Since then he has had a roller-coaster ride as a public figure. Serious recognition, such as the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, competed with caricature: as a Dr Strangelove (from the Stanley Kubrick film Dr Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb [1964]); as a man about town, escorting celebrities thrilled by the aphrodisiac of power; as vain and untrustworthy in a scarifying study, Kissinger: The Price of Power (1983), by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. To those who were disappointed that he gave his intellect and negotiating skills to the cause of ‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon were added those who lamented his part in giving ‘Monster Mao’ respectability. He has had a brittle relationship with the media, teasing and enticing it while remaining opposed to its values. Kissinger values secrecy, not transparency. He also likes order, not the freedom of the chattering classes.

Throughout, however, he has remained a scholar. His dozen books are the record of a busy and eventful public life, and also a journey. Now eighty-eight, his latest book is a legacy to learning and understanding. His encounters with Chinese leaders and officials over forty years have led him to become an admirer of China and have confirmed a youthful conviction when, after coming to the United States from Germany, he tried, without success, to convince Americans of the timeless relevance of European statesmen such as Bismarck and Metternich. Now he has the backing of Confucius, who preached not only hierarchy and harmony, but also love of learning.

He begins with the tantalising notion that the nation of China existed before it began. He treats China as not just a contemporary reality, disentangling its national interest and international responsibilities from revolutionary aspirations, but also as a civilisation emerging, like an Old Testament legend, from the mists of time. His thesis is that China was once the most productive and prosperous country in the world, that it declined, revolted against newly empowered industrial intruders, rescued itself from Mao’s perpetual revolution, and, by sensible diplomacy and economic pragmatism, is now poised for greatness again.

Its encounter with the United States, the dominant power of the twentieth century, is naturally the core of the book. ‘Our announcement will shake the world,’ said Premier Zhou Enlai, after secretly meeting with Kissinger in 1971 to prepare for President Nixon’s visit the following year. Along the way are glimpses of history in the making, from which, it needs to be said, Henry is rarely absent. He enjoyed the secrecy of the early encounters: ‘a minuet so intricate that both sides could always claim that they were not in contact, so stylised that neither country needed to bear the onus of an initiative that might be rejected, and so elliptical that existing political relations could be continued without the need for consultation on a script that had yet to be written.’ You might say he was in his element.

But he provides thoughtful detail to the early excitement and is generous with his opinion of others. A monumental, bantering, sardonic, Socratic Mao, who spent his life struggling against the pervasive effect of Chinese culture and yet, in his dealings with the United States, relied on it, presenting his case by asking questions and raising issues, without making a commitment, is astutely documented, as is the suspicious intruder: lean and hungry Richard Nixon. Each was wary of the other’s dealings with the Soviet Union, the third party in the triangular balancing act, and there are insights into the one-upmanship of diplomacy. We have a glimpse of pantomime in a meeting between Mao and Khrushchev. ‘Mao [received] Khrushchev not in a ceremonial room but in his swimming pool. Khrushchev, who could not swim, was obliged to wear water wings. The two statesmen conversed while swimming, while the interpreters followed them up and down the side of the pool.’

Kissinger is respectful of almost everyone on the Chinese side, including the current leaders, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, the first generation of leaders without personal experience of the revolution. Mao’s place in history would have been less secure without Zhou Enlai and has been sanctified by Deng Xiaoping, who was responsible for the economic powerhouse that China is today. He also treats American successors of the Nixon breakthrough tolerably well, although he is inclined to lean toward the Republicans and is unhappy with President Clinton.

The intellectual dynamic of his book is the clash and reconciliation of the ‘singularity’ of China and the ‘exceptionalism’ of the United States. The United States has an offensive foreign policy, believing that it is obliged to spread its message of liberty throughout the world. China, believing that it is the centre of the world, is defensive, resisting incursions from the barbarians of outer regions, expanding by cultural osmosis, not missionary zeal. Kissinger has a lot of fun playing with a seemingly irresistible force and a seemingly immovable object to make his point that ‘statesmanship needs to be judged by the management of ambiguities, not absolutes’.

His interest in power sets him at odds with the rise of human rights as a factor in global politics and therefore also with the development of international criminal and humanitarian law. He is aware that this is an issue yet rarely mentions it, except in glancing references to Tibet and the Uighurs of Xinjiang, and even then in the context of Russian designs and Indian hostility on border issues. The massacre of Tiananmen Square in 1989 makes a fuller treatment unavoidable, but by then the issue is subsumed in a narrative of prosperity.

His critics will also note that he does not seem interested in China’s growing military capability. His encounter with China has revived his faith in diplomacy. In earlier writings, he had treated the balance of power politics that gave Europe a century of peace between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the first world war of the twentieth century as an effect of shared values, which made balancingdifficult to imagine in the climate of the Cold War. He returns in this book to the Westphalia treaties of 1648, with which he had pestered his students in those early Harvard years, but now with emphasis not on the balance of power politics but on the creation of a regional community.

As the Reagan years ended, the situation in Asia was the most tranquil it had been in decades. A half century of war and revolution … had given way to a system of Asian states on essentially Westphalian lines … Asia was now a world of discrete states with sovereign governments, recognised borders, and a nearly universal tacit agreement to refrain from involvement in each other’s domestic political and ideological alignments. An equilibrium … had been preserved, in part due to the exhaustion of the parties and in part due to American (and subsequently Chinese) efforts to turn back various contestants for dominance. Within this context, a new era of Asian economic reform and prosperity was taking root – one that in the twenty-first century may well return the region to its historic role as the world’s most productive and prosperous continent.

Sir Eyre Crowe’s famous memorandum of 1907, known to all students of international relations because it led Britain to respond to Germany’s rise in Europe by going to war, now appears, not to point the way forward, but as a warning. Kissinger devotes the end of his book to imagining how the United States and China would react if they adopted ‘the Crowe school of thought’. China would try to push back America from its borders, circumscribe its naval power, reduce its weight in international diplomacy. The United States would try to organise Chinese neighbours into a counterweight to China’s dominance.

Kissinger’s memorandum of 2011 proposes something different: Towards a Pacific Community? Note the question mark. The old realist is dealing here with a visionary concept, so he discards the language of statecraft and speaks of ‘evolution’ and quotes from Immanuel Kant’s essay ‘Perpetual Peace’. He wants the contest between China and the United States to be absorbed in a ‘shared purpose’ and a ‘common enterprise’, in which old issues such as Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam would be absorbed and regional powers would participate (he mentions Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and Australia).

Actually, the notion of a Pacific Community has been around for decades and has had several prominent Australian advocates, but Kissinger has always looked to the northern hemisphere for power’s transforming qualities. Gough Whitlam’s initiative is not recorded, although he was in China on his first, controversial visit when Kissinger was secretly on his way, and the subsequent Nixon visit was a rebuff to the hard line that the McMahon government had held on recognition of Beijing. Nor does he acknowledge the Hawke government in establishing Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the work of Indonesia and Malaysia in neutralising great power politics in South-East Asia, the Australian diplomatic initiative in getting the warring factions in Cambodia to agree on a settlement. He shows no understanding of the utility of the G20 group, which includes nations from north and south and has both scope and legitimacy, representing sixty per cent of the world’s population and eighty per cent of global GDP.

Still, even with its northern myopia, this is a book with a wise core, written by someone who has learned that the responsibility of power brings both constraint and motivation and that reaching out to the other side has human, as well as strategic, benefits. From his own experience, Kissinger develops a vision of political leadership in today’s turbulent world. Especially in democracies, where opinion polls and focus groups have become instruments of policy, the following is worth reflection: ‘Societies operate by standards of average performance. They sustain themselves by practising the familiar. But they progress through leaders with a vision of the necessary and the courage to undertake a course whose benefits at first reside largely in their vision.’