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Copyright 2001 Bell & Howell Information and Learning
ABI/INFORM
Copyright 2001 Delegation of the Commission of the European Communities
Europe

September, 2001

OCT 2 2 2001

SECTION: Pg. 47; ISSN: 01914545; CODEN: ERPEDH

B&H-ACC-NO: 82026349

DOC-REF-NO: EUP-2059-39

LENGTH: 601 words

HEADLINE: Does America Need a Foreign Policy?

ABSTRACT:

Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, by Henry Kissinger, is reviewed.

BODY:

By Henry Kissinger, Simon and Schuster; 352 pages; $30

"The desire of Europe for a greater identity is valid and, in the long run, also in the interest of the United States. The difficulty is to find a definition of identity that is something other than almost congenital opposition to the United States," remarks former secretary of state Henry Kissinger in the first chapter of his enlightening book Does America Need a Foreign Policy?

Kissinger answers the question of the title of his book immediately in the affirmative and goes on to state how the world's only super-- powers should act and respond to its neighbors, allies and enemies in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Surprisingly, the veteran observer of world affairs seems to be the most concerned about America's relations with the new Europe. As the author himself admits at the end of his chapter on US-European relations, "many of these pages have deplored trends within Europe."

Kissinger seems genuinely troubled by events going on in Europe today and how they relate to overall US-European relations. He says that "the emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time" but then goes on to remark how a unified and more integrated Europe could pull away from the United States in the future.

The author feels that the United States "has watched the various options being proposed for integrating Europe with a benevolence toward the objective and a delicate neutrality that does not declare itself on the kind of Europe being built"

While saying that the US "cold war orthodoxy" felt a strong Europe would lead to "a more vital Atlantic partnership" this core assumption may not still be true.

A new Europe could be "a Europe shrinking from global responsibilities, assuming the status of a mini-
United Nations and delivering moral homilies while concentrating on economic competition with the
United States or, alternatively there could emerge a Europe challenging the United States and
constructing a foreign policy of mediating between the rest of the world, rather like what India attempted
during the cold war."

Kissinger discusses ideas for a new structure in Atlantic relations by arguing for a Transatlantic Free-
Trade Area and a new Atlantic Steering Group backed by a secretariat "to develop parallel approaches to
world affairs but also to manage differences as they arise."

The author is also quite concerned about the new European military force. He worries that it might impact negatively on NATO. He says the "emphasis of the European Force so far has been on autonomy rather than on increasing military capabilities." He asks, "What if the European Union undertakes a military action with which the United States disagrees?"

The former Nobel Peace prize recipient feels that many Europeans see the United States as "defined by the death penalty, the alleged inadequate system of medical insurance, the vast American prison population, and other comparable stereotypes" including the missile defense system being proposed by President George W. Bush.

Kissinger, like many other American observers of Europe, seems to hold the view that a united more

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[Lc]

Copyright 2001 Scottish Media Newspapers Limited
The Sunday Herald

September 30, 2001

SECTION: Pg. 11

LENGTH: 1194 words

HEADLINE: Cold warrior returns

BYLINE: Reviewed By Douglas Fraser

BODY:

Does america need a foreign policy?

By Henry Kissinger(Simon & Schuster, (pounds) 20)

ODDLY, for all the media coverage of September 11 and its aftermath, the events in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania have not yet found a name. Atrocity, outrage, terrorist attack: nothing quite conveys the enormity of it all, and "apocalypse" is overdoing it a little in the absence of four horsemen.

The French vision of "megacatastrophe" comes close. Or perhaps the September 11 dateline will come to signify it all, defining the point at which the world changed. Those who wrote about international affairs before then are going to have to do a lot of revising. That includes Henry **Kissinger**. When he's finished pontificating pompously on global TV, he needs to start a drastic second edition re-write before the signature on this first one is dry. That is not to say his take on the pre- September 11 world is not worth a close look. It goes a long way to explain America's view of foreign policy until then, and helps explain the context for the attacks, if not an explanation. The author, since September 11, has shared the American reluctance at least to attempt to see themselves as others see them and in this book, that attempt is shallow. Europeans, for instance, are caricatured as seeing America merely as the land of the death penalty, a huge prison population and unequal health insurance.

The very title - Does American Need A Foreign Policy? - now looks ludicrous. But for those in the Bush administration, it had become a serious question. **Kissinger** reaches the unsurprising conclusion that the answer is "yes". What the suicide bombings in New York and Washington added was a lot of exclamation marks.

Twenty-five years after leaving the secretary of state's office in Washington DC, he nurtures his status as the big enchilada of foreign affairs. For much of the 1990s, he watched as the levers of power were operated by a smart Democrat president whose foreign policy is treated here with contempt. Clinton had been an anti-Vietnam war protester, a draft dodger who, once installed in the presidency, went round the world apologising for the cold war mentality which **Kissinger** had come to personify.

With Clinton gone, the old cold warrior has emerged from his personalised control bunker to find a more friendly political environment. His book reads like a prolonged memo to the new kid in the White House - elected with no international component in the election campaign. Pre- September 11, George W Bush declared that America should exercise a measure of humility in its foreign affairs, and when it comes to a world-view, this is a man with much to be humble about.

The title query reflects America's 225 years of conflicting sentiments about the world. Its sense of democratic and moral exceptionalism, its economic clout and dynamism, and its positioning between two oceans let it try, by turns, both isolationism and full-on engagement with the world. In the old world order, it had won the title of undisputed heavyweight world champion, and was torn between using that power for the projection of what it sees to be that moral purpose, or turning in on its own domestic concerns while expressing indignation at the lack of gratitude to Uncle Sam to be found beyond his shores.

This is a warning to fellow Americans that, however confusing or annoying they find foreigners, there is a need to engage, if only to protect American commercial interests and stabilise more countries politically so that they are ripe for American multinationals to move in. In a breathtaking, jetlagging tour of the planet, of history and of sweeping cultural generalisations, **Kissinger** explains why the simple certainties of the old communist threat have been replaced by far more complexity. Each region needs tailored approaches. Power balances have to be struck in east and south Asia, the Latin American backyard has to be nurses into economic and democratic stability, Africa should be a moral cause for America or else it could be "the festering disaster of our age", and the current instability in and around Israel shows it can

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be better to have no peace process than a flawed and delusional one (one of many snipes at Clinton).

The issue of Islam is notable for its low profile in the *Kissinger* world-view. His reckoning is that the Muslim world's statecraft is split in many ways between the secular and the religious, between feudal, tribal and modern, between Shia and Sunni, and that Muslims are given to fighting far more bloody wars against each other than they are against non-Arabs. There is some prescience about the role of Afghanistan's Taliban, with the advice that America should ally more closely with India and Turkey, because they share American concerns about Afghanistan's destabilising potential. His main warning, however, is to Europeans. They, he wrongly argues, will be the first target for Arab missiles and Islamic fundamentalism. "And if the Gulf blows up, the European nations will be the first to ask for access to American energy supplies to avoid an economic catastrophe."

Europe, of course, is merely a region, though he does it the honour of going first on the world tour. European economic and political integration, we learn, has to be managed to ensure that US military and strategic interests are protected, particularly with regard to Moscow.

The old cold warrior is never far away. This is all about international relations defined by inter-government relations, about military might and about balancing power. **Kissinger** all but admits he's not up to much as an economist, and so he seems hardly to notice the great economic forces by which governments are now competing not with each other but with the might of global corporations.

He acknowledges that technology, with its internet and instant communications, is dramatically changing international affairs. So is the rule of law being applied across borders to interfere in foreigners' domestic affairs - as with the cases of Somalia, Pinochet and Kosovo - though his critique of universal jurisdiction oddly omits to mention that the author himself is being accused across international borders for his role in the 1973 Chilean coup. These sections come late in the book, as does a section about the backlash of people alienated and angered by globalisation, the kind who wreck international summits.

The book is an impressive though often arrogant display of intellectual power, reading a bit like a Soviet-era May Day parade in Red Square. But those new factors are added to the mix too late. International relations have been fundamentally changed by the fact that governments and statesmen are struggling to keep up with the links being forged between businesses and citizens. That has become a fundamental starting point. And if, post-September 11, President Bush thinks he can fight a war to drive evil from the face of the earth, a 'whuppin' pesky terrorists and a-smoking 'em out dead or alive, he has set an ambitious target on which even Kissinger Associates Inc might be hard-pressed to advise him.

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Copyright 2001 The Omaha World-Herald Company
Omaha World-Herald

October 14, 2001, Sunday SUNRISE EDITION

SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. 6at;

LENGTH: 619 words

HEADLINE: Kissinger shares worldly insight

BYLINE: Jim Delmont

SOURCE: WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

**BODY:**
Henry **Kissinger**, who knows the world as well as anyone, did not anticipate in his new book the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the dynamics they would bring to foreign policy.

But he does warn about Middle Eastern states that support terrorists and about weapons of mass destruction in rogue states. He also chides the Clinton administration for its queasiness in the use of force. "Does **America Need a Foreign Policy?**" is less a polemic than a civilized essay on the state of the world, with gentle nudges as to how improvements can be made.

**America does need a foreign policy** because only Western Europe and the Americas have entered a peace zone in which war is not seriously considered as a remedy for problems between states. Unfortunately, the rest of the world hasn't reached this point, hence the need for a foreign policy with both economic and military aspects.

Interestingly, **Kissinger** does not have a lot to say about foreign aid, which has all but dried up in the post-Cold War era (only Egypt and Israel get any substantial assistance these days). His main post-Cold War concerns are the state of Europe and the future of free trade.

A European himself, **Kissinger** sees the U.S.-European relationship as the key to stability. While the development of the European Union with its Euro currency was probably inevitable, given the apparent end of the Russian threat, **Kissinger** insists that Europe and the United States must remain tied militarily and economically.

A strong free-trade advocate, **Kissinger** feels a NAFTA-type zone uniting Europe and America is a necessity to preclude the development of rival trade blocs that might alienate former Cold War partners.

**Kissinger** is also deeply skeptical about any independent European military force outside NATO, a trend accelerated recently by France and Germany. The Atlantic partnership is crucial to our survival, he argues.

**Kissinger** is also strongly in favor of a missile defense system, and he demolishes the arguments against it based on the 1972 Soviet-American ABM treaty (which he helped negotiate at the time). By and large he is convincing, and Sept. 11 should help the cause.

In his book, **Kissinger** does not foresee the precipitous rush to the West that has characterized Russian policy since Sept. 11. Strongly anchored to Germany (which has been the only state generous in aid to post-Soviet Russia), Russia could cause difficulties for the United States if it joins either the European Union or NATO. But such problems pale when the alternative - a Russia anchored to China - is considered.

An Atlantic partnership that stretches from San Francisco to London to Berlin to Vladivostok would provide stability and strength to meet the challenges of the 21st century, but **Kissinger** does not predict such a development.

An old China hand, **Kissinger** argues that the regime there cannot be perceived as an inevitable enemy (something that seemed to be brewing in the new Bush administration). Chinese domination of Asia should be resisted, but not with hostility and threats.

Other thoughts from the author: NAFTA is good and should be extended to all of Latin America. George Bush the elder should never have let Saddam Hussein escape. Iran could one day again be a U.S. friend. Wilsonian idealism has its limits. The "universal jurisdiction" of some new global criminal laws may not be in our best interests. And problems there will always be.

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Copyright 2001 Telegraph Group Limited
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)

October 04, 2001, Thursday

SECTION: Pg. 10

LENGTH: 920 words

HEADLINE: America's navel-gazing years are over Henry Kissinger tells Philip Delves Broughton that leaders of the world's only superpower must wake up and accept their responsibility

BYLINE: By Philip Delves Broughton

BODY:

JUST before September 11, Henry Kissinger's latest book was released in Europe, arguing that for 10 years and three presidential elections, America had been navel-gazing its way towards disaster.

He urged America's leaders to wake up and accept their responsibility as the world's only superpower while displaying modesty and respect towards others.

Disturbed by the liberal tendency to demand American morality around the world and a conservative brand of American triumphalism, both conditioned by domestic concerns, Mr Kissinger gave his book the provocative title: Does America Need a Foreign Policy?

With America now facing a clear and immediate danger, Mr Kissinger's prescriptions seem especially prescient. "The September 11 events ended the illusion that we were no longer in a political period of human history, that history was primarily an economic and social phenomenon," he said.

Mr Kissinger, who served as National Security Adviser and Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford, offers an unflinching take on dealing with America's foes - and, with almost 6,000 killed in one day, the crunching diplomatic tacklers of the Cold War are back in fashion.

"There was a self-righteous way of analysing the choices that existed in the Cold War and not understanding the complexity of conducting foreign policy in the face of imminent danger," said Mr Kissinger, taking aim at those who have called him an unscrupulous proponent of America's national interest. "From that point of view, a more sober analysis is now possible in the United States."

One of the more dramatic changes since September 11, he said, had been to relations between Europe and America. Over the last few years, he wrote in his book, European leaders often defined their continent in terms of its antipathy towards America. European opposition to President Bush's decisions to reject the Kyoto agreement on climate control and pursue a missile defence shield were recent examples.

September 11, he said, "demonstrated the need for common action on at least some issues, because we have to conceive that if Europeans face a comparable attack it would really require American support to mount a meaningful response".

"Were the principle to be established now that these events are not to be dealt with by a common response, it would really put Europe at the risk of a terrorist backlash."

The European sophisticates who have spent much of the past year painting President Bush as a Texan boor, in short, must now hush and huddle under his shield.

"From that point of view, the actions of the British government, really have been extremely helpful," said Mr Kissinger. "Tony Blair's speeches are not only expressions of a sentimental arrangement but also a well-understood British national interest."

The attacks also offer a chance for America to work closely with Russia. "If it weren't for the terrorist acts, Russia would still raise with us the possibility or necessity of co-operating against fundamentalism," he said, alluding to the presence of Islamic fundamentalists in Chechnya.

In recent years, Mr Kissinger, long a bogeyman of the Left, has become a target for legal suits filed by the alleged victims of his actions while in office. On September 11 the family of Chilean general Rene Schneider filed a suit against Mr Kissinger in Washington DC for a CIA-backed kidnapping attempt in 1970 which left the general dead.

But the fear of being detained in a foreign country, like General Pinochet, or facing legal action does not

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keep him awake at night, he said. The message from the White House and the Pentagon is that this war
is not for the squeamish. The United States, said Vice President Dick Cheney, will need "unsavoury
characters" on its payroll to dismantle the terrorist networks.

The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has echoed Winston Churchill's promise to protect the truth with a "bodyguard of lies".

"I believe that we treated our intelligence services badly over the last 20 years, because we exposed activities, which in their nature are difficult to fit into existing frameworks, in a manner very invidious to the intelligence services," said Mr **Kissinger**.

"I don't think much of the current craze for assassination as a tool of American foreign policy," he added, in the light of suggestions that taking out certain individuals would advance the anti-terrorist cause. "In extreme circumstances, one might not want to be constrained by legal provisions, but as a general proposition, I do not say that the United States is suited to this kind of intelligence activity."

Like most of the world, Mr **Kissinger** was caught unawares by the terrorists' sophistication. "All the intelligence in Washington I had ever heard dealt with the issue of suitcase bombs and similar kinds of threats."

Mr **Kissinger** is worried that some European allies, though not Britain, may soon feel internal pressure and relax their efforts if the current limbo continues. If the United States then tries to move decisively, he said, he feared "the coalition will become a sort of a veto on action".

Before September 11, Mr **Kissinger's** questioning title Does America Need a Foreign Policy? was a rhetorical taunt to those Americans who saw the United States as the only show in town. Now the world is asking if America can cobble together a new foreign policy in time to defeat its enemies.

The answer, Mr **Kissinger** said, will come not in Bush's rhetoric, but in the "concrete actions" to follow.

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Copyright National Affairs, Inc.
The National Interest

2001 FALL

LENGTH: 3672 words

HEADLINE: Kissinger's Wisdom . . . and Advice

BYLINE: John J. Mearsheimer

**BODY:**

Henry A. Kissinger, Does America Need A Foreign Policy?: Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 318 pp., $30.

When Henry **Kissinger** asks Does America Need A Foreign Policy?, the question is obviously rhetorical. For a global superpower like the United States, the answer is certainly "yes." But **Kissinger** has a reason for choosing such a title for his newest book. He means to imply that the United States has not had a coherent and effective foreign policy since the Cold War ended, and that it needs one badly as it enters the 21st century. And it will surprise no one to discover that **Kissinger** thinks he knows what that foreign policy should be.

It behooves us to pay careful attention to **Kissinger's** views on foreign policy; few are better qualified to write on the subject. Not only was **Kissinger**, as both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, the driving force behind U.S. foreign policy during one of the most tumultuous periods in American history (1969-1977), but he is also a deeply learned man who has written extensively and intelligently about international politics for nearly five decades. Indeed, never has there been a statesman with Henry **Kissinger's** credentials as a scholar, or a scholar with his credentials as a statesman. Does America Need A Foreign Policy? is a tour d'horizon in which **Kissinger** analyzes U.S. interests in five regions of the world-Europe, the Western Hemisphere, Asia, the Middle East and Africa-and offers policy prescriptions for each area. **Kissinger** also devotes separate chapters to globalization and human rights. The most important parts of the book, however, deal with U.S. policy toward Europe and Asia. These two regions, which contain other great powers and in which the United States still maintains a large military presence, are of the greatest strategic importance to America. Hence, **Kissinger's** emphasis on them is understandable.

**Kissinger's** prescription is a simple one: the United States must strive to preserve the core alliances it created and directed during the Cold War. Regarding Europe, he wants to see a formidable NATO united around a clear strategic purpose, and he therefore advocates maximally harmonious transatlantic relations. In Asia, he recommends maintaining close relations between the United States and Japan. In essence, **Kissinger** is bent on preserving the Cold War order in Asia and Europe, even though its original raison d'e tre-the U.S.-Soviet rivalry-disappeared more than a decade ago.

Given these goals, it is hardly surprising that **Kissinger** is distressed by the growing signs that America's diplomatic position is eroding. He is especially disturbed by the situation in Europe, where he sees abundant evidence that the United States and its NATO allies are headed for a messy divorce.

**Kissinger** is well aware that U.S.-European relations have been plagued by disputes since nato's inception in 1949. One might even say he wrote the book on this subject 36 years ago, under the apt title, The Troubled Partnership. But the current tensions are much more serious, as revealed by the willingness of European leaders to criticize U.S. policy in ways that would have been unthinkable during the Cold War. Thus, **Kissinger** is dismayed that French President Jacques Chirac, speaking as the representative of the European Union, stood alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin in October 2000 and "attacked the Clinton administration's plan to explore revision of the ABM Treaty." He also finds the eu's recent move to challenge the Bush Administration's hardline policy on North Korea even more egregious. Europeans have become so hostile to America, **Kissinger** notes, that their identity is now defined largely in terms of an "almost congenital opposition to the United States."

According to **Kissinger**, these tendencies have been exacerbated by errors on the American side. He accuses U.S. policymakers, especially from the Clinton Administration, of exhibiting "overbearing triumphalism", and being guilty of either "self-indulgence or self-righteousness" when dealing with other states. His distaste for the Clinton team even leads him to a certain sympathy for the anti-American views of French Foreign Minister Hubert Ve drine. **Kissinger** cannot bring himself to blame Ve drine and others for being irritated when American leaders convey their belief that "the United States was chosen by providence as the 'indispensable nation' and that it must remain dominant for the sake of humankind."

**Kissinger** also warns that friction within the Alliance has been accompanied by a loss of strategic

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purpose. Instead of focusing on its traditional strategic mission of protecting its members from an external threat, NATO has become a "mini-United Nations" and a "multilateral mishmash", primarily concerned with "a plethora of multilateral collective security enterprises of vague purpose." NATO may remain in name well into the 21st century, but given its present trajectory, **Kissinger** doubts that it can remain a serious military alliance for much longer.

The situation is not much better in Asia. **Kissinger** thinks that "Japanese-American political relations are on the verge of a sea change" due to Japan's growing reluctance to remain a ward of the United States. Japan is already shedding its pacifist veneer and is likely to acquire more formidable military forces and to take greater responsibility for its own defense. Because Americans are accustomed to dealing with a subservient Japan, this process is certain to strain relations between Tokyo and Washington.

**Kissinger's** explanation for these centrifugal tendencies is straightforward. The taproot of the problem is the collapse of the Soviet Union, which means that the United States and its allies no longer face a serious threat to their security. Consequently, they have no good reason to act according to the hard-nosed dictates of realpolitik. Instead, diplomacy has become the prisoner of misguided domestic political forces, which produce foreign policies that make little strategic sense.

**Kissinger** blames three groups of domestic actors in particular. The main culprits are the liberal or left-wing elites who believe that power is a dirty word and that the United States, to quote William Jennings Bryan, is "the supreme moral factor in the world's progress and the accepted arbiter of the world's disputes." Thus, liberal idealists advocate a foreign policy that concentrates on promoting human rights around the globe. Unfortunately, a foreign policy based on such blatant self-righteousness invariably generates profound resentment abroad in countries with different cultures and traditions and poisons relations with allies as well as adversaries.

Yet **Kissinger** is also critical of the right-wing neo-conservative elites who call for the United States to act unilaterally to establish a benevolent global hegemony or Pax Americana. Although he credits them with appreciating the importance of power, he correctly faults their failure to recognize that there are limits even to American power, and that, in any event, other states will not view American hegemony as benevolent. Wielding power unilaterally will encourage the other major powers to join together in a balancing coalition against the United States, "and force it into impositions that would eventually leave it isolated and drained." In short, **Kissinger** thinks that elites from the Left and the Right are pushing the United States to adopt unilateralist policies that will undermine multilateral institutions, like NATO, that he wants to preserve.

The third villain in this story is the American public. **Kissinger** emphasizes that the public's interest in foreign policy is at "an all-time low", as revealed by the scant attention that foreign policy issues received in the last three presidential elections. This worries him, because he understands that it is difficult to sustain an intelligent foreign policy without broad-based support in the body politic, a lesson he learned well during the Vietnam War and its debilitating aftermath.

Although **Kissinger** does not say so explicitly, he surely understands that this public apathy is a dangerous wild card. Elites from both ends of the political spectrum continue to support an activist foreign policy (albeit for different reasons), but the public at large is becoming less supportive of our world-girdling array of global commitments, and it is certainly not interested in global crusades. If the economy erodes and the costs of empire rise, public apathy today could quickly turn into a call to bring the troops home tomorrow.

Of course, given that the Soviet threat is gone and there is no similar sort of adversary in sight, these arguments imply that domestic politics will continue to distort the conduct of U.S. foreign policy and make it impossible for the United States to follow **Kissinger's** advice. **Kissinger** backs away from this pessimistic conclusion, however, and offers a single ray of hope. If a smart and clever statesman-a Bismarck or even a young **Kissinger** is put in charge of U.S. diplomacy, and if that individual understands the dangers of unilateralist behavior, then the United States might be able to adopt the "ideological subtlety and long-range strategy" that **Kissinger** advocates.

To be fair, **Kissinger** recognizes that statesmen are always constrained by the broad structural forces that shape international politics. He drives this point home by quoting Bismarck's famous dictum that, "The best a statesman can do is to listen to the footsteps of God, get hold of the hem of His cloak, and walk with Him a few steps of the way." Nevertheless, **Kissinger** also believes that individuals can shape history in important ways, and that "great statesmen" can be a powerful force for good on the world stage. Personal diplomacy and leadership skills matter a lot in international politics; given the right circumstances, they might trump the malign structural forces that are currently leading U.S. foreign policy astray.

What is one to make of **Kissinger's** analysis? On the one hand, his diagnosis of the problem is acute and his concerns about our ability to surmount it are probably justified. On the other hand, his

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prescription for what to do about it is neither consistent nor persuasive. The Cold War order that he so desperately wants to preserve is doomed to collapse sooner or later-probably sooner-and a foreign policy that fails to recognize this fact is doomed to fail.

A close look at the Clinton Administration's policy toward Europe illustrates the problem nicely. As noted above, **Kissinger** sees the Clinton team as misguided idealists whose unilateralist policies damaged relations between the United States and its European allies and seriously weakened NATO. The evidence, however, does not support this description of events in the 1990s.

There is no question that the Clinton Administration used highly idealistic rhetoric to justify its foreign policy, and some of its members were irritatingly self-congratulatory. The United States also engaged in a handful of small-scale humanitarian interventions on Clinton's watch, although it did so with great caution. Indeed, the administration turned a blind eye toward the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, which prompt action might well have prevented or ameliorated. As is usually the case with U.S. administrations, realistic calculation trumped idealistic aspiration.

More importantly, however, the Clinton team paid careful attention to the global balance of power and diligently pursued the very policies **Kissinger** now advocates. The leading lights in the Clinton Administration were unabashed multilateralists who were deeply committed to preserving America's alliances in Europe and Asia. They expanded NATO eastwards, an idea strongly endorsed by **Kissinger** and most Europeans, and negotiated a new and more extensive security partnership with Japan. Indeed, it is hard to imagine an administration more committed to maintaining the Cold War order.

Despite these efforts, however, transatlantic relations deteriorated steadily over the course of the 1990s and were at an all-time low when Clinton left office earlier this year. **Kissinger's** description of how Americans and Europeans view each other these days is right on the money. Yet this sad state of affairs is hardly the result of the Clinton team's idealistic rhetoric, since that kind of language is music to the ears of most Europeans. The occasional preaching by Madeleine Albright and others surely irritated many Europeans, especially the French, but not enough to create the present state of disharmony. Furthermore, it is hard to blame the problem on the U.S. penchant for humanitarian interventions, since the Europeans are publicly committed to creating their own force for precisely that purpose. Also, the United States and its NATO allies worked closely-if not always intelligently-over the past decade to curb ethnic violence and protect human rights in the Balkans.

As **Kissinger** admits, the primary cause of the problem is neither the ineptitude of the previous administration nor the fecklessness of the American people; it is the disappearance of the Soviet threat. More than any one factor, this change explains why Americans and Europeans (and Asians) now view each other differently. Although **Kissinger** properly highlights this fact in his analysis, he underestimates its impact and fails to recognize how hard it would be for even the most clever statesmen to overcome it.

The problem is simple. The European allies no longer need the United States to protect them from a dangerous external threat. They can provide for their own security, even in the unlikely event that Russia gets its house in order and threatens aggression in eastern Europe. Germany alone could probably deal with a resurgent Russia. But if Germany needed allies, it could get help from Britain, France and Italy, all wealthy and populous countries.

Now that Europe no longer requires American protection, European leaders are going to be much less reticent about challenging U.S. policies that they do not like, regardless of who is running American foreign policy. Even **Kissinger** would have serious trouble selling national missile defense to the Europeans. The fact is that the two sides have numerous minor to medium-size conflicting interests, but no longer have a major common interest-that of containing the Soviet Union. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Europeans are more willing to part company with Washington on issues like landmines, the International Criminal Court, missile defense or the death penalty.

There is a special dimension to this problem that **Kissinger** briefly mentions. Germany, like Japan, has not been a "normal state" since the final days of World War II. For the past half century, it has not had an independent military capability, but instead has subordinated its army to NATO control. More generally, it has depended largely on the United States for its security. In effect, it is a powerful but only semi-sovereign state, trapped in a straitjacket that prevents it from throwing its weight around in Europe.

Germany's impotence is unnatural and unlikely to last much longer. Germany has a large population and the most powerful economy in Europe, and the burdens of its past are diminishing as the generations born after 1945 rise to power. U.S.-German relations, which have long been at the core of NATO, will grow more distant and more contentious once Germany becomes a truly independent state. No American policymaker, even one with velvet gloves on both hands, will find it easy to maintain consistently friendly relations with a normal Germany.

Turning to the other side of the Atlantic, the main problem that **Kissinger's** proposals face is that there is

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no compelling reason for the United States to remain militarily engaged in Europe. Historically, America has acted as an off-shore balancer in Europe (and Asia), which means that it has committed military forces to that region when there was a potential hegemon that the local powers could not contain by themselves. This logic explains why the United States: (1) entered World War I in April 1917 against Wilhelmine Germany; (2) began massively rearming in the summer of 1940 in anticipation of going to war against Nazi Germany; and (3) remained in Europe after 1945 to contain the Soviet Union. For sound strategic reasons, the United States will not tolerate a European hegemon. But no state is threatening to overrun Europe today or will so threaten in the near future.

One might challenge this perspective by arguing that the United States has effectively become a European power over the course of the past century and, therefore, it has no choice but to keep its forces on the other side of the Atlantic and maintain peace among its purported neighbors. But this line of argument is not persuasive. As a cursory look at a map reveals, the United States is neither a European nor an Asian power. It is safely located in the Western Hemisphere, far away from Europe and Asia, and it has a long history of avoiding military commitments in those regions when it was not needed to check an aspiring hegemon. And we should not forget that this policy served the United States well, keeping us out of many unnecessary wars and allowing us to fight the two world wars on favorable terms. There is no potential peer competitor today, however, and no alternative justification for placing American troops in harm's way in Europe-or, for that matter, in any other place. This benign strategic environment explains in large part why most Americans do not want their soldiers dying in combat and why they show little interest in foreign policy issues.

Does Kissinger provide a compelling strategic rationale for continued U.S. military involvement in Europe? No, and some of his arguments actually reinforce the case for withdrawal. In his words: "In Europe, two world wars and the insufficient scale of the European nation-state in the face of global challenges have made the 19th-century balance of power irrelevant. The nations of Europe no longer treat one another as strategic threats." But if security competition and great-power war have been eliminated from Europe, as Kissinger claims, then there is no good strategic reason to maintain NATO and keep 100,000 American troops in the region.

Kissinger's claims about the peacefulness of Europe notwithstanding, he suggests that NATO should still be preserved as a hedge against the possibility of "a new Russian imperialism." But, as noted above, the states of western Europe have the military potential to deal with any conceivable threat from a resurgent Russia on their own. Why should the United States expend blood and treasure to defend states that are eminently capable of defending themselves? There may be a realist case for perpetuating the Cold War order in Europe, but Kissinger has not made it.

Kissinger is on firmer ground to argue for maintaining American troops in Asia, but even here his case is unconvincing. He clearly recognizes that great-power war is possible in Asia, and that the logic of off-shore balancing provides an appropriate rationale for keeping the United States militarily engaged in that volatile region. "It is in the American national interest", he writes, "to resist the effort of any power to dominate Asia-and, in the extreme, the United States should be prepared to do so without allies." The problem, however, is that there is no potential hegemon in Asia today. In Kissinger's own words: "No Asian nation-not even China-is in a position to threaten all its neighbors simultaneously, as the Soviet Union was able to do until the very end of the Cold War." Consequently, his case for an American military presence in Asia is no more persuasive than his justification for preserving the U.S. role in Europe.

The bottom line is that Kissinger's prescription-that the central focus of U.S. foreign policy should be the preservation of its Cold War alliances-is not feasible. The principal obstacle is not misguided domestic political forces. It matters little who occupies the White House or which party controls Congress. After all, George Bush, whom Kissinger contrasts favorably with Bill Clinton, is having even more trouble dealing with America's allies than did his predecessor. Despite his unparalleled credentials and still-impressive powers of analysis, Kissinger's proposals do not persuade. Why? Because one cannot maintain the Cold War order in the absence of the Cold War itself.

Kissinger's own scholarship leads to the same conclusion. He has emphasized over many years that effective statesmanship requires working with, not against, the driving forces of international politics. This is why he has preferred Bismarck to Metternich. According to Kissinger, Metternich's efforts to create a stable order in Europe after Napoleon's final defeat in 1815 were doomed by his failure to accommodate nationalism, the awesome force unleashed by the French Revolution. In effect, Metternich was locked in time. He sought to rebuild the 18th-century political order in Europe, but its underlying political structure had disappeared.

Bismarck, on the other hand, understood that a successful foreign policy must accommodate change, neither resisting it nor surrendering to it. He recognized the potency of nationalism and he used it both to build a powerful Germany and to foster a favorable political order in Europe. In his new book, Kissinger sounds more like the reactionary Metternich than the forward-looking Bismarck. It is as though Kissinger

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[L]

Copyright 2001 Newspaper Publishing PLC
The Independent (London)

September 15, 2001, Saturday

SECTION: FEATURES; Pg. 4

LENGTH: 1108 words

HEADLINE: BOOKS: A FALSE CALM BEFORE THE STORM;
DOES AMERICA NEED A FOREIGN POLICY? BY HENRY KISSINGER SIMON & SCHUSTER,
POUNDS 20, 318PP: US GLOBAL POLICY MAY NOW CHANGE FOR EVER. GODFREY HODGSON
SEEKS LESSONS FROM THE MAN WHO ONCE RAN IT

BYLINE: Godfrey Hodgson Henry Kissinger, once the voice of America. What can he teach his heirs in a totally different world? Hulton Archive

BODY:

For many, the first response to the atrocities in New York and at the Pentagon was: "Pearl Harbor". The parallel is inevitable, but not exact. The Japanese navy's attack on the Pacific Fleet was abrupt, treacherous, and the last time that the territory of the United States was violated. But then the attack was by a known adversary, one of the world's three great navies, and there was never any doubt who was to blame.

The parallel that has not, to my knowledge, been mentioned is with a more recent occasion when great
damage was inflicted on the US and on the world economy by a group of countries that looked, in
comparison, puny. I mean the fourfold rise in the price of oil resulting from the Arab embargo of 1973.
We do not yet know who was responsible for Tuesday's carnage. But like the oil weapon in the 1970s, it
is likely to turn out as teaching two great lessons the US will have to learn: the strength of the weak, and
the danger of underestimating the rage of the wretched of the earth. By a strange coincidence, on the
day of the World Trade Centre bombing, Reuters filed a startling story from Chile. Dr Henry Kissinger is
being prosecuted by the Schneider family for his alleged part in the assassination of General Rene
Schneider in an apparent attempt to prevent the inauguration of Allende as president in 1970. Whether
the prosecution turns out to be serious or not, it comes on top of claims by Christopher Hitchens and
others that Kissinger should be considered a war criminal.

However ruthless Kissinger's conduct of American foreign policy was when he was in power, first as
President Nixon's national security adviser and then as Secretary of State, in retirement his views seem
to have softened. His latest book is intended as nothing less than a blueprint for American foreign policy.
As President Bush junior threatens condign punishment on whoever is responsible for the death of
innocent citizens in New York and Washington (if only he can find out who that is), Kissinger's analysis
is more relevant than ever.

Surprising as it may be to some, the new Kissinger is moderate and restrained. It is easy to disagree with much of what he says. There are passages of self-exculpation (Chile), of special pleading (Israel), and of spite (France).

It is also, of course, an Americo-centric view. The embarrassing ceremony on the White House lawn in
1993, which most of the world saw as a pathetic effort on the part of Bill Clinton to take credit for the
peace agreement brokered by the Norwegians, he sees as testimony to "the unchallenged global
leadership of America."

As we have now seen, American global leadership may be widely accepted - but it is not unchallenged.

Overall, though, even Dr Kissinger's critics (of whom I have often been one), must agree that this is an
impressive attempt at a world view from an American perspective. He might find this libellous, but it also
coincides with a liberal perspective in many respects. He does not approve, for example, of Plan
Colombia. The almost exclusively military response to narcoterrorism in Latin America, he points out, has
the same "fateful momentum" as American policy in Vietnam. Once committed so far, he suggests, the
US may have to take the field itself.

He is also critical of US attempts to impose economic "reform" in Japan by ceaselessly lecturing the
Japanese about the need for changes that would have profound social consequences. More broadly, he
can see that there are matters that are simply not America's business. Most surprising, he seems to
understand what motivates the rising tide of protest against "globalisation", and that a process that
increases the gap between rich nations and poor ones, and between rich and poor within nations, incurs

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the risk of "social and political debacle." There is a danger that a permanent world-wide underclass is emerging "which will make it increasingly difficult to build the political consensus on which domestic stability, international peace and globalisation itself depend." He might have added that it is not only the underclass in Africa, Latin America and many parts of Asia who resent the omnipresence of American military intervention and the constant pressure to impose the "Washington consensus" on the need for "reforms" that favour multinational corporations and US interests.

**Kissinger** starts from the proposition that "the United States is enjoying a pre-eminence unrivalled by even the greatest empires of the past." But if he permits himself occasional bursts of triumphalism, it may be simply a rhetorical device to reach audiences less intelligent than he is. For he does understand one of the two great problems of American foreign policy. It is that while the US has the military and financial power of the world's last empire, it has not been clear that Americans have the will to use it, especially if it interferes with their convenience or risks raising taxes.

**Kissinger** expresses this in the form of a paradox: "Ironically, America's pre-eminence is often treated with indifference by its own people. Judging from media coverage and congressional sentiment - two important barometers - Americans' interest in foreign policy is at an all-time low."

His prescription is ethically modest. America, he concludes, must find a way to translate power into moral consensus.

There is, however, an even harder truth that **Kissinger** does not quite confront. It is the danger of the belief, widely held in the US, in "American exceptionalism". That does not mean the US is exceptionally rich or exceptionally powerful. It means that its people think their country is morally superior. Many nations have believed that in the past, among them the British, French, Russians and Germans, not to mention the Japanese and Chinese. When the claim of moral superiority is made on one's own behalf it should always be met either by rage or laughter. **Kissinger** is clever enough to understand that, but not quite brave enough to say so.

This week's horrors drive home the fact that however much America is admired, even loved, by many around the world, it is also hated by others. Until Tuesday, Americans were in danger of getting indifferent to the outside world. Not now: for the first time since the early Cold War, they feel vulnerable. So a great debate about foreign policy is now inevitable. Henry Kissinger's book should be an important contribution to it.

enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books

Books on these pages can be bought at a discount of up to 50 per cent at The Independent Bookshop, in association with WHSmith.co.uk

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Copyright 2001 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education

August 3, 2001

SECTION: THE CHRONICLE REVIEW; Pg. 10

LENGTH: 2767 words

HEADLINE: The Scholar-Courtier and the Scholar-Politician

BYLINE: MICHAEL NELSON

BODY:

Both of them were tenured Harvard professors who, from early in their careers, aspired to affect, not just observe and analyze, the course of public affairs. Both became controversial figures, enduring attacks from either end of the political spectrum, but especially from the left. Although both had sometimes expressed disdain for Richard M. Nixon and neither supported his candidacy for president in 1968, each accepted eagerly when Nixon invited him to join the White House staff shortly after the election.

As prominent Nixon advisers, both of them suffered further vilification, with the attacks again coming mostly from liberals. Both have remained prominent figures in the decades since their White House service ended. In true, competing-courtier style, each of them disliked and distrusted the other. Both are the subjects of widely reviewed recent books. And there the similarities end between Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Henry Kissinger. Moynihan has become a revered figure at age 74, an icon of both the elder statesman and the public intellectual. Not only did the American-based British journalist Godfrey Hodgson choose an admiring title -- The Gentleman from New York: Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- A Biography (Houghton Mifflin, 2000) -- for his study of Moynihan, but reviewers and their editors also picked up the refrain. Garry Wills's essay in The New York Review of Books was called "Honorable Man." The New York Times Book Review headlined Todd Purdum's review, "The Senate's Philosopher-King." Hodgson himself quotes Michael Barone -- twice -- describing Moynihan as "the nation's best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson."

Kissinger, in contrast, is a man whose reputation at a similar stage of life (he turned 78 in May) remains under siege. A new book about him by another British journalist, Christopher Hitchens, is called The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso Books, 2001), and the charges are "for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture." Hitchens doesn't just want to try Kissinger in the court of public opinion; he wants to see the former national security adviser and secretary of state indicted, extradited, and convicted for actions involving Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Greece, Bangladesh, and East Timor.

Lest Kissinger's continuing presence in respectable New York, Washington, and international circles render Hitchens's attack implausible, he even has an unkind explanation for that: "Kissinger is not ... feted because of his exquisite manners or his mordant wit (his manners are in any case rather gross, and his wit consists of a quiver of borrowed and secondhand darts). No, he is sought after because his presence supplies a frisson: the authentic touch of raw and unapologetic power."

Not many scholars have risen to support Hitchens's legal theory. Douglass W. Cassel Jr., the director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University's law school, is among those who argue that "[m]ixing vague accusations of unspecified crimes with a melange of moral and political charges is worse than unfair to Kissinger. It undermines the credibility of international law on war crimes and crimes against humanity." Cassel is no Kissinger admirer. He agrees with Hitchens, for example, that the Nixon administration's failure to intervene against Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh for the sake of keeping Pakistan as a secret intermediary between the United States and China was "shameful." But, Cassel asks, "where is the crime?"

Although the likelihood is small that Kissinger will end up behind bars, attacks such as Hitchens's have been extremely damaging to Kissinger's reputation. Publishers Weekly attached a coda to its May 28 review of the political scientist Larry Berman's new book, No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (Free Press, 2001), a measured but decidedly negative account of the Nixon administration's conduct during four years of negotiations to end the Vietnam War. The coda alerts display-planning booksellers that along "with Christopher Hitchens's The Trial of Henry Kissinger, other books critical of the former secretary of state [are] beginning to crowd the shelves." And in one recent incident, the ceremony at which Kissinger was installed as chancellor of the College of William and Mary was interrupted by student chants of "Not my chancellor!" and posters declaring "Kissinger kills." The installation was preceded by a faculty-organized "teach-in" that got especially lively when President Timothy J. Sullivan described Hitchens's charges as "a tissue of inaccurate assertions" and Hitchens rose from the audience to say that if Sullivan was going to call him a liar, he must "[m]ake it good or

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withdraw."

Why do Moynihan and **Kissinger**, whose careers were in some ways so similar, have such disparate reputations today? Part of the answer has to do with them. The rest has to do with us, especially with the things Americans value.

Moynihan and **Kissinger** were among Nixon's first senior staff appointees: **Kissinger** as national-security adviser and Moynihan as executive secretary of the newly formed Urban Affairs Council. Nixon plucked them from the Harvard faculty, where each had headed an unusually influential seminar that brought together Harvard and M.I.T. scholars with important policymakers. (**Kissinger's** seminar dealt with arms control, Moynihan's with issues of education and equality.) Although neither had ever been a Nixon supporter, each had demonstrated the skills of a political courtier -- Moynihan to Gov. W. Averell Harriman of New York and **Kissinger** to the man who defeated Harriman for governor in 1958, Nelson A. Rockefeller. Nixon was confident that their loyalties were transferable.

**Kissinger** and Moynihan had both gained notoriety from controversial writings that liberals hated but Nixon admired. A charter subscriber to the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend principle, Nixon particularly liked it that many of his own most scathing critics were also bitterly, and sometimes unjustly, critical of Moynihan and **Kissinger**. **Kissinger's** 1957 best-selling book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, had argued that the United States must develop a strategy for fighting limited nuclear wars in order to avoid the trap of thinking that it must use either all of its nuclear weapons or none. Moynihan's widely circulated 1965 report for the Department of Labor, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, had advanced the thesis that poverty and unemployment had created a "tangle of pathologies" in inner-city neighborhoods, including a "profound weakening of Negro family structure." **Kissinger** was caricatured as a mad political scientist in (and as) Dr. Strangelove. Moynihan was excoriated as a racist.

Although **Kissinger** supported Rockefeller's bid to wrest the Republican presidential nomination from Nixon in 1968 and Moynihan gave speeches for Robert F. Kennedy, Nixon knew that as president he alone could offer the two scholars what they coveted most: a place near the apex of policy and power. As Hodgson points out, Nixon also "liked the idea that two Harvard professors ... would vouch for the administration's policies."

And vouch they did, in ways that benefited Nixon but often drew criticism to themselves. Moynihan helped the president develop his most celebrated domestic-policy initiative, a de facto guaranteed income for the poor called the Family Assistance Plan. But liberal critics rallied congressional Democrats to defeat the proposal on the grounds that its funding was too meager. They also tore into Moynihan with a vengeance when he wrote a widely leaked memo to Nixon calling for a period of "benign neglect" in national policy toward race.

As in The Negro Family, Moynihan was making a constructive point in the memo -- namely, that inflamed racial rhetoric was distracting from, and even impeding, genuine economic progress among African-Americans. But as with "tangle of pathologies," the lure of a good turn of phrase (this time an obscure one borrowed from 19th-century British politics) undid him.

**Kissinger** served Nixon in the area of his presidency that he cared about most, foreign policy. **Kissinger's** realpolitik approach to international affairs (in a nutshell: national interest, not national values, should govern national conduct in the world) coincided perfectly with Nixon's. At the time, few criticized the major goal of the Nixon-*Kissinger* foreign policy, which was to establish independent relationships with the Soviet Union and, for the first time, China that would enable the United States to play one Communist superpower against the other. But many opposed the corollary policies that Nixon and *Kissinger* developed in pursuit of their goal, such as the blind eye they turned to Pakistani atrocities in Bangladesh, and their subversion of an elected Marxist government in Chile. For *Kissinger* the rationale for those policies and, above all, for continuing the Vietnam War was to demonstrate to the Chinese and Soviets that we would show no weakness or lack of resolve in our conduct toward them.

The similarities between **Kissinger** and Moynihan, vast as they were, should not obscure the important differences between them. In the short term, these differences helped to explain the two men's varying fates in the Nixon administration and, after Nixon resigned in 1974, in Gerald Ford's. **Kissinger** thrived by clinging closely to the president and the Republican Party, winning promotion to secretary of state near the start of Nixon's second term. Moynihan, whose fondest hope had been to transform Nixon into an American Disraeli (Tory man, Whig measures), found himself marginalized within an administration that was skittish about liberalism and, more to the point, largely uninterested in domestic policy.

Although Moynihan, like **Kissinger**, was given to rhapsodic bursts of flattery toward the boss -- Moynihan told Nixon in September 1969, for example, that Londoners "generally held" the president's now-forgotten New Federalism proposal to be "the most important domestic initiative since the New Deal" -- he never concealed that, at the end of the day, he was a Democrat who opposed the Vietnam War. Moynihan was gently shown the exit from the White House in 1971. During the remainder of the Nixon-

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Ford years, he bounced around from India to the United Nations in a succession of diplomatic postings.

In the longer term, the differences between Kissinger and Moynihan have turned out to be crucial to the way they are now perceived -- this time to Moynihan's advantage. During the quarter-century since Kissinger left office, his version of realpolitik has lost much of its political and intellectual luster. Liberal champions of a foreign policy based on promoting human rights and democracy helped elect Jimmy Carter in 1976, and conservatives determined to bring down, not just outmaneuver, the Soviet "evil empire" were mainstays of Ronald Reagan's conservative crusade in the 1980's.

To Kissinger's credit, he had come honestly to his distrust of a values-based approach to foreign policy and, for that matter, of the populist style of politics that was most likely to produce such an approach. Kissinger had seen Nazi Germany up close, both as a boy and as a soldier in the occupying American army, and was deeply persuaded of Goethe's maxim that social disorder is worse even than injustice.

But as freedom and democracy spread throughout Eastern Europe and much of Asia and Latin America during the 1980's and 1990's, Kissinger's understanding of political realism came to be regarded not just as morally empty, but also as unduly pessimistic -- in a word, unrealistic. As for Vietnam, even the 20th century's leading theorist of realpolitik, Hans J. Morgenthau, strenuously disagreed that so prolonged, expensive, militarily unsuccessful, and politically divisive a war was in the national interest no matter how narrowly that interest was conceived.

Kissinger's new book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?: Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (Simon & Schuster, 2001), is a continent-by-continent survey of a world in which, contrary to his hard-wired assumptions about the future while in office, the Soviet Union is gone and democracy has spread to many countries with no democratic tradition. But Kissinger still thinks that only starry-eyed naifs would be so foolish as to pursue a human-rights-and-democracy-based foreign policy toward, say, China. And, as the New York Times foreign-affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman points out, Kissinger continues to write in the voice of one who hopes above all to gain the president's ear. "One might even say that this [book] is Kissinger's version of The Prince," Friedman adds. To the end, it seems, Kissinger is determined to equate realism with pessimism and to pursue statesmanship through courtiership.

Moynihan has ridden the waves of intellectual and historical change far more adroitly than his old Harvard and White House colleague. A vocal critic within the Nixon administration of Kissinger's rationale for policies such as staying in Vietnam and favoring Pakistani dictatorship over Indian democracy, Moynihan has never flagged in his advocacy of free government, human rights, and an open foreign policy. His preferred approach to the cold war turned out to be the most prescient form of anti-Communism. Throughout the 1970's and 1980's, Moynihan consistently predicted that ethnic tensions and the dead hand of bureaucracy would cause the Soviet empire to crumble from within.

Even more important in explaining Moynihan's eventual rise to iconic status, however, is that in late middle age he abandoned the well-worn path to influence that Kissinger and other wannabe scholar-statesmen such as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Condoleezza Rice typically have followed -- that is, the courtier's path of hitching their wagon to some national politician's star -- and plunged into the arena of precinct caucuses and legislative logrolling. In 1976, Moynihan went before the voters of New York as a candidate for the U.S. Senate. He won and then won three more times, serving 24 years before announcing his retirement in 2000.

Why was Moynihan's decision to enter the electoral arena so important? Most people who study politics know the story that David Halberstam recounts in The Best and the Brightest -- the story of Lyndon B. Johnson rushing back to the Capitol after attending his first cabinet meeting as John F. Kennedy's vice president so that he could tell Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn about all of the president's brilliant advisers -- Schlesinger and McGeorge Bundy from Harvard, Dean Rusk from the Rockefeller Foundation, and so on. "Well, Lyndon, you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say," Rayburn replied, "but I'd feel a whole lot better if just one of them had run for sheriff once."

There is, in the American experience, an even deeper tradition of scholars testing their ideas in the arena of electoral politics. The political scientist Clinton Rossiter observed in his book 1787: The Grand Convention (Macmillan, 1966) that most of the framers of the Constitution embodied the wonderful nexus between philosophical thought and political action that nearly all modern scholars and politicians lack -- the former because they are too busy thinking to act, the latter because they are too busy acting to think. The nexus Rossiter described was not just between two typically separate careers, but also between two qualities that the scholarly and political careers foster when they converge.

Political reason is one such quality, but it is "tested reason -- reason applied within the limits of history." A higher form of political experience is the other: "digested experience -- experience appraised with the aid of critical intelligence." Scholar-politicians such as the framers -- and Moynihan -- have shown us, in a way that Kissinger and other scholar-courtiers have not, how much democratic politics can enhance,

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Copyright 2001 The Telegraph Group Limited
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)

September 09, 2001, Sunday

SECTION: Pg. 12

LENGTH: 1091 words

HEADLINE: The Doctor's global remedies Henry Kissinger remains one of the few international statesman we should listen to, says Michael Portillo

BYLINE: By MICHAEL PORTILLO

BODY:

Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century by Henry Kissinger

Simon & Schuster, pounds 20, 318 pp pounds 18 (99p p&p) 0870 155 7222

I ADMIT IT. Henry Kissinger impresses me. In conversation he has the gift - shared by very few - of being able effortlessly to circumnavigate the globe. Such people can encapsulate a country in a phrase, and summarise a region in a few lines. Their comments are rooted in deep understanding, and they pepper their allusions with the comments shared with them by leading figures from across the earth. What is more, Kissinger takes a position on everything. In Does America Need a Foreign Policy? he tells us what that policy should be country-by-country, and theme-by-theme, recognising as he does that pan-global topics like globalisation and the environment impinge more now than when he held office.

His period of service, first as National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State, came at a not very lucky time for America. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the Paris peace agreement to end the Vietnam War. But liberals chastise him for the "Christmas bombing" of Hanoi and Haiphong, and conservatives recall that the Paris agreement was followed by America's humiliation in Saigon. American conservatives also tend to dismiss his success with the Sinai peace accord, seeing it as a precursor to the unsustainable Oslo process. Or they remember that he was the architect of President Nixon's visit to China, thus commencing American engagement with a country that some conservatives believe should be treated as a new Cold War adversary.

So I have a sense that this book, intended to lead debate at the beginning of a new Republican Administration, comes from someone who is a little surprised to be on the outside looking in. Maybe Kissinger is surprised also that the new administration has yet to articulate policy positions with anything like his own clarity. The Republicans expressed exasperation with President Clinton who spoke of his concern for human rights and for the environment rather more than of national interests, and who in the process made both allies and adversaries permanently uncertain what

America would do.

Kissinger blames Clinton's rush to conclude a peace deal between Barak and Arafat before leaving the White House, for the failure of the Camp David talks. He finds Clinton's avowed policy of "strategic partnership" with China hollow, and his occasional accolades for Boris Yeltsin naive.

However, this is not a particularly partisan book. It praises Clinton for shepherding the NAFTA agreement through Congress; and conversely Kissinger feels evident anxiety that the Republicans have so far failed to define what form of ballistic missile defence they will pursue. He supplies his own lucid case for missile defence in general. He skilfully rebuts the often self-contradictory counter arguments (eg "it won't work", or "it will work too well").

Kissinger snorts at Tony Blair's claim to be a "pivot" between America and Russia on this pre-eminent issue. He is indignant that President Chirac shared a platform with President Putin to announce that the European Union and Russia have an "identical view" in condemning revision of the ABM treaty. But equally Kissinger knows that for as long as President Bush is ambiguous about what system he wants, he leaves space for Putin and Chirac to make mischief, and for Blair to sit on the fence.

Dr Kissinger believes that Western policy towards Russia has become too sentimental. We were too ready to believe that a Gorbachev or a Yeltsin was about to turn the country into a liberal free market democracy. We are too eager to be drawn into Russian domestic politics, and thus we reflect too little on Russia's historic urge to dominate its neighbours. Putin, argues Kissinger, has already made significant progress towards re-establishing strong Russian holds over Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova,

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Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

American policy in Asia ought, says Dr **Kissinger**, to focus on maintaining equilibrium. It should aim to avoid any state achieving pre-eminence. The USA no longer faces, as it did in his day, the possibility of another superpower outpacing it. On the contrary, Republican zealots now need to be restrained from asserting intemperate claims to American hegemony, and offer leadership rather than domination. Dr **Kissinger** favours using America's weight merely to sustain a balance of power, just as he shifted that weight when he arranged for Nixon to visit China in 1972.

One of the issues that most worries **Kissinger** is the breakdown of common perceptions between the USA and its European allies. He sees European nations defining their European identity by challenging US positions, or by mediating between America and the rest of the world. As foreign policy-making migrates from nation-states to the European Union, he identifies a serious procedural problem: that America is excluded from policy discussions and is presented with a European fait accompli. The proposals for a European military force concern him for precisely that reason: decisions on its use would be taken by the European caucus, before Nato ministers had met.

In any case Nato needs reform, argues **Kissinger**. Its purposes have become nebulous and attendance at its meetings oppressive. It resembles a United Nations, with a generalised peacekeeping remit, almost more than a military alliance, with a clear territorial defensive role. Most importantly, it must evolve into a forum for proper, as opposed to merely platitudinous, political dialogue between the Atlantic partners.

Here Dr **Kissinger** does not mince words. He urges those who seek to establish a European identity "via confrontation with America" not to delude themselves that the USA would remain passive when its policies are being challenged as a matter of principle.

"Future generations must not be able to ask themselves how it was possible for the nations bordering the Atlantic to spend their energies on abstruse debates of identity against co-operation when all around them fundamental problems were threatening the very framework of their societies."

But as **Kissinger** says, it all comes down to the quality of European leadership, and our leaders tend to favour the abstruse over the concrete, and the short- over the long-term. They are perhaps especially unlikely to listen to Dr **Kissinger**, Nixon's Secretary of State, the bomber of Hanoi. That's a pity because they could learn a lot.

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Copyright 2001 Guardian Newspapers Limited
The Observer

September 9, 2001

SECTION: First Edition; Observer Review Pages, Pg. 17

LENGTH: 1061 words

HEADLINE: Books: Evasive manoeuvres: Henry **Kissinger** is quick to rail against tyrants, but completely oblivious to his own guilt: Does **America Need a Foreign Policy?** by Henry **Kissinger** Simon & Schuster pounds 20, pp318

BYLINE: NICK COHEN

BODY:

AN ADVERT for the Economist from the mid-1990s had an astonished corporate manager look up to find Henry **Kissinger** sitting next to him in business class. A scintillating conversation which might be relayed to the grandchildren is on offer, if, that is, the businessman has read enough to keep up with the statesman. The Economist should fire its marketing department. About the kindest comment one can make about the **Kissinger** presented in Does **America Need a Foreign Policy?** is that the dullest executive would learn more from fixing his eyes on the in-flight teen movie - and keeping them there.

**Kissinger's** writing is ugly - 'Asia's economy is becoming ever more important for that of the United States and the world' - and is studded with travel-brochure cliches - 'Bordered on the south by the Indian Ocean, on the north by the Himalayas, on the west by the nearly as formidable mountains of the Hindu Kush, and in the east by the marshes and rivers of Bengal, India has existed for millennia as a world apart.' European readers receive a thoughtless justification of American supremacy. We are instructed that we have no right to oppose the son-of-Star-Wars programme, even though it turns American bases in Britain and Denmark into unprotected targets. Star Wars also tears up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty he negotiated in 1972, and which defenders of **Kissinger** have used in pleas for even-handedness ever since. On the one hand, Nixon's and **Kissinger's** administration was a criminal conspiracy, the argument runs. On the other, it reduced the danger of war with the old Soviet Union. **Kissinger** now confesses without contrition that he didn't want the ABM treaty and is happy to see it go. Nixon was forced into detente because Congress refused to fund the nuclear arms race at the frantic level he required. There goes the other hand, then.

The book is worthless in all respects except one - it is a masterpiece of evasion. Ever since the House of Lords ruled that Pinochet could be prosecuted, the possibility that **Kissinger** may be arraigned for war crimes has received alternately shocked and serious consideration in the American media. Readers can find a helpful digest of the charges against him in Christopher Hitchens's The Trial of Henry **Kissinger** (Verso, pounds 15). They range from **Kissinger's** probably small part in Nixon's sabotage of the 1968 Paris peace talks to end the Vietnam War, through his approval of the assassinations and murders that accompanied Pinochet's seizure of power, to complicity in the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. The body count from these and other acts of statesmanship must be counted in hundreds of thousands, and it isn't only journalists and historians who are totting up the total. An Argentine judge has tried without success to persuade him to testify on US organisation of the kidnapping and slaughter of South American leftists in the 1970s. **Kissinger** left Paris in May after he refused to accept a summons from a judge asking him to give evidence on French citizens who disappeared in Pinochet's terror. (I imagine him flitting through Charles de Gaulle Airport in mirror shades and a false beard.) A Chilean judge wants to question him about the murder of Charles Horman, a young American journalist, during Pinochet's overthrow of democracy.

In these circumstances, any reputable man would surely mount a vigorous defence or provide what help he could to grave judicial inquiries. But, like a terrorist who refuses to recognise the validity of the court, **Kissinger** rejects the validity of prosecution in the abstract without once mentioning the charge sheet or declaring his interest.

Despite appearances to the contrary, **Kissinger** intends this book to be an 'argument against American hegemony'. By hegemony, he doesn't mean the military power he and Nixon wielded to devastate Cambodia, which seemed pretty hegemonic at the time, but the imposition of moral-values through the belated confrontation with Milosevic, which he dislikes with the intensity of Noam Chomsky. The claims of universal principles of human rights to override national jurisdictions are just as deplorable as 'humanitarian interventions'.

**Kissinger** confronts them with the unfamiliar vocabulary of the bleeding heart. 'The instinct to punish

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must be related, as in every constitutional democratic political structure, to a system of checks and
balances,' he moos. The world must not substitute 'the tyranny of judges for that of gov ernments.' (Did
he mean to write that government was tyranny? An interesting admission.) 'Inquisitions and even witch-
hunts' must be discouraged.

He glumly admits that he had promoted human rights as an American negotiator at the 1975 Helsinki
Conference with the Soviet Union. But the principles in the final accord were meant to be 'a diplomatic
weapon to use against Soviet pressure on their own and captive peoples, not as a legal weapon against
individual leaders before courts of countries not their own' (individual leaders such as Pinochet and,
indeed, himself).

His adherence to a double standard that a child could see through in no way inhibits him from accusing
his opponents of hypocrisy. 'So far universal jurisdiction has involved the prosecution of one fashionably
reviled man of the Right while scores of East European Communist leaders - not to speak of Caribbean,
Middle Eastern, or African leaders who had inflicted their own full measures of torture and suffering -
have not been obliged to face similar prosecutions.'

Germany, in fact, tried her neo-Stalinist leaders and Romania executed Ceausescu, thus dispensing with
the need for universal jurisdiction, while the Lords' ruling on Pinochet was followed by international
efforts to indict Saddam Hussein and Hissen Habre, former dictator of Chad. In any case, double
standards are resolved by equality before the law, which is precisely what **Kissinger** doesn't want.

He complains that politicians who may have murdered thousands are treated like'ordinary criminals' who
kill one or two. Not once does he acknowledge or attempt to refute the allegation that he is covered in
enough blood to make a psychopath wince. The silence of this volume speaks volumes.

To order Does America Need a Foreign Policy? for pounds 17 call the Observer Books Service on
0890 066 8979

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Copyright 2001 Information Access Company,
a Thomson Corporation Company;
ASAP

Copyright 2001 American Jewish Committee
Commentary

September 1, 2001

SECTION: No. 2, Vol. 112; Pg. 70 ; ISSN: 0010-2601

IAC-ACC-NO: 77810861

LENGTH: 2045 words

HEADLINE: Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century; Review

BYLINE: Pryce-Jones, David

BODY:

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century by Henry Kissinger
Simon & Schuster. 318 pp. $ 30.00

AMERICA BESTRIDES the world like a colossus. In Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, American garrisons and fleets betoken a power far more absolute than that of the Romans or the British in their time. Such power has consequences. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, other peoples with other traditions are adopting America's freemarket economy, its language, and its popular culture. As once people took on the religion of those stronger than themselves, now, in homage, many claim to be democratic, flimsy as the grounds of the claim may be.

One hundred years from now, Does **America Need a Foreign Policy?** is likely to be read as a summation of where America stood at this moment when its power appeared unchallenged and its future brilliant. The question posed by the title is rhetorical; it ought really to be, How Are We To Use Our Power? The author, Henry **Kissinger**, is a lifelong student of the nature of power and the consequent purposes and practices of statecraft, and as Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford he was able to test his ideas in the real world of politics. In many ways this is a masterful work, displaying a grasp of the entire world's geopolitics and written with admirable clarity. But it also has its peculiarities. THROUGHOUT HISTORY, power has proved an empty shell in the absence of the will to exercise it. Previous empires have had their Caesars and Disraelis to extol and extend power, in their view bringing civilization, peace, and law by means of legionaries and redcoats. But there have also been plenty of critics to warn that there are inbuilt limits to what power can achieve, and that power over others carries with it the inherent risks of backlash and revolt. "The Captains and the Kings depart," in Kipling's melancholy words.

Kissinger is such a critic. By the 19th century, he instructs us, the world order had laid out the foundation of a stability that lasted more or less successfully until 1914. According to its precepts, each nation had its legitimate interests, and the best mechanism for mediating among those interests, and thus for keeping the peace, was a balance of forces; any single power with pretensions to supremacy would be confronted by a defensive coalition of other powers. Successive British prime ministers operated this mechanism, along with the Metternichs and Bismarcks and some of the Russian czars. They were statesmen--the highest term of praise in Kissinger's vocabulary--earning his approval as wise, cautious, restrained.

Some American Presidents have also understood this time-honored mechanism of power politics, and have acted accordingly--Theodore Roosevelt, for one. And after all, **Kissinger** reminds us, it was a coalition of allies that defeated Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and restored the world balance of power. But all along there was also an alternative American tradition, one rooted in the New World idealism of the founding fathers. This alternative found its modern embodiment in Woodrow Wilson, who after World War I declared that America was under a moral imperative to encourage self-determination and democracy for all peoples.

In **Kissinger's** vocabulary, Wilsonianism is the highest term of disapprobation, and his unqualified disdain for this doctrine resonates in the adjectives he applies to it: "messianic," "missionary," even "optimistic." Wilsonian idealism might be valid if American values were universal, but to **Kissinger**, universal values are themselves a chimera. In practice, American values, democracy included, have proved irrelevant in many countries that have a history and culture of their own, and trying to impose them in order to cure ancient ills generally introduces far more destructive contemporary ills.

Worse, moral imperatives inject a self-righteous humbug into international relations. In Wilsonian logic,

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enemies are not simply people defending their own national interest; they are immoral, and therefore fit to be destroyed unconditionally. What begins as morality can thus end in warmongering and imperialism by another name.

**Kissinger's** many adversaries on the Left have accused him of adventurism and even of criminal conduct in office. What his prolific writings, and in particular this book, actually disclose is a deep temperamental fear that the possession of power leads inexorably to the use of force, and the no less deep conviction that the true purpose of power is to anticipate and head off crises that might otherwise end in violence. Like a pedestrian at a particularly complex and dangerous intersection, he is on the lookout for accidents from every direction.

The most serious of the several possible "accidents" **Kissinger** now foresees has to do with the emergence of a unified Europe, which he rightly calls "one of the most revolutionary events of our time." For years, the United States has advocated this very end, in the belief that a unified Europe will naturally share American values and interests. But in reality the European system of nation states is giving way to an institutionalized structure that, though nominally democratic, has been shaped in opposition to the U.S. The creation of a European defense force, the erosion of NATO and the Atlantic alliance, irrational resistance to the American proposal to build a nuclear missile shield, head-on disputes over trade and environmental issues--all these provide evidence that the bloc of Western democratic states is not coming together but splintering, much as did the former Communist bloc.

In Russia, a former KGB officer now rules who understands the national interest and the balance of forces all too well. After the collapse of Communism, American policy concentrated on domestic reform in Moscow, identifying reform mainly with the person of Boris Yeltsin. This in **Kissinger's** view was dangerous sentimentality. America is in no position to introduce genuine democratic reforms in Russia--not in the government, not in the economy, and not in the legal system. Vladimir Putin's Russia already shows signs of wanting to reproduce cold-war tensions, and one of **Kissinger's** preoccupations is that it will be attracted into an alliance or coalition with the new German-led Europe.

The shape of the 21st century will also critically depend, he thinks, on a resolution of the tensions in the Sino-American relationship. If China tries to impose its will on Taiwan, or if it seeks to dominate Asia, it may have to be resisted by force. So terrible a calamity would this be that **Kissinger** recommends a policy of patience as China evolves; that way, in the event of conflict, America will at least be free of blame. "What is the point," he asks, "of a confrontational strategy conducted for its own sake?"

Other nations with interests likely to prove challenging are Japan, India, and Brazil. As for the Middle East, turmoil there is a certainty. In some twenty pages **Kissinger** gives a marvelously cogent account of the Oslo peace process and the mistaken assumptions on all sides that led to its failure. Nationhood and the state, he writes, still count less than religion in the eyes of most Muslims. Israelis are rejected by their neighbors because they are Jews, and there is nothing they can do about it but arm themselves. Elsewhere in the Middle East, a balanced approach to either Iraq or Iran is, for the moment, not feasible.

Finally, **Kissinger** tackles globalization, a bag into which all sorts of Wilsonian scraps have been crammed, weakening nation states for no good purpose and muddling every balance of power. Consensus is required if there is to be world order, but **Kissinger** sees an unbridgeable divide between haves and have-nots, between Internetters and techno-zeros. Putting his trust in statesmen rather than jurists, he is deeply suspicious of one-size-fits-all policies like "human-rights" campaigns and of bodies like the International Criminal Court. In general, missionary or messianic efforts are the butt here of his sometimes quite deadly humor, as when he writes that unilateral gestures to ease Iranian hostility represent "the application of 'politically correct' psychiatric theory to politics," or that the bombing of Kosovo, conducted out of range of Serbian anti-aircraft batteries, suggested that "Western democracies confined their risk-taking on behalf of morality to specific altitudes."

TOURING THE world and its troubles as if following a manual, **Kissinger** generates a profusion of specific ideas and policies. To deal with Russia, there should be consultative mechanisms within the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. An international conference, including Russia, must be convened to settle Bosnia and Kosovo. To strengthen the Atlantic alliance, a Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA) is needed. A program of cooperative control should be set up to deal with drugs. As for globalization, "An international sense of social responsibility must be fostered" and the United States must help "identify the problems and design forums to deal with them." Progress must be made with respect to Iran's acquisition of missiles and nuclear weapons, with "a trusted representative" undertaking secret explorations in Tehran of reciprocal measures to improve relations. Africa needs a global program for AIDS. Eight principles must be borne in mind in formulating policy toward Asia. Nine principles guide a possible new approach to resolving the Arab-Israeli dispute. If humanitarian intervention in other peoples' quarrels is to become a priority, four conditions must be met.

Time and again, at the end of these passages of analysis and prescription, each with its emphatic sprinkling of "musts" and "shoulds" and "needs," **Kissinger** calls for vision and leadership. But vision for

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[L]

what, and leadership toward which ends and in what forms, remains very unclear. There is nothing to indicate what positive achievements **Kissinger** envisages for America, or what shape he would hope the world might be in a century hence. Vision and leadership in this view seem prophylactic, code words for accommodating the demands of other people.

But even on the assumption that convincing others to adopt democracy, or opposing totalitarianism in the name of human rights, is so much Wilsonian absurdity, is it enough just to seek a modus vivendi with those whose values are opposed to America's? The future envisaged here will belong to bureaucrats and diplomats traveling in phalanxes from one conference to the next. This in itself supposes a world in which rationality takes primacy over ambition and there is a disposition on everybody's part to reach agreement, plus plenty of time in which to do so. It speaks well for **Kissinger's** humaneness that this is his remedy for danger, but the realization of his proliferating "musts" and "shoulds" and "needs" will depend on more than fine speeches alone.

To be blunt, are those overseas garrisons and fleets merely decorative? If not, is their ultimate role to strike a balance of forces, or to pursue the national interest regardless? Peculiarly, **Kissinger** omits any discussion of crises in which the preemptive use of force may be the last remaining option. Such appeared to be the case in Bosnia, and perhaps in Kosovo, too. And what if the Saudi royal family should be overthrown? What is to be done in the event that Iran and Iraq, or India and Pakistan, are seen to be preparing a nuclear strike? What if Russia moves against the Baltic states or Ukraine? Or if a rogue state or terrorist group is known to be targeting the United States?

A hundred years from now, readers may well be astonished that at the height of America's power, one of its most distinguished and hard-headed statesmen was recommending a posture whose inadvertent effect would be to undermine the will to use force when the national interest demanded it, and thus hasten another set of captains and kings on their path to oblivion.

DAVID PRYCE-JONES, the British political analyst and the author of *The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire*, is a senior editor of *National Review*.

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September 22, 2001, Saturday

SECTION: Pg. 03

LENGTH: 772 words

HEADLINE: No one hates war more than the Recent events prove what **Kissinger** was arguing all along, finds Paul Johnson

BYLINE: By Paul Johnson

BODY:

Does America Need a Foreign

Policy?: toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century by Henry Kissinger

318pp, Simon & Schuster, pounds 20

T pounds 17 (plus pounds 1.99 p&p) 0870 1557222

This book comes at the right time, for last week's events demonstrate in an unequivocal fashion that **America needs a foreign policy** more than ever: the conclusion which Henry **Kissinger**, the world's most experienced negotiator and geopolitician, reaches and elaborates.

Precisely because America has greater military power in relation to the rest of the world than any other country in history, even imperial Rome or Britain at her zenith, she requires the most widespread approval among nations when she finds it necessary to use it, in her interests and theirs. One of the most important objects of foreign policy is to legitimise in the eyes of the world actions made necessary when the civil arm of foreign policy, diplomacy, hands over to the military. Among Kissinger's merits as a global thinker is that he is not an either/or man: he sees negotiation and force as a continuum and that is why, while working tirelessly for peaceful settlements - no one hates war more than he, for it implies failure of his professional skills - he has always supported the use of armaments when necessary, including defensive shields. He is a remarkable man and there is no one whose advice I would seek earlier if, God forbid, I was in a high position confronted with life or death decisions. When I meet him I always learn something I did not know, and which is well worth knowing. Unlike most retired statesmen, Kissinger does not endlessly relive the past, although he remembers it exactly and continues to learn from it. Thanks to his business, which advises companies and states on likely global developments, he keeps abreast of the news and behind-the-scenes events in five continents, and travels the world seeing experts of every kind, and rulers who share their inner thoughts with him. This book, which systematically surveys the world, noting sources of tension present and future, and how American-led coalitions of nations can deal with them, is an invaluable handbook for all those who exercise, study and record power politics.

It is not without faults and omissions. It has little to say about international terrorism and how America should deal with it, and my advice to Kissinger is to bring out a new edition with a chapter on the subject as soon as possible - in particular, treatment of the question of how larger-scale terrorist attacks can constitute acts of war, bringing momentous consequences. However, Kissinger does point out the guilty importance of Iran, a state almost on a level with Turkey and Pakistan, in harbouring, supporting and financing terrorists, with a long and fiendish record of anti-American acts. Clearly one long-term object of American foreign policy - possibly a short-term object - ought to be the replacement of the present clerical dictatorship in Iran by a civil, democratic regime which will enable the country, like Turkey, to be brought into the lighted circle of civilisation.

Recent events have underlined the need to update America's own defences of every kind, from airport security to airspace control. They have also demonstrated the possibility of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons being used against Americans not merely by rogue states but by well-organised terrorist gangs. All the problems must be tackled, but the overriding objective must be to ensure that the US is protected from the worst possible contingency, an all-out nuclear attack.

Kissinger produces a masterly justification for the missile shield, whose importance is now obvious: for America must be able to pursue all necessary means to crush international terrorism and its harbourers, without feeling inhibited by nuclear retaliation, however remote the possibility. The truth, as Kissinger recognises, is that America cannot be a superpower in the full sense, let alone a sole one, without a viable defence against every weapon in existence. He points out that criticism of the new system is not new: it merely repeats arguments used, in America and Europe, against every significant addition to

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Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Limited
Sunday Times (London)

September 2, 2001, Sunday

SECTION: Features

LENGTH: 893 words

HEADLINE: The elder Statesman

BYLINE: Tony Allen-Mills

BODY:

DOES AMERICA NEED A FOREIGN POLICY?. by Henry Kissinger. Simon & Schuster Pounds 20
pp352.

Henry Kissinger first became US secretary of state in 1973. It is a tribute to his stamina, if nothing else, that as he approaches his 80th birthday almost three decades later, he remains a colossus of American diplomacy, a man whose views may often be reviled, but who simply can't be ignored. The breadth of his learning, as amply exposed in his new book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, is daunting. The book is subtitled Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century, but it might equally be labelled A History of the World, Part 13 (he has already published a dozen volumes on similar themes).

From the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, past the Ottoman empire, the Boer war and the Bolshevik revolution to China, Camp David and Kosovo, Kissinger sweeps down the cobwebbed corridors of international diplomacy to deliver a thunderous knock at President George W Bush's front door. Pay attention, Dubya, he says, not unkindly. Here's what you need to know about how to run the world.

Bush could certainly do worse than to thumb through a couple of chapters. Whatever anyone thinks of Kissinger -and the trend, of late, has not been flattering -nobody has ever accused him of lacking an opinion. His view of the world encompasses not only the great ideological and practical debates of the age, from the collapse of communism to the arrival of the internet, but also the nitty-grittiest issues of modern international diplomacy, from plans for a European Rapid Reaction Force to problems with agriculture in North Korea.

Kissinger surveys all these subjects through a seemingly bottomless glass of intellectual aplomb, and it is a shame he spoils the effect by an ill-advised diversion in a self-serving final chapter into the controversy over Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator who was detained in Britain on human rights charges.

Kissinger complains that governments are being subjected to the "tyranny of judges" and that international courts should "not allow legal principles to be used as weapons to settle political scores". He somehow fails to mention that in some circles he is regarded as a war criminal -for his role in Cambodia and Vietnam -and that one day he may face an arrest warrant himself.

Pet peeves aside, Kissinger's main theme is American supremacy in the wake of the cold war; his concern is that, historically, great empires end in ruin. "No matter how selflessly America perceives its aims, an explicit insistence on predominance would gradually unite the world against the United States," he warns.

As you might expect from a famed diplomatist, Dr K believes the solution is diplomacy (imagine the sensation had Henry Kissinger concluded that America doesn't need a foreign policy). The real question is, what kind?

No prizes for guessing that Kissinger is no fan of the camera-conscious, make-it-up-as-you-go-along-and-get-out-quick-if-there's-trouble approach of Bill Clinton's grandstanding foreign adventures. Kissinger's contempt for Clintonesque muddle and fudge drips from every page.

What's missing, Henry argues, is "vision", accompanied by "enlightened leadership". America needs "an unapologetic concept of enlightened national interest" that nonetheless acknowledges the concerns of other nations.

"America's ultimate challenge is to transform its power into moral consensus, promoting its values not by imposition, but by their willing acceptance," Kissinger concludes.

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Unfortunately, Dr K has chosen a bad moment to be lecturing Bush about the dangers of smugness. For all his protestations of humility, Bush is the president who tore up the Kyoto accord on global warming and is threatening to do the same to the ABM treaty governing nuclear missiles. He has been in office only seven months, but Dubya's evident contempt for painstakingly negotiated international agreements has already gone a long way to uniting the world against the United States.

The trouble with **Kissinger's** book is not that it isn't a worthwhile contribution to foreign policy debate. (It is certain to delight policy wonks everywhere, even if he is sometimes prone to writing sentences such as: "Fate has propelled a nation convinced of the universal applicability of a single set of maxims into a world characterised by a multiplicity of historical evolutions requiring selective strategies." Eh?) The problem is that Bush and his Texan wrecking crew are showing few signs of attention.

At one point in an early chapter, **Kissinger** acknowledges that "the very range and variety of international systems renders much of the traditional American debate about the nature of international politics somewhat irrelevant".

In an age when domestic concerns rule American political debate ("It's the economy, stupid") and when polls show that most Americans couldn't care less about foreign policy, even **Kissinger's** weighty analysis is in danger of sinking into irrelevance.

Available at the Sunday Times Books Direct price of Pounds 18 plus 99p p&p on 0870 165 8585

Read on...

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BOOKS IN REVIEW

YESTERDAY'S REALISM

BY STANLEY HOFFMANN

Epstein's *Book Business*, a hardback that I happened to have as well. I felt relieved that I'd be able to enjoy the author's wisdom on paper.

It struck me later that I had no recollection of exactly how it came to be that I put the icon for Epstein's digital essays on my computer screen. Where did these essays come from? Somewhere on the World Wide Web, no doubt, but I couldn't tell you where. It's not usually that way with acquiring a book. I can remember quite clearly, even though it was 20 years ago, buying a three-volume set of Montaigne's essays in Powell's, a used-book store on 57th Street in Chicago. I had been eyeing the beautifully bound collection for weeks, vacillating about whether to part with the $25 Powell's was asking. I remember where these books were on the shelves and the feeling of carrying them up to the counter. Once the cash was out of my hands, I felt only the satisfaction that comes from owning something well made, durable, and valuable.

Maybe that's not so important. Information, thoughts, and ideas are useful whether they are presented on paper or by some other means. In *Book Business* [reviewed by Scott Stossel in *TAP*, January 29, 2001], Epstein makes the important distinction between the future of the book industry and the future of books. Methods of printing, of distribution, and of sales are being transformed. Since he believes that the publishing industry is in "terminal decrepitude," Epstein sees the arrival of new technologies as providential. He doesn't fear, as some do, that books will lose their power: "New technologies do not erase the past, but build on it."

Sometimes new technologies supplant old ones, though. In the case of books, I don't think it can happen. To close with a summery thought, I make this bold prediction: You will never, ever, want to take an e-book to the beach. Computer chips, for one thing, do not like the hot sun.

Or am I being too optimistic? Maybe a coolant system for the e-book reading machine is being invented at this very moment and the traditional book as we've known it really is dead. ♦

Henry Kissinger

Of course America needs a foreign policy! The title of Henry Kissinger's new book suggests that it hasn't had one recently—a thesis supported by his many criticisms of President Bill Clinton's diplomacy as well as by the statement, early in the book, that "in the face of perhaps the most profound and widespread upheavals the world has ever seen," the United States has "failed to develop concepts relevant to the

emerging realities.” The problem with *Does America Need a Foreign Policy?*, however, is that the foreign policy Kissinger proposes is flawed. It is so deeply rooted in the past of world politics and in his own conservative conception of Realpolitik that it is only partly relevant to the realities of today.

Kissinger has no peers as a geopolitical thinker. His skill in getting to the heart of issues is particularly evident in his chapter on the Middle East. Describing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he writes that negotiations have to deal with both "the stuff of diplomacy"—territory and strategic issues—and "the stuff of theology," which includes the "mandates of ideology, religion and diplomacy." His ability to sum up a conundrum in an epigram, to paint a country's or a continent's history in a few brushstrokes, to get at the essence of a cultural style, is

unmatched: "Japan's culture does not so much seek to beguile foreigners—as does China's—as to surround them with its pervasive distinctiveness so that they have no choice but to adjust to its requirements." His brand of realism, like that advanced 50 years ago by University of Chicago political scientist Hans Morgenthau, never forgets that it is the actors,

especially the major states, that shape the international system, rather than the other way around. In this view, power is the indispensable coin of the realm of world affairs, force is the

most essential component of power, and a major nation must be forever vigilant so that other nations do not dominate strategically vital regions. A major power must also be forever prudent about not throwing its might around and provoking a coalition of its rivals.

Thus, Kissinger's recommendations about China are sensible (and close to Clinton's strategy!): "A policy that is perceived as having designated China as the enemy primarily because its economy is growing and its ideology

is distasteful would end up isolating the United States." China's passion could turn out to be nationalism, not communism; hence the need for a cautious American policy toward Taiwan and one toward China that perceives the United States as "a potential safety net" for the People's Republic. A confrontational strategy at a time when China does

not have the capacity to dominate Asia would be a grave mistake. The motto for U.S. policy in Asia ought to be balancing, not bullying: The latter could drive China and Russia together again.

Does America
Need a Foreign
Policy? Toward a
Diplomacy for the
21st Century,
by Henry Kissinger.

Simon and Schuster,
352 pages, $30.00.

JULY 30, 2001 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 33

BOOKS IN REVIEW

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Kissinger offers shrewd insights on many fronts. He warns that there is no international consensus to leave nuclear weapons behind and that different motives still push nations to want to acquire them. He notes that globalization could be set back should a major recession develop in the United States. And he offers observations about the growing gap between rich nations and poor ones (as well as between the “globalized” and the “backward” sectors within countries). He delivers a sharp critique of the International Monetary Fund’s inability “to apply political and social criteria” and warns of the danger of a “crisis of legitimacy” for an international economic system that “creates new vulnerabilities to political turmoil.” His rather new emphasis on the need for a dialogue with India (whose conduct during the Cold War he compares to that of the United States at its inception) is welcome. So are—idealisls should recognize it—his observations about the difficulty of implanting “Western democratic principles of political organization” in Africa and his reminder that “the pursuit of moral ends in international affairs has a different context from that in domestic politics.” In diplomacy, Kissinger writes, “morality expresses itself in the willingness to persevere through a series of steps, each of which is inevitably incomplete in terms of the ultimate goal.”

With so great a mastery of his subject, so deep an understanding of history, and so convincing a belief that neither Wilsonian messianism nor the outright championing of American hegemony—those two forms of what he calls the “imposition of American solutions on the world’s trouble spots”—can lead to sensible policies, why is Kissinger’s book ultimately disappointing? For two reasons: its debatable geopolitical advice and its failure to come to terms with all that isn’t pure Realpolitik.

To the first problem, then. Sometimes, Kissinger’s acute perception of possible threats becomes excessive. He feared a rapprochement between the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany during much of the Cold War—it never came—and he still fears a

rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow. His view of Russia is far less benign than his appreciation of China, and there is no attempt here to map possibilities of cooperation with President Vladimir Putin’s regime. A Russia faced with huge external and internal challenges might need the United States as “a geopolitical option” just as China does, yet Kissinger won’t have it. His endorsement of new antiballistic missile defenses is not based on a serious discussion of the threat from rogue states, perhaps because he advocates defenses that could stop “established non-rogue nuclear powers” as well. But if this is so, the arguments against a relaunching of the race for offensive nuclear weapons—and concerns about the unraveling of the whole tapestry of nuclear arms control if the United States dumps the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (which was negotiated by Kissinger, who now minimizes its intrinsic importance)—ought to have been addressed in greater detail and less dismissively. The larger issues of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and of terrorism are not discussed at all.

At times the measures Kissinger proposes are unlikely to improve matters as much as he supposes. Encouraging South Korea to avoid marginalization by taking the lead in negotiations with North Korea is dubious advice, because the United States cannot leave the nuclear issue entirely to the two Koreas. “Determined purposefulness” to preserve the U.S. position in the Persian Gulf is not obviously better than the “thrashing around” of the Clinton administration toward Iraq. Leaving African security questions to the Africans—because there is no strategic American security interest there—is a cop-out.

The idea of a new set of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestinians—one that focuses only on territorial issues (other than Jerusalem) and allows the United States to stop being a “broker in legal compromise” as it was at Camp David—is, on paper, sensible. (Was it really different in the days of Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy?) But the fact that such issues as the right of return, the future of Jerusalem, and the ultimate fate of the settlements have been raised will make it very difficult for the Palestinian negotiators to pour them back into the bottle.

Some of the contradictions in *Does America Need a Foreign Policy?* are bizarre. Kissinger criticizes the United States for failing to put enough force behind its policies after the Korean cease-fire in 1951, after the beginning of negotiations with North Vietnam in 1968, and at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. In doing so, he mixes two cases—Korea and the Gulf—in which force was indeed held back (though for very different reasons) with another, Vietnam, in which the United States exercised little restraint in applying force (though it proved singularly ineffective).

Kissinger wants to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (although not to include the Baltic states) but argues that NATO should be seen as a military alliance, not as an instrument of collective security. Though he worries that NATO missions in other parts of the world threaten to dissolve the alliance “into a multilateral mishmash,” he nevertheless wants the NATO nations to go beyond a mere “safety net” conception, to define common purposes, and to resolve together a host of economic and geopolitical issues. Moreover, Kissinger seems unable to conceive of this sprawling enterprise in terms of anything other than the past—that is, as an unequal partnership in which the United States is the dominant player. He therefore trains his heavy artillery on the notion of an autonomous European military capacity and on the European Union’s insistence on reaching decisions without the participation of the United States. The European force, he writes, “in practice would have to be integrated with NATO.” How attractive is this likely to be to the European Union? Would the EU like to be encased in a transatlantic free trade area and an Atlantic steering group? We are not very far from Kissinger’s 1973 ideas for the “year of Europe”—but how compatible are those ideas with his warnings against the costs and perils of hegemony?

The other flaw of the book concerns those “emerging realties” that Kissinger acknowledges at the outset. He is too intelligent to deny the existence of important new aspects of international affairs: Private economic actors (investors, multi-

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national corporations, speculators) and private pressure groups (economic, humanitarian, and social ones) act along with states; terrorists, mercenaries, and mafiosi operate across borders; and foreign policies are activated not only by the “realism” of state leaders but by the interests, ideas, and passions of citizens and by inside forces mobilized by the revolution in communications. The map of passions must be added to that of bases and resources. But Kissinger’s tendency is either to be blind to or deeply resentful of the imperatives that must be heeded if one hopes to prevent these new forces from breeding chaos. He retreats into long-established views of power politics among sovereign states.

Consider his discussion of globaliza-
tion. He has little to say about how to
deal with “the mismatch between the
world’s political and economic systems.”
He notes that “politics divide the world
into national units” and understands
that for the sake of economic growth
political leaders “cannot survive as
advocates of near permanent austerity.”
But he does not stress the fact that
globalization in its present form is an
American construction whose eco-
nomic and cultural manifestations are
largely American, and that they there-
fore expose the United States to formi-
dable resentments that it is in the
nation’s interest to deflect. And precisely
because he is not among those who see
globalization as a force for individual
emancipation, political accommodation,
democracy, and peace, he needs to tell
us how the disruptions it entails will be
handled in a world in which a few rich
individuals can destroy currencies,
excessive or ill-considered loans can
destroy economies, and the loss or ero-
sion of states’ sovereignty makes it more
difficult for them to prevent or handle
crises. One way to address such insta-
bility would be to have effective global
institutions—the World Trade Organiza-
tion is a beginning—that can regulate
and define norms for world trade,
provide “firebreaks” for the inter-
national financial system, and impose
a modicum of discipline on short-term
or speculative investments. In the old
order before 1914, the need for inter-
national institutions capable of manag-
ing the world economy was not an issue.

Kissinger sees the problem but cannot adequately face the solution: better agencies for global governance now that governance can be left neither to a hegemon that is part of the problem nor to the anarchy of shrinking states.

Kissinger is wise enough to recognize that “two world wars and the insufficient scale of the European nation-state in the face of global challenges have made the nineteenth-century balance of power irrelevant” in Europe, but he fails to underline the originality of the European Union and acknowledge its pioneering qualities: All he sees is a complicated process that excludes the United States from European

decision making. The members of
the European Union have understood
that the EU supplements their power,
strengthens their influence, and allows
them to recover at the union level much
of what they have lost at the national
one. The United States has lost far less
sovereignty than most other states, and
it is wealthier and mightier than all
others. Nevertheless, it can't control
the global economy by itself. It needs
strong institutions both to help it try to
do so and to avoid becoming the single
target of all the world's discontents. Yet
Kissinger has never shown much sym-
pathy for international institutions,
which he finds either incompetent
or too resistant to American pre-
eminence. (It's worth remembering
that Morgenthau, a realist, thought
that the predicament of a nuclear world
would require a world government.)

Beyond economic globalization, there is political globaliza-
tion, which involves a wide-
spread movement for human
rights. Here Kissinger's attitude is a mix
of skepticism and hostility. It is not the
idea of human rights that Kissinger
denigrates—he expresses his support
for it many times—but it is the attempt
to go beyond the mere aspiration
that turns him into a defender of the
Westphalian principles of sovereignty
and nonintervention. (The Peace of

Westphalia, recall, ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648 and led to the rise of the system of nation-states.) In one of his many striking insights, Kissinger points out that by removing religious issues from the subjects of contention and "carnage" in world affairs, the Westphalian principle of noninterference in the domestic

affairs of other states was
"the human rights slogan
of the day." Westphalia,
he states correctly, "dealt
with the problem of
peace and left justice
to the domestic institu-
tions." But the twentieth-
century horrors that
resulted from the practices
of totalitarian regimes and
from the clashes of ethnic
groups within states have
led to a demand for new

principles that justify collective inter-
ference to protect people from mur-
derous enterprises such as "ethnic
cleansing" and genocide. This is a major
aspect of the erosion of the border
between what is inside and what is out-
side the state, and between domestic and
foreign policy. It is not true, as Kissinger
asserts, that contemporary human rights
activists believe that "peace flows auto-
matically from justice." They know that
protecting human rights abroad leads to
turmoil, just as the exercise of collective
security against interstate aggression
breeds violence. But they also know that
the gravest violations of rights require, in
Kissinger's words, "some kind of supra-
national authority, entitled to use force
to make its writ run," and this he deems
unacceptable. Why?

In part, he tells us, it is because recent
cases of military intervention “reflected
no traditional notion of American
national interest,” since “their outcome
could in no way affect any historic defi-
nition of American security.” Kissinger
seems to be arguing that the fact that
such initiatives “were a response to
powerful domestic pressures to alleviate
human suffering” made them ipso facto
suspect. He also rejects such military
interventions because the desire to limit
risks and casualties for the intervenors
reduced the efficacy of the endeavors
and because the intervenors, when
they prevailed, were left with almost

Though he urges that
attention be paid to
"emerging realities,"
Kissinger's worldview
is rooted in the past.

JULY 30, 2001 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35

BOOKS IN REVIEW

insoluble problems of internal reconciliation and nation building. Finally, Kissinger frowns on humanitarian military intervention because it is “put forward as a universal prescription applicable to all situations without reference to the historical or cultural context.” But in many instances—such as Rwanda—nothing was done, and in others—Chechnya—little can be done.

It is, of course, true that extending the notion of collective security from external aggression to internal violations of rights is unlikely to be any more universally applied than the UN charter's ban on aggression. But is this a reason to scrap the prescription, as if the impossibility of arresting all criminals justifies giving up on law and law enforcement?

The interventions that Kissinger trentchantly criticizes—especially those in Bosnia and Kosovo—are open to challenge. To be sure, in Bosnia the intervenors are stuck with an artificial, multi-ethnic new state in which the three ethnic components live apart and two of them seek to reunite with their respective brothers and sisters in Croatia and Serbia. As Kissinger says, the intervenors gave preference to the principle of non-acquisition of territory by force over that of self-determination (which Kissinger seems to support even though it has proved to be a major destroyer of the sovereignty of states). But partition, his preferred solution, would have rewarded Serb and Croat aggressions and would have established a highly destructive precedent. Concerning Kosovo, Kissinger ignores former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic's plans for ethnic cleansing (for which he blames NATO). Kissinger's belief that “the desired outcome of an autonomous Kosovo within Yugoslavia . . . could have been achieved at less cost and in a less convulsive fashion” seems very much like wishful thinking.

The post-Westphalian advances that humanitarian interventions represent have been ad hoc and tentative, and they have raised more problems than they have solved. But the problems they tried to address do need to be addressed. This means, once again, strengthening the international and regional organizations

that give such interventions their legitimacy. That can be done by providing them with standing forces and with a capacity to effect the nation-building tasks of material administration and political reconstruction—in cooperation and coordination with the often discordant nongovernmental organizations whose participation in these tasks is indispensable. The alternative is a world of chaos, with disintegrating pseudostates and ethnic, religious, and political upheavals destroying even more genuine ones. Kissinger himself, having declared Africa of no strategic interest for the United States, acknowledges that a “limited military intervention” might have been a duty, and a success, in Rwanda. He thinks that the violations committed there could have been “quickly brought under control.” But is this more evident than it was in some of the interventions he criticizes?

Kissinger is rather silent on the possibilities that reformed and strengthened collective institutions might offer—even though their members are states, which, as a good Westphalian, he trusts more than he does jurists. He is virulently incensed by the role lawyers have been playing in carrying out what he calls the “unprecedented concept” of universal jurisdiction when it comes to human rights violations. Whether it be nations authorizing domestic prosecutors to seek extradition and trials of accused war criminals, or the setting up of international criminal courts—so far, for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as the controversial International Criminal Court (ICC), which the United States has refused to accept—Kissinger is against such developments. He is not wrong in proclaiming that “any universal system should contain procedures not only to punish the wicked but to constrain the righteous.” But his defense of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and the worst-case scenarios he conjures in the case of the ICC are unconvincing. (Is the heat of those pages somehow an anticipation of his recent misadventure at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where he refused to respond after being summoned by a French court investigating a charge against Pinochet?)

Kissinger is right that there is a tension between the principle of universal jurisdiction and the political need for reconciliation, but there can be no true reconciliation without a degree of justice. He is wrong to think that the advocates of universal jurisdiction believe that “if law replaced politics, peace and justice would prevail.” What they in fact believe is that law is necessary to correct the excesses of politics and power. And Kissinger’s own proposals for an alternative to the ICC would leave the punishment of the authors of war crimes or crimes against humanity in the hands of the UN Security Council—that is, in the throes of politics, often untempered by norms.

Ultimately, Kissinger's case against the new drive for humanitarian interventions dodges the problem that has plagued realists ever since Morgenthau proclaimed the mantra that national interests are paramount. Is there a clearly defined and delimited national interest? On security and survival, it is easy to agree—but is everything that a government claims is in its security interest really necessary? (Think anti-missile defenses, or remember Kissinger's rival Zbigniew Brzezinski, who predicted that the outcome of the Cold War might be decided in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia!) Kissinger is clearly on the side of John Quincy Adams (who said that America “does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. . . . She is the champion and vindicator only of her own” freedom and independence) and of Theodore Roosevelt—not Woodrow Wilson. While Wilson's hyperbolic statements rejecting a “standard of national selfishness” are easy to dismiss, his belief that this age requires us also to think about “the interest of mankind” is not so easily ignored.

Material interdependence; the speed with which political turmoil can be transmitted, if only in the form of millions of refugees (a term not found in the index of Kissinger's book); the “germ of a universal consciousness” detected by Raymond Aron—all of these factors require broadening the concept of the national interest so as to include considerations of world order, justice, and humanity. It is not a matter of imposing them on others who are inevitably suspicious of neocolonialism or all too ready

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to see it in all defenses of human rights. But it is precisely a preponderant power such as the United States that most needs norms to constrain the behavior of others, as well as a conception of interest that goes beyond traditional strategic and geopolitical issues. Even realists recognize the prevention of genocide as a legitimate international interest that justifies intervention. The costs and risks of intervening are high; letting thugs go on rampages is even riskier. The sad fact that military intervention against the crimes of major powers (Russia in Chechnya, China in Tibet) is not possible should not deter us from acting when it is, and from seeking other forms of pressure or dissuasion when it is not. A concept of stability or of order that covers up heinous domestic crimes is both immoral and unrealistic in the emerging world society.

Paradoxically, the world is increasingly unified despite its political fragmentation; and therefore justice as well as peace needs to be integrated into the concept of the national interest—a concept that, beyond the often ambiguous case of state survival and security, has always had a variable content. “Fate,” writes Kissinger, “has propelled a nation convinced of the universal application of a single set of maxims into a world characterized by a multiplicity of historical evolutions requiring selective strategies.” This makes the task of diplomacy more difficult; it does not invalidate the maxims. Kissinger chooses to see in the Vietnam War a fiasco resulting from American “values being implemented too universally,” from “too indiscriminating an identification of its strategic interests with Wilsonian principles.” (He did not say so at the time.) But for every Wilsonian going overboard in Vietnam, there were Wilsonians who didn’t. And for every realist who defended the war in purely strategic and balance-of-power terms, there were realists like Morgenthau and George Kennan who did not. What Vietnam “proved” was a very Kissingerian point—the need to know some history. But it also showed something that, on the whole, Wilsonians understand better than realists do: that what happens within a country is often more decisive than calculations of power balance. What a given statesman declares to be in

the national interest rests on assumptions about the nation's goals and status that go way beyond the strictly geopolitical. The alphabet of realism is too short. Today it is necessary to see the world scene as a contest between a global political system that is struggling to organize itself and a state system

Much of the story of Kissinger is already known (not that it's bad to be reminded), so the question that arises apropos of *The Trial of Henry Kissinger*, a book-length version of two articles Hitchens wrote for *Harper's* last winter, is: Why now? What about this moment leads Hitchens to train his considerable powers of detestation upon Kissinger? Some new facts have come to light in the interim, but the case against Richard Nixon's secretary of state stands much as it did in 1976, when a character in Joseph Heller's novel *Good as Gold* characterized Kissinger "as an odious *schlump* who made war gladly," a quote with which Hitchens opens his book.

And it's not as if time, celebrity, and innumerable $25,000-a-shot speaking engagements have washed Kissinger clean. On the contrary, being tainted provides the essential ingredient of his celebrity. As Hitchens notes, to have the likes of Kissinger at your table

that fiercely clings to principles that are increasingly challenged. Reducing international affairs to the latter is neither wise nor desirable. ♦

STANLEY HOFFMANN is the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard University.

# KISSINGER, IN DEED

BY HARVEY BLUME

From the way that Christopher Hitchens tears into bloated reputations, it's easy to imagine that in another age he would have spent many a predawn hour happily preparing to duel. Now he has flung his challenge at Henry Kissinger, a man who generally liked to use the B-52 for predawn confrontations, though he might also send ground forces and, on special occasions, even an assassin.

is to enjoy the guilty pleasure of proximity to “raw and unapologetic power.” One of the unacknowledged merits of the International Tribunal at The Hague, then, is that it prevents at least some war criminals from being reborn as celebrities.

Because of the Hague tribunal—and efforts by Spanish courts to bring Chilean General Augusto Pinochet to

trial—Hitchens concludes that the time has come to press charges in earnest against Henry Kissinger. Proceedings against Pinochet and against Slobodan Milosevic show that leaders of governments are no longer immune to prosecution for crimes against humanity. Hitchens wants the rules that apply to Chile

and Serbia to apply, also, to a superpower. “The United-States,” he writes, “believes that it alone pursues and indicts war criminals and ‘international terrorists’; nothing in its political or journalistic culture yet allows for the

The Trial of Henry Kissinger, by Christopher Hitchens.

Verso, 160 pages, $22.00.

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Financial Times (London)

August 24, 2001, Friday London Edition 2

SECTION: COMMENT & ANALYSIS; Pg. 13

LENGTH: 834 words

HEADLINE: A lesson in diplomacy: **Henry Kissinger** believes US politicians must learn how to link national and international interests, writes Rob:

BYLINE: By ROBERT THOMSON

BODY:

Reality has a way of forcing even reluctant US presidents to focus on international issues. When Harry Truman, the humble, honourable, almost accidental president from Independence, Missouri, was preparing to leave the White House, he was clear that what really mattered was "foreign policy".

George W. Bush came to office with a reputation for being determinedly domestic. He answered the inter-national quiz questions in the presidential debates but was happiest talking tax cuts and his seeming aversion to the cosmopolitan was reflected in an early unwillingness to travel from Washington to the nearest foreign country, New York. The president soon realised that he had inherited from Bill Clinton a Middle East war in everything but name and was then confronted by the "spyplane" crisis on Hainan Island. Haggling with the Chinese government over the release of the disabled aircraft and its crew was a crash course in diplomacy.

Along comes **Henry Kissinger**, his guttural, thoughtful, calculating voice echoing from every page of Does America Need a Foreign Policy? It is a question whose answer is obvious before a page is turned but he has perceived a need to write a presidential primer.

The book is eerily contemporary (there is a reference to the Hainan crisis) but is no rush job. He outlines the tasks facing the US, from dealing with (or coping with) the European Union to cultivating Japan, and presents most, though not all, of the pragmatic permutations.

Having experienced history close up (sometimes at the expense of less pushy colleagues), Kissinger writes with the certainty of someone who is rarely surprised by the present, which is merely an inevitable continuation of the past. What does surprise him is the propensity of US politicians, on the left and right, to believe that the national interest and the international interest rarely overlap.

Given this lack of vision, he argues, the US does diplomacy at a disadvantage. He worries, for example, that not enough thought has been given to the evolving Europe and that the EU is in danger of developing an identity that is defined by its opposition to all things American.

The suggested answer to this problem of Europe's "almost congenital opposition" (the only thing that annoys him more than the EU as a whole is France in particular) is "leadership", which is easy to say and difficult to define. Kissinger's punt at parsing the concept is that governments must "take their societies from where they are to where they never have been" - that sounds lofty enough but does feel like an unpleasant journey to a distant, inhospitable land.

Bill Clinton had the vocabulary to make foreign policy less foreign to a US audience but he lacked the patience to deal consistently with complex conflicts. In Kosovo and in the Middle East, he rushed to reach agreements that were impossible for the disputing parties to accept. And, with the minutes ticking away on the Clinton body clock, he was even tempted to make a quickie visit to North Korea before leaving office.

He was right to begin a conversation with North Korea and he was also clear that engaging China did not necessarily mean indulging China. The sense of those policies has been recognised by Mr Bush and even more so by Colin Powell, the secretary of state.

Kissinger knows a fair amount about most countries but his special subject is China. He fears that if US conservatives are seeking to create a new enemy, Beijing will easily adapt to that role. And he worries that too many leaders in both countries regard friendly relations with the other as a favour to be bestowed.

It is in his commercial interest to suggest that China is difficult to fathom but he does overstate the cultural differences and is dazzled by the sheer length of Chinese history. Ten of 14 imperial dynasties "lasted longer than the entire history of the United States" but it is also true that the Communist

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government was formed only in 1949 and that the modernisation drive was launched just over two
decades ago. China is both old and immature.

The oddest section of what is an interesting book comes at the end, when he airs deep fears about
judicial extraterritoriality - these get too much space, while the anti-globalisation movement gets too few
words. Perhaps he was inspired by The Trial of **Henry Kissinger**, the diatribe against him by Christopher
Hitchens, whose work is a blend of history and histrionics.

Kissinger's conclusion is that the US must recognise that it is pre-eminent and yet build partnerships to deal with the difficult issues, whether it be defusing a crisis on the Korean peninsula or redefining Russia's role in the world. The same idea was raised by George W. Bush during the pres-idential debates, when he spoke of the US being "humble".

Humility comes naturally to some of the administration's foreign policy experts but those who believe that unilateralism is multilateralism made simple do need to consult Kissinger.

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Korea Times

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HEADLINE: DOES AMERICA NEED A FOREIGN POLICY? MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT, AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, IN ONE FORM OR ANOTHER SENDS ITS RIPPLES AS WELL AS ITS SHOCKWAVES AROUND THE GLOBE. WHETHER IT'S THE ROLE THAT AMERICA HAS PLAYED IN THE MIDDLE EAST PEACE PROCESS, THE

BODY:

However, in Does America Need a Foreign Policy?" Dr. Henry Kissinger points out that the last presidential election was the third in a row in which foreign policy was not seriously discussed by the candidates." Indeed, as Kissinger argues, America's preeminence evolved less from a strategic design than a series of ad hoc decisions." In the post-Cold War era, there seems to be more of a case-by-case response to challenges as they arise" than a long-range foreign policy.

Does America need a foreign policy? The answer would be a resounding yes. In this insightful and thought-provoking analysis of America's foreign policy around the globe, Kissinger explains why America urgently needs a more coherent foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. To be sure, for the next 200 plus pages, he shares his thoughts and insights into many of the foreign policy problems and opportunities that confront the United States today and advances what he considers America's foreign policy goals should be in this age of globalization. Each of the eminently readable seven chapters offers a straightforward analysis and assessment of America's foreign policy objectives in the new millennium. As one of America's, not to mention the world's premier elder statesmen and diplomatists, Kissinger brings an incredible amount of historical breadth and scope to this book. It is just as much compelling as it is historically rich with his views on how conventional diplomacy has changed in recent decades. He covers a wide range of foreign policy problems and challenges facing the United States today including the emergence of modern China, the future role of Russia, the demand for humanitarian intervention, as well as economic globalism as a substitute for world order. In addition, he also addresses one of the book's underpinnings: the fear that America's transformation into the one remaining superpower and global leader may unite other countries against presumed imperial ambitions."

In the first four chapters, Kissinger presents a systematic analysis of America's foreign policy around the globe. He has exhaustively outlined many of the foreign policy issues that America faces today and those that will have to be dealt with in the coming years. To be sure, Kissinger looks at each global region – Europe, Asia, the Americas, the Middle East and Africa – and the challenges that America faces in coming up with well-thought out foreign policy for each one of them.

With a strong sense of history, as well as his own experience as a diplomat, Kissinger looks at each region and analyzes past and present historical foreign policy issues, the current situation, and then makes his projections and suggestions. His country-by-country examination is highly informative and instructional.

First, he gives readers an overview of the challenges currently facing the United States in each of the countries as the sole remaining superpower and then shows how the problems or challenges affect America's national interest. Next, he provides a historical summary of how and why the international community got to its current state and its relationship with the United States. Finally, he offers recommendations for how the United States should respond to these problems and challenges.

Without question, America's foreign policy in Europe is dependent upon the future that NATO will have in the region, as well as the controversial missile defense program. (He offers a pretty thorough assessment of it.) Likewise, with the integration of European countries and the creation of new alliances, Kissinger examines how this might affect America's foreign policy. However, he argues that despite the absence of a commonly perceived unifying threat, geopolitics has not disappeared as an element of international politics and that NATO still remains as an insurance policy against a new Russian imperialism."

On the other hand, Kissinger suggests that in the future NATO will no longer prove adequate as the sole institutional framework for Atlantic cooperation." He envisions a new structure in Atlantic relations that goes beyond the European Union and NATO that could one day include such countries like Canada and

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Mexico. According to Kissinger, a Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA) is a structure that would serve such a purpose."

His coverage of other countries like Russia, Colombia, Mexico, as well as Japan is insightful and impressive. Like most of the countries that he surveys, he looks at how foreign policy has evolved and what steps need to be taken in the future. Each one has its own specific challenges.

Since the end of the Cold War and the break up of the Soviet Union, Russia still poses several challenges for America's foreign policy, but none more than whether or not Russia can be induced to modify its traditional definition of security." Kissinger also suggests that Russia needs to be heard and to allow Russia to participate in international decisions, especially those affecting its security."

Of special interest to readers, here in Korea is his section on North-South relations, America's foreign policy in Korea. In reference to last year's summit, a visit to Washington by North Korea's second highest ranking officer, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's visit to Pyongyang, Kissinger points out that these dramatic events must not obscure the reality that the tensions on the Korean peninsula reflect a series of complex and interlocked issues not resolvable by dramatic gestures."

On the other hand, when it comes to reunification, Kissinger argues that America must not lose sight of the fact that Korea is where the interests of several major powers intersect." According to Kissinger, Japan and China are not eager for the rapid unification of Korea." Whatever America's foreign policy is concerning the reunification of both Koreas, it will also be affected by other countries in the region.

As for the presence of U.S. troops in Korea, Kissinger suggests that the future of Asia will importantly depend on what happens to American forces now stationed along the 38th parallel." He argues that regardless of what the leaders of both Koreas may say now, were tensions to ease dramatically, the presence of American troops could become highly controversial within South Korea."

Likewise, the absence of troops from South Korea could become problematic for the troops and bases now in Japan. Further, on down the road, Kissinger questions the bigger issue of stability in the region.

Kissinger is in top form when he describes the current situation in the Middle East, and to an extent, relations with China. He does not hide his disdain for how the Clinton administration, in its last year, handled the ongoing peace process between Israel and the Palestine. Although the United States has devoted much of its diplomatic effort in the region to resolving Arab-Israeli tensions," Kissinger argues that America's foreign policy needs to address other issues in the region.

China also poses a challenge to how America's foreign policy can adapt to the emergence of modern China. The surveillance plane episode earlier this year was in some ways a wake-up call for how America will have to respond to China in the future. Based on his experience as a member of the Nixon administration, not to mention his role since then as a diplomat, Kissinger has a great grasp for current foreign policy and possible trends in the future.

In one of the more insightful chapters on America's foreign policy, Kissinger sheds genuine insights into how the role of humanitarian intervention has become an important part of America's new diplomacy." According to Kissinger, the new doctrine of humanitarian intervention asserts that humane convictions are so integral a part of the American tradition that both treasure and, in the extreme, lives must be risked to vindicate them anywhere in the world.

On the other hand, he seems a bit skeptical about tracking down those who have committed war crimes or violated human rights and putting them on trial. As much as one would like to see the Saddam Husseins and the Slobodan Milosevic's of the world tracked down and brought to justice, Kissinger takes a more pragmatic stance. It is an important principle that those who commit war crimes or systematically violate human rights should be held accountable," notes Kissinger. But the instinct to punish must be related, as in every constitutional democratic political structure, to a system of checks and balances that includes other elements critical to the survival and expansion of democracy."

Similarly, Kissinger argues that with humanitarian intervention, America needs to understand the relationship between moral principle and day-to-day foreign policy." In the case of the U.S. humanitarian intervention in Somalia, American forces were withdrawn as soon as there were casualties. The limits of humanitarian (or other) intervention are established by the readiness to pay the necessary price, in casualties or in financial sacrifice," notes Kissinger.

This is an important and timely book given the current state of affairs around the world. Whether you agree or disagree with Kissinger's views of America's foreign policy and its stake in countries around the globe, he raises some interesting and valid viewpoints here. Although his prescriptions for what course of action the United States needs to take, concerning foreign policy may not be to everyone's liking, he nonetheless offers a compelling and comprehensively thought out vision for America's foreign policy in

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[lc]

Copyright 2001 Richmond Newspapers, Inc.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch

August 12, 2001 Sunday City Edition

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. E-2

LENGTH: 287 words

HEADLINE: HENRY THE K

BODY:

Henry Kissinger seldom inspires a shrug. Whether favorable or un-, reaction to his writings pays him the compliment of taking him and his arguments seriously. His newest book, Does **America Need a Foreign Policy?** (subtitled, Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century), follows the pattern.

It's on our list, and we intend to get to it before Tannu Tuva joins NATO.

In a tome-length review, Thomas Friedman - who, as foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, often is mistaken for Talleyrand - writes:

> Everything that makes Kissinger the most reviled, and most interesting, statesman of his generation is on display here: the Machiavellian Kissinger that liberal internationalists love to hate, the coolly incisive Kissinger that balance-of-power realists love to love, and the statesman-historian that students of diplomacy have to read.

> What happened to Kissinger's conservative critics - to the defense and foreign-policy thinkers whose arguments against not only Nixonian detente but also Carterite naivete inspired many of the highlights of the Reagan years?

> Kissinger has been attacked - and defended - from all sides. His musings generate interest. He has not faded away. And even when stating the obvious, he writes graceful, provocative prose. His columns appear on Op/Ed Pages. He probably is at work on a six-volume set regarding foreign policy in the 22nd Century.

> Secretaries of State put pen to paper. It goes with the job. Dean Acheson did not write as much as Kissinger but he wrote as well. Warren Christopher's memoirs sold at least 17 copies. Madeleine Albright probably will inflict her autobiography on the reading public, too; perhaps she already has. But Henry the K is forever.

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Copyright 2001 Sun-Sentinel Company
Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL)

August 19, 2001 Sunday Broward Metro Edition

SECTION: ARTS & LEISURE; Pg. 10D

LENGTH: 593 words

HEADLINE: KISSINGER SHOWS BIAS, CONFUSION

BYLINE: Craig Eisendrath Book Correspondent

BODY:

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century. Henry Kissinger.
Simon & Schuster. $30. 318 pp.

Readers of Henry Kissinger's memoirs, the last volume of which, Years of Renewal, came out in the spring of 1999, will be familiar with the insightful, though self-serving and sometimes inaccurate, portrayal of diplomatic history written by President Nixon's national security adviser and secretary of state. What is new and dismaying in Does America Need a Foreign Policy? is the frequent imprecision of Kissinger's writing. Muddled sentences and platitudes abound. For example, at one point, Kissinger states, "This generation is subject to being seduced by the idea of riskless global relations as compensation for the intense competitiveness of its private lives," a sentence which leaves this reader clueless.

For the most part, Kissinger prescribes a foreign policy that resembles that of the Austrian diplomat Furst von Mettergybh, who subtly constructed Europe's balance of power after the Napoleonic wars. Despite Kissinger's context of contemporary history, the reader may feel he is prescribing a foreign policy for the 19th rather than the 21st century, a world dominated by sovereign states rather than a world increasingly united by transnational organizations, economic connections and nongovernmental organizations.

Kissinger emphasizes the need for foreign policy to have ascendance over economic policy, and to have a credible, clear and distinctly national self-interest as its guiding principle. "So long as the post-Cold War generation of national leaders is embarrassed to elaborate an unapologetic concept of enlightened national interest, it will achieve progressive paralysis, not moral elevation," he argues.

Globalism by itself is inadequate to form a basis of our foreign relations, Kissinger warns. Rather, the diplomacy of the Cold War, the period he was in power, is his model, a policy driven by national self-interest fulfilled through a close working relationship between the United States and the NATO democracies. Despite some disclaimers, he disdains a policy guided by morality, universal principles or multinational conventions or organizations, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations or the International Criminal Court.

Echoing the current Republican disdain for "humanitarian intervention," he radically overstates the interventionist position when he writes, "On the left, many see the United States as the ultimate arbitrator of domestic evolutions all over the world."

When convenient, Kissinger confuses rhetoric with policy, a tendency which results in biased historical readings of almost exclusively Democratic statesmen Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Bill Clinton, whom he claims were driven by moralism rather than national self-interest. Kissinger ignores or misreads clearly nationalistic actions such as the "Truman Doctrine" or Wilson's realpolitik at Versailles, or Clinton's bombing of Iraq or his refusal to intervene in Rwanda.

Nevertheless, as Kissinger takes the reader around the world in a review of our foreign relations, he is simply too bright to ignore, despite his sometimes confused logic and his patent biases. As for the writing, Kissinger needs a more aggressive editor to help him clean up his act.

Craig Eisendrath reviews books for the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune Co. newspaper. A former Foreign Service officer, he is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO; Kissinger

TYPE: BOOK REVIEW

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Books Editor: Bill Wineke, (608) 252-6146

BOOKS

Wisconsin State Journal

Sunday, July 15, 2001 • F3

## BEST SELLERS

### Fiction

1. *Leap of Faith* by Danielle Steel: Upon returning to the French plateau of her childhood, a woman encounters new love and mortal danger. (Weeks on list: 3)

2. "P" Is For Peril by Sue Grafton: The California private eye Kinsey Millhone searches for a prominent specialist in geriatric medicine who is missing. (4)

3. *Seven Up* by Janet Evnovich: Stephanie Plum, a New Jersey bounty hunter, is assigned the task of finding a semiretired mobster. (2)

4. *The Jury* by Steve Martini: The lawyer-sleuth Paul Madriani represents an important medical researcher who has been charged with the murder of a young colleague. (1)

5. *Hollywood Wives — The New Generation* by Jackie Collins: The loves, passions and ruthless ambitions of women in today's Hollywood. (2)

6. *Cane River* by Lalita Tademy: The story of four generations of African-American women, from 1834 to 1936. (2)

7. *Back When We Were Grownups* by Anne Tyler: A 53-year-old woman, the head of an unruly extended

# The many faces of BUDDHA

A book explores the complexities of one of the world's ancient religions.

By Richard N. Ostling

Associated Press

Buddhism is winning converts beyond its traditional heartland, but for many Westerners its message remains alien.

Donald S. Lopez Jr., professor of Buddhist studies at the University of Michigan, says that the faith's hallmark is that "a permanent, indivisible, autonomous self is an illusion and that the belief in such a self is the cause of all suffering." This ignorance about the nature of things must be overcome.

The ultimate aim is to escape the endless cycle of death and rebirth into other lives and life forms ("reincarnation") and reach a state where desire and conscious attachment that causes suffering are extinguished

from the Bible.

Though the Buddha's birth is traditionally placed at 563 B.C., there's no reference to his teachings being written down until 29-17 B.C. A longer gap, some 1,000 years, separates the Buddha's life from the earliest written accounts about it.

By contrast, even liberal-skeptical scholars see a gap of only four to seven decades between Jesus' death and the final written form of the four Gospels that recount his life and teachings.

The result, Lopez contends: "It is impossible to know precisely what the Buddha taught," so authorship and authority are vexing matters.

"Strictly speaking," Lopez writes, all teachings attributed to the Buddha "are apocryphal because none can be identified with complete certainty as a record of the teaching of the historical Buddha."

Another result is the rift among Buddhism's three major

ences among Christians. The Yale scholar Jaroslav Pelikan wrote that nowhere in world religion is the problem of defining the scriptures "more acute and more complicated."

An additional aspect is that the scriptures present teachings of the Buddha that conflict with each other. Again, there are far fewer similar problems with the Bible.

For instance, along with the Buddha's fundamental "no-self" doctrine, the scriptures also quote him as saying "the self is one's protector."

Then there's the fact that the scriptures are "far beyond the capacity of a single person. ... Not even the most erudite scholar is expected to know the names of all the works included, much less their contents," says Lopez.

One of Tibet's scriptural canons contains 1,108 works regarded as teachings from the Buddha or given with his sanc-

## BOOK CORNER

### NONFICTION

### Kissinger's thoughts on the empire

The United States of America is the world's mightiest power — and that fact alone presents this nation with unusual difficulties, says former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

In "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?

Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century" (Simon & Schuster: $30), Kissinger warns that America's role as a superpower threatens its position both internationally and domestically.

He concludes by issuing a warning against those who would use America's power to inflict its will on the rest of the world.

"The road to foreign leadership to domestic decay because, in time, the claims of om-

nipotence erode domestic restraints. No empire has avoided the road to Caesarism unless, like the British Empire, it devolved its power before this process could develop. In long-lasting empires, every problem turns into a domestic issue because the outside world no longer provides a counterweight.

"And as challenges grow more diffuse and increasingly remote from the historic domestic base, internal struggles become ever more bitter and in time violent. A deliberate quest for hegemony is the surest way to destroy the values that made the United States great."

The book is a clearly written assessment of the world today and of what, in Kissinger's mind at least, the American role is in that world.

Kissinger also gives his views on Asia, Africa, and on international cooperation. Basically, he argues that the paradigm established by the Cold War, in which the free nations were united in opposing Communism, has little to offer when looking at the rest of the world, where the interests of individual nations work against permanent alliances that are in the interest of the United States.

— William R. Wineke

www.tampastrib.com

BOOKS

America's most famous realist reflects on trends in foreign policy

DOES AMERICA NEED A FOREIGN POLICY? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century. By Henry Kissinger. Simon & Schuster. 318 pages. $30.

BY RICHARD BERNSTEIN

NEW YORK — Henry A. Kissinger's new book, "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?" illustrates why Kissinger, almost alone among living secretaries of state, has retained prestige and influence as a commentator on international affairs.

His book is several things. It is a description of the present moment, a period of extraordinary American global ascendancy that will be challenged by new forces. It is a tour of the horizon of international situations, from China to Colombia, Berlin to Buenos Aires. It is also a statement of a credo, an incisive defense of Kissinger's version of realism in diplomatic matters.

Those who have read Kissinger's earlier books, es-
says and opinion articles will find the basic themes of
his latest book and some of its cautionary words and
predictions familiar. Kissinger argues, as he has be-
fore, that the United States must accommodate a ris-
ing China until or unless it poses a direct and unmis-
takable threat to the United States. He worries that in
the post-Cold War world, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization will lose its sense of purpose and dis-
solve "into a multilateral mishmash."

Kissinger argues vigorously for a missile defense
system. "With all respect for the views of allies and
other important countries, the United States cannot

condemn its population to permanent vulnerability,”
he writes. He predicts physical and moral exhaustion
if the United States follows the impulse, strong in re-
cent years, to intervene either to stop atrocities or to
spread its own values and ways of life. “The United
States will drain its psychological and material re-
sources if it does not learn to distinguish between
what it must do, what it would like to do, and what is
beyond its capacities,” he says.

The world, in Kissinger's view, is teetering on the edge of something new. The Cold War is over, but a clear new global configuration has not emerged. The newness of things gives an old tension new meaning, the tension between globalist and missionary impulses, on one hand, and hardheaded realism on the other. Kissinger traces the first back to Woodrow Wilson and the second to what he calls Jacksonianism, after Andrew Jackson, our first backwoods president and a man inclined to turn to the American interior rather than to meddle in global politics. Kissinger clearly tends to the Jacksonian side of the spectrum, though not to isolationism, and this book spells out many of his reasons.

Realism, especially to its opponents, has always
had a coldhearted, Bismarckian aura, a sense that na-
tional interests take priority over the more warm-
hearted concern for the welfare of individuals within
the nation or within other nations. Kissinger argues
that policies stemming primarily from moral purpose,
disconnected from the national interest, would proba-
bly fail and would exhaust the country. A realistic at-
tachment to the national interest, guided not just by

the desirable but also by the possible, has greater po-
tential to realize moral purposes, he says.

Kissinger offers as examples the crises in Iraq and
Kosovo to make his point about what he considers the
dangers of latter-day Wilsonianism triumphing over
the realistic impulse. When Iraq expelled U.N. inspec-
tors at the end of 1998, squelching efforts to monitor
its development of weapons of mass destruction, the
American response was a series of air attacks, carried
out only at night (to avoid civilian casualties) for four
nights running. After the bombing, the world basically
acquiesced in Iraq's rejection of U.N. supervision,
with attendant risks to the Western oil supply and to
the safety of Iraq's neighbors.

By contrast, when Serbian human rights violations
in Kosovo caught the media's attention a few months
later, the former Yugoslavia was bombed by NATO,
under American prodding, for 78 days around the
clock, even though, as Kissinger puts it, "Kosovo rep-
resented no threat to American security in any tradi-
tional sense."

For Kissinger, this difference in response — weak when the national interest was at stake, overbearing when the motive was essentially humanitarian — marks the possible drift of American policy.

Concluding a biting and tough-minded review of
the last several years of American policy in the mo-
rass of the former Yugoslavia, Kissinger concludes:
"On one level, the growing concern with human
rights is one of the achievements of our age and is
certainly a testament to progress toward a more hu-
mane international order. But its advocates do their

cause no favor by pretending that it can be separated
from all traditional notions of foreign policy, and that
American self-restraint in the pursuit of its historic val-
ues was thoughtless or immoral."

There is a partisan flavor to much of this argu-
ment, and in places, too much abstraction as well. Kis-
singer makes specific and clear arguments about the
Balkans — for example, that the United States had es-
sentially no business making unified multiethnic
states its goal, rather than allowing for ethnic separat-
ism — but he does not make clear what, in the face of
the slaughter in Bosnia, for example, he would have
done differently had he been in power.

OR, ON CHINA, he claims that the Clinton admin-
istration lacked "a definition of the national interest
that gives the relationship some geopolitical content."

Maybe, but after its initial human-rights approach
to China, didn't the Clinton administration essentially
pursue the goals of a Kissingerian policy by treating
China as a rising power that should be encouraged to
play by the rules of the international game? Wasn't
"geopolitical content" implicit in virtually everything it
did toward China? Again, Kissinger remains some-
what general here, not saying concretely how the pol-
icy pursued might have been different.

Still, "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?" is con-
gent because it is informed by a consistent vision, one
in which morality is measured not by purity of inten-
tions but by the nature of results. President Bush and
his advisers would do well to read this book.

► Richard Bernstein is a New York Times book reviewer.

Learn from
Disney

RICHARD E. FOGLESONG

Married to

Shaara moves back in time
from Gettysburg to Boston

[1c]

The Economist July 7th 2001

Books and arts 105

▸ demographic who has worked in South Africa since 1966. says the problem in white-run South Africa was that apartheid had few perpetrators but many beneficiaries; in Rwanda there are few beneficiaries but almost all Hutus took part in genocide. Simple justice, which would perpetuate the bitterness and divisions, would be revenge masquerading as justice. "The price of justice would be the perpetuation of civil war." he says. He suggests the victors should blame the system, not individuals, making the perpetrators victims too.

Mr Mamdani's political settlement is

not democracy, which would simply restore the majority Hutus to power, but an acceptance of the Hutu and Tutsi with political, not cultural or class affiliations. He recommends a broad-based constitutional settlement that includes everyone prepared to give up violence whatever their ideology. More Burke than Hobbes, this solution is based on the knowledge that the question "who is to be master?" will be answered by death, unless both sides are prepared to cede power and answer instead: everyone.

In its transitional government of na-

tional unity after the 1994 election. South Africa followed just that solution. Whatever problems the country has now, the revenge that many predicted has not happened.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission played a vital role in this. It has produced three remarkable books: its own horrific and moving five-volume report; Archbishop Desmond Tutu's "No Future Without Forgiveness" (Doubleday; Rider: 1999); and Antjie Krog's "Country of My Skull" (Times Books; Jonathan Cape: 1999). Archbishop Tutu's is a passionate personal >>

Books-in-brief: American foreign policy

## How to be Number One

Four new books debate whether America needs a long-term global foreign policy at all

Does America Need a Foreign Policy?
Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century.
By Henry Kissinger. *Simon & Schuster; 318 pages; $30 and £20*

AMERICA'S most famous foreign-policy mandarin is back again, this time with advice for the Bush administration. Little here is new: warmed-over realism peppered with vigorous criticism of the Clinton legacy, with chapters on international justice and globalisation. Mr Kissinger tackles an array of issues—including China, “rogue states” and the Balkans—but his critiques are similar. He attacks Clinton's foreign policy for having had too much sloppy moralism and too little long-term vision and discipline. Yet many solutions he calls for do not differ dramatically from the policies currently under review.

More intriguing is his excoriation of the movement toward global jurisprudence and an international criminal court. Here Mr Kissinger's liberal critics will charge that his straw men are exaggerated. But they might also admit that his pragmatic outlook provides some relief from the muscular unilateralism in vogue today, at least on a rhetorical level, in certain parts of the administration and in Congress.

Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defence Policy.
*Edited by Robert Kagan and William Kristol. Encounter Books; 402 pages; $22.95 ($15.95 paperback)*

SUCH muscular unilateralism is well represented in this collection of writings, published shortly before last year's presidential election. Many of its contributors have close ties to the Bush team, and one, Paul Wolfowitz, is now second-in-command at the Pentagon.

The tone of the essays ranges from

BOOKS IN BRIEF

centre-right to hardline. One author advocates high tariffs against Chinese exports and an unambiguous American commitment to defend Taiwan if China attacks. Another calls for an increase in defence spending by a third so that America can simultaneously engage in the Balkans, fight Iraq and North Korea, and "contemplate war with China or Russia". But this book will probably fail to convince those readers who ask why a nation that houses an unmatched nuclear arsenal and spends more on defence than the next eight countries combined should be so fretful about a perceived strategic "crisis".

Defending America: The Case for Limited National Missile Defence. By James M. Lindsay and Michael E. O'Hanlon. *Brookings Institution; 258 pages; $24.95. Plymouth; £18.50*

EFFECTIVE missile defence may take many years to achieve, but it already dominates American foreign-policy discussions. This lucid and dispassionate book tries to bring the missile debate back to earth and find a middle ground

between true believers and sceptics. The authors propose a limited, two-tier defence system that focuses mainly on intercepting missiles from smaller "rogue" states (such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea) in the initial ("boost") phase of their launch.

A more ambitious version, they say, would destroy the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, compelling Russia to forgo anti-proliferation efforts, avoid deep cuts in offensive nuclear arms and sell countermeasure technologies to the highest bidder. By tying missile defence to broader strategic and foreign-policy issues, Messrs Lindsay and O'Hanlon usefully sort out this complex topic for non-specialists.

Foreign Policy for America in the Twenty-First Century: Alternative Perspectives.
*Edited by Thomas H. Henriksen. Hoover Institution Press; 152 pages; $15*

READERS seeking an overview of American foreign policy will find this slim volume helpful, although some authors simply rehash the Clinton years. The more interesting contributions include a piece on promoting democracy and a proposal for bolstering globalisation's legitimacy. A particularly pithy concluding article by Walter McDougall argues that America does not actually need a long-term strategic vision in the absence of a major war or crisis.

The nation should instead build on its core "assets". These include a strong economy and military, regional alliances and the pan-American institutions affecting such challenges as illegal immigration and drugs. Otherwise, he writes, America risks adopting a "grasshopper mode—peripatetic, noisy, hopping into other people's backyards, and unready when the weather turns nasty."

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September 16, 2001, Sunday

SECTION: Overseas news

LENGTH: 1707 words

HEADLINE: Kissinger flies with the hawks

BYLINE: Sarah Baxter

BODY:

America's former secretary of state and leading strategist tells Sarah Baxter that his country is suffering the consequences of being too soft on Saddam Hussein after the Gulf war. It should pursue the terrorists with maximum ferocity - but take care that it does not leas to an unlimited conflict it cannot control.

This is no time for jokes, but sometimes they go to the heart of the matter. Henry Kissinger, America's former national security adviser and secretary of state, knows just such a one.

"In the second world war, somebody asked how to solve the submarine problem. The answer was to heat the ocean and boil them to the surface." But that's not possible, everybody gasped. "Look," the answer came, "I've given you the idea, you worry about the practicalities." There can be no clearer indication of President George W Bush's dilemma. Drastic action against the terrorists who attacked New York and Washington is necessary. On that, almost everybody in America is agreed. But what is to be done? It is time to think the impossible and prepare for the achievable.

Kissinger has just published a book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, in which he argues that the nation is at its zenith, enjoying unparalleled military, economic and cultural pre-eminence in the world. This, he argues, is a surprisingly uncomfortable and potentially dangerous spot to occupy - one that requires tact and diplomacy, together with the quiet exercise of strength of the kind that has not been accorded in the past to the Middle East.

The disastrous consequences of diplomatic failure can be seen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Of course, Kissinger would have rather been proved wrong than see America mourn its dead. Yet, as we talked on the morning after the devastating attack on his countrymen, it was clear his mind was racing ahead to the foreign policy challenge Bush now faces.

"We've got a big immediate problem," he admitted. "We've got to take care of the wounded, restore services and allow time for grieving. We also have to find out who did this. An attack on this scale needs a base, an organisation that is capable of carrying it out. We've got to make their survival or functioning impossible.

"If we are determined enough, this 'war' doesn't need to escalate. Nobody is going to confront America head on. The terrorists have already made our lives a misery. You can't stop their attacks, but you can make it more costly and difficult for them."

Hawkish talk, but Kissinger is not just referring to military retaliation. In his view that is only part of the answer, perhaps the least significant part. "I'd go after the terrorists with military measures," he said firmly. "If we can't get an intelligence service that knows about these organisations, we need a new service."

Tough-guy reactions, though, do not solve long-term problems. "When buildings are destroyed and civil life comes to an end, you've had action taken against the very essence of society. This is not just about the World Trade Center going down. If we don't surmount the problem, we will be guaranteed more tense situations in the future," he said.

It is his belief that Americans have ignored the rest of the world at their peril. Since the cold war, politicians have become more obsessed than ever with domestic politics; there are no votes abroad.

Kissinger wants his countrymen to stop and think about foreign affairs for a change. "The USA may be at the height of its powers, but we need to define our national purposes. We used to be confident of our place in the world. Now there's no consensus about what the danger is."

The experience of conflict and reconstruction defined the post-war political mood. Americans emerged

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victorious with an enduring sense of themselves as the "good guys" -fighting the Nazis in the 1940s and the communists after that. The New Deal, which pump-primed the American economy after the Depression, was replicated on an international scale by the Marshall Plan and war-torn Europe was rebuilt. After so many years of self-congratulation, it is puzzling for Americans to know they are regarded with such hatred in some parts of the world that the atrocities of the past week were greeted with cheers.

While America is united in the face of tragedy, **Kissinger** argues that it lost some of its sense of values and direction long ago.

"This consensus started to fall apart after Vietnam, when we tried to apply the same principles in Asia as we'd applied in Europe," he said. With hindsight, he believes it was a mistake for America to enter the Vietnam war. "I was not an Asia expert at the time, but I was not uncomfortable with the decision to go in. I assumed the government knew what it was doing." But it had no get-out plans nor vision of what exactly it thought it could achieve.

Newsweek recently published a memo from President Nixon to Kissinger, which Nixon's biographer, Richard Reeves, has just unearthed. It asked starkly: "Is it possible we were wrong from the start about Vietnam?"

Kissinger now believes "we" were. Although he claimed "Nixon wrote a lot of memos that reflected the mood of the moment and I can't remember this particular one", he conceded: "It's not a wrong question. I think we were wrong from the start."

It is a surprising statement, given that he is being harried by demonstrators in America and elsewhere for war crimes against the Vietnamese and Cambodian peoples, with the Chileans, East Timorese and others thrown in for good measure. He has been targeted by the left as the American version of General Pinochet, to be given no rest until he is hauled before the courts. He finds the comparison offensive. "I don't consider myself in the same category. It's an easy thing to attack me because I'm not a politician any more. It's the mentality of a new inquisition."

He remains, at 78, what he always was: the master of realpolitik. Americans are too eager to believe that "our institutions are universally applicable immediately. It has always been said that I only emphasise power, but that's not true. Without recognition of the realities of the world you cannot be effective, but without a moral compass you cannot find your way through the dilemmas that foreign policy throws up".

The simple foreign policy decisions are made low down the political food chain. Presidents have the responsibility of making the 51%-49% decisions. "If you require a great man in every generation, then you are overstretching your society," said Kissinger. "The great achievement of British foreign policy in the 19th century was that it had a relatively high standard of performance, which it was able to keep for generations."

To his mind, events in Kosovo back up this thesis that doing what might appear to be the right thing - intervening on behalf of those seeking independence from Serbia - can have disastrous consequences and create "more long-term problems than a more measured approach would have done".

The muddled approach of past administrations to the Middle East has now turned out to have the most terrible consequences of all. The Middle Eastern arena is no place, argues Kissinger, to play at foreign politics. The first mistake was to let Saddam Hussein remain in power and then fail to keep him "in his box".

As a result, the sanctions regime is in tatters, the United Nations inspection of weapons has collapsed and Saddam, who may be collaborating with the perpetrators of last week's hijackings and crashes, "faces no obstacle to the production of weapons of mass destruction".

Another costly mistake was to misunderstand the incompatible objectives of the Palestinians and Israelis when the Oslo peace agreement was signed in 1993.

"The dream of Israeli doves," writes Kissinger, "has been that they might live with their Arab neighbours as, say, Belgium and Holland do with each other."

"But the majority of Arab doves - Palestinians especially - think of peace not as fulfilment, but as acquiescence in facts they are powerless to change." Given the chance, he believes, the Palestinians not only want the West Bank and Jerusalem, but also historic towns such as Jaffa in their hands.

If the attacks on America last week were in part the result of these catastrophic failures of comprehension, it is all the more reason, said Kissinger, to act decisively now to quash the terrorists and build up good relations with countries that might otherwise join the ranks of America's enemies.

.../documentDisplay?_docnum=1&_ansset=A-WA-B-B-MsSEVY-UUW-AUUAWDDWUA-CA9/21/01

2 780305 726000

Henry Kissinger

FEB 1 2 2004

Beigique

Tageblatt

01/10/03

Un Prix Nobel et la justice internationale

Guy Wagner

Dr. Heinrich (1) Alfred, dit Henry Kissinger, né le 27 mai 1923 près de Nuremberg dans une famille juive qui émigra en 1938 à New York où il obtint la citoyenneté américaine en 1943, diplômé de Harvard, conseiller des présidents D. Eisenhower, J. F. Kennedy et L. B. Johnson, secrétaire d'Etat de R. M. Nixon et de G. Ford, président du National Security Council, était le maître de la politique étrangère US jusqu'à J. Carter (1977).

C'est lui qui a conclu avec Le Duc Tho les accords sur le désengagement américain du Vietnam, accords qui ont valu aux deux le Prix Nobel de la Paix 1973; c'est lui qui a promu la détente avec l'URSS; c'est lui qui a œuvré pour l'ouverture des USA vers la Chine de Mao.

C'est lui aussi qui était derrière tous les coups tordus de la politique de son pays: Derrière la façade brillante du „nouveau Metternich“, du „magicien de la diplomatie“ se cachait un personnage impitoyable qui „adorait œuvrer dans l'ombre“. Or, ces zones d'ombres se sont éclairées depuis qu'à partir de 1998, sous la pression de l'opinion publique, un grand nombre de documents officiels américains ont été déclassifiés par Clinton.

Ces papiers ont permis à un journaliste britannique, Christopher Hitchens (2), d'établir l'inventaire des actes de nature criminelle de ce monsieur. Relevons les plus nootores: guerre secrète auzbord; assassinat du général chilien René Schneider; soutien direct au coup d'Etat chilien du 11 septembre 1973; appui aux dictatures au Chili et en Argentine; implication dans la création du plan „Condor“, ce terrifiant réseau de chasse aux opposants dans six dictatures: Chili, Bolivie, Brésil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentine; bombardements massifs des populations civiles en Indochine; soutien secret à la tentative d'assassinat de Mgr Makarios à Chypre; complicité dans l'invasion et le génocide au Timor Oriental.

Mettant à nu les vraies motivations de Kissinger – cynisme, argent, pouvoir –, Hitchens démontre aussi comment ce félon, alors qu'il travaillait officiellement pour Lyndon B. Johnson, a sciemment retardé la fin de la Guerre du Vietnam, afin de servir les visées du camp républicain en 1968! Lorsque le conflit s'arrêta, il y avait plus d'un demi-million de victimes supplémentaires.

Deux films ont suivi la publication de Hitchens: „L'honneur perdu de Henry Kissinger“, de Wilfried Huisman et Hé-

L'assassin et l'instigateur

ribert Blondiau, et „Le cas Kissinger“, d’Alex Gibney et Eugène Jarecki, et aujourd’hui, Kissinger, est dans la ligne de mire de la justice pénale internationale, car passible de poursuites pour crimes contre l’humanité et crimes de guerre. Pour Martín Almada, Prix Nobel alternatif 2002 et découvreur des archives du Plan Condor, „Henry Kissinger a tué plus que Ben Laden“, et pour Vasilis Zoumpos, militant de l’ONG Globalise Resistance, il est „le criminel de guerre vivant le plus notoire (...), responsable de la mort de millions de gens à travers le monde“.

Diplomate criminel

„Aussi, des juges du monde entier souhaitent-ils l’interroger: le fameux juge espagnol Baltasar Garzón, les Français Roger Le Loire et Sophie Château qui enquêtent sur la disparition de cinq compatriotes au Chili, le juge argentin Claudio Bonadio qui veut l’entendre sur son implication dans le coup dans son pays, le chilien Juan Guzman Tapia qui a soumis aux autorités américaines une commission rogatoire contenant 17 questions qu’il aimerait lui poser dans le cadre de l’affaire Charles Horman, journaliste, cinéaste et écrivain américain tué par les sbires de Pinochet („Missing“ de Costa-Gavras). De son côté, Joyce, la veuve de Horman, veut forcer Kissinger à témoigner. Quant à la famille du général Schneider, elle exige trois millions de dollars de dommages et intérêts, tandis qu’une coalition de victimes et de militants des droits humains a déposé plainte pour l’implication de Mr. K. dans l’opération Condor.

Les documents déclassifiés révèlent la solidarité totale de Kissinger et du gouvernement US avec le dictateur chilien et sa bande de tortionnaires et d'assassins: „Our D-Day“ ou „Chile's coup

was close to perfect“ peut-on lire. Sous l’égide de leur secrétaire d’Etat, les USA sont restés en contact constant avec Pinochet et lui ont accordé un soutien sans faille durant les années de terreur, y compris dans les assassinats du général légaliste Carlos Prats et de son épouse Sofia Cuthbert en 1974, et du général Orlando Letelier et de son aide de camp Ronni Moffitt en 1976.

La pression contre Kissinger ne cesse de croître. Les National Security Archives l'ont contraint à restituer au Département d'Etat les 10.000 pages de verbatim de ses conversations téléphoniques entre 1973 et 1977, une campagne internationale de pétition a été lancée pour l'écart des institutions dont il est membre: UNESCO, Comité International Olympique, International Rescue Committee, American Academy de Berlin, College William and Mary, Aspen Institute, et on exige officiellement que le Prix Nobel de la Paix lui soit retiré.

Un mois seulement après y avoir été nommé par Bush, „Dear Henry“ a dû démissionner de la tête de la commission d'enquête sur les événements du 11 septembre 2001, la polémique soulevée par les accusations portées contre lui ayant été trop forte.

Que dans son dernier livre (3), Kissinger récuse le Tribunal pénal international (TPI), qui s'en étonnerait? Il a tout à en redouter.

> (1) „Heinrich! Mir graut's vor dir.“
(Goethe: Faust I)

(2) In: The Trial of Henry Kissinger - Les Crimes de M. Kissinger, éd. Saint-Simon, 2001

(3) In: Does America Need a Foreign Policy?
– Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century,
Simon and Schuster, 2001 – La Nouvelle
Puissance Américaine, Fayard, 2003

Pour sourire un peu, allez voir: http://www.markfiore.com/animation/staffing.html

Bimensuel

T.M. : 20 000

☎ 01 48 87 48 58

L.M. : 85 000

DU 16 AU 28 FEVRIER 2003

LA QUINZAINE
LITTERAIRE

ESSAIS, DOCUMENTS

« L'ombre du grand homme a-t-elle, à
la façon d'un chapeau trop large, effacé
jusqu'aux traits de mon visage ? » : Jean
Ristat, associé à Francis Crémieux,
publie Avec Aragon chez Gallimard, où
paraît en Pléiade le troisième volume
des Œuvres romanesques du même
Aragon. Le Dictionnaire de Wittgenstein,
de Hans-Johann Glock est traduit de
l'anglais pour la Bibliothèque de philo-
sophie du même éditeur, tandis que la
Bibliothèque des sciences humaines
accueille Le Siècle du gêne d'Evelyne
Fox-Keller.

On relève aux éditions La
Découverte un titre explicite de l'écolo-
giste Alain Lipietz, Et maintenant,
recoudre, ainsi qu'un document de l'édi-
teur Philippe Pignarre sur « le secret de
l'industrie pharmaceutique », Amères
pilules.

Le philosophe Michel Lacroix publie
*Le Courage réinventé* chez Flammarion,
où André Candiard dénonce L'Anomalie
Berlusconi et Frédéric Encel, associé à
Olivier Guez, *La Grande Alliance* (« De
la Tchétchénie à l'Irak : un nouvel ordre
mondial »).

Jean-Claude Milner analyse d'un
texte court *Le Pas philosophique de
Roland Barthes* (Verdier).

Jacques Le Goff s'est associé au jour-
naliste Nicolas Truong pour donner Une
histoire du corps, qui paraît chez Liana
Levi. On note au Cerf éditeur un Jean
Chrysostome, biographie de l'orateur dit
« Saint-Jean Bouche d'Or » traduite de
l'allemand et due à Rudolf Braendle.

Hubert Reeves et Frédéric Lenoir décrivent une Tempête sur la planète Terre, au Seuil, où paraissent Le dossier de l'eau, de Marc Laimé, une Histoire de l'avortement, de Jean-Yves Le Naour et Catherine Valenti, ainsi qu'une Histoire sentimentale des sciences, par Nicolas Witkowski et un nouvel essai d'Arturo Danto intitulé *La Madone du Futur*.

Chez Fayard, où paraissent des docu-
ments, entre autres, de Claude Allègre
(La Science pour tout le monde : le titre
est provisoire) et Henry Kissinger (La
nouvelle puissance américaine),
Édouard Balladur intervient en historien
A propos de Jeanne d'Arc : réflexions
sur le mythe du sauveur. Chez le même
éditeur, dans une autre collection
(Nouvelles études historiques) Daniel
Roche donne Humeurs vagabondes, « de
la circulation des hommes et de l'utilité
des voyages ». Chez Fayard toujours,
signalons également une biographie du
musicien Roland de Lassus, due à Annie
Coeurdevey, Le profit avant l'homme, de
Noam Chomsky et un essai de
Dominique Noguez consacré à
Houellebecq, en fait. B. L.

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20.04.2003

Bastides

## Kissinger dénonce

Son dernier livre vient de paraître, mais il date déjà. Dans *La nouvelle puissance américaine*

(Ed. Fayard), l'ancien secrétaire d'État américain joue au vieux sage, mais trépigne contre Saddam

Hussein qui « détient des stocks de plus en plus importants d'armes biologiques et bactériologiques ». On attend impatiemment la prochaine réédition pour savoir enfin où sont cachées ces armes!

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La nouvelle puissance américaine

Henry KISSINGER
Traduit de l'anglais (États-Unis) par Odile Demange
Éditions Fayard (avril 2003)
Essai
386 pages - 22 E

HENRY KISSINGER
LA NOUVELLE PUISSANCE AMÉRICAINE

Traduit

Conseiller du président des Etats-Unis pour la sécurité nationale de 1969 à 1975, Secrétaire d'État de 1973 à 1976, prix Nobel de la paix en 1973, Henry Kissinger a publié plusieurs ouvrages, parmi lesquels cinq volumes Mémoires : "A la maison Blanche (1968-1973)" - 2 tomes 1979 -, "Les Années orageuses (1973-1974)" - 2 tomes 1982 -, et "Les années de renouveau (1974-1976)" - 2000. Il est par ailleurs l'auteur d'un monumental traité de Diplomatie (1996).

Henry Kissinger, dans son dernier ouvrage, se propose de nous présenter le monde tel qu'il est selon son regard d'expert en relations internationales.

Il affirme que les Etats-Unis, à l'aube de ce nouveau millénaire, disposent d'une supériorité telle qu'aucun des empires précédents n'en ont connue d'équivalente et il va s'attacher à nous le démontrer.

Après un très bref exposé traitant des mouvances de l'environnement international, il nous explique pourquoi les États-Unis et plusieurs pays ont abandonné l'idée de non-ingérence dans les affaires intérieures d'autres États, au profit d'une notion de droit d'intervention humanitaire et de juridiction universelle.

Ainsi les États-Unis vivent-ils dans un perpétuel défi auquel d'ailleurs leur expérience historique ne les avait pas préparés. Et Kissinger de nous embarquer pour un formidable voyage planétaire, analysant systématiquement toutes les régions du globe. Il nous dresse un panorama ou plutôt soumet à notre sagacité les contextes historiques, les contradictions de chacune d'entre elles et en tire les conclusions propres à définir le rôle de l'hyper-puissance américaine dans ces contrées.

L'Europe et l'Amérique du Nord et/ou du Sud fonctionnent sur le mode démocratique (ou du moins s'en réclament). Ces pays peuvent donc s'entendre sur une vision idéaliste de la paix fondée sur la démocratie et le progrès économique. Les différents éventuels ne sont pas réglés par la guerre ou la menace de guerre.

L'Asie quant à elle doit aspirer à la stabilité car elle est formée de nations très peuplées et stratégiquement rivales. L'affrontement entre puissances est

envisageable à plus ou moins long terme. De plus, si certains de ces pays s'associaient, la paix du monde pourrait être menacée. Il en résulte que l'équilibre des forces doit être maintenu.

Le Proche-orient connaît une période d'instabilité et d'affrontements mais les motivations ne sont ni économiques, ni stratégiques. Elles ont pour objet la légitimité, l'existence même de l'autre camp. Pouvoir régler définitivement de tels conflits, c'est prendre le risque de retourner contre soi la colère des belligérants.

L'Afrique enfin, ne répond à aucun schéma précis. La situation y est explosive, alimentée par les conflits ethniques, un grand sous-développement et des problèmes sanitaires effrayants. H. Kissinger demande que la communauté internationale se fasse un devoir de mettre fin ou d'atténuer les conflits politiques ou économiques du continent.

Comment les U.S.A vont-ils agir pour assumer le choix devant lequel les place leur qualité d'hyper-puissance ? En effet, il est un paramètre non négligeable qui intervient à ce moment de l'analyse : la politique de globalisation est en plein essor et pour la première fois dans l'histoire, un système économique intégré s'est mis en place à l'échelle du monde. Les marchés de tous les continents sont en interaction constante et les nouvelles technologies permettent de réagir à la seconde près aux mouvements mondiaux des capitaux.

Les États-Unis feront-ils le choix de l'hégémonie dominatrice et idéiste ou bien celui du réalisme et prendront-ils le rôle de "la locomotive" ? Henry Kissinger se prononce pour la seconde option et nous expose les modalités pratiques propres à adapter une politique étrangère favorable au respect des différences et des réalités de chacune des régions considérées, à l'heure de la globalisation des économies. Ce souci de la sécurité collective, inclus dans une politique digne de ce nom, aurait sa place au même titre que la défense de l'intérêt national.

Un ouvrage intéressant, même magistral et bien conçu pour l'étude, qui ouvre des perspectives d'avenir vertigineuses. Sa lecture requiert une assez bonne connaissance du fait politique international ou tout au moins un réel intérêt pour ce thème. Il a été rédigé pour des lecteurs américains et le lecteur moyen européen n'y trouve pas toujours ses marques. Le style est agréable et dépouillé de tout artifice sans pour autant s'apparenter à celui d'un compte-rendu.

Pour nous Chrétiens, il y a un grand absent : Dieu et les religions en Europe et aux U.S.A ainsi que le rôle que le concept religieux pourrait jouer pour affermir le ciment démocratique au nom de la solidarité et de l'amour du prochain. Ce regrettable « oubli » est récurrent chez les auteurs qui pensent que la référence divine ne concerne pas l'histoire des hommes

Jean-Paul Lacombe

Belgique

Vif/L'Express, Le

25/04/03

PALMARÈS

Titres

Auteurs

Editeurs

Class. préc./
Nbre semaines

Romans-fiction

<table><tr><td>1. Sept Jours pour une éternité</td><td>Marc Levy</td><td>Robert Laffont</td><td>1 / 7</td></tr><tr><td>2. Oscar et la dame rose</td><td>Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt</td><td>Albin Michel</td><td>4/21</td></tr><tr><td>3. C'était bien</td><td>Jean d'Ormesson</td><td>Gallimard</td><td>6/12</td></tr><tr><td>4. L'Ignorance</td><td>Milan Kundera</td><td>Gallimard</td><td>-/ 1</td></tr><tr><td>5. Jack l'Eventreur. Affaire classée. Portrait d'un tueur</td><td>Patricia Cornwell</td><td>Editions des Deux Terres</td><td>3/ 3</td></tr><tr><td>6. L'Empire des loups</td><td>Jean-Christophe Grangé</td><td>Albin Michel</td><td>2/12</td></tr><tr><td>7. Tout est fatal</td><td>Stephen King</td><td>Albin Michel</td><td>5/ 3</td></tr><tr><td>8. L'Héritage</td><td>John Grisham</td><td>Robert Laffont</td><td>-/ 1</td></tr><tr><td>9. Révolutions</td><td>J.M.G. Le Clézio</td><td>Gallimard</td><td>9/ 8</td></tr><tr><td>10. Disparu à jamais</td><td>Harlan Coben</td><td>Belfond</td><td>16/13</td></tr><tr><td>11. Docteur, puis-je vous voir... avant six mois ?</td><td>Nicole de Buron</td><td>Plon</td><td>8/ 6</td></tr><tr><td>12. Les Taches du léopard</td><td>Françoise Giroud</td><td>Fayard</td><td>11/10</td></tr></table>

Essais-documents

<table><tr><td>1. La Guerre des Bush</td><td>Eric Laurent</td><td>Plon</td><td>2/11</td></tr><tr><td>2. Dieu ?</td><td>Albert Jacquard</td><td>Stock/Bayard</td><td>4/11</td></tr><tr><td>3. Le Jeu des dictionnaires et la semaine infemale</td><td>Aurélia Dejond</td><td>Renaissance du Livre</td><td>-/ 1</td></tr><tr><td>4. Brûlée vive</td><td>Souad</td><td>Oh édition</td><td>-/ 1</td></tr><tr><td>5. Après l'empire</td><td>Emmanuel Todd</td><td>Gallimard</td><td>10/26</td></tr><tr><td>6. Le Murmure des fantômes</td><td>Boris Cyrulnik</td><td>Odile Jacob</td><td>1/11</td></tr><tr><td>7. L'Improbable équilibre</td><td>Guy Spitaels</td><td>Luc Pire</td><td>16/11</td></tr><tr><td>8. Les Nouveaux Maîtres du monde</td><td>Jean Ziegler</td><td>Fayard</td><td>19/27</td></tr><tr><td>9. La Nouvelle Puissance américaine</td><td>Henry Kissinger</td><td>Fayard</td><td>7/ 5</td></tr><tr><td>10. Mes « frères » assassins</td><td>Mohamed Sifaoui</td><td>Le Cherche Midi</td><td>11/ 6</td></tr><tr><td>11. Guérir</td><td>David Servan Shraiber</td><td>Robert Laffont</td><td>-/ 1</td></tr><tr><td>12. Le Marché aux voleurs</td><td>Jean Montaldo</td><td>Albin Michel</td><td>5/ 5</td></tr></table>

Liste établie d'après les renseignements donnés par les librairies CLUB et par les librairies suivantes :

— ARLON : Point-Virgule, 21, Grand-Place — BRUXELLES : La Fnac, City 2, rue Neuve ; Agora et Sciences, 330, avenue de la Couronne ; Libris, Espace Louise, 40-42, avenue de la Toison d'or ; Filigranes, 38, avenue des Arts ; Télélivre, 83, rue Père de Deken ; Tro-pismes, 11, galerie des Princes ; Ri-vages, galerie du Fort Jaco, 1333, chaussée de Waterloo ; La Licome, 36, rue Xavier de Bue — CHIMAY : Le Pa-pyrus, 25, rue des Ormeaux — HUY :

Derive, 10, Grand-Place — LA LOUVIÈRE : L'Ecrivain public, 45, rue de Brouckère — LIÈGE : Agora Beranger, 7 B, rue des Carmes — LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE : Agora, 11 Agora — MOUSCRON : Melpomène, 85, rue de la Station — NAMUR : Agora, 53-55, rue Emile Cuvelier ; Papyrus, 16, rue Bas de la Place — NIVELLES : Hingot, 8, rue de Sainte — TOURNAI : Decallonne, 18, Grand-Place — VERMIERS : Au Fil d'Ariane, 5, rue H. Hurard ; Le Nouveau Monde en Poche, 58, rue du Brou, — WAVRE : Calligrammes, 7, rue Charles Sambon.

Belgique

Vif/L'Express, Le

25/04/03

# PALMARÈS

Titres

Auteurs

Editeurs

Classe onic./
Nbre semaines

## Romans-fiction

<table><tr><td>1. Sept Jours pour une éternité</td><td>Marc Levy</td><td>Robert Laffont</td><td>1 / 7</td></tr><tr><td>2. Oscar et la dame rose</td><td>Eric-Emmanuel Schmidt</td><td>Albin Michel</td><td>4/21</td></tr><tr><td>3. C'était bien</td><td>Jean d'Ormesson</td><td>Gallimard</td><td>6/12</td></tr><tr><td>4. L'Ignorance</td><td>Milan Kundera</td><td>Gallimard</td><td>-/ 1</td></tr><tr><td>5. Jack l'Eventreur. Affaire classée. Portrait d'un tueur</td><td>Patricia Cornwell</td><td>Editions des Deux Terres</td><td>3 / 3</td></tr><tr><td>6. L'Empire des loups</td><td>Jean-Christophe Grangé</td><td>Albin Michel</td><td>2/12</td></tr><tr><td>7. Tout est fatal</td><td>Stephen King</td><td>Albin Michel</td><td>5 / 3</td></tr><tr><td>8. L'Héritage</td><td>John Grisham</td><td>Robert Laffont</td><td>-/ 1</td></tr><tr><td>9. Révolutions</td><td>J.M.G. Le Clézio</td><td>Gallimard</td><td>9 / 8</td></tr><tr><td>10. Disparu à jamais</td><td>Harlan Coben</td><td>Betford</td><td>16/13</td></tr><tr><td>11. Docteur, puis-je vous voir... avant six mois ?</td><td>Nicole de Buron</td><td>Plon</td><td>8 / 6</td></tr><tr><td>12. Les Taches du léopard</td><td></td><td></td><td>11/10</td></tr></table>

## Essais-documents

<table><tr><td>1. La Guerre des Bush</td><td>Eric Laurent</td><td>Plon</td><td>2/11</td></tr><tr><td>2. Dieu ?</td><td>Albert Jacquard</td><td>Stock/Bayard</td><td>4/11</td></tr><tr><td>3. Le Jeu des dictionnaires et la semaine infernale</td><td>Aurélie Dejond</td><td>Renaissance du Livre</td><td>-/ 1</td></tr><tr><td>4. Brûlée vive</td><td>Souad</td><td>Ch édition</td><td>-/ 1</td></tr><tr><td>5. Après l'empire</td><td>Emmanuel Todd</td><td>Gallimard</td><td>10/26</td></tr><tr><td>6. Le Murmure des fantômes</td><td>Boris Cyrulnik</td><td>Odile Jacob</td><td>1/11</td></tr><tr><td>7. L'Improbable équilibre</td><td>Guy Spitaeis</td><td>Luc Pire</td><td>16/11</td></tr><tr><td>8. Les Nouveaux Maîtres du monde</td><td>Jean Ziegler</td><td>Fayard</td><td>19/27</td></tr><tr><td>9. La Nouvelle Puissance américaine</td><td>Henry Kissinger</td><td>Fayard</td><td>7 / 5</td></tr><tr><td>10. Mes « frères » assassins</td><td>Mohamed Sifacoul</td><td>Le Cherche Midi</td><td>11 / 6</td></tr><tr><td>11. Guérir</td><td>David Servan Shreiber</td><td>Robert Laffont</td><td>-/ 1</td></tr><tr><td>12. Le Marché aux voleurs</td><td>Jean Montaldo</td><td>Albin Michel</td><td>5/5</td></tr></table>

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Facing
New Global
Realities

By Henry Kissinger
Simon & Schuster.
320 pp. $30.00.

Reviewed by
Charles A. Kupchan

Senior fellow, Council on Foreign
Relations; professor of international
affairs, School of Foreign Service,
Georgetown University

HENRY KISSINGER has now added his name to the growing list of intellectuals proffering an American grand strategy for the 21st century. Although renowned as one of this country's most distinguished practitioners of realpolitik, the Harvard professor-turned diplomat-turned elder statesman has produced a book whose nuanced arguments and eclectic approach are quite striking.

Kissinger strays from his realist origins because he knows he must. With much of the world no longer playing by the traditional balance-of-power rules, he has no choice but to adapt his thinking to new realities if he is to develop an accurate take on what lies ahead—which for the most part he succeeds in doing. Yet in moving away from familiar ground he invites several logical tensions that occasionally trip up the otherwise elegant and persuasive analysis.

Kissinger's tour d'horizon of the
emerging international landscape has
many strengths. For starters, he correctly
identifies the central paradox America
finds itself in today. The United States is
currently at the peak of its power, ar-
guably more influential than any other
country in history. But it is passing on the
opportunity afforded by this preponder-
ance to shape the international system
that will come next. Most Americans, in-
cluding the political class, have simply
tuned out and pay little attention to for-

eign affairs. "The result," Kissinger la-
ments, "is that the country's pre-eminence
is coupled with the serious potential of
becoming irrelevant to many of the cur-
rents affecting and ultimately transform-
ing the global order."

His book also benefits from the fact
that Kissinger resists the temptation to
impose a single interpretive framework
on a complicated global landscape. Dur-
ing the 1990s, several accomplished schol-
ars sought to replace the organizing prin-
ciple of the Cold War—containment of
the Soviet Union—with a new core idea.
Francis Fukuyama announced that histo-
ry is ending and war dying out because
of the spread of liberal democracy. Sam-
uel P. Huntington countered that history
is picking up and war is making a come-
back because of the clash of civilizations.
And Thomas L. Friedman identified glob-
alization as the new defining force in the
international arena. All of these authors
offered interesting insights, but they
missed the boat by seeking to squeeze
complexity into a single, overarching
concept.

Kissinger does the opposite. He de-
votes a separate chapter to each region of
the world, identifies the unique forces at
play, and explains how they are likely to
interact with U.S. interests. He then adds
two thematic chapters, one on globaliza-
tion and one on peace and justice. All the
chapters weave together history, culture
and contemporary politics. The analysis
is accessible and lucid, at times overly
simplistic for the specialist, but exactly
right for the student or interested lay read-
er.

As for America's relationship with Eu-
rope, Kissinger counsels that the Atlantic
democracies should revitalize their part-
nership, taking into account Europe's on-
going process of integration as well as
the need to ensure "a significant role for
Russia in the building of a new interna-
tional order." He recognizes that transat-
lantic harmony cannot be taken for grant-
ed and recommends both an Atlantic
Steering Group (a body of the major
players) and an Atlantic free-trade area
as means of maintaining and deepening
cooperation.

In Latin America, Kissinger argues,
the United States should focus on help-

ing to combat corruption, improving the
rule of law, and stemming the flow of
drugs. Washington should also pursue a
free-trade area of the Americas to pro-
mote integration throughout the Hem-
isphere and pre-empt competition be-
tween the North American Free Trade
Area and Mercosur, the evolving trade
bloc in South America.

Asia is the one region of the world still playing by the traditional rules of realpolitik. Kissinger recommends that the United States maintain a robust military presence in the region, and that the alliance with Japan should remain "the bedrock of America's Asian policy." Relying on the U.S.-Japan alliance as a foundation, Washington should seek to channel the growing power of China and India toward benign ends, and at the same time try to further rapprochement on the Korean Peninsula.

In the Middle East and Africa religious and ethnic conflict promise to remain endemic problems. Based on his personal experience and contacts, Kissinger offers a series of useful pointers on how to advance the Arab-Israeli peace process. He criticizes the Clinton Administration for having pushed too quickly for a final status agreement at Camp David last year, suggesting that the new Bush team return to a paced, incremental strategy. In Africa, Kissinger urges the international community to improve its humanitarian assistance programs and to help nurture an African crisis intervention force centered around troops from South Africa and Nigeria.

NOTABLE throughout Kissinger's analysis is his warning against the universal application of hard-line policies, fearing that they will merely alienate allies and provoke potential competitors. A strong proponent of the first round of NATO enlargement into Central Europe, he now counsels the alliance to proceed cautiously with future expansion lest it trigger a hostile Russian reaction. "The West needs to be careful," he says, "not to extend its integrated military system too close to Russia's borders."

In similar fashion, Kissinger observes
that U.S. relations with China are likely
to face major strains, but he argues against
prematurely identifying China as an im-

May/June, 2001

13

placable enemy and pursuing a policy of rigid containment. Instead, he calls for a "constructive relationship" and a "sustained geopolitical dialogue" between the two countries, while fully recognizing that Beijing may not be willing to play along. Even Iran, America's bête noire since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini toppled the Shah in the 1979 revolution, is not irredeemable. President Mohammad Khatami should be given time to advance his reformist agenda. Meanwhile, "the United States should be prepared to undertake a serious effort of joint diplomacy" with its allies and pursue "a firm, consistent, and conciliatory policy."

Kissinger's measured instance is a product not only of his recognition of the importance of engaging countries like Russia and China, but also of his concern about an America that becomes overbearing and tries to do too much. He recognizes the strong idealist strains that are part of America's creed, but he cautions against humanitarian intervention, not

ing that the United States has neither the resources nor the domestic will "to right every wrong."

An overly ambitious America also risks provoking the countervailing coalitions that have throughout history formed against dominant powers. "No matter how selfless America perceives its aims," Kissinger admonishes, "an explicit insistence on predominance would gradually unite the world against the United States and force it into impositions that would eventually leave it isolated and drained."

Those are wise and timely words, especially given the hawkish team of foreign policy advisers amassed by President George W. Bush. Indeed, the Bush Administration has already succeeded in alienating Europe, Russia and China by rejecting the Kyoto protocol on the environment, by indicating that it intends to

withdraw from the ABM Treaty, and by pursuing other policies that are too unilateralist in both tone and substance. It is fortunate that the Republicans have an authoritative voice of their own counseling them to cool off.

Kissinger's chapter on globalization deserves mention too. It is first-rate, no small accomplishment for someone who has spent most of his career concentrating on the diplomatic, not the economic, side of the house. He provides a welcome antidote to the overly optimistic accounts of Thomas Friedman and his fellow travelers, all of whom exaggerate the benign effects of globalization. Through an incisive summary of the financial crises of the 1990s, Kissinger exposes the global economy's principal vulnerabilities. Inequalities both within and among countries are growing rapidly. The volume and pace of capital flows make effective management increasingly difficult. Economic structures are changing much more quickly than political ones. These attributes of globalization have the potential to trigger economic troubles and the political backslashes that often accompany them.

DESPITE ITS many strengths, Kissinger's analysis veers off course on two important fronts. First, he mistakenly blames America's current strategic drift on the failings of the generation that came of age during the protest movement against the Vietnam War. "The Administration of President Bill Clinton," Kissinger writes, was "the first staffed by individuals who came out of the Vietnam protest.... They recoiled from the concept of national interest and distrusted the use of power unless it could be presented as being in the service of some 'unselfish' cause—that is, reflecting no specific American national interest." As

a consequence, he concludes, Clinton spent eight years squandering American power and purpose.

Clinton's foreign policy had its weaknesses, but aversion to the use of force simply was not one of them. He repeatedly sent U.S. troops into combat, hemming in Iraq's Saddam Hussein, bringing peace to Bosnia, and driving the forces of Serbia's Slobodan Milošević from Kosovo. Far from being constrained by the legacy of Vietnam, Clinton fought against perhaps its most powerful remnant—antipathy to limited war—and successfully brought back into the U.S. arsenal the notion of proportional use of force.

Kissinger dismisses America's effective interventions in the Balkans as humanitarian digressions. Not so. The Clinton Administration used U.S. military power in Bosnia and Kosovo to defend the integrity and relevance of the Atlantic Alliance and stop the southward spread of the war—important U.S. national interests. Kissinger's charges against Clinton come off as a partisan jab, not a principled critique.

Furthermore, if the legacies of the past are misleading U.S. foreign policy, it is via the current Administration, not its predecessor. Bush's advisers are all excold Warriors, seeking to impose a realist template on a world that refuses to conform. Kissinger's own analysis makes clear the need for a more flexible and differentiated conceptual map. Perhaps that is one reason he is curiously silent on the Bush team's early performance.

The second front on which Kissinger runs into trouble is Europe—rather paradoxically, since it is the part of the world he knows best. Nevertheless, Kissinger seems to be falling on his own sword here, misconstruing the European Union (EU) and its trajectory because he is importing assumptions from an earlier generation—his own. He worries that Germany is becoming more assertive and may well attempt to strengthen its geopolitical position through "a special Russo-German rapprochement based on the Bismarckian tradition." Europe's smaller countries are likely to be discomfited, he says, and try to court Russia as a counterweight to Germany.

HENRY KISSINGER

14

The New Leader

The Bismarckian tradition, however, is gone for good; the EU has entered the postsovereign era and is building a collective union that has succeeded in sublimating the national state. To be sure, Germany is becoming more comfortable with leadership. But it will use its weight primarily to strengthen institutions of collective governance and to enlarge the EU, not to pursue its own national self-interest or seek a separate peace with Russia. In the past few months, Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer have both given visionary speeches laying out plans for a federal Europe. Germany is simply not about to go off on its own.

AN OUTMODED VIEW of Europe similarly colors Kissinger's attitude toward the EU's efforts to build a new defense force capable of operating independently of the U.S. military. Kissinger sees this move as one intended primarily to give the EU more autonomy, arising in part from a European identity that is in "almost congenital opposition to the United States." After all, he asks, "what exactly are the autonomous interests being served? Where precisely would the European Force operate?"

But Europe is not in congenital opposition to the United States. It is just maturing as a collective entity, pursuing the same "enlightened self-interest" that Kissinger urges should guide U.S. foreign policy. And he essentially answers his own question as to where such a European force would operate when he criticizes the Clinton Administration for intervening in Kosovo by arguing that "Kosovo represented no threat to American security in any traditional sense." Ifardent American internationalists like Henry Kissinger are arguing that the United States should stay out of the Balkans, then Europe has absolutely no choice but to prepare to deal on its own with such threats to its well-being.

A more independent EU does not fit the traditional model of Europe as America's junior partner, and is thus alien to Kissinger's instincts. Yet it is precisely these traditional models that we must all update if the U.S. is to have an effective foreign policy for the 21st century.

His misconceptions do not diminish

the major contribution that Kissinger makes to thinking through the challenges facing the United States. For readers seeking a thoughtful, balanced and erudite assessment of the emerging global landscape and what we have to do to prepare for it, *Does America Need a Foreign Policy?* should be at the top of the list.

# Russia's Woes Remembered

## Night of Stone: Death and Memory in 20th Century Russia

By Catherine Merridale

Viking.

402 pp. $29.95.

Reviewed by

Anatole Shub

Author, "The New Russian Tragedy," "An Empire Loses Hope"

CATHERINE MERRIDALE, a young British historian, has written an unusually rewarding book on how Russians recall the many traumas of their country's awful 20th century. I have already read it twice, with increasing enlightenment, and intend to read it again.

Merridale has deftly mined Russian official archives and the classic individual testimonies (from Pitirim Sorokin, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Grossman, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Varlam Shalamov, etc.), but she has also done significant original probing. Sponsored by the Russian Academy of Sciences and on a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, she spent two years (1996-98) in the former Soviet Union—in major cities, in bygone labor camps, at old and newly discovered burial sites—talking with and listening to survivors. Working with human rights and veterans organizations, as well as opinion researchers, she conducted individual and/or group interviews with four categories of people in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev and several smaller towns:

* Survivors of the main catastrophes of 20th-century Soviet history.

* The children of survivors.

* Medical and other professionals responsible for the care of the dying and bereaved at the time (doctors, nurses, priests, Communist Party activists).

* Medical and other professionals responsible for the care of survivors today.

Inevitably in Russia, there were spontaneous conversations, too, on railroad trains and elsewhere. Altogether, Merridale draws on tapes or written notes of interviews and talks with more than 150 people. She is a sophisticated, sympathetic listener, and presents her findings in brisk, vivid prose. She concedes at the outset that the interviews forced an evolution in her perspective:

> "Anyone who has collected spoken testimonies will know how they found even the most meticulously planned research. You arrive with clear-cut questions, neatly typed: you leave with narratives, dialogues, evasions, long digressions, laughter, more phone numbers, photographs and tears.... The sheer weight of the losses, colored though they may be by stories of escape, by courage and generosity, by flashes of humor, even by the surreal, is such that any listener is likely to ... view the easy questions that they brought with near contempt."

Merridale originally thought that a study of changing funeral practices might illuminate the initial Bolshevik promise to create a new Soviet man. She collected material about 1920s creations like the League of Militant Godless and the Society for the Dissemination of Scientific Cremation. But "it did not take long, as I leafed through flimsy carbons in the Communist Party archive, to find the Bolsheviks purblind and even cruel. Their campaign against ritual degenerated into vandalism. Their resentment of the church ... was often crude and hysterical.... Within a decade of seizing power, they had even created a substitute cult of the dead for themselves. Lenin's preserved corpse was installed at the heart of their new capital, and Red Square, the parade ground of Soviet power, became a grave."

Thus, while Merridale started with "an idea of revolutionary culture," she ended up with "an investigation into mass tality and survival." She now believes that "all funerary ritual in Russia is a mixture of per

May/June, 2001

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Copyright 2001 National Review
National Review

June 13, 2001

SECTION: National Review Online; Rich Lowry

LENGTH: 808 words

HEADLINE: Euro-Boosters Against Missile Defense

BYLINE: By Rich Lowry; NR Editor

BODY:

At this rate, President Bush should fire Colin Powell, hire the French foreign minister in his place, and move the State Department to Brussels. Henry Kissinger has just written a book titled *Does America Need a Foreign Policy?* The answer, for much of the U.S. opinion elite, seems to be, "No - the Europeans already have one for us."

In the glorification of European disapproval of Bush that has filled U.S. newspapers and magazines, there is surely an element of partisan opportunism. It is simply an easy way to dump on a Republican president. But there is a more troubling aspect as well, a strain of anti-Americanism not seen since the Cold War: "My country, always wrong." Maureen Dowd is a perfect exemplar of this counter-patriotism, with her tiresome columns about how bumptious, crude, and selfish George W. Bush's America is.

So, naturally, Bush critics like Dowd assume that in any disagreements with Europe, the United States must be wrong. It apparently never occurs to them that America might have different interests to protect, and occasionally a different, more sensible vision of the world than its European allies. Bush's critics must be retroactively scandalized that the U.S. didn't go along with the Suez adventure, that it pushed to deploy Pershing missiles in Europe, and that it hadn't spent the last decade coddling Qaddafi. How could any of these things be right if Le Monde didn't approve?

What upsets the euro-boosters is precisely the fact that Bush is exercising leadership, which occasionally requires getting out in front of your allies and pulling them along. This is why President Bush's determined comments on missile defense yesterday in his press conference with Prime Minister Aznar were so important: "The ABM Treaty prevents our nation and other freedom-loving nations from exploring opportunities to be able to say to those who would hold freedom-loving peoples hostage that we're not going to let you do so."

In February, Secretary Rumsfeld was similarly insistent at a NATO meeting that the U.S. would deploy a missile-defense system. His evident resolve lead, within weeks, to a remarkable change in the posture of the allies toward missile defense.

Consider: NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said, "Now the Europeans have to accept that the Americans really intend to go ahead ... Now that the question of 'whether' it's going to happen has been settled, I want an engagement inside NATO between the Americans and other allies about the 'how' and the 'when.'" German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, addressing fellow Social Democratic Party members, said, "We should be under no illusions that that there will be no difference of opinion with the new American leadership under President George W. Bush. First and foremost, it won't be about the planned National Missile Defense program but about trade policy issues. Differences over NMD are not the decisive factor in the German-American relationship." The German Foreign Minister said that NMD "above all is a national decision for the United States." Britain's Foreign Secretary said "On the question of what happens if national missile defense proceeds; if it means the U.S. feels more secure and therefore feels more able to assert itself in international areas of concern to us, we would regard that as a net gain in security." Dr. Javier Solana of Spain, former Secretary-

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General of NATO and now the director of foreign policy for the European Union, said "The United States has the right to deploy" an NMD system. Of the ABM Treaty, the so-called "cornerstone of strategic stability," Dr. Solana said, "It is not the Bible."

Since then, some of the momentum for missile defense has been lost, perhaps partly because the administration passed on an opportunity to start the initial work of a ground system in Alaska this year, partly because it has seemed uncertain about exactly where it is headed on missile defense, and partly because Joseph Biden and Carl Levin - whose talking points could be written by an EU minister - are now in the ascendance in Washington.

But the sheer insistence that a system will be built and that the ABM Treaty will be shelved can change the atmosphere again. Will Washington's need to protect its cities from missile attack really break up the Western alliance? No, and if it did, it raises the question: What sort of allies are these anyway?

If the Bush administration weathers the current storm and convinces the Europeans that it is serious about missile defense, they will accommodate the U.S., and move on to bitching about something else. As a NATO official told the New York Times last week: "When you know they are going to build it no matter what, is it really worth the fight? I don't think so." Europe will get over missile defense, even if Maureen Dowd and Co. never do.

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Copyright 2001 The Christian Science Publishing Society
The Christian Science Monitor

June 7, 2001, Thursday

SECTION: FEATURES; BOOKS; Pg. 16

LENGTH: 692 words

HEADLINE: What the world needs now

BYLINE: Ruth Walker

HIGHLIGHT:

Kissinger promotes

BODY:

Let's get one thing cleared up right away: Former US Secretary of State **Henry Kissinger** answers his own question, "Does **America need a foreign policy?**" with a resounding "yes."

This slender volume might be described as Kissinger-lite, or maybe "Around the Globe in 300 Pages," far fewer than the usual bulk of a tome by Dr. K. He surveys Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, giving the historical context, raising the issues in each region, and then sketching out some ideas on what "a wise American policy would do" about them.

One of the most interesting and hopeful sections is the discussion of Latin America and its ripeness for the kind of economic integration that Europe has been working on since World War II.

But perhaps most salient in the whole book is his insistence that it is not only acceptable but desirable that American foreign policy promote its "national interest."

That sounds awfully politically incorrect nowadays - even imperialistic. Kissinger argues, though, that policymakers striving for only the high-ground goals of "human rights" and "democracy" may simply confuse other countries.

"Ironically, [the Clinton administration's] claim to unselfishness was interpreted as a special kind of unpredictability, even unreliability, by nations that have historically treated diplomacy as a reconciliation of interests."

One manifestation of idealistic foreign policy that troubles Kissinger: the concept of "universal jurisdiction" trumping state sovereignty, specifically in the case of Spanish efforts to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet from Britain to stand trial in Spain for crimes against Spaniards in Chile.

Christopher Hitchens's "The Trial of **Henry Kissinger**" picks up just about literally where Kissinger's own book leaves off: with the Pinochet case. Kissinger isn't the only one to have doubts whether undertakings like the Pinochet extradition make for good international jurisprudence. But according to Hitchens, Kissinger has a very specific interest in the Pinochet case: If the Chilean can be put on trial, so could Kissinger. Hitchens's book makes the case for Kissinger as war criminal. Among the items on his bill of particulars:

* Kissinger's failure to stop Indonesia's 1974-75 invasion of East Timor - effected largely with US-supplied M-16 rifles - makes him complicit in the deaths of 200,000 Timorese.

* Kissinger's failure to act as Pakistan committed genocide against Bangladesh in the early 1970s (he didn't want to disrupt his opening to China via a Pakistani back channel) makes him complicit in the

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deaths of between half a million and 3 million people.

And so it goes. Many of these charges are not "new," which makes them neither true nor false, but
which does make it hard to get serious, real-time public attention paid to them.

Kissinger is the kind of establishment figure a certain kind of intellectual loves to hate. His passion
for secrecy and micromanagement draw to him personally attention that in a different kind of
administration would have been diffused among a number of players; one might then posit a "fog of
statecraft," analogous to Clausewitz's "fog of war." This might have blurred the lines which, in
Hitchens's account, lead so clearly and sharply to Kissinger.

Hitchens provides careful documentation and cites authoritative sources. He connects the dots
carefully and is amazingly able to parse the opaque prose of official government meeting transcripts.
But Hitchens's tone does not always serve him well: It's one thing for him to acknowledge himself
straightforwardly as a political opponent of his subject. It's another thing to weaken the substance of
his case by stooping to ad hominem attacks, as he does with snide comments about Kissinger's
"manners" and the like. Ironically, the fury of Hitchens's assault risks consigning his argument to the
radical fringe.

Ruth Walker is the Monitor's correspondent in Toronto.

(c) Copyright 2001. The Christian Science Monitor

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Facing
New Global
Realities

HENRY KISSINGER has now added his
name to the growing list of intellec-
tuals proffering an American grand strat-
egy for the 21st century. Although re-
nowned as one of this country's most dis-
tinguished practitioners of realpolitik,
the Harvard professor-turned diplomat-
turned elder statesman has produced a
book whose nuanced arguments and ec-
lectic approach are quite striking.

Kissinger strays from his realist ori-
gins because he knows he must. With
much of the world no longer playing by
the traditional balance-of-power rules,
he has no choice but to adapt his think-
ing to new realities if he is to develop an
accurate take on what lies ahead—which
for the most part he succeeds in doing.
Yet in moving away from familiar ground
he invites several logical tensions that oc-
casionally trip up the otherwise elegant
and persuasive analysis.

Asia is the one region of the world still
playing by the traditional rules of real-
politik. Kissinger recommends that the
United States maintain a robust military
presence in the region, and that the al-
liance with Japan should remain "the bed-
rock of America's Asian policy." Rely-
ing on the U.S.-Japan alliance as a foun-
dation, Washington should seek to chan-
nel the growing power of China and India
toward benign ends, and at the same time
try to further rapprochement on the Ko-
rean Peninsula.

In the Middle East and Africa religious
and ethnic conflict promise to remain en-
demic problems. Based on his personal
experience and contacts, Kissinger of-
fers a series of useful pointers on how to
advance the Arab-Israeli peace process.
He criticizes the Clinton Administration
for having pushed too quickly for a final
status agreement at Camp David last
year, suggesting that the new Bush team
return to a paced, incremental strategy.
In Africa, Kissinger urges the interna-
tional community to improve its human-
itarian assistance programs and to help
nurture an African crisis intervention
force centered around troops from South
Africa and Nigeria.

NOTABLE throughout Kissinger's anal-
ysis is his warning against the uni-
versal application of hard-line policies,
fearing that they will merely alienate al-
lies and provoke potential competitors.
A strong proponent of the first round of
NATO enlargement into Central Europe,
he now counsels the alliance to proceed
cautiously with future expansion lest it
trigger a hostile Russian reaction. "The
West needs to be careful," he says, "not
to extend its integrated military system
too close to Russia's borders."

May/June, 2001

13

placable enemy and pursuing a policy of
rigid containment. Instead, he calls for a
"constructive relationship" and a "sus-
tained geopolitical dialogue" between
the two countries, while fully recogniz-
ing that Beijing may not be willing to play
along. Even Iran, America's bête noire
since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
topped the Shah in the 1979 revolution,
is not irredeemable. President Moham-
mad Khatami should be given time to ad-
vance his reformist agenda. Meanwhile,
"the United States should be pre-
pared to undertake a serious
effort of joint diplomacy"
with its allies and pursue "a
firm, consistent, and con-
ciliatory policy."

Kissinger's measured
stance is a product not
only of his recognition
of the importance of
engaging countries like
Russia and China, but also
of his concern about an Amer-
ica that becomes overbear-
ing and tries to do
too much. He recog-
nizes the strong ide-
alist strains that are
part of America's
creed, but he cautions
against humanitari-
an intervention, not-
ing that the United States has neither the
resources nor the domestic will "to right
every wrong."

An overly ambitious America also
risks provoking the countervailing coa-
litions that have throughout history
formed against dominant powers. "No
matter how selfless America perceives
its aims," Kissinger admonishes, "an ex-
plicit insistence on predominance would
gradually unite the world against the
United States and force it into imposi-
tions that would eventually leave it iso-
lated and drained."

Those are wise and timely words, es-
pecially given the hawkish team of for-
eign policy advisers amassed by Presi-
dent George W. Bush. Indeed, the Bush
Administration has already succeeded in
alienating Europe, Russia and China by
rejecting the Kyoto protocol on the envi-
ronment, by indicating that it intends to

withdraw from the ABM Treaty, and by
pursuing other policies that are too uni-
lateralist in both tone and substance. It is
fortunate that the Republicans have an
authoritative voice of their own counsel-
ing them to cool off.

Kissinger's chapter on globalization
deserves mention too. It is first-rate, no
small accomplishment for someone who
has spent most of his career concentrat-
ing on the diplomatic, not the economic,
side of the house. He provides a welcome
antidote to the overly optimistic
accounts of Thomas Fried-
man and his fellow trav-
elers, all of whom ex-
aggerate the benign
effects of globaliza-
tion. Through an in-
cisive summary of
the financial crises of
the 1990s, Kissinger
exposes the global
economy's principal
vulnerabilities. Ine-
qualities both with-
in and among
countries are
growing rapidly.
The volume and
pace of capital
flows make ef-
fective manage-
ment increas-

ingly difficult. Economic structures
are changing much more quickly than
political ones. These attributes of glob-
alization have the potential to trigger
economic troubles and the political
backlashes that often accompany them.
D
ESPITE ITS many strengths, Kissin-
ger's analysis veers off course on
two important fronts. First, he mistaken-
ly blames America's current strategic
drift on the failings of the generation that
came of age during the protest movement
against the Vietnam War. "The Adminis-
tration of President Bill Clinton," Kissin-
ger writes, was "the first staffed by indi-
viduals who came out of the Vietnam
protest.... They recoiled from the con-
cept of national interest and distrusted
the use of power unless it could be pre-
sented as being in the service of some
'unselfish' cause—that is, reflecting no
specific American national interest." As

Clinton's foreign policy had its weak-
nesses, but aversion to the use of force
simply was not one of them. He repeat-
edly sent U.S. troops into combat, hem-
ming in Iraq's Saddam Hussein, bring-
ing peace to Bosnia, and driving the
forces of Serbia's Slobodan Milošević
from Kosovo. Far from being con-
strained by the legacy of Vietnam, Clin-
ton fought against perhaps its most pow-
erful remnant—antipathy to limited
war—and successfully brought back into
the U.S. arsenal the notion of propor-
tional use of force.

Kissinger dismisses America's effec-
tive interventions in the Balkans as hu-
manitarian digressions. Not so. The Clin-
ton Administration used U.S. military
power in Bosnia and Kosovo to defend
the integrity and relevance of the Atlantic
Alliance and stop the southward spread
of the war—important U.S. national in-
terests. Kissinger's charges against Clin-
ton come off as a partisan jab, not a prin-
cipled critique.

Furthermore, if the legacies of the past
are misleading U.S. foreign policy, it is
via the current Administration, not its
predecessor. Bush's advisers are all ex-
Cold Warriors, seeking to impose a real-
ist template on a world that refuses to con-
form. Kissinger's own analysis makes
clear the need for a more flexible and dif-
ferentiated conceptual map. Perhaps that
is one reason he is curiously silent on the
Bush team's early performance.

The second front on which Kissinger
runs into trouble is Europe—rather para-
doxically, since it is the part of the world
he knows best. Nevertheless, Kissinger
seems to be falling on his own sword here,
misconstruing the European Union (EU)
and its trajectory because he is import-
ing assumptions from an earlier genera-
tion—his own. He worries that Germany
is becoming more assertive and may well
attempt to strengthen its geopolitical po-
sition through “a special Russo-German
rapprochement based on the Bismarck-
ian tradition.” Europe’s smaller countries
are likely to be discomfited, he says, and
try to court Russia as a counterweight to
Germany.

HENRY KISSINGER

14

The New Leader

[Lc]

But Europe is not in congenital opposition to the United States. It is just maturing as a collective entity, pursuing the same "enlightened self-interest" that Kissinger urges should guide U.S. foreign policy. And he essentially answers his own question as to where such a European force would operate when he criticizes the Clinton Administration for intervening in Kosovo by arguing that "Kosovo represented no threat to American security in any traditional sense." If ardent American internationalists like Henry Kissinger are arguing that the United States should stay out of the Balkans, then Europe has absolutely no choice but to prepare to deal on its own with such threats to its well-being.

## Russia's Woes Remembered

### Night of Stone: Death and Memory in 20th Century Russia

By Catherine Merridale

Viking.

402 pp. $29.95.

Reviewed by
Anatole Shub

* The children of survivors.

Inevitably in Russia, too, on railroad trains and elsewhere. Altogether, Merridale draws on tapes or written notes of interviews and talks with more than 150 people. She is a sophisticated, sympathetic listener, and presents her findings in brisk, vivid prose. She concedes at the outset that the interviews forced an evolution in her perspective:

> "Anyone who has collected spoken testimonies will know how they confound even the most meticulously planned research. You arrive with clear-cut questions, neatly typed; you leave with narratives, dialogues, evasions, long digressions, laughter, more phone numbers, photographs and tears.... The sheer weight of the losses, colored though they may be by stories of escape, by courage and generosity, by flashes of humor, even by the surreal, is such that any listener is likely to ... view the easy questions that they brought with near contempt."

Thus, while Merridale started with "an idea of revolutionary culture," she ended up with "an investigation into mass mortality and survival." She now observes that "all funerary ritual in modern Russia is a mixture of personal invention,

May/June, 2001

15

16 Thursday, June 7, 2001

BOOKS

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

# What the world needs now

*Kissinger promotes 'national interest,' but a journalist cries 'J'accuse'*

By Ruth Walker

### DOES AMERICA NEED A FOREIGN POLICY?

By Henry Kissinger
Simon & Schuster
318 pp., $30

### THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

By Christopher Hitchens
Verso
159 pp., $22

Let's get one thing cleared up right away: Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger answers his own question, "Does America need a foreign policy?" with a resounding "yes."

That sounds awfully politically incorrect nowadays – even imperialistic. Kissinger argues, though, that policymakers striving for only the high-ground goals of "human rights" and "democracy" may simply confuse other countries.

"Ironically, [the Clinton administration's] claim to unselfishness was interpreted as a special kind of unpredictability, even unreliability, by nations that have historically treated diplomacy as a rec-onciliation of interests."

Christopher Hitchens's "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" picks up just about literally where Kissinger's own book leaves off: with the Pinochet case. Kissinger isn't the only one to have doubts whether undertakings like the Pinochet extradition make for good international jurisprudence. But according to Hitchens, Kissinger has a very specific interest in the Pinochet case: If the Chilean can be put on trial, so could Kissinger. Hitchens's book makes

* Kissinger's failure to stop Indonesia's 1974-75 invasion of East Timor – effected largely with US-supplied M-16 rifles – makes him complicit in the deaths of 200,000 Timorese.

* Kissinger's failure to act as Pakistan committed genocide against Bangladesh in the early 1970s (he didn't want to disrupt his opening to China via a Pakistani back channel) makes him complicit in the deaths of between half a million and 3 million people.

■ Ruth Walker is the Monitor's correspondent in Toronto.

CHRISTOPHER PEUHL/AP

### DEFENDER OF AMERICA OR WAR CRIMINAL?
Henry Kissinger's latest book about foreign policy is battling a book that challenges his ethics.

POLITICS

# Remembrance of horrors past

courts in The Hague and in Tanzania.

Paris, best described as an investigative historian, is a masterful writer and consummate sto-

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Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston Globe

June 21, 2001, Thursday, THIRD EDITION

SECTION: LIVING; Pg. D1

LENGTH: 2813 words

HEADLINE: ALL THE WORLD'S HIS STAGE REVERED OR REVILED, HENRY KISSINGER REMAINS DIPLOMATIC IN SPOTLIGHT'S GLARE

BYLINE: By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

BODY:

NEW YORK - Kissinger Associates, the consulting firm run by the only person to serve simultaneously as national security adviser and secretary of state, has no listing in the lobby directory of the midtown skyscraper where it's located. Nor does any sign identify the company on the floor it occupies. There's just a receptionist sitting behind an inch-thick sliding glass. It could be the outside of a teller's drive-through window.

Obviously, the sort of people who come here don't need directions. Just as obviously, they don't need an ATM. What they want is the man who remains the world's most famous foreign policy expert.

Of course, not even the famously immodest Henry Kissinger puts it quite so baldly. "We advise clients about the political and, to some extent, economic world through which they move when they are outside their own familiar territory," he explains, sitting in his office overlooking Park Avenue. But there's little doubt it's "Kissinger," not "Associates" that has attracted such clients as Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Daewoo, Fiat, H. J. Heinz, Merck, Midland Bank, and Revlon.

Kissinger, 78, has been in the news even more than usual of late. He's just published his 12th book, "Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century." Another book, Christopher Hitchens's "The Trial of Henry Kissinger," which argues its subject should be indicted for war crimes, has gained him a different sort of attention [see accompanying story, D7], as have efforts in France and Chile to get Kissinger to testify about atrocities committed in the latter country during the early 1970s.

"You have these one-name types: 'Einstein,' 'Madonna,' I guess the most recent is 'Shaq,'" says Thomas F. (Mack) McLarty, President Clinton's onetime chief of staff and now a Kissinger Associates partner. "When you think of foreign policy, you think of 'Kissinger.'"

Kissinger was to have appeared in Cambridge on Tuesday at the Charles Hotel. The appearance has been canceled because of a scheduling conflict. Two nights later, Hitchens is to speak at the Boston Public Library.

Kissinger's office affords a fine view of the Seagram Building. But what holds the eye is the international portrait gallery of statecraft that fills the room: dozens of inscribed photographs of presidents, premiers, and at least one pope. Pride of place, however, goes to a large pastel portrait of his wife, Nancy, which hangs over his desk. She sits on the board of Rockefeller University (they met while working for Nelson Rockefeller, in 1964). Tonight, they are to attend a black-tie dinner there. Since moving to New York, in 1977, the Kissingers have been a fixture of Manhattan society. "The main advantage of being famous," he once remarked, "is that when you bore people at dinner parties they think it is their fault."

The voice of an era

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The close-cropped, crinkly hair is white now. Otherwise, Kissinger looks barely changed from a quarter century ago, when only the pope and Muhammad Ali were more famous - and, even put together, weren't a fraction as controversial. Above the downturned mouth and blocky nose are those familiar eyes, sleepy-looking yet ceaselessly alert, gazing out from behind those equally familiar dark, rectangular frames.

Then there is the voice, that unmistakable basso profundo. Close your eyes, and it could be 1975. The sound of the mid-'70s wasn't disco - not on network news shows, anyway - it was those croaking Teutonic inflections. "Especially after '73, he just dominated the public stage," says Cornell University diplomatic historian Walter LaFeber.

Kissinger's voice verges on a theatrical effect. (Though only a year younger, his brother Walter speaks unaccented English and once quipped: "I am the Kissinger who listens.") He uses it the way a coquette might use her eyes or a bodybuilder his biceps: to impress, attract, or (when need be) distract. Yet it's also a presence unto itself.

Whether discussing the essence of statecraft ("What one has to make sure is that the urgent doesn't drive out the important") or US chances in soccer's World Cup ("I'd be satisfied if America makes it into the final 16"), Kissinger hardly varies his tone or rhythm, speaking with an unhurried inexorability that verges on the geologic.

Kissinger moves unhurriedly, too, almost wearily. Six months ago he suffered a heart attack. He's since lost 25 pounds, on doctor's orders. He's still overweight, but it somehow makes him seem more forceful. His bulk, as much as his intelligence, as much as his history, helps make him the dominant figure in whatever room he's in.

Like his torso, Kissinger's fingers are short and thick. They are also startlingly expressive. When he wags a finger to make a point, the point gets made. He frequently puts his fingers together, forming a steeple. When he does so, the length of his nails is noticeable. John Ehrlichman, a White House colleague, observed he'd "never seen fingernails bitten so close to the quick." The nails are still short, but not that short.

## Celebrated diplomat

Presumably, Kissinger has less on his mind these days. It's as though he squeezed several decades' worth of foreign policy into the eight years he was in Washington. His secret mission to Beijing in July 1971 paved the way for the US opening to China. He was instrumental in the signing of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty in Moscow in 1972. His negotiations with North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho earned the two men the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize. His tireless "shuttle diplomacy" during 1973 and 1974 ushered in a new era in Arab-Israeli relations after the Yom Kippur War. He presided over US participation in the 1975 conference that resulted in the Helsinki Accords, the first tentative step toward raising the Iron Curtain. During his 3 1/2 years heading the US State Department, Kissinger set what remains an unsurpassed standard for personal diplomacy, logging 667,732 miles of travel while visiting 59 countries.

Kissinger was the statesman as celebrity. One of his more celebrated remarks was that "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," and he found himself the world's unlikeliest sex symbol. Almost as pleasing to him as receiving a Harris survey approval rating of 85 percent in 1974 (the highest for a government official in the poll's history) was his being voted "greatest person in the world today" by the contestants in the Miss Universe pageant.

"Well, you couldn't call me a swinger because of my job," Kissinger famously confided to Sally Quinn of The Washington Post. "Why don't you just assume I'm a secret swinger?" He did his best to ensure his "swinging" didn't stay very secret. "Cary Grant with a German accent" was how a friend, the Hollywood executive Robert Evans, described him, and Kissinger made a point of being seen with such actresses as Samantha Eggar, Shirley MacLaine, Marlo Thomas, Jill St. John, Candice

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["Browse Display", "Page 3 of 5", "Bergen, and Liv Ullmann.", "A refugee from Hitler's Germany, Kissinger brought a unique blend of talents to the practice of statecraft: an Old World mastery of realpolitik, a New World taste for improvisation, an intellectual's knack for conceptualizing, a pyrotechnic intelligence, and a remarkable flair for the dramatic. \"We've had some very good secretaries of state, but none, in my view, who has brought the depth and sophistication to the job that Kissinger did,\" says Richard Perle, a onetime Kissinger antagonist who was assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.", "It was Richard Nixon who brought Kissinger to Washington, and they enjoyed one of the most extraordinary - and extraordinarily complicated - partnerships in presidential history. A pair of pessimistic outsiders, both men were insecure, conspiratorial, and consumed by ambition. There were countless reasons for the success of their relationship. Not least among them was the way each let the other live vicariously: Kissinger got good press, had intellectual credentials, an Ivy League background, a reputation for style and wit; Nixon had power.", "The odd man out was Secretary of State William P. Rogers. \"I'm probably least proud of the way some of the internal battles were fought,\" Kissinger says when asked what he most regrets about his career, \"especially the relationship with Rogers.\"", "A winner can afford regrets. The nation's chief maker of foreign policy in everything but name, Kissinger acquired that, too, when a reluctant Nixon named him to succeed Rogers. The move was a direct consequence of the Watergate scandal. As the president's popularity plummeted, Kissinger's soared. Soon Newsweek was putting him on its cover in a Superman suit, and The New York Times was calling him \"president for foreign affairs.\" If anything, his standing increased when Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford became president in 1974.", "Questions and reflections", "Kissinger may have escaped Watergate relatively unscathed, but his career had its dark side, including his role in the secret bombing of Cambodia, the overthrow of the Socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende, and the wiretapping of journalists and subordinates. On none of these events was he then - or is he now - notably forthcoming. \"White House Years\" (1979), the first volume of his memoirs, some dubbed \"White Wash Years.\" Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger once noted that, \"Henry enjoys the complexity of deviousness. Other people when they lie look ashamed. Henry does it with style, as if it were an arabesque.\"", "In his new book, Kissinger notes that \"relentless publicity\" has made more and more people reluctant to enter public life. How much autobiography informs that observation?", "\"I have no complaints,\" he says with a shrug. \"When you receive as much attention as I have, you must be willing to accept the occasional beating you take.\"", "Kissinger has been getting a fair number lately. On Memorial Day, while staying at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Kissinger was served with a nonbinding summons to appear before a French judge investigating the disappearance in Chile of five French citizens during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. \"That got a little bit over the line,\" Kissinger says, who left Paris without testifying.", "Worse, author Hitchens argues that Kissinger should be tried as a war criminal. The arrest of Pinochet in Britain in 1998 for human rights violations sets a precedent for such a case, Hitchens argues. Historian LaFeber, for one, thinks Kissinger may be wondering the same thing. \"There are only three pages in the new book on Chile,\" he points out. \"But there's a sense of his whistling past the graveyard. There's enough evidence there, and he has to be wondering about Chile trying to indict him.\"", \".../documentDisplay?_docnum=2&_ansset=A-WA-B-C-MsSEZE-UUW-EEBVUWZYD-CBA 6/22/01"]

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Clearly, Kissinger's concerns in the new book lie elsewhere. "It's the beginning of a new century, and it's at the end of one period of American foreign policy," he says. "I thought I would put down my reflections on where we stood, where we might go."

He offers a global survey of where the United States is today in relation to the rest of the world and how best to address future problems. As to what those problems might be, only guesses might be made (however educated). The best approach to them, however, is not a matter of guesswork, Kissinger argues. He recommends a diplomatic posture that blends Wilsonian idealism (something he is clearly uncomfortable with but acknowledges is too deeply embedded in the American grain to jettison) with hard-headed self-interest. He implicitly presents himself as holding a center ground between a post-Vietnam approach on the left (Bill Clinton does not fare well here) and a Cold War approach on the right (Kissinger, always alert to the balance of administrative power, refrains from naming names).

Reading Kissinger's pronouncements while knowing he's in no position to enact them calls to mind the night he shared the owner's box at Yankee Stadium with Joe DiMaggio. The home team was losing. "Joe, put on a uniform," Kissinger urged, "they can use you." Does he feel that way reading his morning paper?

"I probably had that feeling in the first years after I left office," he says. "Now that is not my attitude. When I was in office, the people I respected greatly were people like [US diplomats] Ellsworth Bunker, David Bruce, John McCloy, to whom I looked as a sort of reserve army of people who wanted nothing for themselves but might be available to give a crucial piece of advice, if needed. That's the role I see for myself now."

It's a role for which he is well suited, says Perle. "He is today consistently the wisest counsel on foreign policy," Perle says.

While LaFeber doesn't dispute Kissinger's foreign policy prowess, he wonders as to the sincerity of that desire to remain on the sidelines. "Kissinger has never lost his lust for power," LaFeber suggests. "He's like the old war horse. He just can't give it up."

Kissinger hopes to write at least two more books: a volume of reflections on the nature of statecraft and another consisting of profiles of great leaders he has known. That might sound overly ambitious for someone nearing 80, but Kissinger has heredity on his side. His father lived to 95, his mother to 97.

Still, as he admits, he's reached a point in life where he has begun to think about death (though not, he hastens to add, about retirement). Looking back, could he ever have predicted the astonishing course his life would take? "I would never have imagined it, and if you had asked my colleagues [at Harvard] who of that group would ever become secretary of state, they would not have mentioned my name."

Kissinger smiles. The smile is faint, but unmistakable. "It almost makes you believe in destiny."

Mark Feeney can be reached by e-mail at mfeeney@globe.com. SIDEBAR1: TAKING AIM AT AN ICON

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS IS GIVING A READING AT THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY NEXT THURSDAY FROM HIS BOOK, "THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER." HE EXPECTS TO GET IN TOWN A FEW DAYS EARLY, THOUGH, AND HAD HOPED TO ATTEND KISSINGER'S TALK IN CAMBRIDGE ON TUESDAY. TO HITCHENS'S DISAPPOINTMENT, IT'S BEEN CANCELED. "I SORT OF THINK IT'S TIME WE MET," HE SAYS.

Hitchens, a columnist for The Nation and contributing editor at Vanity Fair, says he'd been thinking of writing the Kissinger book for many years. In effect, a prosecutorial brief, it presents an array of misdeeds from what Hitchens calls "the rolling one-man vandalism that is [Kissinger's] career."

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Among them are Kissinger's actions in Indochina, Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor.

What inspired Hitchens finally to write the book is the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, in England in 1998, for human-rights violations, and the widespread call for the trial of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic on war crimes charges. Kissinger's harsher critics have long spoken of him in criminal terms, but this new-found willingness to use international law against world leaders makes such talk seem considerably less abstract. "It's a straight-up case of an unpunished criminal and some unredeemed victims," Hitchens says.

The son of a British naval officer, Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1949. After graduating from Oxford University and working as a journalist in Britain, he came to the United States in 1982 and soon earned a reputation for his stylish, left-wing broadsides.

Hitchens had his own moment in the media spotlight when he filed an affidavit in 1999 during the Senate trial of President Clinton contradicting the grand jury testimony of White House aide Sidney Blumenthal. The experience "didn't teach me anything I didn't know about liberals," Hitchens says, "but it rubbed it in. I wish I'd done it earlier and more decisively."

Hitchens has written books on a wide range of topics, including Cyprus, the Elgin Marbles, Mother Teresa, and Bill Clinton. He also recently published "Unacknowledged Legislation," a collection of his literary journalism. "Believe it or not, I really would rather be writing about Oscar Wilde and George Orwell than doing this. I don't want people to think I'm an attack dog just looking for targets - because it really isn't true."

It's "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" that's been getting all the attention, though (it was recently reviewed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times Book Review). What does its subject think of it?

"Well, it's so over the top," Kissinger says. "I have not actually read it. I have read a few excerpts, but they indicate an absence of restraint that," his voice trails off. "I have not answered it, and I won't answer it." SIDEBAR: KISSINGER'S WORLD

MILEPOSTS IN THE LIFE OF HENRY KISSINGER PLEASE REFER TO MICROFILM FOR CHART DATA.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state and national security adviser, continues to offer counsel to others from his New York office. / GLOBE PHOTO / JOE TABACCA

LOAD-DATE: June 21, 2001

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Copyright 2001 The Indianapolis Star

THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR

June 23, 2001, Saturday, CITY FINAL EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. A13, BOOK REVIEW

LENGTH: 624 words

HEADLINE: Kissinger gives sound advice on 21st century diplomacy

BODY:

For the first time in its history, the United States must devise a global foreign policy stretching into the indefinite future instead of relying on specific policies that apply to different parts of the world.

That's the conclusion of **Henry Kissinger** in *Does America Need A Foreign Policy?* He is former secretary of state under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Kissinger writes with a masterful grasp of history but his writing style, unfortunately, is long-winded and unnecessarily abstract to the average reader. He examines relations with many nations, including Russia, China, Colombia, Vietnam, Israel and the countries of Africa. The chapters become more and more complicated as the relationships expand.

He states the obvious when he says that Germany will play a major role inside the European Union. "The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time," Kissinger writes.

Russia, extending over 11 time zones, contains the largest land mass of any existing state. Its leader, Vladimir Putin, emerged from the world of the secret police. Putin claims that Russians like a strong state, a guarantor of order. But the author adds, "Cold War-style tensions will inevitably reappear if Russia returns to a policy of dominating its neighbors."

In Latin America, leftist guerrillas in Colombia are undermining national cohesion. "Violence is mounting nearly everywhere in Latin America," Kissinger points out. In Colombia, the guerrillas are financed better than the government, and law and order have broken down. "Colombia has a menacing foreign policy aimed at the U.S.," warns Kissinger.

The North American Free Trade Agreement has been of lasting benefit to its three partners, the United States, Mexico and Canada. U.S. trade with Mexico exceeds that of all Europe, while more than 70 percent of Mexico's exports come to the United States. Mexico is America's second-largest trading partner.

Kissinger says the key relationship for the United States in Asia is Japan, which has U.S. military bases located on its soil. The country has the largest economy in the region, and "Japan will, in the next decade, remain economically the strongest country in Asia."

Turning to China, he says there are two American views of the country. The first says that the United States should trade with China and thus become an ally. The second regards China as a morally flawed adversary that should be treated as a rival.

It is nationalism, not communism, that could lead to a conflict with China over Taiwan. "The future of Taiwan is the wild card," Kissinger says. "There is no definite solution at this point."

America's national interest, he says, is to prevent the domination of Asia by any single power.

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In the Middle East, he notes, the Arabs say that the very existence of Israel is an intrusion into their "holy" territory. He adds that the establishment of a Palestinian state is inevitable.

Kissinger concludes that America must devise a global policy. "Our age," he says, "is at the beginning of intellectual and political transformations which will be sweeping."

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? is not for the uninitiated in foreign affairs. It is erudite, comprehensive, and packed with historical references to every nation on Earth. For the serious student of U.S. foreign policy, it will be an encyclopedia of information, but it does not make for light, entertaining reading.

Richards, of Zionsville, is president of Euro-Link Public Relations and Marketing Co.

INFO BOX:

Does America Need A Foreign Policy? Toward A Diplomacy for the 21st Century Author: Henry

Kissinger Publisher: Simon and Schuster Price: $30

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Copyright 2001 The Atlanta Constitution

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

May 20, 2001 Sunday, Home Edition

SECTION: @issue; Pg. 6C

LENGTH: 660 words

HEADLINE: Reading on the Road

BYLINE: JOHN HEAD

SOURCE: AJC

BODY:

Summer is the season of long drives. And so, just as many readers look forward to losing themselves in "beach books" at their favorite vacation spot, audio book listeners anticipate the new releases that will help wile away the miles on the way there. Here are some notable audio books due for release in time for summer listening.

FICTION The Jury. By Steve Martini (Simon & Schuster). 6 hours, abridged.
Another courtroom thriller from the author of "The Judge." Never Change. By Elizabeth Berg (Simon & Schuster). 6 hours, abridged. Berg follows up her eight best sellers with another story of love, not just romance. I Wish I Had a Red Dress. By Pearl Cleage, read by the author (Harper Audio). 6 hours, abridged.
The Atlanta writer's latest novel is set in the same Michigan town as her successful debut, "What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day." Castro's Curveball. By Tim Wendel, read by L.J. Ganser (Recorded Books*). 8 hours, unabridged. What if a young Cuban pitching phenom named Fidel had been given a shot at pro ball? P Is for Peril. By Sue Grafton, read by Judy Kaye (Random House). 10 hours, unabridged; 5 hours, abridged. Private eye Kinsey Millhone searches for a missing doctor. Is he dead, or did he skip town? The Fourth Hand. By John Irving, read by the author (Random House). 13 hours, unabridged. A TV reporter who lost his hand to a lion is offered a replacement. Fearless Jones. By Walter Mosley, read by Peter Francis James (Time Warner). 6 hours, abridged.
Army veteran Fearless Jones helps a friend search L.A. for a beautiful woman who leaves trouble in her wake. The Vendetta Defense. By Lisa Scottoline, read by Barbara Rosenblat (Recorded Books). 14 hours, unabridged. While an 80-year-old defendant insists he committed a murder, his lawyer tries to convince a jury he didn't. My Dream of You. By Nuala O'Faolain, read by Dearbhla Molloy (Simon & Schuster Audio). 6.5 hours, abridged. The first novel by the best-selling memoirist ("Are You Somebody?") is the story of a travel writer who investigates an infamous love affair and then has one of her own.

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NONFICTION Does America Need a Foreign Policy? By Henry Kissinger (Simon & Schuster). 3 hours, abridged. Not surprisingly, the former secretary of state makes the case that we do. John Adams. By David McCullough, read by the author (Simon & Schuster). 6 hours, abridged. The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's biography of America's second president. Founding Brothers. By Joseph J. Ellis, read by Nelson Runger (Recorded Books*). 13 hours, unabridged. Historian Ellis provides a behind-the-scenes look at events leading to the creation of America. The Proving Ground. By G. Bruce Knecht, read by Stanley Tucci (Time-Warner Audio Books). 6 hours, abridged. Hundreds of sailors struggle to survive as a deadly cyclone strikes one of the world's premier yacht races. American Dream. By Dan Rather, read by the author (Harper). 6 hours, abridged. The CBS anchorman interviews people throughout the country and finds that the American dream is very much alive. Killing Pablo. By Mark Bowden, read by the author (Simon & Schuster Audio). 6 hours, abridged. How the United States helped Colombia track down and kill the country's most notorious druglord. The Map That Changed the World. By Simon Winchester, read by the author (Harper Audio). 9 hours, unabridged. The story of William Smith, who figured out how to make a geologic map for all of England. Past Lives, Future Healing. By Sylvia Browne, read by the author (HighBridge). 3 hours, abridged. Brown says the secret to heath and good relationships is understanding your past lives. The Coalwood Way. By Homer Hickam, read by Frank Muller (Recorded Books). 11 hours, unabridged. More about growing up in West Virginia coal country from the author of the best-selling "Rocket Boys." * Titles by Recorded Books are available on its Web site (www.recordedbooks.com) or by calling 1-800-638-1304.

LOAD-DATE: May 20, 2001

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# The World of Dr. K

Love him or hate him, Henry Kissinger was the mastermind of global politics. What would he do today?

by Claudia Dreifus

When Henry Kissinger served as Secretary of State from 1973 to 1977, the hot-button international issues included China, nuclear deterrence, and the Middle East. The faces of leadership have since changed, but the problems persist. In an exclusive MODERN MATURITY interview, the 78-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner, author of the new book *Does America Need a Foreign Policy?* (Simon & Schuster), reflected on the state of the world and on how current leaders are dealing with it.

**Q** How would you rate President Bush's first few months on the foreign affairs front?

**A** He has been amazingly sure-footed. And I agree with the main lines of his foreign policy. Probably it would have been wiser to renegotiate the Kyoto protocols (adopted by the Clinton administration, agreeing to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases), rather than abrogate it. But the main line of the foreign policy I support.

**Q** Whom would you define as America's main enemy now?

**A** I don't think we have any one [enemy] anymore. We have a plethora of issues before us. I think the emergence of China as a major country is a challenge to America and to the international system. It is a test for us: whether we can live in a world in which we are the most powerful country, but in which we do not insist on dominating. [Otherwise] we will use more and more of our resources and expend our energy, as we have recently, by turning foreign policy into a series of domestic issues. And we will lose our relevance.

Now, it could happen that China becomes our enemy. But it is not foreordained. And it should not happen as a result of our actions.

**Q** You are an ardent advocate of close U.S.-China relations. At the same time, you

Chopstick diplomacy: Dining in Beijing with his host, Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, 1973.

TOP: CHRISTOPHER WAHL; BOTTOM: BETTMANN/CORBIS

July/august 2001 mm 25

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facetoface

Busy, busy, busy: For the
photo shoot at his New
York office, Kissinger was
a moving target

support the development of a U.S. "Star
Wars"-type program, which the Chinese
find extremely threatening.

A I know it's an axiomatic view of the Left around the world that missile defense is sin- ful, and that it's desirable to keep each nation as vulnerable as possible. But that's a debatable premise. The U.S. must defend itself against whoever has missiles that would threaten the United States. And you don't have to be able to name an enemy.

Q What would you prescribe at this moment in the Middle East?

A Specifically, one could couple the exis-
tence of a Palestinian state with some
agreement about coexistence with Israel—
and leave such issues like the future of
Jerusalem to some administrative agreement
that does not have the element of finality.

Q Do you see that happening?

A I think it's possible. I think it is not pos-
sible to make an agreement that
settles all issues for all eternity.

Q Why did last year's Camp David meeting fall apart?

A The Arab-Israeli conflict went from an irreconcilable cultural clash to a belief that maybe it was all a terrible misunderstanding—and that if only the psychological barriers could be removed, a final settlement would be quite easy. This is what led Clinton to organize Camp David, in the belief that in one session you could finish the peace process. It turned out that there were deeply religious and philosophical obstacles. As a result, both parties have trapped themselves and have pushed the situation almost back to the point where it was when the peace process started. I think we have to go back to a much more modest understanding. We have to get back to coexistence.

Q There was a time when this country pro-
duced giants in foreign policy—Dean Ache-
son and George Kennan. Why has no one
of comparable stature emerged?

A Because our politics has become brus-
tally competitive. When I was in graduate
school, we thought government service was
a high calling. Now, foreign policy is not a
subject that occupies budding careers. So
there is no comparable group to the ones

we had in the '40s, '50s and '60s.

Q In his book on the Vietnam War, for-
mer Secretary of Defense Robert McNa-
mara wrote that we were "terribly wrong."

A Well, I don't think we were wrong. We made a mistake. We applied the values by which we had conducted post-[World War II] reconstruction to cultures and circumstances ... to which they really did not fit. I do not think it was a moral mistake. The motive was noble. I don't think Vietnam was the place to exercise it.

Q Did you say that then?

A Then, I didn't understand it well enough. I said it as soon as I visited Vietnam, in 1965. I said that the war could not possibly be won that way ... and I urged a negotiated outcome.

Q As someone who lived through the Nixon near-impeachment, how did you feel watching the Clinton impeachment?

'I was the devil incarnate? I was
too power-oriented for liberals,
too conciliatory for conservatives.'

A I was opposed to the impeachment. The correct outcome would have been some form of censure by the Congress. I am very worried about turning into a kind of parliamentary system by using the impeachment process to get rid of our chief executives.

Our media culture makes it so that once
a crisis starts, it almost cannot end. I saw
in the Nixon period this growing preoccu-
pation with survival from day to day and
the focus on technical details not decisive
for the future of the country.

Q Why, in the Reagan era, did many con-
servatives consider you the devil incarnate?

A I was the devil incarnate? Well, some of the conservatives were looking to conduct foreign policy as a crusade. Some of the liberals wanted a morality play. So I was probably too power-oriented for the liberals, and too conciliatory for the conservatives.

Claudia Dreifus' latest book of interviews, *Scientific Conversations*, will be published in October. For an *extended interview*, go to www.modernmaturity.org.

CHRISTOPHER WALK

26 mm july/august 2001

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2 of 2 DOCUMENTS

Copyright 2001 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

June 3, 2001 Sunday Five Star Lift Edition

SECTION: A&E; Pg. F1

LENGTH: 814 words

HEADLINE: FLIGHT OF FANCY

BYLINE: Jane Henderson Post-Dispatch Book Editor

BODY:

* Grab a chair on the porch and let a raft of summer reads transport you through time and space.

With gas prices up, the best travel bargain this summer is a book.

For about $25 you can drive to Kansas City -- or you can visit Honolulu with Paul Theroux, the South Pacific with Larry McMurtry or India and New England with John Irving.

Some book prognosticators say the sequel to Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls" will be the hot book to take to an actual pool or beach. Rae Lawrence supposedly based "Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls" on a first draft by the author, known for her novels' gossipy tone, drug-popping characters and sex scenes. Surprisingly, though, these vicarious thrills of Susann's book are mostly missing, according to Publishers Weekly, which calls it "tame" and "tedious."

For gossip, though, "The Columnist" by Jeffrey Frank looks promising. Frank's novel fictionalizes real-life Washington players and is written as a "memoir" of a sleazy newspaper columnist who uses information from prostitutes to blackmail his bosses.

And we can testify to real sexy, summer book spiciness in Emma Donoghue's "Slammerkin," a literary pageturner about a poor teen-ager who loses her virginity to a peddler just so she can acquire a red hair ribbon. Years ago, a "slammerkin" apparently referred to either a loose dress or a loose woman, and Donoghue's 18th-century heroine becomes acquainted with both. There's great historical atmosphere, if little real educational value -- unless one counts as a linguistic lesson the stylish use of 18th-century slang terms for prostitutes.

But summer reading isn't about education. The book world offers a little more in the way of adventure and thrillers and a little less of science and politics. Serious studies don't entirely disappear (one publisher has deemed June the perfect time to release Henry Kissinger's "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?") But frothier titles such as Jane Green's "Mr. Maybe" and Eric Jerome Dickey's "Between Lovers" usually dominate.

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This fall, we can look forward to "The Language of Cells." But for summer, we'll take "Gunman's Rhapsody."

Turn to F3 for a complete list of books that will transport readers during the next few months. Included are some May titles that may become popular summer reads. Also, for readers who prefer paperbacks, look for a list of good recent or forthcoming titles.

Our information comes from publishers, news services and Publishers Weekly.
(Note: publication schedules are approximate.)

NOTES:

SUMMER BOOKS PREVIEW

GRAPHIC: GRAPHIC, PHOTO; (1) COLOR GRAPHIC / ILLUSTRATION by NIKOLA MARIA TAYLOR / POST-DISPATCH - (Butterflies); A SAMPLE OF WHAT'S INSIDE - See F3 for a complete list of summer reading.; (2) COLOR PHOTO - RECENT FICTION; (Cover art); "Good in Bed"; By Jennifer Weiner; Published by Pocket Books; Witty reporter is devastated when her ex-boyfriend writes about their love life and his "courage" in loving a "larger" woman.; (3) COLOR PHOTO - JUNE FICTION; (Cover art); "Yeats Is Dead"; By 15 Irish writers, edited by Joseph O'Connor; Published by Knopf; A murder mystery written as a benefit for Amnesty International, with one chapter each by writers such as Anthony Cronin, Roddy Doyle, Marian Keyes and Frank McCourt.; (4) COLOR PHOTO - JULY NONFICTION; (Cover art); "The Wildest Ride: A History of NASCAR; (Or, How a Bunch of Good Ol' Boys Built a Billion Dollar Industry out of Wrecking Cars)"; By Joe Menzer; Published by Simon & Schuster; Portrait of a bang-up American institution.; (5) COLOR PHOTO - AUGUST FICTION; (Cover art); "The Hunters"; By Claire Messud; Published by Harcourt Brace; Two literary novellas by the author of "The Last Life.";

LOAD-DATE: June 3, 2001

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1 of 1 DOCUMENT

The Associated Press

The materials in the AP file were compiled by The Associated Press. These
materials may not be republished without the express written consent of The
Associated Press.

June 11, 2001, Monday, BC cycle

SECTION: Lifestyle

LENGTH: 860 words

HEADLINE: BOOKS 6-11; Two old hands write about the Old West

BYLINE: By RON BERTHEL, Associated Press Writer

BODY:

Robert B. Parker and Loren D. Estleman are known for their many crime novels. But for his new novel, each has turned his attention from modern-day urban private eye to Old West lawman.

Parker's "Gunman's Rhapsody" and Estleman's "The Master Executioner" are among the latest hardcover books, which include novels by Philip Roth, Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins; and nonfiction by Larry McMurtry, David McCullough, Dan Rather, Henry Kissinger and Alan M. Dershowitz.

--- 'Gunman's Rhapsody' (Putnam) by Robert B. Parker

Parker, creator of fictional Boston private eye Spenser, focuses on a real-life lawman, Wyatt Earp. It's 1879, and Dodge City, Kan., has lost its appeal for Earp, the 31-year-old assistant city marshal. So he heads for the silver mines of Tombstone, Ariz., taking his two brothers and their women. There, Earp becomes deputy sheriff and meets, among others, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson and Josie Marcus, a showgirl who would become the love of his life.

--- 'The Master Executioner' (Forge) by Loren D. Estleman

No noose is bad noose to Oscar Stone, hangman in 1890s Idaho. Stone is a historian of his art, a student of his craft, a scientist in the behavior of ropes and the anatomy of the human neck. In his 25 years on the job, he has earned a reputation as the best. Stone's life takes a dramatic turn when he learns something that makes him look at himself in a new way.

--- 'The Dying Animal' (Houghton Mifflin) by Philip Roth

The narrator of this short novel is David Kepesh, white-haired and 60-plus, a respected TV culture critic and lecturer at a New York college. He recalls an affair that began eight years earlier with Consuela, a 24-year-old student and

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the daughter of a wealthy Cuban exile. He describes how Consuela's youth and beauty brought disorder to his life that resulted in deep jealousy, possessiveness and loss.

--- 'Leap of Faith' (Delacorte) by Danielle Steel

In Steel's 52nd novel, Marie-Ange, 21, returns to the French villa where she had lived until she was orphaned at 11 and sent to Iowa to stay with a resentful, elderly aunt. Marie-Ange marries the villa's new owner, a widower, and has children. But her happiness is threatened when a mysterious woman tells her a shocking story.

--- 'Hollywood Wives: The New Generation' (Simon & Schuster) by Jackie
Collins

"Hollywood Wives" romped through the 1980s. Now there's a new generation, led by Lissa Roman, star of movies and music, who thinks that husband No. 4 is cheating on her. Other players include Nicci, Lissa's daughter, who is about to marry even though she desires her bad-boy future brother-in-law; Taylor, a minor celebrity yearning for the fame and respect given her Oscar-winning husband; and Eric Vernon, a psychopath and would-be kidnapper.

--- 'Paradise' (Simon & Schuster) by Larry McMurtry

McMurtry describes his 1999 trip to Tahiti, where he reflected upon his parents' generally unhappy 43-year marriage, most spent in the harshness of West Texas. He also searches for the meaning of paradise, and wonders whether it exists and how it compares to his hometown of Archer City, Texas. His observations are interwoven with impressions drawn from Gauguin paintings and writings by Michener, Melville and others.

--- 'John Adams' (Simon & Schuster) by David McCullough

The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography "Truman" (1993) offers this portrait of the second president. McCullough draws from Adams family correspondence and diaries, including the 1,000-plus surviving letters between John and wife Abigail, many of which had not been published previously. An important aspect is the relationship between Adams and Thomas Jefferson - born opposites who were close friends at first, archrivals later.

--- 'The American Dream' (Morrow) by Dan Rather

The CBS newsman explores the concept of the American Dream and describes what it means to various people - teacher, stockbroker, writer, farmer, politician, detective, house cleaner. Among them: a man who became a stockbroker while living in a homeless shelter; a woman who became a best-selling novelist at 40; a teen who provides needy children with school supplies; and a man who learned to read at 26.

--- 'Does America Need a Foreign Policy?' (Simon & Schuster) by Henry Kissinger

Yes, says Kissinger, former presidential adviser, diplomat, and secretary of state during the 1970s. He calls for a new U.S. foreign policy and describes what it should be. He delves into the problems facing the country, with emphasis on Russia, China, the globalized economy and the demand for humanitarian intervention.

--- 'Supreme Injustice' (Oxford University Press) by Alan M. Dershowitz

In a book subtitled "How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000," the Harvard law professor examines the Supreme Court's involvement in the 2000 presidential election and concludes that the court's decision reflected its desire for a particular partisan outcome and disregarded its principles. The result: The court might have sent to the White House a candidate who actually lost the election.

GRAPHIC: AP Photos NY630, NY631, NY632, NY633, NY634

LOAD-DATE: June 12, 2001

DOES AMERICA NEED A FOREIGN
POLICY?: Toward a New Diplomacy
for the 21st Century

HENRY KISSINGER. *Simon & Schuster, 530*
(352p) ISBN 0-684-85567-4

Former Secretary of State Kissinger ambi-
tiously undertakes herein the total revamping
of U.S. foreign policy. This is necessary, he
contends, because even though the U.S. is en-
joying an unprecedented preeminence, it
lacks "a long-range approach to a world in
transition." Recent U.S. foreign policy, he
says, has become dangerously ad hoc, a case-
by-case response to challenges as they occur.
Needed instead is "ideological subtlety and
long-range strategy," which Kissinger pro-
vides. Chapter by chapter, he analyzes the
broad challenges facing the U.S. and the
world, from globalization and its attendant
promises and disruptions (he warns that glob-
alization has enriched many and impover-
ished and dislocated many others) to human-
itarian intervention from Somalia to Kosovo.
In other chapters he offers recommendations
on how the U.S. should proceed in various ar-
cas of the world: Europe, the Western Hemi-
sphere, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Kissinger's point is that each region is unique
and thus so should be U.S. foreign policy to-
ward them. Our alliance with Europe, for ex-
ample, is the bedrock of Kissinger's U.S. for-
eign policy; we must make sure, he warns, that
the European Community remains a political
partner, not a competitor. While not all will
agree with his findings—he is, for instance,
quite skeptical about humanitarian interven-
tion—it is a pleasure to experience a first-class
mind subtly explaining in an accessible way
the immense intricacies of modern U.S. for-
eign policy. 6 maps. Agent, Marvin Josephson,
ICM. (June 14)

Forecast: Given the author's prominence,
this is bound to get major media attention
and to spark debate, fueled by national ad-
vertising and publicity and a four-city author
tour. This title is a BOMC and History Book
Club alternate.

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Los Angeles Times

SUNDAY, JUNE 3, 2001

WWW.LATIMES.COM/BOOKS

Book Review

Is This Man Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity?

WARREN I. COHEN

THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER

By Christopher Hitchens

Verso: 160 pp., $22

By Henry Kissinger

Simon & Schuster: 352 pp., $30

Henry Kissinger is not a nice man. Funny sometimes, clever always, but not nice. Christopher Hitchens, as is his wont, makes the point a little more strongly: He wants Kissinger tried for crimes against humanity. He argues that many of Kissinger's "partners in crime" have been punished, and he is angered by Kissinger's ability to avoid prosecution.

As national security adviser and secretary of state to Richard Nixon and secretary of state in the administration of Gerald Ford, Kissinger was complicit in every major foreign-policy decision made in Washington from 1969 through 1977. Some of those decisions seemed appalling at the time; others are even more disturbing as documentary evidence is declassified a quarter of a century later (see, for example, Larry Berman's forthcoming "No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam" to be published by The Free Press). Kissinger has succeeded in denying access to his official papers, and the full story of his activities is not likely to be known for at least 50 years, when the Library of Congress will open the Kissinger collection to researchers. Much of

Please see Kissinger, Page 2

**DAVID RIEFF** The Quest for Human Rights in an Amoral World. Page 3

International Morality and Eleanor Roosevelt **BLANCHE WIESEN COOK**. Page 6

**JOHN RHODEHAMEL** The Bleak Realism of John Adams. Page 7

Kissinger

Continued from Page 1

what the world knows about Kissinger's actions comes from his own often informative, always self-serving, memoirs.

Hitchens, in "The Trial of Henry Kissinger," declares himself concerned with only those Kissinger offenses open to legal prosecution. Mere "callous indifference to human life and human rights," however depraved, is not his focus. He indicts Kissinger for prolonging the war in Vietnam by helping the Nixon campaign subvert the peace process in 1968 and for planning the attacks on neutral Laos and Cambodia. Looking back to the trials of Japanese war criminals in 1946, he finds Kissinger's responsibility for war crimes greater than the culpability of at least one of the Japanese who was executed.

The most persuasive case against Kissinger relates to the overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende in 1973. Someone in the Nixon administration should be prosecuted for ordering the kidnapping of Gen. Rene Schneider, chief of the Chilean general staff, a man who insisted the military should stay out of politics. Evidence that the CIA facilitated Schneider's murder, which preceded the coup against Allende and the horrors of the Pinochet years, has been on the table for many years, and Hitchens does a lawyerly job of demonstrating Kissinger's involvement.

Hitchens also reminds us of the unwillingness of Nixon and Kissinger to prevent or stop Pakistan's brutal suppression of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971. Its president, Yahya Khan, was serving as Washington's conduit to Beijing, a service which to

Warren I. Cohen is the Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Los Angeles Times
Book Review

Book Editor

- Steve Wasserman

Deputy Editor

Thomas Curwen

Assistant Editors

Cara Mia DiMassa, Nick Owchar, Susan Salter Reynolds

Administrative Assistant

Ethel Alexander

Los Angeles Times

Book Review

202 W. 1st St.

Los Angeles, CA 90012

Tel: (213) 237-7001

Fax: (213) 237-4712

Cover illustration: Photograph by Christian Witkin; from "The Trial of Henry Kissinger" by Christopher Hitchens (Verso: 160 pp., $22)

Kissinger outweighed his responsibility for massacring thousands of Bengalis. The United States would not jeopardize his assistance by criticizing him. Hitchens also spells out the American role in the Greek junta's attempt in 1974 to assassinate Archbishop Makarios, president of Cyprus, and catches Kissinger and Ford acquiescing in the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975.

Certainly the process by which Augusto Pinochet was recently detained in England at the request of a Spanish judge and the decision by the House of Lords that he was not protected from prosecution by sovereign immunity must be unsettling to Kissinger, as is evident in his account of these events in his new book, "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?" If, as Hitchens alleges, Kissinger committed crimes against humanity, he should be brought to trial. Simply that his transgressions were committed as an official of the most powerful state in the world should not exempt him from being held accountable for his actions. He is apparently safe as long as he remains in the United States, but can he be sure that a warrant will not be issued for his arrest during his next trip abroad? Do we want him to enjoy the human right of freedom from fear?

"Does America Need a Foreign Policy?" was not intended as a response to Hitchens, as a statement for the defense. The book nonetheless serves as an apologia for Kissinger's past actions. Most of all, this is Kissinger's testament, a discussion of the principles that should guide American policy. The book bears some resemblance to George Kennan's classic "American Diplomacy." Although it is more profound, it lacks Kennan's elegant style. Surprisingly, Kissinger pays much more attention to economic issues than he did during his years in office.

Threaded throughout the volume is Kissinger's contempt for the Wilsonian penchant for stressing American ideals rather than interests as a basis for policy. He assures his readers that the values of the American people are commendable and important but insists there must be a balance, that policy should be based on an "unapologetic concept of enlightened national interest." He prefers Teddy Roosevelt's big-stick approach to the world over that of Woodrow Wilson. Value-based policy leads to crusades, and Kissinger insists that ideological and religious struggles—which he appears to equate with demands for democratization and respect for human rights—cause more suffering than wars over the balance of power. He concedes that concern for human rights will influence American policy but argues that it should never affect decisions un-

less "there exists scope for discretion," unless the policymakers can be certain that such scruples will not interfere with the achievement of his ends.

He is relentless in his criticism of the Clinton administration, those '60s types embarrassed by the exercise of American power. He is outraged by their apologies for actions he and others took in the course of the Cold War, disgusted by their excessive stress on democratization of the world and their insistence on finding unselfish causes. There was no strategic dialogue in Washington in the 1990s. A critical question for Kissinger is whether states have the right to intervene in the internal affairs of other states. The erstwhile professor offers a learned disquisition on the 17th century Westphalian international order, a system of peace dependent upon acceptance of national sovereignty and noninterference in the domestic conduct of other states. He is deeply troubled by the humanitarian military operations of the 1990s—Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo—and insists that the way states treat their own people is not a legitimate concern for other states, certainly not when it clouds geopolitical considerations. He does have qualms, however, when genocide is involved, as in Rwanda, and he would consider having the United States act to stop the killing.

In a section sure to delight Hitchens, Kissinger applies the Westphalian principle to situations, such as Pinochet's crimes in Chile, in which efforts are made to transcend national boundaries to impose justice. In Kissinger's mind, the case of *Ex Parte Pinochet* would be a terrible precedent that would not only violate traditional conceptions of sovereignty and the doctrine of nonintervention in domestic affairs but could also result in serious threats to Kissinger, as well as to China's Li Peng and Uganda's Idi Amin. At a minimum, he would have to think twice about foreign travel.

Scattered throughout the volume are artful excuses for some of the more troubling actions ordered by Nixon and Kissinger. When Kissinger criticizes the Kennedy and Johnson administrations for "missionary" efforts in Vietnam, for demanding democracy in the South while tolerating the sanctuaries and supply lines that the North established in Cambodia and Laos, he is attempting to justify the attacks Nixon ordered on those neutral countries. His discussion of the coup against Allende omits all mention of the murder of Schneider, and he insists Allende was a radical Marxist ideologue planning to impose a Castro-style dictatorship on Chile with Cuban help. He defends the coup by declaring that democratic parties in Chile welcomed it, al-

though the outgoing president, a Christian Democrat, opposed interference. Pinochet may have few friends left in the world, but Kissinger is clearly one of them.

His discussion of suitable policies toward Asia will disgust anyone who remembers the policies he recommended while in office. There is no reference to his infamous tilt toward Pakistan in a moment of Indian-Pakistani tensions in 1971. Pakistan has disappeared from his concerns, and he insists upon the importance of India. Of course, in his day Indian leaders, poisoned by what they had learned at the London School of Economics, protected somehow by American liberals, talked all sorts of anti-American prattle and could not be taken seriously. Japán, Kissinger reminds us, is America's most important ally in Asia, and there is some danger, he maintains, of its drifting out of our orbit. Yet he says nothing of the contempt in which he and Nixon held the Japanese, nothing about Nixon's attack on Japan's favorable balance of trade with the United States and his decision to keep the Japanese in the dark as he negotiated détente with China—which did more to fray Japanese-American ties than anything since the end of World War II. These "Nixon" shocks of 1971 alerted the Japanese to the tenuousness of their political and economic security.

And then there is China, the country Kissinger and most other foreign affairs analysts see as the most likely rival to the United States in the 21st century. He credits himself and Nixon for the American opening to China "in the absence of any groundswell of demand," a disingenuous remark that neglects to note that elite opinion had long favored the opening and that fear of the red-baiting Nixon had been one of the principal restraints on his predecessors. Equally slippery is his implication that the Clinton administration is responsible for growing tensions in Chinese-American relations. Kissinger is less offended by China's brutal actions against Christians, Tibetans and pro-democracy activists than by Clinton's pathetic efforts to modify Chinese behavior. In Kissinger's world view, the exercise of power in the interests of the state often inflicts pain on those who offend it. He and Nixon were responsible for many more deaths in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and shrugged off countless others in Chile and East Pakistan. In this instance, Kissinger's dictum that the internal affairs of a state are subordinate to geopolitical considerations informs his analysis: Clinton and his aides had no business allowing distaste for China's domestic repression to trump the 'strategic need for amicable relations with Beijing. As

though it were a condemnation (and as if he had never heard of Sen. Jesse Helms [R-N.C.]), Kissinger holds the American left responsible for making human rights and the promotion of democracy the main priorities of American policy toward China.

Carefully, Kissinger explains that containment of China is not an option; that the necessary allies are not available; that European traders would hasten to undermine it. He argues, reasonably, that China does not seek hegemony over all of Asia but is less forthcoming about Chinese ambitions in East Asia.

When he turns to the Taiwan issue, he is simply outrageous. He testifies that even as he opened relations with Beijing in 1971, he and Nixon had great sympathy for the efforts of the people of Taiwan to create a democratic basis for autonomy. That sympathy, however, did not prevent Nixon from assuring Chou En-lai that the United States considered Taiwan part of China. In the Shanghai Communique of 1972, he finessed the issue by acknowledging that Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait contended there was only one China, but he neglects to note that with the end of the Kuomintang dictatorship in the 1980s and the emergence of a democratic polity on Taiwan, the island's people increasingly reject the idea of one China.

Kissinger recognizes the danger inherent in the Taiwan issue: If the United States abandons the "one China" policy that he fashionied, war with China is probable. He warns the Chinese not to force the issue militarily but insists that it is Taiwan's leaders who must show restraint. Again, his geopolitical approach demands that minority states appease major ones, and it is not the role of the United States to side with the weak, Taiwan's democracy notwithstanding.

His discussion of European affairs, on the other hand, is hardly provocative. A more active role by the European Union is to be welcomed, provided it acts in ways to strengthen rather than weaken NATO. The French annoy him with their inability to conceive of their national identity in terms other than in opposition to the United States, undermining American policy at every opportunity. And yet they somehow seem confident that no matter how obstructive they are, Uncle Sam will ride to their rescue once more.

Kissinger's indifference to domestic social conditions, at home as well as abroad, is epitomized by his approach to national missile defense. He is persuaded that technical obstacles to a missile defense system can be overcome and suggests it would be unconvincable not to build one and

Please see Kissinger, Page 3

LOS ANGELES TIMES • BOOK REVIEW • SUNDAY, JUNE 3, 2001

2

Kissinger
Continued from Page 2

protect the American people from
a missile attack. He concedes that
creating such a system could pro-
voke an arms race but concludes
that even if a potential enemy
could afford to build enough
weapons to overwhelm it, the
United States would be no worse
off than before. He simply ignores
the social cost of pouring billions
into a questionable defense. He
cannot understand people who
would rather use the money or
some small part of it to correct
what he calls an "allegedly" inad-
equate system of medical insur-
ance. When he engages the issues
of globalization, he believes that
in the long run this is a tide that
will lift all boats. He notes the op-
position to globalization—the
demonstrations against the World
Trade Organization and the World
Bank—and warns that something
must be done to address the criti-
cism. American environmental
and labor standards should not be
imposed on developing countries,
but he concedes that there must
be better protection of workers
and the environment. Some sort
of sop must be thrown to the op-
position lest it become more radi-
cal. He can already sense the pres-
ence of some of those "familiar
leftist, anti-American and anti-
capitalist" types he remembers
from the 1960s and 1970s.

No one should be surprised
that Hitchens despises Kissinger
or that Kissinger is obsessed with
geopolitical considerations. The
question that must be answered is
how, in the 21st century, will the
enormous power of the United
States be used.

Kissinger takes as his text John
Quincy Adams' famous explana-
tion of why the United States
would not aid Greeks fighting for
their independence in the 1820s.
Adams left no doubt that Ameri-
cans sympathized with those who
sought freedom and independ-
ence all over the world, but this
country would not go abroad "in
search of monsters to destroy,"
Adams' position was eminently
sensible, for the United States of
1821, the kind of "pissant coun-
try" that Lyndon Johnson would
have disdained. A third-rate state,
unable to project what little power
it had, stayed home and decried
the existence of evil in the rest of
the world. Is that a suitable policy
for the United States 180 years
later? Doesn't the United States,
as the world's greatest power,
have a greater responsibility to at-
tempt to right the world's wrongs
than it did almost 200 years ago?
Surely Kissinger's conception of
the national interest is inadequate
for the 21st century. Perhaps he
would benefit from conversation
with Vaclav Havel, Kim Dae Jung
or Aung San Suu Kyi, some of his
fellow Nobel laureates. ☐

'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities'

DAVID RIEFF

IN OUR OWN BEST INTEREST

How Defending Human Rights
Benefits All Americans

By William F. Schulz

Beacon Press: 256 pp., $25

RESOURCE WARS

The New Landscape
of Global Conflict

By Michael T. Klare

Metropolitan Books:
292 pp., $26

A NEW GENERATION
DRAWS THE LINE

Kosovo, East Timor,
and the Standards of the West

By Noam Chomsky

Verso: 160 pp., $23

WILSON'S GHOST

Reducing the Risk of Conflict,
Killing, and Catastrophe in the
21st Century

By Robert S. McNamara and
James G. Blight

Public Affairs: 270 pp., $24

THE INVENTION OF PEACE

Reflections on War and
International Order

By Michael Howard

Yale University Press:
114 pp., $15

Every generation is vulnerable to imagining itself either uniquely blessed or uniquely cursed. And for an understandable reason. After all, it is simply human nature to attach more importance to the time in which one has been fated to live and die than to either the past or the remoter reaches of the future. Add to this the fact that, historically, the turning of a century, let alone the turning of a millennium, has usually been the occasion for extremes of both optimism and pessimism about the human condition, and it is hardly surprising that over the last decade or so, one school of writers and activists has suggested that the human race stands at the verge of a new era of justice while another gloomily discerns in our collective future chaos, war and environmental catastrophe.

About the pessimists, there is
little of great interest to say. Of
course, they may be right, though
probably only in the narrow sense
that all civilizations, including our
own, are just as surely mortal as
each of us is as an individual. But
by and large, at least in their
North American variant, such

David Rieff is a contributing writer
to Book Review.

Detail of flag design by Jacqueline Schuman; from "Barbarian Sentiments: America in the New Century" by William Pfaff (Hill and Wang: 290 pp., $16)

writers as Robert Kaplan, Samuel
Huntington, and Thomas Homer-
Dixon often come across as little
more than updated, inferior ver-
sions of such pre-World War II
conservative European "decli-
nists" as Oswald Spengler and Jo-
sé Ortega y Gasset.

It is the stance of the optimists
that is both more interesting and,
at least for anyone who can attain
a certain critical distance from
both the secular millenarianism
and what William Pfaff once de-
scribed as the "vocabulary of opti-
mism" that is the American na-
tional style, more perplexing. This
belief in the radiant future has
coalesced not around a religious
faith—although there are el-
ements of displaced religiosity in
both its vocabulary and its intoler-
ance for either criticism or self-
criticism—but a secular one: the
human-rights movement.

Anyone doubting that the En-
lightenment project, and its
American descendant, the Wilso-
nian approach to foreign policy,
are alive and well at the millen-
nium need only read the preface
that Mary Robinson, formerly
president of Ireland and now the
United Nations high commis-
sioner for human rights, wrote to
"In Our Own Best Interest," the
new book by William Schulz, the
director of the American branch
of Amnesty International. "All hu-
man rights for all," she writes,
"this should be our common call
to action. I am convinced that by
combining our action and deter-
mination, by building partner-
ships between governments and
civil society, international organi-
zations, and the media, religious
and academic communities, we
will succeed in realizing the vision
of the future which the Universal
Declaration [of Human Rights]

first called for half a century ago.”

This is stirring stuff, to be sure,
but it does not—and this is
putting the matter charitably—
stand up to the most cursory in-
tellectual examination. For who
are these governments, religious
groups, media outlets and inter-
national organizations in which
Robinson puts so much faith? We
know the answer, of course. She
has in mind the international lib-
eral good guys: the United Na-
tions, the liberal Western democ-
racies, environmental groups,
"enlightened" religious denomi-
nations like the Unitarian Univer-
salists of which William Schulz is
past president, and foundations
like Ford, Rockefeller or Lannan.

But much as Robinson would
seem to want to pretend other-
wise, civil society does not just
consist of Amnesty International,
Greenpeace and Doctors Without
Borders (emblematically, Schulz
includes a comprehensive list of
such groups as an appendix to his
book), but of the Pakistani reli-
gious schools in which the Taliban
was shaped, the Israeli settlers'
movement in the occupied West
Bank, and thousands of business
lobbyists from K Street in Wash-
ington to the halls of the Euro-
pean Commission in Brussels.
And the views of a government
like China's are surely at least as
important as those of the govern-
ments of social-democratic Scan-
dinavia. Indeed, if the benchmark
of a civil society organization is to
be the number of private citizens
who actively support its cause
then the National Rifle Assn., with
its millions of members, has a far
better claim to be taken as the
model than Human Rights Watch.
Perhaps even more important
than these cognitive confusions—
this egregiously virtuous brand of

wishful thinking masquerading as
thought—is the question of why
Americans (or, for that matter, the
citizens of other rich countries
whose views, unfair as this may
be, count for far more than those
of the vast majority of the people
of our world who live in the poor
world) should care. It is this ques-
tion, that, to his great credit,
Schulz tries to address in "In Our
Own Best Interest."

As the director of the only ma-
jor grass-roots human-rights or-
ganization in the United States
/groups like Human Rights Watch
have relatively small popular con-
stituencies and rely on their re-
ports from the field and lobbying
skills to try to influence the policy
debate), Schulz is particularly well
situated to be able to analyze both
what has been successful and
what has been unsuccessful about
the human-rights wave of the last
20 years. And unlike so many hu-
man-rights activists, he does not
simply blame outsiders—short-
sighted politicians, an ill-informed
public, a commercialized,
dumbed-down media—but turns
the focus inward, toward activists
like himself.

"Nearly every movement to
change the world," he writes,
"frames the benefits of what it of-
fers in both visionary and practi-
cal terms.... Except, more often
than not, the human rights move-
ment." By this, Schulz means that
the human-rights movement must
not simply speak in ethical and le-
gal terms but, as he puts it, offer
"compelling practical reasons why
respect for human rights is in the
best interests of the United
States."

Schulz's analysis of the human
rights movement's predicament at
the millennium is incontestable.
But despite the establishment of
certain new norms in interna-
tional law that have already led to
the ad hoc international tribunals
for the former Yugoslavia and for
Rwanda and that will soon, with
or without American participa-
tion, give rise to an International
Criminal Court, and the ripple ef-
fect on the judicial systems of
some Western democracies that
inspired the arrest of Gen. Pino-
chet in Britain in 1999, it would be
hard to make the case that these
normative triumphs have done all
that much to make the world a
better place. Indeed, the fact that
in Africa so much attention and so
much hope has been lavished on
the supposed success of the Inter-
national Tribunal for Rwanda dur-
ing a three-year period in which
2.5 million civilians are estimated
to have died in the war in the
neighboring Democratic Republic
of Congo suggests that this judi-
cialization of the world may not

Please see Rights, Page 4

3

Rights

Continued from Page 3

be the advance for civilization its supporters claim.

In fairness, unlike so many of his colleagues, Schulz does not attempt to do so. And yet he shares the extremely optimistic assumption—at times it can seem like the human-rights movement's equivalent of the doctrine of the Resurrection—that, as he puts it, 4,000 years after the Code of Hammurabi, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights constituted a definition of rights that "nearly everybody active on the international scene at the time acknowledged applied [to every human being]." The problem, as Schulz doubtless realizes but chooses to downplay in his book, is that it is one thing for a government to sign an international treaty and quite another for it to actually consider itself bound by that treaty in moments of crisis. After all, the same regime that launched the genocide in Rwanda signed the U.N. Genocide Convention. And there really is no reason to assume that governments that have chosen to commit evil acts are going be distinguished by a treaty or a finding in international law anymore than a street thug is going to be distinguished from mugging someone because it is against the law. Only the absolute certainty of punishment might accomplish that. The equivalent in international law would be some form of world government. But as Schulz himself points out, "at least for the foreseeable future, respect for human rights will remain largely a matter of compliance by governments or armed opposition groups. It will remain largely a matter of... perceived self-interest."

"In Our Own Best Interests" wrestles mightily with the need to make this case from self-interest, but the best one can say is that a charitable reader may feel that Schulz has managed to eke out a draw in the contest. He is to be congratulated for confronting the hard questions straight on, and for refusing the consoling fiction, much beloved of activists, that, in the words of one of Schulz's friends when he described his book to her, "O what a shame to think that we need selfish reasons to care about our fellow human beings." For this alone, the book is of lasting value. But unfortunately, it does not fulfill Schulz's principal intention in writing it by making a case for Americans to see global human rights as being in their best interests. To say this is not to claim that human rights abuses abroad have no consequences for Americans. Countries that violate human rights tend to be unstable (though not always, as in the case of Malaysia), tend to be unsuccessful in addressing poverty (though again, not always;

think of South Korea during the period of military rule) and tend to be contemptuous of other treaty commitments (though not always; think of Israel, whose conduct in the Occupied Territories has not affected its behavior on other issues).

On the most fundamental level, Schulz's book seems to recapitulate George Soros' argument that the political goal of democratic societies like the United States' should be to do everything in their power to encourage pluralistic, rights-respecting "open societies" and put as much pressure as possible on "closed societies" to change. But the problem is less, as Schulz seems to imagine, getting people in America and other developed countries to care—though he is right to see this as a goal worth striving for—and more figuring out what to do about human-rights abusing regimes. Here Schulz is uncharacteristically vague. He sees the argument for military intervention, but, quite rightly, he sees its pitfalls, both moral and operational. His welcomes changes in the law but realizes that the law without force is a largely hollow instrument. As a result, having set out to write a hard-headed "practical" book, Schulz is unable to provide a roadmap for the future not in terms of how much people should care but of what they should demand that their governments do.

In a way Schulz finds himself in a very American trap. He seems to believe—again, the formulation is William Pfaff's—that human beings and human society can be transformed by human will: that if people care enough, a solution will be found. But it is not clear whether this is true. To make this point is not to side with radical conspiracy theorists like Noam Chomsky who, in book after book, claim to see in the human-rights movement some new disguise for American imperial hegemony. Anyone masochistic enough to want a taste of this kind of arrogant fantasy-mongering can turn to Chomsky's latest effusion—"A New Generation Draws the Line." Chomsky writes these books from his study in Lexington, Mass. (far be it for him to have done any actual reporting on the ground in Kosovo; that might have sullied his perfect confidence in his own views), and the over-researched, under-experienced result is an object lesson in the perils of being an armchair radical. Suffice it to say that an unfortunate reader will discover that because the United States behaved badly in East Timor and supported the Turkish government's war against the Kurds, its actions in Kosovo can't possibly have been anything other than in the service of the nefarious interests of the military-industrial complex. Reading Chomsky, and contemplating just how prolific he continues to be, one

weeps for the trees.

Despite what Chomsky imagines, the alliance between the international human-rights movement and Western governments is anything but dishonorable. It has succeeded, albeit inconsistently and usually in areas where large economic or geo-strategic interests were not at stake, in pushing governments to act. Kosovo was a perfect case in point. It is oversimplifying only slightly to say that the West waged war there because of exasperation with Slobovan Milosevic and guilt over its failure to act in Bosnia. Chomsky is too busy perfecting his demonology to accept this, but Schulz sees it clearly. The problem, however, is that though he may be right in insisting that force should remain as much an option in supporting human rights as "it does when it comes to protecting national security or promoting U.S. economic welfare," the issue is what that force is being used for. For as Kosovo demonstrated, the issue in humanitarian war is at least as much what powerful states plan to do when the war is over as while it is going on. Are we to colonize—as we essentially have done in Kosovo and the British have done in Sierra Leone? Declare victory and get out—as we did in Cambodia? Or perhaps declare defeat and get out—as we did in Somalia?

"In dreams," the American poet Delmore Schwartz once wrote, "begin responsibilities." And surely human rights is the ultimate millennial dream. If Schulz is successful in his effort to get more Americans to see the centrality of human-rights concerns in foreign policy—and as he himself would be the first to admit—these are the questions that need to be answered, and soon. For as Michael T. Klare shows in his brilliantly researched, ably argued new book, "Resource Wars," a new geography of conflict based on looming scarcities of water, oil, mineral resources and timber, is already being mapped out. And unfortunately, the areas of conflict—above all Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, the Indonesian archipelago and Sub-Saharan Africa—are precisely those regions where the human-rights picture is dimdest and where, as Klare rightly emphasizes, most of those killed or maimed or uprooted (let us eschew that sanitized euphemism, "casualties") will be civilian non-combatants.

Klare's analysis is indisputable, but, like Schulz's, his prescription, which he offers only as a brief sketch at the end of the book, is woefully unpersuasive. Having outlined in great and convincing detail the coming immiseration of large areas of the world and the subsequent political and social catastrophes that will follow in its

wake, it comes as a surprise that Klare can seriously offer as a remedy some form of world control over scant resources, or, as he puts it, "a global system of resource conservation and collaboration." His own scenario makes a mockery of such a suggestion, and the more one accepts his analysis, the more one is driven to reject his solution.

It may be that, uncomfortable though it is for Americans of good conscience to consider the possibility, the political, moral and societal challenges that confront the world at the beginning of this millennium simply have no solution. To suggest such a thing is obviously to repudiate the deepest and most enduring tendency in American thinking about the world, which is, whether in its right-wing or left-wing variant, Wilsonian. It was Wilson, after all, who insisted that America "puts human rights above all other rights... [and whose flag] is not only the flag of America, but of humankind."

The moral realism to which, at least implicitly, Schulz and Klare appeal, is quintessentially Wilsonian, though the 28th president's name appears in neither book. But the question that needs to be asked is whether, if that is what lies at the core of their intellectual matrix, such a stance can justly be called realism at all. It is a commonplace of American political science to say that, apart from a few errant realists, like that survivor of white picket fence America, George Kennan, or that misplaced Wilhelmine bureaucrat, Henry Kissinger, we are all Wilsonians of one stripe or another. But if this is true, it is only true implicitly. Few American politicians, except in moments of great moral euphoria, like Kennedy at the Berlin Wall or Clinton as the bombs began to rain down on Kosovo, would really be willing to declare themselves Wilsonian in the full intrinsic sense of a man who honestly believed that in the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations, he was setting not just the United States but all the nations on the path to world government. Compared to such moral ambitions, the contemporary human-rights movement looks content with half measures.

Not so Robert S. McNamara and James Blight. "Wilson's Ghost," their new book, is not simply an homage to the father of the League, as the title suggests, but a daring effort to revive Wilsonianism for the 21st century. From the first page of the author's note, the moral ambition of their enterprise is made apparent. McNamara writes that his experience as an insider—at the Ford Motor Co., as Kennedy's defense secretary, as one of the architects of the Vietnam War, and as head of the World Bank—"has caused me to reflect on what went wrong

in the 20th century that led to such wholesale killing of human beings by other human beings, and what might be done to prevent its recurrence."

To say McNamara is a troubling figure is to state the obvious. He, after all, has made his own existential doubts about his role in the Vietnamese catastrophe a matter of public record. There is something of the Loyola in him—the faithful warrior who, after a spiritual crisis, turns to preaching the Gospel. But alongside his new humility, there is also the same arrogant sense of mission and certainty of purpose that marked McNamara's career as a war planner and an international banker laying down the law to the poor world. Who with anything less than McNamara's sense of self could really declare himself in a position to stop not just one war but the recurrence of killing in general? And who but McNamara could imagine that he could find some explanatory key, some geopolitical equivalent to the double helix, to the problem of what went wrong in the 20th century?

Strangely enough, while William Schulz, a Unitarian minister and lifelong human-rights activist is concerned with making an argument for human betterment based on self-interest, McNamara and Blight, the consummate insider and his collaborator, a professor of international relations at Brown University, time and again opt for the transcendental language of morality. "Empathy Now" is the short form of how the authors believe the United States should modify its policies toward both China and the Russian Federation. On their larger purpose, the language they employ is frankly religious. "Wilson's Ghost" concludes with a question: "Don't we have a responsibility," write McNamara and Blight, "to redeem, in some measure, the lives of those who died violently in the 20th century?"

One knows what they mean, and while such language will doubtless be adduced by McNamara's critics as yet another example of his unslakable thirst for self-expiation, it is more respectful to take his words at face value. After all, the questions such a stance give rise to are no less stringent. The first and most obvious is this: What supernatural hubris could lead McNamara and Blight to imagine that anything can be done to "redeem" the deaths of Verdun and Auschwitz, the Gulag Archipelago and the Algerian war of independence, Hiroshima, the Cambodian killing fields and the mission stations of Rwanda? To imagine that there is anything human beings could do, up to and including reducing the risk of nuclear war or mitigating the worst abuses of tyrants and torturers, to somehow "make right" or make

Please see Rights, Page 5

4

# How to Run the World in Seven Chapters

*America's perennial pundit offers a foreign policy to meet the needs of a lone superpower in a new century.*

Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century.
By Henry Kissinger.
318 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $30.

By Thomas L. Friedman

READING Henry Kissinger on foreign policy often feels more like an adventure in geology than political science. What always makes Kissinger interesting as an analyst, whether one agrees with him or not, is that he has a take on the world. That take is grounded in a belief that countries are in many respects like geological formations, forged over centuries by the forces of geography and history. The surface areas may change from time to time, as governments, leaders and even ideologies come and go. But the underlying character of nations does not change, or at least not quickly, any more than the contours of a mountain or the course of a river. And these underlying and immutable characteristics shape a country's interests, instincts and habits. Kissinger would probably not describe his outlook in quite so deterministic a fashion, but that is how it comes through, and frankly that is what gives his analysis its own character. It feels rooted, not in fads or game theory, but in the deepest tectonic plates of geography and history.

Kissinger's latest book, "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?" is much more interesting than its peculiar title. (Does anyone suppose that the answer would be no — America doesn't need a foreign policy — especially coming from Henry Kissinger?) The book is really Kissinger's geological survey of the post-cold-war world. If you'd like to have a conversation, or an argument, with Dr. K. about foreign policy in the 21st century and how America should deal with it, this book is about as close as you're likely to get. Each chapter takes a collection of key countries, summarizes their enduring features and national interests, and then argues how Washington should relate to them to ensure that no power emerges, in any region or globally, to unite others against the United States.

At first I wondered why Kissinger wrote this book, since many of these geological themes have been touched on in his previous works. But as you get into it, you start to realize that it was not intended for library shelves or academic colleagues. In many ways it has an audience of one: President George W. Bush.

Although Kissinger could not have been sure that Bush would win the election when he embarked on this book, it nevertheless reads as though he had. For this relatively slim volume is laced

Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs columnist for The Times.

with criticism (some of it gratuitous) of the soft-headed, "New Age" foreign policy of the Clinton administration and is addressed to a prospective president who Kissinger clearly hoped would be a hardheaded Republican. One might even say that this book is Kissinger's version of "The Prince," by Machiavelli. Indeed, it easily could have been titled "The President" or "The Statesman." Because, consciously or unconsciously, Kissinger, the Republican Party's elder statesman, is passing down his wisdom here to today's novice Republican president, and to others who might follow. And like "The Prince," this book isplete with pointers, road maps, warnings, maxims and pithy recommenda-

tions—but always rooted in Kissinger's sense of the essential character of countries as they struggle for power and survival, much the way Machiavelli rooted his advice in the essential character of human beings as they struggle for power and survival.

Kissinger's overarching theme in his version of "The Prince" is unimistakable: America's pre-eminence in the world today is taken far too much for granted by its citizenry. The last presidential election was the third in a row in which foreign policy was barely discussed. Americans seem to have come to believe that they are now so powerful that they don't really need a serious foreign policy—they can afford to get

by with ad hoc responses or grand finger-wagging.

Those groups who are actively involved in foreign policy today, Kissinger argues, often break down into hyper-idealisers, who believe "America has the appropriate democratic solution for every other society regardless of cultural and historical differences," or hypernationalists, who peddle the notion that the Soviet Union was brought down simply because of Ronald Reagan's assertiveness, not by a bipartisan foreign policy of containment that spanned nine administrations. These hypernationalists maintain that "the solution to the world's ills is American hegemony — the imposition of American solutions on the world's trouble spots by the unabashed affirmation of its pre-eminence." In today's complex international system, Kissinger insists, you cannot have an American foreign policy that is based on the United States as either the world's social worker or the world's schoolmarm, ruler in hand. It requires a blend of the two, with a large dollop of humility and caution in between about what can and cannot be imposed on the world; it requires an appreciation for American traditions of exceptionalism, with a constant eye to the circumstances in which those traditions can be brought to bear.

WHAT was said of "The Prince," as Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. of Harvard University explains in his translation, will no doubt be said by critics of Kissinger. Mansfield wrote: "Soon after being published in 1532," Machiavelli's book "was denounced as a collection of sinister maxims and as a recommendation of tyranny, giving rise to the hateful term 'Machiavellian.'" Kissinger's book is not a recommendation for tyranny in any way, but it is very "Kissingerian" — focused more around power balances, stability and national interests than American values. I have no doubt that Kissinger is as cynical, mean and nasty a bureaucratic enfighter and player of the game of nations as his most venomous critics have charged. At times, he can make Machiavelli sound like one of the Sisters of Mercy. But having said that, one can still value the clarity of his thinking, which is fully on display here.

There is a tendency in some foreign policy circles to believe that you don't have to think about causal chains of events. It is enough just to be outraged about something happening somewhere, and react.

Moral outrage is important. It can save lives and, at times, spur diplomats to cut through all the diplo-babble and do something. But it does not exempt policy makers or critics or protesters from thinking through the implications of any intervention, or the legacy of history that could weigh upon it. People who regularly point that out, or who are in any way restrained by such considera-

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

14 Sunday, June 17, 2001

HENRY A. KISSINGER

Dear Bill:

Not surprisingly, I didn't like the review in *The Weekly Standard*, but I loved the cover. Could I have the original?

Mr. William Kristol
Editor
The Weekly Standard
1150 17th Street, NW
Fifth Floor
Washington, DC 20036

TWENTY-SIXTH FLOOR · 350 PARK AVENUE · NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10022 · (212) 759-7919
FACSIMILE (212) 759-0042

Books & Arts

All photos: Corbis

# The Unrealistic Realism of Henry Kissinger

By MAX BOOT

I saw Henry Kissinger the other day in New York. For a moment I was disoriented. It was as though Bismarck, or Metternich had walked out of a history book and straight into my path. Like his nineteenth-century heroes, Kissinger now seems mostly to belong to history: He has earned his place as one of the most powerful and controversial secretaries of state ever, the architect, along with Richard Nixon, of the opening to China, détente, the Paris Peace Accords, and so many other events that must feel, to a new generation, almost as ancient as the 1878 Congress of Berlin.

Yet a quarter-century after his departure from government Kissinger remains a presence: still dispensing advice to CEOs and politicians, still attending society fêtes, still writing opeds and giving speeches—and still arousing debate. The always-provocative Christopher Hitchens a few months ago took to the pages of *Harper's* to argue at excruciating length that Kissinger is a war criminal. (You

know, the “secret invasion” of Cambodia and all that. Ho-hum.) And though he no longer runs America’s foreign policy, Kissinger can’t resist the urge to coach from the sideline those who do.

His latest book, *Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century*, proves that he still has a lot to say and knows how to say it well. It is hard to think of any other major living American foreign policy figure

been entitled, “My Foreign Policy for America.” Most of it consists of a continent-by-continent, sometimes country-by-country, survey of the world scene, analyzing each area for the problems and opportunities it presents the United States. The final two chapters abandon the geographical format to focus on international economics and questions of “peace and justice.”

Many of Kissinger's observations show an acute eye, especially his critiques of Clinton initiatives. He calls the failed Middle East peace talks “the dialogue of the deaf” and warns of the folly of trying to bribe North Korea to give up its nuclear program—an attempt that “may have encouraged other rogue states to initiate nuclear weapons programs to generate a comparable buyout.”

He is particularly persuasive on ballistic-missile defense. As the author of the ABM Treaty, he repeats his call for voiding this pact signed with a country that no longer exists (the Soviet Union) during a war now over (the Cold War), though he is less convincing in trying to explain why he signed this flawed treaty in the first place. He also makes

who writes so elegantly or with such erudition. Richard Holbrooke, who penned a masterly account of the Dayton peace accords, is his only rival in this department. Whether you agree or disagree with its conclusions, any book by Kissinger promises the kind of rich intellectual meal that makes Warren Christopher’s recently released memoir seem, by contrast, thin gruel indeed.

Given that no one questions whether America needs a foreign policy, Kissinger’s book should really have

Does America Need a Foreign Policy?
*Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century*
by Henry Kissinger
Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $30

Max Boot, the editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal, is writing a history of America's small wars.

JUNE 18, 2001

THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 31

many valuable suggestions, for instance proposing closer American relations with India.

Kissinger's survey of the world scene is informed, naturally, by his position as one of the leading theoreticians and practitioners of the school known as "realpolitik." He has long been associated with the view that the United States should pursue its security interests instead of trying to foster its values around the world. Having spent decades debating this proposition, he is all too aware of the principal criticism—that the American people are too idealistic, democratic, and unruly to have a foreign policy worthy of the Hapsburg Empire. In this book, Kissinger gamely tries to meet his critics halfway, suggesting that American foreign policy should avoid either "excessive 'realism'" or "excessive 'idealism.'" Fair enough. Who is in favor of excess anything?

Yet too often his agreements with the idealist school about human rights and democracy read as though they were uttered through clenched teeth. At the end of a long chapter on Asia, in which he explains why democracy and human rights are *not* appropriate guideposts for U.S. policy in the region, he declares: "Any serious dialogue with Asian nations cannot fail to include the subject of human rights." And why not? Not because they are beneficial to American policy but because "No administration which fails to take account of this reality can maintain public support." One senses he must have resisted the urge to add "Unfortunately" at the beginning of that sentence.

Kissinger's view seems to be that it's a good thing democracy has spread as far as it has—but we should certainly not be doing much to advance it further. He writes, "Though most Asian countries adopted some sort of electoral system, democracy has not been their defining national experience." America's true interests lie in preventing any single power from dominating the rest, not in attempting to transform countries like China into liberal democracies. No "messianic globalism," please.

There is a sort of logic to Kissinger's analysis—though it boils down to little more than the proposition that the absence of democracy in a country means democracy is not relevant there. This is especially glaring in his analysis of the Middle East. “The conflicts in the region are not about democracy because, except for Israel, none of the contestants is a democracy,” he writes.

Kissinger with Nixon and Thatcher

It doesn't seem to occur to Kissinger that, as Natan Sharansky and others argue, the conflicts in the Middle East are about the *lack* of democracy and its attendant freedoms in the Arab world. Israel is America's most loyal friend in the region precisely because Israel shares America's values. Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya destabilize the region because they are thug-ocracies. A major reason the Palestinian Authority won't

make peace with Israel is that it too is governed by men with guns. Like Sadam, Assad, Qaddafi, and all the rest, Rafat needs a foreign threat to justify his tyrannical rule. Having spent decades whipping up hatred of the "Zionist imperialists," he cannot easily turn around and end the struggle. Two Arab strongmen, Sadat and King Hussein, did make peace with Israel (it is perhaps relevant that Jordan is among the most liberal Arab states), but it is a very cold peace indeed.

Yet among the eight principles that Kissinger says "should guide any new approach" to peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, he never mentions the need to transform Palestinian society, to spread freedom and the rule of law to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This is the same mistake Israel and the United States made in the Oslo process: expecting that negotiations between a democracy and a dictatorship with clashing interests could produce a modus vivendi. Come to think of it, this is also the illusion that animated détente.

The charitable explanation for why Kissinger does not suggest trying to transform the Palestinian Authority is that he thinks it impossible (as opposed to undesirable). But who, six decades ago, would have thought that Europe would be as peaceful and democratic as it is today? In 1945 it would have been easy to say that democracy had not been Germany's "defining national experience" and that therefore American ideals had no applicability to the land of Bismarck and Hitler. Indeed during World War II many "realists" did argue that Germany should be dismembered or deindustrialized so that it could never threaten its neighbors again. Luckily, American policymakers ignored the counsels of caution and boldly decided to reshape the former Axis states, turning them into pillars of liberal democracy. The United States after 1945 did not follow a "balance of power" model in Western Europe; it imposed American values, with results Kissinger applauds.

Democracy has now spread to Eastern Europe as well, not least because

32/THE WEEKLY STANDARD

JUNE 18, 2001

America steadfastly opposed commu-
nism for a half century. Though policy
swung toward "coexistence" during the
Nixon-Ford-Carter years, Ronald Rea-
gan moved firmly to an "unrealistic"
policy aimed at the overthrow of Soviet
power. What realist, after all, would
have called the USSR an "evil empire"
or thundered, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear
down this wall"? How naive.

Sophisticates like Kissinger had real-
ized decades before that the existence of
the Soviet bloc was a reality to be ac-
commodated, not a challenge to over-
come. (Kissinger now tends to forget
his pronouncements along these lines
from the 1970s.) Only a Hollywood
actor unschooled in international rela-
tions could possibly think that democ-
racy might spread to areas under the
dominion of the Red Army. So today
only an ignorant clod—or deluded ide-
ologue—could imagine that democracy
might be an appropriate form of gov-
ernment for a country under the sway
of the People's Liberation Army.

Yet democracy has somehow taken
hold in such Asian countries as Taiwan,
South Korea, and Japan, which showed
no more historical affinity for liberal-
ism than mainland China does. (In fact
Taiwan has precisely the same cultural
heritage as the PRC.) Likewise democ-
racy seems firmly established in such
countries as Poland and Hungary,
which had little or no experience of it
before the 1990s. History is not destiny.
Being ignorant of it may even help a
policymaker escape its shackles.

Kissinger, of course, is steeped in diplomatic history and skilled in citing it (the unkind might say "manipulating it") to make his case. And, naturally, no period of history causes him more concern than the one in which he was calling the shots. Even in this volume, ostensibly concerned with the 2000s not the 1970s, he tries to portray his own past actions in the most flattering light possible—a project he undertook at considerably greater length in three volumes of memoirs. He claims that the realpolitik policy he and Nixon implemented "had many remarkable successes." An interesting take on what, to most observers, would appear to be

one of the most dismal decades in
American diplomacy—a decade when
world communism was at its zenith and
American power at its nadir. Of course,
Kissinger argues that he and Nixon and
Ford did the best they could with the
bad hand they were dealt. There's some
justice in this claim, but it conveniently
overlooks the fact that Kissinger was
not matching his accommodationism
with a simultaneous attempt to buck up
the American people to take a harder
line against Communist aggression.
Instead he actively derided and sabo-
taged the conservatives and neoconserv-
atives who were attempting to awaken
America to "the present danger."

One can forgive Kissinger for his
obvious, understandable attempts at
self-exculpation. (One of his most
attractive qualities is his sense of
humor, which he often employs to poke
gentle fun at his own healthy ego.)
Much harder to forgive, because it is
less obvious to readers not steeped in
the study of history, is his attempt to
enlist to his cause one of America's
most admired presidents. In his magis-
terial earlier work, Diplomacy, Kissinger
paid Theodore Roosevelt what is, for
Kissinger, the ultimate compliment:
"He approached the global balance
of power with a sophistication . . . ap-
proached only by Richard Nixon."
Now, in Does America Need a Foreign
Policy?, Kissinger returns to the charge,
praising Roosevelt as the admirable
practitioner of European-style realpoli-
tik, in contrast to Woodrow Wilson,

that dangerous proponent of American
ideology.

Might this be the same Theodore
Roosevelt who whooped America into
war against Spain, because, he
explained, "It was our duty, even more
from the standpoint of National honor
than from the standpoint of National
interest to stop...[the] murderous
oppression" of the Cuban people? The
same Theodore Roosevelt who wanted
war not because of any particular for-
eign threat but to wean Americans of
"the soft and easy enjoyment of material
comfort" and to secure the nation's
"greatness"? The same Theodore Roo-
sevelt who repeatedly stressed that
"righteousness" and "justice" were
more important than "peace" among
"the nations of mankind"?

Roosevelt was described by his biog-
rapher John Milton Cooper as "the
most visionary idealist in American
politics." Kissinger calls him a realist
mainly because he practiced good bal-
ance-of-power politics in brokering an
end to the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.
That is, at best, an incomplete picture.
Roosevelt, like Reagan, knew how to
fuse American ideals with American
force—a combination that Kissinger
still struggles with.

Theodore Roosevelt's policy helps illuminate another shortcoming of Kissinger's worldview. For Kissinger the "balance of power"—maintained by wise statesmen schooled in the diplomatic arts . . . statesmen like himself,

Kissinger eats with Chou En-Lai in 1973

JUNE 18, 2001

THE WEEKLY STANDARD / 33

really—is the highest goal of interna-
tional relations. He recognizes that the
nation-state is in decline today, under
attack from ethnic disturbances below
and from international law above. Nev-
ertheless he argues that tampering with
the Westphalian system and its "doc-
trine of nonintervention in the domes-
tic affairs of other countries" is a dan-
gerous departure from the time-tested
norms of international relations.

But Theodore Roosevelt, unlike Henry Kissinger, knew that the balance of power was not an end in itself. Yes, Roosevelt believed in the balance of power in Asia or Europe, where America was very weak early in the twentieth century. But how did he act in a region where America was strong enough to impose its will? Only the Caribbean fit that description in 1900, and it was there that he promulgated the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, holding that the United States would exercise "international police power" so that American honor would be safeguarded and European meddlers excluded. Showing scant regard for Westphalian niceties, the United States turned Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Panama into protectorates and Puerto Rico into a possession. This policy was expanded under Roosevelt's successors, Taft and Wilson, who added Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Virgin Islands to America's empire.

Britain practiced a similar philoso-
phy for centuries. Whitehall was
famously intent on preserving a balance
on the Continent but only because
Britain did not have the resources to
impose its will there. In much of the
rest of the world Britain did not seek a
balance of power. It sought dominance.
And it sought to impose its "values."

Today America has as much power
in many parts of the world—for
starters, in the Middle East, Europe,
and Northeast Asia—as it once had
only in the Caribbean. It has more pow-
er than Britain ever did. The question
is: Will America practice a timid diplo-
macy based on the balance of power, or
will it try to defend and extend the Pax
Americana, a worthy successor to the
Pax Britannica? Most international
relations scholars agree that a benign

hegemony is more stable than a balance
of power (less risk of a replay of 1914),
though most doubt that it can be pre-
served for long.

If America is to maintain its hegemo-
ny, it will, like Britain, wind up using
its power for purposes hard to justify by
any traditional calculus of "national
interest." Britain stamped out the slave
trade and the thug cult in India; Ameri-
ca has stamped out ethnic cleansing in
the Balkans. Kissinger grudgingly sup-
ported this intervention after the bombs
started falling because NATO's prestige
was on the line, but he is troubled by it.
He implies that the Kosovo campaign
represented an unprecedented and
probably unwarranted interference in
another nation's internal affairs. "We
may be entering a world in which, to
use G.K. Chesterton's phrase, 'virtue

runs amok,'" he writes, darkly. And, he
warns, the United States should not
become "policeman of the world."

Is this the counsel of prudence—or
pusillanimity? I have an idea what
Theodore Roosevelt might say. He had
nothing but scorn for “milk-and-water
cosmopolitanism,” for “flapdoodle paci-
fists and mollycoddlers”—and also for
the unrealistic realists, like Henry
Kissinger, who would define America’s
world role in the most crabbed and nar-
row terms, without reference to Ameri-
can ideals. “The men who have stood
highest in our history, as in the history
of all countries,” Roosevelt wrote in
his autobiography, “are those who
scorned injustice, . . . who did not hesi-
tate to draw the sword when to leave
it undrawn meant inability to arrest
triumphant wrong.” ♦

Last in the
American League

*A history of baseball in Washington.*

BY JAMES W. HALEY JR.

For baseball games played in distant cities in the 1930s and 1940s, local baseball announcers would read the telegraph wire to find out what had happened on each play, add canned applause and the recorded sound of a bat, and broadcast games as if they were really watching the players. Arch McDonald, the Washington Senators' broadcaster, was one of the best at this. But even he had trouble when the telegraph ticker failed. When it resumed, the announcer would have to catch up quickly, frequently by saying batters hit the first pitch and made three quick outs. McDonald was famously caught fabricating. He an-

James W. Haley Jr. is a circuit court judge in Virginia and still a Washington Senators fan.

nounced a three-pitch inning. One
wondered how old Arch had gotten it so
wrong when the Washington papers
revealed the next day that infielder Sam
Dente had set a Senators' record by

fouling off eight straight
pitches.

According to James
C. Roberts in *Hardball
on the Hill*, his absorbing
account of baseball in
the nation's capital,
something similar happened to another
wire-reading announcer in Des Moines,
Iowa. That announcer was "Dutch"
Reagan, who in later years loved to rem-
inisce about having invented a ten-sec-
ond inning. Reagan announced Chica-
go Cubs games for Iowa stations from
1932 to 1937. He went on to other
things, including playing pitcher
Grover Cleveland Alexander in the
1952 film *The Winning Team* and be-

Hardball on the Hill
Baseball Stories from
Our Nation's Capital
by James C. Roberts
Triumph, 258 pp., $22.95

34 / THE WEEKLY STANDARD

JUNE 18, 2001

Living | Arts

THE BOSTON GLOBE THURSDAY, JUNE 21, 2001

D

More Living/Arts C16

TV & Radio C15-16

Movie Directory D4-5

*You must be willing to accept the occasional beating you take.*

HENRY KISSINGER, on the consequences of his fame

GLOBE PHOTO/JOE TABACCA

All the
world's
his stage

Revered or reviled, Henry Kissinger
remains diplomatic in spotlight's glare

By Mark Feeney

GLOBE STAFF

NEW YORK — Kissinger Associates, the consulting firm run by the only person to serve simultaneously as national security adviser and secretary of state, has no listing in the lobby directory of the midtown skyscraper where it's located. Nor does any sign identify the company on the floor it occupies. There's just a receptionist sitting behind an inch-thick sliding glass. It could be the outside of a teller's drive-through window.

Of course, not even the famously immodest Kissinger puts it quite so baldly. "We advise clients about the political and, to some extent, economic world through which they move when they are outside their own familiar territory," he explains, sitting in his office overlooking Park Avenue. But there's little doubt it's "Kissinger," not "Associates" that has attracted such clients as Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Daewoo, Fiat, H. J. Heinz, Merck, Midland Bank, and Revlon.

KISSINGER, Page D6

Kissinger Offers a Realist's Reflections on Foreign Policy

Page 1 of 3 [el]

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June 22, 2001

## BOOKS OF THE TIMES

# Kissinger Offers a Realist's Reflections on Foreign Policy

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Henry A. Kissinger's new book, "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?," illustrates why Mr. Kissinger, almost alone among living secretaries of state, has retained prestige and influence as a commentator on international affairs.

His book is several things. It is a description of the present moment, a period of extraordinary American global ascendancy that will be challenged by new forces. It is a tour of the horizon of international situations, from China to Colombia, Berlin to Buenos Aires. It is also a statement of a credo, an incisive defense of Mr. Kissinger's version of realism in diplomatic matters.

Those who have read Mr. Kissinger's earlier books, essays and opinion articles will find the basic themes of his latest book and some of its cautionary words and predictions familiar. Mr. Kissinger argues, as he has before, that the United States must accommodate a rising China, until or unless it poses a direct and unmistakable threat to the United States. He worries that in the post-cold war world the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will lose its sense of purpose and dissolve "into a multilateral mishmash."

Associated Press

**DOES AMERICA NEED A FOREIGN POLICY?**

Toward a Diplomacy For the 21st Century

By Henry Kissinger

318 pages. Simon & Schuster. $30.

## RELATED ARTICLES

Thomas L. Friedman Reviews 'Does America Need a Foreign Policy?' (June 17, 2001)

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Page 2 of 3 [Jc]

Text Version

Mr. Kissinger argues vajroously for a missile defense system. "With all respect for the views of allies and other important countries, the United States cannot condemn its population to permanent vulnerability," he writes. And he predicts physical and moral exhaustion if the United States follows the impulse, strong in recent years, to intervene, either to stop atrocities or to spread its own values and ways of life. "The United States will drain its psychological and material resources if it does not learn to distinguish between what it must do, what it would like to do, and what is beyond its capacities," he says.

The world, in Mr. Kissinger's view, is teetering on the edge of something new. The cold war is over, but a clear new global configuration has not emerged. The newness of things gives an old tension new meaning, the tension between globalist and missionary impulses, on one hand, and hardheaded realism on the other. Mr. Kissinger traces the first back to Woodrow Wilson and the second to what he calls Jacksonianism, after Andrew Jackson, our first backwoods president and a man inclined to turn to the American interior rather than to meddle in global politics. Mr. Kissinger clearly tends to the Jacksonian side of the spectrum, though not to isolationism, and this book spells out many of his reasons.

Realism, especially to its opponents, has always had a coldhearted, Bismarckian aura, a sense that national interests take priority over the more warmhearted concern for the welfare of individuals within the nation, or within other nations. Mr. Kissinger argues that policies stemming primarily from moral purpose, disconnected from the national interest, would probably fail and would exhaust the country. A realistic attachment to the national interest, guided not just by the desirable but also by the possible, has greater potential to realize moral purposes, he says.

Mr. Kissinger offers as examples the crises in Iraq and Kosovo to make his point about what he considers the dangers of latter-day Wilsonianism triumphing over the realistic impulse. When Iraq expelled United Nations inspectors at the end of 1998, squelching efforts to monitor its development of weapons of mass destruction, the American response was a series of air attacks, carried out only at night (to avoid civilian casualties) for four nights running. After the bombing, the world basically acquiesced in Iraq's rejection of United Nations supervision, with attendant risks to the Western oil supply and to the safety of Iraq's neighbors.

By contrast, when Serbian human rights violations in Kosovo caught the media's attention a few months later, the former Yugoslavia was bombed by NATO, under American prodding, for 78 days around the clock, even though, as Mr. Kissinger puts it, "Kosovo represented no threat to American security in any traditional sense." For Mr. Kissinger, this difference in response — weak when the national interest was at stake, overbearing when the motive was essentially humanitarian — marks the possible drift of American policy.

Concluding a biting and tough-minded review of the last several years of American policy in the morass of the former Yugoslavia, Mr. Kissinger concludes: "On one level, the growing concern with human rights is one of the achievements of our age and is certainly a testament to progress toward a more humane international order. But its advocates do their cause no favor by pretending that it can be separated from all traditional notions of foreign policy, and that American self-restraint in the pursuit of its historic values was

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Kissinger Offers a Realist's Reflections on Foreign Policy thoughtless or immoral."

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There is a partisan flavor to much of this argument, and in places, too much abstraction as well. Mr. Kissinger makes specific and clear arguments about the Balkans — for example, that the United States had essentially no business making unified multiethnic states its goal, rather than allowing for ethnic separatism — but he does not make clear what, in the face of the slaughter in Bosnia, for example, he would have done differently had he been in power.

Or, on China, he claims that the Clinton administration lacked "a definition of the national interest that gives the relationship some geopolitical content."

Maybe, but, after its initial human-rights approach to China, didn't the Clinton administration essentially pursue the goals of a Kissingerian policy by treating China as a rising power that should be encouraged to play by the rules of the international game? Wasn't "geopolitical content" implicit in virtually everything it did toward China? Again, Mr. Kissinger remains somewhat general here, not saying concretely how the policy pursued might have been different.

Still, "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?" is cogent because it is informed by a consistent vision, one in which morality is measured not by purity of intentions but by the nature of results. President George W. Bush and his advisers would do well to read this book.

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JUN 12 2001

nificance to his analysis of the likely | philosophy. Take the outcome of his | understand the nature of the Chinese

BOOKS, ARTS & MANNERS

World
Class

MIDGE DECTER

Does America Need a Foreign Policy?
Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st
Century, by Henry Kissinger (Simon &
Schuster, 318 pp., $30)

WHY is it that, even though Henry Kissinger has beyond any doubt become the most honored elder in the world of foreign affairs, writing about him these days stirs in one the impulse to begin by defending him? It can hardly be claimed that society has treated him in any way shabbily: Has anyone else out of power for more than twenty years continued to be so actively sought out for his counsel and blessing? On the other hand, there are certain corners of allegedly respectable society in which the standing order with respect to him has from the first been "Shoot before you see the whites of his eyes"—the most recent case being that of the unforgivable Christopher Hitchens.

It seems likely that the disturbance
over Kissinger was, at the outset, occa-
sioned mainly by envy, perhaps tinged
with xenophobia, at the idea that a
German Jewish refugee boy who had
not even shed his accent was walking
the world with kings. By now, however,
the obsessive ill will appears to have
become a thing unto itself, such issues
as Vietnam or the shah of Iran or the
overturn of Chilean Communism being
no more than mere stimuli to get the
venom flowing. Add to this the way
Kissinger came to be wholly blamed for
Vietnam by the very liberals who had

Midge Decter's new book, *An Old Wife's Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War*, will be published by ReganBooks in September.

Henry Kissinger by Ismael Roldán

been responsible for entangling us there
in the first place, and on the other side
blamed for the policy of détente with
the Soviet Union by the committed
Cold Warriors (among whom this
reviewer was by all means to be count-
ed).

This is one of the things that make
reviewing a book by Kissinger a some-
what complicated undertaking. For how
to take issue with him without, to bor-
row from Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
“joining the jackals”? Another difficulty
is that, beginning with the memoirs of
his years in the White House, and later
in the State Department, he has be-
come such a beguiling writer. And often
much better than beguiling: His mem-
oirs, taken all together, comprise what
will surely be a permanent classic. He
can summarize a long-ago historical
process—as in his recent volume
Diplomacy, covering international
affairs from 1648 to the present—so
vividly that one will never again have to
find oneself slogging glumly through its
details. And when it comes to advocacy,
he can be dangerously seductive: Buy a

ticker to just one of his assumptions,
and before you know it, you are apt to
discover that getting back home is
going to be a pretty arduous journey.

Such is certainly the case with this
book. It would be hard to name anyone
else who might even have undertaken
such a job. For in fewer than 300 pages
of text he whisks one around the entire
world, offering analyses of America's
interests, or lack of same, in Western
Europe, Central Europe, Eastern
Europe, the Middle East, South Asia,
East Asia, Africa, and Latin America—
along with detailed accounts of the
current conditions disfavoring those in-
terests and how to overcome them.
Many passages are very much like those
brilliant memos Kissinger used to send
to Nixon analyzing one of the foreign-
policy problems besetting his administra-
tion. Take the following brief paragraph
(chosen at random):

The Republic of Korea sees in its
alliance with the United States a way
both to preserve its independence
and to promote Korean reunification.
Despite its democratic institutions, of
which it has every reason to be proud,
Korea's foreign policy is not driven by
Wilsonian principles. More afraid of
democratic Japan than of autocratic
China, South Korea will not participate
in crusades to alter the domestic struc-
ture of any Asian state, least of all
China, which it needs to balance its
relations with North Korea, Japan, and
Russia.

It is hard to resist a mind that moves
with such graceful speed through the
muck of politics and history. Nixon, to
name only one, obviously did not.

Moreover, in recent years a new
piquancy has been added to the Kiss-
singerian analysis, namely the tang of the
covert polemic. That use of the word
"autocratic" to characterize present-day
China, for example, is of no special sig-

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48

NATIONAL REVIEW/JUNE 25, 2001

212 753 7248 P.01

KAI DC

JUN-12-2001 14:03

nificance to his analysis of the likely
behavior of South Korea but rather
bespeaks long days and nights of argy-
bargy with certain of his critics about
whether or how much the introduction
of a relatively free market has really suf-
ficed to lift the long murderous dark-
ness of Chinese totalitarianism. As does
that use of the adjective "Wilsonian,"
bringing to mind Woodrow Wilson's
record of having high-mindedly left the
world an even nastier and more danger-
ous place than he found it. But to those
uninitiated in the ins and outs of
Kissinger's long contention with a cer-
tain group of neoconservatives, such
signals may do no more than add spice
to the general flavor.

The underlying basis of all his analy-
sis is the question of what serves the
national interest, defined in classical
diplomatic terms—which is to say, the
interest of the United States as it may
be either pitted against or held in com-
mon with the interest of each of the
countries that will unavoidably impinge
on ours in coming years. As usual, this
analysis, though brief, is thoroughly illu-
minating.

Also not surprisingly, the general
answer to the question asked in the
book's title is "Yes. And desperately." In
recent years, he points out, for nothing
more pressing than the convenience of
domestic politics (his elegant way of
referring to the antics of our recent
president). America has taken on cer-
tain of the characteristics of a failing
imperial power: most notably, the
Clinton-style sending of troops to keep
order in far-off places for no compelling
reason of state. Meanwhile, in Kiss-
inger's view, all over the world there are
issues crying out for serious policy that
are either being set aside, misdefined, or
viewed purely through the lens of senti-
ment: Europe-NATO, India-Pakistan,
Taiwan-China, South Korea-Japan,
Brazil-Argentina, Gulf States-Israel,
and so on. All of these are too impor-
tant to be left to the occasion of make-
or-break crisis, when it will be too late
for anything but bloodshed. No doubt
this is true, and no doubt we are des-
tined to fumble badly somewhere along
the line.

But, alas, there are more things in the
affairs of men and nations than appear
to be dreamed of in Henry Kissinger's

philosophy. Take the outcome of his
agreement with Le Duc Tho to settle
the war in Vietnam, i.e., the famous
Paris Accords: Everything depended on
the willingness of the U.S. Congress
to send our bombers back to Vietnam
should the North violate the agreement
and move to take over the South. But
when the time came, Congress was not
willing to do what Kissinger had pro-
mised. Why? Because, as anyone less
taken with a belief in the powers of
diplomacy could have seen, once the
U.S. had finally extricated itself from
Vietnam, not a soul would any longer
agree to our continued involvement,
whatever the consequence.

The United States is a
reluctant giant, maintaining
its great power only for the
purpose of keeping others
from abusing theirs.

As it happens, the role of the world's
greatest power, on whose actions the
fate of hundreds of millions, maybe bil-
lions, might depend, is an onerous one
to its citizens. Kissinger must know this
by now. We have not sought this role,
except, as at the end of World War II,
when there was no decent alternative;
and even then we played it with no
gusto. Whether a shortcoming or a
virtue, this is, for both historical and
geographic reasons, the situation any
American leader has to deal with. In the
same way—as, again, Henry Kissinger
must surely have learned on his own
flesh—this reluctant dragonhood has
left us with an uneasy relation to the tra-
ditional concept of “interest.” Along
with being mindful of what best serves
the country, one must also understand
the role of sentiment in determining
America’s relation to the world, includ-
ing feelings like cultural loyalty, anger,
obligation, and yes, piety.

To be sure, this is not the strongest
basis on which either to grasp the
world—something at which Kissinger
has no peer—or to manipulate it. And
no doubt it sometimes drives a secretary
of state worthy of the name to despair.
But if one is required, for instance, to

understand the nature of the Chinese
beast, one must clearly do the same for
the nature of the American. (And
while, for instance, the whole world
knows that the Chinese are very clever
and even, when they are allowed to be,
something beyond brilliant, it is impossi-
ble to believe that they, too, have not
now and then made policy in an ex-
tremely irrational way having nothing to
do with what in the long run will serve
them best.)

But these are quibbles. The point is
that in surveying the world as the
author does, he nevertheless takes in-
sufficient account of the nonrational,
extra-economic, historical, cultural—if
you will, spiritual—quality of nations.

Now a book that took fully into
account the element in world affairs
that remains beyond the questions of
national interest and hard-headed
rationality would have to be twenty vol-
umes long, and even so would undoubt-
edly leave us in a state of bafflement
about what to think. Such a book would
be of little use to a policymaker and way
beyond depressing to a layman. Even so,
it has to be said that, at least in the 20th
century, the diplomatic habit of mind
has led to far greater disaster than that
which Kissinger chooses, in consider-
able measure unfairly, to call Wilsonian.
Indeed, except for the somewhat scat-
tered preoccupation with human
rights—which has now and then, to
be sure, constituted a needless im-
pediment to sound and even decent
policy—neither diplomacy nor Wil-
sonianism seems to describe the interna-
tional behavior of the United States
since World War II. Rather this behavior
has been an odd amalgam of unprece-
dented generosity, hatred of slavery in
all its forms—especially the totalitarian
ones—the capacity for wasting Amer-
ica's worldly credit on such foolishness
as nonproliferation and environmental
treaties, and an unfortunate capacity to
enter into wars (Korea, Vietnam, the
Gulf) with no conceived or articulated
purpose beyond that of restoring the sta-
tus quo.

There are many ways to describe such
an actor in the world, some of them no
doubt far from flattering. But again,
what must be recognized is that the
United States is a reluctant giant, main-
taining its great power only for the pur-

NATIONAL REVIEW/JUNE 25, 2001

53

212 753 7248 P.01

KAI DC

JUN-12-2001 14:05

[L]

TOTAL P.02

pose of keeping others from abusing theirs. This is a tricky proposition, and certainly an often most unreliable one. And it turns out, no doubt to the confusion of our European friends, that the cleverest presidents, like, say, Nixon or Clinton, have done a poorer job at managing this role than the ostensibly more simple-minded Reagan (and, let us pray, Bush the Younger).

These observations are in no sense an indictment of Kissinger's continuing effort to make us understand the world. To hang out in the presence of his endlessly interesting mind for a few hundred, or many thousand, pages never fails to be an illuminating and even comforting experience. For he makes us feel as though the humanly intractable can, in the end, give way with but the right application of intelligence.

Alas, we can only wish that it were so, and must regret that it has proven not to be.

NR

## LEGACY
### WHAT WILL YOURS BE?

What will you bequeath to future generations? How will the ideals you cherish now be sustained then? Who will articulate your principles for the sake of your grandchildren, your faith, your community, and your country?

There is an answer.

With your help, *National Review* will endure as a powerful voice, sustaining those beliefs you hold dear. Now. And for future generations. As ever, standing athwart history, yelling Stop.

To obtain more information about remembering *National Review* in your will or estate, please contact:
*National Review, Legacy*
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212-679-7330

# Retroactivist

## ADAM WOLFSON

The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State, by Michael B. Katz (Metropolitan, 469 pp., $35)

In this age of multiculturalism, identity politics, the Third Way, and postmodernism, it's easy to forget what liberalism meant even 25 years ago. It was not about assembling a "cabinet that looked like America" or allowing gays to serve in the military or putting more cops on the streets. Nor was it about deconstructing the classics and eliminating "dead white males" from college curricula. Rather, it was mainly about expanding the welfare state begun by the likes of FDR and LBJ. Liberals of this persuasion dreamed of a classless society, and thought about how to bring capitalism to heel. They believed in raising taxes, redistributing income, creating new government programs, and nationalizing certain industries. The New Deal and the Great Society were the most tangible accomplishments of this liberal impulse; Walter Mondale, who in 1984 actually promised the American people a tax hike, typified it.

In the 1990s, this older kind of liberalism had perhaps its last hurrah. The unreconstructed liberals of the Clinton administration set their sights on nationalizing health care, only to be resoundingly defeated. Soon after, Bill Clinton declared the death of Big Government and signed historic legislation (forced on him by a Republican Congress) to repeal the federal entitlement to welfare. It was, to paraphrase Clinton, the end of liberalism as we had known it.

So it's nice to be reminded by Michael Katz—if only for nostalgia's sake—what liberalism once meant. A noted social historian at the University of Pennsylvania who writes about poverty and U.S. welfare policy, Katz is something of a dinosaur, an old-school welfare-state liberal who loathes capitalism and wants to bring back the days of Big and Bigger

Mr. Wolfson is executive editor of
*The Public Interest.*

Government. His intellectual hero Michael Harrington, to whom he dedicated an earlier book. Thus it's not surprising that Katz seems blissfully unaware of the large body of scholarly literature why socialism can't work, and uninvolved by the failure of socialism even where its been tried. He also naively thinks that the redistributionist state be sold to the American people, have never shown much interest in it his latest book (partly written, as we le from the acknowledgments, in the turesque village of Oquossoc, Me.) unapologetically defends the wel state and calls for reversing the dan done to it by Newt Gingrich in line with the New Democrats.

Katz's architectonic idea is that the last two decades, the ideal of social justice has been subordinated to my imperatives: "By tightening the l between benefits and employment late-twentieth-century welfare state stratified Americans into first- and ond-class citizens and undermined effective practice of democracy. argues. "Everywhere market price superseded social justice."

A little explanation is in order. V. Katz uses the term "welfare state" does not have in mind simply public finance such as food stamps. Rath means the entire structure of public private assistance, from AFDC (/ Families with Dependent Children: Social Security, and Medicare, to kitchens for the homeless or em benefits for those who work. In his this whole structure has been over by a few well-funded right-wing logues. Public aid has been revo made contingent on work, while profits like the Red Cross have gon mercial, competing, for example the blood supply. The result, he ar not simply the end of Big Government, but the end of both the national id the idea of a common citizenship

Katz's approach is best measured chapter on "The End of Welfare. most far-reaching social policy of recent decades, Congress in AFDC, the nation's most im cash-assistance program, with Te Assistance for Needy Families in 1996. Drawing on the work conservative thinkers in particular Charles Murray, Lawrence Me

NATIONAL REVIEW/JUNE 25, 2001

54

212 753 7248 P.02

KAI DC

JUN-12-2001 14:05

GLOBAL AGENDA

By Michael Elliott

# The Breaking Down of Boundaries

## Dr. Kissinger teaches the world to say farewell to nation-state dominance

WHATEVER YOU THINK OF HENRY KISSINGER, YOU HAVE to admit: the man has staying power. With a new book—*Does America Need a Foreign Policy?*—on the shelves, Kissinger is once again helping to shape American thinking on foreign relations. This is the sixth decade in which that statement can be said to be true.

Kissinger's new book is terrific. Plainly intended as an extended tutorial on policy for the new American Administration, it is full of good sense and studded with occasional insights that will have readers nodding their heads in silent agreement. A particularly good chapter on Asia rebukes anyone who unthinkingly assigns to China the role once played by the Soviet Union as the natural antagonist of the U.S.

But for all its virtues as a *tour d'horizon* of the challenges facing Washington, Kissinger's book can be read in another, and more illuminating, light. It is, in essence, an extended meditation on the end of a particular way of looking at the world: one where the principal actors in international relations are nation-states, pursuing their conception of their own national interest, and in which the basic rule of foreign policy is that one nation does not intervene in the internal affairs of another.

nomic globalization has both blurred the boundaries between nations and given a substantial international role to those giant companies for whom such boundaries make little sense. In today's world, individuals can be as influential as nations; future historians may consider the support for public health of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to be more noteworthy than last week's United Nations conference on AIDS. And a whole raft of institutions are premised on the assumption that intervention in the internal affairs of others is often desirable. Were that not the case, Slobodan Milosevic would not have been surrendered last week to the jurisdiction of the war crimes tribunal in the Hague.

The consequences of these changes are profound. Kissinger is right to note that globalization has undermined the role of the nation-state less in the case of the U.S. (Why? Because it's more powerful than anyone else.) Elsewhere, the old ways of thinking about the “national interest”—that guiding light of the Westphalian system—have fewer adherents than they once did. Not long ago, the national interest of, say, the Netherlands could be defined by a necessity to protect Dutch blood and soil. It would be absurd to imagine that the modern Dutch think that way now. For a sensible

HANSEL-THIEPIK

## Groups of states, like the E.U., have formed their own agendas

Students of international relations call this the “Westphalian system,” after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia that ended Europe’s Thirty Years War, a time of indescribable carnage waged in the name of competing religions. The treaties that ended the war put domestic arrangements—like religion—off limits to other states. In the war’s aftermath a rough-and-ready commitment to a balance of power among neighbors took shape. Kissinger is a noted scholar of the balance of power. And he is suspicious of attempts to meddle in the internal business of others. In a book that drips with devastating, if understated, contempt for the Clinton Administration and all its workings, nothing provokes Kissinger’s ire more than America’s “humanitarian” interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Yet Kissinger is far too sophisticated to attempt to recreate a world that is lost. “Today,” he writes, “the Westphalian order is in systematic crisis.” In particular, nation-states are no longer the sole drivers of the international system. In some cases, groups of states—like the European Union orMERCON-sur—have developed their own identities and agendas. Eco-

Dutch government, it makes sense to define the things that really matter in terms of the international opportunities available to its companies, and in the commitment to global environmentalism that its citizens apparently avow.

As more governments start to think along such lines, Washington risks looking like an outlier. When the U.S. asserts a self-centered policy on, say, missile defense or global warming, it is speaking a language that many others now consider archaic. (Not all: remember China.) In fact, even in America, the old ways of thinking about foreign policy are visibly under threat. It is American-led NGOs who have argued loudest for humanitarian intervention and for elevating the environment into an issue of foreign policy. Perhaps most interestingly, 25 years of mass immigration to the U.S.—the bulk of it from Latin America and Asia—may make it harder for tomorrow’s policymakers to forge a defined national interest than it was for the men who shaped Washington’s thinking after World War II. All of which is a long way of saying that Kissinger’s next book should not be about the rest of the world—but his own country. ■

TIME, JULY 9, 2001

37

BOOKS IN REVIEW

YESTERDAY'S REALISM

BY STANLEY HOFFMANN

emerging realities." The problem with *Does America Need a Foreign Policy?*, however, is that the foreign policy Kissinger proposes is flawed. It is so deeply rooted in the past of world politics and in his own conservative conception of Realpolitik that it is only partly relevant to the realities of today.

BOOKS IN REVIEW

Kissinger offers shrewd insights on many fronts. He warns that there is no international consensus to leave nuclear weapons behind and that different motives still push nations to want to acquire them. He notes that globalization could be set back should a major recession develop in the United States. And he offers observations about the growing gap between rich nations and poor ones (as well as between the “globalized” and the “backward” sectors within countries). He delivers a sharp critique of the International Monetary Fund’s inability “to apply political and social criteria” and warns of the danger of a “crisis of legitimacy” for an international economic system that “creates new vulnerabilities to political turmoil.” His rather new emphasis on the need for a dialogue with India (whose conduct during the Cold War he compares to that of the United States at its inception) is welcome. So are—idealisers should recognize it—his observations about the difficulty of implanting “Western democratic principles of political organization” in Africa and his reminder that “the pursuit of moral ends in international affairs has a different context from that in domestic politics.” In diplomacy, Kissinger writes, “morality expresses itself in the willingness to persevere through a series of steps, each of which is inevitably incomplete in terms of the ultimate goal.”

The other flaw of the book concerns those “emerging realities” that Kissinger acknowledges at the outset. He is too intelligent to deny the existence of important new aspects of international affairs: Private economic actors (investors, multi-

BOOKS IN REVIEW

The interventions that Kissinger tren-
chantly criticizes—especially those in
Bosnia and Kosovo—are open to chal-
lenge. To be sure, in Bosnia the inter-
venors are stuck with an artificial,
multi-ethnic new state in which the three
ethnic components live apart and two of
them seek to reunite with their respective
brothers and sisters in Croatia and
Serbia. As Kissinger says, the intervenors
gave preference to the principle of non-
acquisition of territory by force over that
of self-determination (which Kissinger
seems to support even though it has
proved to be a major destroyer of the
sovereignty of states). But partition, his
preferred solution, would have rewarded
Serb and Croat aggressions and would
have established a highly destruc-
tive precedent. Concerning Kosovo,
Kissinger ignores former Yugoslavian
President Slobodan Milosevic's plans for
ethnic cleansing (for which he blames
NATO). Kissinger's belief that "the
desired outcome of an autonomous
Kosovo within Yugoslavia . . . could have
been achieved at less cost and in a less
convulsive fashion" seems very much like
wishful thinking.

that give such interventions their legiti-
macy. That can be done by providing
them with standing forces and with a
capacity to effect the nation-building
tasks of material administration and
political reconstruction—in coopera-
tion and coordination with the often
discordant nongovernmental organiza-
tions whose participation in these tasks
is indispensable. The alternative is a
world of chaos, with disintegrating
pseudostates and ethnic, religious, and
political upheavals destroying even
more genuine ones. Kissinger himself,
having declared Africa of no strategic
interest for the United States, acknowl-
edges that a “limited military interven-
tion” might have been a duty, and a
success, in Rwanda. He thinks that the
violations committed there could have
been “quickly brought under control.”
But is this more evident than it was in
some of the interventions he criticizes?

Kissinger is rather silent on the possibilities that reformed and strengthened collective institutions might offer— even though their members are states, which, as a good Westphalian, he trusts more than he does jurists. He is virulently incensed by the role lawyers have been playing in carrying out what he calls the “unprecedented concept” of universal jurisdiction when it comes to human rights violations. Whether it be nations authorizing domestic prosecutors to seek extradition and trials of accused war criminals, or the setting up of international criminal courts—so far, for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as the controversial International Criminal Court (ICC), which the United States has refused to accept—Kissinger is against such developments. He is not wrong in proclaiming that “any universal system should contain procedures not only to punish the wicked but to constrain the righteous.” But his defense of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and the worst-case scenarios he conjures in the case of the ICC are unconvincing. (Is the heat of those pages somehow an anticipation of his recent misadventure at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where he refused to respond after being summoned by a French court investigating a charge against Pinochet?)

Kissinger is right that there is a tension
between the principle of universal juris-
diction and the political need for recon-
ciliation, but there can be no true
reconciliation without a degree of justice.
He is wrong to think that the advocates of
universal jurisdiction believe that "if law
replaced politics, peace and justice would
prevail." What they in fact believe is that
law is necessary to correct the excesses of
politics and power. And Kissinger's own
proposals for an alternative to the ICC
would leave the punishment of the
authors of war crimes or crimes against
humanity in the hands of the UN
Security Council—that is, in the throes of
politics, often untempered by norms.

Ultimately, Kissinger's case against the new drive for humanitarian interventions dodges the problem that has plagued realists ever since Morgenthau proclaimed the mantra that national interests are paramount. Is there a clearly defined and delimited national interest? On security and survival, it is easy to agree—but is everything that a government claims is in its security interest really necessary? (Think anti-missile defenses, or remember Kissinger's rival Zbigniew Brzezinski, who predicted that the outcome of the Cold War might be decided in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia!) Kissinger is clearly on the side of John Quincy Adams (who said that America "does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. . . . She is the champion and vindicator only of her own" freedom and independence) and of Theodore Roosevelt—not Woodrow Wilson. While Wilson's hyperbolic statements rejecting a "standard of national selfishness" are easy to dismiss, his belief that this age requires us also to think about "the interest of mankind" is not so easily ignored.

Material interdependence; the speed
with which political turmoil can be
transmitted, if only in the form of
millions of refugees (a term not found in
the index of Kissinger's book); the "germ
of a universal consciousness" detected
by Raymond Aron—all of these factors
require broadening the concept of the
national interest so as to include con-
siderations of world order, justice, and
humanity. It is not a matter of imposing
them on others who are inevitably suspi-
cious of neocolonialism or all too ready

36

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20 **AT ANY COST**, by Bill Sammon. (Regnery, $27.95.) A reporter for The Washington Times describes "how Al Gore tried to steal the election."

21 **ZIM**, by Don Zimmer with Bill Madden. (Sports Illustrated/Total Sports, $25.) From Ebbets Field to Fenway Park to Yankee Stadium: a memoir by the bench coach for baseball's world champions. ■ First Chapter

22 **APRIL 1865**, by Jay Winik. (HarperCollins, $32.50.) An account of one of the most dramatic months in American history.

23 **BODY OF SECRETS**, by James Bamford. (Doubleday, $29.95.) An investigative reporter goes inside the National Security Agency and the world of electronic spying.

24 **PEARL HARBOR: An Illustrated History**, by Dan Van Der Vat. (Basic/Madison, $39.95.) Filled with photographs and eyewitness stories, a naval historian's account of the "Day of Infamy."

25 **KILLING PABLO**, by Mark Bowden. (Atlantic Monthly, $25.) A journalist's account of the hunt for the Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar.

26 **CLOSE TO SHORE**, by Michael Capuzzo. (Broadway, $24.95.) An account of a 1916 epidemic of shark attacks off the New Jersey shore.

27 **THE AMERICAN DREAM**, by Dan Rather. (Morrow, $25.) Based on a CBS Evening News segment, a diverse collection of inspiring stories of ordinary people living the American dream.

28 **AN HOUR BEFORE DAYLIGHT**, by Jimmy Carter. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) The former president recalls his Depression-era childhood on a Georgia farm. ■ First Chapter

6/25/01

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29 TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALLPARK, by Josh Leventhal. (Black Dog & Leventhal, $29.98.) An illustrated guide to baseball stadiums.

30 A PASSION TO WIN, by Sumner Redstone with Peter Knobler. (Simon & Schuster, $6.) The autobiography of the owner and CEO of Viacom.

31 POSITIVELY 4TH STREET, by David Hajdu. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.) The early 60's, as lived by Joan Baez, her sister, her brother-in-law and her lover, Bob Dylan.

32 COMFORT ME WITH APPLES, by Ruth Reichl. (Random House, $24.95.) The second volume of memoirs by the former restaurant critic for The New York Times. ■ First Chapter

33 THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB, by Louis Menand. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.) An intellectual history of a 19th-century conversation club that helped set the tone for 20th-century America. ■ First Chapter

34 WALKING THE BIBLE, by Bruce Feiler. (Morrow, $26.) A 10,000-mile journey retracing the story told in the Pentateuch.

35 FAST FOOD NATION, by Eric Schlosser. (Houghton Mifflin, $25.) From California subdivisions to the New Jersey Turnpike: a survey of "the dark side of the all-American meal." ■ An Audio Interview With Eric Schlosser

Rankings reflect sales, for the week ending June 9, at almost 4,000 bookstores plus wholesalers serving 50,000 other retailers (gift shops, department stores, newsstands, supermarkets), statistically weighted to represent all such outlets nationwide. An asterisk (*) indicates that a book's sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above. A dagger (+) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders. Expanded rankings are available at The New York Times on the Web: www.nytimes.com/books.

Return to the Books Home Page

6/25/01

A dialogue, an improbable turn of plot unpersuasively written, an interior monologue that stinks of unprocessed journal entry, and I'll have to stop reading the book. I'll try to get back into the narrative, but no matter what psychological game I play with myself, I just can't do it. It's as if the book has broken in my hands. The spell is weak. The book doesn't work.

You'd think, from all the attention lavished on them, that the only books that "worked" any more were those that attacked their characters' circumstances, motives, their very beings, with a full arsenal of irony, knowingness, skepticism, pitilessness and pity,

people. We've got withering eyes — right?

Well, Robert Clark's new novel, "Love Among the Ruins," employs an entirely different narrative strategy. This book is shockingly humane, decent, kindly. Yet it's not soft-minded. And it absolutely works. clicks, coheres — however you want to put it. From start to finish, Clark holds you spellbound with his wickedly clean-hearted tragedy.

It's a really simple story. In the first long section, William Lowry and Emily Byrne, smart ordinary kids in the Midwest circa 1968, court one another, fall deeply in love, and disappear. In the second

there's not an over-hyped moment. For instance, after the kids smoke a small amount of pot, they don't descend into giggle fits or deep philosophical speculation. They talk softly, learning just a little bit more about one another, and then they kiss in the deep grass, "tasting the raw smoke in each other's mouth." After some light petting, Emily tells William, "You can do ... more. If you want. We can. Do more." And William declines: "That's okay. I don't need to. This is everything I could want, just for now, just ... perfect."

It's a smart little scene, but Clark isn't satisfied with it. He adds a two-paragraph commentary that strikes me as Peggy Noo-

sult what we mean to purely love. The peace among us depends, equivocation, guesswork, revisionism and reinterpretation, and brevity of memory. Yet William had stumbled across exactly the right thing and said it.

As I read, I had to race past these unwelcome intrusions of author into story. There were moments when I thought Clark, perhaps, wanted to ruin his own spell. But if that was his intention, he failed. This novel's just too good, too strong, to break.

Ben Neihart's first novel was "Hey, Joe." His second, "Burning Girl," was recently published in paperback by Harper Perennial.

Kissinger looks forward to much like Metternich

"Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Towards a Diplomacy for the 21st Century," by Henry Kissinger. Simon & Schuster. 318 pages. $30.

By CRAIG EISENDRATH
SPECIAL TO THE SUN

Readers of Henry Kissinger's memoirs, the last volume of which, "Years of Renewal," came out in the spring of 1999, will be familiar with the insightful — though self-serving and sometimes inaccurate — portrayal of diplomatic history written by President Nixon's national security adviser and secretary of state.

What is new and dismaying in "Does America Need a Foreign Policy" is the frequent imprecision of Kissinger's writing. Muddled sentences and platitudes abound. For example, at one point, Kissinger states, "This generation is subject to being seduced by the idea of riskless global relations as compensation for the intense competi-

For the most part, Kissinger prescribes a foreign policy that resembles that of the Austrian diplomat Furst von Metternich, who subtly constructed Europe's balance of power following the Napoleonic wars. Despite Kissinger's context of contemporary history, the reader may feel he is prescribing a foreign policy for the 19th rather than the 21st century, a world dominated by sovereign states rather than a world increasingly united by transnational organizations, economic connections, and nongovernmental organizations.

Globalism by itself is inadequate to form a basis of our foreign relations, Kissinger warns. Rather, the diplomacy of the Cold War — the period he was in power — is his model, a policy driven by national self-interest fulfilled through a close working relationship between the United States and the NATO democracies. Despite some disclaimers, he disclaims a policy guided by morality, universal principles, or multinational conventions or organizations, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations or the International Criminal Court.

Echoing the current Republican disdain for "humanitarian intervention," he radically overstates the Interventionist position when he writes, "On the left, many see the United States as the ultimate arbitrator of domestic evolutions all over the world."

When convenient, Kissinger confuses rhetoric with policy, a tendency which results in biased historical readings of almost exclu-

sively Democratic statesmen like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Bill Clinton, whom he claims were driven by moralism rather than national self-interest. Kissinger ignores or misreads clearly nationalistic actions such as the "Truman Doctrine" or Wilson's realpolitik at Versailles, or Clinton's bombing of Iraq or his refusal to intervene in Rwanda.

Nevertheless, as Kissinger takes the reader around the world in a review of our foreign relations, he is simply too bright to ignore, despite his sometimes confused logic, and his patent biases. As for the writing, Kissinger needs a more aggressive editor to help him clean up his act.

Craig Eisendrath, a former Foreign Service officer, is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington. Eisendrath is the co-author, with Melpin A. Goodman and Gerald E. Marsh, of, "The Phantom Defense: America's Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion," to be published by Praeger this fall. His "Crisis Game: A Novel of the Cold War" will be published in January by Suntone Press.

[10]

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Copyright 2001 The Buffalo News
The Buffalo News

June 24, 2001 Sunday, FINAL EDITION

SECTION: BOOK REVIEWS, Pg.F6

LENGTH: 930 words

HEADLINE: KISSINGER WAXES ELOQUENT ON FOREIGN POLICY

BYLINE: MICHAEL D. LANGAN; News Book Reviewer

BODY:

By **Henry Kissinger**

Simon & Schuster

318 pages, $30

...

The title of Henry Kissinger's new book, "Does America Need A Foreign Policy?", is coy. Kissinger's complaint is that many American citizens don't give a hoot about foreign policy, which is a big deal to him. The apparent hesitancy of the book's sub-title, "Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century," indicates the academic bent of the book.

Make no mistake about it. **Henry Kissinger** is very bright. He brings a historical heft and sway to the day-to-day peregrinations of nation states leaders. He is also perceived to be shifty and manipulative by his critics. Christopher Hitchens, in his recent book, "The Trial Of **Henry Kissinger**," takes him to task for what he characterizes as 'war crimes' during his tenure as a senior U.S. official overseeing the waging of war in Vietnam and Indochina. More of that charge and how Kissinger refutes it, without adverting to Hitchens' challenge, later.

In Chapter One, Kissinger asks the right questions. "What, for our survival, must we seek to prevent no matter how painful the means? What, to be true to ourselves, must we try to accomplish no matter how small the attainable international consensus, and, if necessary, entirely on our own? What wrongs is it essential that we right? What goals are simply beyond our capacity?"

Chapter Two reviews the 50-year partnership of the United States and European nations. Kissinger is especially good at giving a brief sketch, a thumb print, of each nation's strengths and weaknesses; in fact, he does this for all countries throughout the book. Kissinger raises a large doubt about the Atlantic Alliance, which required "... a large American military presence, integrated military command, and permanent council of ambassadors (who) underscored America's commitment."

Chapter Three deals with the Western Hemisphere. Kissinger's view is that America has a great interest in promoting free trade.

Chapter Four looks at Asia. Kissinger encourages the United States to maintain good relations with all of the countries in the region, but with a basic reliance upon Japan.

Chapter Five puts the Middle East and Africa together, characterizing both areas as "in transition." That's probably the only way they can be conceived as part of the same chapter. With respect to the Middle East, we are told that Israel and the Palestinians are not yet ready for compromise (although the author outlines nine steps to peace). Both countries must live in the interval with the United States as mediator, "striving for a compass course." Israel's former prime minister, Ehud Barak, is

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noted as having offered inconceivable concessions, only to be rebuffed by Arafat, who apparently judged that whatever he did would anger his own constituents. Therefore, Arafat opted for no action at the Wye negotiations in 1998.

With respect to Iraq and Iran, Kissinger judges that "For the time being, no dramatic initiatives are available ... from a Wilsonian point of view, a choice among evils ... " Africa is immense, and so are its problems and prospects. Kissinger reflects that "The most pressing task must be to ease Africa's suffering and defeat its epidemics. The long-range need is to reduce Africa's political conflicts, help reform its political system, and on that basis, bring Africa into the globalized world."

Chapter Six touches upon the politics of globalization. To his credit, Kissinger sees the downside of globalization: the dislocation of workers, the loss of some of the underclass without skills to permanent poverty.

In Chapter Seven, dealing with peace and justice, Kissinger traces the swift acceptance in world affairs of the international condemnation of "... genocide, torture, or war crimes, ... said to be enforceable by national judges who increasingly claim the right to demand extradition of alleged violators into their own jurisdictions."

Kissinger sees a downside to this swiftly moving legal phenomenon. His antagonist, Christopher Hitchens would add, "Well he might. He could be caught up in such an extradition proceeding himself." On the contrary, Kissinger argues without ever alluding to himself that "It is unlikely that any of the signatories of either the United Nations conventions or the Helsinki Final Act thought it possible that national judges would use them as a basis for extradition requests regarding alleged crimes not committed in their jurisdictions." Kissinger's final snare against such action is that it represents a "fundamental change in American constitutional practice that a full national debate and full participation of Congress are imperative."

Waiting for that to happen, to paraphrase Adlai Stevenson, will be like waiting for hell to freeze over. There's no chance here, to use G.K. Chesterton's phrase, for virtue to run amok.

All said, this is a fine book. It's beautifully written with not an unclear sentence. One may disagree with its prescriptive coda, but reading a comprehensive and thorough geopolitical analysis sharpens one's own reflections.

This book is either a tribute to Kissinger's solitary genius or, more likely, to his considerable management skills, honed in the White House and at State, to make sure that experts within his international consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, Inc., and elsewhere, balance his already nuanced world view.

Michael D. Langan is a former headmaster at Nardin Academy and a former Treasury Department official

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Copyright 2001 News World Communications, Inc.
The Washington Times

July 01, 2001, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: PART B; BOOKS; Pg. B8

LENGTH: 1484 words

HEADLINE: Diplomacy for regions, the world;
Henry Kissinger still advising and prescribing

BYLINE: Joshua Muravchik

BODY:

A quarter century after leaving office, **Henry Kissinger** remains our most luminous foreign policy thinker. No other secretary of state in memory, and no other national security adviser, so dominated the diplomacy of his time. And none, upon returning to private life, has matched Mr. Kissinger's literary output.

Mr. Kissinger not only continues to comment on international issues, he has made himself the leading proponent of a philosophy of foreign policy called "realism." In the jargon, "realism" connotes a distinctive interpretation of how states behave and a prescription for how the United States ought to act.

As the realists tell it, states pursue their "interests" rather than the ideals or other fancies of their statesmen, and these interests are mostly determined by things outside their control: geography, resources, neighbors and the like. In such a world, the United States will do best by tailoring its policy to its own intrinsic interests, for example access to petroleum or keeping vital regions free of domination by hostile forces.

The lament of America's realists is that their countrymen are incurably prone to infuse foreign policy with moral values. Hans Morgenthau, the leading academic proponent of realism, believed that U.S. foreign policy reached its apogee in the late 1700s under the guidance of Alexander Hamilton and went steadily downhill from then on. It is embarrassing to realists that after 200 years of ignoring their counsel, the United States has ended up the most dominant nation the world has ever known.

In "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?: Toward a Diplomacy 21st Century," Mr. Kissinger reveals how little is left of realism. It is no longer a guiding doctrine but merely a sensibility. Although the title seems to promise an overarching strategy, Mr. Kissinger argues that it is "impossible to apply . . . a single formula to the analysis and interpretation of the contemporary international order."

Instead, the world should be seen as consisting of four different systems. In the western hemisphere and western Europe, nations behave according to democratic and peaceful standards like those on which the United Nations is based. Asia, in contrast, is locked in a balance-of-power contest reminiscent of Europe in the 1800s. The Middle East is riven by religious wars analogous to those between Catholics and Protestants in the 1600s. And Africa is sui generis.

Mr. Kissinger offers prescriptions for each region, but, given this taxonomy, it is Asia that gets his ideological juices flowing. Balance of power is the realist's metier, and Mr. Kissinger believes that we can manage the Asian game successfully unless we allow ourselves to be diverted by secondary issues - like democracy. He warns against "crusades" to alter the political systems of Asian states and against making "confrontation" the "preferred option" for dealing with China.

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But these are straw men. Who advocates confrontation with China? Or crusades? The real issue is whether the United States can foster China's democratization and thereby make Beijing's emergent power less threatening. That it might pose a threat is acknowledged by Mr. Kissinger in terms that are striking albeit oblique.

Mr. Kissinger says the United States needs missile defense not only against rogue regimes but also "against established nonrogue nuclear powers" - which he does not identify at first. Later, however, he makes clear that he means China. In other words, Mr. Kissinger would keep our powder very dry while trying to find accommodation with Beijing. Is it more realistic to rely on unproven technologies to protect us against China than to look to political change?

Yet Mr. Kissinger is not only a realist in the specialized meaning of that term, he is also a realist in the more prosaic sense. He knows that American opinion will not allow for a purely power-oriented policy. Our Asian diplomacy "cannot fail to include the subject of human rights," he concedes. "No administration which fails to take account of this reality can maintain public support."

This is only the beginning of yielding the ground of realism. The retreat becomes full flight when Mr. Kissinger turns to Africa. "Without the moral commitment of the American people and of the international community, Africa's tragedy will turn into the festering disaster of our age," he warns. The remedy? "The most pressing task must be to ease Africa's suffering and defeat its epidemics. The long-range need is to reduce Africa's political conflicts, help reform its political system, and, on that basis, bring Africa into the globalized world."

This is inspiring but discordant coming from the same voice that heaps ridicule on the idea of trying to change China. Are African peoples more malleable than Asian?

If his ideology is in disarray, Mr. Kissinger nonetheless remains capable of rendering trenchant observations on an array of specific issues.(spade)On the anti-American current in Europe, for example, he minces few words:

"A consistent pattern of European opposition to American policies cannot be explained away indefinitely as part of the inevitable growing pains of the European Union, or obscured by ritual protestation of allied unity . . . ultimately, Europe must be judged, and the American policy toward Europe adjusted . . . on the degree to which European policies and American national interests are able to reinforce each other."

Mr. Kissinger is also tough and compelling about missile defense. Though Europeans say they fear that missile defense will lead America to "decouple" itself from Europe, "Common sense suggests that the opposite must be true. A United States that is totally vulnerable to nuclear attack is much more likely to shrink from fulfilling Alliance obligations."

The book's most powerful section, argued from the depths of Mr. Kissinger's realist convictions, is its critique of the recent trend "to submit international politics to judicial procedures." This was manifest in Spain's efforts to extradite former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and in the proposal to create an international criminal court. Mr. Kissinger asks:

"What legal norms are being applied?(spade)What are the rules of evidence? What safeguards exist for the defendant? How will prosecutions affect other fundamental foreign policy objectives and interests? The world should think carefully about the implications of a procedure by which a single judge anywhere is able, essentially at his personal discretion, to assert jurisdiction over a citizen of another state for alleged crimes committed entirely in that other state and to demand extradition of the accused from a third county."

Mr. Kissinger also scores some telling points against NATO's decision to go to war over Kosovo. Although President Clinton pronounced lofty principles, no comparable action was considered in Chechnya where the issues were similar. And the West's robust response to Slobodan Milosevic's brutalities in Kosovo stood in glaring contrast to its cowardly acquiescence in Saddam Hussein's

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disruption of U.N. weapons inspections. Yet the latter posed the greater danger to western security.

I find Mr. Kissinger persuasive on the incoherence of NATO's Kosovo policy. But was this the result of a shortage of realism or an excess? Guided by just the kind of considerations that Mr. Kissinger champions, the West sat on its hands while Yugoslavia dissolved in an orgy of violence in the early 1990s. The war in Bosnia was merely "a hiccup," said former President George Bush. Eventually this display of indifference or impotence put NATO itself in jeopardy. When Kosovo exploded the alliance rushed in for no other reason than to avoid further discredit. (spade) It was an exercise in slamming the barn door after the horses had fled.

NATO's bombardment of Serbia was carried out under President Bill Clinton, but it had been presaged by President Bush during his last days in office. Increasingly embarrassed by the mayhem in Bosnia, Mr. Bush had warned Mr. Milosevic that the United States would intervene if the violence spread to Kosovo even though the issues there were murkier and the American interests smaller. The designers of this strange gauntlet that Mr. Bush threw down were presumably Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, two of Mr. Kissinger's own disciples. In office, as in print, it is hard to be a consistent realist.

Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book, "Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism" will be published by Encounter Books early next year.

*****

## DOES AMERICA NEED A FOREIGN POLICY?: TOWARD A DIPLOMACY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

By **Henry Kissinger**

Simon and Schuster, $30,318 pages

**GRAPHIC:** Illustration (color), NO CAPTION, By Rich Pope/The Washington Times

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Copyright 2001 Harvard Crimson via U-Wire
University Wire

July 6, 2001

SECTION: BOOK REVIEW

LENGTH: 1524 words

HEADLINE: New Kissinger book outlines foreign policy for future

BYLINE: By David H. Gellis, Harvard Crimson

SOURCE: Harvard U.

DATELINE: Cambridge, Mass.

BODY:

The latest literary effort by **Henry A. Kissinger, "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?"** Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st century," sheds little light on the latest round of controversy of which he is the center. In fact, a skeptical reader might say it sheds little light on anything at all.

The 15th book written or edited by the man who wrote the longest undergraduate thesis at Harvard University is itself most notable for its attempt to play it safe.

Unlike his memoirs it is not nearly as much his draft of history -- it is hard to accuse him of partial and selective history -- making it a book where he focuses almost exclusively on prescriptions for the future. Except for a section that discusses and dismisses the notion of universal jurisdiction, there is also little to connect the book to the argument offered by Christopher Hitchens, author of the new book "The Trial of **Henry Kissinger,**" that **Kissinger** is a "war criminal."

And while Kissinger's book may (as the New York Times' Thomas Friedman suggests) represent a middle course that avoids the pitfalls of both the American Left and Right, it cannot provide what is a necessary synthesis of the old Kissinger's typical balance of power geopolitical intuition -- with the new -- what Kissinger calls the "New Age" issues such as the environment, the economics of globalization, and human rights.

Since Kissinger can hardly hide his disdain for these new issues, the best he does is to again choose the safe course. He covers his bases by paying lip service to the emerging emphasis on human rights and other new issues, accepting them only as fait accompli.

The book is divided into seven chapters that deal with, in order, America's role in the world, Europe, the Western Hemisphere, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, globalization and the enforcement of human rights. It is the typical Kissingerian approach, dividing the world up into neat geopolitical spheres each suitable to a policy of Realpolitik.

The only modification is that he elevates in importance the questions of globalization and "Peace and Justice" by granting them space equal to one of the other spheres.

But the organization actually belies Kissinger's unstated bias -- by treating globalization and human rights as yet two more spheres in which to strategize, he puts them on a level beneath the universal dictates of geopolitics: national interest, stability of the system and great power politics.

His prescriptions for Europe are uncharacteristically bland and uncontroversial. Following a run-through of the history of the nation-state, Kissinger explicates the details of a strategy whose main

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point is the avoidance of combinations of enemies.

Kissinger heightens anticipation by citing an increase in discord among our allies, but in the end only calls for more sensitive policies and rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic. The threat is that parties will be forced to act against their own long-term interest in dissolving the Atlantic alliance, and the medicine is the slow and well-considered expansion of NATO (gauged by geopolitical necessities), a Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area, and continued engagement with the European Union.

Kissinger includes the required argument in favor of a national ballistic missile shield here, but it is not his best effort. His explanation of why he urged Nixon to sign the anti-ballistic missile treaty sounds fishy (he says he was against it but the administration was backed into the treaty by domestic pressure), and he does a far better job of outlining the arguments against a shield than in rebutting them.

He concludes that the shield will eventually work, does not contradict nuclear doctrine and will neither decouple the U.S. from Europe's defense nor promote proliferation, but he fails to explain convincingly why the shield should be a top priority.

At one point he points out that even if a missile shield provoked a race with countries whose arsenal is at the limit of the shield's capacity, it would be a race that the U.S. would eventually win -- but there's no consideration of what the cost of such a race would be, and how that figures into the national interest.

Moving on to the Western Hemisphere, Kissinger says the overall question is how the U.S. can bring about a regime of free-trading, internally stable and externally sated powers while preventing the emergence of rival blocs. Kissinger takes a fairly detailed approach, but again, while the prescriptions are coated in allusions to visionless American policy, they are themselves either vague or totally mired in the details.

Kissinger's chapters on Asia, the Middle East and Africa follow a similar format, made repetitive by atrocious section titles ("Relations with China: The Historical Context," followed by "Relations with China: The Strategic Context") -- sharp analysis of the historical moment the region finds itself in, explanations of how the concerns of balance of power and national interest apply, followed finally by his prescriptions.

In Asia, he explains that we cannot let the North Koreans use America to pressure the South Koreans, that we must affirm our ties to Japan and that we should carefully continue to explore the possibility of cooperation with China (while being sure not to push them too hard on Taiwan, human rights, or the other issues generated by American public sentiment).

In the Middle East, he again says patience is the key. He implicitly blames Clinton's quest for a legacy for the collapse of the peace process, and demands that the U.S. walk a tightrope, being sure not to play a role in pushing too hard for agreements, but at the same time retaining its trusteeship of the region.

In Africa, Kissinger begins by admitting that the U.S. has no geopolitical interest on the continent. He leaves the continent to the world community, explaining, "(Africa) should be turned into a test of the ability of the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations, other international institutions, and the private sector to cooperate in the pursuit of universal goals."

But Kissinger's generosity in turning over the keys to the continent only highlights his failure to deal with the occasion when morality, economics and geopolitics all conflict to different degrees.

The necessary balancing is explained in neither of the subsequent chapters on economics and human rights. The chapter on globalization says little other than that globalization might influence the way nation-states act in the international system, that it's another factor that can cause states to deviate from the pool-ball like predictable physics of national self-interest.

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[lc]

Kissinger begins his chapter on Peace and Justice with the following phrase: "Probably the most dramatic transformation in the nature of contemporary international affairs has been the general acceptance of the proposition that certain universal principles are deemed enforceable."

The phrase sums up his approach to these issues. Kissinger steadfastly refuses to enter into the question of whether these principles are important enough to ever outrank geopolitics, instead presenting them as esoteric details imposed on statesmen by an ignorant public. He never enters into the question of where national interest comes from and dodges the argument that it is these domestic preferences that gives statesmen and geopolitics its direction.

The result is that Kissinger focuses entirely on the question of enforcement and jurisdiction. He argues that international tribunals should be closely overseen and deems jurists' attempts to extend their jurisdiction across borders a threat to national sovereignty, global civil society or not.

While both stances are consistent with Kissinger's brand of realism, intended to prioritize peace over justice, Hitchens sees more selfish motivations.

Hitchens says Kissinger feels personally endangered by the threat of universal jurisdiction. Though Hitchens admits that Kissinger is unlikely to be tried as a war criminal, Hitchens maintains that the fear of possible prosecution or involvement in civil action is on Kissinger's mind. Indeed, Kissinger left France after a French judge issued a summons for the former secretary to be questioned about the disappearance of French citizens in Chile.

The claim that Kissinger's fear influenced his political argument stems from a broader inquiry. Hitchens makes into Kissinger's celebrity status -- an inquiry that relates closely to Kissinger's new book.

"The thing which irritates me most generally, is the extent to which because of his celebrity, Kissinger gets away with things," Hitchens said. "His actions are judged by reputation, not the other way around," Hitchens said.

Kissinger's international consulting work at his firm Kissinger Associates is a product of this reputation, Hitchens says.

Reading Kissinger's book, one gets the feeling that Hitchens' criticism should serve as an important warning. Though the elder statesman's eyes may be fading, his readers' should remain as critical as ever.

(C) 2001 Harvard Crimson via U-WIRE

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