HENRY Kissinger died at the age of 100, on Wednesday. I think there are many contents of the world a columnist after 1980 should never have missing in his/her repertoire of commentaries.
These include Fidel Castro; the assassination of Indira Gandhi; Nelson Mandela; Michael Jackson; Mikhail Gorbachev; the collapse of the USSR; the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004; the rise of the internet; the 9/11 attack on the US; America’s first Black President, Barack Obama; Donald Trump, Julian Assange; the ravages of COVID-19; the genocide in Gaza in October 2023; and now Henry Kissinger.

I may have left out a few important ones, but I believe a columnist doing analyses from 1980 onwards should never end his/her career without penning a commentary on the items listed above. If you ask someone to offer their list as I did mine above, I doubt President Jimmy Carter would make it. But Jimmy Carter has done for the US and the world an invaluable service.
President Carter saved the US and the world from the mental physiology of Henry Kissinger. I prefer the term “mental physiology” to psychology because I think the term best captures what the philosopher, Hanna Arendt describes as the “banality of evil.” Mr. Kissinger did not just have a complex psychology; he was simply an evil man.

When he died on Wednesday, two of the most influential media houses in the US which are far, far from being leftist, HuffPost and Rolling Stone, did a scathing, acidic, attack on his legacy in which they used the words, “war criminal” in their respective headlines to characterise Kissinger. Analyses are pouring out on the man, but I doubt any would exceed the brilliance of the pieces on him in HuffPost and Rolling Stone.

In the 20th century, the developed countries have produced three personalities whose cruelties and demented use of power have no parallel. I am confining the argument to the developed world and not the Third World where Idi Amin in Uganda and Pol Pot in Cambodia were dictators.

The three from the developed world were Stalin in the USSR, Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy. If I was to name another personality from the industrial Western countries that was a figure of cruelty, it would be Kissinger. On the basis of sheer numbers killed through the instrumentality of a directing hand, then Kissinger is far behind Stalin and Hitler. But I would say at the height of his power during the Cold War, the amount of people killed and country ravaged because of the situation would put him in front of Mussolini.

During the Cold War, the United States always enjoyed the label of a better global force over the USSR. People around the world in great numbers chose the US over the USSR. What Kissinger did, was that he erased that distinction by turning the US into an international leviathan that must compete for international survival using methods that derecognised the role of moral values, humanitarian instincts and possession of reason and conscience.

What Kissinger did as Secretary of State in the US was to cause huge parts of the world including most post-colonial nations to treat the US and the USSR as the same side of the coin. To steer clear from both, the post-colonial world invented the Non-Aligned Movement.
I think it is true to say that if you did not have the Henry Kissinger power show in the 1970s, many anti-American revolutions would not have taken place and many fervent nationalist governments would not have become alienated from the US. Kissinger went on a rampage doing things around the world that even his boss, President Nixon did not know about.

While preserving apartheid in South Africa, Kissinger went on an overthrow rampage. He made sure any government that was not close to the US was either overthrown or destabilised. The more countries Kissinger offended the deeper was the alienation from the US.
It was not until the arrival of President Carter that Kissinger was stopped in his tracks. As a direct rebuff to Kissinger’s methodology in the use of global power, Carter made human rights concern one of the cornerstones of his foreign policy. Carter tied aid and arms sale to human rights observance. Many of the dictatorships that Kissinger armed, Carter refused to sell arms to include the brain child of Kissinger – the Pinochet dictator in Chile.

After Kissinger faded from power in 1976 with the rise of Carter, the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama gradually erased any shadow of Kissinger in the foreign policy of the United States. Had there been no Jimmy Carter, Henry Kissinger would have destroyed the US and the world.