Requiem for a warmonger
In South America, his name is remembered in infamy for the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile that led to the bloody reign of Augusto Pinochet
It’s a small coincidence that the long-anticipated death of Henry Kissinger should come at a time when the US is back in the centre of a global debate over imperialism. It is bankrolling two wars today, in Ukraine and Gaza, as the principal sponsor of one of the combatants. This template of extending its hegemony by propping up a client state or nurturing a murderous elite has been a central tenet in American foreign policy. To be fair, Kissinger was not the progenitor of that policy but, as national security adviser and secretary of state to two US presidents and a guru to all presidents since then, he was its most influential practitioner. It was a ruthless policy executed over three continents. It left millions dead and societies broken to this day.
It is justly said that no other diplomat had more influence on the way America engaged with the world than Kissinger. If Israel today brazenly disregards international law to empty out Gaza while claiming to be a victim of genocide, or if an ever-expanding NATO taunts and teases Russia to turn its fury on its neighbours, it is a result of how Kissinger defined America’s role in the world— as a superpower inexorably invested in war, with peace just a ruse.
While Kissinger will be honoured at home as the man who opened the door to relations with China, ultimately enabling the US to outflank and defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War, elsewhere in the world he will be remembered as an evil genius whose counsel led the US into conflicts across the world. In the 1970s, Kissinger and his president Nixon kept the US Congress in the dark as they carried out merciless bombardment of Cambodia and Laos using the excuse that those countries were sheltering the Vietcong militia. When he failed to secure a military victory in Vietnam, he carried out carpet bombing of the north to force it to come to the negotiating table.
In South America, his name is remembered in infamy for the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile that led to the bloody reign of Augusto Pinochet. With Kissinger as national security adviser, every democratic uprising in Latin America was put down, and countries like Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, and Panama were entrusted to military men who then allowed free rein to American corporations while wiping out their own native populations.
In the Middle East, Kissinger perfected the US policy of protecting its oil interests by cosseting Israel as its bridgehead, propping up dictators and monarchs in Arab countries and playing Islamic sects against one another. The template he perfected is practiced to this day, although it has cost the US the lives of thousands of American soldiers.
Kissinger was no friend of India. The origins of the 1971 war between India and Pakistan lay in his policy of using the latter to facilitate his overtures to China. As a trade-off for Islamabad brokering his famous mission to Mao, the US looked the other way as General Yahya Khan unleashed a genocide of Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan, triggering a refugee exodus into India.
Any obituary of Kissinger must of course note that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his efforts to make peace in Vietnam. That precedent has grown into a hoary Nobel tradition now: several warmongers—Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Menachem Begin, Barack Obama—have followed in Kissinger’s wake.
