ANALYSIS – Henry Kissinger, a Jew who fled Nazi Germany with his family as a teenager, before becoming a Harvard academic and dominating U.S. national security policy for years, has died at 100.
In his roles as national security advisor and secretary of state under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford left an indelible mark on U.S. foreign policy and earned him a controversial Nobel Peace Prize.
In his later years cultivated the reputation of respected statesman, giving speeches, offering advice to Republicans and Democrats alike and managing Kissinger Associates, a global consulting business.
While many hailed Kissinger for his brilliance and broad experience, others branded him a war criminal for his support for anti-communist dictatorships, especially in Latin America. More specifically, for reportedly backing the 1973 military coup in Chile by General Augusto Pinochet against the democratically elected (just barely), but aggressively Marxist president, Salvador Allende.
The latter is a criticism I strongly disagree with.
In my view, Kissinger helped save Latin America from brutal communist domination, even if at a high cost.
Going back to his initial rise to prominence, with the Cold War at its height, Kissinger became national security advisor under Nixon in 1968.
In 1969, for the first time, the United States and the USSR agreed to significantly slow the nuclear arms race with the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). Many argued that this only allowed the Soviet Union to catch up to the United States and then push beyond.
Kissinger's détente strategy with the USSR weakened the U.S. under Jimmy Carter, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan, and his strong pushback that ultimately led to the Soviet Union's collapse.
Meanwhile, the Vietnam War had settled into a deadly stalemate, dividing America. Denounced by the left and on college campuses for the bombing and secret allied invasion of Cambodia in April 1970, he intended to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines to communist forces in South Vietnam.
With then rising domestic opposition to the war after the Tet Offensive of 1968, Kissinger led peace talks, which allowed the U.S. military to make what appeared to be a secure and dignified withdrawal in 1973 after eight years of conflict.
This, in contrast to the bloody debacle that was the Afghan retreat under Joe Biden in August 2021. Critics note that both Nixon and Kissinger knew South Vietnam would eventually fall but wanted a ‘decent interval' to pass before it did.
That might have been avoided or prolonged significantly had the U.S. kept backing the South fully as it did during the 1972 Easter Offensive by the North. Most U.S. combat troops had already left the country, but U.S. air and naval forces pounded the North into retreating.
By 1974, and Nixon's resignation, America's commitment to back South Vietnam with U.S. air and naval power against the North, had evaporated and a Democrat Congress cut U.S. funding for the South by half.
The end came with the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Instigated in large part by Kissinger, the Nixon administration had already made a diplomatic rapprochement with mainland China to strengthen America's position in Asia. The Communists had won control in 1949, estranging the U.S. After Kissinger's secret negotiations with Premier Zhou Enlai, Nixon took a spectacular trip to China in February 1972 to seal the new relationship.
Some argue this was a brilliant move to soften the blow of America's withdrawal from Vietnam, while effectively countering the Soviet Union. Others fault the move as the first step toward our current ‘made by U.S.' China threat, which was jump started by Bill Clinton in the late 1990s.
Over the years, Kissinger became more openly soft on Communist China, encouraging engagement over confrontation.
Then there's the Middle East. In October 1973, Israeli officials telephoned Kissinger to say that they were fighting off a multinational, multi-front invasion. Egyptian forces attacked the Sinai while the Syrian army was in Israel's north.
The so-called fourth Arab Israeli War (‘Yom Kippur War' or ‘1973 War') had begun. Nixon dispatched Kissinger to negotiate with Israel, Egypt, and Syria – Kissinger's famous “shuttle diplomacy.”
He is credited with helping save Israel by preventing Soviet troops from entering the conflict by having Nixon place U.S. nuclear forces on higher alert.
He also helped negotiate the end to the war through a cease-fire.
Kissinger's power initially grew during Watergate, when the highly political foreign policy wonk assumed a kind of co-president role to the weakened Nixon. Kissinger's reign as the prime architect of U.S. foreign policy waned though with Nixon's resignation in 1974.
Still, he continued to be a diplomatic force as secretary of state under Nixon's successor, President Gerald Ford, and to offer strong opinions throughout the rest of his life.
Was Kissinger an American villain or a brilliant hero or both? I will let you decide.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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