Kissinger’s view: The Economist’s editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes and BBC director of news James Harding attempted to dissect what a Trump presidency would mean for US international relations in an interview with former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Kissinger says: “the immediate task, that I see … is not to force Trump to live up to everything he has said during the campaign, but to give him an opportunity to look at it from a broader point of view and not necessarily pre-judge everything … in terms of rhetoric that may be more geared towards the elections,” to which Beddoes asks if it is too simple to assume Trump will just be “different” in office? Kissinger seemingly sees eye-to-eye with Trump on many issues, including US intervention internationally, on which he still insists that his view is that removing a central authority in any country is more likely to lead to civil war than democracy, in reference to Syria. He adds that domestic debates can’t continue to be about “absolutes, in which absolute good confronts absolute evil.” Kissinger is arguably one of the most influential diplomats of his era and possibly one of the most divisive, with The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson recently arguing that the former secretary of state “has shown little in the way of a conscience. And because of that, it seems highly likely, history will not easily absolve him” (runtime 31:20).