The Eccentric Realist: Henry Kissinger and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy (review)

So much has been written about Henry Kissinger that one wonders whether any more is really necessary. Calling a halt would be a mistake, however. Kissinger’s life and times are of such central importance to the history and identity of the United States, and of such abiding fascination, that, like history itself, they will rightly continue to be reexamined and reinterpreted for the indefinite future.

Mario Del Pero’s contribution to the genre is a personal essay rather than a comprehensive work. Readable and mercifully short by academic standards, it is a reflective and soberly critical account of Kissinger’s ideas and policies. Del Pero puts forward three main arguments. First, he contests the view of Kissinger, often promoted by the man himself, as the realistic European whose job was to wean naive Americans from their attachment to moral and ideological elements in their foreign policy, a supposed Metternich of the nuclear era.

Del Pero argues that, “far from being a bold and idiosyncratic response to the crisis—in part real, in part exaggerated—that the United States faced, Kissinger’s prescription was a mostly conventional one” (p. 6). The time for new thinking had arrived because a majority of Americans had become disillusioned with global containment and the modernizing crusades of liberal administrations. Kissinger’s policy prescriptions were therefore initially in tune with the more realistic, even pessimistic, mood of the country.

Del Pero’s second point is to disagree with those who accuse Kissinger of paying insufficient attention to domestic politics. On the contrary, writes del Pero, Kissinger spent an inordinate amount of time trying to explain his policies to journalists, senators, and the public. Third, Del Pero accuses Kissinger of paying only lip service to multipolarity and instead looking at every problem through the bipolar prism of Soviet-American relations in the hope of inducing the Soviet Union to abandon revolutionary aims and join the United States in promoting global order.

These three points are useful as cues for debate and signposts through the vast jungle of writings on Kissinger. They could form the basis of exam questions. But, like exam questions, they tend to oversimplify and set up contradictions that dissolve on closer examination. Del Pero is right that Kissinger’s policies were more conventional than Kissinger wished them to appear. In fact the continuity was even greater than Del Pero suggests. In essence Kissinger was carrying on the policy of containment that had guided U.S. policies toward the Soviet Union since the start of the Cold War. His pursuit of détente also followed repeated attempts by previous administrations, as Melvyn Leffler has shown. Nor did Kissinger bring anything new to Washington in his use of extremely immoral means to pursue perceived moral ends. What was new was the brilliance of his diplomacy, the depth with which he conceptualized it, and above all the new context of growing Soviet military power and global reach. This called for new thinking on methodology, as Del Pero says, but no change in fundamentals. So Del Pero is right about Kissinger’s pragmatism. However, although he has a useful passage on the often spurious distinction between realism and idealism in American discourse, he somewhat overplays the distinction between American idealists and European realists. Both sides of the Atlantic harbored both breeds. As Jeremi Suri has argued, Kissinger fused the two tendencies, believing deeply in the moral mission of the United States even while battling moral crusaders at home. Moreover, when differences arose over European détente, the European idealists turned out to be more realistic about the potential for change than the supposed “European realist” in Washington.

As for the second argument, Del Pero is right that Kissinger made strenuous efforts to explain his policies through the media and in lectures and writings, but this is hardly a profound point. No one who remembers or examines that period can seriously take another view. Kissinger resented...