There has almost been too much to read since Henry Kissinger, the former national security adviser and secretary of state who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, died on Wednesday. But I think the best obituaries and retrospectives on Kissinger have emphasized his paramount role in the spread of human misery across the globe, in the name of realpolitik and what he determined were America’s “national interests.”
Let’s start with Kissinger’s full participation, as Nixon’s national security adviser, in the decision to authorize the secret carpet bombing of Cambodia, during which the United States dropped more than 500,000 tons of explosives on the country, killing as many as 150,000 civilians. These bombings, which destabilized the country, played a role in the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who went on to kill approximately 2 million people during his four-year stint in power.
Kissinger was also an architect of the U.S. effort to undermine the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. In the wake of the 1973 coup d’état that installed Gen. Augusto Pinochet at the head of a military dictatorship, Kissinger also pushed the United States to back the new regime, which killed, tortured or imprisoned tens of thousands of Chileans.
“I think we should understand our policy — that however unpleasant they act, this government is better for us than Allende was,” Kissinger said to his deputies, according to declassified transcripts, in the weeks after the coup. A few years later, in 1976, Kissinger would tell Pinochet, “My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist.”