World Order

by Henry Kissinger

In such conditions, America has to make the decision on the basis of what achieves the best combination of security and morality, recognizing that both will be imperfect.

When states are not governed in their entirety, the international or regional order itself begins to disintegrate. Blank spaces denoting lawlessness come to dominate parts of the map. The collapse of a state may turn its territory into a base for terrorism, arms supply, or sectarian agitation against neighbors.

As this void looms, the Middle East is caught in a confrontation akin to—but broader than—Europe’s pre-Westphalian wars of religion. Domestic and international conflicts reinforce each other. Political, sectarian, tribal, territorial, ideological, and traditional national-interest disputes merge. Religion is “weaponized” in the service of geopolitical objectives; civilians are marked for extermination based on their sectarian affiliation. Where states are able to preserve their authority, they consider their authority without limits, justified by the necessities of survival; where states disintegrate, they become fields for the contests of surrounding powers in which authority too often is achieved through total disregard for human well-being and dignity.

Participants in the contests search for outside support, particularly from Russia and the United States, in turn shaping the relations between them. Russia’s goals are largely strategic, at a minimum to prevent Syrian and Iraqi jihadist groups from spreading into its Muslim territories and, on the larger global scale, to enhance its position vis-à-vis the United States (thereby reversing the results of the 1973 war described earlier in this chapter). America’s quandary is that it condemns Assad on moral grounds—correctly—but the largest contingent of his opponents are al-Qaeda and more extreme groups, which the United States needs to oppose strategically. Neither Russia nor the United States has been able to decide whether to cooperate or to maneuver against each other—though events in Ukraine may resolve this ambivalence in the direction of Cold War attitudes. Iraq is contested between multiple camps—this

After America’s bitter experiences and under conditions so inhospitable to pluralism, it is tempting to let these upheavals run their course and concentrate on dealing with the successor states. But several of the potential successors have declared America and the Westphalian world order as principal enemies.

If order cannot be established, vast areas risk being opened to anarchy and to forms of extremism that will spread organically into other regions.

Submerged in waves of conquest by Alexander the Great, the early Islamic armies, and later the Mongols—shocks that all but erased the historical memory and political autonomy of other peoples—Persia retained its confidence in its cultural superiority. It bowed to its conquerors as a temporary concession but retained its independence through its worldview, charting “great interior spaces” in poetry and mysticism and revering its connection with the heroic ancient rulers

taghut;

When government is conceived of as divine, dissent will be treated as blasphemy, not political opposition.

a new paradox took shape, in the form of a dualistic challenge to international order. With Iran’s revolution, an Islamist movement dedicated to overthrowing the Westphalian system gained control over a modern state and asserted its “Westphalian” rights and privileges—taking up its seat at the United Nations, conducting its trade, and operating its diplomatic apparatus. Iran’s clerical regime thus placed itself at the intersection of two world orders, arrogating the formal protections of the Westphalian system even while repeatedly proclaiming that it did not believe in it, would not be bound by it, and intended ultimately to replace it.

As Khomeini elaborated, “We must strive to export our Revolution throughout the world, and must abandon all idea of not doing so, for not only does Islam refuse to recognize any difference between Muslim countries, it is the champion of all oppressed people.” This would require an epic struggle against “America, the global plunderer,” and the Communist materialist societies of Russia and Asia, as well as “Zionism, and Israel.”

“Vasalam Ala Man Ataba’al hoda,”

“Peace only unto those who follow the true path.”

auguring

Three hurdles have to be overcome in acquiring a deployable nuclear weapons capability: the acquisition of delivery systems, the production of fissile material, and the building of warheads.

The best—perhaps the only—way to prevent the emergence of a nuclear weapons capability is to inhibit the development of a uranium-enrichment process. The indispensable component for this process is the device of centrifuges—the machines that produce enriched uranium.

low-enriched uranium (LEU)

America’s relationship with China

moved from hostility to mutual acceptance and even cooperation in a relatively short period of time in the 1970s.

In the past decade, Iran has witnessed the removal of two of its most significant adversaries, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—ironically by American action—and

As “the East,” it has never been clearly parallel to “the West.” There has been no common religion, not even one splintered into different branches as is Christianity in the West.

avariciousness,

The goal of state policy is not to transcend the national interest—as in the fashionable concepts in Europe or the United States—but to pursue it energetically and with conviction.

tenuously,

Hierarchy, not sovereign equality, was the organizing principle of Asia’s historic international systems. Power was demonstrated by the deference shown to a ruler and the structures of authority that recognized his overlordship, not the delineation of specific borders on a map.

irruption

Japan for centuries existed at the fringe of the Chinese world, borrowing heavily from Sinic religion and culture. But unlike most societies in the Chinese cultural sphere, it transformed the borrowed forms into Japanese patterns and never conflated them with a hierarchical obligation to China.

Sun Goddess

Toyotomi Hideyoshi—having

Korea’s Admiral Yi Sun-sin

harrying

By 1825, suspicion of the seafaring Western powers had become so great that Japan’s ruling military authorities promulgated an “edict to expel foreigners at all cost”—declaring that any foreign vessel approaching Japanese shores was to be driven away unconditionally, by force if necessary.

Commodore Matthew Perry,

Surveying Perry’s far superior firepower

Japan’s leaders concluded that direct resistance to the “black ships” would be futile. They relied on the cohesion of their society to absorb the shock and maintain their independence by that cohesion.

After a new faction came to power in 1868 promising to “revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians,” they announced that they would do so by mastering the barbarians’ concepts and technologies and joining the Westphalian world order as an equal member.

The new Meiji Emperor’s coronation was marked with the Charter Oath signed by the nobility, promising a sweeping program of reform, which included provisions that all social classes should be encouraged to participate. It provided for deliberative assemblies in all provinces, an affirmation of due process, and a commitment to fulfill the aspirations of the population. It relied on the national consensus, which has been one of the principal strengths—perhaps the most distinctive feature—of Japanese society:

Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule.

Japan’s reforms were pursued with such vigor that the Western powers were soon obliged to abandon the model of “extraterritoriality”—their “right” to try their own citizens in Japan by their own, not local, laws—which they had first applied in China. In a landmark trade treaty Britain, the preeminent Western power, committed British subjects in Japan to abide by Japanese jurisdiction. In 1902, the British treaty was transformed into a military alliance, the first formal strategic alignment between an Asian and a Western power.

Japan had “arrived” as the first non-Western great power in the contemporary age, accepted as a military, economic, and diplomatic equal by the countries that had heretofore shaped the international order.

There was one important difference: on the Japanese side, the alliances with Western countries were not based on common strategic objectives but to expel its European allies from Asia.

Japan’s postwar leaders (almost all of whom had been in the public service in the 1930s and 1940s) portrayed surrender as adaptation to American priorities; indeed, Japan used the authority of the American occupation regime to modernize more fully and to recover more rapidly than it could have by purely national efforts.

Japan will conduct this analysis in terms of three broad options: continued emphasis on the American alliance; adaptation to China’s rise; and reliance on an increasingly national foreign policy.

World order in Hindu cosmology was governed by immutable cycles of an almost inconceivably vast scale—millions of years long. Kingdoms would fall, and the universe would be destroyed, but it would be re-created, and new kingdoms would rise again. When each wave of invaders arrived

they were fitted into this timeless matrix. Their efforts might disrupt, but measured against the perspective of the infinite, they were irrelevant. The true nature of human experience was known only to those who endured and transcended these temporal upheavals.

Arjuna, “overwhelmed by sorrow” on the eve of battle at the horrors he is about to unleash, wonders what can justify the terrible consequences of war. This is the wrong question, Krishna rejoins. Because life is eternal and cyclical and the essence of the universe is indestructible, “the wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead. There has never been a time when you and I and the kings gathered here have not existed, nor will there be a time when we will cease to exist.”

Redemption will come through the fulfillment of a preassigned duty, paired with a recognition that its outward manifestations are illusory because “the impermanent has no reality; reality lies in the eternal.”

exhortation

Morality was not rejected, but in any given situation the immediate considerations were dominant, while eternity provided a curative perspective.

Kautilya