The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, Henry Kissinger was one of history’s great statesmen

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State who helped shape Cold War history, is a man both revered and reviled.  To his supporters, he was a brilliant statesman whose realpolitik approach to foreign affairs helped maintain international world order and contain Soviet aggression. Kissinger’s skilled diplomacy produced an opening to Beijing, a détente with the Soviet Union, and the eventual peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. As present-day conflict threatens to engulf the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and a new and dangerous alliance is forming between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, a statesman with Kissinger’s strategic acumen is badly needed. To his detractors, however, Kissinger was a war criminal whose pursuit of power resulted in the carpet bombing of Cambodia, a prolonged Vietnam war, a military coup in Chile, and many other such atrocities. Few Americans have been responsible for as many deaths in America and abroad as he. Henry Kissinger, his critics argue, did not make the world more secure; rather, his ruthless brand of realism and callous disregard for human life sowed a deep hatred of US foreign policy overseas that has manifested into the violent conflicts unfolding in the present day. Arguing in favour of the resolution is Niall Ferguson. He’s a world famous historian, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the author of Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist Arguing against the resolution is Patrick Porter, Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of Birmingham SOURCES: AP, ABC News, CNA   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membershipMembers receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki GurwitzEditor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You don't help the poor by making everybody poorer. The media has a frame, and the frame is Israel is the oppressor, and the Palestinians are the oppressed. I shouldn't be forced to acknowledge my privilege unless I desire for that to be part of my interaction with somebody else. What I know to be true and what all of my fellow Gen Z know to be true is that this is the most talented generation yet. With respect to every indicia of disadvantage, there is still a racial hierarch. And though I am, of course, in Anglo, I'm certainly not a Fri-Saxon. Welcome to the Monk Debates. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day.

Our goal with each and every Monk debate program is to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved, Henry Kissinger, was one of history's great statesman. I believe that the concept, that some country, will dominate the world. It's in itself a misunderstanding of the world in which we now live. Hello, I'm your moderator, Roger Griffith. Well, that was Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. Secretary of State. On our monk debate stage at Roy Thompson Hall a decade ago,

arguing that the 21st century would not belong to China. Kissinger, who died earlier this month, at the ripe old age of 100, is a man both, revered and reviled. To his supporters, he's a brilliant statesman whose approach to foreign affairs helped to maintain the liberal international world order led by the United States and contained the Soviet Union as a great power. To his detractors, Kissinger was nothing short of a war criminal whose pursuit of naked power resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Henry Kissinger's supposedly ruthless brand of realism sowed a deep hatred of the

United States and its foreign policy amongst populations around the world that has lasted for decades and manifested itself into the violent conflicts that we see unfolding now. On this installment, the monk debates, we will challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved. Henry Kissinger was one of history's great statesman. Arguing for the resolution is Neil Ferguson, a renowned historian, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Kissinger, 1923 to 1968, The Idealist. Arguing against the resolution is Patrick Porter. He's professor of international security and strategy at the University of Birmingham. Patrick, Neil, welcome to the mug debates. Pleasure to be with you. Thank you. timely and important debate today we're going to move quickly because a lot of to talk about with you

both and we're going to do this in our usual debate format with opening statements first so Neil let me pass the proverbial baton over to you let's hear your opening statement please well you're supposed not to speak ill of the dead and we're having this conversation just a week after uh Henry Kissinger's death so I'm not going to approach this in the spirit of tub-thumping dispatch box debating, we're discussing the proposition that Henry Kissinger was one of history's great statesman. I want to just begin with a quotation. He was asked in 1976 towards the end of his time in office when he was just 52 years old about what he looked back on with the most pride. And this is what he said. Landing in China in 1971 was a tremendous

experience when Li Duk Tau, who was the North Vietnamese negotiator, put on the table, the proposal which I knew would end the Vietnam War, that was a tremendous feeling. The SALT agreement, the Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement with the Soviets in 1972, the signing of the Shanghai Communique with China, also in 1972, the first disengagement agreement between the Egyptian and Israel in 1973. And strangely enough, he said, the first Rombouillet summit, which was where the G7 was born in 1975, because it meant that at least we were beginning to pull. the industrial democracies together. Finally, he added, I was terribly moved when President

Kaundov, Zambia got up at the end of my Lusaka speech, which was the speech Kissinger gave on the coming end of white minority rule in Southern Africa, and embraced me. And the point I would make is that that's a pretty impressive list that most American diplomats would regard with considerable envy. If you want to really appreciate the scale of Kissinger's historically, achievement, I think you have to recognize what an incredibly difficult situation the United States was in when he came into the White House as Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor in 1969. It seemed as if the United States was losing the Cold War. It was certainly losing the Vietnam War. And I'm just going to briefly list the eight things that I think Kessinger achieved in the eight

years he was in office. And I think if one reflects on those eight things, the motion really should be carried NEM-Con. First, I mean, he extricated the United States from Vietnam, where in January 69, half a million Americans were bogged down in a conflict that was claiming the lives of more than 300 of them every week. And the second achievement was, well, he avoided World War III, which was, after all, not a guaranteed outcome of the Cold War. they'd only narrowly avoided World War III over Cuba in 1962. He established, this is the third one, a diplomatic dialogue with the People's Republic of China, which the US had, after all, fought a very bloody war with over Korea.

While obviously there are some differences, there are also many common approaches. And the talks were extremely useful in enabling the leaders of both sides, to understand the perceptions of the others and to see where parallel policies can be pursued. The fourth historic achievement is the one that in many ways impresses me the most, and that was the way he negotiated in this extraordinarily painstaking way step by step, a peace between Egypt and Israel after the Yom Kippur War. Fifth, I think he did ultimately revitalize the transatlantic alliance after the very ropey so-called year of Europe.

Sixth, I think, though it's an unpopular position, that he successfully resisted the tide of communism in Latin America, prevented another Cuba in Chile. Seventh, and I think this is often forgotten. He did a great deal to expedite the end of white minority rule in Southern Africa. I think here particularly of Rhodesia. And finally, I think it's worth adding that he prevented the massive domestic political crisis of Watergate from becoming a really irreversible crisis of American

leadership in the international system. And so when you add up those eight things, I think the kind of charges that we've seen in some of the snarkier pieces published in the last week since his death, which have emphasized Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, East Timor, epiphenomena, I think, in the context of the Cold War, it's clear that the achievements outweigh the demerits and that he really was one of history's great statesman. Thank you, Neil Ferguson. You're listening to our debate today, be it resolved, Henry Kissinger, was one of history's great statesman.

Patrick, you're arguing against the motion. Let's have your opening statement, please. Well, thank you. And when you get two Brits arguing about U.S. foreign policy, nothing can go wrong at all. but it's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you very much. I want to argue that Henry Kissinger was obviously not one of the greatest statesmen of world history. He did some good things and he wrote some good books.

But on the whole, he was a power-worshipping, self-serving businessman. He got too many things wrong. And worst of all, he lived out a career where he consistently put himself above the state and his celebrity and his desire for proximity to power. I think there are two tests of whether someone deserves to be in the ranks of the greatest statesman of all time, of Talleyrand, of Metternich, of Mandela, perhaps, George Washington, Touss en masseur. And the two tests are this. The prudence test, the test of practical sound judgment, and the civics test,

whether someone is committed to the security welfare of the state and of the wider international order above all. I think Kissinger fails both of those tests too often. This is the man who knowingly, and we have overwhelming documentary proof for it, took part in the Nixon Agnew attempt to sabotage a sitting president's diplomacy and undermine his country's foreign policy during the 1968 Paris peace talks. President has sent me back to Paris to make one more major effort. to conclude the negotiation. We expect that the talks this time will be serious

and worthy of the yearnings of people all over the world for an early end of the war. Taking part in an attempt, which was an assault both on the law and indeed on constitutional tradition, for personal gain and for the gain of a private faction carrying out private diplomacy. That's not great statesmanship. That's the opposite of great statesmanship.

That's undermining the state, not furthering it. This is the man who winked at, encouraged, first a coup by a Greek junta and then the retaliatory invasion by Turkey in Cyprus, giving NATO, the transatlantic alliance, a real crisis to deal with, one it could have very well done without, not to mention the occupation partition

that Cyprus could have done without, and taking two countries in NATO near to war. He wasn't the sole author of that crisis, but he contemptuously ignored warnings, played for time and procrastinated. And this was deliberately to do something which I think he's done too often, which is to give the head to allies being reckless

and destabilizing in their behavior. Now, quite understandably, Kissinger's defenders will emphasize China, and China becomes the crown jewel of the case four kids. And indeed, the realignment, the opening to China was an important achievement in the Cold War. It helped to split the Soviet-China alliance. It helped to realign the balance of power in America's favor.

But Kissinger was far from being the main architect. In fact, the main architect, arguably, was Mount Saitung in China. And indeed, Richard Nixon. In fact, eyewitnesses like Al Haig report that Kissinger was initially dismissive of the idea. and depended upon a prior Sino-Soviet split, which had very little to do with anyone in Washington. This is way too Washington-centric as an account of what happened. Now, Kissinger and Nixon had the good sense to accept the gift that Mao was offering

and to make some pretty dark concessions to do so, and I support that. That is not Metternich at Vienna. And indeed, on China, in fact, the thing that where Kissinger is supposed to be at his greatest, I find him at his most myopic, his most romantic, his most... compromised. He became the business partner, counsellor, client of Beijing, even as it became America's wealthiest, largest adversary that it's ever faced. I think all three of these things would disqualify anyone from being considered amongst the greatest statesman of world history. And there, of course, there are other judgment calls, which even a lot of Kissinger's biographers

and admirers will admit to. Being wrong about the missile gap, being wrong to dismiss or underestimate Amwar Sadat's determination to revise the territorial settlement and the Sinai with Israel, being wrong in expecting that the extension and the escalation of bombing in Cambodia would suppress communism rather than in fact expanding communism and not just communism, but one of the most genocidal horrific forms of it. And being largely supporting, most military adventures, even the disastrous ones, ever since. He continually, and the thing about Kessinger is not that he was primarily an idealist or primarily a realist, he was a Kisingerist. He continually shifted his views according to who was in the ascendancy and which ideas

were on top, whether it's on nuclear weapons, his opinions spanned the waterfront, his views on containing the Soviet Union, conciliating the Soviet Union, ramping up against the Soviet Union, his opinions of the Bush doctrine, his opinions of Donald Trump. In other words, this is a man not primarily who taught princes how to think about foreign policy. This was a man who changed his views continually to suit power. He was more of a read in the wind in that respect. But the thing I want to finish with here is the force of Kissinger's example on American foreign policy making and how Washington works as a town.

Kissinger, I think, unfortunately, as a tragic figure, he had studied power, he had written a great book about power, the world restored, he had practiced power, he came to love it too much. And that's not unique to him. That's a possibility for all of us who do these things, and it's a corruption that any one of us can be lured into. And he embodied this very bad tendency in US public life to view public office as something that you coin, that something that you parlay, and something that you use to further one's own interests afterwards in ways that can create conflicts of interest, whether it's corporations or institutions, or in ways where people even have been working covertly for foreign powers which can become hostile. I think that's bad. I think it's bad not only in terms of making good policy,

it's bad in terms of fueling the populist revolt, which is so dangerous. So at a time when the United States does need sound rail politic at a time when it's overstretched and facing crisis and very dangerous scenarios, I think this great republic should look elsewhere for inspiration. And I look forward to the discussion. Thank you. Thank you, Patrick, for that opening statement. You are listening to our debate today, be it resolved. Henry Christinger was one of history's great statesman. Okay, Neil, your opportunity now for a rebuttal in terms of what you've just heard from Patrick. Well, thank you.

Patrick, I was a little surprised when you characterized Henry Kissinger as somebody who was power worshipping and self-serving, unlike Taléant and Metternich. I think you've got it just the wrong way around, read Kissinger's account in a world restored of Taleran and Metternich, and you quickly realize they're not at all the heroes of a world restored. Let me take the points you've made one by one because it's an important opportunity for me to set the record straight. In the case of the 1968 election, it's actually not true that Kissinger behaved in some devious way to let the Nixon campaign know what was going on in Paris so that Nixon could scuttle the talks. Luke Nichter's new book on 1968, just published this year, endorses the view that I put forward in the first volume of my Kissinger biography, that this is a conspiracy theory without any substance. And it shows that in reality, Lyndon Johnson wanted Richard Nixon, not Hubert Humphrey, to succeed him. It's time we got rid of this 1968 nonsense, which is out of the Seymour Hirsch drawer of conspiracy theories and is actually not supported. by documentary evidence.

You went to Cyprus next. It's hard to think of a less consequential issue than Cyprus in the 1970s. These were two undemocratic countries, both within NATO, colliding over a former British military base. And I don't think it can really be regarded as a tremendous failure that the outcome was a partition of the island, the most important outcome was to keep the two allies from going to a large-scale and protracted conflict, the might have broken up NATO and jeopardized American interests in the Mediterranean. The argument that the China opening was nothing to do with Kissinger was really Mao's idea and perhaps also Nixon's, I don't think, is credible. Kissinger certainly came to

see the opportunity presented by the Sino-Soviet split at about the same time as Nixon before they were in office. I try to show that in volume one. And I think it's extremely hard to imagine anybody else managing the opening as deftly as Kisinger did. It was an incredibly difficult thing to pull off without the maintenance of secrecy, which was one of the indispensable parts of the strategy. It wouldn't have succeeded without Kissinger's ability to connect with show and nine, figure out a compromise over Taiwan, the whole thing might well have failed. So I think you're unjust to dismiss the importance of his role. And after all, there's a reason the Chinese came to rely on him as the great interlocutor in the West. It was because he got them in a way

that no subsequent Secretary of State really did. I think it's wrong to portray Kissinger as a kind of client or agent of the PRC. That's unworthy of you, Patrick. It's the kind of thing that the more wild Republicans like to argue these days. Nobody in 1972 could foresee the extraordinary growth of China. It was only really after China was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001 that it began to catch up with the United States. It's kind of strange to lay that at Kissinger's door so long after he was in office. Was he wrong about Sadat initially? But he turned on a dime when he saw what Sadat was really about in 1973. And it was one of the most important relationships that led to at least a partial peace in the Middle East.

For 26 years, and it is quite logic, we have never enjoyed any confidence in Israel, and the same thing happens that Israel never enjoyed any confidence in us. The moment came when Dr. Kissinger appeared on the stage, and he enjoys... My full confidence. I think anybody watching the Middle East today would wish that there was somebody with Kissinger's skill

able to work in bringing some kind of stability to the region now. I'll briefly deal with a couple of other points you made. The bombing of Cambodia is a highly contentious issue, but the person who made the most savage critique of that, which is William Shawcross, in sideshow, has now recanted and essentially disowned that work,

which makes it really hard to have a go at Kissinger. It was the North Vietnamese who violated the neutrality of Cambodia. It was the North Vietnamese who made possible Pol Pot, not the United States government. We should really join William Shawcross in repudiating that argument. Let me end by saying, I think it's a really base suggestion that Henry Kissinger came to love power too much, and particularly the money that it brought him. As I write the second volume of the biography, I'm really struck by how little money Kissinger Associates actually made.

And that really Kissinger Associates was a vehicle for Kissinger to continue to do what he was best at, which was to have conversations with leaders around the world in an attempt to maintain some kind of world order. It wasn't really a particularly successful business by the standards certainly of the period after he left government when enormous sums of money were to be made by investment banks and others in China. and actually I don't think money was something that interested Henry Kissinger. He was far more interested in the intellectual endeavor of international diplomacy,

and he put his services at the disposal of successive presidents right down until the final years of his life in return for absolutely nothing. It didn't get him back into power. If he'd really craved power, I think he perhaps would have been more successful in returning to it. So I think it's a rather mean-minded thing to suggest that he was motivated by mercenary concerns. I think actually I can show that just the opposite was true was one of his lowest priorities. Thank you, Neil Ferguson. You're listening to our debate. Henry Kissinger was one of histories. Great statesman. Patrick, your chance now for rebuttal reacting to Neil's opening remarks or what you've just heard now.

Well, thank you. I mean, I think if the realities are base and mean, we need to be based. and mean in discussing them. I don't share this kind of recoiling at the records of people who happen not to be alive anymore if there's evidence for them. There's plenty of evidence that Kissinger was involved in the deliberate sabotage in 1968, regardless of whether Lyndon Johnson preferred a Nixon presidency to a Humphrey presidency, regardless of whether, in fact, history would have been any different if they hadn't done it. I mean, not one of the people who says that Kissinger is responsible for the war extending beyond that, given North Vietnam's own intransigence and his record of lying.

But I do say in itself that it was a disgrace that he was involved. We do have evidence for this. There may be revisionist work now. We also have the work of Ken Hughes, who is absolutely not a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. He's a very close archival historian. His work chasing shadows. We have the FBI transcripts.

We have the records of the Johnson administration bugging the Nixon Agnew team. We have the notes of Nixon's campaign chief of staff, Holderman. We have memoirs of officials from the Johnson administration. We have Kissinger himself, in his own words, on the Nixon tapes in June 1971, reminded Kissinger about how he'd given information to him at the time. And we know from Richard Allen Nixon's campaign foreign policy advisor that this was on. And let me take up this idea that all suggestions of conspiracies are therefore a conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theorist is someone who believes as a crank that the whole world operates around a single malign intelligence or plot.

I do not think that. I think that people who do think that ought to be called up on it. But it's not the same thing to say that sometimes people in power, or in this case, close to power, do conspire. To say that that, to dismiss that as a conspiracy theory is to be a little naive. it's to be a little innocent. Sometimes people in power do secretly do things, which they ought not to do, and we can call it out. Now, when it comes to China,

I don't say Kissinger had nothing to do with it, and I agree with you that Kissinger skillfully helps set the table, and he deserves some credit for that, but I don't think it's the equivalent of Metternich in Vienna. And it's also, I think, nearly you overstate how difficult it was to do. China, having come out of the Sino-Soviet split, having come out of the cultural revolution, was very keen to do it.

And the United States paid up. It made a lot of concessions, including on Taiwan, which nowadays and indeed then would have been absolutely lambasted. And it made those concessions into ways that China was very eager, had the appetite to do. We know this because Johnson, Lyndon Johnson beforehand, had also tried an opening to China and been rebuffed. So the momentum I still maintained came the other way.

Now, I don't blame Kissinger for China's rise, and I don't at all, that would be ridiculous. What I do blame him for is lending out his talents to China long after it became very clear indeed that China was becoming a ruthless adversary, bidding for power, a revisionist state, bidding for hegemony in Asia, at a time when the United States' interests were seriously threatened.

The US and China are at a crossroads, but there's still a chance for them to prosper in peaceful coexistence. That's what Chinese President Xi Jinping had to say when he met with former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, in Beijing. Mr. Xi referred to the elder politician as an old friend who will never be forgotten. I think it is improper that a respected former diplomat lends his services in that way. And it's certainly improper for the way in which Kissinger's commentary was covered. This was hardly ever mentioned. That Kissinger was reported as this independent, detached guru of foreign.

policy, not as a client with an interest. And it comes down to Sadat. I mean, yes, I agree, he deserves some credit for turning on a dime, but underestimating Sadat and dismissing him first, even Martin Indyck, one of Kissinger's great admirers in which that was a serious fault. And Kissinger did have a flare for helping calm down the crises that blew up sometimes on his watch. But that's quite a compromised verdict. on Cambodia, I actually agree with some of that on you. I don't think that the bombing in Cambodia was the sole cause of the rise of the Khmer Rouge. And I don't think it was necessarily as extensive as some of the critics say.

But I do believe there was a basic misjudgment that extending America's war in Cambodia, the war was already on in Cambodia, right about that. Extending the war into Cambodia would suppress communism. In fact, it did contribute to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. The bombing of that scale did contribute to it. and it had the perverse effect of spreading communism in Asia, not pulling it back. On the issue of Cyprus, you talk about certain parts of the world and certain crises as epiphenomenal or as peripheral.

Well, Kissinger didn't think of them in that way. He thought of Cyprus as absolutely key to America's interest in the Mediterranean, just as he thought looking strong and looking robust and resolved in Vietnam was vital for America's standing in the world. In fact, he was a great domino theorist, in a way. And one of the criticisms of Kissinger is that he helped fan crises, which then got America stuck in situations where allies felt sorry for America rather than being impressed by America's strength. Lastly, on Kissinger Associates, absolutely may be the case,

Kissinger was not personally interested in material wealth. He was very interested in proximity to power, and it cannot be said that he didn't pursue a kind of dark celebrity. And I think that examples have helped to contribute, something we face in Washington now. way too many officials who spend their time outside and between stints in government doing things for corporations and powers in ways that are not very accountable that's bad for the Republic. And I think that's probably enough for me for this round. Thank you.

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tuning into this terrific debate. Neil, let me come to you first. Let me try to just ground us back in the resolution for the benefit of our listeners. The motion before the House today is that Henry Kissinger was one of history's great statesmen. You're a student of history. You've written about many different historical periods. What are a couple of the key qualities of a great statesman in history, and why did Kissinger have them? I think the answer to that question is that there has to be some strategic concept that is related

successfully to one's capabilities and one's predicament. And what's lacking in Patrick's critique, it's a little bit like some of the other critiques that have been published, say Christopher Hitchens, is that it latches on to small parts of the overall picture without relating them to the strategic concept. The situation of the United States in January 1969 was a dire one. It was entirely bogged down in Vietnam with a vast, conventional force deployed and yet no real prospect of victory. The Cold War had taken a distinct turn for the worse

with the crushing of the Prague Spring at the previous year. Once again, the Soviet Union demonstrating a colossal contempt for the opinion of mankind has resorted to brute force to keep a satellite nation under control. Russian tanks and infantry aided by troops from East Germany, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria have occupied Czechoslovakia, and have crushed the new and relatively liberal leadership of that small country. The Soviets were arming at a fantastic pace, rapidly accumulating a larger nuclear arsenal

than the United States. This was not a good situation to be in. And what is fascinating about Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, because they worked together as a partnership in the early years, was the quality of the strategic concept that they developed. Now, they couldn't salvage South Vietnam, but I think they both knew that from the outset. But what they could do was to get the United States out, and they got the United States ground forces out at extraordinary speed, brought an end to the war, and got out, and unfortunately, South Vietnam did not survive long after the departure of US forces, but mainly because Congress cut off all aid to it. The second part of the strategic concept was to establish through what became known as detaunt, a more

constructive relationship with the Soviet Union in which a whole range of different issues, not just strategic arms limitation, but other issues too, including commercial ties, would be used to reduce the risk of an escalation of Cold War into hot war. And I think that was an extraordinarily successful effort that reduced the Soviet threat, at least in the early 1970s quite appreciably. This was most obvious in 1973 when the Soviets contemplated unilateral intervention in the Middle East, but were deterred from doing so by Kissinger. And the third part of the strategic concept was to exploit the Sino-Soviet split in order to exert leverage on Moscow,

force the Soviets into negotiations such as the salt talks. And that was particularly brilliantly executed. So I think if one thinks of the administration in January 1969 and compares the situation by the end of 1972, Kisinger and Nixon had succeeded in radically improving the situation of the United States. And I'd go further and say that even as D'Ataught began to unravel, which it did because of the deep cynicism, and the Soviets felt about it, at the very least, it had bought the United States roughly a decade to recover from the debacle of Vietnam

and to set the stage by the end of the 1970s for a new era in which the United States could be altogether more combative under Ronald Reagan's leadership and ultimately win the Cold War. I don't think you get that outcome without detente and the breathing space that it provided. I'll add one further thing, if I may, Rudyard. You know, the issue of 1968 came up again there, and Patrick's really determined to keep

that theory going that there were nefarious activities. And it's worth rebutting that, and I'll try and show you why. I went through the documents extremely carefully for the relevant chapter of my first volume of Kissinger biography. And what's really clear is that the idea that Kissinger used inside knowledge to equip the Nixon administration to undermine the talks by telling the South Vietnamese what was going on just doesn't stand up, apart from anything else. The South Vietnamese didn't really need anybody to tell them what was going on. They knew. More importantly, what's clear is that Kissinger was offering advice to the Humphrey campaign as well as to the Nixon campaign, just as he'd offered advice to the Johnson administration. Patrick doesn't mention that

Kissinger had been involved in Backchannel approaches to North Vietnam prior to 1968. I showed that too in my book. And so what really has happened in this historiography is that people have taken the testimony of Kissinger's enemies of the kind of gossipy stuff that you get from Richard Allen and Haldeman and try to construct a conspiracy theory in which Johnson administration's efforts to bring peace or undermined by devious Kissinger. Walter Isaacson makes this kind of argument too, and it's just not true. It doesn't stand up to close documentary scrutiny.

And the reason we should push back against this is that we need to explain something really important here. And that is why one president after another, in one way or another, turn to Kissinger for advice. even those like Ronald Reagan who'd regarded him with hostility when he was in office. Now, did they turn to Henry Kissinger because he was devious, untrustworthy, and likely to go behind their backs? Or did they turn to him because he was actually quite good at strategic concepts and offered insights that were valuable to them? And I would suggest that it's a sign of Kissinger's greatness, intellectual greatness and skill as a practitioner, that president after president turned to him for advice and indeed trusted him in doing so.

And it's very hard to my mind to argue that somebody doesn't have something going for them if 50 years after the peak of their time in office, they're still being regarded as an expert and consulted not just by US presidents, but by presidents of other countries. I would add that it wasn't just Xi Jinping who sought Kissinger's counsel in the months before his death. So did Volodymya Zelensky. So were they all consulting Kissinger because of his deviousness? Or was it just more plausibly because he actually had something intellectual to offer?

Thank you, Neil. Patrick, to come back to you with a similar question. You've thought and written a lot about history. What are the qualities of great statesmen and why do you think Henry Kissinger didn't have them. And presumably, what are those specific qualities that you think other great statesmen have evidenced that we don't find in the Kissinger biography?

Well, like I say, I think there are two things. There's consistent sound judgment, and there's a sense of civic purpose. No great statement is perfect, and everyone's record is mixed, but for the great ones, and it's a small club and it's a high bar, they will be involved in violence and moral compromise,

but there's something very large to show for it. And I don't think the US and the Soviet Union were as close to war in 1973 as Neil does, and I don't think America, Kissinger and Nixon's only driver in Vietnam was to get out of Vietnam, was also to demonstrate American strength. That was a very widely repeated rationale for America's campaign in Vietnam after Nixon was elected,

was to signal to the world America's strength as a reliable alliance guarantor had the perverse result of allies saying, what the hell are you doing? You need to start making tracks to get out. It didn't show strength. In fact, showed frailty and vulnerability. And indeed, the United States got out of Vietnam

with terms that weren't that much better than what was offer on offer in the late 60s. The following statement is being issued at this moment in Washington and Hanoi. At 1230, Paris time the day, January 23, 1973, the agreement on ending the war and restoring peace in Vietnam was initialed by Dr. Henry Kissinger on behalf of the United States and special advisor Li Duktoe on behalf of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam expressed the hope that this agreement will ensure stable peace in Vietnam and contribute to the preservation of lasting peace in China and Southeast Asia. So I don't on the scorecard see that as such a home run. In fact, if anything,

I mean, it was a terrible situation they inherited, but it wasn't a terrible situation that was handled particularly well to the point of being a great state. We're not just here to talk about whether Kissinger had something to offer, whether he was bright, whether he had qualities, of course he had some qualities, of course he was bright, of course he had some skills. That's not the, that's not the exam question. The exam question is whether he's one of the greats. And it comes to the point about why do so many people talk to him?

Well, partly because he tells them what they want to hear. Part of Kissinger's genius as a chameleon is to alter his positions. When Ronald Reagan was elected and having often besmirched Henry Kissinger, Kissinger had this kind of nerve and discipline to, in fact, alter his position on Ronald Reagan's hawkery, Ronald Reagan's ideological offensive against the Soviet Union and to encourage it. Kissinger offered great moral encouragement and helped to nerve people in their positions because he was so skillful at talking to them. Of course he could provide some insights, some skill, but this is not some innocent process of power wanting to go and talk to technically gifted people to find out what to do. It's a much more political process than that.

When it comes to other parts of the world, well, yes, we are going to mention Chile. We are going to mention Cambodia. We are going to mention these peripheries, these epiphenomeno, these out-of-the-way places. Because the test isn't whether Kissinger and the United States were involved in moral compromise. They had to be. The question is whether it was excessive, whether there was unnecessary bloodshed. And I think there was. And that's also part of the Talley and part of the register.

and we can't just write off whole parts of the world as sideshows and peripheries, when Henry Kissinger certainly didn't do that. One of the great temptations of being an academic is to sit in your armchair, in your study, and make believe that you'd have done a better job than the people in the situation room. And it's a temptation that I think is to be resisted. But when Patrick, who's a better historian than many, of Kissinger's other critics suggests that somehow the Vietnam War could have been ended earlier at lower cost. He's entering the realm of science fiction and not historical reality,

because really nobody's serious and certainly no leading Democrat advocated simply abandoning South Vietnam in January 1969. The idea that you could have had peace on the same terms in 1969 as in 1973 is, I think, a complete fantasy. Apart for anything else, it was worth at least trying to salvage South Vietnam for the sake of the people of South Vietnam, who fell victim in the end in 1975, to an absolutely brutal communist regime in the North. It's the counterfactuals that are missing

in nearly all the work of the critics. Could Chile have been handled differently? Is there some happy-ever-after story when the Aende government, oh, I don't know, reforms itself, ceases to destroy the Chilean economy and ceases to undermine the rule of law in that country. The great myth perpetuated by the likes of Hirsch and Hitchens is that the United States played a key role

in Ayandi's overthrow in the creation of the Pinnashit dictatorship. When Salvador Aende became Chile's first Marxist president in 1970, it appeared to be a true watershed in Chilean history. But his radical policies polarised the nation. In three years, Chile was tearing itself apart. The internal disarray was resolved in September 1973, when the armed forces with US support combined to overthrow the government. The evidence is quite clear.

While the CIA tried to stop Allende coming to power, pretty unsuccessfully, they really had very little to do with his downfall, which was largely self-inflicted. And the result of a constitutionally motivated a reaction against his increasingly tyrannical, despotic government. So once again, the counterfactuals not plausible. Allende couldn't be saved because he destroyed himself. And it was the Chilean Congress and the Chilean military that got rid of him,

not the CIA and certainly not Henry Kissinger. So I think when we come to assess statesmen, it's a somewhat old-fashioned word, Secreties of State, national security advisors. There are two things that are very important for academics to do. One, be circumspect. It's really hard. As Kissinger said, before he became national security advisor, most of the decisions in foreign policy are choices between evils, and you have to try and choose the lesser evil. He also said it's hard to do because there's a huge element of conjecture involved. You don't know at the moment of decision all that you ideally would know. And so you have to

take the conjectural leap. In the knowledge that if you're right and you avert disaster, there's no reward for that. People aren't grateful for disasters that don't happen that you averted. So Kissinger never expected to win a popularity contest. In fact, one of his whole central points about the nature of being a statesman right at the beginning of his career is that it's essentially tragic. You're bound not to be understood. And in the end, there will be no gratitude for catastrophes averted. And the second thing that I think we need to do as scholars is be explicit about the counterfactuals.

Be explicit about these better scenarios that we think in our clever way we could have brought about. It's actually tremendous arrogance to think that you could have done a better job of being national security advisor or Secretary of State than Henry Kissinger. I think if you look at his successors who inherited different problems,

they're not radically different. The key question is, how do we rank them? How do we rank the presidents? How do we rank the secretaries of state? And I don't think there are many practitioners who would agree with you, Patrick, that Henry Kissinger somehow belongs at the lower end of the league table of secretaries of state. On the contrary, I think it's increasingly clear to me that those people who've been in the situation room almost universally accept that Kissinger was one of the masters of state craft of the 20th century.

Thank you, Neil. Let's go to closing statements. Our resolution today, Henry Kissinger, was one of history's great statesman. Patrick, you've been arguing against the motion. So as per tradition, we'll have your closing statement first. Well, thank you so much. And thank you, Neil, and I only wish we could do this all day. I don't think I could have done a better job, but I'm not the one who's bidding for a place in history as one of the great statesman of all times. That's a sort of silly throwaway point. I mean, the fact is that historians and people in international relations. We do sit in our comfortable armchairs and make judgments, and we do do that from hindsight. Neil, you wrote a very powerful book, The Pity of War, where you did exactly

that, talking about the decisions before the British Cabinet in 1914, and making an argument, quite pretty contentious one, that Britain should have stayed out as the Kaiser Wright crushed Europe. Now, if you can do that about one of the most pressing, difficult, dangerous decisions that Britain had to make, a country, major power had to make with a very high stakes, And the rest of us can make judgments about Kissinger's views of Anwar Sadat, his views of nuclear weapons, his expectations of what would happen of bombing in Cambodia, his reading of the Soviet Union, and his handling of things like Cyprus. We are going to make those judgments.

And if that sounds unfair, if that sounds a bit brutal, well, life's tough in the NFL. No one forced Henry Kissinger to run for office, to be involved in high office. And no one forced him to go around very, very assiduously cultivating his own reputation. This is fair enough stuff on the table. There are counterfactuals. One of them on Vietnam is that Vietnam was in a lot of trouble anyway, but 25,000 more US troops die between 19609 and 1973. So a dire situation created in the end of the 60s

after years of war which were futile, which Kissinger privately agreed was futile, is at least one gain for the United States. It wasn't a charity work. It wasn't a missionary war, not for the most part. It was war for the national interest. When it comes to things like Chile, I'm intrigued you invoke the rule of law and process. I mean, that's really an odd case in which to make that argument when it comes to the US involvement.

Now, no one says, no one says, and no one's sensible anyway, that Kissinger or Nixon or the United States are the main actor in the coup. But they sure as hell abetted it and they sure as hell encouraged it. And in terms of giving America a lot more to think about that it didn't have to think about before. and in terms of reputational harm, it was absolutely unnecessary for America's national interest. I come back as well to Kissinger's varying judgments on nuclear weapons. He gets praised for arms control, but then he was very happy to support the escalation in the 1980s

in the Reagan doctrine. And when Mikhail Gorbachev takes power in Moscow, he then takes a very robust view only to convert to nuclear abolitionism when Russia is ruled by Vladimir Putin. I think that's a legitimate target for criticism. What is the doctrine here? What is the concept beyond altering one's view according to the prevailing atmosphere?

So I think it comes down to not just what we think about Henry Kissinger, but this is a debate really about how we argue about rulers and those who occupy office. Neil brings a lot more sympathy to the table, in this case, at any rate. but I keep counting the interests that were damaged and the dead who didn't need to die. And I think that was bad for the Republic and bad for the world. So thank you.

Thank you, Patrick, for that closing statement. Okay, Neil, as per debate tradition, you get the last word in our debate today. When I look back over the century of Henry Kissinger's life, I'm impressed by two things. by the extraordinary life experiences that shaped him, and by the way he was able to translate experience into scholarship and then scholarship into action. I said earlier that it was unfortunate to see the rule

that one shouldn't speak ill of the dead violated just days, even hours after Henry Kissinger's death. And I was struck by the fact that those people who were so eager, to heap a probrium on him, had somehow forgotten that Henry Kistiniu was born in Germany in 1923, was nine years old when Hitler came to par, was a refugee in 1938, fleeing with his family to the United States with nothing,

was back in Germany as a rifleman and fought at the Battle of the Bulge, emerged from that battle to discover that more than a dozen of his relatives had died in the Holocaust. It seems to me unlikely that somebody who went through those life experience, would be indifferent to the sufferings of people in genocide and war. And I think it's one of the more curious aspects of the historiography on his career

that he's so often being judged by a double standard by people whose motivations, I think, are really suspect. There's a streak of anti-Semitism in some of the the tuperation directed at Kissinger that never ceases to dismay me, and particularly at a time like this when anti-Semitism appears to be rearing its ugly head in other ways, we should be very mindful of the things we say about the first Jewish secretary of state. The second thing that's fascinating to me is that we haven't, as two scholars, really touched on Kissinger's intellectual contribution.

Most people, I think, would acknowledge that diplomacy is a definitive work on the history of foreign policy. It's not his best book, though. A world restored is a masterpiece, and world order is another tremendous. achievement. Kissinger was a productive scholar before and after his time in government, and I think made a more substantive contribution than any other Secretary of State by a country mile. This is really where the claim to greatness, I think, must rest, that in addition to having had those harrowing early life experiences, having seen war and genocide at first hand, Kissinger thought deeply about the nature of international order, published seminal works,

which we continue to read to this day, and then did what very few academics are able to do, including us, Patrick. He entered the realm of power, and he tried to put his ideas into practice. Anybody who's done that knows that it's compromised from day one, compromise with the president of the day, because, after all, it's the president who calls the shots, and compromise with the real world, compromise with the realities that policies, that policy is made not by one genius individual sitting in the west wing of the White House. Policy is made by a combination of agencies and institutions. It's made by not only the National Security Council, but by the State Department,

by the Department of Defense, by the Joint Chiefs, by the U.S. Congress, by the U.S. media. And what we forget in our academic confidence is how incredibly hard it is. And it's the challenge of trying to make policy in an open society that Henry, Kissinger rose to. I want to emphasize that he left the United States in a stronger, much stronger position than it had been in when he came into office in 1969. I think the Kissinger years made possible that resurgence of American power that ultimately led to victory in the Cold War. And it was also Kissinger's skill to avoid the kind of disaster that might have befallen the world very nearly befell it in the 1960s if the Cold War had turned hot. As I said,

And this is the final thing I want to say. Kissinger always knew that the fate of the statesman was tragic. He once said to me, I didn't go into this to win a popularity contest on Google. And it's therefore the biographer's hard task to take on the haters, knowing that ultimately the haters have the easier job. It's very easy to say that people died needlessly. But are you really telling me? Are you really claiming Patrick that there was some path through the 1970s in which nobody

died, nobody got hurt. Everybody just kissed and made friends in Indochina and the Middle East. Because if that's what you really think, then I think you are succumbing to the scholar's delusion and you haven't really understood what it is to be a statesman. I'll leave it there. Thank you, Neil. Thank you, Patrick, for an important debate on an important man. We greatly appreciate both your civility and your insights. We've learned a lot from this conversation today. So on behalf of the Monk Debates community, thank you. you for participating in today's debate. Well, that wraps up today's debate.

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