Power Politics and Statecraft: The World According to Kissinger

Kissinger’s Diplomacy is a masterful, brilliant and provocative account of world politics and American foreign policy from Cardinal Richelieu to the end of the Cold War. Its title, however is somewhat deceptive, because it is more than just an analysis of the tactics and techniques practiced in the conduct of international diplomacy. Diplomacy is old-fashioned diplomatic history which concentrates on the grand strategy, leadership, and philosophy of the great power relationships. It contains almost no account of economic, demographic, social, cultural, or domestic factors. It is a book on power politics, although Kissinger seldom uses that term. He prefers instead the term “geopolitics.” He does not, however, use it in the classic Mackinder sense as the influence of spatial environments on political imperatives. Rather, geopolitics becomes simply a euphemism for power relationships, or power politics, which is what he is really writing about. This is a subject which Kissinger has studied all his life. He writes from the perspective of a former participant who is still trying vigorously, sometimes defensively, to shape how historians and journalists interpret his own tenure as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State from 1969 to 1977. In some sections this book appears to be a response to the scathing biographical attack on Kissinger by Walter Isaacson, Kissinger (1992), as well as the very critical analysis of his tenure in office by Seymour M. Hersch, The Price of Power (1983).

Kissinger believes that the fundamental dilemma of American foreign policy is the conflict between its historic idealism and its acquired respect for the realities of the world. The idealist view sees America as a beacon of light for the perfection of democracy at home and for the rest of mankind. The realist view holds that America’s values impose on it an obligation to crusade for them around the world. After an introductory chapter on the new world order, Kissinger contrasts the two titans of the initial decades of the twentieth century: Theodore Roosevelt, the unashamed advocate of European realpolitik, and Woodrow Wilson the twentieth-century exponent of Jeffersonian idealism.

The relationship between national interest and moral concerns, Kissinger argues, is the dominant theme in American foreign policy. There are the idealists, who believe that spreading American values should be the motivating force for national policy and the realists, who emphasize national interest, credibility, and power. Kissinger, who understands Metternich far better than Jefferson is clearly in the realist camp. Actually, idealism and realism have been interwoven in American foreign policy ever since Benjamin Franklin played an ingenious balance of power game in France while simultaneously propagandizing about America’s exceptional values.

Kissinger sees the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 as a watershed when American thinking on foreign policy and European diplomatic traditions of realpolitik and balance of power, originated by Richelieu, encountered each other. European leaders sought to refurbish the existing system according to familiar methods, while American peacemakers believed that flawed European practices had caused World War I. According to Kissinger, Wilson told the Europeans that henceforth, the international system should rest not on the balance of power, but on “ethnic self determination,” that their security should not depend on military alliances, but on collective security, and that their diplomacy should no longer be conducted secretly by experts, but on the basis of “open agreements openly arrived at” (p. 19). While Kissinger is correct in noting Wilson’s opposition to military alliances and secret agreements, he misinterprets Wilson’s concept of self-determination. Wilson never used that term publicly until February 11, 1918, although his speeches and observations were permeated with his own terms for the concept — self-government. And he considered that term only in its original Jeffersonian sense as simply “that right whereon our own government is founded, that everyone may govern itself according to whatever form it pleases and change those forms at its own will.” ¹

Jefferson’s view was widely accepted by the American public during the ensuing years although never actually followed...