Henry Kissinger: US Loses ‘One Of The Most Dependable’ Voices On Foreign Affairs

The former secretary of state under Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, has died. His consulting firm Kissinger Associates said on Wednesday he died at his home in Connecticut and would be interred at a private family service, and that there would be a memorial in New York later.

The diplomat has advised several heads of state over his career, including the incumbent President Joe Biden, and received a shared Nobel prize for negotiating the Paris treaty that ended the Vietnam war. The Vietnamese negotiator refused to accept the honour, however.

Henry Kissinger Shaped Decades Of US Foreign Policy

Kissinger was 100. A giant of the Republican party, he remained influential until the end of his life, in large part thanks to the authorship of several books on international affairs and the founding in 1982 of his geopolitical consulting firm in New York City.

Tributes for Kissinger have poured in. Former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Kissinger was “endlessly generous with the wisdom gained over the course of an extraordinary life,” while George W Bush said the US “lost one of the most dependable” voices on foreign affairs.

However, some netizens celebrated his demise, highlighting the victims of his bombing campaigns. The celebrity diplomat’s 1973 peace prize was highly contentious as it was revealed that he had supported Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia in 1969.

During a CBS interview in the leadup to his 100th birthday in May 2023 about those who viewed his foreign policy as a kind of “criminality”, Kissinger said “that’s a reflection of their ignorance.” “It wasn’t conceived that way. It wasn’t conducted that way.”

Understanding The Nobel Peace Prize Winner’s Legacy

Kissinger’s legacy differs on the political and intellectual right and left. On the right, he is seen as a master diplomat, a brilliant statesman, an exponent of power politics deployed to the benefit of America, the country he and his family fled to on leaving Nazi Germany in 1938.

On the left, hostility burns over his record on Pakistan, where he and Nixon turned a blind eye to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands; on Chile, where the CIA instigated the overthrow of Salvatore Allende; on Cyprus; on the Middle East; on East Timor and more.