The Conscience of a Conservative: The Dangers of Dogmatism in U.S. Foreign Policy

In the 1890s the young George Bernard Shaw earned his living as a music and theater critic. Convinced that he could do as well as the dramatists whose work he was reviewing, he turned his hand to writing plays, and the rest is literary history. The career of Shaw's fellow Nobel laureate Henry Kissinger followed a similar trajectory. During most of the 1950s and 1960s he was an academic who produced, in a series of books and articles, a sustained critique of American foreign policy. Then, in 1969, he got the chance to conduct that foreign policy himself, and the rest is diplomatic history.

Whereas writing plays can be a lifetime's occupation, however, conducting American foreign policy cannot. And so, twenty-five years after he left government and in the wake of three monumental volumes of memoirs of his time in office, Kissinger has returned to his first career. Does America Need a Foreign Policy? is an assessment of, and a set of prescriptions for, the foreign policy of the United States in the wake of the Cold War.

During his first tour of duty as a critic, almost everything Kissinger wrote addressed the great global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. The present volume, written for a more complicated era, consists of essays on six different subjects: relations between the United States and Europe, U.S. policy in the western hemisphere, the American role in Asia, the turbulent politics of the Middle East, the promises and perils of globalization, and the effort to put considerations of justice rather than the search for peace at the heart of Washington's approach to the rest of the world. Disparate though these subjects are, the author's views on them share a common feature.

George Bernard Shaw was a radical. In his writings and his public activities he attacked what he saw as the archaic customs and arbitrary restrictions that obstructed progress, impeded human happiness, and generally made things worse than they could and should have been. Henry Kissinger, by contrast, is a conservative who believes that not only could things be better, they could also be worse. The presiding theme of the chapters of this book is the conservative's awareness of the fallibility of human design and the recurrence, in human affairs, of unintended and unwanted consequences.

The book has both a message and a mood -- both words and music -- and the music is the stately, subdued sound of the viola and the cello, not the triumphant blare of the brass or the soaring creations of the clarinet or the saxophone. The musical analogue of Does America Need a Foreign Policy? is a Bach cello suite, not a John Philip Sousa march or a Charlie Parker improvisation. The book's message is a version of the conservative wisdom: beware the dogmatic application of doctrines or principles -- no matter how well intentioned -- to the messy realities of international affairs. For the United States after the Cold War, a country with immense international power and no shortage of doctrines or people eager to implement them, this is a message worth heeding.

PEACE, JUSTICE, AND BALANCE

The book's most important essay concerns the post-Cold War effort to make American foreign policy an instrument of justice in the world, and in particular the Clinton administration's signature policy for this purpose: humanitarian intervention -- the use of force against a sovereign state to stop its government from mistreating its citizens. Kissinger sympathizes with the impulse that motivated this policy and understands its deep roots in the American experience. But he notes that the implementation of the policy, if anything, set back the cause it was intended to advance.

The Clinton administration's practice of humanitarian intervention was wildly inconsistent. It launched two military campaigns against Serbia while ignoring more widespread slaughter in Africa, justifying the Russian assault on Chechnya, and warmly welcoming to the United States the second-ranking military official of perhaps the worst human-rights violator on the planet -- the communist government of North Korea. The policy therefore lacked both clarity and predictability, necessary conditions for sustaining public support in the United States. By going to war against Serbia over Kosovo without the sanction of the United Nations and against the objections of a number of prominent countries such as Russia, China, and India, moreover, the Clinton administration deprived humanitarian intervention of what any global doctrine requires: international legitimacy.

In fact, U.S. policy in the Balkans in the 1990s bears out the wisdom of Kissinger's message. In Bosnia and Kosovo the Clinton administration spurned peace, which would have involved separating the warring national groups, in favor of justice, which it defined as the peaceful coexistence of these groups in a single, united, multiethnic political jurisdiction. Although central to the public life of the United States, a country populated mainly by people who immigrated as individuals and voluntarily assumed American nationality, the principle of multiethnicity is inapplicable in the Balkans, where nations that had lived on the same territories for centuries were brought together involuntarily in new, independent countries by political decisions in which they did not participate.