The Trial of Henry Kissinger summary

We’ve just seen how Henry Kissinger helped lengthen the Vietnam War by sabotaging the Paris peace talks. In this blink, we’ll learn how his actions increased the overall slaughter in the conflict in the years that followed.

In his role as National Security Advisor, Kissinger was heavily involved in the planning of two huge military strategies: Operation Speedy Express and Operation Menu – both of which can be described as war crimes.

You probably know that there’s a densely populated country called Bangladesh just east of India. What you might not know is that this country was once part of Pakistan.

In 1971, Bangladesh attempted to break free from the union with Pakistan and become an independent country. The Pakistanis resisted – and that’s when Kissinger got involved. He supported the Pakistani government in fighting against Bangladeshi independence.

Not many people know that the history of Latin America is peppered with US interventions and invasions with the intention of installing leaders loyal to Washington. Perhaps the most famous of these was the United States’ role in the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected leader of Chile.

Allende, who was a Marxist – and therefore seen as an enemy of the United States – had been the target of US plots since his election in 1970. And behind many of these plots and eventual coup was Kissinger.

On December 6, 1975, Henry Kissinger was in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, meeting with their president Suharto. The very next day, Indonesian forces rolled into the neighboring nation of East Timor and took it over. In the following years, 200,000 people – a third of the population of East-Timor – died in the occupation.

So just what did Kissinger and Suharto discuss the day before?

Some people who recognize the allegations we’ve mentioned so far might say that it was all excusable – simply power politics in Cold War times. But things get even murkier once you see that Kissinger turned his policies into cash in his later years.

After his active political career, Kissinger founded Kissinger Associates, a company powered by Kissinger’s personal network that advises clients on gaining market access worldwide. And there are several examples of Kissinger Associates deals directly linked with dubious political decisions Kissinger made in his years in office.

Imagine if the president of an African country had helped assassinate his foreign adversaries, delivered arms to military groups committing genocide, and deliberately killed thousands of civilians in wars he personally waged. There’s no doubt about it: there would be international uproar and probably some kind of tribunal.

Yet if you do all this and you are Henry Kissinger, you’re praised as the godfather of diplomacy instead.