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“Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the diplomat with the thick glasses and gravelly voice who dominated foreign policy as the United States extricated itself from Vietnam and broke down barriers with China, died Wednesday, his consulting firm said. He was 100.” AP News
The right praises Kissinger’s career, arguing that his efforts made America safer.
“A grandmaster of classical balance of power, he exploited the Sino–Soviet rift in 1972 by tacitly backing the (then) lesser of the two evils, China, to break away what was at the time an existential threat for the United States…
“The blame for the rise of China is often unduly levied on Kissinger, when it should be on lesser administrations that came after. It is they who wrecked the ‘peace dividend’ by hollowing out America’s manufacturing base in the ’90s, afflicted with a bout of liberal idealism, and who lost sight of the importance of playing Russia and China against each other.”
Sumantra Maitra, American Conservative
“When he was appointed National Security Adviser by Richard Nixon in January 1969, the United States was losing the cold war, utterly split domestically over Vietnam, on the retreat across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and failing to show leadership to the rest of the free world…
“The next four years saw full-scale war in the Middle East, OPEC's quadrupling of the oil price, the Watergate scandal, Palestinian hijackings and the Munich Olympics massacre, West Germany pursuing its own Ostpolitik appeasement of the USSR, a Pakistani civil war. Throughout, Henry provided the American leadership necessary to keep the western alliance from disintegrating.”
Andrew Roberts, Washington Free Beacon
“His 1973 peace agreement with North Vietnam that ended the U.S. participation in the war is often mocked because the North overran the South two years later. But Kissinger and Nixon inherited the unpopular war from Lyndon Johnson and had little choice other than to manage U.S. withdrawal. Kissinger’s strategy was to negotiate a settlement that allowed the South to take over its own defenses without half a million U.S. troops…
“Kissinger has long argued, rightly we think, that the South would have survived if Congress hadn’t abandoned support. And Lee Kuan Yew, the late leader of Singapore, often said that U.S. support for South Vietnam gave the countries of Southeast Asia the time to build resistance to Communists in their countries. They are freer today because of it…
“The left also blames Kissinger for supporting dictators. But the alternatives then, as now, weren’t usually democrats of the left’s imagining. They were often Communists who would have aligned themselves with the Soviets, as Fidel Castro did in Cuba… Kissinger wasn’t responsible for Augusto Pinochet’s coup or its bloody excesses. Chile eventually became a democracy and free-market success. Cuba remains a dictatorship.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
The left criticizes Kissinger for supporting policies that resulted in the deaths of large numbers of people.
The left criticizes Kissinger for supporting policies that resulted in the deaths of large numbers of people.
“Kissinger’s record influencing Vietnam policy began even before he joined the Nixon administration. While serving as an adviser to the Johnson-Hubert Humphrey administration in the Paris Peace Talks of 1968, Kissinger fed confidential information from the proceedings to Nixon's campaign, which in turn passed the intelligence along to the South Vietnamese government. This contributed to the scuttling of the talks, and the continuation of the war for seven more years…
“The Paris talks would drag on for four more years before ending on January 27, 1973, with a deal that provided for the removal of all US troops; Kissinger shared a Nobel Peace Prize for finalizing talks he had sabotaged over four years and at least 21,126 American combat deaths earlier (not to mention the untold tens of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao deaths that took place in those years). Within months, though, North and South Vietnam began fighting again, and two years after the accords North Vietnam invaded and annexed the South.”
Dylan Matthews, Vox
“He spearheaded the secret campaign to drop nearly 2.8 million tons of bombs on Cambodia, personally approving many of the raids. He marshaled the U.S. behind Augusto Pinochet’s plot to overthrow Salvador Allende, Chile’s lawfully elected democratic socialist, and the resulting reign of terror during which thousands of Chileans were tortured, killed, and ‘disappeared.’…
“He backed the genocide of Bengali Hindus in 1971, a barbaric rampage of rape and murder that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, because it was committed by a Pakistani regime deemed friendly to the U.S. The list of Kissinger-assisted atrocities goes on: sabotaging peace talks with Vietnam, supporting a junta in Argentina, approving Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor—acts that, taken together, cost hundreds of thousands more civilian lives.”
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
“The generous defense is that Mr. Kissinger represented an ethos that saw the ends (the defeat of the Soviet Union and revolutionary Communism) as justifying the means. But for huge swaths of the world, this mind-set carried a brutal message that America has often conveyed to its own marginalized populations: We care about democracy for us, not for them. Shortly before Mr. Allende’s victory, Mr. Kissinger said, ‘The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.’…
“Over the decades, our story about democracy has come to ring hollow to a growing number of people who can point to the places where our actions drained our words of meaning.”
Ben Rhodes, New York Times
