Kissinger's legacy

Last week saw the death of Kissinger - a figure who The Guardian describes as 'a giant' and 'the most controversial US foreign policy practitioner of the last half-century'.

This BBC obituary gives a good overview of his key actions:

We often recommend Foreign Affairs magazine; this article from FA discusses Kissinger's 'complex' legacy and wrestles with the questions: How should one apply morality to Henry Kissinger’s statesmanship? How does one balance his accomplishments against his misdeeds?

It is particularly useful for students studying Global Politics as the article discusses his actions through the lens of realist versus liberal politics.

The conclusion is that: Kissinger sometimes failed to live up to his moral virtues of character and courage. Moreover, some of his means were questionable. International relations are a difficult milieu for ethics, and foreign policy is a world of compromises among values. But in terms of the consequences, the world is a better place because of his statesmanship, and his successes outweighed his failures.

This article by Politico magazine, however, questions many of the 'myths' being perpetuated in the flood of obituaries for Kissinger:

History in the News: An essay in Alternatives

Last month saw a meeting between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping. This prompted Foreign Affairs magazine to re-print an article from 1972 on the significance of face to face meetings by historian Barbara Tuchman. Tuchman was writing in the context of the meeting between Mao and Nixon (in which Kissinger played a key role) and musing on a counterfactual theme - what might have happened had such a face to face meeting taken place between Roosevelt and Mao?

Documents reveal that Mao had requested, in 1945, to meet in person with President Roosevelt. The CCP 'wanted to convince President Roosevelt that they, not the Kuomintang, represented the future of China', wrote Tuchman. They felt 'that if they could reach Roosevelt they could make this clear'. Could such a meeting have prevented the decades of hostility between China and the US?

Imagining an alternative path for the United States and China was more than an exercise in historical counterfactuals, wrote Tuchman. It was a reminder, rather, that different outcomes are possible, that “history is not law-abiding or orderly and will often respond to a breeze as carelessly as a leaf upon a lake.”

Books and Documentaries

A new book by Gary J Bass examines the war crimes tribunals in Tokyo and also makes the case for the real efficacy of international law.

Another recently published book which gets excellent reviews is this one by Stuart Reid on the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Using recently declassified documents, the CFR claims that it reads like a 'Cold War spy thriller'.

Site update

We are currently working on Paper 3, Asia Topic 9: Early modernization and imperial decline in East Asia (1860–1912) and updating the Cuban Revolution for Paper 2, Topic 11 -  Wars.