World Order

by Henry Kissinger

Charles Bohlen,

an architect of the Cold War U.S. policy relationship,

He [Roosevelt] felt that Stalin viewed the world somewhat in the same light as he did, and that Stalin’s hostility and distrust . . . were due to the neglect that Soviet Russia had suffered at the hands of other countries for years after the Revolution. What he did not understand was that Stalin’s enmity was based on profound ideological convictions.

Great leaders often embody great ambiguities.

Roosevelt, like his people, was ambivalent about the two sides of international order. He hoped for a peace based on legitimacy, that is, trust between individuals, respect for international law, humanitarian objectives, and goodwill. But confronted with the Soviet Union’s insistently power-based approach, he would likely have reverted to the Machiavellian side that had brought him to leadership and made him the dominant figure of his period.

John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address on January 20, 1961. Kennedy called on his country to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

he called for was a “new endeavor”—“not a balance of power, but a new world of law.” It would be a “grand and global alliance” against the “common enemies of mankind.” What in other countries would have been treated as a rhetorical flourish has, in American discourse, been presented as a specific blueprint for global action.

At the end of the war, the United States, as the only major country to emerge essentially undamaged, produced about 60 percent of the world’s GNP.

Governments and armed doctrines rejecting American concepts of domestic and international order mounted tenacious challenges. Limits to American capabilities, however vast, became apparent. Priorities needed to be set.

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.

Victory in the Cold War has been accompanied by congenital ambivalence.

Either American objectives had been unfulfillable, or America did not pursue a strategy compatible with reaching these objectives. Critics will ascribe these setbacks to the deficiencies, moral and intellectual, of America’s leaders. Historians will probably conclude that they derived from the inability to resolve an ambivalence about force and diplomacy, realism and idealism, power and legitimacy, cutting across the entire society.

The Soviet Union insisted on shaping a new international, social, and political structure of Eastern Europe on a principle laid down by Stalin in 1945: “Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”

If the Western allies undertook a conventional ground force probe along the access routes to Berlin, Soviet forces were ordered to resist without referring the decision to Stalin. If American forces were mobilizing along the entire front, Stalin said, “Come to me.” In other words, Stalin felt strong enough for a local war but would not risk general war with the United States.

the Marshall Plan in 1948 put forward a recovery plan that in time restored Europe’s economic health.

NATO was a new departure in the establishment of European security. The international order no longer was characterized by the traditional European balance of power distilled from shifting coalitions of multiple states. Rather, whatever equilibrium prevailed had been reduced to that existing between the two nuclear superpowers.

the perennial fear of America’s allies during the Cold War that America might lose interest in the defense of Europe. The nations joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization provided some military forces but more in the nature of an admission ticket for a shelter under America’s nuclear umbrella than as an instrument of local defense. What America was constructing in the Truman era was a unilateral guarantee in the form of a traditional alliance.

the historical debates about the ultimate purpose of American foreign policy reemerged. Were the goals of the new alliance moral or strategic? Coexistence or the adversary’s collapse? Did America seek conversion of the adversary or evolution?

The most comprehensive American strategic design in the Cold War was put forward by a then-obscure Foreign Service officer, George Kennan,

Kennan proposed an explicitly strategic response: to “gather together at once into our hands all the cards we hold and begin to play them for their full value.” Eastern Europe, Kennan concluded, would be dominated by Moscow: it stood closer to Russian centers of power than it did to Washington and, however regrettably, Soviet troops had reached it first. Hence the United States should consolidate a sphere in Western Europe under American protection—with the dividing line running through Germany—and endow its sphere with sufficient strength and cohesion to maintain the geopolitical balance.

Kennan replied in a five-part telegram of nineteen single-spaced pages. The essence of the so-called Long Telegram was that the entire American debate over Soviet intentions needed to be reconceived. Soviet leaders saw East-West relations as a contest between antithetical concepts of world order. They had taken a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity” and grafted onto it a revolutionary doctrine of global sweep. The Kremlin would interpret every aspect of international affairs in light of Soviet doctrine about a battle for advantage between what Stalin had called the “two centers of world significance,” capitalism and Communism, whose global contest was inevitable and could end with only one winner. They thought the battle was inevitable, and thus made it so.

if “the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument” was ever so disrupted, “Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.”

“situations of strength” via NATO; East-West diplomacy would more or less automatically reflect the balance of power.

extended the alliance system through SEATO for Southeast Asia (1954) and the Baghdad Pact for the Middle East (1955). In effect, containment came to be equated with the construction of military alliances around the entire Soviet periphery over two continents. World order would consist of the confrontation of two incongruent superpowers—each of which organized an international order within its sphere.

the United States assumed leadership of the global effort to contain Soviet expansionism—but as a primarily moral, not geopolitical, endeavor.

though it was “difficult for many to understand,” the United States was “really . . . motivated by considerations other than short-range expediency.” America’s influence would not restore the geopolitical balance, in this view, but transcend it:

The implication that other nations had “selfish interests” while America had “principles” and “destiny” was as old as the Republic. What was new was that a global geopolitical contest in which the United States was the leader, not a bystander, was justified primarily on moral grounds, and the American national interest was disavowed. This call to universal responsibility underpinned the decisive American commitment to restoring a devastated postwar world holding the line against Soviet expansion. Yet when it came time to fighting “hot” wars on the periphery of the Communist world, it proved a less certain guide.

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.

the American view about the relationship of power and legitimacy. According to it, war and peace were distinct phases of policy; when negotiations started, the application of force ceased, and diplomacy took over. Each activity was thought to operate by its own rules. Force was needed to produce the negotiation, then it had to stand aside; the outcome of the negotiation would depend on an atmosphere of goodwill, which would be destroyed by military pressure.

The Chinese view was the exact opposite. War and peace were two sides of the same coin. Negotiations were an extension of the battlefield. In accordance with China’s ancient strategist Sun Tzu in his Art of War, the essential contest would be psychological—to affect the adversary’s calculations and degrade his confidence in success. De-escalation by the adversary was a sign of weakness to be exploited by pressing one’s own military advantage.

It was the first war in which America specifically renounced victory as an objective, and in that was an augur of things to come.

The biggest loser, as it turned out, was the Soviet Union. It had encouraged the original decision to invade and sustained its consequences by providing large stores of supplies to its allies. But it lost their trust. The seeds of the Sino-Soviet split were sown in the Korean War because the Soviets insisted on payment for their assistance and refused to give combat support.

The war also triggered a rapid and vast American rearmament, which restored the imbalance in Western Europe in a big step toward the situation of strength that...

Each side suffered setbacks. Some Chinese historians hold that China lost an opportunity to unify Taiwan with the mainland in order to sustain an unreliable ally; the United States lost its aura of invincibility that had attached to it since World War II and some of its sense of direction. Other Asian revolutionaries learned the lesson of drawing America into an inconclusive war that might outrun the American pub...

The Cold War had begun with a call to support democracy and liberty across the world, reinforced by Kennedy at his inauguration. Yet over a period of time, the military doctrines that sustained the strategy of containment began to have a blighting effect on public perceptions. The gap between the destructiveness of the weapons and the purposes for which they might be used proved unbridgeable. All theories for the limited use of military nuclear technology proved infeasible. The reigning strategy was based on the ability to inflict a level of civilian casualties judged unbearable but surely involving tens of millions on both sides in a matter of days. This calculus constrained the self-confidence of national leaders and the public’s faith in their leadership.

The Marshall Plan and NATO succeeded because a political tradition of government remained in Europe, even if impaired. Economic recovery could restore political vitality. But in much of the underdeveloped world, the political framework was fragile or new, and economic aid led to corruption as frequently as to stability.

President Eisenhower’s “domino theory,”

the fall of one country to Communism would cause others to fall,

the doctrine of containment to thwart the aggressor (on ...

economic and political rehabilitation (as in the...

At the same time, to avoid “widen...

the 1968 Tet Offensive, in conventional military terms a devastating defeat for North Vietnam but treated in the Western press as a stunning victory and evidence of American failure—struck

by the time of America’s full-scale participation in Vietnam, Sino-Soviet unity no longer existed, having been in perceptible crisis throughout the 1960s. China, wracked by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, increasingly regarded the Soviet Union as a dangerous and threatening adversary.

The containment principles employed in Europe proved much less applicable in Asia.

acquiesced in by the White House in the expectation that military rule would produce more liberal institutions),

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.

The collapse of high aspirations shattered the self-confidence without which establishments flounder. The leaders who had previously sustained American foreign policy were particularly anguished by the rage of the students. The insecurity of their elders turned the normal grievances of maturing youth into an institutionalized rage and a national trauma. Public demonstrations reached dimensions obliging President Johnson—who continued to describe the war in traditional terms of defending a free people against the advance of totalitarianism—to confine his public appearances in his last year in office largely to military bases.

In the months following the end of Johnson’s presidency in 1969, a number of the war’s key architects renounced their positions publicly and called for an end to military operations and an American withdrawal.

The Nixon administration was convinced that