Henry A. Kissinger, who died on Wednesday at 100, was one of the most consequential statesmen in U.S. history. Though his greatest triumphs occurred a half-century ago, his legacy is complex, contested and contains lessons that should inform Americans facing complicated foreign policy challenges now.
In less than four years during the early 1970s, Mr. Kissinger brokered the opening of relations between the United States and China, the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, major arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union, and Israeli-Arab accords that made the United States the dominant power in the Middle East.
While forging and defending this policy of “detente” — the easing of tensions with the Soviet Union — Mr. Kissinger also pursued what he regarded as a zero-sum contest for global influence with the Soviets, spurring him to what he once privately described, late in life, as his proudest achievement: the negotiation of disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Syria following their 1973 war.
Rather than rely on multilateral forums, the then-secretary of state invented “shuttle diplomacy” and personally brokered the deals, which had the benefit of excluding Moscow. In the aftermath, a once-formidable Soviet presence in the Middle East withered, and the United States became the region’s arbitrating power — a state of affairs that has endured into the 21st century.
Mr. Kissinger’s triumphs, as well as his errors, stemmed from his embrace of a realist school of foreign policy. Like Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich, who forged the post-Napoleonic order in Europe and was a subject of his Harvard Phd dissertation, Mr. Kissinger believed that peace was best achieved by balancing the interests of great states.
“We moved toward China to shape a global equilibrium,” he wrote. “It was not to collude against the Soviet Union but to give us a balancing position to use for constructive ends — to give each Communist power a stake in better relations with us.”
Indeed, even as he orchestrated President Richard M. Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972, Mr. Kissinger was sealing a landmark deal with Moscow limiting strategic nuclear weapons.
In 1978, a Post editorial described what many of President Jimmy Carter’s critics felt was missing from Mr. Carter’s foreign policy: “the sense of design, of architecture, of knowing what he was doing, that Henry Kissinger conveyed widely, even to detractors.”
There were many of those. In Mr. Kissinger’s relentless pursuit of what he perceived as U.S. interests, he was accused of appeasing dictators and abetting war crimes. Mr. Kissinger enabled and encouraged some of the worst offenses of Nixon, including the secret bombing of Cambodia. He also supported a U.S. effort to topple Chile’s elected socialist president and backed Pakistan’s bloody assault on Bangladesh.
Though he recognized even before joining the Nixon administration in 1969 that the United States could not win the war in Vietnam, Mr. Kissinger supported its continuation for years in the name of preserving U.S. “credibility” vis-a-vis the Soviets.
The 1972 deal he negotiated to withdraw U.S. troops was designed to salvage American prestige by providing a “decent interval” between that disengagement and the inevitable collapse of South Vietnam.
When the end came in 1975, Mr. Kissinger appropriately offered to return the Nobel Peace Prize he had been awarded.
NOTING HIS ERRORS is not to downplay Mr. Kissinger’s significance, but to prove it. His diplomacy set the stage for some of the most momentous developments of the late 20th century: the collapse of the Soviet Union; the transformation of China into a global power, propelled by the greatest reduction of poverty in human history; the deep entanglement of the United States in the Middle East.
Indeed, Mr. Kissinger’s heyday was a time when the secretary of state could strike grand bargains that seem elusive to U.S. leaders today. Such a time seems long distant. In his later years, Mr. Kissinger commented on foreign affairs, but spent much time contending with the promise — and perils — of artificial intelligence.
BUT EVEN IF opportunities for sweeping diplomacy seem fewer, Mr. Kissinger’s legacy contains lessons as immediate as ever.
