Personally I do agree with him, mostly becuase Nixon was so overbearing that anything Kissinger proposed had to be examined and authorized by Nixon. Like the whole point of Kissinger's office was to allow Nixon to run his own forgien policy. And to their credit they did do detente with the Soviets and went to China ( which is why a lot of Chinese really like Kissinger and Nixon, of which I am also probably subject).
To their detriment of course is that they killed millions of people, but this is also true of literally every other American administration.
I think the main reason that Kissinger sticks in our minds is that he and Nixon explicitly highlighted their forgien policy becuase they were forced to carry out the Great Society at home by the Dem Congress.
I don't think they wanted to help China in anyway, they explicitly wanted to recruit China as a wedge against the Soviets which China agreed to for recognition and (partial) resolution of the Taiwan crisis.
Nixon and Kissinger really didn't anticipate the offshoring of American factories to China in '72 since China was still closed and offshoring only started happening with Deng's Reform and Opening Up. Like in his recent writings Kissinger has been lamenting how recognition of China led to the current decline of the American empire.
Ironically, a lot of Chinese associate the '72 visit with Reform and Opening Up, and with the current position of China today. Like my Chinese parents were born in the 60s and they vividly remember the visit and kind of attribute everything's that's gone right in China to that moment, despite moving to the US in the 90s and me constantly proselytizing Xi Jingping Thought to them.
i think the one thing you can really say wouldn't have happened without him is the sabotaging peace talks to get nixon elected, but he definitely oversaw one of the most directly violent periods in american foreign policy so don't necessarily know this holds up? but his role in history is exaggerated and there are a lot of lesser known monsters in the history of :amerikkka:
edit: it's basically impossible to quantify this kind of evil though. is kissinger directly overseeing the bombing of millions more or less evil than the overthrowing of allende or arbenz? do you judge by death toll? if so, how do you measure death toll, because a lot of these things have 'unintended' consequences and a bunch of deaths the architects might not have aimed for happen.
basically what i'm saying is there are probably hundreds of different lists you could come up with that would be totally valid depending on the parameters you set.
Ya, it's hard to argue which administration had the worst cost in human lives, especially given all the subtle and uncountable ways that American hegemony kills people. But I do think everyone is too focused on Kissinger and not the hundreds of other people still alive that have done just as evil shit as him.
I think the fact that Kissinger got a Nobel Peace Prize also draws a lot of attention towards him
that's the big thing. there might be more evil people, but he's the most high profile guy outside of the presidents (and he might be more famous than a couple presidents since he rose to power)
I'm going to assume he knows way more about evil policy makers than I do so I'll take his word for it. Kissinger gained a kind of celebrity status that few other American policy makers had, so I'm open to the idea that there's a bunch of lesser-known monsters who are worse.
I think that's ultimately the point, like McGeorge Bundy and Dean Acheson are recurring characters in a Cold War history book, always showing up when a genocide or coup happens.
Not really qualified to say whether he's right but "evil American policymakers of the 20th century" is such a broad category, who cares about the top 10
I dont necessarily disagree but I’d need to see what 10 he puts higher. And like Liberalism said, the fact that he got a Nobel peace prize for committing multiple genocides draws a bit of extra ire.
