- He was a genius but a controversial one, ominous for world peace
He was a cosmic character who played a largely controversial role in shaping history and reshaping the world. When Henry Kissinger exited the stage on November 29, aged 100, the commentaries on his departure were a mix of approbation and denigration.
Between 1969 and 1977, his positions as national security advisor and secretary of state under United States (US) President Richard Nixon, and his continuation as secretary of state under Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, served as platforms for practicalising his own ideas on international relations. In the period, he was highly influential in the formulation and implementation of US foreign policy.
To his credit, he initiated détente with the Soviet Union, explored friendship with China, employed shuttle diplomacy towards ending hostilities in the Middle East, and negotiated the peace accords that ended American involvement in the Vietnam War.
He was controversially a co-winner of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, for helping to achieve a ceasefire and US withdrawal from Vietnam. The other awardee, a prominent Vietnamese diplomat and politician, Le Duc Tho, rejected the award. Interestingly, Kissinger did not attend the award ceremony, donated his prize money to charity, and offered to return his prize medal.
To his discredit, however, was his association with controversial US policies, particularly its bombing of Cambodia, involvement in the 1973 Chilean coup, support for Argentina’s military junta, support for Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, and support for Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War and Bangladesh genocide.
He was accused of war crimes involving mass killings of civilians caused by the policies he favoured, backing US support for dictatorial regimes, and denialism concerning human rights abuses by the US and its allies.
A champion of Realpolitik, he once said in a 1972 interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, “If I were to let myself be disturbed by the reactions of the public… I would accomplish nothing.” After giving such a revealing insight into his approach to international politics, an embarrassed Kissinger later claimed that it was “the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press.”
Notably, a 2014 poll of American international relations scholars ranked Kissinger as the most effective secretary of state in the 50 years prior to 2015.
Born in Germany, he followed an unlikely path to fame. His German-Jewish family fled Germany in the face of Nazi antisemitism, in 1938, when he was 15. They eventually arrived in New York City, in America, after a stop in London. His childhood experiences in Germany are believed to have influenced the formation of his pragmatic approach to foreign policy. He had described it as a place that “had a great deal of order and very little justice.”
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In America, he was drafted into the US Army in 1943, which interrupted his education. He became a US citizen that year. He earned a degree in Political Science from Harvard College in 1950, and a master’s and doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard University in 1951 and 1954, respectively.
As an academic, he worked in Harvard’s Department of Government where he served as the director of the Harvard International Seminar between 1951 and 1971. He was also study director in nuclear weapons and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in 1955/1956. He released his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in 1957. The controversial book proposed the use of tactical nuclear weapons on a regular basis to win wars.
By the time Kissinger was appointed national security advisor in 1969, according to his official biographer, he was possibly “one of the most important theorists about foreign policy ever to be produced by the United States of America.”
After his power years, he founded Kissinger Associates, an international geopolitical consulting firm that sustained his relevance.
Author of over a dozen books on diplomatic history and international relations, he demonstrated remarkable mental fecundity at an advanced age. He published The Age of AI: And Our Human Future in 2021, and Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy in 2022.
