92

# THE CRITICS

## BOOKS

### THE GAMES OF GREAT MEN

BY SIMON SCHAMA

#### Diplomacy

by Henry Kissinger

(Simon & Schuster; $35)

THIRTY years ago, when Henry Kissinger was still a Harvard professor and I was an undergraduate at Cambridge University, everyone I knew was trying his hand at Diplomacy. It was unlike any other board game: no dice; no cards; no trivia. The board itself was a map of Europe in the decade before the First World War, and players assumed the roles of the Great Powers. The United States and Japan were ignored, being too peripheral. The idea was not really to win, for we were conscious that in the Great War—as Kissinger memorably puts it— all those who won also lost. The point was, somehow, to prevail. The fact that no one was exactly sure what prevalence would look like didn't matter, because the game never ended conclusively. It withered away, much as the war itself did: through exhaustion and bad feeling. “Moves” in the game dispatched little plastic warships or infantry divisions across borders, or allowed a player to hold them for defense. But these were merely declaratory gestures. What really counted was the period of “diplomacy” before moves were made: the twenty minutes during which the various Chancellors and Foreign Ministers of the Powers consulted each other about their respective intentions.

On my Cambridge college staircase—the nursery of statesmen and spies—

plotters gathered, conspiring to make or break alliances. The Chancellor of Germany (from Liverpool, reading Math) would retire to a washroom with the Foreign Minister of France (from Bristol, reading English) and plan to do something unspeakable to the exposed flank of the Ottoman Empire (Twickenham, Moral Sciences). Some historical knowledge helped, but literal reënactment could be a hindrance. Deceit, manipulation, intrigue, and betrayal were par for the course. Friendships fell apart over ruthlessly violated nonaggression pacts somewhere in the vicinity of Trieste. There was only one cardinal rule: at all costs, you were to avoid being saddled with Austria-Hungary, since, whatever your defensive plans, all the other players would attack your hopelessly overextended frontiers. Alas, I generally was, and they invariably did.

I've been told that there was a set of Diplomacy in Henry Kissinger's office when he was running the Harvard International Seminar, in the early nineteen-sixties. I can't say I was surprised to learn this. The qualities needed to survive the game were the same ones he champions in his new book: a clear-eyed and unsentimental sense of the national interest; a suspicion of collective-security arrangements that are based on a presumed consensus about aggression; a preference for hard-edged alliances that are based on mutual interest as opposed to pieties about universal peace and freedom; and, above all, a sombre assumption that conflict rather than

harmony is the norm of relations between states, as it is between men. No wonder the United States was excluded from the game: the skills required to succeed at it were precisely those cynical Old World gambits against which the Republic had been founded, and against which Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points (four more than *le bon Dieu*, as Clemenceau remarked) were directed. Unlike the game, though, Kissinger's absorbing book tackles head on some of the toughest questions of our time: Is an American Realpolitik a contradiction in terms? Can the United States sustain a diplomacy based on the calculations of national interest without experiencing periodic convulsions of self-hatred? Or does the whole history and nature of the American national experience preclude any diplomacy—whether shaded by liberal or conservative ideology—that is not somehow grounded in the high-minded principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence?

Since the only two American leaders Kissinger believes to have anticipated his approach to foreign relations are Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, the gung-ho imperialist and the inimitable loner, the prospects for a Yankee Realpolitik do not look auspicious. And readers of this book will search in vain in its disappointingly diffuse and repetitive conclusions for reassuring prophecy. But the virtues of “Diplomacy” (and there are many) do not lie in offering easy answers. At a time when strategic and national interests are becoming increasingly difficult to identify with any clarity, it's a considerable service to bring the testimony of history to bear on the perennial self-interrogation about the obligations of American power.

THERE is already something of a received opinion that “Diplomacy” is actually two books: a historical survey

93

of foreign policy in Europe and the United States over the past two centuries, and a self-exoneration against the criticisms of Walter Isaacson's comprehensive biography and the stinging attacks levelled by Seymour Hersh in his study of Kissinger's years in the Nixon Administration. But this impression is in fact completely misleading. The portion of the book that covers Kissinger's career as national-security adviser and Secretary of State makes up barely an eighth of the volume. And, for some reason—perhaps owing to Kissinger's own sense of fatigue at travelling this same miserable road yet again—the liveliness and the energy that animate much of the book seem to harden into a brittle defensiveness the closer the narrative comes to his own career. So the advice to any prospective reader of "Diplomacy," however daunting the eight-hundred-and-thirty-five-page tome might seem, must be "Don't skip!" Above all, don't slight the richness of Kissinger's epic account of Great Power diplomacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

For "Diplomacy" is an unrepentantly old-fashioned book—the kind of thing that Henry Kissinger might have written had he remained on the Harvard faculty. At one time, he envisaged his analytical monograph on peacemaking after the Napoleonic Wars, "A World Restored" (1957), as the first in a series of books that would extend his account of Realpolitik up to the First World War. But much has happened to the genre of diplomatic history since Kissinger left academe, and "Diplomacy" is a narrative of great men and events, studied with epigrams and lapidary utterances on the practice of power—an appealingly unself-conscious throwback to the literature of the nineteen-fifties. The most astute practitioners of that earlier generation, thinkers like A. J. P. Taylor, duly receive attention from Kissinger even when he is arguing against them. And, like their big, sharply polemical texts, "Diplomacy" is

inflected with irony, and assumes that foreign policy was indeed what its dominant movers and shapers—from Metternich to Truman—made of it. Most of the chapters are built around the doings of the mighty rather than the hithering and thithering of countless little subalterns and consuls, and the result is a sort of diplomatic portrait gallery. Some of the grand actors, like Bismarck, Stresemann, Truman, and Stalin, are well realized; others, like Palmerston and Napoleon III, are much more sketchily drawn.

This approach needs no apology. It was the conviction of Taylor and his generation (and of George Kennan, in

the United States) that history was the best teacher of statecraft—an ideal that goes back to the very origins of Western historical writing, in Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War. Kissinger, likewise, is convinced that American ahistoricism is the cause of our most damaging acts of moral hubris. History, he reasonably argues, never

provides a neatly charted route map for the future, despite the fact that Americans want it to do exactly that. On the contrary, it is a tale of contingency, muddle, and unforeseen outcomes. But it is precisely the pratfalls of history that provide its best instruction. They teach an understanding of limits, even to a culture fixated on the infinite horizon. So "Diplomacy" is offered as a reverse Monroe Doctrine: the tragedies of the Old World are summoned to sober the dangerous innocence of the New.

THE distinction between light and dark brands of diplomacy—between policies premised on views of the world as either corrigible or incorrigible—is not, of course, original. George Kennan's first book, "American Diplomacy 1900-1950," was published in 1951, when the containment doctrine that he had helped institute was at its most influential. In that succinct collection of lectures he rebuked the Wilsonian approach for what he called its "legalistic-moralistic" obsessions. Kennan was prophetically gloomy about the capacity of organizations like the United Nations to deal with substantive conflict between nations, and chastised the tendency of American diplomacy to swing wildly between unrealistic faith in international consensus and hellbent drives to total victory. Kissinger acknowledges Kennan's importance in this critical tradition but goes further in identifying the alternative approach—one that values the perpetuation of a balance of power rather than some sort of final resolution of conflict—as peculiarly and distinctively European.

The figure that Kissinger invokes most often as the embodiment of hard-boiled, interest-directed diplomacy is Cardinal Richelieu. It is Richelieu, rather than Machiavelli or any of the other figures surveyed in Garrett Mattingly's brilliant "Renais-sance Diplomacy" (1955), who is credited by Kissinger with the prop-

Henry Kissinger: summoning the tragedies of the Old World to sober the New.

RICHARD THOMPSON

94

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agation of raison d'état—a term that in fact Richelieu uses only twice in his "Political Testament." The scarlet-robed Cardinal, with his mournful mustache and glittering eyes, stalks through the pages of "Diplomacy": he is its presiding muse, inviting invidious comparisons when, say, John Foster Dulles falls flat on his face yet again. One can almost hear Kissinger mutter, "I knew Richelieu, and believe me, Mr. Secretary, you're no Richelieu."

The trouble is that Kissinger doesn't, after all, know Richelieu very well. He relies for his portrait of Richelieu on the kind of anachronistic literature that wants to see in the seventeenth-century prelate a proto-Bismarck in silks, daringly liberated from conventional pieties and motivated by interest rather than by faith.

He assumes an essentially modern mind beneath the Cardinal's hat. But Richelieu's Christianity was emphatically not used as a fig leaf for the pursuit of national interest; it was, on the contrary, the driving motive of his public life. There is no reason to suppose that he was being at all disingenuous when he said, "What is done for the state is done for God, Who is the basis and foundation of it." His enemies did indeed accuse him of the sort of secularism that Kissinger takes to be a political strength. But the Cardinal's Kissinger, his éminence grise, was the Capuchin Père Joseph, and while Richelieu believed that reason and piety were compatible, his manual for confessors and his pulpit oratory plainly reveal him to be a

BOOKS

95

soldier of the Counter-Reformation. His quarrel was not with the Church but with Spanish-Hapsburg imperialism. By making tactical alliances with the Protestant heretics abroad, he believed, he would be in a better position to attack the Protestant Huguenots at home.

Kissinger is correct in judging the long-term importance of Richelieu's unwavering determination to redress the European balance of power. But Richelieu was motivated not so much by a commitment to the *principle* of equilibrium as by a desire to position the French crown as the most aggressive upholder of Catholic absolutism. Any innocent reader of Kissinger's account would imagine the result of the Cardinal's efforts to have been an unqualified success, but, as J. H. Elliott points out in his illuminating 1984 comparative study, "Richelieu and Olivares" (uncited by Kissinger), what Richelieu actually bequeathed to France were the civil wars of the Fronde, political turmoil, and the crushing misery that went with the monstrous taxes levied to pay for the Cardinal's wars.

Just as tellingly, Kissinger fails to note the institutional despotism that was the necessary domestic corollary of *raison d'état*. Even by the gruesome standards of the seventeenth century, Richelieu's regime—with his informers and perverted summary trials, his habit of executing or else incarcerating in the Bastille those with whom he disagreed—was exceptionally brutal. But then Kissinger has a peculiar way of averting his gaze from the ideological content of the regimes served by the diplomatic virtuosi he most admires, as though foreign and domestic policies existed in wholly different realms. Those who put their faith in the pure technology of power in foreign relations, however, are seldom devotees of liberty on their own shores. G. Gordon Liddy and the rest of the gang would have felt right at home working for Richelieu or Metternich. And while it may be true that the Congress of Vienna following the Napoleonic Wars devised a settlement that produced four decades of relatively peaceful equilibrium between the powers, it is no less true that Metternich's devotion was primarily to the preservation of the

Christian dynasticism of the Austrian Empire, rather than to some abstract notion of a Pax Europa. The shared "values" that Kissinger often cites as the cement that held the Vienna powers together, without being specific about their content, actually consisted of a bitter hostility to liberal constitutionalism and national self-determination. The habitual American assumption that a community of liberal, national democracies will make for a peaceful world is, in Kissinger's view, precisely what makes our diplomacy so naïvely myopic.

Yet an alternative to Realpolitik is by no means a uniquely American vision. By the middle of the sixteenth century, a substantial body of writing had been published, especially in Spain, that attempted to distinguish between just and unjust wars. Indeed, Richelieu himself—who, in Kissinger's version, should have been indifferent to such scruples—labored quite sincerely to demonstrate the justice and morality of France's military intervention against the Hapsburgs. If Kissinger had been looking, he might have noticed that the year after Richelieu's ascendancy, 1625, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, then exiled in Paris, produced his “De Jure Belli ac Pacis” (“On the Law of War and Peace”): the most persuasive attempt up to that point to differentiate between the just and the unjust war and to set limits on the barbarities that might be inflicted on civilians in the name of military necessity. Nor was Grotius some unworldly pacifist philosopher; he was a politician and statesman who had suffered imprisonment in the Netherlands, who had fully accepted the need for the use of force in the relations of powers, but who at the same time was unwilling to relinquish the possibility of moral judgment in international relations.

HAD Kissinger wanted to write a book that truly encompassed the history of diplomacy, he might have given the heirs of Grotius more weight in his narrative even while grudging them much honor. He might, for example, have seen the persistence of Grotian ideas in Enlightenment treatises on international law, or granted to Gladstone's liberalism something more than the role of sanc-

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timonious foil to Disraeli's Realpolitik.

It would be churlish to complain, though, of the chapters in "Diplomacy" that take the story from the Crimean War to Yalta, for it is in this central section of the book that Kissinger's narrative really hits its stride. Its pages sparkle with intelligence and insight: Kissinger obviously takes pleasure at finding himself in the company of Stresemann and Churchill and de Gaulle, and enjoys even more dishing out marks for their performance. He is especially devastating when it comes to egregious moments in diplomatic self-delusion like the lamentable Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which substituted a high-minded outlawing of war for a realistic system of alliances that might have actually done something to prevent it. Of Stanley Baldwin's response to Hitler's rearment (he continued to pursue a policy of arms reduction) Kissinger writes, wickedly, "Baldwin failed to explain what incentive Hitler would have to negotiate disarmament as long as Great Britain was engaging in unilateral disarmament."

The book is an oddly engaging Cracker Jack assortment of gems and howlers. Fortunately, it is the gems that one remembers, even when Kissinger is at his most tendentious. Of Hitler's obsessive prophecy of the brevity of his own life he comments, "History offers no other example of a major war being started on the basis of medical conjecture." Like others in the grand tradition of Realpolitik, from Talleyrand (who gets barely a mention) to Bismarck, Kissinger likes nothing better than to polish a grand maxim and then deliver it, gift-wrapped in his rather plummy prose, to posterity. "A country that demands moral perfection of itself as a test of its foreign policy," he writes, in the midst of attacking American policymakers' refusal to see NATO as an alliance system rather than as a democratic crusade, "will achieve neither perfection nor security."

"Diplomacy" is at its best, though, when Kissinger takes off his statesman's pinstripes and provides informal insights into the operational techniques of the profession. He shrewdly notes, for example, the symbolic significance of Roosevelt's response to Stalin's offer of Soviet lodgings at the Teheran Conference in 1943, which was accepted be-

cause of anxiety about a possible bomb attack on the crippled President. A seemingly minor detail of accommodation played directly into Stalin's determination to put the Western Allies on the defensive by making Roosevelt physically beholden to his host. And Kissinger understands how Roosevelt's amiable characterization of "Uncle Joe" had an effect on American public perception, turning a sinister and murderous dictator into a character from Main Street.

In these observant asides one can glimpse quite a different book that might also have borne the title "Diplomacy": an anatomy of the methods and stratagems of the craft, written with the sharp analytical intelligence of a former Secretary of State who has been both an insider and an outsider and whose sensitivity to the nuances of diplomatic language is unmatched. The chapters of this other book would not have been about Bismarck and Wilson and Trueman but about the coded language of diplomatic instructions; the rituals of state protocol; the psychology of the banquet; the relationship of statesmen to the press; the quotidian routines of the embassy. It would, in effect, have been an anthropology of diplomacy—a successor to Mattingly's wonderful account of how the profession originally evolved out of the thankless task of the royal herald and the papal nuncio—and it would have lived up to the publisher's promise on the flap copy that here, at last, we have a book that reveals exactly what diplomacy is.

Perhaps to produce such a book would be beneath the dignity of the retired statesman who wants to put his diplomatic philosophy on record. But in some ways—for I am still hoping that Kissinger may one day write it—it would serve his own cause even better than the book he has written. At the heart of Kissinger's preoccupations is a poignant irony. For all his sense that American democratic ideals have placed an unbearable burden on the free agency of our foreign policy, Kissinger would be the last to dispute their essential nobility. As he himself acknowledged on becoming Secretary of State, while his parents stood beside him on the same platform as Richard Nixon, such a thing could happen only in America. So even while Kissinger insists that the courting

BOOKS

97

of public consensus is no substitute for
rational and pragmatic policy, he has to
admire Presidents like Roosevelt and
Truman, who worked hardest to make
unpopular decisions acceptable to their
national constituency. And, somewhat
against the grain of his skepticism, he is
forced to grant that Ronald Reagan,
whose addiction to demonizing rhetoric
coupled with impulsive negotiation
ought to have represented a unique
foreign-policy nightmare, somehow
managed to legitimate nuclear cutbacks
in ways that would have been quite
impossible for either a liberal or a
Realpolitiker to accomplish.

It is on just this point—the institu-
tional point where the beady-eyed meets
the starry-eyed—that one wishes Henry
Kissinger had concentrated his own for-
midable gaze. For it is there, somewhere
in the bureaucratic precincts of the State
Department itself (whose habits he criti-
cizes in the text but honors in his dedi-
cation), that the present dilemmas of
American power are most painfully
acute. This was brought home to me by
an extraordinary ABC documentary on
the Bush and Clinton Administrations'
response—or lack of it—to the evidence
of atrocities in Bosnia. One State De-
partment official, fully attuned to the
national interest, simply walked away
when he failed to persuade anyone on
the seventh floor that mutilated and
emaciated bodies behind camp wire
were really the business of diplomacy.
When pressed on this, Kissinger's
protégé Lawrence Eagleburger, who was
Acting Secretary of State under Bush,
conceded that, yes, such things were
unimaginably evil, repugnant, and vile.
But what, he confessed, with a kind of
anguished impotence brimming in his
eyes, was he supposed to do about it?
Never mind that one might have offered
him some answers directly from the
codebook of *raison d'état*: lift the arms
interdiction, threaten aerial bombing.
What one saw on Eagleburger's genu-
inely distressed countenance was the
self-inflicted paralysis of Realpolitik. ♦

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and with its rituals? No. Such a reading is
very misleading.

The data of the past may not be all
that happy for the liberationist move-
ments of our time. Why else would
those movements come into being? But
what the sources record is, for better or
for worse, what the sources record. A
good part of what they record, certain-
ly, is made up of systematic and success-
ful repressions; but tinkering with the

moral balance of the past is a disser-
vice to the study of history and to the
reform of society. The past is dead. We
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The Rules of the Game

By TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

Diplomacy
by Henry Kissinger

(Simon & Schuster, 912 pp., $35)

There is an obvious problem. Should one review the book or the author? Henry Kissinger's own answer is made clear by the way in which his book is written: magisterial, striving to be balanced, remarkably restrained in the use of the first-person singular. So much so, in fact, that he writes "the Nixon administration" or even "Nixon" when what is meant is clearly "I" or "me," or at least the historical figure (as opposed to the historian) Henry Kissinger. In any case, he clearly wants his book to be taken on its own merits or demerits, not on his own. It is a fair request.

Even if one resists the temptation to
review the author rather than the book,
there is a further problem. Which book
does one review? For this is not one
book, it is at least three. There is the his-
tory of the foreign relations of the great
powers from the seventeenth to the
twentieth centuries, from Richelieu to
Reagan, and this is diplomatic history in
the grand style. There is the modern
Machiavelli addressing, with sage and
vulpine counsel, the makers of American
foreign policy at the end of the twentieth
century. And there is a slim volume,
some eighty pages long, about Vietnam.
These are all, of course, closely con-
connected, as are the man and the work; but
they are not wholly integrated. I don't
propose to discuss the little book about
Vietnam, except insofar as Kissinger
draws general lessons for the modern
prince (or president) from that experi-
ence. This is the section that comes clos-
est to being a personal apologia, and the
sense of old quarrels still protrudes
through the stately prose.

After two introductory chapters, a
very general one about the “new world
order” and a more specific one setting
up Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roo-
sevelt as epitomes of the two main Amer-
ican approaches to foreign policy, Kissin-
ger harks back to Richelieu for the
beginning of his diplomatic history. The
premise of this history is that a “balance
of power” system has been the exception
rather than the rule in the history of
international relations. The attempts to
achieve such a system, and the ultimate
failures of those attempts, are at the cen-
ter of his work.

This history, let it be said at once, is a
remarkable achievement. Simply to
cover almost four centuries of the for-
eign relations of the great powers in a
coherent narrative is an achievement;
but Kissinger does it with style, sure-
footed selectivity, conceptual consis-
tency, vivid sketches of individual states-
men and repeated flashes of dry wit. He
is outstandingly good on the whole long
nineteenth century, from Vienna to Ver-
sailles. His pages on the Congress of
Berlin are pure delight. There is "the
vain and aged Gorchakov" taking his
final curtain-call. "I do not wish to be
extinguished like a lamp that is smok-
ing," he declares on arriving in Berlin, "I
want to sink down as though I were a
star." There, center-stage, are the two
great *Realpolitiker*, Bismarck and Disraeli.
"When asked to reflect on the center of
gravity at the congress," Kissinger tells
us, "Bismarck pointed to Disraeli: *Der alte
Jude, das ist der Mann*," the old Jew, he
is the man; and the faint hint of self-
reference only adds spice to a brilliant
account.

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JULY 18 & 25, 1994 THE NEW REPUBLIC 41

It is apt that the front of the book
shows a photograph of Bismarck greet-
ing other statesmen at the Congress of
Berlin, for here Kissinger is completely
at home. The back of the book shows a
photograph of Kissinger himself meet-
ing Mao, almost as if to say: there's Bis-
marck with Gorchakov, here's me with
Mao. The same great game. But a ques-
tion arises with ever louder insistence as
one advances into the narrative of the
twentieth century. Is it really the same
great game? Beside the undoubted con-
tinuities of great power diplomacy, the
familiar quadrilles and minuets of com-
petition and deceit, are there not funda-
mentally new elements—modern com-
munication, industrial society, mass
politics, ideological terror—that change
the nature of the game more than
Kissinger allows?

For *Diplomacy* is very old-fashioned diplomatic history. Like the older generation of diplomatic historians who figure in his footnotes—A. J. P. Taylor, R. W. Seton-Watson, Charles Webster—and like the young Kissinger of *A World Restored*, the author of *Diplomacy* is almost entirely interested in the high politics of states, as made by individual statesmen. Kissinger's true subject is what used to be called *die grosse Politik*. Domestic and structural causes, economic, demographic, social, cultural, even political factors, play virtually no part in his analysis, which is devoted to different versions of statecraft.

About statecraft Kissinger develops a clear, and familiar, view. His key concepts are raison d'état, *Realpolitik* and balance of power. All three terms are invoked frequently. (Simon Schama recently pointed out that Richelieu only mentioned raison d'état twice in his "Political Testament"; but in a few pages on Richelieu Kissinger mentions it eighteen times.) Kissinger uses the three terms almost interchangeably to denote an approach to foreign policy determined by the cool calculation of national interest rather than by the pursuit of universal principles, the attachment to traditional "friendships," or the emotional response to developments abroad. And from Kissinger's pen, all three are usually terms of praise, or, at the very least, terms of grudging respect—even when applied to Stalin or Ho Chi Minh. In what is becoming one of the most quoted sentences in the book, Kissinger observes that "Stalin was indeed a monster; but in the conduct of international relations he was the supreme realist—patient, shrewd and implacable, the Richelieu of his period."

There it is: "realist." Although Kiss-
inger does not make it explicitly, this

book is a grand case for Realism, both in
the sense in which that term is generally
used in the literature of "I.R.," or the ac-
demic study of international relations—
that is, to denote a view of what states
actually do—and as a view of what states
and statesmen should do. To adapt
Churchill's famous remark about democ-
racy, Kissinger thinks that cautious and
responsible *Realpolitik* is the worst possi-
ble way to conduct relations between
states, apart from all the other ways that
have been tried from time to time.

Articulating a classic conservative approach to international relations, Kissinger believes that bloody disorder is the natural condition of human-kind, and that the achievement of a minimal international order between states—irrespective of the degree of freedom or justice inside those states—is the first task of statecraft. At the same time Kissinger is clearly concerned to make his peace with America: with America in general, with Harvard—and with the largely liberal academic community from which he emerged in particular. Again and again Kissinger goes out of his way to stress his respect for the liberal universalist tradition that he describes as Wilsonianism—although, as he acknowledges in passing, much of it was already there in Gladstonianism.

He does not fail to repeat his familiar
criticism of the illusions of American
exceptionalism, in its isolationist or mis-
sionary variant. He observes, with wry
satisfaction, that in its own hemisphere
the United States has been no stranger
to old-fashioned, European-style power
politics. Still, he is at pains—and pains
would seem to be the right word—to
stress that America's idealistic attach-
ment to liberal values, regarded as uni-
versal while being identified with one
country, has also contributed to real for-
eign policy successes. This is particularly
true of his analysis of the end of the cold
war. He pays slightly bemused tribute to
the missionary idealism of Ronald
Reagan, which he describes as naïve,
mistaken and ... successful. He also
acknowledges the contribution of the
human rights principles of the Helsinki
Final Act (though it is not quite accurate
to ascribe these to the so-called Basket
III, which mainly enumerated provisions
for human *contacts*, whereas the human
rights that really interested East Euro-
pean oppositions were enumerated in
the preamble to the Final Act). And he
does this, unusually for this book, by
quoting himself as "I," from a speech
that he delivered shortly after the signa-
ture of the Final Act:

At Helsinki, for the first time in the postwar
period, human rights and fundamental

freedoms became recognized subjects of
East-West discourse and negotiation. The
conference put forward *our* standards of
human conduct, which have been—and
still are—a beacon of hope to millions.

Fine stuff, but was this really Kissinger? Doesn't this sound, in fact, precisely like the kind of missionary exceptionalism—America as beacon and crusader—of which he has been so critical? In other places in the book he quotes "Nixon" or "the Nixon administration" when the voice is authentic Kissinger; here he quotes Kissinger, but his voice seems rather like that of one of those American diplomats who really did believe in the power of the human rights provisions that they helped negotiate into the Final Act. As a historian, however, Kissinger can see that human rights activism in Eastern Europe—partly legitimated by the Helsinki process—made an important contribution to the end of the cold war.

It is here that a serious critique of his argument, and of Realism in foreign policy, must begin. Such a critique is based not on any value judgment about how the world should be, but on an analysis of how the world really is, of what really happened and why. The crucial question is not, how moral is the realist? The crucial question is, how realistic is the realist?

Victory in the cold war, argues Kissinger, came about "as a result of forty years of American bipartisan effort and seventy years of Communist ossification." The bipartisan effort, he says, involved variations of one basic strategy: containment. The ossification resulted in a shift in what Marxists call the "correlation of forces." And elsewhere Kissinger writes: "In the end, communism collapsed partly as a result of its own sclerosis, partly because of the pressures from a reinvigorated West." This is all true enough, as far as it goes. But it does not go very far. The terms "ossification" and "sclerosis" are curiously imprecise. And what "forces" were they exactly, the correlation of which changed? Military forces? To be sure, Soviet policymakers were convinced by the SDI program that they could not out-arm America. To be sure, they were frightened off further adventures in the Third World. But it is hard to argue that the purely military balance, the balance of hard power, had shifted decisively against the Soviet Union.

What did happen was that a small
group of men came to power in Moscow
convinced that the Soviet Union was los-
ing the economic, social and therefore
political competition with the West.
Whereas in the 1930s, 1940s and even
into the 1950s there was, in Europe at
least, a powerful attraction exerted from

42 THE NEW REPUBLIC JULY 18 & 25, 1994

⊕

East to West by the economic and social model of "real socialism," by the 1980s the magnetic pull was overwhelmingly in the other direction, from West to East. Now it was reformed capitalism, particularly in the West European variant of the "social market economy," which looked like the wave of the future. Détente, and particularly some aspects of the "Helsinki process," enabled the magnet to exert an irresistible pull.

The last two decades of the cold war were also decades of what Pierre Hassner has called "hot peace." They were still about containment; but they were just as much about the interaction of societies, about intellectual and cultural attraction, about human contacts, about broadcasting and, yes, about the offensive advocacy of human rights. If it ended with a "victory for the West," then it was as much a victory for what has been called the "soft power" of the West: not only its superior economic performance, but also the way in which the wealth created was then deployed, the overall attractiveness of a certain kind of society and way of life.

These internal economic, social and political dimensions are largely lacking in Kissinger's analysis. He holds firmly to the old-fashioned historiography of the *Primat der Aussenpolitik*, the primacy of foreign policy, whereas the end of the cold war was at least as much a story of the *Primat der Innenpolitik*, the primacy of domestic policy. As war between the nuclear superpowers was virtually excluded, and as communication of every kind increased, what happened inside the two countries and the two "blocs," the "West" and the "East," became ever more important. It was the domestic political imperatives that stood at the beginning of Gorbachev's "new thinking" in foreign policy. For the United States to open diplomatic relations with China—perhaps Kissinger's greatest diplomatic coup—was an important move on the chessboard, adding usefully to the external pressures on the Soviet Union; but it was the china (and the videos and even some of the books) in our shop windows that did more to win the cold war.

The argument goes further. To preach democracy and human rights to countries ruled by dictatorships is not cant but Kant. Kant's dictum that republics do not go to war against each other may be untenable in its pure form, but it is certainly the case that contemporary liberal democracies are not engaged in armed conflict with each other, and that they have developed qualitatively new forms of international cooperation. Kissinger vividly reminds us of the elements of old-

fashioned *Realpolitik* present even in our multilateral, acronymic, postmodern Western Europe. (He has a marvelous anecdote about de Gaulle responding to his question about how German power would be contained in the European Community with three words: "par la guerre.") Still, NATO and the E.U. are not merely the latest version of an alliance, entente or *Dreikaiserbund*.

If there is now a chance for lasting peace in Central Europe, the seedbed of European wars, then it lies as much in the establishment of stable liberal democracies in the region as in any external arrangements; though the latter can, of course, help or hinder the former. The slim chance that Russia will become, for the first time in its history, a modern, unbelligerent nation-state, rather than a new version of empire, depends on its internal development more than on any external factors. Kissinger will quite rightly observe that we in the West cannot determine those domestic outcomes; but we can influence them. And even if we could not influence them, the proper analytical framework would retain its importance. One lesson of the cold war is that you cannot separate the external, international (or, more precisely, interstate) order from the internal order of the states involved, stability from justice, peace from freedom.

And so to China, five years after the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Kissinger himself pursued diplomatic rapprochement with Mao, at a time when the Chinese leader's policies had been directly responsible for millions of deaths. (In this book he characterizes Mao as "occasionally murderous," a breathtaking understatement.) Unsurprisingly, he now advocates a new diplomatic rapprochement with China, although he acknowledges that "the United States cannot abandon its traditional concern with human rights and democratic values." (O.K., Harvard?) "The Clinton administration," he writes, "wisely restored high-level contacts; the future of Sino-American relations henceforth depends essentially on the substance of these exchanges."

At one level this is obviously true, almost tautological. (The future of Sino-American relations depends on the future of Sino-American relations.) But at a deeper level it reveals Kissinger's basic, old-fashioned assumption that relations between states depend essentially on the thoughts and the deeds of the wise old men who lead them. He might have made a very similar statement about Soviet-American relations at the beginning of the 1970s. The personalities and the policies of the men at the top did matter greatly, of course; but the

future of Soviet-American relations was determined by much deeper forces of domestic politics, and the economic, social and psychological competition of the "hot peace."

Similarly, the future of Sino-American relations in the coming decades depends essentially on what happens inside China, and that depends on the far from simple relationship between economic and political liberalization and the encounter of Chinese society with modernity in its Western and Far Eastern variants. The direct impact of all our statecraft on these great historic processes will be small. The indirect impact of the development of our societies and the way we project their achievements and their values will be large. To place so much emphasis on high-level contacts may actually sacrifice deeper long-term interests for highly visible short-term gains—which is precisely the fallacy that Kissinger attributes (often with good reason) to our increasingly television-led democracies.

The criticism of Realism, in sum, is not—or should not be—simply a moral one. The issue is the realism of Realism. Kissinger argues in his concluding chapter that "American idealism needs the leaven of geopolitical analysis." He welcomes "a confluence of moral and geopolitical aims, of Wilsonianism and *Realpolitik*" (this with reference to American policy in the Western hemisphere). Whether such statements will actually make his peace with America may be doubted. The more fundamental point, however, is that the dichotomy between "idealism" and "analysis" is not sustainable. In its best versions, liberal idealism is rooted in a long-term geopolitical analysis, one that takes account of the new dimensions of international relations added in the twentieth century by mass democracy and mass communications to the old elements of the great game that Kissinger describes so well.

The twentieth century, of course, furnishes many instances of naive and starry-eyed idealism in foreign policy. Yet the last two decades of the cold war also offer instances of an idealism that turned out to be more realistic than self-styled Realism. So American policymakers will need to learn the right lessons from the twentieth century, as well as from the nineteenth, if they are to have any chance of success in the twenty-first.

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH is a fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford University, and the author most recently of *In Europe's Name: Germany and the Divided Continent* (Random House).

⊕

JULY 18 & 25, 1994 THE NEW REPUBLIC 43

Chicago Tribune, Sunday, April 17, 1994 -- Section-11, Page 9

# Kissinger

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

while disguising its own power politics in the Western hemisphere by calling conquest "Manifest Destiny."

Thus the American diplomatic tradition has been one of high-minded principle, in the belief that the higher morality enshrined in America's own freedom and its democratic institutions was universally applicable. Principle, not power, universal law, not self-interest, were to be the foundations of international order.

But for Kissinger, self-interest is the law of nations. Foreign policy reflects reality, not moral or ideological scruple. The calculation of risks and rewards is the essence of diplomacy and requires intellectual and imaginative rigor no less than daring. It also demands flexibility and freedom from ideological or pietistic restraint in order to exploit every option that serves the national interest.

Kissinger put his ideas to work, or tried to, as Richard

Nixon's national security advisor and secretary of state; but he had his burdens, whether in dealing with the sterilities of Cold War policy, ideologues of the Left and Right, congressional charlatans or his own bureaucracy. Only those doomed to work within Washington's executive world know how Byzantine are its corridors, where policy can be paralyzed, vitiated or wrecked by disloyalty, executive rivalries, leaks, mindless administration or stupidity. (Somalia is the most recent example.) To believe otherwise, as Harry Truman did in a brief exchange with a younger Kissinger as recounted in "Diplomacy," is to be stubbornly and willfully self-deceived, as many presidents are.

Guided by his own Realpolitik, Kissinger used the traditional tools of the modern bureaucracy, mastered them but paid a price. He nevertheless transcended the Cold War policy dogmas of his time, which denied any opportunity for flexible diplomacy, and achieved remarkable results—most notably the China opening and detente. Yet he will probably be best re-

membered for Vietnam, a trage-
dy he inherited from Eisenhower,
Kennedy and Johnson.

The irony is that Kissinger
would have rejected out of hand
any geopolitical argument made
by those earlier administrations
to justify the U.S. effort in Viet-
nam. Long before he took office
he recognized that a loss in
credibility was inherent in Viet-
nam strategy from the begin-
ning—not because Washington's

... for Kissinger, self-
interest is the law of
nations.'

policymakers deceived the pub-
lic but because they deceived
themselves. And the tragic mis-
takes multiplied as the self-de-
ceit continued.

Curiously enough, Kissinger
gave the American public no
credit for repudiating
Washington's wisdom and ask-
ing the same question he asked
years earlier: What national in-
terest is being served? Their an-
swer was the same as his but
came too late: none at all. What-

ever his diplomatic success, in
the popular view Kissinger was
doomed to failure.

His critics accuse him of
seeing the modern world
through the lens of the past, in
essentially static terms, but as
"Diplomacy" demonstrates, this
isn't true. Systems of order in-
evitably perish, like all human
constructs, and so do those too
rigidly bound to them. An order
is static when it no longer
yields new opportunities, but
Kissinger's conception of diplo-
macy is never static. Diplomacy
for him is a perpetually creative
act, and when it is no longer
creative, it is doomed to stери-
ty, failure and extinction, like
the nation it serves.

Kissinger's most profound influence has been to restore the integrity of foreign policy as an intellectual process—one as elusive, subtle, imaginative and complex as historical inquiry itself. His contribution remains for those sensible enough to heed his warnings, and "Diplomacy" continues the lessons.

As penetrating as his charac-
terizations of earlier European
and American statesmen are,
Kissinger's lucidity blurs as he
approaches the present. The pol-
icy insights he attributes to
Richard Nixon, for example, are
as unremarkable as Nixon's
mind and might have been
made by any astute American
observer, whether graduate stu-
dent, journalist or courthouse
lawyer. Kissinger compares
George Bush to Lord Salisbury
for successfully leading the U.S.
through the Cold War transition
when he might better have com-
pared him to Napoleon III, who
also was guided more by public
relations than clarity of vision.

Dependent on the managerial
pragmatists of his office staff,
Bush didn't know where he was
going until others got him
there. His White House role
went no further than treating
foreign heads of state as his so-
cial equals and wasn't unlike
any American corporate exec-
golfing with his peers at White
Sulphur Springs. Policy, like
power relationships, was per-
sonalized: Gorbachev was an
old chum who'd paid his dues
but was down on his luck,
Yeltsin was up for membership
but still a social unknown,
Shamir's dreadful cocktail hour
manners needed refinement and
Saddam Hussein was the sulien,
underpaid greenskeeper who
firebombed the caddy shack.
This trivializes Bush's leader-
ship no more than Kissinger ex-
aggerates it.

"Diplomacy" also simplifies
the American tradition in ways
that serve Kissinger's analytical

symmetry but not the sprawl of
American reality. One has to
distinguish between foreign pol-
icy as speechmaking, as a col-
lection of simplistic rhetorical
devices intended for public rec-
ognition and support (one of the
inevitable consequences of the
democratization of foreign poli-
cy), and foreign policy as a de-
tailed, offensive and analytical
exercise. The former is too
vague to yield a sensible strate-
gy, the latter too complex to
bring popular approval.

Americans are a shrewd peo-
ple whose daily lives are ruled
by practical experience, not
high-blown rhetoric or abstract
principle. Why a people so com-
monensal in the pursuit of
self-interest at home would be
so idealistic in their demands of
foreign policy seems puzzling.
The answer is, they aren't.

If compassionately aroused by
CNN vignettes showing death
and suffering in distant Somalia
or Bosnia-Herzogovina, they
may support Washington's ef-
forts to end the anguish, but
moral claims have their limits.
When Americans are killed, as
they were in Mogadishu, then
they'll react as Bismarck did:
Somalia, like the Balkans, isn't
worth the bones of a single
American grenadier.

Speechmaking aside, Ameri-
can idealism and evangelism
stop at the water's edge and
won't follow the flag abroad ex-
cept when the danger is mortal-
ly self-disclosing. But, as Kiss-
inger has described better than
anyone, this is the statesman's
eternal challenge.

Nations, like international
systems, are unable to foresee a
mortal challenge as it arises,
and the same will be true of the
new world order. Because the
essence of policy isn't actual ex-
perience but potential experi-
ence, the statesman's genius lies
in his ability to discern threats
not yet apparent to his contem-
poraries. He must transcend the
limits of his nation's tradition
and bridge the gap between
their experience and his vision,
transmuting intuition into truth
and potential experience into
present knowledge. This in-
volves the question of conjec-
ture, which Kissinger describes
as the most difficult, indeed
tragic, aspect of foreign policy,
requiring action on an assess-
ment that cannot be proved true
when it is made.

"The lessons of historical ex-
perience ... are contingent," he
writes. "They teach the con-
sequences of certain actions but
they cannot force a recognition
of comparable situations.... Each
generation is permitted
only one effort at abstraction; it
can attempt only one interpreta-
tion and a single experiment,
for it is its own subject. This is
the challenge of history and its
tragedy; it is the shape 'destiny'
assumes on earth. And its solu-
tion, even its recognition, is per-
haps the most difficult task of
statesmanship."

There is no other American
statesman who could have writ-
ten those lines. And there is no
other American public figure
who could have written a book
that analyzes the lessons of re-
cent history and the problems
of the 21st Century as lucidly as
"Diplomacy" does.

Answers to last Sunday's puzzle

Looking for Order

Gordon Craig

Diplomacy

by Henry Kissinger.
Simon and Schuster, 912 pp., $35.00

In 1716, when the French ambassador François de Callières's treatise *On Negotiating with Sovereign Princes* was published in English translation, an English reader wrote ruefully that the diplomatic corps of continental states seemed to be filled with persons well trained in civil law and the law of nations, deeply read in history, and acquainted with the interests of the respective princes of Europe. This made a better basis for the conduct of foreign policy than the English style, whose initiatives and démarches he described as being supported by no other authority or argument than Juvenal's *Hoc volo, sic iubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas* (Because I want it is reason enough).

During the wars of the eighteenth century, the English learned that they could not prosper by exclusive cultivation of their own desires without making concessions to the interests of others. Their colonists in America, on the other hand, once they had gained their independence, were much slower to learn that lesson. From the very beginning Americans preferred—in the words of Henry Clay—"to pursue a policy exclusively American, uninfluenced by the policy of My Lord Castlereagh, Count Nesselrode, or any other of the great men of Europe."² They either abstained from any involvement in the quarrels and problems of other nations or, when they felt compelled to intervene, did so on their own terms and sometimes for objectives imperfectly understood—or agreed to by their allies. Americans were deeply ambivalent about history, choosing instead to follow the imperative of moral absolutes; they were uncomfortable with the idea of national interest as a guiding principle of policy, preferring motivations that were

nobler, even if harder to define; and they were indifferent to the modalities that other Great Powers had devised over time to help protect themselves from aggression—particularly what John Adams had called "their real and imaginary balances of power."³

It cannot, however, be said that these attitudes had fortunate results over the long haul. Once the revolution in communications and military science had contracted the territory of international violence, America could not remain immune to the quarrels of the old world. Nor did it, and its armies played a crucial role in the two world wars of this century. But its military triumphs were not matched by diplomatic ones. Its attempts to revolutionize the rules of international discourse at Paris in 1919 failed lamentably, and its failure during the war against Hitler to coordinate its political with its military strategy was one of the main causes of the subsequent cold war, which it also conducted, in large part, with little regard for diplomacy and which ended with something less than a triumph.⁴

The time has come, Henry Kissinger says at the beginning of his new book, to put aside old prejudices and correct old mistakes. The challenge facing the great powers in the post-cold war period is to bring order to the multi-state system that is emerging. None of them has had any experience with this, and

never before has a new world order had to be assembled from so many different perceptions, or on so global a scale. Nor has any previous order had to combine the attributes of the historic balance-of-power systems with global democratic opinion and the expanding technology of the contemporary period.

Where are we to turn for guidance as we approach this task? Mr. Kissinger suggests that the only resource we have is the history of the ways in which

¹François de Callières. *The Art of Diplomacy*, edited by H.M.A. Krens Soper and Karl W. Schweizer (Holmes and Meier, 1983), p. 62.

²Two Hundred Years of American Foreign Policy, edited by William P. Bundy (Council on Foreign Relations/ New York University Press, 1977), p. 73.

³Two Hundred Years of American Foreign Policy, p. 68.

⁴See Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, *We All Lost the Cold War* (Princeton University Press, 1994).

states have regulated their relations
with each other in the past.

1.

Henry Kissinger's *Diplomacy* is highly selective in what it includes. Despite its title and the fact that it is dedicated to "the men and women of the Foreign Service of the United States of America," it says almost nothing about them or about diplomacy proper, its origins and the development of its procedures, or the great ambassadors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their accomplishments. This is perhaps understandable. Ever since the Interwar period, and particularly since the Second World War and the cold war years, diplomacy in the historical sense has been in deep decline, and the roles of the ambassador and the foreign office professionals have been increasingly subverted by foreign ministers and heads of state and by that worst of all diplomatic inventions, the summit conference. John Foster Dulles is reported to have said during his tenure as secretary of state,

> Nowadays, when you can by
> overnight flight talk face to face
> with the foreign ministers of other
> countries, it's silly to go at it the
> old fashioned way of exchanging
> notes, which take a month per-
> haps before you get as good an un-
> derstanding, and then not as good
> as you can get talking a few min-
> utes face to face.³

During his own secretaryship, Henry Kissinger insisted on making all major decisions himself and hence carried the State Department along with him during his shuttle diplomacy in 1973 in what one newspaperman called "the biggest permanent floating foreign policy establishment in history."⁴

This process has probably gone too far to be reversed, but, even so, something might have been said here about

³John Robinson Beal, *John Foster Dulles: A Biography* (Harper and Row, 1957), p. 154.

⁴Walter Isaacson, *Kissinger: A Biography* (Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 557.

the diplomacy that is now all but gone. It is worth remembering that the Italian city states had a functioning system of permanent embassies before there were any Great Powers, and that it was the fidelity of those early diplomats in protecting the interests of their masters and the standards they developed for accurate reporting, realistic appraisal of risks, and effective negotiation that were in time transmitted to the greater states of the West and became the basis of the *raison d'être*, or science of government, that guided their foreign policy and the procedures of their own diplomatic establishments. Kissinger's heroes Metternich and Bismarck were, it should be noted, themselves products of this system, and both had been distinguished ambassadors before they rose to ministerial rank, the first at the court of Napoleon, the second in the Prussian embassies in Frankfurt, St. Petersburg, and Paris.

In his book, Kissinger has preferred, however, to concentrate on the search for international order and upon the statesmen who, like himself, sought to establish systems that would preserve it, and he has accomplished this with great skill and shrewdness. He begins with the period between the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century and the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, in the course of which a Europe that was dominated by the Habsburg family connection and a militant Counter Reformation was transformed into a continent of individual powers competing on equal terms. There were perhaps more reasons for this change than Kissinger discusses, having to do with demographic and economic developments and the Turkish threat to Habsburg possessions at the end of the seventeenth century; but he is certainly right in emphasizing as one of the most important a new kind of statecraft exemplified by Cardinal Richelieu of France, whose diplomacy during the Thirty Years' War defeated Habsburg pretensions and left the German states atomized and powerless to threaten France for the next two hundred years, and by William III, Stadtholder of the United Netherlands and after 1689 King of England, who was the *spiritus rector* of the alliance that finally defeated Louis XIV's attempt at continental hegemony.

*The New York Review*

The weapons they both used were a relentless realism, an indifference to ideological and religious affinity, and an imaginative use of the new technique of balance of power, which Ranke once said was invented so that the union of many other states might combat the ambitions of the "exorbitant" ones. Of Richelieu, whom he obviously finds a congenial figure, Kissinger writes, "few statesmen can claim a greater impact on history," since he was the father of the modern state system and the man under whose auspices "raison d'état" replaced the medieval concept of universal moral values as the operating principle" not only of France's policy but of that of its neighbors. Of William III, he says in one of the perceptive adages that are sprinkled throughout his book, that he

played the equivalent of Theodore Roosevelt's later role in America, warning his essentially isolationist people that their safety depended on a participation in a balance of power overseas,

and unlike Roosevelt doing so with such success that within twenty years of his death an opposition paper was stating that the balance of power was one of the "original, everlasting principles of British politics" and that peace on the continent was essential to the prosperity of a trading nation and hence an objective to be sought by the government.

The eightcenth century, although often called the age of reason, was dominated by the passions of princes and the violence of intermittent warfare. Yet there were signs of a desire for a more ordered international community: a general agreement that five principal powers—Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia—were normal and legitimate and should not be diminished in number; a significant degree of restraint on the part of all powers in territorial matters and a feeling that, when gains were made by one, other powers deserved compensation: and a good deal of talk about European federation. But nothing had come of this before the divisions and greed of the powers had lamed their response to the French Revolution; and before long Napoleon's military-political strategy had divided and isolated them and confronted them with a threat of domination greater than that posed by Louis XIV.

It was only after twenty-five years of war that Europe was able to sit down and negotiate what Kissinger regards as the most successful modern system of international order. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 realized the dreams of statesmen like William Pitt the Younger and gave Europe, in Kissinger's words, "the longest period of peace it had ever known." He ascribes this to the skill of Prince Metternich of Austria, Viscount Castlereagh of Great Britain, and their colleagues in devising a system that was based upon a territorial equilibrium that was no stable as to discouraging attempts to overthrow it and upon "a sense of shared values.... There was not only a physical equilibrium, but a moral one. Power and justice were in substantial harmony."

This is, of course, true but seems

overemphasized in Kissinger's account. There were precious few shared values between Metternich on the one hand, and Canning and Palmerston on the other, and postwar fatigue and the low prevailing levels of armament were probably stronger deterrents to violence than moral considerations. After 1830, there was a growing division between the liberal powers, Britain and France, and the three conservative ones of the east, although dangerous crises were avoided by advantageous deals between ideological opposites. Thus, when the revolutions of 1848 shook the whole Vienna system, long-distance cooperation between Britain and Russia, in Germany and Hungary, for example, prevented it from total collapse. When those two powers stumbled into war against each

other in the Crimea in 1854 that dissolution could no longer be delayed.

In the war's aftermath, a new breed of statesman took over the foreign offices of Europe, self-styled realists who exploited the postwar lack of equilibrium to seek advantages for their own countries. In a fascinating chapter, Kissinger describes how the most successful of these, Otto von Bismarck of Prussia, broke with the philosophy of his conservative patrons and the substance of the Vienna settlement and, by a combination of brilliantly ruthless diplomacy and willingness to back it with force, united Germany under the leadership of Prussia after forcing war upon Austria in 1866 and upon France four years later, and defeating both of them

Kissinger underlines both the permanence of this accomplishment—a Germany so strong that all subsequent attempts to weaken it, from Clemenceau and Poincaré to De Gaulle and Mitterrand, would be fruitless—and its effects upon French amour propre.

Since the end of Napoleon III's reign, France has lacked the power to impose the universalist aspirations it inherited from the French Revolution, or the arena to find an adequate outlet for its missionary zeal. For over a century France has been finding it difficult to accept the fact that the objective conditions for the pre-eminence Richelieu had brought it disappeared once national con-

May 12, 1994

solidation had been achieved in Europe.... It is ironic that the country that invented *raison d'être* should have had to occupy itself, for the better part of the century, with trying to bring its aspirations in line with its capabilities.

Meanwhile, in a post-1870 world poisoned by the resentment of the defeated powers, by irrationalism, hypernationalism, and mounting armaments, and by an imperialism that pandered to the newly mobilized masses, the question of creating international order was raised once more. It was taken in hand this time, for quite selfish reasons, by the man who had earlier been its greatest subverter. Bismarck's famous system of secret alliances, which began to take shape at the end of the 1870s, was an attempt to create a European balance of power by isolating France and binding all other powers, one way or another, to Berlin. It was a system "deftly engineered on the one hand to keep Germany's potential adversaries from coalescing and, on the other, to restrain the actions of Germany's partners," and, for a time, it worked. But it did so only at the cost of increasingly convoluted maneuvering and manipulation and to the accompaniment of charges of bad faith by Germany's restive allies, particularly the Russians. In the end, Bismarck's masters, charging that his diplomacy had become too complicated to be understood by anyone but the Chancellor himself (a complaint that Kissinger in his time was also to hear) dismissed him and abandoned his system.

This "dropping of the pilot" brought in its train a radical transformation of the European balance into two hostile and highly armed coalitions, a situation that resembled that of the later cold war, with the significant difference, as Kissinger points out in two chapters on the political and military "doomsday machines," that the political leadership had no comprehension of the destructive potential of the weapons at their disposal and hence lacked the will to forbid their use in the crisis of August 1914.

It was the fatefully unstable bipolarity of the years between 1907 and 1914 that fastened itself upon the imagination of later generations and, because of its catastrophic end, made balance of power an opprobrious term in the postwar period, particularly in the United States. The most eloquent expression of this feeling came in the great speeches of Woodrow Wilson in 1917 and 1918, with their call for a world that would be free of entangling alliances and armaments and of an equilibrium based on "jealous watchfulness and antagonism of interests," and in which there would be not a balance of power but a community of power.

Kissinger's admiration of Wilson is undisguised. If, in his view, Theodore Roosevelt's insight into the workings of international systems was more acute than that of any other American president, it was Wilson who "grasped the mainsprings of American motivation, perhaps the principal one being that America simply did not see itself as a nation like any other." Wilson was at one with most of his countrymen in believing that American policy must

express this exceptionalism and give moral leadership to the world. Yet in his faith that self-determination and collective security were the keys to the new international order, he made assumptions that Theodore Roosevelt would never have permitted himself:

> that the nations of the world would unite against aggression, injustice, and, presumably, excessive selfishness,

and that a world order based upon moral guarantees would be more effective than one based on geopolitical ones.

These articles of faith proved to have no basis. Wilson's own country repudiated the League of Nations, which he had believed would correct the injustices of the peace treaty, and the other nations returned to their old ways. Once more the German question was crucial. If the British had prolonged their wartime alliance with France, the French might have felt secure enough to show more generosity toward the Germans in the matter of reparations and rearmament, the trauma of the Ruhr invasion and the inflation might have been avoided, and Germany might have been appeased under Stresemann rather than under Hitler, and with happier results. But the British persuaded themselves that France was the real threat to European security (it is instructive in this respect to look at David Low's Francophobe cartoons during the 1920s) and gave it neither the alliance it so desperately desired nor the kind of assistance that might have prevented the erosion of the Versailles Treaty settlement. These attitudes persisted long after Hitler's accession to power, which brought with it a speedy dissolution of the system of collective security and a rush of the Danubian and Balkan states into the camp of the dictators. It was not until the very end of the 1930s that the British government sought to return to a balance of power politics that it had abandoned during its spasm of Wilsonian idealism and had been discouraged from resuming for ideological reasons, namely, distrust of the Soviet Union. And that attempt ended with the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939.

On all of this, Kissinger's account leaves nothing to be desired, and he breathes new life into the often-told story of the failure of an international system that never, because of the divisions and fecklessness of the victors of 1918, assumed coherence or strength. Whether this could be corrected by the generation that fought the war that resulted from their failure depended upon whether they could defeat Hitler and whether they could learn from their past mistakes.

The key figure in answering both questions was, in Kissinger's view, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, about whom he has decidedly ambivalent feelings. He has no difficulty in recognizing Roosevelt's historical greatness. He writes that the President's

role in moving his isolationist people toward participation in the war serves as an object lesson in the scope of leadership in a democracy. Sooner or later, the threat to the European balance of

The New York Review

power would have forced the United States to intervene in order to stop Germany's drive for world domination. The sheer, and growing, strength of America was bound to propel it eventually into the center of the international arena. That this happened with such speed and so decisively was the achievement of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.... And he saw to it that, this time, America's involvement would mark a first step toward permanent international engagement. During the war his leadership held the alliance together and shaped the multilateral institutions which continue to serve the international community to this day.

Roosevelt's wartime diplomacy was also marked, however, by a nervous deference to American prejudices, great tactical deviousness and a preference for putting off hard political decisions, excessive belief in the power of his own charm to persuade others to accept his views (what might be called the Uncle Joe Syndrome), and, worst of all; a frivolous refusal to negotiate about the shape of the post-war world until the military victory was won. As examples of the last of these characteristics, we may recall that Anthony Eden's proposal immediately after Pearl Harbor that Britain and the United States concert their attitude toward political and territorial questions that were bound to arise in the future and then discuss them with the Soviet government was completely ignored in Washington;⁷ and that the American representative on the European Advisory Committee, established after the Moscow Foreign Ministers' Conference in 1943 to anticipate postwar problems and make recommendations for their solution, was left in London with virtually nothing to do.⁸

Given this general aversion to planning ahead, it is little wonder that Winston Churchill's frequent admonitions about the folly of failing to reach firm boundary agreements with Stalin in Eastern Europe merely irritated the President and that, in March and April 1945, the commander of American troops in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was deaf to Churchill's arguments that it would be politically advantageous to capture Berlin and Prague before the Red Army reached those capitals. Eisenhower's position was determined by his estimate of the casualties that an advance on Berlin would cause, his concern over the possibility of a clash between American and Soviet troops, and his unwillingness to violate existing Soviet-American agreements. But his obvious disinclination to consider the political aspects of the question—his statement to General Marshall that “Berlin is no longer a particularly important objective”—is strikingly typical of the American leadership's stubborn denial of any vital connection

⁷Foreign Relations of the United States, 1941, Vol. 1 (Government Printing Office, 1975), pp. 204–205; *The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan O.M. 1938–1945*, edited by David Dilks (Putnam, 1972), p. 121.

⁸George F. Kennan, *Memoirs, 1925–1950* (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1967), pp. 164 ff.

between politics and war.⁹

Roosevelt came home from the Yalta Conference in February 1945 proclaiming, much like Wilson before him, that an end had been made of

the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries— and have always failed.

He did not mention all of the questions—most notably that of Poland's future—that had been left unresolved, presumably because he did not consider them to be important. His hope, just before he died, was that they could be taken care of and of the future peace of the world maintained by a system of collective security presided over by the United States. Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China, whom he designated as the Four Powers. Kissinger, admitting that the comparison will probably annoy American liberals, suggests that this scheme was structurally similar to Metternich's Holy Alliance, “a coalition of victors upholding shared values.” But any illusions about the unity of the victors were dispelled by the time of the Potsdam Conference when the cost of failing to plan ahead became painfully obvious. Instead of fleshing out a new international order, the Western allies soon found themselves devising a strategy for the cold war.

Kissinger's principal criticism of what became the containment policy of, despite its optimism and its confidence that Western steadfastness would force the Soviet Union, in the end, to abandon its aggressive tendencies, it was curiously utopian and, in its prescriptions, highly abstract. It assigned to the United States, at the height of its military superiority, a purely reactive role and seemed to foresee no place for diplomatic initiative. Kissinger is inclined to believe, for example, as Winston Churchill did at the time, that Josef Stalin, when he began to realize the economic potential and staying power of the West, may have been prepared to explore the outlines of a general settlement and that the Soviet Peace Note of March 1952, raising the possibility of uniting Germany on the basis of neutrality, may have been a first step in that direction. But the West, feeling that its progress toward integration would be threatened by the onset of negotiations, rejected the note without thorough investigation, as it did other Soviet feelers after Stalin's death. In April 1953, John Foster Dulles wrote to a member of the White House staff,

> There's some real danger in our just seeming to fall in with these Soviet overtures. It's obvious that what they are doing is because of outside pressures, and I don't know

⁹The Papers of General Dwight David Eisenhower: The Years, edited by Alfred D. Chandler, Vol. IV (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), p. 2374. For a persuasive defense of Eisenhower's position see Theodore Draper's review of David Eisenhower's *Eisenhower at War: "Eisenhower's War—II."* The New York Review, October 9, 1986, and "Eisenhower's War—The Final Crisis," October 23, 1986.

anything better we can do than keep up these pressures right now.

Whether opportunities were lost by this attitude or not is impossible to say, but Kissinger plausibly suggests that it represented a failure to make proper use of the country's diplomatic resources. Nor was it a consistent attitude. After Suez and Hungary and Sputnik had inflated Soviet confidence, and the military balance had begun to shift, and after Khrushchev had dispatched his menacing Berlin Note in November 1958, the West sometimes seemed needlessly eager to negotiate and incautiously willing to make concessions. In September 1959, at Camp David, Eisenhower rather gratuitously told Khrushchev that America had no intention of staying in Berlin forever, and some days later, virtually conceding the main point of Khrushchev's note, he admitted that the situation in Berlin was “abnormal.” What might have happened if Khrushchev had acted on these hints, Kissinger writes, is “painful to contemplate.” Again, in the spring of 1962, the Kennedy administration, perhaps in an attempt to dispose of the Berlin issue at a time when it was becoming more involved in Southeast Asia, concocted a plan for regulating access to Berlin which aroused the liveliest apprehensions in Germany, not least of all among American diplomatic representatives there, and forced Chancellor Adenauer to take public issue with his Washington ally in order to defeat it.¹⁰

Containment, then, according to Kissinger, suffered both from the remoteness of its objective, which as the nuclear balance shifted imposed increasing psychological strain upon the Western public, and from a fitful and incoherent diplomacy that sometimes came close to making irreversible errors. But it suffered mostly perhaps from its universalism, its assumption that all Communist regimes were identical and linked and under Moscow's hegemony, and that all must be opposed. This always threatened to overextend America's resources, and in Vietnam it finally did so. The “nightmare” of the war, Kissinger writes, was that the US entered it “without a more careful assessment of the likely costs and potential outcomes. A nation should not send half a million of its young to a distant continent or stake its international standing and domestic cohesion unless its leaders can describe their political goals and offer a realistic strategy for achieving them.”

It was the long agony in Vietnam that inspired Henry Kissinger's own attempt to create the basis of a new world order, or, more properly perhaps, the attempt of Nixon and Kissinger to do so, for his own assumptions about foreign policy were matched by those of his president, whose understanding of geopolitical realities was, in Kissinger's view,

¹⁰See *Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963*, Vol. XIV, The Berlin Crisis, 1961–1962 (1993), especially pp. 824–827, 830–831, 840–841. See also Frank A. Mayer, “Adenauer and Kennedy: An Era of Mistrust,” in *German-American Relations?*” German Studies Review 17, No. 1 (February 1994), pp. 83 ff.

May 12, 1994

The New York Review

"truly remarkable" and who firmly believed the world would be a better place if all of the powers conducted their business on the basis of national interest. It was Richard Nixon who said in 1971 that he believed that the last third of the twentieth century would see the emergence of "a stronger, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance," and that such a situation would make possible "a safer world and a better world."

To be able to play their part in such a balance, Kissinger and Nixon felt that they had to refocus the strategy of containment on its original target and purge it of the ideological distractions that had led to its Vietnam involvement. As John Lewis Gaddis has written, the essence of the problem facing Nixon and Kissinger was

to find a way to withdraw from the Vietnam debacle without appearing to have been forced to do so; to regain the initiative in world affairs without giving evidence of ever having lost it; and to accomplish all of this within the awkward institutional framework that the American constitution demanded. The task would have been worthy of a Metternich or a Bismarck; those statesmen, in turn, would have found much that was familiar in the methods Kissinger used in attempting to accomplish it.¹¹

How Kissinger went about this task he has described before, and his account here differs from the earlier ones in no substantial way, except that the context, a systematic account of the search for world order over the centuries, lends weight to his argument that his task was an essentially political one, while most of his critics insisted upon regarding it as a moral one. He says at one point, "What the Nixon Administration perceived as potential national humiliation [namely, a precipitate withdrawal from Vietnam], the Vietnam protesters treated as a desirable national catharsis."

Kissinger's answer to this, then and now, was that the country doubtless wanted an end to the war but it really didn't want a US surrender, which would irreparably damage America's reputation in the world, and its ability to do good. This "credibility argument" has not won wide acceptance, and the best of Kissinger's biographers has written convincingly,

> There is no denying that a nation's credibility in keeping commitments and resisting adversaries has an effect upon the global balance, as Kissinger argued. But many other factors strengthen America's influence in the world: the perception that it stands for certain moral values; the impressive nature of its economic prosperity; the model of individual freedom that it represents; the respect it shows for the sovereignty and nationalist yearnings of other nations; and the common sense

and competence it displays in pursuing its global goals and keeping threats in perspective.¹²

Kissinger played down these other considerations. He was not, in any case, much interested in economic matters and tended to underrate America's economic power in his calculations. He put his faith in a policy of seeking to build up the strength of South Vietnam while detaching American troops, and simultaneously, through diplomacy, bombing, and mining harbors, applying pressure to the North Vietnamese to make peace. The settlement attained by these means in January 1973 was inherently flawed. Although Kissinger implies that it could have been enforced had not Watergate eroded the President's authority to persuade Congress to vote the necessary funds, this view certainly underestimates the pervasive disenchantment with the whole Vietnam adventure.

Long before this tragic dénouement, the hope of receiving help in forcing the North Vietnamese to negotiate seriously had produced the greatest diplomatic coup of the Nixon administration, the breakthrough in China in July

¹²Isaacson, *Kissinger*, p. 648.

1971. This did not have the results in Vietnam that had been hoped for, but it was a prelude to Kissinger's grandiose experiment in reforming the containment policy by triangular diplomacy, the elaboration of the policy of linkage, and détente with the Soviet Union. He was now projected into a position somewhat similar to that of Bismarck in the 1880s as crisis manager of the system, and his successes were not considerable. One thinks of his persuading the Soviets that they needed arms control more than we did and of how he maneuvered them out of the Middle East during the crisis of 1973.

The tactics employed, however, were too dazzling to remain impressive for long. After a time, the Soviets began to suspect that they had been bilked, as their forebears had felt after the great Bulgarian crisis of 1887. Kissinger complains that his own countrymen, not content with the improvement in Soviet international behavior that détente had effected, began unreasonably to demand changes in Soviet domestic behavior as well. Hence there arose the demand that the Soviets respect human rights, a demand Kissinger found excessive. But it would be more accurate to say that, used to thinking in terms of ideological opportunities, Americans had always been un-

comfortable with détente and were in any case inclined to believe that the Soviets were getting the best of all bargains.

Besides, the Kissinger policy in general seemed to them too "busy," too full of jet planes and secret meetings and surprises to be entirely sound. Their suspicions in this respect were not unfounded. Concerning the Nixon-Kissinger period, former under-secretary of state George Ball has noted:

> A policy of maneuver risks subverting our institutions, puts a premium on furtiveness in the highest places, creates an obsession with... "national security," and provides a factitious justification for such trespasses on individual freedom as wiretapping and even burglary.¹³

Kissinger's diplomacy was not exempt from such criticism, which fed into the other causes of détente's swift decline in popularity during the administration of Gerald Ford and its ultimate jettisoning.

If there was a grain of comfort to be found amid all the troubles that followed, it was that the Soviets did not profit from them. Kissinger notes with some satisfaction that Moscow

¹¹John Lewis Gaddis, "Rescuing Chance from Circumstance: The Statecraft of Henry Kissinger," in *The Diplomats*, 1939-1979, edited by Gordon A. Craig and Francis L. Loewenheim (Princeton University Press, 1994; to be published in July).

May 12, 1994

¹²Cited in Isaacson, *Kissinger*, p. 509.

drew the conclusion that

the historical correlation of forces
had shifted in its favor. As a result, it tried to expand into
Yemen, Angola, Ethiopia and ultimately Afghanistan. But in the
process it found that geopolitical
realities applied just as much to
communist societies as they did to
the capitalist ones. In fact, being
less resilient, Soviet overextension
produced, not catharsis, as it
did in America, but disintegration.

One effective agent of this was the
Reagan arms buildup, which was a response to the widespread perception that the Soviets had gained military
advantage by cheating during the period of détente.

3.

At the end of this impressive book,
Kissinger hazards some thoughts
about the future world order. Some of
these are tentative—he is concerned
about American attempts at social engineering in post-Soviet Russia which
are adapted to individual leaders who
may well be unstable. He is worried
about the inevitable distancing of the
united Germany from the United
States, and about the dangers inherent
in a policy of confrontation with China.

Some of his other comments are
general and oracular. He is sure that in
the new post-cold war world, American
idealsm will need the leaven of
geopolitical analysis, and thinks that
this will be difficult to attain in view of
past prejudices. He writes that

America, like other nations, must
learn to navigate between necessity and choice, between the immutable constants of international relations and the elements subject to the discretion of statesmen.

and that we will have to recognize that
foreign policy must begin with a definition of what constitutes vital interest.

But his thoughts rarely stray away
from the idea of the balance of power,
which he believes should be our preocc

cupation whether we like it or not.

Geopolitically, America is an island off the shores of the large landmass of Eurasia, whose resources and population far exceed those of the United States. The domination by a single power of either of Eurasia's two principal spheres—Europe or Asia—re mains a good definition of strategic danger for America, Cold War or no Cold War. For such a grouping would have the capacity to outstrip American economically and, in the end, militarily.

Protection from that danger lies in an
active balance-of-power policy.

In an intriguing page early in the
book, Kissinger suggests that, in the
brave new post-Communist world, the
American temperament will probably
find the Bismarck approach to balance
more congenial than the British. If we
were to try to imitate the British "disciplined aloofness from disputes and ruthless commitment to the equilibrium in the face of threats," we would, he thinks, find it difficult to summon up either the aloofness or the ruthlessness. On the other hand, the Bismarck policy of restraining the exercise of power in advance by some consensus on shared objectives with various groups of countries would be more our style. (He thus would want the Atlantic Alliance and the European Union to extend a "security umbrella" over "the new democracies in Eastern Europe.") In the new order, the most likely and constructive model, he thinks, would be

partially overlapping alliance systems, some focussing on security, others on economic relations. The challenge for America will be to generate objectives growing out of American values that can hold together these various groupings.

He does not say that a prerequisite of
success would be a negotiator as inventive and as tireless as he was
himself, but we are perhaps justified in
believing that this is assumed. ☐

# Why Go On Missing the Magazine That Brings You Articles Like These?

* **The Scandal of College Tuition** by Thomas Sowell. High-priced colleges collude to charge customers whatever the traffic will bear. When businessmen are caught doing such things, they go to prison.

* **Immigrants and Family Values** by Francis Fukuyama. Don't blame recent immigrants for the cultural decay in America. Many of them come to this country with strong, traditional family values and struggle to keep those values intact.

* **A Statement on the Peace Process** by Norman Podhoretz. The so-called "peace process" could lead to an unstable Palestinian state stretching from the Iraqi border to just outside Tel Aviv, a weakened Israel, and another war in the Middle East. Pray it doesn't happen.

* **What the Sex Educators Teach**

by Dana Mack. They teach the pleasures of "self-pleasuring" (to grade-school children) and all the erotic possibilities of sex. Maybe even some possibilities that parents don't know about. But there's rarely a word about love, intimacy, or long-term commitment.

* **Can American Democracy Survive?** by Bruce D. Porter. Not if we keep dividing ourselves along partisan, class, ethnic, gender, and ideological lines. We must have *some* values that most people accept and defend, in order to keep functioning as a society.

* **On Abortion** by James Q. Wilson. It's a moral issue. If you agree, then it's not unreasonable to put moral pressure on a woman considering an abortion.

* **Greenhouse Anxiety** by Jeffrey Salmon. Scientists can become celebrities by pandering to a panic-mongering press. Meanwhile, there's no evidence that we are heading for a crisis of global warming.

* **Sex & the Feminists** by Carol Iannone. Feminism itself helps to cause many of the problems that feminists decry—by destroying the fabric of attachment between men and women.

COMMENTARY is accessible, and often brilliant, although it does make intellectual demands on its readers. The rewards? Greater awareness, more insight, and heightened clarity in one's own moral and political thinking.

Intrigued? For one dollar, we'll mail you a sample copy of a recent issue. Just send a check for $1.00 to: COMMENTARY, 165 East 56 Street, New York, NY 10022

## Commentary

VOLUME NINTY-SEVENTY-FOURTH FEBRUARY-TWO-PAGE

### What Health-Care Crisis?

Irwin M. Stelzer

**Against the New Pessimism**

Francis Fukuyama

**Talking to the Enemy—A Story**

Avner Mandelman

**The Great Polish Experiment**

George Weigel

**How to Read Philip Roth**

Hillel Halkin

**A Dissent on "Schindler's List"**

Philip Gourevitch

**On a Palestinian State: An Exchange**

David Bar-Illan & Critics

**Books in Review:** Martin Kramer / Dan Himmelfarb / Susan Wivioff / Daniel J. Silver / Jonathan D. Sarna

PUBLISHED BY THE AMERICAN JOURNALIST 1974 / BANCO CANADIAN

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Books

Masterwork

Robert W. Tucker

Henry Kissinger, *Diplomacy* (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 1104 pp., $35.00.

**D**IPLOMACY GIVES every appearance of being Henry Kissinger's last will and testament on the activity to which he has devoted his considerable talents for a lifetime as teacher, writer, and high public servant. It is his summing up (and a long summing up it is). Diplomacy has evidently been written as well in the hope that it may influence Americans at a critical turning point in their history. Given the author's conviction about the triumph of Wilsonianism today, this hope is eloquent testimony to the optimism that ultimately informs even the more resolute of pessimists among us.

*Diplomacy* is also, and perhaps inevitably, a defense of Henry Kissinger's record as a statesman, one of the most celebrated of the age. It is an attempt to explain the deeper meaning of a still controversial chapter in the history of twentieth-century American foreign policy, to illuminate what was of lasting significance in the Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy, and to show why that effort remains instructive in fashioning a post-Cold War policy for the United States.

The publication of *Diplomacy* must be regarded as a notable event not only because of the persona of its author but also because of the nature of the work he has undertaken. With the exception of

Dean Acheson, none of the nation's secretaries of state since World War II has had the renown, both at home and abroad, of Henry Kissinger. Certainly, none has had the celebrity status and notoriety that have attached to Kissinger. For reasons that need not detain us here, Kissinger has that quality an earlier generation found in a select few of its screen stars: glamour. Glamour, as an earlier generation also knew, is essentially indefinable. It might and does reside in otherwise disparate personalities. Its one common denominator is the ability to evoke fascination. This Kissinger has done in abundance, virtually from the outset of his long career.

That such a figure has taken the time and effort to write a 1100-page book on the theory and practice of diplomacy is rather unusual. To be sure, other former secretaries of state have written books. Almost all who survive the office long enough eventually write their memoirs. But *Diplomacy* is not a memoir (of memoirs, Kissinger has already written at even greater length). It is a brilliant though thoroughly idiosyncratic inquiry into the enduring lessons of diplomacy, laid out by an acknowledged master. As such, it is an enterprise for which there is no real precedent among those who have in the past borne responsibility for the conduct of the nation's foreign policy.

For these reasons, the Kissinger book is a publishing event. Whether it will also prove to be a reading event is another matter. It seems unlikely. The length of *Diplomacy* must inhibit. Its message, when clear to a general reader, must provoke

78

The National Interest—Summer 1994

(which is, one must assume, the author's intention). Where the Kissinger study is almost certain to have a widespread and attentive audience is in the college and university community. Given its scope, structure, authoritative tone, and argumentative style, *Diplomacy* is a superb teaching tool, a textbook *extraordinaire*, for the use of Kissinger admirers and critics alike. I wish that I had had its equivalent when teaching American diplomacy. Kissinger may regard this prospect with something less than elation. Still, there are worse fates than to exert an influence on a generation or two of students.

## *The Realm of the Unchanging*

DIPLOMACY IS A study of contrasting traditions of foreign policy—the European and the American—traditions that are rooted in equally contrasting visions of the nature of statecraft. The European tradition is embodied in the doctrine of *raison d'état* which advances the claim of the state's autonomy. Statecraft has its own rules and their character reflects the means distinctive to political life and, above all, to foreign policy. Statecraft also has its distinctive ends and their nature is determined by the law of state interest. To the idea of the state's autonomy is added that of the supremacy of the state's vital interests, of its security, independence, and continuity. The supremacy of foreign over domestic policy, of the state and its necessities over civil life, is the inevitable consequence of this ordering. War has always been the *ultima ratio* of reason of state, just as it has always been justified by reason of state when undertaken to preserve the state's security and independence.

The American tradition proceeded from the conviction that this nation had rejected an ancient reason of state, that it stood for something new under the sun, and that its destiny was to lead the world

from the old to the new. America would be immune from the dark temptations and the terrible excesses of reason of state as a result of its republican character, the benign circumstances attending its development, and the innate virtue of its citizenry. Although at the outset alone in a hostile world, it would set an example to that world. In place of the dual standard of reason of state, it would have, in Thomas Jefferson's words, "but one system of ethics for men and for nations." In the American scheme of things, the objectives of foreign policy may be properly understood only as a means to the end of protecting and promoting individual freedom and well-being. No end of foreign policy can be seen as morally autonomous. Instead, all the ends of statecraft must be seen as means to the ends of society, which are in turn ultimately the ends of individuals.

The vision informing this outlook—one given its quintessential expression in this century by Woodrow Wilson—does not find in the conflict and rivalry of nations the natural order of things but the perversion of such order. Peace, not strife, represents the natural order; cooperation, not conflict, is the destiny of men and nations. War, the great instrument of reason of state, is seen not only as an evil but as an unnecessary evil (and, in consequence, as either a crime or a punishment).

*Diplomacy* is the story of the working out of these two traditions, the European since the seventeenth century, the American in the twentieth century. It is not a work of diplomatic history in the conventional sense. Kissinger is not interested in what one clerk said to another. His concerns are of a loftier and more encompassing character. They deal with the eternal dilemmas of foreign policy that confronted the great European statesmen from Richelieu to De Gaulle; they focus on how those who dominated—for better or for

Books

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worse—the modern state system met their challenges; and they analyze the nature of the achievements and the failures of those who played for a moment in history a central role on the world's stage. Though the work of course draws upon the diplomatic record, it does so in no consistent and systematic manner. *Diplomacy* is not only highly selective in its historical treatment, it also reads like nothing so much as a series of epic tales of statesmen: the blind and the farseeing, the merely clever and the profound, the irresolute and the resolute. Kissinger has always been preoccupied with the problem of leadership, the role in history of the great personage, and never more so than in his latest work. *Diplomacy* is as much as anything else a study in leadership—conservative and revolutionary, despotic and democratic. And since leadership is inseparable from the exercise of power, it is also a study of power and its uses.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, *Diplomacy* is an inquiry into the nature of international order and the attempts in the past two centuries to establish such order. The European and the American traditions of diplomacy evoke distinctive schemes of order. Guided by reason of state, European attempts at order have always embodied the principle of the balance of power. In contrast, the essential American scheme of order has rested on the principle of collective security. The choice between these two schemes of order, Kissinger insists, remains as significant today as it was on earlier occasions in this century, after both world wars. Although the order of the Cold War has come to an end, the order of the post-Cold War world remains no more than embryonic. The nature of that order, he believes, is the great issue we should be seriously addressing. In doing so, the study of past efforts to create international order must interest us for the lessons they teach about what we can hope to achieve in the future.

In taking this position, Kissinger clearly assumes that the future will resemble the past, that as between continuity and change in the international system it is the former that will predominate. International politics is the realm of the unchanging. "Nations have pursued self-interest more frequently than high-minded principle," he writes, "and have competed more than they have cooperated. There is little evidence to suggest that this age-old mode of behavior has changed, or that it is likely to change in the decades ahead." If anything, his argument runs, the developments marking the present system—above all, its fragmentation on the one hand yet its growing globalization on the other—both make order more necessary than ever before and make its achievement more difficult.

If the pattern that has marked state behavior in the past remains essentially unchanged, it follows that the prospects for international order remain what they were in the past (and this despite the greater need for order today). In the past, such order the world has known has either been based on a balance of power among several states or on the domination of one. The irony of the American prospect is that having emerged victorious from the long conflict with the Soviet Union, America is confronted with the kind of world from which it has sought to escape throughout its history. The world of the twenty-first century, Kissinger writes, will be one this country can neither withdraw from nor dominate. Isolation being precluded, America is fated to participate in the international system, though not in the way it participated during the period of the Cold War. For the order of tomorrow, Kissinger is persuaded, will resemble past international orders. Given a world in which power is increasingly diffused, order will rest on a balance of power. But this must prove particularly difficult for a nation that has only had the experiences of

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isolation and domination, neither of which
is adequate preparation for becoming
merely a nation, even if still a great one,
among other nations.

Nor is lack of experience the only
problem. Quite another is a national out-
look that ostensibly remains as deeply
embedded as ever and that can only be
altered over time. Whether time, and cir-
cumstances, will permit the painful adjust-
ment to an altered vision of statecraft,
whether the nation will be receptive to
such change even in the light of a different
experience, are questions Kissinger does
not address. Diplomacy is his effort to
influence the outcome of what promises to
be a long period of national uncertainty
over the nation's role and purpose. The
old world is called into existence to redress
the infatuations of the new. We are urged
to heed the lessons of the (European) past
in order to meet the challenges of the
(American) future.

Idealism—Its Limits and Rewards

DIPLOMACY BEGINS with the
triumph of Woodrow Wilson
over Theodore Roosevelt, a triumph
Kissinger sees as marking a critical turning
point in American, and indeed world, his-
tory in this century. It is Roosevelt who
“understood how international politics
worked.” “No other president defined
America’s world role so completely in
terms of national interest or identified the
national interest so comprehensively with
the balance of power.” But it was Wilson
who “grasped the mainsprings of American
motivation, perhaps the principal one
being that America simply did not see
itself as a nation like any other.” Whereas
Roosevelt “started from the premise that
the United States was a power like any
other, not a singular incarnation of
virtue,” and thus subject to the historic
ground rules of equilibrium, Wilson’s
point of departure was America’s excep-

tionalism. "For Wilson, the justification of
America's international role was messianic:
America had an obligation not to the bal-
ance of power, but to spread its principles
throughout the world." Those principles—
above all, the extension of freedom—
defined the nation's role and purpose, just
as they provided the ultimate justification
of its actions abroad.

Wilson's triumph in American think-
ing about foreign policy, Kissinger writes,
proved to be definitive and enduring.
"Every American president since Wilson
has advanced variations of Wilson's
theme." Although critics have savaged him
ever since, "Wilson's principles have
remained the bedrock of American foreign
policy thinking." They have remained so
despite the difficulties encountered in
attempting to reconcile them with the
necessities imposed by an often hostile and
resistant world. And they have remained
so, Kissinger argues, despite their being
profoundly at odds with the essential prin-
ciples of successful statecraft.

If Wilsonianism has formed the core
of the American foreign policy tradition in
this century, if its influence on thought
about foreign policy has been all pervasive
and if it has often led either to the neglect
or even to the denial of our true interests,
the question must arise: how have we nev-
ertheless managed to do so well? For we
have done well, as Kissinger himself
acknowledges at more than one point in
his critical study. America's rise to world
preponderance in this century has been
both swift and relatively painless. The
costs of the long period of Cold War were
certainly not negligible. Still, by compari-
son with the price other nations have paid
in reaching and maintaining a position of
world power, these costs appear almost
modest. At least, they do so if one takes
the view that the conflict with the Soviet
Union was real and not one that was self-
imposed.

Realist critiques of American diploma-

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cy have often sought to explain the strik-
ing disparity between what is seen as a low
quality of diplomatic thought and effort,
on the one hand, and nevertheless success-
ful results, on the other, in terms of good
fortune. If America has done well, it is
because of the great advantages it has
enjoyed. But while this explanation
undoubtedly carries us a long way, there is
clearly more to the account than good for-
tune. Nor does Kissinger contend other-
wise. Indeed, he credits America's success-
es in the past half century in part to its
very idealism and addiction to universal
principles. America is the bearer of a
diplomatic tradition that is naive. Yet a
certain amount of naivete, he observes,
seems to be a precondition for great
undertakings. The same universalist, ideo-
logical approach to foreign policy that was
largely responsible for the excesses of con-
tainment—above all, to Vietnam—also
provided much of the impetus for the cre-
ative acts of American diplomacy in the
years following World War II.

In part, however, the explanation of
why the nation has managed to do quite
well—its good fortune apart—must be
found in the disparity between its words
and thoughts and its actions. The case of
Wilson, that fount in this century of the
tradition Kissinger criticizes, is illustrative.
Wilson rejected in principle the old diplo-
macy, based as it was on little other than
self-interest. Yet this rejection did not
extend to America's sphere of influence in
the western hemisphere. Quite the con-
trary, Wilson gave greater scope to a cen-
tury-old claim than any of his predeces-
sors—Theodore Roosevelt included—had
done. It may be the case that in doing so
he thought he was forestalling the
encroachment of others. Even so, his
actions in the Caribbean region scarcely
testified to a commitment to banish the
ancient law of self-interest.

On a still larger stage, there is surely
more than the denial of self-interest and

the claim to act as the "disinterested
champions of right" in the role Wilson
cast for the nation at Versailles. If America
would but accept the obligations of the
Covenant of the League of Nations, he
urged, we would be the "senior partners"
in the enterprise. "The financial leader-
ship...the industrial primacy...the commer-
cial advantage will be ours. And other
countries will look to us for leadership and
direction." The rewards of idealism were
to be considerable and they were to be
rendered in the traditional coin of the old
diplomacy.

These rewards, moreover, would pre-
sumably be gained at modest cost. The
rejection of the old diplomacy with its bal-
ance of power and ever-present threat of
war did not spring simply from considera-
tions of principle. It was not moral principle
alone that explains Wilson's position
that anything was preferable to participa-
tion in the traditional system. An unwilling-
ness to pay the price in blood and trea-
sure entailed by participation was equally,
perhaps more, important. Often mistaken
as evidence of moral purity, its motivation
was in fact of a lower order.

IN HIS SUSTAINED critique of
America's Cold War diplomacy,
Kissinger finds the influence of Wilsonian
principles pervasive and significant.
Certainly, the influence of Wilsonianism
cannot be ignored. But neither can the
influence, however unavowed and even
disavowed, of a traditional reason of state.
The latter tradition, we recall, teaches that
in the defense of a state's vital interests—
its security and independence—any and all
means may be employed. It also prescribes
that the determination of the circum-
stances in which the state may exercise this
right be left to the state's sovereign deci-
sion.

I do not know of an occasion during
the Cold War in which these imperatives
of reason of state were denied because of

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