In Defense of Kissinger’s Statecraft

Angelo Codevilla is executing a slow retreat from his previous indictment of the entire foreign policy of the United States from the Second World War to the present, except for the Reagan years. But his effort to hang all its shortcomings after Truman around the neck of Henry Kissinger continues. His technique is laboriously to quote bites from his opponents and himself in a conveniently spliced way and extract absurd conclusions. (If any reader has the slightest interest in the details of my dispute with Codevilla, the previous installments are accessible on National Review Online and the Claremont Institute’s website.) The previous indictment has been shaved down from 80 years to the last 55 years of American foreign policy, except for donkey kicks at Franklin D. Roosevelt. Everything else that has gone wrong is laid at the door of Henry Kissinger: “So, though America has gone from being safe and respected to cornered and scorned, and though the roots of these momentous changes reach back long before 1991 in the ideas of the Establishment on whose watch they have occurred and are occurring, Conrad Black does not want us to examine them. Yet Henry Kissinger[’s responsibility for them as] adviser to or éminence grise in all administrations from Kennedy to Bush 43” (except for Carter and Reagan) “cannot be avoided”; at least not by Angelo Codevilla.

If Codevilla imagines that Henry Kissinger had more than the slightest acquaintance with the four presidents preceding Richard Nixon, he is consuming something dangerously mind-altering. Kissinger met Truman once only, as an ex-president, and Eisenhower three times as an ex-president in the last months of his life. He barely knew Kennedy and Johnson, and most certainly did not have a role opposite them analogous to that of the real éminence grise, Cardinal Richelieu’s confidant, Joseph du Tremblay. We are told, in almost Obaman platitudes, that “Ideas have consequences. Henry Kissinger’s status as the ruling class’s preferred purveyor of ideas on international affairs throughout living memory is such that they have become this class’s common sense.” It was all his fault.

When I wrote that Codevilla’s attack was of “extreme belligerence,” I was referring to his attack on Kissinger, not the one on me. Nor did I change the basis of my defense of Kissinger from exemption of him from the foreign-policy failures of the last 50 years to a general defense of all those who played a role in leading America and its allies to victory in the Cold War. I did not engage in “modestly name-dropping [my] connections with the Anglo-Saxon world’s movers and shakers (Thatcher, Blair, Kissinger, and so on).” I explained that when Thatcher and Blair asked my advice, which was rare, the results were “inconsequential,” and I did not meet Kissinger until three years after he had departed public office. The implicit claim that I am a whitewashing bootlicker of Kissinger’s can be refuted from the merest perusal of my biography of Richard Nixon, which certainly presents Kissinger positively, but is unsparing in some criticism.

The major disputes between Angelo Codevilla and me come down to six points. On his ineradicable conviction that Roosevelt gave Eastern Europe to Stalin (at a time when Kissinger was a sergeant in the Army, though doubtless a precocious one), Codevilla ducks the basic fact that the Anglo-Americans gained Germany, France, Italy, and Japan as flourishing democratic allies, though all had been hostile dictatorships by the end of 1940, while the USSR took, as between the Big Three, 95 percent of the casualties incurred in subduing Nazi Germany, and was able only to seize temporary occupation of unfortunate and secondary strategic nationalities in Eastern Europe. Codevilla cites George Kennan and Winston Churchill as advocates of a different policy, but Kennan was a spheres-of-influence advocate who foresaw Stalin’s brutal occupation of Eastern Europe but never suggested how to avoid it; and Mr. Churchill wanted to charge up the Adriatic and through the (fictitious) Ljubljana Gap rather than across the English Channel. (Mr. Churchill has few greater admirers than I, but that would have handed Germany and France to Stalin in exchange for Vienna.) The allegation that Harry Hopkins was a Soviet agent is a monstrous falsehood, and Alger Hiss ceased any espionage activities in the late Thirties. His only position at Yalta was to advise against giving the USSR three votes at the United Nations.

At Yalta, Stalin promised free elections and genuine liberation for Eastern Europe. Of course, and as Churchill and Roosevelt suspected, he did not mean it, and Roosevelt had hoped to entice some compliance with Stalin’s promises by offering massive economic assistance, brandishing America’s nuclear-weapons monopoly (if the atomic bomb worked), and promising to refrain from remilitarizing Germany. Essentially, Europe was going to have either a Finlandized, neutral cordon sanitaire between Germany and Russia and a demilitarized Germany, or else a revived Germany and a severely divided Europe with the clear advantage to the West. Either was a huge step forward from the time of the Battle of Britain, and Roosevelt was the chief architect of this transformation; Stalin made a catastrophic error launching the Cold War. Eisenhower opened the first postwar summit conference, at Geneva in 1955, by demanding that the USSR live up to the commitments it had made at Yalta. As historian Sanche de Gramont (Ted Morgan) has remarked, “If Yalta was a sellout, why did Stalin go to such lengths to violate the agreement?” Codevilla is an espouser of the Yalta Myth that he doesn’t believe exists.

Our second parting of the ways is over Codevilla’s apparent endorsement of massive (atomic- or hydrogen-weapon) retaliation as practically the only response to the Soviets and Red Chinese in the Fifties. He takes Kissinger to task for suggesting that ultimately American foreign policy would have to be more flexible, and he implies that this attitude led directly to Vietnam. But the limitations of “brinkmanship” and massive retaliation cannot really be disputed. The United States, under Eisenhower, did successfully threaten China with the atomic bomb if it didn’t negotiate seriously to end the Korean War, but no sane person could imagine that the U.S. could have used the nuclear specter as the answer to every challenge, including China’s shelling of the tiny rock-piles of Quemoy and Matsu. I invite readers to determine whether Henry Kissinger chastised President Truman for not confronting Stalin with the specter of war over the Berlin Blockade, on pp. 280–281 of his book (the scurrilous review of which by Codevilla in the Claremont Review motivated the editors of that publication to solicit my reply). Truman did move B-29s that were apparently atomic-bomb-capable to Western Europe (it was a ruse), and everyone, including Stalin and Kissinger, regarded the Berlin airlift as a howling success for the West. Kissinger praises Truman on those pages.

Third, Kissinger had nothing to do with and never approved of Mutual Assured Destruction and toleration of nuclear-weapons parity with the Soviet Union, at the same time that the West acquiesced in Soviet conventional ground superiority. SALT I did reestablish American nuclear superiority for the reasons I gave in my last reply to Codevilla. Kissinger deserves neither the blame for Carter’s attempt to squander that superiority, nor the credit for Reagan’s decisive reestablishment of it.

Codevilla self-righteously imputes contemptible motives to Kissinger without adequate evidence.

Our fourth major bifurcation is that Codevilla self-righteously imputes contemptible motives to Kissinger without adequate evidence. Obviously, the whole subject of Vietnam is very contentious, and Codevilla’s version of these events is certainly arguable. I did not comment on the issue of whether POWs were left behind because I don’t really know enough about it. (Admiral Moorer’s cessation of U.S. troop withdrawals was a pretty damp squib, given that American forces had been reduced by about 97 percent from their highest level when the Paris agreement was signed.) Of course, Kissinger and Nixon and even General Abrams at the start of the great North Vietnamese offensive in 1972, and intermittently thereafter, wondered if the Saigon government would survive, and they regretted not having resumed bombing of the North three years before they did. But the assertion that the Vietnamization strategy announced by President Nixon in the famous Silent Majority speech of November 1969 was never more than a play for a decent interval is unproven and unprovable, and, having discussed the subject at length with both Mr. Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and with others, including General Abrams, General Haig, and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, I do not believe it. The charge isn’t entirely implausible, and Codevilla puts it forward forcefully, but it is unrigorous and unjust to proclaim Henry Kissinger’s guilt with such finality on far sketchier evidence than serious scholars and historians should require.

Codevilla’s polemical method is totalitarian, and this is the fifth area where he and I part company. He is like Rubashov’s interrogator, Ivanov, in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Kissinger was responsible for the whole “political side” of the Vietnam strategy “from near the beginning,” although he became national security adviser only after Kennedy and Johnson had committed 545,000 draftees to the war, and 200 to 400 were returning in body bags every week. Codevilla rhetorically asks (before blaming it all on Henry Kissinger), “Why and how, for a half-century, has America’s ruling class inured itself to a mode of international conduct that has yielded defeat and decline?” The inconvenient fact that the United States led its allies to the victorious end of the Cold War, the disintegration of international Communism, and the emergence of China as a largely capitalist state is ignored.

It is quite in order to criticize Kennedy and his entourage, but Kissinger had almost nothing to do with the Kennedy administration.

While Kissinger’s advocacy of a larger menu of national-security responses than nuclear attack did not bring the U.S into the Vietnam quagmire, that assertion (by me) is “misleading, diametrically,” though Kissinger had absolutely nothing to do with the commitment of combat forces to Vietnam. Kissinger’s theory of “limited war” (rather than obligatory nuclear responses to everything) was, according to Codevilla, part of his “application for transitioning from Nelson Rockefeller’s entourage to Kennedy’s,” yet there was no such transition, nor any evidence for such an ambition. The eventual transition was to the Nixon White House, with Rockefeller’s encouragement and at Nixon’s exclusive initiative — and to Kissinger’s surprise. “Kissinger’s theory” (that a nuclear response wasn’t always the answer) “fit perfectly with the Kennedy people’s penchant for making war and saying they weren’t, or not making war and saying they were.” It is quite in order to criticize Kennedy and his entourage, but Kissinger had almost nothing to do with the Kennedy administration and was quite critical of its foreign policy.

Codevilla, as in most of these matters, does not allow himself to be confused by the facts. Kissinger “embodies” the failings of “U.S foreign policy . . . for most of a half-century.” Kissinger’s “negotiating surrender in Vietnam, arms-controlling our strategic forces into inferiority and leaving us naked to missile attack, sustaining the Soviet empire by ‘détente’ . . . [have] made it normal for his successors to do things like making an arms-control deal with Iran, [and] larding it with billions of dollars.” (Henry Kissinger has vehemently opposed the entire descent to the present proposed agreement with Iran.) Almost all of Codevilla’s assault on Kissinger is an exercise in guilt by association and by temporal extension backward and forward to days when Kissinger had no discernible influence on policies that he, in fact, often publicly opposed.

The last of the main substantive disagreements between Angelo Codevilla and myself is over his blissful refusal to take any account of the domestic political realities that impose themselves on American presidents. Thus, Roosevelt was supposed to threaten war with the Soviet Union over what became the satellite countries, when, in Western Europe, Stalin had almost three times as many forces on the ground as the West and near parity in the air, and the American military chiefs were insisting that the USSR should take some of the million casualties estimated for an attack on the home islands of Japan, before the successful atomic test four months after Roosevelt died. After those weapons were developed, any departure from a nuclear response to international abrasions is deemed almost treasonable, as well as doomed (vide the current South Korea). Nixon should have stormed into office as a foaming-at-the-mouth war-hawk, although he was the first president of the United States since Zachary Taylor 120 years before to be elected without his party controlling either house of Congress, and the Democrats, having plunged into Vietnam and repudiated their own president, were determined to assure a Communist victory, as they eventually managed to do, exploiting the magnified idiocy of Watergate, after Nixon and Kissinger had separated China and the USSR from Hanoi and obtained a chance of survival for a non-Communist South Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh made it clear, in rejecting Johnson’s offer in Manila in 1966 of peace through reciprocal evacuation, that he sought the military defeat of the U.S.. and not just the reunification of Vietnam (which had never been united). These were the realities these statesmen had to deal with, not the Manichaean fantasyland where Codevilla dwells.

I have tried to be civil, but Angelo Codevilla’s presentation of and general persistence in this febrile assault on Henry Kissinger (whose career has its vulnerabilities, but he is not a demiurgic traitor) is a fraud and a disgrace. I think we may have reached the point of diminishing returns.