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> I wouldn't trust any of his advice on geopolitics Numerous choices of his as Secretary of State were nearly indefensible, sure, but often as a product of his

> I wouldn't trust any of his advice on geopolitics Numerous choices of his as Secretary of State were nearly indefensible, sure, but often as a product of his involvement and meticulous work in every foreign affairs matter, where everything had to be exact, and to fit into the grander strategy that he envisioned for the United States. As one small example: while H.W. Bush was able to show his goodness and his morality by fighting for Taiwan's role in his role as Ambassador to the UN, Kissinger's controversial pro-PRC stance, however much I despise the PRC government today and then, was what was necessary for the time. His administration's decision in using the rift that already existed between the PRC and the USSR to further pull them away from one another and open up diplomatic relations with the West instead is a major reason that China has become as powerful as it is today, which is an understandable cause of criticism. At the same time, we can't know what would've happened otherwise, but it's easy to imagine that the USSR could have kept up their Iron Curtain much longer, and the Cold War could've gone in a very different direction. We can look at other controversial decisions like Allende, the Yom Kippur War, and Vietnam in the same light. These are the hard decisions one grapples with as Secretary of State. Kissinger's own history as a Jewish immigrant who witnessed Nazism led to this rationalistic pessimism, and this idea that the best state we can hope for is teetering on the edge, slowly relieving tension a la detente, and that true utopia is unachievable. You can disagree with most of his decisions, but to not even consider his advice after all he's experienced seems unwise. Edit: Questionably cited Taiwan as democratic at the time — it was a military dictatorship as another commenter mentioned. H.W. Bush's decision of supporting the 'true' government of China was the moral, easily swallowed one, that was much more popular with the American public. Taiwan was heralded to the American people as a potential democratic alternative to the PRC, though it was not a democracy at the time, and so citing the decision as supporting democracy is questionable.

whydoibother 5y ago
Two regs, less than 30 min old, both trying to launder the bullshit Kissinger did. Odd. > hese are the hard decisions one grapples with as Secretary of State. SoS of an imperialist country. During a time of America's greatest atrocities. And during a time where no one could challenge US hegemony. There is no statecraft to be learned here. There is nothing to learn from him other than what a piece of shit he is.
- paisawalla 5y ago
  I mean, just admit that you don't want this hegemony to exist on the first place. Let people decide if they've enjoyed the dividends that have flowed from being the uncontested center of the world for a century. But let's not pretend that there's some alternative world out there where we could have had clean hands, but not ended up in some communist dystopia where most of us wouldn't be here, because our parents or grandparents were liquidated.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    > but not ended up in some communist dystopia where most of us wouldn't be here, because our parents or grandparents were liquidated. Wow, that really took a quick turn from apologism into weird tinfoil-hattery
    - lowkey_ 5y ago
      I'm not the above commenter, but I imagine this take is not so tinfoil-y. It's due to the Cold War we were experiencing around that time, and the fact that U.S. hegemony was only checked by a truly evil force (in its good nature, to be apologist). The USSR would have loved for the United States to end up the same type of place, with many millions dead or permanently interned in camps. I imagine you're younger than to have experienced that type of fear, but it was real fear and a real threat. The questionable and bloody decisions our government made was largely to fight that threat and ensure that wouldn't happen to us.
      - whydoibother 5y ago
        Your comment is so ignorant of history. The US was full of paranoid nutjobs who wanted to nuke everyone. How many millions died directly due to the US govt's horrible policies? Stop acting like we were the good guys, that cold war propaganda doesn't hold up if you look at history. Indonesia, Vietnam, how many countries in SA, and how many covert actions we don't know about. Nothing the USSR did compared to that. Nothing the USSR was doing warranted the US inflicting the horrors we have around the world.
hoten 5y ago
What's any of this experience got to do with AI or tech?
- lowkey_ 5y ago
  Sorry, it's more of me being tired of hearing him dismissed as a war criminal with nothing that can be gleaned from him — the comment above claimed he had nothing to teach in geopolitics (I had quoted it). I imagine that nearly everyone with a unique perspective is capable of having interesting thoughts on AI and technology with how ubiquitous it's become. If you'd like me to venture a couple guesses as reasons for his relevance: (1) AI will become closely intertwined with government and governmental processes. (2) There will be an increasingly asymmetric power relationship growing with the power of AI. He's very experienced with government, with asymmetric power relationships, and he's notorious for his belief in analyzing more than data in decisions, whereas AI will lead us towards a further reliance on data. If every government eventually has a form of AGI, it will be a fascinating and terrifying geopolitical climate akin to every government having a nuclear warhead. He knows what that evolution is like. Anyway, my conjecture on the scrapped book aside, here's an article that allegedly led to the book [1]. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/henry-kissinger-the-metamorphosis-ai/592771/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/henry-k...
platinumrad 5y ago
> As one small example: while H.W. Bush was able to show his goodness and his morality by fighting for Taiwan's role and for democracy in his role as Ambassador to the UN, Kissinger's controversial pro-PRC stance, however much I despise the PRC government today and then, was what was necessary for the time. Bizarre framing, given that Taiwan wasn't a democracy in 1971 but rather a military dictatorship.
yongjik 5y ago
> We can look at other controversial decisions like Allende, the Yom Kippur War, and Vietnam in the same light. Isn't it basically like saying Xi Jinping made a controversial decision to wipe out the Uyghurs?
- lowkey_ 5y ago
  I'm not an expert on Xi's policy and if there is such a light with which to view those decisions, I'm not privy to it. Kissinger was a man who made a lot of hard decisions, and that meant a lot of controversial decisions — decisions that killed many people. In most of those decisions (not all to be honest), however, we can clearly see how more destruction may have come from choosing another path. The Uyghur genocide is Xi's attempt to strengthen stability in China through forced assimilation, which I personally have a hard time to stomach, especially without this even being justified by any recent conflict. There were a handful of anti-Chinese terror attacks in the 2000s-2010s following the Urumqi riots, but there are plenty of countries experiencing isolated incidents of terrorism from an ethnic minority that haven't sent that minority to a camp.
tibbetts 5y ago
“We can’t know what would have happened if $historicalfigure hadn’t done $badthing,” is a very weak line of argument. One could similarly suggest that the Nazi Holocaust was better than what might have happened under other circumstances.
- lowkey_ 5y ago
  China's rise to superpower is bad. The Soviet Union surviving and spreading its influence to kill millions more is worse. If you actually want to argue that the Holocaust was the better alternative, I'd be interested to hear your case on what that alternative was. There's a reason that Kissinger was afraid of too much reliance on data, and that's why. As a German Jew, Kissinger experienced the start of the Holocaust. I imagine he's more adept at distinguishing bad from worse than either of us are.
baybal2 5y ago
> You can disagree with most of his decisions, but to not even consider his advice after all he's experienced seems unwise. He was a shitty statesman, and a laughably bad political consultant. For just how a "high class" consultant he was, look for how he absolutely hilariously blew the Rockefeller's plans to enter politics. Saying him simply being "unwise" would not make him any justice. > These are the hard decisions one grapples with as Secretary of State. Kissinger's own history as a Jewish immigrant who witnessed Nazism led to this rationalistic pessimism, and this idea that the best state we can hope for is teetering on the edge, slowly relieving tension a la detente, and that true utopia is unachievable. Traumatic experiences can change a person for both good, or worse. In this case, this bitterness, and insecurity definitely turned a person for worse.

whydoibother 5y ago

Two regs, less than 30 min old, both trying to launder the bullshit Kissinger did. Odd. > hese are the hard decisions one grapples with as Secretary of State. SoS of an imperialist country. During a time of America's greatest atrocities. And during a time where no one could challenge US hegemony. There is no statecraft to be learned here. There is nothing to learn from him other than what a piece of shit he is.

paisawalla 5y ago
I mean, just admit that you don't want this hegemony to exist on the first place. Let people decide if they've enjoyed the dividends that have flowed from being the uncontested center of the world for a century. But let's not pretend that there's some alternative world out there where we could have had clean hands, but not ended up in some communist dystopia where most of us wouldn't be here, because our parents or grandparents were liquidated.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  > but not ended up in some communist dystopia where most of us wouldn't be here, because our parents or grandparents were liquidated. Wow, that really took a quick turn from apologism into weird tinfoil-hattery
  - lowkey_ 5y ago
    I'm not the above commenter, but I imagine this take is not so tinfoil-y. It's due to the Cold War we were experiencing around that time, and the fact that U.S. hegemony was only checked by a truly evil force (in its good nature, to be apologist). The USSR would have loved for the United States to end up the same type of place, with many millions dead or permanently interned in camps. I imagine you're younger than to have experienced that type of fear, but it was real fear and a real threat. The questionable and bloody decisions our government made was largely to fight that threat and ensure that wouldn't happen to us.
    - whydoibother 5y ago
      Your comment is so ignorant of history. The US was full of paranoid nutjobs who wanted to nuke everyone. How many millions died directly due to the US govt's horrible policies? Stop acting like we were the good guys, that cold war propaganda doesn't hold up if you look at history. Indonesia, Vietnam, how many countries in SA, and how many covert actions we don't know about. Nothing the USSR did compared to that. Nothing the USSR was doing warranted the US inflicting the horrors we have around the world.

hoten 5y ago

What's any of this experience got to do with AI or tech?

lowkey_ 5y ago
Sorry, it's more of me being tired of hearing him dismissed as a war criminal with nothing that can be gleaned from him — the comment above claimed he had nothing to teach in geopolitics (I had quoted it). I imagine that nearly everyone with a unique perspective is capable of having interesting thoughts on AI and technology with how ubiquitous it's become. If you'd like me to venture a couple guesses as reasons for his relevance: (1) AI will become closely intertwined with government and governmental processes. (2) There will be an increasingly asymmetric power relationship growing with the power of AI. He's very experienced with government, with asymmetric power relationships, and he's notorious for his belief in analyzing more than data in decisions, whereas AI will lead us towards a further reliance on data. If every government eventually has a form of AGI, it will be a fascinating and terrifying geopolitical climate akin to every government having a nuclear warhead. He knows what that evolution is like. Anyway, my conjecture on the scrapped book aside, here's an article that allegedly led to the book [1]. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/henry-kissinger-the-metamorphosis-ai/592771/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/henry-k...

platinumrad 5y ago

> As one small example: while H.W. Bush was able to show his goodness and his morality by fighting for Taiwan's role and for democracy in his role as Ambassador to the UN, Kissinger's controversial pro-PRC stance, however much I despise the PRC government today and then, was what was necessary for the time. Bizarre framing, given that Taiwan wasn't a democracy in 1971 but rather a military dictatorship.

yongjik 5y ago

> We can look at other controversial decisions like Allende, the Yom Kippur War, and Vietnam in the same light. Isn't it basically like saying Xi Jinping made a controversial decision to wipe out the Uyghurs?

lowkey_ 5y ago
I'm not an expert on Xi's policy and if there is such a light with which to view those decisions, I'm not privy to it. Kissinger was a man who made a lot of hard decisions, and that meant a lot of controversial decisions — decisions that killed many people. In most of those decisions (not all to be honest), however, we can clearly see how more destruction may have come from choosing another path. The Uyghur genocide is Xi's attempt to strengthen stability in China through forced assimilation, which I personally have a hard time to stomach, especially without this even being justified by any recent conflict. There were a handful of anti-Chinese terror attacks in the 2000s-2010s following the Urumqi riots, but there are plenty of countries experiencing isolated incidents of terrorism from an ethnic minority that haven't sent that minority to a camp.

tibbetts 5y ago

“We can’t know what would have happened if $historicalfigure hadn’t done $badthing,” is a very weak line of argument. One could similarly suggest that the Nazi Holocaust was better than what might have happened under other circumstances.

lowkey_ 5y ago
China's rise to superpower is bad. The Soviet Union surviving and spreading its influence to kill millions more is worse. If you actually want to argue that the Holocaust was the better alternative, I'd be interested to hear your case on what that alternative was. There's a reason that Kissinger was afraid of too much reliance on data, and that's why. As a German Jew, Kissinger experienced the start of the Holocaust. I imagine he's more adept at distinguishing bad from worse than either of us are.

baybal2 5y ago

> You can disagree with most of his decisions, but to not even consider his advice after all he's experienced seems unwise. He was a shitty statesman, and a laughably bad political consultant. For just how a "high class" consultant he was, look for how he absolutely hilariously blew the Rockefeller's plans to enter politics. Saying him simply being "unwise" would not make him any justice. > These are the hard decisions one grapples with as Secretary of State. Kissinger's own history as a Jewish immigrant who witnessed Nazism led to this rationalistic pessimism, and this idea that the best state we can hope for is teetering on the edge, slowly relieving tension a la detente, and that true utopia is unachievable. Traumatic experiences can change a person for both good, or worse. In this case, this bitterness, and insecurity definitely turned a person for worse.