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Henry Kissinger writes more than 800 pages to argue that an international system based on balance of power is a better system for conducting foreign policy and serving national interests. He supports his argument with examples from history, especially that of Europe, where the balance of power system originated.

Before proceeding with this review in some detail, it is necessary to say a few words about the author.

Henry Kissinger was the national security adviser for President Nixon. He served in this position from January 1968 to November 1975. He then became secretary of state between September 1973 and January 1977, after Gerald Ford succeeded Richard Nixon who resigned because of the Watergate scandal. Kissinger made a secret trip to China in July 1971, which paved the way for a visit by President Nixon in February 1972—the first by an American president. He was also the negotiator in the peace talks with North Vietnam in Paris. Kissinger and his Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1973.

In a Middle Eastern context, he is famous for his shuttle diplomacy in the region after the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. His frequent trips to Egypt, Syria, and Israel produced two disengagement agreements on the Egyptian front and one on the Syrian. Before joining the Nixon administration, he was a professor at Harvard University. His PhD thesis at the same university dealt with European history. The title of his thesis was “A World Restored: Castlereagh, Metternich, and the Restoration of Peace, 1812-1822.”

In Diplomacy, Kissinger observes at the outset that nearly every 100 years, a new nation emerges “with the power, the will, and the intellectual and moral impetus to shape the entire international system according to its values” (p. 17). In the seventeenth century, he points out, it was France; in the eighteenth, it was Britain; and in the nineteenth, it was Austria and Germany. Unlike these countries, the USA, which dominated the twentieth century, did not practice the balance of power, a system he leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind that he is fond of it. He sees the balance of power and the national interest as two sides of the same coin.

Comparing American and European attitudes toward foreign policy, he says the US oscillated between two “contradictory attitudes.” The first is the US as a beacon for democracy, which reflects the views of the isolationists. The other is the US as a crusader (p. 18) for its values, which reflects the views of those who wanted to involve the USA in international affairs.

With the exception of President Theodore Roosevelt, and several decades later, Richard Nixon, American presidents did not concern themselves with the business of balance of power and calculations of the national interest. “No other president, Kissinger says about Theodore Roosevelt, “defined America’s world so completely in terms of the national interest or identified national interest so comprehensively with the balance of power” (p. 39). However, all other presidents, from Wilson onward, adopted an idealistic attitude toward relations between nations (p. 52). Despite a great deal of praise for this idealism, Kissinger points to the shortcomings of this attitude when he starts to analyze the many situations and crises, contemporary and otherwise.

In the chapters about European history, it is easy to notice, as Malcolm Rutherford does, that Kissinger tended “to idealize the past.”[1] There is ample evidence in the book to support this observation. For example, in a reference to Britain in the nineteenth century, Kissinger writes, “the balance of power enabled Great Britain to traverse the century with only one relatively short war with another major power—the Crimean War” (p. 102). Michael Howard, therefore, is right to say that it is not “wise to regard that limited slice of world history as a universally applicable norm and try to project its values onto the far more diverse yet interdependent world of tomorrow.”[2]

Kissinger’s favorite word throughout the book is geopolitics. It constitutes his terms of reference in assessing any situation anywhere in the world. Every one of the thirty-one chapters of the book has a reference or two to “geopolitical realities, necessities”, and so on. Through the binoculars of geopolitics, Kissinger looks at many events, situations, and crises, going as far back in European history as the seventeenth century, and then moving up to the present time. This review, however, will concentrate on the chapters dealing with the US involvement in Vietnam, the Suez Crisis of 1956, and the new world order.

Vietnam

In view of Kissinger’s direct and personal involvement in forming and implementing the U.S. policies toward Vietnam, chapters 26 and 27 are of particular importance. In them, Kissinger ceases to write as a distant observer, and starts to use “‘I”, which appears very rarely and briefly in other chapters. Describing Vietnamization as a “complex policy,” he reveals that he had reservations about it. These were expressed in a memo to President Nixon. One of them is the following:

Withdrawal of the US troops will become like salted peanuts to the American Public: The more US troops come home, the more will be demanded. This could eventually result, in effect, in demands for unilateral withdrawal—perhaps within a year (p. 682).

Despite his reservations about Vietnamization, Nixon’s ‘secret’ weapon to end the war in Vietnam, Kissinger did not back up his memo with a conversation with President Nixon. Vietnamization became a policy. The Nixon administration analyzed three options to end the war in Vietnam:

1. unilateral withdrawal;

2. a showdown with Hanoi through a combination of military and political pressures, and

3. a gradual shift of responsibility for the war to the South Vietnamese to enable American forces to withdraw gradually (p. 679).

Critical of the idea of unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam, he even includes academics in his criticism when he says: “Under pressure from their students, many professors edged ever closer toward unilateral, unconditional withdrawal” (p. 668).

Kissinger’s preferred option was the second one. Among the military measures adopted were defending population centers, attacking the Ho Chi Minh trails in Laos, destroying North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia, and mining the North Vietnamese harbors. Kissinger believes these measures eventually forced Hanoi to compromise in its peace talks with the US in Paris. The decision to bomb Cambodia, it should be noted, was kept a secret. When it became known, it was a source of disagreement between Congress and President Nixon.

That Suez Crisis

Nowhere in the twenty-eight pages of the chapter will the reader find a hint of sympathy or understanding for the position of the Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, or the Egyptian people in their legitimate desire to exercise sovereignty over the Suez Canal—a move Britain and France were adamant to block even if that meant a war against Egypt. Throughout the chapter, he is critical of the legalistic approach to the crisis of President Eisenhower, and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. Quoting Eisenhower’s rejection to use force to settle international disputes, he indicates, however, that he contradicted his principle when he intervened in Guatemala and Lebanon.

Although Kissinger declares that the US could not have supported Britain and France in their plan to seize the Suez Canal because it was ill-conceived, he asks sympathetically: “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 have lost all capacity for autonomous action?” (p. 544).

He goes on to outline the possible alternatives that the Eisenhower administration could have pursued. One of these is to have linked its condemnation of Britain and France with condemnation of Soviet actions in Hungary, which at that time was going through an uprising against Soviet hegemony.

Kissinger faults the legal, moral approach adopted by Eisenhower and Dulles and their failure to see the “geopolitical basis” of the issue (p. 544). He does not hesitate to explain how the issue should have been dealt with: “America ought to have shared the British and the French perception that Nasser’s brand of nationalism is insuperable to a constructive Middle East policy [...] it would have been desirable to face down Nasser.” (p. 533).

New World Order

Kissinger anticipates that in the post-Cold War era, the United States will not be able to remain as the sole superpower. He expects the emergence of five more powers: United Europe, Russia, Japan, China, and India. The latter’s emergence as a major power is qualified as probable. He calls for the integration of Russia into the emerging international order. “The new order,” Kissinger writes, “will be more like the European state system of the eighteenth and nineteenth century than the rigid patterns of the Cold War” (p. 23).

At the end of the book, Kissinger comes back to the subject to say that the “final form [of the new world order] will not be visible until well into the new century” (p. 806). His conclusions are so tentative that he uses “at this writing” several times. Michael Howard, therefore, is correct to observe in his review of the same book that Diplomacy does not provide “any profound guidance to those who have to pick their way through the new world disorder.”[3]

Having summarized Kissinger’s views on the above three subjects, I would like now to comment on them.

In talking about his geopolitical view of the world, Kissinger gives the impression, and reinforces it again and again, that it is flawless. However, the view he sees through the binoculars of geopolitics is as distorted as that seen by other secretaries of state and national security advisers, before and after him.

From Kissinger’s point of view, small countries have no right to choose their own political system, like the case in Vietnam, nor are they entitled to exercise their full sovereignty, like the case in Egypt in 1956. Small countries, from a Kissingerian perspective, cannot benefit from their geopolitically important positions: the benefits are for the enjoyment of the major powers.

Just as “altruism depends on the definition of the practitioner” (p. 46), so does geopolitics. From Kissinger’s point of view, Vietnam had no geopolitical importance. However, this was not how three presidents saw things. “Kennedy considered Vietnam,” Kissinger writes, “a crucial link in America’s overall geopolitical position [...] He believed as had Truman and Eisenhower that preventing a communist victory was a vital American interest” (p. 648).

Wilsonian idealism in Kissinger’s view is responsible for “disasters” (p. 809) like the one in Vietnam. However, one has to be very naive to believe Kissinger’s premise that American presidents were always motivated by some form of Wilsonian idealism. This idealism, as practiced by various presidents, tolerated dictatorial regimes with appalling rights records in Latin America, and did not deter President Reagan from violating the law preventing him from aiding the Contras of Nicaragua.

Nor did this idealism prevent President Bill Clinton from ordering a cruise missile attack against Baghdad for an alleged plot to assassinate former President George Bush. The cruise missiles hit a hotel and residential areas, killing innocent civilians. The bloody war in Bosnia, on the other hand, has not moved President Clinton to take action, despite all the rhetoric during his campaign for the presidency.

Moreover, the North Vietnamese were not victims of misguided American idealism. They were victims of bombs and bullets. Kissinger deludes himself if he thinks he achieved a withdrawal with honor from Vietnam.

In his biography of Kissinger, the American journalist, Seymour Hersh, correctly concluded that Kissinger and Nixon were “blind to the human cost of their actions […] The dead and maimed in Vietnam, and Cambodia—as in Chile, Bangladesh, Biafra, and the Middle East—seemed not to count.”[4]

Finally, one should not let Kissinger’s references to academics go without a comment. The first reference is very early in the book, when he makes one of the most incredible statements: “The analyst has available to him all the facts [...] The statesman must act on assessments that cannot be proved at the time he is making them” (p. 27). Obviously, this is not true. No analyst sitting in his office in some university or research institution can ever have more information than the statesman dealing with a certain situation. No ordinary analyst can have the benefit of intelligence reports, aerial reconnaissance, or photographs taken by satellites. In fact, one of the problems analysts face is that statesmen prevent them from having all the facts. Statesmen classify documents and impose restrictions on releasing them before twenty years or more have passed. The analyst may have to wait all this time to have his/her conclusions vindicated.

Kissinger as a statesman, on the other hand, possessed more facts about the situation in Vietnam than any academic in the United States. So when an academic ‘gets it wrong’, it is probably because he/she does not have all the information available. When the politician gets it wrong, however, he/she has no excuse because he/she has more information than anyone else. To illustrate my point, I would like to cite a current example [1995]. Rolf Ekeus, the man in charge of disarming Iraq, insists on receiving information about companies Iraq dealt with during its endeavors to make weapons of mass destruction before its invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Like Kissinger’s attitude toward dealing with the situation in Vietnam, Ekeus does not lack any information to be able to make the right decision. He uses lack of information as a pretext to implement a policy favored by the United States and Britain, two of the countries that knowingly sold Iraq equipment and materials that could be used for military purposes.

Neither Rolf Ekeus, nor the permanent members of the UN Security Council really need this information, because they already have it. But just as they hide information from their people when it suits them, statesmen reveal it when it suits them too.

In the case of Iraq and the Security Council, information is ‘revealed’ to justify the continuation of sanctions, whenever the regular sanctions’ review takes place.

It will be hypocritical of Rolf Ekeus to blame academics after twenty years for criticizing his attitude toward Iraq, as it is hypocritical of Kissinger to criticize academics for not seeing things in Vietnam or elsewhere as he did.

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Notes

[1] Malcolm Rutherford, “History in the Balance,” Financial Times, 14 May 1994.

[2] Michael Howard, “The World According to Henry: From Metternich to Me,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 3 (1994): 138.

[3] Michael Howard, “The World According to Henry: From Metternich to Me,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 3 (1994): 140.

[4] Seymour Hersh, Kissinger: The Price of Power (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 640.

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Kissinger, Henry. Diplomacy: History of Diplomacy and the Balance of Power. Simon & Schuster, 1994.