World Order

by Henry Kissinger

The essence of building a constructive world order is that no single country, neither China nor the United States, is in a position to fill by itself the world leadership role of the sort that the United States occupied in the immediate post–Cold War period, when it was materially and psychologically preeminent.

In East Asia, something approaching a balance of power exists between China, Korea, Japan, and the United States, with Russia and Vietnam peripheral participants. But it differs from the historic balances of power in that one of the key participants, the United States, has its center of gravity located far from the geographic center of East Asia—and, above all, because the leaders of both countries whose military forces conceive themselves as adversaries in their military journals and pronouncements also proclaim partnership as a goal on political and economic issues. So it comes about that the United States is an ally of Japan and a proclaimed partner of China—a situation comparable to Bismarck’s when he made an alliance with Austria balanced by a treaty with Russia. Paradoxically, it was precisely that ambiguity which preserved the flexibility of the European equilibrium. And its abandonment—in the name of transparency—started a sequence of increasing confrontations, culminating in World War I.

For over a century—since the Open Door policy and Theodore Roosevelt’s mediation of the Russo-Japanese War—it has been a fixed American policy to prevent hegemony in Asia. Under contemporary conditions, it is an inevitable policy in China to keep potentially adversarial forces as far from its borders as possible. The two countries navigate in that space. The preservation of peace depends on the restraint with which they pursue their objectives and on their ability to ensure that competition remains political and diplomatic.

Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy. In Asia, it must combine a balance of power with a concept of partnership. A purely military definition of the balance will shade into confrontation. A purely psychological approach to partnership will raise fears of hegemony. Wise statesmanship must try to find that balance. For outside it, disaster beckons.

Emerging victorious in the 1912 election with just 42 percent of the popular vote and only two years after his transition from academia to national politics, Woodrow Wilson turned the vision America had asserted largely for itself into an operational program applicable to the entire world. The world was sometimes inspired, occasionally puzzled, yet always obliged to pay attention, both by the power of America and by the scope of his vision.

When, in 1917, Wilson declared that the grave outrages of one party, Germany, had obliged the United States to join the war in “association” with the belligerents of the other side (Wilson declined to contemplate an “alliance”), he maintained that America’s purposes were not self-interested but universal: We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind.

Contemporary research has shown that the motivation on the Communist side was complex. When the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung asked Stalin’s approval for the invasion in April 1950, the Soviet dictator encouraged him. He had learned from the defection of Tito two years earlier that first-generation Communist leaders were especially difficult to fit into the Soviet satellite system that he thought imperative for Russia’s national interest. Starting with Mao’s visit to Moscow in late 1949—less than three months after the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed—Stalin had been uneasy about the looming potential of China led by a man of Mao’s dominating attributes. An invasion of South Korea might divert China into a crisis on its borders, deflect America’s attention from Europe to Asia, and, in any event, absorb some of America’s resources in that effort. If achieved with Soviet support, Pyongyang’s unification project might give the Soviet Union a dominant position in Korea and, in view of the historical suspicions of these countries for each other, create a kind of counterbalance to China in Asia. Mao followed Stalin’s lead—conveyed to him by Kim Il-sung in almost certainly exaggerated terms—for the converse reason; he feared encirclement by the Soviet Union, whose acquisitive interest in Korea had been demonstrated over the centuries and was even then displayed in the demands for ideological subservience Stalin was making as a price for the Sino-Soviet alliance.

On one occasion, an eminent Chinese told me that letting Stalin lead Mao into authorizing the Korean War was the only strategic mistake Mao ever made because, in the end, the Korean War delayed Chinese unification by a century in that it led to America’s commitment to Taiwan. Be that as it may, the origin of the Korean War was less a Sino-Soviet conspiracy against America than a three-cornered maneuver for dominance within the Communist international order, with Kim Il-sung driving up the bidding to gain support for a program of conquest whose global consequences in the end surprised all of the main participants.

the outset of the Cold War, the non-Communist orientation of a government had been taken—perhaps overly expansively—as proof that it was worth preserving against Soviet designs. Now, in the emerging atmosphere of recrimination, the inability of South Vietnam to emerge as a fully operational democracy (amidst a bloody civil war) led to bitter denunciation. A war initially supported by a considerable majority and raised to its existing dimensions by a president citing universal principles of liberty and human rights was now decried as evidence of a unique American moral obtuseness. Charges of immorality and deception were used with abandon; “barbaric” was a favorite adjective. American military involvement was described as a form of “insanity” revealing profound flaws in the American way of life; accusations of wanton slaughter of civilians became routine.

The domestic debate over the Vietnam War proved to be one of the most scarring in American history. The administrations that had involved America in Indochina were staffed by individuals of substantial intelligence and probity who suddenly found themselves accused of near-criminal folly and deliberate deception. What had started as a reasonable debate about feasibility and strategy turned into street demonstrations, invective, and violence.

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.

The essence of such upheavals is that while they are usually underpinned by force, their overriding thrust is psychological. Those under assault are challenged to defend not only their territory but the basic assumptions of their way of life, their moral right to exist and to act in a manner that, until the challenge, had been treated as beyond question. The natural inclination, particularly of leaders from pluralistic societies, is to engage with the representatives of the revolution, expecting that what they really want is to negotiate in good faith on the premises of the existing order and arrive at a reasonable solution. The order is submerged not primarily from military defeat or an imbalance in resources (though this often follows) but from a failure to understand the nature and scope of the challenge arrayed against it. In this sense, the ultimate test of the Iranian nuclear negotiations is whether the Iranian professions of a willingness to resolve the issue through talks are a strategic shift or a tactical device—in pursuit of long-prevailing policy—and whether the West deals with the tactical as if it were a strategic change of direction.

The second cause of an international order’s crisis is when it proves unable to accommodate a major change in power relations. In some cases, the order collapses because one of its major components ceases to play its role or ceases to exist—as happened to the Communist international order near the end of the twentieth century when the Soviet Union dissolved. Or else a rising power may reject the role allotted to it by a system it did not design, and the established powers may prove unable to adapt the system’s equilibrium to incorporate its rise. Germany’s emergence posed such a challenge to the system in the twentieth century in Europe, triggering two catastrophic wars from which Europe has never fully recovered. The emergence of China poses a comparable structural challenge in the twenty-first century. The presidents of the major twenty-first-century competitors—the United States and China—have vowed to avoid repeating Europe’s tragedy through a “n...

To strike a balance between the two aspects of order—power and legitimacy—is the essence of statesmanship. Calculations of power without a moral dimension will turn every disagreement into a test of strength; ambition will know no resting place; countries will be propelled into unsustainable tours de force of elusive calculations regarding the shifting configuration of power. Moral proscriptions without concern for equilibrium, on the other hand, tend toward either crusades ...

In our time—in part for the technological reasons discussed in Chapter 9—power is in unprecedented flux, while claims to legitimacy every decade multiply their scope in hitherto-inconceivable ways. When weapons have become capable of obliterating civilization and the interactions between value systems are rendered instantaneous and unprecedentedly intrusive, the establish...