Henry Kissinger's Deadly Career Gives the Lie to the Myth of the Disinterested Statesman

But his cynical brand of realism did at least lead him to caution against some of America's ideological military adventures.

In the opening pages of his 1994 book Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger recounts a famous, possibly apocryphal quote from Pope Urban VIII upon hearing of the death of Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIII and mastermind of French foreign policy during the 30 Years' War.

"If there is a God, the Cardinal de Richelieu will have much to answer for. If not… well, he had a successful life," said the pope, according to Kissinger's telling.

It's a quote that could easily apply to Kissinger himself, who died Wednesday night after a long, distinguished, and controversial (some would say criminal) career as a diplomat, writer, and intellectual proponent of an aggressive, ultracynical version of realist foreign policy.

By one set of secular metrics, Kissinger did indeed have a very successful life. He died in his bed at the age of 100 after attaining wealth, fame, and an inarguable place in American history. And in the next life, he certainly has a lot to answer for.

The obituaries coming out this week highlight much of what Kissinger will need to account for: helping to scuttle an early peace in Vietnam; secret, illegal carpet bombings of neutral Cambodia; direct involvement in the overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende; and his support for various genocidal campaigns of American Cold War allies, to name a few.

The fact that the Pope Urban quote was allegedly one of Kissinger's favorite anecdotes says a lot about how the man viewed his life's work and how it would stack up against any sort of divine final judgment.

But Kissinger's purpose for including the quote in Diplomacy was less about psychological self-evaluation and more about articulating his own vision of international affairs.

By Kissinger's telling, Richelieu was the first practitioner of modern realpolitik. At home, the Catholic clergyman was an archopponent of the Reformation and an eager persecutor of France's Protestants. In foreign affairs, he was more than happy to ally with Protestant states to check the power of the rival Catholic Hapsburg monarchy.

That seeming contradiction made perfect sense to Kissinger. States and the people who live in them might have their own values and domestic projects. But those domestic goals were always threatened by other states who might seek to dominate them.

In an anarchic dog-eat-dog world of rival powers and no higher authority to seek protection from, states and statesmen had to take what actions were necessary to secure their own existence and power.

This is the basic premise of the realist school of international relations. Reasonable libertarians in good standing can often differ on how compelling they find it.

The most relevant criticism of it in regards to Kissinger himself would be the standard insight from public choice theory: Statesmen and diplomats, like everyone else, are selfish individuals with no special ability to perceive and work toward a national interest separate from their own.

Most bureaucrats in the Education Department are as interested in their own power and influence as they are in educating children. The same is true of most bureaucrats in the State Department.

While Kissinger might argue that all the seemingly abhorrent policies he pursued during his career were necessary to secure America's national interest, his actions conspicuously always aligned with his own accumulation of power and prestige.

Spencer Ackerman, writing at Rolling Stone, recounts the now standard narrative of how Kissinger undermined President Lyndon Johnson's peace initiative in Vietnam, not because he thought a more advantageous deal was in the cards but because a failed peace process would make it more likely he'd get a plum job in the next administration.

The consequence was four more years of war and thousands upon thousands of additional deaths.

Whatever insights Kissingerian realism might have about the conduct of international affairs, it all too easily can be used as an excuse to do some truly awful and nasty things.

To be sure, some of the left-wing obituaries of Kissinger arguably overstate his insidiousness and impact.

Ackerman's back-of-the-envelope math argues that Kissinger is personally responsible for killing three to four million people during his career. That would seem to let a lot of other people off the hook for their own role in the Cold War's body count. (Does the communist government of North Vietnam not also bear some responsibility for the death toll of the Vietnam War?)

Similarly, it's a little difficult to wholly swallow the moral outrage of socialist magazine Jacobin over Kissinger's career (they've produced book-length "anti-obituary" of him) given how eager its writers are in other contexts to minimize, excuse, and explain away the crimes of communist governments he was combating.

It takes two to tango, and Kissinger's own ruthless foreign policy would have gotten a much less sympathetic hearing if half the globe wasn't dominated by totalitarian communist regimes killing their way to a worker's utopia.

Perhaps the best thing that one can say about Kissinger's brand of realism is that there was at least some limiting principle to it.

States should pursue their own power and influence, nothing more, nothing less. For all the bad things that logic inspired, it also saw Kissinger pursue better relations with the Soviet Union and Communist China.

Some Cold War hawks at home might have hated détente, but Kissinger rightly reasoned that learning to live in a world with these countries was better than constantly teetering on the brink of nuclear war while we tried to make them go away.

Similarly, his realism led him to oppose some of the military adventurism of liberal internationalists in the post–Cold War world. He was an archcritic of President Bill Clinton's intervention in Kosovo, for instance.

Kissinger did offer a relatively sunny assessment of the case for invading Iraq and the fruits that would come from it. But he was also prescient enough to warn against the idea, popular amongst neoconservatives in and outside the Bush administration, that the country could be turned into a wellspring of democracy with little effort.

"If war should prove unavoidable, it will not be a time for experiments. The longer military operations last, the greater the danger of upheavals in the region, dissociation by other nations and American isolation," he wrote in a 2002 essay.

None of this is meant to defend Kissinger's generally terrible legacy. Many, many people came to needlessly violent ends because of the way he wielded his power and influence.

As a new set of American hawks ramps up tensions with China and pushes for an endless commitment to the war in Ukraine, it's worth recognizing the ways that even amoral realpolitik has its own set of limiting principles. And those limits often stopped short of where some more "idealistic" modern interventionists would take us.