Is Henry Kissinger the Real Power Behind Trump's Foreign Policy?

Henry Kissinger

By Robert Wenzel

Much focus has been put on the neo-cons in the Trump Administration as the key players in the administration that have been advising Trump in a manner that is putting the United States one mistake away from a US involved military clash in some hot spot in the world and they are bad news.

But could things be even worse than that? Is the evilest of US war criminals pulling the foreign policy strings in the administration?

Henry Kissinger is 96 years old but still remarkably active. He just attended the Bilderberg meeting in Montreux, Switzerland where global elitists meet to plot. That's a 3,886 mile flight for the old man from his residence in Manhattan.

We know that President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner is very close to the president and probably has more policy sway on the president than anyone else (outside of Kushner's wife, Ivanka). So it is interesting that Michael Wolff in his new book, Siege: Trump Under Fire, reports the following as related by The Independent:

Mr Kushner — a real estate developer known for potentially shaky loans he took out to build a skyscraper in Manhattan — was reportedly viewed as a weak link in the Trump administration, but took advantage of the access he has to upend US foreign policy.

The book says that Mr Kushner was obsessed with Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of State and national security adviser for presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

The two reportedly sparked up a friendship, and Mr Kushner would regularly name drop Mr Kissinger. And, just like Mr Kissinger, Mr Kushner reportedly saw himself “as the wiser and more focused adviser to a less sophisticated president.”

While Mr Kushner’s wife Ivanka Trump did not appear to approve of that relationship (she referred to Mr Kissinger as “Jared’s Uncle Henry”), the book paints a portrait of a surprisingly effective effort by Mr Kushner to be relevant in the Trump White House.

Mr Wolff writes that Mr Kushner eventually established himself as the “most efficient point of contact” for foreign governments looking to influence the US president, a role that upended decades of US tradition to “reliably frustrate transactional and freelance diplomatic efforts.”

Great, the foreign point of contact in the Trump administration is Kushner who is being controlled by Kissinger. 

Now, a friend who knows Kushner from his Harvard days tells me that Kushner is a skilled opportunist but has never had an original idea about anything. All his foreign policy ideas, if we are to believe Wolff, are probably Kissinger ideas.

So what kind of advice might Kissinger be giving Kushner?

In 2016, Kissinger said that the biggest challenge facing the Middle East is the "potential domination of the region by an Iran that is both imperial and jihadist..."

“What we have to see to is that Iran does not achieve such a dominant position that the whole region explodes.”

As for what type of advise Kissinger might have given Kushner about Julian Assange, we might be able to get an idea from what he said about the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg:

Because that son-of-a-bitch—First of all, I would expect—I know him well—I am sure he has some more information—I would bet that he has more information that he’s saving for the trial.  Examples of American war crimes that triggered him into it…It’s the way he’d operate….Because he is a despicable bastard. (Oval Office tape, July 27, 1971)

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.