Law, Power, and Justice

Kissinger’s unrepentant dishonesty and duplicity — his apparent belief that the public simply had no right to know about the conduct of its government abroad — would reverberate throughout American politics in the decades after he left the White House. It is hard to look at the actions of the Reagan White House in Iran-contra, for example, and not see a Kissinger-esque attempt to circumvent the public and its representatives in order to exercise power unencumbered by democratic accountability.

The same goes for the illegal torture program pursued under President George W. Bush. The Kissinger ethos, as it were, is a belief that the president can act unilaterally, anywhere in the world, without democratic deliberation or public accountability. It’s a view that treats democracy as either window-dressing or, more often, an irritation and inconvenience to be avoided whenever possible.

Henry Kissinger thought nothing of the democratic aspirations of most people on this planet, Americans more or less included.