Une parole franche

Henry Kissinger from Diplomacy (1994) to Does America Need a Foreign Policy? (2001) Part Two

 

 

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

 

 

The Missed Opportunity to Avert the Cold War

 

 

One of the most remarkable instances of revisionism in Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy is his treatment of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the origins of the Cold War. At the time of his writing in 1994, the mood in the United States was celebratory, nay triumphalist. Notwithstanding forty years of ‘containment’ of Communism pursued unfailingly by a succession of American presidential administrations, for many Americans it was the morally sound, uncompromising spirit of Reaganism which brought about the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union and its ‘evil empire,’ ending the Cold War. And here Kissinger is telling us with great authority and painstaking detail that the Cold War itself need not have come about if only FDR had listened to Churchill starting in 1942 and sat down with Stalin to agree on the post-war settlement in terms of ‘balance of power’ analysis.

 

Indeed, Kissinger believes that as late as 1946 a deal could have been cut resulting in a neutral but free Central Europe enjoying market economies and democratic political structures. What was needed was for America to open its eyes and ears to the opportunities its military advantages afforded and engage Stalin in the kind of interests-based exchange his geostrategic analysis expected. Instead, after a brief and unsuccessful attempt to deal with the Russians within the terms of collective security set down by FDR, the new U.S. Administration of Harry Truman turned its back on all negotiations with the Russians to better rally its allies in Western Europe, thereby locking in place the spheres of influence on either side of the ‘Iron Curtain’ while it awaited regime change in Moscow.

 

Kissinger is saying, in effect, that the victory over Soviet Communism which Americans were toasting in the early 1990s thanks to their nation’s standing true to its idealism merely overturned colossal problems created by that self-same idealism practiced by Reagan’s predecessors in the White House four decades earlier.

 

Surely the boldness of Kissinger’s revisionism on this issue arises from something closer to his heart than dispassionate historical research. Kissinger is defending his own record when he undercuts the hero worship of Reagan, since admirers of the policies of the 40th President were often explicitly critical of the détente approach to the USSR which was emblematic of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy. In this view, which was honed to perfection by the Neoconservatives, détente promoted accommodation with evil and so perpetuated it when the task should have been to vanquish evil.

 

Kissinger deals with this threat to his place in history and takes his revisionism one step further in his chapter on the end of the Cold War.

 

I have already cited in Part One of this essay Kissinger’s identification of Reagan as an idealist in the tradition of Wilson and FDR. And while he insists that Reagan was his own man with fixed and consistent views who was not merely the communicator of messages prepared by his speechwriters, Kissinger does not hesitate to remind us that this President had ‘the shallowest academic background.’

 

When he was in office, it was often said of Reagan by both his followers and his detractors that the man was lucky - and you don’t argue with luck. Kissinger picks up this characterization and fleshes it out to explain why the collapse of the Soviet empire happened on Reagan’s watch.

 

It was fundamentally a question of timing. Reagan’s confrontational policies could have worked at the very beginning of the Cold War, achieving a settlement with Stalin that averted the division of Europe in the manner proposed at the time by Churchill. On the other hand, if Reagan had come to power in the middle of the Cold War, his words and deeds would have only provoked a dangerous and unproductive clash with Moscow while straining relations within the North Atlantic Alliance. In that period of a still dynamic and aggressive Soviet leadership, Nixon’s policies of détente were both appropriate and effective.

 

By arriving in Washington when he did and implementing policies of military build-up and rhetorical pressure on a Soviet regime which had already become fragile, Reagan administered a push which hastened the demise of Soviet Communism. Whether these policies were based on intuition or analysis is academic.

 

For the Neoconservatives in the early 1990s, the apparent success of actively opposing the evil of Communism reinforced their missionary zeal to advance democracy and human rights in those parts of the world still living under tyranny so as to realize the dream of Jefferson, a world of democracies living in peace and the natural state of harmony.

 

Starting from his very different interpretation of the contribution of American idealist ideology to seeing off Soviet Communism, as well as from his different evaluation of the international landscape of the emerging post-Cold War world, Kissinger issued his programmatic statement:

 

“…the Reagan foreign policy was more in the nature of a brilliant sunset than of the dawn of a new era. The Cold War had been almost made to order to American preconceptions There had been a dominant ideological challenge rendering universal maxims, however oversimplified, applicable to most of the world’s problems. And there had been a clear and present military threat, and its source had been unambiguous…In the post-Cold War world, there is no overriding ideological challenge or …single geostrategic confrontation. Almost every situation is a special case.”

 

This is the message which guided Kissinger’s writing of the very last chapter in Diplomacy in which he sets out his specific recommendations for American foreign policy around the world.

 

The New World Order Reconsidered

 

Assuming that professional readers would restrict their perusal of Diplomacy to the final chapter in which he moved from history to his analysis of the present state of international relations and offered advice on future policy, Kissinger spent the first few pages restating his lessons from the 800 preceding pages.

 

As might be expected, he argued the case for geopolitical analysis to inform policy formulation. He called for differentiating between challenges and prioritizing diplomatic efforts on issues of critical national interest while husbanding resources and avoiding making blanket commitments. The only strategic threat facing the United States would be domination of either Europe or Asia by a single power.

 

Though a superpower militarily, America would have to accept that it was finally a nation like the others. This was not a sign of national decline but merely the reestablishment of the situation prevailing through most of its history.

 

He tells us that America should stop trying to remake the world in its own image, but that its foreign policy must nonetheless reflect its core values so as to resonate with the public. It should attempt to forge the broadest possible moral consensus around the world. Here Kissinger makes his peace with his adopted homeland and tries to put behind him the lingering charges of being cynical and amoral.

 

In the tour d’horizon of countries and regions which follows, Kissinger applies the discerning, case by case approach. He pauses to reflect on the various challenges in relations with Russia, the European Allies, Central Europe, China and Japan, and the Western Hemisphere. He stresses the need to pay attention to history, geography and all the local specifics rather than broad-brush application of universal maxims.

 

Compared with the policies of the last Republican Administration of George Bush, Sr. and the current Democratic Administration of Bill Clinton, Kissinger offers few immediate changes of course. The most notable perhaps is his criticism of Clinton over NATO enlargement. As Kissinger reminds his readers, NATO is after all a military alliance and this must not be confused with an instrument of collective security which the recently created Partnership for Peace tended to do by bringing into NATO deliberations the views of not only the former Soviet satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe but also successor states of the Former Soviet Union. Kissinger urges that Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland be fully integrated into Atlantic institutions as well as into the European Union. He also urges that NATO be reorganized to deal with ‘out of area’ threats.

 

The period 1993-1994 was a critical moment in US-Russian relations. In his 1993 visit to Warsaw, Boris Yeltsin withdrew his objections to Poland joining NATO and in turn the Clinton Administration was weighing the possibility of extending full membership in the Alliance to Russia. It has to be said that at this juncture Henry Kissinger expressed his strong objections and played a significant role in the defeat of Russia’s candidacy.

 

We can get a fairly good idea of Kissinger’s reasoning in the passages relating to American policy on Russia generally in the last chapter of Diplomacy. His remarks here are completely in line with what he said about Russia and its imperial expansion in the chapters on 19^th century European diplomatic history.

 

A realistic approach to Russia meant America had to look at the respective foreign policy interests and national traditions, and to pay less attention to domestic Russian politics and the personalities of its leaders. George Bush, Sr. had viewed Russia through the prism of facilitating relations with Mikhail Gorbachev, the man first tipped by Margaret Thatcher as someone you could do business with. Clinton was similarly building his Russian policy on the ‘democrat’ Yeltsin.

 

From Kissinger’s standpoint, an appropriate policy towards Russia had to take into account the country’s long tradition of expansionism, which he believed continued to be evidenced by Russian military bases in the former Soviet republics and interventionism in their ‘near abroad.’

 

And as if to drive a stake through the heart of unnecessary chumminess with Moscow, Kissinger reminded his readers that Russia had always stood apart from the Western world. It had no democratic traditions or familiarity with modern market economics.. In his words, it did not partake of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Age of Discovery.

 

Indeed, Kissinger’s thinking about Russian history is so clear one might imagine he knows what he is talking about. That is an issue I will return to in a moment in my remarks about the methodology of his scholarship.

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The book ends with an appeal for the United States to apply ‘balance of power’ policies to its overall foreign policy in a manner that he believes will be both an improvement on the received practices and acceptable to his skeptical compatriots: maintaining open lines of communication and close relations with as many nations as possible through overlapping alliance systems in the manner of the grand master of Realpolitik, Otto von Bismarck.

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Methodology

 

 

 

 

Diplomacy is not a work of new scholarship. A large part of the material on the history of diplomacy in the 17th – 19th centuries was surely taken from his lectures going back to the 1960s and, in turn, was anchored in his own dissertation research in the 1950s. The Notes point to classics in the field of European history, mostly published well before Kissinger’s graduate studies. For the second half of the 20th century he draws on presidential papers and other documents published by the U.S. Government Printing Office, on his own private papers and recollections and on some unpublished writings of associates, as well as later monographs.

 

As critics of Kissinger’s Diplomacy pointed out, he belongs to the ‘great man’ school of history, very conservative and very traditional. Given that diplomacy is almost everywhere even today the domain of the executive branch of government with little or no legislative supervision, the‘great man’ approach is, by itself, not necessarily wrong-headed or currently inappropriate.

There has to be something truly dramatic going on in the body politic for foreign policy to generate so much heat that people go out onto the streets and bring down a regime. This happened in living memory when Lyndon Johnson resigned in the face of massive civil disturbances over the conduct of the Vietnam War. It is telling that in this unique situation Kissinger saw fit in Diplomacy to criticize Johnson for not resisting the popular tide and continuing to pressure Hanoi by massive offensive weaponry while the transition of power to a successor was going on.

Kissinger’s conservatism as an historian has another dimension which commentators seem to have ignored totally. This is his adherence to the school of historical fact as kiln-fired bricks from which one can build a strong structure of interpretational certitude. This confidence in history as science is misplaced. There are many professionals today who walk more humbly with their God and acknowledge that their craft is an art, no more. If this is so, Kissinger’s confidence in the safe footing of realism for formulation of foreign policy has to be questioned.

I would not begin to pass judgment on the quality of Kissinger’s treatment of the vast swathes of world history he presents in Diplomacy. It is generally my practice to ‘stick to my knitting,’ which means Russian history. Though Russia is not central to this particular book in the same way as it was central to Kissinger’s government service in the 1970s, neither is it insignificant.

 

.Kissinger’s academic focus before he left the university for Washington was on European diplomacy in the 19th century. In the event, Russia was one of the three decisive players in the first half of the century (Holy Alliance) and one of the 5 or 6 decisive players in the second half of the century. Kissinger’s inability to use Russian language materials was an undeniable disadvantage. In Diplomacy he shows us that he compounded the problem by relying on very dated 19^th century classics of Russian history like Vasili Kliuchevsky.

Kliuchevsky is unquestionably a good starting point for students of Russian history. He was the father of the historiography that came down to Kissinger in the person of Michael Karpovich, the founder of Russian studies at Harvard who taught while Kissinger was a student and faculty member. But his comparative understanding of Russia’s own manifest destiny of borders moving out across the Eurasian land mass was, shall we say, limited and by today’s standards, reading him has mainly curiosity value. To put the issue in terms which will be closer to an American reader, it is as if Kissinger were using de Toqueville as the key source for writing about contemporary America.

 

Among the main 20^th century works on Russia cited in Kissinger are those by his comrade in realism, George Kennan. Without question, George Kennan has a generally high reputation in Washington, where his 1946 ‘Mr.X’ article in Foreign Affairs magazine setting out the theory of containment will always get a round of applause even if his shift in the 1970s to favor détente is graciously overlooked Yet, it has to be said that he came to his scholarship only after a diplomatic career of variable success and he brought with him considerable intellectual baggage from his life experience. Kennan’s choice of sources and interpretation of Russia is tendentious in ways that Kissinger is unable to judge; and this is why it is unsatisfactory that Kissinger does not bring in other sources.

 

Kissinger’s argument in Diplomacy for the separateness of Russian history may be no more than the conventional wisdom of his times. His remark on page 140 that “Paradox was Russia’s most distinguished feature’ is a variation on Churchill’s 1939 witticism about ‘a riddle wrapped in an enigma.’ But then Churchill was not a serious scholar and Kissinger is assumed to be one. The notion of separateness is in fact misleading if not fallacious.

Indeed, there was no Reformation in Russia, meaning no church-state conflict expressed in political treatises against absolutism. But to say that Russia missed the Enlightenment is simply ignorant. As for missing the Age of Discovery, Kissinger seems to forget about Russian naval adventurers in the northern seas, the discoverer of the Bering Strait, the colonizers of Alaska.

It is true that Tsarist Russia rightfully never enjoyed a reputation for practicing democracy, as Kissinger claims. But it had proto-democratic institutions of local self-administration going back to the 1860s (zemstvos). Parliamentary institutions of the variety Kissinger describes in the Germany of Bismarck came into existence under Nicholas II following the Revolution of 1905 and endured right down to the end of the regime.

Kissinger makes far too much of the seemingly unique Russian autocracy as it bears on his own specialty of diplomacy. He tells us that the Tsar’s power was such in the 18^th century that foreign alignments could be changed in a moment by imperial whim. I would ask firstly whether the same could not be said of the Habsburg Empire under Maria Theresa or Joseph I. And I ask secondly why Kissinger is overlooking the activity of cabals with the support if not direction of foreign embassies. The question surely surrounds foreign policy changes during the successive reins of Peter I’s immediate female successors. It recurs in the pressures on the Russian court to adopt one or another position with respect to Napoleonic France and the murder of Emperor Paul I whose diplomatic initiatives seem to have gotten in the way.

But I will not cavil. The larger issue and the one bearing on Kissinger’s prescriptions for a policy vis-à-vis Russia after the Cold War, as I already mentioned, is ‘imperial expansionism.’ Kissinger presents this as the defining national tradition. Reading this I must ask to what major world power, including the United States, such a tendency to fill all available space does not apply? National variations of imperialism were practiced by most of Europe and America in the 19^th century just as they exist today with less colorful plumage. It is surprising to see Kissinger, the ultimate realist, find anything untoward in Russia’s national egoism.

If we may approach the same issue from another angle, one could make the argument that for 250 years Russia was among the key world powers. It emerged on this stage in the second half of the 18^th century and never left it. Therefore, how can one expect that the break-up of the Soviet Union and the shaking loose of its appendages after 1992 would change the determination of this nation to be a major world power once again. Even in its pre-imperial borders, the Russian Federation is more than 10% of the Earth’s land surface with vast natural resources. Anyone who thinks it possible to compel such a nation to settle for the ranking of, say, a medium sized European state is ignoring history and geography.

It is regrettable to see Kissinger indulge in tired mystification of Russia when talking about Russia’s 19^th century nationalist movement for which he draws on the publicist Mikhail Katkov, Fyodor Dostoevsky and other sources which have literary merit but are less than scientific.

It is only by such smoke and mirrors that he can arrive at generalizations like the following which he would otherwise scorn as unduly psychological and irrelevant to foreign relations if, for example, someone served them up as a description of Germany:

“The paradox of Russian history lies in the continuing ambivalence between messianic drive and a pervasive sense of insecurity. In its ultimate aberration, this ambivalence generated a fear that, unless the empire expanded, it would implode.”

It is rather sad to consider that one of the country’s great scholar-statesmen of the 20^th century was persuaded by mystical tripe when formulating and implementing the nation’s policies towards its nuclear adversary. This puts in question the validity of attention to history and local specifics which Kissinger says are distinguishing features of realism versus idealism with its universalist over-simplifications.

 

 

The critical response to Diplomacy

 

The outsized persona of Henry Kissinger, his intellectual brilliance, his challenge to academic scholars and people of action alike, ensured that the publication of Diplomacy would not pass without notice, nor would the work end up on the overstock tables of discount booksellers.

 

Soon after its publication, on March 28, 1994, The New York Times issued a review of Diplomacy by its staff literary critic Michiko Kakutani (‘Books of the Times: A Policy Maker on the Subject He Knows Best”). The generally favorable commentary discerned very well that the author had several objectives at work, not merely to provide a reference work on statecraft. She chose to emphasize the way in which Kissinger was justifying his policies when in office and she finds these chapters more enlightening, because they provide more insight into his strategic thinking and are less burdened with detail, than his couple of massive volumes of memoirs devoted to the same period. She also aptly matches points made in Diplomacy over the period of Kissinger’s government service with accusations and negative marks directed against him by his political detractors in the already very substantial literature of the day.

 

This particular review is noteworthy because it demonstrates magnificently that one does not have to be a foreign affairs specialist to pick through Kissinger’s vast text and understand what he is about. Kakutani’s formal education consisted of a B.A. in English literature from Yale University (1976). But then again, her hard work and intellectual prowess are out of the ordinary. In 1998 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

 

Perhaps the most piquant scandal surrounding the appearance of Diplomacy was touched off by Kissinger’s former colleague at the Harvard Department of History and the Kennedy School of Government, a leading specialist on the uses of history for decision making, Professor Ernest R. May. Kissinger had crossed swords with May during the Vietnam War era in a behind closed doors spat in Washtington over conduct of the war. Their 1994 exchange of courtesies took place in full public view in the pages of The New York Times.

 

The opening shot was May’s three-page review of Diplomacy entitled “The ‘Great Man’ Theory of Foreign Policy,’ published in the Times on April 3, 1994. His critique was at once penetrating and picayune, respectful and vengeful. May’s most dismissive comments were delivered right in the opening paragraph, when he called it “a book of maxims disguised as a history of statecraft. The maxims are often splendid. The history is not.”

 

As May picked up, Diplomacy is most interesting for what it says about Kissinger himself and his world view, and this is not an inconsiderable attraction give the author’s status as one of a handful of Secretaries of State who personally shaped foreign policy. In this regard, our first insight is Kissinger’s reverence for power. Second, his ‘great man’ approach to history rather than looking at wider trends or the economic drivers. Third, without his identifying it as such, May points to the cynicism in many of Kissinger’s characterizations, to what he identifies as Kissinger’s contemptuous treatment of moralizing statesmen like Britain’s 19th Prime Minister William Gladstone.He also points to Kissinger’s unconcealed attraction to the sang- froid and analytic skills of tyrants like Stalin

 

In all fairness, May highlighted Kissinger’s seeming appreciation of Wilson and Reagan for their ability to tap into the wellspring of American motivation to realize their policies whereas Kissinger concedes that realists like Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon left the public unsatisfied emotionally and thus fell short in their objectives. Professor May saw in this and in Kissinger’s occasional favorable mention of values as a necessary component of policy as an offsetting positive to the book. As noted above, I doubt Kissinger meant these seeming bouquets to his political opponents in earnest; they more likely reveal purely intellectual enjoyment of life’s ironies.

 

It is interesting that May saw in Diplomacy parts having ‘the mind-provoking quality of great teaching.” By this he meant the author’s ability to move back and forth between past and present to reveal unseen, even at first glance improbable likenesses that can provide practical direction to policy issues.

 

May complimented Kissinger for combining vision and shrewdness in a way that eludes scholars and journalists. And he praised Kissinger’s call for finding a compromise between moral and strategic interests in policy, for avoiding oversimplification and for digging deep into the specifics of problems awaiting resolution.

 

However, after distributing the flowers, Professor May concluded his essay opining that Kissinger had written shoddy history, that he didn’t get his facts straight telling us “’Diplomacy’ makes the types of mistakes for which students fail to get pass degrees in history.”

 

May faults Kissinger’s survey for giving a spotty account of the history of diplomacy, for focusing on a relatively few major personalities and periods while ignoring whole epochs. Finally, he closed the review with a parting insult: “As a history, Mr Kissinger’s ‘Diplomacy’ is amateurish.”

 

While this kind of personal, acrimonious attack may be commonplace in faculty dining rooms, it must have made titillating reading in The New York Times. Kissinger’s response came in a letter published in the paper three weeks later, on April 24th. He answered directly the alleged factual errors, acquitting himself well. He moved the dispute to its broader philosophical level of his own insistent realism vs May’s moralizing. He refuted the innuendo that he never met a dictator he did not like. And he dismissed as ‘silly’ the notion that his work was amateurish.

 

On May 1, 1994 The New York Times gave Ernest May the last word. He claimed Kissinger was ignoring the lavish praise he had given the book as a source of wisdom for generations to come even as he denied its quality as a history. And he elaborated on this very point in a way which has great relevance to the way the book has been generally received since:

 

“Mr. Kissinger’s scholarly credentials and public stature give his name on the title page the quality of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Thousands of readers may think ‘Diplomacy’ an authoritative history of statecraft since the 17th century. Many may never look at another. That will be their loss, for the book does not take pains to reconstruct the past as the past rather than as a source of parables for the present.”

 

In the autumn of 1994, Orbis, the journal of world affairs of the University of Pennsylvania, published a lengthy review of Diplomacy by its editor, Walter A. McDougall, Professor of History and Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations.

 

This excellent article begins as a review of reviews, describing briefly and very effectively the comments of some of the best minds in the profession, including May’s critique in the Times with pertinent facts on relations of the two former Harvard colleagues, a very thought-provoking review by Simon Schama’s in The New Yorker and contributions by Robert Tucker in The National Interest, Gordon Craig in The New York Review of Books, Michael Howard in Foreign Affairs, Peter Grier in The Christian Science Monitor and Robert Divine in The Philadelphia Enquirer. With few exceptions, the reviewers did not coddle Kissinger. McDougall himself points to some questionable interpretations throughout the work, though he finds chapters that are insightful, even superb (World War I from origins through peace-making). In the end McDougall gives Diplomacy high marks as a history:

 

“…Diplomacy is like an oriental carpet, as interesting for its flaws as its brilliant patters. For it tells us much not only about the past but about history as a craft, about Kissinger himself, and (through our reactions to it) about ourselves. You can’t ask much more of a history book.”

 

McDougall directs particular attention to the question of Kissinger the foreign-born, the ‘European’ among us with his Realpolitik versus idealist native-born Americans, an issue raised by Robert Divine and several of the other reviewers. In McDougall’s opinion the dichotomy between European power politics and American universalism is false. First, because Americans have never fully lived up to the ideals and second, because the ideals themselves were inspired by Europeans. We are urged not to confuse the rhetoric of American foreign policy with the substance based on national interest. In fact, such a compromise is what Kissinger himself is offering in Diplomacy, McDougall concludes.

 

McDougall also takes up the various opinions of reviewers about Kissinger’s treatment of the Vietnam War. The most insightful comes from Divine, who sees a heresy in Kissinger’s analysis which explains why he remains a stranger in American hearts: “First Kissinger indicts the ‘idealistic’ cold war liberals for the misapprehensions and hubris that got us into Vietnam, then he blames the ‘idealistic’ Vietnam protesters for contributing to the agony rather than a resolution, then he castigates the whole country for cracking up when it needed to pull together.” This is not the reading Kissinger's compatriots will be thankful for.

 

McDougall opines at the conclusion of his article that perhaps everyone has got it wrong. After all, the Founding Fathers received from Europe a doctrine of human imperfectability which led them to put separation of powers, checks and balances into the Constitution. Thus, says McDougall: “What we now think of as hard-boiled ‘realism’ is not some import carried to America by the likes of Hans Morgenthau or Henry Kissinger. It was fundamental to the classical wisdom on which the country was founded….Could it be, therefore, that Kissinger truly reflects the philosophical sobriety of our nation’s founders? That Kissinger is more American than Wilson?”

 

In 2010 it is not possible to speak of the impact of a work like Diplomacy without taking into account the reviews on the sites of major book retailers, our modern day vox populi The site of Amazon.com presently posts 89 customer reviews which give a fairly consistent impression of who is reading the master work and to what effect. The impression is that May’s prediction of how the book would eventually be used was 100% prescient.

 

It is sadly apparent that in their attempts to describe the experience of reading Diplomacy most of its lay reviewers are clutching at straws. Their comprehension of what Kissinger is trying to do is very superficial however much they like the narrative The author has so overwhelmed his amateur readership with his erudition that most are breathless and…happy that this outsider, this thinker in the European fashion, is ‘on our side.’

 

Most reviewers in amazon.com view the book as a detailed history of the art of diplomacy written in a polished style which is enjoyable to read. One reader summed this up with memorable directness: “What surprised me was the quality and beauty of Mr. Kissinger's prose. This book is heavy on content, but not to the exclusion of the finer points of literature.”

 

The amazon.com readers found in Diplomacy much fascinating information about how statesmen went about their business during major events of the past. To quote one enthusiast whose review was cited as being ‘very helpful’ by 75 out of 83 visitors to the site: “Important stuff, well articulated.” Another calls it “easily the best single volume on diplomacy that I’ve ever read.” Another glowingly satisfied reader came away with this remarkable conclusion from reading Kissinger: “….it is astounding how the errors and travails of one generation of diplomats set up the conditions for war or peace for the next. Indeed, one can trace back the antecedents of the cold war to the events in the Concert of Europe.

 

Of course a polarizing figure like Kissinger could not avoid receiving some brickbats, such as one caustic reader who commented: “This is a wonderful book. I especially love his winning descriptions on the William of Orange. Brilliant stuff. Too bad Kissenger is a liar and a war criminal. How can you reconcile the blood upon his hands and his obvious erudition, his wit, his intelligence? God knows.”

 

But even those politically unsympathetic to Kissinger’s politics seem to have been caught out: “As much as I despise the policies and actions of Henry Kissinger, I must confess that I found this book to be a very well thought out look at the major historical events of the past century…”

 

A small minority of readers of Diplomacy, including the one voted ‘most helpful’ in Amazon’s poll of visitors to the site, appreciated the dominant theme of the swings in U.S. policy between Wilsonian idealism and Realpolitik. Yet it is not always clear that the substance of these concepts penetrated reader’s minds and their occasional attempts to summarize the distinctions often show confusion.

 

Only one of the reviews spotted how Kissinger marshaled history to inform decisions immediately before modern day statesmen. It would appear future educators of American practitioners of ‘Realpolitik’ and ‘balance of power’ have their work cut out for them.

 

© 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