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Oh Henry!

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I was overhearing the news from Daina's cellphone as she listened to a Ukrainian politologist talk about the death of Kissinger.  He was saying that old Henry was cultivated as a Soviet agent many years ago.  I was curious so I began perusing, and sure enough this turned up on the CIA page.  According to an article written by Frank Capell in 1974, young Henry was first approached when he was in Poland during the later stages of WWII, as part of the Counter Intelligence Corps, and then actively recruited when he was a professor at Harvard in the 1950s.   Kissinger was fully investigated by military intelligence in 1955 but unfortunately the article trails off with no definitive conclusions.

There's more of course, including a book by Capell in which he explicitly links Kissinger to Soviet espionage that was published in 1974 at the height of Nixon's downfall.  I do recall Kissinger suffering some fall out from the book but not enough to deter future presidents from consulting him, as he was considered the godfather of realpolitik, and had an inside track to Soviet and later Russian governments.  Not surprisingly, Putin extolled Old Henry as a "wise and farsighted statesman."

It wasn't just the Soviet Union (and later Russia) that Kissinger sought better relations with, but also China.  He paved the way for a new diplomacy in the early 1970s that left many archconservatives in Washington aghast.  A relationship that continued for many years with Kissinger meeting Xi this past summer in Beijing.  Not surprisingly, Xi also lauded Old Henry as a great statesman.

Turns out that all this "detente" was really nothing more than appeasement.  While the US managed to slightly stem nuclear proliferation with its better relations to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 70s, it also allowed the Soviet Union to expand its political reach.  Kissinger seemed just fine with this as long as it didn't impact American interests abroad.  Some would say this was a continuation of George Kennan's strategy of containment, which Old Henry would have been well aware of, but it gave the Soviet Union and Communist China greater pull in the developing world of Southeast Asia, Africa, Central and South America, which saw a rise of left-wing governments that were antagonistic to American interests. This resulted in the Vietnam War and other civil wars throughout the world that the US felt compelled to fund right-wing counter insurgent movements.

The Western world was caught off guard when the Soviet Union began to crumble in the 80s.  Kissinger didn't seem to give it any mind at all, encouraging Reagan to talk with Gorbachev and do what he could to hold the Soviet Union together.  For Kissinger it was more important to maintain "strategic balance" in the region.  When the Soviet Union finally did collapse in 1991, Kissinger blythely shifted his attention to Russia, virtually ignoring the emerging Eastern European nations, and certainly made no distinction between Russia and Ukraine.  In his mind, Ukraine should never be allowed to enter NATO.  This after the Russian invasion in 2014 and annexation of Crimea.  He offered some contrition this past September when he actually met Zelenskyy in Washington, conceding that the ongoing war had altered his thinking and that a "neutral" Ukraine no longer made sense.

A little too late as far as Ukrainians are concerned so little wonder the politologist had nothing good to say about Kissinger.  This was more the confessions of an old man who regretted putting so much stock in Putin.  He wasn't alone in this regard, but his views held considerable weight as he was often featured at Davos, most recently in January, 2023.


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