Kissinger and President Nixon were men of peace.  They inherited a disastrous war–Vietnam–that they had no hand in making.  President John F. Kennedy intended to stop the war before it could get started, which was one of the reasons he was assassinated by the CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secret Service.  The Soviet Threat had to be resisted even at the cost of President Kennedy's life and the trauma inflicted on what was still in those days a free nation.

President Nixon and Kissinger also had to restart the efforts of President Kennedy to defuse the dangerous tensions of the Cold War that both the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam war brought to the surface.  The pursuit of detente by the Nixon administration produced the Strategic  Arms Limitations Agreement and created a working relationship between Washington and Moscow.  Nixon's opening to China might have prevented another war.  Nixon and Kissinger's achievements in defusing the Cold War were unrivaled until President Reagan and Soviet leader Gorbachev ended the Cold war.

The Clinton regime violated the word of the George H.W. Bush administration that in exchange for the Soviet Union permitting the reunification of Germany, the US would not move NATO one inch toward the East.  All subsequent US regimes exited from all of the arms agreements that had reduced tensions and created a bond of trust between the nuclear superpowers.  This bond is especially important, because of the numerous false warnings from warning systems.

The consequence of unraveling the work of Nixon, Kissinger, and Reagan is the total lack of trust today between the US and Russia.  The situation today is far worse than it was in the darkest days of the Cold War.

As an insider I well know that the problem of conservative presidents, such as Nixon and Reagan, in easing tensions with Russia is that their conservative base is suspicious of the effort.  I well remember that Reagan's efforts at detente with the Soviet Union were suspected by Reagan's conservative base. Conservatives worried that a former movie star was not a match for cunning communists, and that America would come out the loser.