Mixed legacy at best.  Critical error opening up contacts with Communist China and waking up that sleeping giant.  Could have ended the Vietnam War years earlier without engaging China to reign in the Soviet Union - and in any event, it was all for naught as the South fell a couple of years later after the pullout anyway.  In some ways, we can trace the unstable current state of world affairs directly to him.

RIP

7 minutes ago, Procus said:

Mixed legacy at best.  Critical error opening up contacts with Communist China and waking up that sleeping giant.  Could have ended the Vietnam War years earlier without engaging China to reign in the Soviet Union - and in any event, it was all for naught as the South fell a couple of years later after the pullout anyway.  In some ways, we can trace the unstable current state of world affairs directly to him.

RIP

Opening up trade with China made a ton of sense at the time. The mistake was not shutting it down after a generation passed and there was no reform towards being a good actor.

6 minutes ago, TEW said:

Opening up trade with China made a ton of sense at the time. The mistake was not shutting it down after a generation passed and there was no reform towards being a good actor.

Nixon called it his biggest regret.  Created a monster.  The world would be a much better place today if the U.S. never opened up to China.

4 minutes ago, Procus said:

Nixon called it his biggest regret.  Created a monster.  The world would be a much better place today if the U.S. never opened up to China.

I mean, there are close to 2 billion people in China whose lives are a lot better because of it.

But the bottom line is that while hindsight shows it was a poor decision, at the time it was a stroke of brilliance. Putting a wedge between Russia and China and giving China a chance to modernize and joining the west was worth it.

We should have shut it down in the 90’s and 2000’s once it was clearly not progressing as we hoped and we still had much greater leverage.

you said pullout

He was a puzzling big hit with the ladies.

May he RIP

12 hours ago, TEW said:

I mean, there are close to 2 billion people in China whose lives are a lot better because of it.

But the bottom line is that while hindsight shows it was a poor decision, at the time it was a stroke of brilliance. Putting a wedge between Russia and China and giving China a chance to modernize and joining the west was worth it.

We should have shut it down in the 90’s and 2000’s once it was clearly not progressing as we hoped and we still had much greater leverage.

The Chinese economy was operating exactly as America's multinational corporations wanted it to in the 90's and 2000's and any attempt to stop them shipping American manufacturing capacity to China to take advantage of the cheap labour and lax regulation would have been shouted down by American CEO's and Investors. The Chinese got the money to build a boatload of cutting edge tech factories and the skilled staff to man them out of it and America got the winding down of heavy industry with nothing to replace it. As a country we did it to ourselves.

The only reason we're falling out with China again now is because we need to distract the masses from the slow decline, making out the Chinese cheated us somehow because they used our late 90's laissez faire capitalism drive to the bottom on wages and standards and married it to socialist ideas of massive state investment and built an economic powerhouse, that's had free access to the designs and concepts behind to pretty much every major western tech product of the last 30 years because they built it for us, and now they have the know how to build their own.

Talking to China isn't close to the worst thing he did, Kissinger was directly and indirectly responsible for a lot of deeply horrible crap that killed millions and indelibly sullied America's name in a lot of countries and he's now got eternity in hell to look forward to, and it still won't be long enough to wash the blood off his hands. 

On 11/30/2023 at 10:30 AM, sameaglesfan said:

He was a puzzling big hit with the ladies.

May he RIP

"Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac."

   -Henry Kissinger

Dude was nailin' Barbara Walters back in the day.

1 hour ago, EaglesRocker97 said:

Dude was nailin' Barbara Walters back in the day.

Kissinger?!

I hardly know her!

For those of you interested, international relations theory in that time broke down into two camps.  Kissinger was firmly in the realist camp, best defined by Hans Morgenthau in Politics Among Nations.

Didn't Kissinger encourage Nixon to use nuclear weapons against Vietnam and Cambodia? Not going to speak ill of the dead, but his legacy is not the greatest.