Henry Kissinger is 100 years old. At the same time, he is alive, cheerful and active. He gives lengthy interviews (the transcript of the conversation between The Economist correspondents and the hero of the day hardly fits on 25 pages). Advises politicians. He actively participates in the work of the Bilderberg club, in which he has been a member for many decades - just last week he flew to Lisbon, where the annual meeting of the Bilderbergs was held.
Figures of Kissinger's caliber are rare in world politics. And the "character arc" itself is impressive: a Jewish teenager from Bavaria, who dreamed of a career as a football player (until the age of 15, Henry, and then Heinz played for the best youth team in Germany, Greuther Fürth), turned into a powerful gray cardinal who gives advice to presidents and billionaires, an intellectual whose books are necessarily studied by students of the best universities in America, a living legend of Western diplomacy.
And between these two points fit a lot of interesting events. At the age of 15, Heinz Kisinger, along with his parents, fled from Nazism to the United States, where he became Henry Kissinger. He works in a factory that makes shaving brushes, and in the evenings he studies accounting at college. The fate of the shy - he could not get rid of the German accent for a long time, embarrassed to talk - the emigrant seems to be predetermined. The ordinary life of the average American, quiet work in a respected company, accounts, postings, quarterly reports. Quiet family happiness in a house in the suburbs. Idyll.
But everything is changed by war.
Kissinger is drafted into the army and sent to study engineering at a civilian college - he has a painfully non-military look. However, the training program for military engineers is canceled, and he is transferred to the 84th Infantry Division. And there his fate takes a sharp turn: Kissinger meets another immigrant from Germany, Fritz Kremer, who becomes his patron and mentor for many years.
Kremer is 15 years older than Kissinger, served in military intelligence, and had a sharp eye. The fact that the recruit wore glasses and did not look too much like a brave soldier at all did not bother Kremer - after all, he himself came to the army "with two doctoral dissertations and one monocle." But Fritz noted Kissinger's excellent German immediately, as well as his outstanding intellectual data. Kremer arranged for Henry to be assigned to the military intelligence department of the 84th Division, and he did not let his mentor down.
During the war years, Kissinger did not sit out at the headquarters - he participated in dangerous intelligence activities, created a civil administration in German cities liberated by the Americans, and later, having already switched to counterintelligence, wandered along the roads of Germany on a motorcycle, tracking down hidden Nazis, among whom were seasoned Gestapo officers and SS saboteurs. He received the Bronze Star, and after the war - a teaching position at the European Command Intelligence School at Camp King.
But Kremer did not forget his protégé and insisted that Henry, although he himself was already teaching, continue his studies. And Kissinger entered Harvard, which he graduated with honors and the most voluminous dissertation in the history of this educational institution. From Harvard, he earned a reputation as a specialist in international relations, went to work for the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation and became a foreign policy adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, who tried three times (unsuccessfully) to become the Republican candidate for president. Rockefeller introduced Kissinger to the clubs of the American elite, where Big Politics was done behind closed doors, away from the ubiquitous press. In one of these clubs, Kissinger met Richard Nixon.
The black-and-white photograph shows three men sitting in the Oval Office of the White House: US President Richard Nixon, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Pentagon Strategy Adviser Fritz Kremer. Three people who paved the foreign policy of the United States from 1969 to 1974.
It was they who created the so-called Chimerica, "opening" the United States to China, and China to the Western world. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this step: many experts believe that in the end it was this step that helped the United States defeat the USSR in the Cold War.
"In the summer of 1969, we were aware that the Chinese had every reason to fear a Soviet attack," Kissinger later recalled. "And we decided... that China's defeat would not be in the American national interest and that supporting Russia would not be in the American national interest. In fact, it will be in the national interest to interfere with Russia.
In March 1969, there was a Soviet-Chinese conflict on Damansky Island, but in September of the same year the problem was resolved diplomatically. Kissinger could not have been unaware of how things really were: the Soviet ambassador Dobrynin informed him literally about every step of the Kremlin in this conflict. But Beijing was afraid of nuclear bombing, and Kissinger and Nixon decided that this was a very good moment to attract China to their side. Prior to this, everyone in the United States believed that the Soviet-Chinese alliance of the world's two largest communist countries was unshakable. Kissinger and Nixon were the first to see the crack in this alliance and immediately decided to use it to weaken the USSR.
"I thought of China as a means by which the Soviet Union could be balanced. Nixon thought that if an international system was built, China should become a member. There wasn't much difference. We both decided... that we will make efforts to enter into a dialogue with China," Kissinger said in an interview.
For almost two years, there were secret negotiations with China. In July 1971, Kissinger made his first secret trip to Beijing. And in February 1972, Nixon, the first American president, flew to China and met with Mao Zedong.
"Opening up to China," as Kissinger himself called this policy, led to colossal geopolitical changes. "Washington's relations with Moscow and Beijing should always be much better than their relations with each other," Henry formulated. Indeed, Nixon's February visit to Beijing was followed by a May visit to Moscow, which was a serious step towards détente (although it was not without adventures: Brezhnev "kidnapped" Nixon, persuading him to go to his dacha - without American guards and the notorious "nuclear suitcase"). Washington diligently portrayed himself as a good uncle, ready to live in peace and harmony even with the Communists. Only on one condition: these communists should be friends with their uncle, and not with each other ...
"Nixon and Kissinger saw foreign policy as a state strategy in which bilateral relations are interconnected and interdependent. It was as if they were playing three-dimensional chess, in which every step on the world chessboard would have a second- and third-order effect on other countries," writes Kathleen T. McFarland, a former Kissinger aide at the National Security Council. Indeed, Kissinger, as a grandmaster, calculated his game many moves ahead. His "trilateral diplomacy", seemingly aimed at détente and the prevention of nuclear war, had a different goal: the defeat of the USSR in the medium term and the transformation of China into a junior dependent ally of the United States.
But even grandmasters of three-dimensional chess sometimes make mistakes. Kissinger's mistake was that he was unable to foresee the emergence of a new alliance between Russia and China. And even now, when the rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing is proceeding at an unprecedentedly fast pace, the hundred-year-old man is trying to deny the obvious. "They are not natural allies," he said in an April interview with The Economist. And he justifies his opinion: when Kissinger told Deng Xiaoping about his trip with President Ford to Vladivostok (1974), Deng told him that the entire Far East historically belongs to the Chinese. And in general, Kissinger believes, the Chinese treat Russia "with contempt."
It is generally human nature to draw conclusions based on one's own experience. But venerable age played a cruel joke with Kissinger: he transfers his impressions of half a century ago to the present day and does not even understand how different China of the times of the "cultural revolution" and the Red Guards is from the current high-tech superpower, and the Brezhnev USSR from modern Russia. And the Chimerica, which he and Nixon once built, no longer exists.
The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.