USA. Henry Kissinger Died at the Age of 100

Henry A. Kissinger, the famous Secretary of State and architect of the foreign policies of two American presidents, died at his home in Connecticut. He celebrated his 100th birthday in May. Kissinger wielded unprecedented influence over US foreign policy during the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. In subsequent decades, as an adviser and writer, he expressed views that were of great importance both for political decisions in Washington and for global politics.

During his distinguished diplomatic career, it was Kissinger who advocated the opening of the United States toward China, negotiated the world’s leading power’s exit from the Vietnam War, and used cunning, ambition, and intelligence to shape Washington’s relationship with China at the height of the Cold War, sometimes through sacrificing democratic values.

As the Italian news agency ANSA recalls, Kissinger was the author of the famous phrase “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” The legacy of the Machiavellian statesman will continue to be debated by those who consider him a diplomatic genius and by those who consider him an evil genius. A shrewd manipulator and influential until his last days, the 15-year-old Jew who fled Europe on the eve of World War II perceived the world as “a giant puzzle, in which each piece played an important and separate role to achieve a single goal: the USA must be an international superpower, even at the expense of interventions on the world stage in the spirit of realpolitik that many consider brutal and illegitimate, such as the bombing and invasion of Cambodia or supporting Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile that overthrew Salvador Allende.”

However, in the last weeks, a few days before his death, after the war outbreak between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Kissinger never spoke out (he was probably already unhealthy), although at one time he was one of the main heroes of the Yom Kippur War that led to Israeli victory in 1973.