I SAW HENRY KISSINGER THE OTHER DAY in New York. For a moment I was disoriented. It was as though Bismarck or Metternich had walked out of a history book and straight into my path. Like his nineteenth-century heroes, Kissinger now seems mostly to belong to history: He has earned his place as one of the most powerful and controversial secretaries of state ever, the architect, along with Richard Nixon, of the opening to China, détente, the Paris Peace Accords, and so many other events that must feel, to a new generation, almost as ancient as the 1878 Congress of Berlin. Yet a quarter-century after his departure from government Kissinger remains a presence: still dispensing advice to CEOs and politicians, still attending society fêtes, still writing op-eds and giving speeches—and still arousing debate. The always-provocative Christopher Hitchens a few months ago took to the pages of Harper’s to argue at excruciating length that Kissinger is a war criminal. (You know, the “secret invasion” of Cambodia and all that. Ho-hum.) And though he no longer runs America’s foreign policy, Kissinger can’t resist the urge to coach from the sideline those who do. His latest book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century, proves that he still has a lot to say and knows how to say it well. It is hard to think of any other major living American foreign policy figure who writes so elegantly or with such erudition. Richard Holbrooke, who penned a masterly account of the Dayton peace accords, is his only rival in this department. Whether you agree or disagree with its conclusions, any book by Kissinger promises the kind of rich intellectual meal that makes Warren Christopher’s recently released memoir seem, by contrast, thin gruel indeed. Given that no one questions whether America needs a foreign policy, Kissinger’s book should really have been entitled, “My Foreign Policy for America.” Most of it consists of a continent-by-continent, sometimes country-by-country, survey of the world scene, analyzing each area for the problems and opportunities it presents the United States. The final two chapters abandon the geographical format to focus on international economics and questions of “peace and justice.” Many of Kissinger’s observations show an acute eye, especially his critiques of Clinton initiatives. He calls the failed Middle East peace talks “the dialogue of the deaf” and warns of the folly of trying to bribe North Korea to give up its nuclear program—an attempt that “may have encouraged other rogue states to initiate nuclear weapons programs to generate a comparable buyout.” He is particularly persuasive on ballistic-missile defense. As the author of the ABM Treaty, he repeats his call for voiding this pact signed with a country that no longer exists (the Soviet Union) during a war now over (the Cold War), though he is less convincing in trying to explain why he signed this flawed treaty in the first place. He also makes many valuable suggestions, for instance proposing closer American relations with India. Kissinger’s survey of the world scene is informed, naturally, by his position as one of the leading theoreticians and practitioners of the school known as “realpolitik.” He has long been associated with the view that the United States should pursue its security interests instead of trying to foster its values around the world. Having spent decades debating this proposition, he is all too aware of the principal criticism—that the American people are too idealistic, democratic, and unruly to have a foreign policy worthy of the Hapsburg Empire. In this book, Kissinger gamely tries to meet his critics halfway, suggesting that American foreign policy should avoid either “excessive ‘realism’” or “excessive ‘idealism.’” Fair enough. Who is in favor of excess anything? Yet too often his agreements with the idealist school about human rights and democracy read as though they were uttered through clenched teeth. At the end of a long chapter on Asia, in which he explains why democracy and human rights are not appropriate guideposts for U.S. policy in the region, he declares: “Any serious dialogue with Asian nations cannot fail to include the subject of human rights.” And why not? Not because they are beneficial to American policy but because “No administration which fails to take account of this reality can maintain public support.” One senses he must have resisted the urge to add “Unfortunately” at the beginning of that sentence. Kissinger’s view seems to be that it’s a good thing democracy has spread as far as it has—but we should certainly not be doing much to advance it further. He writes, “Though most Asian countries adopted some sort of electoral system, democracy has not been their defining national experience.” America’s true interests lie in preventing any single power from dominating the rest, not in attempting to transform countries like China into liberal democracies. No “messianic globalism,” please. There is a sort of logic to Kissinger’s analysis—though it boils down to little more than the proposition that the absence of democracy in a country means democracy is not relevant there. This is especially glaring in his analysis of the Middle East. “The conflicts in the region are not about democracy because, except for Israel, none of the contestants is a democracy,” he writes. It doesn’t seem to occur to Kissinger that, as Natan Sharansky and others argue, the conflicts in the Middle East are about the lack of democracy and its attendant freedoms in the Arab world. Israel is America’s most loyal friend in the region precisely because Israel shares America’s values. Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya destabilize the region because they are thug-ocracies. A major reason the Palestinian Authority won’t make peace with Israel is that it too is governed by men with guns. Like Saddam, Assad, Qaddafi, and all the rest, Arafat needs a foreign threat to justify his tyrannical rule. Having spent decades whipping up hatred of the “Zionist imperialists,” he cannot easily turn around and end the struggle. Two Arab strongmen, Sadat and King Hussein, did make peace with Israel (it is perhaps relevant that Jordan is among the most liberal Arab states), but it is a very cold peace indeed. Yet among the eight principles that Kissinger says “should guide any new approach” to peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, he never mentions the need to transform Palestinian society, to spread freedom and the rule of law to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This is the same mistake Israel and the United States made in the Oslo process: expecting that negotiations between a democracy and a dictatorship with clashing interests could produce a modus vivendi. Come to think of it, this is also the illusion that animated détente. The charitable explanation for why Kissinger does not suggest trying to transform the Palestinian Authority is that he thinks it impossible (as opposed to undesirable). But who, six decades ago, would have thought that Europe would be as peaceful and democratic as it is today? In 1945 it would have been easy to say that democracy had not been Germany’s “defining national experience” and that therefore American ideals had no applicability to the land of Bismarck and Hitler. Indeed during World War II many “realists” did argue that Germany should be dismembered or deindustrialized so that it could never threaten its neighbors again. Luckily, American policymakers ignored the counsels of caution and boldly decided to reshape the former Axis states, turning them into pillars of liberal democracy. The United States after 1945 did not follow a “balance of power” model in Western Europe; it imposed American values, with results Kissinger applauds. Democracy has now spread to Eastern Europe as well, not least because America steadfastly opposed communism for a half century. Though policy swung toward “coexistence” during the Nixon-Ford-Carter years, Ronald Reagan moved firmly to an “unrealistic” policy aimed at the overthrow of Soviet power. What realist, after all, would have called the USSR an “evil empire” or thundered, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”? How naive. Sophisticates like Kissinger had realized decades before that the existence of the Soviet bloc was a reality to be accommodated, not a challenge to overcome. (Kissinger now tends to forget his pronouncements along these lines from the 1970s.) Only a Hollywood actor unschooled in international relations could possibly think that democracy might spread to areas under the dominion of the Red Army. So today only an ignorant clod—or deluded ideologue—could imagine that democracy might be an appropriate form of government for a country under the sway of the People’s Liberation Army. Yet democracy has somehow taken hold in such Asian countries as Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, which showed no more historical affinity for liberalism than mainland China does. (In fact Taiwan has precisely the same cultural heritage as the PRC.) Likewise democracy seems firmly established in such countries as Poland and Hungary, which had little or no experience of it before the 1990s. History is not destiny. Being ignorant of it may even help a policymaker escape its shackles. Kissinger, of course, is steeped in diplomatic history and skilled in citing it (the unkind might say “manipulating it”) to make his case. And, naturally, no period of history causes him more concern than the one in which he was calling the shots. Even in this volume, ostensibly concerned with the 2000s not the 1970s, he tries to portray his own past actions in the most flattering light possible—a project he undertook at considerably greater length in three volumes of memoirs. He claims that the realpolitik policy he and Nixon implemented “had many remarkable successes.” An interesting take on what, to most observers, would appear to be one of the most dismal decades in American diplomacy—a decade when world communism was at its zenith and American power at its nadir. Of course, Kissinger argues that he and Nixon and Ford did the best they could with the bad hand they were dealt. There’s some justice in this claim, but it conveniently overlooks the fact that Kissinger was not matching his accommodationism with a simultaneous attempt to buck up the American people to take a harder line against Communist aggression. Instead he actively derided and sabotaged the conservatives and neoconservatives who were attempting to awaken America to “the present danger.” One can forgive Kissinger for his obvious, understandable attempts at self-exculpation. (One of his most attractive qualities is his sense of humor, which he often employs to poke gentle fun at his own healthy ego.) Much harder to forgive, because it is less obvious to readers not steeped in the study of history, is his attempt to enlist to his cause one of America’s most admired presidents. In his magisterial earlier work, Diplomacy, Kissinger paid Theodore Roosevelt what is, for Kissinger, the ultimate compliment: “He approached the global balance of power with a sophistication…approached only by Richard Nixon.” Now, in Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, Kissinger returns to the charge, praising Roosevelt as the admirable practitioner of European-style realpolitik, in contrast to Woodrow Wilson, that dangerous proponent of American ideology. Might this be the same Theodore Roosevelt who whooped America into war against Spain, because, he explained, “It was our duty, even more from the standpoint of National honor than from the standpoint of National interest to stop…[the] murderous oppression” of the Cuban people? The same Theodore Roosevelt who wanted war not because of any particular foreign threat but to wean Americans of “the soft and easy enjoyment of material comfort” and to secure the nation’s “greatness”? The same Theodore Roosevelt who repeatedly stressed that “righteousness” and “justice” were more important than “peace” among “the nations of mankind”? Roosevelt was described by his biographer John Milton Cooper as “the most visionary idealist in American politics.” Kissinger calls him a realist mainly because he practiced good balance-of-power politics in brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. That is, at best, an incomplete picture. Roosevelt, like Reagan, knew how to fuse American ideals with American force—a combination that Kissinger still struggles with. Theodore Roosevelt’s policy helps illuminate another shortcoming of Kissinger’s worldview. For Kissinger the “balance of power”—maintained by wise statesmen schooled in the diplomatic arts…statesmen like himself, really—is the highest goal of international relations. He recognizes that the nation-state is in decline today, under attack from ethnic disturbances below and from international law above. Nevertheless he argues that tampering with the Westphalian system and its “doctrine of nonintervention in the domestic affairs of other countries” is a dangerous departure from the time-tested norms of international relations. But Theodore Roosevelt, unlike Henry Kissinger, knew that the balance of power was not an end in itself. Yes, Roosevelt believed in the balance of power in Asia or Europe, where America was very weak early in the twentieth century. But how did he act in a region where America was strong enough to impose its will? Only the Caribbean fit that description in 1900, and it was there that he promulgated the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, holding that the United States would exercise “international police power” so that American honor would be safeguarded and European meddlers excluded. Showing scant regard for Westphalian niceties, the United States turned Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Panama into protectorates and Puerto Rico into a possession. This policy was expanded under Roosevelt’s successors, Taft and Wilson, who added Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Virgin Islands to America’s empire. Britain practiced a similar philosophy for centuries. Whitehall was famously intent on preserving a balance on the Continent but only because Britain did not have the resources to impose its will there. In much of the rest of the world Britain did not seek a balance of power. It sought dominance. And it sought to impose its “values.” Today America has as much power in many parts of the world—for starters, in the Middle East, Europe, and Northeast Asia—as it once had only in the Caribbean. It has more power than Britain ever did. The question is: Will America practice a timid diplomacy based on the balance of power, or will it try to defend and extend the Pax Americana, a worthy successor to the Pax Britannica? Most international relations scholars agree that a benign hegemony is more stable than a balance of power (less risk of a replay of 1914), though most doubt that it can be preserved for long. If America is to maintain its hegemony, it will, like Britain, wind up using its power for purposes hard to justify by any traditional calculus of “national interest.” Britain stamped out the slave trade and the thug cult in India; America has stamped out ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Kissinger grudgingly supported this intervention after the bombs started falling because NATO’s prestige was on the line, but he is troubled by it. He implies that the Kosovo campaign represented an unprecedented and probably unwarranted interference in another nation’s internal affairs. “We may be entering a world in which, to use G.K. Chesterton’s phrase, ‘virtue runs amok,’” he writes, darkly. And, he warns, the United States should not become “policeman of the world.” Is this the counsel of prudence—or pusillanimity? I have an idea what Theodore Roosevelt might say. He had nothing but scorn for “milk-and-water cosmopolitanism,” for “flapdoodle pacifists and mollycoddlers”—and also for the unrealistic realists, like Henry Kissinger, who would define America’s world role in the most crabbed and narrow terms, without reference to American ideals. “The men who have stood highest in our history, as in the history of all countries,” Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography, “are those who scorned injustice,…who did not hesitate to draw the sword when to leave it undrawn meant inability to arrest triumphant wrong.” Max Boot, the editorial features writer of the Wall Street Journal, is writing a history of America’s small wars.
