Diplomacy

by Henry Kissinger

In the twentieth century, no country has influenced international relations as decisively and at the same time as ambivalently as the United States. No society has more firmly insisted on the inadmissibility of intervention in the domestic affairs of other states, or more passionately asserted that its own values were universally applicable. No nation has been more pragmatic in the day-to-day conduct of its diplomacy, or more ideological in the pursuit of its historic moral convictions. No country has been more reluctant to engage itself abroad even while undertaking alliances and commitments of unprecedented reach and scope.

Both schools of thought—of America as beacon and of America as crusader—envision as normal a global international order based on democracy, free commerce, and international law. Since no such system has ever existed, its evocation often appears to other societies as utopian, if not naïve.

What is new about the emerging world order is that, for the first time, the United States can neither withdraw from the world nor dominate it. America cannot change the way it has perceived its role throughout its history, nor should it want to.

By the end of the Second World War in 1945, the United States was so powerful (at one point about 35 percent of the world’s entire economic production was American) that it seemed as if it was destined to shape the world according to its preferences. John F. Kennedy declared confidently in 1961 that America was strong enough to “pay any price, bear any burden” to ensure the success of liberty. Three decades later, the United States is in less of a position to insist on the immediate realization of all its desires.

In his famous Fourteen Points, Woodrow Wilson told the Europeans that, henceforth, the international system should be based not on the balance of power but on ethnic self-determination, that their security should depend not on military alliances but on collective security, and that their diplomacy should no longer be conducted secretly by experts but on the basis of “open agreements, openly arrived at.”

Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system. Empires have no need for a balance of power. That is how the United States has conducted its foreign policy in the Americas, and China through most of its history in Asia.

By pursuing its own selfish interests, each state was presumed to contribute to progress, as if some unseen hand were guaranteeing that freedom of choice for each state assured well-being for all.

During the Cold War, America was engaged in an ideological, political, and strategic struggle with the Soviet Union in which a two-power world operated according to principles quite different from those of a balance-of-power system.

No other society has asserted that the principles of ethical conduct apply to international conduct in the same way that they do to the individual—a notion that is the exact opposite of Richelieu’s raison d’état. America has maintained that the prevention of war is as much a legal as a diplomatic challenge, and that what it resists is not change as such but the method of change, especially the use of force.

In the post-Cold War world, the various elements are likely to grow more congruent and more symmetrical. The relative military power of the United States will gradually decline. The absence of a clear-cut adversary will produce domestic pressure to shift resources from defense to other priorities—a process which has already started.

Bordering on three different cultural spheres—Europe, Asia, and the Muslim world—Russia contained populations of each, and hence was never a national state in the European sense. Constantly changing shape as its rulers annexed contiguous territories, Russia was an empire out of scale in comparison with any of the European countries.

leaders. Since the Congress of Vienna, the Russian Empire has placed its military forces on foreign soil more often than any other major power. Analysts frequently explain Russian expansionism as stemming from a sense of insecurity. But Russian writers have far more often justified Russia’s outward thrust as a messianic vocation.

For 500 years before it was forcibly opened by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854, Japan did not even deign to balance the barbarians off against each other or to invent tributary relationships, as the Chinese had.

They run huge bureaucracies of such complexity that, often, the energy of these statesmen is more consumed by serving the administrative machinery than by defining a purpose. They rise to eminence by means of qualities that are not necessarily those needed to govern, and are even less suited to building an international order. And the only available model of a multistate system was one built by Western societies, which many of the participants may reject.

Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them.

Roosevelt was a sophisticated analyst of the balance of power. He insisted on an international role for America because its national interest demanded it, and because a global balance of power was inconceivable to him without American participation.

To hardened veterans of a European diplomacy based on the balance of power, Wilson’s views about the ultimately moral foundations of foreign policy appeared strange, even hypocritical.

The French leader who made the sale, Napoleon Bonaparte, advanced an Old World explanation for such a one-sided transaction: “This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have just given England a maritime rival that sooner or later will lay low her pride.”2

James Madison condemned war as the germ of all evils—as the precursor of taxes and armies and all other “instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

James Monroe, saw no contradiction in defending westward expansion on the ground that it was necessary to turn America into a great power:

American leaders rejected the European idea that the morality of states should be judged by different criteria than the morality of individuals.

If Americans were obliged to invest their foreign policy with the same degree of rectitude as they did their personal lives, how was security to be analyzed; indeed, in the extreme, did this mean that survival was subordinate to morality? Or did America’s devotion to free institutions confer an automatic aura of morality on even the most seemingly self-serving acts?

Like his predecessors, Roosevelt was convinced of America’s beneficent role in the world. But unlike them, Roosevelt held that America had real foreign policy interests that went far beyond its interest in remaining unentangled. Roosevelt started from the premise that the United States was a power like any other, not a singular incarnation of virtue. If its interests collided with those of other countries, America had the obligation to draw on its strength to prevail.

No other president defined America’s world role so completely in terms of national interest, or identified the national interest so comprehensively with the balance of power. Roosevelt shared the view of his countrymen, that America was the best hope for the world. But unlike most of them, he did not believe that it could preserve the peace or fulfill its destiny simply by practicing civic virtues.

Roosevelt at first saw no need to engage America in the specifics of the European balance of power because he considered it more or less self-regulating. But he left little doubt that, if such a judgment were to prove wrong, he would urge America to engage itself to re-establish the equilibrium. Roosevelt gradually came to see Germany as a threat to the European balance and began to identify America’s national interest with those of Great Britain and France.

the threat it posed to the balance of power: “…do you not believe that if Germany won in this war, smashed the English Fleet and destroyed the British Empire, within a year or two she would insist upon taking the dominant position in South and Central America…?”32

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 international systems. Yet Wilson grasped the mainsprings of American motivation, perhaps the principal one being that America simply did not see itself as a nation like any other. It lacked both the theoretical and the practical basis for the European-style diplomacy of constant adjustment of the nuances of power from a posture of moral neutrality for the sole purpose of preserving an ever-shifting balance.

Americans could be moved to great deeds only through a vision that coincided with their perception of their country as exceptional. However intellectually attuned to the way the diplomacy of the Great Powers actually operated, Roosevelt’s approach failed to persuade his countrymen that they needed to enter the First World War. Wilson, on the other hand, tapped his people’s emotions with arguments that were as morally elevated as they were largely incomprehensible to foreign leaders.

Wilson grasped that America’s instinctive isolationism could be overcome only by an appeal to its belief in the exceptional nature of its ideals.

Nothing annoyed Roosevelt as much as high-sounding principles backed by neither the power nor the will to implement them. He wrote to a friend: “If I must choose between a policy of blood and iron and one of milk and water… why I am for the policy of blood and iron. It is better not only for the nation but in the long run for the world.”36

Wilson maintained that America was essentially disinterested, hence should emerge as mediator.

Neither Wilson nor his later disciples, through the present, have been willing to face the fact that, to foreign leaders imbued with less elevated maxims, America’s claim to altruism evokes a certain aura of unpredictability; whereas the national interest can be calculated, altruism depends on the definition of its practitioner.

Disdaining the balance of power, he insisted that America’s role was “not to prove… our selfishness, but our greatness.”40 If that was true, America had no right to hoard its values for itself. As early as 1915, Wilson put forward the unprecedented doctrine that the security of America was inseparable from the security of all the rest of mankind. This implied that it was henceforth America’s duty to oppose aggression everywhere:

Statesmen, even warriors, focus on the world in which they live; to prophets, the “real” world is the one they want to bring into being.

Proving that the time spent in faculty meetings, where hairsplitting exegesis reigns supreme, had not been wasted, he developed an extraordinary interpretation of what George Washington had really meant when he warned against foreign entanglements. Wilson redefined “foreign” in a way that would surely have astonished the first president. What Washington meant, according to Wilson, was that America must avoid becoming entangled in the purposes of others. But, Wilson argued, nothing that concerns humanity “can be foreign or indifferent to us.”42 Hence America had an unlimited charter to involve itself abroad.

compromise. Total victory was the only valid goal. Roosevelt would almost certainly have expressed America’s war aims in political and strategic terms; Wilson, flaunting American disinterest, defined America’s war aims in entirely moral categories.

We set this Nation up to make men free, and we did not confine our conception and purpose to America, and now we will make men free. If we did not do that, all the fame of America would be gone, and all her power would be dissipated.49

Wilson’s historic achievement lies in his recognition that Americans cannot sustain major international engagements that are not justified by their moral faith. His downfall was in treating the tragedies of history as aberrations, or as due to the shortsightedness and the evil of individual leaders, and in his rejection of any objective basis for peace other than the force of public opinion and the worldwide spread of democratic institutions.

The basic premise of collective security was that all nations would view every threat to security in the same way and be prepared to run the same risks in resisting it.

The implication of Wilsonianism has been that America resisted, above all, the method of change, and that it had no strategic interests worth defending if they were threatened by apparently legal methods.

Trusting in the rule of law, it has found it difficult to reconcile its faith in peaceful change with the historical fact that almost all significant changes in history have involved violence and upheaval.

Upon learning of Cardinal Richelieu’s death, Pope Urban VIII is alleged to have said, “If there is a God, the Cardinal de Richelieu will have much to answer for. If not… well, he had a successful life.”

By the time the war ended in 1648, Central Europe had been devastated and Germany had lost almost a third of its population.

As a prince of the Church, Richelieu ought to have welcomed Ferdinand’s drive to restore Catholic orthodoxy. But Richelieu put the French national interest above any religious goals. His vocation as cardinal did not keep Richelieu from seeing the Habsburg attempt to re-establish the Catholic religion as a geopolitical threat

To him, it was not a religious act but a political maneuver by Austria to achieve dominance in Central Europe and thereby to reduce France to second-class status.

If Northern Germany were also to fall under Habsburg rule, France would become perilously weak in relation to the Holy Roman Empire.

In pursuit of what would today be called a national security interest and was then labeled—for the first time—raison d’état, Richelieu was prepared to side with the Protestant princes and exploit the schism within the Universal Church.

Richelieu treated Ferdinand’s faith as a strategic challenge. Though privately religious, he viewed his duties as minister in entirely secular terms. Salvation might be his personal objective, but to Richelieu, the statesman, it was irrelevant. “Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter,” he once said. “The state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never.”6 In other words, states do not receive credit in any world for doing what is right; they are only rewarded for being strong enough to do what is necessary.

In an age still dominated by religious zeal and ideological fanaticism, a dispassionate foreign policy free of moral imperatives stood out like a snow-covered Alp in the desert.

The success of a policy of raison d’état depends above all on the ability to assess power relationships. Universal values are defined by their perception and are not in need of constant reinterpretation; indeed they are inconsistent with it. But determining the limits of power requires a blend of experience and insight, and constant adjustment to circumstance. In theory, of course, the balance of power should be quite calculable; in practice, it has proved extremely difficult to work out realistically. Even more complicated is harmonizing one’s calculations with those of other states, which is the precondition for the operation of a balance of power.