World Order

by Henry Kissinger

over time the South Vietnamese government would be able, with American economic assistance, to build a functioning society and undergo an evolution toward more transparent institutions (as would in fact occur in South Korea).

The chief obstacle was the difficulty Americans had understanding Hanoi’s way of thinking. The Johnson administration overestimated the impact of American military power. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Nixon administration overestimated the scope for negotiation. For the battle-hardened leadership in Hanoi, having spent their lives fighting for victory, compromise was the same as defeat, and a pluralistic society near inconceivable.

America had lost its first war and also the thread to its concept of world order.

Highly intelligent, with a level of personal insecurity unexpected in such an experienced public figure, Nixon was not the ideal leader for the restoration of domestic peace.

Nevertheless, for the task of redefining the substance of American foreign policy, Nixon was extraordinarily well prepared.

The foreign leaders Nixon encountered would spare him the personal confrontations that made him uncomfortable and engage him in substantive dialogue at which he excelled.

his solitary nature gave him more free time than ordinary political aspirants, he found extensive reading congenial. This combination made him the best prepared incoming president on foreign policy since Theodore Roosevelt.

We must remember the only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended period of peace is when there has been balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitor that the danger of war arises. So I believe in a world in which the United States is powerful. I think it will be a safer world and a better world if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance.

Balancing China against the Soviet Union from a position in which America was closer to each Communist giant than they were to each other was, of course, exactly the design of the evolving strategy.

Because when we see the Chinese as people—and I have seen them all over the world . . .—they are creative, they are productive, they are one of the most capable people in the world. And 800 million Chinese are going to be, inevitably, an enormous economic power, with all that that means in terms of what they could be in other areas if they move in that direction.

Nixon, inveterate anti-Communist, had decided that the imperatives of geopolitical equilibrium overrode the demands of ideological purity—as, fortuitously, had his counterparts in China.

Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern, had taunted, “Come home, America!” Nixon replied in effect that if America shirked its international responsibility, it would surely fail at home. He declared that “only if we act greatly in meeting our responsibilities abroad will we remain a great nation, and only if we remain a great nation will we act greatly in meeting our challenges at home.” At the same time, he sought to temper “our instinct that we knew what was best for others,” which in turn brought on “their temptation to lean on our prescriptions.”

Nixon established a practice of annual reports on the s...

Nixon set the general strategic tone of the documents and reviewed them as they were being completed. They were used as guidance to the governmental agencies dealing with foreign policy and, more important, as an indication to foreign countries of the direction of American strategy.

his 1970 report underscored, peace required a willingness to negotiate and seek new forms of partnership, but these alone would not suffice: “The second element of a durable peace must be America’s strength. Peace, we have learned, cannot be gained by goodwill alone.” Peace would be strengthened, not obstructed, he assessed, by continued demonstrations of American power and a proven willingness to act globally—which

The guiding principle was the effort to build an international order that related power to legitimacy—in

All nations, adversaries and friends alike, must have a stake in preserving the international system. They must feel that their principles are being respected and their national interests secured . . . If the international environment meets their vital concerns, they will work to maintain it.

It was the vision of such an international order that provided the first impetus for the opening to China,

An improved relationship with China would gradually isolate the Soviet Union or impel it to seek better relations with the United States. As long as the United States took care to remain closer to each of the Communist superpowers than they were to each other, the specter of the Sino-Soviet cooperative quest for world hegemony that had haunted American foreign policy for two decades would be stifled.

Nixon’s attempt to make American idealism practical and American pragmatism long-range was attacked by both sides, reflecting the American ambivalence between power and principle.

Nixon undertook a tenacious defense along the Soviet periphery, that he was the first American President to visit Eastern Europe (Yugoslavia, Poland, and Romania), symbolically challenging Soviet control,

One of his oft-repeated operating principles was as follows: “You pay the same price for doing something halfway as for doing it completely. So you might as well do it completely.” As a result, in one eighteen-month period, during 1972–73, he brought about the end of the Vietnam War, an opening to China, a summit with the Soviet Union even while escalating the military effort in response to a North Vietnamese offensive, the switch of Egypt from a Soviet ally to close cooperation with the United States, two disengagement agreements in the Middle East—one between Israel and Egypt, the other with Syria (lasting to this writing, even amidst a brutal civil war)—and the start of the European Security Conference, whose outcome over the long term severely weakened Soviet control of Eastern Europe.

The Watergate debacle, foolishly self-inflicted and ruthlessly exploited by Nixon’s longtime critics, paralyzed executive authority. In a normal period, the various strands of Nixon’s policy would have been consolidated into a new long-term American strategy. Nixon had a glimpse of the promised land, where hope and reality conjoined—the end of the Cold War, a redefinition of the Atlantic Alliance, a genuine partnership with China, a major step toward Middle East peace, the beginning of Russia’s reintegration into an international order—but he did not have time to merge his geopolitical vision with the occasion. It was left to others to undertake that journey.

Ford initiated an active diplomacy to bring about majority rule in southern Africa—the first American President to do so explicitly.

According to an ancient tradition, God preserves humanity despite its many transgressions because, at any one period, there exist ten just individuals who, without being aware of their role, redeem mankind. Gerald Ford was such a man.

the Middle East peace process

Though its origin lay in the elimination of Soviet influence and the start of a peace process by previous administrations, its conclusion under Carter was the culmination of persistent and determined diplomacy.

Reagan combined America’s latent, sometimes seemingly discordant strengths: its idealism, its resilience, its creativity, and its economic vitality.

Sensing potential Soviet weakness and deeply confident in the superiority of the American system (he had read more deeply in American political philosophy than his domestic critics credited), Reagan blended the two elements—power and legitimacy—that had in the previous decade produced American ambivalence. He challenged the Soviet Union to a race in arms and technology that it could not win, based on programs long stymied in Congress. What came to be known as the Strategic Defense Initiative—a defensive shield against missile attack—was largely derided in Congress and the media when Reagan put it forward. Today it is widely credited with convincing the Soviet leadership of the futility of its arms race with the United States.

the same time, Reagan generated psychological momentum with pronouncements at the outer e...

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind swept, God blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace—a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.

Contrast this vision to Trump’s immigration policy.

America as a shining city on a hill was not a metaphor for Reagan; it actually existed for him because he willed it to exist. This was the important difference between Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, whose actual policies were quite parallel and not rarely identical. Nixon treated foreign policy as an endeavor with no end, as a set of rhythms to be managed. He dealt with its intricacies and contradictions like school assignments by an especially demanding teacher. He expected America to prevail but in a long, joyless enterprise, perhaps after he left office.

Reagan, by contrast, summed up his Cold War strategy to an aide in 1977 in a characteristically optimistic epigram: “We win, they lose.” The Nixon style of policymaking was important to restore fluidity to the diplomacy of the Cold War; th...

Hiding complexity behind a veneer of simplicity, Reagan also put forward a vision of reconciliation with the Soviet Union beyond what Nixon would ever have been willing to articulate.

Reagan was convinced that Communist intransigence was based more on ignorance than on ill will, more on misunderstanding than on hostility.

Patrician

when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Bush rejected all proposals to fly to Berlin to celebrate this demonstration of the collapse of Soviet policy.

marauding

vendetta;

a reemergence of the ambivalence that has accompanied American military campaigns in the post–World War II period: the dispatch of thirty thousand additional troops for a “surge” in Afghanistan coupled, in the same announcement, with a public deadline of eighteen months for the beginning of their withdrawal. The purpose of the deadline, it was argued, was to provide an incentive to the Karzai government to accelerate its effort to build a modern central government and army to replace Americans. Yet, in essence, the objective of a guerrilla strategy like the Taliban’s is to outlast the defending forces. For the Kabul leadership, the announcement of a fixed date for losing its outside support set off a process of factional maneuvering, including with the Taliban.

The encouragement of free institutions and cooperative major-power relations offered “the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war.”

Bush condemned past U.S. policies in the region for having sought stability at the price of liberty: Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.

Bush, it has been reported, closed a 2007 planning session with the question “If we’re not there to win, why are we there?” The remark embodied the resoluteness of the President’s character as well as the tragedy of a country whose people have been prepared for more than half a century to send its sons and daughters to remote corners of the world in defense of freedom but whose political system has not been able to muster the same unified and persistent purpose.

gainsay

It was in the conduct of its “hot” wars that America found it difficult to relate purpose to possibility. In only one of the five wars America fought after World War II (Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan), the first Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush, did America achieve the goals it had put forward for entering it without intense domestic division.

The essence of historical events is rarely fully apparent to those living through them.

Former Secretary of State George Shultz has articulated the American ambivalence wisely: Americans, being a moral people, want their foreign policy to reflect the values we espouse as a nation. But Americans, being a practical people, also want their foreign policy to be effective.

The American domestic debate is frequently described as a contest between idealism and realism. It may turn out—for America and the rest of the world—that if America cannot act in both modes, it will not be able to fulfill either.

LEITMOTIF,

In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was nationalism combined with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the governing concepts of our age.