Reflections on American Diplomacy
Article Summary and Author Biography
HENRY A. KISSINGER, director of a study group on "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy" of the Council on Foreign Relations; Director of Special Studies, Rockefeller Brothers' Fund; Associate, Foreign Policy Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania; Director, Harvard International Seminar
"POLICY," wrote Metternich, the Austrian minister who steered his country through 39 years of crisis by a tour de force perhaps never excelled, "is like a play in many acts which unfolds inevitably once the curtain is raised. To declare then that the play will not go on is an absurdity. The play will go on either by means of the actors or by means of the spectators who mount the stage. . . . The crucial problem [of statesmanship], therefore, resides in the decision of whether to assemble the audience, whether the curtain is to be raised and above all in the intrinsic merit of the play."
There can be little doubt that the foreign policy of the United States has reached an impasse. For several years we have been groping for a concept to deal with the transformation of the cold war from an effort to build defensive barriers into a contest for the allegiance of humanity. But the new Soviet tactics, coupled with the equally unassimilated increase in the destructive potential of the new weapons technology, have led to a crisis in our system of alliances and to substantial Soviet gains among the uncommitted peoples of the world.
It would be a mistake, however, to ascribe our difficulties to this or that error of policy or to a particular administration, although the present Administration has not helped matters by its pretense of "normalcy." To return to Metternich's metaphor: It can be argued that our policy has reached an impasse because of our penchant for happy endings; the Soviet rulers have been able to use negotiations to their advantage because we insisted on reading from an old script. As in all tragedies, many of our problems have been produced in spite of our good intentions and have been caused, not by our worst qualities, but by our best. What is at issue, therefore, is not a policy but an attitude.
It is with this attitude and its consequences in the conduct of negotiations and our policy of alliances that this article seeks to deal.
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