American foreign policy in the past half a century is perhaps personified in Henry Kissinger, and the 93-year old is finding an all new life under the Trump administration, four decades after he left government. He pursued his preference of order over justice by crossing many moral and legal boundaries and immortalised realism in a memorable dictum: “The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
Mr. Kissinger’s visit to the White House, the day after Donald Trump sacked James Comey as Director of the FBI, took place even as the media was already comparing the President’s action to how President Richard Nixon got rid of officials who were investigating him in 1973. Mr. Kissinger was a key member of the Nixon coterie and the only one to have survived the Watergate scandal. At the unscheduled meeting in Oval Office, they discussed Syria and Russia. “He’s been a friend of mine for a long time... We’re talking about Syria, and I think that we’re going to do very well with respect to Syria and things are happening that are really, really, really positive,” Mr. Trump said.
Diplomatic breakthrough
It was Mr. Kissinger who navigated a breakthrough in U.S relations with China, setting the stage for Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972. He appears to have emerged as Mr. Trump’s adviser on two trouble spots — North Korea and Syria. In a low-key meeting on April 27 in New York, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Mr. Kissinger “conducted in-depth exchanges on the issues of common concern, including the Korean peninsula situation”, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. In December, he visited Beijing, where he was received warmly by President Xi Jinping, who told him: “Dr. Kissinger, I am all ears to what you have to say about the current world situation and the future growth of China-U.S. relations.” Since then, Mr. Kissinger has connected key Chinese officials to the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who engineered a turnaround in ties hit by Mr. Trump’s election rhetoric.
Mr. Kissinger’s influence is matched by the wide revulsion that he invokes among many citizen groups and progressive politicians. He has advised lobbying firms promoting the interests of Chinese companies in America for decades. The fact that he has not registered himself under the Foreign Agents Registration Act has also been criticised by many. “I am proud to say Henry Kissinger is not my friend,” Senator Bernie Sanders, who ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination last year, said, when she described him as a friend.
Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Kissinger was the fodder for a lot of commentary on his Nixonian instincts, but the former diplomat would have held equal sway over Ms. Clinton too if she were the President. During the campaign she said she was “flattered when Kissinger said I ran the State Department better than anybody had run it in a long time”.
Reviewing his book World Order in 2014, she wrote: “Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as Secretary of State.” She went on to suggest that Mr. Kissinger, President Barack Obama and herself shared the same view regarding American leadership in the world.
Mr. Kissinger compared the Nixon administration’s bombing of Cambodia between 1969 and 1973 — kept secret from the American public — to Mr. Obama’s drone strikes against Islamist militants. “I think the principle is essentially the same... You attack locations where you believe people operate who are killing you,” he said. Mr. Trump could also be part of that long-held, domineering narrative of American foreign policy soon.
