World Order

by Henry Kissinger

Europe thus finds itself suspended between a past it seeks to overcome and a future it has not yet defined.

The conflict in Syria and Iraq and the surrounding areas has thus become the symbol of an ominous new trend: the disintegration of statehood into tribal and sectarian units, some of them cutting across existing borders, in violent conflict with each other or manipulated by competing outside factions, observing no common rules other than the law of superior force—what Hobbes might have called the state of nature.

The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century’s decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.

With nearly every president insisting that America had universal principles while other countries merely had national interests, the United States has risked extremes of overextension and disillusioned withdrawal.

The implication that other nations had “selfish interests” while America had “principles” and “destiny” was as old as the Republic.

Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation—at least in the foreign policy world—depend on context and relevance.