Behind the backdoor, the late Henry Kissinger undoubtedly attaches great importance to human rights. Exhibition A is a conversation he had on March 1, 1973 with boss President Richard Nixon, which was caught like Nixon's Oval Office recording equipment. The two have just said goodbye to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who casually discussed what happened during her visit to the White House: whether the government should take any action to help the Soviet Jews, who were persecuted in their country, but also denied the possibility of leaving it. Secretary of State Kissinger asserted, “The immigration of Jews from the Soviet Union was not the goal of American foreign policy.” “And if they placed Jews in the gas chambers of the Soviet Union, it was not the focus of the United States. Perhaps humanitarian.” perhaps.
From the Jews who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and found shelter in the United States, it was something cold. But this is also classic Kissinger, the purest distillation in the chessboard logic of his realistic policy diplomatic philosophy: when dealing with other countries, pragmatism must prevail; there is no moral space, because the American "missionary" diplomatic.
Perhaps no other American politician stands out in foreign policy (intervention between human rights activists and the Democratic Crusaders), like Kissinger. So far, that's it. In the first 100 days of Donald Trump's second term, the president not only avoided those annoying people that the annoying good guy Kissinger had to fight, but he absolutely blows up some of their powerful annoyances and bragging. The changes that Kissinger could have dreamed of were confusing.
By returning funding from the U.S. International Development Agency and allocating offices to deal with human rights and democracy at the State Department, Trump weakened the entire administration almost overnight, committed to defending the basic basic (once seemed to be the United States) principles. Founded in 1941, Freedom House is one of the oldest human rights organizations in the world and will now end 80% of its programming. Government-funded organizations such as the National Institute of Democracy and the International Republican Institute are responsible for overseeing elections overseas and supporting anti-corruption efforts, and they face chain saws of the doors – both must take a leave of absence from two-thirds of their staff and close offices around the world. The third group is the National Democratic Endowment Fund, which is fighting for its lives to restore its funding to the Congress bill.
Then there was the executive order killing the US global media agency, which ran the American voice, Free Europe and Free Asia Radio and broadcasted to countries including Iran, Venezuela and North Korea. Their radio wave transmits 420 million people in more than 100 countries to 420 million people per week. no longer. The Trump administration even canceled the Wilson Center, a foreign policy think tank whose ideas may be related to its eponymous figure, Woodrow Wilson, who is known for his “moral diplomacy.”
Will Kissinger be happy?
He certainly has a negative feeling about human rights, but that's because they are an overwhelming obstacle to the goal: the world stabilizes and avoids nuclear war. To make his moral vision appropriate, he believes that by maintaining the balance of power between major countries based on networks of intersecting his own interests, he may maintain the power of geopolitical chaos and unpredictability. If there were several Soviet Jews who had to go to the gas chamber as collateral damage, it was that he seemed to be saying that a price worth paying to avoid the greater interest of showdown with the Soviet Union, which could blow up the world.
Although this represents tradingism towards a larger purpose - although possible corruption may have occurred, what we are seeing now is that trading attitudes have been declining. Trump seems to want to sweep away moral concerns, not because they exclude the new world order he envisions, but because he thinks they are essentially worthless, or as his secretary of state Marco Rubio said it was “the fruit of radical political ideology.” This is not to say that past presidents are necessarily more idealistic at their core (though Jimmy Carter may be). They found ways to use human rights and democracy as rhetorical weapons to achieve their global goals, such as Ronald Reagan's attack on communism as a godless and immoral system, and George W. Trump's idea of no use. The world is eating dogs, and the United States needs to claim to be the biggest dog. The end of the story.
I asked Jeremi Suri, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin Henry Kissinger and American Centuryimagine the past 100 days from Kissinger's perspective. "He is pleased to see the emphasis on the power of ideals," Suri said. "He has long criticized the US's obsession with Wilson and puts mollusks, idealist elements (idealist elements) before the element of power." Suri said Kissinger would appreciate Trump's contempt for powerful countries and international institutions, such as the EU and the United Nations, which politicians see as "a nuisance at best."
Kissinger has his own tenacious bullying moment, where he exercises American power without much consideration of its consequences. Chile's secret intervention is perhaps the best example. When socialist Salvador Allende won the country's general election in 1970, Kissinger feared the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere, but did not create a balance, but decided to try to impose a threat immediately. "I don't understand why we need communists who accompany a country because of the irresponsibility of the people," he said. (It's not difficult for Trump to say something like that after Canada's recent parliamentary elections, which was the victory of the Liberal Party that won about 44% of the vote.)
Kissinger ushered in the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, further undermining the region's stability (and undermining his larger global stability goal). As Suri said, his approach was more effective (more lasting, more lasting ace) where the “systemic shift” of world power was achieved: with the Soviet détente (those Jews were cursed); open diplomacy to China (ten millions of Mao Zedong victims were cursed). Morality is not a factor here either, but at least these moves are based on strategies to achieve safer and calmer. Whether Kissinger’s legacy has accompanied us with this question, is it worth the tradeoff.
What he never expected was that the pressure of "missionaries" in a world is no longer a factor. Idealists are Kissinger's foil, even if they call him a "war criminal", like Christopher Hitchens. But Kissinger knew their existence was a counter-attack force, a force as old as the country itself. This may not be the case anymore, even if the colder, crueler, more selfish version is realistic policy?
The NPR story about the new changes of the State Department contains a particularly chilling detail: According to a memorandum, employees are asked to “simplify” the annual human rights report released by the department so that they may be consistent with “recently issued execution orders.” The memorandum explains that in fact, the report should scrub references from dissidents such as prison abuse, government corruption and invalid procedures. Now, they should only include the minimum limits set by Congress law. In the report on El Salvador, the criminal system of El Salvador has become a dump for immigrants deported from the United States and will have no details on the conditions of these prisons. Regarding Hungary, Trump has a strong ally in Viktor Orbán, and the part titled "Government Corruption" will be hit.
Even if the United States ignores its ideals, or just gives them verbal services, or leaders like Kissinger actively bypass them, the country remains the record keeper of the record when it is abused by authoritarian forces. If you are a dissident or persecuted minority, then people know that somewhere in the governments of the most powerful nation in the world, someone is working on a report that could prove widespread discrimination or killing. The United States offers the opportunity to hear at least, a hotline that guarantees sympathy for ears on the other end. But Trump is now farther than Kissinger himself might want. He was breaking the line. No one picks up the phone anymore.
*Illustrated source: White House/CNP/Getty; Tom Chalky/Digital Vintage Library; Alex Wroblewski/Tetiana Dzhafarova/AFP/Getty; Getty