“We’re witnessing one of the largest shifts in global geostrategic power the world has witnessed,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley said earlier this month. China is undertaking a full-court press to rewrite the post-World War II democratic international order. So long as U.S. strategy remains in disarray and our politicians snipe at each other rather than unite against a common adversary, Beijing may succeed.
China’s rise was not preordained. When historians consider how communist China managed to sprint past the U.S. militarily, if not economically, they will trace the question back to the Nixon administration. At the time, China was in the midst of its Cultural Revolution, in which Mao Zedong’s ideologues killed up to 20 million of their own countrymen. China was isolated internationally as the United Nations and most of the world continued to recognize the Republic of China who had fled to Taiwan against the backdrop of Mao’s takeover of the mainland.
Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, however, saw an opportunity to peel communist China away from the anti-American axis they formed with the Soviet Union. To this day, Kissinger and his admirers depict his secret trip and the subsequent Nixon-in-China moment as a triumph of Kissinger’s realism and strategy. That breakthrough became the cornerstone of his reputation.
In hindsight, however, and with the declassification of documents, it appears Kissinger botched the moment. Put aside the fact that the drive for rapprochement was more Nixon’s than Kissinger’s. The ease with which Kissinger fell into the traps laid by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai surprised both the Chinese and the Pakistanis who facilitated the secret diplomacy. The classlessness with which the White House informed Taiwan did America’s reputation no favors.
While Kissinger might have done a better job, and certainly misread Mao and his ambitions, it would be unfair to suggest that Kissinger alone bears responsibility for China’s empowerment. President Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski took a bad situation and made it worse by treating the relationship with Beijing as a quasi-alliance. Acquiescing to China’s accession to the World Trade Organization put China’s rise on hyperdrive. By the Clinton era, China’s military ambitions were clear. Kissinger’s support, however, gave China’s WTO membership bipartisan cover.
Nor has China been the only country in which Kissinger’s eloquence and realist sophistication have blinded him to the long-term implications of his Machiavellian compacts. In 1975, at the cost of great human suffering, he sold out U.S. support for Iraqi Kurds as part of a deal to delineate the Iran-Iraq border. It did not work, as Iraq launched an invasion of Iran over that same border just five years later. To this day, Kurds cite Kissinger’s betrayal as a reason why never to trust Washington.
Kissinger’s legacy on Iran is equally problematic. While partisans debate the wisdom and fate of the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran developed the bulk of its military nuclear program during the presidencies of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, often labeled in the press as a moderate and a pragmatist. Ironically, for a refugee who had fled Germany due to Nazi persecution, Kissinger never fully recognized the ideology that drove even the more public relations-savvy among Iran’s clerical leadership. His encouragement for engagement came against the Clinton-era rise in oil prices that provided the Iranian regime a windfall for its covert nuclear and missile programs.
Kissinger may not be the worst secretary of state — he was neither as naïve as Frank Kellogg nor as egotistical as John Kerry. But does he deserve the lionization he has cultivated and enjoyed? Here, what sets Kissinger apart most may be the gap between his record and his carefully cultivated reputation.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
