Global leaders have paid tribute to former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, but there was also sharp criticism of the man who remained an influential figure decades after his official service as one of the most powerful diplomats in American history.
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Kissinger, who died Wednesday at 100, drew praise as a skilled defender of US interests.
On social media, though, he was widely called a war criminal who left lasting damage throughout the world.
"America has lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices" on foreign affairs, said former president George W Bush, striking a tone shared by many high-level officials past and present.
"I have long admired the man who fled the Nazis as a young boy from a Jewish family, then fought them in the United States Army," Bush said in a statement.
Kissinger served two presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and dominated foreign policy as the United States withdrew from Vietnam and established ties with China.
In China, foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called Kissinger an "old friend and good friend of the Chinese people, and a pioneer and builder of China-US relations".
State broadcaster CCTV shared on social media an old segment showing Kissinger's first secret visit to China in 1971, when he broached the possibility of establishing US-China relations.
Criticism of Kissinger, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam in 1973, was especially strong on social media, where many posted celebratory videos in reaction to his death.
A Rolling Stone magazine headline said "Henry Kissinger, war criminal beloved by America's ruling class, finally dies".
"Henry Kissinger's bombing campaign likely killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians - and set (a) path for the ravages of the Khmer Rouge," Sophal Ear, a scholar at Arizona State University who studies Cambodia's political economy, wrote on The Conversation.
"The cluster bombs dropped on Cambodia under Kissinger's watch continue to destroy the lives of any man, woman or child who happens across them."
Kissinger initiated the Paris negotiations that ultimately provided a face-saving means to get the United States out of a costly war in Vietnam.
Nixon's daughters, Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, said their father and Kissinger enjoyed "a partnership that produced a generation of peace for our nation".
Former British prime minister Tony Blair said he was "in awe" of Kissinger, who "was a problem solver, whether in respect of the Cold War, the Middle East or China and its rise".
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said as he met US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Tel Aviv that Kissinger "laid the cornerstone of the peace agreement, which (was) later signed with Egypt, and so many other processes around the world I admire".
Blinken said Kissinger "really set the standard for everyone who followed in this job" and that he was "very privileged to get his counsel many times".
Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he was "a wise and far-sighted statesman" and was inextricably linked with pragmatic foreign policy that made it possible for the US and Soviet Union to achieve detente.
French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X, previously Twitter, that Kissinger's "century of ideas and of diplomacy had a lasting influence on his time and on our world".
Olaf Scholz, the chancellor of Kissinger's native Germany, praised his commitment to trans-Atlantic ties and him remaining close to his German homeland.
Australian Associated Press
