The nihilism of Henry Kissinger

The rotten core of postwar American ideology

As everyone knows by now, Henry Kissinger has (finally) died. He was 100 years old. If you follow politics (especially online political culture war stuff), you probably know that the consensus on him is that he was a war criminal, evil, etc. That’s very true. I don’t need to go into that here. One interesting thing about Kissinger is that he is the darling of liberals like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, etc., and he is known as one of the supreme violators of human rights in the second half of the 20th century. But he is revered by the same people, like Clinton and Obama, who endlessly talk about their love of human rights. So in that way he is a contradictory figure, and one whose contradictoriness reveals much about the fakeness of the ruling class.

But more interesting to me is how the elite worship of Kissinger takes the form of regarding him as this like intellectual giant. This tweet from French president Macron says it all: “Henry Kissinger was a giant of history. His century of ideas and diplomacy had a long-standing influence on his time and on our world. France addresses its condolences to the American people.”

Something about the phrase “his century of ideas” jumped out at me. What were Kissinger’s “ideas”? He is known as this intellectual force, but can anyone name an actual idea of his? His only “idea” was just pushing brute power as far as it could go. There were no ideas. The establishment loved Kissinger because he gave a fake air of intellectualism to their brutish quest for power by any means necessary—a very valuable function for power.

But his function went deeper than that, and I want to talk about that a little bit. This article from 2015 sprang to my mind in thinking about him today. I remember this discussion of the core of Kissinger’s “philosophy” (insofar as he had one). I remember it all these years later because of how nihilistic it was. The author Greg Grandin describes Kissinger as promoting something called “imperial existentialism.”

Here’s the description of what that is: “Action creates our perception of reality; the past has no meaning other than what we in the present assign to it; the future is undetermined…The purpose of American power, then, is to create an awareness of American purpose. We can’t defend our interests until we know what our interests are, and we can’t know what our interests are until we defend them.”

This has stuck with me for several years now, because it so clearly expresses what American foreign policy—and America itself—is all about. It’s this kind of optimistic spin on nihilism—that’s Kissinger’s ideology, and it’s very much the postwar American ideology. Creating purpose out of nothing—the belief that starting from nothingness in fact enables you to create the purpose, to create whatever you want, to do anything. So it’s a kind of positive spin on nihilism—there are no values, no goals—and that lets you do anything.

But this is rotten and wrong—nihilism can’t be positive or creative. If you have nothing as a starting point, you will only ever get to nothing. You can’t get something from nothing—nothing only leads to nothing. And you can’t get somewhere from nowhere—nowhere only leads nowhere.

And this is what Kissinger’s philosophy has gotten America. He shaped postwar American ideology more than almost anyone else, and look where we are. Could things be any worse? Could nothingness be more pervasive? Could we be headed nowhere more than we are now? The optimistic nihilism of Kissinger, which became the default ideology of America for decades, has delivered on the nothingness of that equation…and not at all on the optimistic part. Optimistic nihilism is just nihilism—anything that partakes of nothingness becomes nothingness entirely. Anything multiplied by zero becomes zero.