richard lightner

Dec 3, 20234 min read

Henry Kissinger

The Global South hasn’t forgotten Kissinger

By Eduardo Porter

Columnist and editorial board member

December 3, 2023

I did not personally experience the violence that Henry Kissinger helped unleash on Latin America in his day. But I witnessed some of the collateral damage.

The children of exiles from Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and beyond crowded into my high school in Mexico City. The grandson of Chilean President Salvador Allende, deposed in a U.S.-backed coup in 1973, was just a couple of years behind me. It is not difficult for me to write that Kissinger was an abomination.

And yet, hearing from friends who more directly suffered the military regimes that were enabled, abetted and even directly supported by the United States during his tenure as national security adviser and secretary of state, it dawned on me that Kissinger wasn’t a rogue monster. He embodied a theory of power that underpinned the world order of his time.

It was a world in which human rights, democracy and justice were of little relevance; they were subordinate to the overarching goal of bolstering Washington and its allies in a balance of power with the other great coalition, led by Moscow.

Kissinger is still feted today for his successes: the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, opening relations with Mao’s China, avoiding a potentially fatal hot war between rival nuclear powers.

But as José Miguel Insulza, a Chilean senator and former foreign minister, who fled to Mexico as a young man in 1973 after the bloody coup by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, told me, “the human cost of Kissinger’s grand design was very high.”

It’s an irony that Latin America didn’t matter to Kissinger: The world order was set in Bonn, Moscow and Washington. “Nothing important can come from the South,” he told Chilean foreign minister Gabriel Valdés at a luncheon in June 1969. When Mr. Valdés retorted “you know nothing of the South,” he responded “no, and I don’t care.”

What did matter was preventing, at any cost, another Latin American country following Cuba into the Soviet embrace. Whether the government of said Latin American country was democratically elected was beside the point.

“We will not let Chile go down the drain,” Kissinger said just a few days after Allende was elected president in 1970 on the ticket of the left-wing alliance Unidad Popular. Three years later, Allende was dead. Kissinger “didn’t care what happened to the people of Chile or of Argentina,” Insulza said.

Grim as they were, Washington’s crimes in Latin America pale against the atrocities it committed elsewhere in those days. Hundreds of thousands died in Cambodia, carpet bombed on Kissinger’s advice, in service of delaying America’s inevitable defeat in Vietnam.

Moscow, for sure, was no more constrained by any sense of morality. Indeed, the Soviet Union contemplated invading Poland as recently as 1980. Accusations of human rights abuses were just another weapon shot over the Iron Curtain from both sides.

One would hope that by now the world would have overcome the logic of raw power. The Soviet Union is dead. That Cold War is over. There is a consensus understanding that it is essential to guarantee human rights and democratic governance. An International Criminal Court is in place to adjudicate egregious abuses. Today, Washington could not, with a straight face, green-light an Indonesian invasion of East Timor, as Kissinger did.

The global situation is unsettled, though. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which Kissinger justified on balance-of-power grounds similar to those he calculated at the height of the Cold War) suggests the rules-based world order hasn’t quite taken. China and the United States are casting around for allies to bolster their spheres of influence in what is shaping up to be a new global faceoff. In Gaza, concerns over the human rights of civilians are clearly not front of mind.

It would be a disaster, however, if Washington were to reembrace Cold War logic. The United States might have beaten the Soviets. It might even have become an “indispensable nation” for a little bit. But the ruthless Cold War strategy had unintended consequences.

It’s not just that the carpet bombing of Cambodia contributed to the emergence of the Khmer Rouge (an oopsie the United States experienced again years later with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State in Iraq). The chasm between Washington’s exalted words about democracy, freedom and the like and its unflinching approach to the Cold War did lasting damage to American credibility.

Michael Shifter, a former president of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank who now teaches at Georgetown, pointed out that “a half century after the military coup that brought Pinochet to power, the U.S.’s shameful role continues to be felt throughout the region and is still widely invoked.”

Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister, argued that “Washington’s so-called realist foreign policy was so shameless, cynical and transparent that it generated antibodies around that world that undermined the credibility of future presidents.” This will get in the way of Washington’s efforts to find friends in the Global South, whether to back Ukraine or join its brewing conflict with China.

“Kissinger was doubtless very, very smart,” Carlos Ominami, another former exile of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, who returned to become Chilean economy minister after democracy was restored, said. “One would have preferred that his intelligence had been put in the service of a better cause.”

Kissinger may have died believing it was all worth it. I disagree. To be sure, World War III hasn’t happened. But China is now shaping up to be the enemy. The U.S.S.R. may be gone, but Russia is not looking friendly. Counterfactuals are make-believe, but what if the United States in the Cold War had acted according to its professed values? There probably would have been less Latin American carnage.

Commenti

Different Points of View over the future of Atomic weapons.

During the Afghan War, President Donald Trump (GAG!) authorized a General to use the Mother of all Bombs, a bomb just shy of the power of an atomic bomb, on his own. Notice that this had no positive affect for the US in the outcome of the war. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/world/asia/moab-mother-of-all-bombs-afghanistan.html)

There is a plethora of information about the development and use of the atomic bomb during World War II. Much of the world was astounded that the US used such a bomb on civilians. Others said, drop more.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 9, 1945, “served as the symbolic coronation of American global power.” Nevertheless, the use of the atomic bomb in World War II brought international condemnation. At the Tokyo War Crimes Trials of 1946-1948, Justice Pal of India cited the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as war crimes. U.S. President Harry S. Truman responded by publicly saying that the atomic bombs were dropped “in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands of young Americans.” However, President Truman in correspondence with John Foster Dulles that his reasons for dropping the atomic bombs were the attack on Pearl Harbor and the murder of our prisoners of war. “The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.” (Martin Sherwin. “Hiroshima and Modern Memory.” The Nation. October 10, 1981)

“In the summer and fall of 1945, US atomic policy left us troubled and perplexed. Roosevelt, we thought, had been committed to a policy of international understanding and conciliation. . . . Truman’s policy, however, appeared to have the opposite aim: to keep a monopoly of the atomic bomb in U.S. and British hands, and to use it as a strong trump card in tough political bargaining with the Soviet Union.” (Sherwin, Martin. A World Destroyed: the Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance. 1975. xi)

And, well before the bombings FDR and Churchill “rejected steps that might have led to the international control of atomic energy.” (Martin Sherwin. “Hiroshima and Modern Memory.” The Nation. October 10, 1981)

According to nuclear physicist Hans Bethe who worked on the Manhattan Project, “Many of us had been influenced directly or indirectly by Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist. He argued that only international control of nuclear weapons could save the world from a nuclear arms race, and that such a race would imperil, not enhance the security of the United States and Great Britain. Many other scientists, especially at the University of Chicago Metallurgic Laboratory, at the initiative of Leo Szilard, had come independently to the same conclusion.

Martin Sherwin, George Mason University History professor who specialized in the history of nuclear weapons, wrote that, this interpretation by physicists and historian is wrong. Roosevelt decided, with Churchill, “that the bomb should remain and Anglo-American monopoly.” (Sherwin, Martin. A World Destroyed: the Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance. 1975. xii)

However, this is not mentioned in Hiroshima in America: fifty years of denial, by Robert Jay Lifton and Gregg Mitchell.

KOREA

There are numerous arguments about whether or not the atomic bomb should have been used in Korea, Vietnam, or other existential circumstances.

In late 1950, following their invasion of Korea, Chinese forces surrounded U.S. Marines. “Distraught himself, the chief executive (Truman), told a press conference on November 30 that nuclear bombsight be used against the enemy and seemed to indicate that the decision would be MacArthur’s.” (William Manchester. American Caesar. 608, 610; Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 30)

The U.S. developed the ability fire an “atomic shot from a cannon.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 34)

“In mid-May Ike (President Dwight Eisenhower) told the [American] National Security Council that using nukes in Korea would be cheaper than conventional weaponry, and a few days later the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended launching nuclear attacks against China.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 34)

This is interesting since Eisenhower’s reaction to Hiroshima was, we didn’t have to use that awful thing on them. (Lifton, Robert Jay and Mitchell, Greg. Hiroshima in America: fifty years of denial. 1995. 213)

Operation Hudson Harbor - flying lone B-29 bombers over North Korea to simulate a dropping of an atomic bomb. North Korean leaders must have had “steel nerves” as this simulation was eerily similar to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Operation Hudson Harbor concluded that the use of atomic weapons would not be “useful” as it was difficult to identify “large masses of enemy troops.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 157-159)

The United Nations/United States forces faced defeat in Korea but Truman looked strong because he “threatened to use the atom bomb against China.” However, this “made peace talks virtually impossible.” (Stone, I.F. The Hidden History of the Korean War. 213)

Major General Emmett (“Rosy”) O’Donnell, commander of the Far East Air Force’s Bomber Command . . . [stated that] “We have never been permitted to bomb what are the real strategic targets, the enemy’s real sources of supply.” He said that the strategic bombing commanded been “designed to deliver the atomic offensive to the heart of the enemy” and indicated very clearly that he thought the bomb should have been used against the Chinese.”” (Stone, I.F. The Hidden History of the Korean War. 245)

RICHARD NIXON

Richard Barnet, former State Department aide, activist and scholar, who founded the Institute for Policy Studies (Wikipedia) warned “of the danger that the United States government might resort to the use of nuclear weapons. Barnet then cites Vice President Richard Nixon speaking to the Executive Club of Chicago on March 17, 1955 as saying,

“The weapons which were used during the Korean War and World War II are obsolete. Our artillery and our tactical Air Force in the Pacific are now equipped with atomic explosives which can and will be used on military targets with precision and effectiveness.

“It is foolish to talk about the possibility that the weapons which might be used in the event war breaks out in the Pacific would be limited to the conventional Korean and World War II types of explosives. Our forces could not fight an effective war in the Pacific with those types of explosives if they wanted to. Tactical atomic explosives are now conventional and will be used against the military targets of any aggressive force.”

Of course, we are not aggressors by threatening China or invading Vietnam.

VIET NAM

1964 American Republican Presidential candidate Senator Goldwater of Arizona was a reserve Air Force General and “suggested that the United States could isolate the Vietcong in South Vietnam any bombing the supply routes connecting China and North Vietnam.” He also proposed using nuclear weapons “to clear the jungles where the Vietcong were presumably hiding. The public reaction to those notions was one of horrified alarm.” (Thomas Powers, The War at Home. 2) It turns out that the United States bombed Southeast Asia the equivalent of many atomic bombs through out the war.

“Although Goldwater was finally persuaded to stop talking about nuclear weapons.”

Although Goldwater’s advocacy of atomic weapons scared people his idea to win the war did not. Johnson portrayed himself as “responsible” as opposed to Goldwater who he implied would get us all killed. (Thomas Powers, The War at Home. 9)

Noted military writer Hanson Baldwin believed that the US should use its overwhelming technological power to counter communism even if that meant nuclear weapons. Of course, only for “defensive purposes.” “If we cannot do this, he says, we had better “call it quits.” (Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia. 52)

General Curtis LeMay advocated the use of nuclear weapons to end the conflict with communism once and for all. “We ought to nuke the chinks. . . . We are swatting flies when we should be going after the manure pile.” (Thomas Powers. The War at Home. 40; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Lyndon B. Johnson: the Exercise of Power. 538)

So, there is pretty much agreement that the use of the atom bomb was on the table. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki completely ignored.

In 1954 the United States “assuming the Chinese Communists intervene would engage in a “highly selective atomic offensive.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 46) However, if the “Chinese Communists do not intervene” then the use of atomic weapons would occur if it would aid the US in the war. (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 47)

McNaughton drafted a “Proposed Course of Action” to McNamara. In his long list of actions McNaughton noted risks. One was the “escalation to the use of nuclear weapons.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 442-445, passim)

Presidential assistant for national security, Walt. W. Rostow, wrote a memorandum on May 6, 1967, analyzing U.S. bombing strategy in Viet Nam. One of his conclusions was “we do not want a nuclear confrontation over Viet Nam.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 585, 588)

Henry Kissinger

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