Books

Page 2

Section 14

Chicago Tribune, Sunday, April 17, 1994

HENRY
KISSINGER
DIPLOMACY

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

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

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

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

— PAUL JOHNSON, COMMENTARY

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

— MICHIKO KAKUTANI, *THE NEW YORK TIMES*

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

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

Reference, 1878

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

— ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

K-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB

SIMON & SCHUSTER

A Paramount Communications Company

Books in Review

Commentary

The World Stage

DIPLOMACY. By HENRY KISSINGER.

Simon & Schuster. 912 pp.
$35.00.

Reviewed by PAUL JOHNSON

Good diplomats rarely write well about diplomacy. Ambassad-
dorial memoirs include some of
the worst books ever published.
Castlereagh, Talleyrand, and Met-
ternich, the three men who cre-
ated the 1814-15 Vienna settle-
ment, rightly praised by Henry
Kissinger as one of the most du-
rable works of peacemaking in his-
tory, left nothing apart from their
voluminous papers, and for their
views on their craft we are depen-
dent on a few bons mots. By con-
trast, John Quincy Adams pro-
duced twelve volumes of Memoirs,
and Chateaubriand's Mémoires
d'outre-tombe is another Leviathan.
But both are composed more of
venom, spleen, hurt pride, and vin-
dictive narrative than diplomatic
adages—and, if truth be told, nei-
ther man was a negotiator of world
class. In modern times, the writ-
ings of John Foster Dulles and
Anthony Eden are unilluminating,
George Kennan's books uneven,
and the one outstanding memoir
is Dean Acheson's Present at the
Creation. But even that tells you
what, where, and when, rather
than how.

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

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

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

Now, having already produced
his two gigantic volumes of mem-
oirs—and very good value they
are—he has delivered himself of a
scarcely less formidable study of
diplomatic history and practice.
The book's structure is complex.
He begins by stating the funda-
mental dilemma of American for-
eign policy: the conflict between
its instinctive idealism and its ac-
quired respect for the realities of
the world. In his next chapter he
illustrates this by contrasting the
two titans of the first decades of
the century: Theodore Roosevelt,
unashamed advocate of Realpoli-
tik, and Woodrow Wilson, obsti-
nate and tragic exponent of Ameri-
can idealism. It is Kissinger's con-
tention that, with certain qualifica-
tions, Wilsonian idealism has tri-
umphed in the 20th century as
America, the strongest power, has
committed itself, and persuaded
others to commit themselves, to a

world order based upon the Unit-
ed Nations Charter.

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

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

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

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

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

[LC]

55

56/COMMENTARY APRIL 1994

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith & Fantasy

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

Reviewed by RAEL JEAN ISAAC

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

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

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

Malcolm Rutherford admires
Kissinger the academic

Financial Times

14/15 May 1994

page xxii

"History in the
Balance"

If you want to pay someone a compliment, give them Henry Kissinger's *Diplomacy*. True, it is immensely long: half way through, I began withdrawing my initial impression that it is one of the best books I have read on any subject. But it picks up again and is certainly one of the best, and most enjoyable, on international relations past and present.

Kissinger has many advantages. He was born in Germany in 1923, moved to the US in 1938 and served in the American army in the second world war. He was an historian at Harvard long before he worked for any American administration. Comparisons between 19th century Europe and the 20th century world come naturally to him. He wrote *A World Restored: Castilereagh, Metternich and the Restoration of Peace, 1812-1822*, some of which is reflected in *Diplomacy*, in the mid-1950s. It was intended as the first of series running up to the first world war.

Real diplomacy then intervened. Kissinger has benefited from the experience. He now takes us to 1994, sometimes with an inside view, and with a look beyond. Moreover, Kissinger, the academic, can write better than Kissinger, the practising statesman, ever spoke. The book is a pleasure to read.

There are also defects. Kissinger is not much interested in social or economic trends: a country's economy is relevant to him only in so far as it adds to political and military power. He is not greatly interested in democracy either, still less in human rights. On the latter he advises President Clinton not to push too hard in America's relations with China; if he does, the Chinese might not take him seriously in his pursuit of equilibrium in Asia.

Again, there is a curiously old-fashioned approach to the "great men" of history. Kissinger has his heroes: Richeieu, Bismarck and, to some extent, the German chancellor Stresemann among them. Even where the bad far outweighs the good, he cannot always

avoid a sneaking admiration. For instance, "Stalin was indeed a monster, but in the conduct of international relations, he was the supreme realist – patient, shrewd, and implacable, the Richelieu of his period". Kissinger is not a moralist.

For all his brilliance, neither is he perhaps as good as he thinks he is at reducing his thoughts to a thesis. If *Diplomacy* has a single theme, it is that there is a fundamental distinction between a foreign policy based on the pursuit and maintenance of a balance of power and one based on altruism. Kissinger prefers the former.

His main illustration comes from the presidencies of Theo-

DIPLOMACY
by Henry Kissinger

Simon & Schuster £25, 912 pages

dore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt, he writes, went in for "muscular diplomacy". He was the first US president "to insist that it was America's duty to make its influence felt globally, and to relate America to the world in terms of a concept of national interest". Thus he was a "warrior-statesman" whereas Wilson, with his belief in the power of public opinion as a force for good, was a "prophet-priest". The difference between the categories is that "statesmen, even warriors, focus on the world in which they live; to prophets, the 'real' world is the one they want to bring into being".

Yet one wonders if the real world is anything like tidy enough to sustain such a distinction. Kissinger makes very little allowance for accidents, mistakes or the sheer unexpected (Pearl Harbour, for example).

There is also a tendency to idealise the past. One of the reasons he believes a balance of power was maintained for so long after the Congress of Vienna. in 1815 was that the participants had shared values. He is distinctly shaky about

cont'd.

05-16-94 03:49PM

P003

saying what those values were, save perhaps a preference for the status quo, just as he seldom denies one of his favourite words - "legitimacy". Sometimes he seems to be saying that if only everyone had been as intelligent as Bismarck, the European peace might have lasted even longer. Germany would have simply emerged as the dominant power in Europe without war and, as Kissinger observes, the Germans have got there in the end.

It is not ultimately for the judgments, however, that

Diplomacy should be read. It is for the sheer historical sweep, the characterisations, the story-telling, the ability to look at large parts of the world as a whole. The failings in British policy between the two world wars, for instance, look quite different when viewed by a dispassionate American historian. Kissinger thinks that it was the reluctance to make alliances that let Britain down, and a failure to understand Stalin. He is also notably sympathetic to Britain and France at Suez. He never makes the

mistake of condemning with hindsight.

Kissinger's own role in history emerges very gradually. The first use of the first person comes in shyly on page 347 when he mentions a disagreement with A.J.P. Taylor. Vietnam and the opening to China come much later and are among the best sections in the book. They are not quite autobiographical, but he has a marvellous way of combining past and present experience. Richard Nixon, he thinks, had the most sophisticated grasp of the

global balance of power of any president since Theodore Roosevelt.

In the 19th century the US had no need for a balance because it was not confronted by any powers needing to be balanced. The change by the end of the 20th, Kissinger concludes, is that America is "an island off the shores of the large landmass of Eurasia, whose resources and population far exceed those of the US". That is why a balance, or a series of balances, still matters.

BOOK REVIEW BY RALPH BUULTJENS

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

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

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

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

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

I

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

## II

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

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

3

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

[L.C.]

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

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

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

## IV

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

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

6

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

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

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

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

7

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

From DIPLOMACY Pg.382

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92

THE CRITICS

BOOKS

THE GAMES OF GREAT MEN

BY SIMON SCHAMA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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PAGE 2

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

For "Diplomacy" is an unrepentantly old-fashioned book—the kind of thing that Henry Kissinger might have written had he remained on the Harvard faculty. At one time, he envisaged his analytical monograph on peacemaking after the Napoleonic Wars, "A World Restored" (1957), as the first in a series of books that would extend his account of Realpolitik up to the First World War. But much has happened to the genre of diplomatic history since Kissinger left academia, and "Diplomacy" is a narrative of great men and events, studied with epigrams and laudatory

utterances on the practice of power—an appealingly unself-conscious throwback to the literature of the nineteen-fifties. The most astute practitioners of that earlier generation, thinkers like A. J. P. Taylor, duly receive attention from Kissinger even when he is arguing against them. And, like their big, sharply polemical texts, "Diplomacy" is

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Kissinger formulating policy in the Old World. (RJ.)

RICHARD DOWNEY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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timonious foil to Disraeli's Realpolitik.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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PAGE 6

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

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

DEAL OF THE WEEK

(From the Brattleboro (Vt.) Register.)

BRATTLEBORO.—The Police Department has
found a bag of marijuana on Cotton Mill Hill.
Anyone wishing to claim this property may
do so by contacting the Police Department.

Switzerland

An extraordinary hotel
with turn-of-the-century charms
and modern day comfort.

- Summer + winter resort

- Free bus service to the cableways

- Tea concert

- Indoor pool and tennis / Sauna

- Children's nursery / Golf nearby

Summer season: June 10th - Oct. 16th

Winter season: Dec. 17th - April 22nd

Personally managed by the owners

APR-22-94 12:42 FROM: KORDA-NYC

ID:

PAGE 4

# Kissinger-centered 'Diplomacy'

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

### Diplomacy

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

By Daniel Schorr
Special for USA TODAY

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

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

## BOOK REVIEW

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

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

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

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

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

bids, contrition).

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

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

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

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

Daniel Schorr is senior news analyst for National Public Radio.

By Marcia Stalmer, USA TODAY