{"id":2008,"date":"2023-12-07T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-07T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shinsori.me\/?p=2008"},"modified":"2023-12-07T20:50:58","modified_gmt":"2023-12-07T20:50:58","slug":"henry-kissinger-was-a-realist-without-illusions-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/shinsori.me\/index.php\/2023\/12\/07\/henry-kissinger-was-a-realist-without-illusions-opinion\/","title":{"rendered":"Henry Kissinger was a realist without illusions | Opinion"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Henry<\/p>\n

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Henry Kissinger smiles as he walks to a helicopter at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, Saturday, Aug. 19, 1972. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger died Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023, his consulting firm said. He was 100.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/span><\/p>\n

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Associated Press<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Few immigrants have influenced the course of America\u2019s role in the world as profoundly and for as long as Henry Kissinger who died last week aged 100. Brilliant, strategic, bureaucratically agile and indefatigable, Kissinger played a crucial role in public office and out.  <\/p>\n

Each of the 12 U.S. presidents from John Kennedy to Joseph Biden sought his counsel and listened to his advice, as did leaders around the world. He used his immense prestige to the very end including traveling to China, a country he visited more than a hundred times, to meet with Xi Jinping in July this year.<\/p>\n

Ever the realist<\/h3>\n

The Spanish-American War in 1898 was a watershed event in U.S. diplomatic history. Before it, the U.S. spent a century acquiring, exploring and developing a continent greatly expanded by Jefferson\u2019s acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase while hewing to George Washington\u2019s counsel to avoid entangling alliances.<\/p>\n

Since the U.S. intervention against Spain over Cuba, U.S. foreign policy has been a struggle between the realist tradition guided by strict national interest and the idealist tradition advanced by Woodrow Wilson of making the world safe for democracy. Henry Kissinger was perhaps the longest standing and most articulate advocate of the realist orientation.<\/p>\n

Shaped by his early years in Nazi Germany, Kissinger escaped with his family as a teenager to the United States and returned to Germany with the U.S. Army and its occupying forces. Those sobering experiences influenced his view of the nature of power and the desirability of freedom as an essential element in a stable and prosperous society.<\/p>\n

His Harvard education as an undergraduate and graduate student and nearly two decades as a professor brought him into contact with a wide variety of those engaged in public service and diplomacy from across the world. Rarely has anyone combined the roles of scholar, adviser and practitioner with as much success. <\/p>\n

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