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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Kissinger leaves the stage

Although it ill behoves anyone to speak ill of the dead it would nevertheless be hard to find a good word to mark the passing of Henry Kissinger, the former US foreign minister who passed away last month at the ripe old age of 100.

Kissinger, the academic turned diplomat who served US imperialism during the Nixon era will, of course, be remembered as the pioneer who made a historic contribution to the normalisation of American relations with People’s China. He was also a supporter of detente which led to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) negotiations between the USA and the Soviet Union that curbed the nuclear arms race during the 1970s.

The political career of the man who was said to be the master of “realpolitik” in his hey-day ended in 1977 with the defeat of the Republicans in the presidential elections. Kissinger returned to academia to promote his own legend while retaining an advisory role in Republican ruling circles right up until his death in November.

Kissinger may have called his dealings with the USSR “reciprocity” or “realism”; in reality it was just horse-trading with the Brezhnev leadership that was pursuing a futile attempt at achieving nuclear parity with the Americans to divide the world into Soviet and American spheres of influence.

But in what US imperialism considered to be its own “sphere”, Kissinger merely continued the Cold War tactics of supporting worthless kings such as the Shah of Persia and military dictators throughout the Global South who willingly sold themselves to US imperialism while supporting what we would now call ‘regime change’ with disastrous results for the people of Chile and Cambodia.

In reality Kissinger achieved little during his years in Washington. While he remains one of the few post-war US foreign ministers any can recall, this is simply because those that followed him were much, much worse.