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Realism and Revisionism: Henry Kissinger from Diplomacy (1994) to Does America Need a Foreign Policy? (2001)Part One

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

Henry Kissinger needs no lengthy introduction. National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for bringing the lengthy war in Vietnam to a conclusion. After leaving office following the Republican loss to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 elections, he established a very successful consultancy serving multinational corporations and foreign governments. His private life was followed closely for years by the paparazzi who reported on his romances and socialite habits to a curious general public.

Even in his late 80s, Dr Kissinger remains very much in the public eye. In the past year he played a key role in preparations for the first summit between Presidents Obama and Medvedev in London on April 1^st. His articles on current major issues in international affairs appear frequently in the New York Times and are carried in syndicated mainstream media.

Henry Kissinger’s public persona was formed in academia, more specifically at Harvard University, where he graduated summa cum laude from the College and completed his doctorate in 1954. He directly proceeded to become a member of the faculty in Harvard’s Department of Government and Center for International Affairs. His first book on Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy was published already in 1957 and brought him nationwide attention. A succession of scholarly works followed. From the very start of his academic career, he was invited down to Washington periodically to advise federal agencies on international security issues. He was drawn into the Foreign Relations Council. In the 1960s, he came to the attention of Nelson Rockefeller, whose presidential ambitions he served in the capacity of foreign policy aide. In 1968, he was taken on by Richard Nixon.

Notwithstanding his intense work for the federal government and then his years in business, Kissinger never let go of his intellectual preoccupations. In 1973, he published A World Restored based on his doctoral dissertation and dealing with the peace concluding the Napoleonic wars. His weighty tomes of memoirs from his government service in Washington culminated in Years of Renewal, published in 1999.

From among his many publications, there are within the post-Cold War period two which may be said to represent Kissinger’s response to the new opportunities and risks of the 21^st century and we shall examine them here at some length. These are his 835 page scholarly work Diplomacy published in 1994 and the facetiously titled Does America Need a Foreign Policy? published in 2001 .In a way these two works are highly complementary. The first is 95% backward looking, setting out the historical context for the present day division between American realists and idealists over how to understand and manage international relations and 5% forward looking, setting out policy recommendations for the present and future. The second book has an inverse relationship, consisting primarily of specific recommendations for American policy towards four major regions of the world and key individual countries within these regions based on principles of Realpolitik softened so as to be acceptable to an American readership. Abstract or philosophical observations taken from Diplomacy are thrown in as leavening along the way.

Although Henry Kissinger’s Curriculum Vitae places him at the very center of the American foreign policy Establishment, the two volumes under consideration, particularly Diplomacy would, if authored by anyone of lesser prestige and proven gravitas, merit characterization as revisionism. These works are more critical, more revelatory of national weaknesses and misperceptions than one could find in the writings of many nonconformist or irresponsible intellectuals in ivory towers.

Kissinger himself would probably vehemently deny that anything like revisionism was his intention. It emerges time and again as an almost involuntary subtext which, despite his praise in major for the positive contributions of his homeland to peace and justice worldwide over the past century by acting out the national myths, nonetheless carries a minor motif which is derogatory of those same myths and of simplistic good-heartedness. He never lets us forget how peace and justice are often contradictory objectives before foreign policy makers and implementers.

Diplomacy

As you first leaf through the 835 page text of Diplomacy plus the Notes, it is to all appearances a textbook on how foreign relations were conducted in Europe and the United States over the course of 300 years with particular attention to the accepted notions of statecraft and the view of mankind these presuppose. The frequent repetition of general conclusions throughout the book suggests that the publishers expected readers would not have the patience to swallow it at one go but would possibly see in it a reference work to be dipped into as needed. Kissinger’s dedication of the book to officers of the U.S. Foreign Service adds to this view.

However, nothing could be more erroneous than this initial impression. Upon full reading, it becomes clear that the author had a very insistent message, one which is not so much scholarly as practically orientated, to guide and inform an appreciation of what must change in American thinking and practices to deal with the new international landscape of the post-Cold War world. The book was meant to be very topical in 1994 and it has become even more so today following the experience of two presidencies, Democratic and Republican, in which outworn policies and mentalities proved their inability to deal with the present and future much as Kissinger had reasoned.

 

Like any classic, Diplomacy operates on several different levels and appeals to readers having different interests and objectives. This is a history of statecraft, but one that has been selectively assembled with enormous care by a seasoned educator to serve practical and immediate needs.

 

In Diplomacy, Professor Kissinger delivers what could be masterful lectures to undergraduates, describing events and statesmen in an entertaining manner and ending each segment in small discoveries or paradoxes, drawing parallels between the past and the present that are useful for mnemonic purposes. At the same time, he conducts a graduate class elucidating the big picture, in this case the vindication of realism and a severe rebuke to idealism in the management of international affairs.

 

Competing Principles

By realism is meant the focus on national strategic interests in a world where moral considerations may be a guide to ultimate objectives but the amoral calculus of relative power and feasibility determine day-to-day conduct of international affairs. By idealism is meant the values-based management of international affairs serving universalist principles and altruistic commitments.

In the first quarter of the book, Kissinger deals with the formative periods and, in particular, the personalities who contributed significantly to the evolution of the concepts and practices of power-oriented statecraft. This begins in the 17^th century, which in the terms of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) established the modern notion of the nation state in sovereign control of its domestic affairs and in the diplomacy of French minister Richelieu practiced raison d’etat to guide the defense and expansion of the nation state by all means fair or foul.

We then follow step by step the formulation of the ‘balance of power’ concept in 18^th century England where it meant occasional intervention in Continental power arrangements at turning points to prevent the emergence of hegemonic control by any one power. Next we are led through the golden age of realism following the Congress of Vienna in 1815 which ended the Napoleonic Wars, established a Europe-wide status quo based on shared values of conservative dynasts and kept the peace for two generations. We arrive finally at the age of Bismarck and the launch of Realpolitik, entailing the judicious use of raw force to achieve national objectives followed by the implementation of a new ‘balance of power’ model weaving direct ties with all competing powers to prevent hostile blocs from forming among those countries which lost out in the new pecking order.

This survey course in the evolution of what we would today call a geopolitical or geostrategic approach to international affairs drives home several distinct points. Firstly, this concept of diplomacy was built on a specific understanding of human behavior as selfish and competitive, in which the normal condition of relations between states is a clash of interests from which is distilled an ultimate harmony in the form of the ‘balance of powers’ preventing any one from exercising tyranny over the others. Secondly, this assumes shifting alliances among several states of similar strength to preserve the balance. Thirdly, to succeed best it should be supported by a common sense of legitimacy.

We see that the school of power-oriented diplomacy was developed on European soil. Along with other Enlightenment political concepts, it was well known on American shores in the British colonies where it found exponents among the Founding Fathers of the United States in such outstanding statesmen as Alexander Hamilton. However, in Kissinger’s view, the overwhelming majority of leaders of the new country, among them Thomas Jefferson, was unsympathetic to the political habits of the Continental Europe under the ancien régime as much as to the former colonial master, believing instead in the exceptionalism of their young democracy and in the universalist values it represented. They held that, unlike the absolutist monarchies, nations built on democratic principles of popular representation would naturally live in harmony and peace. They warned against entanglements in European affairs and took comfort in the security provided by a vast ocean separating them from the disputes of another world. Thus, during most of the 19^th century America pursued a stance of isolationism with respect to the Continent. Foreign policy was limited to implementation of the Monroe Doctrine and keeping the Western Hemisphere free of interference by the European powers.

The growing mercantile and industrial power of the new republic and the increasing interdependence of the world powers towards the end of the 19^th century brought America willy-nilly face to face with the challenge of forming a proper foreign policy of worldwide dimensions. This was first met in the new century by President Theodore Roosevelt, who was a sophisticated practitioner of statecraft in the European tradition.

And this approach was countered by his successor, Woodrow Wilson, who developed the theses of an idealist approach to foreign policy which became the bedrock of American thinking for most of the 20^th century.

In Kissinger’s précis, the key elements of Wilsonianism were ethnic self-determination, collective security instead of military alliances, open rather than secret diplomacy. Wilson’s vision was an international order defended by moral consensus rather than force of arms. The League of Nations, consisting mostly of democratic states, would be the trustee for peace.

The whipping boy of the Wilsonian idealists was the ‘balance of power,’ which was held accountable for Europe’s tragic military conflicts of the past and, in particular, World War I, which drew America into the Old Continent’s suicidal civil war against its will ‘to make the world safe for democracy.’.

Having established the origins and meaning of the opposing principles of realism and idealism in the conduct of international affairs, Kissinger devotes about 600 pages to exploring how in practice these concepts shaped the major historical events of modern times: World War I, the Versailles Treaty and its follow-on conventions, World War II and the Cold War

Interplay of Realism and Idealism in the 20^th Century.

 

Kissinger’s overriding message is that supposedly cynical and amoral realistic politics often do good in practice and that moralizing idealism has often led to disasters. Kissinger painstakingly argues that the ‘balance of power’ was not to blame for the general European conflagration which broke out in 1914; to the contrary it was precisely the wearing away of the prerequisites for the balance beginning in the 1890s which removed essential restraints on what became a doomsday machine. He tells us that the explicit rejection of geostrategic considerations to guide the peace settlement after the Great War and their replacement by universalist principles of ethnic self-determination and collective security under the tutelage of Woodrow Wilson made possible the eventual return of Germany to the position of dominance on the Continent which it enjoyed before the war since it no longer faced mighty empires on its eastern frontiers but instead contrived buffer states lacking the means to protect themselves. Meanwhile the draconian but unenforced terms of the peace provided grist for the resurgence of German nationalism and revanchisme.

Moreover, Kissinger says it was the demoralization of Western statesmen compounded by their lack of confidence in the unfamiliar new tools of diplomacy imposed by Wilson which set in train the pattern of behavior later called appeasement of German demands for rectification of the injustices in the Versailles settlement, leading ineluctably to the outbreak of WWII. Kissinger draws a straight line from the 1922 Treaty of Locarno to the Munich pact of 1938.

Turning to the Cold War, Kissinger takes the sources back to the inability of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt given his idealist mindset on the conduct of foreign relations to accept the good advice of his realist Ally, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and strike a deal with Stalin over what the map of postwar Europe would look like. The proposal was made by Churchill in 1942 and, Kissinger assures us that if pursued at the time it could well have resulted in Stalin’s settling for the restoration of the USSR’s 1941 borders, meaning a democratic Eastern Europe.

However, during the war FDR rejected the kind of horse trading Churchill had in mind. Like Woodrow Wilson thirty years earlier, the American President believed the war was being fought over grand principles, not for the sake of adjustments to national borders in Europe. His vision of the post-war world was of the victors, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia and China, constituting Four Policemen to keep the peace worldwide under an international order of collective security. Moreover, Roosevelt and his close advisers had convinced themselves of the trustworthiness of ‘Uncle Joe’ and refused to be drawn into Churchill’s machinations, which they believed were motivated by Britain’s selfish interest in preserving its empire.

After the war, Stalin took the matter of European borders into his own hands, furthering the state interests of the USSR without any initial resistance from the American allies. In effect he created buffer states to protect against any possible aggressive threat from Germany in the future. Stalin’s meeting with the new American President in Potsdam in July 1945 was a dialogue of the deaf in which Truman attempted in vain to advance FDR’s agenda of collective security and avoided geopolitical settlements.

Nonetheless, Kissinger contends that as late as 1946, while the U.S. held an overwhelming strategic advantage over Russia as the only nuclear power, the Americans could quite possibly have reached agreement with Stalin on the Finlandization of Eastern Europe if they listened to the urgings of Churchill at that time. Throughout the region this would have meant normal democratic societies with market economies subject only to the condition of their neutrality and the understanding they would not pursue anti-Soviet policies.

Instead, President Truman and his team were already looking in other directions for solutions. By 1947 this led to the adoption of the ‘containment policy’ drafted by George Kennan. The American administration now turned its back on Moscow as untrustworthy and established the principle that it would wait out regime change in Russia before re-entering substantive negotiations over the post-war settlement. The division of Europe into spheres of influence was well under way, advanced by the Marshall Plan and NATO, America’s first ever peacetime defense alliance. A final window of opportunity to reach a better deal with the Soviets over the fate of Germany opened by Stalin’s peace initiative in 1952 was allowed to lapse without due response

This takes us approximately half way through the century and half way through Kissinger’s text devoted to elucidating the interplay of realism and idealism in 20^th century American foreign policy. His narrative on the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, the Berlin Crisis of 1958-63 and the Vietnam War are always insightful and authoritative. He systematically peppers the narrative with side remarks on the geostrategic mindset of Russian, French and other foreign leaders versus the frequently moralizing idealism, appeal to legality and the like practiced by the leading American statesmen involved ih the given issues.

Time and again Americans' failure to see conflicts in terms of national interests at odds and their invoking grand and righteous principles when commencing military action hinders the definition of war objectives and so prolongs fighting needlessly. Kissinger tells us that "[t]he Wilsonian approach to foreign policy permitted no distinction to be made among the monsters to be slain...America was obliged to fight for what was right, regardless of local circumstances, and independent of geopolitics." Accordingly poor decisions were taken on where to make a stand against the worldwide Communist threat. After the grand prize of China was lost to the Maoists without significant American involvement, the Americans engaged 'the enemy' in Korea and then later in Vietnam at great cost and for meager results.

There is a special interest in Kissinger's discussion of the 1970s diplomacy of détente with the Soviet Union which was buttressed by the opening of relations with China in a triangular relationship. After Theodore Roosevelt, Nixon was the unique instance of an American President believing in and practicing traditional European-style geopolitical statecraft. In Nixon’s achievements Kissinger is able to show what good professional analysis of national interest can yield when properly executed.

When Kissinger dusts off ‘balance of power’ politics to show its merits and when he marshals vast material for his exposé of the failures of Wilsonian idealism in practice, these are not an end in themselves. It is his overriding purpose to bring to the reader’s attention the relevance of geopolitical strategy and especially ‘balance of power’ calculations to today’s needs.

Kissinger states this plainly in the very first chapter and returns to it in the final chapter of specific recommendations on a U.S. foreign policy country by country. He argues that the recent liberation of Eastern Europe from Communist domination, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union created conditions markedly different from those which predominated during the forty years of the Cold War, conditions much less amenable to management by an ideologically driven, oversimplified American approach to international affairs.

In the new world order taking shape, power will be more diffuse, he tells us, and ‘almost every situation is a special case.’ Under these circumstances, American foreign policy will have to be more subtle, attuned to the challenges and opportunities of a multipolar world which resembles more the Europe of the 19^th century than the bipolar world of the recent past. And in that new-old world, the practices of balance of power typically spurned by today’s American politicians as they have been in much of the past century since Woodrow Wilson can make a very positive contribution.

Is Idealism an Unavoidable or Immutable Feature of American Foreign Policy?

As I have noted, Kissinger sees the modern archetypes for American practitioners of realist versus idealist foreign policy in Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson respectively.

Judging by his characterizations of each, there can be little doubt that Kissinger identifies with Roosevelt, whose mastery of ‘balance of power’ diplomacy was so complete as to earn him America’s first Nobel Prize for Peace in recognition of the way he brought the Russo-Japanese War to a satisfactory conclusion. Kissinger admires Roosevelt’s worldly wise sophistication and clearly shares Roosevelt’s belief that that America is finally a power like any other which must pursue its national interests on the grand chessboard following the European rules and exercise its power prudently. He matches Theodore Roosevelt with Richard Nixon whom he so closely assisted during his own period in power.

At the same time, Kissinger acknowledges that the great reputation and influence of Wilson on American foreign policy thinking for the century which followed was not accidental. Unlike Wilson, the realist Theodore Roosevelt was unprepared to persuade the nation to enter World War I after he became convinced that it was in America’s national interest to oppose Germany, whereas Wilson ultimately led his isolationist compatriots to war by means of his inspirational message of a crusade to spread universal liberties:

“Roosevelt understood how international politics worked among the nations then conducting world affairs – no American president has had a more acute insight into the operation of the international systems. Yet Wilson grasped the mainsprings of American motivation…that America did not see itself as a nation like any other..”

This insight is emblematic of Kissinger’s quandary over the merits and drawbacks of his adopted homeland. He tries mightily to deal with this as an irony, as if the negatives were an unavoidable side of the indispensable positive contributions America brings to the world.

Exactly the same question arises in Kissinger’s treatment of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, as we saw, Kissinger identifies as an enthusiastic disciple of Wilson. FDR was not indifferent to power relations but spoke of them if at all in what we would now call politically correct language. Otherwise he used guile and skirted the limits of his constitutional powers to pursue his objectives.

Kissinger’s appreciation of FDR is at times an exact repetition of what he extolled in Wilson: “Few American presidents have been as sensitive and perspicacious as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in his grasp of the psychology of the people. Roosevelt understood that only a threat to their security could motivate them to support military preparednesss. But to take them into a war, he knew he needed to appeal to their idealism in much the same way that Wilson had.”

Here Kissinger’s delving into the ironies of history is more than the professional habit of a skilled and popular lecturer.. His juxtaposition of Churchill and FDR later in the narrative reminds us of his previous matching of Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson: “Churchill’s geopolitical analysis proved far more accurate than Roosevelt’s. Yet Roosevelt’s reluctance to see the world in geopolitical terms was the reverse side of the same idealism which had propelled America into the war and enabled it to preserve the cause of freedom.”

And as our final citation relating to FDR which bears on the same issue and is important for understanding Kissinger’s feelings about his adopted homeland, we find the following: “Roosevelt’s conception of the postwar world may have been far too optimistic. But in light of American history, this position almost surely represented a necessary stage that America needed to traverse if it hoped to overcome the crisis ahead.”

Turning to the Truman Administration, Kissinger remarked on the way brilliant geostrategic innovations such as the Marshall Plan and NATO were presented to the nation and the world at large under the ideological cover of Wilsonian universal principles in an enlarging struggle between good and evil.. In the case of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, a man of great sophistication, Kissinger assumes this was a matter of playing the political game by the rules in force in Washington. Kissinger says nothing of the President himself, but given his relatively modest background, past unfamiliarity with the intricacies of foreign policy and down-to-earth personality, we may assume the intellectual contradictions were not a matter of great concern.

Kissinger approves of the subterfuge and possible self-deception which made it possible to get around the predilections of the American people and much of the political Establishment. Although he explains to us how FDR spent three years educating the public on the need to combat Hitler, he does not ask himself why the final appeal had to be to American idealism rather than self-interest.

Is the American psyche which has evolved in so many ways over the past century of industrialization, urbanization and now globalization truly immutable with respect to the principles which drive foreign policy? Could the one Realpolitik president of the second half of the 20^th century have done something to change the country’s thinking in this domain?

This is a question which Kissinger addresses in Diplomacy only superficially and unconvincingly. After all, Kissinger devotes substantial narrative to the stunning foreign policy successes of the Nixon Administration.. Nixon and Kissinger opened relations with the People’s Republic of China and leveraged the relationship to bring the Soviet Union into a relationship of détente which significantly reduced Soviet adventurism, reduced the flash points in Europe and, incidentally, brought the United States out of the Vietnam quagmire in a strategically undiminished posture. Yet, these achievements were, by his admission, to no avail in taming domestic critics of Realpolitik or in overturning the American infatuation with Wilsonian idealism

Kissinger rather lamely explains that Nixon simply ran out of time. When the successes were safely in house, the Watergate scandal broke out at the start of his second term and the President’s prestige was sapped to the point where he no longer enjoyed the moral leadership to bring about changed perceptions of how to manage foreign policy either in the Establishment or among the broad public.

However, I think this explanation is disingenuous. It was hardly in the personality of Richard Milhous Nixon to educate the public. It was much more in character to use of the levers of power silently to get his way and to circumvent Congressional controls.

In a way, Kissinger acknowledges this when he gives us one final matching of Presidents, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan: "...Nixon was to Reagan as Theodore Roosevelt had been to Woodrow Wilson. Like Roosevelt, Nixon had had a far better understanding of the workings of international relations; like Wilson, Reagan had a much surer grasp of the workings of the American soul."

It is a great pity that Kissinger himself never undertook the educational mission in the past. He seems to have limited his efforts to distancing himself from the domestic misdeeds of the Nixon White House, rebutting the charges of his detractors from the right and left over the alleged moral failings of détente and providing expert advice directly to the nation's leaders when called down to Washington. The writing of Diplomacy may in the end be Henry Kissinger’s greatest contribution to the cause of re-educating America – if only the public and its representatives can be made to see its relevance for the foreign policy challenges before us today.

Revisionism

As I have indicated at the start of this essay, Kissinger presents in Diplomacy what must be called a revisionist history of diplomatic affairs in the 20^th century. This is not the result of original new research or access to hitherto inaccessible archives and primary sources. Nor does Kissinger appear to be saying anything that you could not find in the scholarly tomes of others. The extraordinary element here is who is saying this and with what intent.

It is widespread practice for retired high civil servants, not to mention former Secretaries of State to accept university professorships in their retirement, to conduct graduate courses and share their insights into statecraft with the up and coming generation. However, what we have in Kissinger is not some ex-official with a law degree assuming a scholarly pose but a full-blooded scholar taking his own conclusions as well as those of others in the historical profession, reflecting on them with the benefit of his own life experience as formulator and practitioner of foreign policy, and serving this up for the edification of the general public to make a programmatic statement that could shake people in power out of their comfortable and homely truths if they took the time to wade through his vast text.

Kissinger’s narrative covers many of the major 20^th century international issues and revisionist  interpretations crop up in a number of places. I will limit myself here to mention of two separate instances where the conventional wisdom which Kissinger overturns has been preached to the American public by its political class, both Democrats and Republicans alike, for decades to the detriment of intelligent analysis and pragmatic problem solving today.

The first is the question of appeasement of a brutal dictator as the major contributing cause to the Second World War. The second concerns our understanding of how and why the Cold War started, more particularly whether it could have been averted if our political leaders had been cleverer or less blinkered by accepted truths.

The question of moral responsibility for the outbreak of World War II remains hotly debated among present day leaders of Europe as we saw in the commemorative events of September 1, 2009 marking the 70^th anniversary of the war’s outbreak.

It is a sign of how politicized the past has become when serving today’s leaders in Central and Eastern Europe, that Germany, the country which started the war was given a pass by the organizers and media at the September 1^st ceremony, while suspended judgment shifted to Russian Prime Minister Putin whose speech was very closely watched..

In an interview with the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza just days before the ceremony, Putin acknowledged the cynical and immoral nature of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact which many Poles consider a significant factor in the German attack by ensuring no two-front war would follow. In his speech on the 1^st, Putin called upon other nations to accept their forebears’ own guilt in making the war possible, indeed inevitable.

Putin’s remarks were notable for highlighting the complexity of causality and shared guilt of world leaders. In fact he was saying no more than what Kissinger sets out in Diplomacy. Yet Putin elicited very negative comment not only from the Polish Right but also from the U.K. tabloids which took umbrage at the hint of British accountability.

No top American officials were present in Gdansk for the commemorative ceremony. The blame game which marred the anniversary is not what American politicians engage in when drawing lessons from World War II to justify current policy decisions.

In American consciousness, appeasement occurred when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain accepted Hitler’s demands on the Sudetenland at Munich in September 1938.. The Munich agreement led directly to the partial dismemberment, then the complete conquest of Czechoslovakia. It set in train a belated British and French démarche, the drawing of a line in the sand making further Nazi expansion by force a casus belli, and this in turn resulted in a declaration of war when the Germans attacked the Polish positions outside of Danzig.

What we see every so often in the speeches of our highest officials is the association of appeasement with some character flaw in Chamberlain, a weak-kneed syndrome, so to speak, all of which is said to have resulted in catastrophe. Those who would lead us into the next overseas military adventure liken every tin-pot dictator to the psychopathic Hitler, both intent on and capable of regional if not worldwide domination. And the uniform response to such threat is resolve, sanctions and, in extremis, preventive military intervention.

What Kissinger has to say Diplomacy is dramatically different:

“Munich has entered our vocabulary as a specific aberration - the penalty of yielding to blackmail. Munich, however, was not a single act but the culmination of an attitude which began in the 1920s and accelerated with each new concession. For over a decade, Germany had been throwing off the restrictions of Versailles one by one...By conceding that the Versailles settlement was iniquitous, the victors eroded the psychological basis for defending it…”

In Kissinger’s narrative we find appeasement of German interests took the upper hand in British policies almost as soon as Germany ceased to be a threat to Britain following their takeover of the German merchant fleet as partial reparations and the end of the German navy. War-ravaged France had a rather different understanding of their recent foe’s potential threat given Germany’s greater population and relatively intact industry, which contrasted with France’s war-ravaged industrial zones. However, from the beginning the British were unsympathetic to French calls for a military alliance to ensure Germany stayed in line, seeing in France the greater threat to the status quo.

As if struck by a guilty conscience over the territorial concessions imposed on Germany by Versailles in the creation of Poland and by the incorporation of Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia against their will following the denial by the victors of a request to be assigned to German Austria, in the Locarno Treaty of 1922 which was the final phase of the peace settlement, the Western powers guaranteed only Germany’s western frontiers while the Eastern borders enjoyed no such general recognition.

Indeed, in the Weimar Republic of Chancellor Stresemann a policy of superficial ‘fulfillment’ of the conditions of Versailles enabled the Germans to largely evade the war reparations and to challenge convincingly the disarmament of their country.

Driving home his core message in this book, Kissinger lays the ultimate blame for appeasement on the efforts of European statesmen to implement the principles of Wilsonian idealism in the Versailles Treaty and its related conventions down to Locarno in 1922 amidst general disillusionment with traditional European diplomacy. At the same time, Kissinger ends this lesson in the manner of the professor relishing paradoxes, telling us that this self-same Wilsonian idealism is what ultimately pushed Britain towards implacable opposition to Hitler and to a more vigorous fight than Realpolitik would ever have given rise to once the dictator’s violation of its moral criteria was proven beyond doubt.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2010

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This three-part article devoted to Henry Kissinger forms part of a collection of essays on America's most influential political scientists and their writings about international affairs in the post-Cold War period published during the years 1993 – 2009.  Publication of the collection in the United States is planned for late 2010. Visitors to this site may wish to consult other chapters already issued here as blog articles on the dates indicated below:

 

Francis Fukuyama, From the End of History to After the Neocons, 30.11,2009

Zbigniew Brzezinski, From Grand Chessboard to Obama Advisor, Parts One to Four, 14.09.2009

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and Smart Power, 10.08.2009

Can Common Sense fix what is wrong with American foreign policy? Leslie Gelb and Power Rules, 03.06.2009

The History Wars…A review of Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams and a bit more, 20.04.2009. Revised 24 February 2010.

Samuel Huntingon and The Clash of Civilizations, Parts One and Two, 03.02.2009. Revised 4 March 2010