To some, he was the legendary diplomat responsible for saving the world from nuclear war. To others, he was the world's greatest threat to democracy and a war criminal responsible for the death of millions of innocent people.
In this episode, we'll learn about the controversial but impactful life of one of America's most famous diplomats.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about Henry Kissinger.
[00:00:25] To some, he was a legendary diplomat, responsible for saving the world from nuclear war and bringing peace when there was conflict.
[00:00:35] To others, he was the world’s greatest threat to democracy, a war criminal and a heartless megalomaniac responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people.
[00:00:46] He was nothing if not controversial, so let’s not waste a minute and learn about the extraordinary life of Henry Kissinger.
[00:00:57] If you look down the list of people who have won The Nobel Peace Prize, you’ll probably see some familiar names.
[00:01:05] Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun who was awarded the prize in 1979 for "her work for bringing help to suffering humanity."
[00:01:14] Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights activist who earned the prize in 1964 for “his non-violent struggle for civil rights for the Afro-American population."
[00:01:25] And even going further back, in 1944 an organisation, the International Committee of the Red Cross, was awarded the prize "for the great work it performed during the war on behalf of humanity."
[00:01:40] All relatively uncontroversial so far.
[00:01:44] But go to 1973, and you’ll see that the prize was shared by two men: A Vietnamese man, Lê Đức Thọ, and an American, Henry Kissinger. They were awarded the prize for “jointly having negotiated a ceasefire in Vietnam."
[00:02:05] In his acceptance speech, Kissinger spoke passionately about the importance of peace in an increasingly complex world, saying, and I quote directly: “America’s goal is the building of a structure of peace, a peace in which all nations have a stake and therefore to which all nations have a commitment. We are seeking a stable world, not as an end in itself but as a bridge to the realisation of man’s noble aspirations of tranquillity and community.”
[00:02:42] END QUOTE.
[00:02:44] Impressive words, “a stable world…tranquillity and community”, it all sounds very enticing.
[00:02:52] But not everyone was buying it, and there were many who thought that Kissinger was one of the world’s greatest threats to world stability, that he was an enemy of tranquillity and community.
[00:03:07] In fact, he would go from winning this globally recognised prize to being the subject of a famous book called “The Trial of Henry Kissinger”, in which the author puts Kissinger on trial for war crimes in Vietnam, Bangladesh, East Timor, Chile, and even the United States.
[00:03:29] To better understand how it got to this, and who Henry Kissinger really was, we need to go right back to the start.
[00:03:38] He was German by birth, born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in 1923.
[00:03:44] He was also Jewish, and when it became clear that Nazi Germany was not going to be a safe place for Jewish people, his family fled Germany, seeking a new life in the United States.
[00:03:59] This was in 1938, and the 15-year-old Kissinger arrived in America not speaking a word of English.
[00:04:08] He learned quickly, but it wasn’t long before he found himself back in Europe, this time as an American soldier fighting his own countrymen, the Germans.
[00:04:20] He was initially destined for the front, as a regular soldier, but he was noticed by another German immigrant, Fritz Kraemer, who recognised both the fact that the young Kissinger could speak fluent German and that he was clearly gifted, he was very intelligent. As a result he was transferred to the military intelligence service, where his skills could be put to better use.
[00:04:47] Kissinger distinguished himself during the war, and would later say that it was during this time that he started to think of himself as an American, not a German.
[00:04:59] And it would be Fritz Kramer, the same German immigrant that first spotted Kissinger’s talents, who advised the young man to raise his post-war ambitions. At this point he had thought of perhaps going to university and getting a job as an accountant, or some kind of respectable but not world-changing career.
[00:05:22] Kraemer saw Kissinger’s potential, and encouraged him to aim higher. When he got back from the war, Kissinger sent off applications to the top universities in the United States. He got rejection letter after rejection letter, until finally one said yes: Harvard University, the most prestigious university in the country.
[00:05:48] He excelled at Harvard, majoring in political science. He stayed on afterwards as an academic, and developed his own unique sense of politics and diplomacy.
[00:06:01] This was in the mid 1950s. The Cold War was in full swing, and new alliances were being sought between nations.
[00:06:11] Underpinning all of this was the threat not just of nuclear war, but of nuclear destruction.
[00:06:19] The US had a growing stockpile of nuclear weapons, as did the USSR.
[00:06:25] From the American side, if the Soviets fired a weapon it seemed like there were only two choices, retaliate in full, raining down nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union, which would most likely end in a serious counterattack, with the destruction of much of both the US and the Soviet Union. This was clearly in nobody’s interests, it would result in mutually assured destruction.
[00:06:53] And the second choice, the alternative, was to simply give in, not retaliate at all in order to avoid this nuclear holocaust.
[00:07:04] Of course, neither of these two choices were good outcomes for either side, or for the world.
[00:07:11] And from a US foreign policy perspective, this position didn’t give the US much negotiating power with the Soviet Union.
[00:07:21] Kissinger’s first somewhat revolutionary political idea was to find some kind of middle ground. He favoured fighting the Soviets with localised, small-scale force, and backing this up with the threat of using nuclear weapons on a small-scale level.
[00:07:41] He outlined this theory in a hugely influential work called Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which he published in 1957. This theory might sound relatively sensible and obvious to us now, but it wasn’t at the time. And it was this idea that started to get this thirtysomething political scientist noticed in Washington DC.
[00:08:09] He served as an advisor and consultant, both to the US government and on the failed Presidential campaign of a man called Nelson Rockefeller, of the famous Rockefeller dynasty.
[00:08:22] He might not have got “his man” into the White House, but his talents had caught the attention of Richard Nixon, who appointed Kissinger as his National Security Advisor when he took office in 1969.
[00:08:37] Now, let me give you a quick reminder of what was going on in the world, especially related to US foreign policy, when Kissinger took his first political role. The Vietnam War had entered its 14th year, with no end in sight.
[00:08:54] The Cultural Revolution in China was in full flow.
[00:08:58] In the Middle East, during the Six-Day War, Israel gained control over a huge amount of territory, including The West Bank, The Gaza Strip, The Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula.
[00:09:11] And in Latin America, there was the rise of Marxist movements combined with the overthrow of democratically elected governments by fascist regimes.
[00:09:22] The political situation all over the world was tense, and, as National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger got to work right away.
[00:09:33] His main focus was the Vietnam War, which was by this time incredibly unpopular domestically. It had been dragging on, it was costing the US taxpayer some $30 billion a year, and hundreds of young Americans were flying home every week in body bags.
[00:09:55] As you heard at the start of the episode, Kissinger would jointly win a Nobel Peace Prize for ending the war, but what did he actually do, and did he deserve it?
[00:10:08] Well, there is little debate that the end of the Vietnam War was a positive outcome, no war is an improvement from a never ending war.
[00:10:18] But where it starts to get more debatable is what Henry Kissinger’s role was in the war, what he was prepared to do to end the war, and whether he really deserved any of the credit.
[00:10:33] Firstly, he would be accused of delaying the peace negotiations for political gain. There was going to be a US election in 1972, and he would be accused of delaying the peace process because he wanted it to be announced in the lead up to the election, so that Richard Nixon, his boss, stood to benefit politically.
[00:10:57] Secondly, he conducted negotiations outside the normal government channels, he bypassed his colleagues and negotiated directly with the North Vietnamese. To his critics, this was an example of the fact that he considered himself superior, and that the normal rules didn’t apply to him, but this was only the tip of the iceberg.
[00:11:23] Much more importantly, it would emerge that the steps he was willing to take went much further than simply ignoring diplomatic protocols. It transpired that, without approval from Congress, he had personally authorised bombing raids on Cambodia, which was not an active participant in the war, but was allowing North Vietnamese troops to pass through.
[00:11:50] And this wasn’t a one-off, a case of Kissinger trying to get something done quickly and, as an exception, ignoring the normal channels.
[00:12:00] According to one Pentagon report, so an official source, “Henry A. Kissinger approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids in 1969 and 1970” as well as “the methods for keeping them out of the newspaper.”
[00:12:19] And in terms of what the impact of these bombing raids was, it’s estimated that these were responsible for the deaths of anywhere from 150 to 500,000 people.
[00:12:33] His role in the Vietnam war would be far from his only controversy.
[00:12:38] If you are from Latin America, and certainly if you are from Chile, you may be aware of Kissinger’s role in the coup that toppled the democratically elected leader, Salvador Allende, replacing him with General Augusto Pinochet, and resulting in a military junta which ruled the country for almost two decades.
[00:13:00] Now, why was Kissinger getting involved with the domestic politics of Chile, you might be asking?
[00:13:06] Well, Kissinger was a disciple of realpolitik, a system of politics or principles based on practical rather than moral or ideological considerations, and he was more than willing to interfere with the democracy of other sovereign states, if it served the interests of the United States.
[00:13:28] And as you may know, this went on all across Latin America in the 1970s and 80s, in something that was called Operation Condor. Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, the list goes on.
[00:13:44] The playbook was simple but effective: if a country looked like it was about to elect a leader that was not in the interests of the United States, typically because that leader had socialist sympathies, Kissinger and the CIA would do their utmost to stop that person from gaining power, or if they were already in power, there would be a US-backed military coup.
[00:14:09] And as you will know, these coups were typically brutal, murderous and repressive. Political adversaries were locked up and tortured, with many disappearing forever without a trace.
[00:14:25] Due to its clandestine nature, estimates vary as to how many people were killed as part of Operation Condor, but the numbers are typically thought to be somewhere between 60 and 80,000 people. And this was all supported and partially enabled by Henry Kissinger.
[00:14:45] Understandably, in many of the countries where this took place, they are calls for justice, and for Henry Kissinger in particular to be held to account, to be held responsible. In 2001, when he was staying at the Ritz in Paris, a French judge attempted to serve Kissinger with a court summons, asking him to testify about his role in Operation Condor.
[00:15:11] There are calls in the Argentine and Chilean legal systems to officially summon Kissinger to answer questions about particular murders or disappearances of civilians, and the Supreme Court of Uruguay has sent an official extradition request.
[00:15:30] And although he hasn’t held any official US government role since 1977, and he was acting in an official not personal capacity, he has had to be very careful about where he travelled, for fear of being whisked away and forced to answer for his actions, or for his crimes, as many would put it.
[00:15:52] But, as they say, it wasn’t all bad.
[00:15:56] In the interests of balance, we must take a look at some of the less controversial acts of Henry Kissinger, the most famous of which is the rapprochement with China, the normalisation of relations between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China.
[00:16:14] As a brief reminder of what was going on here and why it was important, Mao Zedong had come to power in 1949, founding the People’s Republic of China. The United States had supported his opponents, the Nationalist government, which was led by Chiang Kai-Shek.
[00:16:34] The Nationalists were driven out by the Communists, and forced to retreat to Taiwan.
[00:16:40] This is obviously a very brief and simplistic overview, but the point to underline is that the United States simply didn’t recognise the new Chinese Communist government, it did not accept it as a legitimate nation state, and the two countries had no formal relations.
[00:17:01] Kissinger recognised that this wasn’t a situation that could go on forever, and he made it one of his missions to re-engage with China. He went on a series of secret, undercover trips to Beijing, negotiating with the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai, which resulted in US President Richard Nixon’s famous trip to China in February of 1972, and the resumption of diplomatic relations at the start of 1979.
[00:17:30] Nowadays, a visit by a US President to China might seem like a run-of-the-mill diplomatic trip, but it’s hard to overstate just how important and unusual this was. The two countries had no official relations, they were ideological enemies, Mao’s Cultural Revolution was in full-swing, and there was a sitting US President, from the Republican party no less, shaking hands with the leader of the largest Communist country in the world.
[00:18:03] It took some serious diplomacy and statesmanship, for which Kissinger took the credit.
[00:18:10] He did a similar thing in the Middle East after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, going from country to country trying to broker some kind of peace agreement. This constant shuttling around, to and from Middle Eastern states, even brought a new expression into the English language: “shuttle diplomacy”.
[00:18:32] And it worked, or at least Kissinger was one of several people who played an important role in the peace process.
[00:18:41] Now, Henry Kissinger was born in 1923. I’m recording this in 2023, a few months after he celebrated his hundredth birthday, and to this very day he has been commenting on world politics: the Iranian nuclear programme, the COVID Pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, he is very happy to voice his opinion on the latest goings on in the world, particularly to do with foreign policy.
[00:19:08] And one subject that he has shown a particular interest in, an interest that you might think is unusual for a man in his hundredth year, is Artificial Intelligence.
[00:19:21] Yes, “artificial intelligence” might be the expression of the moment, but Kissinger has been talking about the risks and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence for longer than most people.
[00:19:35] Back in June of 2018 he wrote an article for The Atlantic magazine with the title “How the Enlightenment Ends”, and the subtitle, “Philosophically, intellectually—in every way—human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence.”
[00:19:54] It is, perhaps, unusual. If I ask you to close your eyes and picture an expert on Artificial Intelligence, that person probably wasn’t born in the 1920s.
[00:20:06] Still, the more you learn about Henry Kissinger, the more you realise that, yes, Artificial Intelligence is probably exactly the sort of thing that someone like him would be thinking about. He spent his career thinking about the motivations of nation states, how to negotiate, what deals to do, how to act in the best interests of his adopted country, the United States of America.
[00:20:34] These were hard problems, but they were human problems, problems of ego, problems of miscommunication, problems of misunderstanding. He realised that lots of these problems could be solved through diplomacy. Sure, you can certainly point out that a “problem” for Henry Kissinger might simply be called “democracy” by someone else, but the point is that Kissinger’s career was spent working with, negotiating with, manipulating you might even say, “people”, confronting human problems.
[00:21:12] What does a world look like with these human problems removed?
[00:21:17] He realised relatively early on that Artificial Intelligence changes the playing field when it comes to foreign and domestic policy. An AI can ingest far more information than a human being ever can, and it can be programmed to make decisions based on all of this information, rationally, without letting emotion or prejudice cloud its judgement.
[00:21:44] Much like he no doubt looked at his own abilities and thought that he played an important part in US foreign policy successes because of his superior decision-making abilities, he started to believe that there would be an Artificial Intelligence arms race, with the countries with the most sophisticated AIs able to outsmart and outnegotiate the others.
[00:22:08] Time will only tell if he is right as far as this is concerned, but given the fact that he has been studying foreign policy for longer than most people are alive, he was working 15 hours a day even as he celebrated his 100th birthday, and he can look back on his life and see a long list of the impacts he had on countries spanning from Chile to Israel, China to Vietnam, it seems foolish to bet against Henry Kissinger.
[00:22:39] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Henry Kissinger, the controversial but undeniably influential US diplomat.
[00:22:48] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:22:51] Was he a War Criminal, Diplomat Extraordinaire, or somewhere in between?
[00:22:57] Are you from a country where Henry Kissinger is loved or hated? And why was that?
[00:23:03] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:23:07] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about Henry Kissinger.
[00:00:25] To some, he was a legendary diplomat, responsible for saving the world from nuclear war and bringing peace when there was conflict.
[00:00:35] To others, he was the world’s greatest threat to democracy, a war criminal and a heartless megalomaniac responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people.
[00:00:46] He was nothing if not controversial, so let’s not waste a minute and learn about the extraordinary life of Henry Kissinger.
[00:00:57] If you look down the list of people who have won The Nobel Peace Prize, you’ll probably see some familiar names.
[00:01:05] Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun who was awarded the prize in 1979 for "her work for bringing help to suffering humanity."
[00:01:14] Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights activist who earned the prize in 1964 for “his non-violent struggle for civil rights for the Afro-American population."
[00:01:25] And even going further back, in 1944 an organisation, the International Committee of the Red Cross, was awarded the prize "for the great work it performed during the war on behalf of humanity."
[00:01:40] All relatively uncontroversial so far.
[00:01:44] But go to 1973, and you’ll see that the prize was shared by two men: A Vietnamese man, Lê Đức Thọ, and an American, Henry Kissinger. They were awarded the prize for “jointly having negotiated a ceasefire in Vietnam."
[00:02:05] In his acceptance speech, Kissinger spoke passionately about the importance of peace in an increasingly complex world, saying, and I quote directly: “America’s goal is the building of a structure of peace, a peace in which all nations have a stake and therefore to which all nations have a commitment. We are seeking a stable world, not as an end in itself but as a bridge to the realisation of man’s noble aspirations of tranquillity and community.”
[00:02:42] END QUOTE.
[00:02:44] Impressive words, “a stable world…tranquillity and community”, it all sounds very enticing.
[00:02:52] But not everyone was buying it, and there were many who thought that Kissinger was one of the world’s greatest threats to world stability, that he was an enemy of tranquillity and community.
[00:03:07] In fact, he would go from winning this globally recognised prize to being the subject of a famous book called “The Trial of Henry Kissinger”, in which the author puts Kissinger on trial for war crimes in Vietnam, Bangladesh, East Timor, Chile, and even the United States.
[00:03:29] To better understand how it got to this, and who Henry Kissinger really was, we need to go right back to the start.
[00:03:38] He was German by birth, born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in 1923.
[00:03:44] He was also Jewish, and when it became clear that Nazi Germany was not going to be a safe place for Jewish people, his family fled Germany, seeking a new life in the United States.
[00:03:59] This was in 1938, and the 15-year-old Kissinger arrived in America not speaking a word of English.
[00:04:08] He learned quickly, but it wasn’t long before he found himself back in Europe, this time as an American soldier fighting his own countrymen, the Germans.
[00:04:20] He was initially destined for the front, as a regular soldier, but he was noticed by another German immigrant, Fritz Kraemer, who recognised both the fact that the young Kissinger could speak fluent German and that he was clearly gifted, he was very intelligent. As a result he was transferred to the military intelligence service, where his skills could be put to better use.
[00:04:47] Kissinger distinguished himself during the war, and would later say that it was during this time that he started to think of himself as an American, not a German.
[00:04:59] And it would be Fritz Kramer, the same German immigrant that first spotted Kissinger’s talents, who advised the young man to raise his post-war ambitions. At this point he had thought of perhaps going to university and getting a job as an accountant, or some kind of respectable but not world-changing career.
[00:05:22] Kraemer saw Kissinger’s potential, and encouraged him to aim higher. When he got back from the war, Kissinger sent off applications to the top universities in the United States. He got rejection letter after rejection letter, until finally one said yes: Harvard University, the most prestigious university in the country.
[00:05:48] He excelled at Harvard, majoring in political science. He stayed on afterwards as an academic, and developed his own unique sense of politics and diplomacy.
[00:06:01] This was in the mid 1950s. The Cold War was in full swing, and new alliances were being sought between nations.
[00:06:11] Underpinning all of this was the threat not just of nuclear war, but of nuclear destruction.
[00:06:19] The US had a growing stockpile of nuclear weapons, as did the USSR.
[00:06:25] From the American side, if the Soviets fired a weapon it seemed like there were only two choices, retaliate in full, raining down nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union, which would most likely end in a serious counterattack, with the destruction of much of both the US and the Soviet Union. This was clearly in nobody’s interests, it would result in mutually assured destruction.
[00:06:53] And the second choice, the alternative, was to simply give in, not retaliate at all in order to avoid this nuclear holocaust.
[00:07:04] Of course, neither of these two choices were good outcomes for either side, or for the world.
[00:07:11] And from a US foreign policy perspective, this position didn’t give the US much negotiating power with the Soviet Union.
[00:07:21] Kissinger’s first somewhat revolutionary political idea was to find some kind of middle ground. He favoured fighting the Soviets with localised, small-scale force, and backing this up with the threat of using nuclear weapons on a small-scale level.
[00:07:41] He outlined this theory in a hugely influential work called Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which he published in 1957. This theory might sound relatively sensible and obvious to us now, but it wasn’t at the time. And it was this idea that started to get this thirtysomething political scientist noticed in Washington DC.
[00:08:09] He served as an advisor and consultant, both to the US government and on the failed Presidential campaign of a man called Nelson Rockefeller, of the famous Rockefeller dynasty.
[00:08:22] He might not have got “his man” into the White House, but his talents had caught the attention of Richard Nixon, who appointed Kissinger as his National Security Advisor when he took office in 1969.
[00:08:37] Now, let me give you a quick reminder of what was going on in the world, especially related to US foreign policy, when Kissinger took his first political role. The Vietnam War had entered its 14th year, with no end in sight.
[00:08:54] The Cultural Revolution in China was in full flow.
[00:08:58] In the Middle East, during the Six-Day War, Israel gained control over a huge amount of territory, including The West Bank, The Gaza Strip, The Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula.
[00:09:11] And in Latin America, there was the rise of Marxist movements combined with the overthrow of democratically elected governments by fascist regimes.
[00:09:22] The political situation all over the world was tense, and, as National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger got to work right away.
[00:09:33] His main focus was the Vietnam War, which was by this time incredibly unpopular domestically. It had been dragging on, it was costing the US taxpayer some $30 billion a year, and hundreds of young Americans were flying home every week in body bags.
[00:09:55] As you heard at the start of the episode, Kissinger would jointly win a Nobel Peace Prize for ending the war, but what did he actually do, and did he deserve it?
[00:10:08] Well, there is little debate that the end of the Vietnam War was a positive outcome, no war is an improvement from a never ending war.
[00:10:18] But where it starts to get more debatable is what Henry Kissinger’s role was in the war, what he was prepared to do to end the war, and whether he really deserved any of the credit.
[00:10:33] Firstly, he would be accused of delaying the peace negotiations for political gain. There was going to be a US election in 1972, and he would be accused of delaying the peace process because he wanted it to be announced in the lead up to the election, so that Richard Nixon, his boss, stood to benefit politically.
[00:10:57] Secondly, he conducted negotiations outside the normal government channels, he bypassed his colleagues and negotiated directly with the North Vietnamese. To his critics, this was an example of the fact that he considered himself superior, and that the normal rules didn’t apply to him, but this was only the tip of the iceberg.
[00:11:23] Much more importantly, it would emerge that the steps he was willing to take went much further than simply ignoring diplomatic protocols. It transpired that, without approval from Congress, he had personally authorised bombing raids on Cambodia, which was not an active participant in the war, but was allowing North Vietnamese troops to pass through.
[00:11:50] And this wasn’t a one-off, a case of Kissinger trying to get something done quickly and, as an exception, ignoring the normal channels.
[00:12:00] According to one Pentagon report, so an official source, “Henry A. Kissinger approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids in 1969 and 1970” as well as “the methods for keeping them out of the newspaper.”
[00:12:19] And in terms of what the impact of these bombing raids was, it’s estimated that these were responsible for the deaths of anywhere from 150 to 500,000 people.
[00:12:33] His role in the Vietnam war would be far from his only controversy.
[00:12:38] If you are from Latin America, and certainly if you are from Chile, you may be aware of Kissinger’s role in the coup that toppled the democratically elected leader, Salvador Allende, replacing him with General Augusto Pinochet, and resulting in a military junta which ruled the country for almost two decades.
[00:13:00] Now, why was Kissinger getting involved with the domestic politics of Chile, you might be asking?
[00:13:06] Well, Kissinger was a disciple of realpolitik, a system of politics or principles based on practical rather than moral or ideological considerations, and he was more than willing to interfere with the democracy of other sovereign states, if it served the interests of the United States.
[00:13:28] And as you may know, this went on all across Latin America in the 1970s and 80s, in something that was called Operation Condor. Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, the list goes on.
[00:13:44] The playbook was simple but effective: if a country looked like it was about to elect a leader that was not in the interests of the United States, typically because that leader had socialist sympathies, Kissinger and the CIA would do their utmost to stop that person from gaining power, or if they were already in power, there would be a US-backed military coup.
[00:14:09] And as you will know, these coups were typically brutal, murderous and repressive. Political adversaries were locked up and tortured, with many disappearing forever without a trace.
[00:14:25] Due to its clandestine nature, estimates vary as to how many people were killed as part of Operation Condor, but the numbers are typically thought to be somewhere between 60 and 80,000 people. And this was all supported and partially enabled by Henry Kissinger.
[00:14:45] Understandably, in many of the countries where this took place, they are calls for justice, and for Henry Kissinger in particular to be held to account, to be held responsible. In 2001, when he was staying at the Ritz in Paris, a French judge attempted to serve Kissinger with a court summons, asking him to testify about his role in Operation Condor.
[00:15:11] There are calls in the Argentine and Chilean legal systems to officially summon Kissinger to answer questions about particular murders or disappearances of civilians, and the Supreme Court of Uruguay has sent an official extradition request.
[00:15:30] And although he hasn’t held any official US government role since 1977, and he was acting in an official not personal capacity, he has had to be very careful about where he travelled, for fear of being whisked away and forced to answer for his actions, or for his crimes, as many would put it.
[00:15:52] But, as they say, it wasn’t all bad.
[00:15:56] In the interests of balance, we must take a look at some of the less controversial acts of Henry Kissinger, the most famous of which is the rapprochement with China, the normalisation of relations between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China.
[00:16:14] As a brief reminder of what was going on here and why it was important, Mao Zedong had come to power in 1949, founding the People’s Republic of China. The United States had supported his opponents, the Nationalist government, which was led by Chiang Kai-Shek.
[00:16:34] The Nationalists were driven out by the Communists, and forced to retreat to Taiwan.
[00:16:40] This is obviously a very brief and simplistic overview, but the point to underline is that the United States simply didn’t recognise the new Chinese Communist government, it did not accept it as a legitimate nation state, and the two countries had no formal relations.
[00:17:01] Kissinger recognised that this wasn’t a situation that could go on forever, and he made it one of his missions to re-engage with China. He went on a series of secret, undercover trips to Beijing, negotiating with the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai, which resulted in US President Richard Nixon’s famous trip to China in February of 1972, and the resumption of diplomatic relations at the start of 1979.
[00:17:30] Nowadays, a visit by a US President to China might seem like a run-of-the-mill diplomatic trip, but it’s hard to overstate just how important and unusual this was. The two countries had no official relations, they were ideological enemies, Mao’s Cultural Revolution was in full-swing, and there was a sitting US President, from the Republican party no less, shaking hands with the leader of the largest Communist country in the world.
[00:18:03] It took some serious diplomacy and statesmanship, for which Kissinger took the credit.
[00:18:10] He did a similar thing in the Middle East after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, going from country to country trying to broker some kind of peace agreement. This constant shuttling around, to and from Middle Eastern states, even brought a new expression into the English language: “shuttle diplomacy”.
[00:18:32] And it worked, or at least Kissinger was one of several people who played an important role in the peace process.
[00:18:41] Now, Henry Kissinger was born in 1923. I’m recording this in 2023, a few months after he celebrated his hundredth birthday, and to this very day he has been commenting on world politics: the Iranian nuclear programme, the COVID Pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, he is very happy to voice his opinion on the latest goings on in the world, particularly to do with foreign policy.
[00:19:08] And one subject that he has shown a particular interest in, an interest that you might think is unusual for a man in his hundredth year, is Artificial Intelligence.
[00:19:21] Yes, “artificial intelligence” might be the expression of the moment, but Kissinger has been talking about the risks and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence for longer than most people.
[00:19:35] Back in June of 2018 he wrote an article for The Atlantic magazine with the title “How the Enlightenment Ends”, and the subtitle, “Philosophically, intellectually—in every way—human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence.”
[00:19:54] It is, perhaps, unusual. If I ask you to close your eyes and picture an expert on Artificial Intelligence, that person probably wasn’t born in the 1920s.
[00:20:06] Still, the more you learn about Henry Kissinger, the more you realise that, yes, Artificial Intelligence is probably exactly the sort of thing that someone like him would be thinking about. He spent his career thinking about the motivations of nation states, how to negotiate, what deals to do, how to act in the best interests of his adopted country, the United States of America.
[00:20:34] These were hard problems, but they were human problems, problems of ego, problems of miscommunication, problems of misunderstanding. He realised that lots of these problems could be solved through diplomacy. Sure, you can certainly point out that a “problem” for Henry Kissinger might simply be called “democracy” by someone else, but the point is that Kissinger’s career was spent working with, negotiating with, manipulating you might even say, “people”, confronting human problems.
[00:21:12] What does a world look like with these human problems removed?
[00:21:17] He realised relatively early on that Artificial Intelligence changes the playing field when it comes to foreign and domestic policy. An AI can ingest far more information than a human being ever can, and it can be programmed to make decisions based on all of this information, rationally, without letting emotion or prejudice cloud its judgement.
[00:21:44] Much like he no doubt looked at his own abilities and thought that he played an important part in US foreign policy successes because of his superior decision-making abilities, he started to believe that there would be an Artificial Intelligence arms race, with the countries with the most sophisticated AIs able to outsmart and outnegotiate the others.
[00:22:08] Time will only tell if he is right as far as this is concerned, but given the fact that he has been studying foreign policy for longer than most people are alive, he was working 15 hours a day even as he celebrated his 100th birthday, and he can look back on his life and see a long list of the impacts he had on countries spanning from Chile to Israel, China to Vietnam, it seems foolish to bet against Henry Kissinger.
[00:22:39] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Henry Kissinger, the controversial but undeniably influential US diplomat.
[00:22:48] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:22:51] Was he a War Criminal, Diplomat Extraordinaire, or somewhere in between?
[00:22:57] Are you from a country where Henry Kissinger is loved or hated? And why was that?
[00:23:03] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:23:07] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are talking about Henry Kissinger.
[00:00:25] To some, he was a legendary diplomat, responsible for saving the world from nuclear war and bringing peace when there was conflict.
[00:00:35] To others, he was the world’s greatest threat to democracy, a war criminal and a heartless megalomaniac responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent people.
[00:00:46] He was nothing if not controversial, so let’s not waste a minute and learn about the extraordinary life of Henry Kissinger.
[00:00:57] If you look down the list of people who have won The Nobel Peace Prize, you’ll probably see some familiar names.
[00:01:05] Mother Teresa, a Catholic nun who was awarded the prize in 1979 for "her work for bringing help to suffering humanity."
[00:01:14] Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights activist who earned the prize in 1964 for “his non-violent struggle for civil rights for the Afro-American population."
[00:01:25] And even going further back, in 1944 an organisation, the International Committee of the Red Cross, was awarded the prize "for the great work it performed during the war on behalf of humanity."
[00:01:40] All relatively uncontroversial so far.
[00:01:44] But go to 1973, and you’ll see that the prize was shared by two men: A Vietnamese man, Lê Đức Thọ, and an American, Henry Kissinger. They were awarded the prize for “jointly having negotiated a ceasefire in Vietnam."
[00:02:05] In his acceptance speech, Kissinger spoke passionately about the importance of peace in an increasingly complex world, saying, and I quote directly: “America’s goal is the building of a structure of peace, a peace in which all nations have a stake and therefore to which all nations have a commitment. We are seeking a stable world, not as an end in itself but as a bridge to the realisation of man’s noble aspirations of tranquillity and community.”
[00:02:42] END QUOTE.
[00:02:44] Impressive words, “a stable world…tranquillity and community”, it all sounds very enticing.
[00:02:52] But not everyone was buying it, and there were many who thought that Kissinger was one of the world’s greatest threats to world stability, that he was an enemy of tranquillity and community.
[00:03:07] In fact, he would go from winning this globally recognised prize to being the subject of a famous book called “The Trial of Henry Kissinger”, in which the author puts Kissinger on trial for war crimes in Vietnam, Bangladesh, East Timor, Chile, and even the United States.
[00:03:29] To better understand how it got to this, and who Henry Kissinger really was, we need to go right back to the start.
[00:03:38] He was German by birth, born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in 1923.
[00:03:44] He was also Jewish, and when it became clear that Nazi Germany was not going to be a safe place for Jewish people, his family fled Germany, seeking a new life in the United States.
[00:03:59] This was in 1938, and the 15-year-old Kissinger arrived in America not speaking a word of English.
[00:04:08] He learned quickly, but it wasn’t long before he found himself back in Europe, this time as an American soldier fighting his own countrymen, the Germans.
[00:04:20] He was initially destined for the front, as a regular soldier, but he was noticed by another German immigrant, Fritz Kraemer, who recognised both the fact that the young Kissinger could speak fluent German and that he was clearly gifted, he was very intelligent. As a result he was transferred to the military intelligence service, where his skills could be put to better use.
[00:04:47] Kissinger distinguished himself during the war, and would later say that it was during this time that he started to think of himself as an American, not a German.
[00:04:59] And it would be Fritz Kramer, the same German immigrant that first spotted Kissinger’s talents, who advised the young man to raise his post-war ambitions. At this point he had thought of perhaps going to university and getting a job as an accountant, or some kind of respectable but not world-changing career.
[00:05:22] Kraemer saw Kissinger’s potential, and encouraged him to aim higher. When he got back from the war, Kissinger sent off applications to the top universities in the United States. He got rejection letter after rejection letter, until finally one said yes: Harvard University, the most prestigious university in the country.
[00:05:48] He excelled at Harvard, majoring in political science. He stayed on afterwards as an academic, and developed his own unique sense of politics and diplomacy.
[00:06:01] This was in the mid 1950s. The Cold War was in full swing, and new alliances were being sought between nations.
[00:06:11] Underpinning all of this was the threat not just of nuclear war, but of nuclear destruction.
[00:06:19] The US had a growing stockpile of nuclear weapons, as did the USSR.
[00:06:25] From the American side, if the Soviets fired a weapon it seemed like there were only two choices, retaliate in full, raining down nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union, which would most likely end in a serious counterattack, with the destruction of much of both the US and the Soviet Union. This was clearly in nobody’s interests, it would result in mutually assured destruction.
[00:06:53] And the second choice, the alternative, was to simply give in, not retaliate at all in order to avoid this nuclear holocaust.
[00:07:04] Of course, neither of these two choices were good outcomes for either side, or for the world.
[00:07:11] And from a US foreign policy perspective, this position didn’t give the US much negotiating power with the Soviet Union.
[00:07:21] Kissinger’s first somewhat revolutionary political idea was to find some kind of middle ground. He favoured fighting the Soviets with localised, small-scale force, and backing this up with the threat of using nuclear weapons on a small-scale level.
[00:07:41] He outlined this theory in a hugely influential work called Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which he published in 1957. This theory might sound relatively sensible and obvious to us now, but it wasn’t at the time. And it was this idea that started to get this thirtysomething political scientist noticed in Washington DC.
[00:08:09] He served as an advisor and consultant, both to the US government and on the failed Presidential campaign of a man called Nelson Rockefeller, of the famous Rockefeller dynasty.
[00:08:22] He might not have got “his man” into the White House, but his talents had caught the attention of Richard Nixon, who appointed Kissinger as his National Security Advisor when he took office in 1969.
[00:08:37] Now, let me give you a quick reminder of what was going on in the world, especially related to US foreign policy, when Kissinger took his first political role. The Vietnam War had entered its 14th year, with no end in sight.
[00:08:54] The Cultural Revolution in China was in full flow.
[00:08:58] In the Middle East, during the Six-Day War, Israel gained control over a huge amount of territory, including The West Bank, The Gaza Strip, The Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula.
[00:09:11] And in Latin America, there was the rise of Marxist movements combined with the overthrow of democratically elected governments by fascist regimes.
[00:09:22] The political situation all over the world was tense, and, as National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger got to work right away.
[00:09:33] His main focus was the Vietnam War, which was by this time incredibly unpopular domestically. It had been dragging on, it was costing the US taxpayer some $30 billion a year, and hundreds of young Americans were flying home every week in body bags.
[00:09:55] As you heard at the start of the episode, Kissinger would jointly win a Nobel Peace Prize for ending the war, but what did he actually do, and did he deserve it?
[00:10:08] Well, there is little debate that the end of the Vietnam War was a positive outcome, no war is an improvement from a never ending war.
[00:10:18] But where it starts to get more debatable is what Henry Kissinger’s role was in the war, what he was prepared to do to end the war, and whether he really deserved any of the credit.
[00:10:33] Firstly, he would be accused of delaying the peace negotiations for political gain. There was going to be a US election in 1972, and he would be accused of delaying the peace process because he wanted it to be announced in the lead up to the election, so that Richard Nixon, his boss, stood to benefit politically.
[00:10:57] Secondly, he conducted negotiations outside the normal government channels, he bypassed his colleagues and negotiated directly with the North Vietnamese. To his critics, this was an example of the fact that he considered himself superior, and that the normal rules didn’t apply to him, but this was only the tip of the iceberg.
[00:11:23] Much more importantly, it would emerge that the steps he was willing to take went much further than simply ignoring diplomatic protocols. It transpired that, without approval from Congress, he had personally authorised bombing raids on Cambodia, which was not an active participant in the war, but was allowing North Vietnamese troops to pass through.
[00:11:50] And this wasn’t a one-off, a case of Kissinger trying to get something done quickly and, as an exception, ignoring the normal channels.
[00:12:00] According to one Pentagon report, so an official source, “Henry A. Kissinger approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids in 1969 and 1970” as well as “the methods for keeping them out of the newspaper.”
[00:12:19] And in terms of what the impact of these bombing raids was, it’s estimated that these were responsible for the deaths of anywhere from 150 to 500,000 people.
[00:12:33] His role in the Vietnam war would be far from his only controversy.
[00:12:38] If you are from Latin America, and certainly if you are from Chile, you may be aware of Kissinger’s role in the coup that toppled the democratically elected leader, Salvador Allende, replacing him with General Augusto Pinochet, and resulting in a military junta which ruled the country for almost two decades.
[00:13:00] Now, why was Kissinger getting involved with the domestic politics of Chile, you might be asking?
[00:13:06] Well, Kissinger was a disciple of realpolitik, a system of politics or principles based on practical rather than moral or ideological considerations, and he was more than willing to interfere with the democracy of other sovereign states, if it served the interests of the United States.
[00:13:28] And as you may know, this went on all across Latin America in the 1970s and 80s, in something that was called Operation Condor. Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, the list goes on.
[00:13:44] The playbook was simple but effective: if a country looked like it was about to elect a leader that was not in the interests of the United States, typically because that leader had socialist sympathies, Kissinger and the CIA would do their utmost to stop that person from gaining power, or if they were already in power, there would be a US-backed military coup.
[00:14:09] And as you will know, these coups were typically brutal, murderous and repressive. Political adversaries were locked up and tortured, with many disappearing forever without a trace.
[00:14:25] Due to its clandestine nature, estimates vary as to how many people were killed as part of Operation Condor, but the numbers are typically thought to be somewhere between 60 and 80,000 people. And this was all supported and partially enabled by Henry Kissinger.
[00:14:45] Understandably, in many of the countries where this took place, they are calls for justice, and for Henry Kissinger in particular to be held to account, to be held responsible. In 2001, when he was staying at the Ritz in Paris, a French judge attempted to serve Kissinger with a court summons, asking him to testify about his role in Operation Condor.
[00:15:11] There are calls in the Argentine and Chilean legal systems to officially summon Kissinger to answer questions about particular murders or disappearances of civilians, and the Supreme Court of Uruguay has sent an official extradition request.
[00:15:30] And although he hasn’t held any official US government role since 1977, and he was acting in an official not personal capacity, he has had to be very careful about where he travelled, for fear of being whisked away and forced to answer for his actions, or for his crimes, as many would put it.
[00:15:52] But, as they say, it wasn’t all bad.
[00:15:56] In the interests of balance, we must take a look at some of the less controversial acts of Henry Kissinger, the most famous of which is the rapprochement with China, the normalisation of relations between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China.
[00:16:14] As a brief reminder of what was going on here and why it was important, Mao Zedong had come to power in 1949, founding the People’s Republic of China. The United States had supported his opponents, the Nationalist government, which was led by Chiang Kai-Shek.
[00:16:34] The Nationalists were driven out by the Communists, and forced to retreat to Taiwan.
[00:16:40] This is obviously a very brief and simplistic overview, but the point to underline is that the United States simply didn’t recognise the new Chinese Communist government, it did not accept it as a legitimate nation state, and the two countries had no formal relations.
[00:17:01] Kissinger recognised that this wasn’t a situation that could go on forever, and he made it one of his missions to re-engage with China. He went on a series of secret, undercover trips to Beijing, negotiating with the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai, which resulted in US President Richard Nixon’s famous trip to China in February of 1972, and the resumption of diplomatic relations at the start of 1979.
[00:17:30] Nowadays, a visit by a US President to China might seem like a run-of-the-mill diplomatic trip, but it’s hard to overstate just how important and unusual this was. The two countries had no official relations, they were ideological enemies, Mao’s Cultural Revolution was in full-swing, and there was a sitting US President, from the Republican party no less, shaking hands with the leader of the largest Communist country in the world.
[00:18:03] It took some serious diplomacy and statesmanship, for which Kissinger took the credit.
[00:18:10] He did a similar thing in the Middle East after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, going from country to country trying to broker some kind of peace agreement. This constant shuttling around, to and from Middle Eastern states, even brought a new expression into the English language: “shuttle diplomacy”.
[00:18:32] And it worked, or at least Kissinger was one of several people who played an important role in the peace process.
[00:18:41] Now, Henry Kissinger was born in 1923. I’m recording this in 2023, a few months after he celebrated his hundredth birthday, and to this very day he has been commenting on world politics: the Iranian nuclear programme, the COVID Pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, he is very happy to voice his opinion on the latest goings on in the world, particularly to do with foreign policy.
[00:19:08] And one subject that he has shown a particular interest in, an interest that you might think is unusual for a man in his hundredth year, is Artificial Intelligence.
[00:19:21] Yes, “artificial intelligence” might be the expression of the moment, but Kissinger has been talking about the risks and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence for longer than most people.
[00:19:35] Back in June of 2018 he wrote an article for The Atlantic magazine with the title “How the Enlightenment Ends”, and the subtitle, “Philosophically, intellectually—in every way—human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence.”
[00:19:54] It is, perhaps, unusual. If I ask you to close your eyes and picture an expert on Artificial Intelligence, that person probably wasn’t born in the 1920s.
[00:20:06] Still, the more you learn about Henry Kissinger, the more you realise that, yes, Artificial Intelligence is probably exactly the sort of thing that someone like him would be thinking about. He spent his career thinking about the motivations of nation states, how to negotiate, what deals to do, how to act in the best interests of his adopted country, the United States of America.
[00:20:34] These were hard problems, but they were human problems, problems of ego, problems of miscommunication, problems of misunderstanding. He realised that lots of these problems could be solved through diplomacy. Sure, you can certainly point out that a “problem” for Henry Kissinger might simply be called “democracy” by someone else, but the point is that Kissinger’s career was spent working with, negotiating with, manipulating you might even say, “people”, confronting human problems.
[00:21:12] What does a world look like with these human problems removed?
[00:21:17] He realised relatively early on that Artificial Intelligence changes the playing field when it comes to foreign and domestic policy. An AI can ingest far more information than a human being ever can, and it can be programmed to make decisions based on all of this information, rationally, without letting emotion or prejudice cloud its judgement.
[00:21:44] Much like he no doubt looked at his own abilities and thought that he played an important part in US foreign policy successes because of his superior decision-making abilities, he started to believe that there would be an Artificial Intelligence arms race, with the countries with the most sophisticated AIs able to outsmart and outnegotiate the others.
[00:22:08] Time will only tell if he is right as far as this is concerned, but given the fact that he has been studying foreign policy for longer than most people are alive, he was working 15 hours a day even as he celebrated his 100th birthday, and he can look back on his life and see a long list of the impacts he had on countries spanning from Chile to Israel, China to Vietnam, it seems foolish to bet against Henry Kissinger.
[00:22:39] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Henry Kissinger, the controversial but undeniably influential US diplomat.
[00:22:48] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:22:51] Was he a War Criminal, Diplomat Extraordinaire, or somewhere in between?
[00:22:57] Are you from a country where Henry Kissinger is loved or hated? And why was that?
[00:23:03] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:23:07] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:23:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
