In Kissinger’s death, China lost its greatest patriot

Here’s the Thing

Whenever America came up in a discussion, a former editor of mine would say, “America? Let’s talk about a civilised country.” This was in the 1990s, when I was starting out as a journalist, and my editor was talking from his memories of the 1970s. As a reporter, he had seen first-hand what the America of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did in Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War and during the 1971 Bangladesh War -- the Agent Orange attacks, the bombing of Cambodia, the total and unforgivable neglect by Kissinger of the rape and killings of millions in the then East Pakistan in formulating US policy towards India and Pakistan in his frenzied Cold War mentality…

Kissinger died on November 29, aged 100 and feted right up to his last days as one of the greatest strategic thinkers of post-WWII America. I’m not going to decry Henry Kissinger’s “record of crimes”. Rather, I want to simply ask the question, is this (Kissinger’s record of policymaking and its consequences) what is called ‘strategic thinking’?

I won’t spend much time on Kissinger’s many failures, which are now well recognised. Rather, I would like to focus on Kissinger’s biggest claim to strategic thinking gurudom – the 1971-72 US opening to China. A whole myth has been built that Kissinger’s ‘balance of power’ politics (inspired by his reading of the 19th century European balance of power that Metternich, et al, designed to keep the peace in Europe) in allying with Communist China was what led to, first, détente and, ultimately, to the collapse of the Soviet Union and America’s victory in the Cold War.

We know now that that’s not true. The Soviets did not begin to sign arms control pacts out of fear of being encircled by the US and a poverty-stricken China reeling under Mao’s cruel revolutions. Rather, they did so because by the mid-1960s, the Soviet General Staff had realised that the US had galloped ahead in technology. In particular, they feared that US semiconductor technology and compute power gave it the ability to launch a first strike on Soviet ICBMs and submarines and destroy a substantial part of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. The Soviets started to build their own copy of Silicon Valley – Zelenograd – in 1963, but it went nowhere. By the early-1970s, the American moon landing, its advances in chip technology, the then nascent GPS and internet (ARPAnet), all served to convince the Soviets that they could not compete. In fact, much before the US military itself realised it and theorised the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ (RMA) in the 1990s, the Soviet military had theorised a ‘Military Technical Revolution’ (MTR), gamed the scenarios, and concluded that they had lost.

The single-biggest reason for the Soviets to fall behind in the tech race was semiconductor technology. Kissinger had a Machiavellian political mind, but he was blind to what rapidly changing technology was doing to national military and economic prowess, despite being at the helm of US national security and strategic affairs.

Soviet/Russia historian Chris Miller’s 2022 book Chip War confirms this analysis about why the Soviets lost the Cold War. Kissinger’s opening up to China had little to do with it. The Soviet monster would have died on its own anyway, but Kissinger’s strategic brilliance has led to the creation of the even bigger China monster.

Through the 1960s, US companies had seeded technological growth, including in semiconductors, in America’s Asian allies – Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, even Malaysia, but not China, for good reason. Whatever prowess China has in semiconductor tech today is thanks to Kissinger and the opening to China. So is China’s enormous economic power, thanks in no small part to Kissinger Associates, which enabled the movement of American capital, technology and managerial capability to China over the next few decades.

The evidence is clear: Kissinger, almost single-handedly made China the peer competitor to the US that it is today. Perhaps it was his very disdain for democracy – which he showed on Chile, Indonesia, Iran, Vietnam, Cambodia, and with regard to India – that has come back to haunt America in the form of China.

My verdict: In Henry Kissinger’s death, China has lost its greatest
patriot.