“Is power really the ultimate aphrodisiac?” I asked Henry Kissinger the last time I saw him, at a party in New York in 2017. “Well, I did say that …” he evasively replied. Kissinger, who died on November 29th at the age of 100, was 94 at the time and could easily be forgiven a lapse in confidence. Like much else about his storied life, however, his romantic appeal was largely a myth. Having divorced his first wife in 1964, Kissinger enjoyed a decade of renewed bachelorhood, during which he rose to the height of his power, before remarrying the statuesque Nancy Maginnes in 1974. While he was frequently seen and photographed with beautiful movie stars of yesteryear—Jill St. John, Marlo Thomas, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Candice Bergen, among others—virtually all later confirmed that their relationships with the prominent statesman were platonic. In a Washington Post interview some years after their marriage, the second Mrs. Kissinger derided gossip to the contrary, describing her husband—whom she met while employed by his initial patron, New York Governor and sometime Republican presidential candidate Nelson Rockefeller—as “so square.”
Kissinger certainly looked “square.” Short, stodgy, and heavily bespectacled, he spoke with the thick accent of his native Germany—a deep Central European groan that both informed and reinforced the mid-20th century stereotype of would-be masters of the universe in a Cold War many such people fought but none was fated to win.
He also had a sinister side. To this day, he is widely believed to have inspired Peter Sellers’s titular mad scientist character in Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), who advises a weak American president based on failed Democratic contender Adlai Stevenson that he could fight and win a nuclear war. Sellers and Kubrick denied it (Sellers claimed the character was based on the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who worked for the American missile program).
Kissinger insisted in his memoirs that he was too obscure at the time to merit such notice, but his controversial 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy had advocated a strikingly similar strategic idea, while the film directly satirized his (inaccurate) fear of “missile gap,” elaborated in his 1960 sequel The Necessity for Choice. Until Kissinger’s later-life apotheosis as an elder statesman who trailblazed the highly lucrative post-government service political consulting industry, his petulant personal manner was almost uniformly said to lack what is now called “emotional intelligence.”
No one could deny that Kissinger was an overachiever. A teenage German-Jewish immigrant to the United States just before World War II, he grew up an ace student before serving in combat and then with distinction in U.S. Army intelligence in his occupied home country. Harvard was the only Ivy League university to admit him, but he excelled there. At 383 pages, the length of his senior thesis—a study of competing philosophies of history—so annoyed his teachers that the university imposed a 150-page limit on all future senior theses under what is still known as the “Kissinger Rule.” When he received his doctorate in political science from Harvard a few years later, he was not offered the then-customary teaching post due to apprehensions (and almost certainly envy) that he was too involved in national policy-making.
Kissinger’s flirtation with the notion of limited nuclear war quickly passed as the advent of the intercontinental ballistic missile reinforced earlier doctrines of massive retaliation and mutually assured destruction. His lasting contribution to strategic thinking lay in his doctoral dissertation, which he published under the title “A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22.” Still in print, its central thesis held that the post-Napoleonic “Concert of Europe” stood out as a successful case of managed diplomacy worthy of emulation in the fractured post-World War II world.
Accordingly, Kissinger advocated a world order managed by the elites of major powers who, he believed, could keep the peace thanks to shared values, balanced national interests, and a commitment to relaxing tensions as geopolitical factors changed and new challenges emerged. As a Cold War practitioner, he tried to implement détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China. After the Soviet collapse, he and his disciples reimagined the project as a “new world order” dominated by like-minded liberal democracies coordinated under American leadership. When that spark flickered out early in the current century, he pivoted to advocating acceptance of a multipolar world in which important powers with responsible leaders would follow a “rules-based” international system. We have seen the results.
Ironically for a man who grounded his approach to diplomacy in an intense realism, in which such “soft” factors as human rights, collective security, and ideology counted for little, his aspirations to a managed international system were in fact highly idealistic. Just what are “shared values,” and how, in realist terms, can they be expected to prevent major international conflict when every family that has suffered through an inheritance battle knows better? And if they were real, and worked, did the Cold War powers Kissinger sought to manage have them?
The 19th century dreamworld he evoked in his dissertation and later—in his 1994 retrospective Diplomacy—was dominated by conservative monarchies, a proudly shared pan-European culture, and national elites who were not merely similar but closely interrelated. Yet their managed system came to the point of collapse on numerous occasions before coming totally asunder in the inferno of World War I. In the rising “new diplomacy,” democracies did not fare much better. Interwar France and Germany were democratic republics and each other’s largest trading partners, yet both spent much of their respite from one massive war against each other planning the next. Wartime practicalities notwithstanding, neither the United States nor the USSR ever became anything remotely like a non-ideological partner in a shared global hegemony, and on balance their elites had no lasting commonalities or faith in each other during or beyond the Cold War.
The only way Kissinger could operate in such an imperfect world was to do what all ideologues ultimately do: try to squeeze its inconvenient realities into his preconceptions. In practice, this led him to devalue principles, institutions, interests, allies, and even his own ideals when they conflicted with what he imagined was the effective management of the international system he desired. If democratic elections disappointed—whether in Chile, Bangladesh, or East Timor—they were to be disregarded, even if the real-life consequences were horrible and allegations of hypocrisy and anti-American sentiment proved so profound that they have outlived Kissinger’s centennial year. If arms control negotiations conceded a strategic advantage to the Soviet Union, the adverse results were worthwhile if, as Kissinger misguidedly hoped, they would goad the Soviets into geopolitical restraint. If gaining modest advantage in the Middle East meant persuading Israel to diminish its security, Kissinger pursued that course, even if the region remained so chronically unstable that only a few weeks before his death he wondered whether Israel could survive. If communist China looked like an apt strategic partner vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, the opportunity was too good to resist, even if it normalized China’s murderous regime, permanently endangered Taiwan and the general security of East Asia, and precipitated Beijing’s rise into a rival power so dangerous—and today once again so closely aligned with Moscow—that toward the end of his life Kissinger confessed he had no idea what to do about it.
The highpoint of Kissinger’s career, the settlement of the Vietnam Conflict in 1973, was merely another example of brute praxis flouting high-minded theory. The Paris Peace Accords required American withdrawal from South Vietnam but allowed pro-North Vietnamese forces to remain in place in that country. Ending the conflict won Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart the Nobel Peace Prize, but the terms were not substantially different from what had been offered four years earlier and before much greater loss of life. Worse, as Kissinger well knew and admitted at the time, they doomed the South Vietnamese to rapid conquest. To his credit, he offered to return his Nobel Peace Prize when South Vietnam fell in 1975, but this little known gesture could not mask arguably the greatest diplomatic humiliation in American history until Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
Kissinger deftly survived the implosion of his boss Richard Nixon’s presidency over the Watergate scandal and continued in high office under his successor Gerald Ford. He was the only person in American history to serve simultaneously as national security adviser and secretary of state, a situation that at least theoretically allowed him both to offer and implement policy options. Without Nixon’s counterbalancing authority, he succeeded in placing in positions of power younger incarnations of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George H. W. Bush, and others who would later identify as neo-conservatives and, to much ill effect, manage American foreign policy at another crucial time in the nation’s history.
After Ford lost the presidency to Jimmy Carter in 1976, Kissinger never returned to high office. He remained relevant, however, publishing three massive volumes of memoirs that retrospectively justified his choices as the best possible options in what he claimed was a world of bad options. Trading on his celebrity and wide-ranging global contacts, he built a powerful consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, which charged enormous fees for analysis, dealmaking, and the symbolic imprimatur of his presence. He periodically resurfaced as an éminence grise, advising all subsequent U.S. presidents through Biden and other world leaders, though few really listened to him. Some, particularly Barack Obama, openly despised him, and most simply coveted the grandeur and legitimacy that his presence bestowed. He briefly returned to an official role in 2001 to lead the investigative commission into the September 11th terrorist attacks, but soon resigned rather than disclose potential conflicts of interest on his client list.
“This is not my world,” German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck pronounced upon viewing the vast industrial sprawl of Hamburg’s modern port shortly before his death in 1898. Baffled by social media, artificial intelligence, cyber warfare, mass migration, radical identity politics, and other unfamiliar phenomena of our current world, Henry Kissinger made similar but less dramatic statements on multiple occasions before his own death 125 years later. Dealing with those challenges, and the usual ones, will occupy the attention of our strategists for decades to come. Amid all the hagiography—and assuming they study history at all—they would do well to consider whether Kissinger should be a role model or a cautionary tale.
