There have been few statesmen who were equally revered and maligned during their time in office as in their retirement from government, as was Henry Kissinger, who passed away last month. The strong feelings have not subsided much, even though he left his posts as US secretary of state and national security adviser nearly 50 years ago.

It is not surprising that he divided opinion, as he was a man of contradictions who was shaped by his own traumatic experiences as a young person. He was the most powerful person in US foreign policy during some of the most volatile and eventful times in America’s post-1945 years; not to mention that he lived a very long life, of 100 years to be exact, during which the world was to change dramatically more than once or twice.

Kissinger’s ascent to being the most prominent foreign policy influence on the presidencies of both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford was remarkable for someone who was born in Germany before being forced to flee the Nazis with his family in 1938 at the age of 15 and make the US his home. And, in an historical irony, he seven years later participated in the liberation of the Hannover-Ahlem concentration camp as a military intelligence soldier wearing the uniform of his adopted country. These formative experiences left a mark, some might argue a deep scar, on his political-diplomatic thinking, even if he refrained from talking about them in public.

During the Cold War, his greatest impact on world affairs is mainly associated, for better or mainly for worse, with the notion of realpolitik, which is widely held to be synonymous with “power politics” in the vein of Machiavelli, Bismarck or Morgenthau, and is seen as devoid of moral and ideological considerations. From being a refugee and later a soldier, he became a leading scholar fascinated by the manner in which, after the Napoleonic wars, stability was restored to Europe by the monarchs of the time in the Congress of Vienna. This was explained by him through power politics.

At the heart of the realist paradigm of international relations is the concept of national interest and Kissinger was often accused of viewing this concept through the very narrow prism of wielding power and directing the foreign policy of the most powerful country in the world through this line of thinking. But this did not prevent the US also feeling vulnerable in its relations mainly with the Soviet Union, but also to a lesser degree China, with some very troubling consequences for both friends and foes.

If the highlight of his time in the White House and the State Department was the opening of the way toward the normalization of relations with China, which he initiated in 1972, he is equally, if not better, remembered for abandoning America’s allies in South Vietnam and supporting brutal regimes in the name of what he perceived to be America’s national interest of containing communism or serving domestic political needs.

Kissinger was often accused of viewing the concept of national interest through the very narrow prism of wielding power

Yossi Mekelberg

Kissinger was instrumental in thawing relations between Washington and Beijing, ties that had been frozen since the Chinese revolution of 1949, while the theatrical aspect of this move was of an American table tennis team being invited to play in the People’s Republic. This symbolized the gradual end to the animosity between the two countries, which was first seen with Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing to meet Chairman Mao Zedong, followed by both countries fully normalizing their relations in 1979.

This was an immense success, not only on a bilateral level but also through the outwitting of the Soviet Union. And, in a bipolar international relations world characterized by the zero-sum game, the taking out of a fellow major communist country from its foe’s orbit was a significant coup. It also most probably helped to make Moscow more susceptible to embarking on its own path of detente with Washington and opening negotiations on arms control.

This, however, can hardly mitigate Kissinger and Nixon’s brutal and treacherous approach to the wars in Southeast Asia or their policies toward Latin America. In Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, Kissinger is remembered as the architect of a US strategy that sowed enormous destruction, devastation and suffering.

In Cambodia, secret ground incursions conducted by the CIA and US special forces followed a massive bombing campaign that is estimated to have killed 50,000 people. And instead of weakening the Khmer Rouge, it most probably led to their seizing power, which ended in a genocide and failed to significantly improve America’s position in the Vietnam War. Ultimately, the US signed the Paris Peace Accords, which to this day are regarded as a betrayal of the South Vietnamese, who were sacrificed on the altar of ending America’s involvement in the war, which had become politically too costly both domestically and internationally.

Closer to home in Latin America, Kissinger’s policies treated the region as just another playground in East-West relations, but with even more vigor, by supporting any murderous regime as long as it was pro-American. In Chile in 1973, Kissinger played a key role in bringing down the legally elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, who was replaced in a coup by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The latter went on to brutally murder many of Allende’s supporters, cancel elections, restrict the media, suppress labor unions and disband political parties. Similarly, Kissinger supported the juntas in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. This is a legacy that many in this part of the world remember with dread.

But alongside this cold, calculating realist was someone who, for instance, helped bring an end to the rule of white supremacy in Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) and establish Black majority rule there. Kissinger also left a positive legacy in the Israeli-Arab conflict and his shuttle diplomacy between Israel, Syria and Egypt not only helped to end the 1973 war, but it also yielded a culture of reaching agreements in which Washington served as a mediator. This contributed to the eventual peace agreement between Israel and Egypt a number of years later, when President Jimmy Carter was in office, as well as to a stable ceasefire along the border between Israel and Syria, which is still holding up more than 50 years later.

Kissinger’s legacy is paradoxical and complex because it crossed continents and different historical international systems, representing his own inherent tensions between adhering to hardcore interests that clashed with more laudable values, which he employed too sparsely on too many occasions. This cast a long shadow over an otherwise unparalleled diplomatic and scholarly career.

• Yossi Mekelberg is a professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House. X: @YMekelberg