Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee whose controversial foreign policy pronouncements have alarmed some in his own party, is scheduled to meet this week with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a senior campaign aide told NBC News on Monday.
Trump and Kissinger have spoken many times by telephone, the aide said. But the aide didn't know whether Wednesday's meeting in New York, which was first reported by The Washington Post, would be their first face-to-face meeting.
Kissinger, who served as national security adviser and secretary of state for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, remains a divisive figure in American politics, even at the age of 92.
Kissinger shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with then-North Vietnamese Communist leader Le Duc Tho for negotiating a cease-fire during the Vietnam War. The cease-fire later collapsed, and Le rejected his share of the award, which was so controversial that two members of the Nobel board quit in protest.
He is also remembered as the architect of the policy of détente with the then-Soviet Union, leading to the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, and for negotiating Nixon's historic visit to Communist China in 1972.
But he was also reviled by many anti-war activists for U.S. policies supporting repressive regimes in Indochina, South Asia and Latin America that happened to share Washington's opposition to Moscow and Beijing.
Those policies are widely regarded to have led or contributed to bloody wars in Cambodia, Bangladesh and East Timor and to have propped up anti-democratic military leaders in Chile and Argentina. At least two unsuccessful lawsuits have sought his prosecution for alleged war crimes.
