One day receiving the Canadian ambassador to the United States, Henry Kissinger said to him at the outset: “I hope you haven’t come to talk to me about the sexual life of salmon. »
American secretaries of state are rarely passionate about relations with their northern neighbor. In the case of Kissinger, who was from 1969 to 1976, this was even more true. He had no time to waste on this flatly economic relationship, when the geopolitics of the Cold War demanded his attention across the globe.
Nixon, whose advisor he was, did not hide his revulsion for Pierre Trudeau, who refused to align his foreign policy with his own.
In a meeting at the White House, Nixon insisted to Trudeau that there cannot be a viable relationship between Canada and the United States “if one party exploits the other.”
Then, turning to Kissinger, who was the mastermind behind his entire foreign policy, Nixon said, “Right, Henry? »
And Kissinger puts his stamp of approval. That was absolutely the policy of the United States: equal exchanges.
“What you are saying there is revolutionary, Mr. President,” Trudeau replied, laughing in the sarcastic tone that has earned him his reputation for arrogance.
Henry Kissinger, who died this week at age 100, had more personal affinities with Trudeau. They had both been students of historian William Yandell Elliott, an advisor to six presidents and a legendary professor at Harvard, where Kissinger made his career. During the 1950s, Trudeau attended Kissinger’s summer seminars on international relations for the rising political elite.
US WHITE HOUSE PHOTO, PROVIDED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES
US President Richard Nixon speaking with his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the White House in 1972
On the ideological level, on the other hand, it is difficult to imagine two men more distant. Trudeau, who was prime minister throughout the Kissinger years, was particularly opposed to American action in Vietnam. Strategically, it changed absolutely nothing for the Americans. But politically, it was annoying.
Especially since Canada had opened its doors to all young Americans who refused to enlist in the army. You have our sympathy and Canada “is a refuge from militarism,” Trudeau told the conscientious objectors.
When the American army massively bombed Cambodia and Laos, which served as a rear base and route of passage for the communist army of North Vietnam, the Canadian government denounced it.
The rest of the story proved him right. This war was a military, strategic and humanitarian disaster. And what we have learned over the past 50 years allows us to measure the extent of the war crimes which were committed mainly at the dictation of one man: Henry Kissinger.
Before Nixon was elected in 1968, peace talks took place that nearly ended the war. Witnesses from the time maintain that Kissinger helped derail the deal, allowing Nixon to win the election, and make peace on his terms.
The war did not end until 1973, and the final withdrawal did not occur until 1975.
In the meantime, to put pressure on the communist government of the North, the head of American diplomacy had developed the “mad man” theory, which consisted of spreading the rumor that Nixon was crazy and that it was necessary to urgently settle with him before he burns the entire region.
It wasn’t so wrong. Without even talking about Vietnam itself, the bombings in Cambodia, a neutral country in principle, left more than 100,000 dead.
The country was destabilized to the point of allowing the rise of Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime, which massacred between 1.5 and 2 million people.
The demonstration of military force was to serve to establish the credibility of the United States as the leading world power, to counter communist influence and promote peace and liberalism.
And it was indeed on the advice of Kissinger that the first movements of nuclear “detente” between the USSR and the United States were initiated, and a certain disarmament thereafter.
But Vietnam nonetheless ended in humiliation for the Americans.
Kissinger, a scholar who had read everything and knew every corner of the world, retained until the end this aura of genius in political science and diplomacy, including among the Democrats. Hillary Clinton considered him a “friend” and said she was the best secretary of state. Obama also paid tribute to him, in particular for having had the audacity to meet in secret with Chinese leaders in order to initiate a Sino-American relationship. The rapprochement of the two countries, which somewhat blurred the identity of the “communist bloc”, was a historic turning point in international relations.
PHOTO ARCHIVES ASSOCIATED PRESS
Handshake between Chinese leader Mao Zedong and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Beijing, 1973
But on the day of his death, the Argentine ambassador to the United States recalled the other side of the man. He wrote of X that the brilliance of his historical intelligence “will never succeed in concealing his profound moral baseness”.
Kissinger in fact supported the Argentine coup of 1976, which brought the army to power and led to the assassination and disappearance of 30,000 people.
When Salvador Allende became president of Chile in 1970, relying in part on communists, Kissinger said: “I don’t see why we should stand by and watch a country become communist because of the irresponsibility of his people. » He is now known to have orchestrated Augusto Pinochet’s military coup and takeover of power in 1973, which led to mass political assassinations.
No man, arguably, has exercised such influence over the international policy of the United States in 50 years, especially since he was in office when the country was at the height of its power. It is no exaggeration to say that he alone helped shape the current state of the world.
His shadow still hovers.
He is single-handedly the inspiration for the sometimes cruel political strategies that have fueled hatred of the United States in many parts of the world, still to this day.
Would things have been so different in Washington without Kissinger?
Raymond Aron, in his memoirs, writes that Kissinger’s policy, apart from the rapprochement with China, was only the continuity of American policy since the Second World War. But the man stood out so much for his intellectual stature that this “éminence grise […] drew all the light on him and cast the president into the shadows. Aron wrote in 1982 that Kissinger esteems him “or, if you prefer, he does not extend to me the awareness of his intellectual superiority with which he tends to overwhelm, it is said, the common man.”
The French intellectual, who nevertheless did not cultivate the image of a sensitive soul, writes that he could not have fulfilled this type of function. “It’s one thing to admit the use of weapons in the abstract,” or to play with strategic blocs in theory… it’s another to send people to their deaths.
For Kissinger, this was never a problem.