How Do You Explain Henry Kissinger? [View all]

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*What Gewen focuses on, and excels at, is the story of how the rise of gangster dictators left an irradicable impression on the Jewish intellectuals who escaped Nazi Germany before World War II. These men and women — Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Hans Morgenthau and Kissinger — bent their brilliant minds toward the questions raised by the century’s savagery. They concluded that human beings are timorous and manipulable vessels who could not be relied on to recognize and resist evil — at least not before the Imperial Japanese Navy broke the still of a Sunday morning in Hawaii.

Kissinger, and Gewen, acknowledge a use for Wilsonian romanticism. It is hard to recruit an army with the battle cry: “Restore the balance of power!” It was America’s naïve idealists — bleeding out on Iwo Jima or Omaha Beach in the cause of human rights and justice — who bred Kissinger’s affection for his adopted country. “Nowhere else is there to be found the same generosity of spirit and absence of malice,” Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, as in “small-town America.”

Yet Kissinger “was separated from most other Americans by his sense of tragedy,” Gewen writes. In Germany, “he had seen how the processes of democracy could go disastrously wrong.” Thus, the famous realism. “The task for policymakers in his view is a modest, essentially negative one,” Gewen says: “Not to steer the world along some preordained path to universal justice but to pit power against power to rein in the assorted aggressions of human beings and to try, as best they can, to avert disaster. This is a perspective shaped by pessimism.”>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/books/review/barry-gewen-inevitability-of-tragedy-henry-kissinger.html?