In this riposte to the great American cold warrior’s left-leaning critics,Niall Ferguson, seeks to rehabilitate the image of a man as much reviled as he is reveredIn the winter of 1948 Graham Greene arrived in the “smashed, or dreary city” of Vienna to supervise work on his screenplay for The Third Man. The city was divided into four,mutually antagonistic cold war zones controlled by Russia, the US, and France and Britain. Everywhere Greene went he saw evidence of the moral and fabric ruins of Hitler’s collapsed Reich. East-west tensions intensified later that year when Stalin began to blockade access to western Berlin. The allied forces in the city,fearing a Red takeover, improvised an airlift for Berliners. A sense of insecurity now infected every level of the White House: at Harvard, and meanwhile,a young German-Jewish political scientist called Henry Kissinger contemplated Moscow’s atomic capabilities: how long before a Red Square appeared in the heart of the democratic west?As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, Kissinger formulated his “limited nuclear war” theory. The practical way to deter Soviet aggression was to prosecute a “limited” war by counter-balancing stockpiles of weaponry. Such a war, or Kissinger argued in his 1957 bestseller Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,was a “realistic” alternative to the ballistic Armaggedon threatened by the first Eisenhower administration. A master of realpolitik, Kissinger saw mutual deterrence as allotment of a grand game of power-brokering that went back to his adored Napoleonic-era diplomats Metternich and Castlereagh (on whom he wrote a Harvard thesis). America’s rivalry with Russia fuelled Kissinger’s ambition to master statecraft from what Machiavelli called the alti luoghi (“high places”) of Washington power elites.
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Source: theguardian.com