Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger says President-elect Donald Trump could go “down in history as a very considerable president.” In an interview this Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Kissinger said Trump is asking “a lot of unfamiliar questions.”
“Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven’t seen. So it is a shocking experience to them that he came in to office,” Kissinger said.
“I believe he has the possibility of going down in history as a very considerable president.”
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The Nobel Peace Prize-winning foreign policy expert, who has advised numerous presidents in his career, said Trump’s election could usher in “something remarkable and new” because the incoming president has “an extraordinary opportunity.”
Kissinger also spoke about the current controversy over alleged Russian cyber-hacks during the presidential election, saying, “I don’t doubt the Russians are hacking us. And I hope we’re doing some hacking there.”
“Everybody has a hacking capability. And probably every intelligence service is hacking in the territory of other countries,” he says. “But who exactly does what? That would be a very sensitive piece of information. But it’s very difficult to communicate about it because nobody wants to admit the scope of what they’re doing.”
Kissinger called Russian President Vladimir Putin “a character” out of a Fyodor Dostoevsky novel.
The former national security advisor and secretary of state to President Richard Nixon also admitted that he miscalculated Trump’s electoral potential, thinking he was a “transitory phenomenon.”
He has since altered that opinion.
“I give him huge credit for having analyzed an aspect of the American situation, develop a strategy, carry it out against his leadership of his own party, and prevailing. Now, his challenge is to apply that same skill to the international situation.”