Kissinger restored?
Christopher Hitchens
Washington It is arguably true to say that of all living American politicians, Dr Henry Kissinger has s the most strongly developed sense of history. It is a rather warped and unusual sense, as his fanciful memoirs indicate and as his book on Metternich, A World Restored, confirms. But history is at least Present as a factor in the good doctor's calculations, which is more than can be said °I• the calculations of the President, or of Walter Mondale and John Glenn. This makes it all the more peculiar that his Corn- rnIssion on Central America should have e,onle up with a re-make of John Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. American politicians, Dr Henry Kissinger has s the most strongly developed sense of history. It is a rather warped and unusual sense, as his fanciful memoirs indicate and as his book on Metternich, A World Restored, confirms. But history is at least Present as a factor in the good doctor's calculations, which is more than can be said °I• the calculations of the President, or of Walter Mondale and John Glenn. This makes it all the more peculiar that his Corn- rnIssion on Central America should have e,onle up with a re-make of John Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. .Twenty years ago, the United States was still lurching from the shock of the Cuban revolution, and from the fear that it might Prove infectious or contagious. The Alliance for Progress was a blend of economic aid on one hand, and counter- revolutionary violence on the other. The Bay of Pigs invasion, and the setting up of the Green Beret special forces, was as much a Part of it as was the sending of grants and volunteers to the poverty-stricken southern c.,,°ne. The policy was, by and large, a 'allure. It failed to topple Castro, it did not succeed in any extensive economic amelio- ration. It left the Somozas and other despots in place (Sornoza having let the Invasion of Cuba take place from
Nicaraguan soil) and it created a huge revolution of expectations. Its greatest long-term result was probably the election of Salvador Allende as President of Chile in 1970, after a period of years in which the Christian Democrats had been moving to the left in order to pre-empt him.
We all know what Henry Kissinger thought of the election of Allende; and he is now to be heard saying that Kennedy's big- gest mistake was his agreement not to try invading Cuba again. This time round, says Kissinger, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua must have no such assurance or guarantee. Whether or not the recommen- dations of his commission about economic aid are accepted, the war against Nicaragua and the war in El Salvador will go on. The difference is that whereas in Nicaragua the Reagan Administration believes that its clients can and should 'bomb their way to the negotiating table', in El Salvador it sup- ports the government in resisting direct negotiations with the rebels. The embar- rassment of the latter policy is the indirect association it brings wills the so-called `death squads' of the Salvadoran armed forces. The latest attempt to dilute this embarrassment also came last week, when President Reagan's press spokesman Larry Speakes repeated an earlier Reaganism. The rebel forces, he said, were themselves responsible for a lot of 'death squad' activi-
ty. By killing themselVes and each other they hoped to attract international sym- pathy from the gullible media.
The commission did not oblige the Presi- dent by saying anything as fatuous as that. But it did, generally speaking, turn out the report which Reagan would have liked. Kissinger has the knack of pleasing presidents, and it is difficult to remember that only a few months ago the entire Republican Right was ranged against him as a man 'soft on communism' and willing to barter away American interests. His cleverness has been to take senior Democrats, like Robert Strauss, Lane Kirkland of the AFL-C10, and Henry Cisneros, the mayor of San Antonio, along with him.
The main reason for this bipartisan alliance is Kissinger's argument that action now will avoid the necessity of even more drastic action later. By 'drastic action' is understood the commitment of United States ground troops — the incident on the Honduran border last week was a well- timed reminder that so far casualties have been minimal. Within a few months, the Americans hope to have established a 'Free Nicaragua' enclave extending across that area of the frontier, and with any luck they can do it while acting only as support troops — on the model of the South Africans in Angola and the Israelis in south Lebanon.
The United States is, from the point of view of borders, the luckiest superpower in history. To have as neighbours the Atlantic, Canada, the Pacific and Mexico is greatly preferable to having, say, China and Ger- many if you are Russia, or Russia and Japan if you are China, It is gradually dawning on the public that the United States might have to have a southern fron- tier rather than a border. The region known for so long under the contemptuous title of 'backyard' is now taking a different shape. Kissinger has been fairly adroit in dramatis- ing this unfamiliar and queasy situation by exploiting the issue of immigration. He predicts that if the United States does not regain control over the nations to its south, it will be faced by a vast inflow of 'foot people'. This will mean either accepting a rapid hispanisation of the South-West, or treating the Mexican border as a serious security zone. This is a crudely effective tac- tic, though it overlooks the fact that, at the moment, the refugees are fleeing El Salvador rather than Nicaragua.
All these questions have had an airing in the past few days, but the cognoscenti prefer to steer the conversation around to quite a different topic. Does Henry Kiss- inger want to be Secretary of State again? George Shultz has been acting more toughly of late, as if he sensed that his low-key and doveish image was doing him no good. But he is also rumoured to want to get back to the boardroom. If so, and if Reagan gets a second term, he would have to consider Kissinger for the job. Unlike potential rivals, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Kissinger could not be lured by anything less, so that failure to employ him in this capacity would mean dispensing with him altogether. That would now be a much more difficult decision than it would have been a few months ago.
The fact that attention is being focused in this way is a measure of the failure rather than the success of the commission. Many senior policymakers have privately written off the Salvadoran armed forces as poten- tial allies, as have the last two American ambassadors to the country. Others, like the ex-hawk, McGeorge Bundy, believe that there is no alternative to coexistence with the Sandinistas, and point to the fact that Ronald Reagan of all people is now aban- doning Taiwan in favour of Peking. Nobody thinks that economic aid to the deserving poor nations of the region will touch the problem even if Congress votes for it. And the military option thus becomes more imminent than theoretical.
It would not be the first time that Henry Kissinger had benefited from the failure of his own recommendations. It was always at times of acute anxiety that he did best under Nixon, even when the responsibility was partly his. He seems to be immune even to silver bullets — his actions are judged by his reputation rather than his reputation by his actions. And his reputation, still, is that of a crisis manager. As he himself wrote in A World Restored: `So agile was Metternich's performance that it was forgotten that its basis was diplomatic skill and that it left the fundamental problems unsolved, that it was manipulation and not creation.'
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