Yet by any measure his actions while occupying various public and private offices for successive American administrations have had and will continue to have a significant effect on our lives.
Younger generations will have little idea what the geopolitical world was like in the 1960s and 1970s, but it is sufficient to say that for more than 30 years the prospect of global war was imminent. Time and again the nuclear powers were brought to the brink, usually by the former Soviet Union's determination to spread its version of communism to all continents, contrasted with the Western powers', notably the United States', determination to prevent it.
Somewhere on the edge, also, was communist China, that is to say, Mao's China, a new country, in effect, from the revolution in 1949, with a huge population of mostly illiterate peasants, with greatly inferior defence forces, but determined to overcome its sense of being a neo-colonial victim and to rebuild itself into a super-state proudly based on its long history. For some years, as the Cold War got hotter, China was formally aligned with the Soviet Union, but then there was a falling out when Mao, in effect, felt he and China were being treated as subjects of the Kremlin.
So badly did relationships deteriorate that a million Soviet troops were massed on China's northern border for several years, and Mao felt - with some justification - an invasion would take place. As Kissinger eventually learned from China's leader, he was quite prepared to lose hundreds of millions of his people to such an attack, believing that China would survive because of its huge size and population.
When the communist split took place the geopolitical world divided into three main parts. Then the question became: if the Soviets invaded China, would the West (i.e., the US) stand aside?
What if China invaded the Soviet Union pre-emptively. Would the West assist?
Clearly, whatever outcome was likely, China needed a friend if not an ally.
At that moment, in the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon realised there was an opportunity to contain Soviet expansion, and so sent Kissinger in secret to determine if some sort of alignment might be possible between China and the US.
The story of On China is an account of the steps leading to that astonishing visit, what took place, and what has taken place since. Within the known boundaries of historical record, it is fascinating - especially given the state of the relationship today.
Kissinger has been to China at least 50 times since on many official visits and as an unofficial envoy for various administrations. He has also made many private business visits as the principal of his consulting business.
He has known all of China's leading political lights, from Mao down. It is obvious that he admires the Chinese and is never short of compliments for them in his book. That will disturb some readers.
While he does not avoid the atrocities, such as the Tiananmen Square killings, or the appalling realpolitik like the US abandonment of Taiwan, these are treated with near-obsequiousness, almost as footnotes to the main story. "This is not the place to examine the events that led to the tragedy of Tiananmen Square," he writes. "Each side has different perceptions depending on the various, often conflicting, origins of their participation ..."
Kissinger also treats as a minor matter the very considerable opposition in the US to the furtherance of contact with China.
That opposition provides an interesting contrast to the near-slavish desire on the part of New Zealand's leaders to establish trade and other relationships with communist China and the almost total lack of political opposition to such moves here. I'll not soon forget the sycophantic efforts by our authorities to prevent visiting Chinese leaders from seeing, let alone hearing, protest activity about China's appalling human rights record.
Kissinger is excellent when describing China's view of the rest of the world, from its historic, self-located position at the centre, its flexibility in determining when, where and for how long to make contact with the outside world, its determination never again to be subject to outside influence at any level, and to seek rapprochement - so far as possible on its terms - purely (so China says) to serve its national interest.
He is at his best with his eyewitness accounts of the talks he had with the leadership, and as a participant in the various presidential visits. The reader cannot help but occasionally feel, I suggest, that what is done in our name at this level of government and in secret, is simply terrifying.
One must never forget either, that China is a totalitarian state content to murder dissidents and repress any sign of opposition, that its current version of "socialist market forces" has led it to a position where the West (especially the US) is virtually its supplicant, and that although Kissinger repeats what China's leaders tell him about China's disinterest in influencing other nations, the evidence suggests otherwise.
The world order changed after that fateful visit in 1971 and it changed because of it. Now we are told this century will be the Asia-Pacific region's. That's where we live.
Kissinger's On China, for all its author's manifest admiration for China's progress, and its largely uncritical discussion of how that progress has been achieved, does illuminate some of the darker corners of that new order and will leave the reader speculating about how the geopolitical world will look by 2099.
ON CHINA
Henry Kissinger
Allen Lane
- Bryan James is the Books Editor.
