In perceiving the Soviet Union as permanent, orderly, and legitimate, Robert Kaplan says, Kissinger shared a failure of analysis with the rest of the foreign-policy elite — notably excepting a few insightful individuals:
- the scholar and former head of the State Department’s policy-planning staff George Kennan,
- the Harvard historian Richard Pipes,
- the British scholar and journalist Bernard Levin, and
- the Eureka College graduate Ronald Reagan.