Behind closed doors, the late Henry Kissinger left no doubt about how little he valued human rights. Exhibit A is the conversation he had with his boss, President Richard Nixon, on March 1, 1973, which was caught, like so much else, on Nixon’s Oval Office recording device. The two have just said goodbye to Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, and they are casually discussing a matter that came up during her White House visit: whether the administration should do anything to help Soviet Jews, a population persecuted in their country but also denied the possibility of leaving it. “The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,” Secretary of State Kissinger asserts. “And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” Maybe.
Coming from a Jewish man who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and found refuge in the United States, this is some ice-cold stuff. But it is also classic Kissinger, the purest distillation of the chessboard logic of his realpolitik diplomatic philosophy: When it comes to dealing with other countries, pragmatism must prevail; there is no room for morality, for America’s “missionary vigor,” as he scornfully called it in his book Diplomacy.
Perhaps no other American statesman has ever disdained the role of idealism in foreign policy—the meddling of human-rights activists and democracy crusaders—quite like Kissinger. Until now, that is. In just the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term, not only has the president sidestepped those annoying do-gooders Kissinger had to contend with, but he has pretty definitively blown them away with a few robust huffs and puffs. And the change, which Kissinger could have only dreamed about, is bewildering to consider.
By defunding the U.S. Agency for International Development and rooting out offices dealing with human rights and democracy at the State Department, Trump decimated, almost overnight, a whole government sector focused on defending fundamental (and, it once seemed, deeply American) principles. Freedom House, established in 1941, one of the oldest human-rights organizations in the world, will now end 80 percent of its programming. Government-funded groups such as the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, which monitor elections overseas and support anti-corruption efforts, have faced the chain saws of DOGE—both have had to furlough two-thirds of their staff and are closing offices all over the world. A third group, the National Endowment for Democracy, is in a fight for its life to get its funding restored by an act of Congress.
Then there was the executive order killing the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia, and broadcasts into countries including Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea. Their radio waves were transmitted to 420 million people in more than 100 countries each week. No more. The Trump administration even did away with the Wilson Center, a foreign-policy think tank whose thinking may have been too closely associated with its namesake, Woodrow Wilson, a president known for championing “moral diplomacy.”
Would Kissinger be pleased?
He certainly had negative feelings about human rights, but that was because they were a bothersome obstacle to an overriding goal: world stability and the avoidance of nuclear war. To give his own ethical vision its due, he thought that, by maintaining a balance of power among major states based on intersecting webs of self-interest, he might keep at bay the forces of geopolitical chaos and unpredictability. If a few Soviet Jews had to go to the gas chambers as collateral damage, that was, he seemed to be saying, a price worth paying for the greater good of avoiding a showdown with the Soviet Union that could blow up the world.
Though this represented transactionalism toward a greater purpose—morally corrupting though it may have been—what we are seeing now is transactionalism all the way down. Trump seems to want to sweep aside moral concerns not because they preclude the new world order he envisions, but because he believes they are inherently worthless—or, as his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, put it, the fruits of a “radical political ideology.” This is not to say that past presidents were necessarily more idealistic at their core (though Jimmy Carter probably was). They found ways to use human rights and democracy promotion as rhetorical weapons for achieving their own global aims—such as Ronald Reagan’s attack on communism as a godless and immoral system, and George W. Bush’s framing of the Iraq War as part of a grand strategy to bring democracy to the Middle East. Trump has no use for these ideas. The world is dog-eat-dog, and the United States needs to assert itself as the biggest dog. End of story.
I asked Jeremi Suri, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Henry Kissinger and the American Century, to imagine these past 100 days from Kissinger’s perspective. “He would have been happy to see an emphasis on power over ideals,” Suri said. “He long criticized the United States for having this Wilsonian obsession and placing the soft elements, the idealistic elements, ahead of the power elements.” And Kissinger would have appreciated Trump’s emphasis on powerful nations and contempt for international bodies, such as the European Union and the United Nations, which the statesman considered “a nuisance at best,” Suri said.
Kissinger had his own Trumpy moments of impetuous bullying, in which he exercised American power without much thought to its consequences. The covert intervention in Chile is perhaps the best example. When the socialist Salvador Allende won the country’s election in 1970, Kissinger feared the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere, but rather than creating a counterbalance, he decided to try to immediately stomp out the threat. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” he reportedly said. (It’s not so hard to imagine Trump saying a similar thing after Canada’s recent parliamentary election, in which the winning Liberal party won roughly 44 percent of the vote.)
The military coup that Kissinger helped foment in Chile, which ushered in the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet, only further destabilized the region (and undermined his larger goal of global stability). Where his approach was more effective—more enduring and less Trumpy—was in bringing about “systemic shifts” in world power, as Suri put it: détente with the Soviet Union (those Jews be damned); the diplomatic opening to China (tens of millions of Mao’s victims be damned). Morality was not a factor here either, but at least these moves were based on a strategy of arriving at more security and calm. Whether this was a worthy trade-off is the question that Kissinger’s legacy leaves us with.
What he would never have anticipated is a world in which the “missionary” strain in American foreign policy would cease to be a factor at all. The idealists were foils for Kissinger, even when they called him a “war criminal,” as Christopher Hitchens did. But Kissinger knew they existed as a countervailing force, one as old as the country itself. What does it mean that this might no longer be the case, that an even colder, crueler, more self-interested version of realpolitik is upon us?
An NPR story on the new changes at the State Department contained a particularly chilling detail: According to a memo, employees were asked to “streamline” the annual human-rights reports issued by the department, so that they might align with “recently issued Executive Orders.” In practice, the memo explained, the reports should be scrubbed of references such as those to prison abuses, government corruption, and locking up dissidents without due process. They should now contain only the minimum that was legally mandated by Congress. In the report on El Salvador, whose penal system has become a dumping ground for migrants deported from the United States, there will be no details on the conditions in those prisons. Regarding Hungary, where Trump has a strongman ally in Viktor Orbán, the section titled “Corruption in Government” is to be struck, the memo shows.
Even when America neglected its ideals, or just paid lip service to them, or had leaders like Kissinger who actively circumvented them, the country still presented itself as a record keeper of last resort when it came to abuses carried out by the forces of despotism. If you were a dissident or a persecuted minority, there was solace in knowing that, somewhere in the government of the most powerful country in the world, someone was working on a report that might bear witness to widespread discrimination or killing. America offered the chance to at least be heard—a hotline with some assurance of a sympathetic ear at the other end. But Trump is now going further than Kissinger himself might have wanted. He is disconnecting that line. There is no longer anyone left to pick up the phone.
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