To some, he was a titan of foreign policy, a Holocaust survivor who built a distinguished career as a top U.S. diplomat and national security advisor during the administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, leaving a lasting mark in history.
But for others, Henry Kissinger was a war criminal, whose brutal exercise of realpolitik left a trail of blood across the world – an estimated 3 million bodies in far-flung locations, from Argentina to East Timor .
As the late British author and journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote: “Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every honest person and should be humiliated, ostracized and excluded. »
Here are 10 nations, regions and conflicts in which Kissinger intervened, leaving an often bloodstained legacy that in many cases still endures.
Vietnam
Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering a cease-fire in Vietnam in 1973. But that war might have ended four years earlier if he had not enabled Nixon’s plan to “tear apart » President Lyndon B. Johnson’s peace negotiations. In 1969, Nixon was elected president and Kissinger was promoted to national security advisor. The protracted war claimed the lives of millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians.
Cambodia
Kissinger’s expansion of the war set the stage for the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, who seized power from a U.S.-backed military regime and subsequently killed a fifth of the population, or two millions of people. Cambodians were driven into the hands of the communist movement by Kissinger and Nixon’s massive bombing campaign, which killed hundreds of thousands of people. To this day, people still die from unexploded U.S. ordnance.
Bangladesh
In 1970, Bengali nationalists in what was then known as East Pakistan won elections. Fearing a loss of control, West Pakistan’s military government launched a deadly crackdown. Kissinger and Nixon strongly supported the massacre, choosing not to warn the generals to hold back. Motivated by Pakistan’s usefulness as a counterweight to Soviet-leaning China and India, Kissinger was unmoved by the murder of 300,000 to three million people. Captured in a secret recording, he expressed contempt for people who “bleed” for “dying Bengalis”.
Chile
Nixon and Kissinger disapproved of Salvador Allende, a self-described Marxist, democratically elected president of Chile in 1970. Over the next three years, they invested millions of dollars in fomenting a coup. William Colby, then head of the CIA, told a secret 1974 hearing of the House Armed Services Special Intelligence Subcommittee that the U.S. government had spent $11 million to “destabilize” Allende’s government. This included $1.5 million that the CIA pumped into Santiago’s newspaper, El Mercurio, which opposed Allende. CIA agents also established ties with the Chilean military. In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet came to power following a military coup. During his 17-year rule, more than 3,000 people disappeared or were killed and tens of thousands of opponents were imprisoned. As Kissinger told Nixon: “We didn’t do it. I mean, we helped them. More than three decades after Pinochet was finally ousted from power, Chile is still grappling with the legacy of the former U.S.-backed dictator.
Cyprus
Cyprus, home to Greek and Turkish populations, experienced ethnic violence throughout the 1960s. In 1974, after a coup by Greece’s ruling military government, Turkish troops intervened. Kissinger effectively encouraged a crisis between the two NATO allies, advising the newly installed President Ford to appease Turkey. “The Turkish tactic is the right one: grab what they want and then negotiate on the basis of possession,” he was quoted as saying. Together, the Greek coup and the Turkish invasion caused thousands of casualties.
East Timor
In 1975, Kissinger gave President Suharto the green light for Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, a former Portuguese colony on the path to independence. During a visit to Jakarta, Kissinger and Ford told Suharto, the brutal dictator and close ally in the battle against communism, that they understood his reasons, advising him to end it quickly. The next day, Suharto arrived with his US-equipped army, killing 200,000 East Timorese.
Israel
When the October War of 1973 broke out when a coalition of Arab nations led by Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, Kissinger led the Nixon administration’s response. He opposed Pentagon attempts to delay arms shipments to Israel, rushing for weapons that helped the Israeli military reverse its early losses and reach a 100-kilometer radius around Cairo. A ceasefire followed. His shuttle diplomacy between Egypt, other Arab countries, and Israel is often credited with paving the way for the eventual signing of the Camp David Accords in 1978. By this time, Kissinger had left office, but in 1981 he explained that at the heart of his Middle East diplomacy was a simple political objective: “to isolate the Palestinians” from their Arab neighbors and friends.
Argentina
No longer in office after Jimmy Carter succeeded Ford as president in 1976, Kissinger continued to condone the killing, giving his seal of approval to Argentina’s neo-fascist army, which had overthrown the government of President Isabel Perón the same year. The military government has waged a dirty war against leftists, calling dissidents “terrorists.” During a visit to Argentina in 1978, Kissinger flattered dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, praising him for his efforts in fighting “terrorism.” Videla would oversee the disappearance of 30,000 opponents. Around 10,000 people died under military rule, which lasted until 1983.
South Africa
During most of his tenure under the Nixon and Ford administrations, Kissinger does not appear to have given Africa much thought. But in 1976, as his term was coming to an end, he visited South Africa, providing political legitimacy to the apartheid government shortly after the Soweto uprising, which saw black schoolchildren and other people shot dead by police. Although he forced Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith to accept a majority black government, he moved closer to the South African apartheid government in his support of the Unita rebels fighting the Marxist-Leninist People’s Movement for the liberation of Angola. This war lasted 27 years, one of the longest and most brutal of the last century.
China
Kissinger is often praised for brokering détente between the United States and China. After a first visit to Beijing in 1972, he contributed to the reestablishment of diplomatic relations in 1979. Chinese President Xi Jinping described him as an “old friend”. However, the protesters who camped in Tiananmen Square in 1989 remember him with less emotion. In the aftermath of the massacre – which killed between several hundred and several thousand people – he offered a glimpse of the cold, hard realpolitik that characterized his approach to diplomacy. The crackdown, he said, was “inevitable.” “No government in the world would have tolerated the main square of its capital being occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators,” he said. China, he said, needed the United States, and the United States needed China.
