How should one apply morality to Henry Kissinger’s statesmanship? How does one balance his accomplishments against his misdeeds? I have wrestled with those questions since Kissinger was my professor, and later colleague, at Harvard University. In April 2012, I helped interview him before a large audience at Harvard and asked whether, in hindsight, he would have done anything differently during his time as secretary of state for U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. At first, he said no. On second thought, he said he wished he had been more active in the Middle East. But he made no mention of Cambodia, Chile, Pakistan, or Vietnam. A protester in the back of the hall shouted out: “war criminal!”

Kissinger was a complex thinker. As with other postwar European émigrés, such as the international relations theorist Hans Morgenthau, he criticized the naive idealism of pre–World War II U.S. foreign policy. But Kissinger was not an amoralist. “You can’t look only at power,” he told the audience at Harvard. “States always represent an idea of justice.” In his writings, he noted that world order rested on both a balance of power and a sense of legitimacy. As he once told Winston Lord, his former aide and the ambassador to China from 1985 to 1989, the qualities most needed in a statesman are “character and courage.” Character was needed “because the decisions that are really tough are 51-49,” so leaders must have “moral strength” to make them. Courage was required so leaders could “walk alone part of the way.” In the case of Vietnam, he believed he had a mandate to end the Vietnam War. But, he said, he did not have a mandate to end it “on terms that would undermine America’s ability to defend its allies and the cause of freedom.”

Evaluating ethics in international relations is difficult, and Kissinger’s legacy is particularly complex. Over his long tenure in government, he had many great successes, including with China and the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Kissinger also had major failures, including in how the Vietnam War ended. But on net, his legacy is positive. In a world haunted by the specter of nuclear war, his decisions made the international order more stable and safer.

VALUE JUDGMENT

One of the most important questions for foreign policy practitioners is how to judge morality in the realm of global politics. A true amoralist simply ducks it. A French diplomat, for instance, once told me that since morality made no sense in international relations, he decided everything solely on the interests of France. Yet the choice to reject all other interests was itself a profound moral decision.

There are essentially three different mental maps of world politics, each of which generates a different answer as to how states should behave. Realists accept some moral obligations but see them as severely limited by the harsh reality of anarchic politics. To these thinkers, prudence is the prime virtue. At the other end of the spectrum are cosmopolitans, who believe that states should treat all humans equally. They see borders as ethically arbitrary and believe that governments have major moral obligations to foreigners. In between are liberals. They believe that states have a serious responsibility to consider ethics in their decisions but that the world is divided into communities and states that have moral meaning. Although there is no government above these countries, liberals think the international system has an order to it. The world may be anarchic, but there are enough rudimentary practices and institutions—such as the balance of power between countries, norms, international law, and international organizations—to establish a framework by which states can make meaningful moral choices, at least in most cases.

Realism is the default position that most leaders use. Given that the world is one of sovereign states, this is smart: realism is, in fact, the best place to start. The problem is that many realists stop where they begin, rather than realizing that cosmopolitanism and liberalism are valuable in thinking about how to approach foreign policy. The question is often one of degree, and leaders should not arbitrarily reject human rights and institutions. Since there is never perfect security, they must first figure out what degree of security their states need before considering other values—such as welfare, identity, or the rights of foreigners—in how they make policy. Ultimately, they might factor morals into a wide range of decisions. Most foreign policy choices, after all, do not involve survival. Instead, they involve questions such as whether to sell weapons to authoritarian allies or whether to criticize the human rights behavior of another country. They involve debates about whether to take in refugees, how to trade, and what to do about issues such as climate change.

Hardcore realists ultimately treat all decisions in terms of national security, very narrowly defined. They are willing to make many morally suspect choices to improve the security of their country. In 1940, after France’s surrender to the Nazis, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill attacked French naval ships on the Algerian coast, killing thousands of now neutral sailors, to prevent the fleet from falling into German hands. In 1945, President Harry Truman used the atomic bomb against Japan, killing more than 100,000 civilians. But by ignoring hard tradeoffs, realist leaders are simply ducking hard moral issues. “Security comes first” and “justice presupposes order,” but leaders have an obligation to assess how closely a situation fits a Hobbesian or Lockean mental map, or whether they could follow other important values without truly jeopardizing their country’s security.

At the same time, leaders cannot always follow simple moral rules. They may need to make amoral choices to prevent even great catastrophes; there are no human rights, for example, among those incinerated in a nuclear war. As Arnold Wolfers, a prominent European-American realist, once said, the most one can hope for in judging the international ethics of leaders is that they make “the best moral choices that circumstances permit.”

This is true, but such a broad rule of prudence can easily be abused when convenient. Leaders could claim they had to commit a horrendous act to protect their country when, in fact, the circumstances afforded them much greater leeway. Instead of simply taking policymakers at their word, analysts should judge them in terms of their ends, means, and consequences. To do so, experts can draw from the wisdom of all three mental maps: realism, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism, in that order.

Ultimately, as analysts look at ends, they should not expect that leaders will pursue justice at the international level in ways that resemble what they might pursue in their domestic societies. Even the renowned liberal philosopher John Rawls believed that the conditions for his theory of justice applied only to domestic society. At the same time, Rawls argued that there were duties beyond borders for a liberal society and that the list should include mutual aid and respect for institutions that ensure basic human rights. He also wrote that people in a diverse world deserved to determine their own affairs as much as possible. Analysts should therefore ask whether a leader’s goals include a vision that expresses widely attractive values at home and abroad. But they should also ask if a leader’s goals prudently balance attractive values against the assessed risks. In other words, analysts should evaluate if there is a reasonable prospect the leader’s vision can succeed.

When it comes to evaluating ethical means, experts can judge leaders by the long-standing tradition of “just war” criteria, which holds that a state’s use of force must be proportional and discriminate. They can factor in Rawls’s liberal concern for carrying out minimal degrees of intervention in order to respect the rights and institutions of others. As for evaluating consequences, people can ask whether leaders succeeded in promoting their country’s long-term national interests; whether they respected cosmopolitan values when possible by avoiding extreme insularity and unnecessary damage to foreigners; and whether they educated their followers by promoting truth and trust that broadened moral discourse.

These criteria are modest and derived from the insights of realism, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism. But they provide some basic guidance that goes beyond a simple generality about prudence. I call this approach “liberal realism.” It begins with realism, but it does not end there.

LOOKING AT THE LEDGER

How does Kissinger measure up on these criteria? He certainly had great successes: the opening of China, establishing détente with the Soviet Union, and managing crises in the Middle East, all of which made the world safer. On China, for instance, Kissinger and Nixon had the vision and temerity to guide world politics away from Cold War bipolarity and reintegrate Beijing into the international system. They had to ignore the ugly nature of Mao Zedong’s totalitarian regime.

Similarly, in managing détente and arms control with Moscow, Kissinger had to accept the legitimacy of another totalitarian regime and go slower than many Americans wanted on pushing the Kremlin to allow Jewish emigration. Nonetheless, his position helped lower the risk of nuclear war and create the conditions in which the Soviet Union itself gradually eroded. Here, again, the moral gains far outweighed the costs. And although he took risks by raising the alert level of U.S. nuclear forces to DEFCON 3 during the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, Kissinger’s judgment turned out to be right. Ultimately, he managed to reduce tensions in the region despite the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon to resign.

But there is another side to the ledger. Kissinger’s failures of moral statesmanship include bombing Cambodia from 1969 to 1970, doing nothing to stop Pakistan’s brutality in the Indian-Pakistani war of 1971, and supporting a coup d’état in Chile in 1973. Consider, first, Chile. The U.S. government did not instigate the coup that overthrew the country’s democratically elected president and installed a military dictator, but Kissinger made it clear that Washington was not opposed. His defenders argued that Washington had no choice but to back a junta, given that the preceding regime was leftist and might fall into the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. But having a right-wing government in Chile was not really vital to American global credibility in a bipolar world, and the leftist government was not nearly enough of a security threat to justify abetting its overthrow. Kissinger, after all, once likened Chile to a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica.

In the war of secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, Kissinger and Nixon were criticized for not condemning Pakistani President Yahya Khan for his repression and bloodshed in Bangladesh, which resulted in the deaths of at least 300,000 Bengalis and sent a flood of refugees into India. Kissinger argued that his silence was needed to secure Yahya’s help in establishing ties with China. But he has admitted that Nixon’s personal dislike of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, which Kissinger abetted, was also a factor.

The bombing of Cambodia in 1970 was supposed to destroy Viet Cong infiltration routes, but ultimately, the attacks did not shorten or end the war. What they did do is help the genocidal Khmer Rouge take power in Cambodia, resulting in the deaths of over 1.5 million people. For a man who extolled the importance of a long-term vision of protecting freedom, these were three failures.

THE MEANING OF VIETNAM

Then there is the Vietnam War. Kissinger described his policies during the conflict as a would-be success, decisions that could have saved South Vietnam as a free society were it not for Watergate and Congress’s decision to withdraw support for U.S. involvement. But this is a self-serving account of a complex history. Kissinger and Nixon originally hoped to link arms control issues to Vietnam, in an effort to get the Soviets to pressure Hanoi to stop attacking the South. But when these hopes proved illusory, they settled for a negotiated solution that would produce what Kissinger called a “decent interval” between U.S. withdrawal and the collapse of the government in Saigon. The United States and the North Vietnamese ultimately signed a peace deal in Paris in January 1973, which allowed the North to leave its army inside the South. When Kissinger was asked, privately, how long he thought the South Vietnamese government could survive, he responded, “If they’re lucky, they can hold out for a year and a half.” Ultimately, he was not far off. (The South survived for just over two.)

Nixon and Kissinger did end the Vietnam War, but their efforts came at a high moral cost. Just over 21,000 Americans died during their three years of stewardship, compared with 36,756 under Johnson and 108 under Kennedy. The toll in Indochina was far greater: millions of Vietnamese and Cambodian were killed under their tenure. Kissinger and Nixon kept fighting to preserve Washington’s credibility—an important attribute in international affairs, but it is far from clear that creating a modest “decent interval” was worth such a devastating toll.

Moral choices are sometimes the lesser of evils. If Kissinger and Nixon had followed the advice of U.S. senators like William Fulbright and George Aiken and withdrawn early on, accepting that Saigon would eventually be defeated, there would have been some damage to American global power, but the country’s credibility suffered anyway, after Saigon fell in 1975. Accepting defeat and declaring a withdrawal over the course of 1969 would have been a courageous but politically costly move. Kissinger and Nixon showed themselves capable of such moves when it came to China; in Vietnam, however, they did not. Instead, their choices did not alter the ultimate outcome, and it proved costly in lives as well as credibility.

Kissinger sometimes failed to live up to his moral virtues of character and courage. Moreover, some of his means were questionable. International relations are a difficult milieu for ethics, and foreign policy is a world of compromises among values. But in terms of the consequences, the world is a better place because of his statesmanship, and his successes outweighed his failures.F