Diplomacy

“Every American president since Wilson has advanced variations on Wilson’s theme. Domestic debates have more often dealt with the failure to fulfill Wilson’s ideals (some so commonplace that they were no longer even identified with him) than with whether they were in fact lending adequate guidance in meeting the occasionally brutal challenges of a turbulent world. For three generations, critics have savaged Wilson’s analysis and conclusions; and yet, in all this time, Wilson’s principles have remained the bedrock of American foreign-policy thinking.”

In Kissinger’s estimation, US foreign policy in the 20th-century has been uniformly idealistic, dedicated to universalizing the principles of democracy and individual rights that prevail in its domestic politics. Many academics, Kissinger perhaps most notably, have articulated a critique based on the harsh realities of power politics, but with the possible exception of Kissinger’s own time at the helm of the State Department, he regards America as thoroughly Wilsonian, a habit it will have to break, he argues, to manage the geopolitical challenges of the 21st century.

“Whereas the nemesis of Wilsonian idealism is the gap between its professions and reality, the nemesis of raison d’état is overextension—except in the hands of a master, and it probably is even then. For Richelieu’s concept of raison d’état had no built-in limitations. How far would one go before the interests of the state were deemed satisfied? How many wars were needed to achieve security?”

Kissinger clearly prefers the practitioners of raison d’état (“reason of state”) to ideologues like Wilson, or his predecessors such as Emperor Ferdinand II who regarded the Catholic faith in a similar light, a universal moral principle for organizing all of international politics. But while Kissinger has little respect for those who fail to acknowledge the harsh realities of politics, he acknowledges that even the most cunning and ruthless practitioners of diplomacy make mistakes of their own: Their refusal to acknowledge moral restraints makes them liable to excesses.

“In dealing with the defeated enemy, the victors designing a peace settlement must navigate the transition from the intransigence vital to victory to the conciliation needed to achieve a lasting peace. A punitive peace mortgages the international order because it saddles the victors, drained by their wartime exertions, with the task of holding down a country determined to undermine the settlement. Any country with a grievance is assured of finding nearly automatic support from the disaffected defeated party. This would be the bane of the Treaty of Versailles.”

Kissinger wrote his doctoral thesis on the Vienna Congress, and he regards it as one of the most important events in the history of international relations history. He regards it as the ideal model for achieving a postwar settlement, managing to strike the difficult balance between containing the defeated enemy (France) while giving it a stake in the new arrangement. The settlement after World War I inflicted punishments on Germany that it was strong enough to avenge, and the settlement after World War II failed to articulate a principle of legitimacy capable of mitigating the disagreements among the victors.

“Russia was at was at once a threat to the balance of power and one of its key components, essential to the equilibrium but not fully a part of it. For much of its history, Russia accepted only the limits that were imposed on it by the outside world, and even these grudgingly. And yet there were periods, most notably the forty years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when Russia did not take advantage of its vast power, and instead put this power in the service of protecting conservative values in Central and Western Europe.”

Russia’s geography leaves it straddled between Europe and Asia, and Kissinger sees a similar duality in its diplomatic history. Its participation in the Vienna Congress established it as a major player in European politics, but Europe and its balance of power system could have little to say about its expansion to the Pacific or Central Asia. Its relentless expansion helped to make its government highly autocratic, and so it is not a coincidence that the high-water mark of its participation in the European balance of power was as a defender of autocracy.

“The balance of power works best if at least one of the following conditions pertains. First, each nation must feel itself free to align with any other state, depending on the circumstances of the moment […] Second, when there are fixed alliances but a balancer sees to it that none of the existing coalitions becomes predominant […] Third, when there are rigid alliances and no balancer exists, but the cohesion for the alliances is relatively low so that, on any given issue, there are either compromises or changes in alignment. When none of these conditions prevails, diplomacy turns rigid. A zero-sum game develops in which any gain of one side is conceived as a loss for the other.”

Europe’s balance of power system came to a devastating end with the First World War. The diplomatic structures that had guided Europe for centuries were no longer aligned with military realities, namely the capacity to mobilize millions of troops to inflict a potentially crushing defeat on the enemy that was slower to mobilize. Alliances were meant to provide deterrence against the enemy’s mobilization, but as soon as one state mobilized, in this case Austria-Hungary against Serbia, each of the Great Powers believed they had no choice but to follow suit.

“The paradox of the First World War was that it had been fought to curb German power and looming predominance, and that it had aroused public opinion to a pitch which prevented the establishment of a conciliatory peace. Yet, in the end, Wilsonian principles inhibited a peace which curbed Germany’s power and there was no shared sense of justice. The price for conducting foreign policy on the basis of abstract principles is the impossibility of distinguishing among individual cases. Since the leaders at Versailles were not willing to reduce German power by either the implicit rights of victory or the calculations of the balance of power, they were obliged to justify German disarmament as the first installment of a general plan of disarmament, and reparations as an expiation of guilt for the war itself.”

Some, especially the French, came to the Versailles Conference looking for the most effective method of containing German power. Others, most notably the United States, came to build an entirely new international order based on peace, national self-determination, and diplomatic transparency. The failure to commit to one or the other plan ultimately meant that neither goal was achieved. Any effort to contain Germany had to filter through a utopian grand design to which few were committed, and the resulting system lacked both the power to achieve its goals or the legitimacy to win adherence to its guiding principles.

“Since there was no geopolitical basis for the Versailles order, the statesmen were driven to invoking their personal relationships as a means of maintaining it—a step none of their predecessors had ever taken. The aristocrats who had conducted foreign policy in the nineteenth century belonged to a world in which intangibles were understood in the same way. Most of them were comfortable with each other. Nevertheless, they did not believe that their personal relations could influence their assessments of their countries’ national interest. Agreements were never justified by the ‘atmosphere’ they generated, and concessions were never made to sustain individual leaders in office.”

The 1925 Treaty of Locarno validating Germany’s western boundaries was hailed as a diplomatic breakthrough, less for what it accomplished in substance as for the very idea of a diplomatic arrangement between Germany and its former enemies. The “spirit of Locarno” was supposed to generate still greater cooperation, but as Kissinger points out, a convivial atmosphere cannot displace hard realities of power, which the Locarno treaty made even more salient by leaving the question of Germany’s eastern boundaries conspicuously unresolved.

“It would have taxed the comprehension of a less determined leader than Hitler why, if it was prepared to concede adjustments in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Polish Corridor, Great Britain would balk at the method Germany used to make those adjustments. Having yielded the substance, why should Great Britain draw the line at the procedure? What possible peaceful argument did Halifax expect could convince the victims of the merits of suicide? League orthodoxy and the doctrine of collective security had it that it was the method of change which had to be resisted; but history teaches that nations go to war in order to resist the fact of change.”

In the 1930s, Hitler exploited the Western powers’ fear of another war and their avowed principle of national self-determination, which Hitler used to justify a union of all German-speaking peoples into a single Reich. Their principal objection was to Hitler advancing this project through force rather than diplomacy, and Kissinger points out the absurdity of objecting to methods when the fact of Hitler rebuilding a German empire was itself the main cause for alarm, even if Hitler were to accomplish it by asking nicely.

“Stalin, the great ideologue, was in fact putting his ideologue in the service of realpolitik. Richelieu or Bismarck would have had no difficulty understanding his strategy. It was the statesmen representing the democracies who were wearing ideological blinkers; having rejected power politics, they thought that the precondition to good relations among nations was a general belief in the premises of collective security, and that ideological hostility would preclude any possibility of practical cooperation between the fascists and the communists.”

Kissinger regards both Hitler and Stalin as ideologues, but whereas Hitler’s ideology of racial supremacy led him down a violent and reckless path of aggression and genocide, Stalin’s Marxism provided a long-term framework through which to understand the workings of history. Since the victory of communism was guaranteed, Stalin was justified in anything that advanced the interests of the Soviet state or sowed discord among the capitalists. There was accordingly no incompatibility between Stalinist ideology and realpolitik.

“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 far safer than the familiar promontory.”

Franklin Roosevelt had an enormously difficult task of preparing the country for intervention in a war he regarded as necessary but for which the public was extremely reluctant to join. Part of the reason he was able to do so was an extraordinary personal charisma, but, even more importantly, he also had a grasp of the country’s fundamental political instincts, which ran deeper than the twists and turns of public opinion at any particular moment. Americans may not care a whit for the balance of power, but over time they could be convinced that Nazism represented evil and that America must confront it as proof of its own goodness.

“Churchill wanted to reconstruct the traditional balance of power in Europe […] Roosevelt envisioned a postwar order in which the three victors, along with China, would as a board of directors of the world, enforce the peace against the potential miscreant, which he thought would most likely be Germany—a vision that was to become known as the ‘Four Policemen.’ Stalin’s approach reflected both his communist ideology and traditional Russian foreign policy. He strove to cash in on his country’s victory by extending Russian influence into Central Europe. And he intended to turn the countries conquered by Soviet armies into buffer zones to protect Russia against any future Russian aggression.”

The three wartime allies were firmly united against a common threat, but once it became clear that victory was inevitable, they had to confront the profound differences among their visions of a postwar world. Roosevelt, a former cabinet official in the Wilson administration, was eager to succeed where his mentor had failed in establishing a new international order grounded in liberal principles. Churchill was an old-school imperialist desperate to hang onto a British preeminence that was fast slipping away. Stalin wanted a free hand in Eastern Europe as a surety against another devastating attack. The need to defeat Hitler helped put these issues aside, but it also allowed them to fester, so that they proved unmanageable almost immediately after Germany’s and Japan’s surrender.

“With almost reckless bravado, Stalin chose to pretend that the Soviet Union was acting from strength, not weakness. Volunteering concessions was, in Stalin’s mind, a confession of vulnerability, and he viewed any such admission as likely to generate new demands and pressures. So he kept his army in the center of Europe, where he gradually imposed Soviet puppet governments. Going even further, he conveyed an image of such implacable ferocity that many thought him poised for a dash to the English Channel—a fear widely recognized by posterity as chimerical.”

Historians continue to debate whether the principal cause of the Cold War was Soviet expansionism or America’s inability to draw limits on its own sphere of influence, prompting the Soviets to lock down their own sphere. Kissinger tilts toward the first position but finds some nuance between them in the observation that Stalin was more afraid of American power than desirous of imposing Soviet rule on the whole of Europe. But even if his intentions were not aggressive, he chose to mask his own insecurity with measures that the Western leaders were bound to perceive as aggressive.

“Had Soviet leaders been more aware of American history, they would have understood the ominous nature of what the President was saying. The Truman Doctrine marked a watershed because, once America had thrown down the moral gauntlet, the kind of realpolitik Stalin understood best would be forever at an end, and bargaining over reciprocal concessions would be out of the question. Henceforth, the conflict could only be settled by a change in Soviet purposes, by the collapse of the Soviet system, or both.”

Unsure of how to reconcile increasingly alarming Soviet behavior with the formal institutions of postwar cooperation (such as in Germany), the Truman administration ultimately decided that if they could not be unequivocal partners, they would be adversaries, and proclaimed a worldwide struggle between freedom and authoritarianism. Soviet leaders did not immediately realize its significance, as they were accustomed to using the most brazen propaganda as a cover for slight policy shifts. The Americans, however, would seek to align policy with rhetoric, and from that point on it would be nearly impossible for the issues of the Cold War to be resolved through moderate compromises.

“Thus, the Korean War grew out of a double misunderstanding: the communists, analyzing the region in terms of American interests, did not find it plausible that America would resist at the tip of a peninsula when it had conceded most of the mainland of Asia to the communists; while America, perceiving the challenge in terms of principle, was less concerned with Korea’s geopolitical significance—which American leaders had publicly discounted—than with the symbolism of permitting communist aggression to go unopposed.”

The North Korean invasion of the South in 1950 exposed one of the flaws of containment—the US and its allies could not possibly defend against potential aggression at every single point, but failure to prevent such aggression would undermine the premises of containment. The Soviet Union and North Korea believed that they could take South Korea with little trouble, as Secretary of State Acheson had conspicuously left Korea outside of the US security perimeter in Asia. But once the invasion happened, it fell squarely within the emerging narrative of good versus evil, prompting the US and its allies to quick and decisive action.

“Stalemate served Moscow’s immediate tactical and internal purposes, but it played into the hands of America’s long-range strategy—even if all of the America leaders did not fully understand this. Since the United States and its allies were bound to win an arms race and their sphere of influence had the greater economic potential, properly conceived Soviet long-range purposes actually required a genuine easing of tensions and a realistic settlement of Central European issues. Molotov avoided making concession which, however painful, might have saved the Soviet Union from strategic overextension and eventual collapse. Dulles avoided flexibility, for which he paid the price of needless domestic controversy and vulnerability to Soviet cosmetic peace offensives, but which also laid the basis for America’s ultimate strategic victory.”

After the death of Stalin, his successors were eager to relieve the tensions of the Cold War, which had imposed enormous costs on a state that had already suffered so much in the Second World War. American policymakers always feared that any letup in pressure on the Soviets would empower them to pursue fresh aggressions, but a long-term perpetuation of Cold War tensions would ultimately reward the greater economic potential of the West, which would readily translate into a superior military position. By failing to end the Cold War, the Soviets made sure that it would ultimately end them.

“The French and British expedition had been ham-handedly conceived and amateurishly implemented; designed in frustration, and lacking a clear-cut political objective, it doomed itself to failure. The United States could never have supported so flawed an enterprise. Yet the gnawing question remains whether America’s dissociation from its allies needed to be quite so brutal. Did the United States really have no other choice than either to support the French and British adventure or to oppose it outright? […] Was the United States’ national interest really served by bringing home in so ruthless a fashion to two of America’s most indispensable allies that they had lost all capacity for autonomous action?”

The French-British intervention in Egypt was an obvious ploy to justify the earlier Israeli invasion to regain control of the Suez Canal, and the US had a genuine dilemma in choosing between its allies and its anti-imperial policy. In Kissinger’s view, Eisenhower was too harsh and unequivocal in his decision to threaten the Western powers with financial collapse and isolation from oil markets. It brought the rifts among Western allies into public view, and it marked a major concession to Nasser’s position, which Nasser, a reliable Soviet client, would never even try to repay.

“Khrushchev had snared himself in a tangled web of his own creation. Trapped, he found that he could not hope to achieve his demands without war. For this he proved never quite ready, and yet he dared not take the West up on its offers to negotiate lest he be accused by the ‘hawks’ in the Kremlin and his Chinese cohorts of having settled for too little. Too weak to steer his ‘doves’ toward a more confrontational course, too unsure of his standing to impose concessions on his ‘hawks,’ Khrushchev procrastinated as long as he could, then staked everything on a desperate roll of the dice by placing missiles in Cuba.”

By the late 1950s, Khrushchev had decided upon a strategy of nuclear saber-rattling. He was confident that a posture of recklessness would offset his country’s weakness and compel the allies to accommodate him. But once the allies figured out that he was no more eager for war than they were, his belligerence had squandered the opportunity for genuine negotiations, without achieving any of its promised gains.

“In 1954, there was little foundation in South Vietnam for nationhood, and even less for democracy. Yet neither America’s strategic assessment nor its belief that South Vietnam had to be saved by democratic reform took account of these realities. With the enthusiasm of the innocent, the Eisenhower Administration hurled itself headlong into the defense of South Vietnam against communist aggression and the task of nation-building in the name of enabling a society whose culture was vastly different from America’s to maintain its newfound independence and to practice freedom in the American sense.”

The United States saw Vietnam as a symbol of its willingness to confront communism anywhere and everywhere, but it proved a troubled subject of its efforts. American triumph required a working example of democracy, but Vietnam was a premodern society, in Kissinger’s view, just out of colonialism that could not organize itself according to the categories of modern politics. The more resources the US poured in to accelerate its modernization, the more it distorted a society already unlike its own and made it more difficult to organize under an American model of governance.

“What could not work was the strategy which America in fact adopted: the mirage of establishing 100 percent security in 100 percent of the country, and seeking to wear down the guerrillas by search-and-destroy operations. No matter how large the expeditionary force, it could never prove sufficient against an enemy whose supply lines lay outside of Vietnam and who possessed extensive sanctuaries and ferocious will. At the end of 1966, North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong told Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times that, although the United States was far stronger militarily, it would lose in the end because more Vietnamese than Americans were prepared to die for Vietnam, and to fight as long as it might take to outlast the Americans. His assessment proved correct.”

Kissinger regards the Vietnam War as a combination of America’s two worst tendencies, a moralistic approach to politics and a totalistic approach to war. The logic of the military situation in his opinion required a war across all of former French Indochina, while the US limited itself to South Vietnam for fear of triggering the Chinese intervention that had spoiled is efforts in Korea a generation earlier. In the end, the United States expended enormous military resources toward a political end it could not achieve, exhausting itself while its enemies bided their time in advance of a more favorable political climate.

“America, at any rate, paid a price for its adventure in Vietnam that was out of portion to any conceivable gain. It was clearly a mistake to have staked so much on such ill-defined causes. America had become involved in the first place because it applied literally the maxims of it successful European policy to a region with radically different political, social, and economic conditions. Wilsonian idealism permitted no cultural differentiation, while the theory of collective security held that, security being indivisible, the fabric of the entire international order would unravel if even one strand were pulled out.”

Some readers may object to Kissinger offering a distant, objective reading on a policy to which he made major contributions for many critical years. Regardless of his own complicity, the accuracy of this judgment seems unobjectionable, as American policymakers of both parties tended to portray Vietnam as a symbol of broader commitments rather than a worthwhile effort unto itself, even as the war cost tens of thousands of American lives in addition to many more Vietnamese lives. Its idealistic commitment to Vietnamese freedom clashed directly with the realities of Vietnamese politics, producing a terrible tragedy for both nations.

“The idea was to emphasize those areas in which cooperation was possible, and to use that cooperation as leverages to modify Soviet behavior in areas in which the two countries were at loggerheads. That, and not the caricatures which came to characterize the subsequent debate, was what the Nixon Administration understood by the word ‘détente.’”

Nixon’s détente policy was based on the principle of linkage, that advancements on certain issues to the interest of one party could be made contingent on advancements in other issues to the interest of the other party. For example, the Soviet Union was eager for arms control to manage its defense expenditures and receive food shipments from the West, while the US wanted Moscow to put pressure on Hanoi to accept a peace proposal and expedite the withdrawal from Vietnam.

“Nixon’s new approach to foreign policy challenged American exceptionalism and its imperative that policy be based on the affirmation of transcendent values. America’s challenge, as Nixon and his advisors saw it, was to adapt these traditional verities to the new international environment. America’s domestic experience had led it to interpret the international order as being essentially benign, and its diplomacy as an expression of goodwill and a willingness to compromise. In that scheme of things, hostility was seen as an aberration. Nixon’s foreign policy, on the other hand, perceived the world as composed of ambiguous challenges, of nations impelled by interest rather than goodwill, and of incremental rather than final changes—a world, in short, that could be managed but could neither be dominated nor rejected.”

Nixon’s legacy has become shrouded in Watergate, and so his contributions to US foreign policy have not received sufficient attention. Nixon’s policies were controversial, offending liberals with his realist sensibilities and offending conservatives with his willingness to cooperate with the Soviet Union and China, but he unquestionably made great successes in opening up relations with China, stabilizing the balance of power in the Middle East, and easing Cold War tensions. Kissinger unsurprisingly omits the uglier chapters of Nixon’s foreign policy, such as the support of the Pinochet dictatorship and sponsorship of Pakistan’s gruesome war in what is now Bangladesh, but other historians have since covered that ground well.

“What had changed most radically was the way East-West policy as being presented to the American public. Reagan had instinctively sandwiched tough Cold War geostrategic policies between an ideological crusade and a utopian evocation of peace that appealed simultaneously to the two major strands of American thought on international affairs—the missionary and the isolationist, the theological and the psychiatric.”

An actor with no foreign policy experience, Reagan seemed an unlikely figure to end the Cold War, at least on terms other than the militant anticommunism he had espoused since serving as president of the Screen Actors Guild. But while his rhetoric never softened, he proved a capable negotiator, especially once he had a willing partner in Mikhail Gorbachev. Just like Nixon, whose own anticommunism shielded him from criticism when he opened relations with China, Reagan’s sincere professions of anticommunism ironically fueled a moderate and generous diplomacy, which he could advertise as a personal relationship with Gorbachev that ran parallel to their respective ideologies.