Kissinger’s critics complained that the deals he had agreed had led to no moderation in Soviet behaviour, while, at least according to the hawks, Moscow had been allowed to pull ahead in the arms race. The idea that the détente with the Soviet Union meant the end of the Cold War turned out to be premature. South Vietnam had fallen to the North, the American engagement ending with the spectacular evacuation of personnel from the top of the US Embassy in Saigon.

It was Kissinger, first as the President’s National Security Advisor and then as Secretary of State, who led the negotiations on strategic arms control with the Soviet Union as part of an effort to get a détente between the superpowers, who made a secret journey to Beijing to set up Nixon’s historic visit to China in February 1972, who found a way to get a peace agreement to the end the Vietnam War (and with it an unlikely Nobel Peace prize), and then forged the agreements between Israel and its enemies after the October 1973 War, Egypt, and Syria, that brought a degree of peace to the Middle East.īy the time he completed his time as Secretary of State at the start of 1977 the record did not appear to be so lustrous. There was a time in the mid-1970s when he was feted for taking bold foreign policy initiatives even as President Nixon struggled with the Watergate scandal and then as the inadvertent successor, Gerald Ford, sought to turn himself into a credible replacement. To say that Henry Kissinger excites mixed emotions is an understatement.

Henry alfred kissinger world order