Accessing the full review requires a subscription – an institutional subscription, for example. Apart from what is available, I have added the following: A factor that Indyk omits is the disdain Kissinger repeatedly demonstrated for Arab leaders (“pathetic,” “wily,” “uncouth,” “quixotic,” and “machismo-driven,” which is rich coming from him) and peoples (“mad,” their “ways” a mystery, above all in the Persian Gulf, home to “eight million savages”). Indyk dismisses it as mere “frat-boy talk.” Decades ago, journalist Seymour Hersh instead insisted that the racism of Kissinger and his two closest and most hard-core anti-communist sidekicks, Haig and Helmut Sonnenfeldt, was as entrenched as Nixon’s. This was true whether they were assessing the intelligence of the African Americans then rising through the ranks of the State Department (“Do you think he’ll understand the cables?”) or hosting Organization of African Unity officials (“I wonder what the dining room is going to smell like”). T...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51