Kissinger's Counsel
September-October 2014
WHEN HENRY KISSINGER celebrated his ninetieth birthday in Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel in June 2013, he attracted an audience of notables, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Valery Giscard D’Estaing, Donald Rumsfeld, James Baker and George Shultz. Kerry called Kissinger America’s “indispensable statesman,” but it was John McCain who, as the Daily Beast reported, electrified the room with his remarks. McCain, who was brutally tortured in what was sardonically known as the Hanoi Hilton, earned widespread respect for courageously refusing to accept an early release from his Vietnamese captors after his father had been promoted to commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
At the party, McCain recounted for the first time the specific circumstances of that refusal. He explained that when Kissinger traveled to Hanoi to conclude the agreement ending the war in 1973, the Vietnamese offered to send McCain home with him. Kissinger declined. McCain said:
He knew my early release would be seen as favoritism to my father and a violation of our code of conduct. By rejecting this last attempt to suborn a dereliction of duty, Henry saved my reputation, my honor, my life, really. . . . So, I salute my friend and benefactor, Henry Kissinger, the classical realist who did so much to make the world safer for his country’s interests, and by so doing safer for the ideals that are its pride and purpose.
It was a poignant moment. On one side was a scion of one of America’s preeminent military families who went on to become a senator championing a hawkish foreign policy that precisely reflects the neoconservative wing of the GOP. On the other was a Jewish refugee who had personally witnessed the descent of his homeland into ideological fanaticism and fled it with his parents to embark upon a new life in the United States, where he became a premier exponent of realist thought in foreign policy and a world-famous statesman. Both were bound together by events that forged a bond between them that was deeper than any differences they may have about America’s role abroad.
THE COMITY they displayed at the birthday gala is especially striking in the context of the contemporary Republican Party, where the principles that Kissinger has espoused over the past seven decades have not simply been abandoned. Again and again, they have been denounced as antithetical to American values. And this denunciation has come from both the left and the right.
Though Kissinger has come under attack from liberal circles—among the more notable assaults are Seymour Hersh’s The Price of Power, Christopher Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger and, most recently, Gary J. Bass’s The Blood Telegram—he has also regularly incurred the ire of conservatives. Throughout the 1970s, he was steadily denounced as deaf to human-rights concerns on the one hand, and as an appeaser on the other.
Perhaps the virulence of the attacks should not have come entirely as a surprise, since Kissinger did not emerge from the conservative wing of the GOP. Instead, he emerged from the ranks of the American establishment. Indeed, Kissinger was a Rockefeller Republican who first earned fame in the 1950s as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he published a study on nuclear weapons and Europe. He was also a professor of government at Harvard and a consultant to John F. Kennedy’s national-security adviser, McGeorge Bundy. Then, in 1968, Richard Nixon tapped Kissinger to become his national-security adviser. Kissinger added the post of secretary of state in 1973, a position that he retained after Gerald Ford became president, though he had to relinquish his post as national-security adviser.
Throughout, Kissinger attempted to apply the theoretical principles of classical realism to achieve what he saw as a global equilibrium of power. Together with Nixon, he promoted détente with the Soviet Union, established relations with China, ended the Vietnam War, and pursued shuttle diplomacy to end the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and the Arabs. In essence, Kissinger outmaneuvered the Soviets in both China and the Middle East. Kissinger’s aim was not to launch a crusade against the Soviet Union, but to formulate a creative response to promote a balance of power in the mold of the Congress of Vienna, which secured the peace for much of nineteenth-century Europe before the big bang of World War I, when a rising Wilhelmine Germany embarked on a reckless bid to relegate the British Empire to the second tier of world powers.
In response, the neoconservatives, who had been staunch Democrats, united with the Right in decrying Kissinger as pursuing a policy of appeasement and surrender. Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson and his aide Richard Perle steadily worked to stymie the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks that Nixon and Kissinger pursued with the Soviet Union and helped author the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which tied most-favored-nation status to the right of Soviet Jews and others to emigrate. (In his memoir Years of Renewal, Kissinger would single out neocon leaders Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol for criticism: “Tactics bored them; they discerned no worthy goals for American foreign policy short of total victory. Their historical memory did not include the battles they had refused to join or the domestic traumas to which they had so often contributed from the radical left side of the barricades.”)
At the same time, Ronald Reagan, during his 1976 primary run against Gerald Ford, denounced Kissinger as aiming for “second best” against the Soviet Union. Kissinger responded by issuing a ten-page State Department document titled “The Reagan Speech and the Facts” and by calling Reagan’s remarks a “contemptible, irresponsible invention.”
As president, Reagan split the difference between Kissingerian realism and a crusading foreign policy. He was cautious about the direct use of military force abroad, relying upon aiding insurgent forces in Nicaragua, Afghanistan and elsewhere to take the battle to Moscow. He temporized during the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, causing Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz to accuse him of “appeasement by any other name.” By the end of his term, Reagan, prompted by his fear of nuclear war and the rise of a more conciliatory Soviet leader in the form of Mikhail Gorbachev, signed more sweeping arms-control treaties than Nixon and Kissinger had ever envisioned.
The George H. W. Bush administration represented a reversion, more or less, to the doctrines of Nixon and Kissinger. Bush himself was an alumnus of the Nixon administration, as was his national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. Secretary of State James Baker incurred the wrath of the neocons for his opposition to Israel’s construction of settlements. And as the Soviet Union imploded, the administration deliberately avoided adopting a triumphalist tone.
But triumphalism quickly became the order of the day as conservatives claimed that Reagan, and Reagan alone, had not only prognosticated the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also brought it about. By 1996, William Kristol and Robert Kagan were declaring in Foreign Affairs that it was high time to return to what they termed a “neo-Reaganite foreign policy.”
The results were on display in the debacle that the George W. Bush administration created in the Middle East. The GOP has not really moved on from this disaster. For much of Barack Obama’s presidency, it has mostly refused to reexamine what went wrong in Iraq. Senator Ted Cruz, Governor Rick Perry and Senator Marco Rubio are all decrying what they describe as the appeasement-minded policies of President Obama and calling for a return to what they see as the principles exemplified by Reagan. Today, a debate has belatedly begun to emerge as Senator Rand Paul challenges the presuppositions of the neocons, as he did in a speech at a dinner at the Center for the National Interest in January 2014, where the audience included Kissinger and Scowcroft. Paul said that “our foreign policy and national security policy are too belligerent” and that “negotiation can improve our world.” But no potential candidate has sketched out a fully coherent and persuasive program of renewal.
IN HIS NEW book, World Order, Kissinger does just that. It demonstrates why he remains such a courted adviser to American presidents and foreign leaders alike. Written with his characteristic lucidity and incisiveness, it offers a grand tour of the rise of the West. Kissinger does not provide a laundry list of policies. Instead, he offers a meditation and a mode of thinking about events that is starkly at variance with much contemporary foreign-policy discourse. Diplomatic history has largely fallen into desuetude in the American academy, but Kissinger expertly mines the past to draw parallels between it and the present. Kissinger returns to his central concern of the difficulty of establishing an equilibrium among the great powers. He has been preoccupied with this problem since his first book, A World Restored, in which he examined the efforts of Metternich and Castlereagh to create a stable Europe in the nineteenth century. It is remarkable how consistent his thought has remained over the decades. He argues that the central challenge of the twenty-first century is to construct a new international order at a time of mounting ideological extremism, advancing technology and armed conflict.
Kissinger begins by returning to the tension in Europe between the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and the French Revolution. He next turns to Islam and the Middle East. He follows his scrutiny of the Ottoman Empire and Islam with a study of China’s rise and its implications for its neighbors. But his most extended thoughts are reserved for what he sees as America’s ambivalence about its status as a superpower. He traces the rise of the United States from Theodore Roosevelt down to today, discussing his own tenure in the Nixon administration to explore the unresolved tensions in U.S. foreign policy between isolationist and crusading instincts. Throughout, he aims to reconcile American universalist aspirations with the stark reality of competing powers intent on protecting and projecting their own visions and concepts of order.
Nowhere was the concept of order more fragile than in Europe for much of its history. As Kissinger observes, in contrast to China and the Islamic world, where political contests were conducted to control an established order, Europe never enjoyed a single, fixed identity. It was always a geographic expression. The closest it came to unity was in 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as Imperator Romanorum. But the Carolingian Empire succumbed to its fissiparous tendencies almost as soon as it had been formally established. Charlemagne never made a serious attempt to rule the Eastern Roman Empire. Nor did he recapture Spain. The Habsburg Empire tried to re-create the idea of European identity, but its monarchs were never really more than Europe’s leading landlords. Charles V was thus unable to vindicate the universality of the Catholic Church. Bowing to reality, he signed the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which recognized Protestantism by sanctioning the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, or “whose realm, his religion”—a principle that essentially amounted to a premodern version of spheres of influence. To be sure, the name Holy Roman Empire lingered on for centuries. Its formal existence prompted Voltaire to quip that it was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”
FOR ALL his emphasis on structural factors, Kissinger does not scant the importance of individuals in history. He points, for example, to Cardinal Richelieu as a statesman whose fundamental insight was that the state should be the basic unit of international relations. Its lodestar should be the national interest—not a ruler’s family interests or the demands of a universal religion. In essence, Richelieu commandeered the state as an instrument of high policy. His motto was: “The state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never.”
Richelieu’s insistence on the centrality of the state was codified at the Peace of Westphalia, which terminated the Thirty Years’ War and which occupies a good deal of Kissinger’s thinking about international relations. Kissinger makes many illuminating points about Westphalia and emphasizes that the peace it established continues to have profound implications for the present. Though the seventeenth-century representatives of the warring European states employed pious phrases about a “peace for Christendom,” their true aim was to create stability through balancing rivalries. The Thirty Years’ War may have started as a battle of Catholics against Protestants, but Kissinger aptly remarks that it rapidly devolved into a “free-for-all” of constantly shifting alliances. The treaty’s most profound innovation was to affirm that the state, not a dynasty or empire, was the basic structure of European order. All were granted equal treatment in protocol, from new powers such as Sweden and the Dutch Republic to older, more established ones such as France and Austria. Kissinger underscores that this set the basis for the international order that exists down to this day:
The Westphalian concept took multiplicity as its starting point and drew a variety of multiple societies, each accepted as a reality, into a common search for order. By the mid-twentieth century, this international system was in place on every continent; it remains the scaffolding of international order such as it now exists.
The Peace of Westphalia may be attacked as a system of cynical power manipulation, Kissinger writes, but it actually represented something else—the attempt to ward off dominance of a single country by establishing a balance of power.
It was even flexible enough to allow for the integration of rising powers. Consider Prussia. An army in search of a state, Prussia was something of a Johnny-come-lately on the European scene. It was Frederick the Great who established the House of Hohenzollern as a great power during the Seven Years’ War. Despite being abused by his capricious father—Lord Macaulay wrote, “Oliver Twist in the parish workhouse, Smike at Dotheboys Hall, were petted children when compared with this wretched heir apparent of a crown”—he surprised his contemporaries by transcending his early woes to become the archetypal benevolent despot, establishing Prussia as a European power without attempting to dominate the Continent. Westphalia, in other words, worked.
THE MOST potent early challenge to the Westphalian system came from revolutionary France. The revolution of 1789 morphed into a militant ideological persuasion, a crusading international movement that demonized its adversaries. The French revolutionaries scorned the notion that an international order with clearly demarcated limits of state action should have any purchase. In 1792, the members of the National Convention passed a decree stating that France “will accord fraternity and assistance to all peoples who shall wish to recover their liberty,” an idea that may sound harmless enough but soon led to a series of wars. The revolution, writes Kissinger,
demonstrated how internal changes within societies are able to shake the international equilibrium more profoundly than aggression from abroad—a lesson that would be driven home by the upheavals of the twentieth century, many of which drew explicitly on the concepts first advanced by the French revolution.
Order was restored at the 1815 Congress of Vienna. But there another messianic vision emerged. Czar Alexander I was convinced that he could usher in a new world order—a “Holy Alliance” of princes that forswore sordid national interests and sought to create a new international brotherhood. He espoused a great melting pot of nations: “There no longer exists an English policy, a French, Russian, Prussian, or Austrian policy; there is now only one common policy which, for the welfare of all, ought to be adopted in common by all states and all peoples.”
Alexander’s eupeptic sentiments prompt Kissinger to deliver the sternest rebuke he can offer, which is that they represented a “Wilsonian conception of the nature of world order, albeit on behalf of principles dramatically the opposite of the Wilsonian vision.” In the end, the Congress created three institutions to establish peace: a Quadruple Alliance consisting of Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia; a Holy Alliance to neutralize domestic threats to the legitimacy of the monarchies; and a Concert of Europe, which provided for regular diplomatic conferences among the heads of governments.
Nationalism, the revolutions of 1848, the Crimean War and the unification of Germany ensured that the arrangements forged by Europe’s magnificoes in 1815 did not last. Kissinger perceptively notes that the shift from Metternich, who was focused on preserving the principle of legitimacy, to Bismarck, who was intent on amassing power, acutely displays the breakdown of the European order. Both are often viewed as conservatives, but Bismarck is probably best viewed as a radical conservative, at least in his formative incarnation. Unlike Metternich, Bismarck sought to demonstrate that conservatism could be annealed to nationalism. But Bismarck was aware of Germany’s limits. He may have created an empire, but he did not seek to displace the British Empire or to humiliate France. After the unification of Germany, his main object was to preserve the peace, which he did. His epigones in the Wilhelmstrasse, by contrast, did not.
After World War II, the division of Europe into two hostile camps meant that the western half largely sought to subsume its identity, partly by identifying with the United States, at least when it came to its military defense, as well as by aiming for economic unity within its bloc. With the end of the Cold War, Europe has striven to define a separate, independent identity. Kissinger worries that the Continent’s pursuit of soft power may have become an end in itself, thereby creating an imbalance of power at a moment when other regions of the globe are pursuing hard power. He suggests that Europe finds itself uneasily suspended between a past it seeks to overcome and a future that it has yet to define. But even as it searches for a new order, Europe, he concludes, has evolved into a society united by the laudable ambition to sequester moral absolutes from political endeavors.
THE CONTRAST with the United States, we are told, could hardly be starker. America fused distrust of established institutions with a crusading spirit. For Thomas Jefferson, America was an “empire of liberty.” It was, he wrote, “acting under obligations not confined to the limits of our own society.” The first president to assign America a role as a world power was Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt sketched out a vision of America as the guardian of the global balance of power and, by extension, the international peace. In Kissinger’s view, “This was an astonishingly ambitious vision for a country that had heretofore viewed its isolation as its defining characteristic and that had conceived of its navy as primarily an instrument of coastal defense.” Kissinger makes clear his admiration for Roosevelt. He believes that had Roosevelt been president during World War I, the conflict would have been terminated much more quickly. A negotiated peace would have left Germany defeated but indebted to American restraint. But it was Woodrow Wilson, of course, who gave full flower to the proselytizing persuasion. Rather than seeking to restore a balance of power, Wilson wanted to “make the world safe for democracy”—a goal that was as laudable as it was impractical. Speaking at West Point in 1916, Wilson told the graduating class, “It was as if in the Providence of God, a continent had been kept unused and waiting for a peaceful people who loved liberty and the rights of men more than they loved anything else, to come and set up an unselfish commonwealth.”
For all its idealism, however, America bumped up against rather different views of world order. Communism and the Third World directly challenged the American gospel. Kissinger raises several questions that he believes confronted Washington: Was American foreign policy a tidy story with a beginning and an end that leads to final victories? Is there an ultimate destination? Or is it really a tale of managing constant challenges? It will come as no surprise to those familiar with his record and writings that Kissinger markedly inclines toward the latter view.
It was for this approach to international relations that he came under such fire in the 1970s. But the notion, widely disseminated by his ideological foes, that Kissinger, far from trying to buttress U.S. power, was trying to manage its decline is something of a fiction. Actually, he was attempting to address a daunting new reality, which was that the tumult of the 1970s meant that the United States required breathing space as it extricated itself from Vietnam and confronted a newly emboldened Soviet Union, not to mention a Western Europe, led by the Federal Republic of Germany, that was intent on rapprochement with Moscow.
When it comes to his discussion of this era and his own accomplishments, Kissinger is not reticent about expressing his admiration for Richard Nixon. Nixon’s solitary nature meant that he had read widely, a trait that Kissinger avers made him the best-prepared incoming president since TR on foreign policy. Nixon and Kissinger also evinced a theoretical unanimity in their approach toward foreign affairs that is quite rare. Kissinger reminds us that in 1971, Nixon told the editors of Time that it would be desirable to have an interlocking set of ambitions among the great powers: “I think it will be a safer world and a better world if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance.”
This sentiment did not represent a maleficent doctrine antithetical to the American credo. On the contrary, it constituted a form of moralism—relations based on mutual dignity and respect, forgoing the attempt to derive advantage from temporary circumstances in favor of an enduring peace. As Kissinger notes in reflecting upon Reagan’s record as president, neither pure power nor pure idealism can suffice. Kissinger calls for “a concept of order that transcends the perspective and ideals of any one region or nation. At this moment in history, this would be a modernization of the Westphalian system informed by contemporary realities.”
Whether this will actually occur is, of course, questionable. When it comes to the GOP itself, as Robert D. Kaplan noted of Kissinger in the Atlantic last year, “The degree to which Republicans can recover his sensibility in foreign policy will help determine their own prospects for regaining power.” Kissinger himself never returned to high office after Ford’s defeat in 1976. He was too controversial a figure inside both political parties. But no other modern secretary of state has come close to matching his influence and fame.
His latest contribution amounts to a guide for the perplexed, a manifesto for reordering America’s approach to the rest of the globe. No doubt Russia, China and Iran may strike out on courses that seek to overturn the kind of Westphalian principles lauded by Kissinger. But as a means of apprehending international affairs—and of maintaining the delicate balance between power and idealism—Kissinger’s precepts are surely more valuable than ever. It is no accident that after the debacles of the past decade, Kissinger’s realism is starting to make something of a comeback. Now that the doctrines championed by his neocon detractors have largely come into disrepute, at least among the American public, realism is starting to receive more of a hearing.
Perhaps the return of realism should not altogether be surprising. In a sense, it has never gone away. For the tenets that Kissinger has studied and pursued amply merit the term classical, as they are timeless. Kissinger’s vision could help to shape a more tranquil era than the one that has emerged so far. He himself ends his work on a note of humility, observing that in his youth he was “brash enough” to believe he could pronounce on “The Meaning of History.” “I now know that history’s meaning,” he writes, “is a matter to be discovered, not declared.” It would be a pity if his counsel went unheeded.
Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest.
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