Henry Kissinger is 100 years old today. He doesn’t need a card.

Did anyone in the history of cinema ever perform a more exact version of a well known historical character than Paul Sorvino as Henry Kissinger? It’s like watching a film full of very creditable actors having to work alongside someone who has decided that he has to play himself. Nobody else is worthy.

The real Kissinger is not a modest man. He is also very defensive. If any interviewer attempts a challenging line of questioning, he storms out in a huff. Basically, as soon as the bombing of Cambodia is brought up, the conversation is over. The charge sheet against Kissinger as a war criminal is long. But Kissinger regards himself as above the vulgarity of legal accountability.

In essence, he is an imperialist, and it is no accident that Niall Ferguson is his biographer. Kissinger is an imperialist in the sense that he instinctively sees the world divided up into great powers with natural if shifting spheres of influence, powers that must be variously challenged and placated and above all, triangulated. He sees the world in terms of blocks. The USA, Europe, Russia, China, India – all need to be assessed in terms of their relative relations. None must be weakened without assessing who might profit from such weakness. It’s all about centres of gravity and gravitational influences. Deals between authentically Great Powers override the sovereignty of peripheral and marginal states. Any relative peace and prosperity in the world is attributed to the wisdom, maturity, and cool-headed calculations of rare people like himself.

The art of Kissingerian diplomacy involves respecting powers rather than either peoples or people. It’s about states rather than the people in those states. And it’s a secretive business. Kissinger sees himself in the tradition of Meternich, who achieves peace settlements by addressing powerful people behind closed doors. Geopolitics on the Kissingerian model is also all about “the big picture”. Unfortunately the kind of big picture we’re talking about involves a great deal of collateral damage. Kissingerian diplomacy stands back so far that sufferings inflicted within supposedly acceptable spheres of influence dissolves into irrelevance. It’s not that he doesn’t care about human rights abuses, it’s that the balance of power concerns him more. He justifies himself on the basis of hypothetical “worse case” scenarios that will enfold whenever the lessons of realpolitik are ignored.

There are things that are more important than denouncing Kissinger. At the age of one hundred he has, after all, “gotten away with it”. More important is to disprove him. More important is to imagine forms of international cooperation and international recognition that make a kind of practical sense. Is there a world order based on democracy and transparency that is possible – one that involves recognition of affinities and differences and affinities derived from cherishable versions of being distinctive? Finding this out is more important than trying to prosecute Kissinger on his 100th birthday.

Fun fact. Henry Kissinger is a Harlem Globetrotter.