The death of Henry Kissinger – and why we will never see his America again

It is with the world in a state of diplomatic flux that Kissinger, the great global realist, has bowed out, writes Mary Dejevsky. And this leaves a question: is the US now less able to order the world?

He had something to say about the war that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (PA)

It seems highly fitting, almost poetic, that Henry Kissinger, the man who for so long embodied US foreign policy, should have died at the age of 100 in the midst of a conflict that testifies in many ways to the waning of US diplomatic power.

The arc of Kissinger’s life – starting from service in the US army as a refugee from Nazi Germany, through his key role as US secretary of state in President Nixon’s opening to China, his contribution to the Paris talks that ended the Vietnam war, and his part in negotiating the resolution of the 1973 Yom Kippur war that established the first lasting peace between Israel and the surrounding Arab countries – tracked the rise of the United States as it became the dominant, and then the sole, superpower, against the background of the Cold War.

So dominant a figure did Kissinger become, through his speaking and writing, through the advice that presidents continued to solicit, and his sheer longevity, that it is hard to believe that his formal government career actually began after the Cuban missile crisis and ended in 1977, long before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union’s collapse. If he was not active in frontline diplomacy, however, his voice was still heard and his influence endured.