Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state who crafted foreign policy for Presidents Nixon and Ford, with an eye toward supporting friendly dictatorships that could help the US balance Soviet power, and helped direct a massive bombing campaign killing tens of thousands of Cambodians and Vietnamese, has died. He was 100.
Born to a Jewish family in Weimar Germany in 1923, Kissinger fled to New York City with his family in 1938 at the age of 15 to escape Nazi persecution. He would later fight against his birth country after being drafted into the US Army during World War II. He would retire as a sergeant and earn a Bronze Star for his service.
Before entering government, Kissinger was a tenured professor of government at Harvard. His academic work was influential in expounding a “realist” vision of foreign affairs, where great powers are forced to jockey to advance their material interests to cope with an anarchic international system, and great statesmen are needed to build a global order to prevent war between great powers.
In 1969, Kissinger left academia to serve as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser. In 1973 he became secretary of state, while preserving his earlier title. He continued to serve as secretary of state through the entirety of Gerald Ford’s presidency, though he relinquished the national security adviser title to his protégé Brent Scowcroft in 1975. Throughout, he emphasized support for dictatorships friendly to the US, like Indonesia’s Suharto and Pakistan’s Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, even as they engaged in wars killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Kissinger became well-known for his advocacy of “détente” with the Soviet Union, in which US-Soviet tensions were eased through arms control negotiations and other diplomatic outreach; while Soviet nuclear stockpiles doubled during Kissinger’s time in office, making it hard to argue that détente was succeeding in the near term, the SALT arms control talks he…
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