Henry Alfred Kissinger died Wednesday. The years were kind to Kissinger, who was the secretary of state under then-President Richard Nixon. He died at the age of 100; if his influence waned over the years, it never fully evaporated. History, however, may be less kind. The outpouring that accompanied his death was not so much grief as recognition that the end had finally come for a man who eluded death in a way that defied karma or cosmic justice.
Kissinger shaped decades of U.S. foreign policy. He was a refugee who climbed the ranks of power in a way few before or since have managed. He was a diplomat who helped negotiate the end of the Yom Kippur War, the architect of relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for ending the Vietnam War. He received that award after greenlighting the deaths of, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of civilians — a cruel irony that has only recently come to be acknowledged in the popular imagination.
Kissinger was a man for whom power and influence were resources for achieving his goals and, ultimately, goals unto themselves.
Kissinger was a man for whom power and influence were resources for achieving his goals and, ultimately, goals unto themselves. As an academic at Harvard University in the 1950s, he embraced the theory of realpolitik: the idea that a state should act with its pragmatic interests at the forefront of its policies. Concepts such as “human rights” and “democracy” could be weighed against whether a state was stronger or weaker than its peers. It’s not hard to see how he applied that maxim in his own life, as he sought to attach himself to those who could turn his theories into reality.
When Nixon won the presidency in 1968, Kissinger had spent the last several election cycles as a foreign policy adviser to Republican Nelson A. Rockefeller. But Nixon named Kissinger as his national security adviser, despite his bitter denunciations of Nixon…
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