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Use Your Illusions

Slavoj Žižek: Obama’s Victory and the Financial Meltdown, 20 November 2008

... disavowed racism will re-emerge? – was proved wrong. One of the interesting things about Henry Kissinger, the ultimate cynical Realpolitiker, is how utterly wrong most of his predictions were. When news reached the West of the 1991 anti-Gorbachev military coup, for example, Kissinger immediately accepted the ...

I met murder on the way

Colin Kidd: Castlereagh, 24 May 2012

Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny 
by John Bew.
Quercus, 722 pp., £25, September 2011, 978 0 85738 186 6
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... side of human nature. And it certainly doesn’t help that his principal modern apologist is Henry Kissinger, another supposed friend of tyrants, who built his later career as an exponent of realpolitik on the intellectual foundations of his Harvard doctorate, published as A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace ...

Gosh, what am I like?

Rosemary Hill: The Revenge Memoir, 17 December 2020

Friends and Enemies: A Memoir 
by Barbara Amiel.
Constable, 592 pp., £25, October 2020, 978 1 4721 3421 9
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Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power 
by Sasha Swire.
Little, Brown, 544 pp., £20, September 2020, 978 1 4087 1341 9
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... pardon due in part, the White House said, to lobbying by the powerful and unlikely duo of Henry Kissinger and Elton John. Nonetheless Amiel remains furious at the way she and Black have been treated and is intent on establishing his innocence on all counts. Her memoir is a bookend to his, A Matter of Principle, published in 2011, in which he ...

World Policeman

Colin Legum, 20 November 1986

With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua 
by Christopher Dickey.
Faber, 327 pp., £12.50, September 1986, 9780571146048
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Jonas Savimbi: A Key to Africa 
by Fred Bridgland.
Mainstream, 513 pp., £14.95, October 1986, 0 906391 99 7
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... who it was in Washington who pushed them into what turned out to be a disastrous military failure. Henry Kissinger, who was Secretary of State at the time and who was prevented by Congress from intervening directly, has always denied being involved in Pretoria’s decision. Now, Bridgland has documented what happened. ...

Heresy from Lesser Voices

Andrew Preston: The Helsinki Conference, 20 June 2019

The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War 
by Michael Cotey Morgan.
Princeton, 424 pp., £27, November 2018, 978 0 691 17606 2
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... in the CSCE, agreeing to participate mainly in order to further the emerging détente with Moscow. Henry Kissinger could have played a starring role if he’d wanted to, but he worried that the Western Europeans’ obsession with human rights and freedom of movement would interfere with superpower détente, especially the delicate negotiations over ...

Diary

Jeremy Harding: Hitchens, 31 March 2011

... year – the year of lawyering dangerously, at least at the LRB – saw Hitchens’s wet job on Henry Kissinger (22 October 1992). As he does with many of his subjects, he walked straight up to this one and dropped the guillotine, likening the book under review – an authorised biography – to ‘the profile of a serial murderer’. Out came the rest ...

‘The Refugee Problem’

Leila Farsakh, 16 November 2023

... begin multilateral negotiations based on Resolution 242. But the Geneva conference fell apart when Henry Kissinger took control of the diplomatic process in order to consolidate the role of the US as the sole peace-broker in the region. Washington was committed to fostering bilateral rather than multilateral negotiations between Israel and its ...

They were expendable

Joost Hiltermann: Iraq and the Kurds, 17 November 2016

Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds and the Cold War 
by Bryan Gibson.
Palgrave, 256 pp., £65, May 2015, 978 1 349 69552 2
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... father, Mullah Mustafa Barzani, the legendary founder of the Kurdish national movement, to Henry Kissinger, then both US secretary of state and national security adviser, as quoted by Bryan Gibson from declassified US government documents: Our hearts bleed to see that an immediate byproduct of [Iran and Iraq’s] agreement is the destruction of ...

Losing the War

Robert Dallek, 23 November 1989

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam 
by Neil Sheehan.
Cape, 861 pp., £15.95, April 1989, 0 224 02648 8
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... to defeat the insurgency during the seven years between 1965 and 1972, Vann hoped that the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of Vietnamisation, which Kissinger attributed to Vann, would allow South Vietnam to become the autonomous country the United States had aimed to create from the start of its involvement in the fighting. By ...

Small nations, take heed

Andrew Bacevich: Hanoi’s War, 7 February 2013

Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam 
by Lien-Hang Nguyen.
North Carolina, 444 pp., £29.95, July 2012, 978 0 8078 3551 7
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... events did not accord with the expectations contained in the text that the chief negotiators Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho had signed in Paris. Yet the ‘war for peace’ did not in fact end in failure, if only because peace was never the objective. None of the protagonists actually sought peace, at least not in the commonly accepted sense of the ...

It’s Been a Lot of Fun

David Runciman: Hitchens’s Hitchens, 24 June 2010

Hitch-22: A Memoir 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Atlantic, 435 pp., £20, June 2010, 978 1 84354 921 5
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... variety of causes, in which the common theme has been a desire to take on the evil-doers, from Henry Kissinger to Mother Teresa to Bill Clinton to Saddam Hussein. The United States is a great country for political romantics because there is always something going on. There are almost limitless occasions on which to display yourself. But what’s wrong ...

Bad White Men

Christopher Tayler: James Ellroy, 19 July 2001

The Cold Six Thousand 
by James Ellroy.
Century, 672 pp., £16.99, April 2001, 0 7126 4817 8
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... His murder is engineered by rogue cops and FBI men; Hoover is complicit, while LBJ takes the Henry II role (‘Do what you can on this, all right?’). Bobby Kennedy is murdered at the behest of the Mob, who also offer Nixon financial backing. The biggest surprise, in fact, is Ellroy’s continuing attachment to RFK. According to ...

Big enough to deter

Jeff McMahan, 15 April 1982

Nuclear Illusion and Reality 
by Solly Zuckerman.
Collins, 154 pp., £7.50, January 1982, 0 00 216554 6
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... he offers for remaining in Nato consists in producing an opaque and irrelevant quotation from Henry Kissinger. It is an annoying feature of the book that Zuckerman often dodges the necessity of providing reasons for his beliefs by simply quoting authorities. Zuckerman’s only positive argument for retaining the deterrent is that, as an instance of a ...

Short Cuts

Andrew O’Hagan: Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book, 15 August 2019

... For students of the society black book, there are some no-brainers among Epstein’s contacts: Henry Kissinger, Nicky Haslam, Mick Jagger. But it becomes clear that Epstein much preferred to hang out with famous intellectuals, lunching them at Delmonico’s, Elaine’s, the Four Seasons and the Pierre. He liked popular scientists (Steven Pinker says ...

I blame the British

Charles Glass: A report from Lake Dokan, 17 April 2003

... behest in 1974. When the Shah of Iran signed a border agreement with Saddam in Algiers in 1975, Henry Kissinger let Saddam blast the Kurds out of the mountains. Mullah Mustafa died, a much loved if defeated leader, in American exile. His son, Massoud, succeeded him. A hearty people with forgiving memories, the Kurds turned to the US for succour in ...

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