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And yet, hearing from friends who more directly suffered the military regimes that were enabled, abetted and even directly supported by the United States during his tenure as national security adviser and secretary of state, it has dawned on me that Kissinger wasn’t a rogue monster. He embodied a theory of power that underpinned the world order of his time.

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It was a world in which human rights, democracy and justice were of little relevance; they were subordinate to the overarching goal of bolstering Washington and its allies in a balance of power with the other great coalition led by Moscow.

Kissinger is still feted today for his successes: the policy of détente with the Soviet Union; opening relations with Mao’s China; avoiding a potentially fatal hot war between rival nuclear powers.

But as José Miguel Insulza, a Chilean senator and former foreign minister, who fled to Mexico as a young man in 1973 after the bloody coup by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, told me, “the human cost of Kissinger’s grand design was very high.”

It’s an irony that Latin America didn’t matter to Kissinger: The world order was set in Bonn, Moscow and Washington. “Nothing important can come from the South,” he told Chilean foreign minister Gabriel Valdés at a luncheon in June 1969. When Mr. Valdés retorted “you know nothing of the South,” he responded “no, and I don’t care.”

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What did matter was preventing, at any cost, another Latin American country following Cuba into the Soviet embrace. Whether the government of said Latin American country was democratically elected was beside the point.

“We will not let Chile go down the drain,” Kissinger said just a few days after Allende was elected president in 1970 on the ticket of the left-wing alliance Unidad Popular. Three years later, Allende was dead. Kissinger “didn’t care what happened to the people of Chile or of Argentina,” Insulza said.

Grim as they were, Washington’s crimes in Latin America pale against the atrocities it committed elsewhere in those days. Hundreds of thousands died in Cambodia, carpet bombed on Kissinger’s advice, in the service of delaying America’s inevitable defeat in Vietnam.

Moscow, for sure, was no more constrained by any sense of morality. Indeed, the Soviet Union contemplated invading Poland as recently as 1980. Accusations of human rights abuses were just another weapon shot over the Iron Curtain from both sides.

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One would hope that by now the world would have overcome the logic of raw power. The Soviet Union is dead. That Cold War is over. There is a consensus understanding that it is essential to guarantee human rights and democratic governance. An International Criminal Court is in place to adjudicate egregious abuses. Today, Washington could not,........

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