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Coastal communities across the UK and Europe face an uncertain future, as climate change speeds up erosion. In England, the region of East Anglia is already suffering the consequences.

Brilliant, witty, and ambitious, Henry Kissinger made diplomacy the stuff of unrivaled celebrity. He thrived on attention, and would have been thrilled by  the flood of coverage that marked his death last week. Whether the obituaries and commentaries put his record in a positive or negative light, almost all of them treated Kissinger as the master of events.

This may be how he wanted to be remembered, but it’s not what really happened. No matter how often Kissinger is described as the Cold War’s most powerful secretary of state and a peerless elder statesman, the truth is that his tenure was often rocky, as full of setbacks as acclaim. By the time he left government, he was viewed by many of his colleagues as a burden, not an asset. Once out of office, the advice he gave his successors was sometimes spectacularly wrong, and frequently ignored.

In President Richard Nixon’s first term, Kissinger presided over three big diplomatic transformations—withdrawal from Vietnam, the opening to China, and détente with the Soviet Union. When he became secretary of state, his policy dominance was virtually unchallenged.  He was the first (and, to this day, only) person ever to run the State Department while serving simultaneously as the president’s national security adviser. Outside of government, he enjoyed unprecedented global renown. Less than a month after his Senate confirmation, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

[Shan Wang: Henry Kissinger’s real legacy]

Yet when Kissinger left office barely three years later, most of his ambitious schemes were unrealized. Others had simply been rejected. On the left, many revile Kissinger for the human costs of the policies he pursued; on the right, some still admire his unsentimental use of military force. In fact, the real story of Kissinger’s tenure as secretary of state is a tale in which, again and again, he encountered the limits of his power, and found himself unable to impose his will.

The policies Kissinger developed largely in secret to help wind down the Vietnam War enjoyed far less support once the war was over and they were subjected to more normal, open debate. His influence ebbed steadily. In 1975, Gerald Ford, who had succeeded Nixon a year earlier, forced Kissinger to give up the national-security job. Ford created further checks on Kissinger’s power by picking two former congressional colleagues, Donald Rumsfeld and George H. W. Bush, as secretary of defense and CIA director, respectively. Congress itself voted into law a series of challenges to Kissinger’s policies, something it had consistently failed to do under Nixon. Perhaps worst of all, the secretary of state bore some of the blame for Ford’s defeat in the 1976 election. The president’s campaign managers told reporters they saw him as a vulnerability. So did Ronald Reagan, whose bid for the Republican nomination centered in part on a promise to fire Kissinger.

Kissinger’s lost dominance was especially pronounced in what was arguably the central arena of his policy: the stable relationship—known as “détente”—that he sought to establish with the Soviet Union. His problems began with arms control. In November 1974, soon after Ford became president, Kissinger arranged a quick summit with the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, hoping for a breakthrough in negotiating a long-term treaty to limit each side’s strategic nuclear forces. But he was never able to turn the framework they agreed on into a real treaty. One obstacle was a congressional requirement that U.S. and Soviet forces be equal—at a time when Soviet missiles were getting steadily bigger and more numerous. Outside experts claimed that Kissinger’s framework couldn’t meet that test. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Paul Nitze—a senior national-security official under Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson—insisted it would give Soviet forces a three-to-one advantage. (Privately, Nitze was far angrier, calling the secretary of state a “traitor to his country.”)

Even harder for Kissinger to handle was opposition within Ford’s inner circle. Rumsfeld, once he became defense secretary, was ready to take disagreements with Kissinger right into the Oval Office, telling the president that the United States had been losing its nuclear edge for a decade. At the CIA, Bush approved an assessment largely endorsing Nitze’s critique. Outside the administration, Reagan echoed the same charges. No surprise, then, that Ford eventually put the talks aside.

Kissinger found the ideological dimension of Soviet-American relations still more vexing. He had promised Soviet leaders to expand trade ties by granting Moscow “Most Favored Nation” tariff status, but he could not manage congressional demands for freer emigration from the Soviet Union. The initiative collapsed, but not before senior figures in both Congress and the Kremlin concluded that Kissinger had been deceiving them. On human rights more generally, the secretary of state was isolated within his own administration. He did persuade the president not to meet with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the most famous and outspoken Soviet dissident, but three other members of the Ford Cabinet defied him and conspicuously attended an AFL-CIO dinner in Solzhenitsyn’s honor. Even the young Dick Cheney, then the deputy White House chief of staff, dissented: Détente, he argued, didn’t have to be all “sweetness and light.”

[Gary J. Bass: The people who didn’t matter to Henry Kissinger]

Learning little from this opposition, Kissinger continued to hurt himself with scarcely concealed disdain for opponents of the Soviet regime. (“You know,” he once joked, “what would have happened to them under Stalin.”) The impact reached well beyond Washington. When Reagan delegates to the 1976 Republican convention wanted to repudiate Kissinger, they drafted a platform plank titled “Morality in Foreign Policy.” Ford and his advisers—who had already banned official use of the word détente—felt they had to allow it to pass.

Apart from arms control and human rights, Kissinger also had trouble imposing his views on Soviet-American competition in the Third World. When he wanted to launch a covert program to arm rebels against Moscow’s client regime in Angola, news quickly leaked to The New York Times. Congressional Democrats, predictably, voted to block the weapons transfer altogether. Less predictably, many Republican senators—liberals, moderates, and conservatives alike—also joined in, giving the measure a two-to-one majority. The president’s own party was deserting its celebrity diplomat.

Kissinger was furious, just as he had been earlier in 1975 when, with the fall of Saigon approaching, he proposed a big increase in arms supplies for South Vietnam. To make it happen, however, congressional approval was necessary—and again wanting. Ford ultimately chose not to fight the issue. Instead, in a speech at Tulane University, he declared the war “finished as far as America is concerned.” The White House did not even let Kissinger know that the game-over announcement was coming.

Much of the commentary on Kissinger’s career has presented him as the embodiment of unchecked presidential power over foreign policy. But the pushback against his policies grew steadily stronger as their downsides became better known. In the 1970s, Congress became far more assertive on foreign policy, legislating issues including arms control, human rights, foreign military sales, and covert action. Kissinger frequently railed against the decade-long decline in national-security budgets, but this too was part of his legacy. So were other institutional reforms, such as the Carter administration’s creation of a human-rights bureau in the State Department and the annual publication of global-human-rights reports. Other forms of pushback were less foreseeable: The “most powerful secretary of state in the post-World War II era” surely never imagined what Jimmy Carter’s high-profile envoy to China—Leonard Woodcock, the former head of the United Auto Workers—would tell his Beijing staff at their first meeting: “Never again shall we embarrass ourselves before a foreign nation the way Henry Kissinger did with the Chinese.”

After he left office, Kissinger kept much of the advice he gave his successors confidential, probably thinking that a little mystery about the extent of his influence would only help his new consulting business. But enough is known about some of his Oval Office meetings to challenge the common picture of presidents and advisers listening reverently while Henry Kissinger shared his wisdom. Kissinger’s sustained effort to reorient Reagan’s policies toward the Soviet Union provides a striking example. Together with Nixon, he argued that Mikhail Gorbachev was cynically exploiting the president’s naive antinuclear sentiments so as to tear apart the Western alliance. Under perestroika, they argued, the Soviet threat was actually increasing, not diminishing. Reagan ignored them—and over time harvested a global Soviet foreign-policy retreat.

Kissinger’s shortfalls in office and after are not the whole story, of course. In his first weeks as secretary of state, he was plunged into a crisis—Egypt’s surprise Yom Kippur attack on Israel, followed by the OPEC oil embargo. The cease-fire and disengagement agreements he negotiated bolstered American influence in the Middle East, a region to which he had paid little previous attention. He seemed, to quote the title of my colleague Martin Indyk’s recent book, the “master of the game.”

Yet here, too, the master’s record seems ripe for reassessment—and not just for his early, forgivable missteps. At the start of the Yom Kippur war, Kissinger thought it might be best to keep a low profile and meet Israel’s needs indirectly, by contracting with private companies to deliver arms. Nixon ordered his celebrity policy maker to stop dithering and organize a U.S. airlift. “Do it now!” he barked. More serious is the charge that, even at the height of his power, Kissinger had, of all things, a too-limited conception of what diplomacy could achieve. The most it should try to accomplish, he felt, was to stabilize the world, not to alter—much less transform—it. Hence, the secretary of state was reluctant to take on the hardest parts of the Middle East puzzle—above all, the clash between Israelis and Palestinians, still atop the headlines half a century later.

[From the December 2016 issue: The lessons of Henry Kissinger]

Indyk traces Kissinger’s hesitation to the same sources others have cited: his conservative view of history, his immersion as a scholar in the diplomacy of 19th-century Europe, and his personal experience of 20th-century totalitarianism. All of these drove home the value of stability. But, in looking to explain this conception of diplomacy, we should not leave out what Kissinger surely learned from his own bumpy record as secretary of state. No matter what the tributes and obituaries say, every day on the job confirmed the limits of his power, the difficulty of overcoming them, and his ability to make mistakes when he tried to do so.

For most of American history, when parents separated, their kids almost always ended up living with just one of them. But recent studies have confirmed a new era: Joint physical custody, in which a child resides with each parent a significant portion of the time, has become dramatically more common in the U.S.

The trend was first documented in Wisconsin, where court data revealed that the percentage of divorces leading to equal joint custody—in which time with each parent is split 50–50—rose from just 2 percent in 1980 to 35 percent in 2010. Even among never-married Wisconsin couples who came to court to establish child support—a group in which the prevalence of shared custody is, perhaps unsurprisingly, low—shared arrangements doubled from 2003 to 2013. And a 2022 study found that, nationally, the share of divorces resulting in joint custody jumped from 13 percent before 1985 to 34 percent in the early 2010s. (We don’t have the data to assess custody arrangements among never-married couples nationwide.) Although the increase is steepest among high-income couples, it’s happening across the socioeconomic spectrum, Daniel Meyer, a social-work professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies child custody, told me.

The same change appears to be happening in Europe: The prevalence of equal joint custody roughly doubled from the mid-2000s to 2021, according to a study published earlier this year. The rate of shared custody varies massively among European countries, but it seems to be rising in many of them.

On average, children in shared arrangements tend to fare slightly better than those in sole custody on a variety of metrics, including life satisfaction, stress levels, and self-esteem. But the couples that share custody are usually wealthier, better educated, and have a less fraught relationship with each other, which makes sense: Even in an unequal joint arrangement, a child must be housed, fed, and cared for in two places—which usually requires duplicating expenses. Coordination is needed to transport the kid back and forth. Whether the better outcomes associated with joint custody reflect the arrangement itself or the conditions that make it possible is unclear, Meyer told me. And of course, in some situations—if one parent is abusive or unstable, for example—sole custody is in fact what’s best for the child.

Regardless of whether it’s the right outcome for a given separation, though, joint custody is a growing reality—one that our systems for accounting for and supporting families aren’t built to accommodate. Americans may be ready for the two-household child, but American public policy isn’t.

[Read: The high cost of divorce]

In America’s earliest years, custody of children, who were largely considered property, was typically granted exclusively to fathers following divorce. But as the nation industrialized and men began working outside the home, women developed a distinct role in domestic matters—and a stronger claim to their children. Over the course of the 19th century, sole maternal custody became the near-universal outcome of divorce. But both arrangements were rooted in the conviction that custody is “indivisible,” as J. Herbie DiFonzo, a law professor at Hofstra University, once wrote. A child may have two parents, but only one household.

That bedrock assumption has made it difficult for researchers to track the rise of joint custody in the first place. In the rare cases where national surveys ask about a parent outside of a given household, they don’t usually clarify whether or how often the child is actually residing with them, Molly Costanzo, a scientist at the Institute for Research on Poverty, told me. This makes it hard to know how joint-custody kids, whose parents could both report that the child is living with them, are showing up in data sets. “I’m sure there are instances where they’re double counted,” Katherine Michelmore, a public-policy professor at the University of Michigan, told me. To be fair, constructing surveys that capture the complexities of joint custody is difficult. Anecdotally, we know that such arrangements tend to be highly fluid, shifting throughout the year during summer breaks and holidays, and over time as kids age.

The recent Wisconsin and national data provide the clearest picture yet that shared custody is rising in prominence. In one sense, this development is hardly surprising. As more couples take a more egalitarian approach to family life—with mothers working and fathers involved in child care—more are carrying that dynamic into separation as well, Mia Hakovirta, a social-work professor at the University of Turku, in Finland, told me. This helps explain why famously egalitarian Sweden is the only country in Europe—and likely the world—where the majority of parents who live separately share custody of their kids.

Over time, and often with pressure from fathers’-advocacy groups, legal systems in Europe and America have adapted to facilitate or even encourage shared custody. And at least in the U.S., courts tasked with ordering child support, Costanzo told me, have started taking custody arrangements into consideration. Our social policies, unfortunately, do not.

Consider the earned income tax credit (EITC), a refundable tax credit available to low-income Americans. The refund is substantially larger for those claiming a dependent child—but a child can be claimed only once each year. That makes some sense in a sole-custody arrangement (though some people would argue that a “noncustodial father” paying child support shouldn’t be treated like a single, childless adult). In a joint-custody arrangement, it creates confusion about which parent is entitled to claim the credit—and ultimately a lopsided scenario in which two adults regularly house and care for a child while only one gets state help.

[Read: The great, overlooked tax policy for getting people to work]

This problem has no obvious solution. Perhaps both parents should be able to claim a shared child for the purposes of the tax credit; New York, for example, already has what’s called a “noncustodial parent EITC” available to parents paying child support. Something of the sort could be adapted at the federal level for parents sharing custody. But treating single parents sharing custody and those with sole custody in the same manner might be unfair. Splitting a child’s care with a co-parent can afford more time for leisure and paid work than managing it all yourself.

Another approach, Michelmore told me, would be to base eligibility for the credit solely on a worker’s income, without factoring in their dependents—and then award a “child benefit” for all kids, as many European countries do. Such an allowance would theoretically be easier to split across two households, though that’s rarely an option in practice. In Germany, Anja Steinbach, a professor of sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen, told me, the child benefit is sent to the house where the child is registered; as in most countries, there can only be one and it’s usually the mom’s. And even if Germany enabled parents to split the allowance—as dual-residence parents in Norway can—that benefit would still go a lot further in one household than in two. Some Germans have argued that the child benefit should be more generous for dual-residence families to account for their greater costs.

Joint custody raises these sorts of complications for any program for which one’s eligibility depends on the presence of a child in their home. That includes most benefits targeting people with low incomes—even those that, at face value, have nothing to do with kids. Take Medicaid, the public health-insurance program for Americans with limited means. In most states, an adult’s eligibility is determined by whether their income falls below 133 percent of the federal poverty level, a cutoff that varies by the size of the individual’s household; the size of their household hinges on who they expect to claim as a dependent on their tax return. Again, each child can be claimed only once.

Figuring out an equitable path forward for joint custody will force the U.S. to ponder some fundamental questions about what it means to be a family, what constitutes parenting, what the government’s role is in supporting it, and how much of it one has to do before being entitled to such assistance. The answers won’t be straightforward, but two-household children are already here. There’s no sense in ignoring them any longer.

Catch up with the most important stories from around Europe and beyond - latest news, breaking news, World, Business, Entertainment, Politics, Culture, Travel.

Europe will need to "rewrite the rules" for Ryder Cup eligibility following Jon Rahm's move to LIV Golf, says Rory McIlroy.

Catch up with the most important stories from around Europe and beyond - latest news, breaking news, World, Business, Entertainment, Politics, Culture, Travel.

Britain's Dakota Ditcheva looks to extend her impressive record of eight finishes in nine fights when she faces Valentina Scatizzi in the PFL Europe finals in Dublin on Friday.