Andrew Bacevich, historian and co-founder of the Quincy Institute
I met Kissinger just once, at a small gathering in New York back in the 1990s. When the event adjourned, he walked over to where I was sitting and spoke to me. ”Did you serve in the military?” ”Yes,” I said. ”In Vietnam?” ”Yes.” His tone filled with sadness, he said: ”We really wanted to win that one.”
I did not reply but as he walked away, I thought: What an accomplished liar.
George Beebe, Director of Grand Strategy, Quincy Institute
Henry Kissinger’s impact on American foreign policy, although controversial, was on balance overwhelmingly positive. As he entered office in 1968, America was overextended abroad and beset by domestic political conflict. An increasingly powerful Soviet Union threatened to achieve superiority over America’s nuclear and conventional arsenals. The United States needed to extract itself from Vietnam and focus on domestic healing, yet any retreat into isolationism would allow Moscow a free hand to intimidate Western Europe and spread communism through the post-colonial world.
Kissinger’s answer to this problem, conceived in partnership with President Nixon, was a masterwork of diplomatic realism. Seeing an opportunity to exploit tensions between Moscow and Beijing, he orchestrated a surprise opening to Maoist China that reshaped the international order, counterbalancing Soviet power and complicating the Kremlin’s strategic challenge. In parallel, the United States pursued détente with Moscow, producing a landmark set of trade, arms control, human rights, and confidence-building arrangements that helped to constrain the arms race and make the Cold War more manageable and predictable. Läs artikel