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

1. The Crisis of Containment

1 The Crisis of Containment During the first two decades of the Cold War, the United States promoted a mostly coherent and unitary foreign policy. Washington did not always achieve its goals and occasionally suffered symbolic and practical defeats, the most significant of which came in October 1949 with Communist victory in the Chinese civil war and the subsequent birth of the People’s Republic of China. The fundamental objective of giving form to a U.S.-dominated “international liberal order” was, however, consistently pursued, whereas the necessity to limit the influence of the Soviet Union and the spread of Communism was rarely questioned.1 The Nature and Objectives of Containment This “international liberal order” was less global and universal than originally hoped for in Washington. The projects elaborated during World War II, and the optimistic vision of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that The Crisis of Containment 13 underpinned them, proved to be impracticable. Cooperation with the Soviet Union did not survive the end of the war and the disappearance of the forced, if highly effective, bond provided by the common Nazi enemy. Both Roosevelt and Winston Churchill recognized the Soviet sphere of in- fluence in central Eastern Europe, although the fact this sphere was constructed through brutal and coercive practices provoked the protests and indignation of the U.S. public. Contrary to Roosevelt’s auspices and predictions , the Soviet Union did not undertake a process of gradual and inexorable liberalization, which over time might have determined a progressive evolution in the Soviet system, a consequent convergence—of interests, but also of policies and models—between the two superpowers, and the inevitable extension of a U.S.-led liberal global order.2 Not only did the expected convergence not take place, but the Soviet Union also attempted to challenge this order by projecting an alternative universalism. The Soviet-socialist vision offered the world a counterteleology , amid a renewed global ideological dispute, that replicated some features of the one between Wilsonianism and Leninism thirty years earlier. Therefore, what came to be known as the Cold War also represented an ideological conflict between two universalisms and two progressive and finalistic views of modernity. The ideological dimension of the antagonism thus complemented the geopolitical competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, sharpening the antagonism and making it almost impossible to heal the fracture between the two sides. This ideological component rendered the post–World War II epoch a peculiar and unique period in the history of international relations.3 The objective of integrating the Soviet Union into the liberal order was rapidly substituted with that of excluding the Soviet regime to avoid the possibility that Moscow could somehow “influence” the foundational and structural features of this order. The Soviet Union was therefore excluded and “externalized.” Yet because of the nature of the Soviet Union and its challenge to the international system, this exclusion was not enough. Moscow ’s influence had to be constrained and limited to counter the spread and appeal of Soviet socialist universalism, but also to lay the foundations for a liberal evolution of the Soviet regime that would, over time, remove the challenge it posed to U.S. world hegemony. The transformation of the USSR through collaboration and convergence—the highly unrealistic goal of Roosevelt—was therefore replaced by a new strategy of transforming the 14 The Eccentric Realist Soviet Union through confrontation, rejection, and the exercise of constant pressure, all intended to exhaust the Soviet regime over time. U.S. policy vis- à-vis the USSR shifted from dialogue and interaction to “non-dialectical” rejection, producing a binary and nondialogic form of foreign policy.4 This new approach was synthesized in the metaphor of “containment”: the term used from 1946 onward to summarize U.S. post–World War II global strategy toward the Soviet/Communist enemy. The term was popularized by the historian and diplomat George Kennan, one of the figures who contributed most, during the early Cold War years, to defining the new U.S. attitude toward world affairs, and its conceptual and theoretical underpinnings. In the famous Long Telegram sent from the U.S. embassy in Moscow in February 1946 and in an article published in the journal Foreign Affairs in July 1947, Kennan discarded the idea that any dialogue or collaboration with the Soviet Union was possible or, indeed, desirable. Intrinsically aggressive, opportunistic, and unscrupulous, the USSR could...