The Lessons His Failures Could Teach Us Today...

 Kissinger’s five year bombing of Cambodia (which, by credible estimates, killed 100,000 civilians), along with his “savage” (Kissinger’s word) bombing of North Vietnam, was motivated by the opposite of realism: to try to bring about a world Kissinger believed he ought to live in (one in which he could, by the force of military power, bend peasant-poor countries like Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam to his will) rather than reflect the real world they did live in: one in which, try as he might, he was unable to terrorize weaker nations into submission. “I refused to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point,” Kissinger once complained.