World Order

by Henry Kissinger

New methods of accessing and communicating information unite regions as never before and project events globally—but in a manner that inhibits reflection, demanding of leaders that they register instantaneous reactions in a form expressible in slogans.

The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight.

With a balance of power now perceived as natural and desirable, the ambitions of rulers would be set in counterpoise against each other, at least in theory curtailing the scope of conflicts.

In this sense the European effort to end its conflagration shaped and prefigured the modern sensibility: it reserved judgment on the absolute in favor of the practical and ecumenical; it sought to distill order from multiplicity and restraint.

As Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror admonished the Italian city-states practicing an early version of multipolarity in the fifteenth century, “You are 20 states . . . you are in disagreement among yourselves . . . There must be only one empire, one faith, and one sovereignty in the world.”

for the American vision rested not on an embrace of the European balance-of-power system but on the achievement of peace through the spread of democratic principles.

Of all these concepts of order, Westphalian principles are, at this writing, the sole generally recognized basis of what exists of a world order.

The contemporary, now global Westphalian system—what colloquially is called the world community—has striven to curtail the anarchical nature of the world with an extensive network of international legal and organizational structures designed to foster open trade and a stable international financial system, establish accepted principles of resolving international disputes, and set limits on the conduct of wars when they do occur.

Europe has set out to depart from the state system it designed and to transcend it through a concept of pooled sovereignty.

The United States has alternated between defending the Westphalian system and castigating its premises of balance of power and noninterference in domestic affairs as immoral and outmoded, and sometimes both at once.

Yet after withdrawing from three wars in two generations—each begun with idealistic aspirations and widespread public support but ending in national trauma—America struggles to define the relationship between its power (still vast) and its principles.

both the multifariousness of the human condition and the ingrained human quest for freedom.

Order in this sense must be cultivated; it cannot be imposed.

Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent.

three levels of order. World order describes the concept held by a region or civilization about the nature of just arrangements and the distribution of power thought to be applicable to the entire world.

Any one of these systems of order bases itself on two components: a set of commonly accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action and a balance of power that enforces restraint where rules break down, preventing one political unit from subjugating all others.

The history of most civilizations is a tale of the rise and fall of empires. Order was established by their internal governance, not through an equilibrium among states: strong when the central authority was cohesive, more haphazard under weaker rulers.

For more than a thousand years, in the mainstream of modern European statecraft order has derived from equilibrium, and identity from resistance to universal rule. It is not that European monarchs were more immune to the glories of conquest than their counterparts in other civilizations or more committed to an ideal of diversity in the abstract. Rather, they lacked the strength to impose their will on each other decisively.

full flowering of the medieval concept of world order was envisioned only briefly with the rise of the sixteenth-century Habsburg prince Charles (1500–1558); his rule also ushered in its irrevocable decay.

the end, he was satisfied to base order on equilibrium. Hegemony might be his inheritance but not his objective, as he proved when, after capturing his temporal political rival the French King Francis I in the Battle of Pavia in 1525, he released him—freeing France to resume a separate and adversarial foreign policy at the heart of Europe.

To his son Philip, he bequeathed the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, then the crown of Spain and its global empire.

head navigator Zheng He’s death in 1433, the Chinese Emperor put an end to overseas adventures, and the fleet was abandoned. China continued to insist on the universal relevance of its principles of world order, but it would henceforth cultivate them at home and with the peoples along its borders. It never again attempted a comparable naval effort—until perhaps our own time.

International relations, once a regional enterprise, would henceforth be geographically global, with the center of gravity in Europe, in which the concept of world order was defined and its implementation determined.

hence individual conscience—not established orthodoxy—was put forward as the key to salvation.

The Protestant Reformation destroyed the concept of a world order sustained by the “two swords” of papacy and empire. Christianity was split and at war with itself.

In a period of general upheaval, a country that maintains domestic authority is in a position to exploit chaos in neighboring states for larger international objectives.

In feudal systems, authority was personal; governance reflected the ruler’s will but was also circumscribed by tradition, limiting the resources available for a country’s national or international actions.

When Richelieu conducted the policies of his country, Machiavelli’s treatises on statesmanship circulated. It is not known whether Richelieu was familiar with these texts on the politics of power. He surely practiced their essential principles.

He invented the idea that the state was an abstract and permanent entity existing in its own right. Its requirements were not determined by the ruler’s personality, family interests, or the universal demands of religion. Its lodestar was the national interest following calculable principles—what later came to be known as raison d’état. Hence it should be the basic unit of international relations.

“Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter,” he said. “The state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never.”

Richelieu’s design would endure through vast upheavals. For two and a half centuries—from the emergence of Richelieu in 1624 to Bismarck’s proclamation of the German Empire in 1871—the aim of keeping Central Europe (more or less the territory of contemporary Germany, Austria, and northern Italy) divided remained the guiding principle of French foreign policy.

Three conclusions emerge from Richelieu’s career. First, the indispensable element of a successful foreign policy is a long-term strategic concept based on a careful analysis of all relevant factors. Second, the statesman must distill that vision by analyzing and shaping an array of ambiguous, often conflicting pressures into a coherent and purposeful direction. He (or she) must know where this strategy is leading and why. And, third, he must act at the outer edge of the possible, bridging the gap between his society’s experiences and its aspirations.

The war had shattered pretensions to universality or confessional solidarity. Begun as a struggle of Catholics against Protestants, particularly after France’s entry against the Catholic Holy Roman Empire it had turned into a free-for-all of shifting and conflicting alliances. Much like the Middle Eastern conflagrations of our own period, sectarian alignments were invoked for solidarity and motivation in battle but were just as often discarded, trumped by clashes of geopolitical interests or simply the ambitions of outsized personalities.

The Peace of Westphalia became a turning point in the history of nations because the elements it set in place were as uncomplicated as they were sweeping. The state, not the empire, dynasty, or religious confession, was affirmed as the building block of European order.

Diplomatic exchanges, including the stationing of resident representatives in the capitals of fellow states (a practice followed before then generally only by Venetians), were designed to regulate relations and promote the arts of peace. The

The genius of this system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive.

The nineteenth-century British statesman Lord Palmerston expressed its basic principle as follows: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

“When people ask me . . . for what is called a policy, the only answer is that we mean to do what may seem to be best, upon each occasion as it arises, making the Interests of Our Country one’s guiding principle.”

What political theory could then explain the origin and justify the functions of secular political order? In his Leviathan, published in 1651, three years after the Peace of Westphalia, Thomas Hobbes provided such a theory.

The sovereign state’s monopoly on power was established as the only way to overcome the perpetual fear of violent

The international arena remained in the state of nature and was anarchical because there was no world sovereign available to make it secure and none could be practically constituted. Thus each state would have to place

book grew out of a dinner conversation with Charles Hill,

They were J. Stapleton Roy and Winston Lord (on Asia); Michael Gfoeller and Emma Sky (on the Middle East);

Professor Rana Mitter of Oxford University (on the entire manuscript).

Les Gelb, Michael Korda, Peggy Noonan, and...