The Importance of Kissinger in the Cold War

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Unlike most people in the immediate post-1945 period, Kissinger did not believe that money made the world go round. He rejected Marxism Leninism and capitalist theories of economic superiority. And he comes to a very important conclusion about totalitarianism: we would reject it even if it had an economically superior system. So I think that's the idealism I'm referring to... The proof really is that he clashed with the real realists, people like Hans Morgenthau,. over a whole range of issues of foreign policy in the 1960s.

No American statesman has been as revered and as reviled as Henry Kissinger. To the late Christopher Hitchens he was a war criminal who should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. To his admirers he is the greatest strategic thinker America has ever produced, the ‘indispensable man’, whose advice has been sought by every president from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush. Internationally renowned Harvard historian Niall Ferguson came to the Intelligence Squared stage to discuss his new appraisal of Kissinger. In his view, far from being the amoral arch-realist portrayed by his enemies, Kissinger owed a profound debt to philosophical idealism. In this exclusive London appearance, Ferguson was joined by the distinguished historian Andrew Roberts, who brought his expertise from writing about great statesmen of the past – from Napoleon to Churchill – to the examination of this controversial figure. How did Kissinger’s worldview develop over the course of his early years, as a Jew in Hitler’s Germany, a...

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