"Prospective imperialists can turn to his authorized biographer Niall Ferguson for answers. Harvard’s specialist in restoring the devil’s reputation — having done so previously for the House of Rothschild and the British and American empires — argues that if we weigh the good (the United States winning the Cold War) against the bad (the “loss of life in strategically marginal countries”), Kissinger comes out a hero.
Fortunately, those of us unwilling to perform that calculus have Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. The book avoids the trap of simply enumerating Kissinger’s crimes and actually takes its subject’s worldview seriously.
Since the actual trial of Kissinger will never happen and the intellectual trial has already taken place, Grandin follows a different path: he traces how Kissinger’s ideas have come to dominate American foreign policy over the past fifty years. Using Kissinger as his protagonist, Grandin reveals the origins of now-prevailing practices like Obama’s drone bombing of supposed terrorists’ “safe havens” or Dick Cheney’s post-9/11 “1 percent doctrine.”
Rather than focus on how Kissinger plotted and manipulated to gain so much power, Grandin analyzes why he did it, revealing the ideology that underlies Kissinger’s crimes."
Kissinger's Crimes
See also
Kissinger's Crimes
See also
Comments