Kissinger’s Legacy Still Ripples Through Vietnam and Cambodia

Henry A. Kissinger in 1979. He sought to strike and maintain balances of power in a dangerously precarious world.
Picture: Neil Leifer/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images

Henry A. Kissinger, the most powerful secretary of state of the postwar era, died at 100. He was famous for engineering and reshaping the US foreign policies in the era to boldly represent American interests. In an article by The New York Times, Mike Ives highlights the ripple effects of his decisions to carpet bomb Cambodia, rapidly disengage from South Vietnam, and form diplomatic ties with China, which continue to reverberate in Southeast Asia.

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.

Many Vietnamese also resent the role that Mr. Kissinger played in establishing diplomatic relations between the United States and China, Vietnam’s powerful northern neighbor and former imperial occupier.

The normalization of U.S.-China ties in 1979 elevated China’s international standing and paved the way for its rise, said Duong Quoc Chinh, 46, a Vietnamese architect and political commentator in Hanoi, the capital. “Now people dislike him primarily because they see him as the person responsible for China’s prosperity.”

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.