What Makes God Laugh? - Review

National Review, May 17, 1999 by John O'Sullivan

John O'Sullivan

Years of Renewal, by Henry Kissinger

(Simon & Schuster, 1,151 pp., $35)

Towards the end of his third volume of memoirs, Henry Kissinger indulges in some reflections on the changing nature of statesmanship. These are characteristically shrewd until he reaches the argument that information has largely removed the need for style as an instrument of diplomacy. Where once the statesman absorbed history and a sense of perspective by reading well- constructed and precisely phrased diplomatic analyses, runs the argument, he can now retrieve all the information on any given topic at the touch of a button on a computer keyboard.

At this point, the reader has just completed 1,078 pages of Kissinger's stylish prose. Would he have plowed happily through the same volume of words, culled by an Internet search engine, to learn about the Cyprus crisis of 1974, the "new dialogue" (also of 1974) with Latin America, the "breakthrough" to majority rule in Rhodesia, and many other now-distant controversies? The question answers itself. History recreates the dilemmas that faced the statesman at the time in all their painful, absorbing complexity; the computer merely tells that he took Course A rather than Course B. It is style, clarifying choices and helping the past to live again, that makes the difference between the two types of information.

But then Kissinger has always been his own best historian, for the unflattering reason that he is actually less biased about his own diplomatic career than have been certain critics who are moved by an almost superhuman animus towards him. Years of Renewal is unlikely to remove that hostility. As other reviewers have noted, however, it sheds as much light on the author as it does on the events he describes. Threaded through the details of diplomatic negotiations is a melancholy story of personal honor preserved amid the self-destruction of America's honor.

This third volume describes the fate of the foreign policy that the author, as national security advisor or secretary of state, helped Richard Nixon to shape and Gerald Ford to sustain from, roughly, the 1972 presidential election to Ford's defeat in 1976. As Kissinger points out, the main lines of that foreign policy-the strategic alliance with China, the Middle East peace process, the arms-control process with the Soviet Union, even a version of detente-were all continued by the administrations that followed Nixon-Ford. Yet when he handed over the reins to Cyrus Vance in 1977, it was the common view that his foreign policy had fallen apart, with the collapse of detente, the rise of a new adventurism in Soviet policy, and the crippling of American initiative by the "Vietnam syndrome" occasioned by the fall of Saigon in 1975. And Left and Right, which agreed on so little else, were agreed that perhaps his policy deserved to fail because it was a Machiavellian realpolitik detached from the idealism of the American people.

If anything of that caricature still remains, it should finally be eradicated by this account. Diplomatic history is, of course, an education in the vanity of human wishes. Many of the attempts to solve ancient disputes here chronicled-in which so much intellectual effort and, yes, idealism were invested-either went nowhere or ended in tears. The Middle East peace process is still with us, of course; but then so is the Arab-Israeli conflict to which it is a seemingly permanent response. The Cyprus dispute, featuring some of the original disputants, is still on the international agenda. And Rhodesia has become majority-rule Zimbabwe, but is today a ruined country. As a character says in Hugh Whitemore's recent play about the Profumo affair: "What makes God laugh? People making plans."

Most of this final volume, however, is concerned with two questions that had momentous consequences and continue to agitate us still-the policy of detente with the Soviet Union and the fall of Vietnam. On the former, Kissinger takes considerable pains to respond to the neoconservative critique of detente: namely, that by treating the Soviet Union as a legitimate partner in world order, he was unable to call on the idealism of the American people to resist Soviet ambitions, weakening the U.S. in negotiations and compelling undue concessions in trade, arms control, and human rights. When Ronald Reagan sounded the ideological trumpet, directly challenging Soviet legitimacy, the walls of Jericho promptly collapsed.

Kissinger concedes that Reagan was right to wage this rhetorical war. He points out, however, that it was an accompaniment to-not a substitute for-containment, arms control, and superpower summits. The author himself could not have carried out the same fruitful combination of kicks and kindnesses, in part because the Soviet Union was at an earlier stage of decay, but mainly because he was operating in more hostile domestic political circumstances.

Almost all of the Nixon-Kissinger-Ford foreign policy was conducted against the background of a moral civil war in America in which the liberal establishment had embraced the radical view of "Amerika" as a domineering and aggressive hegemon. The period described in Years of Renewal was darkened still more by the shadow of Watergate, which gravely weakened the executive branch in its relations with Congress. As a result, there was almost no political support available for consistent policies either of strong resistance to the Soviet Union or of prudent mutual bargains with it. The former were seen as aggressive, the latter as unprincipled, and both were seen as expressions of an amoral realpolitik incarnated in the secretary of state. Speculatively but persuasively, Kissinger argues that it would have been Utopian to attempt a Reaganite foreign policy when all the Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were doves at best.