Hawkwin,
Every last word he has is vacuous.
There has been a part of our society that has worked hard and not had time to publish. Their thoughts are very unreliable. Their ideas are simplistic. Now online they all quasi publish. That is being nice before the conspiracy theories enter into it. That is before their claim to normalization of nonsense.
I do too, but Tim had such wonderful way of putting things.
An interesting reading list, all well worth more than a brief summary. Glad you show some good roots.
Mersheimer I respect, especially his profound works through the 1990’s (including and very to the point of this thread his joint German Ukrainian nuclear partnership fantasy) but since then have increasingly respectfully disagreed with much of his analysis. I regret his current poor comprehension both of the new structure of our main conflicts and of the ongoing international restructuring of our post Soviet time.
Morgenthau is an interesting choice for your list as his most significant Realist stance in international affairs was his thankfully never implemented
I am glad Morgenthau’s one major foray into international policymaking (he truly was an amazing political analyst and a public finance genius) was not accepted by Roosevelt nor Truman, who instead implemented the
which proved to be the foundation of European cold war peace and economic prosperity for over 40 years.
I worship Waltz, founder of Neo-Realist foreign policy theory, and am glad to see him on your list. After reading Man the State and War I went to a small lecture/discussion he gave at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs in I think 1973 or 74 when I was a student there and was blown away. I would love to have been able to hear him speak on today’s situation.
Kissinger I hold in great esteem for his brilliance and execution, but found myself often disagreeing with where he placed his balance point between conflicting views on post soviet era power realities (yes, I am an arrogant buzzard). Despite the tremendous success using Vietnam War ploys to drive a deep wedge between China and Russia, and his follow on shaping of the end of the dying communist era, I never accepted his acceptance of the carnage he needlessly extended in Southeast Asia. However, on that one I might will be wrong.
George Friedman I considerred an acutely interesting maverick observer of international economics and politics. I often gained financially from careful readings of his musings, but never trusted the stability of his foreign policy thoughts and guesses. I tuned in to one of his recent podcasts only a couple weeks ago and was dismayed by the muddiness of his presentation, but even more to hear and see what seemed to me to be early cues of mental decline of some sort.
I do not think your posts on this board reflect an accurate application of the theoretical structures created by these men to our current events. Instead you seem to post (as others have noted) simple slogans and stances echoing the new USAian administration.
You are not wrong. I don’t want to get into it too much, but Kissinger apologists don’t get to accept his successes without also accepting his blunders, of which he made quite a number.
The Sino-Russian split was well under way before Kissinger took power. Sure, he threw some gas on the fire, but that relationship was done already. Kissinger did the obvious thing by trying to engage China, but some of his tactics were barf-inducing. Bangladesh, for example.
Kissinger sabotaged LBJ’s peace talks with North Vietnam in order to gain personal power. This is not in dispute. This certainly was not in the best interests of the US at the time.
History doesn’t allow us to do counter-factuals, but in hindsight Kissinger made a number of clear blunders, and he made the same type of blunder several times. One of his key strategic issues was preventing the domino effect.
Kissinger hoped that by extending and expanding the Vietnam war he could negotiate better peace terms. This included massive bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos–who were not parties to the war–to interdict North Vietnamese supply lines and troop movements. Kissinger ordered (and yes, he gave the order) full scale bombing against all targets regardless of military value. Additionally, Kissinger feared left wing groups would overthrow the governments of Laos and Cambodia and believed attacking the civilian population in border areas would tamp down the rebels.
Kissinger completely misunderstood how the Vietnamese viewed the war. Kissinger viewed it as the West vs. Communism. The Vietnamese viewed it as independence vs. Western Imperialism. The more Kissinger bombed them, the more they resented the west.
Sure, the communists were bad, but the South Vietnam government was just as bad, and western puppets. Easy choice. Ultimately, Kissinger negotiated the Paris Accords and the war ended. But before the ink was dry, North Vietnam invaded and the south quickly collapsed.
The same thing happened in Laos and Cambodia. The rural populations especially were radicalized against the US-backed governments and quickly overthrew them. The domino theory became a reality because of Kissinger’s policies, not in spite of them.
This was an unforced error. After WWII the US conducted a big study on the effects of strategic bombing and found while there were some clear benefits, one clear downside was that it rallied the German population. Kissinger should have known this would happen in southeast Asia as well.
This is a long post already, but the hits just keep coming. Kissinger made the same blunder again in East Timor. At the time East Timor was a colony of Portugal, which was in the process of fighting for independence, lead by some left wing groups. Kissinger gave Indonesia the green light to invade (illegally using US weapons) and tamp down the commies. Surprise! This threw popular support towards the rebels, which enabled radical groups to seize power, and the whole thing has been crapshow ever since.
Again, we can’t do counterfactuals, but in each case it is hard to see how things might have turned out was worse than how things actually did turn out. Kissinger has a reputation as a genius strategist, which doesn’t quite hold up when you see that almost everything he touched turned to crap.
Yes. Be creative. Start other fronts elsewhere on Russia’s borders–drawing even more and more resources from an already over-extended military. Start carving Russia like a turkey at Thanksgiving. He really is stupid. Nukes to end things? If he tries, he dies.
ok Professor, you want to test my geopolitics? Not sure you can be the one to do so. I am here to explain and to provide my opinions just like you have yours.
I think you should make a distinction between scholarship, logical form or structure, and opinions because you are garbling them.
I have developed my own views but I do agree with a lot of what Mersheimer has said on Ukraine and on Israel, and with some of Friedman’s analysis.
an excerpt from Friedman:
On Kissinger, I think he is a great figure. Many think he is an ultimate realist but no so. He took the constraints and dynamics of a real world to shape his vision for a world of peace. The historian Niall Ferguson even calls him an idealist.
On balance history has passed its judgement on the man.
Have you read Kissinger’s biography by Ferguson? the 2nd part will be out shortly I think.
Ferguson is an apologist who worships the British Empire. Of course he’s going to downplay the failures and celebrate the successes.
I prefer one by someone with a more balanced realpolitik worldview. I could not struggle through his own view of himself (and gave up), but Isaacson did a creditable job. I’d like to read Hitchen’s take, but I don’t want to walk a path that dark at the moment. And any real world view of Kissinger is going to be dark verging on black.
You might consider Ferguson an apologist for the British Empire and, to an even further extent, for Western civilization. I wouldn’t. He speaks of the West as it sees itself. That’s all he could have done.
However, Ferguson is a serious historian, and his body of work is compelling. Unlike Isaacson, who is more of a journalist and commentator, Ferguson takes a scholarly approach. With his understanding of history he can form a clearer picture of who Kissinger was in the world he acted on. As Kissinger’s official biographer, he had access to a wealth of documents that no one else had, making his book a thoroughly researched and well-documented biography. You should read it.
I haven’t read what Issacson wrote about Kissinger but his Job and Musk bio are quite a fun read.
Yes, Hitchens wasn’t a fan of Kissinger—nor of Mother Teresa. But I liked his debates. He was a brilliant polemicist and a gifted writer.