RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Surely no statesman in modern times … has been as revered and then as reviled as Henry Kissinger.” So begins Niall Ferguson’s commissioned biography. But reverence and revulsion for Kissinger have never been sequential. Instead, for sixty years, Henry Kissinger has been a paragon of of America’s bipartisan ruling class, whose evolving identity he has reflected.

Ordinary people, however, sensed that he cared less for them than for his own career and ideas, and that he has served America badly. In 1976, as Democratic and Republican Party elites were celebrating Secretary of State Kissinger’s 1972 deals with the Soviet Union, his 1973 “Paris Peace Accords” after which America’s naval bases in Vietnam became Soviet bases, and were looking none too closely at the substance of the newly established relationship with China, the insurgent faction of the Democratic Party that nominated Jimmy Carter made rejection of Kissinger the winning issue of that year’s presidential campaign. Meanwhile Ronald Reagan was doing the same thing on behalf of the Republican rank and file, and continued to do it through his landslide victory in 1980.

Henry Kissinger’s luminous career was punctuated by one great disappointment, namely his failure to foresee the collapse of the Soviet system and the downfall of the foreign-policy system to which he devoted his life. That’s on par with the old joke: “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” Kissinger was more hedgehog than fox: The fox knows many things, said Archilochus, but the hedgehog knows one important thing. Kissinger knew one important thing, which had the sole defect of being wrong. Like the Bourbons, Dr. Kissinger has learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as he showed in an Oct. 16 essay for the Wall Street Journal entitled, “A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse.” Kissinger bewails “disintegration of the American role in stabilizing the Middle East order” and wishes to restore it.

As Angelo Codevilla argued on this site in his review of a new Kissinger biography, the great man took as dogmatic truth that the Cold War was unwinnable, and thus “’the goal of war can no longer be military victory,’ but rather to achieve ‘certain political conditions that are fully understood by the other side,’ and that to this end, the U.S would ‘present (the enemy) at every point with an opportunity for a settlement.’”

Ronald Reagan, by contrast, told the first meeting of his national security team, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: We win, they lose.” He and his advisors–Richard Allen, William Clark, William J. Casey, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and then-younger men like Angelo Codevilla, Herbert Meyer and Norman Bailey–saw a sea-change when it stared them in the face.

President Obama had several key opportunities to put pressure on the ruling mullahs in the Islamic Republic to free the three American citizens (pastor Saeed Abedini, journalist Jason Rezaian and US Marine Amir Hekmati) who have been held for years in one of Iran’s notorious jails on bogus and baseless charges.

Last week, Jason Rezaian, the Tehran bureau chief for The Washington Post, who has been behind bars in Iran since July 2014, was convicted. An Iranian court has finally handed down a verdict, but it is vague. The verdict comes after 447 days of Mr. Rezaian being in jail — that is three days more than the 444 days that American diplomats were held hostage. For those who argue Iran of 2015 is far different from the revolutionary Iran of 1979, this is a clear-cut example that the Islamic Republic is still the same: Islamist, anti-American, and oppressive.

The Iranian Students’ News Agency quoted Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, a hardliner who is a spokesman for Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, as stating that Rezaian had been found guilty. Interestingly, Mr. Mohseni-Ejei, who was the minister of intelligence from 2005 to July 2009, insisted that he did not know the details of the sentence. Really?