The World According to Henry: From Metternich to Me
Article Summary
Henry Kissinger_s eleventh book, Diplomacy, is a magnificent survey of power politics over more than three centuries. He contends that the great statesmen, Richelieu, Metternich and (of course) Nixon, have tried to purchase international stability with judicious realism, while paying political debts to ideological constituents. But Diplomacy fails to transcend eloquent nostalgia; Kissinger_s brand of realism is ill-suited to today_s interdependent world.
Sir Michael Howard recently retired from the Robert A. Lovett Chair of Military and Naval History at Yale University. Before that, he was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University.
About a third of this book is devoted to European politics before 1941, from the emergence of the states system after the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 to its collapse with the triumph of Hitler. Some academics may lament the absence of more rigorous analysis, others the narrow focus on political elites and the little consideration given the social and economic transformations that provided the context for their policies, but it is a magisterial narrative, well-spiced with Kissingerian insights and ironies. The author is of course at his best on his familiar ground of post-Napoleonic nineteenth-century Europe. Whatever the philosophers may have said in the eighteenth century about the balance of power, the princes of Europe then still fought for aggrandizement or survival as nakedly as their predecessors. It was not until Metternich that a statesman appeared who had not only internalized the concept but was given the opportunity to create a new international structure that explicitly embodied it. His less perceptive successors allowed it to collapse. Bismarck recreated it, although on a far less stable basis. Again his successors allowed it to collapse. The First World War came about not because of the unstable power balance created by competing alliances (though it is not quite clear whether Kissinger accepts this), but because the German Empire was no longer interested in maintaining a power balance. The Second World War followed because the victorious allies were incapable of, or uninterested in, restoring that balance. The withdrawal of the United States, the pariah status of Russia and the dithering of Britain, whose leaders had forgotten the lessons so sagely taught by their predecessors, left a vacuum that could all too easily be filled by the expansion of German power. When U.S. leaders came to pick up the pieces, their effort was in the belief that the balance of power, far from having prevented those wars, had been their cause. So they set about creating a new world order based on different, and erroneous, principles.
WOODROW’S WORLD
Like Metternich, Woodrow Wilson had the opportunity, or so he believed, to create a new international system based on a coherent ideology. The ideology, like that of the balance of power, derived from the eighteenth-century philosophers, who assumed an underlying harmony in nature that was distorted and broken only by human error and misperceptions. International conflict was at best the result of what Marx called "false consciousness"; at worst of the sinister activities of monarchs, aristocrats, or, a little later, "military-industrial complexes," all of whom, as Kant pointed out at the end of the eighteenth century, had a vested interest in war. For the Wilsonians peace was not a precarious condition maintained only by a constant and conscious balancing of power and interests, but the normal state of mankind, or at least it would be if only the artificial barriers to its maintenance could be swept away.
In this view American democracy was a microcosm of humanity, and nations could and should govern their relations by the same kind of consensus as the Americans did themselves. There should be an international town meeting, the League of Nations, to establish that consensus, and a posse comitatus to enforce it against offenders. As in domestic affairs, the security of one was the security of all. Separate pacts, alliances and military guarantees were as unacceptable on the international plane as they were on the domestic. Peace, in short, was indivisible.
When in 1919 the congress of the United States was called upon to ratify the covenant setting up the League of Nations, it understandably recoiled from a universalism that would have committed the country to undifferentiated and global intervention. But, having no tradition or understanding of power politics, it relapsed into the opposite extreme of isolationism. When the power balance in Europe collapsed in 1940, President Roosevelt saw that the necessities of the power balance demanded American intervention to prevent a German victory, but his electorate still did not. When the issue was decided for them by the actions of their adversaries, the American people went to war, not to restore a balance of power, but to punish the aggressors, enforce their surrender and put their leaders on trial. When peace was eventually reestablished, a new world order was created under American leadership based on Wilsonian principles, except that this time the United States locked itself into the United Nations and tried to provide it with teeth.
THE UNRESTRICTED COLD WAR
