Diplomacy. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, May, 1994 by John Morton Blum

In Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger has written another long, weighty, and important book. Swollen to more than 910 pages, some two kilograms of European heft, replete with controversial advice for current or future pursuit and with analyses of strategies suitable or mistaken in the past, it will command an audience of policy wonks. They will find the Kissinger they know--assertive, arrogant, disdainful of his critics, in favor of an imperial presidency and of tough diplomacy, impatient with Congress and the people. Though he dedicates the book to the men and women of the Foreign Service, he faults bureaucracy on several alleged accounts: for impeding innovative policies; for a tendency to avoid decisions by picking a middle course; for taking a segmented rather than holistic view of policy.

In the busy environment of Washington, readers will be tempted to turn at once to the last chapter, the repository of counsel for immediate and future use. They will learn enough there (though without surprises for Kissinger connoisseurs) to equip themselves for intelligent conversation about author and book alike. But even the busy should try to resist the temptation. A learned man, Kissinger is also an authority on diplomacy, a subject he has studied much of his life and practiced in the light of his conclusions. This book reveals the historical sources and contemporary vectors of his thinking. Therein lies its gravitas.

Kissinger writes in a tradition old for Europe but only recently established in the United States, by George Kennan and Walter Lippmann in particular, both of whom he frequently cites in support of his own views. Like Lippmann in several of his later books, and like Kennan in his American Diplomacy, Kissinger does not write as a historian but as a pamphleteer using history to make his case. Kennan, of course, did both, but Kissinger is too much the controversialist to spend his energy in research for the purpose of recapturing the past as it probably was. Diplomacy offers no evidence of sustained or disinterested scholarship. Rather, Kissinger seems to have written a draft about European and American diplomats, subjects familiar to him, in order that his readers may draw lessons Kissinger thinks appropriate. Then he had his research staff provide a sparse documentation for his interpretations.

Kissinger's use of history elucidates his familiar diplomacy. As he sees it, geopolitical realities define national interests. Men in power then make decisions that govern relations among states. Those who are wise protect and advance their national interests by practicing a balance of power diplomacy enhanced, when possible, by the common values, cultural and moral, of necessary allies. Kissinger methodically, at times ponderously, builds an historical structure to sustain those generalities. The figures with whom he identifies invariably act as if they had been he. They succeed. The others do not.

He associates himself with men whose strategies he deems still vital for diplomacy. So we visit with Cardinal Richelieu, who first formulated the concept of raison d'etat--the primacy of the interests of the state; with William III of Britain, who devised the system of the balance of power; with Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill, who taught their reluctant countrymen to keep a hand in Europe. Disraeli and Churchill's leadership, Kissinger holds, "reflected a geopolitical fact of life"--the potential danger to Britain, "an island off the coast of Europe," if all the resources of the continent were arrayed against it. The United States now, Kissinger contends, is an island off the coast of Eurasia and must act accordingly.

In engineering the rise of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, with whom Kissinger especially identifies, practiced a diplomacy that required political control which military chiefs later usurped; restraint which his German successors lacked; and flexibility which became incompatible with "an age of mass public opinion." Kissinger, for his part, also distrusts both the people and the politicians who use them.

Fundamentally a European intelligence, Kissinger falters when his narrative moves, in 1917, to the United States, which he persists in calling "America," perhaps in deference to his simplistic assertion of the country's hegemony throughout the western hemisphere. He derides Woodrow Wilson for what Kissinger defines as a naive belief in the goodness of man, the related harmony of the world, and the resulting faith in a concert of powers to preserve peace by reliance on the moral force of opinion.

While praising Franklin Roosevelt for his insights about foreign affairs and for his leadership, Kissinger makes FDR appear more Wilsonian than he actually was. For example, Kissinger overlooks FDR's effort to tilt the balance of power in both Europe and Asia by recognizing the Soviet Union in 1933. More important, he criticizes FDR for assuming a community of interests that did not exist among the Four Policemen, the powers he expected to preserve the postwar peace. Roosevelt, Kissinger holds, was returning to an unrealistic Wilsonian hope for a concert of powers. But there is a strong case for viewing FDR's proposal as an implicit recognition of spheres of influence, though Roosevelt never considered Eastern Europe as part of a Soviet sphere. Further, Roosevelt's wartime strategy left the United States with sole possession of the atom bomb and with a ring of global bases which the Air Force deemed essential for an attack, if one became necessary, on the Soviet Union. Consequently, Moscow had reason to wonder about American intentions, though Kissinger dismisses that possibility as part of a deluded, "psychiatric" interpretation of the Cold War, a fantasy of Henry Wallace and others like him.