Henry Kissinger, who died on Wednesday, helped to extricate the United States from Vietnam and broke down barriers with China. But he also helped to prop up bloody military dictatorships, claiming they would put the brakes on communism. Photo / AP
Henry Kissinger, who died on Wednesday, helped to extricate the United States from Vietnam and broke down barriers with China. But he also helped to prop up bloody military dictatorships, claiming they would put the brakes on communism. Photo / AP
The death of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger drew both admiration and scorn from world leaders, highlighting the complicated legacy of Kissinger’s views about what it meant to serve America’s interests during the Cold War and how the country should exert its influence.
Kissinger, who died on Wednesday aged 100, was one of America’s most powerful diplomats. During his years serving Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, he shaped foreign policy in ways that led to breakthroughs, including normalising US-China relations and advancing detente with the Soviet Union.
But during Kissinger’s tenure the US also overlooked the rise of brutal regimes in other countries and critics argue his approach ran counter to democratic ideals and left lasting damage throughout the world.
Current US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who said he was among those who sought Kissinger’s counsel over the years, said that “to serve as America’s chief diplomat today is to move through a world that bears Henry’s lasting imprint – from the relationships he forged, to the tools he pioneered, to the architecture he built”.
Blinken’s tone was echoed by others who hold or held high-ranking positions, including former President George W Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, China’s President Xi Jinping and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby called Kissinger’s passing a “huge loss”.
“This was a man – whether you agreed with him or not, whether you hold the same views or not – he served in World War II, bravely in uniform, and for decades afterwards, which we can all be grateful for and appreciate, just the public service,” Kirby said.
“And again, whether you saw eye to eye with him on every issue, there’s no question that he shaped foreign policy decisions for decades and he certainly had an impact on America’s role in the world.”
For some, that impact led to improved relations, such as when his diplomacy helped end the 1973 war between Israel, Egypt and Syria.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said Kissinger “laid the cornerstone of the peace agreement, which (was) later signed with Egypt, and so many other processes around the world I admire”.
Many in China mourned his passing on social media. State broadcaster CCTV shared an old segment showing Kissinger’s first secret visit to China in 1971, when he broached the possibility of establishing US-China relations and met then-Premier Zhou Enlai.
Henry Kissinger in 2007 with Joe Biden, who was then chairman of the US Senate's foreign relations committee. Photo / AP
But across South America, Kissinger is remembered as a key figure who helped prop up bloody military dictatorships, claiming they would put the brakes on socialism in the region.
Documents have shown Kissinger’s and Nixon’s support for the 1973 coup that deposed Chilean President Salvador Allende. General Augusto Pinochet’s subsequent dictatorship went on to violate human rights, murder opponents, cancel elections, restrict the media, suppress unions and disband political parties.
“A man has died whose historical brilliance never managed to conceal his profound moral misery,” Chile’s ambassador to the US, Juan Gabriel Valdes, wrote on X. Chile’s leftist President Gabriel Boric reposted the message.
US Congressman Jim McGovern, a Democrat, posted a remembrance on X for “all the lives Henry Kissinger destroyed with terrible violence he unleashed in countries like Chile, Vietnam, Argentina, East Timor, Cambodia and Bangladesh”. McGovern also wrote that he never understood why people revered Kissinger.
Kissinger also “heedlessly extended and expanded” the war in Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia came to “symbolise his ruthless hypocrisy when claiming to support American democracy”, according to journalist Elizabeth Becker, who covered Cambodia before the 1975 Khmer Rouge takeover and wrote When the War was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution.
“And to what end? Ultimately, no dominoes fell to communism. The only country communist Vietnam invaded was communist Cambodia to overthrow Pol Pot,” Becker said.
In Africa, Kissinger’s legacy for many suffers from his official visit to apartheid South Africa in 1976, a few months after the regime’s police killed more than 170 black protesters, most of them schoolchildren, in the Soweto uprising.
At the time, the US was allied with South Africa as a buffer against Soviet influence in the region. Kissinger saw South Africa as “merely a gambit in the game of the Cold War”, said John Stremlau, a professor of international relations at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
For all his efforts to keep Soviet influence from expanding, among those lauding Kissinger’s legacy was Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin said in a message to Kissinger’s wife that he was “a wise and far-sighted statesman” and his name “is inextricably linked with a pragmatic foreign policy line, which at one time made it possible to achieve detente in international tensions and reach the most important Soviet-American agreements that contributed to the strengthening of global security”.
