The U.S. and the world's situations are fluid and President-elect Donald Trump's positions policies will similarly be, too — so do not expect him to stick unilaterally to his campaign promises, Henry Kissinger, 93, said Sunday.
One should not insist on nailing [Trump] into positions that he had taken in the campaign, Kissinger, who won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Vietnam War, told CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS."
Kissinger met with President-elect Trump on Thursday and said he came away seeing Trump differently than the campaign coverage which might have painted him as obtuse.
"It was of a determined president, a president-elect, who is making the transition from being a campaigner to being a national strategist and was trying to inform himself on the various aspects of the current situation," Kissinger told Zakaria of his Trump impressions from the meeting.
"We should give him an opportunity to develop the positive objectives that he may have and to discuss those," Kissing added. "And we've gone through too many decades of tearing incumbent administrations apart, and it may happen again, but we shouldn't begin that way.
"And we shouldn't end up that way, either, but — so that would be my basic view."
Trump's policies can and should be impacted by what he learns and experiences first hand while president, not necessarily what he campaigned on, per Kissinger.
"What is striking about his campaign is that he did seem to have a strategy to which he stuck regardless of the pressures that came on him," he added. "Now . . . develop a strategy that is sustainable, that meets the concerns that have appeared during the campaign, but that can be linked to some of the main themes of American foreign policy — because with all the criticism, all of us have made for the entire post World War II period, the freedom and peace of the world have been maintained by America primarily."
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