In Trump, Kissinger’s Conservative Foes Have the Last Laugh

Gerald Ford risked his presidency to keep Henry Kissinger onboard. But both soon lost power. Photo: Bettmann Archive

The reaction to Henry Kissinger’s death at the age of 100 gives fresh meaning to the term “mythical figure.” His most consequential years as the dominant figure in the Nixon and Ford administrations’ foreign policy ended 47 years ago with Gerald Ford’s reelection defeat. That was nearly four years before the birth of today’s most vociferous obituarist of Kissinger’s war crimes, Spencer Ackerman. (That’s not to say Ackerman isn’t entitled to his judgment; I have very strong negative feelings about Andrew Jackson, who died in 1845.) So for many years Kissinger was primarily a symbol, albeit an enduringly influential one. For some, he embodied unabashed American imperialism in its most cynical form; for others, he was a sort of unbanishable social and media presence who lingered like a low-grade virus. For still others, he exemplified the empty prestige of the perpetual éminence grise whose triumphs and crimes faded into the mists of time; New York Times columnist David Brooks once wrote a satirical piece on the career path leading to global oracular status entitled “How to Become Henry Kissinger.”

It has been all but forgotten, however, that in his heyday some of Kissinger’s angriest critics were not on the left or center but on the right, in a debate over conservative foreign policy that Kissinger’s enemies may be on the brink of winning once and for all if Donald Trump returns to the White House. There’s a reason Ford’s Republican presidential successors more or less kept Kissinger at arm’s length, and it had little or nothing to do with the former secretary of State’s complicity in extending the Vietnam War or destabilizing Cambodia and Chile.

Kissinger’s position in the Ford administration, in fact, became a major campaign issue during Ronald Reagan’s narrowly unsuccessful effort to deny Ford renomination in 1976. Reagan and his backers fingered Kissinger as the author of détente with the Soviet Union; the diplomatic opening to China; and, indeed, as someone who was fatally weak in pursuing war in Southeast Asia. More generally, much like many human-rights-oriented liberal critics, some conservatives deplored Kissinger’s Realpolitik approach to foreign policy as a balancing act of alliances, treaties, and commitments aimed above all at maintaining global order. It was in that spirit that Kissinger’s great conservative nemesis Jesse Helms sought to derail Ford’s nomination and/or force Kissinger’s resignation as secretary of State by offering at the 1976 convention a platform plank entitled “Morality in Foreign Policy.” Ford salvaged his nomination by taking a dive on this platform plank, to Kissinger’s fury. But the Reagan-Helms challenge to Kissinger’s distinctive brand of conservative internationalism arguably won this first battle and ultimately the war.

Subsequent Republican administrations oscillated between the kind of nationalist unilateralism Helms promoted and the more ideological internationalism that peaked during the early “War on Terror” and faltered in Iraq (from the sidelines, Kissinger backed both the Iraq invasion and the later war, but on the characteristic grounds that America’s role as a guarantor of global order was at stake).

In Donald Trump’s “America First” approach to world events (the term itself being a throwback to pre–World War II anti-internationalism), the old tradition of Helms-style nationalism and unilateralism in foreign policy began gradually taking over the GOP. Yes, it’s hard to imagine Trump — the one major American figure decidedly more cynical than Kissinger himself — standing for “morality in foreign policy.” But to the extent that he and his MAGA followers identify U.S. self-interest with “morality,” and would violate (if not avoid) any alliance, treaty, or commitment to wreak insane levels of violence on anyone directly threatening America, Trump indeed represents a definitive repudiation of conservative internationalism, particularly where the deployment of “soft power” via diplomacy or international organizations is concerned (the very idea of “soft power” seems to offend the 45th president).

There is, of course, one major area of overlap between “America First” and Kissingerian foreign-policy principles: Both traditions assume that U.S. willingness to use military force must never come into question lest adversaries be tempted to take advantage of a global or regional power vacuum. Indeed, during the Vietnam War (and again in putting U.S. forces on nuclear alert during the 1973 Middle East crisis), Nixon and Kissinger pursued what was called the “madman theory” of sowing fear over the excesses they might be willing to countenance if challenged by other nations. In Trump, America has its most credible “madman” ever, unrestrained by the global-order concerns that gave Henry Kissinger guardrails against his own ruthless cynicism.