So how should we do this, asks Henry Kissinger. We have not even begun and already the great statesman is negotiating terms and defining the respective interests of all of the participants in this tête-à-tête, in his office above Park Avenue.
I have asked him to lay out his hopes and fears for the new president. “I thought we would do this as a conceptual interview,” he says, in response. He suspects that I would like a “hot news interview”. He is correct in his assumptions.
I try to rephrase my question, so that it sounds more conceptual.
Conceptually speaking, what does he make of Mr Trump, I wonder? Nixon’s right-hand man, praised for a series of spectacular diplomatic achievements and blamed for various bloody calamities, sighs and stares into space, his eyes half-closed. I think he must be peering into the future.
We are teetering on the brink of a new world order, he says. In the past eight years, “the world, no matter what they thought of Obama, believes that America stepped back”, he says. “And in that stepping back, a great part of the world has discovered the importance of a role for America, even if they do not like every manifestation of it. So therefore, Donald Trump has an opportunity.”
Advertisement
He speaks very deliberately, as if dictating a communiqué. “Those countries that have learnt the importance of America may co-operate with him in a bigger design,” he says.
This is his most hopeful vision of what is to come, he says. But if Mr Trump does not take this opportunity, then “the tendencies of the Obama period may multiply”.
I don’t want to be a killjoy here, but Mr Trump has never sounded like a committed internationalist. “You can’t judge Trump by the campaign,” he replies. “The test of Trump will be to what extent he can use his intuition and the conditions he has created to build a new international order.”
Dr Kissinger envisages a grand bargain with Russia but, most important of all in his opinion, will be Mr Trump’s dealings with China. This, he says, will be “the most critical relationship for peace and progress in the world”.
“A great part of the world has discovered the importance of a role for America, even if they do not like every manifestation of it
Dr Kissinger is a perceptive fellow, but he no longer lurks in the corridors of power. He served as secretary of state for Nixon and Ford. He was the architect of Nixon’s vaunted trip to China; he brokered a détente with the Soviet Union and a peace accord between Israel and Egypt. Set against this glittering résumé is the secret bombing of Cambodia, fostering the rise of the Khmer Rouge and American support of General Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile.
Advertisement
It is almost four decades since he last held public office and, though he has offered advice to every president that followed, he has faded slowly out of public discourse. But we are in a strange season. A property tycoon long associated with the 1980s is to be president. And Dr Kissinger has appeared at Trump Tower to advise the president-elect and his transition team.
He was, it was noted, a confidant of Vladimir Putin: it was said that he might now act as an intermediary between Washington and the Kremlin. A spokesman for President Putin called Dr Kissinger “one of the wisest experts” and a man with “a deep knowledge of Russian affairs.”
I go to see Dr Kissinger late in the afternoon, on the eve of inauguration day. The offices of his consultancy, Kissinger Associates, are high in a pyramid-shaped glass building in Manhattan. Before long, a deep Bavarian accent sounds from the corner office. Then he appears in the doorway: a small, round figure, his suit trousers held up above his midriff by a spectacular pair of braces.
This time last year, he was telling all his friends in Europe not to fret about Mr Trump. “I would say, ‘He will be gone in a few months’,” he says. He was not a supporter of Mr Trump. But then neither was he a supporter of Richard Nixon. If Dr Kissinger’s career shows anything, it is a swift ability to reconcile himself to new political realities.
“Nixon was a very conceptual thinker and a student of world affairs,” he says. “Trump is much more instinctual.” And Trump beat 16 professional politicians to the nomination and pursued a strategy “universally decried as hopeless and prevailed. A person who can do that is a leader of some significance,” he says.
Advertisement
Dr Kissinger thinks that we are witnessing a domestic revolution in the sense that Mr Trump was a complete outsider, reviled by members of both parties. And his nominees for the cabinet seem drawn “from a political grouping that we didn’t know existed”.
Dr Kissinger recalls going in to see Mr Trump’s team. “He is certainly a dominant personality in the sense that his entourage is clearly used by him for his purposes, and is not a group that manipulates him.”
But here is the challenge for Mr Trump, he says. “[As] a businessman, particularly an entrepreneurial type of businessman, you usually deal with one objective. In foreign policy, and in the relation of political units with each other, the game never stops. It’s an unending process and so you are judged not only by a single move but by the perception of observers of the coherence of your actions.”
“You can’t judge Trump by the campaign. The test of Trump will be to what extent he can build a new international order
I think here of Dr Kissinger accepting Pakistan’s violent suppression of Bangladeshi nationalists in 1971, in part because the president of that country was providing a back channel to China. Or the frenzy of diplomacy that followed the outbreak of the Yom Kippur war: Kissinger flying between Middle Eastern capitals, rescuing the Israelis with American arms, then saving the Egyptians by persuading the Israelis to hold back, and holding off the Soviets by putting US nuclear forces on alert. I suppose Trump supporters might point to the way he gathered all the air rights, from different shops on Fifth Avenue, to build Trump Tower. But it’s hard to compare the two.
What Mr Trump has, Dr Kissinger says, “is an instinct for trends”. He may not be able to describe these trends “as a professor would”, he says. Yet “some of the statements he makes that outrage people, are so outrageous to them because they are partly correct. I’m a great believer in Nato. My whole political life was involved in the creation of the Nato world and maintaining it. The assertion that Nato is obsolete, I find the moral implications of that not acceptable. The role of the Atlantic component has diminished and the European component of this has found it difficult to bring its capacities to bear on actual problems.”
Advertisement
In this sense, Dr Kissinger says, “I sympathise with Trump’s attempt to revitalise Europe. He doesn’t say it the way I would say it.” He pauses, then says: “And I don’t like him tying it to the withdrawal of an American role. That I don’t agree with.”
Mr Trump has also talked down the European Union, contradicting decades of American policy. Here, Dr Kissinger says, he has undergone a “personal evolution” with regard to Brexit. “I had a very friendly relationship with George Osborne,” he says. “My initial instinct was on the side George Osborne represented.”
So he tried to draft an article on the subject, laying out his support. “As I analysed what I thought the long-term interests to be, I became increasingly open to the Brexit concept because I think that the Europe of bureaucratic entities is not going to solve the problem of strategic identity.”
Is the European project over, then? Dr Kissinger shakes his head. He would like to see it roll on, but with the countries “best equipped” to lead Europe “having a greater influence”.
“President Putin has called Dr Kissinger ‘one of the wisest experts’ and a man with ‘a deep knowledge of Russian affairs’
I ask if he worries about Russian hacking, or Russian-sponsored fake news, or allegations of payments flowing from the Kremlin to Trump supporters. “No,” he says. “We have not yet seen how he interprets his relations.” I ask about suggestions that he might act as an intermediary. “I could participate in it only if I believed that the assumptions of the West and Russia were sufficiently close, or that something useful could be done,” he says. “I will be 94 at my next birthday, I’m not looking for employment.”
Advertisement
According to the Putin autobiography First Person, Dr Kissinger once told the Russian president: “All decent people got their start in intelligence. I did too.”
Dr Kissinger, who was born in Fürth, near Nuremberg, and suffered social ostracism and beatings as a Jew in Nazi Germany before his family fled to New York, served in the US Army’s 84th Division and then in the counter-intelligence corps, tracking down senior Nazis. For the past 15 years the former KGB officer and the one-time Nazi hunter, have met periodically, “once in my apartment here, the other times in Moscow”.
They have not talked since the election, he says. Does he believe, as Joe Biden, the former vice-president, said, that Mr Putin’s main aim is to destabilise the West. “No,” he says. “Well, it’s true in the sense that if God handed this to him he would gratefully accept it but I don’t think he thinks it’s in his capacity . . . We are worried that this is his objective. He is worried that our objective is to undermine him.”
Does he tell you this, I ask. Is he frank with you?
“Our meetings are a strategic dialogue,” he says. “I don’t do business, it’s not a business meeting ever. Is he honest with me?” Kissinger shrugs. “We usually talk about strategic and historical problems.”
Syria, Ukraine? He nods.
“The assertion that Nato is obsolete, I find the moral implications of that not acceptable
But the big question will be China. Mr Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, compared China’s island-building in the South China Sea to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, in confirmation hearings, and said that the Trump administration would signal to the Chinese that “your access to those islands is not going to be allowed”. It sounded like a blockade: Chinese newspapers warned of war.
“I don’t understand that Tillerson statement,” he says. “I hope he clarifies.” He is also leery of Mr Trump’s decision to take a call from the president of Taiwan. Before Nixon went to China, he says, there were “162 meetings on Taiwan”. The outcome of the Nixon visit, was that “America recognises the principle of one China” and the Chinese “permit time to evolve and to solve the issue ultimately . . . They can’t be altered without threatening the basis of our relationship.”
Dr Kissinger looks at his watch. I am not sure if we have had a conceptual interview. Nevertheless, he congratulates me on some “thoughtful” questions.
I ask him if he worries about his legacy: some will call him the great statesman, some a war criminal. “It’s beyond my control,” he says.
Has he considered retirement? “I am lucky in my life that my profession has been also my hobby,” he says. “I don’t know what I would rather do.”
Gardening? I say. Maybe a cruise?
He shakes his head. “I like reflecting about history,” he replies.
I thank him, profusely, for the tea.
He nods, gravely. “You see the lengths I went to to corrupt you?”
Heinz Alfred Kissinger
Born May 27, 1923, in Fürth, Germany, to a teacher, Louis Kissinger, and Paula Stern. The family fled Germany for the United States in 1938
Education George Washington High School, New York; City College of New York; Harvard, obtaining a BA in 1950 and a PhD in 1954
Career Served in the army from 1943 to 1956; received a Bronze Star in 1946. Worked at Harvard’s Department of Government and Center for International Affairs until 1969, and advised Kennedy and Johnson on foreign policy. Secretary of state to Nixon and Ford, September 1973 to January 1977. Awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1973 for his part in negotiating the 1973 ceasefire between the US and Vietnam
Family Married Nancy Maginnes in 1974. He has two children from a previous marriage