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How will Henry Kissinger be remembered in Europe?
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden, shares his perspective on European politics from Stockholm.
How will Henry Kissinger be remembered in Europe?
There's always an amount of controversy around the person who's been around in politics in powerful positions for such a long time as he was. But primarily, I think he would be remembered as a great European. He was an American, no doubt. But he came out of the tragedy of Europe and he was deep concerned with all of the lessons that could be learned from the failure to preserve peace in Europe time after time. His first academic and his first book was about the Congress of Vienna. And then book after book after book, that was really around the same theme, how to preserve peace also in the age of nuclear weapons. And that, of course, from the European point of view, is not an insubstantial issue.
Is the nuclear renaissance going on in Europe?
Sort of. I would say. There are still countries that are very much opposed. The Germans are, the Austrians are, there might be others. But I noticed that in Dubai, COP28, there was now signed declaration by a number of European leaders as well to triple global nuclear power by 2050. So no doubt nuclear power will make a substantial contribution to the efforts to create a much greener and much more sustainable Europe in the decades to come.
Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State, attends the opening news conference of the annual WEF meeting in the Swiss Alpine resort town of Davos, Switzerland January 23, 2008.
Kissinger is dead. Long live his memes
At the spritely age of 100, former US Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Dr. Henry Kissinger passed away this week … to much internet fanfare. This polarizing figure drew a wide range of responses – amplified by social media algorithms intended to reward polarization.
There was some praise, and much vitriol, creatively spread across social media after the death of the man who helped the United States navigate the troubled waters of the Cold War and Vietnam. I waded through the rough, dark waters of social media hot takes to break down some of the most popular reactions – so you don’t have to.
The Shady Tweets
Dr. Kissinger supported a coup of the democratically elected government in Chile, backed Indonesia’s killing of hundreds of thousands in East Timor, and championed the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, all in the name of American Exceptionalism.
There is blood on his hands, and the internet doesn’t want you to forget it. Besides his name, some of the top trending topics on X included Cambodia, Laos, War Criminal, RIP BOZO, and IT FINALLY HAPPENED. The general sentiment shared by many can be best encapsulated by the following:
@yashar: A reminder that Henry Kissinger is owed absolutely zero grace or kindness when he dies … a man responsible for destabilizing countries all over the world. He is an unrepentant monster.
@EmissaryOfNight: "Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands." – Anthony Bourdain
Oh, and we mustn’t forget the update from the “Is Henry Kissinger Dead Yet?” account, which currently is sitting at 37k followers: YES
When a famous person dies, people often come together on X to share their sorrows and participate in collective mourning. For Kissinger, at times, it felt more like a celebration.
The Memes
There is this tried-and-true meme that pops up anytime a beloved celebrity dies: The grim reaper choosing his next victim from a claw machine and asking, “Is Henry Kissinger even in this thing?” Thoughts and prayers poured in from many across X … about the death of that meme. Sorry guys, next time a “Friends” cast member dies, you will have to find another way of saying “Take someone else instead.”
Also, now that Kissinger has passed, the internet is using AI to get creative about what lies ahead for him. A way-too-realistic image broke the news of his death on Facebook with an AI Kissinger embracing Satan in the fiery depths of the underworld.
And finally, my favorite meme technically isn’t a meme but a reflection on the British prime minister, who holds the record for the shortest time in office but the longest time being compared to produce: Liz Truss. In a response to Truss’ photo taken outside of the US Capitol building, a user wrote: “Liz Truss went to Balmoral Castle and the Queen died two days later. Liz Truss has gone to America and Henry Kissinger died within hours.”
Correlation has to imply causation sometimes, right?
The Bright Side
Regardless of what my polarizing algorithm would like me to believe, there was some outpouring of condolences and warm tributes honoring Kissinger for his many years of service to the United States.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was all smiles in a picture he posted with the late statesman, reminding us of Kissinger’s brave journey to the US as a teenager fleeing Nazi Germany. Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell also offered his condolences to the Kissinger family and praised the power of his diplomacy.
Another place that featured glowing tributes for Dr. Kissinger: Chinese social media. Only a few hours after the announcement of his death, discussions about Kissinger netted 660 million views on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like alternative. “I can't help but lament the passing of this era where heroes were born in large numbers,” wrote one admirer. Don’t forget, Kissinger visited China at least 100 times, and Xi Jinping even recently called him “an old friend” of the Chinese people.
The Surprises
Clicks generate revenue, and nuance doesn’t generate clicks. Maybe that’s why Rolling Stone’s obituary was titled “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies” (Subtitle: good riddance). It worked, garnering over 44,000 likes on X. Are there any lies in that headline? No. Is it tasteful? No. Does he deserve to be remembered tastefully when so many allegedly died as a result of his actions? You decide.
A more measured read that doesn’t shy away from Kissinger’s human rights record comes from David Sanger in The New York Times: “Henry Kissinger Is Dead at 100; Shaped the Nation’s Cold War History.” In 10,000-plus words, Sanger provides a thorough analysis of Kissinger’s life and legacy, minus the headline optimized to elicit emotion (and thus engagement). This obituary, in contrast, only garnered a few hundred likes on X.
Kissinger leaves behind a complicated legacy. He will inevitably be remembered for the many people lost as a direct result of his foreign policy decisions. Any accurate retelling of his life story must include a footnote about how uniquely the centenarian was hated by the collective conscience of 2020s social media — that spent years not so patiently awaiting his death.
And I speak for so many when I say, we will all truly, deeply miss … the memes.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has died at age 100.
Negotiating with Henry Kissinger and his legacy
I was writing my column today about the Israel-Hamas cease-fire when I heard the news that Henry Kissinger had died at the age of 100. For a media company like ours, which focuses on geopolitics, Kissinger is one of the most defining, controversial, and complicated figures of the last century.
It is hard to find anyone who has worked seriously on politics or studied foreign affairs who has not had an encounter with or held a view of Henry Kissinger. Statesman. War criminal. Genius. Failure. You name it, the allegations have been thrown at him. Kissinger embodied the possibilities and the perils of power. You will hear the debate over his legacy play out – as it has been playing out for decades – in the days and weeks to come. But the first thing you have to know about him is this: Everything and every moment with Kissinger was a negotiation. Including his legacy.
I experienced this the first time I met him.
It was April 2003, and I was in New York at Dr. Kissinger’s office to interview him for the weekly CBC TV show I hosted at the time, “Hot Type.” I would do hour-long, sit-down interviews with thinkers, writers, and leaders. Our team had tried to get the interview with Kissinger for two years, first because he had much to say about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were then raging, but also to get him to respond to the best-selling, eviscerating critique of his life written by Christopher Hitchens in the book, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger.” It demanded a response.
Hitchens, a brilliant writer who marshaled language as a weapon to combat Kissinger’s bombs, was a regular on my show who argued strenuously that Kissinger should be tried as a war criminal. “I have never been more serious,” he said, as he took a drink. We always had a drink handy during Hitchens interviews because he insisted on having a Scotch and an ashtray before deploying his thoughts. “We have the evidence.” Hitch went on to present it all, from the illegal bombing of Laos and Cambodia to what he said was one of Kissinger’s worst but almost ignored alleged crimes. “In his capacity as national security adviser, Henry Kissinger arranged for the murder of a military officer in Chile, Raul Schneider, head of the Chilean armed forces general staff.” Hitch took a puff of smoke and went on: “You may have heard this expression lately in America, that there should be a proper, orderly transition of power. Well, because of Nixon, people didn’t want an orderly transition of power, and it fell to Kissinger to have Schneider removed, so he commissioned a hit on him.”
The events Hitch described bear repeating. On Oct. 22, 1970, CIA-backed militants shot Schneider point blank as he traveled to work. They didn’t kill him immediately, but Schneider died three days later. Declassified documents from the National Security Archive make it impossible to overestimate how involved Kissinger and the CIA were in this assassination and the subsequent coup that overthrew the democratically elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende. It was part of the secret CIA plan called “Operation FUBELT,” which irrefutably laid out everything Hitch argued (read more about it here, if you want). In 2001, Schneider’s family actually brought a wrongful death lawsuit against Kissinger, but it was tossed out of court because the Official Act protected Kissinger from legal liability.
In any case, you can see why Kissinger was not keen on a sit-down. His legacy was, even then, so long and so vast that both supporters and detractors like Hitchens had much to put on display. Supporters often pointed to his ending the Vietnam War and the Nobel Peace Prize he won in 1973, or the “shuttle diplomacy” he did in the Middle East, or the critical role he played in bringing China into the global community. They argue – as did Kissinger in his memoirs – that he was a man of his time, a time when the fight against Communism was the dominant threat to democracy. Add in the existential threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and Kissinger believed that the US had a critical, if sometimes bloody, role to play that it could not ignore. That is the very essence of realpolitik, as he defined it. Maybe. But even his most ardent supporters – and there were many – knew that the US role in Cambodia, Chile, and Indonesia left behind hard-to-remove immoral tattoos.
Still, this was the world in which Kissinger lived, and eventually, he agreed to talk to us, and we went to his office. As we were setting up, Kissinger walked by and popped his head into the room.
He looked at me in that languorous, predatory manner of his and said, “You will have 20 minutes.”
I knew immediately that he was testing me, seeing how I would react, and I was prepared. That was his way with everyone. “Dr. Kissinger,” I said, “you like to negotiate, and I think you can do a lot better than that.”
He paused, but I could not discern any reaction. “You have 20 minutes,” he repeated, his deep, bouldery voice falling another impossible octave as he trundled off.
When he finally sat down, he stayed for an hour.
We went through as much of his career as we could – he would not talk much about the Schneider case as it was in court, but he focused a fair bit on Hitchens’ critique, trying to bat it away.
“I’m not going to go through my life answering charges that are always, almost always out of context,” he said. “I have written three volumes of memoirs which people can read, and which I think will stand the test of documents becoming available. And if there is an important discussion of an issue, I may participate in it, but I’m not going to spend my life answering Hitchens.”
I pressed him on the illegal bombing of Cambodia, which was a stain he would never erase. How did he justify the bombings? His response is something that has stayed with me ever since. Remember, from 1969 to 1973, Kissinger worked with President Richard Nixon as both national security adviser and secretary of state, and to contain the Vietcong, Kissinger orchestrated the illegal bombing of Cambodia. In those years, the US dropped hundreds of thousands of bombs on Cambodia, causing what scholars have estimated to be 150,000 deaths or more. As the Washington Post wrote today, “The scale of this bombing campaign, internally called Operation Menu, was kept secret from the American public for many decades, though leaked and declassified records have revealed that Kissinger personally 'approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids.'” Not only that, the bombing eventually led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the genocide that took place there.
But when I asked Kissinger about it, he simply said, “There were no people in those villages.”
No people?
The line haunts me. Of course, there were people there. What did he mean – that his end-justifies-the-means calculator didn’t count numbers below 150,000? Or worse, that Communist sympathizers were not considered people?
We debated the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan – he was 80 then and an adviser to George W. Bush – and we talked about his opening up of China and many other more celebrated aspects of his career, until I finally asked him a more fundamental question: Do you have any regrets? I wanted to turn back to the terrible costs of war.
“You know, on the question of regret,” he said, “I – one of these days I’m going to learn a good answer to that because …”
“You don’t have any regrets?” I interrupted, still a bit incredulous. And now, he smiled.
“No, I have many,” he admitted. “But what you mean by that is moral regret. You don’t mean tactical regrets. So, we tried to think through, my associates and I, where America was back then. We wrote annual, long, reports, we spent much time, I think, on the basic strategies we developed, and … I have no…I have no regrets.”
The last time I saw Kissinger was a few months ago in New York. I was at the launch of a new book on artificial intelligence by Mustafa Suleyman, and the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, was giving the opening remarks. Schmidt had co-written a book with Kissinger in 2021 called “The Age of AI: And Our Human Future” and suddenly, as I was walking in, out walked Dr. Kissinger.
“Dr. Kissinger,” I said, but he passed silently, surrounded by people.
He was 100 and still attending book launches, writing about AI and politics and the future, advising politicians from both sides of the aisle, and right up to the very end, trundling forward, pushing ideas, and flexing his influence … with no regrets.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, seen here in Berlin, in 2015.
Henry Kissinger: Towering (and polarizing) figure in US foreign policy dies at 100
In memoriam: Dr. Henry Kissinger (1923-2023)
From America to China to the social media universe, the world marked the passing of diplomat and presidential adviser Dr. Henry Kissinger, whose realpolitik approach to foreign policy definitively shaped the course of international relations in the 20th century.
Born in Germany in 1923, Henry Alfred Kissinger emigrated to the United States in 1938 and became a citizen in 1943. He served three years in the US Army and later in the Counter Intelligence Corps, earned a Ph.D., and became a professor of international relations at Harvard before embarking on a diplomatic career in the service of three American presidents – John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Gerald R. Ford.
At the time, America was mired in conflict: The Vietnam War seemed intractable, the Cold War raged white hot, and the Middle East was a tinderbox. Kissinger’s realpolitik approach helped the United States navigate all these conflicts. As national security adviser and later as secretary of state, Kissinger was instrumental in opening diplomatic relations with China in 1972 and negotiating the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) with the former Soviet Union. He defined the term “shuttle diplomacy” for his mediation work in the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
That year, Kissinger was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in brokering a ceasefire to the Vietnam War, together with Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho (who refused to accept). Admirers lauded him as a skilled tactician in a time of great peril. Nixon’s daughters, Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, said their father and Kissinger enjoyed “a partnership that produced a generation of peace for our nation.” Former US President George W. Bush said "America has lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices on foreign affairs.”
Kissinger was not without controversy, however. Detractors blamed him for the deaths of millions of Cambodians during the Vietnam War and for supporting repressive regimes including that of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Upon his death, Rolling Stone Magazine ran the headline, “Henry Kissinger, war criminal beloved by America’s ruling class, finally dies.” On X, "RIP BOZO," referring to a meme celebrating someone's death, trended in the top 10 together with "IT FINALLY HAPPENED," while "War criminal" reached the top 25.
Kissinger would have likely met these criticisms with the same sangfroid that marked his diplomatic career. Shortly before his 100th birthday, he told CBS that such comments are “… a reflection of their ignorance.”
After leaving the US government, Kissinger continued to provide counsel to world leaders until the last days of his life. In September, he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York; in July, he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. The Chinese Ambassador to the United States Xie Feng said he was “deeply shocked and saddened” by Kissinger’s death. “He will always remain alive in the hearts of the Chinese people as a most valued old friend.”
Kissinger was also a prolific author, penning 21 books on topics as varied as politics in the nuclear age, the rise of China, the art of diplomacy, and most recently, the promise and perils of artificial intelligence. He leaves behind his wife of nearly 50 years, Nancy Kissinger, his two children from a previous marriage, Elizabeth and David, and five grandchildren.
WATCH: On Henry Kissinger's 100th birthday in May, GZERO's Ian Bremmer reflected on his legacy.
Henry Kissinger turns 100
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here. Happy Tuesday to you after Memorial Day weekend, and I thought I'd talk for a bit about Dr. Kissinger since he's just turned 100 old. I'm pretty sure he's the only centenarian that I know well. And lots of people have spoken their piece about how much they think he's an amazing diplomat, unique, and how much they think he's a war criminal, unique. And maybe not surprising to anyone, I'm a little bit in between those views.
I have known him for a long time. I remember first time I met him was around 1994. I'd just come back from Ukraine and I introduced myself to him at some event in New York. And he was interested in what I had to say. And so why don't you come and have lunch with me? Which was kind of surprising since he didn't know me at all. And I thought, well, maybe he's just getting rid of me to talk to other people that are in line. But a couple days later, I find myself in his office having tea sandwiches and talking about Ukraine and the context of Russia relations, Europe relations and US. It could have been with a professor of mine or some colleague, the kind of discussion we were having. It didn't feel like he was being pompous or talking down to me. Spoke like he wanted to understand what I had learned from my relationships on the ground and my analysis and challenge it against his own. So that was pretty interesting.
Of course, I will tell you at that point, the reading that I had done of Kissinger was mostly in his own words on diplomacy and from some professors of mine at Stanford and the colleagues there that generally were very well-disposed to him. Since then, I probably sit down with him a few times a year and talk about global issues. And it's always interesting to hear his perspective. I would say that when it comes to broad international relations, he is of a very specific view and school, very transactional, very strategic. He's also of a certain time and place in the sense that he still doesn't believe that Europe really matters, doesn't accept that the European Union has become much stronger, much more capable as an institution than it was 10, 20, 30 years ago, than it was when he was saying, "Who do I call in Europe? Give me a phone number. They don't have one."
On the other hand, he's retooled himself considerably to truly learn about and understand artificial intelligence, and not just from a layman's perspective, but understand the policy implications. And to do that at the age of 100 is pretty extraordinary. I consider AI to be an utter game changer, geopolitically more important than any transformation I've seen on the global stage since I did my PhD some 30 plus years ago.
But for Kissinger to do that at 100 is quite something. And the fact that he has the wherewithal and the acumen to do that, I'm sure says a lot about why he still is put together as he is. There was an event that I did for the Young President's Organization, a few thousand folks, a few months ago. And this was on a big stage and Kissinger was going to give a masterclass, but they needed someone to engage with him for an hour, and he asked if I'd do it. So I said, "Sure." And what was interesting about it was, I mean, I sat in close to him so that he could hear everything I was saying clearly. But I mean, for an hour, this was a very serious conversation, frankly, as good as anyone else I've spoken with on my show over the course of the last several years, and again, doing that at 100. So put all of that together, you have to be impressed in the sense that it makes an impression upon you. Whether negative or positive, it's an impression that someone can do that at his age.
So that that's all of my relationship with him. And when I disagree with him, I say so, and do it more strongly privately than I do it publicly, in part because his willingness to respond to that usefully, publicly is fairly limited. And so you don't get value out of it. But that doesn't mean that I'm a big proponent of his worldview. And some of that is true today. A lot more of that is true, of course, historically. You learn a lot about someone by what they do when they're in a position to really do something, when they're in a position of power, when it matters. For example, I'd like to believe that when the chips were down and I had the ability to either keep my mouth shut or say something publicly about Elon Musk, and it would've been a lot more convenient to do the shutting your mouth, that I used my platform hopefully to make a more positive difference.
And I think that that's in a very small way. In a very big way of course, when you're National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, you have real power in your hands and you make decisions that destroy people. That says a lot about who you are. And I obviously can't in any way justify or support or align myself with a lot of the decisions that Kissinger has taken. And you look at Chile and the support for Pinochet and the coup overthrowing a democratically elected government, something that he strongly and individually supported despite lots of opposition inside the Nixon administration and from President Nixon at the time. I think about Kissinger's support for Suharto in Indonesia and the killing in East Timor. Over a hundred thousand innocent civilians dead from what now has an independent country, but at the time, was the Americans happy to privately support essentially a genocide. And that was a Kissinger policy. This was American exceptionalism. It was the opposite of that. And Vietnam, a lot of people take responsibility for the murderous interventions in Vietnam and not something that the Americans learned enough from. But specifically around Cambodia and a bombing campaign that was conducted in secret, which was denied for a long time by Kissinger. And again, over a hundred thousand civilians dead. And then one of the most murderous regimes we've ever seen in the 20th century comes in the Khmer Rouge because the country had been so destabilized by the Americans and by Kissinger's decision that led to the deaths of millions more.
So that's on his hands individually. And I guess you live to be 100 and you have that kind of power, few people are going to be proud of everything they did, but this is a very different kind of decision. I will say that part of meeting Kissinger turned me off from power. The fact that someone who had been a Harvard professor who I respected so much from the writings that I read of his, and then as you learn what that person, despite what they're like when they meet you, had done when they were in power, just turns you off from power. It makes you feel like that's something you don't want to be any part of. That was my initial sort of knee-jerk reaction. I think it's become more nuanced since then.
But you can't have a retrospective about one of the men that has had the greatest impact on American diplomacy and its influence around the world without recognizing just how negative some of that has been. And I will say that in today's very polarized environment, Kissinger is one of the people probably most responsible for the fact that when people around the world see that you're an American and do international affairs, they assume that your views of the world are equally high-handed, hypocritical, disdainful of the rights of human beings as humans. I mean, in some fundamental way, I'm probably the antithesis of realpolitik because I actually believe first and foremost that if there are 8 billion people on the planet, they all kind of count the same. And the fact that that means more to me than any individual citizenship is pretty much not any of what Kissinger did when he was Secretary of State, which is kind of sad for someone that's that bright and someone that has the capacity to do so much more.
So that's my view of Kissinger at 100. Probably a little different than a lot of what you've heard thus far on the topic, but for Memorial Day in particular, maybe a more appropriate read. So that's it for me. I hope everyone's well and take it easy this week.- Who is Tony Blinken? ›
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