June 17, 2001
How to Run the World in Seven Chapters
America's perennial pundit offers a foreign policy to meet the needs of a lone superpower in a new century.
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First Chapter: 'Does America Need a Foreign Policy?'
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
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DOES AMERICA NEED A FOREIGN POLICY?
Toward a Diplomacy
for the 21st Century.
By Henry Kissinger.
318 pp. New York:
Simon & Schuster. $30.
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eading Henry Kissinger on foreign policy often feels more like an adventure in geology than political science. What always makes Kissinger interesting as an analyst, whether one agrees with him or not, is that he has a take on the world. That take is grounded in a belief that countries are in many respects like geological formations, forged over centuries by the forces of geography and history. The surface areas may change from time to time, as governments, leaders and even ideologies come and go. But the underlying character of nations does not change, or at least not quickly, any more than the contours of a mountain or the course of a river. And these underlying and immutable characteristics shape a country's interests, instincts and habits. Kissinger would probably not describe his outlook in quite so deterministic a fashion, but that is how it comes through, and frankly that is what gives his analysis its own character. It feels rooted, not in fads or game theory, but in the deepest tectonic plates of geography and history.
Kissinger's latest book, ''Does America Need a Foreign Policy?'' is much more interesting than its peculiar title. (Does anyone suppose that the answer would be no -- America doesn't need a foreign policy -- especially coming from Henry Kissinger?) The book is really Kissinger's geological survey of the post-cold-war world. If you'd like to have a conversation, or an argument, with Dr. K. about foreign policy in the 21st century and how America should deal with it, this book is about as close as you're likely to get. Each chapter takes a collection of key countries, summarizes their enduring features and national interests, and then argues how Washington should relate to them to ensure that no power emerges, in any region or globally, to unite others against the United States.
At first I wondered why Kissinger wrote this book, since many of these geological themes have been touched on in his previous works. But as you get into it, you start to realize that it was not intended for library shelves or academic colleagues. In many ways it has an audience of one: President George W. Bush.
Although Kissinger could not have been sure that Bush would win the election when he embarked on this book, it nevertheless reads as though he had. For this relatively slim volume is laced with criticism (some of it gratuitous) of the soft-headed, ''New Age'' foreign policy of the Clinton administration and is addressed to a prospective president who Kissinger clearly hoped would be a hardheaded Republican. One might even say that this book is Kissinger's version of ''The Prince,'' by Machiavelli. Indeed, it easily could have been titled ''The President'' or ''The Statesman.'' Because, consciously or unconsciously, Kissinger, the Republican Party's elder statesman, is passing down his wisdom here to today's novice Republican president, and to others who might follow. And like ''The Prince,'' this book is replete with pointers, road maps, warnings, maxims and pithy recommendations -- but always rooted in Kissinger's sense of the essential character of countries as they struggle for power and survival, much the way Machiavelli rooted his advice in the essential character of human beings as they struggle for power and survival.
John Decker/ The New York Times |
"Today I would be very reluctant to go back into government because it's a different atmosphere now. I thought I had it hard, but
I had press people with me who really had studied the subject. . . . Now the emphasis is much more on short-term, dramatic
things . . . Today most of the Congress are younger people with no foreign experience at all who look at foreign policy mostly
from the domestic point of view. . . . [As Secretary of State] you spend half your time testifying, then another big slice of your
time traveling around, then when you're in Washington you spend a lot of your time with bureaucratic infighting, so how to get
the time to reflect about what it is you're trying to do is becoming more and more of a problem." -- Henry Kissinger, in an audio interview, March 17, 1999.
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Kissinger's overarching theme in his version of ''The Prince'' is unmistakable: America's pre-eminence in the world today is taken far too much for granted by its citizenry. The last presidential election was the third in a row in which foreign policy was barely discussed. Americans seem to have come to believe that they are now so powerful that they don't really need a serious foreign policy -- they can afford to get by with ad hoc responses or grand finger-wagging.
Those groups who are actively involved in foreign policy today, Kissinger argues, often break down into hyperidealists, who believe ''America has the appropriate democratic solution for every other society regardless of cultural and historical differences,'' or hypernationalists, who peddle the notion that the Soviet Union was brought down simply because of Ronald Reagan's assertiveness, not by a bipartisan foreign policy of containment that spanned nine administrations. These hypernationalists maintain that ''the solution to the world's ills is American hegemony -- the imposition of American solutions on the world's trouble spots by the unabashed affirmation of its pre-eminence.'' In today's complex international system, Kissinger insists, you cannot have an American foreign policy that is based on the United States as either the world's social worker or the world's schoolmarm, ruler in hand. It requires a blend of the two, with a large dollop of humility and caution in between about what can and cannot be imposed on the world; it requires an appreciation for American traditions of exceptionalism, with a constant eye to the circumstances in which those traditions can be brought to bear.
What was said of ''The Prince,'' as Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. of Harvard University explains in his translation, will no doubt be said by critics of Kissinger. Mansfield wrote: ''Soon after being published in 1532,'' Machiavelli's book ''was denounced as a collection of sinister maxims and as a recommendation of tyranny, giving rise to the hateful term 'Machiavellian.' '' Kissinger's book is not a recommendation for tyranny in any way, but it is very ''Kissingerian'' -- focused more around power balances, stability and national interests than American values. I have no doubt that Kissinger is as cynical, mean and nasty a bureaucratic infighter and player of the game of nations as his most venomous critics have charged. At times, he can make Machiavelli sound like one of the Sisters of Mercy. But having said that, one can still value the clarity of his thinking, which is fully on display here.
There is a tendency in some foreign policy circles to believe that you don't have to think about causal chains of events. It is enough just to be outraged about something happening somewhere, and react.
Moral outrage is important. It can save lives and, at times, spur diplomats to cut through all the diplo-babble and do something. But it does not exempt policy makers or critics or protesters from thinking through the implications of any intervention, or the legacy of history that could weigh upon it. People who regularly point that out, or who are in any way restrained by such considerations, tend to be reviled as morally indifferent. As an analyst and a statesman, Kissinger almost always emphasizes the long causal chains, and what might happen at the end, rather than submit to any immediate emotions.
''Moral principles are universal and timeless,'' Kissinger writes. ''Foreign policy is bounded by circumstance; it is, as Bismarck noted, 'the art of the possible,' 'the science of the relative.' When moral principles are applied without regard to historical conditions, the result is usually an increase in suffering rather than its amelioration.''
For example, Kissinger insists, with some justification, that in the case of Bosnia the most moral position, the one that would actually have resulted in the least amount of human suffering, was the partition of Bosnia, when it was still possible early in the war -- rather than compelling three communities, two of whom did not want to live together, to form a self-ruling, multiethnic state that had no precedent in Bosnian history and no connection to any fundamental American interests. Kissinger probably treats too lightly the difficulty policy makers had in Bosnia in balancing justice and stability, when the Serbs were balancing neither and mass killing was loose in the land and on CNN. But his basic point is still valid: ''Why should a multiethnic state favored by basically only one of the ethnic groups'' -- the Muslims -- be imposed by outside military force? What American national interest or larger purpose was served by such a policy?'' As for Kosovo, Kissinger makes a strong argument that American diplomacy helped make the situation far worse and was based on a poor historical appreciation of who the Albanians were and what their ultimate objectives were in and beyond Kosovo.
One thing about Kissinger, as both professor and statesman, is that he could always write, and this book does not disappoint in that regard. It is as easy to read as ''The Prince.'' Among his sharpest recommendations and observations to future American princes: ''A wise American policy will seek to navigate between a Europe abdicating from international responsibilities and a Europe striving for a global role in rivalry with the United States.'' Confrontation with China ''should be a last resort, not a preferred option.'' ''The dream of the Israeli doves has been that they might live with their Arab neighbors as, say, Belgium and Holland do with each other. But the majority of Arab doves -- Palestinian especially -- think of peace not as fulfillment but as acquiescence in facts they are powerless to change.'' ''The Australian scholar Coral Bell has brilliantly described America's challenge: to recognize its own pre-eminence but to conduct its policy as if it were still living in a world of many centers of power.''
As tough-minded as Kissinger is, he does occasionally pull his punches. While ceaselessly scorning the Clinton administration for its woolly-headed approach to international relations, he says virtually nothing about some of the more lunatic, ideologically driven positions of his Republican colleagues. One gets the feeling at times that Dr. K. just doesn't want to find himself in the cross hairs of searing critics from the Republican right. Kissinger, à la Machiavelli, writes at the end of this book that great statesmen are distinguished less by their detailed knowledge than by ''their instinctive grasp of historical currents, by an ability to discern amidst the myriad of impressions that impinge on consciousness those most likely to shape the future.'' It is Kissinger's way of saying: beware of those who go to extremes; always balance your ideology with a sense of the currents of history.
Personally, I find it hard to see how Kissinger can hold these views and really believe his own endorsements for NATO expansion or for the Bush team's latest version of a high-tech missile defense shield -- an idea that, so far, doesn't work, shows every possibility of unraveling the complex web of arms control and diplomatic initiatives that have kept the peace for 50 years and at heart is driven by a zealous hatred of any form of arms control on the part of those right-wing Republican ideologues whom Kissinger dislikes.
If the strongest part of this book is Kissinger melding what is old and immutable -- history and geography -- into a 21st-century foreign policy, then the weakest part is his attempt to blend in what is new and still evolving -- the information revolution and globalization. He includes a chapter entitled ''The Politics of Globalization,'' which is largely a rehash of old debates about the I.M.F. and the World Bank, and is not really integrated with the rest of the book. What I hungered for was a chapter that would have been called ''The Geopolitics of Globalization'' -- in which Kissinger reflected on economic integration, the Internet, the information revolution and the fact that we all increasingly know how everyone else lives and the impact these developments have on the balance of power, the behavior of statesmen and the game of nations. Even if he thinks they have no impact, I would have liked to hear the argument. Globalization is about so much more than trade and financial markets.
Just consider China. You cannot explain the relative speed with which China backed down in the spy plane dispute with the United States in April without assuming that China weighed its multibillion dollar exports to America, its aspirations to be a member of the World Trade Organization, its burning desire to host the Olympic Games and its 54,000 students studying in America and concluded that these ties had to restrain whatever aggressive geopolitical impulses some Chinese generals might have had. Indeed, I suspect that Henry Kissinger was among those who, privately, were pointing that out to the Chinese. Globalization does not spell the end of geopolitics, but it does influence it -- a lot. Jody Williams shared a Nobel Peace Prize for helping to organize a global movement against land mines, using e-mail. Because the Internet so lowers the barriers to entry into the news business, while simultaneously giving the smallest news portal a global reach, its impact on statesmen promises to be enormous. You cannot fully explain international relations today without reference to both cruise missiles and Web servers, to McDonald's and McDonnell Douglas.
Which is why if I had one question for Kissinger after reading this book it would be: Is there, indeed can there be, anything new in the world that could fundamentally shape the behavior of nations as much as their immutable history and geography? Kissinger treats globalization as a fact of 21st-century geopolitics, but not as a real force.
Everything that makes Kissinger the most reviled, and most interesting, statesman of his generation is on display here: the Machiavellian Kissinger that liberal internationalists love to hate, the coolly incisive Kissinger that balance-of-power realists love to love and the statesman-historian that students of diplomacy have to read. As someone who makes his living writing about foreign policy, I would conclude that you ignore Kissinger's take on the world at your peril. It is too rooted in an appreciation of history and a lifetime of diplomacy to ignore. But you limit yourself to it at your peril as well. Does America need a foreign policy? Yes, it sure does -- one that takes account of Henry Kissinger, but not only Henry Kissinger.
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs columnist for The Times.
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