Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, who escaped Nazi Germany in his youth to become one of the most influential and controversial figures in the history of American foreign policy, has died at the age of 100 years old. Kissinger died Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, according to a statement from his consulting firm, Kissinger Associates. The cause of the death of one of the key figures in understanding the USA as a power in the unipolar world was not revealed.
Who Was Henry Kissinger?
Henry Kissinger was the great reference of United States foreign policy for several decades. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for helping negotiate an end to US military involvement in the Vietnam War and is credited with secret diplomacy that helped President Richard Nixon open communist China to the United States and the West. highlighted by Nixon’s visit to the country in 1972. However, he was also disowned by many due to the bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, which led to the rise of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, and for his support of the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile.
In the Middle East, Kissinger carried out what became known as “back-and-forth diplomacy” to separate Israeli and Arab forces after the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. His détente approach to U.S.-Arab relations The Soviet Union, which helped ease tensions and led to several arms control agreements, largely guided the American posture until the Ronald Reagan era. However, many members of Congress rejected the murky approach of Nixon and Kissinger to foreign policy, and activist groups criticized Kissinger’s neglect of human rights in other countries.
No issue complicated Kissinger’s legacy more than the Vietnam War. When Nixon took office in 1969, after promising a “secret plan” to end the war, approximately 30,000 Americans had died in that country. A historical burden. Despite efforts to transfer more combat responsibilities to the South Vietnamese government, American involvement persisted throughout the Nixon administration; Critics accused Nixon and Kissinger of unnecessarily prolonging the war, and U.S. involvement ultimately ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975 and more than 58,000 American lives lost.
In a highly controversial decision, Kissinger shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho for the Paris Peace Accords of that year. Citing the lack of real peace in Vietnam, Tho refused to accept the prize, and two members of the Nobel committee resigned in protest at the award. National outrage in the United States over the war focused on the bombings in Laos and Cambodia, where the brutal Khmer Rouge movement used American bombing as a recruiting tool before coming to power and carrying out one of the worst genocides in the world. twentieth century.
Although his era as an influential architect of US foreign policy diminished with Nixon’s decline amid the Watergate scandal, Kissinger remained an independent actor whose reflections on diplomacy always found echo in the great circles of power.
This story was written in Spanish by Miguel Fernandez in Cultura Colectiva
