Convenience Big Store: What Kissinger didn’t understand about America

5 December, 2023

In the headlines

Home Secretary James Cleverly has unveiled a five-point plan to curb net migration, pledging to cut the number of annual arrivals by 300,000. The proposals include banning health and care workers from bringing their families to the UK and hiking the minimum salary for skilled overseas workers from £26,200 to £38,700. Britain's most hazardous nuclear site, Sellafield, has been hacked by cyber groups linked to Russia and China, says The Guardian. Experts first detected "sleeper malware", which may still be present, embedded in computer networks at the nuclear waste storage plant in Cumbria "as far back as 2015". The "world's smelliest cheese" will hit supermarket shelves this Christmas, says The Times. Shoppers at 54 Asda stores in Scotland will be able to buy Minger, a pongy brie-style fromage described by maker Highland Fine Cheeses as "brutal on the nose" with an aroma of "old feet".

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With Thatcher in 1976. Graham Wood/Evening Standard/Getty

What Kissinger didn't understand about America

When Henry Kissinger had breakfast with Margaret Thatcher after she became Conservative leader in 1975, says Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph, he wasn't impressed. "I don't think Margaret Thatcher will last," the US secretary of state told President Gerald Ford. The smart money, he said, was on Winston Churchill's son-in-law Christopher Soames, then a European commissioner. You can see why Kissinger may have thought this way. Soames, like him, was "a grandee, well known in the chancelleries of Europe"; Thatcher was a lower-middle-class politician. Yet Soames "never again held elected office", while Thatcher was prime minister for 11 and a half years.

This error reveals something important about Kissinger: "he was not one of nature's democrats". Despite being a colossus in international relations, he never competed for a public vote. And this helps explain both his success and his failures. Anyone seeking re-election would never have dared make his secret trip to Communist China, which helped pave the way for Richard Nixon's historic visit, or use back channels to facilitate détente with the Soviet Union. Like the dictators he dealt with, Kissinger didn't have to worry about voters, so he could "think in decades rather than months". But this approach was also suffused with pessimism. Those who lack the "democratic gene" see the future as "one great struggle against disorder and aggression" – they don't believe that people's wishes for a better life tend to prevail. Kissinger was a "great American". But his elite view of power – wholly removed from the will of the people – led him to ignore why America was great.

🎸😡 At a private lunch I attended in 1994, says Moore, Kissinger said Bill Clinton had told him: "Henry, you have to understand that my generation cares more about rock music than foreign policy." Amused that he had needed a US president to tell him this, I began reciting the words of John Lennon's song Gimme Some Truth: "No short-haired, yellow-bellied son of Tricky Dicky is gonna Mother Hubbard soft-soap me with just a pocketful of hope." The "good doctor" glared at me, and "cast a glance of mute appeal towards the attendant security men".

Fashion

The British Fashion Awards in London last night saw plenty of striking red carpet looks, including Anne Hathaway in a vintage Valentino design inspired by strands of spaghetti; Alexa Chung in a sparkling, jingling metal dress; Daphne Guinness in a fluffy shawl and elaborate headpiece; and Rita Ora pairing a Primark dress with a prosthetic dinosaur spine. See more here.

Zeitgeist

Oxford University Press has named "rizz" as its word of the year. The Gen Z term, which is slang for "style, charm or attractiveness", beat contenders like "situationship" (an informal romantic relationship) and "Swiftie" (a diehard Taylor Swift fan). Derived from "charisma", rizz went viral in June after the actor Tom Holland admitted in an interview that he had "no rizz whatsoever", spawning a rash of related memes. OUP says the choice reflects how social media has exponentially increased the pace of language change. Plus, says The New York Times, "the word simply has rizz".

Art

Andy Gotts has made it his "mission" to photograph all the actors who have played Bond villains, says the BBC. A new exhibition of his work includes portraits of Charles Dance, who played a henchman in For Your Eyes Only (1981); Mads Mikkelsen, who was Le Chiffre in Casino Royale (2006); Andrew Scott, the sinister double agent in Spectre (2015); and Rami Malek, 007's foe in No Time to Die (2021). The only notable missing face is that of the deceased Gert Fröbe, who played Auric Goldfinger in the 1964 movie. Click here to see the others.

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Le Pen with Jordan Bardella: "on the offensive". Pascal Guyot/AFP/Getty

A wake-up call for Europe

The victory of anti-EU firebrand Geert Wilders in the Dutch parliamentary elections has been a wake-up call for the French, says Françoise Fressoz in Le Monde. Paris largely ignored previous wins for far-right parties in Italy, Sweden, Hungary and Slovakia, but with European elections taking place next year, MEPs are starting to "sound the alarm". Pascal Canfin, a French MEP from the liberal centrist Renew Europe group – which includes Emmanuel Macron's party in the European Parliament – has talked of the "political battle to be fought" against the rising right. Renew chairman Stéphane Séjourné calls it "the battle for Europe".

They've got their work cut out. In France, the far right is "on the offensive", and the gamble taken by Marine Le Pen's National Rally to throw itself into the European elections is paying off. The party – spearheaded by wunderkind Jordan Bardella – has already built up a nine-point poll lead over Macron's lot; in the 2019 elections, they were "neck and neck". As the 2024 vote draws closer, it is looking more and more like a "referendum for or against Europe". There are even fears that an international coalition of far-right Eurosceptic MEPs could "seize the blocking minority in the European Parliament" and make the whole thing unworkable. One significant advantage they hold is the fact that they all agree on the crucial issue of mass migration, whereas "the opposing side still hasn't decided on its position". As Canfin says: unless Europe can get its house in order, it will "implode, fragment and disappear from history".

Christmas

Chevy Chase finding his tree in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989)

More than 40 national forests in the US are encouraging people to chop down their own Christmas tree, says Mental Floss. A permit costs around $10, but woodland authorities say DIY lumberjacks will be doing them a favour – thinning out the woodland makes more space for wildlife and helps other trees to grow.

Noted

Spotify Wrapped is a brilliant piece of marketing, says music critic Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. The streaming giant has turned what is essentially just "a bit of automating data-scraping" – telling users which songs and artists they most listen to each year – into a "global event" in which people eagerly share their results on social media. But I'm not convinced it's very good at telling us what music we actually like. My most-played artist this year is someone I've "barely given a thought to". The only reason they're top of the pile is because I put on one of their tracks after coming home from the pub, then immediately fell asleep, "thus obliviously 'listening' to it over and over again for eight hours".

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It's a chinstrap penguin catching a very brief bit of shut-eye. Scientists have discovered that the beach-dwelling birds get their 40 winks by engaging in four-second "microsleeps" more than 10,000 times a day. The snappy snoozes, which add up to more than 11 hours of daily kip, "seem to be enough", says Nature. When researchers monitored 14 penguins nesting on an Antarctic island for 10 days, they found the birds "never engaged in prolonged sleep". The longest nap they registered was a comparatively louche 34 seconds.

Quoted

"When somebody says it's not about the money, it's about the money."

HL Mencken

That's it. You're done.

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