German-born American foreign-policy strategist. He arrived in New York from central Europe in 1938, fleeing fascism, six weeks before Zbigniew Brzezinski. Both sought tenured professorships at Harvard in the 1950s; Kissinger won his. He became Richard Nixon's foreign-policy guru and got Nixon to China.
After Brzezinski died in 2017, Kissinger offered the assessment that, among American national security advisers, Brzezinski would rank among the two greatest strategic thinkers—putting himself, implicitly, first.
He was known as deceitful and charming, a brilliant self-publicist. After Carter's presidency, Kissinger sought to ingratiate himself with Ronald Reagan by blaming the mess in Iran on Carter's preference for human rights. When Brzezinski heard of this, his mordant retort was: "I conclude that, although power corrupts, the absence of power corrupts absolutely."
Neither Kissinger nor Brzezinski served in government again after the Carter era, though both retained a taste for power.
A week after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, Kissinger wrote that the only way for Ukraine to survive and thrive was to serve as a bridge between East and West, rather than joining either side, citing Finland as a model. He had strongly opposed inviting Ukraine to join NATO. But in May 2023 he told The Economist that having armed Ukraine to the teeth, the West now had no choice but to take it into the alliance—because leaving Ukraine as the best-armed country in Europe, unanchored and unconstrained, was dangerous. He envisaged an enhanced, independent Ukraine closely tied to Europe, and predicted the war would end with both sides dissatisfied.
Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.