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H Kissinger on global security

31 agosto, 2015 por Felipe Sahagún | Sin comentarios

 

Kissinger: global challenges and U.S. National Security Strategy
Kissinger: global challenges and U.S. National Security Strategy
Henry Kissinger testifica ante el Comité de Fuerzas Armadas del Senado de EEUU para hablar sobre los retos globales y las Estrategia de Seguridad Nacional de EEUU. via @rielcano

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February 16, 0015

Review Essay

The World According to Kissinger
By Wolfgang Ischinger: With the existing world order under assault, Henry Kissinger still champions the traditional building blocks of the international system—sovereign states—even as he recognizes the rising influence of global markets and liberal values.
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Reconsidering Kissinger’s realism—and its lessons for the Obama administration: http://ow.ly/Rz0k2 

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KISSINGER’S SHADOW

The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman

By Greg Grandin

270 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $28.

Review by Mark Atwood Lawrence, who teaches history at the University of Texas at Austin. His latest book is “The Vietnam War: A ­­Concise ­International History.”

‘Kissinger’s Shadow,’ by Greg Grandin

Oct 1, 2015

“Arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes!” Thus chanted protesters as they disrupted a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee in January. One demonstrator brandished handcuffs within inches of Kissinger’s head just after the former secretary of state, who had been invited to appear before the committee, took his seat. Once the Capitol police restored order, though, the event gave way to a frenzy of praise for the grand old man of American foreign policy. George Shultz, another former secretary of state scheduled to testify, inspired a standing ovation in the hearing room by praising Kissinger’s “many contributions to peace and security.”

Such is life for one of America’s most polarizing figures, and so it has been for as long as Kissinger has walked the national stage. The competing narratives are familiar, even stale: Kissinger’s champions hail him as a great statesman whose bold initiatives ended the Vietnam War, bolstered world peace and helped restore American power in an era of national decline. His detractors — members of a “hate Henry industry,” as the New York Times columnist William Safire once put it — view him as an immoral cynic who coddled dictators and enabled appalling bloodlettings on three continents.

Greg Grandin’s “Kissinger’s Shadow” decidedly belongs to the second category. A professor of history at New York University and an eloquent voice of the political left, Grandin hits all the topics that one might expect to see in a sharp indictment of Kissinger’s work as national security adviser and secretary of state in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Drawing on bits of new evidence but mostly synthesizing long-available sources, Grandin revisits, for example, Kissinger’s tolerance of Pakistan’s brutalization of civilians during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, his support for Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s murderous regime in Chile and his endorsement of Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor and the bloody occupation that ensued.

Grandin delves most deeply into Cambodia’s tortured history, accusing Kissinger of waging an illegal war on the country between 1969 and 1973 and, by wreaking havoc on it through a huge bombing campaign, creating conditions that helped bring the genocidal Khmer Rouge to power. Especially disturbing are passages detailing Kissinger’s efforts to keep the bombing secret by, among other things, conniving with military officers to falsify records.

But to Grandin’s credit, he aims to do much more than merely rehash these and other depressing episodes that journalists and scholars have been working over for years. The book’s main agenda is to develop a fresh argument that, although more provocative than convincing, amounts to one of the most innovative attacks on Kissinger’s record and legacy.

Grandin challenges the conventional wisdom that Kissinger should be categorized as a “realist” — as a statesman driven by hardheaded calculation of national interest and calibration of the balance of power. Instead, Grandin contends that Kissinger is best understood as an existentialist who believed that in a world without objective truth or inescapable historical patterns, great statesmen distinguish themselves through spontaneity and resolute action rooted in intuition rather than rational thinking. Kissinger’s “philosophy of the deed,” as Grandin puts it, treated reality not as a constraint but as something to be created by individuals courageous enough to overcome inertia and break the shackles of mindless bureaucracy, political opposition and legalistic concepts like the inviolability of national sovereignty.

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