Henry Alfred Kissinger, one of the most influential statesmen in American history, died on Nov. 29 at age 100 after a long and tumultuous career in which he helped author some of the greatest triumphs—as well as some of the most tragic failures—of U.S. foreign policy.
Henry Alfred Kissinger, one of the most influential statesmen in American history, died on Nov. 29 at age 100 after a long and tumultuous career in which he helped author some of the greatest triumphs—as well as some of the most tragic failures—of U.S. foreign policy.
Kissinger, a German-born refugee from Nazism who came to the United States at the age of 15, was credited with several of the most epoch-making diplomatic achievements since World War II. These included launching detente with the Soviet Union to preserve peace during the Cold War and, along with his boss, President Richard Nixon, dramatically altering the terms of that 40-year conflict by opening relations with communist China in 1972.
As Nixon’s national security advisor and then secretary of state, two roles he combined, Kissinger was also possibly the most successful Mideast negotiator ever, creating the art of “shuttle diplomacy” that produced four Arab-Israeli agreements. In doing so, he “established a new American-led order in that turbulent part of the world and laid the foundations for Arab-Israeli peace,” wrote veteran Middle East negotiator Martin Indyk, author of the book Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy.
In the view of some biographers, Kissinger ranks in stature with George Kennan, the principal author of America’s successful Cold War containment strategy, as well as with other hallowed architects of the post-World War II global system. “The structure of peace that Kissinger designed places him with Henry Stimson, George Marshall, and Dean Acheson atop the pantheon of modern American statesmen,” Walter Isaacson wrote in his 1992 biography of Kissinger. “In addition, he was the foremost American negotiator of this century and, along with George Kennan, the most influential foreign policy intellectual.”
Former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz (right) pushes away protesters shouting “Arrest Henry Kissinger for war crimes” as Kissinger watches prior to the two testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington on Jan. 29, 2015. Win McNamee/Getty Images
Yet Kissinger also came to be reviled, especially by liberals, for practicing what they regard as a cold-blooded projection of American power that contributed to countless deaths. At Nixon’s side, he supported the disastrous bombing of Cambodia that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and its monstrous slaughter of more than a million people. Following the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, Kissinger completed peace talks with Vietnam that won him a Nobel Peace Prize but ultimately led to the humiliating North Vietnamese takeover just two years later in America’s worst defeat in a war until that point.
Kissinger also backed the 1973 coup d’etat against elected President Salvador Allende in Chile, who was considered friendly to communism, and turned a cold eye to the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh. Nixon and Kissinger stood behind Pakistani generals as they sought to prevent independence by East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) and armed them, in violation of U.S. law, as they oversaw the mass slaughter and rape of Bengalis. Gary Bass, a political scholar at Princeton, later characterized this episode as “among the darkest chapters in the cold war.” Declassified White House tapes and documents quoted by Bass show that, in internal meetings at the time, Kissinger expressed contempt for those who “bleed” for the “dying Bengalis.”
In his 2001 book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, the late Christopher Hitchens argued that Kissinger should be prosecuted under international law for “ordering and sanctioning the destruction of civilian populations, the assassination of inconvenient politicians, the kidnapping and disappearance of soldiers and journalists and clerics who got in his way.”
Kissinger poses for a portrait in the Situation Room at the White House in Washington in 1969 while national security advisor to U.S. President Richard Nixon. Wally McNamee/Corbis via Getty Images
Born Heinz Kissinger in Furth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, Kissinger was forever haunted by the breakdown of order in Weimar Germany and the rise of the Nazis, who killed much of his family. Exiled to the United States , he embraced his new country with passionate zeal and yet never abandoned his admiration for European-style realpolitik, just as he never lost his heavy Bavarian accent.
His hero in international affairs was Otto von Bismarck, the fabled “iron chancellor” who, as Kissinger later wrote, “urged that foreign policy had to be based not on sentiment but on an assessment of strength.” As Isaacson noted, “That would also become one of Kissinger’s guiding principles.”
An academic star at Harvard, Kissinger became known both for his brilliance and his ambitiousness in wangling his way into the confidence of rising U.S. leaders, starting with John Kennedy, then Nelson Rockefeller, and finally Nixon, whose notorious insecurities were sometimes rivaled by Kissinger’s own. Kissinger often displayed an incendiary temper behind the scenes, and he was ever at work trying to sideline rivals such as William Rogers, Nixon’s first secretary of state.
Kissinger also became, to the chagrin of Nixon and his many rivals in government, an international celebrity, squiring Hollywood actresses to movie openings and fancy restaurants. Power, Kissinger famously said, “is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” At one point, when Marlon Brando, star of The Godfather, declined to show up for the film’s premiere in 1972, producer Robert Evans prevailed on Kissinger to appear in Brando’s place, as the only celebrity with sufficient star power to do so.
Yet it was as a scholar and a persuader par excellence that Kissinger left his most enduring mark. After completing a doctoral dissertation at Harvard that dissected the successful 19th century realism of Klemens von Metternich and Lord Castlereagh, Kissinger first achieved some renown with his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which improbably hit the bestseller list. The book argued in favor of limited nuclear war, a view Kissinger later disavowed.
He supported the Vietnam war—even though scholar Barry Gewen notes that Kissinger had concluded as early as 1965, after a visit, that the war was futile—but also brilliantly calibrated its draining effects on American power. Thus, he launched the era of detente and nuclear-reduction talks with the Soviets, angering many conservatives.
At the same time, however, Kissinger blindsided Moscow in 1972 by launching an unprecedented rapprochement with communist China, with which the USSR had split. According to some scholars, this may have helped prevent the outbreak of war with the Soviets at a time when Washington was distracted and split by domestic turmoil.
Nixon and Kissinger attend a sports event with Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in Beijing on Feb. 23, 1972, during an official visit in China.XINHUA/AFP via Getty Images
Kissinger accepts food from Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai during a state banquet in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 1973. Bettmann Archive via Getty Images
It was a moment in history uniquely suited to Kissinger and his equally realist-minded boss, Nixon. Both men came to realize earlier than most that the 1960s concepts of monolithic communism and the domino theory, by which successive nations would inevitably topple to the communists, were unsound. As Gewen wrote in his 2020 book, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World, “Once the idea of a monolithic communism was discarded, what sounder policy could there be for two Realpolitikers than to play the feuding Communists off against one another?”
“Detente was ultimately driven by the Vietnam War, by the sense of overreach,” said Charles Kupchan, a scholar of international affairs at Georgetown University. “Kissinger and Nixon saw the need to, one, retrench, and two, lower the temperature when it came to the Cold War. They were largely successful at this, especially in moving China out of the enemy column.” He added, “Kissinger thought strategically in a way that some other important figures have not. When it comes to U.S. statecraft, I often think there is a problem of too much policy and not enough strategy. Kissinger was someone who reversed that.”
And yet Kissinger also became renowned for his personal touch, winning over foreign leaders and diplomats with his charm, humor, and mastery of history. It helped, of course, that he never seemed terribly bothered by the abuses of the dictators with whom he negotiated.
The two foreign leaders Kissinger came to admire most, according to Isaacson, were Premier Zhou Enlai of China and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, whom Kissinger considered a “prophet” for his willingness to engage in talks with the Israelis. During Kissinger’s first attempt at shuttle diplomacy in 1974, Sadat brought him to a tropical garden by his presidential villa and “beneath a mango tree, kissed him,” Isaacson wrote. “You are not only my friend,” Sadat told the startled secretary of state. “You are my brother.” Kissinger later joked to the press corps that “the reason the Israelis don’t get better treatment is because they don’t kiss me.”
Despite the controversy that surrounded him, Kissinger never really lost his reputation as America’s preeminent foreign-policy expert. In the decades before his death, both Republicans and Democrats, along with many world leaders, sought his counsel. Kissinger bolstered this reputational rebirth with a tireless output of memoirs, books, and articles that some scholars consider to be the most exhaustive and profound elucidation of foreign policy by any American expert.
Considered America’s foremost realist, Kissinger also proved prescient in his skepticism about the world-changing Wilsonian idealism—essentially the notion that Washington can reorder the world in America’s image—that has so often characterized U.S. foreign policy. More clearly than most, he saw Wilsonianism’s pitfalls even as he conceded that it formed the “bedrock” of American foreign policy.
Nowhere has he been more vindicated than in his skepticism that, after the Cold War, the spread of democracy would prove a panacea. As Gewen noted, Kissinger foresaw that the end of the Cold War would not lead to the triumph of American-style liberal democratic capitalism, but was more “in the nature of a brilliant sunset.”
This proved especially true for China—the country Kissinger came to know best—as developments in the last decade or so have shown. Successive administrations, starting with Bill Clinton, sought to co-opt China into the post-Cold War system of global markets and emerging democracies, what Kissinger once called “the age-old American dream of a peace achieved by the conversion of the adversary.” But China, along with post-Soviet Russia, has become the driving force behind a new era of autocracy and suppression of human rights.
Kissinger meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Nov. 8, 2018. Thomas Peter/Getty Images
The only reasonable approach to China and other major powers, Kissinger long argued, was a brand of realpolitik that did not seek to solve the world’s problems in an idealistic way, but rather to manage them through a careful tending of the ever-changing balance of power. “The task for policymakers in his view is a modest, essentially negative one,” Gewen wrote. “Not to steer the world along some preordained path to universal justice but to pit power against power to rein in the assorted aggressions of human beings and to try, as best they can, to avert disaster.”
The key to his approach was to identify achievable goals rather than permanent solutions. Or as Indyk put it, “For Kissinger, peacemaking diplomacy was a process designed to ameliorate conflicts between competing powers, not resolve them.”
Kissinger himself defined this realist philosophy in Diplomacy, his 1994 masterwork. “International systems live precariously,” he wrote. “Every ‘world order’ expresses an aspiration to permanence … Yet the elements which comprise it are in constant flux. Indeed, with each century, the duration of international systems has been shrinking.”
This would be especially true of the 21st century. He added, “Never before have the components of world order, their capacity to interact, and their goals all changed so rapidly, so deeply, or so globally.”
Kissinger concluded, “In the next century, American leaders will have to articulate for their public a concept of the national interest and explain how that interest is served—in Europe and in Asia—by the maintenance of the balance of power. America will need partners to preserve equilibrium in several regions of the world, and these partners can not be chosen on the basis of moral considerations alone.”
Kissinger was fearful toward the end of his life that Washington, by taking a confrontational approach to both China and Russia on moral or ideological grounds, might be in danger of isolating itself and resurrecting the old alliance between Beijing and Moscow. In 2018, he reportedly counseled then-President Donald Trump to try to work more closely with Russia to counter China.
At the same time, Kissinger also warned that by launching a new Cold War against China, Washington might be creating an even greater danger than it faced against the Soviet Union. The USSR, he said in May 2021 at the McCain Institute’s Sedona Forum, “didn’t have developmental technological capacity as China does. China is a huge economic power in addition to being a significant military power.”
In one of his last essays, written for the Economist after America’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, Kissinger yet again warned against an excess of idealistic zeal about changing the world for the better. He harked back to the nation’s previous counterinsurgency failure in Vietnam and diagnosed Washington’s failures in terms that fit his lifelong approach to foreign policy:
“The United States has torn itself apart in its counterinsurgent efforts because of its inability to define attainable goals and to link them in a way that is sustainable by the American political process. The military objectives have been too absolute and unattainable and the political ones too abstract and elusive,” he wrote. “The failure to link them to each other has involved America in conflicts without definable terminal points and caused us internally to dissolve unified purpose in a swamp of domestic controversies.”
Kissinger in his office on Park Avenue in New York on May 10, 2011. David Howells/Corbis via Getty Images
Until the end, Kissinger was hard at work trying to figure out the world. In a series of writings culminating in The Age of AI, a 2021 book he coauthored with former Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he expressed his deep concerns that things were going in the wrong direction.
Ironically for a statesman who, for most of his career, had been accused of ignoring moral considerations, his main worry was the loss of the human element. He worried that the paradigm that ruled since the Enlightenment—the primacy of human reason—was being overturned and, as he put it in an essay in the Atlantic, too many decisions were now “relying on machines powered by data and algorithms and ungoverned by ethical or philosophical norms.”
With his grave demeanor and rumbling German accent, Kissinger could often seem aloof. But he was a close student of humanity, both broadly and narrowly defined, and throughout his career he excelled by studying closely the character of the leaders with whom he negotiated. He was at work on a last book summing up these experiences at the time of his death.
In an interview with me in 2000, after the death of Syrian dictator Hafez Assad, Kissinger tended to gloss over the dictator’s bloody history but otherwise frankly assessed his strengths and weaknesses. “His success was in managing to stay in office for 30 years, which was not a mean achievement,” Kissinger said. “He was a man of survival and small increments. He was not a man of huge departures … What he lacked was to transcend the environment in which he grew up.”
Kissinger himself proved a man of huge departures, yet in some ways his assessment of Assad could be applied to him as well, at least in terms of whether he truly transcended his native environment. Throughout his life, Kissinger remained the European exile, the student of Bismarck and Metternich, even as he passionately embraced America and deftly manipulated—for better and worse—the morality-based power politics of his adopted country.
“He was much more aware of morals in foreign policy than he’s been given credit for,” said Joseph Nye, the diplomat and political scientist who was Kissinger’s student—and later became a political rival—at Harvard. “He knew that order rests on the balance of power and, at the same time, legitimacy. His wasn’t a crude realpolitik. It was a sophisticated realpolitik.”
It is this complex legacy that Kissinger leaves behind, for the United States and for the world.
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