an attachment to Wilsonian principles. Kissinger argues that Wilsonianism accentuated the ambivalence in American thought between the substance of change threatening the nation's interests and the methods of implementing such change. "The implication of Wilsonianism has been that America resisted, above all, the method of change, and that it had no strategic interests worth defending if they were threatened by apparently legal methods." This may be the implication of Wilsonianism, but it clearly did not express Wilson's policy in the Caribbean where strategic interest prevailed over method. The same may be said of Wilson's Cold War successors: an ambivalence in thought did not find a serious expression in action. While committed to the principle proscribing force save in response to the prior, and unlawful, use of force, they were also careful to reserve a freedom of action in determining the circumstances in which the principle was applied. The Cuban missile crisis provided the classic case in which this freedom was exercised to prevent the method of change from legitimizing the substance of change. The movement of Soviet missiles into Cuba, though done with Cuba's consent, threatened America's strategic interests. To remove the missiles, the United States was prepared to resort to force. "[Law] simply does not deal with such questions of ultimate power," a former secretary of state declared at the time, "The survival of states is not a question of law." Although Dean Acheson's candor was considered by many at the time as indiscreet, it accurately expressed the logic of the American position.

The terrifying feature of reason of state has always been the absence of limits to the actions it enjoins to preserve the state's vital interests. It is not the abuse to which the doctrine lends itself that constitutes its most disturbing characteristic, but its refusal to recognize any clear restraints

on the measures that may be taken on behalf of the state. In this respect, nuclear deterrence formed the extreme, and perfect, expression of reason of state. In a manner the great European practitioners of reason of state could scarcely have dreamed, deterrence laid bare as never before the demonic nature of this doctrine. Yet it was American statesmen, the epigones of Woodrow Wilson, who first perfected deterrence and who justified doing so in terms of the values a deterrent strategy was presumably designed to protect. To be sure, these values were always seen as transcending the security and independence of the United States. The fate of deterrence was ultimately equated with the fate of freedom everywhere. But this equation did not alter the fact that ends, however ultimate they were judged, were sought by means that had no discernible limits. Kissinger depicts America's Cold War diplomacy as the pursuit of universal principles that were often divorced from considerations of national interest and power (that is, from geopolitics, a synonym for reason of state). The principal military expression of this diplomacy, however, shows instead a determination to defend the core interests of the United States by threatening the use of unlimited power.

*Diplomacy* reveals its author as more of a believer in the American claim to exceptionalism than one had heretofore suspected. It is not, of course, that Kissinger has himself become a convert to what he sees as the American tradition in foreign policy, but that he has come to credit that tradition as having had, and as still having, a remarkable hold over the nation's thought and action. Woodrow Wilson insisted that whereas other nations have interests, America has principles. Kissinger, apparently, has come to believe this as well (however much he may deplore it). In examining the origins of the American involvement in Vietnam, he writes: "Most

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countries go to war to resist concrete, definable threats to their security. In this century, America has gone to war—from World War I to the Persian Gulf War in 1991—largely on behalf of what it perceived as moral obligations to resist aggression or injustice as the trustee of collective security.” So it was in Vietnam, where America’s universalist tradition would not permit policy to be determined 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 grounds of the American national interest.”

This portrayal of American belief and motivation is much too unguarded. It is so even if we take at face value the public statements of American leaders. Those statements make up a reasonably consistent pattern. It is one in which self-interest is not denied but rather identified with interests greater than the national self. In Vietnam, these interests were security and freedom, not only for others but for ourselves. This was the burden of the Johnson Administration's rationale for the war. In his first major address following the beginning of aerial bombardment against North Vietnam, President Johnson declared:

> We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny. And only in such a world will our own freedom be secure...We are also there to strengthen world order...To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake this confidence...in the value of American commitment, the value of America's word. The result would be unrest and instability, and even wider war.

This theme was echoed on many occasions. Whatever else one may say of it, to regard it as disinterested—as oblivious of national interest—seems misplaced. It is

also worth recalling that essentially the same theme formed the rationale of the policy of containment when initiated in 1947. In the historic expression of that policy, the Truman Doctrine stated “that totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.”

If we have not denied interest, it may still be argued that we have had a mistaken view of it. Kissinger evidently thinks this to be the case; it is the real burden of his critique of Cold War diplomacy. Our view of American security interest, he believes, has been undifferentiated. It has been undifferentiated because it has been seen as inseparable from principles deemed universally valid—from order *a la* collective security, from self-determination, from freedom. The result has been an inability to particularize interest (that is, to differentiate it), to tie interest to time and place and, of course, to power. Containment, Kissinger writes, betrayed this defect from the outset. It accounted for much of that policy’s rigidity. And it was an unwillingness to differentiate interest that, above all, led to Vietnam.

There is clearly much to be said for this critique. Still, the excesses containment led to had other roots. It is not only a universalistic, ideological outlook that may fail to differentiate interests. A geopolitical approach may do so as well. It did do so on frequent occasions in the course of the Cold War. Indeed, a bipolar power structure seemed to make this result almost inevitable. From the outset of containment, the attempt to distinguish which areas were vital to American security, and thus to differentiate interests, generally floundered when put to a practical test. Both the ultimate stakes and the inner dynamic of the conflict prevented clear distinctions from being drawn between the marginal and the central, the periphery

84

The National Interest—Summer 1994

[LC]

and the core. There was always the consid-
eration, difficult to reject, that the periph-
ery would become the core if challenges to
it were not dealt with effectively. Kissinger
has himself always urged this considera-
tion which is, after all, inseparable from
linkage. At the same time, he is reluctant
to acknowledge the consequences to which
it may well lead. Thus he insists that
Vietnam was the result of Wilsonian uni-
versalism that "permitted no distinction to
be made among the monsters to be slain."
Nearer the truth is that geopolitics as well
afforded no reliable means for determining
which of the monsters had to be slain. The
war was as much the result of mistaken
geopolitical calculation as it was of a mis-
placed ideological universalism.

Kissinger understandably views his
years in office as a valiant, if ultimately
unsuccessful, effort to change an outlook
that led to disaster in Vietnam and to the
overextension of American power. In
Richard Nixon, the nation had for the first
time in the twentieth century a worthy
successor in foreign policy to Theodore
Roosevelt. Yet Nixon is also seen as a
believer in American exceptionalism. He
was, for Kissinger, the practical idealist
who undertook to combine Wilsonianism
and realpolitik. If he failed in the end,
despite a foreign policy that registered
some remarkable successes, it was not only
because of Vietnam and Watergate but
because at a deeper level his approach to
foreign policy challenged a perception of
the world too strongly held to be relin-
quished in one brief term. Still, Kissinger
speculates that, "Without Watergate,
Nixon might have been able to rally the
country to his style of diplomacy and show
that it was, in fact, the most realistic means
of vindicating American idealism."

Kissinger may well be right in this
speculation. Certainly, one would have
never predicted at the outset of Nixon's
second term what would soon be the fate
of the new structure of peace. Despite

Vietnam, the Nixon-Kissinger policy
reformulation had elicited broad domestic
support. It seemed only reasonable to
assume—as many observers did assume at
the time—that once Vietnam was removed
from the commanding position it had for
so long occupied on the public agenda,
this support would become still greater.
Then Watergate made its appearance and
changed everything. But if Kissinger's
speculation is well-taken, what does it say
about the obstacles to a foreign policy
approach that combine Wilsonianism and
geopolitics? Does it not indicate that he
has exaggerated these obstacles and that
they are neither as profound nor as perva-
sive as he has made them out to be?

## Has the Game Changed?

IN THE WAKE of the Cold War,
America has less to learn from the
European tradition than Kissinger appears
to believe. How relevant, in any event, is
that tradition for the American future?
Kissinger thinks it remains quite relevant,
more so indeed than it was in the period of
the Cold War. The world of the twenty-
first century, he assumes, will bear a strik-
ing resemblance in a number of respects to
that of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies. Absent an overriding ideological or
strategic threat, conventional national
interests will again prevail. Absent as well
a condition of bipolarity, the prospect is
for a return to a balance of power system
reminiscent of this earlier period.

In taking this position, Kissinger is not
unmindful of change in the international
system. He writes of the present period:
"Never before have the components of
world order, their capacity to interact, and
their goals all changed quite so rapidly, so
deeply, or so globally." The substance,
method, and, above all, the reach of inter-
national relations, he notes, have radically
changed. Never before has the interna-
tional system consisted of major centers of

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power distributed around the entire world, one in which events are experienced instantaneously and simultaneously.

These vast changes notwithstanding, Kissinger foresees an international system in which continuity with the past prevails. The world of the next century will be one dominated, as in the past, by the great powers (Kissinger lists them as the United States, Europe, China, Japan, Russia, and probably India). Great power relations will continue to be in the future, as they have always been in the past, the driving force of international politics. Those relations will be characterized as much by conflicting as by common interests. This being the prospect, the need for order will not only persist but, given the changes that have occurred, will be far greater than in the past. In the absence of one dominant state, able to impose its vision of order, Kissinger concludes that this need can only be met by resort to the balance of power. The great task of American foreign policy must be to sustain an equilibrium in both Europe and Asia. In the pursuit of that task, the aspirations of Wilsonianism will have to be partially abandoned and a more conventional concept of national interest openly embraced.

The concluding chapter of *Diplomacy* is devoted to the elaboration of these themes. It is an essay replete with acute observations and sensible prescriptions bearing upon virtually every major issue of American foreign policy. The value of the analysis is not diminished by noting that in the treatment of each issue—whether it is Russia, the North Atlantic Alliance, the Asian powers—the invariable conclusion is that America will have to play the critical role in assuaging the fears, constraining the destabilizing ambitions, and resolving the dangerous conflicts of interest, of the major powers. Still, it must be acknowledged that this is a large order for a state whose power in the coming century is expected to decline relatively. It is this

decline, after all, which is at the basis of Kissinger's conviction that America will have to moderate its Wilsonian mission of reforming the world and that a failure to do so threatens to open a gap in American policy "between its pretensions and its willingness to support them; the nearly inevitable disillusionment too easily turns into an excuse for withdrawing from world affairs altogether."

This warning needs to be taken seriously. The reformist urge that has been a powerful motive force for engagement in the past has also been, when frustrated, a powerful force for withdrawal, particularly in the absence of a clear and compelling security threat to offset it. At the same time, Kissinger's is not the only warning that needs to be heeded. If the pursuit of Wilsonianism holds out dangers, so may the pursuit of an ostensibly traditional reason of state. For the latter may prove to be quite as elusive, even illusory, in the world of tomorrow as the former.

How is the balance of power to function in tomorrow's world? This is the great question Kissinger's position must raise. It is a question, however, that he has not answered. We know, of course, how the balance has operated in the past. *Diplomacy* is largely a study, and a profound one, of its operation. "Its goal," Kissinger writes of the balance of power system, "was not peace so much as stability and moderation." But such stability and moderation as the balance brought rested on the threat or use of force. War was intrinsic to the operation of the balance; it was, in Albert Sorel's classic portrayal, "the supreme argument of reason of state...considered right as soon as it was judged necessary."

If the means intrinsic to the balance always left something to be desired, so did the results of its operation. Prudence limited these results. But prudence might sanction almost any results that—while observing the principle of equilibrium—

86

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held out the promise of success. Again, Sorel has given the memorable description of how the operation of the balance led, in eighteenth century Europe, to the system of great power partitions that "confused the equity of the deed with the equality of the shares, the justice of the operation with the niceness of the balance..." In the nineteenth century, the principle of equal aggrandizement, often termed the principle of compensation, was increasingly satisfied by the acquisition of territory and people beyond Europe.

Although Kissinger acknowledges these features of the historical balance, he thinks they can be largely overcome by a moral consensus of the great powers. His model, invoked on several occasions, is the Congress of Vienna. "It combined legitimacy and equilibrium, shared values, and balance of power diplomacy. Common values restrained the scope of nations' demands while equilibrium limited the capacity to insist upon them." The only prospective basis for a concept of international legitimacy today, however, rests, in the main, on a conception of domestic order that Kissinger is, to say the least, reluctant to endorse. That conception is the principal feature of Wilsonianism. To bar it from entering the front door while allowing it to sneak in the back door will not do. While Kissinger is willing to give a limited scope to Wilsonianism ("That America should give preference to democratic governments over repressive ones and be prepared to pay some price for its moral convictions is beyond dispute."), he is clearly not prepared to make of it the

test of legitimacy in the post-Cold War era.

We are thus thrown back on the balance of power as the basis of international order. And once again the question must be put: how will it work in a period when war between great powers promises to be nuclear? We underline *between great powers* since it is the great powers that have sustained the balance in the past, just as it is the great powers, and only great powers, that have challenged and periodically overturned an established equilibrium. All of the great powers today either possess nuclear weapons or could possess them in a brief period (a capacity which makes them the functional equivalent of nuclear powers).

The likelihood is that the balance, as we have known it in the past, will not work. The great powers will continue to have conflicts of interest but they are highly unlikely to resolve those conflicts through war. They are highly unlikely to do so for essentially the same reasons that the United States and the Soviet Union did not do so. The game has changed, for it was the means that distinguished it above all else. The balance of power will persist, it characterizes all politics, but the distinctive meaning and significance the balance has had in the classic European tradition will not. What will take its place in great power relations is likely to remain unclear for some time. ☐

Robert W. Tucker is a contributing editor to *The National Interest*.

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# The Case for the Prosecution

S. Frederick Starr

Martin Malia, *The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991* (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 575 pp., $24.95.

Richard Pipes, *Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime* (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 587 pp., $35.00

EVERY FIELD HAS its lexicon of praise, and for academic history in recent decades it has included words like cool, dispassionate, nuanced, and non-judgmental. No matter how provocative the thesis, the *compleat* historian has been expected to offer it up in the guise of a white-coated clinician speaking ever so calmly, preferably in the passive voice. In presenting one's findings it has been understood that one gains points for being clever, but not for being passionate. It is all rather boring.

These two volumes bear a very different stamp. Martin Malia declares his value-charged thesis in the very title of *The Soviet Tragedy*, underscoring his point with a fullsome dedication to Poland's Solidarity and to "Democratic Russia." Covering the entire sweep of Soviet history down to the collapse of 1991, he blends icy logic and moral anger in a manner that is anything but detached. Richard Pipes' *Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime*, the third volume of his magisterial triptych on Russian political culture down to the death of Lenin, poses the core moral and emotional question even more bluntly than Malia: "Can one—should one—view such an unprecedented calamity with dispassion?" Tossing aside his lab coat, Pipes answers no, arguing that "the refusal to pass judgment on

historical events rests on moral values, too, namely the silent premise that whatever occurs is natural and therefore right..." Pipes makes it clear that he is not about to offer up a cool and laconic account of a Civil War that cost millions of lives, led to a famine worse than anything Europe had experienced since the Black Death, and, he argues, brutalized the Bolshevik regime beyond all hope of reform.

Both of these historians direct their ample wrath against two targets in particular: first, the Russian Communist Party that in 1918 took the unprecedented step of waging a ghastly war against much of the population over which it ruled, employing in the process both terror and mass murder; and, second, the post-Thaw scholars in the West who, they charge, tortured the historical evidence in an effort to present the system that perpetrated such horrors as having been legitimate except during the era of Stalin, which at any rate has long since receded into the past.

"How could so many have been so wrong about so much for so long?" Malia asks. He is referring in particular to Western politicians, journalists, and the millions of Western "Fellow Travelers" (*poputchiki*) whose faith in Marxist utopia was so strong as to blind them to crimes committed in the name of socialist perfectionism. In covering the same ground, Pipes backs his case with both greater detail and sharper barbs. In a particularly spicy zinger, he faults the revisionist historians and their graduate students for producing a shelf full of "weighty tomes filled with mostly meaningless events and statistics," all presented in a style that he characterizes as "both vacuous and dull." Fighting words!

88

Bimensuel
T.M. :

140.000 ex.

01 40 60 40 60

L.M. : 1.104.000

Jeu. 20 FEVRIER 1997

L'Expansion

PAGE N°

L'ATLAS DE LA CROISSANCE

MOTEURS

APR 2 1 1997

STABILITÉ POLITIQUE

Carte mondiale
des risques 1996-1997

Risque très faible

Risque faible

Risque modéré

Risque assez élevé

Risque élevé

Risque très élevé

Risque dangereux

Source : Nord-Sud Export Conseil

<< Il y a toujours des risques dans une moitié du monde >>

Par Henry Kissinger

Le monde vit une transition ma-
jeure, le passage du monde
bipolaire de la guerre froide à un
monde multipolaire, où domi-
neront cinq ou six grandes puis-
sances, dont certaines auront
émergé grâce à leur croissance
vertigineuse : les Etats-Unis,
l'Europe (si elle s'unit), le Japon,
la Chine, la Russie, et peut-être
l'Inde. A l'image de l'Europe du
XVIIIe et du XIXe siècle, ce nou-
veau monde évoluera dans un
système sophistiqué d'équilibre
des forces. L'incertitude de cette
transition est d'autant plus
grande que tous ces pays sont en
train de changer simultanément.

L'Amérique, tout d'abord, doit
apprendre à vivre dans un monde
qu'elle ne peut plus ni dominer
ni fuir en lui tournant le dos.
Si, dans une sorte de néo-im-
périalisme, elle s'acharnait à
vouloir dominer moralement
l'univers, elle s'épuiserait et se
condamnerait, car ce nouveau
monde ne tolérera plus l'hégé-

monisme. De son côté, l'Europe
met toute son énergie à tenter de
se définir, elle n'est pas encore
à la hauteur de son rôle poten-
tiel. La Russie, elle, doit accep-
ter de vivre durablement dans
des frontières aussi étroites que
celles d'avant Pierre le Grand,
et elle doit bouleverser toutes ses
structures. La Chine, bientôt su-
perpuissance économique, com-
mence à entrer sur la scène in-
ternationale, et il sera très délicat

d'établir avec
elle des relations
équilibrées.
Quant au Japon,
il est tenté de
mener une poli-
tique de plus en
plus nationale.

Toutes ces grandes nations
sont donc en mouvement, et il
n'existe aucun principe géné-
ral d'évolution.

Je divise le monde en deux en-
sembles. Le premier, dans lequel
la guerre est devenue impos-

sible : l'hémisphère occidental
(les Amériques et l'Europe oc-
cidentale et centrale). Leurs éco-
nomies avancées sont si fragiles
qu'elles n'ont rien à gagner à une
guerre classique.

Dans le second ensemble, des
conflits stratégiques majeurs sont
possibles. Le danger principal
se situe dans la zone Pacifique,
où les pays en forte croissance
peuvent soit décider de travailler
ensemble et se fixer des règles

de conduite, soit
s'affronter dans
une course à la
puissance. Dans
cette zone, la
Chine se trouve
confrontée dès
cette année à

deux questions brûlantes, Hong-
kong et Taïwan. Je reste
convaincu, malgré les événe-
ments récents que les dirigeants
chinois tiennent à réussir la tran-
sition à Hongkong. Ils savent que
c'est un double test : pour le

monde extérieur et pour leurs re-
lations avec Taïwan. Mais trois
risques demeurent : comment la
bureaucratie chinoise peut-elle
prendre en main une cité plura-
liste ? quel est le poids réel de
tous ceux qui, à Hongkong, sou-
haitant l'échec de la transition,
feront tout pour provoquer une
crise ? enfin, comment se com-
porteront ceux qui, à Taïwan, es-
perent que l'expérience échoue,
pour qu'elle ne puisse jamais
se reproduire chez eux ?

En Russie, le problème vient des frontières. La plupart des Russes ne peuvent accepter l'idée d'une Ukraine, d'une Bié-lorusse ou d'un Caucase indé-pendants. Les Russes voudront toujours rétablir ces frontières

Les risques politiques

se concentrent
pour l'essentiel dans
des régions qui
ne connaissent pas
la croissance : l'Afrique
centrale, certains pays
du Moyen-Orient
et les républiques issues
de l'ex-Union soviétique.
En Asie, il subsiste
quelques points de forte
tension internationale :
la Corée du Nord, Taiwan
et le Cambodge.

Inspirateur de la
politique étrangère de la
Maison-Blanche pendant
près d'une décennie,
Henry Kissinger reste
l'un des meilleurs
spécialistes des relations
internationales. Il est
l'auteur d'une somme
magistrale, « Diplomatie »
(Fayard), publiée en 1996.

stratégiques. La tentation est
done grande, pour les dirigeants,
d'utiliser ce nationalisme à la
place de la croissance comme
force de cohésion sociale. D'aut-
tant que, malgré le redémar-
rage économique, le niveau de
vie est plus bas qu'auparavant.

Cependant, c'est insulter les Russes que de les traiter comme de perpétuels instables. Il faut cesser de se demander s'il faut défendre Eltsine ou Lebed. Qu'importe qui gagne ou perd ! Dans dix ans, le pays sera toujours dirigé par le même genre de gouvernement, autoritaire, de type Pinochet, avec quelques institutions démocratiques. Nous devons traiter la Russie comme une question de politique étrangère. Et donc avec respect : il faudra traiter le cas russe comme on a traité le cas français à la fin des guerres napoléoniennes, grâce à une alliance des pays voisins, capable de résister à une éventuelle attaque. A

l'époque, la
France, tenue à
l'écart de cette al-
liance, participait
pourtant active-
ment au concert
européen. De
même, il faut que
la Russie prenne part aux grandes
décisions dans une instance de
coopération. A une condition :
la stabilité de ses frontières.

Le problème de l'Amérique du Sud n'est pas celui des risques de guerre, mais d'une crise de l'économie de marché. La politique qui consiste à baisser le niveau de vie pour assurer la croissance de demain ne sera pas acceptée indéfiniment. Les partis populistes prendront de l'influence et exigeront un filet social. Et il ne faut pas croire que les Etats-Unis pourront intervenir en cas de crise, comme au Mexique, où ils ont apporté une aide massive de 50 milliards de dollars. Le cas du Mexique est

<< Il faut que
la Russie prenne
part aux grandes
décisions >>

très particulier, il
ressemble à celui
de l'Allemagne
de l'Est au mo-
ment de la réuni-
fication : si le
mark n'était pas
allé à l'Est, les
Allemands de l'Est seraient
venus à l'Ouest ; le même dan-
ger menaçait avec le Mexique et
le dollar : si celui-ci n'était pas
allé au Mexique, les Mexicains
seraient allés à lui, massivement,
en émigrant aux Etats-Unis.

Au Proche-Orient, je ne vois
pas de risques réels de guerre.
Certes, un ou des pays arabes
pourraient déclencher un conflit,
sans espoir de le gagner, mais
avec l'objectif de provoquer une
crise telle que le monde accé-
derait à leurs demandes. Je ne
vois actuellement aucun leader
dans le monde arabe prêt à ris-
quer une telle aventure, tant que
l'Egypte ou la Turquie ne bas-
culent pas dans le fondamenta-

lisme. La Syrie est très prudente : une guerre menacerait gravement son système de gouvernement. Quant à Israël, s'il s'engageait dans la guerre, il perdrait le soutien de tous ses amis étrangers, dont les Etats-Unis. Aujourd'hui, aucun camp n'a quoi que ce soit à gagner à un conflit.

Dans ce monde multipolaire,
il faudra bâtir des systèmes de
sécurité régionale, où chaque
grande puissance s'efforcera
de garantir la paix dans sa zone.
Mais cela ne suffira pas toujours,
et le XXIe siècle s' annonce déli-
cat : une crise grave en Asie cen-
trale, par exemple, ne concer-
nerait pas seulement la Russie
et la Chine, mais aussi l'Inde,
l'Europe, voire les Etats-Unis,
en raison des enjeux pétroliers...
Les conséquences de toute crise,
à l'image de l'économie, seront
de plus en plus mondiales. »

Propos recueillis par
Vincent Giret
et Gérard Moatti ●

[1c]

LA QUIETÉ DU MIEL

l'OURS
janvier 97

# LES MONDES DE KISSINGER

Diplomatie est un brillant essai de géopolitique au croisement des connaissances encyclopédiques et de l'expérience.

ÉMINENT PRATICIEN des relations internationales, Henry Kissinger a inspiré la politique extérieure des présidents nord-américains Richard Nixon et Gérald Ford en pleine guerre froide. Cette participation à la gestion des grands dossiers diplomatiques de l'époque avait été conclue par la publication attendue et traditionnelle de souvenirs, intitulés sans surprise, *A la Maison blanche*.

La traduction récente par les éditions Fayard du dernier ouvrage de Henry Kissinger, *Diplomatie*, est venue rappeler l'origine universitaire du conseiller présidentiel. Le professeur de Harvard avait écrit bien avant sa fulgurante carrière politico-diplomatische de respectables sommes sur les origines du Concert européen, Metternich et Castelreagh, divers essais sur l'Alliance atlantique et les relations extérieures de son pays. Pourtant, *Diplomatie* n'est pas le livre d'un universitaire. Pas plus qu'il n'est celui d'une ex-éminence grise. Il ne reflète ni les prudences intellectuelles de l'un, ni le narcissisme habituel aux autres.

Diplomatie est un brillant essai de géopolitique au croisement des connaissances encyclopédiques et de l'expérience. Les travaux pratiques prolongés du diplomate ont nourri l'approche du théoricien. La méthodologie qui a été suivie est celle d'un médecin qui scruterait les viscères du monde. Henry Kissinger expose à l'intention des bons gouvernants l'art des relations internationales puisé

aux meilleures sources scientifiques confrontées, corrigées, et revisitées par le frottement du quotidien. Il propose un diagnostic triséculaire du mouvement international assorti d'un mode d'emploi. « *Chaque ordre international prime*, selon le professeur-diplomate, « *un désir de permanence*, une connotation d'éternité»,

> Diplomatie n'est pas le livre d'un universitaire. Pas plus qu'il n'est celui d'une ex-éminence grise. Il ne reflète ni les prudences intellectuelles de l'un, ni le narcissisme habituel aux autres.

du traité de Westphalie au XVIIème siècle à la post-guerre froide aujourd'hui. «Or les éléments qui le composent sont perpétuellement en mouvement (...) Chaque fois que les entités qui forment un ordre international changent de caractère, il s'ensuit inévitablement une période de troubles (...) Il faut procéder à un dosage entre les données stratégiques et les considérations morales» pour répondre à ces situations. «Le début de la sagesse consiste à comprendre la nécessité de ce dosage.»

L'architecture de cette pensée articulant une solide culture historique à une expérience personnelle et affinée de l'histoire d'aujourd'hui peut déconcerter l'historien qui la trouvera trop engagée et le sociologue, trop immédiate, alors que pour le pratique elle aura un côté excessivement théorique. La richesse du livre est pourtant là, dans

cette rencontre inédite du savoir et de l'intuition. Le pari intellectuel de *Diplomatie*, résultat d'une destinée unique est séduisant et convaincant. La clarté synthétique de l'exposé, est celle du conseiller présidentiel. Le brassage de l'histoire est le fruit d'un passé universitaire brillant. Le diplomate-universitaire a mis en scène sans anachronisme une continuité chronologique de trois siècles. Il a tendu des ponts intellectuels entre périodes différentes. Le regard qu'il porte, par exemple, sur Napoléon III définit en peu de mots l'homme, et un comportement qui sont toujours, selon l'auteur, actuels : « L'opinion publique cesse de respecter, à la longue, les dirigeants qui lui renvoient l'impression de ses propres incertitudes (...) Au bout du compte Napoléon III fut le précurseur d'un curieux phénomène moderne : la figure politique qui cherche désespérément à comprendre ce que veut l'opinion publique et finit, pourtant par être rejetée par elle». Sans doute Henry Kissinger ici ou là manifeste-t-il un parti-pris discret lorsque les États-Unis sont concernés. Le travers qui était prévisible reste malgré tout supportable. Il enlève peu de choses à un traité qui présente de façon cohérente les stratégies, les enjeux, les mobiles des acteurs qui ordonnent les relations internationales depuis trois siècles.

JEAN-JACQUES KOURLIANDSKY

HENY KISSINGER, *Diplomatie*, Paris, Fayard, 1996, 860 p.

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L'OURS N° 270 Janvier-Février 1997

HISTOIRE

La quinzaine littéraire

1-15 janvier 97

# QUAND LE STRATÈGE SE FAIT HISTORIEN

JAN 16 1997

Diplomatie combine la trame chronologique du travail d'historien et les schémas interprétatifs du théoricien, le tout éclairé en permanence par l'expérience d'un conseiller du Prince, ce que Kissinger a été à un double titre, d'abord comme adviser du président en matière de sécurité auprès de Nixon (1969-1972), puis comme secrétaire d'Etat (sous Nixon, 1973, puis Ford, 1974-1977) (1).

BERNARD CAZES

HENRI KISSINGER

### DIPLOMATIE

trad. de l'anglais
par Marie-France de Paloméra
Fayard éd., 864 p., 198 F

Kissinger historien retrace l'évolution chaotique des relations internationales (et pas seulement de l'activité des diplômates) depuis le traité de Westhalie jusqu'à nos jours, mais il est clair que, même lorsqu'il est purement décritif, il n'oublie jamais de mettre en perspective les événements en dégagant la stratégie qu'ils reflètent — stratégie subtile comme chez Bismarck, ou remarquablement inépuis dans le cas de Napoléon III... Ce mot de stratégie, Kissinger l'emploie à de nombreuses réprises sans jamais le définir (pas plus qu'il ne définit diplomatie, d'ailleurs). Je ne crois pas beaucoup me tromper en disant qu'il s'agit d'une ligne d'action conçue en fonction à la fois de ce qu'on veut (et de ce qu'on peut) faire et de ce que risquent de vouloir (et de pouvoir) faire les autres acteurs opérant sur la scène internationale.

## BALANCE OF POWER OU SÉCURITÉ COLLECTIVE

La lecture de *Diplomatie* montre que pour son auteur il y a deux façons de mettre un peu d'ordre dans l'affrontement des stratégies des Etats :

1) L'approche par la *balance of power*, où l'on essaie de maintenir un certain équilibre entre les puissances en présence pour éviter qu'une d'entre elles ne prenne trop d'importance. Inaugurée par Richelieu face à la maison d'Autriche, poursuivue par Guillaume d'Orange, devenu Guillaume III en 1688, pour faire obstacle à la toute-puissance de Louis XIV, cette approche fut portée à sa perfection lorsqu'il s'agit pour la même Grande-Bretagne de contrecarrer les visées hégémoniques de Napoléon Ier « en se mettant à la disposition de n'importe quelle coalition de nations opposées à une entreprise de cette nature ».

2) L'approche par la sécurité collective, dont le président Wilson fut le plus éloquent protagoniste, et qui repose sur l'idée que « la sauvegarde de la paix ne résulterait plus de l'arithmétique des forces traditionnelles mais d'un consensus mondial étayé par un mécanisme de police ». Elle convient parfaitement, nous dit Kissinger, à l'esprit américain toujours porté à considérer que la pratique de « l'arithmétique des forces » est une caractéristique des Européens à la fois immorale et inopérante, et qu'il vaut mieux soumettre la politique étrangère des Etats à des principes moraux tels que le droit

des peuples à disposer d'eux-mêmes. Mais l'auteur lui trouve un grave défaut : les intérêts des participants « sont rarement uniformes et la sécurité, rarement d'un seul tenant ». Si bien que l'on tombe « plus facilement d'accord pour ne rien faire que pour entreprendre une action commune ». De fait la traduction d'un tel principe dans le traité de Versailles (et la SDN) a été, on le sait, fort décevante (2).

HENRI KISSINGER

On a bien l'impression que Kissinger, dont les racines sont après tout européennes, est fort réservé à l'égard de tout arrangement fondé sur la notion de sécurité collective, et il laisse entendre en conclusion que la diplomatie américaine aurait intérêt, non pas à jeter par-dessus bord la tradition wilsonienne, mais à la relativiser en tenant devant compte des contraintes géopolitiques. Il paraît également très séduit par un modèle intermédiaire, celui qui sous-tend l'ordre établi par le traité de Vienne et dont l'artisan fut le grand homme de Kissinger, le prince Clément de Metternich (3) : voilà un congrès qui aboutit à préserver l'Europe d'un conflit généralisé pendant une centaine d'années, et qui reposait sur un triptyque dont Versailles n'a pas su 'inspirer — une paix de conciliation avec la France évitant que celle-ci ne devienne une nation « révisioniste », des forces en présence raisonnablement équilibrées, et enfin des valeurs suffisamment communes pour empêcher les inévitables conflits d'intérêts de dégénérer.

L'avantage de disposer d'une grille d'analyse suffisamment englobante est qu'elle autorise des rapprochements parfois un peu tirés par les cheveux (Staline « le Richelieu de son époque », par exemple), mais souvent éclairants, comme le rapprochement entre la doctrine de Roosevelt et la Sainte Alliance de Metternich : « l'une comme l'autre s'efforçent de préserver la paix au moyen d'une coalition de vainqueurs dépendant les mêmes valeurs ». En même temps on se rend compte que la rigueur analytique de Kissinger théoricien est tempérée par la sagacité quelque peu désenchantée de l'ex-stratégie de la Maison Blanche : « Les hommes d'Etat se heuristic régulièrement au même dilemme : lorsqu'ils ont le maximum de possibilités d'action, ils ne détiennent qu'un minimum d'informations. Le temps qu'ils comblient cette lacune, la possibilité d'une action décisive risque fort d'avoir disparu » ; « dans le gouvernement américain, les rapports d'analyse préconisent presque toujours l'option intermédiaire lorsqu'il en existe trois » : « la politique étrangère oblige souvent à choisir entre des options imparfaites ». Ma préférence va à ceci, qui exprime sans avoir l'air d'y toucher l'essence de la pensée stratégique : « Ni dans un cas ni dans l'autre on n'évalua les conséquences qu'aurait le « succès » de la politique préconisée ». Cette idée trouve dans le livre une illustration frappante à propos de Franklin Roosevelt, d'où il ressort que si l'on est tenté de regretter que celui-ci ait eu à la fin de la guerre une vision géopolitique moins juste que celle de Churchill, c'est là « le revers de l'idéalisme qui avait poussé l'Amérique dans la guerre et lui avait permis de maintenir en vie la cause de la liberté ». Pour paraphraser W.C. Fields, un secrétaire d'Etat républicain capable d'un tel jugement sur un président démocrate, ne peut pas être entièrement mauvais.

1. La quatrième de couverture commet une erreur de date, et il faut lire : conseiller... de 1969 à 1972. La traduction se lit agréablement, mais si le livre est réimprimé, je suggère que la citation, au demeurant fort connue, de Tocqueville soit donnée en version originale, et non pas retraduite de l'anglais.

2. Ce que J. Bainville avait su voir dès 1920 (voir *Les Conséquences politiques de la paix*, réédité récemment aux éditions G. de Bouillon). Kissinger a peut-être lu Bainville (voir les pp. 221, 222 et 269), mais il ne le cite pas. Omission plus étrange, celle de Jean Monnet. Est-ce parce que, comme l'écris son biographe François Duchène, Kissinger voyait en lui « une sorte de Gaulliste européen cherchant à obtenir de l'Amérique par des moyens dérobés ce que De Gaulle esprait arracher de force » ?

3. Voir le *Chemin de la paix* (1957), trad. Française 1972, Denoël). Notons que l'historien Guglielmo Ferrero, dont on a réédité le remarquable *Talleyrand à Vienne* (Ed. de Fallois) porte une appréciation similaire mais crédite du résultat Talleyrand plutôt que Metternich.

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PAGE N°

Mensuel
T.M. : 257.000 ex.

☎ 90-65-29-16
L.M. : 1.053.000

DÉCEMBRE 1996

LE MONDE
diplomatique

« DIPLOMATIE », de Henry Kissinger

## Ambitions et omissions

DANS un ouvrage qui se veut à la fois réflexion théorique et guide d'action (1), on retrouve les thèmes et les personnages chers à l'ancien secrétaire d'Etat Henry Kissinger. Parmi les « grands hommes » qu'il évoque, et dans la lignée desquels il entend se situer : le cardinal de Richelieu, théoricien de la « raison d'Etat », le Bismarck de la « Realpolitik » et, encore et toujours, Metternich. Pour l'ancien professeur d'histoire et de relations internationales de Harvard, le Congrès de Vienne de 1815 (auquel il avait consacré sa thèse de doctorat) reste en effet l'événement phare qui permit à l'Europe d'entrer dans une longue période de stabilité, et qui, même aujourd'hui, pourrait servir de modèle à l'élaboration d'un nouvel ordre mondial.

Henry Kissinger compare les traditions diplomatiques des grandes puissances et analyse les bonnes et les mauvaises décisions de l'histoire des relations internationales. L'idéalisme du président Woodrow Wilson illustre selon lui l'« exceptionnalisme » américain – cette tendance à chercher à exporter ses institutions et ses valeurs, à s'embarquer dans des croisades idéologiques et à vouloir jouer les redresseurs de torts. Car, contrairement aux puissances européennes, l'Amérique « a toujours justifié ses engagements internationaux par une doctrine quasiment

sacro-sainte : elle défend un principe et non des intérêts, le droit et non la puisance »...

Or, pour Henry Kissinger, le critère suprême est la stabilité du système, qui ne peut être atteinte que par la poursuite par les dirigeants des grandes puissances de leur intérêt national bien compris. La politique extérieure doit donc être purgée de préoccupations idéologiques et de tout sentimentnalisme – ce qui explique l'expansion de l'ancien secrétaire d'Etat face à la défense des droits de l'homme, son scepticisme quant à l'idée d'autodétermination, et son indulgence envers les dictateurs (chinois, en particulier). Les bonnes décisions sont en effet celles qui, fondées sur une juste évaluation des rapports de force, permettent d'échafauder des liens (linkages) entre différents dossiers et visent à concilier les intérêts respectifs des négociateurs.

Si Diplomatie se présente comme une grande synthèse destinée à faire référence, l'érudition y est partielle autant que partiale. M. Kissinger a toujours été son propre – et son meilleur – hagiographe. L'œil tourné vers la postérité, il n'a en fait sélectionné que les épisodes qui l'impliquent – comme universitaire ou comme diplomate. Et ceux qui confirment sa thèse. Ainsi, la politique américaine au sein de l'hémisphère occidental y est à peine évoquée. D'événements auxquels il n'a pas été associé – les accords de Camp David par exemple – il est rarement question. Enfin, les facteurs économiques sont étrangement absents d'un ouvrage qui se veut encyclopédique.

CEUX qui en achèveront la lecture ne manqueront pas de noter que, lorsqu'il vient à évoquer l'événement diplomatique de cette fin de siècle – la fin de la guerre froide –, Henry Kissinger contredit tout ce qu'il venait d'expliquer. MM. Mikhaïl Gorbatchev et Ronald Reagan – envers lesquels il ne tarit pas d'éloges – ressemblent en effet assez peu aux grands hommes de l'univers kissingé-rien. Le premier n'a rien compris aux rapports de force existants et s'est sans cesse fourvoyé. Le second, engagé dans une croisade manichéenne et toute « wilso-nienne » contre « l'Empire du mal » illustre toutes les tares de la diplomatie américaine. Mais, à grand renfort de sophismes, l'auteur tente de sauver son grand édifice intellectuel. Certes, M. Ronald Reagan – dont M. Kissinger avait jadis publiquement dénigré les capacités intellectuelles – ne connaissait rien à l'histoire, mais il en aurait, intuitivement, saisi les ressorts. Et, derrière des positions sans nuance se profilait en réalité un brillant calcul géopolitique. Lequel n'était que la continuation et le couronnement d'une politique de détente inaugurée un quart de siècle plus tôt par l'auteur lui-même – et dont M. Reagan était alors le critique le plus sévère...

IBRAHIM WARDE.

(1) Henry Kissinger, Diplomatie, Fayard, Paris, 862 pages, 198 F.

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Un feu d'artifice illumine le ciel de Little Rock (Arkansas), fief politique de Bill Clinton, au soir de sa réélection, le 5 novembre dernier. Il a bénéficié du redressement économique de l'Amérique.

president sortant, on ne pouvait rêver mieux », avait affirmé alors Robert Reich, le secrétaire d'Etat au Travail. Bill Clinton ne manqua pas d'exploiter aussitôt cette nouvelle providentielle.

« C'est la première fois, au XXe siècle, que le déficit recule durant chacune des quatre années d'une administration », avait-il déclaré lors d'un de ses derniers meetings, s'appropriant une réussite qui n'était pas la sienne. Car le mérite en revenait en réalité à Robert Rubin, le secrétaire au Trésor, qui, dès janvier 1993, avait persuadé le président que son action la plus urgente était de résorber le déficit. Une tâche indispensable, avait-il plaidé, pour restaurer auprès des marchés financiers une crédibilité sans laquelle toutes ses autres initiatives seraient vouées à l'échec.

La réduction du déficit tient également à l'influence « mécanique » exer-

cée par le surplus de croissance que Bill Clinton n'a pas non plus manqué de porter à son propre crédit. Indûment, là encore, car l'économie américaine n'est pas une économie dirigée, ni même une économie mixte. Toute l'activité repose sur le secteur privé. « Notre position dans l'économie mondiale dépend de l'initiative privée, pas du gouvernement », a rappelé récemment à ce propos Gary Parker, un industriel proche du parti républicain, dans un article paru dans le *Wall Street Journal*.

L'influence du président sur l'économie se limite en fait à son « impact psychologique », a souligné dans ce même quotidien Felix Rohatyn, le directeur de la banque Lazard Frères. Un « impact » dont les effets sont en tout état de cause de moindre ampleur que la politique monétaire, le système fiscal, l'innovation technologique ou même l'action du Congrès.

Une évolution revendiquée par Bill Clinton a surtout favorablement impressionné l'électorat : la baisse du chômage. Durant la campagne, le président candidat a vanté à loisir les « dix millions d'emplois nouveaux créés en quatre ans ». Quatre ans plus tôt, il en avait pro-

bénéficient à nouveau d'une relative prospérité économique. Voici quatre ans, le pays sortait de la récession. Le chômage était à 7,5 %, l'inflation à 3 %, la croissance du PNB, négative en 1991, atteignait à peine 2 %. A l'époque, les revenus après impôt étaient en recul et le déficit budgétaire approchait le niveau record de 300 milliards de dollars.

Le tableau est bien différent aujourd'hui. Le chômage a été réduit à 5,2 % et flirte depuis dix-huit mois avec ce que les économistes estiment être son « niveau incompressible ». L'inflation se situe en dessous de 3 % pour la troisième année consécutive. Le pays connaît son soixantième mois de croissance positive, et celle-ci, après un bond de 4,7 % en termes annuels au second semestre, devrait dépasser 2,5 % en 1996. Les revenus avant impôt ont progressé de 5 % en 1995, soit deux fois plus vite que l'inflation. Par ailleurs, cette année les salaires réels ont progressé de 1,4 %, leur plus forte hausse en vingt ans.

Un dernier coup de pouce est venu couronner cette avalanche de bons résultats une semaine avant le scrutin. Le 28 octobre, en effet, on apprenait que le déficit était retombé à 107 milliards de dollars, soit un recul de 63 % ! « Pour un

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## LE CONGRÈS AMÉRICAIN

CHAMBRE DES PRÉRESENTANTS

(*) y compris trois sièges en ballottage favorable.

Six sièges restent donc officiellement toujours "indéterminés."

Le Congrès américain après les élections du 5 novembre dernier. Les démocrates y demeurent minoritaires, même s'ils ont gagné neuf sièges à la Banque des représentants.

par le républicain Pat Bucchanan, qui remporta la primaire du New Hampshire. Le *New York Times* avait publié à l'époque une

série d'articles sur les « restructurations » et leur « coût humain ». « Les Américains sont pessimistes quant à l'avenir de leurs enfants », titrait de son côté le *Wall Street Journal* le 6 janvier.

Quelques actions habilement ciblées et une présentation flatteuse des statistiques ont permis depuis de dissiper l'inquiétude. Ainsi, en septembre dernier, le Bureau du recensement a annoncé que le « revenu familial a augmenté en 1995... pour la première fois en cinq ans ». Un mois plus tôt, le président avait approuvé une hausse du salaire minimum qui concerne quinze millions d'Américains, en majorité des femmes. Ce salaire a ainsi été porté de 4,25 à 4,75 dollars de l'heure le 1er octobre, et passera à 5,15 le 1er septembre prochain. Une augmentation de 21 % qui, en dollars constants, le placera à son niveau de... 1956.

Mais la Maison-Blanche est parvenue à orchestrer ce réajustement de manière à en tirer le maximum de profit politique. De 1992 à 1994, alors que le Congrès était contrôlé par les démocrates, Bill Clinton n'en avait jamais fait mention. Après 1994, il y fit allusion à quarante reprises... Il est vrai qu'entre-temps le salaire minimum était devenu, face aux républicains, un thème de campagne. « Les P-DG américains se sont donné une augmentation de 23 % en 1995, pour un salaire moyen de 4,5 millions de dollars. Pourquoi ne pouvons-nous pas donner 90 cents de plus à nos ouvriers les moins bien payés ! » avait ainsi lancé Robert Reich, un des ténors démocrates. En traînant à

comme cela fut le cas en 1990-1991.

Cette croissance sous contrôle n'a pourtant pas résolu tous les problèmes.

La dette fédérale, qui progresse du simple fait des intérêts qu'elle engendre, est passée de 43 à 46 % du PNB en deux ans. Le déficit commercial a presque doublé, passant de 8 milliards de dollars par mois environ à la fin de 1992 à plus de 14 aujourd'hui. Les faillites personnelles atteignent un niveau record et affectent 22 % des adultes. Un avantage-se RELATED ARTICLE

Une menace estompée ces derniers mois par l'aspect le plus tangible de la croissance actuelle : la hausse des revenus. Le revenu hebdomadaire moyen, qui était de 262 dollars en 1990, était tombé à 253 au début de 1993 et à 250 à la fin de 1995. Il approche à nouveau 260 dollars. Amélioration toute relative qui a néanmoins permis de dissiper le malaise dû à un niveau de vie qui a globalement stagné depuis le premier choc pétrolier de 1973. Une fois encore, Bill Clinton aura été le grand bénéficiaire de cette brise d'optimisme, malgré un climat général d'insécurité et d'insatisfaction.

Ces sentiments dominaient encore au début de l'année. Ils furent exploités

Bill Clinton donne l'accolade à son secrétaire d'Etat Warren Christopher qui vient de lui présenter sa démission, le 7 novembre.

Comme plusieurs « ténors » du cabinet.

mis huit millions. En fait, il s'avère que l'économie américaine a créé près de douze millions d'emplois. Mais seuls cent mille peuvent être portés au crédit de l'hôte de la Maison-Blanche : il s'agit principalement des postes de policiers promis en 1992, que Bill Clinton était contraint de pourvoir.

Pour le reste, la courbe de l'emploi résulte bien moins des initiatives de l'exécutif que des évolutions de la croissance. Laquelle résulte de la politique monétaire et du coût du crédit, qui dépendent eux-mêmes de la Federal Reserve, la Banque fédérale américaine, et de son président, Alan Greenspan. Il est ainsi de coutume de dire à Washington que « le président des Etats-Unis est l'homme le plus puissant du monde, mais l'homme le plus puissant des Etats-Unis est le président de la Banque fédérale ».

Tout au plus peut-on mettre sur le compte de Bill Clinton la reconduction à son poste, à deux reprises, d'Alan Greenspan, un républicain nommé en 1987 par Ronald Reagan et maintenu par George Bush. Son contrôle vigilant des taux d'intérêt a assuré une croissance modeste, et évité à l'économie américaine les deux écueils de l'inflation et de la récession. En effet, lorsque l'économie parut s'emballer — affichant une croissance de 7,6 % — en 1993-1994, Alan Greenspan imposa une hausse des taux d'intérêt, qui passèrent de 3,25 à 6 % en douze mois. Résultat : la croissance retomba à 2,5 % en 1995. Nombre d'économistes considèrent que l'économie américaine a ainsi réussi grâce à lui un atterrissage en douceur (soft landing), c'est-à-dire le passage d'une surchauffe de croissance (observée en 1993-1994) à un rythme plus mesuré, sans passer par une phase de récession

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CLINTON EMBALLE L'AMÉRIQUE

sa suite, sans grande surprise, 84 % d'opinions favorables, ainsi que le révé- lèrent alors les sondages.

Du coup, Bob Dole, qui martelait que « les choses ne vont pas bien », perdit de sa crédibilité. En 1992, George Bush avait paru détaché des problèmes de l'Amérique parce qu'il affirmait que tout allait bien. Ironie de la campagne : en 1996, Bob Dole parut tout aussi dé- taché parce qu'il affirmait le contraire.

Dans le contexte d'une économie en expansion, sa proposition de réduire les impôts de 15 % perdait de son attrait. D'autant qu'elle fut doublée à droite par les propositions de Bill Clinton, qui préconisa des réductions d'impôts « ci- blées ». Mesures d'une moindre am- pleur globale mais plus directement tangibles pour l'électeur. Elles permi- rent aux démocrates de revendiquer le « principe » d'un Budget équilibré, et de s'approprier ainsi la proposition répu- blicaine de parvenir au « zéro déficit » budgétaire en 2002.

Le pillage du programme républicain.

L'

'l'équipe Clinton mettait ainsi en pratique le deuxième atout maître qui, avec les fruits du re- dressement économique, allait contribuer à la maintenir au pouvoir : la captation du programme républicain. Paradoxalement en effet, dans le do- maine social et sur le terrain des va- leurs, Bill Clinton s'est montré plus conservateur que ses adversaires. Alors que sa première directive présidentielle avait autorisé les homosexuels dans

l'armée, il a signé par la suite une loi interdisant les unions homosexuelles. Il a approuvé la censure à la télévision grâce à une puce électronique appelée V-chip, intégrée aux récepteurs. Puis il s'est déclaré favorable au port de l'uni- forme dans les écoles, et au droit des parents d'opter pour l'établissement pu- blic de leur choix. Il accepté l'idée d'un « couvre-feu » applicable aux adoles- cents pour tenter de réduire la crimi- nalité et le trafic de drogue.

Mais sa plus importante initiative, en même temps que sa principale conces-

sion au programme républicain, a été la réforme de l'aide sociale, le fameux welfare. Durant la campagne de 1992 déjà, le candidat Clinton avait promis de « changer l'aide sociale telle que nous la connaissons ». Une fois élu, en dépit de cette promesse, il mit deux vetos suc- cessifs aux réformes proposées par les républicains. Avant de mettre finale- ment en chantier, le 1er août dernier, une réforme qui s'inspire étroitement des theses républicaines.

La nouvelle loi élimine en effet les ga- ranties d'aide sociale aux pauvres. Elle réduit la durée des prestations et en transfère la responsabilité aux Etats. Les versements sont désormais limités à vingt-quatre mois consécutifs et à une durée totale d'indemnisation de cinq ans au maximum. En outre, les bénéficiaires sont contraints de trouver un emploi avant 2002. Un train de mesures qui re- présente une économie de 55 milliards de dollars pour le Budget.

Pour les démocrates, cette réforme fait figure de trahison. « C'eût été après l'élection, il n'aurait pas signé », admet le sénateur de New York Daniel Moy- nihan qui, comme nombre de démo- crates, estime que la nouvelle loi sape les fondements de l'Etat-providence. « Le président a mis son propre intérêt poli- tique avant celui de millions d'enfants pauvres », va même jusqu'à affirmer une autre personnalité démocrate. « Bill Clinton a-t-il vendu son âme pour être réélu ? » s'interroge pour sa part l'édito- rialiste démocrate Albert Hunt.

Ci-dessus : Bob Dole et son épouse Elizabeth en meeting, la veille du scrutin.

Ci-dessous : l'évolution des taux d'intérêt américains. Leur baisse a servi la reprise.

LES TAUX D'INTÉRÊT

Federal funds

(taux entre banques au jour le jour en pourcentage)

Cette dernière campagne présiden-
tielle a donc été le théâtre d'une cu-
rieuse inversion des rôles. Bill Clinton
a endossé les habits de Ronald Reagan
et Bob Dole ceux de Harry Truman,
président de 1945 à 1953. En effet, Clin-
ton a repris la question posée par Ronald
Reagan durant la campagne de 1980 :
« Votre situation est-elle meilleure au-
jourd'hui qu'il y a quatre ans ? » Il a
aussi repris, mot pour mot, le thème
de la campagne républicaine de 1984 :

« Un nouveau matin pour l'Amé-
rique. » Ce faisant, les démocrates ont
erigé le conservatisme en vertu pour
mieux affubler les véritables conserva-
teurs, comme Pat Buchanan, de l'éti-
quette diffamatoire d'« extrémistes ».

De son côté, perpétuellement à la
 traîne dans les sondages, Bob Dole avait
promis une victoire suprême. Il a même
eu recours à une photo célèbre, datant
de 1948, où Harry Truman présente un
journal annonçant l'élection de son ad-

UN METTERNICH
AMERICAIN

L'échec du « nouvel ordre mondial » était contenu dans
ce péché d'idéalisme qui pousse trop souvent
l'Amérique à s'ériger en empire du Bien.
Une magistrale leçon de diplomatie de Henry Kissinger.

Alain Barlet

C'était à la fin des années quatre-
vingt, avenue Kléber, à l'endroit
même où, en 1973, avaient été
négociés et signés de haute lutte
les accords de Paris sur le Vietnam.
Henry Kissinger, une fois encore, affron-
tait la presse en virtuose : « Eh bien mes-
sieurs, avez-vous des questions pour
mes réponses ? » Quatre tomes de Mé-
moires et bien des doctes facéties plus
tard, l'ancien secrétaire d'Etat de Richard
Nixon et de Gerald Ford n'en a a toujours
pas terminé avec la grande affaire de sa
vie : les affaires étrangères. Diplomatie,
la somme magistrale qu'il vient de publier
chez Fayard, tout à la fois retrace l'in-
vention des relations internationales mo-
dernes, règle les derniers comptes du
bourbier indochinois et, surtout, démonte
au nom de la Realpolitik les tentatives ré-
pétées des Etats-Unis pour ériger un
« nouvel ordre mondial ».

Le principal mérite de ce maître ouvrage réside en effet dans la mise en regard des deux traditions qui, depuis le XVIIe siècle, tissent l'histoire de la diplomatie occidentale.

L'école européenne est dominée par Ri-
chelieu, Metternich et Bismarck. Le pre-

mier, en nouant alliance avec les princes
protestants pour faire pièce à l'hégémonie
des Habsbourg, remplaça la vieille notion
médiévale de « valeurs morales univer-
selles » par un concept novateur, la raison
d'Etat. Celle-ci devint alors le principe di-
recteur de la diplomatie européenne. Dé-
sormais, souligne Kissinger, « l'équilibre des
forces se substituait à la nostalgie d'une mo-
narchie universelle, avec, en guise de
consolation, l'idée que chaque Etat, en
poursuivant ses intérêts égoïstes, contri-
buerait d'une manière ou d'une autre à la
sécurité et au progrès de tous les autres ».
Un siècle et demi plus tard, Metternich —
auquel Kissinger voue une admiration par-
ticulière — fut, lui, le grand architecte d'un
système fondé sur l'équilibre des forces
qui, après le congrès de Vienne, assura à
l'Europe cinq décennies de paix, jusqu'à
la guerre de Crimée.

Bismarck, enfin, tira un trait sur l'ordre de
Vienne en se faisant le héraut de l'affir-
mation prussienne. Une politique étrangère
fondée sur le calcul des forces et l'intérêt
national déboucha sur l'unification de l'Al-
lemagne. La force l'avait emporté sur l'équi-
libre. Avec, souligne Kissinger, un terrible
risque, qu'illustrera la première conflagra-

tion mondiale : celui de voir la Realpolitik
« se retourner contre elle-même ».

Et puis il y a l'école américaine. Au panthéon
des diplomates — que Kissinger, on le sent
bien, aspire lui aussi à rejoindre —, il place
deux présidents des Etats-Unis : Theodore
Roosevelt (à la Maison-Blanche de 1901 à
1908) et Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921). A
l'aube d'un siècle qui sera celui de la puis-
sance américaine, ces deux grandes figures
ont, en tournant la page de l'isolationnisme
édicté par Monroe en 1823, durablement im-
primé leur marque — quoique de façon in-
verse — sur la politique étrangère des Etats-
Unis. Le premier, dans la veine des grands
Européens, estima que l'intérêt national du
pays lui commandait de participer à l'équi-
libre international. La paix mondiale ne pou-
vait résulter que d'un équilibre des intérêts
nationaux. Aux yeux du second, inspiré par
les pères fondateurs de la nation américaine,
il incombait à cette dernière un rôle quasi
messianique : propager son système de va-
leurs — la démocratie, l'autodétermination
des peuples —, pilier naturel de la sécurité
collective et de la paix. L'un considérait les
Etats-Unis comme une nation parmi
d'autres, quoique aspirant à devenir « l'es-
poir du monde » ; l'autre estimait qu'ils sont
l'incarnation unique de la vertu civique, l'ho-
rizon moral universel, bref, l'empire du Bien.
D'un côté, la politique étrangère considérée
comme la mise en équilibre des intérêts ; de
l'autre, la diplomatie vue comme l'affirma-

CLINTON EMBALLE L'AMÉRIQUE

versaire. Mais, cette fois, la surprise ne s'est pas produite.

La réélection de Bill Clinton ne doit pourtant pas faire illusion. L'âge de Bob Dole (soixante-treize ans) a joué en faveur de son adversaire. Mais le « jeune » président n'a pas bénéficié d'une vague d'engouement, ainsi qu'en témoigne son score. Avec 49 % des suffrages — six points de plus qu'en 1992 —, il a gagné aux voix sans obtenir la majorité qu'il recherchait. Par contraste, Franklin Roo-

sevelt en 1936, Dwight Eisenhower en 1956, Richard Nixon en 1972 et Ronald Reagan en 1984 furent tous réélus avec environ 60 % des voix. « En période de paix et de prospérité, les présidents sontants, même ceux qui n'inspirent pas confiance, sont rarement rejetés », avait souligné le New York Times. Dans ces circonstances favorables, Bill Clinton n'a pas été « rejeté ». Mais il n'inspire pas pour autant confiance à beaucoup d'Américains, qui se sont largement absous — le taux de participation (49 %, soit 5 % de moins qu'en 1992) a été le plus bas depuis 1924.

La litanie menaçante des scandales.

Ce faible capital électoral permettra-t-il à Bill Clinton de « gérer » son second mandat ? Rien n'est moins sûr tant se sont multipliées les affaires et les irrégularités qui, pour la plupart, font toujours l'objet d'enquêtes du Congrès ou du département de la Justice. « Aucune administration n'a été encombrée par autant de scandales », a soulagé le quotidien Investor's Business Daily, qui en a dénombré trente-neuf. De véritables bombes à retardement.

La plus explosive s'appelle White-water. Dès 1992, le président et son épouse Hillary avaient été impliqués dans la faillite d'une caisse d'épargne de l'Arkansas (consécutive à des investissements immobiliers douteux) et dans diverses malversations électorales. En mai dernier, après une longue procédure, trois condamnations ont été prononcées dans l'affaire White-water, et Bill Clinton a été contraint de témoigner sur vidéo.

Quelques mois après l'arrivée de Bill Clinton à la présidence avait éclaté, en mai 1993, le Travelgate mettant en cause le personnel des voyages officiels de la Maison-Blanche. Contrairement à l'usage, l'ensemble de cette équipe avait été licencié à l'instigation de Hillary Clinton, qui souhaitait la remplacer par des « gens de confiance ».

L'année suivante, Webster Hubbel, ami des Clinton et proche collaborateur d'Hillary au sein du Rose Law Firm, son ancien cabinet d'avocats, a été condamné pour fraudes et fausses factures — dont certaines seront retrouvées en juillet 1995 à la

Maison-Blanche, dans un boudoir adjacent au bureau de la First Lady.

Cette année, la moisson des affaires aura été particulièrement fertile. En juin dernier, le Filegate a mis en cause l'obtention par la Maison-Blanche d'un millier de dossiers confidentiels du FBI sur des personnalités républicaines.

En octobre a éclaté l'Indogate : un conglomerat indonésien, le Lippo Group, aurait fourni un million de dollars au parti démocrate durant la campagne électorale. James Riady, le fils de ces généreux pourvoyeurs, est un ami des Clinton et, depuis 1978, un client de la Rose Law Firm.

« Nous allons tout droit vers une crise constitutionnelle, un second Watergate ! » avait lancé l'homme d'affaires et candidat Ross Perot, qui n'a finalement obtenu que 8 % des voix. L'anathème, alors, n'a guère porté. Mais il résonnera dans les couloirs de la Maison-Blanche durant les quatre prochaines années.

tion d'une harmonie naturelle dont l'Amérique serait la vestale casquée.

Avec le recul, force est de reconnaître que le wilsonisme s'est imposé. « En même temps, ce credo a engendré une infinité de problèmes. » De fait, d'un bout à l'autre du siècle, la « sécurité collective » n'a souvent été qu'une illusion. Les principes n'ont pu être mis en actes par des mécanismes efficaces. Une confusion de la diplomatie et de la morale a poussé l'Amérique au péché d'irréalisme, comme en témoigne la « catastrophique croisade » du Vietnam. « Trop idéaliste pour fonder sa politique sur l'intérêt national, convaincue que ses valeurs présentaient un aspect universel, l'Amérique sous-estima considérablement les obstacles à la démocratisation dans une société coulée au moule du confucianisme. Le credo wilsonien n'admettait aucune différenciation culturelle... », écrit-il. Et maintenant ? Malgré l'issue victorieuse de la guerre froide, souligne Henry Kissinger, la prédominance américaine est mise à mal par l'émergence, à l'horizon du XXIe siècle, d'un monde multilingue. Cinq à six grandes puissances (Etats-Unis, Russie, Chine, Inde, Japon et, peut-être, l'Union européenne), as sorties d'une multiplicité de puissances secondaires, battrent résolument en brèche l'« exceptionnalisme » américain. « L'Amérique restera la plus grande nation, la plus puissante aussi, mais une nation comme les autres qui devra apprendre à manœuvrer dans un système d'équilibre des forces », pronostiqué Kissinger. Une véritable terra incognita : car si, en son temps, Metternich a arrimé son édifice diplomatique aux valeurs monochiques partagées par l'Europe entière, quel sera le socle sur lequel ses lointains successeurs pourront ancrer le leur ? ■

● Diplomatie, de Henry Kissinger (Fayard, 860 pages, 198 F).

["[] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] []

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Le Monde
LIVRES

Ven. 27 SEPTEMBRE 1996

# Kissinger, un regard européen

De Richelieu à Clinton, le secrétaire d'Etat de Richard Nixon relate trois siècles de relations internationales. À l'utopisme américain, il rétorque par le sacro-saint « équilibre des forces »

## DIPLOMATIE

### (Diplomacy)

de Henry Kissinger.

Traduit de l'anglais (Etats-Unis)

par Marie-France de Paloméra.

Fayard, 862 p, 198 F

(en librairie le 4 octobre)

Sous le titre bien fade de Démocratie, Henry Kissinger nous propose une somme que son excessive épaisseur n'empêche pas d'être éblouissante. Bizarrement, il se garde d'en préciser le dessein. A-t-il voulu démontrer une thèse? Justifier sa collaboration avec Nixon? Résumer, de Richelieu à Clinton, trois siècles de relations internationales? Démontrer son don de synthèse (en dix lignes tout est dit sur l'ex-Yougoslavie)? Etaler son érudition? Brosser une gallerie de portraits, où le grand Frédéric et Metternich cotoient Napoléon III, exécuté, Bismarck, admiré, Gladstone, les deux Roosevelt, Wilson, de Gaulle, Adenauer? Allez savoir... Mais qu'importe? Qu'on prenne le temps de le lire minutieusement ou qu'on l'ouvre au hasard, il n'est guère de page de Diplomatie où l'on ne trouve plaisir à butiner.

Avec son vieux rival Brzezinski, « le cher Henry » constitue un cas très rare, à l'époque contemporaine, dans la conduite de la politique étrangère américaine. Nombre de ses prédécesseurs ou successeurs étaient des hommes d'affaires, des avocats en cheville avec le big business. Lui ne se passionne guère pour l'économie, dont il est à peine question dans ce nouveau livre. Il est fondamentalement resté un intellectuel, comparable à bien des égards à Raymond Aron, un connaisseur de l'histoire et de la psychologie des peuples, d'une rare vivacité d'esprit, et doté de surcroît d'un joli talent de négociateur.

On remarquait surtout, lorsqu'il enseignait à Harvard, son art du

summing up, son aptitude à pré-senter la conclusion des discussions auxquelles il participait. Nixon avait repéré ce don quand il a fait de lui son conseiller pour les affaires de sécurité, et plus tard son secrétaire d'Etat. Le trait le plus original cependant, chez un Américain qui a occupé de telles fonctions, c'est sans doute que l'esprit de ce fils d'immigrants juifs allemands qui avaient fui la persécution nazie soit resté à tel point européen.

## PROCHE DE LA REALPOLITIK

Non qu'il n'aît pas beaucoup contribué à faire en sorte que les Etats-Unis soient « plus proches des deux géants communistes qu'eux-mêmes ne l'étaient entre eux ». Il a été fasciné, par Mao, Zhou Enlai et Deng et n'a trouvé nulle part « d'interlocuteurs plus réceptifs à la diplomatie nixonienne ». Il sent bien que l'Asie va peser, dans le siècle qui vient, d'un poids considérable. De même s'est-il occupé activement du Proche-Orient, jusqu'à trouver du charme au Syrien Hafez El Assad. Reste que son nouveau livre parle dix fois plus de l'Europe que du reste du monde. Que sa pensée appartient à une école, celle de la Realpolitik, qui est fondamentalement européenne. Et surtout que le regard, souvent étonné, amusé ou critique, qu'il porte sur « l'exceptionnalisme » de son pays d'adoption est en quelque sorte extérieur à celui-ci.

Sous le titre *Un monde restauré*, Kissinger avait consacré sa thèse de doctorat à Metternich et au congrès de Vienne. Leur œuvre demeure pour lui un modèle, dans la mesure où il s'est agi d'une paix négociée et non, à la différence du traité de Versailles, imposée. Où elle a assuré la plus longue période de paix que notre continent ait connue, les guerres qui l'ont entroupçée gardant un caractère local. Où elle était basée sur cette

notion d'équilibre des forces, qui constitue aux yeux de l'auteur l'alpa et l'oméga de toute politique étrangère digne de ce nom, alors que la plupart des Américains lui « imputent les douleurs de l'Europe ». Qu'ils conçoivent leur pays comme le « phare du monde » ou comme « menant croisade », ils « aspirent à un ordre international fondé sur la démocratie, la liberté du commerce et le droit international. Comme aucun système de cette nature n'a encore jamais existé, écrit Kissinger, les autres sociétés voient dans cette aspiration, sinon de la naïveté, du moins une utopie » ? d'essence « messianique ».

Le président Wilson, père renié par ses compatriotes de la Société des nations, entendait en faire un « Parlement de l'humanité », calqué sur les institutions de son pays. Franklin Roosevelt voulait confier la préservation de la paix à « quatre shérifs », américain, britannique, soviétique et chinois, le premier nommé ayant bien entendu le pas sur les autres. Quant au fameux « long télégramme » expédié de Moscou en 1946 par le diplomate George Kennan, sur lequel a reposé, tout au long de la guerre froide, la politique américaine « d'endigement » du communisme, Kissinger y voit « l'expression la plus achevée de l'optimisme national ».

Deux présidents seulement ont tourné le dos à cet idéalisme et recherché la stabilité dans l'équilibre des forces: Theodore Roosevelt, le chantier avoué de l'impérialisme, qui recommandait au début de ce siècle de « parler doucement et [d'] avoir un gros bâton » et... Nixon, qui a dit un jour: « Le monde serait plus sûr et meilleur avec des Etats-Unis, une Europe, une Union soviétique, une Chine et un Japon forts, chacun faisant contrepoids à l'autre, ne se dressant pas l'un contre l'autre, en parfait équilibre. » S'il « usait du discours wilsonien pour expliquer ses objec-

tifs, commente son ex-secrétaire d'Etat, il faisait appel à l'intérêt national pour étayer sa tactique ». Mais, « trop cérébral », il communiquait mal. Du coup, au fur et à mesure qu'il « accumulait les succès en politique étrangère, et que les périls qu'elle avait conjurés s'évanouissaient, sa stratégie (et la mienne) suscitaient des polémiques grandissantes ».

On croyait se rappeler que les bombardements du Vietnam du Nord et l'intervention au Cambodge avaient déjà suscité de très violentes protestations outre-Atlantique, mais il est vrai que, le Watergate aidant, le Congrès avait fini par rogner au maximum la marge de manœuvre de la Maison Blanche. Finalement, c'est à Reagan qu'il est revenu, à la visible surprise de l'auteur, non seulement de redresser la barre mais de mettre le boxeur soviétique dans les cordes. Son ignorance historique était pourtant abyssale et il n'avait jamais pris le temps d'étudier à fond un grand dossier de politique étrangère. Mais c'était un homme de intuition, un affectif, qui « avait le don mystérieux d'unir le peuple américain ».

Il n'est pas d'hégémonie sans idéologie. Nation d'immigrants, patrie choisie plus encore qu'hériée, les Etats-Unis ne font pas exception à la règle: leurs enfants sont persuadés que si l'on suit leurs « prescriptions morales », on peut « triompher de l'histoire ». Kissinger n'en croit rien, qui oppose leur « pragmatisme dans la conduite ordinaire de leur diplomatie » à « l'idéologie » marquant « la poursuite de leurs convictions morales historiques ». On le trouvera tout de même bien discret sur l'égoïsme et le cynisme dont savent faire preuve à l'occasion les responsables américains quand il s'agit de faire prévaloir l'intérêt national - ou l'idée que s'en fait l'électeur....

André Fontaine

PAGE N° 104

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Ven. 04 OCTOBRE 1996

LE POINT

Discours sur la diplomatie

ESSAI « Diplomatie », de Henry Kissinger, est un triple livre : une philosophie des relations internationales, une histoire de ces relations et, enfin, un plaidoyer pour la manière dont l'auteur en exerça le métier.

PAR JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL

Le dernier-né des livres de Henry Kissinger est un monument de réflexion théorique, de connaissance historique et, malheureusement aussi, pour une part, d'égocentrisme et de susceptibilité. Car c'est un triple livre, aux éléments magistralement liés et fondus : une philosophie générale des relations internationales ; une histoire fouillée de ces mêmes relations, depuis le cardinal de Richelieu jusqu'à Ronald Reagan ; enfin, un plaidoyer furibond pour la manière dont l'auteur lui-même a dirigé la politique extérieure américaine, donc largement mondiale, de 1969 à 1977, d'abord avec Richard Nixon, puis quasiment seul, après la démission forcée du président et son remplacement par Gerald Ford.

La diplomatie est à l'étude des relations internationales ce que la médecine est à la biologie. Et si Kissinger intitule son livre « Diplomatie », c'est qu'il entend répondre à la question qui est au centre de toute sa vie, de sa carrière d'historien et de professeur de relations internationales d'abord, d'acteur politique capital ensuite. A savoir : dans quelle mesure et par quels moyens peut-on ou ne peut-on pas instaurer ou restaurer périodiquement, par la négociation et le compromis, une garantie de paix et un équilibre entre les nations ? Equilibre qui, pour être durable, doit satisfaire peu ou prou toutes les parties explicitement contractantes ou tacitement consensantes. Du moins doit-il ne léser ni mécontenter gravement aucune d'elles. L'exemple idéal de l'édifice diplomatique réussi et solide fut l'œuvre du congrès de Vienne en 1815. Il assura un demi-siècle de paix complète en Europe, suivi d'un autre demi-siècle de paix relative. Le contre-exemple, le ratage désastreux, fut celui de Versailles en 1919, réservoir de frustrations telles qu'il nous apparaît non comme un traité de paix, mais, si moral qu'il se voulût, comme un bref et précaire armistice entre deux conflagrations quasi mortelles.

Trois principes et trois méthodes ont inspiré, successivement ou simultanément, la diplomatie depuis la fin du Moyen Age, qui avait rêvé d'un empire européen. D'abord le principe de la raison d'Etat conçue comme entièrement différente à la morale et se voulant au service

Henry Kissinger

MELLOU SYNA

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de l'intérêt national pur, conçu comme entière-
ment indifférent aux intérêts des autres. D'après
Kissinger, l'inventeur et le praticien suprême de
cette diplomatie fut le cardinal de Richelieu. Le
deuxième principe est celui de l'équilibre des
puissances. Il encadra aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles le
« concert européen » dont l'inoubliable chef d'or-
chestre fut Metternich. Lorsqu'un Etat – tel l'Em-
pire de Napoléon Ier – tentait de s'emparer de
l'hégémonie continentale, les autres se liguaient
ensemble contre lui pour rétablir un système de
contrepoids entre nations petites et moyennes.
Préservant tant bien que mal la liberté de cha-
cun par une neutralisation réciproque et orga-
nisée de tous, l'équilibre des puissances joue en
politique étrangère le même rôle que la sépara-
tion des pouvoirs en politique intérieure.

Le troisième principe est engendré par la
faillite des deux premiers, c'est-à-dire de la di-
plomatie européenne, aboutissant aux catas-
trophes des guerres de 1914-1918 et de 1939-
1945. C'est le principe de la sécurité collective,
apporté des Etats-Unis en Europe par Woodrow
Wilson en 1919, date qui marque l'entrée invo-
lontaire de l'Amérique dans la politique mon-
diale. Il fut réaffirmé en 1945 par Roosevelt, puis
Truman, et se traduisit par la création d'instances
supranationales censées transcender tous les
égøismes: la Société des Nations après la Pre-
mière Guerre mondiale, l'Organisation des Na-
tions unies après la Seconde. Selon l'idéalisme
wilsonien, en 1919, comme selon la Charte de
l'Atlantique, élaborée par Roosevelt dès 1941, la
paix future du monde ne repose pas sur l'équi-
libre des forces, sur des marchandages entre di-
verses raisons d'Etat, vieilles techniques euro-
péennes. Elle repose sur la mise en œuvre d'une
justice internationale liée, en dernier ressort, à
une sorte de démocratie planétaire et de morale
universelle. L'Amérique « a toujours justifié ses
engagements internationaux par une doctrine qua-
siment sacro-sainte: elle défend un principe et non
des intérêts, le droit et non la puissance ». C'est
ce que Kissinger appelle l'exceptionnalisme amé-
ricain. Cet exceptionnalisme explique la const-
tante juxtaposition, si déconcertante pour les
Européens et les Asiatiques, de l'isolationnisme
américain et du rôle, sans cesse repris depuis
1919, de « gendarme du monde » que jouent les
Etats-Unis.

Une juste évaluation du rapport des forces

La raison d'Etat de Richelieu, rebaptisée
« Realpolitik » par Bismarck, comme l'équilibre
des puissances, rebaptisé aujourd'hui « géopoli-
tique » ou « géostratégie », ne devaient leur via-
bilité qu'à de subtiles et tacites conventions de
savoir-vivre partagé et de modération sponta-
née. Ces conventions furent brisées en Europe
par la démesure de la force à partir de 1890 et
entre les deux guerres. Kissinger n'a pas de qua-
lificatifs assez durs pour l'incompétence et l'in-
conséquence des dirigeants européens durant
les deux décennies qui précèdent chacun des
conflits mondiaux. Seule la perspective d'une
chute générale du monde dans la violence chao-
tique tire par deux fois les Etats-Unis d'un isola-
tionnisme congénital et sincère pour les amener
à intervenir, sans être eux-mêmes directement
menacés, dans des régions éloignées où ils

[L]

Henry Kissinger
rencontré
Mao Zedong
à Pékin,
le 22 février 1973,
et Leonid Brejnev
au Kremlin,
le 29 mars 1974

KISSINGER

REUTERS

L'auteur

«Dear Henry», en-
core dit «Mr Mi-
racle» ou «le der-
nier des
Metternich», est né
en Bavière le
23 mai 1923. Le
père du jeune
Heinz Albert, un
professeur, perd
son emploi en 1933
et la famille part
aux Etats-Unis. Là,
Henry, juif et imm-
gré, comprend qu'il
faut être un excel-
lent élève... Il le de-
vient. Une belle
guerre, comme on
dit, puis Harvard,
un doctorat. En
1962, il est nommé
professeur à Har-
vard. Parallèle-
ment, il écrit de
nombreux livres de
géopolitique,
conseille de mul-
tiples institutions,
dirige des sémi-
naires internatio-
naux... jusqu'à ce
que Nixon l'ap-
pelle, en 1968. En
1970, il abandonne
son poste à Har-
vard et choisit la
Maison-Blanche.
La suite appartient
à l'Histoire.

n'avaient aucun intérêt vital (sauf la zone du Pa-
cifique après l'agression japonaise de 1941.)

De même, les Américains furent très surpris
d'avoir à se réengager en Europe et dans d'autres
parties du monde après la défaite des puissances
de l'Axe pour devoir «contenir» leur ancien allié,
l'Union soviétique. Encore la politique d'endi-
guement, associée à la guerre froide, excluait
elle l'affrontement. Elle avait pour prémise fon-
damentale de renoncer à « refouler » l'URSS. D'où
l'immobilité américaine lors de la révolte hon-
groise de 1956. Il ne fallait même pas exploiter
les faiblesses manifestes de la tyrannie sovié-
tique ni en secourir les victimes. En retour, l'URSS
ne devait pas élargir militairement davantage sa
sphère d'influence. En enfreignant cette loi im-
plicite, Moscou provoqua l'intervention améri-
caine en Corée, qui se termina par un succès, et
l'intervention au Vietnam, qui se termina par une
débâcle. De Wilson à Clinton, on voit l'Amérique,
de crise en crise, passer chaque fois de l'idéal
de la sécurité collective à l'engrenage de la real-
politik. Ce n'est pas pour étonner Kissinger, le-
quel, peu messianique par nature, ne croit qu'à la
négociation ancrée dans une juste évaluation du
rapport des forces et visant à concilier les inté-
rends respectifs des négociateurs.

Mais – ô paradoxe de l'amour-propre – Kissinger renâcle à être jugé lui-même à l'aune de la realpolitik lorsqu'il en vient à commenter la diplomatie dont il fut le principal architecte, sinon l'inventeur : la détente. Le ton devient acrimoniaux pour repousser les critiques émanant, surtout, des néoconservateurs, qui, dit-il, voulaient non pas des progrès tangibles, mais une croissance idéologique. Or cette objection est fausse. Car c'est justement au nom des progrès tangibles, ou de leur absence, que la détente est contestable et fut contestée. Qu'était-elle au juste? Elle consistait à parier que des concessions occidentales dans le domaine du contrôle des armements, de la parité nucléaire, de l'aide

économique et financière, des avantages com-
merciaux et des transferts de technologie en-
 traîneraient chez les Soviétiques une modéra-
tion de l'expansionnisme et un respect croissant
des droits de l'homme. Or, que se produisit-il?

A partir du moment où fut posée la clé de
voûte de cette diplomatie, les accords d'Helsinki
de 1975, l'URSS reprit plus énergiquement que
jamais son expansion en Afrique, relança la gué-
rilla en Amérique centrale et le terrorisme en Eu-
rope, déploya les fusées de portée intermédiaire
SS20 et, pour couronner le tout, envoya l'Armée
rouge envahir l'Afghanistan. Jolie façon de se
calmer. Quant aux droits de l'homme, les ci-
toyens soviétiques assez imprudents pour invo-
quer la fameuse « troisième corbeille » d'Helsinki
furent expédiés dare-dare au goulag, dans les
hôpitaux psychiatriques spéciaux (passés en
quelques années de trois à trente) ou, au mieux,
soit en résidence surveillée, soit en Occident.
C'était déjà préférable au coup de pistolet dans la
nuque, mais insuffisant pour crier victoire.

De brillantes réussites

Le plus étonnant est que Kissinger accepte
implicitement la critique de la détente en faisant
un éloge sans réserve de la diplomatie de Ro-
nald Reagan, qui prit le contrepied de la sienne et
réussit à déstabiliser l'Union soviétique. Car,
contrairement à la méthode appliquée jusque-
là, le reaganisme ne s'en prit plus seulement au
comportement soviétique: il attaqua de front le
système lui-même, défini comme intrinsèque-
ment et incurablement agressif. En fait, contre
un impérialisme d'essence idéologique, le ré-
quisitoire lui aussi idéologique rendit plus effi-
cace la realpolitik. La dénonciation reaganienne
de l'«Empire du mal», qui suscita aux Etats-Unis
les cris effarouchés des pudeurs universitaires et
épiscopales, fut confirmée par les révélations du
postcommunisme et fit perdre à la nomencla-
tura sa confiance en elle-même.

Au terme de cet ouvrage riche, profond et
talenteux, somme historique de la diplomatie
occidentale, on regrette que Kissinger n'ait pas
su, en devenant son propre chroniqueur, conser-
ver la sérénité morale et l'objectivité scientifique
avec lesquelles il parle de Richelieu, Pitt, Dis-
raeli, Bismarck ou Roosevelt. Est-ce impossible,
quand un homme d'Etat parle de lui ? Non. Toc-
queville ou Guizot y sont parvenus. Celui-ci écrit,
au terme de ses « Mémoires » : « En retraçant les
principaux événements qui ont marqué ces dix-
huit années et le part que j'y ai prise, je me suis
proposé d'en écarter toute polémique. La longue et
laborieuse expérience de la vie politique m'a en-
seigné non pas le doute, mais l'équité. » L'équité
eût été d'autant plus à la portée de Kissinger que
la politique étrangère de cette vaste intelligence
comporte aussi, bien entendu, de brillantes réus-
sites. Hélas ! nous supportons d'autant plus mal
les critiques justifiées que les critiques injusti-
fiées les surpassent en nombre et altèrent notre
egalité d'humeur. Comme l'a déclaré un jour,
avec son célèbre humour, Kissinger en plaisan-
tant sur son propre compte : « Même les para-
noiaques ont parfois de vrais ennemis. »

« Diplomatie », de Henry Kissinger, traduit de l'anglais
par M.-F. de Paloméra (Fayard, 862 pages, 198 F).

PAGE N°

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Valeurs
ACTUELLES

« Le Congrès de Berlin », 13 juin au 13 juillet 1878, par Anton von Werner.

UNE LEÇON DIPLOMATIQUE DE KISSINGER

Les États-Unis à
l'école de Richelieu

Sens de la synthèse et goût
de l'anecdote. L'histoire
des relations internationales
sous le regard d'aigle
de l'ancien secrétaire d'État.

par Frédéric Valloire

● C'est avec Richelieu que tout com-
mence. Du moins dans l'histoire des
relations internationales telle que la
raconte Henry Kissinger dans *Di-
plomatie*, un essai volumineux et
éblouissant où l'expérience de
l'homme d'Etat nourrit la réflexion
de l'intellectuel.

Pourquoi le Cardinal ? Parce
qu’il invente la conception moderne
des relations internationales. Fondée
sur l’Etat-nation, déterminée par la
recherche de l’intérêt national de sé-
curité, servie par la raison d’Etat,
cette nouvelle diplomatie vise à éta-
blir un équilibre des forces. Quitte à
ce que cet homme d’Eglise empêchât
la victoire de la Contre-Réforme et
se rangeât aux côtés des princes pro-

testants et des Turcs musulmans. Une
révolution par rapport à la notion
médiévale de monarchie universelle.
Sous-tendue par des valeurs morales
et religieuses absolues, celle-ci im-
pliquait pour les souverains qui lui
étaient attachés l'impossibilité de
transiger, de négocier et de manœu-
vrer. Ainsi l'empereur Ferdinand II
de Habsbourg qui déclarait : « Plutôt
mourir que de faire la moindre
concession lorsqu'il s'agit de reli-
gion. » Il tint parole. Au détriment de
son empire.

Si la stratégie de Richelieu est
claire, sa tactique ne l'est pas moins :
accorder les moyens avec la fin et
mener une politique coupée de tout
ancrage moral. « Pour une fois, note
Kissinger, un homme d'Etat prenait
la mesure de sa juste valeur. » Avec
Richelieu, moralité et religion de-
viennent soumises à la raison d'Etat.

Dans le sillage du Cardinal, les
grands hommes d'Etat européens.
Kissinger en brosse d'inoubliables
portraits. Castlereagh et Metternich
assurent à l'Europe, avec le congrès

Henry Kissinger. L'art de mêler
l'expérience de l'homme d'Etat
à la réflexion de l'intellectuel.
En haut : Bismarck,
au sommet de sa gloire, arbitre
une paix précaire dans les Balkans.

de Vienne, quarante années de paix
(la plus longue période jamais
connue) qui s'achèvent dans la
guerre de Crimée. Quinze années de
troubles, et une autre Europe s'éla-
bore, plus précaire.

L'artisan en est un « révolution-
naire », Bismarck, aidé involontaire-
ment par un autre « révolution-
naire », Napoléon III. Alors que le
premier identifie la politique à l'ana-
lyse des forces, le second en fait une
entreprise de relations publiques.
Désormais, le mot *Realpolitik* rem-
place l'expression raison d'Etat.
« Personne ne surpassa jamais Bis-
marck en matière de souplesse di-
plomatique », note Kissinger, d'aut-
tant que pour le Chancelier la force
bien comprise porte en elle-même sa
légitimité et sa propre limite. La po-
litique étrangère devient alors une

impitoyable lutte, au point que la
*Realpolitik* se retourne, à la mort de
Bismarck, contre l'Allemagne.

Vient le XXe siècle. Kissinger fait un lumineux exposé du proces- sus qui transforme une crise balka- nique secondaire en une guerre mondiale. Au milieu de cette « aber- ration monumentale » arrive un nou- veau protagoniste, les Etats-Unis de Wilson. Avec une assurance, une puissance et un idéalisme que ne peuvent imaginer ses alliés euro- péens. Foin d'équilibre des forces! Au diable l'immorale *Realpolitik* ! Vive l'ordre international fondé sur les critères de la démocratie, la sé- curité collective et le droit des peuples à disposer d'eux-mêmes! Trois principes qui n'avaient jamais servi à régler un conflit européen mais qui résultent de « la conviction que les Etats-Unis possèdent le meilleur système de gouvernement au monde, que le reste de l'humanité peut parvenir à la paix et à la pros- périté en renonçant à la diplomatie traditionnelle et en vénérant, comme l'Amérique, le droit international et la démocratie ».

Passé au crible d'une analyse ser-
rée, précise et pertinente, où le sens
de la synthèse n'écrase jamais l'anec-
dote, le XXe siècle apparaît à Henry
Kissinger comme dominé par les
Etats-Unis. Des accords internatio-
naux de la Société des Nations à
l'acte final d'Helsinki, aucun autre
pays n'a exercé une influence aussi
décisive, malgré des échecs drama-
tiques : « A l'aube de la dernière dé-
cennie du XXe siècle, la doctrine Wil-
son semble triompher. »

Pourtant, suggère l'auteur, le
nouvel ordre mondial qui se dessine
n'est en rien comparable à celui qui
a traversé le siècle. L'Amérique n'y
sera qu'une grande puissance parmi
l'Europe (une nécessité), la Chine, le
Japon, la Russie, l'Inde, auxquels
s'ajoutent nombre d'Etats secon-
daires. Un système qui ressemble
étrangement à celui des XVIIIe et
XIXe siècles. Et si l'enseignement de
l'histoire sert à quelque chose, le
nouvel ordre mondial ne naîtra que
de la conciliation et de l'équilibre
d'intérêts nationaux concurrents. Au-
trement dit, les Etats-Unis doivent
apprendre le concept européen
d'équilibre des forces et se convertir
à la politique étrangère de Richelieu
et de Bismarck, cela sans renoncer à
leurs idéaux. En seront-ils capables ?
Voilà pour Kissinger l'enjeu de de-
main.

Diplomatie, d'Henry Kissinger, Fayard,
862 pages, 198 francs.

[] [] []

PAGE N°

Quotidien ☎ 49-53-68-00
T.M. : 70.000 ex. L.M. : 245.000

1 4 OCT. 1996

Panorama du Médecin

Kissinger :
l'art et la manière

REUTER

Kessinger félicité par Arafat et Rabin lors de la
remise du prix Houphet-Boigny pour la paix.

Il ne s'agit pas
de ses
mémoires
mais au
contraire
d'une vaste
fresque
historique sur
les politiques
comparées
de Richelieu à
Clinton.
Brillant

Un titre fade, une présenta-
tion rebutante : voilà de
quoi décourager l'amateur. Et
pourtant, le résultat est excep-
tionnel. Exceptionnel tout
d'abord par la qualité de l'auteur,
ancien secrétaire d'Etat de
Nixon, « auteur » lui-même de la
paix au Vietnam et du spectacu-
laire rapprochement avec la Chi-
ne de Mao. Fervent admirateur
de Metternich, Kissinger a pris le
pari de décortiquer trois siècles
de diplomatie, de Richelieu à
Clinton : un travail universitaire,
certes, mais pimenté par l'écritu-
re très dynamique d'un homme
qui n'a pas l'habitude de mâcher
ses mots. Ce qu'il écrit à propos
de la Russie, par exemple, méri-
te largement d'être médité :
« L'empire russe joua toujours
un rôle dans l'équilibre euro-
péen, mais n'en fit jamais partie
du point de vue psychologique...
La Russie en marche montrait
rarement qu'elle avait le sens des
limites ; contrariée dans ses pro-

jets, elle se repliait sur elle-même, ruminant sa vengeance tout en boudant le monde. » Toujours à propos de la Russie et de l'effondrement de l'empire soviétique, Kissinger se dit surpris de voir comment Reagan – dont l'inculture historique était colossale – réussit à « mater » les Soviétiques au début des années quatre-vingt.

A la différence de ses prédé-
cesseurs et de certains de ses suc-
cesseurs, Kissinger n'est pas un
homme d'affaires même si, pour
la petite histoire, les tarifs de ses
conférences étaient récemment
encore assez exorbitants... Côté
« Diplomatie »*, « Dear Hen-
ry » avec son côté « Marx Bro-
thers » et son incroyable accent
allemand est l'archétype de
l'universitaire extrêmement
brillant tel que la vieille Europe
savait les produire avant qu'ils
ne deviennent Américains...

HERVÉ KARLESKIND
* Fayard, 198 F

La liberté 26. x. 96.

Henry Kissinger: un avis toujours très autorisé. Keystone

# Et si Clinton s'inspirait du souvenir de Henry Kissinger

Quelle place pour les Etats-Unis au XXIᵉ s.? Vaste programme pour le président qui foulera le siècle prochain.

Il aura donc fallu attendre l'antépénultième semaine de campagne électorale pour voir Bill Clinton aborder les questions internationales. Une apparition tardive mais logique dans la mesure où, traditionnellement, la course à la présidence se joue sur des promesses de politique intérieure.

A Detroit, le président qui devrait faire entrer les Etats-Unis dans le XXIᵉ siècle a ouvert, enfin, de nouvelles perspectives reliant son pays au destin du monde. Et sa proposition – qui vise à élargir l'OTAN à de nouveaux pays en 1999 – casse définitivement l'union qu'avait engendrée en 1994 la création du Partenariat pour la paix (ouvert notamment aux pays de l'ex-bloc communiste).

## SOMME DIPLOMATIQUE

En se décidant à franchir le pas, Bill Clinton s'est peut-être rappelé au souvenir de celui qui restera le grand architecte de la diplomatie américaine des années 70, Henry Kissinger. Dans un vaste traité historique au titre-programme – *Diplomatie – l'ex-secrétaire d'Etat souligne l'impasse à laquelle mène l'idée du Partenariat pour la paix, qualifié de «vague système de sécurité collective»*. En fait, remarque l'ancien professeur de Harvard, le Partenariat pour la paix risque d'être jugé inutile, silicon dangereux, par les potentiels victimes de l'agression, tout en étant considéré en Asie comme un club ethnique, essentiellement dirigé contre la Chine et le Japon.

## UN POIDS TOUT RELATIF

Car au-delà de l'élargissement de l'OTAN – annoncé opportunement alors qu'une quasi-vacance du pouvoir laisse Moscou sans réaction! – c'est du rôle des Etats-Unis à l'échelle planétaire au siècle prochain dont il ressort ici.

En funambule de la diplomatie des grands ensembles, Kissinger relativise d'abord le poids militaire économique de son pays au XXIᵉ siècle. Ainsi, à l'allure actuelle, le produit intérieur brut de la Chine (8% de croissance par an en moyenne) équivaudra à celui des Etats-Unis vers la fin des années 2020! Six grands ensembles (USA, Europe, Japon, Chine, Russie et Inde) – et non plus deux comme durant la guerre froide – se feront alors front.

Conscient de la complexité des futurs rapports de force à various multiples, l'ancien conseiller de Nixon désigne un objectif prioritaire, dont Bush comme Clinton ont peint leur bannière idéologique: le nouvel ordre mondial. «En s'attelant, pour la troisième fois en un siècle à la création d'un nouvel ordre mondial, l'amérique doit s'efforcer avant tout de trouver un équilibre entre les tentations juellelles inhérentes à son excentrualisme: croire qu'elle doit re-

médier à tous les maux et stabiliser toutes les turbulences, et cédier à son instinct profond de repli sur soi.

## LE RISQUE DU REPLI

Cette dernière observation tient lieu de conseil. Davantage que ses prédécesseurs, encore marqués par le souvenir des conflits Est-Ouest, Bill Clinton a été confronté à la tentation du repli américain (en particulier au début de son mandat). Un repli tout relatif étant donné l'accompagnement nécessaire, par la diplomatie ou le poids militaire, de la bataille économique à l'échelle planétaire. C'est ainsi que depuis son arrivée à la Maison-Blanche, la part du commerce extérieur dans le produit intérieur brut américain a augmenté de 35% (passant de 8,7% à 11,8% du PIB).

## XXIᵉ OU XIXᵉ SIÈCLE?

Le paradoxe veut qu'en cette fin de siècle, les Etats-Unis se retrouvent confrontés à un monde proche de l'Europe du XIXᵉ s., mais à l'échelle planétaire: «Le système international en voie de formation se révèle infiniment plus complexe que tous ceux auxquels la diplomatie américaine a dû se mesurer». Venant de Kissinger, maître en la matière, le constat porte en soi un avertissement.

Pour le futur nouveau président, l'enjeu consistera donc à approfondir une ligne de conduite entre les idéaux et la réalpolitique. A savoir: rester le gardien d'un système d'équilibres, notamment au Moyen-Orient, entre l'Allemagne et la Russie, la Chine et le Japon, etc. «L'idéalisme américain, ajoute Kissinger, reste aussi nécessaire que jamais, peut-être plus encore. Mais, dans le nouvel ordre mondial, son rôle consistera à insuffler à l'Amerique la foi qui la soutiendra au fil des choix ambigus qu'il lui faudra faire dans un monde impairfait.

En d'autres termes, les objectifs concrets de la diplomatie américaine restent les mêmes (stabilité, progrès démocratique, liberté individuelle), mais l'utopie d'une sharmonie du monde n'est plus de mise. De la une conclusion qui laisse la porte ouverte à plus d'une stratégie: «C'est dans la patiente accumulation de succès partIELS qu'il faudra chercher l'accomplissement des idéaux américains. Les qualités nécessaires pour maîtriser le monde à naître ont parfois liée avec l'abstraction: l'avoir est impossible à fixer de façon concrète et l'analyse des rapports entre l'espoir et la réalité envisageable relève, par essence, de la conjecture.» *Pascal Baeriswyl*

Henry Kissinger: Diplomatie. Fayard. 1996, 860 p.

The Independent - April 10, 1977

CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN

[L.C.]

# Sleight of hand from a maestri

HENRY Kissinger's book *Diplomacy*, published this month in the United States (Simon and Schuster, 912 pages, $35), is, as one would expect, instructive and entertaining. As readers of his memoirs, *Years of Upheaval*, would also expect, the instruction is limited by discretion, while the entertainment is sometimes intentional, sometimes inadvertent, sometimes ambiguous.

The book's dedication seems to fall into the last category: "To the men and women of the Foreign Service of the United States, whose professionalism and dedication sustain American diplomacy."

Only the simple-minded among those men and women — not an insignificant proportion of the total — will be wholly gratified by that compliment. "Professionalism and dedication..." — no reference to "wisdom" or even "skill". Worse, "sustain" not "excuse", still less "constitute". The clear implication is that diplomatic policy is shaped by a different order of beings, and that all these dedicated professionals are there to make appointments, supply interpreters and generally make themselves useful to such people as Henry Kissinger.

Although today's recipients of the compliment in question are too young to recall this, Kissinger's formidable effectiveness in his days as a practitioner rested precisely on his capacity to bypass all that "professionalism and dedication", except in so far as it was required for carrying his bags.

In the circumstances, Kissinger's dedication in the book has the ring of a tip: a well-earned gratuity affably bestowed.

*Diplomacy* has a thesis, to the general effect that American policy is based on "exceptionalism", a uniquely American form of idealism. The foreign policies of other countries are by definition lacking in this noble characteristic.

It would therefore be prudent in an imperfect world for Americans to moderate their idealism a bit, to safeguard their interests. Henry James would nod approvingly. Kissinger has been an American citizen for more than 50 years and has a right to his share in the American Myth. According to the Myth, the New World (or

rather the English-speaking part of it, south of the 49th parallel) is providentially protected from the consequences of the Fall, while the inhabitants of the Old World are fascinatingly post-serpentine.

Henry Kissinger, as serpentine a diplomatist as ever wound his way through any sinful capital, knows better than anyone else that the American Myth does not fit the sub-luminary facts of American diplomatic practice. Much of the fun of reading *Diplomacy* is watching how Kissinger copes with the facts, while still doing his best for the Myth. Sometimes he boldly states a fact that does not fit the Myth in the lens, and then goes back to the Myth as if nothing had happened. The book is a lot more complex than you would gather from the blurb, which

says: "Kissinger shows how Americans, from the very beginning, sought a distinctive foreign policy, based on idealism." Kissinger shows nothing of the kind.

American foreign policy in the earliest years of the United States was shaped by George Washington in his two administrations. Kissinger accurately defines the Washingtonian approach in the early years of the republic: "American foreign policy was, in fact, a sophisticated reflection of the national interest, which was, simply, to fortify the new nation's independence."

There was no cant about Washington, nor about his immediate successor, John Adams. Cant set in with Jefferson, Madison and Monroe and eventually overwhelmed several of their 20th-century successors, most notably Wood-

row Wilson. Much of Kissinger's *Diplomacy* consists of a critique of the Wilsonian approach.

"Wilson not only responded to the wellsprings of American motivation (that is, 'exceptionalism'), but took it to a new and higher level. All his successors have been Wilsonian to some degree, and subsequent American foreign policy has been shaped by his maxims."

That last statement is flatly untrue, and nobody has more reason to know this than its author.

American foreign policy has not been shaped by Wilson's maxims. American rhetoric concerning foreign policy has been influenced by the Wilsonian style, and actual policy has sometimes been affected, usually disconcertingly, by the consequences of the rhetoric.

The policy, like the policies

of other count based on personal interest, terms defined the time, with cific political very much in dress it all up upsumption is a everywhere.

The American tradition, from through Wilson own times, recollectly sanctimoniouslutin style Sometimes the policy may ring up, and recollect refurbishments, rated by Mach than Wilsons. Example: Eisenhower to the Hungarian then left them took the matter Nations in an nian rhetoric, it appear that Nations, not that that had left the lurch. Will Machiavellian

Henry Kissinger: much of the fun of reading *Diplomacy* is watching how he copes with the facts, while still doing his best for the American Myth
Photograph: Hulton Deutsch

Ifancy Dr K reads all this is murmuring "Who are you ing your grand eggs!"

A sound policy with this mother is that she knows all about doesn't.

I wonder mother should way? At her age to gain by it? > her partiality avow her ad sucking of the

I suspect the habit. The old used to diplomand that he could tells the story extricated the from Vietnam veals many decisions while st the actual subse ing of American the pretence to win on their own which Kissinger shape, was brilful from an An view. But it was was far from Grandmother that it ever hap-

04-20-94 06:17PM

TO 7590041

P002

Pass Notes

No 385: Henry Kissinger

Real name: Heinz Kissinger. His family fled Nazi Germany for America when he was 15.

Age: 70.

Appearance: Vladimir Zhirinovsky in glasses.

Occupation: Peacemaker. In 1973 he said that "perpetual peace ... looms as tomorrow's reality". He's expected to go to South Africa to do a bit of his famous "shuttle diplomacy" before the elections.

He's tried this shuttling before has he? Yes. He negotiated the 1973 peace accord between the US and North Vietnam for a start.

After America's covert bombing of Cambodia and rejection of a similar peace accord four years earlier, thereby allowing 15,000 Americans to die in the intervening period? Well, yes. Very peaceful.

Did he not envisage "limited nuclear war"? Up to a point, but he did get the Nobel Peace Prize. He tried to give it back when Saigon fell to the communists two years after the peace. They wouldn't take it and anyway he brought about the 1973 ceasefire between Egypt and Israel and "shuttled" between Jerusalem and Damascus before the peace deal in 1974.

In effect making the Middle East war inevitable? Possibly, but he did peacefully persuade President Carter to let the Shah of Iran into the US.

Resulting in the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran? Perhaps, but he helped Rhodesia become Zimbabwe.

I thought that was Lord Carrington? Him too. In fact he is also expected to go to South Africa to mediate.

Poor old Super-K will probably need some help after 17 years out of politics? Yes, he didn't exactly go out in a blaze of glory either, what with all that Nixon had been up to (remember Watergate?). But he's kept his ear in as unofficial adviser to Bush during the Gulf war.

A dab hand at the unofficial is he? He is a bit paranoid about paper. "Everything on paper will be used against me."

Even now? Yes. He will only give spoken briefs to his clients at Washington-based Kissinger Associates whence he serves up his pearls of wisdom in return for around $7.5 million a year.

China Ventures, the business he has just founded, wouldn't interfere with his impartiality, would it? Not at all. He simply felt an affinity with the Chinese after having negotiated a detente with them under Nixon.

A pretty powerful bloke in his day, then? "Power," he says, "is the ultimate aphrodisiac."

Most likely to say: "The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think that it's their fault."

Least likely to say: "Just let them fight it out amongst themselves."

23/05 '94 19:27 FAX 071 402 0639

SIMON & SCHUSTER

☑010

tactics

MURRAY SAYLE wonders
who's Kissinger now

DIPLOMACY

by Henry Kissinger

Simon & Schuster, £25, politics

What's this, then? The title Diplomacy suggests one of those teach-yourself books, with tips on the correct use of the denial, the demarche, and the double-cross — handy, perhaps, for anyone taking up the dubious trade.

But from Kissinger? Isn't he the former professor who drops big names on TV in a thick German accent ('Ven I vas talkink with Vinston Churchill')? The self-styled 'first-class mind' who organised the American debacle in Vietnam? The original shuttle diplomat, who was going to bring peace to the Middle East two wars, 21 years, and countless atrocities ago? Keeper of the enemies list for Tricky Dick Nixon? Model for Dr Strangelove...? What are they trying to sell us here — a textbook on navigation by the captain of the Exxon Valdez? Anyone can learn from their mistakes, but surely eight previous tomes are enough already?

Still, before we put any book or its author down, it may be wise to read it. From its 912 pages of small type, the first name dropped, that of Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) and the portraits of Bismarck, Mao and the author on the dust-jacket, it is clear that this will be no lighthearted romp around the subject, especially in view of Dr Kissinger's reputation for going on a bit. And, it must be admitted, the first two-thirds of Diplomacy are gruelling. It is likely, in fact, to be the great unread book of the year — a pity, because, once you have cancelled engagements for the weekend and settled in, the Doctor has some new and important things to say.

Kissinger (the professor) is a frank, unashamed exponent of the balance of power, or, as he prefers to call it, realpolitik.

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Diplomacy ('the management of international relations by negotiation' — OED) works best, or only works at all, if nations have a clear idea of their own interests, and pursue them with like-minded allies, keeping the game fluid by making sure that no one nation or group dominates the rest.

This usually means the weak ganging up against the strong, with the occasional reversal of alliances, as diplomats say, or a stab in the back in less diplomatic language.

As his mentors, Kissinger introduces Princes Metternich, Bismarck and our own Lords Castlereagh, Palmerston and Disraeli. These are not, perhaps, everyone's choice of heroes, and an especially odd lot for a Jewish refugee from Germany who found fame in the democratic US.

Metternich managed to stave off liberal revolutions for a generation, Bismarck proclaimed the Second Reich in conquered Paris ('tactlessly', Kissinger concedes) and seized Alsace and Lorraine, thus laying the groundwork for two world wars, while Disraeli helped to carve up Africa and the Balkans, with results to he seen every night on television.

However, as Kissinger rightly points out, balances of power, when (rarely) they have worked have seen the greatest human intellectual and artistic achievement. But he end result has always been the same: after a few centuries of fancy diplomatic footwork, the balance hardened into mutually suspicious camps, someone pushed the button, and general war and tyranny followed. Without an infinite supply of Kissingers, it seems, sooner or later the balance must col-

071 402 0639

05-23-94 02:23PM P010 #41

005

SIMON & SCHUSTER

09/05 94 19:22 FAX 071 402 0639

B
EHIND each foreign min-
ister stands a cohort of
his predecessors, mod-
estly ready to advise,
encourage and warn.

This distinguished gathering
would, I am sure, elect Henry Kissinger as their dyen. His formidable record in action as Secretary of State is matched by no less formidable an ability to reason and dissect. His company is a pleasure which does not fade.

Dr Kissinger has now written a
book about diplomacy. Budding
diplomats and politicians should
read it as avidly as their predecessors read Machiavelli. Machiavelli got a bad name from people who
had not read *The Prince*, and Dr
Kissinger may suffer in the same
way. Diplomacy is a long book. But
he knows better than most politicians how to load pith and power
into an English sentence.

For the most part this is an analysis of the balance of power. Dr Kissinger traces its development between the days of Richelieu and the Agreement at Yalta in 1945. He does not conceal his admiration for the doctrine in its heyday, when it was presided over in the last century by Castlereagh and then Metternich. It was possible for the great European powers to work together and ensure the peace during these decades.

There was a reasonable balance
between them, and they shared a
belief in social order and dislike of
violent change. Bismarck, because
of his subtlety and intelligence,
over-complicated the system. The
Kaiser and his contemporaries in
other countries allowed the balance of
power to degenerate until it
became inoperable as a means of
keeping the peace.

After both world wars of this cen-
tury the United States found itself
presiding over the peace settlement. But the United States was not willing either in 1919 or in 1945
simply to reconstruct a balance of
power. In the American view world
order must rest on moral and democratic foundations. In 1919, President Wilson's 14 points and the
League of Nations were the results
of this moral insistence. In 1945, it
led to the United Nations and the

dismemberment of all colonial
empires except the Russian.

Dr Kissinger is as scathing as any
European about the shortcomings
and inconsistencies of this American approach to international life.
It was compatible throughout the
19th century with selfish American
ambitions in the Western hemisphere.
It converted Britain, and so
paralysed British foreign policy
between the two wars, leaving
France without the guarantee
against German military revival
which she might have expected
under the old balance of power.

Hitler thrived from this Anglo-
American destruction of the bal-
ance of power until his own foolish-
ness in dealing with the Soviet
Union recreated it and destroyed
him.

YET WITH these criticisms Dr Kissinger acknowledges, as we must all, the extraordinary, even demonic power of the idea of a world order based on morality. In his last chapter he advocates a synthesis of the concept of a moral world order with that of the balance of power. Both, he thinks, are necessary in maintaining a tolerable system.

This combination still eludes
both the governments of the world
and the commentators. The Balkans have for more than a century
provided the classical example of
this dilemma. Long before President Wilson and the 14 points, the
argument had been contested
between Disraeli and Gladstone.

Disraeli was an expert on the bal-
ance of power. His concern was the

spread of Russian influence south-
wards at the expense of the ailing
Turks. Gladstone cared for this not
at all, at least not, while he was a
commentator in opposition. His
concern was with the atrocities the
Turks were said to be committing.
against their Bulgarian subjects.

The two men argued past each
other, as usually happens on these
occasions, neither having any
respect for the genuine opinions of
the other. Bismarck was very conscious of the Balkan trap. "One
must give these sheep stealers
plainly to understand," he rum-
bled, "that the European governments
have no need to harness
themselves to their lusts and their
rivalries." A thought echoed nowadays
in many a saloon-bar.

Now again we see the heirs of Disraeli and Gladstone arguing past each other. Once again the Balkans offer one, though not the only example. There is no imperial power, left in the world ready to impose solutions. The United States so far will not put its ground troops into Bosnia even for peace-keeping purposes. For different reasons Germany also excludes herself.

Britain and France work closely
together, but do not profess to be

able to impose and then maintain
indefinitely a particular peace
settlement. Yet most of us dislike
the alternative, which by a paradox
finds favour with some Gladstonian
idealisrs, namely that we should sit
back and allow each side to be
armed by its patrons so that the war
flares up again and possibly
spreads.

As time passes fresh decents,
fresh atrocities of all kinds, are con-
veyed into our living rooms on tele-
vision night by night. If there had
been television in the 1370s, Glad-
stone would not have had to fight
the Midlothian Campaign which
was dominated by atrocities in the
Balkans. He would have beaten
Disraeli from a studio and forced
him into action, but would the
Bulgarians have been better off?

In an effort to bring forward the
day when there is a negotiated
peace, we bring extra means to
bear - air power, ground troops,
economic sanctions. By the mix of
these means the international com-
munity has helped to bring the
fighting to an end so far in Croatia,
around Sarajevo and in central
Bosnia.

In other places the war continues
and where peace is restored, that
peace is fragile. Does this count as

success or failure? It is certainly
inadequate. If you believe, that
there is a new world order in being,
then every breach of that order,
whether in Bosnia or Rwanda, or
Angola or Nagorno Karabakh,
appears a disaster calling forth
cries of cynicism and despair. If on
the other hand you believe, like
Castlereagh, Dr Kissinger and
most Tories, that the natural state
of the world is disorder and even
cruelty, then every small step away
from such disorder is a small success.
The glass is not half empty,
but half full, and perhaps filling
slowly. The remedy is not cynicism
and armchair anger, but the
patient, realistic mobilisation of
remedies.

FOR SOME, the new world
order is a glass palace, con-
structed as a whole in heaven,
a palace of which we are the guard-
ians. Woodrow Wilson thought that
he was bringing such a palace to
Europe in 1919 so that we could
dwell in peace for ever more. Those
who think like this despair when
they see the beautiful panels broken
and the palace defiled by yahows.

But this is an unrealistic and
depressing view. Rather we should
see the new world order as a build-
ing constructed here on earth, brick
by brick, amidst all the mess and
unsightliness of a building site. We
should be motivated rather than
depressed by the evident fact that
so far we have only got as far as
building the ground floor.

☐ Diplomacy is published
by Simon & Schuster

If you believe, like Dr Kissinger, that the
natural state of the world is disorder and
even cruelty, then every small step away
from such disorder is a small success

[L]

SIMON & SCHUSTER

002

BOOKS

Kissinger's *Diplomacy* is about the conflicting theories that have been the basis of the foreign policy of the European powers over the past three and a half centuries and of the USA since the beginning of this century. It is not, therefore, an up-to-date version or expansion of Harold Nicolson's book of the same tide which dealt, not with the substance of foreign policy but with the methods.

What characterises Kissinger's attitude to foreign policy as historian, practitioner or analyst, is the way he thinks of every move in conceptual terms. He has to see whether it serves the hard-headed nationalism — the *Realpolitik* — associated with the names of Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck and Theodore Roosevelt; or whether it reflects more universal, high-minded, moral values of which the outstanding exponent this century has been President Wilson.

Kissinger has drawn on his unique combination of knowledge and experience to give a personal and practical lesson. Not that he intrudes himself. The personal pronoun, I, does not appear until page 425, when he describes his only meeting with Truman, at which the President criticised Churchill's *Realpolitik*. It is as if Kissinger has been reading out to us and then suddenly looks up to say, "Yes, here I am. He frequently does this so as to relate the past to the present, believing that, if history provides no automatic manual for the future, it can teach by analogy. Thus, in their foreign policy, British leaders, who have generally been 'Hobbesian, have practised 'a convenient form of ethical egotism: what was good for Britain 'was considered good for the rest of the world', whereas the Americans, seeing themselves as more ethical and less egotistical, have followed the doctrine of the American Founding Fathers that their nation has been a beacon of liberty for all mankind.

Another parallel has been in collective security arising from the different way countries view and respond to aggression. This flaw became apparent at the time of Mussolini's attack on Abyssinia in 1935, just as it has in the current Bosnian crisis. Or in the basic principle of foreign policy that Richelieu put forward three centuries earlier — the need to take account of where the national interest lies. America lost sight of this in Vietnam.

*Diplomacy* is studded with epigrams such as: 'Historically Germany has been either too weak or too strong for the peace of Europe'; or 'the responsibility of statesmen ... is to resolve complexity rather than to

Idealists
versus
realists

Nicholas Henderson

DIPLOMACY

by Henry Kissinger

Simon & Schuster, £25, pp. 1104

contemplate it'; or 'the standard American belief ... is that conflicts among nations are caused by misunderstanding rather than by clashing interests'.

Kissinger attributes responsibility for the first world war to both Germany and Russia. Yet they had no major conflict with each other. Their confrontation was by proxy in the Balkans and the same danger could arise again in the same place.

An event arose in 1915 that Kissinger describes as the earliest demonstration of the 'special relationship' when Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary of the country

Grace and Favour

The shop bell's
wanging coil, their entry's
imprimatur, boxed
provisions carried for them
to the boot: We'll settle up
next week if that's
acceptable. The cost of it.
I've found a little man
who doesn't charge ...

We grew to judgement
by the names our mothers
gave them. Mrs
so and so, and all
above themselves although
they practised charity
and sat in church.
This was our inheritance
of grace and favour,
the old bitch gossip
and small kindnesses.

John Mole

that had been the bastion of balance of
power diplomacy, proposed that President
Wilson should promote the idea of a
League of Nations.

According to Kissinger, the democracies were not mentally, let alone militarily, prepared for war at the time of Munich. Hitler felt cheated, as he wanted war then. As Richard Lamb has written in *The Drift to War, 1922-39*, we did not use the breathing-space, September 1938 to 1939, to catch up. The democracies at that time failed to foresee the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 because, in Kissinger's view, they attached too much importance to Hitler's ideological conflict with Stalin who was 'the supreme realist ... the Richelieu of his period'.

The way Roosevelt (and other American leaders) cozed up to Stalin towards the end, and in the immediate aftermath of the war, disassociating themselves from the British, earns Kissinger's tribute of being 'the ultimate triumph of hope over experience'.

While clearly on the side of realism, Kissinger recognises the importance of idealism in the American psyche. He acknowledges that if US policy, which he says shaped the international order since the second world war, had been based purely on the calculation of national security and equilibrium, such as had characterised European diplomacy, and if it had not taken account of American values, it would not have had the support of the country for 'four decades of gruelling exertion'. Containment, he adds, was thoroughly American, in that it assumed that the collapse of a totalitarian adversary could be achieved in an essentially benign way.

The gnawing question' that Kissinger raises over the Suez crisis is whether the USA, even if justifiably critical of the British-French action, need have been quite so 'brutal'. The USA acted as if the issue was a purely moral and legal one. The consequences, he says, were far reaching politically and materially: the international status of both Britain and France was destroyed; France decided to make the nuclear bomb and a united Europe; Britain opted for 'permanent subordination to American policy'; the pro-Western government in Iraq was soon overthrown; when the Vietnam war came the US found itself without any military allies; and Soviet policy became much bolder. However, after the failure of Khrushchev's 1959 Berlin ultimatum and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet Union never again posed a direct military challenge to the USA. They

THE SPECTATOR 30 April 1994 31

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With her Afric
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veered off to pursue liberation movements
in the Third World.

Vietnam is, of course, a painful story for
Kissinger. He thinks that Nixon, early in his
term, should have gone to Congress for an
endorsement of his policy, in the absence
of which he 'should have asked for a vote
to liquidate the war and made the
Congress assume responsibility'. Not sur-
prisingly, Nixon rejected this policy which
would have been an abdication of the
executive responsibility for foreign
policy which, as Kissinger acknowledges
later in his account, the President alone
possesses,

Admiring of Nixon's 'geopolitical
intuition'. Kissinger writes of his hard-
headed pursuit of the national interest
which Nixon's critics considered a form of
'moral disarmament'. Tribute is also paid
to Nixon's opening to China, a step that
Kissinger was simultaneously proposing.
Nixon's warning to Russia not to attack
China is described as 'perhaps the most
daring step of his presidency'.

He shifted much of the decision making
of foreign policy into the White House,
thereby annoying officials in the State
Department — about which Kissinger com-
ments sardonically: 'Hell hath no fury like
a bureaucrat scorned.'

Alongside his capacity for rigorous
analysis, Kissinger shows sensitivity in
describing people. He saw Reagan, for
instance, as 'both congenial and remote,
full of good cheer, but in the end aloof'.

Kissinger is, of course, fascinated by the
causes and consequences of the collapse of
the Soviet Union, Gorbachev said to him
in 1989. 'Knowing what was wrong was
easy, knowing what was right was the
hard part'. To which Kissinger responds
ruefully that Gorbachev never found the
answer.

The book may well be criticised for the
scant attention paid to economics, technol-
ogy and social matters, or to the confer-
ences and multilateral institutions that
command much of a modern diplomat's
time; but, given his background, he is sure-
ly right to focus on the major political and
strategic moves, in which these other issues
will be subsumed, which will always com-
mand the main squares in the world's
game.

The USA will remain the predominant
world power. It will have to face the
challenges it has hitherto eluded: is it a
model, or does it have a mission; and if the
latter, what is the national interest that has
to balance the ideals that have always been
the hallmark of its history? Not all
monsters can be slain; over-extension must
be avoided. Future policy cannot be
prescribed in the abstract; but Kissinger
has provided a brilliant guide for the many
who must be fascinated by the fate of the
western world.

Sir Nicholas Henderson was ambassador to
Washington, 1979-1982.

32 THE SPECTATOR 30 April 1994

Reflections on Containment

Henry Kissinger

THE SUCCESS AND PAIN OF THE STRATEGY

NO MATTER WHAT Wilsonian-minded American statesmen called them, by late 1945 spheres of influence were emerging across Europe, and they were to remain in place until the collapse of communism four decades later. Under U.S. leadership, the Western occupation zones of Germany were consolidated, while the Soviet Union turned the countries of Eastern Europe into its appendages. The erstwhile Axis Powers—Italy, Japan and, after 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany—gradually moved toward alliance with the United States. The Soviet Union cemented its dominance over Eastern Europe by means of coercion. At the same time, the Kremlin tried its utmost to interrupt the process of Western consolidation by fostering a guerrilla war in Greece and by encouraging mass demonstrations by West European communist parties, especially in France and Italy.

American leaders concluded that they had to resist further Soviet expansion. But their national tradition caused them to seek to justify this resistance on nearly any basis other than as an appeal to the traditional balance of power. In doing this, American leaders were not being hypocritical. When they finally came to recognize that Franklin D. Roosevelt's vision of a peaceful globe guarded by the four police-men (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and China) could

HENRY KISSINGER was National Security Adviser and Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations. This essay is adapted from his eleventh book, *Diplomacy*, with the permission of Simon & Schuster. Copyright 1994 © by Henry A. Kissinger.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS · May/June 1994

[113]

Henry Kissinger

not be implemented, they preferred to interpret this development as a
temporary setback on the way to an essentially harmonious world
order. Here they faced a philosophical challenge. Was Soviet intransi-
gence merely a passing phase, which Washington could wait out? Were
the Americans, as former Vice President Henry Wallace and his fol-
lowers suggested, unwittingly causing the Soviets to feel paranoid by
not adequately communicating their pacific intentions to Stalin? Did
Stalin really reject postwar cooperation with the strongest nation in the
world? Did he not want in the end to be America's friend?

As the highest policymaking circles in Washington considered
those questions, a document arrived on February 22, 1946, from an
expert on Russia, one George Kennan, a relatively junior diplomat at
the American embassy in Moscow, that was to provide the philo-
sophical and conceptual framework for interpreting Stalin's foreign
policy. Rarely does an embassy report by itself reshape Washington's
view of the world, but what later came to be known as the "Long
Telegram" emphatically did. Kennan maintained that the United
States should stop blaming itself for Soviet intransigence; the sources
of Soviet foreign policy lay deep within the Soviet system itself. For
Kennan, communist ideology was at the heart of Stalin's approach to
the world. Stalin regarded the Western capitalist powers as irrevoca-
bly hostile. The friction between the Soviet Union and America was
therefore not the product of some misunderstanding or faulty com-
munication between Moscow and Washington but was inherent in
the Soviet Union's perception of the outside world.

From time immemorial, argued Kennan, the Russian tsars had
sought to expand their territory. They had sought to subjugate
Poland and to turn it into a dependent nation. They had regarded
Bulgaria as within Russia's sphere of influence. And they had sought
a warm-water port on the Mediterranean, mandating control of the
Black Sea Straits:

At bottom of Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful, agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of

[114]

FOREIGN AFFAIRS · Volume 73 No.3

Reflections on Containment

insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries.

This historical insecurity was, according to Kennan, given a new
sense of urgency by communist dogma:

In this [communist] dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found
justification for their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship
without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not
dare not to inflict, for sacrifices they felt bound to demand. . . . Without it
they would stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long suc-
cession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced
[their] country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guar-
antee external security of their internally weak regimes. . . .

America, Kennan argued, had to hunker down for a long struggle; the goals and philosophies of the United States and of the Soviet Union were irreconcilable.

In a top-secret study dated September 24, 1946, Truman adviser
Clark Clifford fell in with this view: "The main deterrent to Soviet
attack on the United States, or to attack on areas of the world which
are vital to our security, will be the military power of this country."
By now, this had become conventional wisdom. But Clifford used it
as a springboard from which to proclaim a global American security
mission, embracing "all democratic countries which are in any way
menaced or endangered by the U.S.S.R." It was not clear what was
meant by "democratic." Did this qualification limit America's
defense to Western Europe, or was it a courtesy that extended to any
threatened area and thus required the United States to defend simul-
taneously the jungles of Southeast Asia, the deserts of the Middle
East and densely populated Central Europe? In time, the latter
interpretation became dominant.

Clifford rejected any similarity between the emerging policy of
containment and traditional diplomacy. In his view, the Soviet-Amer-
ican conflict was not caused by clashing national interests—which by
definition might be negotiated—but by the moral shortcomings of the
Soviet leadership. Therefore, the goal of American policy was not so
much to restore the balance of power as to transform Soviet society.

[115]

Henry Kissinger

Just as in 1917 Wilson had blamed the need for a declaration of war on the kaiser rather than on the threat Germany posed to American security, so Clifford now ascribed Soviet-American tensions to "a small ruling clique and not the Soviet people." A significant Soviet change of heart, and probably a new set of Soviet leaders, was required before an overall Soviet-American agreement would be possible. At some dramatic moment, these new leaders would "work out with us a fair and equitable settlement when they realize that we are too strong to be beaten and too determined to be frightened."

Neither Clifford nor any subsequent American statesman involved in the discussion of the Cold War ever put forward specific terms to end the confrontation or to initiate a process that would bring about negotiations to do so. So long as the Soviet Union maintained its ideology, negotiations were treated as pointless. After a Soviet change of heart, a settlement would become nearly automatic. In either case, spelling out the terms of such a settlement in advance was deemed to inhibit America's freedom of action—the same argument that had been used during World War II to avoid discussion of the postwar world. America now had the conceptual framework to justify political and military resistance to Soviet expansionism.

## TRUMAN EXPANDS THE CONCEPT

SINCE THE END of the war, Soviet pressures had followed historical Russian patterns. The Soviet Union controlled the Balkans (except for Yugoslavia) and a guerrilla war was raging in Greece, supported from bases in communist Yugoslavia and the Bulgarian Soviet satellite. Territorial demands were being made against Turkey, along with a request for Soviet bases in the Straits—very much along the lines of what Stalin had wanted from Hitler on November 25, 1940. Ever since the end of the war, Great Britain had supported both Greece and Turkey, economically as well as militarily. In the winter of 1946-47, the Attlee Government of Britain informed Washington that it could no longer shoulder the burden. Truman was prepared to take over Great Britain's historical role of blocking a Russian advance toward the Mediterranean, but neither the American public nor Con-

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Reflections on Containment

gress could countenance the traditional British geopolitical rationale. Resistance to Soviet expansionism had to spring from principles based strictly on the American approach to foreign policy.

This imperative became apparent at a key meeting held on Febru-
ary 27, 1947, in the Oval Office. Truman, Secretary of State Marshall
and Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson sought to persuade a
congressional delegation led by Senator Arthur
Vandenberg (R-Mich.) of the importance of aid
to Greece and Turkey—a formidable assignment,
since the traditionally isolationist Republicans
controlled both houses of Congress. Marshall led
off with a dispassionate analysis setting forth the
relationship between the proposed aid program
and American interests. He elicited stereotypical
grumblings about “pulling Britain’s chestnuts out

of the fire,” the iniquities of the balance of power and the burdens of
foreign aid. Recognizing that the administration was about to lose its
case, Acheson asked Marshall in a whisper whether this was a private
fight or whether anyone could join in.

Given the floor, Acheson proceeded, in the words of one aide, “to
pull out all the stops.” Acheson boldly presented the group with visions
of a bleak future in which the forces of communism stood to gain the
upper hand: “Only two great powers remained in the world . . . [the]
United States and the Soviet Union. We had arrived at a situation
unparalleled since ancient times. Not since Rome and Carthage had
there been such a polarization of power on this earth. . . . For the
United States to take steps to strengthen countries threatened with
Soviet aggression or communist subversion . . . was to protect the secu-
rity of the United States—it was to protect freedom itself.”

When it became evident that Acheson had roused the congres-
sional delegation, the administration stuck to his basic approach.
From that point on, the Greek-Turkish aid program was portrayed as
part of the global struggle between democracy and dictatorship.
When, on March 12, 1947, Truman announced the doctrine that
would later be named after him, he dropped the strategic aspect of
Acheson's analysis and spoke in traditional Wilsonian terms of a

Once America had
thrown down the moral
gauntlet, only a collapse
of the Soviet system
could end the conflict.

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Henry Kissinger

struggle between two ways of life: "One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections and the suppression of personal freedoms."

Had Soviet leaders been more aware of American history, they would have understood the ominous nature of what the president was saying. The Truman Doctrine marked a watershed because, once America had thrown down the moral gauntlet, the kind of realpolitik Stalin understood best would be forever at an end, and bargaining over reciprocal concessions would be out of the question. Henceforth, the conflict could only be settled by a change in Soviet purposes, by the collapse of the Soviet system, or both. Truman had proclaimed his doctrine as "the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Inevitably, criticism of the objective of defending democracy appeared at both ends of the intellectual spectrum: some protested that America was defending countries that, however important, were morally unworthy; others objected that America was committing itself to the defense of societies that, whether free or not, were not vital to American security. It was an ambiguity that refused to go away, generating debates that have not ended to this day about American purposes in nearly every crisis. Ever since, American foreign policy has been obliged to navigate between those who assail it for being amoral and those who criticize it for going beyond the national interest through crusading moralism.

Once the challenge had been defined as the very future of democracy, America could not wait until a civil war actually occurred, as it had in Greece. On June 5, less than three months after the announcement of the Truman Doctrine, Secretary Marshall in a commencement address at Harvard committed America to the task of eradicating the social and economic conditions that tempted aggression. America would aid European recovery, announced Marshall, to avoid

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THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE

Charting containment's course

"political disturbances" and "desperation," to restore the world economy and to nurture free institutions. Therefore, "[any] government that is willing to assist in the task of recovery will find full cooperation, I am sure, on the part of the United States government." In other words, participation in the Marshall Plan was open even to governments in the Soviet orbit—a hint taken up in Warsaw and Prague and just as quickly squelched by Stalin.

Only a country as idealistic, as pioneering and as relatively inexperienced as the United States could have advanced a plan for global economic recovery based solely on its own resources. And yet the very sweep of that vision elicited a national commitment that would sustain the Cold War generation through its final victory. The program of economic recovery, said Secretary Marshall, would be "directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos." Just as when the Atlantic Charter had been proclaimed, a global crusade against hunger and despair was found to be more persuasive to Americans than appeals to immediate self-interest or the balance of power.

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THE X ARTICLE

AT THE END of all of these more or less random initiatives, there emerged a document that would, for over a generation, serve as the bible of the containment policy, indeed which supplied it with its very name. All the various strands of American postwar thought were brought together in an extraordinary article published in July 1947 in *Foreign Affairs*. Though it was anonymously signed by "X," the author was later identified as George F. Kennan, by then head of the policy planning staff of the State Department. Of the thousands of articles written since the end of the Second World War, Kennan's "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" stands in a class by itself. In this lucidly written, passionately argued literary adaptation of his "Long Telegram," Kennan raised the Soviet challenge to the level of philosophy of history.

By the time Kennan's article appeared, Soviet intransigence had become the staple of policy documents. Kennan's distinctive contribution was to explain the ways in which hostility to the democracies was inherent in the Soviet domestic structure and why that structure would prove impervious to conciliatory Western policies. Tension with the outside world was inherent in the very nature of communist philosophy and, above all, in the way the Soviet system was being run domestically. Internally, the Communist Party was the only organized group, with the rest of society fragmented into an inchoate mass. Thus the Soviet Union's implacable hostility to the outside world was an attempt to gear international affairs to its own internal rhythm. The main concern of Soviet policy was "to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power." The way to defeat Soviet strategy was by "a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world."

Like almost every other contemporary foreign policy document, Kennan's "X" article disdained the elaboration of a precise diplomatic goal. What he sketched was the age-old American dream of a peace achieved by the conversion of the adversary, albeit in language more elevated and far more trenchant in its perception than that of any contemporary. But where Kennan differed from other experts was when

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Reflections on Containment

he described the mechanism by which, sooner or later, through one
power struggle or another, the Soviet system would be fundamentally
transformed. Since that system had never managed a "legitimate"
transfer of power, Kennan thought it likely that,
at some point, various contestants for authority
might reach down into these politically immature
and inexperienced masses in order to find support
for their respective claims. If this were ever to
happen, strange consequences could flow for the
Communist Party: "For the membership at large
has been exercised only in the practices of iron
discipline and obedience and not in the arts of
compromise and accommodation. . . . If, conse-
quently, anything were ever to occur to disrupt the unity and efficacy
of the party as a political instrument, Soviet Russia might be changed
overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most
pitiable of national societies."

No other document forecast quite so accurately what would in fact
take place after the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev. And in the after-
math of so total a collapse of the Soviet Union, it may seem carping
to point out just how back-breaking an assignment Kennan had pre-
scribed for his people. For he had charged America with combating
Soviet pressures for the indefinite future all around a vast periphery
that embraced the widely differing circumstances of Asia, the Middle
East and Europe. The Kremlin was, moreover, free to select its point
of attack, presumably only where it calculated it would have the great-
est advantage. Throughout subsequent crises, the American political
objective was deemed to be the preservation of the status quo, with
the overall effort producing communism's final collapse only after a
protracted series of ostensibly inconclusive conflicts. It was surely the
ultimate expression of America's national optimism and unimpaired
sense of self-confidence that as sophisticated an observer as George
Kennan could have assigned his society a role so global, so stern and,
at the same time, so reactive.

Kennan sketched
the American dream
of a peace achieved
by conversion of the
adversary.

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Henry Kissinger

THE INGREDIENTS OF CONTAINMENT

THIS STARK, EVEN HEROIC, doctrine of perpetual struggle committed the American people to endless contests with rules that left the initiative to the adversary and confined America's role to strengthening the countries already on its side of the dividing line—a classic policy of spheres of interest. By abjuring negotiations, the containment policy wasted precious time during the period of America's greatest relative strength—while it still had the atomic monopoly. Indeed, given the premise of containment—that positions of strength had yet to be built—the Cold War became both militarized and imbued with an inaccurate impression of the West's relative weakness.

The redemption of the Soviet Union became the ultimate goal of policy; stability could emerge only after evil had been exorcised. It was no accident that Kennan's article concluded with a peroration instructing his impatient, peace-loving compatriots about the virtues of patience and interpreting their international role as a test of their country's worthiness:

> The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations. . . . The thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

One of the outstanding features of these noble sentiments was their peculiar ambivalence. They rallied America to a global mission but made the task so complex that America would nearly tear itself apart trying to fulfill it. Yet the very ambivalence of containment seemed to lend an extraordinary impetus to American policy. Though essentially passive with respect to diplomacy with the Soviet Union, containment evoked tenacious creativity when it came to building “positions of strength” in the military and economic realms. This was because in containment were merged lessons derived from the two most important American experiences of the previous generation: from the New

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Reflections on Containment

Deal came the belief that threats to political stability arise primarily
from gaps between economic and social expectations and reality,
hence the Marshall Plan; from the Second World War America
learned that the best protection against aggression is having over-
whelming power and the willingness to use it, hence the Atlantic
alliance. The Marshall Plan was designed to get Europe on its feet
economically. NATO was to look after its security.

THE CRITIQUES OF CONTAINMENT

AS CONTAINMENT SLOWLY took shape, the criticism it encountered emerged from three different schools of thought. The first came from the “realists,” exemplified by Walter Lippmann, who argued that the containment policy led to psychological and geopolitical overex tension while draining American resources. The spokesman for the second school of thought was Winston Churchill, who objected to the postponement of negotiations until after positions of strength had been achieved. Finally, there was Henry Wallace, who denied Amer ica the moral right to undertake the policy of containment in the first place. Postulating a fundamental moral equivalence between both sides, Wallace argued that the Soviet sphere of influence in Central Europe was legitimate and that America's resistance to it only intensified tension. He urged a return to what he viewed as Roo sevelt's policy: to end the Cold War by American conciliation.

As the most eloquent spokesman for the realists, Walter Lippmann rejected Kennan's proposition that Soviet society contained the seeds of its own decay. He considered the theory to be too speculative to serve as the foundation of American policy: containment, argued Lippmann, would draw America into the hinterlands of the Soviet empire's extended periphery, which included, in his view, many countries that were not states in the modern sense to begin with. Military entanglements that far from home could not enhance American security and would weaken American resolve. Containment, according to Lippmann, permitted the Soviet Union to choose the points of maximum discomfiture for the United States while retaining the diplomatic, and even the military, initiative. Lippmann stressed the importance of estab-

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Henry Kissinger

lishing criteria to define areas in which countering Soviet expansion was a vital American interest. Without such criteria, the United States would be forced to organize a "heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets," which would permit America's newfound allies to exploit containment for their own purposes. The United States would be trapped into propping up nonviable regimes, leaving Washington with the sorry choice between "appeasement and defeat and the loss of face, or . . . support[ing] them [U.S. allies] at incalculable cost."

It was indeed a prophetic analysis of what lay ahead for the United States, though the remedy Lippmann proposed was hardly congenial to the universalist American tradition, which was far closer to Kennan's expectation of an apocalyptic outcome. Lippmann asked that American foreign policy be guided by a case-by-case analysis of American interests rather than by general principles presumed to be universally applicable. In his view, American policy should have been aiming less at overthrowing the communist system than at restoring the balance of power in Europe, which had been destroyed by the war. Containment implied the indefinite division of Europe, whereas America's real interest should be to banish Soviet power from the center of the European continent:

> For more than a hundred years all Russian governments have sought to expand over Eastern Europe. But only since the Red Army reached the Elbe River have the rulers of Russia been able to realize the ambitions of the Russian empire and the ideological purposes of communism. A genuine policy would, therefore, have as its paramount objective a settlement which brought about the evacuation of Europe. . . . American power must be available, not to 'contain' the Russians at scattered points, but to hold the whole Russian military machine in check, and to exert a mounting pressure in support of a diplomatic policy which has as its concrete objective a settlement that means withdrawal.

From among its intellectuals, America was able to draw on the thinking of both Lippmann and Kennan while they were at the height of their powers. Kennan correctly understood communism's underlying weakness; Lippmann accurately foretold the frustrations of an essentially reactive foreign policy based on containment. Kennan called for endurance to permit history to display its inevitable tendencies; Lippmann called for diplomatic initiative to produce a European settlement while America was still preponderant. Kennan had a

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Reflections on Containment

better intuitive understanding of the mainsprings of American soci-\ety; Lippmann grasped the impending strain of enduring a seemingly
endless stalemate and of the ambiguous causes that containment
might lead America to support.

THE MOST COMPELLING ALTERNATIVE

IN THE END, Lippmann's analysis found a substantial following, though mainly among the opponents of confrontation with the Soviet Union. And their approbation was based on only one aspect of Lippmann's argument, emphasizing as they did its critique while ignoring its prescriptions. They noted Lippmann's call for more limited objectives but overlooked his recommendation for more aggressive diplomacy. Thus it happened that in the 1940s the most compelling alternative strategy to the doctrine of containment came from none other than Winston Churchill, then leader of the Opposition in the British Parliament.

Churchill supported containment, but for him it was never an end
in itself. Unwilling to wait passively for the collapse of communism,
he sought to shape history rather than rely on it to do his work for
him. What he was after was a negotiated settlement. His "iron cur-
tain" speech at Fulton, Missouri had merely hinted at negotiations.
On October 9, 1948, at Llandudno, Wales, Churchill returned to his
argument that the West's bargaining position would never be better
than it was at that moment. In a much-neglected speech, he said:

No one in his senses can believe that we have a limitless period of time
before us. We ought to bring matters to a head and make a final settlement.
We ought not to go jogging along improvident, incompetent, waiting for
something to turn up, by which I mean waiting for something bad for us to
turn up. The Western nations will be far more likely to reach a lasting set-
tlement, without bloodshed, if they formulate their just demands while they
have the atomic power and before the Russian communists have got it too.

Two years later, Churchill made the same plea in the House of Com-
mons: the democracies were quite strong enough to negotiate, and
would only weaken themselves by waiting. Defending NATO rearma-
ment on November 30, 1950, he warned that arming the West would
not by itself change its bargaining position, which, in the end,
depended on America's atomic monopoly:

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Henry Kissinger

[W]hile it is right to build up our forces as fast as we can, nothing in this
process, in the period I have mentioned, will deprive Russia of effective
superiority in what are now called the conventional arms. All that it will do
is to give us increasing unity in Europe and magnify the deterrents against
aggression. . . . Therefore I am in favour of efforts to reach a settlement
with Soviet Russia as soon as a suitable opportunity presents itself, and of
making those efforts while the immense and measureless superiority of the
United States atomic bomb organization offsets the Soviet predominance
in every other military respect.

For Churchill, a position of strength was already in place; for
American leaders, it had yet to be created. Churchill thought of nego-
tiations as a way of relating power to diplomacy. And though he was
never specific, his public statements strongly suggest that he envis-
aged some kind of diplomatic ultimatum by the Western democrac-
cies. American leaders recoiled before employing their atomic
monopoly, even as a threat. Churchill wanted to shrink the area of
Soviet influence, but was prepared to coexist with Soviet power within
reduced limits. The American leaders had a nearly visceral dislike of
spheres of influence. They wanted to destroy and not to shrink their
adversary's sphere. Their preference was to wait for total victory and
for the collapse of communism, however far off, to bring about a
Wilsonian solution to the problem of world order.

The disagreement came down to a difference between the historical
experiences of Great Britain and America. Churchill's society was all too
familiar with imperfect outcomes; Truman and his advisers came from a
tradition in which, once a problem had been recognized, it was usually
overcome by the deployment of vast resources. Hence America's prefer-
ence for final resolutions and its distrust of the sort of compromise that
had become a British specialty. The American view prevailed, because
America was stronger than Great Britain, and because Churchill, as
leader of the British Opposition, was in no position to press his strategy.

HENRY WALLACE AND THE RADICAL TRADITION

IN THE END, the most vocal and persistent challenge to American
policy came from neither the realist school of Lippmann nor
Churchill's balance-of-power thinking, but from a tradition with
roots deep within American radical thought. Whereas Lippmann and

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Reflections on Containment

Churchill accepted the Truman administration's premise that Soviet expansionism represented a serious challenge and only contested the strategy for resisting it, the radical critics rejected every aspect of containment. Henry Wallace, vice president during Roosevelt's third term, former secretary of agriculture, and secretary of commerce under Truman, was its principal spokesman.

A product of America's populist tradition, Wallace had an abiding Yankee distrust of Great Britain. Like most American liberals since Jefferson, he insisted that "the same moral principles which governed in private life also should govern in international affairs." In Wallace's view, America had lost its moral compass and was practicing a foreign policy of "Machiavellian principles of deceit, force and distrust," as he told an audience in Madison Square Garden on September 12, 1946. Since prejudice, hatred and fear were the root causes of international conflict, the United States had no moral right to intervene abroad until it had banished these scourges from its own society. The new radicalism reaffirmed the historical vision of America as a beacon of liberty but, in the process, turned it against itself. Postulating the moral equivalence of American and Soviet actions became a characteristic of the radical critique throughout the Cold War. The very idea of America having international responsibilities was, in Wallace's eyes, an example of the arrogance of power. The British, he argued, were duping the gullible Americans into doing their bidding: "British policy clearly is to provoke distrust between the United States and Russia and thus prepare the groundwork for World War III."

To Wallace, Truman's presentation of the conflict as one between democracy and dictatorship was pure fiction. In 1945, a time when Soviet postwar repression was becoming increasingly obvious and the brutality of collectivization was widely recognized, Wallace declared that "the Russians today have more of the political freedoms than they ever had." He also discovered "increasingly the signs of religious toleration" in the U.S.S.R. and claimed that there was a "basic lack of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union." Wallace thought that Soviet policy was driven less by expansionism than by fear. In his speech at Madison Square Garden in August 1946, Wallace laid down a direct challenge to Truman, which caused the president to demand Wallace's resignation:

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Henry Kissinger

We may not like what Russia does in Eastern Europe. Her type of land reform, industrial expropriation and suppression of basic liberties offends the great majority of the people of the United States. But whether we like it or not the Russians will try to socialize their sphere of influence just as we try to democratize our sphere of influence. . . . Russian ideas of social-economic justice are going to govern nearly a third of the world. Our ideas of free enterprise democracy will govern much of the rest. The two ideas will endeavor to prove which can deliver the most satisfaction to the common man in their respective areas of political dominance.

In a curious reversal of roles, the self-proclaimed defender of morality in foreign policy accepted a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe on practical grounds, while the administration he was attacking for cynical power politics rejected the Soviet sphere on moral grounds.

Wallace's challenge collapsed after the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin blockade and the invasion of South Korea. As a presidential candidate in 1948, he gained only one million votes against more than 24 million for Truman, placing him fourth. Nevertheless, Wallace managed to develop themes that would remain staples of the American radical critique throughout the Cold War and move to center stage during the Vietnam conflict. These emphasized America's moral inadequacies and those of the friends it was supporting; a basic moral equivalence between America and its communist challengers; the proposition that America had no obligation to defend any area of the world against largely imaginary threats; and the view that world opinion was a better guide to foreign policy than geopolitical concepts. When aid to Greece and Turkey was first proposed, Wallace urged the Truman administration to put the issue before the United Nations. If "the Russians exercised their veto, the moral burden would be on them. . . . [W]hen we act independently . . . the moral burden is on us." Seizing the moral high ground meant more than whether America's geopolitical interests were being safeguarded.

Though Wallace's radical critique of American postwar foreign policy was defeated in the 1940s, its basic tenets reflected a deep strain of American idealism that continued to tug at the nation's soul. The same moral convictions that had conferred such energy on America's international commitments also had the potential to be turned inward by disillusionment with the outside world, or with America's own imperfections. In the 1920s, isolationism had caused America to withdraw

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Reflections on Containment

on the grounds that it was too good for the world; in the Wallace movement and its heirs, it revived itself in the proposition that America should withdraw because it was not good enough for the world.

THE COMPLEXITY OF CONTAINMENT

ONE RESULT OF THE containment policy was that the United States relegated itself to an essentially passive diplomacy during the period of its greatest power. That is why containment was increasingly challenged by yet another constituency, of which John Foster Dulles became the most vocal spokesman. His constituents were the conservatives who accepted the premises of containment but questioned the absence of urgency with which it was being pursued. Even if containment did in the end succeed in undermining Soviet society, these critics argued, it would take too long and cost too much. Whatever containment might accomplish a strategy of liberation would surely accelerate. By the end of Truman's presidency, the containment policy was caught in a crossfire between those who considered it too bellicose (the followers of Wallace) and those who thought it too passive (the conservative Republicans).

This controversy accelerated because, as Lippmann had predicted, international crises increasingly moved to peripheral regions of the globe, where the moral issues were confused and direct threats to American security were difficult to demonstrate. America found itself drawn into wars in areas not protected by alliances and on behalf of ambiguous causes and inconclusive outcomes. From Korea to Vietnam, these enterprises kept alive the radical critique, which continued to question the moral validity of containment. Thus surfaced a new variant of American exceptionalism. With all of its imperfections, the America of the nineteenth century had thought of itself as the beacon of liberty; in the 1960s and 1970s, the torch was said to be flickering and would need to be relit before America could return to its historical role as an inspiration to the cause of freedom. The debate over containment turned into a struggle for the very soul of America. As early as 1957, even George Kennan had come to reinterpret containment in this light when he wrote: "To my own countrymen who have often

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Henry Kissinger

asked me where best to apply the hand to counter the Soviet threat, I have accordingly had to reply: to our American failings, to the things we are ashamed of in our own eyes, or that worry us; to the racial problem, to the conditions in our big cities, to the education and environment of our young people, to the growing gap between specialized knowledge and popular understanding.”

A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.

A decade earlier, before he had become disillusioned by what he considered the militarization of his invention, George Kennan would have recognized that no such choice existed. A country that demands moral

perfection of itself as a test of its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security. It was a measure of Kennan's achievement that, by 1957, the free world's parapets had been manned, his own views having made a decisive contribution to this effort. The parapets were in fact being manned so effectively that America permitted itself to indulge in a hefty dose of self-criticism.

Containment was an extraordinary theory—at once hardheaded and idealistic, profound in its assessment of Soviet motivations yet curiously abstract in its prescriptions. Thoroughly American in its utopianism, it assumed that the collapse of a totalitarian adversary could be achieved in an essentially benign way. Although this doctrine was formulated at the height of America's absolute power, it preached America's relative weakness. Postulating a grand diplomatic encounter at the moment of its culmination, containment allowed no role for diplomacy until the climactic final scene in which the men in the white hats accepted the conversion of the men in the black hats.

With all of these qualifications, containment was a doctrine that saw America through more than four decades of construction, struggle and, ultimately, triumph. The victim of its ambiguities turned out to be not the peoples America had set out to defend—on the whole successfully—but the American conscience. Tormenting itself in its traditional quest for moral perfection, America would emerge, after more than a generation of struggle, lacerated by its exertions and controversies, yet having achieved almost everything it had set out to do. ❧

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[L]

Reviews

THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE

Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Wilson at Versailles, 1919

"If the philosophy of Wilson has been a flicker of marsh gas leading into the quagmire, does Metternich's furnish any more reliable guidance?"

The World According to Henry Michael Howard 132

Tales of the Desert *Eliot A. Cohen* 141

Recent Books on International Relations 148

Letters to the Editor 177

## 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.

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implementation of
some of its theories
by German and
Japanese statesmen
during the first half
of this century
proves that it is not
necessarily anything
of the kind.

Kissinger would
have done better to
have come clean and
admitted that his
subject was neither
diplomacy nor
geopolitics, as those
terms are generally
understood, but the
subject that he has

spent his life studying and much of it
practicing: the politics of power.

The subtext of his book, however,
explains why he could not do so. Ameri-
cans do not take kindly to the idea of
power politics, even when they are most
blatantly engaged in it. From Wilson to
Clinton, the rhetoric of American foreign
policy has been to deny the need for any-
thing so crude and to denounce the very
idea as a European perversion. But for
Kissinger, steeped as he is in the Euro-
pean history of the nineteenth century,
power politics is both natural and neces-
sary. The statesmen he most respects—
Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck, even
Stalin—were those who recognized this
and practiced it most openly. For power
politics is not simply *Machtpolitik*, the
accumulation, threat, and if need be use
of armed force as an instrument of policy.
It is based on the recognition and accep-
tance of the limits of one's own power.

THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE

Metternich

Statecraft, from the
days of Richelieu to
those of Nixon, has
consisted in the
identification of
national interests,
the realistic assess-
ment of available
resources, and the
alignment of both
in an appropriate
relationship within
the context of the
interests and
resources of rival
states. If the
resources are
sufficient, a state
may realistically
aspire to hegemony, the destruction or
subordination of all rival powers. But if
they are not, as for the states of Europe
from the seventeenth until the twentieth
centuries they were not, the statesman
must strive to enhance the power of his
own state through explicit or implicit
alliances. In Lord Palmerston's oft-
quoted words, there are no permanent
friends or permanent enemies; there are
only permanent interests.

Kissinger has said this often, and here
he says it again, definitively and at con-
siderable length. For him the European
practice, particularly as defined by British
nineteenth-century statesmen, was not an
aberration, but the norm for the conduct
of international relations in any era. The
American abjuration of power politics in
the nineteenth century was a luxury that
only their oceanic isolation enabled them
to afford. In the twentieth, however, it
was a disaster, whether it took the form of

[133]

isolationism, as it did
in the 1920s and
1930s, or ideological
crusade, as it did in
the 1950s and 1960s.
Richard Nixon,
claims Kissinger, was
the first American
president, with the
solitary exception of
Theodore Roosevelt,
to understand power
politics and so to
guide the United
States back into the
mainstream of inter-
national relations. (It
is a claim to states-
manship for Nixon

that could be made as convincingly for
Louis XIII of France, Francis II of Aus-
tria or William I of Prussia, the patrons of
Richelieu, Metternich and Bismarck,
respectively, but let that pass.) But the
United States cannot be Europeanized.
The policies of its statesmen, however
much they may be guided by a perception
of the national interest, must always be
made acceptable to an ideologically moti-
vated electorate. That is the problem
Kissinger faced when in office, and one to
which, in the latter part of this volume, he
constantly returns.

1648 AND ALL THAT

About a third of this book is devoted to
European politics before 1941, from the
emergence of the states system after the
Thirty Years' War in 1648 to its collapse
with the triumph of Hitler. Some aca-
demics may lament the absence of more
rigorous analysis, others the narrow focus

may have said in the eighteenth century
about the balance of power, the princes of
Europe then still fought for aggrandize-
ment or survival as nakedly as their pre-
decessors. It was not until Metternich
that a statesman appeared who had not
only internalized the concept but was
given the opportunity to create a new
international structure that explicitly
embodied it. His less perceptive succes-
sors allowed it to collapse. Bismarck
recreated it, although on a far less stable
basis. Again his successors allowed it to
collapse. The First World War came
about not because of the unstable power
balance created by competing alliances
(though it is not quite clear whether
Kissinger accepts this), but because the
German Empire was no longer interested
in maintaining a power balance. The
Second World War followed because the
victorious allies were incapable of, or
uninterested in, restoring that balance.

Bismark

THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE

on political elites
and the little con-
sideration given the
social and economic
transformations
that provided the
context for their
policies, but it is a
magisterial narra-
tive, well-spiced
with Kissingerian
insights and ironies.
The author is of
course at his best on
his familiar ground
of post-Napoleonic
nineteenth-century
Europe. Whatever
the philosophes

[1c]

[134]

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

[135]

[Lc]

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]

adviser Henry Kissinger, who shared none of them.

Kissinger has already told us in his memoirs how he tried to manipulate the balance of power to extricate his country from the Vietnamese morass. Although his success in doing so was, to put it mildly, limited, he nevertheless transformed the international scene. He treated the Russians not as crimin-

als but as adults with legitimate interests of their own. He brought the Chinese into play as independent actors in the international system, and he destroyed the specter of "Arab nationalism" by regaining Egypt as a Western-oriented power. This he has already dealt with very fully in the two volumes of his memoirs. Here he summarizes the process succinctly and dispassionately, with remarkably little reference to the part he played. It was hardly his fault that the Nixon era ended in such humiliating disaster, and neither he nor his successors could prevent the Russians from exploiting the American loss of nerve that resulted from Vietnam, Watergate and the U.S. humiliation in Iran. But not only did Soviet triumphalism eventually provoke the Reaganite reaction in the United States, but, Kissinger suggests, it produced the over-extension of Soviet resources that led directly to economic

mentally the Americans had been talking the humdrum prose of power politics, and the Soviets always knew it.

Now, Kissinger believes, we are back in a multipolar world. He had tried to create one in the 1970s, with China, Europe and Japan as potential great powers, together with the Soviet Union and the United States, making possible a Metternichian or Bismarckian balancing game. Then only China had been willing to play, or rather China produced in Chou En-lai the only statesman who was willing to play; the Europeans were still too disunited and the Japanese too modest.

Today Kissinger sees better hope of true multipolarity. American military supremacy, though unchallenged, is of limited value in the modern world. Europe and Japan have drawn level as economic powers, and China is likely to do so during the coming century. Without accepting the "declinist" thesis that

and ultimately political collapse. In spite of the Wilsonian rhetoric and the mistakes to which it led, suggests Kissinger, the United States had actually been applying a doctrine of containment throughout the Cold War, and ultimately it worked. Whatever the flights of Wilsonian poetry in presidential addresses, funda-

THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE

Wilson

[137]

[10]

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]

[LC]

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 opinion. In Germany the Bismarckian system collapsed less because of the lack of diplomatic skill on the part of his successors than because of an increasingly unmanageable Reichstag. As for Britain...

Kissinger is curiously blind to what was happening in Britain in the nineteenth century, and to its consequences. He quotes with understandable approval the statements by Castlereagh, Palmerston and Disraeli about national interests and the balance of power, while regarding their nemesis, Gladstone, as something 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 opinion, 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 Roosevelt 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 interest" 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 indicates a deep flaw in Kissinger's analysis. The model for the conduct of international 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 interdependent, 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]

[L.C.]

HISTOIRE

Diplomatie combine la trame chronologique du travail d'historien et les sché-
mas interprétatifs du théoricien, le tout éclairé en permanence par l'expérience
d'un conseiller du Prince, ce que Kissinger a été à un double titre, d'abord comme
adviser du président en matière de sécurité auprès de Nixon (1969-1972), puis
comme secrétaire d'Etat (sous Nixon, 1973, puis Ford, 1974-1977) (1).

BERNARD CAZES

HENRI KISSINGER

DIPLOMATIE

Kissinger historien retrace l'évolution chaotique des relations internationales (et pas seulement de l'activité des diplomates) depuis le traité de Westphalie jusqu'à nos jours, mais il est clair que, même lorsqu'il est purement descriptif, il n'oublie jamais de mettre en perspective les événements en dégageant la stratégie qu'ils reflètent — stratégie subtile comme chez Bismarck, ou remarquablement inépuis dans le cas de Napoléon III... Ce mot de stratégie, Kissinger l'emploie à de nombreuses reprises sans jamais le définir (pas plus qu'il ne définit diplomatie, d'ailleurs). Je ne crois pas beaucoup me tromper en disant qu'il s'agit d'une ligne d'action conçue en fonction à la fois de ce qu'on veut (et de ce qu'on peut) faire et de ce que risquent de vouloir (et de pouvoir) faire les autres acteurs opérant sur la scène internationale.

1) L'approche par la *balance of power*, où l'on essaye de maintenir un certain équilibre entre les puissances en présence pour éviter qu'une d'entre elles ne prenne trop d'importance. Inaugurée par Richelieu face à la maison d'Autriche, poursuivie par Guillaume d'Orange, devenu Guillaume III en 1688, pour faire obstacle à la toute-puissance de Louis XIV, cette approche fut portée à sa perfection lorsqu'il s'agit pour la même Grande-Bretagne de contrecarrer les visées hégémoniques de Napoléon Ier « en se mettant à la disposition de n'importe quelle coalition de nations opposées à une entreprise de cette nature ».

des peuples à disposer d'eux-mêmes. Mais
l'auteur lui trouve un grave défaut : les intérêts
des participants « sont rarement uniformes et
la sécurité, rarement d'un seul tenant ». Si bien
que l'on tombe « plus facilement d'accord pour
ne rien faire que pour entreprendre une action
commune ». De fait la traduction d'un tel prin-
cipe dans le traité de Versailles (et la SDN) a
été, on le sait, fort décevante (2).

HENRI KISSINGER

On a bien l'impression que Kissinger, dont
les racines sont après tout européennes, est fort
réservé à l'égard de tout arrangement fondé sur
la notion de sécurité collective, et il laisse enten-
dre en conclusion que la diplomatie américaine
aurait intérêt, non pas à jeter par-dessus bord
la tradition wilsonienne, mais à la relativiser en
tenant devantage compte des contraintes géo-
politiques. Il paraît également très séduit par un
modèle intermédiaire, celui qui sous-tend l'or-
dre établi par le traité de Vienne et dont l'arti-
san fut le grand homme de Kissinger, le prince
Clément de Metternich (3) : voilà un congrès
qui aboutit à préserver l'Europe d'un conflit
généralisé pendant une centaine d'années, et qui
reposait sur un triptyque dont Versailles n'a pas
su s'inspirer — une paix de conciliation avec la
France évitant que celle-ci ne devienne une
nation « révisionniste », des forces en présence
raisonnablement équilibrées, et enfin des va-
leurs suffisamment communes pour empêcher
les inévitables conflits d'intérêts de dégénérer.

L'avantage de disposer d'une grille d'analyse
suffisamment englobante est qu'elle autorise des
rapprochements parfois un peu tirés par les che-
veux (Staline « le Richelieu de son époque »,
par exemple), mais souvent éclairants, comme
le rapprochement entre la doctrine de Roosevelt
et la Sainte Alliance de Metternich : « l'une
comme l'autre s'efforçèrent de préserver la paix
au moyen d'une coalition de vainqueurs défendant
les mêmes valeurs ». En même temps on
se rend compte que la rigueur analytique de Kissinger théoricien est tempérée par la sagacité
quelque peu désenchantée de l'ex-stratège de la
Maison Blanche : « Les hommes d'Etat se heurtent régulièrement au même dilemme : lorsqu'ils
ont le maximum de possibilités d'action, ils ne
détiennent qu'un minimum d'informations. Le
temps qu'ils comblent cette lacune, la possibilité d'une action décisive risque fort d'avoir disparu » ; « dans le gouvernement américain, les
rapports d'analyse préconisent presque toujours
l'option intermédiaire lorsqu'il en existe
trois » : « la politique étrangère oblige souvent
à choisir entre des options imparties ». Ma
préférence va à ceci, qui exprime sans avoir l'air
d'y toucher l'essence de la pensée stratégique :
« Ni dans un cas ni dans l'autre on n'évaluer les
 conséquences qu'aurait le « succès » de la politique préconisée ». Cette idée trouve dans le
livre une illustration frappante à propos de
Franklin Roosevelt, d'où il ressort que si l'on
est tenté de regretter que celui-ci ait eu à la fin
de la guerre une vision géopolitique moins juste
que celle de Churchill, c'est là « le revers de
l'idéalisme qui avait poussé l'Amérique dans la
guerre et lui avait permis de maintenir en vie
la cause de la liberté ». Pour paraphraser W.C.
Fields, un secrétaire d'Etat républicain capable
d'urf tel jugement sur un président démocrate,
ne peut pas être entièrement mauvais.

2. Ce que J. Bainville avait su voir dès 1920 (voir *Les Conséquences politiques de la paix*, réédité récemment aux éditions G. de Bouillon). Kissinger a peut-être lu Bainville (voir les pp. 221, 222 et 269), mais il ne le cite pas. Omission plus étrange, celle de Jean Monnet. Est-ce parce que, comme l'écrit son biographe François Duchène, Kissinger voyait en lui « une sorte de Gaulliste européen cherchant à obtenir de l'Amérique par des moyens dérobés ce que De Gaulle espérait arracher de force ? ».

3. Voir le *Chemin de la paix* (1957), trad. française 1972, Denoël). Notons que l'historien Guglielmo Ferrero, dont on a réédité le remarquable *Talleyrand à Vienne* (Ed. de Fallois) porte une appréciation similaire mais crédite du résultat Talleyrand plutôt que Metternich.

Quinçain littéraire
1er-15 avril 1997

young Mormon man and his well-known executioner, thus becoming the first man to be legally executed in America in over a decade, provides the obvious commercial hook for "Shot in the Heart." Gary's last days on Utah's Death Row in the fall of 1977 were as glaring a public sensation in their epoch as the ordeal of O.J. Simpson is in ours. (A subsequent Norman Mailer book and Tommy Lee Jones movie made the Gilmore case even more of a *cause célèbre*, while the first shock wave of the punk rock explosion produced "Gary Gilmore's Eyes," turning the killer's steely gaze—and his view of the "normal" world from the other side of a murderous pathology—into a neo-noir icon of alienation and despair.)

But Mikal, youngest of the four Gilmore brothers and the sole survivor enabled to tell their grim tale, digs beneath the disposable headlines. His harrowing "inside" version of the Gary Gilmore story transforms the hyped-up, pseudo-mythic media image of the "natural born killer" back into something as disturbingly human as our worst nightmares—or our problematic daytime present.

Tracing the roots of Gary Gilmore's violent fate in his family's dysfunction, Mikal speculates that Gary's demand for his own death may have been guided by a morbid craving for retribution inculminated in the Gilmore boys by their doomy mother—a spooky eccentric who

dead-end America who dragged his family around the dingy urban margins of the West, took out his rage at life on his wife and three eldest sons. Only Mikal, born nearly 10 years later than his siblings, when his father had dwindled to a worn-out old man, was spared Frank Sr.'s savage beatings. In describing his own angry rejection of the compulsory violent branding whose "indelible signs" had marked his brothers for life, Mikal honestly admits to feeling more than a trace of guilt at having been left out of that "fidelity born of blood," which bound the other male Gilmores in a destructive mutual stranglehold with the world and with each other.

Mikal's search here for the pivotal instance of his family's tragedy—the "moment in this story when everything went wrong"—leads him back to the family's stay in '50s Portland, a time in which, as a teen-age rebel, his brother Gary conceived the "ideal of badness," which to him "would always remain a guiding ethos."

The convicted killer, asked on Death Row to name an early event he regarded as fateful, had recounted a curious episode from his troubled adolescence: Attempting to take a shortcut from school, he had got caught in a dense thicket of brier bushes that loomed on a hillside behind the family house. Gary claimed that this seemingly trivial episode represented the point at which he had learned to conquer fear by overcoming himself. Mikal, looking deeper, discovers in this incident not the comic-book

a false ground for several of the collapsed homes. In other words, there was a dead city buried under the part of town we lived in. Some people even thought that some of the old houses still survived there. Down in that web of thorns and bushes beneath our house, my father told me, were the remnants of another house. Sometimes I'd stand on the bridge and look down into that moat of undergrowth, and I'd imagine the skeleton of the other house down there. I would wonder if it was still full of the skeletons of the people who had once lived in it. Every time I saw a rustle in that underbrush, it gave me a chill. I didn't dream well in that house, but that was nothing new."

Toting up the sad balance of damage in his family, Mikal's own most compelling concern is understandably the exorcism of personal demons. Ours is something else again. The peculiar resonance of Gilmore's story lies not in the images of violence before which we are reduced to voyeuristic spectators, transfixed, ashamed and unable to turn away, but in the generalized attitudes they reflect, the existential anomie, emotional estrangement and utter moral emptiness that unfortunately typify this society at large as it uneasily turns the corner into a frightening millennium. Gary's "ideal of badness" might well stand as an ironic, prophetic emblem of the American dream in its inverted contemporary mutation, the favored stance of youth in a time when to be "bad" is seemingly the highest good. ■

Tom Clark, a biography prize judge, is the author of "The Exile of Celine" (Random House).

LOS ANGELES TIMES / BOOK REVIEW

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1994 / PAGE C

# Kissinger

*Continued from Page D*

of Roosevelt—of either political party—who, having had the courage and foresight to recognize the challenge, would have had the willpower to lead his isolationist people, step by step, toward the commitment to do whatever was necessary to defeat Nazi Germany. . . . The wisdom of his solitary passage is now, quite simply taken for granted.”

No leader in Kissinger's pantheon gets higher marks. Why? That Roosevelt got it right would be reason enough.

Attention to detail ranks high on Kissinger's list of wise foreign policy principles. So does seeing things as they are rather than as they should be. So does smiling confidence and one's choice of allies. So does winning.

Kissinger is no more comfortable now than ever with the Wilsonian concept—still very much alive—that every skirmish is part of a crusade in the cause of democratic enlightenment.

Having right as well as might on one's

side is better than Bismarck's or Riche-lieu's notion that might is enough.

But being right without might isn't enough, either.

Another dazzling moment in U.S. diplomatic history is the “long telegram” that George Kennan sent from Moscow in 1946 that was gradually written—or, as Kennan believes, rewritten—into the policy of containment and the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Kennan's waiting game worked. Moscow collapsed. But the strain on the United States took its own toll. Debate over the policy “turned into a struggle for the very soul of America,” as Kissinger puts it.

Containment began to go sour in Korea where the United States found itself in “a limited war for which it had no doctrine and in defense of a country for which it had no strategic interest.”

But it collapsed in Vietnam where the “almost causal relationship the nation had always enjoyed between its values and its

achievements began to fray.”

The basic problem, he says, was that “Nobody asked the important questions about” escalation in Vietnam: “Was it really true . . . that every communist gain hurt? . . . [W]as it conceivable that the addition of Indochina to the Communist camp could by itself overthrow the balance of power?”

Kissinger made three trips to Vietnam as a consultant in 1965 and 1966. As he has written before, the visits “convinced me that the war could not be won by the prevailing strategy, and that America would need to extricate itself by negotiating with Hanoi. . . .”

Hanoi knew that, too, and while he covers in detail the Nixon Administration's efforts to prevail, the important lesson for the future is that strategic miscalculations made Vietnam a hopeless cause. Kissinger wants a formula that will avoid future Vietnams, as do we all.

Carefully nurtured, he thinks, a balance of power similar to the one achieved in 1815 by the alliance of Great Britain,

Austria, Russia, and eventually France, is America's best bet.

The alliance that emerged from the Congress of Vienna worked because its combined military power created a balance to any possible combination of competitors and because the member nations shared a value system.

Despite America's historic aversion to the balance of powers, Kissinger says, the 19th-Century concept can and should be adapted to the new world emerging from the Cold War.

“Though a military superpower,” he writes, “America can no longer impose its will because neither its [largely nuclear] power nor its ideology lends itself to imperial ambitions. . . .”

Finding the right allies—allies who share America's values—would be a diplomatic task for the United States as formidable as either Kissinger or his new book. But it's a task that Kissinger inspires us to begin in this important book.

PAGE F / SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1994

BOOK REVIEW / LOS ANGELES TIMES

tured Karyl Norman, heading Parade." The advertisement billed the show as "something different."

Chauncey not only splendidly re-creates this little-known chapter of New York history, but also produces an exquisite story, combining extensive original historical research with captivating narrative passages. His material is primarily drawn from court trials, the papers of the Manhattan district attorney, of the city magistrates' courts and other governmental regulators, as well as various committees of harassment such as the records of the anti-prostitution society and the Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Given such an ample record of repression, arrests, investigations, and trials for sodomy and prostitution, it no doubt must have been tempting for Chauncey to compose a persecution story. After all, the philosopher Michel Foucault achieved his immense contribution to the history of sexuality by highlighting the

Elazar Barkan, a judge for the history book prize, is director of the humanities center and professor of history at the Claremont Graduate School.

tale.

In Chauncey's interviews, the gay men who lived through the pre-repression period describe gay New York early in this century as the good old times. Through these interviews, the streets and clubs of Harlem, the Village, Uptown, Broadway and Times Square come alive as scenes of gay life in a period when the homosexuals supposedly existed only in the closet. The celebration of the drag-queen in the good old days before repression is told in vivid colors, highlighting the pleasure and the playfulness, even when the images depict arrest and harassment. The tone only changes in the last chapter, which briefly describes "the exclusion of homosexuality from the public sphere in the 1930s." On the page preceding this chapter, a picture (1940, at right) depicts a glowing drag queen emerging from a police van, posing for the camera.

The juxtaposition—of the picture and the text, of the celebration and the repression—is illuminating. Victimization, as Chauncey shows here, can also be subverted into cultural and political resistance. Homosexuals, although persecuted during those years, were able to create a temporary enclave that

The middle-class Angst of masculinity did not invent the fairy, but it did turn the fairy into a "potent cultural figure [that] could serve to mark the boundaries of acceptable male behavior." However counterintuitive, this argument is persuasive when backed by such rich evidence and engaging narrative. Thus Chauncey's story reminds us in a powerful way that contemporary prejudices—notwithstanding their seemingly eternal, natural, or obvious nature—are anything but permanent. ■

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1994 / PAGE E

92

New Yorker - May 2, 1994

THE CRITICS

BOOKS

THE GAMES OF GREAT MEN

BY SIMON SCHAMA

Diplomacy
by Henry Kissinger
(Simon & Schuster; $35)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

93

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RICHARD THOMPSON

94

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

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

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

BOOKS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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timonious foil to Disraeli's Realpolitik.

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

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

"Diplomacy" is at its best, though, when Kissinger takes off his statesman's pinstripes and provides informal insights into the operational techniques of the profession. He shrewdly notes, for example, the symbolic significance of Roosevelt's response to Stalin's offer of Soviet lodgings at the Teheran Conference in 1943, which was accepted because of anxiety about a possible bomb attack on the crippled President. A seemingly minor detail of accommodation played directly into Stalin's determination to put the Western Allies on the defensive by making Roosevelt physically beholden to his host. And Kissinger understands how Roosevelt's amiable characterization of "Uncle Joe" had an effect on American public perception, turning a sinister and murderous dictator into a character from Main Street.

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

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

BOOKS

97

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

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

DEAL OF THE WEEK

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# The 'Great Man' Theory of Foreign Policy

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## 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-Emperor, 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."

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

TL

RAY BARTKUS

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*

[L]C7

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Contents

<table><tr><td>3</td><td>Garry Wills:</td><td>Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events by Murray Kempton</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>Menand: Louis Eliot's 'Middlemarch,' a film for television directed by Anthony Page</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>Craig: Gordon A. Craig: Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger</td></tr><tr><td>14</td><td>Fenton: James Fenton: Poem</td></tr><tr><td>15</td><td>Holmes: Richard Holmes: Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law by E. P. Thompson</td></tr><tr><td>18</td><td>Burma: Ian Burma: Blueprint for a New Japan by Ichiro Ozawa</td></tr><tr><td>23</td><td>Bayley: John Bayley: Brazil by John Updike</td></tr><tr><td>25</td><td>Davis: David Brion Davis: The Age of Federalism by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick</td></tr><tr><td>29</td><td>Urquhart: Brian Urquhart: Cooperating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990s by Gareth Evans</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>Seeking Peace from Chaos: Humanitarian Intervention in Somalia by Samuel M. Makinda</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>The UN in Cambodia by Michael W. Doyle and Nishkala Suntharalingam</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>Aftermath of the Gulf War: An Assessment of UN Action by Ian Johnstone</td></tr><tr><td>34</td><td>Nagel: Thomas Nagel: The Mind and Its Depths by Richard Wollheim</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>Freud and His Critics by Paul Robinson</td></tr><tr><td>39</td><td>Jenks: Christopher Jenks: Over the Edge: The Growth of Homelessness in the 1980s by Martha R. Burt</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>A Place to Call Home: The Low Income Housing Crisis Continues by Edward Lazere, Paul Leonard, Cushing Dolbeare, and Barry Zigas</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women by Elliot Liebow</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>The Way Home by the New York City Coalition on the Homeless</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness by Peter H. Rossi</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>New Homeless and Old: Community and the Skid Row Hotel by Charles Hoch and Robert Slayton</td></tr><tr><td>46</td><td>Annan: Gabriele Annan: Pirandello's Love Letters to Marta Abba edited by Benito Ortolani</td></tr><tr><td>48</td><td>Naipaul: V.S. Naipaul: A Way in the World</td></tr><tr><td>55</td><td>Letters from: Raymond Bonner, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Kees Tamboer, Denis Donoghue, Charles Larmore, Isaac Levi, and Sidney Morgenbesser, and Fred Inglis</td></tr></table>

CONTRIBUTORS

GABRIELE ANNAN, who lives in London, is a film and book critic.

JOHN BAYLEY has written books on Pushkin, Shakespeare, Housman, and Hardy, and received the Heinemann Literary Award for Tolstoy and the Novel.

DAVID BRION DAVIS is Sterling Professor of History at Yale. His books include *The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, Slavery and Human Progress, and, most recently, Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations*.

IAN BURUMA is a writer living in London. His new book, *The Wages of Guilt*, has just been published.

GORDON A. CRAIG's books include *The Germans and Die Politik der Unpolitischen*, a study of German writers and politics from 1770. He is the co-author, with Francis L. Loewenheim, of *The Diplomats, 1939-1979*, to be published in July.

JAMES FENTON is the author of *All the Wrong Places and Children of Exile*. The poem in this issue will appear in his new collection of poems, *Out of Danger*, to be published in July by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

RICHARD HOLMES is the author of *Shelley: The Pursuit, Footsteps, Coleridge: Early Visions*, and, most recently, *Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage*.

CHRISTOPHER JENCKS is Professor of Sociology and Urban Affairs at Northwestern University and the author, most recently, of *The Homeless*.

LOUIS MENAND teaches English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

THOMAS NAGEL is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. Among his books are *Equality and Partiality* and *The View from Nowhere*.

V.S. NAIPAUL's many books include *A Bend in the River, The Enigma of Arrival, and India: A Million Mutinies Now*. The article in this issue is drawn from his new book, *A Way in the World*, to be published by Knopf later this month.

BRIAN URQUHART, a former Undersecretary-General of the United Nations, is Scholar in Residence at the Ford Foundation. His books include *Dag Hammarskjöld, A Life in Peace and War* and, most recently, *Ralph Bunche: An American Life*.

GARRY WILLS is Adjunct Professor of History at Northwestern University. His new book, *Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders*, has just been published.

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Drawings on the cover and on pages 3, 5, 8, 18, 23, 25, 26, 29, 36, and 46 by David Levine. Engraving on page 55 comes from 'R. B. Kitts' by Marco Livingstone (Thames and Hudson, 1992). The photograph on page 50 comes from 'The Book of Trinidad,' edited by Gerard Besson and Bridget Brereton (Port of Spain: Paria Publishing, 1992).

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Copyright © 1994, NYREV, Inc. All rights including translation into other languages reserved by the publishers in the United States, Great Britain, Mexico, and all countries participating in the Universal Copyright Convention, the International Copyright Convention, and the Pan American Copyright Convention. Nothing in this publication may be reproduced without the permission of the publisher.

2

The adaptation's reconciliation scene is very sweetly done. But subtlety, not sweetness, is the note of the original. For the storm isn't merely the natural correspondent of human passion; it's also terrifying, and it reduces the lovers to children. After the kiss, "Will stood still an instant looking at her, then seated himself beside her, and laid his hand on hers, which turned itself upward to be clasped. They sat in that way without looking at each other, until the rain abated and began to fall in stillness." It's an echo of the book's first sentence: "Who... has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?" The image of maturity confronting, as though a child all over again, the wonders of a world both fallen and new is the epic image in English: it closes *Paradise Lost*, and it closes Wordsworth's *Prelude*. In *Middlemarch*, it's the image that expresses everything Eliot wants to claim for Dorothea as a heroic soul. But this is one of those effects, words reaching back to words, that film cannot achieve, and Eliot's adapters, seeing in the thunderstorm scene only a cliché, have let it go by.

Nietzsche thought that what George Eliot wanted was Christian morality without the Christianity. "They have got rid of the Christian God," he says of the English in *Twilight of the Idols*, with Eliot in mind, "and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality." He was being contemptuous, of course (and he probably hadn't read any of Eliot's novels); but many other commentators have assumed that Eliot did write her books in order to articulate a post-Christian moral and social philosophy, and they have devoted themselves to the business of deciphering it. It's this idea of Eliot as, in some systematic sense, a moralist that is responsible for the assumption that modern readers (and modern viewers) will find her preachy and dull.

Various candidates have been proposed as bases for Eliot's putative moral theory: the Comtian "religion of humanity"; the philosophy of duty; what Bernard Semmel, in his excellent new book on Eliot and nineteenth-century political theory, calls "the politics of national inheritance."* Like anyone with strong intellectual interests, Eliot had views on the political and ethical principles desirable for modern society. But searching for the articulation of those views in her novels mistakes the nature of the form. Novels don't articulate theories; they disarticulate them. They are to ideals of conduct what hunger is to table manners: they are keenly aware of the disproportion between the elegance of form and the exigencies of appetite.

*Middlemarch* is about the effort to make morality consistent with uncertainty. About uncertainty, Eliot is certain; but about morality, she is not. Nearly every discussion of Eliot's

thought retells the story of her evening walk in the garden with F. W. H. Myers, which ends with her sibylline utterance of the word "duty" as the one peremptory commandment surviving the passing of the age of faith. But if *Middlemarch* has anything to say about duty, it is to ask, Duty to what? On one view of duty, Dorothea has a duty to marry Chettam, so that their adjoining estates can be combined by their heir. On another view, she has an obligation to respect the testamentary wishes of her husband concerning her remarriage. The only way in which we can understand her union with Ladislaw as expressive of "duty" is to say that Dorothea has a duty to her own happiness—but this can hardly stand as a moral philosophy. Rosamond feels a duty to her

happiness, too, and it brings her marriage to ruin.

"Signs are small measurable things," Eliot says of *The Key to All Mythsologies*, the work in which Casaubon proposes to demonstrate that all myths derive from a single source, "but interpretations are illimitable." The world is sensible, in other words, but there is no end to making sense. We feel comfortable in holding this doctrine against Casaubon, whose maze is so clearly without a plan. It takes us a little longer, perhaps, to see that it applies as well to Lydgate, whose quest for the physiological "primitive tissue" that underlies all matter is no less quixotic because it adheres to the most advanced methods of modern science. But we've missed the experience of

the novel if we fail to see that the point has still another target, which is the moral authority of the author herself.

With Eliot, interpretation takes the form of moral discrimination, for which her capacity is so fine and apparently inexhaustible that we begin to feel that there is no wickedness in which she could not discover a virtue, and no virtuous act which she could not show to originate in some self-serving motive. We start to suspect that it's only the author's sympathy with our desire for coherence at any price that prevents her from deconstructing morality all the way down to the ground; and *Middlemarch* comes, at that moment, to seem like a bubble of light held aloft only by our gaze. That's an image for another film maker to try for. ☐

*George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (Oxford University Press, 1994).

May 12, 1994

Looking for Order

Gordon Craig

Diplomacy

by Henry Kissinger.

Simon and Schuster, 912 pp., $35.00

In 1716, when the French ambassador François de Callières's treatise *On Negotiating with Sovereign Princes* was published in English translation, an English reader wrote ruefully that the diplomatic corps of continental states seemed to be filled with persons well trained in civil law and the law of nations, deeply read in history, and acquainted with the interests of the respective princes of Europe. This made a better basis for the conduct of foreign policy than the English style, whose initiatives and démarches he described as being supported by no other authority or argument than Juvenal's *Hoc volo, sic iubeo, sit proratione voluntas* (Because I want it is reason enough).¹

During the wars of the eighteenth century, the English learned that they could not prosper by exclusive cultivation of their own desires without making concessions to the interests of others. Their colonists in America, on the other hand, once they had gained their independence, were much slower to learn that lesson. From the very beginning Americans preferred—in the words of Henry Clay—"to pursue a policy exclusively American, uninfluenced by the policy of My Lord Castlereagh, Count Nesselrode, or any other of the great men of Europe."²² They either abstained from any involvement in the quarrels and problems of other nations or, when they felt compelled to intervene, did so on their own terms and sometimes for objectives imperfectly understood—or agreed to by their allies. Americans were deeply ambivalent about history, choosing instead to follow the imperative of moral absolutes; they were uncomfortable with the idea of national interest as a guiding principle of policy, preferring motivations that were

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.

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

> Nowadays, when you can by overnight flight talk face to face with the foreign ministers of other countries, it's silly to go at it the old fashioned way of exchanging notes, which take a month perhaps before you get as good an understanding, and then not as good as you can get talking a few minutes face to face.⁵

During his own secretaryship, Henry Kissinger insisted on making all major decisions himself and hence carried the State Department along with him during his shuttle diplomacy in 1973 in what one newspaperman called “the biggest permanent floating foreign policy establishment in history.”⁶

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⁵John Robinson Beal, *John Foster Dulles: A Biography* (Harper and Row, 1957), p. 154.

⁶Walter Isaacson, *Kissinger: A Biography* (Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 557.

8

The New York Review

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

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

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

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

It was only after twenty-five years of war that Europe was able to sit down and negotiate what Kissinger regards as the most successful modern system of international order. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 realized the dreams of statesmen like William Pitt the Younger and gave Europe, in Kissinger's words, "the longest period of peace it had ever known." He ascribes this to the skill of Prince Metternich of Austria, Viscount Castlereagh of Great Britain, and their colleagues in devising a system that was based upon a territorial equilibrium that was so stable as to discourage attempts to overthrow it and upon "a sense of shared values.... There was not only a physical equilibrium, but a moral one. Power and justice were in substantial harmony."

This is, of course, true but seems

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

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

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

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

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

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9

Alma Guillermoprieto

THE HEART
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Just published by Knopf

PHOTO © STEPHEN FERRY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New York Review

10

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

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

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

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

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

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between politics and war.⁹

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

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

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

Kissinger's principal criticism of
what became the containment policy is
that, despite its optimism and its con-
dence that Western steadfastness
would force the Soviet Union, in the
end, to abandon its aggressive tenden-
cies, it was curiously utopian and, in its
prescriptions, highly abstract. It as-
signed to the United States, at the
height of its military superiority, a
purely reactive role and seemed to
foresee no place for diplomatic initia-
tive. Kissinger is inclined to believe,
for example, as Winston Churchill did
at the time, that Josef Stalin, when he
began to realize the economic poten-
tial and staying power of the West,
may have been prepared to explore
the outlines of a general settlement
and that the Soviet Peace Note of
March 1952, raising the possibility of
uniting Germany on the basis of neu-
trality, may have been a first step in
that direction. But the West, feeling
that its progress toward integration
would be threatened by the onset of
negotiations, rejected the note with-
out thorough investigation, as it did
other Soviet feelers after Stalin's
death. In April 1953, John Foster
Dulles wrote to a member of the
White House staff,

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

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

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

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

Containment, then, according to
Kissinger, suffered both from the re-
moteness of its objective, which as the
nuclear balance shifted imposed in-
creasing psychological strain upon the
Western public, and from a fitful and
incoherent diplomacy that sometimes
came close to making irreversible er-
rors. But it suffered mostly perhaps
from its universalism, its assumption
that all Communist regimes were iden-
tical and linked and under Moscow's
hegemony, and that all must be op-
posed. This always threatened to
overextend America's resources, and
in Vietnam it finally did so. The
"nightmare" of the war, Kissinger
writes, was that the US entered it
"without a more careful assessment of
the likely costs and potential out-
comes. A nation should not send half a
million of its young to a distant conti-
nent or stake its international standing
and domestic cohesion unless its lead-
ers can describe their political goals
and offer a realistic strategy for
achieving them."

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

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

The New York Review

INTERNATIONAL

# ‘An Element of Guile’

## Books: Henry Kissinger on the uses of power

KARL SCHUMACHER

Reasons of state: *The author*

Diplomacy

HENRY KISSINGER

912 pages

Simon & Schuster

$85

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 before 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

...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

May 1, 1994 NY Times Book Review Letters

Ernest May replies to Henry Kissinger,

Kissinger's 'Diplomacy'

In a letter to the editor (April 24), Henry Kissinger charged that my review of his "Diplomacy" reflected ideological or personal animus. I am surprised at such a reaction to a review that compli- ments the book's unusual "marriage of vision and shrewdness," likens it to Ma- chiavelli's classic "Discourses" and pre- dicts that future generations will read it, like Machiavelli's book, "for its wisdom." Far from quoting Mr. Kissinger as prais- ing Stalin and Mao to establish that he "never met a dictator [he] did not like," the review stresses his new insistence that political leaders must respect val- ues as well as power.

The review does criticize "Diplomacy" as a history. It cites some examples of mistakes about particulars. Though Mr. Kissinger protests that these examples are distorted, his letter actually makes them more telling.

To take one example, the review ob- jected to the statement that Wilsonian self-determination was "unfamiliar" to European diplomats of World War I. Mr. Kissinger counters that his meaning was plain. In practice, he says, European diplomats thought the balance of power "took precedence over the preferences of the affected population." This defense misses the point, which was that Euro- pean diplomats had come to expect the contrary well before hearing from Wil- son. Beaten upon by Benes, Masaryk, Pasic and their many allies, including the publisher of The Times of London, European diplomats already contem- plated peace treaties providing for self- determination. To claim precision for the adjective "unfamiliar" is to defend an outmoded and oversimplified contrast between American sentimentalism and European realism.

Mr. Kissinger characterizes such com- plaints as "technical" and "petty." The review cited specifics, however, not to say "Gotcha!" but to illustrate weak- nesses of "Diplomacy" as a history. Mr. Kissinger's scholarly credentials and public stature give his name on the title page the quality of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Thousands of readers may think "Diplomacy" an authoritative history of statecraft since the 17th centu- ry. Many may never look at another. That will be their loss, for the book does not take pains to reconstruct the past as the past rather than as a source of para- bles for the present.

Mr. Kissinger is right in calling me to account for saying that he ignored Har- old Nicolson's "Diplomacy." As he points out, his book has a copyright page dis- claimer, saying that Nicolson's early book was "quite different in scope, inten- tions, and ideas." Though I missed that disclaimer and apologize, I would note that its wording supports my general point, which was not that Nicolson had been slighted, but that Mr. Kissinger's book tells readers almost nothing about previous writings on the subject.

Mr. Kissinger worked very hard on those parts of "Diplomacy" that bear on current and future foreign policy issues. He kept revising the forward-looking fi- nal chapter almost until publication day. And he was right to do so, for he is

deservedly one of the world's most lis- tened-to policy analysts. He did not take equally seriously his professional re- sponsibilities as a historian, and that is a shame.

ERNEST R. MAY

Cambridge, Mass.

C10

THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, MARCH 28, 1994

[L]C

Books of The Times

# A Policy Maker on the Subject He Knows Best

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

With Henry Kissinger's "Diplomacy," the reader actually gets two books in one. On one level, the volume is an elegantly written study of Western diplomacy, from Richelieu down through Metternich and Bismarck to modern times. This book tries to give the reader an understanding of four centuries of Western politics and history, as well as an appreciation of the highly divergent traditions in statesmanship found in Europe and the United States. Like Henry James, Mr. Kissinger contrasts European coldbloodedness and sophistication with American innocence and naïveté; like Tocqueville, he wants to examine the consequences that American optimism and democratic ideals have had on the country's practical conduct.

The second book, the book that emerges as a subtext in "Diplomacy," is a more subjective and cunning one. To begin with, this book attempts to place Mr. Kissinger's own policy-making exploits (as national security adviser and Secretary of State under President Richard M. Nixon) in context with the policy-making records of such historical giants as Metternich, Castlereagh and Bismarck. While making an impassioned case for such Kissingerian concepts as triangular diplomacy, linkage and balance-of-power negotiations, the book also tries to spin recent and not-so-recent history to support Mr. Kissinger's own embrace (as both a scholar and a policy maker) of the power-oriented pragmatics of realpolitik.

For instance, the failure of the Western democracies to recognize the dangers of Nazi Germany early on, Mr. Kissinger suggests, can be attributed to those countries' failure to pay attention to traditional balance-of-power tenets, which "should have made it clear that a large and strong Germany bordered on the east by small and weak states was a dangerous threat," regardless of Hitler's motives.

Such arguments, of course, serve another purpose in this book as well: they provide a resonant historical backdrop for Mr. Kissinger's efforts to explain and vindicate his own handling of foreign affairs for President Nixon. After all, as Mr. Kissinger well knows, books have the capacity to help shape one's place in history (or at least affect how one's efforts are perceived): his second book, "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy" (1957), made him an intellectual celebrity at the age of 34, while his later books, including his best-selling memoirs, helped cement his fame. In this respect, "Diplomacy" can be seen as a kind of response to the publication of recent books (from Seymour M. Hersh's angry diatribe "The Price of Power" to Walter Isaacson's comprehensive biography, "Kissinger") that have provided less-than-flattering portraits of the former Secretary of State.

Indeed, the last portion of "Diplomacy" rehashes events dealt with at length in Mr. Kissinger's two volumes of memoirs ("White House Years" (1979) and "Years of Upheaval" (1982), including the end of the Vietnam War, détente with the Soviet

Union and the opening to China. Although Mr. Kissinger does not directly address the charges of secretiveness frequently made against him and Mr. Nixon, he argues (in a passage about Franklin D. Roosevelt) that "there is inevitably in every great leader an element of guile which simplifies, sometimes the objectives, sometimes the magnitude, of the task." Elsewhere, he suggests that only hands-on ministers "with executive powers over all aspects of foreign affairs" can rise to the level of greatness.

Many arguments in "Diplomacy" are decidedly familiar. Once again, Mr. Kissinger complains that Watergate undermined the authority of the President and his long-term foreign-policy objectives. He defends Vietnamization as "the best of the available options." And he angrily rebuts critics like William Shawcross who have charged that his policies set the stage in Cambodia for the Khmer Rouge atrocities.

What overall lesson does Mr. Kissinger draw from the Vietnam War? "The nightmare of Vietnam was not the way in which America entered the war," he writes, "but why it did so without a more careful assessment of the likely costs and potential outcomes. A nation should not send half a million of its young to a distant continent or stake its international standing and domestic cohesion unless its leaders can describe their political goals and offer a realistic strategy for achieving them — as President Bush did later in the gulf war. Washington should have asked itself two basic questions: Was it possible to establish democracy and achieve military victory more or less simultaneously? And even more crucial, will the benefits justify the costs?"

Whereas the sheer amount of detail in Mr. Kissinger's memoirs often shrouded the larger policy goals of his tenure in the Nixon Administra-

tion, "Diplomacy" provides a succinct overview of both his basic philosophy and his interpretation of individual events. The reader finishes the volume with a vivid sense of the author's dark, Hobbesian view of the world and the political implications of that vision.

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. He is also adept at articulating parallels between seemingly disparate situations — between, say, 19th-century Europe and the post-cold-war world — and using this ability to define broad historical patterns and dynamics. The book's final chapter sketchily sets forth Mr. Kissinger's current views on such matters as United States relations with the former Soviet Union, Germany, Eastern Europe, China and Japan, views that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the author's frequent appearances on public-affairs talk shows on television.

Mr. Kissinger argues that the conduct of American foreign policy has historically divided into two dominant schools: the realist school exemplified by Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, and the messianic, idealist school exemplified by Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan. He argues that America's universalist ideals, combined with its advocacy of collective security, has sometimes blinded the country to the cultural differences of other countries. And he argues that the United States, alone

Associated Press, 1987

Diplomacy

By Henry Kissinger

Illustrated, 912 pages. Simon & Schuster. $35.

A history of
international
relations through
four centuries.

among nations, has "rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism," a claim that possesses "a certain aura of unpredictability" for other countries used to blunt calculations of national interest.

Such assessments of America's role in the world should win Mr. Kissinger a new set of readers, even if "Diplomacy" itself fails to solidify the place in diplomatic history Mr. Kissinger would like. In fact, while Mr. Kissinger's focus on national interests and geopolitical realities frequently led to criticism that he lacked an innate feel, as a policy maker, for American values and mores, his very position as a philosophical outsider in this country makes him a provocative observer and essayist, the roles best ratified by this shrewd, often vexing and consistently absorbing book.

54. George E. Gruen, "Turkey's Growing Regional Role," Near East Report, June 27, 1994, p. 116.

55. Silver, op. cit., p. 21.

56. Ibid., p. 20.

57. Text of Ambassador Grossman's speech to the American Turkish Council on January 19, 1995, in *Newspot*, February 10, 1995, p. 2.

Professor George E. Gruen has been closely following Turkish affairs for almost four decades. Professor Gruen has taught international relations and

Middle East politics at Columbia University and at City College and Brooklyn College. He has been a consultant to the United States government and the United Nations on regional water issues, refugees, and aspects of the peace process. His works include *The Water Crisis: The Next Middle East Conflict?* (1991) and monographs on *Syria, Syrian Jews and the Peace Process* (June 1992) and *Jerusalem and the Peace Process* (November 1993).

This article is based in part on research during 1992-1994 under a grant from the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) to study Turkey's potential contribution to Middle East peace. The opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USIP. Nor do the views of Professor Gruen necessarily reflect those of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy.

## BOOK BRIEF

### DIPLOMACY

by Henry Kissinger

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994, 912 pp.

Hardcover: $34.00.

*Diplomacy*, Henry Kissinger's latest book, is probably his most significant contribution to the study of foreign policy. Brilliantly expounding his ideas on the proper conduct of diplomacy, he traces its practice during the last 350 years, including the period of his own involvement and not neglecting the postcold-war epoch. The book is truly a work of magnificent proportions in which the former secretary of state elucidates his strong belief in power-political realities, the balance of power, raison d'etat, and the alleged exceptionalism, the nonpower-political propensity, of American foreign policy. Well written and always holding the reader's interest, *Diplomacy* is a must for all those interested in foreign affairs and the history of relations between nations.

Kissinger's main point in this book is the danger of disregarding the realities of power politics. He maintains that Cardinal Richelieu "introduced the modern approach to international relations, based on the nation-state and motivated by national interest as its ultimate purpose" (p. 1) and expresses his admiration for other practitioners of the craft such as Prince Metternich, Benjamin Disraeli, Otto von Bismarck, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt prior to 1942. On the other hand, statesmen such as William E. Gladstone, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt after 1942 seem less praiseworthy to the author, although he makes every effort to be fair to them as well. His admiration for practitioners of realpolitik has long been known, but here he places it in what he believes is its proper historical setting.

Kissinger's treatment of Richelieu's foreign policy sets the pace for what follows. Stressing the cardinal's desire never to allow any state in Central Europe to become too strong and a menace to France, he made every effort to keep the Holy Roman Empire divided, allied himself with some of its members against others, and made use of the Thirty Years War to further his designs. A strong believer in the primacy of raison

d'etat, the Roman Catholic cardinal, managing the affairs of His Most Christian Majesty, had no compunction in allying himself with Protestant Swedes and Muslim Ottomans against the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor because such connections served his purpose. And what Richelieu supposedly elevated to a principle of diplomacy became the guiding precept of Prince Metternich, whose reliance on the balance of power enabled him and his associates to craft a peace that substantially lasted for a century. Bismarck's similar policies, though for different ends, also succeeded after the unification of Germany in preventing war as long as he remained in power, for he realized that the first duty of a satiated nation is the maintenance of peace. And Teddy Roosevelt, disregarding the traditions of American exceptionalism that had always considered foreign policy in abstract terms, embarked on a policy of power politics as effective as that of its European practitioners whom the United States professed to disdain. But although Kissinger obviously tends to emphasize the importance of power politics, he does not deny the significance of shared values, an advantage that enabled Metternich and his associates to make their system work.

The British version of raison d'etat was the maintenance of the balance of power. British statesmen had long seen to it that no one continental rival became too powerful and had particularly stressed the necessity of preserving the inviolability of the Low Countries. Perfecting those practices, Disraeli benefited the British Empire by his skillful maneuvers. Franklin D. Roosevelt, too, knew how to practice the art of national self-interest in diplomacy and expertly steered the United States ever more closely to Great Britain in his well-considered effort to protect America from a German victory that would be dangerous for the United States. In his dealings with the Soviet Union after America's entry into the war, however, he fell back on traditional American universalism in the impossible attempt to safeguard the peace of the world through the agency of four policemen, the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China.

According to the author, American foreign policy has always sought to differentiate itself from European practice by regarding the United States as a beacon to the world and by basing its diplomacy on broad universal principles rather

24 American Foreign Policy Interests

April 1995

than power politics or the national interest. Although this
sometimes served America's needs, it often fell far short
of the mark. Woodrow Wilson with his Fourteen Points,
Franklin D. Roosevelt with his Four Policemen, and John F.
Kennedy with his anticommunist crusade embodied this ten-
dency, and although Kissinger does not condemn it alto-
gether, he thinks that it also caused many unwarranted
difficulties.

The most interesting part of the book is the portion dealing with modern American diplomacy in which the author played such an important role. The otherwise impersonal diplomatic survey here becomes a memoir and an attempt at self-justification. Interestingly presented, enriched with personal anecdotes, and cogently argued, it naturally seeks to show the main actors involved in a favorable light. Thus the former secretary of state, who considered the war in Vietnam an overextension of American capabilities, vigorously defends both himself and President Nixon against charges that the terms he finally obtained could have been negotiated four years earlier. Never during Kissinger's involvement did the North Vietnamese ever consent to any arrangement prior to U.S. withdrawal and the jettisoning of the South Vietnamese government, he argues, until the mining of their principal harbors, the interception of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia, and the heavy bombing campaign leading to the end of the war. The terms the Nixon administration managed to extract from the North Vietnamese were therefore dependent on these actions and could not have been procured earlier. Linkage and détente are presented as brilliant strokes of foreign policy, and Richard M. Nixon emerges as a statesman who enjoys the author's unstinted admiration.

The chapters dealing with the end of the cold war, partially attributed to Ronald Reagan's rearmament policies, and those concerning the future needs of the United States are less revealing. Although it is interesting to read Kissinger's views about the necessity of not overextending American influence and power and not putting too much trust in a democratic Russia, the prescriptions are too vague to require much comment, and his predictions about the future importance of China and Japan are self-evident.

It is, of course, unavoidable that in a book of such broad
scope and great length certain ideas and statements are ques-
tionable. Cardinal Richelieu was hardly the first practitioner
of a policy of national self-interest; power politics has existed
throughout recorded history. Moreover, the emphasis on
American exceptionalism as consisting of a special kind of
idealist foreign policy is also dubious. Critics might say that
the Fourteen Points, flawed as they were, served American
interests well, as did the worldwide struggle against commu-
nism. The assertion that Britain, France, and Israel were
responsible for the Suez debacle is also open for discussion.
It was the Eisenhower administration that erred when it failed
to support its allies, a mistake whose consequences the author
recognizes. Finally, the proposition that Ronald Reagan's
policies were one of the causes of the collapse of the Soviet

Union would have to be proved further. But these criticisms
hardly undermine the general value of the book, which will
remain a classic in the field for years to come.

Hans L. Trefousse
Brooklyn College and
the Graduate Center,
City University of New York

FOR THE RECORD

The Two Faces of Mr. Willy Claes

On February 20, 1995, Willy Claes, secretary general of NATO, wrote an article titled "NATO's Agenda for the New European Order" (Financial Times). In it he reaffirmed the alliance's purpose as "the defense of its members' territory and independence." From this it follows that "instability and threats to regional security, including weapons proliferation," are "things which do concern NATO."

Whereas in the past the primary focus of NATO was on
the Soviet Union, the postcold-war period, according to Mr.
Claes, necessitates NATO, among other things, to "contrib-
ute to security and stability in the Mediterranean region" and
to "achieve a better mutual understanding with [NATO's]
southern neighbors." Toward that end, Mr. Claes notes that
NATO will initially establish contact with "Egypt, Israel,
Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia."

What Mr. Claes said could have emanated from the pen of
a political realist, for it is generally agreed in a good part of
the world that the Mediterranean region is unstable and
threatens to destabilize the Middle East and regions be-
yond it, and the consensus is that Islamic militant funda-
mentalism is engendering serious threats to peace. Yet we
learn from the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization that "Islamic fundamentalism is not a concern
for NATO . . . [and that] NATO has no quarrel with Islam."

If Islamic militant fundamentalism is not a serious de-
bilizing force in Mediterranean politics, what forces are
threatening the security of Morocco and Tunisia? If Islamic
militant fundamentalism in Algeria is not the cause of serious
security concerns in neighboring countries as well as in
France and elsewhere on the continent of Europe, why are so
many Europeans concerned about it? Is Islamic fundamental-
ism a benign political force in Egypt and in Turkey? And who
is destabilizing and endeavoring to torpedo the Israeli-PLO
peace process if not rampant Islamic militant fundamentalism?

What emerges is Mr. Claes's confusion, which manifests
itself in his failure to understand the difference between Islam
and Islamic militant fundamentalism. That NATO should
have no quarrel with Islam cannot be argued against, for Islam
is one of the great Abrahamic religions. Islamic militant
fundamentalism, on the other hand, is the political exploita-
tion of orthodox interpretations of Islam that can lead to mili-

April 1995

American Foreign Policy Interests 25

LETTERS

To the Editor:

As the medical director of the State Department's Office of Medical Services, I feel obliged to respond to attorney Ralph Martin's comments ("Letters," September *Journal*) regarding the death of Nancy Ferebee Lewis in Cairo. Mr. Martin suggests that the department failed to respond properly to her medical emergency and has since treated her family badly by refusing to provide information on the incident.

It is important that your readers have an accurate picture of the department's response in the Lewis case. Immediately upon learning of Ms. Lewis's death, the Office of Medical Services began a review of the actions of the medical team. When a family member informed the post two days later that a highly toxic fumigant had been applied in Ms. Lewis's apartment by a local firm, a Mishap Analysis Board was convened under the direction of the Office of Safety, Health and Environmental Management. The board members traveled to Cairo in the second week of January to investigate. The MAB study was followed by an in-depth investigation, recently concluded, conducted by the Office of the Inspector General. Extensive reports on both investigations have been shared with the Lewis family.

Investigations of Ms. Lewis's death detailed attempts by a nurse, a physician and others in the health unit to aid Ms. Lewis and to resuscitate her after her collapse. After advising that

Ms. Lewis should be brought to the embassy for evaluation, the on-call nurse arranged to meet her when she arrived. Within 20 minutes, the nurse had evaluated Ms. Lewis, consulted the duty doctor, and asked the doctor to come in.

Regarding the autopsy, it is policy to provide pathologists with as much information as possible. This was done in the Lewis case. Again, the results of the autopsy were promptly provided to the family.

There has been no attempt to withhold the results of investigations or any other material. The department is subject to the procedures dictated by the Freedom of Information Act and must comply with those requirements and the Privacy Act. Fortunately this has not caused exceptional delay in providing information to the Lewis family.

Elmore F. Rigamer

Medical Director

Office of Medical Services

Washington, D.C.

To the Editor:

Charles Maechling's review of Henry Kissinger's *Diplomacy* (September *Journal*) does not do justice to a work of striking insight, originality and force. Offered here is a brief but contrasting assessment of this absorbing analysis of how American foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson assumed its contours and of how

America might fare in the future.

By drawing the reader's attention in new ways to what is to be learned from relations among European statesmen in the 18th and 19th centuries, Kissinger arrives at his central proposition that there is an inner tension in American foreign policy between Wilson's moral idealism and the legacies of Cardinal Richelieu's *raison d'état*, Bismarck's *Realpolitik* and Theodore Roosevelt's and Richard Nixon's visions of national interest.

This enduring tension, so evident in the Clinton administration's policies toward Haiti, becomes in the telling a sort of *yang* and *yin*, a tugging and pulling of opposing forces for which Henry Adams, in a different American context, provided us the metaphor of the virgin and the dynamo. "I tried to describe America's unique blend of hope and necessity," Kissinger wrote to *The New York Times* about his book.

Interestingly, Kissinger finds much of indispensability in Wilson's idealism. "For America, any association with Realpolitik must take into account the core values of the first society in history to have been explicitly created in the name of liberty," he wrote in the end.

Kissinger develops a theory of "America's exceptionalism" (there are 21 references to it in the index) that is a stroke of insight. Defined as a sense in this country of "moral superiority ... backed by the nation's material abundance," America's exceptionalism also finds expression in "unrivaled power."

7 FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL/NOVEMBER 1994

LETTERS

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This concept, an invaluable analytical tool, has an anchor in Wilsonianism as well. Perhaps only someone born and raised in formative years outside the United States could arrive at this penetration with such a sure and elegant touch.

In creating a new world order, the subject of the last chapter, Kissinger argues that "America's dominant task is to strike a balance between the twin temptations inherent in its exceptionalism: the notion that America must remedy every wrong and stabilize every dislocation, and the latent instinct to withdraw into itself." That chapter alone is worth the price of his hefty book.

This is a grand and indispensable work that fills a gap in diplomatic literature so great that one appreciates its magnitude only at the end. As secretary of state, Kissinger forced badly needed discipline upon the intellectual processes shaping our foreign policies, to the annoyance of many who had their memos returned to them for further work. Suspicious of the Foreign Service throughout his tenure, Kissinger came at the end to admire its best and bravest.

I, too, stood among the many State Department employees gathered in the C Street lobby on the afternoon of his formal departure 17 years ago, when he paused on the landing of the stairs to say a few words of farewell. His voice cracked noticeably, and emotion embarrassed him. Mr. Maechling should have noted that the author of *Diplomacy* dedicated his best and most important book "to the men and women of the Foreign Service of the United States of America, whose professionalism and dedication sustain American diplomacy."

Brandon Grove Jr.

Retired FSO

Washington, D.C.

To the Editor:

Thank you for your excellent article, "The Men Behind the Legends," (September *Journal*). As a first tour junior officer, I found the examples set by Ambassadors Herman Cohen, Deane Hinton and Terence Todman daunting and inspirational at the same time.

Your readers might be interested to know that Ambassador Cohen continues to play a role in the evolution of the Foreign Service: He was the mentor of my A-100 class (the 70th). Further, Ambassador Cohen continues to demonstrate the diplomatic virtue and deftness that your article credits him with. An example is an anecdote from our class.

The object of the "off-site" exercise was to simulate the workings of an embassy just prior to and during a vice presidential visit. Ambassador Cohen played the role of the visiting vice president. The host country, Anthuria, had a series of bizarre rituals, which visiting dignitaries were expected to endure so as not to offend their Anthurian hosts. When he stepped off an imaginary Air Force Two, Ambassador Cohen was wrapped in a feather boa, presented with orange slices and crowned with a large sun. Despite his ridiculous attire and the strange greetings that courtesy dictated he exchange with his counterparts, Ambassador Cohen delivered a flawless speech on the importance of the trade, defense and cultural ties between Anthuria and the United States. And he maintained a serious and respectful calm throughout.

Should any members of the 70th attain ambassadorial rank, I hope that they can perform with as much grace under fire as Ambassador Cohen.

Jeff Hawkins

Political Officer

U.S. Embassy Abidjan

8 FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL/NOVEMBER 1994

11 05 94 05:35PM

TO: RAY

1002

[c]

<table><tr><td colspan="2">Post-it® brand fax transmittal memo 7671</td><td># of pages</td></tr><tr><td>To</td><td>Steve Conway</td><td>From</td><td>Liz Allan</td></tr><tr><td>Co.</td><td></td><td>Co.</td><td>F.S.J.</td></tr><tr><td>Dept.</td><td></td><td>Phone #</td><td>202 558-4045</td></tr><tr><td>Fax #</td><td>202 753-7248</td><td>Fax #</td><td></td></tr></table>

BOOKS

A DIPLOMATIC ICON RECREATES HISTORY

Diplomacy

By Henry Kissinger, Simon & Schuster, 1994, $35.00 hardcover, 912 pages.

BY CHARLES MARCHLING

Diplomacy, the latest product of Henry Kissinger's prolific if ponderous pen, is an impressive but uneven work. Like all of Kissinger's writings, it is heavy on geo-strategic analysis, harsh on American moralism and naivete and almost obsessive on worship of power. But as other reviewers have noted, good history it is not. Rather, it is the author's frequently strained interpretation of personalities and episodes in history, carefully selected to support his views on foreign policy.

Throughout the book, the diplomacy that counts for Kissinger is European, and central European at that. The entire first century of American diplomacy from Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution to Theodore Roosevelt is ignored, and that goes for the rest of the Western Hemisphere as well. The focus of the first half is on statesmen of extinct European monarchies who exemplify realpolitik — Cardinal Richelieu of 17th century France, Prince Metternich of the Austrian empire and Chancellor Bismarck of imperial

Germany, to name the most prominent. Why these exemplars of an absolutist and dynastic tradition should serve as models for the diplomacy of a modern democracy committed to world order through multinational institutions will be up to the reader to judge.

The book actually begins with a disquisition on the dichotomy between idealism and realism in foreign relations, with Woodrow Wilson cast in the role of moralistic visionary and Theodore Roosevelt the astute and forceful exponent of national interest. This part ignores that moral outrage over German invasion of Belgium and submarine sinkings, not balance-of-power calculation, provoked Roosevelt's passionate interventionism in World War I; it was Wilson who for three years tried to keep America neutral and to mediate a balanced peace. President Wilson intervened in Latin America as much as Roosevelt — two incursions into Mexico (1914 and 1916) and a U.S. Marine occupation of Haiti that lasted for 20 years.

Kissinger next goes back to Cardinal Richelieu who laid the foundation of the French state by crushing feudal nobility and checking the Habsburgs. Kissinger praises the way Richelieu invoked raison d'état to justify support of the Protestant princes in the Thirty Years War in order to keep Germany divided. But there was no unified Germany, rather only the

fragmented Holy Roman Empire; and the Habsburg that encroded France from the Spanish Netherlands to the Pyrenees was the king of Spain, whose empire was then at its apogee. Richelieu was a sinister figure whose biographers describe him as mean-spirited and pitiless. Kissinger admires the way Metternich used the Holy Alliance to unify the monarchies of Europe against a recurrence of the spirit of the French Revolution by creating a Concert of Europe based on "shared values." But what were these values? For Kissinger, pursuit of stability is an end in itself; the fact that Metternich and his imperial masters (England dropped out and France went its own way) equated every popular manifestation of liberalism and nationalism with revolution — to be suppressed by bayonets and imprisonment — and that "shared values" boiled down to "legitimacy" and a determination to cling to power and privilege at all costs, is dismissed as secondary. So is the fact that when the lid finally blew off in 1848, taking Metternich with it, the explosion was all the more violent.

In the second half of the book, covering the Cold War and Kissinger's own years in high office, the author is master of his material. Unfortunately, he is still so burdened with responsibility for his share in past decisions, and so linked in personal and professional association with past colleagues and

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influential members of the American "establishment," that his judgements on policy disasters like Vietnam and Iran come through as ambiguous and even evasive. In some contexts his faith in "analysis" sounds ridiculous. His only condemnation of Hitler is that he "operated by instinct" and his criticism of Lyndon B. Johnson's advisers in regard to Vietnam is that they "failed to develop criteria to assess a challenge at variance with American experience."

Toward the end of the book, Kissinger seems to recognize that realpolitik must be tempered by American values if policy gets public support. At the same time he deplores allowing policy to be influenced by domestic politics — which in a democracy is where values find expression. Throughout, he is disdainful of human rights. He still clings to the idea that the United States is an autonomous superpower that can pick and choose which of its international obligations to fulfill regardless of its commitments to international instruments like the U.N. and OAS charters.

There is no evidence from the chapter notes that he consulted leading American diplomatic historians...If he had he would have observed how often altruistic American policies have paid off, such as FDR's Good Neighbor policy and hemisphere solidarity in World War II. The theme that threads through Diplomacy seems to be a prescription for unilateralism, isolationism and further deterioration of the American image; this is surely not the result that the author intended.

Charles Maochling is an international lawyer who writes frequently on diplomacy.

WORLD'S SEARCH FOR COMMON MORAL GROUND

Shared Values for a Troubled World's Conversations with Men and Women of Conscience

By Rushworth M. Kidder, Jossey-Bass, 1994, $29.00, hardcover, 333 pages.

BY DANIEL O. NEWBERRY

We hear a lot about a pragmatic U.S. foreign policy these days. In that context, the word "pragmatism" sometimes seems like a synonym for expediency.

Pragmatism, lot us remember, was an American connotation, at least in its character as a philosophical movement. Pioneered by Charles Sanders Pierce in 1875 and elaborated by William James a generation later, pragmatism taught that the meaning of conceptions is to be sought in their practical bearings, that the function of thought is as a guide to action. Even William James, by the way, called pragmatism a "new name for some old ways of thinking."

For our immediate purposes, a memorable lesson of the pragmatist movement is that the truth is to be tested by the practical consequences of belief. The practical consequences of America's pragmatic foreign policy are hardly inspiring. So, perhaps it is not a bad idea to spend some time examining our beliefs and reflecting on what we believe is "true." Many foreign policy commentators have been doing this by indirection, that is, by re-examining questions of what is the national interest and what should be the goals of our foreign policy.

Rushworth Kidder's book took another approach. The "shared values" of his title are ethical values. His method was to travel the globe interviewing moral leaders, the highly

placed and the lowly, in search of common moral ground that is, or can be, shared by the peoples of the world.

Kidder is an experienced and expert interviewer, drawing on his many years as a foreign correspondent and senior columnist for the Christian Science Monitor. For this book, Kidder targeted and sought out 24 thinkers, some of them world renowned, others less well known outside their immediate spheres of influence. Eight are women, including Nien Cheng, the heroic survivor of Chinese government persecution; Grace Machel, the former first lady of Mozambique; and Whina Cooper, whom he calls the "most visible Maori woman of her time." In addition to captains of industry and political leaders, he also talks to such relatively obscure personalities as Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, who invented a scheme of micro-banking for his impoverished compatriots; Reuben Snake, chief of the Winnebago Tribe; and James A. Joseph, the black head of the Council on Foundations.

In distilling the values common to his 24 Jacobs, Kidder frankly relies on intuition as much as on mathematical analysis. The read-out offers eight moral values that may shape the globe's future in the next century and beyond: love, truth, fairness, freedom, unity, tolerance, responsibility and respect for life. If a Journal reader believes these values have no relevance for the foreign policy practitioner, Kidder's book might just as well be left untouched. For others who, out of conviction or desperation, are looking for inspiration, comfort or encouragement in the turmoil and discord of today, Kidder's interlocutors invite us in to explore their inner lives and to savor the value of contemplation.

You will not want to read Shared Values straight through in one sitting. One chapter at a time is better,

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# All the Presidents' Man

*Diplomacy* by Henry Kissinger.

Simon & Schuster. 1230 Avenue of the Americas.

New York, N.Y. 10035.

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" preoccupation 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.

36

FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW

DIMAGGIO ALL WE HOPED HE'D BE,
HIT SATCH ONE FOR FOUR.

Jackie Robinson may have been the first black player to ascend to the major leagues when the color lines began to dissolve in the 1940s, but the then middle-aged Paige — born into poverty and shaped by four years

game, til I got out there.

Drawing on baseball archives, newspaper and magazine clippings, Paige's 1962 memoir, but gentle hand in dealing with the controversy, misdeeds and injustices of the past. He also gives us as detailed a history of Negro baseball as we are likely to find in such a book and fascinating portraits

Ribowsky has a talent for nosing outktor-maging and entertaining anecdotes and a and magazine clippings, Paige's 1962 memoir, but gentle hand in dealing with the controversy, misdeeds and injustices of the past. He also gives us as detailed a history of Negro baseball as we are likely to find in such a book and fascinating portraits

Finally, noted his curve ball and in the first of his three seasons took the old Marlins to third place in the standings and second in league attendance. He was somewhere in his 50s then, "and I saw him pitch," says my lucky friend. "I remember his leg kick. It hit the sky."

From Richelieu to Reagan, a la Henry the K

■ Diplomacy. Henry Kissinger.

Simon & Schuster. 912 pages. $35.

By FRANK DAVIES

What's left for Henry Kissinger, superstar ex-diplomat and ubiquitous pundit? He has already written his memoirs

on how he masterminded U.S. foreign policy in 1970s. On numerous interview shows, he pontificates on every subject from China to U.S. politics, while defending his numerous business endeavors from conflict-of-interest charges.

Kissinger

But Kissinger has found two subjects worthy of his ambitious reach — the history of diplomacy and the future of the world. The result is *Diplomacy*, a work of definite heft and occasional insight.

This World According to Kissinger explores and explains international relations from the development of the modern state system under Cardinal Richelieu, one of his 17th Century heroes. to

Reagan, Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet bloc. And it provides lots of quotable if vague advice about the dangers of life after the Cold War.

Kissinger offers a rich trove of historical analysis but little that surprises or enlightens when it comes to deciphering the current world scene. At the end, we're left with common sense aphorisms about balancing the "moral and strategic elements" of U.S. policy and a lecture that sensible strategy depends on the "patient accumulation of partial successes."

China 'ascendant'

For what global challenges should we prepare? Kissinger warns that the "imperial, missionary" impulses of Russia will still threaten its neighbors, that China is the "ascendant power" in Asia and that a continuing U.S. alliance with Europe is vital to ward off future threats such as Islamic fundamentalism.

Here's a typical truism: "In the post-Cold War world, American idealism needs the leaven of geopolitical analysis to find its way through the maze of new complexities. That will not be easy."

It doesn't get much more insightful than that: Americans

should conduct foreign policy based on the way the world is, not the way we want it to be.

Kissinger believes that take of a "New World Order" led by one superpower — the United States — is premature, and that "America... can accomplish more than any other society if it can only learn its limits." But many commentators have said the same

thing for years.

If *Diplomacy* is disappointing in its counsel for the future, it is impressive in its incisive history of international relations in the modern era. Kissinger explains how European balance of power kept the peace for most of the 19th Century because shared values among the European monarchs and diplomats prevented crises from becoming wars.

His description of how that system collapsed and led to World War I is worthy of Barbara Tuchman's *The Guns of August*. Kissinger focuses on the inability of Europe to deal with a powerful, growing Germany and Germany's failure to behave once the brilliant Bismarck left the scene. This is familiar ground for the former Harvard professor, and he shows his range. Kissinger can compare the disintegration of the Soviet empire to the decline of the Ottomans and Hapsburgs and show the legacy of Woodrow Wilson's idealism in the determined ideology of Ronald Reagan.

Kissinger could be a self-promoting lone-wolf diplomat in his heyday, but as an author he's restrained in dealing with his own role in China. Vietnam and the

other great issues of the 1970s. With the exception of some labored self-justification about how he handled Vietnam, he takes himself out of this story.

In his fine biography of Kissinger two years ago, Walter Isaacson sorted out the many talents and contradictions of the youthful, insecure German refugee who became a brilliant academic, tu quo statesman and media star.

'Dramatic strokes'

The closest Kissinger comes to describing himself is his laudatory portrait of two 19th Century giants, Bismarck and Disraeli: "Both subscribed to *Realpolitik* and hated what they considered moralistic cant. Both were given to biting, cynical quips and broad generalizations. Bored with nettle-some details, they preferred to approach policy in broad, dramatic strokes."

*Diplomacy* is 900 pages of broad strokes. Don't look to it for startling revelations or a guide to the future's tough decisions. Kissinger's most important contribution is lively, thoughtful analysis — of the past.

Frank Davies is The Herald's associate news editor

HURRAH!

Congratulations to Miami Beach author John Rothchild, whose *Beating the Street*, written with Peter Lynch for Simon & Schuster, was the 12th best-selling non-fiction book of 1993, according to Publishers Weekly.

'COVER TO
COVER'

Margaret Atwood and *The Robber* Bride. 8 p.m. Monday on WLRN (91.3 FM).

APR-22-84 12:46 FROM: KORDA-NYC

ID:

PAGE 6

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LETTERS

To the Editor:

Elmore F. Rigamer
Medical Director
*Office of Medical Services*
Washington, D.C.

To the Editor:

7

LETTERS

Contact Erik Granholm, our Diplomatic and Tourist Sales Manager, a native of Munich Germany who has been with American Service Center for 27 years.

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To the Editor:

Jeff Hawkins

Political Officer

U.S. Embassy Abidjan

NOV 21 RECD

HENRY KISSINGER'S "DIPLOMACY" IS A MEDITATION ON HISTORY WITH A POINT OF VIEW. BEGINNING WITH CARDINAL RICHELIEU, ITS FIRST PART IS A DISCUSSION OF THE SUCCESSES, AND WEAKNESSES, OF THE EXERCISE OF the BALANCE OF POWER AS PLAYED BY THE NATION STATES OF EUROPE.

WITH THE EMERGENCE OF THE REVOLUTIONARY UNITED STATES ON THE WORLD SCENE, KISSINGER TURNS TO THE ROLE IDEALISM HAS PLAYED IN AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY. HE PLAYS OFF THIS IDEALISM, UNTIL THEN NOT SEEN IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS, AGAINST THE TRADITIONAL METHODS OF USING POWER FOR A STATE'S ADVANTAGE: THE IDEALISM OF WOODROW WILSON VERSUS THE POWER POLITICS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

IT IS THE FIRST TIME THAT KISSINGER HAS ACKNOWLEDGED SO FULLY THE PLACE OF IDEALISM IN AMERICAN THINKING ABOUT THE WORLD, THE FIRST TIME HAS HAS CONCEDED THAT IT IS AN INTEGRAL PART OF THE AMERICAN MIND.

HOW, THEN, IS AMERICA, WITH ITS OFTEN-CONFLICTING TUG BETWEEN THE USES OF POWER AND THE IMPULSES OF PROMISE, TO ACT IN A WORLD IN WHICH IT THE MOST POWERFUL NATION BUT BY NO MEANS OMNIPOTENT?

KISSINGER SUGGESTS THAT THE UNITED STATES SHOULD REMEMBER THE USEFULNESS OF THE BALANCE-OF-POWER CONCEPT AS IT MANEUVERS AMONG THE GREAT STATES AND REGIONS OF THE WORLD, BUT HE DOES NOT OFFER DETAILED PRESCRIPTIONS. HE IS FOND OF SAYING THAT "A STATESMAN'S TASK IS TO ASK THE RIGHT QUESTION. THEN YOU HAVE A CHANCE AT FINDING TO THE RIGHT ANSWER."

IN THIS BOOK, OFTEN WITTY, ALWAYS PERSONAL, SOMETIMES

- Kissinger

*Continued from Page D*

of Roosevelt—of either political party—
who, having had the courage and fore-
sight to recognize the challenge, would
have had the willpower to lead his
isolationist people, step by step, toward
the commitment to do whatever was
necessary to defeat Nazi Germany. ...
The wisdom of his solitary passage is now,
quite simply taken for granted."

Kissinger is no more comfortable now
than ever with the Wilsonian concept—
still very much alive—that every skir-
mish is part of a crusade in the cause of
democratic enlightenment.

side is better than Bismarck's or Riche-
lieu's notion that might is enough.

Another dazzling moment in U.S. diplomatic history is the "long telegram" that George Kennan sent from Moscow in 1946 that was gradually written—or, as Kennan believes, rewritten—into the policy of containment and the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Kennan's waiting game worked. Moscow collapsed. But the strain on the United States took its own toll. Debate over the policy "turned into a struggle for the very soul of America," as Kissinger puts it.

Containment began to go sour in Korea where the United States found itself in "a limited war for which it had no doctrine and in defense of a country for which it had no strategic interest."

But it collapsed in Vietnam where the
"almost causal relationship the nation had
always enjoyed between its values and its

achievements began to fray."

The basic problem, he says, was that "Nobody asked the important questions about" escalation in Vietnam: "Was it really true . . . that every communist gain hurt? . . . [W]as it conceivable that the addition of Indochina to the Communist camp could by itself overthrow the balance of power?"

Kissinger made three trips to Vietnam as a consultant in 1965 and 1966. As he has written before, the visits "convinced me that the war could not be won by the prevailing strategy, and that America would need to extricate itself by negotiating with Hanoi. . . ."

Hanoi knew that, too, and while he
covers in detail the Nixon Administra-
tion's efforts to prevail, the important
lesson for the future is that strategic
miscalculations made Vietnam a hopeless
cause. Kissinger wants a formula that will
avoid future Vietnams, as do we all.

The alliance that emerged from the
Congress of Vienna worked because its
combined military power created a bal-
ance to any possible combination of
competitors and because the member
nations shared a value system.

"Though a military superpower," he writes, "America can no longer impose its will because neither its [largely nuclear] power nor its ideology lends itself to imperial ambitions. . . ."

Economist - May 14, 1994

ARTS, BOOKS AND SPORT

to lure foreign visitors and foreign investors to China itself. Cultural understanding is another aim, according to park officials. But its critics regard the park as a propaganda ploy, using make-believe and entertainment to polish China's image as preferential trade terms with the United States come up for renewal next month. "Don't look too hard for the Murdered Dissidents' Pavilion," is how the *Miami Herald* put it in a recent editorial.

Amnesty International and other human-rights groups charge that the park, which features more than 60 miniature versions of such famous Chinese landmarks as the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, portrays a false picture of social harmony and contentment among China's persecuted religious and ethnic minorities. In China, dissent is quashed. At Splendid China, Buddhist monks and human-rights activists are staging sporadic protests against the theme park and Chinese repression.

The International Campaign for Tibet, a Washington-based pressure group, is particularly agitated by the placid scene involving the replica of the Potala Palace, the exiled Dalai Lama's residence in Lhasa, Tibet,

which was invaded by China in 1950. The Dalai Lama, Tibet's religious and political leader, fled into exile in 1959 and since then the Chinese authorities have persecuted Buddhist religious orders and shut down temples in Tibet. Another group of protesters is angered by the way the theme park presents the Mongolians as people content with their lot. In the tableau of the Forbidden City, there is no mention of Tiananmen Square, known to most Americans as the place where the pro-democracy movement met a bloody end in 1989.

Pan Xin Liang, the managing director of the American subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based China Travel Service (CTS), which owns the park, denies the charge of propaganda. "People have been trying to stress the political side instead of the cultural exchange and instead of what is more peaceful," he says. Since 1989 CTS has owned and operated another Splendid China theme park in China's Guangdong province near Hong Kong. The narration of the introductory film shown at the Florida park explains that this enterprise was such a hit "that the Chinese people wanted to share it" with people in the United States.

Balancing idealism and Realpolitik in diplomacy

Henry Kissinger weighs in

DIPLOMACY. By Henry Kissinger. *Simon & Schuster*; 1,104 pages; $35 and £25

ATTENTION must be paid to the views of Henry Kissinger. The Harvard professor turned diplomatic superstar and winner of the Nobel prize for peace in 1973 (with Lee Duc Tho of North Vietnam) has produced a massive, elegant and provocative tome which traces the evolution of the system of nation states from the Thirty Years' War of the 17th century. Its focus is entirely on great men. The purpose is not to recount history but to analyse and instruct—and, not so incidentally, to defend the author's own role.

Mr Kissinger's prime concern is to reconcile his advocacy of the European approach of Realpolitik and balance-of-power diplomacy with his recognition that Americans can be moved to great deeds only through a vision that fits their view of their country as moral and exceptional.

President Theodore Roosevelt is presented as a believer in European statecraft whose views were incompatible with American experience and values. In contrast, President Woodrow Wilson grasped that idealism was the main spring of American motivation. Mr Kissinger's frustration can be sensed when he concludes: "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."

Mr Kissinger's history is sometimes flawed. It is made fascinating by his conclusions, which are often expressed in striking epigrams. It is also enjoyable to ponder the grades he confers on the protagonists. The man who, with Richard Nixon, set new

standards of American duplicity gives Franklin Roosevelt high marks at the same time as he points out that FDR's tactics were devious and that many of his actions were on the fringe of constitutionality. Did he have any other statesman in mind?

His logic can be so relentless as to leave reality behind. During the American civil war, was the main foreign-policy concern of Abraham Lincoln's administration really, as he asserts, to prevent the Confederacy from being recognised by European nations "lest a multi-state system emerge on the soil of North America and with it the balance-of-power politics of European diplomacy"? Or was it, as generations of American schoolchildren have been taught, to preserve the union? Can Winston Churchill's intransigence towards Germany in the summer of 1940 really be interpreted "as a decision in favour of American over German hegemony"? Or is it more accurate, as well as simpler, to say merely that Churchill decided that England would try to preserve its historic liberties?

In discussing the need for the United States to reach a consensus on where to draw the line on the use of military force in the post-cold-war world, Mr Kissinger points out that in its heyday Britain would have gone to war to prevent the occupation of the Channel ports in the Low Countries, even if they had been taken over by a major power governed by saints. In his next paragraph he concludes that 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." That danger, he says, "would have to be resisted" even were the dominant power apparently benevolent—for "if the intentions ever changed, America would find itself with a grossly diminished capacity for effective re-

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ARTS, BOOKS AND SPORT

[LC]

## A sense of the ridiculous

IN THE British diplomatic service, says Ruth Dudley Edwards in her endlessly fascinating "True Brits"*, an officer used to be allowed two illegitimate children without being fired. These days, it seems, there are no limits. Cohabiting couples are treated as if they are married when applying for a joint posting abroad. Homosexuals are no longer barred "automatically" from the service. It would be wrong, though, as British diplomacy tries to adjust to the modern world, to assume that the service is full of dangerous radicals and gays. In most of the things it does it clings to tradition.

Gentle British humour is apparently one of its admired skills. A book of advice to newcomers to the Foreign Office includes the instruction, "Maintain a sense of the ridiculous." During Britain's tussle with Iceland over fishing rights in the 1970s Sir Donald Maitland, an eccentric even by Foreign Office standards (and dubbed the "poison dwarf" by his foes), was ordered to make urgent representations to his Icelandic opposite number. The Icelandic was a foot taller than the Brit. Sir Donald climbed on to the Icelandic's desk. "I have been told," he an-

nounced, "to make representations at the very highest level."

What Miss Edwards, an occasional reviewer for *The Economist*, calls British "self-deprecating wit" may not be understood by foreigners, but she says British diplomats are regarded by their foreign colleagues as among the best in the world. If there is a longueur in her book it is her pleas for diplomats to be treated kindly by the public.

Life can be tough for our people in

cramped quarters in Minsk or sweltering it out in Kampala or sipping orange juice at diplomatic receptions in Islamic lands. Perhaps, but most people will continue to regard the foreign service as an agreeable, cosseted life, if only because people such as Sir John Ure, a former British ambassador, write about it so affectionately. His "Diplomatic Bag"† is a collection of diplomatic anecdotes from Marco Polo onwards. It is just the thing to read in bed at the end of an undiplomatic day. Miss Edwards's book, sadly, may have a shorter shelf life because it is tied to a BBC series.

KEITH COLQUHOUN

Security reminder in the lavatory of the British Embassy in Bangkok

* BBC Books; 256 pages; £16.99

† John Murray; 248 pages; £19.99

sistance.”

What policy is Mr Kissinger suggesting for the United States towards development of an enlarged European Union capable of acting as a single unit? Or towards a potential entente between the European Union and Russia? The questions raised by his conclusions are just as provocative as the conclusions themselves.

### Britain's industrial decline

### Who's to blame?

THE ANATOMY OF CHANGE. By John Banham. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 308 pages; £20

MANY and various reasons have been offered for Britain's century-long industrial decline: the end of empire, the exhaustion of two world wars, the fading of the industrial revolution, a class-ridden anti-business culture, and an educational system ill-equipped to secure commercial success. The all-purpose single explanation, favoured by Sir John Banham, is bad government or, more generally, the failure of

British institutions.

He has had several useful perches from which to observe this process. He began life as a diplomat, before becoming a director of a firm of managing consultants. He was then picked by Michael Heseltine to be the first controller of the Audit Commission, and subsequently became director-general of the CBI, the bosses' union. He is currently chairman of Tarmac and of the Local Government Commission.

This broad experience makes his views worth listening to, but the scatter-shot approach he adopts makes the whole less impressive than the parts. Government, Parliament, the civil service, local authorities, the education system and the National Health Service all come in for a wigging. The supply-side revolution of the 1980s was not let down by industrialists, rather it was betrayed "by the economic-policy establishment, Parliament, the civil service, and our financial institutions". Chief scapegoat is the Treasury, whose style and ethos have become "part of the problem rather than a solution to the failures of national economic policy-making". His solution is to scrap the oldest department of state and merge its functions into the Cabinet Office and a newly created Department of Commerce.

Like many businessmen, Sir John is impatient with politics and politicians. This leads him to compare the cabinet to the board of a company, and to argue that, if only it were streamlined, it would be more effective at taking decisions. But the art of politics is not the same as running a company, nor are voters as biddable as shareholders. The author acknowledges that businessmen who make the switch have not always been outstandingly successful in politics—witness Sir John Davis and, more recently, Lord Young—but he still wants a ministry of all the talents, leavened by a sprinkling of top-level managers.

At best, this hankering after business values is unconvincing. At worst, it reads like an after-dinner discussion at the CBI when the port has circulated a bit too freely. The author is on much firmer ground when he argues the case for stronger local government, independent of Westminster and Whitehall. He notes that Lady Thatcher was driven mad by the antics of a handful of "loony-left" councils. The malign consequence was not just the poll tax but also an excessive centralisation of power. The moralising cycle of decline in many of Britain's inner cities, coinciding with the emergence of an alienated urban underclass, has

94

THE ECONOMIST MAY 14TH 1994

ARTS, BOOKS AND SPORT

A sense of the ridiculous

IN THE British diplomatic service, says Ruth Dudley Edwards in her endlessly fascinating “True Brits”*, an officer used to be allowed two illegitimate children without being fired. These days, it seems, there are no limits. Cohabiting couples are treated as if they are married when applying for a joint posting abroad. Homosexuals are no longer barred “automatically” from the service. It would be wrong, though, as British diplomacy tries to adjust to the modern world, to assume that the service is full of dangerous radicals and gays. In most of the things it does it clings to tradition.

Gentle British humour is apparently one of its admired skills. A book of advice to newcomers to the Foreign Office includes the instruction, “Maintain a sense of the ridiculous.” During Britain’s tussle with Iceland over fishing rights in the 1970s Sir Donald Maitland, an eccentric even by Foreign Office standards (and dubbed the “poison dwarf” by his foes), was ordered to make urgent representations to his Icelandic opposite number. The Icelander was a foot taller than the Brit. Sir Donald climbed on to the Icelander’s desk. “I have been told,” he an-

nounced, “to make representations at the very highest level.”

What Miss Edwards, an occasional reviewer for *The Economist*, calls British “self-deprecating wit” may not be understood by foreigners, but she says British diplomats are regarded by their foreign colleagues as among the best in the world. If there is a longueur in her book it is her pleas for diplomats to be treated kindly by the public.

cramped quarters in Minsk or sweltering it out in Kampala or sipping orange juice at diplomatic receptions in Islamic lands. Perhaps, but most people will continue to regard the foreign service as an agreeable, cosseted life, if only because people such as Sir John Ure, a former British ambassador, write about it so affectionately. His “Diplomatic Bag”† is a collection of diplomatic anecdotes from Marco Polo onwards. It is just the thing to read in bed at the end of an undiplomatic day. Miss Edwards’s book, sadly, may have a shorter shelf life because it is tied to a BBC series.

KEITH COLQUHOUN

sistance.”

Britain's industrial decline

Who's to blame?

British institutions.

This broad experience makes his views worth listening to, but the scatter-shot approach he adopts makes the whole less impressive than the parts. Government, Parliament, the civil service, local authorities, the education system and the National Health Service all come in for a wigging. The supply-side revolution of the 1980s was not let down by industrialists, rather it was betrayed “by the economic-policy establishment, Parliament, the civil service, and our financial institutions”. Chief scapegoat is the Treasury, whose style and ethos have become “part of the problem rather than a solution to the failures of national economic policy-making”. His solution is to scrap the oldest department of state and merge its functions into the Cabinet Office and a newly created Department of Commerce.

At best, this hankering after business values is unconvincing. At worst, it reads like an after-dinner discussion at the CBI when the port has circulated a bit too freely. The author is on much firmer ground when he argues the case for stronger local government, independent of Westminster and Whitehall. He notes that Lady Thatcher was driven mad by the antics of a handful of “loony-left” councils. The malign consequence was not just the poll tax but also an excessive centralisation of power. The moralising cycle of decline in many of Britain's inner cities, coinciding with the emergence of an alienated urban underclass, has

THE ECONOMIST MAY 14TH 1994

ARTS, BOOKS AND SPORT

## Balancing idealism and Realpolitik in diplomacy

### Henry Kissinger weighs in

thinking."

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