The world according to Henry Kissinger
As he turns 88 this week, the world’s most famous diplomat is just as outspoken as ever, finds Philip Sherwell
Henry Kissinger in his office on Park Ave. Manhattan

9:00PM BST 21 May 2011


For a sweeping historical tome on China written by the most famous living practitioner of international statecraft, Henry Kissinger’s latest book has a dedication striking for its unexpectedness. “To Annette and Oscar de la Renta”, it reads, a tribute to the fashion designer and his wife, who lent Kissinger their opulent home in the Dominican Republic for his writing.

But then the former US national security adviser and secretary of state has never been a conventional diplomat. Even when he dominated US foreign policy at the height of the Cold War, the Harvard professor with the distinctive German accent was also a media celebrity with a reputation as a ladies’ man. “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” he once noted, dryly.

Another phrase associated with Kissinger is “shuttle diplomacy”, coined to describe his Middle Eastern peregrinations in the 1970s. And just days before turning 88 later this week, he is still advising – and still shuttling. This weekend, for instance, he is in London for a conference on how the world can defuse the threat of “loose nukes”. He arrives from Berlin where a prestigious prize – named after him and awarded annually for outstanding contributions to transatlantic ties – was presented by Bill Clinton to Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor who oversaw his country’s reunification.

But if the focus there was the success of the long-established Atlantic alliance, Kissinger is also busy promoting his model for a new Pacific community.

On China, his 13th book, is part grand historical tour, part riveting memoir, and part geopolitical analysis. With the world focused on the dramas of the Arab Spring and the killing of Osama bin Laden, it is a timely reminder that China and the US are jockeying for power and pre-eminence as the aspiring and existing superpowers of the 21st century.
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Kissinger’s book connects China’s ancient past and philosophy to its current global ambitions. But its core is his personal involvement: the veteran statesman has visited China more than 50 times since making his first secret trip in 1971 to broker the great rapprochement between Chairman Mao and President Richard Nixon.

As interlocutor-in-chief, he has spent much of that time trying to explain the mysteries of the two countries to each other. “The relationship between China and the US is central to world peace and its importance reflects the shift in the centre of gravity of global equilibrium towards the Pacific. And, since I have probably had more experience and contact with high-level Chinese than any other American, I thought to sum up my conclusions could be relevant to considerations of where we go with the relationship.”

Kissinger is illuminating, for example, on the way the West tends to react to short-term crises while China takes the long view – and that long view can mean centuries, if not millennia.

“The Chinese approach to policy is conceptual while ours is pragmatic. For the Chinese, history is part of current reality. For America, current reality usually begins with the perception of a problem we are trying to solve now.”

He illustrates this with an example of Mao, during a border war with India, referring his commanders back to two historic Indo-Chinese conflicts. “It would be like a British prime minister calling his war cabinet together and saying that during the period of Charlemagne in Europe, we had the following adventures.

“This leads to different perceptions of the strategy of deterrence. In the West, we look to assemble overwhelming force; the Chinese look for a superior psychological balance. The West waits more or less passively for a provocation and then seeks to overwhelm it. The Chinese think that provocations have to be pre-empted, though not necessarily overwhelmed.”

Kissinger is an engaging and sharp interviewee. We meet in his spacious New York office lined with photographs of him with half a century’s worth of the great and the good: Kissinger with Barack Obama, say, and with George W Bush. And behind them, a portrait of Richard Nixon, the man who elevated him from academia to the most powerful job in American foreign policy.

“Don’t draw any conclusions from those photos. The cleaner moves them each day,” he insists, his accent still bearing witness to his Bavarian roots – his Jewish parents fled Nazi persecution in 1938 when he was 15. He also retains the measured tones of top-table diplomacy, parsing every phrase for nuance and emphasis.

Kissinger looks as distinctive as he sounds. Today he is wearing blue braces decorated with red scales of justice, but has swapped his trademark heavy dark-rimmed glasses for a contemporary steel-rimmed set. He is also a little shorter and rounder than in his days as an unlikely sex symbol: before marrying his second wife Nancy Maginnes, a philanthropist, in the mid-Seventies, he was linked to a string of glamorous women including, Candice Bergen, Jill St John, Shirley MacLaine and Liv Ullman, who called Kissinger, “the most interesting man I have ever met”.

As well as opening relations with China, Kissinger’s legacy is, well, legendary. He introduced realpolitik – the 19th century German concept of power politics – to the US, oversaw a policy of détente with the Soviet Union, and negotiated the end of the Vietnam War – winning the Nobel Peace Prize in the process even though critics have portrayed him as an international war criminal for the secret carpet-bombing of Cambodia and other dark Cold War episodes.

Realpolitik is a diplomatic modus operandi that is at odds with both the studious multilateralism of Obama, who arrived in office with a message to the world that he was going to tone down displays of American power, and the neo-conservatives who sought to spread democracy through American intervention.

But what is striking as Kissinger surveys recent world dramas, is that America’s current foreign policy highlights continuity with previous administrations as much as the fractures.

“President Obama clearly reflects a different viewpoint from his predecessors. On the rhetoric there is a substantial difference. But in his actions, there are considerable parallels. On the Osama bin Laden operation, there would have been no difference at all. On China and Russia, I do not see any significant difference.”

In the wake of events in the Arab Spring, Kissinger has developed a theory of “pragmatic idealism” in determining whether the US should intervene militarily abroad to support human rights and democracy, or only as an expression of vital national interests. “Our values impel us to alleviate human suffering,” he has written. “But as a general principle, our country should do so militarily only when a national interest is also at stake.”

But he accepts there are exceptions – and Libya is one of them. “I unenthusiastically endorsed intervention,” he says, although he does not back the broader interpretation by Britain and France of the United Nations mandate to protect civilians.

Kissinger also warns that we are only at the first stage of a dangerous “five-stage act” in Libya. “The true test is what emerges. One cannot deduce the outcome of a revolution from the pronouncements of those who start the revolution. And one has to assess a revolution not only in terms of its initial enthusiasm. As a general principle, the greater the destruction of existing institutions, the greater will be the violence in re-establishing order.”

He is disdainful of the “cocktail-party wisdom that we should have seen an explosion was coming” in the Arab world. And of bin Laden’s death, he notes: “It must have an effect on the morale of al-Qaeda and the view of their relevance, considering that there were so few protests in the Arab world.” It is also, he believes, a major domestic political boost for a president who had been tagged by critics as a “wimp”.

As Obama and David Cameron now assess the options for reducing their nations’ troop numbers in Afghanistan, the dilemma of how to withdraw forces from a far-away conflict zone is one of which Kissinger is all too aware. For although Nixon was elected in 1968 committed to ending the war in Vietnam, he wanted “peace with honour” and withdrawal “with dignity”.

So how does he think the US and its allies should be handling a situation in Afghanistan that is often compared to Vietnam?

“There is an emerging consensus that we should negotiate with the Taliban. But even if you can get an agreement from them about withdrawal how do you enforce that? Otherwise it develops into a unilateral withdrawal. That was the tragedy of Vietnam, where we thought we had an agreement but our domestic situation didn’t permit it.

“In Afghanistan, I think withdrawal will become a political necessity because of the inability to create a structure which we can turn over. So I would negotiate with surrounding countries who would be threatened by a terrorist Afghanistan if it emerged.”

And in this policy prescription of talks, he believes that including Pakistan is “an indispensable part”. He is not someone who wants Pakistan cut out of the loop after bin Laden was found hiding deep in its soil. “We should stop beating-up on Pakistan,” he says.

Since leaving office, Kissinger has run a lucrative international consultancy business, and his counsel has been sought by the six subsequent commanders-in-chief and countless foreign leaders. But it is with Chinese officials that he has struck the most consistent relationship; he recently had dinner with Dai Bingguo, the top official at the Chinese foreign ministry, who was visiting the US for talks.

That friendly meeting was a far cry from his first encounter with Chinese officials in 1971. After diplomats from both countries had established initial feelers, Kissinger set off for a tour of Asian states with a stop in Pakistan, which had good relations with the US and China.

Once there, Kissinger feigned a stomach upset and the line was put out that he was going to a former British hill station to recover. Instead, he and his team flew to Beijing.

Kissinger disappeared for 48 hours – this was an era when it was still possible to do that. Even so, the ruse almost failed when a British diplomat’s son spotted something wrong – his family had a home in the hill station, and when the boy watched the convoy that was supposedly carrying the sick US diplomat, he noted that several of the cars were empty.

“He told his father that I wasn’t in the convoy and his father told him not to be so silly,” Dr Kissinger recalls. “The boy was right, of course, but his father believed the official version.”

It was a great step into the unknown that involved a mix of drama, tension and mystery. As Kissinger co-drafted the joint communiqué at the end of the mission that would pave the way for Nixon’s visit to Beijing the following year, his Chinese counterpart, the premier Zhou Enlai, noted: “Our announcement will shake the world.”

But world-shattering import was not at the forefront of Kissinger’s thoughts. “When we were drafting it, I was not thinking we were making history; I was just trying to get the phrasing right. You don’t feel the drama when you’re in the middle of it; you just worry about the next step.”

Kissinger’s book has been criticised by some US reviewers who believe that he downplays the Tiananmen Square massacre – an approach that fuels the view of many that he considers democratic niceties and human rights an impediment to an uncompromising foreign policy.

“That is a philosophical debate where there can be respectful disagreements,” he says now, couching his position as ever in diplo-speak. “I was shocked by the actual events, but I believed in a policy of engagement rather than confrontation. Those of us who had access to the Chinese government sought to use our influence to improve human rights through quiet diplomacy rather than showdown.”

With Obama’s visit to the UK later this week, Kissinger has thoughts, too, on another bond: the so-called Special Relationship.

“I think this Administration started with no special feeling about the relationship – if anything, that Britain should be treated like any other European country.

“Although I don’t think the Special Relationship is what it was in its heyday during the Cold War, my impression is that the Administration has developed a greater appreciation for the special role that Britain is playing and can play. They will come [to the UK] with a more positive attitude and with the intention of restoring the high degree of confidentiality and trust that existed previously.”

Indeed, despite the superficial tensions he believes Britain’s performance over recent months has impressed them, notably in Libya. “The British Government seems to be handling Libya to the great satisfaction of the Administration. The White House believes that more should be done by the Europeans in Nato – and Britain is doing that.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-politics/8528270/The-world-according-to-Henry-Kissinger.html