"The most lasting achievement of [former US President Richard] Nixon and Kissinger was rapprochement with China," Black said. "By 1972, the United States had successfully isolated the People's Republic of China from the world for 22 years. In a bold stroke of genius, Nixon and Kissinger broke the isolation, freeing all nations to recognize and trade with China."
Black said the politically courageous action eventually "helped enrich the entire world while enabling hundreds of millions of Chinese to lift themselves from lives of grinding poverty."
Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in the US state of Connecticut at the age of 100.
Black pointed out that Kissinger made his mark as national security adviser for Nixon and his career benefited greatly from the former US president's seldom-acknowledged brilliance in foreign affairs.
"President Nixon was comfortable putting Kissinger out front, and they made a powerful team together. In the end, their greatest foes were not the communists abroad, but the leftists at home in the increasingly radical Democratic Party of the late 60s," he said.
Black also said Nixon and Kissinger struggled to extricate the United States from Vietnam without damaging US prestige or harming its allies, the South Vietnamese.
"Only after the Democrat-dominated media exaggerated a petty break-in in what became the ‘Watergate scandal,’ were his opponents able to block Nixon from achieving an acceptable peace deal with North Vietnam," Black said. "For as soon Nixon was deposed, Democrats slashed all funding for the increasingly confident and successful South Vietnamese Army. Completely deprived of supplies and ammunition, the situation for South Vietnam became hopeless. The South soon fell to the North."
Black said it is ironic that two Democrat US presidents - John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson - launched and expanded the major war in Vietnam.
"But when Nixon, who was elected to end the war, had almost succeeded in doing so, it was the resurgent Democrats who deliberately collapsed the entire war effort to ensure that Republicans were denied credit for ending the long, bloody, and ill-conceived war that the Democrats themselves had foolishly initiated," Black added.