Henry Kissinger: Good or Evil?

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

62% : Humans create their truth, they come to understand their "purpose" (a very Kissingerian concept) though action.
51% : As national security adviser and then secretary of state he understood the need to adapt U.S. foreign policy to a more even distribution of global power, and he shared with his boss Richard Nixon an ability to think in broad conceptual terms about America's place in the world.
50% : In his relatively short time in government, Kissinger played a leading role in creating the world we live in -- a post-Cold War world, a globalized world and a more diffuse world.
47% : What the archival record has so far revealed is that Kissinger was often simplistic, binary and even uninformed during his tenure as national security adviser and secretary of state.
45% : In short, he wasn't a war criminal, he wasn't a very deep or sophisticated thinker, he rarely challenged the intellectual vogues of the time (even because it would have meant to challenge those in power, something he always was -- and still is -- reluctant to do), and once in government he displayed a certain intellectual laziness vis-à-vis the intricacies and complexities of a world that he still tended to see in black-and-white.
43% : Nossel's approach favors a much more wide-ranging set of strategies for advancing the U.S. national interest, by advancing policies that embody American values such as human rights, the rule of law and women's equality.
42% : As Anne-Marie Slaughter and others have pointed out, those headings that are missing from the index of Kissinger's books -- and books about Kissinger -- such as non-governmental organizations, activists, women and human rights ideas and institutions -- light the way to a new pragmatism that could transcend Kissinger's stale realism.
40% : And don't forget that Kissinger knowingly violated U.S. law in allowing secret arms transfers to Pakistan during the India-Pakistan war in December 1971.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.