The Good Old Days of Henry Kissinger: Vietnam and the Death of a Good Old Freund in 1976–2017, and the End of an Era for China

The bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and 1970, which Mr. Kissinger authorized in the hope that it would root out pro-Communist Vietcong forces operating from bases across Vietnam’s western border, also fueled years of debate about whether the United States had violated international law by expanding the conflict into an ostensibly neutral nation.

When Henry Kissinger turned 100 this year, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken toasted him at one birthday celebration in New York, and the C.I.A. director, William J. Burns, did so at another in Washington. Kissinger kept his role as adviser to Washington policymakers a half century after he left office because of his relevance to the crises of today.

President Trump imposed broad tariffs on Chinese goods, greater scrutiny of visa applications from China, stricter limits on high-tech exports to China and tighter monitoring of Chinese investment and intelligence-gathering activities in the United States. Mr. Biden has kept Mr. Trump’s tariffs and further tightened export controls. He has strengthened military agreements with Australia and the Philippines in order to counter China.

On Chinese social media, a lot of the search topics were about Mr. Kissinger. People shared comments on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, mourning the death of Mr. Kissinger and that on Tuesday of Charles T. Munger, a prominent American investor who was also well known in China.

“Many people think that he was not a good friend of Taiwan, and I think there is some truth to that,” said Lu Yeh-chung, a professor of the department of diplomacy of National Chengchi University in Taipei.

Mr. Kissinger was considered a living legacy of the good old days, according to the dean of the Institute of International Studies.

In July, Mr. Kissinger also met with China’s defense minister at the time, Li Shangfu, who had rebuffed multiple requests for meetings with his American counterpart. John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council expressed his disgust that a private citizen had access to the Chinese leadership.

State media outlets hailed him as “China’s old friend.” On Chinese social media, people said his death marked the end of an era. He visited the country in July of last year at age 100.

His experience goes a long way to the reason he was asked to give advice. The same path Mr. Kissinger traveled in November of 1969 was used by him to carry out shuttle diplomacy.

To Mr. Kissinger’s many critics, this fervor for remaining involved, decades after he could have retired, showed a thirst for power or an effort to burnish his legacy, which he knew was tarnished by charges he forgave massacres, bombings and the deaths of thousands when doing so served his diplomatic purposes.

The Kissinger conversations with secretaries of state and presidents were not only about navigating the downward spiral in relations with Beijing. He was involved in strategy discussions with a person who negotiated a major arms-control treaty. He wrote about artificial intelligence, as well as many other topics, in a lengthy letter to EricSchmidt, his former boss at the search engine company who was close to the former secretary of state.

In an era when it seemed implausible that China would become the world’s second-biggest economy, Mr. Kissinger talked to the embassy’s staff about what it was like to open the relationship.

On that same trip, Mr. Kissinger was celebrated at the U.S. Embassy, where R. Nicholas Burns, the current U.S. ambassador, lives in a house that Mr. Kissinger helped get constructed when the United States had a representative to China, but full diplomatic recognition had not yet happened.

It was a calculated move. Mr. Xi was making clear that he wanted to move back toward the warmth that surrounded President Richard M. Nixon’s opening to China in the early 1970s, engineered by Mr. Kissinger in secret interchanges and a remarkable, also secret trip to China. And the July visit helped set up Mr. Xi’s summit meeting with President Biden, outside of San Francisco, this month.

Vietnam’s 1975 Battle of the Khmer Rouge: The U.S. Foreign Ministry and its Implications on Southeast Asia and the Vietnam-China Relationship

In 1975, the fighting between North Vietnam and South Vietnam came to an end. The inevitable result was the cynical American policy intended to create space between the American withdrawal from the country in 1973, and the fall of Saigon two years later.

Mr. Kissinger said that America shouldn’t torture itself on the notion of having a settlement earlier if it had been more willing. “They could not have had a settlement, except for selling out and withdrawing unconditionally, which nobody would have supported.”

He wrote in his memoirs that the bombing campaign was a decision forced upon the president by North Vietnam.

In postwar Cambodia, Prime Minister Hun Sen, who spent nearly four decades in power before transferring the premiership to his son this year, long argued that Mr. Kissinger and other former American officials should be charged with war crimes for their role in the bombing campaign.

Many analysts have said that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia led in part to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which oversaw horrors that killed nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population in the late 1970s.

But Mr. Sophal Ear, who escaped the Khmer Rouge as a child, added that Mr. Kissinger was slowly fading from memory in a country where the median age is now only about 27. “I surmise that they cannot blame someone whose name they do not know,” he said.

The Vietnam Foreign Ministry did not reply to the request for comment on Mr. Kissinger’s legacy. A spokesman for the Cambodian government did not want to speak about it.

The United States had disagreements with Mr. Hun Sen over his backsliding on democracy and the need to restore fair elections. Mr. Hun Sen referred to Cambodia as his country’s most trustworthy friend.

Vietnam, by contrast, has sought to offset a historically close but complicated relationship with China by pursuing warmer ties with the United States, its former enemy. Though a one-party state, Vietnam has found common ground with Washington in concerns over China’s mounting ambitions in Southeast Asia.