May 8, 2013
SO TOO WAS JEFF DAHMER QUITE MORAL...:
In Defense of Henry Kissinger : He was the 20th century's greatest 19th-century statesman. (ROBERT D. KAPLAN, APR 24 2013, The Atlantic)
Like Palmerston, Henry Kissinger believes that in difficult, uncertain times--times like the 1960s and '70s in America, when the nation's vulnerabilities appeared to outweigh its opportunities--the preservation of the status quo should constitute the highest morality. [...]
To be uncomfortable with Kissinger is, as Palmerston might say, only natural. But to condemn him outright verges on sanctimony, if not delusion. Kissinger has, in fact, been quite moral--provided, of course, that you accept the Cold War assumptions of the age in which he operated.
...provided that you accept the cannibalistic assumptions under which he operated.
Of course, the notion that we were vulnerable vis a vis the communists was just a mistake of fact, but that we ought to engage in helping them maintain a murderous and oppressive status quo because of some (perceived) vulnerabilities was anti-moral. It is the argument that if a man of sufficient size is beating his wife you ought to make sure he is not interrupted lest he get angry with you.
As Mr. Kaplan conceded in a parenthetical in an earlier Kissinger profile: "In perceiving the Soviet Union as permanent, orderly, and legitimate, Kissinger shared a failure of analysis with the rest of the foreign-policy elite -- notably excepting the scholar and former head of the State Department's policy-planning staff George Kennan, the Harvard historian Richard Pipes, the British scholar and journalist Bernard Levin, and the Eureka College graduate Ronald Reagan."
Posted by Orrin Judd at May 8, 2013 4:34 PM
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