Sino-US Détente Was Bought in Blood. Sino-US Rivalry is Worse

Smart folks have been going hard in the paint on Henry Kissinger of late:

--You might’ve caught my conversation with Nick Turse, about the massive body count on Kissinger’s name in Cambodia.

--Matt Duss just wrote about how Kissinger’s consulting firm became the model for Beltway corruption, which is gross on the face of it but also distorts US foreign policy in the process.

--Jonathan Guyer, who was able to crash Kissinger’s 100^th birthday party, exposed the cult of sycophancy that surrounds this man.

Love to see it.

Not so much because Kissinger is a uniquely horrible person…Rather, he’s a totem of unaccountability; a standout representative of a corrupt system. His status is a leading indicator of the health of the greater apparatus that makes possible war crimes, militarism, and influence-peddling.

For what it’s worth, 20 years from now I doubt anyone will be thinking about or praising this man. He’ll just be a name on scattered endowed chairs and plaques around Washington, meaningless syllables adorning the offices of the next generation of unpaid interns hustling to get by.

But in the meantime, people of sound mind and conscience have the receipts for his misdeeds.

This whole Kissinger discourse got me thinking about Pacific Power Paradox. The one policy move for which he is most routinely praised is his role in Nixon’s opening to China. Kissinger was instrumental to Sino-US détente in the 1970s, and a bulwark within the Republican Party favoring a cooperative relationship with Beijing thereafter. I have an entire chapter of the book recounting how détente happened; it was the start of the “Asian peace.”

But détente was orchestrated in a manner that facilitated mass death. It bothers me that I removed from my détente chapter the part that documented how Sino-US rapprochement involved the killing of so many people half a world away.

Why would I skip covering it? Because I had a contracted word count limit and was way over; I did a lot of last-minute triage cuts to the manuscript right as it was going to the publisher. And one of the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript thought the entire chapter itself was superfluous—since the Asian peace didn’t start until 1979, there was little need for a pre-history chapter. Priorities.

Anyway, with all the Kissinger hullaballoo going on these days, now seemed like a good time to acknowledge and share the price we paid for Sino-US détente…not because détente was bad—it was good!

But we need to be clear-eyed about what happened and why. It was done stupidly, far from cost-free. Romance is for reactionaries.

Let me explain.