The World According to Henry: From Metternich to Me

Henry Kissinger has never written anything less than magna opera, but this 1,000-page blockbuster must certainly qualify as his maximum opus. Its title is modestly deceptive. The term "diplomacy" is normally applied to the techniques and tactics employed in the conduct of international relations, and about these Kissinger is well qualified to write. He is dealing here, however, with a great deal more than techniques and tactics. His topic is the grand strategy, indeed the philosophy, of great power relationships, from the days of Richelieu until our own times.

The proper title of this book would be something like Power Politics, but that is a term that Kissinger seldom allows to pass his pen. Instead he refers frequently, and bewilderingly, to "geopolitics." He does not use this term as did its European inventors, Rudolph Kjellen, Halford Mackinder and Albrecht Haushofer, to mean the influence of spatial environment on political imperatives. For Kissinger "geopolitics" is simply a euphemism for power relationships. His use of it is reminiscent of the term "behavioral sciences," which was coined in the United States a generation ago to describe what had hitherto been known as the social sciences, but sounded to suspicious congressmen too much like socialism to qualify for governmental support. In the same way, power politics is a concept (though not a practice) so blatantly un-American that no foundation is likely to underwrite its study. "Geopolitics," on the other hand, sounds conveniently value-free, though the implementation of some of its theories by German and Japanese statesmen during the first half of this century proves that it is not necessarily anything of the kind. Kissinger would have done better to have come clean and admitted that his subject was neither diplomacy nor geopolitics, as those terms are generally understood, but the subject that he has spent his life studying and much of it practicing: the politics of power.

The subtext of his book, however, explains why he could not do so. Americans do not take kindly to the idea of power politics, even when they are most blatantly engaged in it. From Wilson to Clinton, the rhetoric of American foreign policy has been to deny the need for anything so crude and to denounce the very idea as a European perversion. But for Kissinger, steeped as he is in the European history of the nineteenth century, power politics is both natural and necessary. The statesmen he most respects, Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck, even Stalin, were those who recognized this and practiced it most openly. For power politics is not simply Machtpolitik, the accumulation, threat, and if need be use of armed force as an instrument of policy. It is based on the recognition and acceptance of the limits of one’s own power. Statecraft, from the days of Richelieu to those of Nixon, has consisted in the identification of national interests, the realistic assessment of available resources, and the alignment of both in an appropriate relationship within the context of the interests and resources of rival states. If the resources are sufficient, a state may realistically aspire to hegemony, the destruction or subordination of all rival powers. But if they are not, as for the states of Europe from the seventeenth until the twentieth centuries they were not, the statesman must strive to enhance the power of his own state through explicit or implicit alliances. In Lord Palmerston’s oft-quoted words, there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies; there are only permanent interests.

Kissinger has said this often, and here he says it again, definitively and at considerable length. For him the European practice, particularly as defined by British nineteenth-century statesmen, was not an aberration, but the norm for the conduct of international relations in any era. The American abjuration of power politics in the nineteenth century was a luxury that only their oceanic isolation enabled them to afford. In the twentieth, however, it was a disaster, whether it took the form of isolationism, as it did in the 1920s and 1930s, or ideological crusade, as it did in the 1950s and 1960s. Richard Nixon, claims Kissinger, was the first American president, with the solitary exception of Theodore Roosevelt, to understand power politics and so to guide the United States back into the mainstream of international relations. (It is a claim to statesmanship for Nixon that could be made as convincingly for Louis XIII of France, Francis II of Austria or William I of Prussia, the patrons of Richelieu, Metternich and Bismarck, respectively, but let that pass.) But the United States cannot be Europeanized. The policies of its statesmen, however much they may be guided by a perception of the national interest, must always be made acceptable to an ideologically motivated electorate. That is the problem Kissinger faced when in office, and one to which, in the latter part of this volume, he constantly returns.

1648 AND ALL THAT