Henry Kissinger's death met with polarized reaction globally

Henry Kissinger speaking to Chinese President Xi Jinping

By FOSTER KLUG and GEIR MOULSON

Associated Press

Nov. 30, 2023 Updated 8:03 AM PT

TOKYO — Global leaders paid tribute to former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on Thursday, but there was also sharp criticism of the man who remained an influential figure decades after his official service as one of the most powerful diplomats in American history.

Kissinger, who died Wednesday at 100, drew praise as a skilled defender of U.S. interests. On social media he was widely called a war criminal who left lasting damage throughout the world.

“America has lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices” on foreign affairs, said former President George W. Bush, striking a tone that many high-level officials, past and present, tried to convey.

“I have long admired the man who fled the Nazis as a young boy from a Jewish family, then fought them in the United States Army,” Bush said in a statement. “When he later became Secretary of State, his appointment as a former refugee said as much about his greatness as it did America’s greatness.”

Kissinger served two presidents, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, and dominated foreign policy as the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam and established ties with China.

Criticism of Kissinger, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, was especially strong on social media, where many posted celebratory videos in reaction to his death.

A Rolling Stone magazine headline said: “Henry Kissinger, war criminal beloved by America’s ruling class, finally dies.”

Across South America, Kissinger was remembered as a key figure who helped prop up bloody military dictatorships on the grounds that they would put the brakes on socialism in the region. Documents have shown Kissinger’s and Nixon’s support for the 1973 coup that deposed Chile’s president. Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship went on to violate human rights, murder opponents, cancel elections, restrict the media, suppress labor unions and disband political parties.

“A man has died whose historical brilliance never managed to conceal his profound moral misery,” Chile’s ambassador to the U.S., Juan Gabriel Valdes, wrote on X. Chile’s leftist President Gabriel Boric retweeted the message.

The head of the independent Documentation Center of Cambodia, Youk Chhang, described Kissinger’s legacy as “controversial” though not widely debated in his country. Well over half of the population was born after the Khmer Rouge was ousted in 1979, and even those who lived through the civil war and the group’s brutal rule recall the U.S. involvement and its B-52 bombers “but not Henry Kissinger,” he said.

“Henry Kissinger’s bombing campaign likely killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians — and set [a] path for the ravages of the Khmer Rouge,” Sophal Ear, a scholar at Arizona State University who studies Cambodia’s political economy, wrote on the Conversation website.

“The cluster bombs dropped on Cambodia under Kissinger’s watch continue to destroy the lives of any man, woman or child who happens across them,” Sophal Ear wrote.

Kissinger’s legacy in Africa is pinned for many historians on his official visit to South Africa in 1976, just a few months after the apartheid regime’s police had killed more than 170 Black protesters, most of them schoolchildren, in the Soweto uprising.

At the time, the United States was allied with South Africa as a buffer against Soviet influence in Africa during the Cold War. Kissinger saw South Africa as “merely a gambit in the game of the Cold War,” said John Stremlau, an honorary professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and a former vice president for peace programs at the Carter Center.

“He never, I think, saw Africa as anything more than instrumentality in the larger geopolitical game,” Stremlau said, “and so therefore not recognizing that Africa had its own integrity and its own drives and its own ambitions and its own values that needed to be accommodated.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping sent President Biden a message of condolence Thursday.

“Dr. Kissinger will always be remembered and missed by the Chinese people,” the message said, according to Chinese state broadcaster CCTV. “China is ready to work with the United States to carry on the cause of friendship between the Chinese and American people, to promote the healthy and stable development of China-United States relations for the benefit of the two peoples, and to make due contributions to world peace and development.”

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin called Kissinger an “old friend and good friend of the Chinese people, and a pioneer and builder of China-U.S. relations.”

Many on social media in China mourned his passing. State broadcaster CCTV shared on social media an old segment showing Kissinger’s first secret visit to China in 1971, when he broached the possibility of establishing U.S.-China relations and met with then-Premier Zhou Enlai.

Kissinger exerted uncommon influence on global affairs long after he left office. In July, for instance, he met Xi in Beijing while U.S.-Chinese relations were at a low point.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida paid tribute to Kissinger, praising his contributions to peace in the region, especially his role in normalizing U.S.-China relations. Kishida said he learned a lot from the former U.S. diplomat.

“I myself had the privilege of meeting him in person a number of times since I was younger and had the honor of learning from his insights,” Kishida told reporters in Tokyo.

“Henry Kissinger’s strategy and excellence in diplomacy has shaped global politics throughout the 20th century,“ European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement posted on X. “His influence and legacy will continue to reverberate well into the 21st century.”

Kissinger initiated the Paris negotiations that ultimately provided a face-saving means to get the U.S. out of a costly war in Vietnam.

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.”

“Dr. Kissinger played an important role in the historic opening to the People’s Republic of China and in advancing detente with the Soviet Union, bold initiatives which initiated the beginning of the end of the Cold War. His ‘shuttle diplomacy’ to the Middle East helped to advance the relaxation of tensions in that troubled region of the world,” the Nixon daughters said in a statement.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was “in awe” of Kissinger.

“Of course, like anyone who has confronted the most difficult problems of international politics, he was criticized at times, even denounced,” Blair said. But I believe he was always motivated not from a coarse ‘realpolitik,’ but from a genuine love of the free world and the need to protect it. He was a problem solver, whether in respect of the Cold War, the Middle East or China and its rise.”

Israeli President Issac Herzog said as he met Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in Tel Aviv on Thursday that Kissinger “laid the cornerstone of the peace agreement, which [was] later signed with Egypt, and so many other processes around the world I admire.”

Blinken said that Kissinger “really set the standard for everyone who followed in this job” and that he was “very privileged to get his counsel many times, including as recently as about a month ago. ... Few people were better students of history. Even fewer people did more to shape history than Henry Kissinger.”

U.S. climate envoy and former Secretary of State John F. Kerry called Kissinger “a major figure in global politics.”

“I’ve put out a public statement that honors his incredible service, historic individual,” Kerry said while in Dubai for the United Nations climate conference. “And our thoughts are with the family.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a message to Kissinger’s wife that the late diplomat was “a wise and far-sighted statesman” and that his name was “inextricably linked with a pragmatic foreign policy line, which at one time made it possible to achieve detente in international tensions and reach the most important Soviet-American agreements that contributed to the strengthening of global security.”

French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that “Henry Kissinger was a giant of history. His century of ideas and of diplomacy had a lasting influence on his time and on our world.”

Leaders of Kissinger’s native Germany paid tribute to the former secretary of State.

“His commitment to the transatlantic friendship between the USA and Germany was significant, and he always remained close to his German homeland,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

In a message of condolences to Kissinger’s family, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier wrote that “with his detente and disarmament policy, Henry Kissinger laid the foundation for the end of the Cold War and the democratic transition in Eastern Europe” that led to Germany’s reunification.

As he did in life, Kissinger divides opinion around the world after his death

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