What Kissinger did not understand about Cyprus

It has been about a year since the passing of Henry Kissinger, but Thomas Alan Schwartz, American foreign relations historian, has not lost his interest in the life and especially the actions of the controversial former US secretary of state. Besides, he wrote about it in his book “Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography” (published by Hill and Wang, 2020). It is perhaps Schwartz’s work as a biographer that makes him note the polarization of opinion that the late top American diplomat still stirs up.

The negative assessments of the “reviled” Kissinger do not come only from the left but from other political sides too, though he maintains “a certain respect within the American establishment,” he tells Kathimerini. In fact, Johns Hopkins University opened the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs this year. “I think the polarization of opinion about Henry Kissinger will remain for quite some time. I think it’s going to be a while before passions about his role cool off enough to have a more reasoned discussion of his achievements and his failures,” he says.

Schwartz, distinguished professor of history, political science and European studies at Vanderbilt University, will participate in the conference organized by the Hellenic Parliament Foundation for Parliamentarism and Democracy on December 13-14 on the topic of Southern Europe’s transition to democracy in the period 1974-1977. His speech is titled “Henry Kissinger on the Cyprus Crisis: Foreign Political Realism and American Domestic Policy.” 

What international concerns did Washington have in the 1970s and what share could we say corresponded to the situation in Greece and Cyprus?

I think if you actually look at the degree of concern there, I think what I would highlight is the degree to which Nixon and Kissinger foreign policy was geared around the idea of extracting the United States from extensive commitments and from the possibility of military intervention in various parts of the world. Public opinion in the United States had turned decisively against the degree to which the United States had been involved in military interventions and the rest, and so this meant the United States was much more limited in what its objectives could be. And I think Nixon and Kissinger sought, above all, to maintain the status quo in the sense they wanted to. When they looked at Greece and Cyprus, they didn’t want change that would cause difficulties. And their biggest concern, to the extent that they really ever thought much about Greece and Cyprus – which before 1974 I don’t think you can see a lot of indication that they did – were about some degree of stability. They didn’t really care about issues like democracy promotion or questions of minority rights or the possibilities of what Cyprus, what Archbishop Makarios was about. They didn’t care that much about those issues. They really just wanted to preserve stability in that area and not have NATO’s eastern flank weakened by a conflict between Greece and Turkey in that sense.

To what extent did the Watergate scandal influence Kissinger’s and Nixon’s foreign policy in the Mediterranean?

Well, this is this is an interesting question. And it’s been disputed, of course, in his memoirs, Kissinger argued that the travails of Watergate, the issues that consumed Nixon, particularly from about the beginning of 1973 until his resignation in August of 74, seriously weakened American foreign policy, and became a great distraction in American foreign policy and lessened its ability to be effective in all parts of the world, not just the Mediterranean. Now, others have argued, and I have argued in my book that, of course, one of the effects of Watergate was to give Kissinger considerable power. And in fact, I call him the president of foreign policy. During this time, and to a degree, Kissinger was in effect running American foreign policy as Nixon tried to deal with the scandals connected to Watergate. What that meant, I think, is that Kissinger’s priorities were set around what he needed, what he felt he needed to do. And in this case, I think his major concern was always Cold War and great power issues, and he had relatively little concern for the types of things going on between Greece and Turkey or on Cyprus, until they affected anything more significant. And so in a way, I think the the degree to which he centralized power in his own hands during this time – he was both national security adviser and secretary of state – meant that his attention span for other issues was limited by what he was up to at the time. In particular, during this period in which Cyprus exploded. That was the Middle East issue that he was very concerned with, particularly trying to get disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt and Syria.

‘Kissinger, coming off of his Middle East diplomacy, saw Cyprus as essentially a lose-lose situation and told Gerald Ford that, you know, Turkey’s more important to us’ 

During a conversation with President Ford in the Oval Office he made the most famous – at least in Greece – comment, that “there is no American reason why the Turks should not have the one third,” of Cyprus. But he also said “the British have made a mess of it.” So my question is, was he always guided by realpolitik, or did he think that the situation in Cyprus was already out of hand?

I think what you have there is the degree to which Kissinger, when he was running foreign policy on his own, slipped into his geopolitical reasoning, which was always, you know, what is the strongest state to be allied to, what matters most for American national interests? And it was a fairly narrow way of conceiving of American interests. The idea there’s no American reason why the Turks couldn’t have a part of Cyprus. And in a way, that’s a very narrow and blinkered way of looking at it. Not incorrect, I think, because most Americans would not really think that it mattered much to the United States what the political arrangements were on Cyprus. But I think it underestimated the degree to which issues like this could inflame public opinion, especially if it was seen as a violation of human rights, ethnic cleansing, the types of things that did go on in Cyprus, and that would then have an effect on Kissinger’s image and on the United States, the image of American foreign policy in the Mediterranean. So I do think these quotes and what you’ve cited show the degree to which Kissinger, coming off of his Middle East diplomacy, saw Cyprus as essentially a lose-lose situation and told Gerald Ford that, well, you know, Turkey’s more important to us without, I think, alerting the president on the degree of political difficulties this was going to cause. So I think this was a case of Kissinger being affected by his own tendency to centralize power and to only be concerned about the issue in front of him at the time, to the extent that he really did not understand or recognize some of the politics of the Cyprus situation until it was too late.

Why did Kissinger refuse to meet Konstantinos Karamanlis in exile in Paris? Would he have preferred someone else to lead Greece after the restoration of democracy?

I went back to his memoirs on this just to see, because I had never questioned him particularly on that, and it wasn’t an issue that came up a great deal in other biographies, and it was rarely raised outside of a few journalists who raised it at the time in his memoirs. He’s really somewhat dismissive of Karamanlis when he did meet him in Paris in the late 60s, early 70s, before the issue [of his return] came up. He described him as vain and somewhat detached from really what was going on in his own country, something that he recognized was frequent among exiled politicians who basically lose touch. And so he seems to have been rather dismissive of Karamanlis. I think the fact that he didn’t meet with him afterwards right away or recognize that he would be coming back into power, is also indicative of Kissinger’s relative lack of interest in democratic leaders, relative or in situations where he thought, in fact, that countries were not going to have democratic transitions and that he would be dealing with authoritarians. And in that sense, I think he dismissed Karamanlis as largely ineffectual. So in this case, I think he underestimated him. And this was characteristic in some ways of Kissinger’s tendency to be less committed, you might say, to democratic institutions and developments.

And what about the foreign policy of the United States nowadays? What should we have in mind in order to understand it from this point onward?

Well, I do think particularly Europeans are going to be a bit distressed by some of the rhetoric coming out of Washington. I think probably one of the cautions I would suggest to most European observers is to look at actions more than rhetoric. The rhetoric of the Trump administration will be very nationalistic. More than their rhetoric, the way they speak. Donald Trump and his advisers will speak in very nationalistic terms. They will talk about America first, American national interests. That there’s no American reason why we should care about Cyprus. I think they will speak in those terms. That doesn’t mean, though, that they don’t have concerns about the international impact of American action. So Marco Rubio, who will become the secretary of state, and Michael Waltz, who’ll be the national security adviser, are both strongly interested in peace through strength and wanting to see the United States stand up to aggressors around the world, particularly this new axis of resistance of Russia, Iran, China and North Korea. So I think there’s going to be some action. I think it will be interesting to see what type of solution they’re going to come up with for Ukraine, and whether they can indeed end that war in a way that preserves Ukraine’s sovereignty, but not maybe its entire territory. So I think it is going to be unpredictable.

Thomas Allan Schwartz’s lecture “Henry Kissinger on the Cyprus Crisis: Foreign Political Realism and American Domestic Policy,” will take place on December 14, as part of the conference “Global Crisis and Democratic Transition in Southern Europe: a Political History” at the Greek Parliament.