Deep State & Dark Soul | USA & Kissinger

I propose, on the contrary, to establish a school of the superficial state (the shallow state).

—Emmanuel Todd, The Defeat of the West (my translation)

In Saturday’s book recommendation post, I explored Aaron Good, American Exception: American Empire and the Deep State. For all its merits, I preferred Emmanuel Todd’s diagnosis of the American state in The Defeat of the West. In that book, Todd mocked the idea of the deep state. Instead, he argued, the US empire ‘runs the world’ in the fragile shell of the shallow state.

In this deep dive, I will take up Todd’s idea of the shallow state in the biographical case of the leading exponent of American foreign policy in the American Century, who many regard as the deepest thinker and darkest war criminal of the American deep state, Henry Kissinger.

I will suggest, contrary to Good’s arguments on the deep state, that while Kissinger exhibited all the lawless, exceptionist criminality of the American century, he was in truth a servile courtier of the shallow state.

Upgrade now to hear some voices of the past—Mao Zedong, Niall Ferguson, Richard Nixon and the Twisted Nixons— on the Dark Soul of Henry Kissinger.