In a career spanning more than two decades in the Foreign Office, Palmerston was fated on occasion to be just as hated as Castlereagh. ![]() “There could not have been a greater loss to the Government,” Palmerston declared, “and few greater to the country.” Palmerston himself would soon join the battle against the UK’s radical intellectuals, who in the early 1820s demanded that Britain go to war to help democracy take root in Spain, even though no vital British interest had been threatened-and even though this same intellectual class had at times shown only limited enthusiasm for the war against Napoleon, during which Britain’s very survival seemed at stake. One person who did not rejoice at Castlereagh’s death was Henry John Temple, the future British foreign secretary, better known as Lord Palmerston. Of course, this very lack of idealism, by safeguarding the aristocratic order, provided various sovereigns with the only point on which they could unite against Napoleon and establish a continent-wide peace-a peace, it should be noted, that helped Britain emerge as the dominant world power before the close of the 19th century. But because the settlement restored the Bourbon dynasty in France, while providing the forces of Liberalism little reward for their efforts, Castlereagh’s accomplishment lacked any idealistic element, without which the radicals could not be mollified. Lord Byron, the Romantic poet and heroic adventurer, described Stewart, better known as Viscount Castlereagh, as a “cold-blooded … placid miscreant.” Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary from 1812 to 1822, had helped organize the military coalition that defeated Napoleon and afterward helped negotiate a peace settlement that kept Europe free of large-scale violence for decades. In August of 1822, Britain’s radical intelligentsia openly rejoiced upon hearing the news of Robert Stewart’s suicide. To mark his legacy, we need to begin in the 19th century. The former secretary of state turns ninety this month. When policy makers disparage Kissinger in private, they tend to do so in a manner that reveals how much they measure themselves against him. In that book, he laid out the significance of Austria as a “polyglot Empire could never be part of a structure legitimized by nationalism,” and he offered a telling truth about Greece, where I had been living for most of the decade: whatever attraction the war for Greek independence had held for the literati of the 1820s, it was not born of “a revolution of middle-class origin to achieve political liberty,” he cautioned, “but a national movement with a religious basis.” In the 1980s, when I was traveling through Central Europe and the Balkans, I encountered A World Restored, Kissinger’s first book, published in 1957, about the diplomatic aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Later, as I experienced firsthand the stubborn realities of the developing world, and came to understand the task that a liberal polity like the United States faced in protecting its interests, Kissinger took his place among the other political philosophers whose books I consulted to make sense of it all. When I was growing up, the received wisdom painted him as the ogre of Vietnam. I have been a close friend of Henry Kissinger’s for some time, but my relationship with him as a historical figure began decades ago. ![]() ![]() In the summer of 2002, during the initial buildup to the invasion of Iraq, which he supported, Henry Kissinger told me he was nevertheless concerned about the lack of critical thinking and planning for the occupation of a Middle Eastern country where, as he put it, “normal politics have not been practiced for decades, and where new power struggles would therefore have to be very violent.” Thus is pessimism morally superior to misplaced optimism. Thus, this essay especially manifests the sensibilities of the Cold War. A key point that I would emphasize is that one must judge historical figures on the assumptions and perspectives that existed in their day, not in ours. Though, it is as relevant now as it was then. It was originally meant to be an obituary. Author’s note: My Atlantic magazine essay, “ In Defense of Henry Kissinger,” posted here, appeared over a decade ago on Henry Kissinger’s 90th birthday in May 2013.
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