The End of Pax Americana
Kissinger's passing highlights the end of the era of crisis stabilization
Heinz Alfred Kissinger passed away at age one hundred, at a moment when the world he helped craft is beginning to fall apart in rapid order. The irony of the current US Secretary of State visiting Israel to broker a longer ceasefire, precisely fifty years after Henry Kissinger was working on the same is of course not lost on anyone. The world has made great progress in many areas, but the core conflicts that have a potential to set the world on fire again are smoldering and beginning to explode all around us. Ukraine-Russia, Taiwan-China, Israel-Arabs, they all represent deep fault lines that have been cleverly managed into stalemates, but never been resolved.
What Kissinger has accomplished in his life was furthering American interests as best he could and in doing so craft deals with some of history’s more unsavoury characters. He worked hard to keep the Soviet Union in check, stabilized the Middle East and brought China into the global fold. It all stood in stark contrast to the ‘freedom agenda’ and ‘democracy’ driven foreign policy doctrines that came to see the light in later years. Kissinger’s foreign policy approach was not visionary: it was transactional. The name it got was ‘realism’, whatever is required to broker a better arrangement between nations, all tools allowed.
It was painful to see the exuberance on social media over his death. History has come to re-evaluate the man who came to the US as a refugee from Fürth, Germany over the past few decades. Notably the late Christopher Hitchens with his book from 2001 that made the case that Kissinger should be prosecuted for war crimes. Drawing out the Vietnam War, the brutal incursions into Cambodia and Laos and backing up tyrants in rolling back communism (Pinochet vs. Allende in Chile and Suharto vs. East Timor in Indonesia come to mind) are some of the darker chapters in the diplomat’s illustrious career. But they served the same purpose as what earned him the Nobel Peace Prize (jointly with Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho): furthering American interests. And most countries in the western hemisphere benefited from it, experiencing an incredibly peaceful and prosperous age.
It was also a career that was shaped by the man who elevated him to the world stage, Richard Nixon. And not because Kissinger was a lifelong Republican, no, he had equally offered his services as a highly rated foreign policy expert with the same enthusiasm to the Democrats. It just so happened that Nixon won the elections and entered the White House that provided Kissinger’s ticket to power and celebrity. That move too was transactional, only here it was not good for America, but for Henry.
Despite the charges and the chaos he left behind in some areas stands the breakthrough to China in the early 1970s. While Nixon got the credit it was Kissinger who had engineered the split between the world’s two communist powerhouses: Beijing no longer was aligned with Moscow. Some secret under the radar trips to China paved the way for Nixon’s historic call on Beijing in 1972 and the consequential redistribution of global power. It gave Kissinger so much kudos and stature in Beijing that he remained a welcome guest in China, he again visited president Xi in July this year on behest of Biden to try and improve US-Sino relations.
What Kissinger did in 1973 shuttling back and forth between Israel and the surrounding Arab states helped create the basis on which eventually the peace deals between Israel and Egypt and Jordan later came into being. The Clinton administration built on this by trying to tackle the remaining piece and that was to establish a lasting peace between Israel and Palestinians. As of October 7th that now seems farther away than ever. Worse, the breakdown in Gaza now has the potential to reverse all the progress made between Israel and the Arab World, potentially undoing all of Kissinger’s foundational work. Kissinger too was actually painfully aware of this and said so.
One of the first reactions after the horrendous pogrom in Israel was that a Palestinian state now seemed further away than ever, it was probably shelved for good on that day. It did not stop US and European politicians to continue to push the concept of a ‘two state solution’ as the eventual end to all bloodshed between Jews and Arabs. As noble as the concept sounds, there is no appetite on either side to pursue it. It is a tired diplomatic trope. Hamas yesterday by way of its commander Yahya Sinwar made it clear that October 7th was only a rehearsal. Israel on the other hand went through the painful images and accounts of the released hostages with the absolute low point of the missing Bibas family. That and the ceasefire falling apart this morning point to an ever more determined nation that will avenge the blood of its citizens and prevent this from ever happening again. A negotiated settlement is further away than ever.
Henry Kissinger essentially managed conflicts on the edges of the American empire while ensuring his adopted country would remain the leading player in global affairs. He represented a unified power centre. Today there is no longer a Kissinger to talk the parties off the ledge and even unified leadership in Washington is absent: Biden’s position on Israel and Gaza is now under attack from his own staff.
We are entering a vacuum where American power is fraying and anything is possible. The destruction of Ukraine is one, but so is taking the two-state solution to its last resting place. Henry Kissinger’s death marks the end of an era and a journey into a level of instability that was last seen when American’s famous top diplomat fled Europe in the late 1930s. His life was an arch spanning an era that is now over.
Photos: Kissinger sharing a meal with China’s premier Zhou Enlai in the early 1970s and one of the hostages, Amit Soussana, is released amid a chaotic and hostile crowd yesterday. Full video of that event here.