Henry KissingerAs he heads towards his century, Kissinger has lost none of the intellectual firepower that set him apart from other foreign policy professors and practitioners of his and subsequent generations. In the time I have spent writing the second volume of his biography, Kissinger has published not one but two books — the first, co-authored with the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher, on artificial intelligence, the second a collection of six biographical case studies in leadership.
We meet at his rural retreat, deep in the woods of Connecticut, where he and his wife, Nancy, have spent most of their time since the onset of Covid. The pandemic had its silver linings for them. It was the first time in 48 years of marriage that the compulsively peripatetic Dr Kissinger came to an enforced halt. Cut off from the temptations of Manhattan restaurants and Beijing banquets, he has shed pounds. Though he walks with a stick, depends on a hearing aid and speaks more slowly than of old in that unmistakable bullfrog baritone, his mind is as keen as ever.
Nor has Kissinger lost his knack for infuriating the liberal professors and progressive or “woke” students who dominate Harvard, the university where he built his reputation as a scholar and public intellectual in the 1950s and 1960s.
Every secretary of state and national security adviser (the first post he held in government) has had to make choices between bad and worse options. Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, who currently hold those positions, last year abandoned the people of Afghanistan to the Taliban and this year are pouring tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons into the war zone that is Ukraine. Somehow those actions do not arouse the invective that has been directed at Kissinger over the years for his role in such events as the Vietnam War (a significant amount of criticism has also come from the right, though for very different reasons).
Nothing could better illustrate his ability to enrage both left and right than the controversy sparked by his brief speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on May 23. “Henry Kissinger: Ukraine must give Russia territory” was The Telegraph’s headline, arousing almost equal numbers of enraged tweets from progressives who have added Ukraine’s blue and yellow colours to the latest version of the pride flag and neoconservatives who are baying for a Ukrainian victory and regime change in Moscow. In a scathing response, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, accused Kissinger of favouring 1938-style appeasement of fascist Russia.
The oddest thing about the furore was that Kissinger said nothing of the sort. In arguing that some kind of peace must eventually be negotiated, he simply stated that “the dividing line [between Ukraine and Russia] should be a return to the status quo ante” — meaning the situation before February 24, when parts of Donetsk and Luhansk were under the control of pro-Moscow separatists and Crimea was part of Russia, as has been the case since 2014. That is what Zelensky himself has said on more than one occasion, though some Ukrainian spokesmen have recently argued for a return to the pre-2014 borders.
Such misinterpretations are nothing new to Kissinger. When he was trying to persuade Barack Obama to pull out of Afghanistan, the vice-president, Joe Biden, drew an unfortunate analogy with the disgraced former US president Richard Nixon. “We have to be on our way out,” he told the veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke, “to do what we did in Vietnam.” Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, replied that he “thought we had a certain obligation to the people who had trusted us”. Biden’s response was revealing: “F*** that,” he reportedly told Holbrooke. “We don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.”
Yet the reality was, again, quite different. Nixon and Kissinger wholly rejected the idea of abandoning South Vietnam to its fate, as antiwar protesters urged them to in 1969. Rather than cut and run, they sought to achieve “peace with honour”. Their strategy of “Vietnamisation” was in fact a version of what the US is doing in Ukraine today: providing the arms so the country can fight to uphold its independence, rather than relying on US boots on the ground.
Harvard and Yale types will splutter even more when they see Nixon as one of the six exemplars in Kissinger’s Leadership, rubbing shoulders with Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, the former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher (whose inclusion will make the Oxford and Cambridge types splutter too).
I ask Kissinger how Nixon — the only president forced to resign — deserves a chapter to himself in a book on leadership. Isn’t he a case study in how not to lead? Kissinger starts with the succinct verdict on Watergate provided by Bryce Harlow, the experienced Washington operator who had been Nixon’s liaison man with Congress: “Some damn fool got into the Oval Office and did as he was told” — meaning someone in the White House had taken Nixon too literally.
“As a general proposition,” Kissinger says, “assistants owe their principals in politics not to be held to emotional statements [about] things you know they wouldn’t do on further reflection.” There were many times when, in the heat of the moment, or to impress present company, Nixon would give intemperate verbal orders. Kissinger learnt quickly not to act every time Nixon ordered him to “bomb the hell” out of someone.
“If you look at Watergate,” he argues, “it was really a succession of transgressions” — starting with the break-ins at the rival Democratic Party’s National Committee headquarters, which were ordered by the campaign to re-elect Nixon in 1972. Those transgressions then “came together in one investigation. I thought then and think now that they deserved censure; they did not require removal from office.”
From Kissinger’s vantage point, Watergate was a disaster because it wrecked the ingenious foreign policy strategy that he and Nixon had devised to strengthen the position of the United States, which had effectively been losing the Cold War when they came into office in January 1969.
“We had a grand design,” he recalls. “[Nixon] wanted to end the Vietnam War on honourable terms … He wanted to give the Atlantic alliance a new strategic direction. And above all he wanted to avoid a [nuclear] conflict [with the Soviet Union] through arms control policy.
“And then there was the unexplored mystery of China. [Nixon] proclaimed from his first day that he wanted to open to China. He understood that this was a strategic opportunity, that two adversaries of the United States were in conflict with each other” — a reference to the border war that broke out between the Soviet Union and China in 1969, after the two biggest communist powers had split over ideological issues eight years before. “In his name I gave an instruction to try to place ourselves closer to China and Russia than they were to each other.” These trends, he says, were coming together in the year before the Watergate scandal broke.
“By the end of [Nixon’s presidency] there was a peace in Vietnam that in its terms was honourable and was sustainable by a president who had domestic support. We had redone Middle East policy,” effectively ejecting the Soviets from the region and establishing the US as peace broker between Arabs and Israelis. “And we had opened to China and [negotiated strategic arms limitation] with Russia. Unfortunately the domestic support disintegrated. Instead of exploiting those opportunities, we were forced by Nixon’s domestic debacle into just holding on.”
The Nixon that emerges from Kissinger’s Leadership is a tragic figure — a master strategist whose unscrupulous cover-up of his re-election campaign team’s crime destroyed not only his presidency but also doomed South Vietnam to destruction. Nor was that all. It was defeat in Vietnam, Kissinger suggests, that set the US on a downward spiral of political polarisation.
“The conflict,” he writes, “introduced a style of public debate increasingly conducted less over substance than over political motives and identities. Anger has replaced dialogue as a way to carry out disputes, and disagreement has become a clash of cultures.”
I ask if the US is more divided today than at the time of Vietnam.
“Yes, infinitely more,” he replies.
Startled, I ask him to elaborate. In the early 1970s, he says, there was still a possibility of bipartisanship. “The national interest was a meaningful term, it was not in itself a subject of debate. That has ended. Every administration now faces the unremitting hostility of the opposition and in a way that is built on different premises … The unstated but very real debate in America right now is about whether the basic values of America have been valid,” by which he means the sacrosanct status of the Constitution and the primacy of individual liberty and equality before the law.
I ask: “Can any leader fix this?”
“What happens if you have unbridgeable divisions is one of two things. Either the society collapses and is no longer capable of carrying out its missions under either leadership, or it transcends them …”
“Does it need an external shock or an external enemy?”
“That’s one way of doing it. Or you could have an unmanageable domestic crisis.”
I take him back to the oldest of the leaders profiled in his book, Konrad Adenauer, who in 1949 became the first chancellor of West Germany. At their last meeting — for of course Kissinger knew all six personally — Adenauer asked: “Are any leaders still able to conduct a genuine long-range policy? Is true leadership still possible today?” That is surely the question Kissinger himself is asking, nearly six decades later.
Leadership has become more difficult, he says, “because of the combination of social networks, new styles of journalism, the internet and television, all of which focus attention on the short term”.
This brings us to his very distinctive view of leadership. What his sextet of leaders had in common were five qualities: they were tellers of hard truths, they had vision and they were bold. But they were also capable of spending time on their own, in solitude. And they did not fear being divisive.
“There must be in the life of the leader some moment of reflection,” he says, pointing to Adenauer’s time of inner exile in Nazi Germany; de Gaulle’s time as a German prisoner in the First World War; Nixon’s wilderness years in the mid-1960s after he had lost bids for both the presidency and the California governorship; Sadat’s jail time when Egypt was still under British control. Some of the most striking passages of the book are about these periods of isolation. “Dominating oneself ought to become a sort of habit,” de Gaulle wrote as a PoW, “a moral reflex acquired by a constant gymnastic of the will especially in the tiniest things: dress, conversation, the way one thinks.”
In 1932 the future French president called “unceasing self-discipline” the price of leadership — “the constant taking of risks, and a perpetual inner struggle. The degree of suffering involved varies according to the temperament of the individual; but it is bound to be no less tormenting than the hair shirt of the penitent.” The inner de Gaulle was profoundly compassionate, as his love for his daughter Anne, who had Down’s syndrome, revealed. But the outer man was austere, aloof, antagonistic even to allies.
“She was so irate,” Kissinger recalls. “I did not have the heart to explain that the idea was not mine but her chief diplomat’s.”
I suggest that the current prime minister, Boris Johnson, is almost the opposite of a leader as Kissinger defines it. There has certainly not been much of de Gaulle’s unceasing self-discipline in Downing Street of late. Again, Kissinger’s answer surprises me: “In terms of British history, he’s had an astounding career — to alter the direction of Britain on Europe, which will certainly be listed as one of the important transitions in history.
“But it often happens that people who complete one great task can’t apply their qualities to the execution of it, which is how to institutionalise it.” Carefully switching to discuss today’s leaders in general, he adds: “I would not be telling the truth if I said that the level [of leadership] is appropriate to the challenge.”
I counter that we are surely being given a masterclass in leadership by the president of Ukraine, the unlikely figure of the comedian turned war hero.
“There’s no question that Zelensky has performed a historic mission,” Kissinger agrees. “He comes from a background that never appeared in Ukrainian leadership at any period in history” — a reference to Zelensky being, like Kissinger, Jewish. “He was an accidental president because of frustration with domestic politics. And then he was faced with the attempt by Russia to restore Ukraine to a totally dependent and subordinate position. And he has rallied his country and world opinion behind it in a historic manner. That’s his great achievement.”
The question remains, however, “Can he sustain that in making peace, especially a peace that implies some limited sacrifice?”
I ask for his thoughts on Zelensky’s adversary, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, whom he has met on numerous occasions, dating back to a serendipitous encounter in the early 1990s, when Putin was deputy mayor of St Petersburg.
“I thought he was a thoughtful analyst,” Kissinger says, “based on a view of Russia as a sort of mystic entity that has held itself together across 11 time zones by a sort of spiritual effort. And in that vision Ukraine has played a special role. The Swedes, the French and the Germans came through that territory [when they invaded Russia] and they were in part defeated because it exhausted them. That’s his [Putin’s] view.”
Yet that view is at odds with those periods of Ukraine’s history that differentiated it from the Russian empire. Putin’s problem, Kissinger says, is that “he’s head of a declining country” and “he’s lost his sense of proportion in this crisis”. There is “no excuse” for what he has done this year.
Kissinger reminds me of the article he wrote in 2014, at the time of the Russian annexation of Crimea, in which he argued against the idea of Ukraine joining Nato, proposing instead a neutral status like that of Finland, and warning that to continue talking in terms of Nato membership risked war. Now, of course, it is Finland that is proposing to join Nato, along with Sweden. Is this ever-enlarging Nato now too big?
“Nato was the right alliance to face an aggressive Russia when that was the principal threat to world peace,” he replies. “And Nato has grown into an institution reflecting European and American collaboration in an almost unique way. So it’s important to maintain it. But it’s important to recognise that the big issues are going to take place in the relations of the Middle East and Asia to Europe and America. And Nato with respect to that is an institution whose components don’t necessarily have compatible views. They came together on Ukraine because that was reminiscent of [older] threats and they did very well, and I support what they did.
“The question will now be how to end that war. At its end a place has to be found for Ukraine and a place has to be found for Russia — if we don’t want Russia to become an outpost of China in Europe.”
I remind him of a conversation we had in Beijing in late 2019, when I asked him if we were already in “Cold War II”, but with China now playing the part of the Soviet Union. He replied, memorably, “We are in the foothills of a cold war.” A year later he upgraded that to “the mountain passes of a cold war”. Where are we now?
“Two countries with the capacity to dominate the world” — the US and China — “are facing each other as the ultimate contestants. They are governed by incompatible domestic systems. And this is occurring when technology means that a war would set back civilisation, if not destroy it.”
In other words, Cold War II is potentially even more dangerous than Cold War I? Kissinger’s answer is yes, because both superpowers now have comparable economic resources (which was never the case in Cold War I) and the technologies of destruction are even more terrifying, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence. He has no doubt that China and America are now adversaries. “Waiting for China to become western” is no longer a plausible strategy. “I do not believe that world domination is a Chinese concept, but it could happen that they become so powerful. And that’s not in our interest.” Nevertheless, he says, the two superpowers “have a minimum common obligation to prevent [a catastrophic collision] from happening”. This was in fact his main point at Davos, though it went largely unnoticed.
“We in the West have seemingly incompatible tasks. You need defence establishments capable of dealing with the modern challenges. At the same time you need some kind of positive expression of your society so that these exertions are in the name of something, because otherwise they won’t be sustained. Secondly, you need a concept of co-operation with the other society, because you cannot now work out any concept of destroying them. So a dialogue is necessary.”
“But that dialogue has stopped,” I note.
“Apart from the airing of grievances. That is what deeply worries me about where we are going. And other countries will want to exploit this rivalry, without understanding its unique aspects.” A nod, I surmise, to the growing number of countries seeking economic and military aid from one or other superpower. “So we’re heading into a very difficult period.”
I ask if Kissinger thinks of himself as a leader. “When I started I probably didn’t,” he replies. “But I do now. Not in a total sense … [but] I attempt to be a leader. All of the books I’ve written have an element of ‘How do you get to the future?’ ”
I point out that this is excessive modesty. Having led the National Security Council, the State Department and, at times during Watergate, practically the US government, he is a fully qualified leader, even if never an elected one.
It is time to leave. The nonagenarian may still be firing on all cylinders, but I am fading and have a plane to catch. A final inspiration prompts me to ask about the necessary corollary of leadership. “What about followership?” I ask. “Has that declined as well? Are people less willing to be led?”
“Yes,” he nods. “The paradox is that the need for leadership is as great as ever.”
There are those who will doubtless continue to demonise Henry Kissinger and disregard or disparage what he says. At 99, however, he can well afford to ignore the haters. Yet he has not lost his impulse to lead. “Leadership,” he writes, “is needed to help people reach from where they are to where they have never been and, sometimes, can scarcely imagine going. Without leadership, institutions drift, and nations court growing irrelevance and, ultimately, disaster.”
You are under no obligation to follow. But to drift to disaster without any leadership — or, worse, with fake leadership bereft of self-discipline — seems like a worse idea.
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist. The second volume will be completed in 2023
Kissinger on Thatcher — ‘there were no sacred cows’
The former UK prime minister’s resistance to entering any kind of middle ground left a lasting impression
From our first meeting [in 1973, when Thatcher was education secretary], Thatcher’s vitality and commitment fixed her notion of leadership firmly in my mind. Nearly every other politician of the era argued that to win elections, one had to capture the centre ground. Thatcher demurred. That approach, she asserted, amounted to a subversion of democracy. The quest for the centre was a recipe for vacuity; instead, different arguments had to clash, creating real choices for the voter.
An event that helped shape our burgeoning relationship was Thatcher’s visit to Washington in September 1977. The national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski advised President Carter to “plead a heavy schedule” and refuse to meet with Thatcher; Carter obliged. As a result, she was treated with less attention than she had expected given her own warm feelings for the United States.
Nancy and I invited her to dinner one evening, together with leading Washington personalities from both parties, an informal occasion that set the tone for our future meetings. After becoming prime minister, Thatcher generally invited me for private discussions to exchange views on international topics — or simply to cross-check the prevailing views of her Foreign Office against my own analysis of international affairs.
Shortly after Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party, she outlined her concepts at a meeting with me over a traditional English breakfast at Claridge’s. Articulate and thoughtful, she made clear that her ambition was nothing less than to transform the country. She aimed to do so not by pursuing some vague middle ground, but by articulating a programme that would make the middle ground see things as she did. Her rhetoric and policies would strike a genuine contrast to the staid conventional wisdom that, in her view, had doomed Britain to stagnation. Then, after winning the next election, she would carry out fundamental reforms to overcome conventional wisdom, the doctrine of complacency, and the existing passivity with respect to the ravages of inflation, the power of the trade unions or the inefficiency of state-owned enterprises.
For Thatcher, there were no sacred cows, much less insurmountable obstacles. Every policy was up for scrutiny. It was not sufficient, she argued, for Conservatives to sand down the rough edges of socialism; they had to roll back the state before Britain’s economy collapsed in catastrophic fashion. In the realm of foreign affairs, she was disarmingly honest about her inexperience, confessing that she had yet to formulate detailed ideas of her own. But she made clear that she believed passionately in the “special relationship” with the United States.
Our meetings continued long after Thatcher left office and through the rest of her life. I describe our relationship in this way to make a point: unlike the president of the United States, the British prime minister does not have the ability to override the cabinet and still maintain his or her government. Thatcher was aware of these limits. To help her compensate, she would discreetly call on friends in Britain and around the world to discuss her vision and her options.
Thatcher’s economic reforms changed Britain irrevocably. She had assumed high office after years of apparent national decline. Inflation had been at 18 per cent in 1980 but had been cut to 8 per cent by 1990, when she left office. Likewise, unemployment had been reduced to 7 per cent by 1990. In 1983 nearly 100,000 workers left Britain, but by 1990 more than 200,000 were arriving annually. The number of working days lost to labour disputes plummeted from 29.5 million in 1979 to 1.9 million in 1990.
As the economy improved, she led the Conservative Party to three consecutive electoral victories. On the other hand, Thatcher never succeeded in winning a broad consensus in favour of her economic reforms, even after they began to show results. She was admired by many, loved by some, but resented by much of the working class and left- leaning intellectuals for the exertions of the reform period. In 1988 the perception of Thatcher as cold-hearted was revived by her embrace of the “community charge” (a flat tax imposed to fund local government that was dubbed the “poll tax”), which sparked widespread protests and contributed to her eventual political downfall.
By contrast, Thatcher achieved a lasting impact on the economic views of the median voter and political elites. When Tony Blair’s New Labour government was elected in 1997 — seven years after Thatcher’s departure from office — I wrote her a letter of congratulations for laying the groundwork for this major turn away from the left:
“I never thought I’d congratulate you on a Labour victory in the British elections, but I cannot imagine anything that would confirm your revolution more than Blair’s program. It seems to me well to the right of the Conservative government that preceded yours.”
While Thatcher continued to be pained by the circumstances under which she was forced from office, on this occasion she managed good cheer. “I think your analysis is the correct one,” she replied, “but to make one’s political opponent electable and then elected was not quite the strategy I had in mind!”
Two weeks after Blair took office — and much to the consternation of his left flank — he invited Thatcher to tea at 10 Downing Street. Ostensibly, the meeting’s purpose was to seek her advice regarding an upcoming European summit, but there was clearly also an element of personal admiration. Likewise, ten years later, Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, made a point of extending a similar invitation within his first three months as prime minister. On that occasion, Thatcher was seen leaving the prime minister’s residence with a clutch of flowers in her hands. It was proof that she had met the objective she had laid out in the baleful 1970s: creating a new centre.
Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy by Henry Kissinger is published by Allen Lane on June 28 at £25
