Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. November 30, 2023 | |
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Henry Kissinger, Titan of Realism |
Love him or hate him, Henry Kissinger is dead. The former US national security adviser and secretary of state passed yesterday at 100, leaving behind him a complicated legacy as America's most famous and most important diplomat, one who shaped US foreign policy during the Cold War and, thus, shaped the world as we know it today. Obituaries and retrospectives oscillate between hagiography and scorn, with complexity laced throughout.
Philippe Bernard and Henri Pierre write for Le Monde: "'Doctor Strangelove,' 'Nixon's Metternich,' "Middle East Cyclone': These nicknames attributed to Henry Alfred Kissinger … testified to the exceptional personality and immense power in world affairs, from 1968 to 1977, of the one who was mostly called 'Dear Henry,' through affection or derision. His life illustrated the extraordinary success of an academic, a diplomacy theorist promoted to a first-rank actor on the international scene. … His career testified to the mobility of American society, where a German-Jewish emigrant with no resources managed to reach the heights of power, until he became the most famous diplomat in the world." Noting that Kissinger advised 12 presidents (in formal and informal capacities) from Kennedy to Biden, a New York Times obituary by David E. Sanger summarizes Kissinger, "(c)onsidered the most powerful secretary of state in the post-World War II era," as a "scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered the United States' opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam, and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake American power relationships with the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values to do so."
On that trampling of democratic values, Gary J. Bass writes for The Atlantic that Kissinger steered the US into some of the policies for which it is most criticized globally. Bass writes: "Yet for all the praise of Kissinger's insights into global affairs and his role in establishing relations with Communist China, his policies are better remembered for his callousness toward the most helpless people in the world. How many of his eulogists will grapple with his full record in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Chile, Argentina, East Timor, Cyprus, and elsewhere?" At The Washington Post, Rebecca Tan and Regine Cabato review Kissinger's role in the secret US bombing campaign in Cambodia under President Richard Nixon, writing: "Historians say his decisions led to decades of violence that have continued to haunt Cambodian society."
As a foreign-policy thinker and practitioner, Kissinger is forever associated with the school of realism: a body of thought that focuses on hard power, competing self-interests and balancing power dynamics to achieve advantageous outcomes. In a Foreign Policy obituary, Michael Hirsh encapsulates this indelible aspect of Kissinger: "The only reasonable approach to China and other major powers, Kissinger long argued, was a brand of realpolitik that did not seek to solve the world's problems in an idealistic way, but rather to manage them through a careful tending of the ever-changing balance of power. … The key to his approach was to identify achievable goals rather than permanent solutions." Hirsh quotes from Kissinger's 1994 book "Diplomacy," in which Kissinger wrote: "International systems live precariously. Every 'world order' expresses an aspiration to permanence … Yet the elements which comprise it are in constant flux; indeed, with each century, the duration of international systems has been shrinking.'"
Addressing the harsh critiques of Kissinger's legacy, Hirsh notes credit given by a critic, in the face of them: "'He was much more aware of morals in foreign policy than he's been given credit for,' said Joseph Nye, the diplomat and political scientist who was Kissinger's student—and later became a political rival—at Harvard. 'He knew that order rests on the balance of power and, at the same time, legitimacy. His wasn't a crude realpolitik. It was a sophisticated realpolitik.'" |
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'The Israel–Palestine Debate, on TikTok' |
The public-relations battle over the war in Gaza is an important one. As the Global Briefing noted before, Jonathan Stock put it aptly in a Der Spiegel feature last week: "The images from Israel and Gaza are also decisive for this war. The footage broadcast by television news channels influences decisions about aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, shipments of medical supplies from Germany and votes in the United Nations Security Council. Images of dying newborns from the Shifa Hospital in Gaza are set against images of the burned bodies of children from the kibbutz. Pictures of babies against pictures of babies."
Global opinions of the war have real-world consequences of multiple kinds. As Der Spiegel has noted elsewhere, antisemitism has returned to the streets of Europe; in the US, a spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes has been likened to the period immediately after 9/11.
More broadly, Joe Buccino predicted in Al Arabiya earlier this month: "Israel defeating Hamas militarily may take a year or more, but Israel has military overmatch across all capabilities and is committed to eradicating the terror group. … Along the way, however, Israel will lose the war for public sentiment and commit irreparable harm to its reputation. The images of bloodied babies, wounded and dead children, and portions of the Gaza Strip laid flat will proliferate international broadcast news. … As the situation grows more gruesome, Hamas, in going down to military defeat, will get exactly what it sought in striking into Israel on October 7th. … In this information war, Hamas has been agile and timely, conducting rapid information operations while the rest of the world struggles to understand what's happened."
Illustrating how the debate over Gaza, Israel and Palestine has gone global in strange ways, populating phone screens via popular apps, at The New Yorker Jacob Sweet writes of Americans who've taken to debating the decades-long Israeli–Palestinian conflict in TikTok livestreams. Sweet writes: "Though not everyone is muffling their debate partners mid-discussion, most agree that convincing the other side of anything is essentially impossible. Instead, they're aiming for audience members who don't yet have strong views on the topic. … Even as social-media companies like Meta, X, and TikTok continue to deëmphasize news, they remain the main source of information for many people, their window to the world. Users can watch scores of first-person reports from Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, or learn about the history behind the current fighting." |
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Saudi Civilian Nuclear Ambitions on Pause |
Hamas's Oct. 7 massacres had one obvious and immediate geopolitical implication: They scuttled, for the time being at least, percolating plans for a three-way diplomatic deal between the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia—which would have seen Saudi Arabia normalize ties with Israel, Israel grant concessions to Palestinians, and the US extend security guarantees and civilian-nuclear assistance to Saudi Arabia.
That last component has received little attention in the aftermath of Oct. 7 and amid the ongoing war in Gaza. At the Italian international-affairs think tank Istituto Affari Internazionali, Manuel Herrera acknowledges it and examines how prospects have and haven't changed, writing: "Saudi Arabia's ambitions for the development of nuclear energy have been frozen once again, as a result of the 7 October attacks and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war … Nonetheless, the Saudi leadership continues to see the development of nuclear energy as a feasible plan for the future and hopes that a diplomatic solution to the conflict could bring talks back on track. At a broader level, however, the biggest hurdle in moving forward with such plans remains: that is, the international community's lack of confidence in the Saudi regime, particularly given its lack of transparency and threats to develop a nuclear bomb in response to any similar development by Tehran." |
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Progress on Paying for Climate Change? |
Creating a vehicle is one thing; filling it with actual money is another. Still, The Atlantic's Zöe Schlanger writes that a long-held goal has been achieved: "Today, on the opening day of COP28, the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, the host country pushed through a decision that wasn't expected to happen until the last possible minute of the two-week gathering: the creation and structure of the 'loss and damage' fund, which will source money from developed countries to help pay for climate damages in developing ones. For the first time, the world has a system in place for climate reparations."
UN Secretary-General António Guterres welcomed the development, calling on "leaders to make generous contributions" to get the fund "started on a strong footing." So far, national contributions include, for instance, $100 million apiece from the UAE and Germany, nearly $76 million from the UK, and $17.5 million from the US. For years, the quest for such funding has been a major cause championed by some of the countries most vulnerable to the effects climate change, particularly developing countries and island nations that could be devastated by rising sea levels. In a GPS interview with Fareed this summer, Barbadian Prime Mininster Mia Mottley argued it's a moral imperative for wealthy countries, many of which benefited economically by emitting greenhouse cases, to help others who are paying the price. |
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'How Geopolitics Caught Up With Canada' |
Who doesn't like Canada? The knee-jerk answer is "no one"; the country is so friendly and diplomatic that the notion of a US war with Canada served as the outlandish premise of a 1995 Michael Moore comedy film featuring John Candy. But in a Financial Times feature, Demetri Sevastopulo writes that recently, "Canada has found itself sucked into a series of perilous foreign policy dilemmas that have left it struggling to balance its values, interests and identity."
Canada has been at odds with China over a series of issues that have reared in recent years, including Canada's detention (at America's behest) of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, who had been accused of violating US sanctions. (Meng was later released; two Canadians, detained by China amid the controversy, were also let go.) Canada has launched a public inquiry into potential meddling in Canadian politics by China and Russia. This fall, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused India of assassinating a Sikh activist outside a temple on Canadian soil in June.
"Canada is a dramatic example of the question that many midsized democracies are now confronting," Sevastopulo writes: "how to conduct a foreign policy that is consistent with their political identity at a time when authoritarian governments are gaining influence and when economic power and opportunity is shifting more and more to Asia—most notably China and India." |
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