"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 fore...
“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