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

Thus none of the groups in Bosnia or Kosovo accepted the principle that the Clinton administration sought to impose on them, and for this reason the administration failed to impose it. In both places these groups are still kept apart by NATO garrisons, the departure of which could lead to renewed fighting. The failures have been costly: in lives lost that might have been saved had the administration not ruled out partition, which might have ended the fighting sooner; in moral principles compromised when the United States tolerated, in both Bosnia and Kosovo, the kind of ethnic cleansing of Serbs that it had condemned as criminal when practiced by Serbs; and in the political and military investments necessary to keep American and European troops in the Balkans indefinitely.

The book's most eloquent chapter concerns globalization. Kissinger recognizes the enormous benefits the spread of free markets has brought to the world. But he calls attention to the human costs of the social dislocation that the normal workings of the market create and to the hardships inflicted when market-created bubbles burst, as occurred in eastern Asia in the late 1990s. He is particularly unhappy with what he considers the International Monetary Fund's overzealous demands for policies of economic austerity in response to the Asian crises; the implementation of these policies in the afflicted countries endangered the political consensus in favor of liberal economic practices upon which free markets must rest.

In Asia and the Middle East, two important regions where peace, prosperity, and democracy are neither widely nor firmly established, Kissinger commends to American policymakers a quintessentially conservative aim: maintaining a balance of power. Although China would certainly be a more decent country if it adopted American political values and Japan perhaps a more prosperous one with American economic practices, and although every country of the Persian Gulf would undoubtedly be better off by embracing either or both, the United States does not have the power to bring about these results. Its first priority in both regions should therefore be to ensure that no local actor achieves the kind of military predominance that could threaten its neighbors and American interests. Those coming to Does America Need a Foreign Policy? in search of fresh approaches for a new era will find in these chapters a prescription for the oldest foreign policy of all.

CONTROVERSIAL QUESTIONS

In his essay on America and Europe, Kissinger takes up two issues with which the Bush administration will have to grapple. On one of them his position seems to violate his own conservative instincts. The issue is ballistic missile defense. He favors it. He favors it despite lacking settled views on just what kind of defenses should be deployed and what threats they should be designed to counter. "An early American commitment to a [missile defense] program," he writes, "is essential." "The decision of missile defense having been made," he goes on, "an open-minded study should seek to determine the most appropriate technology."

Asked his view of Western civilization, Mohandas Gandhi is said to have replied that he thought it would be a good idea. The same is surely true of missile defense. If the United States can deploy a defensive system that makes the country safer and better able to advance its interests in the world it should certainly do so. Whether this is possible, however, will depend on a range of technical and political considerations complicated and uncertain enough to preclude definitive judgment at present. In the spirit of conservatism, Kissinger warns elsewhere in the book that the single-minded pursuit of humanitarian intervention, or of a policy of containment toward China, risks alienating other countries and isolating the United States. Since every major country has expressed serious reservations about missile defense and several are adamantly opposed, the course he prefers on this issue would seem to run the same risks.

On another important issue Kissinger's recommendations are uncharacteristically incomplete. The question of how best to provide for security in Europe preoccupied American policymakers during the Cold War and is a subject on which he has written and spoken authoritatively for nearly half a century. The Clinton administration's major European initiative was the expansion of NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Kissinger approves, but takes that administration to task for downplaying the most important reason for expansion: "to eliminate once and for all the strategic vacuum in Central Europe that in the twentieth century had tempted both German and Russian expansionism."

For history to repeat itself, some country would have to play the part of one of the two totalitarian powers. It is inconceivable that peaceful, democratic Germany would do so, which leaves postcommunist Russia as the only candidate. "NATO must be maintained," Kissinger believes, "as a hedge against a reimperializing Russia." But if Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were vulnerable to Russia without NATO membership, the former Soviet republics (now independent countries) of the Baltic region -- Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania -- are even more vulnerable. All of them share borders with Russia. Here Kissinger is cautious: "Given its historical experiences, Russia is bound to have a special concern for security around its vast periphery and ... the West needs to be careful not to extend its integrated military system too close to Russia's borders."