World Order

by Henry Kissinger

To the question of what in his presidency had made him most proud, Truman replied, “That we totally defeated our enemies and then brought them back to the community of nations. I would like to think that only America would have done this.” Conscious of America’s vast power, Truman took pride above all in its humane and democratic values. He wanted to be remembered not so much for America’s victories as for its conciliations.

No truly global “world order” has ever existed. What passes for order in our time was devised in Western Europe nearly four centuries ago, at a peace conference in the German region of Westphalia, conducted without the involvement or even the awareness of most other continents or civilizations. A century of sectarian conflict and political upheaval across Central Europe had culminated in the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48—a conflagration in which political and religious disputes commingled, combatants resorted to “total war” against population centers, and nearly a quarter of the population of Central Europe died from combat, disease, or starvation. The exhausted participants met to define a set of arrangements that would stanch the bloodletting.

The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general equilibrium of power. No single claim to truth or universal rule had prevailed in Europe’s contests. Instead, each state was assigned the attribute of sovereign power over its territory.

it sought to distill order from multiplicity and restraint.

Europe has set out to depart from the state system it designed and to transcend it through a concept of pooled sovereignty. And ironically, though Europe invented the balance-of-power concept, it has consciously and severely limited the element of power in its new institutions. Having downgraded its military capacities, Europe has little scope to respond when universal norms are flouted.

Success in such an effort will require an approach that respects 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.

Any system of world order, to be sustainable, must be accepted as just—not only by leaders, but also by citizens. It must reflect two truths: order without freedom, even if sustained by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent.

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.

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. In time, pluralism took on the characteristics of a model of world order.

A haunting portrait by Titian from 1548 at Munich’s Alte Pinakothek reveals the torment of an eminence who cannot reach spiritual fulfillment or manipulate the, to him, ultimately secondary levers of hegemonic rule.

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.

Richelieu developed a radical approach to international order. 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.

Royal power would continue to be exercised by the King as the symbol of the sovereign state and an expression of the national interest.

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. Because repetition of the familiar leads to stagnation, no little daring is required.

While they employed almost identical high-minded phrases about achieving a “peace for Christendom,” too much blood had been spilled to conceive of reaching this lofty goal through doctrinal or political unity. It was now taken for granted that peace would be built, if at all, through balancing rivalries.

Every party had been abandoned at some point during the war by its “natural” allies; none signed the documents under the illusion that it was doing anything but advancing its own interests and prestige.

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.

The Westphalian concept took multiplicity as its starting point and drew a variety of multiple societies, each accepted as a reality, into a common search for order. By the mid-twentieth century, this international system was in place on every continent; it remains the scaffolding of international order such as it now exists.

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.”

In his Leviathan, published in 1651, three years after the Peace of Westphalia, Thomas Hobbes provided such a theory. He imagined a “state of nature” in the past when the absence of authority produced a “war of all against all.” To escape such intolerable insecurity, he theorized, people delivered their rights to a sovereign power in return for the sovereign’s provision of security for all within the state’s borders. The sovereign state’s monopoly on power was established as the only way to overcome the perpetual fear of violent death and war.

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 its own national interest above all in a world where power was the paramount factor. Cardinal Richelieu would have emphatically agreed.

It fought in European wars but with shifting alliances—not in pursuit of specific, purely national goals, but by identifying the national interest with the preservation of the balance of power. Many of these principles apply to America’s role in the contemporary world,

There were in fact two balances of power being conducted in Europe after the Westphalian settlement: The overall balance, of which England acted as a guardian, was the protector of general stability. A Central European balance essentially manipulated by France aimed to prevent the emergence of a unified Germany in a position to become the most powerful country on the Continent. For more than two hundred years, these balances kept Europe from tearing itself to pieces as it had during the Thirty Years’ War; they did not prevent war, but they limited its impact because equilibrium, not total conquest, was the goal.

Wars were therefore fought for limited territorial objectives, not to overthrow existing governments and institutions, nor to impose a new system of relations between states. Tradition prevented rulers from conscripting their subjects and severely constrained their ability to raise taxes. The impact of wars on civilian populations was in no way comparable to the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War or what technology and ideology would produce two centuries later.

Humanity, Kant reasoned, was characterized by a distinctive “unsocial sociability”: the “tendency to come together in society, coupled, however, with a continual resistance which constantly threatens to break this society up.” The problem of order, particularly international order, was “the most difficult and the last to be solved by the human race.”

Humanity faced either the peace of “the vast graveyard of the human race” or peace by reasoned design.

The Revolution’s intellectual godfather, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, formulated this universal claim in a series of writings whose erudition and charm obscured their sweeping implications. Walking readers step by step through a “rational” dissection of human society, Rousseau condemned all existing institutions—property, religion, social classes, government authority, civil society—as illusory and fraudulent.

At the climactic moment of his coronation as Emperor in 1804, Napoleon, unlike Charlemagne, refusing to be legitimized by a power other than his own, took the imperial crown from the Pope’s hands and crowned himself Emperor.

Napoleon could not live in an international order; his ambition required an empire over at least the length and breadth of Europe, and for that his power fell just barely too short.

He feared that any formal acceptance of limits would destroy his only claim to legitimacy. In this way, he was overthrown as much by his own insecurity as by Westphalian principles. Europe’s strongest conqueror since Charlemagne was defeated not only by an international order that rose up against him, but by himself.

Since then, Russia has played a unique role in international affairs: part of the balance of power in both Europe and Asia but contributing to the equilibrium of the international order only fitfully. It has started more wars than any other contemporary major power, but it has also thwarted dominion of Europe by a single power, holding fast against Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon, and Hitler when key continental elements of the balance had been overrun.

Russia was close enough to Europe to share a common cultural vocabulary yet perpetually out of phase with the Continent’s historical trends. The experience would leave Russia a uniquely “Eurasian” power, sprawling across two continents but never entirely at home in either.

It expanded each year by an amount larger than the entire territory of many European states (on average, 100,000 square kilometers annually from 1552 to 1917).

Yet the position of the Czar differed from that of his Chinese counterpart in one important respect. In the Chinese view, the Emperor ruled wherever possible through the serenity of his conduct; in the Russian view, the leadership of the Czar prevailed through his ability to impose his will by unchallengeable assertions of authority and to impress on all onlookers the Russian state’s overwhelmingly vast power. The Chinese Emperor was conceived of as the embodiment of the superiority of Chinese civilization, inspiring other peoples to “come and be transformed.” The Czar was seen as the embodiment of the defense of Russia against enemies surrounding it on all sides.