Out of the Quagmire

National Review, April 7, 2003 by Michael Knox Beran

We like to envision our foreign policy as an unbroken series of gracious acts. This is a mistake, for in the affairs of men the spirit of muddle is generally ascendant. Acts of grace are the exception, not the rule; but these days our presidents -- and perhaps their publics -- feel cheated if they are denied a succession of transcendent achievements in foreign affairs. Wilson began the tradition of the foreign policy coup de grace, and now every president is obliged to have a Fourteen Points. At its most dangerous, this mentality leads to pushes for "breakthroughs" that only make existing situations worse.

The policy mavens promise their statesmen the world; and, drunk on ideas ripped from the Platonic pages of Foreign Affairs, the diplomats look around the planet and mistakenly see only so much malleable clay. Wilson's own drive for a deed that would astonish the historians ended badly: Unable either to work his way patiently through the muddle of European diplomacy or to overmaster it gracefully, he watched as his Fourteen Points -- intended to bind up European wounds -- were transformed by Clemenceau into an instrument of vengeance. The result of Wilson's showy diplomacy was the League of Nations, an ineffective piece of do-gooder whimsy, and a Carthaginian peace that prepared the way for Hitler.

It is precisely our Wilsonian impatience with the muddling arts that makes it necessary for us to read Kissinger, even when we disagree with him. With his generous insights into the motivations of others, his love of complexity, his flair for intrigue, his relish of subtlety and nuance, Kissinger is, with George Kennan, the most distinguished of our living diplomatists. Like his memoirs, from which he drew in writing this book, Ending the Vietnam War is full of wisdom about the mistakes to avoid in a palled period, when the footsteps are muffled and the hem just out of reach. We may now be entering a more gracious time, an unmuddled moment when great things are again within America's grasp. But golden epochs eventually give way to intervals of stalemate; and during these ages we must look to statesmen like Kissinger for inspiration. They can teach us much about how to act decently when all of the choices are hard and none of the alternatives is good.