Men. Im not sure, theres no question there has been a convergence at the end of the cold war and if you look like issues like was me or iraq itself but there were people on the left who had documentary challenges working on a regular isolationist, thats certainly true and that is what is an independent is other than perhaps someone who chooses casebycase. Guest writer somebody that recognizes that can be as simple party line on these National Security issues and somebody who doesnt want to be bound by a partyline on social and cultural issues. Interestingly i find kissinger as a young man was in rather the same position. He thought of himself as a small c. Conservative. He certainly didnt selfidentify as a liberal in the 1950s or harvard. But what being counters real american conservatism by goldwater supporters of 1964 Republican Convention he was appalled and he had an uneasy relationship with the rise of the Republican Party with the neoconservatives as well. Thats one of the interesting things that kissingers predicament may explain why he is a controversial figure. He had enemies on the left. Christopher hitchens, he really attacks him for that but he also has many enemies on the right. Whether detente with the soviet union was a. Host so the book is called the idealist with is a rather country and taken kissinger who is even the most timely description is described as the ultimate idealist. So your choice of the word idealists which are explained in the book is really not a wilsonian notion of idealism. Its more of a kantian notion of idealism. Can you explain for the audience at home what you mean idealist when it comes to kissinger and why are notion of course traditionally is wilsonianism but thats not the description you give. Guest its true that most people think of Henry Kissinger as the realist and then names they throw around our macular aid. Maybe its not surprising that people have fallen into that fat but id like to show in the book that he really wasnt a realist. There were realist who argued that the United States should follow its narrow national selfinterest but he wasnt one of them and those who were realist were often critical of him, not to prove there was something wrong with this machiavellian notion. When i started to read his writings which i began to think that many people had done i was really struck a something. They were in fact critical of realism. The book about the Congress Pretty critical. The things they say on bismarck the white revolution is critical of the maestro of 19th century reality so i started to think and then i delve deeper into kissingers intellectual development and three things are really striking. One, its an experience growing up in the 20s and 30s made them not surprisingly highly critical of the foreignpolicy appeasement of the dictators. In a very interesting essay they thought they were pursuing the kind of narrow selfinterest approach to Foreign Policy and disregard of the human rights abuses of the dictatorship. Number one, his own experience in the 1930s makes him suspicious of what he saw as the realist of pieces. Number two, he comes to harvard and to try to get rid of this rather push a undergraduate William Elliott professor government said if you go away and read Immanuel Kant expecting youll never see him and underestimating kissinger. Andy put it into his thesis. Particularly in the problem that on the one hand cant solve this freedom, free will and free choice but the experience of freedom is real but on the other hand cant argue there some kind of plan for the world, the humanity meaning leading ultimately to potential peace and kissinger senior thesis is whether theres a way of reconciling these to positions and he concludes there is some ultimately the experience of choice is a real one, and freedom as kissinger pointed his in the experience and intellectual sample experience. The third point which is perhaps the crucial one given the cold war concept in his early academic career was that kissinger was an idealist in the sense that he had a materialist view of history like marxism and leninism but theory. The soviet bloc and he also rejected capitalist purists midtier which said if our growth rate is higher than their growth rate than we will win the cold war. So i think on those three kissinger emerges as an idealist. A realty in the harvard of the 1950s i think its what made his contribution fundamentally distinct and made them stand out that you could solve the cold war with systems or something of that sort. Although you have many quotes in the book that make him sound as if he is an idealist and certainly someone who is horrified by the appeaser, someone that believes the u. S. And is more likely to win on ideals than a materialist issues. At the same time, his writing and other browder freezer filled with a pretty brutal rail quality quotes as well as i noticed in Walter Isaacsons biography kissinger is pushing that give me 70s pressing pakistan to be less repressive asking why is it her business to govern . He defends cutting off aid to the kurds in iraqs thing covert action should not be confused as missionary work. This is a sort of that doesnt sound to me like an idealist, someone who doesnt feel that the u. S. Has to be defending human rights are pressing allies because of their repressive nature. There are two answers to that. One is we are really talking about volume two which i havent written yet and theres no telling what the subtitle will be. Its not the idealist, lets put it that way and im cautious about talking that since im frankly still doing research and i wont make up my time might until ive gone through a lot of documents so its early days in the 1970s for me. The most i can risk saying secondly in response is that we cant really understand what kissinger and for that matter nixon and the president he served were trying to achieve if you just look at isolated cases and throw up your hands and say how shocking and callous because these isolated countries, these particular instances that you mention have to be seen as part of the ground strategy. Most books that are highly critical of kissinger tend to focus on a particular issue and disregard the strategic framework. The strategic framework as kissinger says in his early writings, something that imposes a hierarchy if your primary goal is to avoid world war iii and seek some kind of accommodation to detente with the soviet union then there may be other things on the chessboard that you have to sacrifice to that end. If your second goal is to use an opening to china to put pressure on the soviets, then for the sake of that you may have to make compromises with the pakistani government. If you have no other concerned but any judgment you might make about Foreign Policy has to be done not on a casebycase basis but in the strategic framework. In his earlier writings of kissinger says it is the nature of statesmanship that you have to make choices and you are free to make these choices but they are really choices between evils and challenges to decide whats the better of the two evils is. Kissinger says right from the very earliest writing that is the problem. That is the challenge in the states that there are sometimes no good options. There are just evils that you have to choose between. All of that is persuasive but i dont put that into the real politic camp of seeking stability for the sake of peace. We are not in i leisha but having to look the other way on repression or his decision, his joint decision for the bombing of cambodia and you do engage some of us this in the book, his role in chile. He himself has suggested while he was engineered the coup that he supported the idea that it didnt want to end there. He said some transcendent things that sound real politic to me and it is the reason there is no controversy itself. One of the things they do in volume one which ended january 1969 is to imply that there is a question. The question is does he remain in idealist . Does he adhere to the principles that he set out and a critic of u. S. Foreignpolicy or give the experience of government changing into realist. That question i have yet to answer. Its very central to volume two of this biography. This biography, the first volume covers the first half of his life and in that period although he was involved in government and an adviser to Kennedy Mosley writes books and articles and i think its fascinating to study him as an intellectual. Imagine if you like he was hit by a bus in january of 1969. This book would have been impossible. It seems to me the intellectual contribution is quite a substantial one. At a time when International Relations became more and more divorced and have become even more so since then. Kissinger argued you have to have a historical framework. History is what characters did individuals that if you dont know the history you wont understand. I think that was a very important insight that still resonate today or think about the problem of conjecture which i thinks get to the heart of some of questions youre racing. Kissinger says not choosing between two evils but when you make the choice you dont really know how things are going to turn now. He may take a difficult preemptive action and avert disaster. But if you are successful can you be grateful . Know because it didnt happen and foreignpolicy does this great asymmetry that the Early Edition may get you low payouts because in preempting disaster you basically prevented from happening and therefore prevent people from suffering. You may get lucky and people will think you are wise and if you are not lucky and things turned out badly you can always say well i did my best. The temptation as we see these days is to keep the can down the road. When you assess any of the decisions taken after 1968 in a position to advise the decisionmaker you have to ask yourself how does this fit into the grand strategy but also the question at the time the decision was made was this the right decision . At the time could you say with certainty or with confidence, not with certainty, this is the lesser evil of any two courses of action. Thats the goal i set for myself in the second volume. Host so is she said the book begins with this childhood in germany. He notes several times the impact on this world view of that childhood and that he lost many friends and many members of his family in the holocaust, and you quote in a 2007 interview with him when he says my First Experience was a member of a persecuted jewish minority. Many members of my family and 70 of the people i went to school is with died in concentration camps of thats not something i can forget. I do not agree with the view that analyzes everything in terms of my alleged jewish origin. Ive i have not thought of myself in those terms. I am a Jewish American and a lot of my attitudes towards my horror in the world, repression, extremism as well as my notion of american responsibility to try to fix things comes i believe. Patch. So whats going on there and i would say its origin is a disturbing one. Would what do you think is happening with him . Guest i have tried in the book to tell the story is accurately as i can. Its a remarkable one although not a unique one. Nazism was violent and as he grew up he became a teenager of the nazi regime came to power and his rights were whittled away just as his parents were and tell his parents had to flee. When he came back six years after leaving in a u. S. Army uniform he witnessed the liberation of the concentration camp in ireland and then he discovered after the war was over that nearly all those family members who had left germany had died including his grandmother. So clearly these were searing experiences and i think the reason he subsequently sought to downplay them was the tendency of maybe earlier rightists who describe so much importance to those events that his Subsequent Development was the kind of response to trauma. He is very clear and the letters that he writes home to his parents in the late 1940s and the things that he writes about the works. , that he is not traumatized, is something that he explicitly says. I think we need to understand the war experience was not quite as we imagine it those of us who were too young to experience this. For example i think its very striking that he writes this short essay really a thing for some use to record the experience after seeing the liberation of the concentration camp and its addressed to one of the polish inmate. Its a remarkable document which i reproduce in full because it captures how searing the witnessing of the holocaust to be. At the same time the war changed him and a very important way. It had destroyed his religious faith and he and his younger brother have to confront particularly the orthodox father with this change. Kissinger writes very openly i am different. This has changed me. This exposure not just to the holocaust but to the war has made me fundamentally different. I know longer can really believe in what you brought me up to believe so that moment is a profoundly important one. I think it explains some of the ambivalence which he subsequently discussed, his jewishness and kissinger is a man who identifies as jewish but he is not. He is not an observant. Thats by no means an unusual predicament that what i try to do is to show how he arrives at that position after the orthodox upbringing that have been germany an extraordinary experience that he had during the war. Host being a believer is different from being orthodox for any religion. Guest absolutely. Hosts are you suggesting that he is no longer believing that god existed because of experience in germany . Guest thats not something thats entirely specific to anything he has said. Cisco does that go to his core idealism as well . Guest he is not writing i am reformed. That is definitely not the message and he did not subsequently so in that sense it was at complete loss but not something that led him to denying his jewishness. Its not as if he was looking to convert. On the contrary. He is not a believer. Its an important consequence of the war experience and its unusual that is so welldocumented that he wrote very frankly to his parents what this meant for the rest of his life. Host believer in idealism, dont those two things relate to each other in a way . Guest what is clear is if you are steeped in philosophy is kissinger was, you dont necessarily subscribe to a traditional deity although you may acknowledge the possibility of a supreme being and the ultimate divine or providential purpose. But kissinger is much more adjusted in the experience of freedom of choice, individual choice of freedom and a possible than allknowing deity that plays a role in the subsequent thought. Host so2 move that notion of one to another one of the things that i hadnt realized is that he really made his name and became something of a rock of a rock star of a rock star at a recently young age when writing about Nuclear Weapons. And being a strong advocate of this concept of limited war, the limited use of Nuclear Weapons. You go out of your way to say that he was not the model for dr. Strangelove but there is something strange about the idea that you could have the limited use of Nuclear Weapons without its spiraling out of control. What drove him to think that and why do you think it made him so popular at that point . It seems now people think he was pretty crazed. Guest first of all you cant imagine an encounter in harvard yard with his friend Arthur Schlessinger junior. Essentially he eisenhowers concept was that you had to threaten massive retaliation to deter the soviets from expansion. And he was very binary. You either blow up the world are you except the world is tolerable. The debate was whether they could be in the middle position or it had shrunk to this all or nothing strategy which implied brinksmanship which risked armageddon every time he wants me to soviet move around the world. On the basis run the conversation harvard yard the thoughts on this question they impress other people and he has gradually drawn away from the study of diplomacy which he wrote his ph. D. About and debate about nick lear strategy. He begins discussions at the council of Foreign Relations with far more experience strategic thinkers. He didnt think about the unthinkable question could you use Nuclear Weapons in a limited way and avoid fullscale armageddon . Cam me put it like that . It does down sound like dr. Strangelove legitimizing the use of the most destructive weapon that had ever been devised. Thats how he tries to make the case of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy that you can have limited Tactical Nuclear exchanges that wont escalate to fullblown armageddon. Two interesting things. One, he later reversed that position and came to the conclusion that he couldnt be sure it wouldnt escalate so he did a kind of intellectual flipflop or do you turn on that key question. That was after the book it made him famous book arrives at the critical moment in history. Sputnik has just been launched. Its 1957. Americans are thinking that the soviets have not only caught up with them but this book dynamic you think who argues there is a way of dealing with this problem that would not load the world to smithereens. The key point that is often overlooked is although kissinger himself pulled back from the idea of a nuclearfree war, the u. S. Military did not an order to soviet military or for the batman or did any of the native countries because from that point on, strategy in the cold war assumed the possibility of a limited nuclear war. He became the basis for natos plans to descend on western europe from soviet invasion. This wealth was tactical battlefield Nuclear Weapons were for. Thats why the superpowers didnt just have intercontinental ballistic missiles. The key point that i try to make in the book is that although kissinger himself was ambivalent about intellectual breakthrough, the idea of a nuclear war he didnt practice it and it became doctrine for the militarys on both sides in the cold war. Just because it didnt happen, just because there never was a limited nuclear war doesnt mean that it was science fiction. In fact to this day it is a real possibility and it has resurfa