Business mogul Chung Mong-joon donates $1m to honor Kissinger

Chung Mong-joon, honorary chairman of Asan Institute for Policy Studies, has donated $1 million to honor the work of Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, a renowned scholar in international relations, the institute said Wednesday.

Half of the fund was given to the Center for Strategy and International Studies in Washington, DC, and the other half to the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies.

An influential realist scholar in international relations, Kissinger served as national security adviser to former President Richard Nixon and as secretary of state during the Ford administration. He offered the insight that even though many foreign policy decisions are choices between evils, and leaders should be wary of the perils of a morally vacuous realism.

Kissinger’s most important achievement was his role in accelerating the end of the Cold War through improving US-China relations. He was the chief architect of the detente policy that started in the late 1960s. He helped it continue into the 1970s, and strived to avoid the worst possible outcome despite the nuclear arms race between the US and Soviet Union.

In 2010, when Kissinger visited South Korea at the invitation of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, Chung met with him to discuss various issues extensively. The contents of the discussion are in Chung’s book, titled “Communications with World Leaders.” In his meeting with Chung, Kissinger stated, “The relationship between Korea and the United States has a long history, and the American people are well aware that more than 50,000 US soldiers died in Korea during the Korean War.



By Shin Ji-hye (shinjh@heraldcorp.com)