Henry Kissinger might well be the most famous Jew in America. If fame is measured cumulatively, then he certainly would be, for Kissinger has been famous for longer than most of us have been alive. He is 98-years-old, and was a mere stripling of 44 in 1967, when he first met Richard Nixon.

At the time, Kissinger was foreign-policy adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, who was running for the Republican nomination in 1968 and who is chiefly remembered as the avatar of two species that have become increasingly rare in American public life: the WASP quasi-aristocracy who used to run the country, and the “Rockefeller Republican”, the kind of liberal, Northeasterner who lost control of the Republican Party to the South and the Sun Belt, the Bible-bashers and Californians like Nixon and Reagan.

When Nixon won the 1968 election, Kissinger switched and secured a job with him. Not for nothing is Kissinger the greatest living exponent of the realist school of foreign policy.
His relationship with Nixon is fascinating. Kissinger had distrusted Nixon, and Nixon, as his tapes make clear, didn’t much like Jews: “You can’t trust the bastards.” They were both outsiders and both amoral. Machiavelli, the father of modern foreign-policy realism, would have approved, but Americans do slather morality on their politics like ketchup on their fries. Perhaps this is why Kissinger remains a figure of suspicion. For a man who has risen to the top of his field three times over — as an academic, as a diplomat and unlikely sex symbol, and in his 40-year encore as a freelance sage — he remains an outsider.
It is not just that Kissinger was born Heinrich, not Henry, or that, having been born in Germany in 1923, he is perhaps the last public figure in America to have been beaten up as a youth by pro-Nazi gangs. Nor is it that his accent, a gift to mimics everywhere, remains foreign. It’s his thinking that is foreign to most Americans — and not only because Kissinger has long warned that America is in decline.

The realist sees the world as a battlefield devoid of morality. The WASP upper class used to produce Americans who saw the world in that way: the diaries of George Kennan, the father of the “containment” strategy that won the Cold War without blowing us all up, are cold-bloodedly Old-World in their pursuit of power. But America’s rulers these days are sentimentalists, like the voters.

No one ever mistook Kissinger for a sentimentalist. In seven years as Nixon’s adviser and then Secretary of State, and then, after the Watergate indelicacy, Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State, Nixon defused the Cold War with Russia, got the US out of Vietnam, won the Cold War in the Middle East by pulling Egypt out of the Soviet orbit and brokering the treaty between Israel and Egypt, and — most consequentially of all — brought China in from the cold.

The left will never forgive Kissinger for these successes, some of which — getting out of Vietnam, reducing tensions with Russia — were fixes for Democrats’ failures. Its outrage at his support of dictators such as Pinochet during the Cold War is a moral veneer for the deeper rot of anti-Americanism, and a dodge of the compromises that politics require.
The right came around to Kissinger when it too became internationalist in the Eighties. But the Old Right — the rump of Birchers, Southern romantics and bigots — never did. They were isolationists, and as America goes through one of its periodic fits of isolationism, parts of the right too are turning on Kissinger.

America has a China problem. Much of it is America’s own fault. When we trace back the origins of present discontents, we arrive in 1971, when Kissinger went twice to China to meet with Mao’s foreign minister, Zhou Enlai. So the isolationist right says that America wouldn’t have a China problem if Kissinger hadn’t opened the door to détente. This is silly: so much has happened since then. It’s also what happens if you live to 98.

Zhou Enlai is remembered these days for his joke when he was asked about the significance of the French Revolution: “It’s too early to tell.” Westerners took that as straight-faced Confucian wisdom. This was only the first of many modern misunderstandings of China, whose civilization Kissinger, judging from his book On China, understands better than any other diplomat.

I approached Kissinger a few years ago at a black-tie dinner in New York. I told him I’d recently quoted from his book on Metternich, the wily Austrian chancellor, and the Congress of Vienna, which had created a balance of power that produced Europe’s long peace after the Battle of Waterloo. We discussed what the Congress of Vienna would make of the disordered world we now live in.
“We need more Metternichs,” he said. It occurred to me that we need more Kissingers, too.
Then it occurred to me that this was what he meant.

Dominic Green is the editor of The Spectator’s world edition