Henry Kissinger

Perceptions of International Politics

Harvey Starr

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813186573
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Henry Kissinger conducted American foreign policy with a distinctive assurance and panache that gave dramatic force to his tenure as secretary of state. His was the shaping hand in decisions that led to detente with the Soviet Union, to opening relations with the People's Republic of China, and to "shuttle" diplomacy in the Middle East and the disengagement of Egypt and Israel during the 1973 war.

Taking a fresh look at the statecraft of Henry Kissinger, Harvey Starr brings to bear a variety of analytical methods on data drawn from different stages in Kissinger's career to define and explain the beliefs and perceptions that formed the ground of his policy decisions. Using psychohistory and content analysis, Starr defines Kissinger's perceptions of his adversaries—the Soviet Union and Red China—and draws revealing comparisons between Kissinger and John Foster Dulles. Henry Kissinger: Perceptions of International Politics is an illuminating view of an important era in American diplomacy.

PART I

Henry Kissinger:
Biographical and
Psychological Study

1

The Study of
Henry Kissinger:
Why and How

In his Harvard senior thesis, “The Meaning of History,” Henry Kissinger observed that, “Everybody is a product of an age, a nation, and environment. But beyond that, he constitutes what is essentially unapproachable by analysis, the form of the form, the creative essence of history, the moral personality.”¹ However, the personalities of foreign-policy decision makers are not “essentially unapproachable by analysis.” Although the decision maker is, indeed, difficult to study, there are ways one can approach understanding the individual and can “gain access” to his personality as revealed in his thoughts, ideas, and beliefs. This book is an application of these approaches to the study of one particular policymaker, Henry Kissinger.

To begin, I use and merge biographical and psychobiographical studies of Henry Kissinger. Through the use of secondary sources, such as the biographies by Marvin and Bernard Kalb, David Landau, Ralph Blumenfeld, Dana Ward, and Bruce Mazlish, a chronology of the important events of Kissinger’s life and other psychobiographical traces may be identified. In addition, the large body of Kissinger’s professional, pre–public office, academic writings also contains clues to the nature of the subsequent foreign-policy decision maker. These academic works can be studied through the use of an operational code framework that identifies their author’s political “belief system.” My operational-code analysis also draws heavily from works that were concerned with Kissinger’s writings, especially those of Stephen Graubard, Peter Dickson, John Stoessinger, and Mazlish, and the work of Stephen Walker.

My initial goal is not only to set out Kissinger’s belief system as delineated by operational-code analysis, but also to examine how the belief system derives from the individual’s personality as it was formed in childhood, adolescence, and young manhood.² This goal is directly relevant to the first half of the general, integrative theme of this work, which is a description of 1) Henry Kissinger’s belief system and 2) a specific aspect of that belief system—his images of opponents. Subsidiary themes addressed in various sections of the book include the developmental background for that belief system, how images of the opponent relate to behavior, and the methodological problems associated with the understanding of these topics.

Just as Kissinger the child/adolescent/young man and Kissinger the academic left “traces” that could be analyzed, so did Kissinger the policymaker. As a policymaker, Kissinger made numerous public statements and performed numerous public acts that could be studied. To identify Kissinger’s images of contemporary opponents, I apply formal content analysis (evaluative assertion analysis) to the public statements of Kissinger the foreign-policy decision maker. This analysis focuses as well upon U.S. foreign policy during Kissinger’s policy-making tenure, in order to reveal the relationship between his belief system and the nation’s eventual foreign policy.

KISSINGER AS SUBJECT: FOREIGN-POLICY ACTOR

Henry Kissinger was the key presidential adviser on foreign policy under two presidents; therefore, a study of Kissinger is necessarily a study of American foreign policy. In this book, the emphasis is upon the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy as it concerned the triangular or triadic framework of American, Soviet, and Chinese relations. These relations are studied using Kissinger’s images of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, as well as events data that describe each state’s behavior toward the other two. The Nixon-Kissinger years were dramatic: they encompass the Chinese-American breakthrough and the growing era of U.S. détente with the Soviet Union. The eventual extrication of the U.S. from the trauma of Indochina, U.S. policy in the Middle East after the fourth war within twenty-five years, and the eventual cooling down of détente during the Ford presidency were also based upon policies developed by the Nixon-Kissinger team.

In this era of dramatic American policy (from the “Nixon Doctrine” through the opening with China, to “shuttle diplomacy”), Henry Kissinger was undoubtedly the primary foreign-policy adviser to President Nixon. As Stephen Walker points out, Kissinger emerged as the “star” of the Nixon Administration because of Nixon’s strong emphasis on foreign policy and Nixon’s own lack of charisma. In contrast to Nixon, Kissinger was “amenable to popularization and, just as importantly, to humanization.”³

Henry Kissinger is one of the major foreign-policy phenomena of our times. His background, style of behavior, foreign-policy positions, relationships with Presidents Nixon and Ford, and preeminence in American foreign policy for eight years, have fascinated the man in the street, journalists, and academics alike. In 1972, Kissinger was ranked fourth in the Gallup Poll’s “Most Admired Man Index.” The next year Kissinger was first. Never before had a secretary of state, or any presidential adviser, even made the list—and Kissinger topped it in 1973. In May of that year, 78% of Americans were able to identify Kissinger, a recognition factor matched only by presidents, presidential candidates, and major sports and entertainment figures.⁴

Much commentary has been devoted to the relative influences of Kissinger and Nixon on U.S. foreign policy. From earlier statements, as well as Kissinger’s memoirs, it is clear that Nixon and Kissinger both understood the formal hierarchy of authority, and they had similar views of the world and how international relations should be shaped in that world. In 1973, Henry Brandon observed, “But one only needs to examine the prolific writings of the former Harvard professor to realize how much Mr. Nixon’s views happened to coincide with Kissinger’s and to what extent these two in fact saw the world from a similar vantage point.”⁵ Albert Eldridge notes in greater detail the intellectual similarities between Nixon and Kissinger:

In fact the “operational codes” of both men were highly congruent. Both men held a classic realpolitik view of the world; both believed that flexibility and opportunity for manuevering were crucial to the successful outcome of American diplomacy; both shared the conviction that centralized authority was a prerequisite for flexibility; both men were critical of ad hoc styles of decision making. In Kissinger, Nixon would find an elitist who was distrustful of bureaucracies. It is no wonder their thinking on the reorganization of the NSC coincided.⁶

Along with a similarity of views came the development of Kissinger’s central position within the foreign-policy process. In brief, as National Security adviser, Kissinger controlled the apparatus of the National Security Council and its staff. Kissinger became the conduit and the screen for the great bulk of information about foreign policy and foreign-policy alternatives that moved from the bureaucracy upward to the president. The many “bureaucratic politics” battles that occurred in the Nixon administration are vividly described by Kissinger time and again in his memoirs.⁷ Kissinger eventually dominated these struggles, as Graham Allison has suggested, through his personal relations with the President and his position within the formal policy-making process.⁸ As National Security adviser, Kissinger became chairman of the five major interagency committees that supervised foreign policy: the Washington Special Actions Group (WSAG), which dealt with crises; the Defense Programs Review Committee; the Viet Nam Special Studies Group; the Forty Committee, which supervised covert intelligence operations; and the Verification Panel, which dealt with the SALT negotiations. In addition, Kissinger headed the Senior Review Group, which dealt with all issues sent up by any of the interdepartmental groups created to handle foreign policy.

Kissinger’s memoirs make it clear that although Kissinger and Nixon both recognized the hierarchy of power and responsibility between the two men, Kissinger was provided wide latitude in the foreign-policy arena:

By the end of 1970 I had worked with Nixon for nearly two years; we had talked at length almost every day; we had gone through all crises in closest cooperation. He tended more and more to delegate the tactical management of foreign policy to me. During the first year or so I would submit for Nixon’s approval an outline of what I proposed to say to Dobrynin or the North Vietnamese, for instance, before every meeting. He rarely changed it, though he rarely failed to add tough-sounding exhortations. By the end of 1970 Nixon no longer required these memoranda. He would approve the strategy, usually orally; he would almost never intervene in its day-to-day implementation.⁹

Given Kissinger’s central role during a dynamic and fascinating era of American foreign policy, it is not surprising that so many pages have been devoted to him. With all of this attention, however, few writers have employed systematic methods for collecting and analyzing data about Henry Kissinger. Fewer still have undertaken studies using quantitative data.¹⁰

STUDY OF HENRY KISSINGER: WHY

Much of the impetus for this book has stemmed from the desire to make comparisons—between decision makers, eras of American foreign policy, images of America’s adversaries, and influences on the making of foreign policy. Many of the comparisons sought are related to more general issues extant in the contemporary study of foreign policy. Others derive from an interest in individuals: What impact can an individual have? Do individuals make a difference? What factors might account for the ways in which individuals make decisions and behave?¹¹

The data on Kissinger’s perceptions of the Soviet Union permit a number of comparisons with the perceptions of another influential secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. Ole R. Holsti used evaluative assertion analysis to study the manner in which Dulles perceived the Soviet Union. Holsti’s research was concerned with how high-level decision makers viewed other states, especially “enemies.” His analyses studied the openness of those images, how resistant they were to new information, changes in parts of one’s belief system, and similar questions. Modeling the present study after Holsti’s makes possible a comparison between Kissinger and Dulles that also allows comparative statements about U.S. foreign policy under different leaderships, in different historical eras.¹² Such statements as, “Kissinger was an improvement on John Foster Dulles,”¹³ can also be partially tested in terms of belief systems, openness of image, image of the Soviet Union, and belief system–behavior relationships.

A major issue in the study of foreign policy, and particularly in the comparative study of foreign policy conducted by those scholars who follow the intellectual lead of James N. Rosenau, is the comparative impact, i.e., “the relative potency,” of different variables on foreign policy process and output. In his seminal article on “pre-theories” of foreign policy, Rosenau outlines five types of factors that could influence foreign policy: idiosyncratic, role, governmental, societal, and systemic factors.¹⁴ Rosenau further notes that it is up to the comparative study of foreign policy to delineate and to assess the relative potencies of the variables that affect foreign policy. Another issue raised in the literature is the relative impact of idiosyncratic and role influences, since it is clear that both role and idiosyncratic factors influence decision making. Again, research testing the potency of these variables is limited.¹⁵

The current study is designed not only to provide evidence concerning existing types of idiosyncratic influences, but also to be a partial test of the idiosyncratic–role issue. By comparing Kissinger’s operational code to his words and actions while a foreign-policy decision maker, it is possible to assess the influence of his official role upon his previous idiosyncratic orientations. Employing a more rigorous methodology, I also compare the images of the Soviet Union and China that Kissinger held before and after assuming the post of secretary of state, in order to discover what effect, if any, his official change in role had on his perceptions. Similarly, I examine what effect the change in presidents, from Nixon to Ford, had on Kissinger’s images. The change in presidents may also be viewed as an informal change of role for Kissinger within the U.S. governmental structure.

Finally, several explicit methodological purposes motivated this project. Because of its earlier influence on substantive issues, Holsti’s study of Dulles was used as a model for the Kissinger study. However, because Holsti’s work was an important study that employed content analysis, another goal was to replicate as closely as possible Holsti’s methodology. This effort permits closer comparison of substantive results and allows at least a partial assessment of the utility (validity and reliability) of evaluative assertion analysis. The concern with content-analysis methodology may be justified on the grounds that it is one of the few methods now available for gaining access to the perceptual, cognitive, and decision-making processes of foreign-policy decision makers.

In his discussion of the comparative study of foreign policy, Pat McGowan rightly points out that, “We have omitted replication as a basic scientific activity. . . . Only through this painstaking process can we build a body of cumulative knowledge in foreign policy...