TO adapt William Wordsworth’s invocation to the poet John Milton: ‘Kissinger! thou shouldst be living at this hour: the Middle East hath need of thee’.

Some argue that Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy between Arab countries and Israel prevented a conflagration in the combustible Middle East. Others suspect that he banked an ember that has glowed for over half a century, and which has finally flared into open war.

Dr Kissinger’s book on Diplomacy (1994) should be compulsory reading for all world leaders, especially those with imperial aspirations. The Stoic Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius once advised: “Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you foresee the future.” He spoke from experience. He was the last (r.161-180 AD) of the Five Good Emperors whose governance brought peace and social order — a Pax Romana — to a turbulent empire.

In modern times, who knew better than Dr Kissinger the lessons history provides? He spent his life teaching it, and then making it.

Who knew better than Kissinger the lessons history provides?

In his Diplomacy, he explained that, for millennia, “Empire has been the typical mode of government”: France dominated the 17th century; Great Britain, the 18th; Austria-Germany, the 19th; and in the 20th, the US. He believed that “empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system”.

In no instance has this been more apparent than America’s imperialist foreign policy since 1945. It has been the American dream to dominate the New World Order. In a unipolar world, it might have succeeded, had it not been for the drag of the Soviet Un­­ion, China and the European Union (EU).

When Kissinger escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1938, Europe consisted of a number of independent states. He described the creation of a post-war unified Europe as an attempt by these countries to compensate for their individual weakness. Today, Europe has relapsed into a pre-1938 pattern, in which separate national interests have gradually unravelled the cord that bound them into a collective bundle. They seem to be going their separate ways.

Trump’s US has no use for a myopic EU, nor for the smokescreen of Nato, nor the impotent UN. Trump will agree with Kissin­ger’s claim that the US is the “greatest and most powerful nation”. He may find less appealing Kissinger’s admission that, while the US may see itself as primus inter pares, it is “nonetheless a nation like others”.

Kissinger accepts that “the United States can neither withdraw from the world nor dominate it”. He warns with skilled prescience that “whenever the entities constituting the international system change their character, a period of turmoil inevitably follows”.

Today, as the US and Israel are rearranging the international system to a design that better suits their interests, the rest of the world is trapped within that period of turmoil. Every country in the world is being affected by it.

Kissinger, before he died at the age of 100, complained that “the leaders of the world have failed”. And then, washing his hands of the blood of millions who died needlessly on his watch in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Chile, East Timor, Cyprus, Angola and Argentina, not counting the Arab/ Israeli conflict, he urged societies “to find a way to solve their problems without continuously having a series of conflicts”.

His deathbed piety has no place in the homicidal policies of Trump and his accomplice in arms, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They are repeating a pattern of US interventions which history has not forgotten nor the dead forgiven: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt and now Iran. Take your pick from the menu of alleged justifications: percei­ved security threats, unproven WMDs, re­­gime change, insolent nuclearism. Any one has been enough to unleash a modern holocaust.

In his book, Kissinger named six great po­­wers, present and future: the US, Europe, China, Japan, Russia and India. Interest­i­n­g­ly, he does not include any country from South America or Africa. Nor countries which admit to having nuclear weapons — France, the UK, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan.

One reason the US and Israel have given to justify their illegal aggression towards Iran is its nuclear programme. If only on those grounds, Pakistan should double its guard. Over 50 years ago, (according to the late Benazir Bhutto), Kissinger warned PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto that if he did not desist from his nuclear plans, “We will make a horrible example out of you”.

At the end of February, Indian PM Narendra Modi made a quick two-day visit to Israel. Both are nuclear powers. The US will never demand that they disarm. So, should we expect an unfriendly call from the White House? Or worse, an unwelcome intrusion by PM Modi?

The writer is an author.

www.fsaijazuddin.pk

Published in Dawn, March 5th, 2026