Henry Kissinger on Global Order

World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History
by Henry Kissinger
Penguin, 2014, 432 pages, $49.99

Dr Henry Kissinger was undoubtedly one of the leading statesmen of the Western world during and after the Nixon presidency. His extraordinary rise from refugee boy to professor at Harvard, to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s adviser and finally Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State is unparalleled.

More extraordinary still were the skill and understanding with which he dealt with his moody master and various foreign leaders. His achievements were even more remarkable: we need think only of the way he arranged detente with the Soviet Union, ended the Vietnam War (only to see his promise of American material help for South Vietnam’s defence undermined by the Watergate scandal and a resentful Congress), arranged a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt and, by no means least, brought China back into the international arena by persuading Nixon to give Chairman Mao Zedong the matchless political gift of a presidential visit. For Chinese citizens that visit carried echoes of foreign rulers carrying tribute to the “Son of Heaven” in Beijing. No statesman’s career, not even Kissinger’s, is free from missteps and errors but it would be difficult to match his record.

Now, at the age of ninety-one, Dr Kissinger has published yet another book, this time reflecting broadly on the problems of world order. He begins, perhaps inevitably for a student of history, with the Thirty Years War and its outcome in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. After political and religious disputes had led to battles, disease and starvation in which nearly a quarter of the population of Central Europe died, that treaty created a pattern in which Europe was divided among entities called “nation-states” that agreed not to interfere in each other’s affairs and to keep the peace. Order was maintained among them by a “balance of power” while, within them, foreign was separated from domestic politics.

This book brings together history, geography, modern politics and good advice. Also in part a policy lecture and in part a memoir, it is less a chronology than a division into themes that can be roughly divided into three, or perhaps four. One is the opening story of the diplomatic world that Westphalia created in Europe and that lasted, in one form or another, and especially through the 1815 Congress of Vienna, until the end of the nineteenth century. Second, there are chapters that deal with international developments especially during the twentieth century, notably the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, who understood the need for his country to be involved but also managed to fashion its idealism to a pragmatic end. That was followed by the influence, and failures, of Woodrow Wilson’s idealism, and the period of US ascendancy in and following the Second World War. Third, Kissinger offers some thoughts on what might be done, or avoided, in the present confused state of the world. Finally, he contemplates some aspects of the likely scientific and political future.

Throughout, Kissinger remains, as he has always been, a supporter of “Realpolitik” with a deep distrust of any foreign policy based on nothing more substantial than morality. The Westphalian settlement, he readily admits, “reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a moral insight”. His heroes in the diplomatic and political story that followed Westphalia are the great figures of European diplomacy and politics: like Cardinal Richelieu in France, Prince Metternich in Austria and Lord Palmerston (“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies”) in England. However, while Europe has provided the most plausible historical model, it is no longer the sculptor, given the damage done by two world wars, the half-baked outcome of the post-Westphalian union that was the League of Nations, and its fascination, since 1950, with the construction of a “New Europe”.

So it was America that had to carry the ball. And Kissinger’s discussion indeed sees internationalism very much from the standpoint of American values. He remains a believer in the necessity of American world leadership throughout the vicissitudes of changing politics and science. During the Cold War, he argues, America’s order worked well: there was a clear adversary, there were willing and compliant allies and, not least, there were set rules of engagement. So it was America that led what was to be “an inexorably expanding co-operative order of states observing common rules and norms, embracing liberal economic systems, forswearing territorial conquest, respecting national sovereignty, and adopting participatory and democratic systems of governance”. However, it turned out that for many Americans, and given their country’s geographical separateness, foreign policy was an “optional activity”. Not only that, but America has suffered from “the conviction that its domestic principles were self-evidently universal and their application at all times salutary”.

In any event, in Kissinger’s view, we are now at an historic turning point. “While ‘the international community’ is invoked perhaps more insistently now than in any other era, it presents no clear or agreed set of goals, methods or limits … Chaos threatens side by side with unprecedented interdependence.” “So are we,” he asks, “facing a period in which forces beyond the restraints of any order determine the future?” The liberal world order, headed by the United States, may have governed world affairs, arguably since 1918 and certainly since 1945, but it has begun to be challenged by new powers that have not accepted Western values. The Islamic world has never accepted the Westphalian model of nation-states and does not, even now, differentiate properly between mosque and state.

Kissinger argues for a “rules-based order” but, while China may make careful use of some convenient rules, it “has not forgotten that it was originally forced to engage with the existing international order … utterly at odds with its historical image of itself”. Indeed, though he does not exactly say so, China is trying to build a new China-centred order, not for the world but in East and perhaps Central Asia. (No doubt the creation of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation that groups China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and might be joined before long by India and Pakistan, but from which the USA has been excluded, is a beginning.) A series of mistakes by the West also created a power vacuum around Russia’s borders (which President Putin is trying to cope with in the process of restoring Russia’s greatness). Kissinger also quotes the Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s introduction to the seminal Islamist Sayyid Qutb’s work Islam, the Religion of the Future: “ultimately world government shall be in the hands of our school and ‘the future belongs to Islam’.” It is a sentiment that contemporary IS supporters in Iraq or Syria support in identical language. Which, to a dispassionate observer, might be frighteningly reminiscent of the Hitler Youth Song, “Denn Heute gehoert uns Deutschland, und morgen die ganze Welt” (Today Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole world).

What is needed now to cope with the dangers of separating cultures in and around China, Islam, India, Russia, Iran, Kissinger argues, is a new balance of power—a system that is in principle timeless—but this time global in scope, based on Westphalian principles and still led by the United States. Admittedly, in the Middle East almost all the states “are threatened by militant challenges to their legitimacy”. The so-called “Arab Spring” was far from bringing an upsurge of democracy. American officials endorsed the demands of Egyptian protesters as cries for “freedom”, “representative government” and “genuine democracy”. Yet, says Kissinger, “those committed to democratization have found it difficult to discover leaders who recognize the importance of democracy other than as a means to achieve their own dominance”. In fact, “the Arab Spring has exhibited rather than overcome the internal contradictions of the Arab-Islamic world and of the policies designed to resolve them”. In Asia, on the other hand, “the state is treated as the basic unit of international and domestic politics”. Indeed, “Asia has emerged as among the Westphalian system’s most significant legacies: historic, and often historically antagonistic, peoples are organizing themselves as sovereign states and their states as regional groupings.” The present challenge is:

not simply a multipolarity of power but a world of increasingly contradictory realities. It must not be assumed that, left unattended, these trends will at some point reconcile automatically to a world of balance and co-operation—or even any order at all.

Kissinger will have none of the popular notion that easier connection and transparency will make the world safer as peoples learn more about each other. Past conflicts “have not been limited to an absence of information or an insufficient ability to share it”. Instead, everything immediately becomes part of domestic politics.

All in all, Kissinger blames the new world disorder largely on the unravelling of the modern state. In Europe this happened because of the attempt by Europeans to pool sovereignty at the cost of ceasing to be an effective international actor. In the Middle East, the state has dissolved into ethnic and sectarian conflict. And in Russia, the state has once again been taken over by the kind of single strong ruler whom Russians have traditionally respected.

It is perhaps unnecessary to say that, in retrospect, Henry Kissinger, like any other notable statesman, can be accused of making a number of mistakes and miscalculations. To critics after the fact, hindsight almost always confers brilliance. He can still be accused of masterminding the bombing of Cambodia, though the effort to halt North Vietnam’s massive supply to the South seemed an essential strategic move at the time. He can also be accused of making too little of the faults of American policies in the Middle East, including the essentially naive recent trillion-dollar effort at democracy-building on a ridiculously brief US election timetable. There are many more such instances.

More broadly, economics is not Kissinger’s strongest suit, and he says very little about the contradictions in having a world economic system that is largely based on the free flow of capital and goods but retains its deep connection with a political system that remains national. As against that it can obviously be argued that the world’s financial and currency systems are to a marked degree controlled on one side by international bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and on the other by quiet and usually unpublicised understandings and co-operation between the leading central banks: the People’s Bank of China, the Bundesbank, the Bank of England, especially the US Federal Reserve, and one or two other institutions. Not only are these major banks national institutions, but their co-operation reinforces the old principle that economics and trade ultimately depend on politics and not, as much of the media would have us believe, politics depending on economics.

In adopting his basic approach, so strongly centred on US interests but also ideals, Kissinger also warns—repeatedly—against the idealistic strand in American policy. He warns that too much idealism in foreign policy is a grave mistake. “Moral prescriptions without concern for equilibrium” lead to undesirable, even disastrous, outcomes. America may have become “an ambivalent superpower”, but what the difficulties “do not permit is withdrawal”. That being so, he is worried about the dangers of a power vacuum, about the legacy of a weakened president like Obama and a public that wants to turn inward. He well understands the difficulties of balancing contending principles. Yet he continues to distrust policy prescriptions based on “values” instead of real and practical interests, and is opposed to the common Anglo-Saxon guilt complex that says if anything goes wrong in some part of the world, it is probably “our” fault.

Yet the world may be changing even more radically than Kissinger has allowed for. To be sure, the complexities of world politics and policies are probably beyond the grasp of any single book, or even a man as wise and experienced as Henry Kissinger. Yet some mention of the gaps seems permissible.

He acknowledges the importance of cyberspace as an arena of conflict but not, perhaps, the opportunities the internet provides for a closer control of the population and even the media by the central authorities of a nation or even a corporation. He mentions the growing importance of non-government organisations, for instance as a basis for trans-border terrorism, but says little about them as ways of influencing economic activity and public opinion. He does not comment on ways in which, in the West, the bases of democracy have largely switched from representation to direct populism, a change reinforced by instant communication, the invention of social media networks and therefore an amalgamation of domestic and foreign policies with a demand for instant solutions to problems. Public sentiment can unduly guide policy, as the flow of information triumphs over full knowledge, let alone allowing time for decision based on calm reflection and wisdom. Or again, there are new “Responsibility to Protect (R2P)” policies that people (such as former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans) have nailed to policy, yet which appear to commit any subscriber state to intervening anytime, anywhere around the world where developments offend the domestic public.

No one has illuminated this subject with greater and more elegant brevity than the great British historian Sir Michael Howard, who commented forty years ago on:

that high-minded itch for responsibility which, far more than any desire for territorial conquest or economic gain, has got the Anglo-Saxon nations into such trouble in so many parts of the world and keeps them from getting out again.

Together with that come even more profound changes in the political “public” to which leaders react. There are several elements to this. It is not just in the West that there have emerged deep demographic changes in the balance between young and old. There are equally profound changes in the ethnic and religious composition of “the public” of many countries in a period of easy air and sea transport, together with the active promotion of “multiculturalism” as a vehicle for economic progress and cultural diversity. In the USA itself, forty years ago almost no one would have thought of analysing the voting public in terms of Anglo, Afro-American, Asian, Latino, Jewish groupings, not to mention separating the votes of men and women. Today, such analyses are inescapable for election managers.

More subtle changes are producing fresh kinds of social segmentation and economic pluralism within as well as between the states that Charles de Gaulle once called “cold monsters”. In “advanced states” especially, one sees the growth of cities and regional segregation along cultural, income, political and income lines, all of which are reflected in national politics. These increasing local variations visibly expose the weakness of central governments still trying to micromanage what they cannot any longer efficiently control.

There is also the matter of international law and organisations and of a real or alleged progress towards supra-national and perhaps even global governance. There has clearly been a multiple growth of international organisations in recent times, though none of them seem to have supplanted national authorities as distinct from imposing certain obligations on them, to be effective usually by their own consent. But it remains far from clear that new forms of trans-nationalism, let alone global governance, if achievable without local consent, would be in any way desirable. It may be doubtful whether even Dr Kissinger’s wise, far-reaching and magisterial work will greatly change the global “Time of troubles” into which these various developments have launched us.