Eclipse of a Statesman - Review

Washington Monthly, May, 1999 by Jacob Heilbrunn

YEAR OF RENEWAL By Henry Kissinger Simon & Schuster, $35

One of the few historical constants is unexpected change. Consider the United States in the 1970s when gloom prevailed. America had been defeated in Vietnam. Richard Nixon had resigned. Stagflation--high unemployment coupled with even higher interest rates--made it appear that the economy was permanently weakened. So pervasive was the view of America's collapse that it stretched into the 1980s, reaching full flower in Yale professor Paul Kennedy's bestseller, The Decline and Fall of the Great Powers, which argued that because of imperial "overstretch" the United States was headed the way of the Habsburg, Spanish, and British empires--into the rubbish heap of history.

Today, apart from the mess in the Balkans, the outlook could not be cheerier. Bill Clinton, having survived impeachment, is riding high in the polls. The 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins bill defined full employment at four percent unemployed; now unemployment hovers at three percent, while interest rates remain at historically low levels. And the real victim of imperial overstretch was, of course, the Soviet Union.

History, especially U.S. history, tends to move in boom-bust cycles, but one question anyone looking at the past few decades has to ask is, "How did American elites get it so wrong?" In any such survey, one of the main culprits has to be Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, as the third and final installment of his memoirs suggests, was the first declinist--a pessimist about America's political system, its social cohesion, and its role in the world. A self-proclaimed realist, the one country Kissinger does not seem to have been very realistic about is the United States.

The mischief rests in Kissinger's embrace of realism. At a moment when the Clinton administration is being bludgeoned for pursuing a haphazard and reactive foreign policy, Kissinger's Years of Renewal offers a useful reminder of what can happen when a procrustean academic theory of politics is rigidly imposed on the messy, recalcitrant world abroad. Though seen as a Harvard liberal in the '60s, Kissinger easily jumped ship from the Rockefeller campaign to join the Nixon administration in 1968 as national security adviser. And the main thing he carried in his toolkit, fresh from the Harvard seminar room, was the doctrine of realism.

What did Kissinger understand by realism? Realism counsels that the world is a Hobbesian one, filled with warring states in which human rights considerations are a pesky, if not frivolous, annoyance. Stability is the highest goal; a balance of power the best possible outcome. Kissinger and Nixon attempted to create such an environment with what they called triangular diplomacy--a three-power world in which the Soviet Union, China, and the United States checked each other. Essentially, Kissinger saw himself as maintaining the status quo, and viewed with contempt the more aggressive breed of Republican that came on the scene with Reagan. The question that Kissinger's account raises is whether he was more than a transitional figure as a Secretary of State to the Carter and Reagan administrations. Despite the razzle-dazzle of his shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East and arms-control agreements with the Soviet Union, his tenure seems to have left few real accomplishments.

Indeed, as the title Years of Renewal suggests, this is no chronicle of triumphs because there wasn't all that much triumph. Rather, it is a settling of accounts. Kissinger's saturnine view of the world, and America's role in it, did not sit well with the former liberals turned neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz, nor with human rights activists on the Left. Now Kissinger responds. His enemies, real and imagined, come in for a drubbing. His main ideological opponent doesn't appear to be communism; instead, it is what he refers to as Wilsonianism--the notion that the United States should intervene abroad on behalf of democracy and human rights rather than vigilantly pursue what Kissinger would define as the national interest pure and simple.

The red thread running through Kissinger's account is the battle over detente. From the outset, Kissinger makes it clear that he and Nixon saw the United States as moving from "domination to leadership." The American nuclear monopoly, Kissinger says, was dwindling. Europe was regaining its vitality, Asia was on the rise, and Africa was being swept by independence movements. Kissinger says that his ambition was to create not dominance based on power, but leadership resting on consensus. "But an attempt to balance rewards and penalties inseparable from consensus-building," writes Kissinger, "ran counter to the prevailing Wilsonianism, which tried to bring about a global moral order through the direct application of America's political values undiluted by compromises with `realism.'"

What Kissinger objected to were two camps: liberals and the ex-liberal, budding neoconservatives who attempted to push for a pro-human rights policy inside the Soviet Union. The New York Times began arguing for linking agreements with the Soviet Union to changes in its internal behavior. At the same time, the neoconservatives started pushing for a more moralistic foreign policy as a means of regenerating American morale. In particular, Kissinger tangled with Sen. Henry M. Jackson over the Jackson-Vanik amendment which set firm numbers for the yearly emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union. The amendment tied those numbers to Most-Favored-Nation status for the Soviet Union. Kissinger v/as outraged. According to Kissinger, "Nixon and I agreed with the neoconservative premise, but we also believed that the simple Wilsonianism of the early '60s had lured us into adventures beyond our capacities and deprived us of criteria to define the essential elements of our national purpose."