Imagine, if you can, a single human life that
spans an entire century. And not just any century.
No, we are talking about the American century.
A timeline that starts in post -World War I Germany,
moves through the rise of the Nazis, the inferno
of the Second World War, the Cold War. The fall
of the Berlin Wall, the unipolar moment of the
90s, all the way to, I mean, the age of AI and
a rising China. It's a narrative that, if you
wrote it as fiction, People would say is a little
too on the nose. A bit much. Yeah. If you pitched
it, a Jewish refugee flees Nazi Germany, comes
back in a U .S. Army uniform to hunt Gestapo
and then becomes the very face of American global
power. A publisher would probably tell you to
tone it down. Tone it down is right. We are,
of course, talking about Henry Kissinger, born
1923, died 2023. He lived to be 100 years old.
And for a massive, absolutely pivotal chunk of
that time, he wasn't just watching history. No,
he was in the room with his hands on the steering
wheel. And that's where this story really stops
being just a biography and becomes, I think,
a debate about the very soul of modern foreign
policy. It absolutely does. Because depending
on who you talk to, Henry Kissinger was either
the most brilliant diplomatic strategist of the
20th century, you know, the architect of the
opening to China, the man who ended the Vietnam
War. Or he was a monster. Or he was a monster.
The polarization is just... It's off the charts.
It really is. You have a 2014 poll of international
relations scholars, actual experts in the field,
ranking him as the most effective secretary of
state in 50 years. And then on the other side,
you have someone like Anthony Bourdain, who famously
said that after you've been to Cambodia, you'll
want to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your
bare hands. Or Christopher Hitchens, who wrote
an entire book with the title The Trial of Henry
Kissinger, explicitly calling him a war criminal.
And that extreme divide, that chasm in perception,
is exactly what we need to unpack today. It is
so easy to fall back on the characters. Genius
strategists on one side. And the beltway butcher
on the other. But our mission for this deep dive
is to try and move past that, to look at the
record. We've got a mountain of sources here.
Biographies, declassified cables, his own memoirs,
those famous telephone transcripts. The telecoms,
yeah. The goal is to understand the why. We need
to get inside the machinery of this philosophy
he lived by. Real politic. Real politic. It's
a word you hear all the time, but it usually
just gets used as a synonym for, I don't know,
being cynical or tough. Right. But it's so much
more than that. It's a whole worldview. It's
a belief that foreign policy shouldn't be driven
by idealism or morality as we traditionally think
of it. So what should it be based on? A cold,
hard calculation of power, of national interest,
and above all else, stability. It's the idea
that order is almost always preferable to justice.
Order is preferable to justice. Wow. That is
a heavy, heavy statement. It is. And to really
understand how someone gets to a place like that,
I feel like we can't start in the Nixon White
House. We have to go all the way back. You have
to. You have to start in Firth, Bavaria. You
cannot understand Henry Kissinger without first
understanding Heinz Kissinger. That was his birth
name. Yes. Heinz Alfred Kissinger. Born in 1923
into a pretty typical middle class German Jewish
family. They were patriotic. His father was a
very well -respected school teacher. For the
first 10 years of his life, he was a German kid
who was obsessed with soccer. And then 1933 happens.
Hitler comes to power. Heinz is nine years old.
And his entire world is just turned upside down.
The accounts from that time are, they're heartbreaking.
Friends he played soccer with in the street,
they suddenly joined the Hitler Youth and stopped
talking to him. Or worse. Or worse. They beat
him up. He'd see boys he grew up with now in
uniforms, and they would attack him just for
being Jewish. There's that one detail in the
biographies about the soccer stadium that just
gets me every time. Oh, with his team, SBV Giefer.
Yeah. He was obsessed with them. But after the
Nuremberg laws are passed, Jews are banned from
the stadiums. And he wouldn't accept it. It's
this first real glimpse into his personality,
I think. He would sneak in. He'd try to blend
in with the crowd, but he had this, you know,
distinctive look. And security or Hitler youth
members would spot him. And they'd drag him out
and beat him. Yes. And the next week, he'd do
it again. Just this incredible stubbornness.
But the walls are closing in. His father loses
his teaching job. The family is being systematically
stripped of their rights and their dignity. And
finally, in 1938, his mother, Paula, who really
seems to have been the practical one. The driving
force. She decides they have to get out. Now.
And they were so lucky they got out just months
before Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.
They made it to London, then to New York City,
and settled in Washington Heights. Frankfurt
on the Hudson. That's what they called it, yeah,
because of all the German Jewish refugees. And
that is where Heinz becomes Henry. Now here's
a really interesting psychological point. Later
in life, Kissinger always downplayed this period.
He'd sort of brush it off, saying the Nazi era
didn't really shape his worldview in the way
people assumed. He did. He famously wrote something
like, The Germany of my youth had a lot of order
and very little justice, so it wasn't exactly
a great advertisement for order. Which is a clever
line. It is. But most scholars, including his
main biographer, Walter Isaacson, think he's
really rationalizing there. I mean, think about
it. He witnessed firsthand a modern, civilized,
democratic society, the Weimar Republic, completely
collapse into barbarism. Because the structure
failed. Because the order disintegrated. He saw
what happens when you have chaos. You get Hitler.
So for him, the absolute worst case scenario
isn't tyranny. The worst case scenario is chaos.
Exactly. Chaos. Is the vacuum. Monsters are born
in the vacuum. So for the rest of his hundred
year life, his prime directive, the thing that
overrides almost everything else is the pursuit
of stability, of equilibrium. Even if that stability
means you have to make deals with monsters. Even
then, because it's better than the alternative.
So he's in New York. He's working in a shaving
brush factory, going to night school, keeping
that thick German accent his whole life. And
then, 1943, the U .S. Army drafts him. And this
is what transforms him. It gives him a new identity.
He's not just a refugee anymore. He's an American
soldier. And because he's brilliant and a native
German speaker, he gets fast -tracked into counterintelligence.
I mean, he goes back to Germany. He goes back,
but this time he's the one with the gun and the
authority. That story about him in the town of
Krefeld is just... It's incredible. He's this
20 -year -old private first class, and he basically
ends up running the entire civilian administration
of the city because all the officials had fled.
He was hunting Gestapo officers, rooting out
Nazi stay -behind networks. He earned a bronze
star for it. It's the ultimate role reversal.
But there is one specific moment one day during
the war that we have to focus on. April 1945.
The Alam Concentration Camp. Yes. His unit participates
in the liberation of this camp, which was a sub
-camp of a larger one. And he wrote about it
in his journal, the descriptions. It's just brutal.
I have it here. He wrote, I had never seen people
degrading to the level that people were in Elam.
They barely looked human. They were skeletons.
They had been beaten and starved and worked until
they dropped. To see that with your own eyes,
it... has to reinforce that core belief we just
talked about. This is what happens when civilization
breaks. This is the bottom. This is the abyss
of chaos. So when he comes back and goes to Harvard
on the GI Bill, he isn't just looking for an
education. No, he's looking for a theory of everything.
He's looking for a way to structure the world
so that LM never happens again. And by all accounts,
he hits Harvard like a bomb. His undergraduate
thesis is the stuff of legend. Oh, the meaning
of history. It was almost 400 pages long. It
was so dense, covering Spengler, Coinby, Kant,
that Harvard actually created a page limit for
all future undergrad theses. They literally named
the rule after him. The Kissinger rule, yes.
But it's his doctoral dissertation that really
creates the intellectual blueprint for his entire
career, isn't it? It is. It was called Peace,
Legitimacy, and the Equilibrium. And he wasn't
studying something modern. He went back to the
19th century. To the Congress of Vienna. Where
the great powers of Europe tried to put the world
back together after the chaos of the Napoleonic
Wars. Exactly. He studied these old world diplomats,
Metternich from Austria, Castlereagh from Britain.
And in their actions, he found this core concept
that he called legitimacy. OK, we really have
to define this because this word legitimacy is
the key to everything. He doesn't mean legitimate
in the way you and I would use it, like a fairly
elected government. Not at all. In the Kissingerian
dictionary, legitimacy is a very specific technical
term. It has nothing to do with justice or democracy.
It simply means, do all the major powers, the
great powers, agree on the basic rules of the
game? So if the U .S., the Soviet Union, and
China all accept the borders and the spheres
of influence, even if they hate each other, the
system is legitimate. Precisely. in that system
you have stability you have order a power that
rejects the system like say germany after world
war one becomes what he called a revolutionary
power and revolutionary powers are dangerous
they want to burn the whole thing down so the
job of the statesman the great diplomat is to
keep the great powers inside the tent keep them
balanced keep them satisfied even if it means
sacrificing the interests of smaller countries
to do it The smaller countries are, well, they're
the currency of great power politics. They are
the pawns on the chessboard that you move and
sometimes sacrifice to keep the major pieces
from toppling each other. It is an incredibly
cold logic. It is. But you can see how in an
age with thousands of nuclear weapons pointed
at everyone, that logic might seem not just appealing,
but necessary. Which brings us to how he first
made his name outside of academia. his book in
1957 nuclear weapons and foreign policy it became
a bestseller which is just wild for a dense book
on foreign policy it was controversial right
very he made this argument that the u .s policy
of massive retaliation you know if the soviets
invade west berlin we launch everything was insane
it was a suicide pact he suggested that maybe
you could fight and win a limited nuclear war
using smaller tactical nuclear weapons. That's
terrifying. It terrified people, yes. But it
also made him seem like a serious man. a hard
-nosed realist who wasn't afraid to think the
unthinkable. And that reputation is what eventually
puts him on the radar of Richard Nixon. The ultimate
odd couple. You really couldn't invent two more
different people. Nixon, the grocer's son from
California, full of resentments, hating the East
Coast elites. And Kissinger, the Harvard professor,
the darling of that same elite, a guy who loved
the George Count cocktail party circuit. And
it's funny, in 1968, Kissinger was working for
Nelson Rockefeller, who was Nixon's rival for
the Republicans. nomination. We have him on record
calling Nixon the most dangerous of all the men
running. He said he was unfit for the presidency.
He did. And then a few weeks after Nixon wins,
he gets the call offering him the job of national
security advisor and he takes it instantly. That's
ambition for you. But once they were together,
they found they had this incredible bond. They
were both outsiders in their own way. They were
both paranoid. They were both obsessed with secrecy.
And they shared this deep. deep distrust of the
federal bureaucracy. Exactly. The State Department.
Oh, they saw the State Department as a bunch
of leaky, soft -headed liberals who would undermine
their grand plans. So they created a system where
all the important foreign policy decisions were
made by the two of them in secret from the White
House basement. Which leads directly to what
even his harshest critics will often concede
was his masterpiece. The opening to China. It's
hard to overstate what a huge deal this was.
It was a geopolitical earthquake. You have to
put yourself back in 1969. The US is trapped
in Vietnam. The Cold War with the Soviet Union
is in this deep freeze. And China is just this
enormous, isolated, hostile question mark. The
US hadn't had any diplomatic contact with mainland
China since 1949. We didn't even recognize them.
We pretended the real China was the government
in Taiwan. Right. But Kissinger saw an opportunity.
He realized the communist world wasn't a monolith.
In fact, the Soviets and the Chinese hated each
other. They were having border clashes, shooting
at each other. So he thought, the enemy of my
enemy is my friend. It was triangulation. If
the U .S. could get China on its side, it would
completely isolate the Soviet Union. It would
terrify them. It would force them to negotiate
on things like arms control. It would change
the entire balance of the Cold War. And so begins
this incredible cloak and dagger operation in
July 1971. It's pure spy novel stuff. Kissinger
is on a public trip through Asia. While he's
in Pakistan, he fakes a stomach illness. Deli
belly, I think, was the excuse. That was it.
He's taken to a hill station to recover. The
press corps is told he's resting. But in the
middle of the night, he slips out, gets in an
unmarked car, and is driven to an airport where
a Pakistani plane is waiting to fly him. in secret
to Beijing. Can you imagine the feeling on that
plane? You're heading into the heart of what
America considered its mortal enemy. You have
no idea what the reception will be. Nerves of
absolute steel. He lands and he begins these
marathon talks with the Chinese premier, Zhu
Anlai. And they hit it off. They talk philosophy,
history. They bond over their mutual dislike
of the Soviets. But there was one huge sticking
point. Taiwan. Taiwan. The Chinese said, we can't
have a relationship until you admit that Taiwan
is part of China. And the U .S. had a defense
treaty with Taiwan. So here comes the real politics.
This is a textbook example. Kissinger and Nixon
made the calculation. The strategic prize of
an alliance with a billion people in mainland
China against the Soviet Union was worth more
than our commitment to the government on Taiwan.
They traded them. In essence, yes. He agreed
to what became the one China policy. He promised
the U .S. would eventually pull its troops out
of Taiwan. dismissed the American effort to keep
Taiwan in the U .N. as a doomed rear guard action.
And it worked. The next year, 1972, Nixon goes
to China, shakes Mao's hand. The photos are iconic.
The Soviets are panicked. The entire global chessboard
is tilted in America's favor. A stunning diplomatic
achievement. While they're celebrating this grand
strategic victory, there is a very hot. Very
bloody war still raging in Southeast Asia. Vietnam.
And the real politic applied there was a lot
messier and a lot deadlier. This is the deepest,
darkest shadow on Kissinger's entire legacy.
There's no getting around it. When he and Nixon
came into office in 69, they knew the war was
basically unwinnable in a military sense, right?
They did. They knew pretty quickly that short
of a massive politically impossible escalation,
they couldn't just beat the North Vietnamese
on the battlefield. The American public was done
with the war. So the goalpost shifted. It wasn't
about victory anymore. It was about peace with
honor. Which is a great slogan. But what it actually
meant was finding a way for the U .S. to get
out of Vietnam without looking like it had been
defeated. It was all about American credibility.
He believed that if the US just packed up and
left, it would be a signal of weakness to the
whole world. No ally would ever trust a US security
guarantee again. So they needed a strategy to
withdraw, but to leave the South Vietnamese government
in place for long enough that the US could claim
it hadn't abandoned its ally. And this is where
we get to the decent interval theory. It's one
of the most cynical foreign policy concepts I've
ever heard of. It is. The accusation, which is
backed by a lot of evidence from their own tapes,
is that Kissinger and Nixon knowingly negotiated
a peace agreement that they believed would ultimately
fail. But they just needed it to hold together
for a year or two. Exactly. Get the American
POWs home, get the American troops out. And then
if South Vietnam collapses 18 months or two years
later, well... That's a tragedy, but it's not
America's fault. The interval creates plausible
deniability. We have the transcripts. We have
Kissinger telling Nixon that the terms of the
Paris Peace Accords would eventually destroy
the South Vietnamese President Thieu. He told
the Chinese that the U .S. wasn't necessarily
committed to a permanent South Vietnam. The goal
was an exit strategy, not a lasting peace. And
to get to that exit strategy, to force North
Vietnam to the table on their terms, they didn't
de -escalate the war, they expanded it. Which
brings us to Cambodia. Operation Menu. This is
maybe the single most damning part of his record.
The North Vietnamese army was using trails through
officially neutral Cambodia to supply their forces
in the south. It was called the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
So Nixon and Kissinger decided to bomb those
supply lines and sanctuaries. But they couldn't
do it publicly because bombing a neutral country
is an act of war. So they did it in total secrecy.
They created a separate clandestine system of
record keeping to hide the bombing runs from
Congress, from the American people, even from
the secretary of the Air Force. And the scale
of this bombing is just. Mind boggling. It's
almost incomprehensible. The U .S. dropped more
tons of bombs on rural Cambodia than the allies
dropped on Japan during all of World War II.
The civilian cost. The estimates vary, but credible
sources put the number of Cambodian civilian
deaths from the bombing somewhere between 50
,000 and 150 ,000 people. The strategic result
was an absolute catastrophe, wasn't it? It was
arguably one of the worst foreign policy blunders
in U .S. history. The bombing completely destabilized
the neutral government of Cambodia. It shattered
the rural society. And it drove hundreds of thousands
of enraged, radicalized peasants into the arms
of a tiny, fanatical communist insurgency. A
Khmer Rouge. An obscure group that almost no
one had heard of before the bombing. The bombing
campaign was the single greatest recruitment
tool Pol Pot ever had. And we know what happened
next. The Khmer Rouge take power and you get
the killing fields. The murder of almost 2 million
people. Kissinger would argue for the rest of
his life that they didn't cause the Khmer Rouge
to win. But the evidence is overwhelming that
the U .S. bombing created the conditions, the
chaos, that made their victory possible. It's
the ultimate tragic irony of his philosophy.
In the name of preserving order for American
credibility, he unleashed absolute genocidal
chaos on Cambodia. And yet in the middle of all
this, he and his North Vietnamese counterpart,
Lu Duc Tho, are awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace
Prize for negotiating the Paris Peace Accords.
It's just surreal. The war was still raging on
the ground. Two members of the Nobel Committee
resigned in protest, which had never happened
before. And Lu Duc Tho, he turned it down. He
refused to accept it. He said, with perfect clarity,
Peace has not yet been restored. He had the integrity
to reject it. So what did Kissinger do? He accepted
with humility. He donated the prize money to
a scholarship for children of American soldiers
killed in Vietnam. He was afraid to go to Oslo
to pick it up because of the protests. And then
in 1975, when Saigon fell exactly as the decent
interval had predicted, he actually tried to
return the medal. And they wouldn't take it back.
The Nobel Committee refused to take it back.
So he was stuck with it. A peace prize for a
peace that never was. It's an incredible story.
But Vietnam and Cambodia, as dark as they are,
weren't the only places where this great power
chess game had lethal consequences. Let's turn
to South Asia. The year is 1971, the Bangladesh
Liberation War. This is a moment that I think
most Americans know very little about, but it's
a defining event in that part of the world. It's
huge. So Pakistan at the time was split into
two parts, West Pakistan and East Pakistan, which
were separated by India. In 71, the military
dictatorship in West Pakistan launched a horrific
military crackdown on East Pakistan, which was
pushing for independence. And we say horrific.
We're talking about what was widely described
at the time as a genocide. Mass killings, systematic
rape as a weapon of war, targeting intellectuals
and leaders. Hundreds of thousands of people
were killed. Millions fled into India as refugees.
And the U .S. had diplomats on the ground in
East Pakistan, in the city of Dhaka. They were
seeing this happen. Yes. The consul general,
there was a career diplomat named Archer Blood,
a man of incredible integrity. And he and his
staff were watching the slaughter unfold and
they were cabling Washington, begging them to
do something to condemn the violence. And they
were being ignored. Completely ignored. So Archer
Blood did something almost unprecedented. He
and 20 of his staff signed and sent a formal
dissent cable through official channels. It's
now known as the Blood Telegram. It's one of
the most powerful documents in the history of
American diplomacy. I have a line from it here.
It says, Our government has failed to denounce
the suppression of democracy. Our government
has failed to denounce atrocities. The overworked
term genocide is applicable. He used the word
genocide. He did. He accused the U .S. government
of moral bankruptcy. And how did Kissinger and
Nixon respond to this courageous act of truth
telling? They fired him. They recalled Archer
Blood. They ended his career. They shot the messenger.
Why? Why would the U .S. side with a government
committing genocide? One word. China. Remember
when this is happening. Mid -1971. The dictator
of Pakistan, Yahya Khan, was the secret go -between.
He was the one carrying Kissinger's messages
to Beijing to set up the secret trip. So they
couldn't risk upsetting him. To Kissinger, the
opening to China was the grand prize. It was
the move that would change the world. And if
the price of that prize was turning a blind eye
to the slaughter of Bengalis, so be it. The smaller
country was sacrificed for the great power game.
The private comments from the Oval Office tapes
from this time are just... They are stomach turning.
You have Nixon and Kissinger egging each other
on. Kissinger is recorded calling the Indians
who are helping the Bengalis bastards. He called
the Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi a bitch.
He later said he regretted the language, but
it reveals the contempt they had for anyone who
got in the way of their grand strategy. It's
perfectly consistent with the real politic framework,
though. Pakistan was the U .S. ally and the key
to China. India was seen as pro -Soviet. Therefore,
Pakistan gets a pass. And you see the same cold
logic applied to an issue that should have been
deeply personal for Kissinger, the plight of
Soviet Jews. Right. There was a huge movement
in the U .S. Congress to pressure the Soviet
Union to allow its Jewish citizens to emigrate.
But for Kissinger, this was just an annoying
distraction. He was in the middle of negotiating
the first major arms control treaty, Salt West.
He was trying to establish detente, a relaxation
of tensions with the Soviets. He didn't want
messy human rights issues getting in the way.
And this leads to another one of those Oval Office
tapes that is just chilling. It's from 1973.
Yes. He's talking to Nixon after a meeting with
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, and he tells
Nixon the emigration of Jews from the Soviet
Union is not an objective of American foreign
policy. And then he goes further. He does. He
says, and if they put Jews into gas chambers
in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.
maybe a humanitarian concern. To hear a man who
fled the Nazis, who lost more than a dozen relatives
in the Holocaust, say that if the Soviets start
using gas chambers, it's not an American concern.
I mean, it's almost impossible to process. It
is the ultimate expression of his ability to
compartmentalize, to separate the personal from
the political. He truly believed that if you
let moral outrage guide your foreign policy,
you get crusades. And crusades lead to endless,
catastrophic wars. So in his mind, ignoring the
gas chambers is what prevents a nuclear war that
would kill everyone. That is the steel man argument
for his position. Yes, that by securing detente,
he was preventing a nuclear holocaust. And compared
to that, all other tragedies were in his cold
calculus secondary. OK, so we've looked at the
exhibits for the war criminal case. Let's pivot
to the Middle East, because if Vietnam and Bangladesh.
are exhibit A for the prosecution. The Yom Kippur
War is almost always exhibit A for the defense.
It is. This is where his supporters say you can
see the genius of real politic in action. So
set the scene. October 1973. On Yom Kippur, the
holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Egypt and
Syria launch a massive coordinated surprise attack
on Israel. The Israeli military is caught completely
by surprise. The first few days of the war are
a complete disaster for them. And by this point,
Kissinger is no longer just national security
advisor. He is now also secretary of state. And
Nixon is completely consumed by Watergate. So
Kissinger is effectively running U .S. foreign
policy on his own. He's the acting president
when it comes to this crisis. And his first move
is fascinating. He actually delays sending weapons
to Israel. He does. He holds back the airlift.
The theory is that he wanted Israel to bleed
a little. He felt that if Israel won another
swift, crushing victory like in 1967, they would
become arrogant and would never feel the need
to negotiate for peace. He wanted a stalemate.
That's playing with fire. It is. But then he
sees the Soviets pouring weapons into Syria and
Egypt, and he realizes the balance is tipping
too far. The Arabs might actually win. So he
flips the switch and authorizes Operation Nickelgrass.
A massive round -the -clock airlift of American
tanks, ammunition, everything Israel needs. It
saves Israel from defeat. But then, as the tide
turns and the Israeli army is about to encircle
and destroy the entire Egyptian Third Army, Kissinger
steps in again. He forces the— Israelis to stop.
Why do that? Because his goal wasn't just to
save Israel. It was to reshape the entire Middle
East. By saving the Egyptian army from total
humiliation, he gave the Egyptian president,
Anwar Sadat, a reason to turn away from the Soviets
and toward the United States. It was a brilliant
move. And this is what leads to shuttle diplomacy.
The famous images of him on his plane, flying
constantly between capitals. He was a force of
nature. He'd spend hours negotiating with Golda
Meir in Tel Aviv, then fly to Damascus to haggle
with Hafez al -Assad, whom he called a riverboat
gambler. And he brokers a deal. He brokers disengagement
agreements that separated the armies and stabilized
the situation. It was a diplomatic masterclass
that lead the foundation for the Camp David Accords
a few years later. And crucially, it effectively
kicked the Soviet Union out of the Middle East.
For the next 40 years, the U .S. was the indispensable
power in the region. But there was a price for
that airlift, wasn't there? Oh yes, the Arab
oil embargo. The Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia,
were furious about the U .S. support for Israel,
so they cut off the oil. Leading to gas lines
around the bloc, a massive economic shock in
the West. But even there, Kissinger managed to
turn a crisis into an opportunity, eventually
forging the petrodollar system with the Saudis
that stabilized the global economy for decades.
So, the Middle East? You could call it a win
for his brand of diplomacy. But then we have
to turn our gaze south to America's backyard.
To Latin America. And this is where that cold,
real politic just looks like straight -up support
for fascism. In Latin America, the Kissinger
Doctrine was simple. No more Cubas. He had zero
tolerance for left -wing governments in the Western
Hemisphere, democratically elected or not. Which
brings us to Chile. 1970, the socialist candidate
Salvador Allende wins a free and fair election.
And Kissinger and Nixon are immediately hostile.
This is where we get one of his most infamous
quotes. He said. I don't see why we need to stand
by and watch a country go communist due to the
irresponsibility of its own people. The irresponsibility
of its own people. It's such an incredibly arrogant
and anti -democratic statement. It's the order
over justice thesis in its purest form. A democratic
vote that produces what he considers a revolutionary
outcome is, in his view, an illegitimate vote.
The stability of the hemisphere trumps the will
of the Chilean people. So the CIA was authorized
to undermine Allende's government, to make the
economy scream. They did. And in September 1973,
the military, led by General Augusto Pinochet,
launched a coup. Allende was killed. And Pinochet
established one of the most brutal dictatorships
in modern history. We're talking torture, concentration
camps, political opponents being thrown from
helicopters, thousands. disappeared. And Kissinger
not only supported Pinochet, he defended him.
There's a damning piece of evidence where the
U .S. ambassador to Chile, who was horrified
by the human rights abuses, wanted to send an
official diplomatic letter warning the Pinochet
regime against assassinating its political opponents
abroad. And Kissinger ordered him not to send
it. He personally canceled the cable. A few weeks
later, a car bomb planted by Pinochet's agents
exploded in Sheridan Circle in Washington, D
.C., killing a prominent Chilean dissident. Orlando
Letelier, and his American colleague. It's sickening.
And it's not an isolated case. There's also Argentina.
The dirty war. Yeah. 1976. Another military junta
takes power and begins a campaign of mass murder
against suspected leftists. And this is where
we have the green light meeting. Yes. Kissinger
meets with the Argentine foreign minister. The
Argentine is worried about condemnation from
the U .S. Congress. And Kissinger basically tells
him not to worry about the White House. He says,
and this is a quote, if there are things that
have to be done, you should do them quickly.
In other words, do your killing now before Congress
comes back from recess and cuts off your funding.
It was perceived as a clear green light from
the highest level of the U .S. government. The
U .S. ambassador in Buenos Aires at the time,
Robert Hill, was appalled by the slaughter and
was trying to push a human rights agenda. But
Kissinger completely undercut him. And this all
took place under the umbrella of a larger program,
right? Operation Condor. Operation Condor was
a coordinated multinational intelligence and
assassination program set up by the right wing
dictatorships of the southern Conchili, Argentina,
Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay. They hunted down their
political opponents across borders. Exactly.
They shared intelligence. They kidnapped people
in one country and sent them to be tortured in
another. It was a state -sponsored terror network.
And the CIA and Kissinger's State Department
were, at a minimum, aware of it and did nothing
to stop it. Because these dictators were anti
-communist. They provided order. They were our
guys. There are two other cases from this period
we have to mention. Cyprus in 1974. Classic Kissinger.
A coup in Cyprus backed by the military junta
in Greece, followed by a Turkish invasion of
the island, a war between two NATO allies. And
Kissinger's response? He tilted toward Turkey,
which he saw as the more important strategic
prize. He basically allowed the invasion to happen.
There's a report he said the Turkish approach
was correct. Grab what they want and then negotiate.
which led to the permanent partition of Cyprus
and massive anti -American riots in Greece. That's
when Kissinger, murderer, became a popular chant
there. And then, maybe the most clear -cut case
of all, East Timor, 1975. This one is just, there's
no ambiguity. President Gerald Ford and Kissinger
are in Jakarta meeting with the Indonesian dictator
Suharto. And Suharto tells them he's about to
invade the newly independent nation of East Timor.
And he asks for America's blessing. The declassified
transcript of the meeting is just shocking. Kissinger
tells Suharto, it is important that whatever
you do succeeds quickly. And then he adds a request.
We would be able to influence the reaction in
America if whatever happens, happens after we
return. He literally says. Please just wait until
our plane is in the air. Don't embarrass us by
invading while we're still here. The day after
they left, Indonesia invaded using American -made
weapons. And the result was a near genocide.
A quarter of the population of East Timor, maybe
200 ,000 people, died during the Indonesian occupation
that followed. When you add it all up, Cambodia,
Begalish, Chile, Argentina, East Timor, the body
count is staggering. And yet the man himself
didn't just survive these controversies, he thrived.
He became a celebrity. The first celebrity diplomat.
It was a completely new phenomenon. He was on
the cover of magazines. He was photographed at
fancy clubs like Studio 54. He was dating Hollywood
actresses. Which is where that famous line comes
from. Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. He knew
how to cultivate an image. But his ego was also
his greatest weakness. Which brings us to the
disastrous Oriana Falaci interview. Oh, the cowboy
interview. Falaci was this legendary Italian
journalist who could get anyone to say things
they shouldn't. And in late 72, she gets Kissinger
to open up about his own fame. And he says what?
He says the main point arises from the fact that
I've always acted alone. And then he compares
himself to a cowboy from an American Western
movie. The cowboy who leads the wagon train by
riding ahead alone on his horse. Which must have
made his boss, Richard Nixon, absolutely exploit.
Nixon went ballistic. The idea that Kissinger
saw himself as the lone hero and Nixon was just,
what, driving the wagon. It was an act of supreme
arrogance. Kissinger later said it was the single
stupidest interview he ever gave. But he survived
it. He survived Nixon's resignation. He stayed
on under Ford. And then when he finally left
government, he basically invented the modern
career for a post -administration official. Kissinger
associates. He didn't just retire to a university.
He monetized his contacts. He created a consulting
firm that charged huge fees to corporations who
wanted access to the world's leaders. If you
wanted to do business in China, you hired Kissinger.
Exactly. He wouldn't lobby for you directly.
He would just pick up the phone. He was the old
friend of the Chinese people, and that opened
doors that no one else could. Which led to another
huge controversy after the Tiananmen Square Massacre
in 1989. The Chinese government murders hundreds,
maybe thousands of student protesters. The world
is horrified. And Kissinger goes on TV and writes
op -eds urging against HAARP sanctions, arguing
that the U .S. shouldn't isolate China. While
his firm, Kissinger Associates, had major corporate
clients with billions of dollars at stake in
China. The line between his real politic philosophy
and his personal financial interests became very,
very blurry. And he just kept going. He remained
a relevant voice right up until his death. I
mean, he was co -authoring books about artificial
intelligence in his late 90s. It was incredible.
He worried that AI controlled weapons systems
would destabilize the nuclear balance he'd worked
so hard to create. It was the same old fear of
chaos just applied to a new technology. And he
even changed his mind on major issues like Ukraine.
He did. For years after Russia's 2014 invasion,
he made the classic realist argument that Ukraine
should be a neutral buffer state, not a member
of NATO. But after the full -scale invasion in
2022, he completely reversed his position. In
2023, he said neutrality was no longer an option
and that Ukraine should be admitted to NATO to
guarantee its security. He adapted his realism
to the new reality on the ground. At 100 years
old, he flew to Beijing to meet with Xi Jinping.
And he was received like a visiting head of state.
She called him an old friend that China would
never forget. So finally, November 2023. At 100
years old, Henry Kissinger dies. And the global
reaction was the perfect summary of his life.
It was a perfect Rorschach test. In Washington,
the establishment eulogized him. Biden, George
W. Bush, they all talk about his towering intellect
and his service to the nation. But then you looked
elsewhere. Rolling Stone magazine's headline
was. Henry Kissinger, war criminal beloved by
America's ruling class, finally dies. In Chile,
in Argentina, in Cambodia, there were celebrations.
And that really brings us back to the central
question. Was he a great man whose cold -blooded
realism saved the world from nuclear war by managing
the superpowers? Or was he a man who treated
entire nations, Cambodia, East Tamor, Chile,
as disposable pawns in his game, leaving a legacy
of mass death and instability? He believed, fundamentally,
in order over justice. He did. And that leaves
us with a final, I think, very provocative thought
for today's world. We're living in a time of
growing chaos. We have a rising China, a belligerent
Russia, disruptive new technologies like AI.
The stable order he prized seems to be fraying.
So the question is, are we drifting back into
a world that needs a Kissinger? Does managing
this new era of great power competition require
that same cold, ruthless realism where smaller
nations are once again sacrificed for the sake
of stability? Or have we, or should we, evolved
past that? Is the human cost of that kind of
order simply too high a price to pay? Kissinger's
answer would be clear. He'd say you can have
a world based on justice. Or you can have a world
based on peace. But in the real world, you can
rarely have both. A sobering thought to end on.
If you want to dig deeper into this, I really
recommend Gary Bass's book, The Blood Telegram.
It is a devastating account of the Bangladesh
crisis. Or for the other side, read Kissinger's
own memoirs, White House Years. The sheer intellectual
power is undeniable. Absolutely. Thanks for joining
us for this deep dive. We'll see you next time.