[wc]

INDIA CHAIR
# A Sign of the Times

An Interview With Ambassador WILLIAM CLARK, JR.

William Clark, Jr., former U.S. Ambassador to India, is once again involved in Indo-
U.S. relations, albeit in a nongovernmental role. Clark served as head of the American
Embassy in New Delhi from 1989 to 1992, then transferred to Washington, D.C., to serve
one year as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Last summer,
Clark joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a nonpartisan
Washington think tank, as holder of its Japan Chair and senior associate on Asian Affairs.

Clark's arrival at CSIS coincided with the development of plans by the influential think tank to set up a Chair in Indian Studies. The ambassador, given his experience with India, agreed to spearhead the effort "as a labor of love" in addition to his other duties at CSIS. He recently spent more than a week in India seeking support from Indian industrialists and others for the India Chair.

Clark took time from his busy schedule to talk with SPAN about his work on behalf of the India Chair and about Indo-U.S. relations in general.

QUESTION: Let's begin with your involve-
ment with CSIS and your work on behalf of the
India Chair. How did this come about?

WILLIAM CLARK, Jr.: I enjoyed serving as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, but a funny thing happened in November of 1992. A new administration was voted into office. Clearly a new administration wants its own team to run the State Department. That doesn't bother me. I was a career foreign service officer and was offered another ambassadorial assignment, but about the same time David Abshire, cofounder of the CSIS, talked to me about my going to the Center as head of the Japan Chair, which is an endowed position, and as senior adviser on Asia. The thing that really tipped it was that the Center had been formulating plans for an India Chair and had started working with the Indian community in America. When I came on board I said I would like to get involved in the India Chair, and so I am doing it.

Why an India Chair? How much interest and support for it is there?

In the United States, the contrast between today and 1989—when I was about to come out here as ambassador—in the interest level of the American business community toward India is not comparable. In 1989 a lot of people were keeping an eye on India—sort of—but knew it was a hard market to get into. Some companies were coming in. Pepsi Cola had started up. Guardian Glass had started up, and a few others.

Now, everyone wants to come. I find that
although I am on the Japan Chair, I get many
more questions today about India. It's a sign

of the times. I am convinced there is interest in
doing business with people here. If the Indian
business community doesn't support the
Chair, it won't work. If the American business
community doesn't support it, it won't work.
If both of them support it, it will work. I know
I've got interest in the United States. And I am
delighted, after talking here to senior business
and other leaders, to find the same interest
here. We're going to make it work. Funding
the Chair will be a costly business—a four-
million-dollar operation.

Why does it cost so much?

Because of interest rates and the conser-
vative policies of the endowment people at
CSIS. Such a Chair operates on the interest its
endowment generates. You don't want to lose
the Chair if inflation goes the wrong way. So,
to do it properly, the endowment should be
about that much.

What has been the response from Indians,
and what do you expect from them?

The response has been very good. Of course,
it could just be politeness at this point. Because
of the unique facilities that the Center offers. I
want to see if certain Indian large companies,
the small ones too, are interested in being
affiliated with the Center. I'll give you an
example. We have a tremendous support
group out in the world. I have 18 to 20
Japanese corporations that support the Cen-
ter—not to know about Japan; they know
about Japan—but basically to learn about
commercial conditions in Russia, the United
States, Latin America, Africa. And they're
interested in the Japanese programs too,
particularly the United States' reaction to

things involving Japan. It gives me feedback
on the Japanese side so that I know what
they're thinking. So I think it would be useful
for Indian corporations, now that they're get-
ting global, to be involved in the same way.

I know India has been involved in supporting South Asian Study programs at such institutions as the Asia Society and Columbia University. CSIS is really focused on serving people who don't have six months to study, who don't have six days or even six hours. They have two hours and you have to catch them, make your point— involve them in programs that don't take all of their time but get them working on things they're interested in, like India.

What do you mean by programs? Can you
give some specific examples?

I see the chairholder, a respected specialist, identifying particular problems and putting together study groups, conferences, and seminars. And doing them in Delhi as well as in Washington. In putting together a program on the Japan Chair, we always have a Japanese partner, and not always the same one.

The Chair will facilitate a CSIS Congres-
sional Study Group for the purpose of bring-
ing together a bipartisan group of senators
and representatives to discuss and debate pol-
icy issues related to India and America. There
also will be an opportunity to bring South
Asians into the Washington scene in a way
that hasn't been done before. One part of CSIS
is the Pacific Forum in Hawaii. One of the
things that the Forum has done is to establish
links with think tanks around the Pacific
region and Asia. So it's this type of activity
that I see for the India Chair. We'll give a

46 SPAN MARCH 1994

South Asia aspect to CSIS that hasn't been there, and just at the right time.

**Do you see the Chair affecting Indo-U.S. relations?**

On the official level, the Indian Embassy and Ambassador Siddhartha Shankar Ray are doing a great job in Washington. The U.S. Embassy is doing a great job making the American case here. But they speak for the American government. The India Chair will be an independent, credible source in Washington for projects and for bringing opinions together. The Center itself does not have an opinion, the chairholder may well have one. The Chair will put together study groups that come up with recommendations. Another thing is that the Chair will give the news media in Washington a focal point. When something comes up about India, for instance, they will say, "Let's call the India Chair at CSIS." So you have the chairholder being interviewed on television and writing pieces for the op-ed pages of the newspapers. The chairholder will be doing all kinds of different things.

**To change the subject, you were here when India's economic reform program began. What do you think of it now? How has it gone?**

I think it has gone better than most of us might have had a right to expect. People who are always inordinately ambitious would have liked it to go even faster. Speaking as a former bureaucrat, the ability to move the bureaucracy in India has been amazing. Trying to move the American bureaucracy, God knows, is difficult. This has been impressive. But for a bureaucrat to judge it is one thing. The real judges are in the business community, and last year 2,000 million dollars worth of foreign investment was made in India—half of it from the United States. That seems to me the ultimate vote of confidence.

**U.S. trade with India had for years remained stationary at around 5,000 million dollars per year. Now it's...**

Now it's 7,000 million. Everything is at the takeoff stage right now and that doesn't mean there aren't going to be difficulties. There will be. Look at our difficulties with Japan about access to their markets.

**How do you view the state of Indo-U.S. relations now? Friction in various areas has been widely reported in recent weeks.**

The fact remains—and this is another reason for pushing for creation of the India Chair—that India is not a part of the daily policy diet in Washington. The Clinton Administration has several global issues that it is working on—human rights, arms proliferation, labor rights, etc. These are issues that are overarching and they are going to be viewed from a different perspective. And that's true in

East Asia as well as South Asia. And that sometimes causes some problems.

Now when someone couches an item to the President of the United States in human rights terms, one has to expect that he is going to respond positively. The impression here may be that it is support for Pakistan when, in fact, it is support for human rights on a global basis.

Similarly, there have been these letters—what I call vanilla letters—from the Clinton White House to congressmen and others. This President is dedicated to domestic policy, so he counts congressmen in terms of "I'm going to need them for health care and I'm going to need them for welfare reform," and he writes them a letter in response to something they have written to him. Unless there is some overriding reason not to do so, he will express, in general terms, sympathy or understanding for their position—and then say, "By the way I'll be coming back for your vote later on." So you have to keep it in context and stay cool.

**What would you say to the author of a recent newspaper article here who wrote: "It is easy to understand why South Asia is shown low on the American agenda. There are no vital American interests involved in the region."?**

Certainly in strategic terms, India has been important to the United States in terms of regional stability. We have established over the past six years first-rate relations between the U.S. military and the Indian military. Even at times when we didn't have good relations between our two countries, we always had Indian officers at our military schools and U.S. officers at Indian military schools. And that gets overlooked.

There are other more important considerations—the political influence of India in the Third World and other places. Also let's not forget that we have been able to work together in various forums. We are democracies, and so it's a little harder to work together.

And if people are paying attention to this President and this Prime Minister one sees that both are trying to transform the economic potentials of their countries. Say India is a poor country, of course it is; say India is a rich country, of course it is; say India has a large middle class, of course it does. It has all of these and in numbers that are somewhat mindboggling. The opportunities for cooperation on technology transfer, for economic interaction that helps us both—they've just started. I am very confident that by the turn of the century India will be an economic giant.

**Professor Kenneth Galbraith has often said, let's not worry about a few people in Washington and a few people in New Delhi. The fund of goodwill among the people of the two countries is what matters, due in large measure to the presence of a sizable Indian community in the United States. What do you think?**

**Is the Indian-American community becoming more involved and focused on policy related to Indo-U.S. relations?**

The Indian-American community's involvement in the politics of the United States probably has been the quickest of all immigrant groups. It takes most immigrant communities until the second or third generation to become comfortable with political activism. For the Indian community, democracy is something that they understand.

While I was serving here as ambassador. I flew to Chicago to keep a promise I had made to speak to an Indian community organization there. Among those present that evening were a city council member and a congressional candidate. They didn't come to hear me. They came to court the Indian community. Beyond this, yes, I think there is a growing interest in India and Indian-American relations. But the problem there is always a concern not to be perceived as being Indian, but as being American. So, it's "Yes I want to, but I don't know whether I should." More and more, the Indian-American community is becoming active in U.S. politics.

**They seem to be doing very well.**

If one goes by income statistics, Indians are probably the most successful and educated ethnic community in the United States. "I'm Dr. So-and-So and this is my wife, Dr. So-and-So"—this has been my overwhelming experience whenever I have been introduced to them in the United States.

Let me tell you another fact that is encouraging: The number of them studying and coming back is increasing because India is where the action is. They would like to help the country and they would like to help themselves. They see the opportunity for both here. Those who leave the United States don't leave because they don't like it, they leave for the same reason they left India in the first place: The opportunities were good in the United States. They're coming back because the opportunities are good in India. It's a positive thing that you can say that.

SPAN MARCH 1994 47

MAR-01-94 11:10 FROM: KORDA-NYC

ID:

MVK

PAGE 1

MAR 01 1994

KIRKUS REVIEWS

In quoting or excerpting, please refer to
KIRKUS REVIEWS

Date of Issue: March 1, 1994

Jaffe, Harry S. & Tom
Sherwood
DREAM CITY: Race,
Power, and the Decline of
Washington, D.C.
Simon & Schuster
(336 pp.)
$23.00
May 1994
ISBN: 0-671-76846-8

Two veteran Washington journalists offer a vigorous and resonant portrait of the 30-year decline and polarization of our capital.

Jaffe (of Washingtonian magazine) and Sherwood (of WRC-TV, formerly of the Washington Post) tell their story in episodic sketches, covering the city's historic caste system among blacks, the rise of community organizer (and, later, mayor) Marion Barry during the War on Poverty, and the shift of power to blacks after the traumatic 1968 riots. The authors criticize the long-standing federal stranglehold on the district, as well as the Post's ignorance of black Washington, but their major culprit is "Boss Barry," who emerged in his second mayoral term (1982-6) as a betrayer of the biracial coalition that first elected him. Barry's failures were legion: political spoils for a narrow group of adventurers such as profiteer-from-the-homeless Cornelius Pitts; a top aide turned embezzler; a police department in disarray; a downtown that boomed as other neighborhoods crumbled. His defiance of the black bourgeoisie and the white power structure preserved his popularity among blacks, and when he was arrested on drug charges in 1990—an episode recounted in telling detail—his lawyer successfully argued that the government was out to get him. After serving a six-month jail term for one misdemeanor, Barry began a comeback as council member from the city's poorest ward. The authors criticize the current mayor, reformer Sharon Pratt Kelly, as out of touch, and warn that federal receivership for Washington is as likely as full home rule and statehood.

Reliance on dialogue-rich scenes sometimes sacrifices depth for drama, but this is a memorable and disturbing reminder of much unfinished urban business.

♦ Kissinger, Henry
DIPLOMACY
Simon & Schuster
(912 pp.)
$35.00
Apr. 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-65991-X

The Nobel laureate and former national security advisor and secretary of state (Years of Upheaval, 1982, etc.) presents an engrossing and monumental (in every sense) historical survey of diplomacy from the 17th century to the present.

Kissinger begins his narrative after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), when militarily ascendant France strove for dominance on the continent, preventing the fragmented German states from coalescing into a major power. Thereafter Britain, its own internal turbulence quelled and its monarchy restored, sought to check France by creating alliances of weaker European states. Kissinger shows how wily statesmen like Richelieu, Britain's William III, Metternich, and Bismarck frankly pursued their own nation-state's interests without regard for the idealistic concepts of collective security that have motivated American policy since the Wilson administration: only Britain, because of its unique geographical position, actively pursued a policy of promoting equilibrium on the continent. Kissinger extensively discusses the unraveling of the post-Napoleonic arrangements in the decades leading up to WW I, Soviet and German consolidation and French and British demoralization in the years after the Versailles treaty, and the dominance of the Soviet-American rivalry in world politics after World War II. Kissinger draws fascinatingly on his own experiences as President Nixon's chief diplomat to illustrate his arguments about diplomacy. Finally, he argues that the ideal of collective security that American policy has promoted since Wilson's presidency and throughout the Cold War, while sometimes effective, is often weak because it is not strongly grounded in national interests.

Buttressing his argument with a sweeping historical survey, Kissinger persuasively contends that leaders of the western democracies, particularly the US, should leaven their idealism in the turbulent post-Cold War era with the realistic pursuit of concrete national interests. Profound and important. (Book-of-the-Month main selection for April; History Book Club main selection)

# The 'Great Man' Theory of Foreign Policy

*In Kissinger's view, the heroes are the cool thinkers, not the nice guys.*

## DIPLOMACY

By Henry Kissinger.
Illustrated. 912 pp. New York:
Simon & Schuster. $35.

By Ernest R. May

WHEN reading Winston Churchill's "World Crisis, 1914-1918," Arthur Balfour called it "an autobiography disguised as a history of the world." Henry Kissinger's "Diplomacy" is a book of maxims disguised as a history of statecraft. The maxims are often splendid. The history is not.

After a brief introduction, "Diplomacy" opens with an essay contrasting Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — the Realpolitiker and the moralist. It then backs up to Cardinal Richelieu, France's chief minister in the early 17th century, and marches through the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, the Bismarckian era and the two world wars. Though half of the book concerns the cold war, little is autobiographical. Only three chapters cover the early 1970's, when Mr. Kissinger was the President's national security assistant, then Secretary of State. Except in a few anecdotes, these chapters, too, pose as history. "Nixon and his advisers" substitutes for "I" or "we."

"Diplomacy" calls to mind Machiavelli's "Discourses." Machiavelli also commented on history — that of the Roman Republic. He mistook details and distorted Roman history in the large. A scholar at a Welsh university analyzed "Discourses" and concluded, according to Bernard Crick, the editor of the Penguin Classics edition, that Machiavelli "could hardly have hoped for a pass degree." We do not read "Discourses" to learn about Rome, however. We read the book now for what it tells about Machiavelli himself and for its wisdom. Future generations will read "Diplomacy" for comparable reasons.

Mr. Kissinger is an important historical figure. Only four other Secretaries of State were molders of United States foreign policy — John Quincy Adams, Charles Evans Hughes, George Marshall and Dean Acheson. Mr. Kissinger's mammoth autobiography (2,750 pages and still not complete) is designed to shape what future historians write. ("Let us leave hindsight to history," Churchill once said, "that history which I am now, myself ... writing.") It also has some of the literary quality of testimony prepared for delivery under oath. "Diplomacy" is more self-revealing.

"Diplomacy" discloses the depth of Mr. Kissinger's reverence for both power and analysis. It is "great man" history. It focuses on particular statesmen, not on forces or trends. (It mentions almost no women, though Margaret Thatcher does win an admiring reference or two.) Beginning with Richelieu, its heroes calculate and manipulate balances of power. Mr. Kissinger remarks that Richelieu's opponents, the Hapsburgs, were "men of principle" and "therefore quite defenseless." After other states adopted Richelieu's approach, he writes, "France lost the advantage of having adversaries constrained by moral considerations."

Mr. Kissinger scorns or dismisses most people who thought in other terms. William Ewart Gladstone, Britain's moralistic 19th-century Prime Minister, he writes contemptuously, "insisted that Christian decency and respect for human rights ought to be the guiding lights of British foreign policy, not the balance of power and the national interest." He is equally critical of those who let domestic politics dictate foreign policy. Of France's 19th-century President-Empress, Napoleon III (and perhaps elliptically of President Jimmy Carter), Mr. Kissinger observes that he "conducted his foreign policy in the style of modern political leaders

Ernest R. May is Charles Warren Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent book is "American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68."

RAY BARTIKUS

who measure their success by the reaction of the television evening news" and thus "made himself a prisoner of the purely tactical."

Mr. Kissinger applauds anyone who approached international politics analytically, whatever the results. He writes charitably, for example, of the men who advised Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson on Vietnam. Though he says they got the United States into a hopeless war from which "Nixon and his advisers" arranged honorable extrication, he nevertheless praises his predecessors as "gluttons for analysis." He faults them only for failing to develop "criteria to assess a challenge so at variance with American experience and American ideology."

Mr. Kissinger even admits admiration for Stalin and the tyrants of Beijing because of their coolheadedness. Stalin, he says, "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." Of the Chinese: Mao, Zhou and Deng "reflected a common tradition of painstaking analysis and the distillation of the experiences of an ancient country with an instinct for distinguishing between the permanent and the tactical." Mr. Kissinger is impatient with Hitler because he "operated by instinct rather than analysis."

Yet Mr. Kissinger does not revere only analysis focused on power. He holds it equally important that analysis take account of values. In the 1950's, while still on the Harvard faculty, he wrote "A World Restored," a book starring Prince Metternich. In "Diplomacy," Metternich remains a hero. More than in the earlier book, however, it is because of Metternich's understanding of factors other than power. The long period of peace after 1815 was due, Mr. Kissinger declares, to "a sense of shared values. There was not only a physical equilibrium, but a moral one."

Despite Woodrow Wilson's moralism, Mr. Kissinger admires him. "Wilson grasped the mainsprings of American motivation," he writes, adding later: "For

three generations, critics have savaged Wilson's analysis and conclusions; and yet, in all this time, Wilson's principles have remained the bedrock of American foreign-policy thinking."

Passages in "Diplomacy" imply that "Nixon and his advisers" paid too little heed to values. Mr. Kissinger ascribes to Richard Nixon "powerful analytical skills and extraordinary geopolitical intuition." He characterizes Mr. Nixon as "the first President since Theodore Roosevelt to conduct American foreign policy largely in the name of the national interest." He adds: "The drawback of this approach was its dearth of emotional resonance among the American people."

Mr. Kissinger closes his narrative by contrasting Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He characterizes Mr. Reagan as intellectually vacuous yet possessed of "an extraordinary intuitive rapport with the well-springs of American motivation." "Nixon was to Reagan," he continues, "as Theodore Roosevelt had been to Woodrow Wilson. Like Roosevelt, Nixon had had a far better understanding of the workings of international relations; like Wilson, Reagan had a much surer grasp of the workings of the American soul."

Parts of "Diplomacy" have the mind-provoking quality of great teaching. Mr. Kissinger urges us, for example, to think of the present as like the period after the Crimean War of the mid-1850's. Russia, previously thought all-powerful on land, lost the war and had to sign a humiliating peace. Britain emerged victorious, but the whole Metternichian system collapsed. Erupting nationalism created, among other things, a united Italy and a consolidated German Empire more powerful than any Continental state since the France of Napoleon I. Then, as now, Mr. Kissinger writes, the "sense of shared values gradually eroded."

AMERICA'S alternative strategies, Mr. Kissinger suggests, resemble those followed from the aftermath of the Crimean War until the 1890's by Britain on the one hand and Bismarck's Germany on the other. British governments preferred to stand apart from other nations, then move at the last moment if the balance of power needed to be righted. Bismarck chose entanglement in potentially conflicting alliances in order continuously to keep rein on other governments. The British approach, Mr. Kissinger contends, requires too much ruthlessness and resolve for Americans. "Strange as it may seem," he writes, "the Bismarck style of operating a balance of power is probably more attuned to the traditional American approach to international relations."

Much of his concluding chapter illustrates this thesis, arguing that America should maintain close relationships with nations that are potentially rivals, much as Bismarck did with Russia and Austria-Hungary. Mr. Kissinger advises, for example, that the United States keep tight ties with Bonn (Berlin) and with Moscow. Germany and Russia then will not "fixate on each other as either principal partner or principal adversary." He urges similarly that the United States be effectively an ally of Japan, an ally of China and a confidant of Asian states that dread both. "To the extent that the United States attempts to preserve the equilib-

*Continued on page 24*

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The New York Times

Book Review

April 3, 1994

NONFICTION

3 DIPLOMACY. By Henry Kissinger.

7 E. M. FORSTER: A Biography. By Nicola Beauman.

9 LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History.
By Sheila M. Rothman.

11 THE DEATH OF THE MESSIAH: From Gethsemane to the Grave.
A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels.
By Raymond E. Brown.

12 THE RECKONING: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe.
By Charles Nicholl.

14 STORIES OF SCOTTSBORO. By James Goodman.

23 A FATHER'S STORY. By Lionel Dahmer.

25 SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE: Breaking Free From the World of Autism. By Donna Williams.

FICTION AND POETRY

1 THE END OF THE HUNT. By Thomas Flanagan.

10 LIVING TO BE A HUNDRED: Stories. By Robert Boswell.

12 THE WAY TO THE CATS. By Yehoshua Kenaz.

13 HERE: Stories. By Elizabeth Inness-Brown.

18 EARLY WORK: 1970-1979. By Patti Smith.

19 THE ALIENIST. By Caleb Carr.

29 BANISHED CHILDREN OF EVE. By Peter Quinn.

FEATURES AND DEPARTMENTS

16 In Short.

20 Calvin Trillin Is Not Your Normal Poet. By Calvin Trillin.

22 Crime. By Marilyn Stasio.

26 Best Sellers.
And Bear in Mind.

28 Paperback Best Sellers.
New & Noteworthy Paperbacks.

31 Letters.

["# Where Did I Go?", "A searching memoir by Jeffrey Dahmer", "## A FATHER'S STORY", "By Lionel Dahmer.", "Illustrated, 255 pp. New York:", "William Morrow & Company. $20.", "By Will Self", "LIONEL DAHMER'S analysis of his hopelessly flawed relationship with his son Jeffrey is particularly unpleasant for a parent to read. It might be possible to dismiss \"A Father's Story\" as just another example of the breast-beating occasion when someone lights on a newfound jargon to explain his life mistakes (\"denial\" is made much of in this book), were it not for the palpable pain and despair that gusts from the text.", "Of course, nothing is easier than to-impose a retrospective interpretation on events. What makes Lionel Dahmer's narrative so compelling is that he is trying in this ascription to peer not just into the soul of his son but into his own.", "\"A Father's Story\" is fairly straightforward, running chronologically from the son's birth and childhood in the Middle West through to his arrest in July 1991 at the age of 31, conviction seven months later (for killing and dismembering 15 boys and young men to gratify his sexual desires with their bodies) and his incarceration for life.", "Throughout, the sense of someone constitutionally ill-equipped for introspection of any kind groping toward a vile realization is gripping. Lionel Dahmer comes across — as he presumably intends to — as an emotionally and spiritually absent parent. A chemist who describes his emotional makeup as \"a broad, flat plain,\" he buried himself in the laboratory where \"the ironclad laws of science governed,\" rather than face up to the \"chaotic\" world of human relationships and to the impact that his disintegrating marriage to a seriously depressed woman was having on his younger son.", "The details of Jeffrey L. Dahmer's life — from his increasing lack of affect to his growing obesession with bones, his teen-age alcoholism and his arrest for child molestation — are brought into grotesque salience. And as Lionel Dahmer writes of his chronically moody, asocial son, one wants to grab hold of the author and shake him out of his withdrawn state.", "Clearly Lionel Dahmer is not a professional writer, and the text bears the evidences of strong editing. Whether or not this makes its execution and publication a wholly meretricious act is difficult to judge. Clearly Lionel Dahmer believes he is acting in good faith, but then according to him, he has always done that.", "The tone of \"A Father's Story\" stands in interesting contrast to that of Brian Masters's fine \"Killing for Company,\" which I first read in 1985, when it was published in Britain (it came out in the United States a year later and was minimally distributed). Mr. Masters's unconventional biography of the British mass murderer Dennis Nilsen is long and graphic, yet in reading it one doesn't feel macabre or like a voyeur. Lionel Dahmer's memoir of his homicidal son, Jeffrey, is a lot shorter and a lot less graphic, yet the sense of spying on the mechanics of evil can be almost overpowering.", "I was fascinated by Dennis Nilsen, for he lived and killed in the same area of North London where I grew up and still live. He was an interviewer for a state employment bureau in Kentish Town — his", "Will Self's first novel, \"My Idea of Fun,\" will be published this month. He is the author of \"The Quantity Theory of Insanity,\" a short-story collection, and \"Cock\" and \"Bull,\" twin novellas.", "task was to assessment — and one was me.", "It is now almost banal, chillingly so, that the Dennis Nilsen who did to his colleaque, had no charge, really, whatsoever. His death in 1983, when he was attendant necropsy of his hoarding of discovered.", "Like Jeffrey, largely loveless and aloof from a poor background, distinct enclave of attempting to score Brian Masters's time-honored training he sees as key to a 5-year-old, he was a parlor to pay respect to, a grandfather, a father, a Masters identified as a great-great-great-great-great-great

MAR-16-94 WED 11:00

COMMENTARY

FAX NO. 212 751 1174

P. 02

MAR 16 1994

Commentary

165 East 56 Street
New York, New York 10022
(212) 751-4000, Ext. 228
FAX: (212) 751-1174

NORMAN PODHORETZ, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

March 16, 1994

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
Kissinger Associates
350 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10022

Dear Henry:

Thanks for the warmly inscribed copy of your
new book (and the kind acknowledgment). I
look forward to reading the final version,
and Midge looks forward to her first encounter
with what I feel confident will be seen as a
major work.

NP:hr

P.S. I enclose a copy of Paul Johnson's review,
which will appear in our April issue (out in a
few days).

Enc.

KISSINGER ASSOCIATES
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NEW YORK NY 10022-6022
(212) 759-7919
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# Books in Review

## The World Stage

DIPLOMACY. By HENRY KISSINGER
Simon & Schuster. 912 pp.
$35.00.

Reviewed by PAUL JOHNSON

Good diplomats rarely write well about diplomacy. Ambassadorial memoirs include some of the worst books ever published. Castlereagh, Talleyrand, and Metternich, the three men who created the 1814-15 Vienna settlement, rightly praised by Henry Kissinger as one of the most durable works of peacemaking in history, left nothing apart from their voluminous papers, and for their views on their craft we are dependent on a few bons mots. By contrast, John Quincy Adams produced twelve volumes of *Memoires*, and Chateaubriand's *Mémoires d'outre-tombe* is another Leviathan. But both are composed more of venom, spleen, hurt pride, and vindictive narrative than diplomatic adages—and, if truth be told, neither man was a negotiator of world class. In modern times, the writings of John Foster Dulles and Anthony Eden are unilluminating. George Kennan's books uneven, and the one outstanding memoir is Dean Acheson's *Present at the Creation*. But even that tells you what, where, and when, rather than how.

That leaves us with two authors—Harold Nicolson and Henry Kissinger. Both engaged in diplomacy with a passion for the art and with a view to writing about it later. Both studied carefully that perennial sourcebook of diplomacy, the Vienna Congress: Nicolson's *The Congress of Vienna* (1946) and Kissinger's *A World Restored* (1957) are the two best short accounts of it. Nicolson was brought up to the job. His father was head of

the Foreign Office and as a lad he personally delivered the British ultimatum to the German ambassador in July 1914; later he served under the last of the old-world Foreign Ministers, the Marquess Curzon. His writings on diplomacy are notable for their clarity and sense.

Kissinger, by contrast, came to diplomacy via academia and had to teach himself the silken ropes. Unlike Nicolson, however, he went right to the top where he acquired experience unique in his generation. He well knows how it feels to make lonely decisions. As Secretary of State, he also invented his own grandee diplomatic style, rather in the manner of the old cardinals like Wolsey or Richelieu. He had more aides than Richelieu had *monsignori*, and where Curzon took a private train, Kissinger had his circus pile into two or three big jets. Even Richard Nixon, no slouch when it came to display, once complained to me of the size of Kissinger's traveling entourage. But all this was deliberate. No man living, and few dead, have thought more carefully about the externals, the *impedimenta*, of negotiating.

Now, having already produced his two gigantic volumes of memoirs—and very good value they are—he has delivered himself of a scarcely less formidable study of diplomatic history and practice. The book's structure is complex. He begins by stating the fundamental dilemma of American foreign policy: the conflict between its instinctive idealism and its acquired respect for the realities of the world. In his next chapter he illustrates this by contrasting the two titans of the first decades of the century: Theodore Roosevelt, unashamed advocate of *Realpolitik*, and Woodrow Wilson, obstinate and tragic exponent of American idealism. It is Kissinger's contention that, with certain qualifications, Wilsonian idealism has triumphed in the 20th century as America, the strongest power, has committed itself, and persuaded others to commit themselves, to a

world order based upon the United Nations Charter.

HOWEVER, to say all that does not make a big book, and Kissinger is determined to provide one. So we go on a long historical tour, in which the author gives himself the pleasure of recounting, and pondering upon, the great diplomatic moments of the past. First he examines, in turn, efforts by Richelieu, William of Orange, and Pitt the Younger to conduct foreign and war policies based upon the concept of the balance of power. Then he takes another look at the Congress of Vienna: the notion of the neatly balanced major powers acting in concert to preserve civilized, undemocratic order. Next he has a look at "two revolutionaries"—Napoleon III and Bismarck: the one an overambitious buffoon running a fragile nation which broke in his hands, the other a "genius" in the business of matching aims to power—"Few statesmen have so altered the course of history."

Kissinger now turns to the decades leading up to World War I, showing how the balance of power in Europe turned dangerously rigid and how, in consequence, the powers constructed competing military alliances which in conjunction became what he calls a "doomsday machine." The implication here is that if Bismarck, or someone like him, had continued to run Germany, the war would have been avoided.

Kissinger has now reached the time of Wilson, and we have two chapters on the Treaty of Versailles, followed by one on the recovery of Germany. Then he shows how Hitler, a "demonic personality," brought about "the collapse of the house of cards which represented the Versailles international order." There follow two chapters leading up to the Nazi-Soviet pact and the opening of World War II.

At this point, Kissinger reintroduces America to the world stage, concentrating first on Franklin D. Roosevelt's "role in moving his iso-

PAUL JOHNSON, who writes a weekly column for the London Spectator, is the author of, among other books, Modern Times, The Birth of the Modern, and Intellectuals.

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56/COMMENTARY APRIL 1994

lationist people toward participa-
tion in the war," which he thinks
"serves as an object lesson on the
scope of leadership in a democ-
acy." He has an interesting chap-
ter showing the three contrast-
ing approaches to peace of FDR,
Churchill, and Stalin; after this
comes one demonstrating the in-
evitability, given Stalin's aims, of
the cold war. He then takes us
through the last half-century: con-
tainment, its successes and limita-
tions; the Korean war; the postwar
German problem; the Suez crisis;
the Hungarian revolt; Berlin; and
three poignant chapters on the
tragedy of Vietnam. The histori-
cal section concludes with chapters
on Nixon's foreign policy, détente,
and the end of the cold war.

IN SUMMARIZING the bulk of Kissinger's book, I am anxious to demonstrate two points: first, the range of his historical interests; and second, the ingenuity with which all these different episodes are tied into his central theme of showing how men of good will, the heroes of history, have sought to contain the demons or fools by mixtures of *Realpolitik* and idealism.

Kissinger is a born teacher and
carries the reader willingly along
on his bumpy ride through four
centuries of complex war- and
peace-making. He has an eye for
color, incident, and character; he
summarizes well; and he keeps a
neat balance between narrative
and reflective analysis. He has read
widely and intelligently, and I
found myself both learning a lot
and stimulated into reexamining
some well-known historical turning
points. For those who have the lei-
sure, the entire book is very much
worth reading.

But to get the gist of Kissinger's
thinking on diplomacy one only
has to read the first two and
the last two chapters. The final
one, "The New World Order Re-
considered," is particularly valu-
able. Kissinger's deepest diplo-
matic instincts are those of a civi-
lized European. He regards the
Vienna settlement, which endured
for a century, as the most success-
ful in European history because "it
combined legitimacy and equilib-

rium, shared values, and balance-
of-power diplomacy." At the same
time, as an American guru, he rec-
ognizes that the idealist goal of a
stable world order based on liber-
alism and democracy has to be the
guiding principle of United States
policy. His job, then, as he sees it,
is to chart the pitfalls in pursuing
this goal, and to show how they
can be circumvented.

Thus his final chapter is a check-
list of warnings. In general: "The
domination by a single power of
either of Eurasia's two principal
spheres—Europe or Asia—remains
a good definition of strategic dan-
ger for America, cold war or no
cold war." On Russia: America
should encourage that country "to
concentrate—for the first time in
her history—on the development
of her national territory, which,
extending over eleven time zones,
from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok,
gives no cause for claustrophobia."
On Western Europe: recognition
that "Both the Atlantic Alliance
and the European Union are indis-
pensable building-blocks of a new
and stable world order." Eastern
Europe: tie the ex-Communist
states into NATO by a wider group-
ing, and then, "If Russia remains
within its borders, the focus on se-
curity would shift over time...."
On China: play down violations of
human rights and emphasize, in-
stead, "tacit cooperation on glo-
bal—and especially Asian—strat-
egy." On Japan: prevent its arm-
ing dangerously, and so frighten-
ing China, by maintaining "a sub-
stantial American military pres-
ence in Northeast Asia." The West-
ern Hemisphere: build on NAFTA
through GATT.

All this advice is reasonable, and
there is much more to the same
effect. Kissinger is always worth lis-
tening to, and a sensible man in
the White House will make a habit
of consulting this remarkable man.

But is there a sensible man
in the White House—or, for that
matter, in Foggy Bottom? What
the world needs today is not great
guidance in sorting out its prob-
lems but effective leadership In
applying that guidance. British,
French, German, American—and
now Russian—dabbling in the
Balkans has been a depressing ex-

ercise in ineptitude punctuated by
braggadocio, cowardice, stupidity,
and futile point-scoring. So far
only the Russians have emerged
with any marks for diplomatic cun-
ning. It makes one shudder at what
would happen if the West were
confronted by a real crisis.

Wisdom of the kind Kissinger
imparts in this book is valuable—
and I hope President Clinton will
find the time to read it—but it
is not enough by itself. Until we
find a new generation of heavy-
weights to replace Ronald Reagan
and Margaret Thatcher, the post-
cold-war world will continue to
drift alarmingly. For wisdom has
to be translated into action by will.

BOOK REVIEW BY RALPH BUULTJENS

DIPLOMACY by Henry Kissinger. Simon and Schuster. New York. 912pp. $35.00

Until relatively recently, diplomacy was an activity essentially conducted by small groups of patricians or pseudo-patricians. More concerned with balances of power than balances of public opinion, the statesmen of the past went about their work largely untroubled by popular sentiment and demands for disclosure. Their manners and style, if not their modalities, are encapsulated in Secretary of State Stimson's response to requests for permission to increase cipher decoding of diplomatic dispatches: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail!"

In more modern times, a new diplomacy has emerged - summit conferencing, concern for non-political issues, the proliferation and required use of international institutions, official rights of participation for non-governmental organizations. This is the rumbustious diplomacy of public relations and polls, press leaks and counter-leaks, partisan propaganda and mass mobilization, think-tanks and spin doctor punditry. Dragged into the public arena, diplomacy has become democratized, politicized and vulgarized. It is now everybody's business.

Henry Kissinger is a rare bridge between the old and new worlds of diplomacy. By background and temperament he belongs to the European tradition - the grand vizier as policy-maker, the consummate courtier - counsellor with a subtle sense of the play of power. Yet, by ability and achievement he is both master and partial maker of the modern diplomatic method - skilled as foreign minister, as shuttle mediator, as policy analyst inside and outside government, as media commentator or as mentor to the rich and famous in their transnational transactions. Such virtuoso flexibility requires extraordinary talents and these Kissinger has in ample measure.

Kissinger's worldview and career are conditioned by four particularly noteworthy features - elements which give his perspectives on international affairs a particular authority. First, the phenomenal capacities which sustained his rise from a non-English speaking migrant to a significant - if not always welcome - place in the American establishment, a progression achieved in little more than two decades. Second, his unusual exposure as scholar-statesman/thinker-practitioner, advancing and applying in office ideas which had gestated in his earlier intellectual incarnation. Third, the capability to maintain public influence long beyond the duration normal for former high governmental officials. Fourth, an adroit instinct for self-preservation which has now become a requisite for survival in contempory American political life. Such a man must have much to say about concept and conduct in relations between states. And said it he has in a number of writings on strategy and foreign policy.

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I

Kissinger's tenth book, DIPLOMACY, is unlike his prior works. His earlier historical studies have mostly followed an inductive pattern - presentation and analysis of facts from which inferences and lessons are refined. Thus, for example, *A World Restored* discussed the post-Napoleonic settlement in Europe and then stated the author's findings, implying their validity for other times and place. Even Kissinger's celebrated memoirs described events and extracted larger meanings from them, often by juxtaposing his experience with the ideas he carried into office. DIPLOMACY is constructed differently. Its approach is somewhat deductive - history is largely used to underpin general principles that Kissinger has distilled from his reflections and working knowledge. In many ways, then, this is a logical extension and conclusion to much of Henry Kissinger's previous thinking. And, because he so fashions it, the book becomes a powerful prescription for a foreign policy erected on this plinth.

DIPLOMACY arrives at a fateful moment. As Kissinger puts it: "With the collapse of Communism, the disappearance of a global military threat and the simultaneous emergence of new power centers in Asia and Europe, the problem of how to build a world order has become central to American foreign policy." He argues that a new world order has never before been sculpted in an environment embracing so many different perceptions, disparate interests and distanced loci. History, especially, that of past attempts to evolve international structures, is the best guide in our current search for a suitable architecture. And so, DIPLOMACY sets out to see how others have done it and how these efforts can instruct us.

Yet, Kissinger's quest is not quite so objective or clearcut. DIPLOMACY is, in fact, a book with two agendas or perhaps two books with a single agenda. First of all, in its scope and factual content, it is the aforementioned historical audit. Moving back and forth across 400 years, Kissinger describes how certain European statesmen and twentieth century American leaders have tried to advance the interests of their countries while crafting an international order. The men he most admires sought an enduring stability and were prepared to sacrifice ephemeral advantage for it. Their method was often personalized and their diplomacy secretive. Their strategy was a calibrated balancing of power. When challenges became seriously disruptive and upset the existing equilibrium, and when negotiations could not contain them, these leaders were robust in the use of force. Inevitably, the shrewd coalition-builders, those who organized alliances of interests, vanquished the more singular disturbers of the peace - as Richelieu did to Ferdinand II, Metternich to Napoleon and Roosevelt to Hitler.

This dimension of DIPLOMACY is not narrative history nor should it be seen as such. It is a kaleidoscope of historical segments brilliantly assembled to give coherence to a central thesis. With remarkable insight and telling anecdote, Kissinger examines policies and personalities - and often the link between the two. The triumphs of Richelieu and William of Orange, Metternich and Bismarck, Woodrow Wilson, the two Roosevelt and others are recounted with rare verve. As valuable are portraits of their adversaries. The

2

analyses of failure are every bit as thoughtful and telling as the descriptions of success. Alongside fact and inquiry are occasional philosophic ruminations, the hallmark of Kissinger's writings, which elevate the discourse.

Grand sweep and great issues are the leitmotif of Kissinger's exposition. And so, it is trivial to grumble at the choice of situations and participants. Yet, some reference to the diplomacy of recovery may better highlight the instances he so deftly presents. The *realpolitik* of the Vatican - the oldest political institution in the Western world - is a case in point. Twice in the last century, the diplomacy of ecclesiastical statesman (Consalvi and Antonelli) rescued the papal political position when it was on the brink of being overwhelmed by external forces. Twice in this century, ingenious manipulations enabled the Vatican to redeem itself from the suspicion with which the victors regarded the wartime behavior of Popes Benedict XV and Pius XII. The Holy See is today a respected and formidable diplomatic powerhouse, truely testimony to the fact that ambassadors of God are maestros of the secular arts of recuperative statecraft and *raison d'etat* - as Kissinger's clever portrait of Cardinal Richelieu also demonstrates! They surely deserve at least a footnote.

II

Despite its all-embracing title, only one-fifth of DIPLOMACY addresses the period before 1900. Its central focus is international affairs since then and here three themes dominate: the rise of America from peripheral to planetary power; the steady expansion of the critical nub of world politics - from Europe to virtually the entire globe; the massive and sequential struggles of the Western democracies to combat expansionist autocracy. Against this backdrop, the international behavior of America acquires an ever larger importance for itself and for others. As these realities of global life dovetail into the historical evidence he presents, Kissinger erects a conceptual design for foreign policy. This is the second aspect of this book and, indeed, the principal reason for it.

Kissinger's thesis can be crudely compressed into a few central propositions - the foreign policy of the United States needs to be built on national interest rather than on moral abstraction; the task of statesmanship is to create a stable international order though which these national interests can be pursued; since the United States can no longer dominate the world or withdraw from it, a balance of power strategy is the best instrument by which to maintain a favorable international order; in weaving such a network, a policy of national interest will also probably serve the global interest - protecting the world from cruel upheavals and enabling cooperation on some planetary problems (e.g. environment). Underlying all this is an approach of which the starting point is less the question of morality (who is right and who is wrong?) than the question of power (who is weak and who is strong?). In articulating this hypothesis, Kissinger summarizes Richelieu's sentiments: "States do not receive credit in any world for doing what is right; they are only rewarded for being strong enough to do what is necessary." He would certainly appreciate Cornwallis' comment after the Third Anglo-Mysore War: "We have won the perfect victory - crippled our enemies without strenghting our friends!"

3

The argument is made with perspicacity and, at times, almost compelling logic. The sinews of Kissinger's conviction and the breadth of his historical knowledge move the presentation forward in an intellectual blitzkrieg. Yet, before we succumb, two questions require examination. First, is not the ethic of morality - the perception that world affairs is a struggle between good and evil, between justice and inequity - a better wellspring of foreign policy than the concept of national interest and balance of power? Kissinger evidently regards a stable world order as much more important and less dangerous than the turbulence which a policy lodged in straight-line morality can produce. It is only in such a world of balanced power that lasting higher good can be achieved. Stability, then, is a basic and worthy imperative in an imperfect world - a desirable end in support of which Kissinger once quoted Goethe: "If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter."

More than in his other writings, Kissinger implies that this view does not denote an indifference to issues of justice and morality. It is merely an unsentimental reaction to the state of the world and, as he asserts, the need "to navigate between necessity and choice, between the immutable constants of international relations and the elements subject to the discretion of statesmen." Ideals should not be easily abandoned, but it is more important to defend interests resolutely: "Wherever the balance is established between values and necessity, foreign policy must begin with some definition of what constitutes a vital interest - a change in the international environment so likely to undermine the national security that it must be resisted no matter what form the threat takes or how ostensibly legitimate it appears." In short, Kissinger is skeptical of the roseate prospect which the idealist-moralist school of foreign policy envisions - enlightened values shared by most nations, the unifying appeal of peace and truth and fairness, and an international grid sustained by moral assurances instead of geopolitical balances.

Some of this affinity for realism is rooted in Kissinger's view of history and his European background. Tragedy is ever present. Frequent references scattered throughout his works make this point: "I believe in the tragic element in history" says Kissinger as Harvard student; "Europeans live on a continent covered with ruin testifying to the fallibility of human foresight" writes Kissinger as historian; "one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy" claims Kissinger as Secretary of State. Major choices in world politics are seldom between easily apparent rights and wrongs: more often, they are between greater wrongs and lesser wrongs. Such perceptions do not lend themselves to an upbeat and cheerful interpretation of happenings. They are more likely to induce a greater confidence in power balances and counterweights than in the moral nature of political man.

Realism as a pedestal for policy is difficult to refute. But in this day and age, so far removed from the atmosphere of just a generation ago, one wonders how directly relevant the experiences of the past can be. DIPLOMACY makes its case, especially the case for Kissinger's extrapolations, exceedingly well. The excitement and enthusiasm which his demarche provokes obscures the possibility that both realist and idealist,

4

reasoning by apposite analogy, could be well off the mark. The world of today, more so
the world of tomorrow, seems to be a kind of oxymoronic functioning anarchy - confused,
illogical, disorderly and simply too large to be organized around a consistent principle.
For such a global condition we may have to devise a wholly fresh policy mix. Until this
is done, however, Kissinger's formulations remain seductive and deserve careful
consideration. After all, we cannot yet tell whether he is Canute confronting modern
waters with a bucketful of history or whether he is the purveyor of timeless truths!

III

The Kissinger line, postulating balance of power and national interest, inspires another
question: How does his prescription for foreign policy jibe with American tradition and
how acceptable will it be to American public opinion? As Kissinger sees it, the sustained
projection of the United States into global affairs, an irreversible thrust which began early
in this century, brought into being two markedly contrasting responses. One was
manipulative, the other messianic; one saw foreign policy in terms of power and the
enhancement of national security and interests, the other saw the world in terms of
principle and the struggle between good and evil; one resonated to the ethic of realism,
the other pulsated with idealism and moral fervor.

Kissinger explains how Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson embodied these
philosophies. The clash of their legacies constitutes the great and continuing debate
about the purposes of American foreign policy. Kissinger himself is foursquare in the
track which runs from Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. It is both thought and action which
places him there, as accounts of his stewardship in the Nixon and Ford Administrations
indicate. This segment of DIPLOMACY, consisting of about 100 pages or less than 15
percent of the book, illustrates how the Secretary of State and his Presidents acted upon
principles of equilibrium and national interest in momentous matters - Vietnam, the Middle
East, China, the Soviet Union and other tests. The specifics of these situations are, of
course, elaborated with much vehemence in Kissinger's memoirs published over a
decade ago. Their inclusion here appears to have more to do with reinforcing the wisdom
of a strategy than with personal vindication - an approach his detractors would not expect
from Henry Kissinger!

The import of Kissinger's message is that America's foreign successes and failures are
largely in proportion to the degree and the intelligence with which a national interest -
geopolitical strategy has been applied. The performances of all recent presidents, from
Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, are measured by this yardstick. An exception is Jimmy
Carter, who gets less mention in this book than Henry Wallace, Henry Jackson or even
Lavrenti Beria! Carter's influential adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski receives no recognition at
all. Does the diminution of the impact of this chief executive reflect Kissinger's disasteem
for the idealist-moralist pathways of international relations? Perhaps he shares Theodore
Roosevelt's disdain for "milk-and-water righteousness." Yet, in policy content and style
although certainly not in intellect, Carter stands closest to Wilson among modern
presidents. This is a minor cavil. After all, Kissinger's judgements of American

5

presidential performance are lodged in the midst of a splendid and magisterial history of
high international politics in our century - passages of which must rank among the more
profound compositions in this field.

At this point, however, Kissinger's policy preferences run head-on into a peculiar and very
American paradox. Rooseveltian realism maybe functionally more effective, but
notwithstanding its operational limitations Wilsonianism has captured the hearts of the
people: "Wilson grasped the mainsprings of American motivation...[he] tapped his
people's emotions with arguments that were as morally elevated as they were
incomprehensible to foreign leaders... he knew how to move the American people." The
realist may well point out that the ends of realism and idealism - peace, stability,
progress, freedom - are similar, that it is means and style which diverge. The American
public consistently perceives these differences as fundamental and is quite certain of its
preference.

As Kissinger well knows from his sojourn at the State Department, the absence of public
support hamstrings the execution of policy. How, then, in a democracy which resents its
means and style, is a policy of geopolitical realism to be made welcome? Kissinger
suggests that education of the people by their leaders is a possible answer. This is not
an easy task, as Theodore Roosevelt knew: "If I should advocate all that I myself believe,
I would do no good among our people, because they would not follow me. Our people
are short-sighted and they do not understand international matters." It requires a level of
popularity and trust which few presidents enjoy - where TR failed Richard Nixon could
hardly hope to succeed! And even FDR, whose appeal was enormous and who was both
lion and fox, met great resistance in selling foreign policy. This is why Kissinger makes
the shrewd observation that American practitioners of realpolitik have often cloaked
pragmatism in moral virtue and used guile or simplification to gull their citizens.

IV

Here, in many ways, is the dilemma of DIPLOMACY The course it upholds, superbly
advocated and intellectually so well buttressed, is unlikely to obtain the fulsome
endorsement it must have among the American public. Yet, Kissinger contends that this
same American public can be attuned to a kind of modified balance of power style of
foreign policy - the management of "overlapping alliance systems, some focusing 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." The idealism of American tradition can then be put in the service of a policy
which accommodates contemporary realities - mature in the realization that every choice
has its price, that balances have to be struck in a world where absolute solutions cannot
be imposed.

The vulnerability of this proposition is not in concept, but in personnel. As Kissinger
himself allows, today's leaders "rise to eminence by means of qualities that are not
necessarily those needed to govern and are even less suited to building an international

6

order." Where, in this civic environment, are we to find men and women with enough knowledge and sophistication to implement the policy Kissinger outlines? Those who have it are quite unlikely to be drawn to the commonweal. There is another, although involuted, possibility. General social idealism, which is the fount and sustenance of a moralist worldview, appears to be receding - driven from young minds by a kind of hard-headed ruthlessness forged in the streets and the money markets. As the next generation come of age, this "realism" will surely impregnate, if not dominate, attitudes to society and to the world. But would even the most cold-blooded enthusiast of balance of power politics want a foreign policy run by the likes of Charles Keating or John Gotti? If the future of realism as public philosophy is bright, the lustre of realism will fade.

Another social trend is likely to undermine classical foreign policy concepts. As America becomes more multicultural, either by migration or by sectarian consciousness, powerful ethnic and other interest groups are finding their voice in international affairs. The notion of national interest then becomes more complex - difficult, if not impossible to define. The consensus which is its pedestal is then demolished. Such perplexities cannot be translated into coherent policy. Similar confusions could bedevil the idea of generalized morality, replacing it with multiple moralities which share few common meridians. Multiculturalism, then, can be an instrument which obsoletes the categories into which we have long placed foreign policy alternatives. So, indeed, maybe the entanglements of regionalism, ties which limit the demense of a nation's interests. Form and structure will not remain constant in world politics.

These are, however, thoughts for times far ahead. As America prepares to participate in creation of a global order - the third attempt in our century - we need all the intellectual energy we can garner. DIPLOMACY is a rich source of this vitality. Written with brio, it is full of wise insights - the outcome of fertile scholarship conjoined to extraordinary experience. Above all, this book does two important things - it shapes a seminal debate about the current role of the United States in the world, and it signals the return of Henry Kissinger to the ring of high scholarship. Those who know Kissinger's past works - the numbers dwindle with the passage of years and the unwillingness of publishers to keep backlists - will be relieved that a life of celebrity has not dimmed the life of the mind. New readers will find in DIPLOMACY powerful ideas and the seeds of thoughtful controversy which is its natural outcome. These are ample reasons, and there are many more, to relish one of the most important contributions to thinking about foreign policy in our time.

□□□

RALPH BUULTJENS, former Nehru Professor and Professorial Fellow at Cambridge University (U.K), is the author of several books, Toynbee Prize Laureate and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council. He teaches international politics in New York.

The interplay between leaders and their publics in a democracy is always complex. A leader who confines himself to the experience of his people in a period of upheaval purchases temporary popularity at the price of condemnation by posterity, whose claims he is neglecting. A leader who get too far ahead of his society will become irrelevant. A great leader must be an educator, bridging the gap between his visions and the familiar. But he must also be willing to walk alone to enable his society to follow the path he has selected. There is inevitably in every great leader an element of guile which simplifies, sometimes the objectives, sometimes the magnitude, of the task. But his ultimate test is whether he incarnates the truth of his society's values and the essence of its challenges. These qualities Roosevelt possessed to an unusual degree. He deeply believed in America; he was convinced that Nazism was both evil and a threat to American security, and he was extraordinarily guileful. And he was prepared to shoulder the burden of lonely decisions. Like a tightrope walker, he had to move, step by careful, anguishing step, across the chasm between his goal and his society's reality in demonstrating to it that the far shore was in fact safer than the familiar promontory.

From DIPLOMACY Pg.382

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, 1994

# How Nixon's Metternich Sees the World

By ENOCH POWELL

In "Diplomacy" (Simon & Schuster, 912 pages, $35) Henry Kissinger has written on a huge scale a description of foreign policy, growing outward from Europe to that world into which America has found itself drawn ever since it came into existence and, more especially, since its involvement in the 1914-18 War. Those who wish to understand America's interventions, their causes and consequences, will henceforth be able to use this descriptive book as a tool and a stimulant.

Ever since the Middle Ages down to our lifetime, European thinking has been obsessed with a pursuit of the balance of power, in strategy and therefore in diplomacy. Though England, for obvious reasons, placed special store upon that concept, it was not an idea of English making. When the Spanish Armada swept up the English Channel in 1588 to conquer the obscure island, it was off the coast of the Low Countries that the fleet met with disaster before being ravaged in Atlantic storms. The notion which emboldened the Dutch king, William III, to claim and seize the English crown in 1688 was that of a Europe already familiar with the balance between Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, upon which the inhabitants of the Low Countries and of other lands depended to gain and to defend their independence. Balance of power, in fact, is always implicit in the co-existence of large separate powers, and it duly reasserts itself as long as those powers remain separate.

It was the balance of power which the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 sought; it was the balance of power which the rise of the new German empire of Bismarck threatened after 1870; and it was the balance of power which Nazi Germany overturned by military force in 1940. With the entry of the U.S. into World War II, the perspective

shifted: the balance of power was globalized and a moral motivation—democracy versus communism—was injected. In Europe itself the East-West balance of power was replaced by the antithesis between two blocs, whence American pressure upon Britain to join France in being politically amalgamated with West Germany.

It is this transformation scene which Mr. Kissinger analyzes from the American standpoint: "The America of the 1920s and 1930s rejected even its own doctrine of collective security," he writes, "lest it lead to involvement in the quarrels of distant, bel-

## Bookshelf

"Diplomacy"
By Henry Kissinger

licose societies ... Disillusionment with the results of the war erased to a considerable extent the distinctions between the internationalists and the isolationists. Not even the most liberal internationalists any longer discerned an American interest in sustaining a flawed post-war settlement and even the most dedicated internationalists insisted that the Monroe Doctrine superseded the League of Nations and re-coiled before the idea of America's joining League enforcement measures, even economic ones."

The rise of Japan, by throwing the Pacific into the scales, contributed to undermining acceptance of the European balance of power and thus to altering the complexion of America's eventual involvement again in European war. So did the introverted preoccupation of the Soviet Union with affairs in its own state, which pushed France toward the unsatisfactory substitute of the "Little Entente" in the East and toward skepticism about

the value of the British alliance.

Mr. Kissinger's analysis has been rendered more timely and necessary by contemporary developments. The conclusion of the Cold War between America and the U.S.S.R. has coincided with a rising tide of resentment in Britain and in continental Europe against the loss of national self-determination in a European political union. With these developments American policy and public opinion is now endeavoring to cope. Hence in the present the phenomenon of America's "new world order," as exhibited in Bosnia and in Somalia. It is not Mr. Kissinger's fault but due to the nature of things that just at this point his lights become dimmed: "Both Bush and Clinton spoke of the new world order as if it were just around the corner. In fact, it is still in a period of gestation, and its final form will not be visible until well into the next century," he writes. "Part extension of the past, part unprecedented, the new world order, like those which it succeeds, will emerge as an answer to three questions: What are the basic units of the international order? What are their means of interacting? What are the goals on behalf of which they interact?"

The killing question there is the first one. What Mr. Kissinger—and America—must do in order to base their diplomacy upon a sound foundation, is to recognize the nation state as the "basic unit" of what he calls "the international order." But the American republic, having originated in a protest against the nation state, is not well situated to solve the insoluble. "Woodrow Wilson's appeal to America to go forth in the pursuit of democracy produced acts of great creativity. It also led to such disastrous crusades as Vietnam." So states Mr. Kissinger, but is "democracy" itself not a modality of the nation state?

Mr. Powell is a former British treasury minister and member of Parliament.

MAR-28-94 11:24 FROM: KORDA-NYC

ID:

QUOTE LIST - From Michael Korda

MAR 28 1994

Date: 3/28/94

TO:

Dick Snyder
Chuck Adams
Marcella Berger
Suzanne Donahue
Marie Florio
Mark Gompertz
Michael Jacobs
Roz Lippel
Michele Martin
Frank Metz
Victoria Meyer
Wendy Nicholson
Martha Otis
Carolyn Reidy
Jack Romanos
Tom Spain
Martin Weaver
Karen Weitzman

RE: Henry Kissinger - DIPLOMACY

The following terrific quote has just arrived:

"This is a great book. Henry Kissinger's **DIPLOMACY** is **brilliant** in its analysis and **masterful** in its sweep. He brings history to life in its relevance to contemporary events, issues, and opportunites."

--George P. Shultz

MVK:rh

cc: Henry Kissinger
Marvin Josephson

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3-24-94 ; 9:56AM ;

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The Easton Press

47 RICHARDS AVENUE
NORWALK, CONN. 06857

Announcing the very limited availability
of the leather-bound Signed First Edition
Of Henry Kissinger's

Diplomacy

Each individual copy is personally signed
by the President of the United States Henry Kissinger.

Dear Collector:

Once in a great while, a book appears about history -- by someone who made history. Such an event is taking place now, with the publication of Dr. Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy.

This work is being hailed as the best book ever written about diplomacy -- a classic that will stand as the definitive work on the subject for years to come.

You can own one of the most historic copies. If you order quickly, you can own one of 2,500 sequentially numbered leather-bound Signed First Edition copies, personally autographed by Dr. Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. Secretary of State and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Only Dr. Kissinger could have written this book!

Henry Kissinger is recognized, even by his former adversaries, as one of the most brilliant diplomats of all time. Probably no one else alive commands a comparable grasp of international relations, world events, and history. No one else could have written such a book, based on scholarship (he taught at Harvard) and experience.

I received the book early, in galley form. More than any other book I have read, Diplomacy provides the key to understanding history. Dr. Kissinger sheds light on virtually all major world events of the twentieth century:

* How the "balance of power" preserved world peace. How, when it broke down, World War I broke out. (Dr. Kissinger describes how European leaders unwittingly created a political and military "doomsday machine.")

* How President Woodrow Wilson changed the course of history by rejecting national interest as the basis for U.S. foreign policy.

* How Stalin played off Britain and France on the one hand and Hitler on the other. And why the diplomatic surprise of the century should have been no surprise!

How we got involved in Vietnam -- by the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the way out.

NO one is better equipped to tell this story than Henry Kissinger. Now -- in full detail -- he explains how the U.S. became involved in

(over, please)

SENT BY: MBI BOOKS DIV.

3-24-94 ; 9:56AM ;

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Vietnam, why we kept getting involved deeper (despite clear misgivings
by Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy), and how -- with enormous
difficulty -- we finally extricated ourselves.

Dr. Kissinger provides a first-hand account of what actually took
place during the peace negotiations in Paris with North Vietnam. (Dr.
Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for successfully negotiating
the cease-fire.)

There is much more, including how the Cold war balance of power
worked. How the U.S. and the Soviet Union came to the brink over the
Berlin blockade and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Why the United States
decided to normalize relations with China (while Dr. Kissinger served as
President Nixon's National Security Advisor). Why the Chinese leaders
and President Nixon got along so well.

What will this book do for you? For me, it has filled
in and rounded out my grasp of history. Explained
things I never fully understood before, such as how
World War I began and why the U.S. was so slow to
respond to Stalin's moves in Eastern Europe after World
War II.

It has given me insights into why different countries
have acted, and continue to act, the way that they do --
including Russia, and, of course, the United States.

Each book is beautifully bound in rich, premium-quality leather,
with gilded page ends and lustrous moiré fabric endsheets. The lubbed
spines are accented with 22kt gold. The pages are printed on archival
paper. This is truly an impressive volume -- over 800 swiftly-moving
pages. The edition is priced at just $125.00, plus $5.00 shipping and
handling, payable in four convenient monthly installments of just $32.50
each, as described on the accompanying Reservation Application.

THIS EDITION COULD SELL OUT WITHIN DAYS.

Please don't wait. Only 2,500 copies are available -- no more.
When we issued an earlier leather-bound signed First Edition by another
great world leader (Lady Thatcher), our edition sold out within days.
And I expect a similar response to this book.

This book is about history. It will make history. And
the Signed First Edition, in particular, is history. It
is autographed by one of the great world leaders of the
twentieth century.

I am honored that The Easton Press is able to offer the leather-
bound Signed First Edition exclusively. Please order now, to avoid
disappointment. Dr. Kissinger, using diplomatic terminology, might call
this a limited "window of opportunity."

A-2 THE RECORD

DUCHESS OF YORK ... ALEXANDRA POWERS ... SPIKE LEE

MONDAY, APRIL 25, 1994

PEOPLE

**SCHINDLER'S GRIST:** Amy Irving uses images from ex-husband Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" as inspiration on Broadway.

She stars in the new *Arthur Miller* play "Broken Glass," the story of a Jewish woman in 1938 Brooklyn pushed into psychosomatic paralysis by a bad marriage and a terror of rising Nazism in Germany.

Spielberg's Oscar-winning movie "helped me a great deal on this," Irving said in a published report Sunday.

To help her during a dream sequence, "the man pushing me down was Ralph Fiennes' Nazi," she said. "Since then, I've used other images, but I still have images from 'Schindler's List' inside."

**A SHINNING EXAMPLE:** The Duchess of York is "kicking a few shins" in America to raise awareness and research money for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease.

"For me, it's a passion," she said Friday.

The former *Sarah Ferguson*, president of the Motor Neurone Disease Association of the United Kingdom, toured ALS research laboratories at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago and presented an award to researchers.

The duchess became involved in the fight against ALS, known in Britain as motor neurone disease, after it killed a friend, Sir Robert Cooke, in 1987.

Her U.S. charity work called her to Washington and New York, as well.

"I'll kick a few more shins to get them to help us," she said.

**SWITCH CHEESE:** Alexandra Powers, who plays Tonya Harding in an upcoming TV movie, didn't mind the radical change from the Christian lawyer she normally plays on television.

"There must be some white trash in me somewhere, because I like the clothes," Powers said in the April 30 TV Guide. "I don't mind the makeup. It's a little dramatic, but I think it's kind of cool."

Powers, who plays lawyer Jane Halliday on "L.A. Law," was eager to make the switch from the more reserved character.

"They said, 'Tonya's a little cheesy. She's different from Jane Halliday,'" Powers said. "A lot of actresss want to protect the integrity of their character, but I said, 'Cheese me up! Go ahead!'"

Powers plays Harding in "Tonya and Nancy: The Inside Story," a tale of the knee-bashing attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan.

**STRIKING A SOUR NOTE:** — Spike Lee is on the outs with his jazzman dad.

Bill Lee scored his son's first four films, but those days are over.

"I don't have anything to do with Spike now," Lee said in an interview published Sunday. "We haven't talked for two years."

The jazz musician, who has a history of heroin abuse, says the feud began with his son's intolerance of his interracial second marriage.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

**HIGH FIVE:** Recipients of the Commonwealth Awards, given Saturday at the Hotel Dupont in Wilmington, Del., from left: Dr. Leland Hartwell, August Wilson, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Larry King, and Henry Kissinger.

Bad feelings intensified with "Jungle Fever," the younger Lee's take on black-white romance.

"That's directly talking about me and my wife in a negative way," he said.

Things got ugly in 1992, when the father asked his son for a few thousand dollars to cover household expenses. Spike turned him down "and his attitude was very insulting," said Lee, 65.

The rift came shortly after the father's heroin arrest, but he says that didn't contribute to the split.

Asked for his side of the story, Spike didn't have much to say.

"Why should I dignify comments my father said, or play it out in a public forum?" he said.

**WHISTLE-MANIA:** Chris Ullman wasn't just whistling "Dixie."

He blew his way to the national whistling championship Saturday with a rendition of Handel's "The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba," beating out 21 other finalists.

Ullman defeated defending champion Tanguay Desgagne of Sherbrooke, Quebec, who took second. Marge Carlson of Fullerton, Calif., came in third.

They competed in the 21st annual National Whistler's Convention in Louisburg, N.C., which bills itself as the world's whistling capital.

Roy Thoreson of Calgary, Alberta, received the Hall of Fame award as the most outstanding whistler. He's won more international whistling championships than anyone, said Allen De Hart, convention founder and project director.

Ullman, press secretary to U.S. Rep. Rod Grams of Minnesota, has whistled on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and other radio and TV programs.

— FROM NEWS SERVICE REPORTS

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Steven Spielberg visiting with ex-wife, Amy Irving, and their son Max at Broadway's Booth Theater.

04259401

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APR-22-94 12:37 FROM: KORDA-NYC

ID:

PAGE 1

Henry Kissinger at the National Press Club discussing his new book, the ponderously titled "Diplomacy."

STILL A SUPERPOWER

What Is It About Henry Kissinger That Draws Star-Seekers?

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer

One of the oddities of the moment is how many people who you think are dead, or who you think probably ought to be dead, or who you simply haven't thought about in two or three decades, are in fact still alive, alert, ambitious. Some of the undead reappear dramatically by getting into trouble, like Clark Clifford. Others manage to get dusted off and reappointed to power, like Warren Christopher. The king of the undead is, of course, Richard Nixon. Say what you will about the guy, but give him credit: He's more durable than Dracula.

Henry Kissinger, another titan of the undead, just blew through town, book-touring, looking just like the Kissinger of old, a mite grayer but still robust, confident, suave, still wearing the thick glasses, still wielding the heavy accent—"... at de

end of de secund wuhld wuhr...—still protean in his knowledge of the world, still the nation's singular foreign policy polymath, and still, no doubt to his delight, a draw, his star power sufficient to fill the ballroom of the National Press Club even though he's still talking about Metternich and Bismarck and that whole balance-of-power business.

Kissinger, now 70, runs a lucrative consulting firm called Kissinger Associates, and he writes a column for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, but his undeadness is most compellingly evidenced by his new book. It is called "Diplomacy." That's it. "Diplomacy." A disdain for subtitles is always a sign that a person is not lacking in self-esteem. Even with the pomp of the title it pales against the larger declaration on the cover: "Henry Kissinger." Perhaps "Diplomacy" is really the subtitle we've been searching for here.

See BOOK TOUR, B4, Col. 1

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BY BILL O'LEARY THE WASHINGTON POST

WALL STREET JOURNAL

[Lc]

AL WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, 1994

By ENOCH POWELL

Ever since the Middle Ages down to our lifetime, European thinking has been obsessed with a pursuit of the balance of power, in strategy and therefore in diplomacy. Though England, for obvious reasons, placed special store upon that concept, it was not an idea of English making. When the Spanish Armada swept up the English Channel in 1588 to conquer the obstreperous island, it was off the coast of the Low Countries that the fleet met with disaster before being ravaged in Atlantic storms. The notion which emboldened the Dutch king, William III, to claim and seize the English crown in 1688 was that of a Europe already familiar with the balance between Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, upon which the inhabitants of the Low Countries and of other lands depended to gain and to defend their independence. Balance of power, in fact, is always implicit in the co-existence of large separate powers, and it duly reasserts itself as long as those powers remain separate.

## Bookshelf

licose societies ... Disillusionment with the results of the war erased to a considerable extent the distinctions between the internationalists and the isolationists. Not even the most liberal internationalists any longer discerned an American interest in sustaining a flawed post-war settlement and even the most dedicated internationalists insisted that the Monroe Doctrine superseded the League of Nations and recoiled before the idea of America's joining League enforcement measures, even economic ones."

Books

Page 2

Section 14

Chicago Tribune, Sunday, April 17, 1994

HENRY
KISSINGER
DIPLOMACY

"THIS IS A GREAT BOOK.... BRILLIANT IN ITS ANALYSIS AND MASTERFUL IN ITS SWEEP."

"He brings history to life in its relevance to contemporary events, issues, and opportunities."

— *GEORGE P. SHULTZ, FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE*

"No man living, and few dead, have thought more carefully about the externals...of negotiating. Kissinger is a born teacher and carries the reader willingly along on his bumpy ride through four centuries of complex war-and peace-making...Wisdom of the kind Kissinger imparts in this book is valuable—and I hope President Clinton will find the time to read it."

— PAUL JOHNSON, COMMENTARY

"Elegantly written.... Moving from the philosophic to the anecdotal with ease, Mr. Kissinger holds the reader's attention with colorful cameo portraits of statesmen and sharp aperçus about the practice of power...consistently absorbing."

— MICHIKO KAKUTANI, *THE NEW YORK TIMES*

"The most important work on diplomacy in thirty years."

— WALTER LAQUEUR, CHAIRMAN, INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL CENTER FOR STRATEGIC & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

Berlin Peace Conference, 1878
Anton Von Werner
Photo courtesy of
Culver Pictures

A MAIN SELECTION OF THE BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB

"This rich and absorbing work is both a brilliant study of the international crises that have shaped the modern world and a provocative meditation on the American style in foreign affairs."

— ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.

"At a time of unprecedented confusion in world affairs, Diplomacy distills Kissinger's unique combination of deep thought and high-level personal experience to illuminate the past and suggest the future."

— EDWARD N. LUTTWAK, DIRECTOR, GEO-ECONOMICS CENTER FOR STRATEGIC & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

"The strength of Diplomacy lies in its marriage of vision and shrewdness. Most commentary on foreign policy Jacks one quality or the other (or both)."

— ERNEST R. MAY, *THE NEW YORK TIMES* BOOK REVIEW

"It should be read and digested by everyone who will play any part in shaping the New World Order."

— RT. HON. LORD CALLAGHAN OF CARDIFF KG, FORMER FOREIGN SECRETARY

SIMON & SCHUSTER
A Paramount Communications Company

APR-13-'94 WED 15:00 ID:

TEL NO:212-947-6780

#866 P02

# Kissinger-centered Diplomacy

## Casting world politics in terms of players and balance of power

### Diplomacy

By Henry Kissinger
Simon & Schuster, 912 pp., $35

By Daniel Schorr
Special for USA TODAY

My favorite Henry Kissinger anecdote is about the star-struck woman who approached him at a reception and gushed, "I just wanted to thank you for saving the world." Without skipping a beat he replied, "You're welcome!"

In Diplomacy, the most definitive and most self-defining of his 11 books, we find all the evidence of the towering intellect and towering ego that have combined to make Kissinger a super-celebrity — savior to some, scoundrel to some, icon to all.

## BOOK REVIEW

Here he seeks to vault over the heads of his biographical detractors — Walter Isaacson, Seymour Hersh and Roger Morris, to name a few. In an intimidating 835 pages (plus notes and bibliography), he traverses four centuries of foreign policy and places himself in the European pantheon of shapers of international order like Metternich, Richelieu and Bismarck.

His basic message is that Americans should learn from them, and from him, to be less sentimental about the outer world — that they should view conflicts less in terms of ideals, values, principles (if the phrase “human rights” appears anywhere in the book, I missed it) and more in terms of balance of power, equilibrium, national interest. He wants us to practice Realpolitik the way the clever Europeans do.

By Kissinger's lights, President Woodrow Wilson was a tragedy whose wooly ideas about self-determination, collective security and making the world safe for democracy only set the stage for World War II — and the Vietnam war, for that matter. Kissinger's Realpolitik heroes are Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and, of course, Richard Nixon, who rejected "WILLIANONIC VERITIES ABOUT THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF MAN" and "FULFILLED, UNDER THE MOST DIFFICULT OF CIRCUMSTANCES, THE CRUCIAL TEST OF LEADERSHIP."

Ronald Reagan, that exemplar of American Values, still makes the "good guy" list by the device of saying, "The high-flying language in support of freedom and democracy globally was leavened by an almost Machiavellian realism."

Discounting for Congress of Vienna nostalgia, this is a cogent survey of diplomatic history — up to the time that Kissinger himself became a leading player. Predictably, the awkward and labored portion is about Vietnam, where exposition becomes interlaced with apology (that is, in the Greek sense of justification, not, God for-

bid, contrition).

Those who lived through the Nixon-Kissinger stewardship, the carpet bombing and the secret invasion of Cambodia, will find it hard to relate to Kissinger's insistence that he was bent not on escalation, but extrication. He is troubled at Americans' failure to understand that he was only looking for an honorable way out, fearing that "unilateral withdrawal would turn into a geopolitical disaster." It did anyway, and the author seems still angry at Americans for a lack of support that made his job more difficult. He says America faced the test of whether a society "can submerge its differences in pursuit of common objectives," and "America failed that test." So, the professor flunks America.

For all its daunting length, the book has gaps in areas where Kissinger is not very interested. There is little about the Cuban missile crisis, for example, or about whole regions like Latin America and Africa.

An introductory chapter foresees a New World Order "emerging more like the European state system of the eighteenth and nineteenth century." In his construct, power would be balanced among the United States, Europe, China, Japan, Russia and "probably" India. In a late-added chapter, "The New World Order Reconsidered," the author warns against banking too heavily on Russia, about whose internal development and external intentions he has serious doubts.

Concerned more about America's global condition than America's human condition, Kissinger seems to yearn for a century when strong men could manipulate power without worrying about public opinion. But, in his wish for perfect equilibrium managed by cool-headed leaders, he is more utopian than Wilson.

Daniel Schorr is senior news analyst for National Public Radio.

By Marcia Staimar, USA TODAY

NEW YORK TIMES UP-ED THURSDAY, MARCH 10, 1994

[L]C]

Etienne Delessert

many people into fits of rage and ecstasies of rage? Have we one Proust and only one is no Bulgarian Proust. Tended the Bulgarians too? At matter, have no Proust could the White House issue and set a price on my head neming against American are?

s, many of whom could not be a New Guinea on the part to convict me of contempt culturalism and defamation of world. I am an elderly man — a Jew, to boot. Ideal for doses.

eracy of which we are so often amounts to very little. Take the word of a practitioner for it that not all novel are good readers. The ground the art of fiction are not understood. No writer can be granted that the views of others will not be attributed personally. It is generally Moreover, that all the events of a novel are based on the lives and the opinions of the author himself.

American preference is for the only facts count. A gold miner watching an early film and set the screen to hit the villain novel is my favorite illustra-

My critics want to
convict me of
defamation of
the third world.

Rage, the reverse of bourgeois prudence, is a luxury. Rage is distinguished, it is a patrician passion. The rage of rappers and rioters takes as its premise the majority's admission of guilt for past and present injuries, and counts on the admiration of the repressed for the emotional power of the uninhibited and "justly" angry. Rage can also be manipulative; it can be an instrument of censorship and despotism.

As a onetime anthropologist, I know a taboo when I see one. Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo.

We can't open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists.

As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated. ☐

## Essay

WILLIAM SAFIRE

# Needed: A 'Team B'

WASHINGTON

Boris Yeltsin is in a snit. He canceled a date with Richard Nixon in Moscow because the former President dared to visit the recently freed Aleksandr Rutskoi, as well as the Communist Party chief and a motley assortment of Russian politicians, reformers, putschists and shovists, all lusting after Mr. Yeltsin's job.

"I am glad President Clinton supports this position," huffed the Russian President, apparently over-interpreting a sympathetic cluck from Mr. Clinton over the phone. To American reporters, Mr. Clinton mildly indicated otherwise.

Ironically, Clinton will have his own seeing-Nixon problem after the former President returns March 18. On one hand, Clinton sorely needs a bark-on, politically savvy assessment of the cast of characters vying for power in Moscow; a Nixon briefing would also show a Clinton interest in foreign affairs.

On the other hand, the White House spin doctors — constantly murmuring the mantra “Whitewater Ain’t Watergate” — are frozen in horror at the prospect of a picture inviting wags to caption “Tricky to Slick: Try Modified Limited Hangout Route.”

What to do? The split-the-difference photo op will probably be of Clinton listening intently to Nixon's report over the phone.

More important, what to do about an American policy toward Russia that has been overtaken by events? That's a subject that has been seeking a new consensus ever since December's democratic election de-railed economic reform and put empire-revivalists within striking distance of power.

In a nutshell, Clinton is still zigging while Russia has zagged. We cannot talk of aid toward a market economy while Russians reject the rudiments of private property and contracts, nor sign accords about "strategic partnership" while Moscow issues stern warnings to nations reaching for NATO protection.

Nor can we reinvent the cold war, lest that quash the enlightened Russian minority's hopes for democratic progress, or lest simplistic neo-containment encourage an amalgam of nationalists, militarists and mafiosi.

The Administration that talked with such fervor about "change" now finds itself requiring basic change of early-90's changes, or at least a major course correction, but is fearful of making a historic mistake. Clinton's

Russia policy troika — Strobe Talbott and James Collins at State, Nicholas Burns at the N.S.C. — is well informed and articulate, but sticks to outdated partnership rhetoric rather than wrestle with grand theory.

To provide establishmentians with a basic strategic fix, a cascade of heavy thinking is on the way:

1. In the current Foreign Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski calls for "the consolidation of geopolitical pluralism within the space of the former Soviet Union," Zbigeseg for balancing aid to Russia with aid to Ukraine and the other new independencies.

2. In an unnoticed but memorable speech last week titled "The Russians Are Tough Rivals, Not Partners," Senator Richard Lugar —

## To reformulate Russia policy.

somebody's next Secretary of State — overcomes the present fear of line-drawing to call for "associate membership" in NATO for Eastern European states with criteria and a timetable for full membership.

3. In a New York Times Op-Ed piece before leaving with Nixon on his current trip, Dimitri Simes urged the depersonalization of our Yeltsin relationship, and the exploration of lines to Grigory Yavlinsky, Sergei Shakrai and even the non-reformist Viktor Chernomyrdin. (No wonder Yeltsin is in a snit.)

4. In a recent 90-page report from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School, Fiona Hill and Pamela Jewett detail Russia's intimidation of neighbors in the guise of protecting its "near abroad" ethnic kin. The section on the Baltics is especially damning.

5. In Henry Kissinger's monumen-tal book "Diplomacy," coming out April 18, the final chapter will offer his Weltanschauung of the new world order. The Kissinger course is both conceptual and specific, and today's water-treaders cannot ignore its intellectual reach and strategic grasp.

And then Nixon's "Beyond Peace" in May. With all this policy firepower incoming, would it not be a useful service to their President for Talbott & Co. to appoint a prestigious "Team B" to suggest an alternative Russia policy to Mr. Clinton? ☐

MAR-15-94 16:24 FROM: KORDA-NYC

ID:

PAGE 2

DIPLOMACY

Henry Kissinger. Simon & Schuster,
$35 (912p) ISBN 0-671-65991-X

Kissinger maintains that the United
States cannot dominate the emerging
new world order but should rely in-
stead on a balance of power built on
security pacts and economic alliances.
In this magisterial political history, the
former National Security Advisor and
Secretary of State draws lessons from
the statecraft of Richelieu, Napoleon,
Bismarck and Metternich, then
shrewdly reappraises the foreign poli-
cy blunders and the failures of moral
nerve and vision that led in our century
to the mass carnage of two world wars,
genocide, Cold War and a nuclear arms
race. He limns striking portraits of Hit-
ler craving war to fulfill his global am-
bitions, of Stalin, a "supreme realist"
in international affairs, and of Frank-
lin D. Roosevelt courageously steering
an isolationist people into war. Kissin-
ger defines Nixon's achievement as a
refusal to abdicate America's global
role, and he gives Reagan a large mea-
sure of credit for the collapse of the
Soviet empire. While urging support
for Russian liberalism, he stresses that
the U.S. should simultaneously bolster
obstacles to Russian expansionism,
which neither Bush nor Clinton has
done. Photos. BOMC and History
Book Club main selections. (Apr.)

THE UNREDEEMED CAPTIVE:

A Family Story from Early America

John Demos. Knopf, $25 (353p) ISBN 0-
394-55782-4

The armed conflicts of the 18th centu-
ry between the English colonies in
North America and the French settle-
ments that stretched into Canada were
fought with the support of Native
American allies. Demos, a Yale history
professor (Entertaining Satan:
Witchcraft and the Culture of Early
New England), draws on primary
source material to provide a perceptive
analysis of the cultural encounters
that occurred between combatants by
detailing the experiences of the John
Williams family. Williams, a Puritan
minister, and his family were captured
in 1704 in their Massachusetts home
by a group of Frenchmen and Native
Americans, and forced to march to
Canada. Although he and four of his
children were later released, his wife
died on the march and his daughter,
Eunice, became a convert to Catholi-
cism and married a Native American.
Despite the ongoing attempts of her
father and brother to persuade Eunice
to return to Massachusetts, she would
agree only to brief visits and lived in a
Native American settlement until her
death at the age of 95. Illustrations not
seen by PW. History Book Club main
selection; BOMC alternate. (Apr.)

TO THE GOLDEN CITIES:

Pursuing the American Jewish Dream
in Miami and Los Angeles

Deborah Dash Moore. Free Press,
$22.95 (800p) ISBN 0-02-922111-0

Joining the great postwar migrations
from the Northeast and the Midwest to
Los Angeles and Miami were large
numbers of Jews from Chicago and
New York. Cut loose from their ties to
the old European religious cultures of
their families, these "permanent tour-
ists," as Moore calls them, created a
new and distinctly American Jewish
identity, colored by the comparably
free-wheeling, easy life around them in
their new Edens. Regular attendance at
religious services and observation of
ritual customs met with strong compe-
tition from sun and sea; some rabbis felt
obliged to hold a congregation together
by promoting the Sabbath services as
"entertainment." Moore, director of
Vassar College's Program in American
Culture, details Jewish life minutely in
Miami and Los Angeles; the loss of a
traditional Jewish sense of identity, and
its ultimate reconstitution in the estab-
lishment of Israel; and the constant
presence of anti-Semitism, which
could, paradoxically, serve to reunify.
Although often overwhelmed by docu-
mentation of such trivia as the name of
the manager of the gift shop of a Miami
synagogue, Moore's study is neverthe-
less a notable depiction of the social,
political and religious experiences of
the two migratory streams. (Apr.)

AND WEAPONS FOR ALL:

How America's Multi-Billion Dollar
Arms Trade Warps Our Foreign Policy
and Subverts Democracy at Home

William D. Hartung. HarperCollins,
$23 (288p) ISBN 0-06-019014-0

Hartung, a senior fellow at the World
Policy Institute in Manhattan, grap-
les with a vital question: how did the
world's leading democracy become the
world's leading arms merchant? He
contends that President Nixon's arms-
sales policy, President Reagan's sup-
port of anti-communist "freedom
fighters" and President Bush's mili-
tary assistance to Saddam Hussein all
contributed to a grotesque "boomer-
ang effect" in which recent U.S. bat-
tlefield opponents—Panama, Iraq, So-
malia have been armed with U.S.
military technology. Hartung exam-
ines what he calls the permanent arms-
supply network (defense contractors,
former military and intelligence opera-
tives, foreign brokers and middlemen
and influential government officials)
and suggests that their collective influ-
ence over U.S. foreign policy may ex-
ceed that of Congress. There is an ur-
gent need, he warns, to break Ameri-
ca's economic dependence on weapons
exports, to cease arming potential ad-

versaries and to control arms traffick-
ing that spreads violence and disorder
around the globe. A coherent, convinc-
ing exposition of a complex and timely
subject. (Apr.)

CRACKING THE SHOW

Thomas Boswell. Doubleday, $23
(368p) ISBN 0-385-47286-2

A collection of baseball essays by
*Washington Post* sportswriter Bos-
well (*The Heart of the Order*) is a ma-
JOR event for diamond fans. He has an
abiding affection for the game and
most of those involved in it and is opti-
mistic about its future. A Baltimore
Orioles devotee, Boswell is a great ad-
mirer of Cal Ripken Jr. and has fallen
in love with the new field at Camden
Yards, but he does not stint in his
praise for opposing teams. He is enthu-
siastic about Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey
Jr. and Juan Gonzalez, manager Whit-
ey Herzog and commissioners Bart
Giamatti and Fay Vincent. He was
devastated when Pete Rose was ban-
ished from baseball for life in 1989 for
gambling and seems to hope that the
all-time hit leader will be elected to the
Hall of Fame. Boswell is no Pollyanna,
however: he is critical of White Sox
owner Jerry Reinsdorf and Dodger
owner Peter O'Malley and views

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#866 P02

### Diplomacy

In *Diplomacy*, the most definitive and most self-defining of his 11 books, we find all the evidence of the towering intellect and towering ego that have combined to make Kissinger a super-celebrity — savior to some, scoundrel to some, icon to all.

## BOOK REVIEW

Here he seeks to vault over the heads of his biographical detectors — Walter Isaacson, Seymour Hersh and Roger Morris, to name a few. In an intimidating 835 pages (plus notes and bibliography), he traverses four centuries of foreign policy and places himself in the European pantheon of shapers of international order like Metternich, Richelieu and Bismarck.

By Kissinger's lights, President Woodrow Wilson was a tragedy whose woolly ideas about self-determination, collective security and making the world safe for democracy only set the stage for World War II — and the Vietnam war, for that matter. Kissinger's Realpolitik heroes are Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and, of course, Richard Nixon, who rejected “Wilsonian verities about the essential goodness of man” and “fulfilled, under the most difficult of circumstances, the crucial test of leadership.”

Ronald Reagan, that exemplar of American Values, still makes the “good guy” list by the device of saying, “The high-flying language in support of freedom and democracy globally was leavened by an almost Machiavellian realism.”

bld, contrition).

Those who lived through the Nixon-Kissinger stewardship, the carpet bombing and the secret invasion of Cambodia, will find it hard to relate to Kissinger's insistence that he was bent not on escalation, but extrication. He is troubled at Americans' failure to understand that he was only looking for an honorable way out, fearing that “unilateral withdrawal would turn into a geopolitical disaster.” It did anyway, and the author seems still angry at Americans for a lack of support that made his job more difficult. He says America faced the test of whether a society “can submerge its differences in pursuit of common objectives,” and “America failed that test.” So, the professor funks America.

An introductory chapter foresees a New World Order “emerging more like the European state system of the eighteenth and nineteenth century.” In his construct, power would be balanced among the United States, Europe, China, Japan, Russia and “probably” India. In a late-added chapter, “The New World Order Reconsidered,” the author warns against banking too heavily on Russia, about whose internal development and external intentions he has serious doubts.

By Marcia Stalmar, USA TODAY

APR-05-94 09:07 FROM: KORDA-NYC

ID:

PAGE 1

San Francisco Chronicle

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA'S GUIDE TO BOOKS, AUTHORS & LITERARY EVENTS • APRIL 3, 1994

REVIEW

A RIDDLE WITHIN A RIDDLE

Janet Malcolm explores Sylvia Plath's life story and the risky terrain of biography

Janet
Malcolm,
left:
Sylvia Plath
with her
daughter,
Frieda, in
1960

THE SILENT WOMAN

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
By Janet Malcolm

Alfred A. Knoepf, 2081 pages, $20

REVIEWED BY DAVID WIEGAND

Janet Malcolm's provocative and clearly self-serving new book, "The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes," is deceptively titled, since it concerns only superficially the tragic American poet and her tortured marriage to England's poet laureate.

Three decades after Plath placed her head on a neatly folded cloth in the gas oven of her London flat (only after tightly sealing the door to her children's bedroom and leaving snacks for them), we think we know quite a bit about the creator of "The Bell Jar" and the quintessential example of preeminent confessional poetry. "Arici" Despite Hughes refusal to tell what he knows about his wife's death and their marriage, there have been five biographies of Plath, the publication of her journals and letters to her mother, memoirs by others and count

See Page 10

New World
Order, New
Diplomacy

DIPLOMACY

By Henry Kissinger
Simon & Schuster, 302 pages, $15.

REVIEWED BY DANIEL L. WICK

The relative equilibrium of the Cold War era, dominated by two competing superpowers, is gradually being supplanted,

Kissinger, by a world that will contain "at least six major powers — the United States, Europe, China, Japan, Russia, and probably India ..." How America fares in such a world, argues Kissinger, depends on how it participates in a system that will require constant

adjustments in the balance of power among competing states without abandoning its historical commitment to democratic values.

But the United States has never really taken part in the balance-of-power system, which was invented by Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries to prevent any single European state from dominating the others. American foreign policy, says

Kissinger, developed in isolation from European conflicts. The United States oftenly fought in both-world wars to defend democratic principles, in Woodrow Wilson's well-known phrase, "to make the world safe for democracy." And the Cold War was a battle between two powers in which a "gain for one side [was] a loss for the other."

But the situation now has changed:

"What is new about the emerging world order is that, for the first time, the United States can neither withdraw from the world nor dominate it." The novelty of this emerging multi-power world has sent U.S. policy experts scrambling to formulate a diplomatic strategy for the future.

One such strategy, embraced by the Clinton administration, is enlargement Throughout the Cold War, the United States followed the policy of containment, attempting to contain the expansion of

See Page 10

INSIDE

Grace Paley stories 3

James Baldwin biography 3

On the Resurrection 6

WASHINGTON POST - APRIL 3, 1994

ILLUSTRATION BY GARY VISKUPIC FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

# Peace Keepers and Power Brokers

## DIPLOMACY

By Henry Kissinger
Simon & Schuster. 912 pp. $35

By Walter Russell Mead

HENRY KISSINGER is an eminent feature of our intellectual landscape. In a sense, he is beyond controversy. Love him or loathe him—and almost everybody does one or the other—he is inescapably there. Now in a powerful and erudite new book, *Diplomacy*, Kissinger has created something almost as monumental as his own brooding presence. At 835 pages plus notes and bibliographies, *Diplomacy* conducts its readers on a Kissinger's-eye tour of European and American diplomacy from the Peace of Westphalia to the New World Order.

Not everyone will want the full tour. At his best Kissinger is a brilliant diplomatic historian, but 350 years is a lot of territory and

Walter Russell Mead, senior policy advisor for the World Policy Institute at the New School, is currently working on a book on foreign policy for the Twentieth Century Fund.

Kissinger is a busy man. His interpretations of German history are always interesting and sometimes gripping, but although his analysis of American grand strategy during the Cold War is often both original and convincing, Kissinger grows generally less satisfactory as a guide the farther his focus shifts from Vienna and Berlin.

But let's cut to the chase. This book isn't really about diplomacy in general. It is about diplomacy in particular: American diplomacy at the end of the Cold War. Kissinger believes that the United States needs a more sophisticated intellectual framework for its foreign policy process, and this book is his most determined and comprehensive effort to date to provide it. Kissinger believes that American diplomats and public opinion need to absorb European ideas about realism and balance of power politics and Diplomacy is intended as a primer for the new breed of American realpoliticians that Kissinger would like to encourage.

Fair enough. No serious student of international relations can fail to be appalled by the insularity, naivete and uncritical national egoism that surrounds the public discussion of American foreign policy like a thick and

noxious fog. Kissinger, pilloried for decades by zealots and true believers on both the left and the right, is uniquely well placed to criticize the consequences of moralistic, wishful thinking on American foreign policy during the Cold War.

In the end, however, Kissinger is more successful as a critic of other people's foreign policy than as the exponent—or even the defender—of his own. Take Vietnam. The long section on Vietnam—the chapter on the Nixon years is somewhat optimistically titled "The Extrication"—concedes that the end result of all Nixon's and Kissinger's efforts was close to what the United States could have had for nothing in 1969: a humiliating fiasco and a dismal withdrawal.

As it turned out, and as Kissinger now acknowledges, that defeat was bad for the Vietnamese, but not very bad for the United States. We lost the war in Vietnam, but won the subsequent peace in Asia as well as the Cold War as a whole. There were, in short, no important American interests of any kind at stake in Indochina. Surely a cold-blooded, black-hearted, utterly unsentimental Realpolitician could have seen this in 1969 and realized that the most —Continued on page 14

[L0]

Kissinger

*Continued from page 3*

practical policy would have been to take the losses, end the war and blame the whole mess on Lyndon Johnson.

This Kissinger did not do. Instead he blames the American people and the Congress for lacking the fortitude his policy required. "My policy," he says in effect, "would have worked if the American people had been willing to fight indefinitely in Indochina." But, of course, they weren't, and he knew it at the time. Somehow it seems that "realists" above all ought to base policy on facts however unpleasant, and not wishes however appealing.

That is one part of the problem; economics is another. Kissinger understands our strategic interests rather well: We need a balance of power in both Europe and Asia so that no single power on either continent can threaten us here at home. But our economic interests do not seem to engage him. He does not, for example, discuss the 1973 collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed currency rates among major western economies—one of the two or three most momentous moments in American foreign policy since World War II. To Kissinger, economics has little to do with diplomacy, and he simply does not see that the postwar economic system was a political as well as an economic force. Under the Bretton Woods system, the Federal Reserve acted in effect as the world's central bank. This gave the United States enormous leverage over the economic policies of its principal trading partners: Washington could impose expansionary policies on countries like Germany and Japan when our economic interests seemed to require it. We don't have that leverage any more, and we miss it every day.

The primacy of economics is the key to something vital that Kissinger seems not to understand: the Anglo-American tradition of diplomacy. This is not, as Kissinger sometimes seems to think, simply a tradition of moralistic rhetoric. It is also a tradition of very effective, and sometimes very ruthless seeking for economic advantage. What Europeans still sometimes call "the Anglo-Saxon powers" are not just otherworldly psalm-singers; we are accomplished pocket pickers as well.

At times Kissinger seems more than a little naive about the purposes of American policy, taking our assertions of principle at face value. Case in point: During the 1956 crisis over Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal, the United States sided with Egypt against a Franco-British invasion. Kissinger can only explain this policy as feckless moralism run wild; he seems utterly unaware that this was the moment when the United States achieved a long held ambition, definitively replacing Great Britain as the political arbiter of the Middle East and, especially, of its oil reserves.

Kissinger is right that the United States needs to cultivate a more sophisticated and thoughtful foreign policy debate, but wrong to suppose that we need to import it. The United States is not a power like France or Prussia, and its interests are both larger and wider than the interests of continental European powers. As the United States struggles to define its foreign policy in the post-Cold War world, we may cast an occasional glance at the figures like Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck and Stalin, who figure so brilliantly in this readable and stimulating if somewhat misguided book. We would do better, however, to pay closer attention to people whom Kissinger treats much more lightly, if at all.

Above all the contemporary American foreign policy debate needs to be refreshed and invigorated by the study and analysis of something that Kissinger scarcely acknowledges—our own homegrown American foreign policy tradition. This tradition, one wants to remind him, is not without its occasional modest successes. It was developed—with reference to British ideas—by the first generation of Founding Fathers and extended into the 19th century by their sons and heirs. Although foreign policy slipped into the background of American politics during the 19th century, men like Charles Francis Adams and John Hay among others kept the tradition alive and added layers of reflection to it; it was the chief resource, which the architects of America's Cold War diplomacy relied on during the Truman administration.

PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANK JOHNSTON FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger

T HANKS IN PART to its emphasis on economics, this American diplomatic tradition bridges what to Kissinger is an unbridgeable chasm between interests and morals. For traditional American realists like Dean Acheson, American interests were compatible with—and accountable to—morality, but not moralism. The postwar economic system that included Bretton Woods is an example of policy that is both moral and realistic: The United States built structures into the global system that would protect American interests while advancing the good of other countries and accelerating decolonization.

Morality in Acheson's wider sense is almost a synonym for creative statesmanship, and it remains necessary for the long term success of American foreign policy. Moralism by contrast is the habit of applying litmus tests to individual situations without an appreciation for the overall thrust and direction of policy. While moralism deserves all the contempt Kissinger can summon, it can never be held at bay in the absence of an overall foreign policy strategy that is clearly and convincingly rooted in the moral values of the nation.

The homegrown American foreign policy tradition, and no other, can accommodate and encourage the foreign policy debates Kissinger so correctly insists that we need. That Kissinger seems comparatively unfamiliar with this tradition goes far to explain the persistent difficulty he has had selling Continental realism to informed American opinion. It may also explain why Kissinger has so far not earned the unchallengable place in the pantheon of American diplomacy to which his talents, his influence, his patriotism and his indefatigable industry—all so attractively displayed in this remarkable book—would seem to entitle him. ■

## Book Bag

### #778

Writers can be difficult, but some novelists and poets are more diplomatic than others. Identify the following: (1) This great novelist was the French consul at Civittavecchia; (2) this famous Chilean poet was a career diplomat; (3) this 19th-century American novelist served as our consul in Liverpool; and (4) this highly regarded 20th-century French poet represented his country in Washington.

All entries (one per person) must be clearly written on postcards and mailed to: Book Bag, The Washington Post, Washington, D.C. 20071, and must include complete return address and competition number. The winning entry will be the first correct answer drawn at random. Employees of The Washington Post Company and their families are not eligible to enter. Entries must be received no later than Apr. 14. The winner's name and city of residence will be announced in the Apr. 24 issue. A Washington Post Book World book bag will be sent to the winner.

Answer to Book Bag #775 (Mar. 13): Authors who revised their earlier work include (1) Wordsworth ("The Prelude"); (2) Henry James (for the New York edition); (3) Marianne Moore (most famously, the poem "Poetry"); (4) W.H. Auden (much of his work from the 1930s).

The winner is: Stephen Rojeewicz, Silver Spring.

other infidelities. Hughes admits he destroyed some of her journals after her death, and the post-feminist spin essentially makes him out to be a kind of Bob Packwood of poetry.)

But what set off a raging intellectual debate was that an author's note in the galleys of "Bitter Fame" read that the book was "the result of a three-year dialogue between the author and Olwyn Hughes, agent to the Plath Estate. Ms. Hughes has contributed so liberally to the text that this is in effect a work of joint author-

sans on both sides of the academic war against "Bitter Fame" — her point being that those who attack Stevenson for bias borne of collaboration with Olwyn Hughes have their own biases.

By talking to some of the "usual suspects" among the Plath-biography sources, Malcolm tries to show that while these people offer the obvious benefit of having witnessed some of the events of the dead poet's life, they were also participants in those events and, as such, come to the discussion table with their own biases.

In a sense, this is a biography of
biography, a consideration of how
perception's inevitable coloring
pushes us away from truth and makes the
craft of summing up a dangerous
business

ship."

OK. No big deal. Except that Olwyn Hughes is the sister of Ted Hughes, and, as literary executor until recently, she has been an especially formidable protector, guarding not only her brother from bothersome biographers, but a particular version of her dead sister-in-law's legend as well.

Anyone wishing to quote from Plath's poetry, letters or journals had to get permission from Olwyn, and that permission, sparingly granted, came with Olwyn's fierce attention to the resulting text.

Many argued that Stevenson's
portrait of Hughes was tainted by
Olwyn's participation, that it put
forth the Hughes' version of
Plath while the poor dead woman
herself was able to speak only
through her poetry, letters and
journals, all of which were con-
tructed by Olwyn.

It did not seem to quell the tide of antipathy toward Stevenson that she eventually tired of Olwyn's interfering cooperation and broke from her in finishing her book. And, as Malcolm points out, it didn't seem to occur to any one that if this was, as charged, the official Hughes version of the story, it would have great value simply because Ted Hughes has been so reticent about telling "his side."

In what is clearly not a biography
but an investigation of the
Olwyn-Ted Hughes-Anne Steven-
son approach to the craft of re-
searching and writing biography,
Malcolm defends Stevenson and
the concept that so-called pure
truth is impossible.

She sets out to prove her the-
ses by interviewing not only many
of the sources used by Stevenson
and other Plath biographers, but
also some of the biographers
themselves as well as chief parti-

She speaks, for example, to Trevor Thomas, the Hughes' downstairs neighbor, who had developed a rehearsed monologue on Plath over the years, including Plath's desperate, late-night visit on the day she died. An old man at the time Malcolm interviewed him, Thomas was clearly not very reliable, not only because of his age but also because he wasn't very friendly with the Hugheses and didn't even know Plath was a poet at the time.

In defending Stevenson against charges of collaboration-ism, Malcolm argues that biography — and, perhaps, journalism in general — cannot be created without a devil's pact between a writer and his or her source.

The central irony of research-
ing nonfiction, Malcolm says, is
that while writers may get valu-
able material the more inter-
view people who actually knew
the subject, the information — or
purer truth — is more likely to be
filtered through the sieve of sub-
jectivity.

Because "pure truth" is an im-
possible goal, it is the biogra-
pher's challenge to arrange per-
ceptions in such a way as to con-
vey the gist of what happened as
clearly and accurately as possible,
with the emphasis on the
phrase "as possible."

For any thinking person, Mal-
colm's book is provocative and
wonderfully maddening reading.
In essence, Malcolm has written
an allegorical "If a tree falls in the
forest" riddle about the craft of
writing nonfiction. But "The Sl-
lent Woman" probes a real-life
riddle with serious implications,
not only for those who write non-
fiction but for those who read
— and sometimes believe it.

David Wiegand is on the staff of The
Chronicle.

ID:

PAGE 2

KISSINGER

*Continued From Page 1*

communism; despite significant
failures in Vietnam and else-
where, containment is generally
judged to have been successful.
Enlargement, on the other hand,
envisions the expansion of de-
mocracy and free trade to encom-
pass all nations.

Kissinger is skeptical that a
single foreign policy formula of
this kind will be universally appli-
cable to the challenges ahead. In
Asia, for example, he suggests
that an approach similar to that
of traditional balance-of-power
diplomacy may be needed. Most
Asian countries are not democra-
cies and are not likely to restruc-
ture their governments along
Western lines. The two countries
that have the potential power to
dominate Asia are Japan and Chi-
na.

It is, therefore, in the interest of the less-powerful Asian countries and of the United States to work toward maintaining a stable equilibrium among China, Japan and the smaller but still economically powerful Southeast Asian countries of Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and the other Asian nations, including Vietnam.

Indeed, Kissinger places a
high priority on avoiding the iso-
lation of China, a country that is
rapidly moving toward super-
power status. To place human
rights at the core of the Sino-
American relationship, as the
United States did after the Tian-
ammen Square massacre of 1989,
refusing to engage in high-level
discussions and threatening to
eliminate most-favored-nation
trading status, risks losing all
American influence over China's
international behavior. China has
consistently viewed such efforts
to influence its domestic affairs
as a gross and condescending vio-
lation of its sovereignty.

As Kissinger points out, even
at the height of the Cold War, the
United States never cut off high-
level contacts with the Soviet
Union. Why apply a harsher stan-
dard to China?

As for Russia, Kissinger cau-
tions that the triumph of its anti-
Communist revolution by no
means ushers in the millennium.
As evidenced by recent parla-
mentary elections, Russian na-
tionalism remains very strong.
"The anti-imperialist revolution,
directed against domination by
Russia, is widely popular in the
new non-Russian republics and
extremely unpopular in the Rus-
sian Federation," he writes.

A realistic policy toward Rus-
sia, in Kissinger's view, would
support Russian reform while
trying to limit Russian expansion-
ism. Uncertain support of the Yel-
tsin regime might lead the United
States into appearing to sanction
Russian ambitions to reconstitute
its empire because, reformist
leanings aside. Yeltsin and many

supporters remain highly nation-
alistic.

None of these considerations
requires that the United States
abandon its democratic ideals in
the pursuit of a cold-blooded real-
politik. As Kissinger points out,
American diplomacy has long
been rooted in the almost reli-
gious belief in American excep-
tionalism, the notion that the
United States, a self-created re-
public, is completely free of the
corruption of the Old World and
possessed of democratic and hu-
mane values that, if adopted by

> 'What is new about
> the emerging world
> order,' Kissinger
> writes, 'is that, for
> the first time, the
> United States can
> neither withdraw
> from the world nor
> dominate it'

all peoples, would render future
conflict untestable.

The doctrine of American ex-
ceptionalism, most consistently
articulated by Woodrow Wilson,
is responsible, says Kissinger, for
much good, including the Mar-
shall Plan and the containment of
the Soviet Union. Yet when un-
critically applied, this principle
has caused significant harm. Con-
sider the Wilsonian dictum of es-
tablishing states on the basis of
ethnic self-determination, which
created a power vacuum of unsta-
ble Eastern European nation-
states following World War I. An-
other example is Vietnam. There,
says Kissinger, Wilsonian ideal-
ism ran rampant: "Universalist in
its approach to world order, Wil-
sonianism did not lend itself to an
analysis of the relative impor-
tance of various countries. Amer-
ica was obliged to fight for what
was right, regardless of local cir-
cumstances, and independent of
geopolitics."

"Diplomacy" is far more than a treatise on U.S. foreign policy; it is also a stimulating and scholarly analysis of the history of modern diplomacy since the 17th century. Probably the most readable of Kissinger's books, it combines the dispassionate judgments of the diplomatic historian with the shrewd insights of the foreign policy practitioner.

Less partisan than Kissinger's
memoirs, imbued with greater
historical depth than his early ac-
ademic works, "Diplomacy" will
contribute significantly to Ameri-
can's continuing debate over its
proper role in the emerging new
world order.

Daniel L. Wick teaches 'History in Our
Time' at the UC Davis.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

MAR 07 1994

DREAM CITY: *Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C.*
Simon & Schuster
(336 pp.)
$23.00
May 1994
ISBN: 0-671-76846-8

Jaffe (of *Washingtonian* magazine) and Sherwood (of WRC-TV, formerly of the *Washington Post*) tell their story in episodic sketches, covering the city's historic caste system among blacks, the rise of community organizer (and, later, mayor) Marion Barry during the War on Poverty, and the shift of power to blacks after the traumatic 1968 riots. The authors criticize the long-standing federal stranglehold on the district, as well as the *Post's* ignorance of black Washington, but their major culprit is "Boss Barry," who emerged in his second mayoral term (1982-6) as a betrayer of the biracial coalition that first elected him. Barry's failures were legion: political spoils for a narrow group of adventurers such as profiteer-from-the-homeless Cornelius Pitts; a top aide turned embezzler; a police department in disarray; a downtown that boomed as other neighborhoods crumbled. His defiance of the black bourgeoisie and the white power structure preserved his popularity among blacks, and when he was arrested on drug charges in 1990—an episode recounted in telling detail—his lawyer successfully argued that the government was out to get him. After serving a six-month jail term for one misdemeanor, Barry began a comeback as council member from the city's poorest ward. The authors criticize the current mayor, reformer Sharon Pratt Kelly, as out of touch, and warn that federal receivership for Washington is as likely as full home rule and statehood.

♦ Kissinger, Henry

Apr. 18, 1994

ISBN: 0-671-65991-X

BOOKS

How the World Works

*Henry Kissinger's Diplomacy silences all doubt that he is among this century's most profound thinkers on international affairs*

By WALTER ISAACSON

BOTH FANS AND FOES OF HENRY KISSINGER, whose ranks rival each other in fervor, have long agreed on one thing: he is brilliant at analyzing national interests and balances of power. If only he would step back from his corporate consulting and fashion-set socializing, they say, he might produce the grand tome that secures his place alongside George Kennan among the great diplomatic thinkers of our century.

Now he has, and it will. In *Diplomacy* (Simon & Schuster; 912 pages; $35), a sweeping portrayal of historical forces that begins with Cardinal Richelieu and ends with the challenges facing the world today, Kissinger makes the most forceful case by any American statesman since Theodore Roosevelt for the role of realism and its Prussian-accented cousin realpolitik in international affairs. Just as Kennan's odd admixture of romanticism and realism helped shape American attitudes at the outset of the cold war, Kissinger's emphasis on national interests rather than moral sentiments defines a framework for dealing with the multipolar world now emerging. He has produced one of those rare books that are both exciting to read and destined to be a classic of their genre.

I should make it clear that I come to this book as an interested party. Two years ago, I wrote a biography of Kissinger, for the same publisher, which many of his detractors, and some of his putative friends, said pulled too many punches, and which his fervent defenders (himself among them) decried as too harsh. My conclusion was that Kissinger had a remarkable feel for the interplay of national interests but that he failed to appreciate the strength America derives from the openness of its democratic system. His strategic and tactical brilliance made possible the U.S.'s rapprochement with China, but his secretive style and disdain for the moralism that undergirds America's sense of mission led to a backlash from both the left and the right against détente with the Soviet Union. *Diplomacy* reaffirms both my respect for his brilliance as an analyst and my reservations about the low priority he places on the values that have made American democ-

racy such a powerful international force.

The world, Kissinger writes, is entering an era when many states of comparable strength will compete and cooperate based on shifting national interests. America has never felt comfortable with such balance-of-power arrangements. So to understand what lessons history may hold for this new order, Kissinger maintains, we should study the diplomatic dances that began in Europe 350 years ago—a topic that, perhaps not coincidentally, is Kissinger's area of academic expertise.

NUTT—SYGMA

Cardinal Richelieu, the First Minister of France at the time, developed the concept of national interest while working to prevent the revival of the Holy Roman Empire, which he deemed a threat to France's security even though both were Catholic. No longer were national interests to be equated with religious or moral goals. During the 18th century, balance-of-power diplomacy was perfected by England, an island state with a security interest in preserving equilibrium on the European continent.

In discussing the century of relative stability after the Congress of Vienna in 1814, Kissinger draws on his published doctoral dissertation on Metternich and Castlereagh (*A World Restored*, 1957) and an academic paper he wrote on Bismarck. (Like a good professor, he footnotes himself.) One difference between

the earlier works and *Diplomacy* is that Kissinger now puts slightly greater emphasis on the role of justice and values. "The Continental countries were knit together by a sense of shared values," he writes. "Power and justice were in substantial harmony."

This relationship between moral concerns and national interest, Kissinger argues, is the dominant theme in American foreign policy. There are the idealists, who believe that spreading American values should be the nation's motive force, and the realists, who emphasize national interests, credibility and power.

Kissinger, a European refugee who read Metternich more avidly than Jefferson, is unabashedly in the realist camp. "No other nation," he writes, "has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism." Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a

rather unsettling tribal ritual. The practice of basing policy on ideals rather than interests, he points out, can make a nation seem dangerously unpredictable.

In fact, America's idealism and realism have been interwoven ever since Benjamin Franklin played an ingenious balance-of-power game in France while simultaneously propagandizing about America's exceptional values. From the Monroe Doctrine to Manifest Destiny, the U.S. has linked its interests to its ideals. This was especially true during the cold war, which was a moral crusade as well as a security struggle.

Kissinger's tone shifts from academic to defensive when he discusses Vietnam and his own turn on the world stage, as National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford. He pounds away at the naivete

TIME, APRIL 11, 1994

of the peace movement, the hypocrisy of
the Establishment and the perfidy of the
North Vietnamese. And he dismisses the
notion that America's national interests
would have been better served if Nixon
had set an early withdrawal date (and in
the process lands a little jab—"Would
that history were as simple as journal-
ism"—at the contrary treatment of this
point in my book).

Kissinger casts Nixon as a realist, the first in the White House since Theodore Roosevelt. To support this contention, he quotes from Nixon's annual foreign policy reports, which Kissinger himself wrote. But as Kissinger admits, Nixon placed a picture of the unabashed idealist Woodrow Wilson in the Cabinet Room and repeatedly proclaimed the altruism of American policy. It amounted to a combination that Kissinger rather disparagingly calls "novel" but which seems to me quintessentially American.

"By the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century," Kissinger writes, using a typically grandiloquent phrase to say *by 1990*, Wilsonian idealism "seemed triumphant." This does not please him. He concludes his book with sentences of pro forma praise for America's idealism followed by sentences that begin with *But*. In the end, the *buts* win: "American idealism remains as essential as ever, perhaps even more so. But in the new world order, its role will be to provide the faith to sustain America through all the ambiguities of choice in an imperfect world."

Kissinger is probably right that the end of the cold war has made Wilson's emphasis on exporting American values "less practicable." Instead of engaging in a moral showdown with a rival superpower, the U.S. will have to participate in a balancing act with Europe, Japan, China and others. The irony may be that his emphasis on national interests and power balances may turn out to be more politically palatable now than when he had the chance to put it in practice in the midst of the cold war and Vietnam.

FURTHERMORE

His previous writing was limited to a
spiritual newsletter, but the first
novel of Alabama therapist James
Redfield, 43, is a phenomenon. *The
Celestine Prophecy*, a tale of a
Peruvian manuscript that unfolds the
secrets of life, sold 100,000 copies in a
self-published paperback. Now the
Warner Books hard cover has sold an
additional 450,000 in six weeks and
just reached No. 1 on the New York
Times best-seller list.

BOOKS

# It's a Wonderful Life

*A biography details Steve Ross's rise from undertaker to mogul*

By NEAL GABLER

WHEN STEVE ROSS, NEAR death with cancer, checked into a Los Angeles hospital in late 1992, he registered as George Bailey, the self-sacrificing common-man hero of Frank Capra's *It's a Wonderful Life*. No doubt that was how the man who masterminded the merger

of Time Inc. (which owns TIME) and Warner Communications wished to be perceived. But the Steve Ross who emerges in *Master of the Game* (Simon & Schuster; 395 pages; $25), *New Yorker* staff writer Connie Bruck's intelligent and fascinating biography, is composed equally of George Bailey, Don Corleone, Felix Krull and Oskar Schindler—Steven Spielberg has said Ross was a model for the portrayal of Schindler in *Schindler's List*.

Born in Brooklyn in 1927 to a once affluent Jewish family that lost everything in the Depression, Ross was a young opportunist without an opportunity until he married a woman whose father owned a string of funeral parlors. Within a few years, Ross expanded the company's businesses to include car rentals, parking lots and

cleaning services. In 1967 Ross acquired a powerful talent agency, and two years later, he bought the faltering Warner Bros. studio.

As Bruck amply demonstrates, Ross's charm made him a natural for Hollywood, where everyone is a vortex of ego and where success belongs not to those who count the beans but to those who extravagantly spoil the stars. If Barbra Streisand wanted a painting, why not buy it for her? If Dustin Hoffman was vacationing in Europe, why not provide him with a yacht? If Steven Spielberg was looking for a home in the Hamptons, why not arrange the sale for him? "It's about people, really—realizing what they want," Ross once told Bruck.

With Ross expertly stroking egos,
Warner prospered astonishingly, but his
highly personal, unbusinesslike style had
its darker side. Bruck provides the most

Neal Gabler is the author of *An Empire of Their Own and the forthcoming* Winchell.

detailed account yet of an illegal cash-
skimming operation at the Mob-run
Westchester Premier Theater in the
1970s. Ross's best friend, Warner execu-
tive Jay Emmett, pleaded guilty to two
counts of fraud arising from the scheme,
and Bruck leaves the unmistakable im-
pression that Ross himself was deeply in-
volved, which Ross steadfastly denied.
(Ross cut off Emmett summarily when

LOUIS P. PHOTOS—MATRI

THE CHARMER: If Barbra wanted a painting, why not buy it for her? Why not provide Dustin with a yacht?

Emmett began cooperating with the
prosecution.)

The silver-tongued Ross always extri-
cated himself from dicey situations and
moved on to the next play in a bigger
game. The 1989 merger of Time Inc. and
Warner was his triumph. Personally, he
reaped $193 million in stock from the
deal, and while, technically, Time was
acquiring Warner, and Ross and Time
chief Nick Nicholas were to be co-CEOs,
Ross quietly maneuvered himself into
supremacy by dazzling the board with
promises of a rich future. He then or-
chestrated a coup in which the directors
ousted Nicholas.

The only thing Ross couldn't whee-
dle to his own advantage was cancer. On
his deathbed, unable to ply his wiles, he
was superseded at Time Warner by Ger-
ald Levin. Superseded but not replaced.
Ross was the inimitable master of the art
of seduction. From Spielberg to the
Time Inc. board, he convinced others
that he wasn't a venal capitalist—he was
really George Bailey.

TIME, APRIL 11, 1994

Review Essay

# The World According to Henry

## From Metternich to Me

### Michael Howard

*Diplomacy* by HENRY KISSINGER. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994, 912 pp. $35.00.

Henry Kissinger has never written anything less than *magna opera*, but this 1,000-page blockbuster must certainly qualify as his *maximum opus*. Its title is modestly deceptive. The term “diplomacy” is normally applied to the techniques and tactics employed in the conduct of international relations, and about these Kissinger is well qualified to write. He is dealing here, however, with a great deal more than techniques and tactics. His topic is the grand strategy, indeed the philosophy, of great power relationships, from the days of Richelieu until our own times.

The proper title of this book would be something like *Power Politics*, but that is a term that Kissinger seldom allows to

pass his pen. Instead he refers frequently, and bewilderingly, to “geopolitics.” He does not use this term as did its European inventors, Rudolph Kjellen, Halford Mackinder and Albrecht Haushofer, to mean the influence of spatial environment on political imperatives. For Kissinger “geopolitics” is simply a euphemism for power relationships. His use of it is reminiscent of the term “behavioral sciences,” which was coined in the United States a generation ago to describe what had hitherto been known as the social sciences, but sounded to suspicious congressmen too much like socialism to qualify for governmental support. In the same way, power politics is a concept (though not a practice) so blatantly un-American that no foundation is likely to underwrite its study. “Geopolitics,” on the other hand, sounds conveniently value-free, though the

SIR MICHAEL HOWARD recently retired from the Robert A. Lovett Chair of Military and Naval History at Yale University. Before that, he was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University.

[132]

The World According to Henry

The withdrawal of the United States, the pariah status of Russia and the dithering of Britain, whose leaders had forgotten the lessons so sagely taught by their predecessors, left a vacuum that could all too easily be filled by the expansion of German power. When U.S. leaders came to pick up the pieces, their effort was in the belief that the balance of power, far from having prevented those wars, had been their cause. So they set about creating a new world order based on different, and erroneous, principles.

WOODROW'S WORLD

Like Metternich, Woodrow Wilson had the opportunity, or so he believed, to create a new international system based on a coherent ideology. The ideology, like that of the balance of power, derived from the eighteenth-century philosophes, who assumed an underlying harmony in nature that was distorted and broken only by human error and misperceptions. International conflict was at best the result of what Marx called "false consciousness"; at worst of the sinister activities of monarchs, aristocrats, or, a little later, "military-industrial complexes," all of whom, as Kant pointed out at the end of the eighteenth century, had a vested interest in war. For the Wilsonians peace was not a precarious condition maintained only by a constant and conscious balancing of power and interests, but the normal state of mankind, or at least it would be if only the artificial barriers to its maintenance could be swept away.

In this view American democracy was a microcosm of humanity, and nations could and should govern their relations by the same kind of consensus as the

Americans did themselves. There should be an international town meeting—the League of Nations—to establish that consensus, and a posse comitatus to enforce it against offenders. As in domestic affairs, the security of one was the security of all. Separate pacts, alliances and military guarantees were as unacceptable on the international plane as they were on the domestic. Peace, in short, was indivisible.

When in 1919 the congress of the United States was called upon to ratify the covenant setting up the League of Nations, it understandably recoiled from a universalism that would have committed the country to undifferentiated and global intervention. But, having no tradition or understanding of power politics, it relapsed into the opposite extreme of isolationism. When the power balance in Europe collapsed in 1940, President Roosevelt saw that the necessities of the power balance demanded American intervention to prevent a German victory, but his electorate still did not. When the issue was decided for them by the actions of their adversaries, the American people went to war, not to restore a balance of power, but to punish the aggressors, enforce their surrender and put their leaders on trial. When peace was eventually reestablished, a new world order was created under American leadership based on Wilsonian principles, except that this time the United States locked itself into the United Nations and tried to provide it with teeth.

THE UNRESTRICTED COLD WAR

When the Soviet Union revealed itself to be, not a loyal partner in upholding the

FOREIGN AFFAIRS · May/June 1994

[135]

[L]

Michael Howard

American concept of world order, but a potential adversary, such as statesmen as George Marshall, Dean Acheson and George Kennan accepted the concept of "containment," which was effectively an update of the traditional balance of power. But in order to gain public support their rhetoric had to be universalist. In fact Stalin, in Kissinger's view, had no serious global ambitions. He was an old-fashioned realpolitiker concerned with the cautious expansion of Soviet power, and he expected his adversaries to be playing the same game. He made it clear to the British that he would have no objection to their establishing military bases in Western Europe pari passu with the establishment of Soviet power in the eastern half of the continent. If the Western allies had been similar practitioners of realpolitik, Kissinger suggests, a deal might have been struck immediately after the war along the lines that Churchill himself favored: a Soviet pullout from Germany in exchange for the Finlandization of Eastern Europe. As it was, the American leadership could mobilize the domestic support necessary to achieve even the most limited objective of a power balance in Europe only by proclaiming a crusade, as it did in the Truman Doctrine. The global implications of this crusade were to be made suddenly explicit by the purely adventitious attack across the 38th parallel by the forces of North Korea in a region in which American statesmen had explicitly and understandably stated that they had no interests to defend.

The United States now found itself committed to a conflict that was not only global but to all appearances permanent.

But it was one, Kissinger points out, to which the American people were temperamentally well suited. They were pledged to the defense, against the forces of an evil empire, of a world that, if left to itself, would be free, harmonious and democratic. Any administration, whether that of Truman or Eisenhower, that adopted anything less than a posture of total and undifferentiated hostility to the communist world was subjected to the unremitting attacks of its opponents. Young John Kennedy in particular, after the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco, had to show both his domestic and Soviet adversaries that he was prepared to live up to his rhetoric and defend the frontiers of freedom wherever they might be and whatever the cost, and he unwisely chose to do so in Vietnam.

It would be hard to find—apart from Korea—a region where the United States had fewer interests to defend, but it was there that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations believed that American resolution was being tested and that the decisive battle had to be fought. But Vietnam was a battlefield where Wilsonian ideals were as irrelevant as U.S. military power. Realpolitikers like Hans Morgenthau joined hands with pacific isolationists like Noam Chomsky to castigate a policy from which even America's closest allies tried to distance themselves. After five years it was clear that the Vietnam involvement was as much a domestic as a military disaster. In consequence, the American people, without quite knowing what they were doing, elected a president who, much as he admired Woodrow Wilson, shared few of his ideals, and Nixon selected as his

[136]

FOREIGN AFFAIRS · Volume 73 No.3

[lc]

THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE

Kissinger

some of his more apoplectic Harvard associates have attributed to Paul Kennedy, Kissinger sees the need for the United States to learn to function as one power in a complex system that it can neither escape nor dominate. The hopes of yet a third new world order in which the United States will be able to impose its pluralist-democratic ideology on a grateful world will go the way of those entertained by Woodrow

Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Once again America must define her interests and bring them into balance with her resources. “The fulfillment of American ideals,” Kissinger concludes, “will have to be sought in the patient accumulation of partial successes.” The Clinton administration, which in spite of its necessary rhetoric wants to involve itself as little as possible with the anarchic world beyond the oceans, can only take comfort from such cautious minimalism.

## GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

But if the universalist philosophy of Wilson has been an ignis fatuus, a flicker of marsh gas only leading deeper into the quagmire, does that of Metternich furnish the United States today with more reliable guidance? Power politics (or, as Kissinger insists, geopolitics) certainly provided a necessary framework for statecraft in Europe between its two

Thirty Years' Wars, that of the seventeenth century and that of the twentieth century, but how relevant is that experience likely to be to the world of the twenty-first?

My own judgment is: not very. We would not be wise to regard that limited slice of world history as a universally applicable norm and try to project its values onto the far more diverse yet interdependent world of tomorrow. The

precissions of Richelieu could be as irrelevant as those of Woodrow Wilson, if not more so. During the two centuries between 1650 and 1850 Europe consisted of what political scientists call “perfect states,” whose rulers owed no allegiance upward nor, more to the point, downward. They were absolute in their power to conduct foreign, if not domestic, policy. In their largely self-sufficient agrarian economies, transnational interests were minimal. The conduct of foreign policy was in the hands of small elites who, as Kissinger points out, were often interrelated and shared common values; shared more with each other, indeed, than they did with the peoples ruled over by the dynasties they served. For such elites power politics could be conducted as a game of skill. Even if they lost, the consequences were seldom catastrophic, and certainly not for them.

This system was badly shaken by the

[138]

The World According to Henry

wars of the French Revolution, but not
destroyed: it staggered on for another
half-century. By 1900, however, it had
ceased to work. Political developments
within their own countries had destroyed
the capacity of the old elites to play.
nicely balanced games of power politics.
Kissinger points out how even within the
most autocratic of European states, the
Russian Empire, the government was
running scared of nationalist public opin-
ion. In Germany the Bismarckian system
collapsed less because of the lack of dip-
lomatic skill on the part of his successors
than because of an increasingly unman-
ageable Reichstag. As for Britain...

Kissinger is curiously blind to what
was happening in Britain in the nine-
teenth century, and to its consequences.
He quotes with understandable approval
the statements by Castlereagh, Palmer-
ston and Disraeli about national interests
and the balance of power, while regard-
ing their nemesis, Gladstone, as some-
thing of an oddball. But Gladstone was
the voice of the future, his adversaries
that of the past. He was the true avatar of
Woodrow Wilson, and he was not alone.
He represented a rising tide of liberal
internationalism in British public opin-
ion, which by the twentieth century was
to become dominant. Edward Grey,
Britain's liberal foreign secretary in 1914,
knew all about the balance of power and
tried, by his alliances with France and
Russia, to preserve it. But his efforts had
to be almost as covert as those of Roo-
sevelt in 1940: the parliamentary majority
to which he was responsible abjured the
whole concept of a balance of power.
When it supported British entry into the
war in 1914, the rationale was not to pre-

serve the balance of power but to protect
the neutrality of Belgium and vindicate
the rule of law. And the war aim of the
British Liberals was the creation of a
League of Nations, an idea proposed by
the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham
and powerfully propagated in the United
States by emissaries of the British Union
for Democratic Control. The idea of the
League may have been, in Kissinger's
words, "quintessentially American," but
it was far more popular in Britain
between the wars than in the United
States. If British statesmen between the
wars failed to pursue "the national inter-
est" in the traditional fashion laid down
by their nineteenth-century predecessors,
it was not simply because they were more
clumsy and shortsighted. It was because
public opinion made it impossible for
them to do so.

I make this point, not out of any
British chauvinism, but because it indi-
cates a deep flaw in Kissinger's analysis.
The model for the conduct of interna-
tional relations that he holds up for our
admiration had simply ceased to work by
the beginning of this century, not
because of unskillful statecraft, but
because the hermetic system in which it
had been effective had ceased to exist.
The more democratic societies became,
the less possible it was for the system to
survive. The Wilsonian illusions that
Kissinger regards as uniquely American
in fact originated outside America and
have now spread far beyond, and it is
arguable that the more widely they are
spread, the less illusory they become.
Further, in a world that is now so inter-
dependent, it is questionable whether the
concept of a purely "national" interest

[139]

Michael Howard

makes sense any longer. Finally—but this
takes us into very deep waters—there is
now a question mark over the primacy of
the state in the international system and
its capacity to control those huge eco-
nomic, social and demographic move-
ments known as transnational flows.
Given the prevalence of something like
international anarchy, where would a new
Metternich begin?

Kissinger's own sagacious prescription
is that of all wise old men: *surtout, pas
trop de zèle*. It cannot be said that his
book furnishes any profound guidance to
those who have to pick their way through
the new world disorder, but that was
hardly its purpose. It is history, on a
splendid and massive scale: a magnificent
survey, not only of the world in
Kissinger's own lifetime, but of that
ancien régime from which he derived his
values and to which he now looks back
with such understandable nostalgia. ❧

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[140] FOREIGN AFFAIRS · Volume 73 No.3

Books in Review

The World Stage

DIPLOMACY. By HENRY KISSINGER.
*Simon & Schuster.* 912 pp.
$35.00.

Reviewed by PAUL JOHNSON

GOOD diplomats rarely write well about diplomacy. Ambassadorial memoirs include some of the worst books ever published. Castlereagh, Talleyrand, and Metternich, the three men who created the 1814-15 Vienna settlement, rightly praised by Henry Kissinger as one of the most durable works of peacemaking in history, left nothing apart from their voluminous papers, and for their views on their craft we are dependent on a few bons mots. By contrast, John Quincy Adams produced twelve volumes of *Memoirs*, and Chateaubriand's *Mémoires d'outre-tombe* is another Leviathan. But both are composed more of venom, spleen, hurt pride, and vindictive narrative than diplomatic adages—and, if truth be told, neither man was a negotiator of world class. In modern times, the writings of John Foster Dulles and Anthony Eden are unilluminating, George Kennan's books uneven, and the one outstanding memoir is Dean Acheson's *Present at the Creation*. But even that tells you what, where, and when, rather than how.

HOWEVER, to say all that does not make a big book, and Kissinger is determined to provide one. So we go on a long historical tour, in which the author gives himself the pleasure of recounting, and pondering upon, the great diplomatic moments of the past. First he examines, in turn, efforts by Richelieu, William of Orange, and Pitt the Younger to conduct foreign and war policies based upon the concept of the balance of power. Then he takes another look at the Congress of Vienna: the notion of the neatly balanced major powers acting in concert to preserve civilized, undemocratic order. Next he has a look at “two revolutionaries”—Napoleon III and Bismarck: the one an overambitious buffoon running a fragile nation which broke in his hands, the other a “genius” in the business of matching aims to power—“Few statesmen have so altered the course of history.”

Kissinger now turns to the decades leading up to World War I, showing how the balance of power in Europe turned dangerously rigid and how, in consequence, the powers constructed competing military alliances which in conjunction became what he calls a “doomsday machine.” The implication here is that if Bismarck, or someone like him, had continued to run Germany, the war would have been avoided.

Kissinger has now reached the time of Wilson, and we have two chapters on the Treaty of Versailles, followed by one on the recovery of Germany. Then he shows how Hitler, a “demonic personality,” brought about “the collapse of the house of cards which represented the Versailles international order.” There follow two chapters leading up to the Nazi-Soviet pact and the opening of World War II.

55

56/COMMENTARY APRIL 1994

lationist people toward participation in the war," which he thinks "serves as an object lesson on the scope of leadership in a democracy." He has an interesting chapter showing the three contrasting approaches to peace of FDR, Churchill, and Stalin; after this comes one demonstrating the inevitability, given Stalin's aims, of the cold war. He then takes us through the last half-century: containment, its successes and limitations; the Korean war; the postwar German problem; the Suez crisis; the Hungarian revolt; Berlin; and three poignant chapters on the tragedy of Vietnam. The historical section concludes with chapters on Nixon's foreign policy, détente, and the end of the cold war.

Kissinger is a born teacher and carries the reader willingly along on his bumpy ride through four centuries of complex war- and peace-making. He has an eye for color, incident, and character; he summarizes well; and he keeps a neat balance between narrative and reflective analysis. He has read widely and intelligently, and I found myself both learning a lot and stimulated into reexamining some well-known historical turning points. For those who have the leisure, the entire book is very much worth reading.

But to get the gist of Kissinger's thinking on diplomacy one only has to read the first two and the last two chapters. The final one, "The New World Order Reconsidered," is particularly valuable. Kissinger's deepest diplomatic instincts are those of a civilized European. He regards the Vienna settlement, which endured for a century, as the most successful in European history because "it combined legitimacy and equilib-

rium, shared values, and balance-of-power diplomacy." At the same time, as an American guru, he recognizes that the idealist goal of a stable world order based on liberalism and democracy has to be the guiding principle of United States policy. His job, then, as he sees it, is to chart the pitfalls in pursuing this goal, and to show how they can be circumvented.

Thus his final chapter is a checklist of warnings. In general: "The domination by a single power of either of Eurasia's two principal spheres—Europe or Asia—remains a good definition of strategic danger for America, cold war or no cold war." On Russia: America should encourage that country "to concentrate—for the first time in her history—on the development of her national territory, which, extending over eleven time zones, from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, gives no cause for claustrophobia." On Western Europe: recognition that "Both the Atlantic Alliance and the European Union are indispensable building-blocks of a new and stable world order." Eastern Europe: tie the ex-Communist states into NATO by a wider grouping, and then, "If Russia remains within its borders, the focus on security would shift over time. . . ." On China: play down violations of human rights and emphasize, instead, "tacit cooperation on global—and especially Asian—strat egy." On Japan: prevent its arming dangerously, and so frightening China, by maintaining "a substantial American military presence in Northeast Asia." The Western Hemisphere: build on NAFTA through GATT.

All this advice is reasonable, and there is much more to the same effect. Kissinger is always worth listening to, and a sensible man in the White House will make a habit of consulting this remarkable man.

But is there a sensible man in the White House—or, for that matter, in Foggy Bottom? What the world needs today is not great guidance in sorting out its problems but effective leadership in applying that guidance. British, French, German, American—and now Russian—dabbling in the Balkans has been a depressing ex-

ercise in ineptitude punctuated by braggadocio, cowardice, stupidity, and futile point-scoring. So far only the Russians have emerged with any marks for diplomatic cunning. It makes one shudder at what would happen if the West were confronted by a real crisis.

Wisdom of the kind Kissinger imparts in this book is valuable—and I hope President Clinton will find the time to read it—but it is not enough by itself. Until we find a new generation of heavyweights to replace Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the post-cold-war world will continue to drift alarmingly. For wisdom has to be translated into action by will.

## Faith & Fantasy

THE NEW MIDDLE EAST. By SHI-MON PERES. *Holt. 224 pp. $25.00.*

Reviewed by RAEL JEAN ISAAC

ELISE BOULDING, a mother-figure in the 1960's peace movement in the United States, used to urge her followers to "Imagine Peace." The idea was that if you imagined hard enough, and in enough detail, the image would become reality. This book by Shi- mon Peres, Foreign Minister of Israel and chief architect of the peace agreement with Yasir Arafat, is based precisely on such an exercise; having "imagined" a political paradise, Peres proceeds to confuse it with reality.

The book is a blueprint for a reconstructed, democratic Middle East. After introductory sections on the secret negotiations with the PLO—Peres says he embarked on them when it became clear that the PLO controlled the Palestinian delegation to the talks begun at the Madrid conference over two years ago—and on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, he sets forth his vision of the future. He foresees a new regional superstructure, providing security and eco-

RAEL JEAN ISAAC contributed "The Real Lessons of Camp David" to our December 1993 issue. Her books include Israel Divided, Parties and Politics of Israel, and Madness in the Streets (which she co-authored with Virginia Armat).

INTERNATIONAL

'An Element
of Guile'

**Books:** Henry Kissinger on the uses of power

IT MUST DRIVE HENRY KISSINGER CRAZY to be sitting on the sidelines while the post-cold-war world realigns itself. An opportunity like this hasn't come along since the Congress of Vienna in 1814, when Austrian Prince Klemens von Metternich and his colleagues established a finely balanced European order that averted all-out war for a century. Now, at a comparable turning point in history, there is no latter-day Metternich to create a new international system. As Richard Nixon's chief foreign-policy aide, Kissinger tried to build a "structure of peace" by extricating the United States from Vietnam, opening relations with China and pursuing détente with the Soviet Union. But the effort bogged down in the Watergate scandal, and it wasn't until the sudden collapse of communism, nearly 15 years after Kissinger left office, that anyone could begin to design a "new world order." Kissinger, long an admirer of Metternich, never got a chance to play his role.

Writing about it is Kissinger's next-best

option. His new book, "Diplomacy," is less a history of the statesman's craft than a celebration of great men who practiced it single-mindedly, from Cardinal Richelieu to President Reagan. Like Machiavelli be-

fore him, Kissinger has a keen appreciation for the hardheaded use of power, to the point of admiring some traits in leaders who were otherwise detestable. Richelieu, who made France pre-eminent in the early 17th century, never allowed morality, or

even the dictates of his church, to get in the way of *raison d'état*—coldblooded national interest. Generations of tyrants learned from his example. "Stalin was indeed a monster," Kissinger writes, "but in the conduct of international relations, he was the supreme realist—patient, shrewd, and implacable, the Richelieu of his period."

Kissinger takes an odd hit-or-miss approach to the history of diplomacy, saturating some subjects and skimming over others. He almost ignores the impact of political upheavals in the late 18th century; the French Revolution is only alluded to

while the American Revolution isn't discussed at all. He mentions the Cuban missile crisis only in passing, while devoting reams of analysis to the Berlin crises of 1958-63. He defends, once again, his (and Nixon's) accomplishments in office, but offers only oblique rebuttals to critics of his Indochina policy, such as William Shawcross and Seymour Hersh. Kissinger does not directly answer their charges of duplicity, for example, but he observes, in another context, that there "is inevitably

in every great leader an element of guile."

**Push and pull:** The former secretary of state describes U.S. foreign policy as a constant "push and pull" between ideals and national interests—with moralism prevailing more often than he would have liked. The tone for most of this century was set, he writes, by Woodrow Wilson, who wanted America to be "a beneficent global police-man." Eventually the policeman landed in an Asian quagmire. Nixon tried to put idealism aside and pursued national interests through balance-of-power tactics, playing China against the Soviet Union. But Kissinger writes that it was left to Ronald Reagan, a shallow man with a few good ideas and "an extraordinary intuitive rapport" with the American psyche, to unite might with right and finish off the Soviet Union.

As for the future, Kissinger argues that the new world order will look a lot like the order propounded by Metternich. "In the next century," he writes, "American leaders will have to articulate for their public a concept of the national interest and explain how that interest is served—in Europe and in Asia—by the maintenance of the balance of power." But Kissinger himself points out that balance-of-power politics succeeded in 19th-century Europe because "the Continental countries were knit together by a sense of shared values. There was not only a physical equilibrium, but a moral one." It will not be easy to make the turbulent and diverse world of the 21st century run like a Victorian gentlemen's club.

RUSSELL WATSON

KARL SCHUMACHER

Reasons of state: *The author*

Diplomacy
HENRY
KISSINGER

912 pages
Simon & Schuster
$35

...AND PULLED THE TRIGGER

DEATH IN TIJUANA: A videotape caught the moment when a man put a gun to the head of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. The killing two weeks ago triggered a frenzy of conspiracy theories, particularly after a security guard was held as an alleged accomplice. Colosio's campaign manager, economist Ernesto Zedillo, was named to replace him as the ruling party's candidate.

TELEVISA-AFP

42 NEWSWEEK APRIL 11, 1994

BOOKS

# How the World Works

By WALTER ISAACSON

BOTH FANS AND FOES OF HENRY Kissinger, whose ranks rival each other in fervor, have long agreed on one thing: he is brilliant at analyzing national interests and balances of power. If only he would step back from his corporate consulting and fashion-set socializing, they say, he might produce the grand tome that secures his place alongside George Kennan among the great diplomatic thinkers of our century.

> "No other nation [aside from the U.S.] has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism."

N. DULLY-STOVA

Kissinger, a European refugee who read Metternich more avidly than Jeffer- son, is unabashedly in the realist camp. "No other nation," he writes, "has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism." Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a

TIME, APRIL 11, 1994

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DEEP FOREST IS THE PRODUCT OF a global village in which the natives are getting funky. On the opening, title track, misty clouds of synthesizer swirl around a percolating hip-hop rhythm as a woman's soothing warble rises over the high-tech groove. Mesmerized, one can almost understand the lyrics. Almost but not quite, because the vocalist is an African Pygmy from Ghana and she is singing in her native tongue. Suddenly, cultural borders blur. What kind of music is this anyway? And would anyone actually dance to it?

The answer to the latter question is yes. Already a hit in Australia, France and Britain, *Deep Forest* has entered the dance and modern-rock charts in the U.S., where it was released last year. Sales are surging, thanks to a lyrical MTV clip by video auteur Tarsem and a Grammy nomination for Best World Music Album.

*Deep Forest* was conceived by Michel Sanchez and Eric Mouquet, two French musicians who blended New Age electronics with UNESCO field recordings of music from Zaïre, the Solomon Islands, Burundi, Tibesti and the Sahel.

A percentage of the profits from sales of *Deep Forest* will go to the Pygmy Fund, a California-based organization committed to helping the natives of central Africa cope with environmental threats to their homeland. But for Sanchez and Mouquet, the most important purpose of the record is to express their own fascination with the Pygmies—and open the world's ears to the exquisite sound of a quickly vanishing culture. As Mouquet notes, “It’s not very often you can hear a Pygmy singing on the radio.”

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of the peace movement, the hypocrisy of the Establishment and the perfidy of the North Vietnamese. And he dismisses the notion that America's national interests would have been better served if Nixon had set an early withdrawal date (and in the process lands a little jab—"Would that history were as simple as journalism"—at the contrary treatment of this point in my book).

"By the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century," Kissinger writes, using a typically grandiloquent phrase to say by 1990, Wilsonian idealism "seemed triumphant." This does not please him. He concludes his book with sentences of pro forma praise for America's idealism followed by sentences that begin with *But*. In the end, the *buts* win: "American idealism remains as essential as ever, perhaps even more so. But in the new world order, its role will be to provide the faith to sustain America through all the ambiguities of choice in an imperfect world."

FURTHERMORE

**His previous writing was limited** to a spiritual newsletter, but the first novel of Alabama therapist James Redfield, 43, is a phenomenon. *The Celestine Prophecy*, a tale of a Peruvian manuscript that unfolds the secrets of life, sold 100,000 copies in a self-published paperback. Now the Warner Books hard cover has sold an additional 450,000 in six weeks and just reached No. 1 on the New York *Times* best-seller list.

BOOKS

# It's a Wonderful Life

By NEAL GABLER

Neal Gabler is the author of *An Empire of Their Own and the forthcoming Winchell.*

detailed account yet of an illegal cash-skimming operation at the Mob-run Westchester Premier Theater in the 1970s. Ross's best friend, Warner executive Jay Emmett, pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud arising from the scheme, and Bruck leaves the unmistakable impression that Ross himself was deeply involved, which Ross steadfastly denied. (Ross cut off Emmett summarily when

LOUIS PISHOHOV—MATRIK

The silver-tongued Ross always extricated himself from dicey situations and moved on to the next play in a bigger game. The 1989 merger of Time Inc. and Warner was his triumph. Personally, he reaped $193 million in stock from the deal, and while, technically, Time was acquiring Warner, and Ross and Time chief Nick Nicholas were to be co-CEOS, Ross quietly maneuvered himself into supremacy by dazzling the board with promises of a rich future. He then orchestrated a coup in which the directors ousted Nicholas.

The only thing Ross couldn't wheel-dle to his own advantage was cancer. On his deathbed, unable to ply his wiles, he was superseded at Time Warner by Gerald Levin. Superseded but not replaced. Ross was the inimitable master of the art of seduction. From Spielberg to the Time Inc. board, he convinced others that he wasn't a venal capitalist—he was really George Bailey.

TIME, APRIL 11, 1994

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PLTUR

HENRY A. KISSINGER gelang ein Klassiker über Diplomatie und internationale Politik

BUCH

Das Vermächtnis eines
Realpolitikers

TITEL: Die Vernunft der Nationen

AUTOR: Henry A. Kissinger

VERLAG: Siedler, Berlin, 998 S., 78 Mark

IN KÜRZE: In der Eleganz seines Sprachstils kann sich der Autor mit Bismarck messen

Die „Vernunft der Nationen" ist ein
Instant-Klassiker, von dem noch Ge-
nerationen von Studenten zehren wer-
den. Wer es schafft, sich durch die 1000
Seiten durchzuarbeiten, kann sich vier
Semester Internationale Politik und
Diplomatiegeschichte ersparen.

Schade nur, daß der Verlag in seiner
Hast, das Buch auf den deutschen
Markt zu werfen, eine so geschluderte

Übersetzung durchgehen ließ. Wer das
Buch im Original (Titel: „Diplomacy")
kennt, wird bittere Tränen beim Durch-
queren des deutschen Textes vergleichen.

Der ernsthafte Versuch sei trotzdem
empfohlen – am besten kapitelweise
und in der Abgeschiedenheit eines
Studierstüchchens. Der 71 Jahre alte
Kissinger breitet die Quintessenz sei-
nes Denkens aus – nach einem Leben
in Harvard und im Zentrum der ameri-
kanischen Macht, erst als Sicherheits-
berater, dann als Außenminister von
Präsident Richard Nixon.

Was lehrt uns, fragt Kissinger, die
Geschichte der internationalen Politik?
Kann sie uns einen Leitfaden bieten in
der komplizierten Welt nach dem Fall
der Berliner Mauer? Bis 1989 galt das
simple Schachspiel des Kalten Krieges.
Nur zwei Supermächte beherrschten
das Brett, und das Regelwerk war so
klar wie die Rache einer atomar auf-
geladenen Wirklichkeit im Fall eines
falschen Zuges.

Kissingers Antwort ist ein brillant
formuliertes „Ja“. Zwar sind die alten
Gewißheiten zusammen mit der So-
j wetunion weggebrochen, zwar ist die
Demokratie ebenso auf dem Vormarsch
wie ein ganzes Bataillon neuer Proble-
me – von Bosnien bis Haiti, von der Be-
völkerungsexplosion bis zur Massen-
wanderung. Aber eines, so Kissingers
Katechismus, hat sich nicht geändert:
Der Nationalstaat, wie er sich im
17. Jahrhundert herausgeschält hat,
spielt noch immer die Hauptrolle.

Und der Staat lebt in einer anderen
Welt als der Bürger. Der Staat kann sich
bei Streit nicht auf unparteiische Rich-
ter verlassen, auch nicht auf eine Poli-
zei, die Leib und Leben schützt. Der
Staat kann an keine höhere Instanz
appellieren und bleibt so letztlich auf
sich selbst angewiesen. Folglich muß er
anderen Gesetzen gehorchen, nämlich
denen der Staatsräson, die nicht immer
im Einklang mit den Zehn Geboten ste-
hen – die unüberbrückbare Kluft zwi-
schen Innen- und Außenpolitik.

Ganz gleich, wie kräftig die Globa-
lisierung (der Märkte) oder die Inter-
dependenz (beim Umweltschutz) die
Souveränität unterminiert haben – die
Nationen bleiben im Zentrum der in-
ternationalen Politik. Und die, so Kis-
singer, „haben häufiger ihr Eigeninter-
esse verfolgt als hehe Prinzipien, und
sie haben eher die Konkurrenz als die
Kooperation gepflegt. Wenig läßt dar-
auf schließen, daß sich diese uralten
Verhaltensweisen in den kommenden
Jahrzehnten ändern werden."

Daraus folgt, daß nicht Ideale die
Welt bestimmen, sondern Interessen. In
meisterhafter Weise, die ihm kein an-
derer Politiker, auch kein zeitgenössi-
scher Historiker nachmachen könnte,
illustriert Kissinger diese unbequeme
Wahrheit anhand von knapp 400 Jah-
ren Staatengeschichte.

Wo andere ganze Bücher brauchen,
schafft es Kissinger in ein paar Seiten,
das Wesentliche am Dreißigjährigen oder
Vietnamkrieg herauszuarbeiten. Von ge-
radezu literarischer Qualität sind seine
Porträts von Richelieu, Disraeli oder Bis-
marck - den großen Figuren der Welt-
politik. Wie der Historiker-Staatsmann
mit ein paar knappen Federstrichen
Konstellationen und Konflikte umreißt,
das ist von atemberaubender Prägnanz.

Kissingers Devise ist nicht die reine
Macht-, sondern die Realpolitik. De-
ren Moral mißt sich nicht an hehren
Absichten, sondern an Konsequenzen.
Der amerikanische Präsident Woodrow
Wilson, der 1919 in Versailles das Regi-
ment führte, war ein lupenreiner Idea-
list. Doch haben ihm seine Ideale –
Demokratie, Selbstbestimmung – den
Blick für die europäischen Realitäten
verstellt. Die Folge: Versailles schuf
eine Welt, die alsbald in den Zweiten
Weltkrieg schlitterte, die eine giftige
Erbschaft hinterließ, welche uns etwa
in Bosnien noch heute quält.

Der wahre Staatsmann, das lehrt uns
Kissinger auf fast jeder Seite, muß Kräf-
te und Konsequenzen berechnen. Sein
Maßstab ist nicht die absolute Gerech-
tigkeit, sondern die Stabilität einer
internationalen Ordnung, die Krisen
dämpft und Kriege verhindert. Verlaß
ist dabei eher auf das Gleichgewicht
der Kräfte als auf fromme Wünsche.

Das trifft heute mehr denn je zu, da
zwar die USA die unbestrittene Num-
mer eins sind, aber allenthalben neue
Machtzentren ihren Platz an der Sonne
beanspruchen: China, Japan, Deutsch-
land, Europa, das altneue Rußland, der
militante Islam. „Es ist nicht sicher,
daß selbst ein demokratisches Rußland
zur internationalen Stabilität beitragen
wird", meint der historisch geschulte
Realpolitiker, und deshalb plädiert er
für Erhalt und Ost-Ausdehnung der
NATO als Garant einer Machtbalance
auch im nächsten Jahrtausend.

Die „Vernunft der Nationen" ist ein
Jahrhundertwerk, ein Seminar in inter-
nationaler Politik auf 1000 Seiten und
ein Kompaß für die unübersichtliche
neue Welt nach dem Kalten Krieg.

CHRISTINE BRINCK

144

foto.dpa

FOCUS 42/1994

fieren hieß Teilnehmen" zusammenzutragen.

**Der Titel ist Programm:** Vorgestellt werden Fotografinnen der Weimarer Republik, einer Epoche, in der sich Frauen zunehmend eigene berufliche Ausbildung und mehr Selbständigkeit erstritten. Stärker als alles andere ver half ihnen das Fotografieren zur Teilnahme am modernen Leben.

Ihre Hoffnung auf Mobilität erfüllte erstmals die Kleinbildfotografie, die seit 1925 mit dem Namen der Leica verbunden war. Zudem brauchte die Bildpresse stets neue Fotos. Frauen nutzten entschieden die neue, mobile Technik. Manche beeinflußten damit maßgeblich die Mode-, Presse- und Werbfotografie der Zeit. Umgekehrt prägte das Bild der „Neuen Frau" in der Presse den sozialen Mythos der 20er Jahre.

**Die Aufbruchsära** brachte vielen Frauen die Emanzipation. Der Beruf der Fotografin erlaubte Bürgertöchtern die Entfernung von Haus und Herd, ohne im Büro oder in der Fabrik arbeiten zu müssen. Die Beweglichkeit des Mediums wurde nicht zuletzt zum Instrument ihrer eigenen Fortbewegung. Das Zeitalter der Medien begann. Die Frauen der „1/100 Sekunde" wurden Schrittmacher ihrer Zeit.

Das Berliner Adreßbuch enthielt 1931 über 600 Ateliers – mehr als 100 davon von Frauen geführt. Ein Verzeichnis aus demselben Jahr nennt über 200 Frauen-, Haus- und Modeblätter. „Die Dame" erschien mit einer Auflage von 50 000. Die „Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung" hatte sogar 1,7 Millionen Auflage.

Aus der Vielzahl der Biographien sticht die der 1900 geborenen Else Neuländer hervor, die unter dem Namen „Yva" bekannt wurde. Sie prägte die moderne Bildsprache der Mode- und Werbefotografie.

Ab 1927 publizierten „Die Dame" und „Uhu" ihre Fotografien regelmäßig. 1933 änderte sich das Klima im Land: Jüdische Fotografinnen beomen Berufsverbot. Yvas Atelier wurde 1936 „arisiert". 1938 erhielt sie Berufsverbot. Danach arbeitete sie als Röntgenassistentin, bevor die Gestapo sie verhaftete. Kolleginnen organisierte man zwangsweise in Berufsverbänden. Ellen Auerbach, Grete Stern, Lucia Moholy und Gisèle Freund verließen Deutschland gleich 1933. Andere wie Elliott Marcus, Lotte Jacobi, Hedda Walther oder Germaine Krull lebten bereits in Paris und waren etabliert.

KLAUS KLEINSCHMIDT

UNSERE DAMEN- UND HERRENKOLLEKTIONEN ERHALTEN SIE IM GUTEN FACHHANDEL MÄRZ MÜNCHEN: TEL. (089)6 27-27-172

FOCUS 42/1994

143

POLICY & POLITICS

10

# THE ART OF...

## Review by Ralph Buultjens

### Diplomacy

Henry Kissinger

Simon & Schuster

912 pp. $35.00

Until relatively recently, diplomacy was an activity essentially conducted by small groups of patriots or pseudo-patriots. More concerned with balances of power than balances of public opinion, the statesmen of the past went about their work largely untroubled by popular sentiment and demands for disclosure. Their manners and style, if not their moieties, are encapsulated in Secretary of State Stimson's response to requests for permission to increase cipher decoding of diplomatic dispatches: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail!"

In more modern times, a new diplomacy has emerged—summit conferencing, concern for non-political issues, the proliferation, and required use of international institutions, official rights of participation for non-governmental organizations. This is the rumbustious diplomacy of public relations and polls, press leaks and counter-leaks, partisan propaganda and mass mobilization, think-tanks and spin doctor punditry. Dragged into the public arena, diplomacy has become democratized, politicized and vulgarized. It is now everybody's business.

Henry Kissinger is a rare bridge between the old and new worlds of diplomacy. By background and temperament he belongs to the European tradition—the grand vizier as policy-maker, the consummate courtier-counselor with a subtle sense of the play of power. Yet, by ability and achievement he is both master and partial maker of the modern diplomatic method—skilled as foreign minister, as shuttle mediator, as policy analyst inside and outside government, as media commentator or as mentor to the rich and famous in their transnational transactions. Such virtuoso flexibility requires extraordinary talents and these Kissinger has in ample measure.

Kissinger's worldview and career are conditioned by four particularly noteworthy features—elements which give his perspectives

on international affairs a particular authority. First, the phenomenal capacities which sustained his rise from a non-English speaking migrant to a significant—if not always welcome—place in the American establishment, a progression achieved in little more than two decades. Second, his unusual exposure as scholar-statesman, advancing and applying in office ideas which had gestated in his earlier intellectual incarnation. Third, the capability to maintain public influence longer beyond the duration normal for former high governmental officials. Fourth, an adroit instinct for self-preservation which has now become a requisite for survival in contemporary American political life. Such a man must have much to say about concept and conduct in relations between states. And said it he has in a number of writings on strategy and foreign policy.

Kissinger's tenth book, *Diplomacy*, is unlike his prior works. His earlier historical studies have mostly followed an inductive pattern—presentation and analysis of facts from which inferences and lessons are drawn. Thus, for example, *A World Restored* discussed the post-Napoleonic settlement in Europe and then stated the author's findings, implying their validity for other times and places. Even Kissinger's celebrated memoirs described events and extracted larger meanings

from them, often by juxtaposing his experience with the ideas he carried into office. *Diplomacy* is constructed differently. Its approach is somewhat deductive—history is largely used to underpin general principles that Kissinger has distilled from his reflections and working knowledge. In many ways, then, this is a logical extension and conclusion to much of Henry Kissinger's previous thinking. And, because he so fashions it, the book becomes a powerful prescription for a foreign policy erected on this plinth.

*Diplomacy* arrives at a fateful moment. As Kissinger puts it: "With the collapse of Communism, the disappearance of a global military threat and the simultaneous emergence of new power centers in Asia and Europe, the problem of how to build a world order has become central to American foreign policy." He argues that a new world order has never before been sculpted in an environment embracing so many different perceptions, disparate interests and distanced loci. History, especially that of past attempts to evolve international structures, is the best guide in our current search for a suitable architecture. And so, *Diplomacy* sets out to see how others have done it and how these efforts can instruct us.

Yet, Kissinger's quest is not quite so objective or clearcut. *Diplomacy* is, in fact, a book with two agendas or perhaps two books with a single agenda. First of all, in its scope and factual content, it is the aforementioned historical audit. Moving back and forth across 400 years, Kissinger describes how certain European statesmen and 20th-century American leaders have tried to advance the interests of their countries while crafting an international order. The men he most admired sought an enduring stability and were prepared to sacrifice ephemeral advantage for it. Their method was often personalized and their diplomacy secretive. Their strategy was a calibrated balancing of power. When challenges became seriously disruptive and upset the existing equilibrium, and when negotiations could not contain them, these leaders were robust in the use of force. Inevitably, the shrewd coalition-builders, those who organized alliances of interests, vanquished the more singular disturbers of the peace—as Richelieu did to Ferdinand II, Metternich to Napoleon and Roosevelt to Hitler.

This dimension of *Diplomacy* is not narrative history nor should it be seen as such. It is a kaleidoscope of historical segments brilliantly assembled to give coherence to a central thesis. With remarkable insight and telling anecdote, Kissinger examines policies and personalities—and often the link between the two. The triumphs of Richelieu and William of Orange, Metternich and Bismarck, Woodrow Wilson, the two Roosevelt and others are recounted with verve. As valuable are portraits of their adversaries. The analyses of failure are every bit as thoughtful as the descriptions of success. Alongside fact and inquiry are occasional philosophic ruminations, the hallmark of Kissinger's writings, which elevate the discourse.

Grand sweep and great issues are the leitmotif of Kissinger's exposition. And so, it is trivial to grumble at the choice of situations and participants. Yet, some reference to the diplomacy of recovery may better highlight the instances he so deftly presents. The realpolitik

of the Vatican—the oldest political institution in the Western world—is a case in point. Twice in the last century, the diplomacy of ecclesiastical statesman (Consalvi and Antonelli) rescued the papal political position when it was on the brink of being overwhelmed by external forces. Twice in this century, ingenious manipulations enabled the Vatican to redeem itself from the suspicion with which the victors regarded the wartime behavior of Popes Benedict XV and Pius XII. The Holy See is today a respected and formidable diplomatic power-house, truly testimony to the fact that ambassadors of God are maestros of the secular arts of recuperative statecraft and *raison d'état*—as Kissinger's clever portrait of Cardinal Richelieu also demonstrates. They surely deserve at least a footnote.

Despite its all-embracing title, only one-fifth of *Diplomacy* addresses the period before 1900. Its central focus is international affairs since then, and here three themes dominate: the rise of America from peripheral to planetary power; the steady expansion of the critical rub of world politics—from Europe to virtually the entire globe; the massive and sequential struggles of the Western democracies to combat expansionist autocracy. Against this backdrop, the international behavior of America acquires an ever larger importance for itself and for others. As these realities of global life dovetail into the historical evidence it presents, Kissinger erects a conceptual design for foreign policy. This is the second aspect of this book and, indeed, the principal reason for it.

Kissinger's thesis can be crudely compressed into a few central propositions. The foreign policy of the U.S. needs to be built on national interest rather than on moral abstraction. The task of statesmanship is to create a stable international order through which these national interests can be pursued. Since the U.S. can no longer dominate the world or withdraw from it, a balance of power strategy is the best instrument by which to maintain a favorable international order. In weaving such a network, a policy of national interest will also probably serve the global interest, protecting the world from cruel upheavals and enabling cooperation on some planetary problems (e.g. environment). Underlying all this is an approach whose starting point is less the question of morality (who is right and who is wrong) than the question of power (who is weak and who is strong). In articulating this hypothesis, Kissinger summarizes Richelieu's sentiments: "States do not receive credit in any world for doing what is right; they are only rewarded for being strong enough to do what is necessary." He would certainly appreciate Cornwallis' comment after the Third Anglo-Mysore War: "We have won the perfect victory—crippled our enemies without strengthening our friends!"

The argument is made with perspicacity and, at times, almost compelling logic. The sinews of Kissinger's conviction and the breadth of his historical knowledge move the presentation forward in an intellectual blitzkrieg. Is not the ethic of morality—the perception that world affairs is a struggle between good and evil, between justice and inequity—a better wellspring of foreign policy than the concept of national interest and balance of power? Kissinger evidently regards a stable world order as much more important and less dangerous than the turbulence which a policy lodged in straight-line morality can produce. It is only in such a world of balanced power that lasting higher good can be achieved. Stability, then, is a basic and worthy imperative in an imperfect world—a desirable end in support of which Kissinger once quoted Goethe: "If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter."

*continued on next page*

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8 THE BOSTON BOOK REVIEW

POLICY & POLITICS

[L]C

*continued from previous page*

indifference to issues of justice and morality. It is merely an unsentimental reaction to the state of the world and, as he asserts, the need "to navigate between necessity and choice, between the immutable constants of international relations and the elements subject to the discretion of statesmen." Ideals should not be easily abandoned, but it is more important to defend interests resolutely: "Wherever the balance is established between values and necessity, foreign policy must begin with some definition of what constitutes a vital interest—change in the international environment so likely to undermine the national security that it must be resisted no matter what form the threat takes or what ostensibly legitimate it appears." In short, Kissinger is skeptical of the roseate prospect that the idealist-moralist school of foreign policy envisions—enlightened values shared by most nations, the unifying appeal of peace and truth and fairness, and an international grid sustained by moral assurances instead of geopolitical balances.

Some of this affinity for realism is rooted in Kissinger's view of history and his European background. Tragedy is ever present. Frequent references scattered throughout his works make this point: "I believe in the tragic element in history" says Kissinger as Harvard student; "Europeans live on a continent covered with ruin testifying to the fallibility of human foresight" writes Kissinger as historian; "one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy" claims Kissinger as Secretary of State. Major choices in world politics are seldom between easily apparent rights and wrongs. More often, they are between greater wrongs and lesser wrongs. Such perceptions do not lend themselves to an upbeat and cheerful interpretation of happenings. They are more likely to induce a greater confidence in power balances and counterweights than in the moral nature of political man.

Realism as a pedestal for policy is difficult to refute. But in this day and age, so far removed from the atmosphere of just a generation ago, one wonders how directly relevant the experiences of the past can be. Diplomacy makes its case, especially the case for Kissinger's extrapolations, exceedingly well. The excitement and enthusiasm that his demarcative provokes obscures the possibility that both realist and idealist, reasoning by opposite analogy, could be well off the mark. The world of today, more so the world of tomorrow, seems to be a kind of oxymonic functioning anarchy—confused, illogical, disorderly, and simply too large to be organized around a consistent principle. For such a global condition we may have to devise a wholly fresh policy mix. Until this is done, however, Kissinger's formulations remain seductive and deserve careful consideration. After all, we cannot yet tell whether he is Canute confronting modern waters with a Platinum of history or whether he is the purveyor of timeless truths.

The Kissinger line, postulating balance of power and national interest, inspires another question: how does his prescription for foreign policy jibe with American tradition and how acceptable will it be to American public opinion? As Kissinger sees it, the sustained projection of the U.S. into global affairs, an irreversible thrust that began early in this century, brought into being two markedly contrasting responses. One was manipulative, the other mezzo-mansic. One saw foreign policy in terms of power and the enhancement of national security and interests, the other saw the world in terms of principle and the struggle between good and evil; one resonated to the ethic of realism, the other pulsed with idealism and moral fervor.

about the purposes of American foreign policy. Kissinger himself is foursquare in the track that runs from Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. It is both thought and action that places him there, as accounts of his stewardship in the Nixon and Ford Administrations indicate. This segment of Diplomacy, consisting of about 100 pages or less than fifteen percent of the book, illustrates how the Secretary of State and his Presidents acted upon principles of equilibrium and national interest in momentous matters—Vietnam, the Middle East, China, the Soviet Union and other tests. The specifics of these situations are, of course, elaborated with much vehemence in Kissinger's memoirs published over a decade ago. Their inclusion here appears to have more to do with reinforcing the wisdom of a strategy than with personal vindication—an approach his detractors would not expect from Henry Kissinger.

As Kissinger well knows from his sojourn at the State Department, the absence of public support starships the execution of policy. How, then, in a democracy that resents its means and style, is a policy of geopolitical realism to be made welcome? Kissinger suggests that education of the people by their leaders is a possible answer. This is not an easy task, as Theodore Roosevelt knew: "If I should advocate all that I myself believe, I would do no good among our people, because they would not follow me. Our people are short-sighted and they do not understand international matters." It requires a level of popularity and trust which few presidents enjoy—where TR failed Richard Nixon could hardly hope to succeed. And even FDR, whose appeal was enormous and who was both lion and fox, met great

social idealism, which is the fount and sustenance of a moralist worldview, appears to be succumbing—driven from young minds by a kind of hard-headed ruthlessness forged in the streets and the money markets. As the next generation comes of age, this "realism" will surely saturate, if not dominate, attitudes to society and to the world. But would even the most cold-blooded enthusiast of balance of power politics want a foreign policy run by the likes of Charles Keating or John Gotti? If the future of realism as public philosophy is bright, the luster of realism will fade.

Another social trend is likely to undermine classical foreign policy concepts. As America becomes more multicultural, either by migration or by sectarian consciousness, powerful ethnic and other interest groups are finding their voice in international affairs. The notion of national interest then becomes more complex—difficult, if not impossible to define. The consensus, which is its pedestal, is then demolished. Such perplexities cannot be translated into coherent policy. Similar confusions could bedevil the idea of generalized morality, replacing it with multiple moralities which share few common meridians. Multiculturalism, then, can be an instrument that obsolesces the categories into which we have long placed foreign policy alternatives. So, indeed, maybe the entanglements of regionalism, ties which limit the deme of a nation's interests. Form and structure will not remain constant in world politics.

These are, however, thoughts for times far ahead. As America prepares to participate in creation of a global order—the third attempt in our century—we need all the intellectual energy we can garner. Diplomacy is a rich source of this vitality. Written with brio, it is full of wise insights—the outcome of intellectual scholarship conjured to extraordinarily experience. Above all, this book does two important things—it shapes a seminal debate about the current role of the U.S. in the world, and it signals the return of Henry Kissinger to the ring of high scholarship. Those who know Kissinger's past works—the numbers dwindle with the passage of years and the unwillingness of publishers to keep backlists—will be relieved that a life of celebrity has not dimmed the life of the mind. New readers will find in Diplomacy powerful ideas and the seeds of thoughtful controversy which is its natural outcome. These are ample reasons, and there are many more, to relish one of the most important contributions to thinking about foreign policy in our time.

> The interplay between leaders and their publics in a democracy is always complex. A leader who confines himself to the experience of his people in a period of upheaval purchases temporary popularity at the price of condemnation by posterity, whose claims he is neglecting. A leader who gets too far ahead of his society will become irrelevant. A great leader must be an educator, bridging the gap between his visions and the familiar. But he must also be willing to walk alone to enable his society to follow the path he has selected. There is inevitably in every great leader an element of guile which simplifies, sometimes the objectives, sometimes the magnitude, of the task. But his ultimate test is whether he incarnates the truth of his society's values and the essence of its challenges. These qualities Roosevelt possessed to an unusual degree. He deeply believed in America; he was convinced that Nazism was both evil and a threat to American security, and he was extraordinarily guileful. And he was prepared to shoulder the burden of the lonely decisions. Like a tightrope walker, he had to move, step by careful, anguishing step, across the chasm between his goal and his society's reality in demonstrating to it that the far shore was in fact safer than the familiar promontory.

From Diplomacy

largely in proportion to the degree and the intelligence with which a national interest-geopolitical strategy has been applied. The performances of all recent presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, are measured by this yardstick. An exception is Jimmy Carter, who gets less mention in this book than Henry Wallace, Henry Jackson or even Lavrentia Beria. Carter's influential adviser Bziginiew Brzezinski receives no recognition at all. Does the diminution of the impact of this chief executive reflect Kissinger's disectism for the idealist-moralist pathways of international relations? Perhaps he shares Theodore Roosevelt's disdain for "milk-and-water rightheousness." Yet, in policy content and style although certainly not in intellect, Carter stands closest to Wilson among modern presidents. This is a minor cilav. After all, Kissinger's judgments of American presidential performance are lodged in the midst of a splendid and magisterial history of high international politics in our century—passages of which must rank among the more profound compositions in this field.

At this point, however, Kissinger's policy statements run head-on into a peculiar and very American paradox. Rooseveltian realism can be functionally more effective, but not withstanding its operational limitations. Wilsonianism has captured the hearts of the people: "Wilson grasped the mainsprings of American motivation...[he] tapped his people's emotions with arguments that were as morally elevated as they were incomprehensible for foreign leaders...he knew how to move the American people." The realist may well point out that the ends of realism and idealism—peace, stability, progress, freedom—are similar, that it is

Here, in many ways, is the dilemma of Diplomacy. The course it upholds, superbly advocated and intellectually so well buttressed, is unlikely to obtain the full endorsement it must have among the American public. Yet, Kissinger contends that this same American public can be attuned to a kind of modified balance of power style of foreign policy—the management of “overlapping alliance systems, some focusing 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.” The idealism of American tradition can then be put in the service of a policy that accommodates contemporary realities—mature in the realization that every choice has its price, that balances have to be struck in a world where absolute solutions cannot be imposed.

The vulnerability of this proposition is not in concept, but in personnel. As Kissinger himself allows, today's leaders "rise to eminence by means of qualities that are not necessarily those needed to govern and are even less suited to building an international order." Where, in this civic environment, are we to find men and women with enough knowledge and sophistication to implement the policy Kissinger outlines? Those who have it are quite unlikely to be drawn to the commonwealth. There is another, although involuted, possibility. General

Ralph Buultjens, former Nehru Professor and Professorial Fellow at Cambridge University (U.K.), is the author of several books, and is Toynbee Prize Laureate and Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council. He teaches international politics in New York. □

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THE BOSTON BOOK REVIEW 9

BOOKS

All the Presidents' Man

Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger.

Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas,
New York, N.Y. US$35.

This is a textbook on realpolitik by the master of the craft himself. Not content just to make history, Henry Kissinger wants to ensure that the record is properly understood. Provocative, penetrating and self-serving, Kissinger's Diplomacy interprets Western diplomacy from the 17th century to the end of the Cold War, focusing its critical wrath on American idealism in the debate between "proponents of foreign policy as strategy and of foreign policy as crusade."

In 900 pages of analysis and advice, Kissinger, national security adviser and co-author with Richard Nixon of the dramatic United States opening to China and, later, secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford, argues that there are two main schools of foreign-policy thinking in the U.S.: idealism and realism.

President Woodrow Wilson, author of the Fourteen Points in 1918 and proponent of the League of Nations following World War I,

typifies the idealist: proclaiming the universality of American values and a commitment to propagate them around the world. His predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, hero in Cuba with his Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, represents for Kissinger the alternative, realist vision: a "European-style" pre-occupation with the balance of power and the national interest. Kissinger's interpretation of U.S. diplomacy from Wilson to President Bill Clinton, which makes up the heart of the book, is woven around an evaluation of these two themes.

A proponent of realism and power politics, Kissinger is critical, even sarcastic, about Wilsonian-type idealism and the notion of diplomacy "as a conflict between good and evil, and as a struggle on behalf of the free world." For example, commenting on an early State Department explanation that NATO was designed to influence not the balance of power but "a balance of principle," former Harvard professor Kissinger remarks: "No history graduate student would have received a

passing grade for such an analysis." Nonetheless, he acknowledges that "Americans could be moved to great deeds only through a vision that coincided with their perception of their country as exceptional," a "beacon" of freedom and democracy for the world.

Then came Vietnam. "With the enthusiasm of the innocent," the Eisenhower administration leaped to the defence of South Vietnam after the 1954 Geneva Conference, writes Kissinger, and later "inexperienced idealists in Washington" under President John Kennedy led the U.S. deeper into overextension and disaster. "America's rejection of national interest

as the basis of foreign policy had cast the country adrift on a sea of undifferentiated moralism," he concludes. America had to confront the gap between power and principle.

Anyone can guess the rest of Kissinger's Vietnam story. Realpolitik came to the rescue. Beseiged by "violent" anti-war demonstrators at home, President Nixon, coached by Kissinger, achieved a withdrawal from Vietnam "with honour" by playing communists against

communists. When the Soviet Union threatened to attack China in the summer of 1969, Nixon warned Moscow that the U.S. would not remain indifferent if they attacked ("perhaps the most daring step of his presidency"), and thus began the famous opening to China. "It marked America's return to the world of realpolitik," which was sustained through the Ford and Reagan administrations — one would hardly know that Jimmy Carter was president in between — culminating in the collapse of communism.

Kissinger's interpretation of Western diplomacy in terms of geopolitics is illuminating about the dreams and deceptions of post-World War II U.S. foreign policy, but in the end, an analysis of political power alone is not enough. The pursuit of power as "national interest" was not sufficient, as Kissinger notes, to motivate the American people to support major U.S. initiatives abroad. And an analysis of relations among nations, both then and now, that conceives of foreign policy simply as the self-interested pur-

suit of power is not enough to explain why states cooperate as well as confront each other in the post-Cold War world.

Especially notable in Kissinger's single-minded treatment is a lack of consideration of the growing web of global economic relationships (trade, investment, foreign assistance and technology transfer) that binds all countries of the world together in patterns of growing interdependence.

Also ignored by the guru of realpolitik are the communications revolution and transnational ties among environmental campaigners, multinational corporations, peace groups and human-rights activists that have begun to shape international relations in new ways. Finally, the diplomacy of non-Western countries, with the brief exception of China, is barely mentioned at all.

Warily picking a path among the dangers and the opportunities in today's world after communism, Bill Clinton and other leaders are obviously confused about the possibilities. Kissinger describes the lowest common denominator, the pursuit of political power. Learning from the limitations of his vision, others will have to provide the imagination and the courage to attempt something better.

■ Peter Van Ness

Peter Van Ness teaches international relations and Chinese politics at the University of Denver.

HENRY KISSINGER
DIPLOMACY

Akbar on Ice

Indian Food: A Historical Companion

by K. T. Achaya.

Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford, U.K.
US$35.

Curry is India's greatest contribution to mankind, wrote Norman Douglas, British traveller and novelist. One assumes that Douglas's tongue was firmly planted in his cheek when he penned this assessment, but his comment hints at a wide range of opinion not only about the origin and preparation of curries but about Indian food — of which curries form only a small part.

Vegetarians in India have vigorously spread the idea that the majority of Indians shun meat and fish. To them, and to many non-Indians, K. T. Achaya reveals that Hindus, including Brahmins, ate beef in Vedic times and during many later centuries.

Communists and atheists have long known this, and used the fact to fight conservative Hindus who sought a ban on cow slaughter soon after India gained independence in 1947. The anti-cow-slaughter lobby won, except in West Bengal and

36

FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW

AUGUST 25, 1994

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AUC

Diplomacy

by Henry Kissinger

912 pp. illustrated, New York:

Simon & Schuster. $35.

Review by J. Peter Scoblic

Historically, debates on American foreign policy have centered around one problem: how to reconcile the often conflicting principles of morality and national self-interest. In *Diplomacy*, Dr. Henry Kissinger tries to resolve this classic conflict, as have many before him, but the depth of Kissinger's historical narrative and political insight lends *Diplomacy* more credibility than is due many of its predecessors. In discussing international relations, Kissinger begins by asserting that there has always been a fundamental policy difference between Americans and their transatlantic neighbors—Americans have

pursued idealistic goals, Europeans have followed a more realistic approach. While Europeans have recognized the utility and dominance of balance of power politics, Americans have long sought a loftier medium for global interaction. Kissinger posits that this opposition stems from a difference in root beliefs: Americans have traditionally expressed faith in the goodness of human nature, whereas Europeans have held the Hobbesian view that the ever-present potential for conflict among men validates and promotes the law of self-preservation.

Author William Faulkner best summarized the dis-

The Brown Journal of World Affairs
Spring 1994

399

Book Reviews

tinct nature of American optimism when he said, "I believe that man will not just endure: he will prevail."

To the modern eye it might seem that young America was naive in challenging the experience-derived philosophy of Europe. But in essence, the desire to part with the Old World ways and views of Europe was the rationale for forming the United States. It was this important concept to which Jefferson referred when he spoke of the United States removing itself from "the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe." Thus, from the moment of its birth, the United States has been driven by a sense of mission—a mission grounded in the belief that democracy is a superior form of government and that the path to global harmony lies in the proliferation of its founding principles. The fact that America was founded on specific core ideals and the fact that it was geographically removed from European conflicts distinguished

it from other nations, and this exceptionalism spawned two morally motivated approaches to foreign affairs, one isolationist and the other interventionist. By first serving as an inspiring "beacon on a hill" and later by actively promoting democracy abroad, U.S. foreign policy has consistently been geared toward reversing the destructive trend Americans have traditionally perceived in European balance of power politics.

In *Diplomacy*, Kissinger offers one fundamental criticism of American foreign policy: America's quest to apply the concepts of individual morality to global geopolitics has resulted in a tug-of-war detrimental to its security and its international efficacy. Kissinger points out that, though many Americans are ignorant of the fact, their application of missionary morality to the conduct of foreign policy is unique among the international actors. The patterns of conflict and cooperation that have characterized the realm of inter-

national severs been princi- law of

Kissinger, the Wilson, and other noti- tionals con- tinue to con- trol the poli- cy of a real, vol- umeable, and isolat- ed poli- cy. Like other in- ter- national role, poli- cy, con- cerns the vol- ume of poli- cy that is in- volved in an inter- national efficacy. Kissinger points out that, though many Americans are igno- rant of the fact, their appli- cation of missionary moral- ity to the conduct of foreign policy is unique among the international actors. The patterns of conflict and cooperation that have char- acterized the realm of inter-

400

Spring 1994

Book Reviews

national politics since the
seventeenth century have
been governed not by moral
principle but rather by the
law of self-interest.

According to Kissinger, the isolationism of the nineteenth century, Wilson's idealism, FDR's notion of collective security, and the implementation of containment during the Cold War all exemplify the excessive influence of morality on American foreign policy. Kissinger concedes that the U.S. has increasingly allowed the national interest to play a defining role in the formulation of policy, but he qualifies this concession by demonstrating the arduous process to earn public consent involved in each step toward realpolitik. Wilson was only able to pull the U.S. out of isolation by appealing to its sense of moral obligation. Likewise, FDR was only able to secure the U.S. a permanent international role by offering collective security as a more idealistic, and therefore more palatable, alternative to balance of

power politics. Leaders who
have tried to effect too dras-
tic a shift toward realist
foreign policy, like Theodore
Roosevelt and Richard
Nixon, have had their efforts
rebuffed. Thus, the success
of any given policy depends
not only on its content but
also on its presentation—
marketing is as important as
substance.

But why is Kissinger
making this criticism now
and, more importantly, what
is his recommendation for
the future? The answer to
the first question is rela-
tively obvious—the end of
the Cold War and the rising
prominence of countries like
Germany, Japan, and China
are forcing an evolution
toward a multi-polar global
structure. Such a dramatic
shift in the international
order requires a comparable
shift in policy. This fact was
recognized by President
Bush several years ago in his
attempt to forge a "new
world order," but Kissinger
expresses little faith in col-
lective security, illustrating
that the effectiveness of such
a system hinges on the rare

401

Book Reviews

conditions that the partici-
pants all agree on the nature
of the challenge and that
they are all willing to make
the same commitment to
diffusing that challenge
regardless of self-interest.
Kissinger unequivocally
advocates a shift toward a
realist approach, but he does
not support the unrestrained
pursuit of realpolitik.
Rather, he posits that the
most stable system is one in
which a flexible balance of
power relationship is
strengthened by a set of
common values, much like
Metternich's Concert of
Europe. Kissinger says,
"The balance of power in-
hibits the capacity to over-
throw the international
order; agreement on shared
values inhibits the desire to
overthrow the international
order." Thus, Kissinger
asserts that a successful
foreign policy lies in the
careful balance between
morals and geopolitics, a
balance that is difficult to
prescribe in the abstract, but
nevertheless extremely im-
portant. The absence of
such an equilibrium results

in the familiar conflict over
policy which, in turn, results
in inaction and ultimately in
security deflation.

The primary value of
this book lies not in the
novelty of its ideas, which
have been heard before in
academic circles, but rather
in the educational process
that it serves. Citing
America's traditional aver-
sion to balance of power
politics as the main obstacle
to reaching the desirable
foreign policy equilibrium,
Kissinger uses the geopoliti-
cal logic of *Diplomacy* to
counter the arguments of a
morally predisposed Ameri-
can public. He traces the
history of geopolitics from
Richelieu's raison d'état to
Bismarck's realpolitik and in
doing so, demonstrates the
success of leaders who ad-
hered to realist tenets rela-
tive to those who filtered
their national interest
through a moral code.
Kissinger also draws a com-
parison between balance of
power politics and the
microeconomic level of
America's free market eco-
nomic system whereby each

indi-
mor-
own-
ing t
pow-
ting t
the c
geol-
Kiss-
the n
cha-
any shift
ing i
land
cha-
and
pick
curi-
Kiss-
that
1970
tion
poli-
Am-
and
link
ful.
lost
the
nam
follo
lash
Thu
serv

402

Spring 1994

Book Reviews

individual furthers the common good by acting in his own self-interest. By narrating the history of balance of power politics and by putting a more familiar face on the concepts behind pure geopolitical interaction, Kissinger is trying to effect the necessary attitudinal change that must precede any major foreign policy shift. In this, he is attempting nothing less than the landmark foreign policy changes made by Wilson and FDR.

Of course, anyone picking up *Diplomacy* will be curious to read how Kissinger handles the years that he was in office. In the 1970s, the Nixon administration tried to forge a foreign policy more reliant on American national interest, and the result of this effort, linkage, was quite successful. Unfortunately, Nixon lost credibility because of the negative impact of Vietnam and Watergate, and the following years saw a backlash of moral idealism. Thus *Diplomacy* in part serves as a follow-up to

Nixon's policies. Conceding his obvious partiality on the subject, Kissinger refrains from grappling with many of the over-debated questions that Vietnam raised, but he nevertheless attempts to vindicate the actions of Nixon and himself by using Vietnam as a perfect illustration of the foreign policy problem to which *Diplomacy* is geared. Kissinger explains that the U.S. initially became involved in Vietnam to maintain the Asian balance of power by preventing a communist takeover of the South, a formidable task in and of itself. However, in order to be consistent with its domestic values, the U.S. felt it necessary to try to create a democratic government in the South even though Vietnam had no tradition of pluralism -- this extraneous effort reduced the effectiveness of U.S. intervention.

In *Diplomacy*, Kissinger reasserts himself as America's premier realpolitician. But in addition to confirming the realities of balance of power

403

Book Reviews

politics, he also acknowl-
edges the considerable obsti-
nacy of American idealism.
As nations become more
interdependent and as
America's economic and
military power experiences
relative decline, the U.S. will
be ill-served by a morally
derived isolationism or
interventionism, but
Kissinger points out that
"[a] country with America's
idealistic tradition cannot
base its policy on the bal-
ance of power as the sole
criterion for a new world
order." Indeed, columnist
Charles Krauthammer once
wrote, "There is no stomach
and very little tolerance in
the United States for a for-
eign policy of realpolitik.
The strain of American mor-
alism—whether it energizes
an expansive international-
ism or a self-righteous isola-
tionism—is simply too pow-
erful." However, the educa-
tional and analytical quality
of *Diplomacy* combined with
the prominence of its author
constitutes a formidable
attempt to overcome the
classic American distaste for
balance of power politics.

Realistically, it is be-
yond the capabilities of any
single book to divert Ameri-
can foreign policy to a more
geopolitically conscious
track, but *Diplomacy* can
certainly be classified as the
definitive work on balance
of power politics. The logic
and the topicality of this
book represent an appropri-
ate summation of Kissinger's
career ideology, and while
*Diplomacy* will not convert
the American public, it may
indeed serve as a sort of
latent catalyst for future
policy change. Ⓐ

(C
TI

by
57
Si.

Re

ing
wear
and
why
War
peacenece
disob
long-
betwe
and t
ututed
plom
flicts
tion h
plex a
the sin
Cold V
gious
spread
nuclea

404

The Brown Journal of **World Affairs**

Spring 1994

Kissinger on U.S. foreign policy

By Thomas P. Ostrom

Thomas P. Ostrom is
professor of
anthropology,
geography and history
at Rochester
Community College.

Another View

Henry Kissinger served as assistant for national security affairs and later as secretary of state for the Nixon administration in the 1970s. Kissinger emigrated from Nazi Germany and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He then earned a doctorate from and taught at Harvard University.

Kissinger's expertise is diplomatic history. He earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for his part in ending the Vietnam War, but participated in the formulation of strategy in that war through both Nixon administrations. Kissinger brings all that experience to his latest book, "Diplomacy" (Simon and Schuster, 1994, 912 Pages, $35.), a voluminous and scholarly work surprisingly balanced and objective given his direct participation in many of the events discussed. The first half of the book covers the last four centuries of Euro-American history. The last half covers world affairs up to the present, including the Clinton administration.

Especially interesting are Kissinger's observations about the characteristics of the major foreign and domestic leaders he dealt with. The professor's main thesis seems to be how foreign policy has been crafted in the vortex of a heterogeneity of domestic and foreign, political and moral (ideological) consideration. These complex factors hinge on balance of power considerations, and what historians call "Realpolitik."

The United States, writes Kissinger, has especially been buffeted by the tensions between idealism and limits to power, and between national self-interest and cooperation with international alliances and organizations. This is well illustrated by President Clinton's policies (or lack thereof) toward Bosnia, Haiti, Africa, the People's Republic of China and North Korea, and covering everything from trade, human rights and the threat or use of military forces.

Four of the author's 31 chapters deal with Vietnam. The last three chapters

consider detente with the Communist bloc, the end of the Cold War, the post-Cold War "New World Order," and observations about the policies of Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton. Since Kissinger's book was published, even Li Peng, premier of the People's Republic of China, has called for a New World Order based on Chinese principles to end post-Cold War political tensions. Among Li's suggestions: Mutual respect and noninterference in the internal affairs of other nations. This is probably a response to the feeble Bush-Clinton attempts to lecture China on human rights, while threatening and backing off trade sanctions. Li Peng said China will never practice "aggression or expansion in any form." That statement ignores China's increased military presence in the disputed Spratley Islands of the South China Sea, and her brutal suppression of Tibet.

Kissinger expressed strong admiration for several statesmen in history: Richelieu, "the father of the modern state (nation) system"; Bismarck, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and, to Kissinger's own surprise, Reagan — "who knew next to no history" but developed "a foreign policy of extraordinary consistency and relevance." Margaret Thatcher stimulated Dr. Kissinger's admiration as well, but the author devoted surprisingly little space to the "Iron Lady."

In spite of Kissinger's affection for the concept of national self-interest, he

is somewhat inconsistently enamored with the emerging European Community (union). The author has advice for future leaders: The United States must maintain its involvement in international affairs, but cannot expect to dominate; overlapping alliance systems for defense and trade must be nurtured; Russia must be integrated into the international system; and NATO must be the underpinning of European cooperation and stability, but block historic Russian expansionism.

The statesman-historian does not seem to think too much of the United Nations, about which Nixon observed, "one-third of whose members have populations smaller than the state of Arkansas."

Kissinger's Vietnam chapters are riveting and often emotional, given his involvement in Indochinese policy-making. His passion was evidenced in a recent New York Times editorial response to syndicated columnist Anthony Lewis who blamed the United States more than North Vietnam for the prolongation of the War: "If Mr. Lewis' knowledge matched his passion he would know only one issue prevented an earlier settlement: (Hanoi's insistence) that the United States overthrow the South Vietnamese political structures put in place by the Kennedy-Johnson administrations." And, "It was Hanoi, (not Mr. Lewis' nation) that is responsible for the death of (South Vietnamese and) U.S. servicemen."

On Clinton: "This administration has not been able to distinguish between professorial concepts and foreign policy." Kissinger has contributed to both. America's diplomatic weakness: "America's rejection of national interest has cast the nation adrift in a sea of undifferentiated moralism."

Former Secretary of State Kissinger dedicated his book "to the men and women of the Foreign Service of the United States of America, whose professionalism and dedication sustain American diplomacy."

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
cannot change it. What we can change is
the future; but the way to a better fu-
ture requires an unsentimental and
accurate understanding of what hap-
pened in the past, and why. A more civil
and humane modernity will not be
achieved by tendentious misreadings of
antiquity.

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-
nected, 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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Modern Editions of Classic Works
for Today's Readers

EDUCATION AND THE STATE

A Study in Political Economy

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By E. G. West

Foreword by Arthur Seldon

A major accomplishment.

—Milton Friedman

Education and the State

reeamines the role of government
in education and challenges the
fundamental statist assumption
that the state is best able to provide
an education for the general
population. West examines the
arguments of nineteenth-century

British reformers and demonstrates that the state system of education in nineteenth-century Britain was superimposed over successful private efforts, thereby suppressing an emerging and increasingly robust structure of private, voluntary, and competitive education funded by families, churches, and philanthropies.

**Education and the State** addresses as well the
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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 fre-
quently. (Simon Schama recently point-
ed out that Richelieu only mentioned
raison d'état twice in his "Political Testa-
ment"; 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 princi-
ples, 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 mon-
ster; 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-
missionary 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 Real-
ism 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 hap-
pened 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 Hasserner 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 "idealismand "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 naïve 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

Necropolis News

By ANDREW DELBANCO

The Waterworks
by E.L. Doctorow

(Random House, 253 pp., $23)

Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution:
Selected Essays, 1977-1992
by E.L. Doctorow

(Random House, 206 pp., $20)

Everybody's favorite stage set this year has been old New York. It first turned up in Martin Scorsese's movie of *The Age of Innocence*, which made viewers feel as if they were inside a meticulously accurate diorama of Edith Wharton's fashionable Manhattan in the 1870s. Then Caleb Carr enlarged the set for his murder mystery of the 1890s, *The Alienist*, to include the haratives and the dark alleys where Wharton's grandees would never venture. Now E.L. Doctorow has returned to the immediate post-Civil War period for his own New York tale.

If the setting of *The Waterworks* is similar, Doctorow's way of representing it is entirely different. This is a writer who— ever since the first chapter of his first book, *Welcome to Hard Times* (1960), in which we meet a character known simply as "the Bad Man"—has been committed less to realism than to a kind of allegorical romance. Descended from the line of American fabulists that runs from Hawthorne to Malamud, Doctorow has always disavowed what Hawthorne (referring to the conventional fiction of his day) dismissed as "minute fidelity ... to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience," in favor of a more imaginative "latitude ... to mingle the Marvellous" with the real.

Late in *The Waterworks*, Doctorow sums up the dream effect he is after:

> There are moments of our life that are something like breaks or tears in moral consciousness, as caesuras break the chanted line, and the eye sees through the breach to a companion life, a life in all its aspects the same, running along parallel in time, but within a universe even more confounding than our own. It is this other disordered existence ... that our ministers warn us against ... that our dreams perceive.

To catch this "disordered existence" in fiction, the logic of the work must be more associative than sequential. Accordingly, the speech of the narrator is continually interrupted by ellipses that give his sentences a fractured quality and seem to represent a habitual pause—a hesitancy to deliver consecutive thoughts. "There is a difference," he remarks, "between living in some kind of day-to-day crawl through chaos, where there is no hierarchy to your thoughts, but a raucous equality of them, and knowing in advance the whole conclusive order ... which makes narration ... suspect." Yet, at the same time, a fiction that takes seriously this suspicion must commit itself to achieving something like the fluent exfoliation of images that one expects from poetry.

In the case of Doctorow's new novel, the images are those of a city closer to one of Red Grooms's cartoonish ensembles than to any actual New York. Doctorow calls this city a "necropolis." Its "paving stones pound ... with horsedroppings," while carrion birds swoop in between the carts and carriages, "picking out their meals" from the dung. Wooden remnants of the antebellum town are being literally burned away ("we had fire all the time, we burned as a matter of habit") and replaced by the city of iron and stone that survives today in patches of cast-iron buildings, mainly below Houston Street. This New York was already the "huge jagged city" that Henry James would describe at the turn of the century as "... looking at the sky in the manner of some colossal haircomb turned upward and so deprived of half its teeth that the others, at their uneven intervals, count doubly as sharp spikes."

This is the gothic setting for a story that, briefly told, sounds outlandish. It

begins with a tycoon named Augustus Pemberton, who grew rich during the War of Secession by abetting death itself—by “supplying the Army of the North with boots that fell apart, blankets that dissolved in rain, tents that tore at the grommets and uniform cloth that bled dye.” Under sentence of death from pernicious anemia, he tells his family that he is going to an Adirondack spa to seek a cure. There he—apparently—dies. With due Episcopal ceremony, he is seemingly buried. But his estranged son, a free-lance journalist—one “of that postwar generation for whom the materials of the war were ironic objects of art or fashion,” who “walk[s] down Broadway with his Union greatcoat open, flowing behind him like a cape”—thinks he sees his father alive.

The startled young man, Martin Pemberton, is one of those whom Whitman had in mind when he wrote, in 1870, that "the aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of." A believer turned ironist, he produces caustic book reviews and half-fawning, half-mocking articles for the society page in which he enumerates the carats in the ladies' diamonds. Now, suddenly, he becomes the credulous object of scorn, surrounded by doubters. One stormy morning, while on his way up Broadway to deliver a review, he encounters a city omnibus carrying a group of pale old men who sit eerily still, oblivious to the lurches of the carriage and the bursts of lightning and the pedestrian shouts and traffic gongs. Peering in the carriage windows at its ghostly passengers, he sees that one of them has "the familiar hunch of his father's shoulders ... and the wizened Augustan neck with its familiar wen, the smooth white egglike structure that from Martin's infancy had always alarmed him."

Most people dismiss Martin's report as fantasy or hoax, though a few take him seriously and even grope toward an explanatory idea of the Oedipal unconscious (everyone knows he loathed his father) to account for his delusion. When Martin himself disappears, his soft-boiled editor, McIlvaine—whose "newsman's cilia [are] up and waving" at the smell of a good story—joins the chase to find out what, if anything, his young free-lance has really seen.

After some further twists and turns the road of detection leads to a Mephistophelian character named Doctor Sor torius, who is a cross between one of Hawthorne's mad scientists and one of Poe's reclusive aesthetes. Ahead of Pasteur and Koch, he has intuited the germ basis of disease. He has transfused blood and is preparing to perform organ transplants. We discover him deep within the massive stone structure of the water-

44 THE NEW REPUBLIC JULY 18 & 25, 1994

AUG 1 1 REC'D

August 10, 1994

Dr. Henry Kissinger
350 Park Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10022

Dear Dr. Kissinger:

I came across this review on a trip to Buenos Aires. It's
very positive. It opens by saying that "Henry Kissinger has
finished publishing the most important of his books."

The highlighted passage states that "It is much better for a
statesman to know how to play the chess game of power, even
if his motivations may be reproachable, than for one who is
driven by the best of intentions but whose blunders lead him
to produce the opposite of the good he aspired to."

I don't recall if that passage is in the book, or if the
reviewer is paraphrasing you.

Pág. 10/LA NACION

Notas

Domingo 7 de agosto de 1994

La semana internacional

Camisa de once varas

Henry Kissinger acaba de publicar el más importante de sus libros. En *Diplomacia*, Kissinger estudió la evolución de las relaciones internacionales durante los últimos cuatrocientos años; desde el cardenal Richeley hasta Bill Clinton (ver Henry Kissinger, *Diplomacy*, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994, 912 Págs.).

A cada paso, Kissinger deja ver una idea central en torno de la cual organiza el relato de los aciertos, ambiciones y tragedias que han acompañado al hombre moderno desde el siglo XVII hasta nuestros días. Esa idea podría resumirse con este modo: lo que importa, en definitiva, es la inteligencia.

Sean cuales hayan sido sus principios, sus convicciones o sus ambiciones, los estadistas podrían ser clasificados, según Kissinger, en dos categorías: aquellos que calcularán correctamente el poder del cual

Es mucho mejor un estadista que sepa jugar el ajedrez del poder, aun cuando sus motivaciones finales sean reprobables, que otro habitédo por la mejor de las intenciones, pero cuya torpeza lo lleva a producir lo contrario del bien que pretendía

disponían y lo usaron, por lo tanto, en forma adecuada, y los que cayeron en ilusiones o delitos por los cuales ellos, sus pueblos y a veces la humanidad centeran pagaron un alto precio.

Kissinger no le importa tanto la bondad de los estadistas sino su inteligencia. Para el sistema internacional, para los pueblos, para la paz, es mucho mejor un estadista que sepa jugar el ajedrez del poder, aun cuando sus motivaciones finales sean moralmente reprobables, que un estadista habitado por la mejor de las intenciones cuya torpeza, cuya misión, lo llevan, al fin, a producir lo contrario del bien que pretendía.

Kissinger ofrece innumerables ejemplos para avalar su tesis. Porque supieron medir con exactitud lo que podían hacer y lo que está más allá de sus posibilidades, estadistas como el austríaco Metternich y el francés Talleyrand construyeron una paz de cien años al día siguiente de la derrota de Napoleón en Waterloo, en 1815. El contrasté moral entre el leal Metternich y el inescrupuloso Talleyrand, empero, no podría ser más agudo. Eso sí: ambos eran superlativamente inteligentes.

Porque supo realizar lo posible -la unidad alemana-, pero se detuvo ante

VILLARREAL.

Carlos Menem y Guido Di Tella

lo imposible -el predominio aleman en el mundo multipolar del *balance de poder* que regenteaba Gran Bretaña-, Otto von Bismarck exaltó a su país sin condenarlo a la repuerta de sus vecinos entre 1862 y 1890, prolongando así la larga paz iniciada en 1815.

En el otro extremo, el kaiser Guillermo II que expulsó a Bismarck del gobierno a dos años escasos de su propia coronación, se ufanaba con las apariencias. Quería una Alemania dominante, temida y temible. Lo que logró fue aislar a su país en virtual del terror de sus vecinos, precipitar la guerra y combatir en dos frentes en 1914. Pero sus vencedores, al modelar la utópica paz de Versailles, en 1919, lograron, también por falta de realismo, lo opuesto de lo que pretendían.

Humillaron a Alemania por reparticiones de guerra impagables y cenjamaciones territoriales, pero al permitir el desmembramiento del imperio austríaco en varios fragmentos impotentes (Austria, Checoslovaquia, Yugoslavia, Hungría...) eliminaron una gran valía de contención, tentando a Alemania a tomar una porción las pequeñas naciones que la rodeaban. Dejaron a Alemania, en suma, ofendida y poderosa. El resultado sería Hitler, el Holocauso y la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Kissinger encuentra otros ejemplos para ilustrar su idea en la política exterior norteamericana. El contrasté es aquí entre Teodor Roosevelt, que gobernó entre 1901 y 1909, y Woodrow Wilson, que lo hizo entre 1913 y 1921. Roosevelt era un descarnado realista. Su lema fue, como se recuerda: "Ha-

bla bajito, sonrié, pero lleva en la mano un garrote". Roosevelt comprendió el papel que desempeñaban los Estados Unidos en el mundo y dio los pasos adecuados para concretarlo. Wilson era, al contrario, un idealista. Su sueño fue construir un mundo "seguro para la democracia". Ese fue el designio detrás de la creación de la Liga de las Naciones, en 1919. Finalmente, su propio país lo rechazó, refugiándose otra vez en el aisladonismo, mientras la Liga de las Naciones exhibitó su importancia frente a las aventuras geopolíticas de Hitler, Mussolini y Stalin, que desembarcarían en la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

La desmesura argentina

El análisis de Kissinger se apoya en Maquiavelo. Lo que debe saber un príncipe, por lo pronto, es jugar al ajedrez del poder. Los errores de cálculo tienen consecuencias incompablemente más graves que la falta de conciencia. Si queremos agregar a Maquiavelo y a Kissinger una perspectiva moral, aun así es preciso el ajedrez. Ambos autores exigen, en suma, un alto contenido de profesionalidad a las decisiones estatales. Si el ajedrez conduce a un resultado molecularmente encomiable, tanto mejor.

En estos momentos, los círculos diplomáticos discuten intensamente si la Argentina, al ocupar posiciones altamente visibles en crisis tales como la Guerra del Golfo en 1991 o la prevista invasión a Haití en estos momentos, no ha excedido sus propias posibilidades de acompañar esa política exterior en cierta forma altoslande con una red de poder y de segu-

ridad que compense sus eventuales riesgos.

Se podrían distinguir, en tal sentido, dos etapas en la historia de nuestra diplomacia. Entre 1889 y 1941 se ve una Argentina económicamente próspera y militarmente fuerte que logra ejecutar con realismo un objetivo exterior bien definido: contener, demorar el avance de los Estados Unidos hacia el sur de América en cumplimiento de un "destino manifiesto" hegemónico que tuvo por principal promotor, precisamente, a Teodor Roosevelt.

Episodios tales como la oposición de los delegados argentinos Roque Sáenz Peña y Manuel Quintana al impulso *panamericana* de los Estados Unidos en el Congreso de Washington de 1889, o inclusive la política neutralista del presidente Yrigoyen en la Primera Guerra Mundial de 1914-1918, entran dentro de este esquema. En esos tiempos, la Argentina se apoyaba en Europa y particularmente en Gran Bretaña para frenar el expansionismo norteamericano en nuestro continente. La geometría, el ajedrez de ese designio, era viable.

Por inercia, empero, la Argentina siguió fiel a la política de apoyarse en alguna potencia europea para frenar en el tiempo la invasión de los pascado esplendor, empezó a morder más de lo que podría comer.

Cuando la Argentina se empeñó en seguir siendo neutral en la Segunda Guerra Mundial con el débil presidente Ramón S. Castillo, por ejemplo,

ignoraba la creciente capacidad de presión de los Estados Unidos que habían sido heridos y ofendidos en Pearl Harbour a fines de 1941. La desmesura continuó desapuntar con la grandilocuente *tercera posición* del presidente Perón, y llegó al extremo cuando el presidente Galtieri desafió a Gran Bretaña, los Estados Unidos y la NATO al invadir las islas Malvinas, en 1982.

El debate de hoy sobre la política exterior argentina podría formularse, entonces, en estaifa: al enviar las naves al golfo, al proclamar *urbi et orbi* las "relaciones carnales" con los Estados Unidos, al ponersé en la primera fila en la condena de Cuba y en la invasión de Haití, apartándose en todos estos casos de la actitud discreta del resto de las naciones latinoamericanas, "no está cayendo la Argentina, otra vez, en la desmesura, en la falta de relación entre una política exterior altisonante y una muy limitada capacidad de resiliencia con suficientes resortes económicos, militares y de seguridad?"

La trampa del fundamentalismo

La bomba en la AMIA ha venido a subrayar trágicamente los riesgos que el hoy enciende la sistema internacional. Ninguno observador externo o interno ha dejado de suponer que de trás de este acto de crueldad y de barbara opera la fundamentalismo islamico que, en minoría hoy en Medio Oriente, en virtud de la paz entre Israel y los musulmanes moderados, habría optado por radicalizar su militancia en el terrorismo potencial como bien lo sabemos por experiencia, el terror magnífico el poder de los que han quedado en minoría.

La oliva de terror se expande, por otra parte, afuera del Medio Oriente y hace las capitales de Occidente, entre ellas Londres y Buenos Aires. Unos 12500 fundamentalistas se retuercan hoy en el estado de Wembley, aprovechando la ancestral tolerancia inglesa, para exaltar esta nueva verión de la guerra santa. Más de una mirada apuntada hacia el gobierno iraní, donde la ala radicalizada de Ali Khameneí-que se considera el auténítico sucesor del ayatollah Khomeini-se impone hoy alala moderada de Ali Rafsanjani. Aquí residiría el apoyo político central a los grupos radicalizados, ya sean ellos el tristemente célebre Hezbollah, del Libano, o los que operan con estruendo en Argelia y Egipto.

El gobierno argentino se encuentra en una posición delicada. La investigación del atentado en la AMIA potiría llevarlo en pocos días a algún

tipo de sanción contra la embajada de Irán en Buenos Aires; desde la exhumación de alguno de sus miembros hasta una medida extrema, como la ruptura de relaciones.

La preocupación oficial ante esta perspectiva deriva de unido a su miembros hasta una medida extrema, como la ruptura de relaciones.

Tampoco es, como Francia o Alemania, un gran comprador del petróleo iraní. Carece, en fin, de la eficiencia proverbial del Reino Unido en cuestiones de espionaje y inteligencia. A Irán le vendemos, no lecompramos. Nuestra escasa capacidad de represalias militares o económicas, y de inteligencia, nos convierte por ello en un blanco fácil para los planificadores del odio. El temor a la *tercera bomba*, como consecuencia, no deja de aumentar.

En el nivel del Gobierno, aparece entonces la urgencia de una doble tarea. De un lado, *bajar la visibilidad de una política exterior que, a la inversa de lo que decía Roosevelt, habla fuerte, pero no cuenta con gronde*. En Haití, por ejemplo, el lenguaje altisonante sólo logró concentrar las iras de la dictadura contra nuestra embajada, sin nada a cambio.

En el otro lado, es urgente replantear el sistema de seguridad. Todo esto es tarea del Gobierno. En cuanto a la sociedad como tal, la continuidad de los reinos de *segregación* de los blancos presentamente peligrosos que empezaron a aparecer (reclamación del colegio de la Salle contra la mudanza de la AMIA a su lado, retiro de ajedrecistas juveniles del turno organizado por la Sociedad Hebraica, movilización de vecinos contra la instalación de la embajada de Egipto en la calle Arroyo...) no haría otra cosa que debilitar nuestra imagen. Si dos bombas lograron hacernos menos solidarios, los planificadores del odio podrían interpretar esta señal como una invitación para seguir adelante.

Lo contrario ocurrirá si a un gobierno que muestre la capacidad de rectificarse logramos sumar una sociedad más y no menos solidaria ante el desafío del odio. Cuando el cuerpo revela su debilidad ante la invasión de un germen, éste se asienta y se multiparta, entonces, no es tanto el germen sino el cuerpo, cuya meta es recharzarlo.

Mariano Grondona

## SEMINAL WORK

Richmond, VA Times-Dispatch

July 3, 1994

# Kissinger Sees Where Foreign Policy Has Been, Must Go

DIPLOMACY, by Henry Kissinger; Simon & Schuster, $35.

Reviewed by
NELSON WIKSTROM

Diplomacy, by Henry Kissinger, a former Secretary of State and one-time member of the Harvard faculty, is a truly brilliant account of international diplomacy and relations from the 17th Century, when the renowned Cardinal Richelieu practiced his realpolitik, to the present, with somewhat greater attention devoted to the United States' experience. From the vantage-point of both a respected scholar and a seasoned practitioner, Kissinger provides the reader with an insightful and sweeping account of the general evolution of international politics, based upon the system of nation states, and a specific rendering of the diplomatic trials leading up to such milestones as the commencement of World War I and II, the onslaught of the Cold War, and the debacle of the United States in Vietnam.

Kissinger emphasizes that U.S. foreign policy has been shaped by the dual considerations of President Woodrow Wilson's concept of international morality and the advancement of democracy and human rights, and President Theodore Roosevelt's dictum of pursuing a foreign policy based upon the nation's self-interest. He notes that U.S. foreign policy-makers should always be mindful of American ideals, but that the advancement of these ideals needs to be tempered by the recognition of base national interests.

KISSINGER underscores that the U.S. has enjoyed, by and large, a remarkably successful record in terms of foreign policy, most notably laying waste to the challenges of Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan, and culminating in its Cold War victory over the former Soviet Union and its satellite regimes. Unlike the perspective of some "revisionist" scholars who have argued that the Soviet Union was destined to collapse owing to internal political-socio-economic difficulties, Kissinger forcefully maintains that the policy of containment over the long haul, because of the economic and military stress it

placed upon the Soviet system, played a crucial role in ensuring the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satrap allies.

Henry Kissinger

In a contrasting vein, Kissinger notes that the "disastrous crusade" of the United States in Vietnam was unfortunately undertaken because our policy leaders, driven by admirable political ideals, failed to take into account the limits of the nation in the rapidly changing world arena.

Adding to the luster and value of this work, Kissinger's recollections of his personal interactions with and consequent estimation of such grand world figures as Charles de Gaulle, Chou En-lai, Mao Tse-tung, Mikhail Gorbachev, and, of course, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He awards high marks to Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, and de Gaulle for their sense of historical perspective and canny diplomatic skills. Gorbachev is accorded his sympathies for ultimately being the unintended victim of his own policies, unable to control the earth-shaking political developments he set in motion that swept Soviet-style Communism off the world stage.

Kissinger bestows high praise

upon Nixon for overcoming his earlier "seige mentality" toward Communism and promoting a shrewd foreign policy marked by innovation, such as the historic episode of "opening up the door" to China, and a continued sensitivity to the nation's self-interest. He notes with amazement the ability of Reagan, an individual not known for his intellectual savvy, successfully to mobilize American public opinion on behalf of foreign-policy goals.

IN THE final chapter of his magnificent tour de force, Kissinger advances some caveats that should, in part, constitute the operating maxims of U.S. foreign policy. The latter, of course, should be framed within the context of American political ideals, tempered by an acute sense of the nation's economic and military limits and self-interest. Second, the United States should encourage the implementation of further democratic reforms in Russia (to be sure, a rather slow and cranky process), but

it should not identify itself too closely with any one political personality, as it tended to do during the Gorbachev era.

In addition, the United States should encourage and facilitate the goal of greater European economic and political cooperation. And, fourth, we need to continue our dialogue with China and not opt for a political divorce over the issue of human rights.

Diplomacy is a lengthy work of more than 900 pages, fascinating to read and intellectually worth every page. It is Kissinger's best written effort to date and constitutes a semi-nal discussion of diplomacy and international affairs, underscoring the human character and dynamics of international politics. It is one of those rare volumes that will more than stand the test of time and rapidly earn classic status.

■ Dr. Nelson Wikstrom is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at VCU.

07-27-94 12:12PM

TO KAI

P002

DIPLOMACY

Henry Kissinger

Simon & Schuster/912 pages/535

reviewed by JOSEPH SHATTAN

In 1968, a young and relatively obscure Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger published an essay entitled, "Central Issues in American Foreign Policy." Its basic argument was that the United States had to develop a new conception of its international role that somehow struck a balance between American idealism and European realism. "A sense of mission." Kissinger argued, "is clearly a legacy of American history. . . . But a clearer understanding of our interests can give perspective to our idealism and lead to humane and moderate objectives."

I would like to think that, even back then. Kissinger was planning to expand his essay into a major book. But events, as they say, intervened, and it is only now, a quarter-of-a-century later, that his book has appeared. Covering some three centuries of diplomatic history, *Diplomacy* is a rich and complex work. Its underlying theme, however, is no different from Kissinger's 1968 essay: the need to develop an American diplomatic tradition that is at once idealistic and realistic

Contrary to his public image, Kissinger is not an advocate of European-style power politics. To be sure, he is a close student and brilliant expositor of Europe's diplomatic history, and he may well harbor a sneaking admiration for the likes of Richelieu, Bismarck, or even Stalin, of whom he writes, "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." But

when, as Nixon's national security adviser, he met a living representative of Europe's diplomatic tradition, France's President Charles de Gaulle. Kissinger was genuinely taken aback. During the meeting, Nixon asked him to comment on de Gaulle's presentation:

> Foolhardily, for de Gaulle did not relish debating with assistants—or, for that matter, being in the presence of assistants—I asked how France proposed to keep Germany from dominating the Europe he had just described. Obviously, de Gaulle did not consider this query to merit an extensive reply. "*Par la guerre* (through war)," he replied curtly—a mere six years after he had signed a treaty of permanent friendship with Adenauer.

This kind of single-minded devotion to the national interest, Kissinger knows, is simply not compatible with America's character and institutions. But there is a

British variant of European power politics—the balance of power approach—that is considerably more benign than the Richelieu/de Gaulle/Stalin tradition. For the past 300 years, England has identified its own security with the existence of a balance of power on the Continent strong enough to deter—or defeat—any would-be conqueror. To secure the balance, writes Kissinger, "England switched sides or organized new coalitions against erstwhile allies in defense of the equilibrium. Its unsentimental persistence and self-centered determination earned Great Britain the epithet, 'Perfidious Albion.'"

The greatest twentieth century exponent of the British balance of power approach was Winston Churchill—hardly a statesman one thinks of as “perfidious.” Yet when he was criticized in the 1930s for being anti-German, Churchill neatly summarized the British balance-of-power tradition when he replied, “If the circumstances were reversed, we could equally be pro-German and anti-French.” Kissinger admires Churchill and believes that Britain’s self-chosen role of “balancer” did much to preserve Europe’s liberties. Nevertheless, he does not think that America could follow in England’s footsteps:

> The Palmerston/Disraeli method would require a disciplined aloofness from disputes and a ruthless commitment to the equilibrium in the face of threats. Both the disputes and the threats would have to be assessed almost entirely in terms of balance of power. America would find it quite difficult to marshal either the aloofness or the ruthlessness, not to mention the willingness, to interpret international affairs strictly in terms of power

In ruling out a foreign policy based on *Realpolitik* for America, Kissinger is undoubtedly correct. Reading his account of the crimes and follies committed in its name, I'm reminded of Nick the Greek's description of football: "A game invented by sons-of-bitches for sons-of-bitches." America's Founders had a similarly low opinion of European statecraft.

Joseph Shattan is a writer living in Silver Spring, Maryland.

The American Spectator

July 1994

68

Although they could play the game quite well when they had to, they preferred to have nothing to do with it. Indeed, until the end of the nineteenth century, writes Kissinger, "the foreign policy of the United States was to have no foreign policy."

Thus, when America finally developed a foreign policy tradition under Woodrow Wilson, it seems almost inevitable that it did so on the basis of principles diametrically opposed to Realpolitik. Where Realpolitik took it for granted that every state would strictly be guided by its own conception of the national interest. "Wilsonianism" believed that countries should cooperate in a League of Nations dedicated to "collective security": where Realpolitik was skeptical of democracy and thought that foreign affairs were best left in the hands of cosmopolitan elites. Wilsonianism believed that democracy and peace went hand-in-hand: where Realpolitik believed that national boundaries should reflect the balance of power. Wilsonianism repudiated the balance of power in favor of national self-determination.

Wilsonianism was a noble attempt to translate American ideals into practice: it was also a total screw-up. Disaster overtook it not, as is widely believed, because a guileless Wilson was snookered by the wily Europeans at the Versailles Peace Conference. The root cause of Wilsonianism's failure was its obviousness to the realities of power and its attempt to build a peace on the basis of collective security. As Kissinger explains it:

In the end, collective security fell prey to the weakness of its central premise—that all nations have the same interests in resisting a particular act of aggression and are prepared to run identical risks in opposing it. Experience has shown these assumptions to be false. No act of aggression involving a major power has ever been defeated by applying the principle of collective security.

Either the world community has refused to assess the act as one which constituted aggression, or it has disagreed over the appropriate sanctions. And when sanctions were applied, they inevitably reflected the lowest common denominator, often proving so ineffective that they did more harm than good.

Had European leaders merely paid

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lip service to Wilsonianism, while conducting their foreign policies along traditional balance of power lines, the doctrine of collective security would not have done much harm. The rise of Nazism would almost certainly have led Britain to conclude an alliance with France, and the two great European powers, acting in concert, might well have defeated Hitler early in his rule. But the great tragedy—and irony—of the post-World War I period is that while Wilson initially failed to convert Americans to his views, he succeeded all too well with the British. With the exception of Churchill and his circle, they had all been converted to Wilsonianism, and looked to the League of Nations rather than themselves for security. Thus, while France desperately sought an alliance and Britain's balance of power tradition virtually demanded it. British leaders placed their faith in "the public opinion of the civilized world" and—when that failed—in appeasement. A straight line links Wilson's Fourteen Points to Chamberlain's capitulation at Munich.

In the aftermath of World War II, however, American policy makers refused to draw the right lessons from the Wilsonian debacle. Instead of tempering their idealism with at least a dose of European realism, they took up the Wilsonian banner and, according to Kissinger, came to view foreign policy as a selfless crusade on behalf of freedom and democracy. As President Kennedy famously put it, we would, "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." These were stirring words, but as Kissinger coolly observes, "America's rejection of national interest had cast the country adrift in a sea of undifferentiated moralism." The result was Vietnam.

Unlike those critics of the war in Vietnam who ascribe our involvement to all sorts of sinister motives, Kissinger believes that it sprang from what was best in America—from our idealism, our optimism, and our willingness to help a beleaguered country fighting for its survival. He also thinks that the much-derided Domino Theory—according to which the defeat of South Vietnam would have started a

chain-reaction culminating in a communist East Asia—may have been essentially correct: "Singapore's savvy and thoughtful Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, clearly thought so, and he has usually been proven right."

What Kissinger deplores is that, having chosen to resist Communism in Southeast Asia, we drew the line at the wrong place. "The real question," he writes, "was not whether some dominoes might fall in Southeast Asia, which was likely, but whether there might not be better places in the region to draw the line—for instance, around countries where the political and security elements were more in harness, such as Malaya and Thailand." But America's idealism would not even allow us to pose the question:

> America's universalist tradition simply would not permit it to differentiate among the potential victims on the basis of strategic expediency. When American leaders invoked their nation's selflessness, it was because they genuinely believed in it; they were more likely to defend a country to vindicate principle than on the grounds of national interest.

This, then, is America's dilemma: Its values and ideals prevent it from adopting European traditions of statecraft, yet its own diplomatic tradition has repeatedly led to disaster. Is there not some third path, some middle ground between the demands of our conscience and the requirements of our situation?

Kissinger believes there is. Surprisingly, he does not find the solution to our dilemma in the policies of the Nixon administration. Nixon's foreign policy, he concedes, "veered too far in the direction of stressing what it perceived as America's geopolitical necessities." But Ronald Reagan's foreign policy got it exactly right.

That Kissinger should end up heaping praise on Reagan comes as a surprise even to Kissinger. "Reagan's was an astonishing performance," he writes, "and, to academic observers, nearly incomprehensible. Reagan knew next to no history, and the little he did know he tailored to support his firmly held

preconceptions.... Many of the historical anecdotes he was so fond of recounting had no basis in fact, as facts are generally understood."

But if Reagan was untutored, he was not uncomplicated. "The high-flying Wilsonian language in support of freedom and democracy globally was leavened by an almost Machiavellian realism.... The Reagan Administration dispensed aid not only to genuine democrats (as in Poland), but also to Islamic fundamentalists ... in Afghanistan, to rightists in Central America, and to tribal warlords in Africa." In a similar vein, "the postwar president most committed to building up America's military strength, including its nuclear capacity, stood at the same time for a pacifist vision of a world from which all nuclear weapons were banished."

It is this complexity, this union of opposites, that Kissinger finds so compelling. In his view, Reagan's policies not only won the Cold War; they also provide the model for a new tradition of American statecraft:

> At a time when America is able neither to dominate the world nor to withdraw from it... it must not abandon the ideals which have accounted for its greatness. But neither must it jeopardize that greatness by fostering illusions about the extent of its reach... American idealism needs the leaven of geopolitical analysis to find its way through the maze of new complexities.

This, of course, is just what Kissinger was arguing back in 1968. Already then, Kissinger had partied ways with other European émigrés, such as Hans Morgenthau or Hannah Arendt, who seemed to think that Americans needed to be taken firmly by the hand and taught the rudiments of political thought by their European elders and betters. By contrast, Kissinger realizes that while Americans have much to learn from Europeans, we have much to teach as well. In his own field—international affairs—he has done what immigrants to this country have always done: taken the best in their own tradition and blended it with the best in the American tradition to produce something—in this case, an approach to foreign policy—at once authentically American and genuinely cosmopolitan. ☐

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The American Spectator

July 1994

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Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

# Wilson als Sieger?

## Kissingers diplomatisches Denkgebäude

Henry A. Kissinger: Die Vernunft der Nationen. Über das Wesen der Außenpolitik. Aus dem Englischen von Matthias Vogel, Lektoratsbüro Bonn, unter Mitarbeit von Wolfgang Astelbauer, Klaus Blöcher, Ina Breuning, Manfred Knoll, Udo Rennert und Peter A. Schmidt. Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1994. 1008 Seiten, Abbildungen, 78,- DM.

Die Außenpolitische Strategiedebatte der Gegenwart dreht sich um das Ende des Ost-West-Konfliktes und die Zukunft der neuen Weltordnung. Wie kam das eine zustande, wie soll die andere aussehen? Brachen Ostblock und Sowjetunion zusammen, weil der Westen sie zu Tode gerüstet oder weil der Kommunismus sich als unfähig erwiesen hatte, die Forderungen seiner Bürger nach Freiheit, nach Wohlstand zu erfüllen? Worauf soll demnach die neue Weltordnung sich gründen, auf Demokratie und Marktwirtschaft, wie es Präsident Clinton verkündet, oder auf die Nato-Entweiterung und auf Krisenreaktionsstreitkräfte? Ratlosigkeit und Verzweiflung angesichts so vieler Bürgerkriege in der Welt zeigen, daß die großen Fragen des internationalen Systems keinesfalls beantwortet, die Bausteine einer neuen Weltordnung noch nicht diskutiert, geschweige denn gefunden worden sind. Sie werden aber darüber entscheiden, ob die Welt das 21. Jahrhundert in einer besseren oder in einer schlechteren Verfassung betritt, ob es ein Jahrhundert welf politischer Ruhe oder er globaler Konflikte werden wird. Macht und Rivalität sind dauerhafte Stoffe, aus denen die Geschichte Muster der Gewalt webt.

Wenn sich zu diesem Thema jemand äußert, der die Qualität des Staatsmanns und des Historikers, des Politikers und des Wissenschaftlers, des Denkers und des Akteurs in einem solchen Maß vereinct wie Henry Kissinger, greift der Leser mit hochspanntem Interesse zu. Er wird nicht entäuscht. Kissinger verbindet die, Darstellung des internationalen Systems vom Wiener Kongreß bis zur Partnerschaft für den Frieden, von Metternich bis Clinton mit systematischer Reflexion über die Strategien, die diese Welt bewegt haben. Er bietet eine in den zahlreichen Einzelheiten gediegene, im Reichtum der Vergleiche bewunderrungswürdige, in der Durchmischung chronologischer mit systematisch-theoretischen Erörterungen hervorragende Problemstudie über die Weltpolitik. Dem Buch ist ein wichtiger Platz sicher in der andauernden großen Debatte zwischen Realismus und Idealismus, Gewalt und Recht, Gleichgewicht und internationaler Organisation, Diplomatie und Ideologie. In der amerikanischen Diskussion wählt das Buch zwischen den Strategien Theodore Roosevelt und Woodrow Wilsons - zwischen Amerika, dem Welthegemon, und Amerika, dem Stern, der der Welt zum Frieden durch Recht und Demokratisierung leuchtet.

Kissingers Vorliebe liegt eindeutig bei Roosevelt und der Diplomatie. Gleichgewicht der Kräfte und Realpolitik, Geopolitik und nationale Interessen sind seine leitenden Kategorien. Richelieu, Metternich und Bismarck haben sie erfolgreich angewendet. Der Leser, der Kissingers frühe Arbeiten kennt, weiß es - und kann das erste Drittel des Buches überschlagen. In der zweiten Hälfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts aber verschwimmen diese Leitlinien.

Was erhtet die Politik, wenn sie die Vereinigten Staaten nach Korea und wieder hinausbringt, wenn sie Vietnam dem Präsidenten Johnson als wichtig und seinem Nachfolger Nixon als unwichtig zeigt? Gewiß, man kann, wie Kissinger es am Schluß seines umfangreichen Werkes tut, auf die klassischen geopolitischen Thesen vom Herzland Rußland und damit auf dessen

Gefährlichkeit hinweisen; sie sind sozusagen enttauschungsfest. Nationale Interessen aber lassen sich daraus für Gesellschaften, deren Macht auf technologischer Innovation und innenpolitischem Konsens beruht, kaum mehr ableiten.

Dem Gleichgewicht ergeht es nicht besser. In den zwanziger Jahren wurden fast tausend Bedeutungen dieses Begriffs gezählt. Mehr als eine verbale Wegkreuzung, auf der sich Themen und Optionen verschieben lassen, ist er nicht. Andernfalls müßte Kissingers These, daß das amerikanisch-französische Verhältnis „den Schlüssel zum europäischen Gleichgewicht“ enthält, das Ende des europäischen Einigungsprozesses und das auch von Kissinger konstatierte amerikanische Interesse daran heraufführen.

Nein, mit der Begrifflichkeit des 19. Jahrhunderts kann auch Kissinger keinen Staat machen. Sein Thema ist die Realpolitik. Sie versucht nicht, allgemeine Prinzipien auf jede konkrete Lage anzuwenden, sondern eigene Interessen mit den allgemeinen abzustimmen. Realpolitik ist die „Außenpolitik, die auf Machtverwägungen und nationalen Interessen beruht“. Sie ist die bewegliche Diplomatie, das Gegenstück zu einer Politik, die unbeurbar idealen oder ideologischen Prämissen folgt.

Was heißt, hat Kissinger mit seiner Definition vom Gleichgewicht beschrieben: Jeder Staat muß sich mit jedem Staat verbinden können. Das hatte er 1972 praktiziert, als er zusammen mit Nixon die Isolierung China's beendete und die Entspannung mit der Sowjetunion begann, ohne auf deren ideologische Bekehrung zu warten. Kissinger setzt diese Pragmatik der Idealpolitik Wilsonscher Prägung entgegen, die Hitler gegenüber erst unter-, dann überreagiert habe. Mit seiner Forderung, die Strategie von der Ideologie frei zu machen, hat Kissinger der großen politischen Leistung, die er und Präsident Nixon mit dem Umbau des internationalen Systems zu einer die Entspannung ermöglichenenden Dreiëingfigur in den siebziger Jahren erbracht hatten, die theoretische Rechtfertigung geliefert.

Ideologische Außenpolitik ist unbeweglich und gefährlich: Das ist Kissingers stille Kritik an der amerikanischen Außenpolitik von Truman bis Johnson. Kissinger hätte die Stalin-Note von 1952 ernster genommen und sich nach dem Tod des Diktators mit Churchill für eine Auflockerung der Bundnisse ausgesprochen, die von John Foster Dulles statt dessen verfestigt wurden. Er kritisiert Eisenmans Desavouierung Frankreichs und Englands in der Suez-Krise, weil sie nur der Gerechtigkeit, aber nicht den westlichen Interessen gedient habe.

Unter solchen realpolitischen Gesichtspunkten führt Kissinger die Weltpolitik der Nachkriegszeit anhand ihrer wichtigsten Krisen brillant vor. Korea, Ungarn, Suez, Berlin und - in dieser Zeit - noch immer traumisch wirkende Vietnam-Intervention. Je näher die Analyse den siebziger Jahren kommt, um so mehr nehmen apologetische Elemente zu. Wer Kissingers Memoiren kennt, wird hier kaum neue Details, wohl aber none neu geordnete, stark kondensierte und deswegen leichter lesbare Darstellung der Vietnam-, China-, Rußland- und Europa-Politik der siebziger Jahre finden. Kissinger weist die „Linkage“-Politik nun als Erfolg aus, obwohl er sie als Akteur 1974 in Angola für gescheitert erklärt hatte. Solche kleinen Preise zahlt der Leser für die zeitliche Entfernung des Autors von den Einzelheiten, er verdankt ihr andererseits eine glänzend geschriebene Darstellung der amerikanischen Diplomatie. Nur die Makroanalyse erlaubt eine so bestehende Verbindung von Beschreibung, Erklärung und Bewertung.

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Politische Bücher

Seinerzeit um zwölf Uhr mittags; zwei Prinzipien sollten anschaulich gemacht werden
Kissinger (rechts) verkörperte die realpolitische Strategie in der Außenpolitik, Dean
Martin spielte den ideologischen Isolationisten. Hauptrolle, Drehbuch, Kostüm und Re-
gie, Kissinger.

Foto Keystone

Foto Keystone

Der erste Lehrsatz der Kissingerschen Realpolitik, daß Ideologie und Strategie entkoppelt werden müssen, verführt allerdings leicht zur Blindheit gegenüber der Bedeutung, die das Herrschaftssystem in der Strategie einnehmen müßte. Zu dieser Einsicht gelangt der Autor erst langsam, erst durch die Analysen der letzten Jahre des Ost-West-Konfliktss. Dessen Zusammenbruch paßt ja nun gar nicht in die Lehre von Geopolitik und Gleichgewicht. Sicher hat der Druck der amerikanischen Aufrüstung unter Ronald Reagan, wie Kissinger richtig schreibt, „zum Teil“ auch zum Zusammenbruch des Kommunismus beigetragen. Präsident Reagan genießt ohnehin die besondere Gunst Kissingers, weil er wie ein Idealist geredet, aber wie ein Realist gehandelt habe. Das Experiment des sowjetischen Kommunismus ist jedoch nicht an der westlichen Realpolitik, sondern an sich selbst zugrunde gegangen. Kissinger räumt konsequent die Möglichkeit ein, daß „die Lehren Wilsons“ triumphiert hätten.

Um das widerborstige Ergebnis vertreten
zu können, erinnert Kissinger daran, daß
auch die Ordnung des 19. Jahrhunderts
nicht nur eine realpolitische, sondern auch
eine idealistische Komponente hatte; es ver-
band Gleichgewicht und Legitimität. So
akzeptiert der Verfasser für die neue Welt-
ordnung den amerikanischen Idealismus,
will ihm freilich einen großen Schuß geopo-
litischer Analyse beimischen. Diese Synthe-
se klingt versöhnlich, aber reicht sie aus?
Die Bedeutung der Demokratisierung, auf

die schon Wilson aufmerksam gemacht, die
Carter neu betont und Clinton übernom-
men hat, wird von Kissinger nicht regi-
striert. Er nimmt nicht zur Kenntnis, daß
schon Carter und Brzezinski 1976 die Welle
der Demokratisierung durch die Welt lau-
fen sahen. Die Innenpolitik der von ihm be-
schriebenen Länder, selbst die in den Verei-
nigten Staaten, bleibt ausgeblendet. Daß,
beispielsweise, Ronald Reagan keineswegs
freiwillig und spontan nach Reykjavik fuhr,
sondern vor einem Kongreß flüchtete, der
ihm sonst die Abriistung per Gesetz vorge-
schrieben hätte, bleibt unerwähnt.

Für Kissinger ist Außenpolitik eben
nicht die Ausführung gesellschaftlicher
Forderungen, sondern die autonome Bear-
beitung geopolitischer und realpolitischer
Notwendigkeiten. Der Staatssmann muß
wie ein Pädagoge zwischen „seiner Vision“
und der Sicht seiner Wähler Brücken schla-
gen; folgt er ihr, stagniert die Außenpolitik,
vernachlässigt er sie, gerät er in die Isolie-
rung – ein Standpunkt, den Kissinger
schon in den fünfziger Jahren vertreten hat.

Aus solcher Sicht nimmt die Gesellschaft
nur die Funktion eines Resonanzbodens
der Diplomatie ein, nicht die des Urhebers
und des Adressaten der Außenpolitik von
Demokratien. Mit der „Vernunft der Na-
tionen“, wie die deutsche Ausgabe unver-
ständlicherweise heißt, hat Kissinger nichts
im Sinn. Seine Welt trägt das englische Ori-
ginal im Titel: Diplomatie.

ERNST-OTTO CZEMPIEL

## SEMINAL WORK

Richmond, VA Times-Dispatch

July 3, 1994

[ic]

Reviewed by
NELSON WIKSTROM

Diplomacy, by Henry Kissinger, a former Secretary of State and one-time member of the Harvard faculty, is a truly brilliant account of international diplomacy and relations from the 17th Century, when the renowned Cardinal Richeieu practiced his realpolitik, to the present, with somewhat greater attention devoted to the United States' experience. From the vantage-point of both a respected scholar and a seasoned practitioner, Kissinger provides the reader with an insightful and sweeping account of the general evolution of international politics, based upon the system of nation states, and a specific rendering of the diplomatic trials leading up to such milestones as the commencement of World War I and II, the onslaught of the Cold War, and the debacle of the United States in Vietnam.

Henry Kissinger

Kissinger bestows high praise

Diplomacy is a lengthy work of more than 900 pages, fascinating to read and intellectually worth every page. It is Kissinger's best written effort to date and constitutes a seminal discussion of diplomacy and international affairs, underscoring the human character and dynamics of international politics. It is one of those rare volumes that will more than stand the test of time and rapidly earn classic status.