2023-11-30 03:36:01
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger He died this Wednesday at the age of 100 in his home in Connecticut, the North American media reported.
“El Dr. Henry Kissinger, a respected American scholar and statesmandied today at his residence in Connecticut,” Kissinger Associates announced in a statement Wednesday night.
Born in German Bavaria in 1923, began his public career at the New York Academy and at Harvard, from where he went non-stop to the White House. He was Secretary of State under the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (1969-1977) and served as National Security Advisor during the former’s initial term.
His last participation in the public debate was about Ukraine. It was considered a key figure in American diplomacy in the post-World War II era. In fact, in 1973 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to the end of the Vietnam War.
Kissinger’s predominant role in the 60s and 70s
The design of a new world map starting in the 70s, with the surprising rapprochement with China and the ambivalent relationship with the former Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War. The decisive intervention in that cauldron called the Middle East. And other interventions, equally relevant and controversial, that allowed the establishment of dictatorships in most South American countries. Intervention, as or even more relevant, in that ordeal that ended up being for the United States the Vietnam War, recently concluded in 1975 with the fall of Saigon.
In all these events, which marked the world between the 60s and 70s, a character had fundamental participation: Henry Kissinger. He did so from his strategic positions in the Republican governments of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as Secretary of Homeland Security (1968-1973) and as Secretary of State (until Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in early 1977). But if his “official functions” were extinguished there, his influence did not disappear.
Was a persistent lobbyist, almost until the end of his daysboth for geopolitical interests and for large companies in his country, pulling the strings of high politics.
And therefore, it is not surprising that the name of Henry Kissinger divided waters even on the eve of the last presidential elections in his country: Donald Trump supported him and Bernie Sanders hated him, they criticized him -but they also admired him to some extent- the Clintons and it was questioned by university and intellectual circles in the United States.
Kissinger divided waters: Donald Trump supported him and Bernie Sanders detested him, the Clintons criticized him – but also admired him to some extent. Photo REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File
“He was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the history of our country,” Sanders said.
But Kissinger was much further: he had become Vladimir Putin’s own confidant and the successive leaders of China, a fundamental actor in world politics today. A country that Kissinger, since that historic and secret trip in 1971 that paved the way for the Mao-Nixon meeting, visited more than 50 times throughout his life.
The “detail” why he could not aspire to the presidency of the United States
Just a detail”maybe, prevented him from becoming president: Kissinger was born in Germany and, although he obtained American nationality, he was already unable to reach the highest office.
Heinz Alfred Kissinger He was a native of Fürth, Germany (1923). From a Jewish family, they managed to escape the Nazi regime almost at the limit, when Henry was a teenager, in 1938.
Kissinger was born in Germany and, although he obtained American nationality, he could not aspire to the presidency of the North American country. Photo Joël Saget / AFP
“He felt discrimination and anti-Semitism, religious, cultural, racial and ethnic prejudices. It was only when he emigrated to the United States that he felt more relieved at being able to walk with his head held high through the streets of New York,” said Walter Isaacson, in one of his biographies.
Praise, questions and a controversial Nobel Peace Prize for the Vietnam War
His professional career was launched when he studied Political Science at the prestigious Harvard University, although he had to interrupt classes due to service in the army, in the middle of World War II (it is said that he served in the Military Intelligence, of the 84th Division of Infantry).
After rising through the ranks in the Republican Party, while teaching diplomacy at major US universities, Kissinger was summoned by Nixon for strategic positions in his government, in a world in turmoil.
Although Kissinger was relevant in all the efforts that ended the Vietnam War -so much so that he was even awarded a controversial Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, along with his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho- others remember his bellicose tonewhen American soldiers were fighting in Southeast Asia.
According to Noam Chosky, “soldiers in Vietnam, Laos and Camboa followed Kissinger’s instructions to destroy everything that flies and everything that moves.”
The book by journalist Christopher Hitchens (“The Trials of Kissinger”) denounces that 350,000 people in Laos and 600,000 in Cambodia were killed by the “orange bombs” that Kissinger ordered his airmen to throw.
According to Hitchens, Kissinger was responsible for prolonging the war, when peace talks in Paris failed in the late 1960s.
But the other peace talks, with the communist regime of North Vietnam, also had him as the protagonist until the agreements were reached, also in the French capital, in January 1973.
The United States began the withdrawal of its troops. And the conflict would only end two years later, with the fall of Saigon and the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime – allied to the United States – which opened the definitive path to the unification of his country.
At that point, probably, the attention of Kissinger and American geopolitics was moving to other horizons. Tension always remained with the Soviet Union, but the situation with China had eased.
There Kissinger had played a decisive role. Hillary Clinton once wrote: “Kissinger was lucky there were no smartphones or social media when he made his first secret trip to Beijing. Imagine if today a secretary of state tries to do that.”
Diplomatic relations between China and the United States were finally normalized in 1979, with Mao already dead and Nixon (and Kissinger) removed from power.
Of course, he intervened with emphasis in the Middle East, especially at the end of the Yom Kippur War (1973).
Kissinger’s influence in Latin America
But where their efforts – public or private – are left to the historical controversywhen the rejection does not stop, it is in its policy towards Latin America, especially in the Pinochet coup in Chile that ended the socialist experience of Salvador Allende. Furthermore, some consider Kissinger to be the inspirer of the disastrous Condor Planwhich unified the repressive action of Latin American dictatorships since the mid-70s.
Already in June 1970, months before Allende’s triumph, Kissinger expressed before the so-called 40 Committee: “I don’t see why we have to wait and allow a country to become communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” He told the director of the CIA, Richard Helms, that “we will not let Chile go to waste.”
With Nixon ousted by the Watergate scandal, Kissinger maintained his position as Secretary of State until the end of Gerald Ford’s term. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
When Pinochet’s tanks and planes destroyed the Palacio de la Moneda on September 11, 1973, many saw Kissinger’s hand behind them. However, Kissinger had promised the Chilean ambassador in Washington, Orlando Letelier, that “we will not participate” in the campaign against Allende. Letelier himself would be assassinated in 1976, in Washington, by a Pinochet hitman’s bomb.
Dan Moynihan, former US ambassador to the United Nations, stated: “Kissinger does not lie following his interests. He lies because lying is in his nature.”
With Nixon ousted by the Watergate scandal, Kissinger maintained his position as Secretary of State until the end of Gerald Ford’s term. Then, he would begin the other stage, that of lobbyist and negotiator.
Russia, heir to the power of the former USSR and with Vladimir Putin as leader, welcomed Kissinger as a “wise man.” The Russian Diplomatic Academy awarded him an Honorary Doctorate.
At the same time, an International Student Parliament considered the recognition of Kissinger as “a macabre joke,” blaming Kissinger for “war crimes and human rights violations in Asia and South America.” His influence was among the greatest powers, but he reached the most remote countries.
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