Kissinger the Reactionist: Reassessing the Political Theory of America’s Most Controversial Statesman

• In Event: Realism: War, Participation, and Restraint?

Abstract

Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday, and his death a few months later, reinvigorated
scholarly and public interest in the legacy of the last and most controversial of American Cold
War statesmen. Perhaps no American has been more closely associated with the realist tradition,
especially for personally representing the movement of that school from Germany across the
Atlantic. Of course, anyone studied as extensively as Kissinger is bound to generate various
interpretations. In a more sympathetic treatment, Niall Ferguson points to Kissinger’s affinity
with Kantian Idealism to portray him as a paradoxical hodgepodge of philosophical influences,
while Stephen Walt, himself yearning for the designation as America’s preeminent realist, finds
him lacking theoretical depth and too concerned with his own personal power to merit inclusion
among the ranks of the true realists.
Though Kissinger will no longer be counseling presidents or foreign heads of state, the
question of his ideological basis remains important not only for understanding the period of
foreign policy to which he contributed, but also the character of a nation which both venerated
and despised him as no other figure in a comparable position. In this paper, I argue that Kissinger
belongs not to realism, but what I call the ‘reactionist’ tradition, an addition to Martin Wight’s
‘Three Traditions’ of realism, rationalism, and revolutionism. The distinctive feature of
reactionism is the attempt to revive a new sense of national virtue from the leveling effects of
modern egalitarianism. With the world of Metternich and Bismarck long gone and replaced by
near-unanimous support for democracy of some kind, Kissinger popularized and embodied the
notion of the masters statesmen guiding the forces of history like a maestro. If he was in no way
accountable to the public, the public could nonetheless take comfort that such great men (and
perhaps the occasional woman) were the ultimate manifestation of national virtue. They could
act with impunity to demonstrate superiority over common rules and norms, while their
insularity likewise spared the public from having to acknowledge any responsibility. In sum,
Kissinger represents the fine line between a democratic people's quest for glory and the revulsion at the consequences.

Author

• Eric Andrew Fleury, Connecticut College