For nearly a decade, Henry Kissinger, the US national security adviser and secretary of state who has died at 100, was able to put into practice what he had preached in his academic career — that realpolitik diplomacy was rooted in the understanding that achieving a balance of power, as was in place between the demise of Napoleon and the tumult of 1848, required taking the interests of all parties into consideration, but not necessarily the interests of those not holding power.
Under US presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford from 1969 to 1977, Kissinger was unquestionably the dominant international statesman of his time. His every sentence was parsed around the world and his travels keenly followed. He appeared to provide a plausible US foreign policy road map for a domestic audience and a network of US allies as they both looked to Washington for assurance and leadership at the height of the cold war between two nuclear superpowers.
Yet, with the passage of time and hindsight, Kissinger became both revered and reviled. He came into office confronting three big regional problems: Asia (the Vietnam war and China under the imponderable Mao Zedong), the Soviet Union (the adversary in the cold war) and the Middle East (oil, a perennial powder keg). His successful rapprochement with China, a Nixon idea that Kissinger implemented and a staggering achievement by any standards, was offset by his secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam war. Certainly in 1968 he had done his best to undermine the existing peace talks in Paris, thereby helping Nixon’s presidential campaign. Nonetheless, in 1973 he was controversially awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Le Duc Tho, his North Vietnamese counterpart — a premature accolade because hostilities did not end until the fall of Saigon in 1975.