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I have been struck by the difficulty in the contemporary period of forming reasonable historical judgments. In the nineteenth century communications between diplomats and their governments were very difficult, and it was therefore necessary for the governments to give rather conceptual instructions and for the diplomats to explain their philosophy. It was impossible for the participants at the Congress of Vienna, for example, to receive day-to-day tactical instructions on how they should conduct their affairs. Historians can therefore read the documents -- which are mercifully not all that plentiful -- and form some impression of what the various individuals wanted to achieve.

Today communication is instantaneous. There is no need to give an explanation of why certain things are being done. Instructions very often simply tell the diplomat what he is supposed to say at a particular session. Moreover, since the danger of leaks is overwhelming, anybody who wants to conduct a successful diplomatic career confines his communications to those practical instructions. One result is that an enormous amount of materials accumulates, that can be selectively leaked, that cannot possibly be studied by any one scholar. The instructions go out in so many different channels and in so many different forms of classifications that I daresay that it will be impossible for somebody who has not been a participant to determine what was crucial and what was peripheral; what was written to keep the bureaucracy quiet, and what was written to be implemented, what was written for purposes of later disclosure, and what was written in order to be really carried out.

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A second result is that the documents do not provide a reliable guide to the ideas and passions of the participants. This will make it terribly difficult for historians and statesmen of the future to use our records as we have used those of the past. Whether this will have a deleterious effect on statecraft remains to be seen, for the practice of diplomacy is not something that can be learned from texts -- historical or otherwise.

Foreign policy is a form of art and not a precise science, something that professors have great difficulty grasping. On the other hand, the conduct of foreign policy requires in each instance a recognition of comparable situations. We can talk forever about the "balancer of power" or "legitimacy" or the "impact of personalities," and yet as every new case arises, that knowledge will be empty if one does not understand what the elements of power are, how legitimacy is conceived, and what the impact of structure on events can be. That requires an intuitive feeling, which can be partly taught but which is partly indefinable.

The dilemma of the statesman is that he has to make a whole series of judgments that he cannot prove while he is making them. He has to deal with other unites (whatever they are called -- nations, regions, continents), that are not necessarily subject to his will, and he therefore has to strike a balance between the capabilities of the other parties and their intentions. A statesman can always escape his dilemma by assuming that the other party is always benevolent. If his judgment should turn out to be wrong, however, he may have to produce something irretrievable. Consequently, one of the purposes of statesmanship must be to restrict the significance of the other's intentions.

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In the abstract, it might appear that it is better to gear policy
to the capabilities of the other side rather than to its intentions.
Yet if this is carried to an extreme, it lead to a policy that seeks
empire or hegemony. The only way to be sure the other side is not
capable of harming you is to reduce it to impotence. Absolute secur-
ity for one side must mean absolute insecurity for all other sides.
For example, the debate that often goes on, over whether the purposes,
say, of the Soviet Union are defensive or offensive, could be beside
the point. The key question may not be merely whether a country feels
threatened, but what it takes to reassure it. If a country is only
reassured by the impotence of all its neighbors, then the trend of
its policies will be toward hegemony, whatever its motives may be.
Defensive motives can therefore lead to aggressive foreign policies.
Any statesman must strike a balance between capability and intention.
He cannot rely entirely on the goodwill of another sovereign state,
because that would be an abdication of foreign policy. He cannot
base his policies on physical preeminence alone, because unless he
is willing to establish a world empire, this will unite his enemies,
force him to adopt a cynical and dangerous policy of divide and rule,
and so forth. The structural problem of foreign policy is therefore
to try to guarantee the relative security and therefore also the rela-
tive insecurity of all the parties. Along with this, some common
sense of values must be found so that the participants will not attempt
to overthrow the international order.

The application of these priniciples depends on the conception
of a sovereign unit, on what the sovereign units are capable of doing
to each other, and on what these units want to do to each other. One

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tremendous change in the international system occurred at the time
of the change from the 18th to the 19th century, when the feudal or-
der broke down and the nation-state emerged. Every feudal ruler was
threatened, no matter how benevolently he governed, no matter what
his intentions were, because the concept of a legitimate political
unit had changed. The same was true at the end of the Colonial
period. It is clear that all these colnies did not feel oppressed
at every period in their history. A few thousand Britishers could
not possibly have colonized India without the support of a signifi-
cant proportion of the population. The change in values that made
colonialism appear intolerable was brought in part by the colonizers
themselves, and it must be recalled that the concept of an Indian
nation was unheard of in the 18th century. The ideas brought in by
the colonizers changed the concepts of legitimate authority, and there-
fore brought about a revolutionary situation for British rule in India.
The same is true in many other parts of the world. If there is a change
in the idea of a legitimate unit, you will automatically have a trans-
formation of the international system and a period of upheaval; this
is one of the problems of the contemporary period.

The second problem is what nations are capable of doing to each
other. In the 18th century, it was a matter of total irrelevance
whether China was hostile to the West or vice versa. There was no
means by which they could interact on each other in any consistent
manner. The technical capability for imposing the will of one region
on another simply did not exist. The various regions of the world
therefore conducted their foreign policy in virtual isolation from
each other, without even any real knowledge of each other. Totally
different styles of foreign policy were designed in the East and West.

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In Europe, foreign policy was based on a group of more or less equal sovereign states that balanced off each other's power. In Asia, foreign policy revolved around a hegemonial power, one country that dominated the whole region by its cultural and physical strength and which never had to think of balance of power as it was conceived in the West. And the conduct of foreign policy today, by China, for example, is quite different from that in the West.

Finally, any analysis of foreign policy must contain an evalua-
tion of other units' intentions: what do they _want_ to do to one
another?

The Era of Metternich

Any newsman who wants to write something moderately profound
mentions the enormous debt that I owe to Metternich. The unfortunate
problem for this theory is that I really wanted to write a book about
Bismarck, and I only started writing about Metternich as a counterpoise
to Bismarck in order to understand him. The discussion of Metternich
grew to so long, and I got drawn off into so many other things that I never
got around to finishing the Bismarck book, which is still half written.
So it simply isn't true that I was extremely influenced by Metternich,
who operated under quite different conditions. However, there are a
number of aspects to that period that I found fascinating. One is
that they managed to create an international system that lasted a
hundred years, which is a lot better than any of their successors.

Paradoxically, all of their successors said they were making permanent
peace and they were lucky if it lasted a generation. The people who
made peace at the Congress of Vienna thought they'd be lucky if it
lasted a decade, and it lasted a hundred years, which shows that states-
men are not always the best prophets.

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The Metternich period had many of the elements that reappeared in later periods. Hundreds of feudal states were being consolidated into larger, national units, which meant that all the traditional power relationships had to be adjusted both physically and conceptually. As always in revolutionary periods, the emerging new forms existed alongside the old ones. Furthermore, when Napoleon's invasion of Russia failed, the question of a major war emerged, because it suddenly became conceivable to defeat French hegemony.

The American approach to war has always been that war and peace are discrete elements of policy: that you fight a war, you defeat your enemy, and then you make peace and live happily ever after. The difference between this naive romanticism and the approach of the statesman at the end of the Napoleonic Wars is very striking. At the end of World War II General Bradley wrote in his autobiography, very scathingly, the British were obsessed with the Balkans and with southern Europe. "Of course there was no great military goal to be sought, but what they lacked in military goals they made up in political opportunity." -- as if there were something wrong with this, as if it were somehow sacrilegious to seek a political objective in a war. A problem emerged at the end of the Napoleonic Wars that was quite similar to the one that existed at the end of World War II. As the Russian armies entered Central Europe, they became the dominant factor in European politics; the more territory they acquired, the greater their ability to determine the shape of the settlement. At the end of the Second World War, virtually no attention was paid to this issue, and the post-war world has been profoundly affected by the decisions concerning the location of lines of demarcation and the exercise of political control in areas occupied by military force. It has taken us thirty years to establish

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some equilibrium on the continent of Europe, and even then it has
required the permanent presence of American forces to maintain the
equilibrium.

The chief actors at the Congress of Vienna would not permit
any military operations to be conducted without having some poli-
tical goals met. They did not fight a war for unconditional sur-
render, they fought a war in which Russia had to agree to some po-
litical structure as a price for military advance. In the post-war
period these agreements limited the Russian capacity to impose
their will. To be sure, this is not a very glorious way to fight
a war, but it has the significant advantage of linking the bargaining
that follows a war to the actions that occurred during it.

The second interesting aspect was the relationship between le-
gitimacy and equilibrium, between intentions and capabilities.
There was an attempt to create a moral consensus (on a moral basis
that would be quite unacceptable today) that united enough countries
in a common approach to give them each a stake in maintaining the
peace. There was a rather subtle solution to the German problem.
Germany has traditionally been either too strong or too weak for
the peace of Europe. When Germany was very weak, as it was in the
16th, 17th and 18th centuries, it tempted invasions from all sides.
When it was very strong, it was tempted to attack all of its neigh-
bors. A Germany strong enough to defend itself against all of its
neighbors simultaneously was strong enough to defeat each of them
singly. Therefore, it had a tendency to produce an armaments
race by its very existence, quite apart from its intentions.
In the period between 1815 and 1860 a loose confederation of Ger-
man states was created, that was strong enough for defense but
too disunited for attack. The Confederation was capable of resis-

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ting pressures from the outside without being able to generate
pressures of its own.

These are interesting lessons about the relationship between
legitimacy and equilibrium and peace, but the really modern period
started with the advent of Bismarck.

started with the advent of Bismarck. Without going into the specifics of the diplomacy, Bismarck essentially believed that an international system can be based entirely on the balance of power. The restraints that had been imposed by the common adherence to legitimate principles, along with the convictions that had developed since the 18th century, were so much baggage for him. Every state should be free to conduct its own policy based on its own conception of national interest. If it calculated correctly it would understand that there are inherent limits to its strength and it would produce a rather moderate foreign policy. But at the same time it placed all the energies on the balance of power. Through extraordinarily skillful and extremely moderate foreign policy, Bismarck managed to create a united Germany and maintain the peace for about forty years, even after upsetting the previous system.

Contrary to popular belief, a policy based on pure balance of power is the most difficult foreign policy to conduct. It requires, first of all, a constantly correct assessment of the elements of power. Secondly, it demands a total ruthlessness, and means that statements must be able to ignore friendship, loyalty, and anything other than the national interest. Third, it requires a domestic structure that will tolerate, if not support this strategy. Fourth, it requires the absence of both permanent friends and permanent enemies, because as soon as a permanent enemy exists,

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freedom of maneuver is immediately reduced.

After Germany defeated France in 1871, the German generals insisted on the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, something that Bismarck fought very bitterly, and which caused him to say "I have achieved much more than I thought desirable in this war." He was correct: France became a permanent German enemy, and Germany's freedom of maneuver was greatly reduced. Indeed, the paradox of the German victory was that it, along with the German unification which followed, produced the very structural dangers that Bismarck had sought to avoid. A united Germany was a threat to each of its neighbors; its very existence forced them into an alliance.

Subsequent German leaders tried to be "reliable" and consistent in foreign affairs, but this only compounded their problems, for the more rigid their policy, the more united their neighbors became.

All of this is crucial in understanding the great tragedy in Western history: the outbreak of the First World War. There was no reason for this to be that justified the enormous numbers of casualties that were inflicted, the destruction of material and human values, and the overthrow of practically all political systems that entered the war. There was an unfortunate combination of circumstances. First, the entry of a major new power—Germany—into the international system produced a profoundly unsettling effect. This is inevitable, just as it is today in the instance of the growth of Soviet power. When a country acquires enormous additional resources of power in a relatively short period, it forces adjustments on the other participants in the system. When that

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country has mediocre leadership, unaware of the implications of their actions, the situation can become--as it became--highly unmanageable. Bismarck's balance of power system rested on the existence of great European statesmen in every generation. Alas, most statesmen are mediocre, and it was not evil intention but mediocrity that produced World War I. None of the political leaders of Europe understood that their system was tending towards confrontation. None of them understood that a war with modern weapons would be violently destructive. None of them understood that they were making military plans that would spread a war over at least all of Europe. None of them understood that they were heading into a four-year conflict. The Germans started out with what was called the "nightmare of coalitions" and began making military plans to protect themselves against an attack from both sides. They then modified it to a plan to knock out one of their opponents quickly so that they could then turn on the other. By the turn of the century, German military plans required that even if one of their neighbors did not attack, the Germans would have to attack them. Germany was intent on knocking one neighbor out before the other one could mobilize. Each of the European countries had drawn lessons from history that made a catastrophe highly likely. The Austrians, for example, decided that Serbia was like Sardinia, and that they had to knock it out before it organized all of the Balkans. All of them made military plans, and the military decisions ran away with political judgment in the end.

At the end of June, 1914, when the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, no European leader thought that there was a serious

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situation, and they all went on vacation (except, unfortunately,
the Austrians). The French went on a state visit to Russia, and
the German Emperor went into the Norwegian fiords. By the time
they were all back in their capitals, so many military decisions
had been taken that the mobilization schedules ran away with poli-
tical decisionmaking.

There is a lesson to this story, and it regards balance of
power. A balance is important--perhaps more today than during
Bismarck's lifetime--but if a balance of power becomes an end in
itself it becomes self-destructive. A country without strength
will become the plaything of forces out of its control, but a country
that makes its decisions only on military grounds will be dragged
into adventures with consequences it cannot foresee. We have to
learn from World War II (when a preponderance of strength in one
country tempted it to attack), but we also have to learn from World
War I (when a balance of strength produced a war because nobody got
it under political control and put it in the service of foreign
policy).

None of the European statesmen had the foggiest idea of going
to war in the summer of 1914. They thought they were going into a
crisis similar to one they had surmounted many times in the pre-
vious decade. Not one leader in Europe would have gone to war in
August 1914 if he had known what the world would look like four years
later. The great watershed in European politics was this horrible
war, which came at the end of a century of belief in uninterrupted
progress, and which led to the slaughter of tenmillion people for
a purpose that nobody could really define. It was all very well
to say that the Kaiser had to be overthrown, but he had never been

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considered the incarnation of evil, until mounting casualties forced each country to invent war aims in order to justify what they had already done.

If there was any real purpose to World War I, it was that of destroying German hegemony, but the Versailles peace settlement was more favorable to German expansion than the world that existed previously. Before the war Germany had France on one side and Russia on the other, with Britain commanding the seas. After the Peace Conference Germany came to be surrounded by weak successor states of uncertain domestic strength. None of them was capable of resisting Germany. Moreover, the Soviet Union was no longer part of the European system, and weak states were at least as afraid of the Soviet Union as they were of Germany. In short, the diplomats had paid no attention to the structure of the post-war world, and the result was that French vigilance was the only hope for European peace. Peace could be preserved if France had a hairtrigger response, and Germany was permanently disarmed. France had the permanent obligation of becoming the policeman of Europe. But France had just lost two million young people--five percent of its population--in the war, and was in no condition to carry out this role. Britain was even less inclined to police Germany, because the English had always supported the weaker against the stronger on the continent, and were instinctively led to support Germany against France.

Given this political and military problem, the French built the Maginot line, thus guaranteeing that Germany sooner or later would become predominant in Europe. The Versailles agreement

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could only be maintained through an offensive French strategy, and as soon as the French withdrew behind the Maginot line they invited the Germans to expand towards the East. The Versailles settlement was, as we all know, very onerous for the Germans, and was bound to inflame Germany, but that is not the issue. The central point is that statesmen can misconceive their structural problems and their balance of power interests. When Hitler took over in Germany he had a relatively easy task. He had only to rearm and reoccupy the Rhineland, and Eastern Europe lay defenseless before him. When France did not move following the occupation of the Rhineland, it was all over. From a structural point of view, it was just a question of time and method of how Eastern Europe would fall under German hegemony.

There used to be a myth in America that the Europeans were peculiarly petty and peculiarly prone to produce wars by their approach to foreign policy. The American approach was considered morally superior. The fact of the matter was that the European margin of survival was so much narrower than the American margin that Europeans felt threatened by changes that were bound to be peripheral to the United States. The control of Alsace-Lorraine was not a matter of great importance to the United States, but for a long time it was vitally important to France and Germany. The Europeans would begin to defend themselves long before American security was threatened, creating the illusion in this country that there was something superior in our approach to foreign policy. Now we have found that a basic problem of foreign policy is that at a time when there is a capacity for action, you have no knowledge.

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By the time you have knowledge, you may have lost the capacity for
action. This was the case in the German invasion of the Rhineland
in 1936. Morally it would have been indefensible for France to
attack, because the Germans were moving troops into their own ter-
ritory, something every national state was permitted to do at the
time. But once there were German troops in the Rhineland, the French
capacity to intervene in Eastern Europe disappeared. To repeat,
onee the French permitted the Germans to fortify the Rhineland, it
was simply a question of time before Austria, Czechoslovakia and
Poland fell, and indeed a moderate German leadership would probably
have brought about this domination without a World War. All of this
stemmed from the Versailles agreement, which put a burden on
France that could not be met.

The Post-War World

After World War I the problem of German hegemony disappeared,
but another colossal country spread itself into the center of Europe.
In contrast to the period of the Congress of Vienna, none of the
statesmen of the war years, except perhaps Churchill, gave any
attention to what would happen after the war. Americans were de-
termined not to discuss the postwar period while the struggle was
going one. We were determined that we were going to base the
postwar period on good faith, and getting along with everybody.
The victors in World War II would work together in the postwar period.
I don't know whether anything could have been done; we'll probably
never know. We do know, however, that practically no attention
was paid to the issue of structure until the Soviet armies were in

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the center of Europe. Once Eastern Europe was under Communist domination, for the first time in European history there was no chance to balance Russian power through European sources. In addition to the sudden expansion of Russian hegemony, the elements of power became incongruous with each other. In the past there had almost always been a direct relationship between economic, military and political power. It was very rare that a country could be very strong economically and very weak militarily. In the post-war world, it is possible to be militarily very strong and economically of moderate strength. It is also possible, as in the case of Japan, to be economically very strong and militarily feeble.

What can be learned from history in the post-war epoch? You can not learn how to handle the Middle East crisis that broke out in 1973, but you CAN learn from the structural problems that I have very superficially discussed. In each period we must decide which of these structural problems are relevant. History is not a cookbook which gives recipes, it teaches by analogy and forces us to decide what, if anything, is analogous. History gives us a feel for the significance of events, but it does not teach which individual events are significant. It is impossible to write down a conceptual scheme and apply it mechanically to evolving situations. Certain principles can be developed, certain understandings can be elaborated, but it is impossible to predict in advance how they apply to concrete situations.

One of the problems of contemporary leadership is that in all democracies that I know, and perhaps in all dictatorships as

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well, the struggle of getting office is so intense that people
have no time to reflect about the sort of issues I have raised.
By the time they get into office it is much too late to think
about them, because they then have to make decisions. Nobody would
believe that he can go onto a tennis court and play, just because
somebody has given him a few principles, but many people seem to
think that foreign policy can be conducted after reading a few
briefing papers. What was the difference between men like Churchill
and De Gaulle and their contemporaries? It wasn't superior
intelligence. They had a feel for the course of events and how
they could influence it, and I know no great leader who did not
study history and try to get an understanding of problems that other
nations and other leaders have faced.

It is dangerously arrogant to believe that foreign policy can
be conducted effectively without knowing something of how other
generations have faced comparable problems--the problems compromises
they've had to make, how their best judgments turned out to be
disastrous, and how limited human foresight is, even in the best
men and under optimum circumstances. We always tend to think of
historical tragedy as failing to get what we want, but if we
study history we find that the worst tragedies have occurred when
people got what they wanted...and it turned out to be the wrong
thing.