Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen or Bluesky @mwpalen.bsky.social

A special Henry Kissinger edition of this week’s top picks in imperial and global history.

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A People’s Obituary of Henry Kissinger

Greg Grandin
Nation

Henry Kissinger, who was born in Weimar Germany in 1923, is dead. He made it to 100, and in the last years of his life, politicians, writers, and celebrities feted him as if he were the American Century incarnate. In a way, he was. Earlier, during more critical times, he had been accused of many bad things. Now that he’s gone, his critics will get a chance to rehearse the charges. Christopher Hitchens, who made the case that the former secretary of state should be tried as a war criminal, is himself dead. But there’s a long list of witnesses for the prosecution: reporters, historians, and lawyers eager to provide background on any of Kissinger’s actions in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, East Timor, Bangladesh, against the Kurds, in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Cyprus, among other places. 

There have been scores of books published on the man over the years, but it is still Seymour Hersh’s 1983 The Price of Power that future biographers will have to top. Hersh gave us the defining portrait of Kissinger as a preening paranoid, tacking between ruthlessness and sycophancy to advance his career. Small in his vanities and shabby in his motives, Kissinger, in Hersh’s hands, is nonetheless Shakespearean because the pettiness gets played out on a world stage, with epic consequences. [continue reading]

Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies

Spencer Ackerman
Rolling Stone

Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100.

Measuring purely by confirmed kills, the worst mass murderer ever executed by the United States was the white-supremacist terrorist Timothy McVeigh. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a massive bomb at the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The government killed McVeigh by lethal injection in June 2001. Whatever hesitation a state execution provokes, even over a man such as McVeigh — necessary questions about the legitimacy of killing even an unrepentant soldier of white supremacy — his death provided a measure of closure to the mother of one of his victims. “It’s a period at the end of a sentence,” said Kathleen Treanor, whose four-year-old McVeigh killed. 

McVeigh, who in his own psychotic way thought he was saving America, never remotely killed on the scale of Kissinger, the most revered American grand strategist of the second half of the 20th century. [continue reading]

From the War Room to Wall Street

Christy Thornton
Jacobin

The scourge of the international investor is uncertainty: the inability to predict the social, political or economic future in a country halfway around the world increases the risk of invest- ing there, and therefore raises the cost of borrowing for or insuring a given venture. How, then, does a firm hedge against an unknowable future in some far-flung corner of the globe? It turns to the expert, the consultant, the analyst, who provides the intelligence that will assure the board of directors, calm the skeptical lender, and still the shaking hand of the insurance broker.

In fact, risk consulting has itself become a multibillion dollar industry, metastasizing within a larger financial economy sick with securities and derivatives of increasing complexity. But even as the risk consulting industry has grown, there was, for decades, one expert par excellence to whom the titans of industry turned: Henry Kissinger. [continue reading]

Henry Kissinger’s central role in the U.S. carpet bombing of Cambodia

Rebecca Tan and Regine Cabato
Washington Post

Nowhere is the debate over the legacy of former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger more searing than in the countries that bore the brunt of his military policies, such as Cambodia. Historians say his decisions led to decades of violence that have continued to haunt Cambodian society.

For many in the country, Kissinger’s impact was not abstract but visceral and continues even after his death. Land mines planted during Cambodia’s three-decade-long civil war, which was driven in part by U.S. interference, are still exploding today. In neighboring Vietnam and Laos, officials are also still undergoing the painstaking process of identifying and removing unexploded ordnance from a war that Kissinger helped to wage five decades ago. [continue reading]

Latin America remembers Kissinger’s ‘profound moral wretchedness’

John Bartlett and Julian Borger
Guardian

Henry Kissinger’s death has brought out some bitter epitaphs from Latin America where the legacy of US intervention helped saddle the region with some of the most brutal military regimes of the 20th century. Nowhere has been the reaction been more damning than in Chile, where Kissinger was instrumental in the 1973 coup that led to the death of a democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende and the installation of a dictator, Gen Augusto Pinochet, and his military junta.

Kissinger was a man “whose historical brilliance was never able to conceal his profound moral wretchedness”, wrote Juan Gabriel Valdés, Chile’s ambassador in the US, on X, formerly Twitter. The coup was seen a major victory by Richard Nixon’s White House, but it marked the start of 17 years of autocracy in Chile. [continue reading]