KISSINGER: A SUPERMAN AND A SCHOLAR

(The jocular title here is an obvious parody of the “gentleman and scholar” cliché. For the record, my personal attitude toward Dr. Kissinger has always been markedly benign, and whatever presumably unflattering I am going to say about  him in this and the next entry, has nothing to do with any kind of subjectivity on my part... And, mind you, this entry was written several years ago, and presently I see no particular need to update its dated elements.)

So far, I have devoted a few pleasant words, here and there, to Dr. Henry Kissinger, the professor emeritus of superpower pageantry and feel-good cold war atmospherics. It is time, perhaps, to dedicate a whole entry to this important man, whose personal impact has not lost weight even after more than three decades out of public office, and whose symbolic value will not lose currency for as long as other public servants, like him, successfully aspire to places of top consequence in American foreign policy.

His outstanding role in Russian-American affairs has recently been highly praised by Vladimir Putin ipse, during a short press conference in the Kremlin on the occasion of their one-on-one meeting, that may not have been their last. These days, Henry Kissinger is regularly sitting vis-à-vis another elder, his friend and counterpart Yevgeni Primakov, on the recently-hatched American-Russian Council on Bilateral Relations. All is well, in so far as the Kissinger legacy is concerned.

Very few people, if any, on the American side of the Atlantic, realize, however, the true reasons for such an unprecedented distinction for a has-been Secretary of State, who has long been singled out (unfairly, I dare say) as a “war criminal” in certain ultra-liberal circles of Western Europe for his role in Washington’s decision-making in the closing phase of the American military involvement in South-East Asia, broadly known as the Vietnam War.

In one of my more provocative, but immensely important, entries, I have discussed the prevailing attitude in the Kremlin, which emerged circa 1967, toward the American Jews in foreign policy as the fifth column, or the weakest, most vulnerable link in this country’s political establishment, that is, most open and vulnerable to direct Soviet influence and manipulation. This attitude was best articulated by my former boss Dr. Georgi Arbatov (himself an ethnic Jew), in this immortal dictum: “When they (Americans of Jewish descent) look at you (meaning all non-Jewish Soviet officials), they see their Soviet adversary; but when they look at me, they see a fellow Jew!”

It is therefore in this capacity, as an American high-placed Jew, that Dr. Kissinger was cultivated the most by the old Soviet government, and is presently symbolically cultivated by the Russian government of Putin and Medvedev. This is not to detract anything from Kissinger’s personal competence and from all his other admirable qualities, which may well be prodigious. But to fail to understand the main reason for Moscow’s attraction to this man then and now, is to fail to understand the dynamic substance of the key political game going on in the world today, and to lose it, for sure, in the end. (Which is probably going to happen anyway, as there are no brave souls in America today, willing to learn, or to admit to having learned from this.)