Henry Kissinger interview: ‘I don’t see the wisdom there once was’

The former US Secretary of State, now 91, on statesmanship from Richelieu to Obama

The Spectator

The tragedy of America is that it entered all the wars with a consensus in favour of them, but within a defined period the legitimacy of the war became a major domestic issue, with some people arguing that withdrawal was the only legitimate objective.’

... "Kissinger is clearly nostalgic for more direct US action in defence of its interests. ‘In 1904 a resident of New Jersey called Ion Perdicaris was kidnapped by Moroccan brigands led by someone called Mulai Raisuli,’ he tells me. ‘The State Department sent a message demanding “This government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.”’ "

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"In his book he describes America as ‘an ambivalent superpower’, so I asked him when this ambivalence began. ‘Vietnam,’ he replied. ‘That was when the moral basis for American foreign policy was challenged for the first time in our history.’ "

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"Yet today, he considers, the situation is worse than during Vietnam. ‘I don’t see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today. There are fewer shared global concepts and experiences among the groups making high policy.’ There’s also isolationism; is he worried by the libertarian Kentucky senator Rand Paul, who is likely to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016? ‘Paul is an intelligent man, who might learn on the job. But it is not a risk we should take.’ "

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Andrew Roberts concludes his column on Henry Kissinger with these words:  " ... the President can substantially do what he wants, provided he knows what that is!’ If President Obama needs to remind himself what he wants in foreign policy, all he needs to do is read World Order."

The New York Times book review excerpts this paragraph on the recent drifting of America's goals in the world over the past few administrations:

How do America’s current leaders shape up? Here the book is both irritatingly coy and implicitly devastating. There is no direct criticism of the Obama administration and even a slightly comic paragraph expressing Kissinger’s deep personal admiration for George W. Bush — in the midst of a section on the cluelessness of his foreign policy. But under the equivocation and the courtiership, the message is clear, even angry: The world is drifting, unattended, and America, an indispensable part of any new order, has yet to answer even basic questions, like “What do we seek to prevent?” and “What do we seek to achieve?” Its politicians and people are unprepared for the century ahead. Reading this book would be a useful first step forward.

 
 The Wall Street Journal review opens with this bit of perspective of Bush vs. Obama:
... "Since the terrorist attacks of 2001 upended our sense of the world, the United States has been governed by a conservative idealist who tried to impose American values on the Middle East, and failed calamitously, and a liberal idealist who invited America's adversaries to re-engage with us on the basis of a new humility and mutual respect, and found his hopes dashed.

More reviews of World Order