Politics & Power Quote by Henry A. Kissinger

Kissinger’s candor here is almost accusatory, but the target is less Nixon than the American political psyche. By calling their approach “unnatural,” he’s admitting that the Vietnam War forced a collision between how the U.S. likes to narrate itself and how power actually gets exercised. “National interest” is the hard currency of realist statecraft; “abstract principles” are the moral language Americans expect their wars to speak. Kissinger isn’t repudiating realism so much as acknowledging its sales problem in a democracy that wants virtue to be strategy.

The line works because it reverses a familiar critique. Instead of saying Vietnam was immoral and therefore failed, he suggests it failed because it couldn’t be made legible within America’s preferred moral frame. Nixon and Kissinger tried to pivot policy toward geopolitics, credibility, and negotiated exit ramps - deterrence, balance of power, containment’s optics - while the public and Congress increasingly demanded a war justified in ethical terms or not at all. The “unnatural” act was asking Americans to accept loss, compromise, and limits without the consolations of crusade.

Context matters: this is the author of Vietnamization, secret bombing, and Paris peace talks sketching a postmortem on legitimacy. The subtext is that even skillful manipulation of levers abroad can’t overcome a domestic narrative collapse. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the idea that technocratic competence alone can rescue a policy whose moral story has curdled. Kissinger implies that in Vietnam, realism didn’t just meet resistance - it met an immune system.