I’m not old enough to hate Henry Kissinger. His realism always seemed to me to be an island of sanity in a sea of imperial overstretch and misplaced idealism. As a result, for me, his original sin was not Cambodia or Vietnam, but the Iraq War, for which his support was a clear violation of his principles. Metternich would have known better.
There is an interview with Kissinger in the most recent edition of The Atlantic which largely focuses on Obama’s record with regard to China. Kissinger gives Obama a B+ for his China policy, which seems fair to me, but he criticizes the President for lacking a long-term vision in the Far East, which does not. It is reasonable to say that Obama’s approach to foreign affairs has been largely fact-driven and ad hoc, but his “pivot to Asia” was an exception to that. He actually did have a long-term goal of creating a rules-driven economic and security framework in the Pacific which could either accommodate or thwart the rise of China, depending on the behavior of the Chinese. The cornerstone of that approach was the TPP.
Now, with the election of Trump, this approach is in ruins. More on that in a subsequent post.