His polarizing years as the nation’s top diplomat reordered U.S. relations around the world.
Henry Kissinger, a ruthless practitioner of the art of realpolitik who had an outsize impact on global events and who won a premature Nobel Peace Prize for ending a war that kept going, has died.
A cunning, erudite strategist whose transformative diplomatic efforts helped to reshape the world, Kissinger was 100.
His death Wednesday was announced in a statement by his consulting firm.
The former secretary of State will be forever connected with President Richard M. Nixon, particularly for their efforts in three areas: getting America out of the Vietnam War, opening diplomatic relations with China, and reducing tensions with the Soviet Union. For decades thereafter, Kissinger’s work with Nixon and President Gerald Ford earned him the role of the Republican Party’s elder statesman when it came to foreign policy.
“The Middle American professional politician and the German-born Harvard professor,” wrote George C. Herring in “America’s Longest War” of Nixon and Kissinger, “could hardly have been more different in background, but they shared a love of power and a burning ambition to mold a fluid world in a way that would establish their place in history. Loners and outsiders in their own professions, they were perhaps naturally drawn to each other.”
In 1973, Kissinger shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Le Duc Tho, his North Vietnamese counterpart, for hammering out an agreement to end the Vietnam War. The accord, which was signed Jan. 27, 1973, had “brought a wave of joy and hope for peace over the entire world,” the Nobel committee said.
However, Tho declined to accept the prize, saying peace was not yet a reality, and the war rapidly flared up again, minus the American troops.
More significant in the long term was Nixon’s “opening” of China; Kissinger helped establish relations with communist government there. The duo also focused on “detente,” an effort to improve relations with the Soviet Union. These developments came about as Nixon and Kissinger played the two Communist superpowers off each other, a tactic that also helped extricate America from the quagmire in Vietnam.
“Our objective,” Kissinger once wrote, “was to purge our foreign policy of all sentimentality.”
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Henry Kissinger, America’s most famous diplomat, dies at 100 https://t.co/lvI8FBAL3J
— POLITICO (@politico) November 30, 2023
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