World Order

by Henry Kissinger

Every international order must sooner or later face the impact of two tendencies challenging its cohesion: either a redefinition of legitimacy or a significant shift in the balance of power. The first tendency occurs when the values underlying international arrangements are fundamentally altered—abandoned by those charged with maintaining them or overturned by revolutionary imposition of an alternative concept of legitimacy. This was the impact of the ascendant West on many traditional orders in the non-Western world; of Islam in its initial wave of expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries; of the French Revolution on European diplomacy in the eighteenth century; of Communist and fascist totalitarianism in the twentieth; and of the Islamist assaults on the fragile state structure of the Middle East in our time.