What Kissinger accomplished

With Nixon, their opening to China and detente with the Soviets helped elevate the US-led global system to the globalization we know today

Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

[NOTE: I screwed up with first send, neglecting to send preview to all subscribers, so repeated this one for them. Sorry! Still learning.]

Everybody’s rendering their historical judgment this week on the life and times of Henry Kissinger, arguably the single most important US foreign policy figure of the Cold War outside of the presidents themselves. For a classic rendering, see Joseph Nye’s piece at Foreign Affairs. [SIDENOTE: I was a TA for Nye at Harvard and he later served as chairman of my diss. committee.] It is the sort of good-with-the-bad weighing of items that the Chinese themselves would readily recognize per their tendency to judge historical figures in percentages — as in, Mao 70% good, 30% bad.

Frankly, that 70/30 split is about as good as anyone in history can do, which is why I respect that particular formula.

But we Americans are not like that. There is good and then there is good destroyed by bad. We can, as Nye does, call that ends v. means, but there’s still this theme of ruination, as in, you were trying to do something good and then you ruined it all by doing that.

I tend to offer much softer judgments: if you achieved your ends, I can forgive a lot of mean.