The Economic Times
December 01, 2023
Heinz Alfred, a.k.a. Henry Kissinger, a practitioner of unmitigated realpolitik who unapologetically disregarded the issue of morality in the chess game of power, had once pushed the US' singularly anti-India policy. But by the time he died on Thursday at the age of 100, his views toward India had changed.
I gained this insight during my interactions with him over the decades. When I last met him at his 52nd Street art deco apartment in New York in 2018, he was more optimistic about the future of India-US relations. 'Even in periods that there was tension, in the end, India will find a parallel course because we have no conflicting interests,' he had said.
Considering the comments came from a scholar who sculpted policies to serve only US interests while ignoring many universal values - including terming limited nuclear war as an 'effective strategy' - it was a rare glimpse into how that sharp mind saw geopolitical interests realigning over the last 50 years.
Serving as national security adviser to US President Richard Nixon, and then also as his secretary of state, Kissinger had taken strong stands against India in the 1970s. The Nixon-Kissinger duo dispatched a task force led by the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal to arm-twist India to give 'emphasis' to US 'warnings against an Indian attack on West Pakistan'. It further got its allies Saudi Arabia, Libya, Jordan and Iran under the shah to loan Pakistan military aircraft and supplies.
A true Machiavellian, he attempted to shift the blame on his president for giving him, in his words, 'unshirted hell every half-hour' for not 'carrying out his wishes' in the US' support of Pakistan. Then, he tried to mend fences by visiting India in October 1974 as President Gerald Ford's NSA, with some persuasion from Ratan Tata, with whom he would later serve in an advisory capacity in AIG (American International Group). During the visit, Kissinger said that '[the 1971] crisis is now behind us', and that India and the US had 'surmounted past strains and moved with promise'.
As a strong advocate of military power, he used it unhesitatingly and employed covert measures to further US interests in the Cold War, flouting international law with abominable disdain. To find an 'honourable' way out of the Vietnam quagmire, he advocated carpet bombing of Hanoi while holding peace talks with it. The bombings were extended to Cambodia, a neutral nation, alleging that it was being used as a conduit for arms by the Viet Cong, resulting in 50,000 civilian deaths.
Kissinger played a crucial role in the coup in Chile in 1973 that brought down Salvador Allende, the world's first freely elected communist leader of a nation. Revealing his callous disregard for the international law and values of democracy, he said, 'I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.'
As a strong balance-of-power votary, his masterstroke was to divide the two communist giants, the Soviet Union and China. He extended an olive branch to China no sooner than Moscow had signalled Washington of the growing need to contain Beijing. It was his realism-guided calculus at play.
Despite stepping down some 45 years ago, world leaders courted him and sought his counsel. During his last visit to China, a country he had visited some 100 times, in July this year, Xi Jinping denied an audience to US treasury secretary Janet Yellen and other top-level US officials while he met Kissinger during a warm tete-a-tete without aides.
Kissinger sustained his influence in the world, advising several US presidents and world leaders, aided by a life of many years more than any of his contemporaries on the world stage of international politics. In my last encounter, he had told me that conflict between India and China, 'compounded by modern technology, would have catastrophic consequences', and advised constructive engagement. In his death, the world has lost a diplomat who constantly reminded world leaders that the pursuit of power solely dictates the conduct of foreign policies, a homily that is best abandoned for the larger good of the world.
