Political lives, unless they are prematurely terminated at some happy crossroads, end in failure". That's what Enoch Powell said - despite this well-known aphorism, Henry Kissinger, Cold War strategist, US Secretary of State, adviser to 12 US presidents and an alleged war criminal, who died at the age of 100, is a significant exception.
The man who invented shuttle diplomacy, promoted the concept of hard realpolitik and sought fleeting illusions of easing tensions between hostile powers, paradoxically lived a life of multiple professional failures that ended happily, marked by generally high international esteem.
Kissinger, throughout his long career, was the biggest proponent of American global hegemony, which is now crumbling. He and his followers gave imperialism a new, post-colonial face, pursuing perceived national interests regardless of the cost - which was mostly imposed on others.
And yet the three pillars of Kissinger's achievement - the opening of Communist China in 1979, a calmer relationship with the Soviet Union, and the search for common ground between Israel and the Arabs - were built on weak foundations that subsequently collapsed.
Richard Nixon's trip to Beijing in 1972, where he met with Mao Zedong, was at the time considered an astonishing undertaking. That maneuver, a not-so-subtle attempt to outsmart the Russians, became known as the "Chinese card game." In theory anyway, it put pressure on Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
However, in the long run, it was post-revolutionary China, not the US, that benefited enormously from this first untrustworthy engagement and the subsequent rapid and unchallenged economic, business and investment boom.
Deng Xiaoping, who came to power in 1978 after Mao's death two years earlier, took full advantage of normalization to begin building a global superpower that is now a rival, and some would say an existential threat, to Kissinger's American hegemony.
It would be absurd to blame him for China's modern transformation into an aggressive, expansionist predator with little regard for democracy and human rights. On the other hand, it is clear that President Xi Jinping, with whom he met in July, is following Kissinger's model.
Thawing relations with the Soviet Union and a series of nuclear arms control agreements reached during the terms of Nixon's successors Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush (both advised by Kissinger) are credited to him.
However, the final collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1989-1991. , the key, triumphant goal of Western political leaders who looked up to Washington, brought humiliation to the Russian people.
Instead of helping the new leaders in Moscow build a functioning, progressive democratic state, Bush and Bill Clinton cashed in on the "peace dividend" and, in Vladimir Putin's view, broke their word on NATO's eastward expansion. From this point of view, it was failure leading to failure.
Whether Putin is a student of Kissinger's pragmatism and realpolitik, the two met in the Kremlin in 2017, remains to be seen. What is clear is that the current Russian leader is familiar with the "Chinese card" trick.
Weeks before the invasion of Ukraine in February last year, Putin and Xi held a meeting in which they declared a partnership "without borders". The roles were reversed, now it was the US that was caught off guard diplomatically.
China: Bigger Problem Than Ever, Challenging American Leadership and Values Around the World. Russia: An embittered, renewed power now again threatens peace in Europe. Both are a legacy of Kissinger's world and the maximalist thinking that often guided his actions.
It is not necessary to glance at the terrible suffering in Gaza, nor to hear the suffering of the family members of more than a thousand Israelis who perished on October 7, to be clear that the successes of American mediation in the Middle East, both under Kissinger and later, are mostly illusory.
Kissinger certainly mediated the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. However, the main unknown, how Jews and Palestinians can live side by side on the disputed land, remains without an essential answer even 50 years later. And the lingering impression that America unilaterally and unfairly favors Israel dates back to when he was in office.
By lasting so long and continuing to contribute to foreign policy debates, Kissinger became a unique witness to the conflicts, trials and triumphs of what became known as the American Century - the post-1945 US-dominated international order.
However, in many ways he seemed to stand, like King Cnut, against the rising tide of world events, which increasingly emphasized the importance of national self-determination and human rights.
His support for the murderous military coup in Chile in 1973 that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende and installed the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet still stands as a horrifying monument to the short-sighted, destructive American neo-imperialism of the era.
American support for violent Cold War nationalist groups through proxy wars with the Soviet Union, such as Unita in Angola or later the Contras in Nicaragua, and Washington's support for the worst kind of African and Middle Eastern dictators, because it supposedly served American geopolitical interests, are policies that are largely merited Kissinger's views.
Then there is Vietnam. Although Kissinger is credited with helping to end the war, what he left behind, like Donald Trump in Afghanistan, was a broken, collapsed country that quickly succumbed to totalitarianism, rendering all previous sacrifices in vain.
Some remember that Kissinger will never be forgiven for the secret merciless bombing of neutral Cambodia in 1969-70, as part of the Vietnam campaign. Kissinger reportedly told the US Air Force to target "anything that flies or anything that moves". About 50 civilians were killed.
His actions were dealt with by Christopher Hitchens in the book "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" in 2001, in which he accuses him of having committed numerous war crimes. However, as the decades passed and he gradually assumed the role of elder statesman, such horrors - and all his many failures - were largely put aside.
Kissinger was a man of a different era. It would be good to believe that, with him, that era has passed.
The text is taken from "The Guardian"
Translation: N. Bogetić
Bonus video:
