Kissinger, in the obituaries to come, will be called a “realist.” That would be accurate, if realism is defined as holding a pessimistic view of human nature and a belief that power is needed to impose order on anarchic social relations.
But if realism is taken as a view of the world that the “truth” of facts can be arrived at from observing those facts, then Kissinger was clearly not a realist. Rather, Kissinger often declared himself in favor of what today the right denounces as radical relativism: There is no such thing as absolute truth, he argued, no truth at all other than what could be deduced from one’s own solitary perspective.“Meaning represents the emanation of a metaphysical context,” he wrote; “every man in a certain sense creates his picture of the world.” Truth, Kissinger said, isn’t found in facts but in the questions we ask of those facts. History’s meaning is “inherent in the nature of our query.”
This kind of subjectivism was in the postwar air, and Kissinger in his early writings sounded not unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, whose influential lecture on existentialism was published in English in 1947 (and cited by Kissinger in The Meaning of History). When Kissinger insisted that individuals have the “choice” to act with “responsibility” toward others he sounds absolutely Sartrean, echoing the radical French philosopher’s belief that, since morality isn’t something that is imposed from without but comes from within, each individual “is responsible for the world.” Kissinger, though, took a very different path than Sartre and other dissenting intellectuals, and this is what made his existentialism exceptional: He used it not to protest war but to justify waging it.
Kissinger wasn’t alone among postwar policy intellectuals in invoking the “tragedy” of human existence and the belief that the best one can hope for is to establish a world of order and rules. George Kennan, a conservative, and Arthur Schlesinger, a liberal, both thought human nature’s “dark and tangled aspects” (in Schlesinger’s words) justified a strong military. The world needed policing. But both men (and many others who shared their tragic sensibility like Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau) eventually became critical, some extremely so, of American power. By 1957, Kennan was arguing for “disengagement” from the Cold War, and by 1982, he was describing the Reagan administration as “ignorant, unintelligent, complacent and arrogant.” The Vietnam War provoked Schlesinger to advocate stronger legislative power to rein in what in 1973 he would call the “imperial presidency.” Not Kissinger.