Diplomacy

by Henry Kissinger

reductio ad absurdum (an argument so immoral and dangerous that it refutes itself)

It fell to Daniel de Priezac, a scholar close to the royal administration, to make the formal rebuttal, almost certainly with Richelieu’s own imprimatur.

Rather, he argued, it was Richelieu’s critics whose souls were at risk. Since France was the most pure and devoted of the European Catholic powers, Richelieu, in serving the interests of France, was serving as well the interests of the Catholic religion.

an argument that Richelieu must have hated as it returned to justifying national security actions with religion/principle

Another of Richelieu’s critics, Mathieu de Morgues, accused the Cardinal of manipulating religion “as your preceptor Machiavelli showed the ancient Romans doing, shaping it… explaining it and applying it as far as it aids the advancement of your designs.”11 De Morgues’s criticism was as telling as that of Jansenius, and as ineffective. Richelieu was indeed the manipulator described, and did use religion precisely in the manner being alleged.

Like Machiavelli, he might well have preferred a world of more refined moral sensibilities, but he was convinced that history would judge his statesmanship by how well he had used the conditions and the factors he was given to work with.

Richelieu thwarted the Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire was divided among more than 300 sovereigns, each free to conduct an independent foreign policy. Germany failed to become a nation-state; absorbed in petty dynastic quarrels, it turned inward. As a result, Germany developed no national political culture and calcified into a provincialism from which it did not emerge until late in the nineteenth century when Bismarck unified it.

When Germany did finally unify, it had so little experience with defining its national interest that it produced many of this century’s worst tragedies.

Wilsonian idealism, proclaiming a selfless policy, is possessed of the constant danger of neglecting the interests of state; Richelieu’s raison d’état threatens self-destructive tours de force.

Once all states played by the same rules, gains became much more difficult to achieve.

Raison d’état provided a rationale for the behavior of individual states, but it supplied no answer to the challenge of world order. Raison d’état can lead to a quest for primacy or to establishment of equilibrium.

Products of the Enlightenment, they mirrored the eighteenth-century faith that out of a clash of competing interests harmony and fairness would emerge. The concept of the balance of power was simply an extension of conventional wisdom.

None of the key Continental countries felt any special obligation to the balance of power so lauded by the philosophers. Russia thought of itself as too distant. Prussia, as the smallest of the Great Powers, was still too weak to affect the general equilibrium. Every king consoled himself with the thought that strengthening his own rule was the greatest possible contribution to the general peace, and left it to the ubiquitous invisible hand to justify his exertions without limiting his ambitions.

When any state threatened to become dominant, its neighbors formed a coalition—not in pursuit of a theory of international relations but out of pure self-interest to block the ambitions of the most powerful.

William played the equivalent of Theodore Roosevelt’s later role in America, warning his essentially isolationist people that their safety depended on participation in a balance of power overseas. And his countrymen accepted his views far more quickly than Americans embraced Roosevelt’s.

The difference between the foreign-policy strategies of the Whigs and the Tories was practical, not philosophical; tactical, not strategic; and it reflected each party’s assessment of Great Britain’s vulnerability. The Whigs’ policy of wait-and-see reflected the conviction that Great Britain’s margin of safety was wide indeed. The Tories found Great Britain’s position more precarious. Almost precisely the same distinction would separate American isolationists and American globalists in the twentieth century.

Having sought pre-eminence for a century and a half in the name of raison d’état, France after the Revolution had returned to earlier concepts of universality. No longer did France invoke raison d’état for its expansionism, even less the glory of its fallen kings. After the Revolution, France made war on the rest of Europe to preserve its revolution and to spread republican ideals throughout Europe.

In Russia, everything depended on the whim of the tsar. It was entirely possible for Russian foreign policy to veer from liberalism to conservatism depending on the mood of the incumbent tsar—as indeed it did under the reigning Tsar Alexander I. At home, however, no liberal experiment was ever attempted.

The balance of power inhibits the capacity to overthrow the international order; agreement on shared values inhibits the desire to overthrow the international order. Power without legitimacy tempts tests of strength; legitimacy without power tempts empty posturing.

But how a people perceives the fairness of a particular world order is determined as much by its domestic institutions as by judgments on tactical foreign-policy issues. For that reason, compatibility between domestic institutions is a reinforcement for peace.

For nations simply do not define their purpose as cogs in a security system. Security makes their existence possible; it is never their sole or even principal purpose.

Austria and Prussia were the leading German states, after which came a number of medium-sized states—Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony among them—which had been enlarged and strengthened. The 300-odd pre-Napoleonic states were combined into some thirty and bound together in a new entity called the German Confederation.

In dealing with the defeated enemy, the victors designing a peace settlement must navigate the transition from the intransigence vital to victory to the conciliation needed to achieve a lasting peace. A punitive peace mortgages the international order because it saddles the victors, drained by their wartime exertions, with the task of holding down a country determined to undermine the settlement.

The British believed no formal guarantee was either required or could add much to commonsense analysis.

Talleyrand expressed the importance of having some principle of restraint this way: If… the minimum of resisting power… were equal to the maximum of aggressive power… there would be a real equilibrium.

“Rights,” according to Metternich, simply existed in the nature of things. Whether they were affirmed by laws or by constitutions was an essentially technical question which had nothing to do with bringing about freedom. Metternich considered guaranteeing rights to be a paradox: “Things which ought to be taken for granted lose their force when they emerge in the form of arbitrary pronouncements…. Objects mistakenly made subject to legislation result only in the limitation, if not the complete annulment, of that which is attempted to be safeguarded.”6

For Metternich, moderation was a philosophical virtue and a practical necessity. In his instructions to an Austrian ambassador, he once wrote: “It is more important to eliminate the claims of others than to press our own…. We will obtain much in proportion as we ask little.”

Yet the crux of Metternich’s problem was that necessity obliged him to treat as practical what Great Britain considered abstract and speculative. Domestic upheaval happened to be the danger Austria found the least manageable.

no British government had ever undertaken a permanent commitment to review events as they arose without confronting a specific threat. Participating in a European government was no more attractive to British public opinion than the League of Nations would be to Americans a hundred years later, and for much the same reasons.

To Castlereagh and Wilson, security was collective; if any nation was victimized, in the end all would become victims.

The weakness of collective security is that interests are rarely uniform, and that security is rarely seamless. Members of a general system of collective security are therefore more likely to agree on inaction than on joint action; they either will be held together by glittering generalities, or may witness the defection of the most powerful member, who feels the most secure and therefore least needs the system. Neither

In other words, Great Britain would reserve the right to steer its own course according to the merits of each case and guided only by its national interest, a policy which made allies either auxiliaries or irrelevant.

The British view of security was not unlike the view of American isolationists, in that Great Britain felt impervious to all but cataclysmic upheavals.

British leaders did not in any sense consider the spread of representative institutions as a key to peace in the way their American counterparts generally did, nor did they feel concerned about institutions different from their own.

Its unsentimental persistence and self-centered determination earned Great Britain the epithet “Perfidious Albion.” This type of diplomacy may not have reflected a particularly elevated attitude, but it preserved the peace of Europe, especially after the Metternich system began fraying at the edges.

Yet any pragmatic policy—indeed, especially a pragmatic policy—must be based on some fixed principle in order to prevent tactical skill from dissipating into a random thrashing about.

And the fixed principle of British foreign policy, whether acknowledged or not, was its role as protector of the balance of power, which in general meant supporting the weaker against the stronger.

One cause of Great Britain’s single-mindedness in times of crisis was the representative nature of its political institutions. Since 1700, public opinion had played an important role in British foreign policy. No other country in eighteenth-century Europe had an “opposition” point of view with respect to foreign policy;

Thus, Palmerston approvingly quoted Canning’s own pragmatic adage: “That those who have checked improvement because it is innovation, will one day or other be compelled to accept innovation when it has ceased to be improvement.”

America came to believe that the spread of democracy would ensure peace; indeed, that a reliable peace could be achieved in no other way. Great Britain might prefer a particular domestic structure but would run no risks on its behalf.

balance-of-power policy: the German word Realpolitik replaced the French term raison d’état without, however, changing its meaning.

Palmerston once summed up Napoleon’s statesmanship by saying: “…ideas proliferated in his head like rabbits in a hutch.”5 The trouble was that these ideas did not relate to any overriding concept.

Whereas Richelieu had understood that a weak Central Europe was the key to French security, Napoleon’s policy, driven by his quest for publicity, concentrated on the periphery of Europe, the only place where gains could be made at minimum risk.

The responsibility of statesmen, however, is to resolve complexity rather than to contemplate it.

The more Austria feared Napoleon, the more it would have to make concessions to Prussia, and the greater would become Prussia’s diplomatic flexibility.

Bismarck asserted that power supplied its own legitimacy; the conservatives argued that legitimacy represented a value beyond calculations of power.

The bargaining position of a country depends on the options it is perceived to have. Closing them off eases the adversary’s calculations, and constricts those of the practitioners of Realpolitik.

This bitter declaration of faith was the functional equivalent of Richelieu’s assertion that, since the soul is immortal, man must submit to the judgment of God but that states, being mortal, can only be judged by what works.

Just as Gerlach found it inconceivable that the principle of legitimacy could inspire more than one interpretation, it was beyond Bismarck’s comprehension that statesmen might differ in the way they assessed the national interest.

Attempts to tilt the balance of power had, of course, occurred even in the heyday of the Metternich system. But then every effort would have been made to legitimize the change by means of European consensus. The Metternich system sought adjustments through European congresses rather than through a foreign policy of threat and counterthreat.

The bane of stable international systems is their nearly