World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

by Henry Kissinger

In Europe, the Westphalian system was an outgrowth of a plethora of de facto independent states at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Asia entered the modern era without such a distinct apparatus of national and international organization. It possessed several civilizational centers surrounded by smaller kingdoms, with a subtle and shifting set of mechanisms for interactions between them.

When urged to adhere to the international system’s “rules of the game” and “responsibilities,” the visceral reaction of many Chinese—including senior leaders—has been profoundly affected by the awareness that China has not participated in making the rules of the system. They are asked—and, as a matter of prudence, have agreed—to adhere to rules they had had no part in making. But they expect—and sooner or later will act on this expectation—the international order to evolve in a way that enables China to become centrally involved in further international rule making, even to the point of revising some of the rules that prevail.

The cultural and political backgrounds of the two sides diverge in important aspects. The American approach to policy is pragmatic; China’s is conceptual. America has never had a powerful threatening neighbor; China has never been without a powerful adversary on its borders. Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems. Americans seek an outcome responding to immediate circumstances; Chinese concentrate on evolutionary change. Americans outline an agenda of practical “deliverable” items; Chinese set out general principles and analyze where they will lead. Chinese thinking is shaped in part by Communism but embraces a traditionally Chinese way of thought to an increasing extent; neither is intuitively familiar to Americans.

Two other issues are contributing to tension in Sino-American relations. China rejects the proposition that international order is fostered by the spread of liberal democracy and that the international community has an obligation to bring this about, and especially to achieve its perception of human rights by international action. The United States may be able to adjust the application of its views on human rights in relation to strategic priorities. But in light of its history and the convictions of its people, America can never abandon these principles altogether.

In East Asia, something approaching a balance of power exists between China, Korea, Japan, and the United States, with Russia and Vietnam peripheral participants. But it differs from the historic balances of power in that one of the key participants, the United States, has its center of gravity located far from the geographic center of East Asia—and, above all, because the leaders of both countries whose military forces conceive themselves as adversaries in their military journals and pronouncements also proclaim partnership as a goal on political and economic issues.

America’s foreign policy has reflected the conviction that its domestic principles were self-evidently universal and their application at all times salutary; that the real challenge of American engagement abroad was not foreign policy in the traditional sense but a project of spreading values that it believed all other peoples aspired to replicate.

The openness of American culture and its democratic principles made the United States a model and a refuge for millions. At the same time, the conviction that American principles are universal has introduced a challenging element into the international system because it implies that governments not practicing them are less than fully legitimate. This tenet—so ingrained in American thinking that it is only occasionally put forward as official policy—suggests that a significant portion of the world lives under a kind of unsatisfactory, probationary arrangement, and will one day be redeemed; in the meantime, their relations with the world’s strongest power must have some latent adversarial element to them.

The American experience supported the assumption that peace was the natural condition of humanity, prevented only by other countries’ unreasonableness or ill will. The European style of statecraft, with its shifting alliances and elastic maneuvers on the spectrum between peace and hostility, seemed to the American mind a perverse departure from common sense. In this view, the Old World’s entire system of foreign policy and international order was an outgrowth of despotic caprice or a malignant cultural penchant for aristocratic ceremony and secretive maneuver. America would forgo these practices, disclaiming colonial interests, remaining warily at arm’s length from the European-designed international system, and relating to other countries on the basis of mutual interests and fair dealing.

In Roosevelt’s view, the international system was in constant flux. Ambition, self-interest, and war were not simply the products of foolish misconceptions of which Americans could disabuse traditional rulers; they were a natural human condition that required purposeful American engagement in international affairs. International society was like a frontier settlement without an effective police force:

Roosevelt was impatient with many of the pieties that dominated American thinking on foreign policy. The newly emerging extension of international law could not be efficacious unless backed by force, he concluded, and disarmament, emerging as an international topic, was an illusion:

Liberal societies, Roosevelt believed, tended to underestimate the elements of antagonism and strife in international affairs. Implying a Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest, Roosevelt wrote to the British diplomat Cecil Spring Rice, It is … a melancholy fact that the countries which are most humanitarian, which are most interested in internal improvement, tend to grow weaker compared with the other countries which possess a less altruistic civilization … I abhor and despise that pseudo-humanitarianism which treats advance of civilization as necessarily and rightfully implying a weakening of the fighting spirit and which therefore invites destruction of the advanced civilization by some less-advanced type.

Roosevelt, though in essence a partisan of Russia, undertook a mediation of a conflict in distant Asia underlining America’s role as an Asian power. The Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 was a quintessential expression of Roosevelt’s balance-of-power diplomacy. It limited Japanese expansion, prevented a Russian collapse, and achieved an outcome in which Russia, as he described it, “should be left face to face with Japan so that each may have a moderative action on the other.” For his mediation, Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American to be so honored.

Had Roosevelt been succeeded by a disciple—or perhaps had he won the election of 1912—he might have introduced America into the Westphalian system of world order or an adaptation of it. In this course of events, America almost certainly would have sought an earlier conclusion to World War I compatible with the European balance of power—along the lines of the Russo-Japanese Treaty—that left Germany defeated but indebted to American restraint and surrounded by sufficient force to deter future adventurism.

When America entered World War I, a conflict which started a process that would destroy the European state system, it did so not on the basis of Roosevelt’s geopolitical vision but under a banner of moral universality not seen in Europe since the religious wars three centuries before. This new universality proclaimed by the American President sought to universalize a system of governance that existed only in the North Atlantic countries and, in the form heralded by Wilson, only in the United States. Imbued by America’s historic sense of moral mission, Wilson proclaimed that America had intervened not to restore the European balance of power but to “make the world safe for democracy”—in other words, to base world order on the compatibility of domestic institutions reflecting the American example. Though this concept ran counter to their tradition, Europe’s leaders accepted it as the price of America’s entry into the war. Setting out his vision of the peace, Wilson denounced the balance of power for the preservation of which his new allies had originally entered the war. He rejected established diplomatic methods (decried as “secret diplomacy”) as having been a major contributing cause of the conflict. In their place he put forward, in a series of visionary speeches, a new concept of international peace based on a mixture of traditional American assumptions and a new insistence on pushing them toward a definitive and global implementation. This has been, with minor variation...

The spread of democracy, in Wilson’s view, would be an automatic consequence of implementing the principle of self-determination. Since the Congress of Vienna, wars had ended with an agreement on the restoration of the balance of power by territorial adjustments. Wilson’s concept of world order called instead for “self-determination”—for each nation, defined by ethnic and linguistic unity, to be given a state. Only through self-government, he assessed, could peoples express their underlying will toward international harmony. And once they had achieved independence and national unity, Wilson argued, they would no longer have an incentive to practice aggressive or self-interested policies.

What Wilson meant by community of power was a new concept that later became known as “collective security.” In traditional international policy, states with congruent interests or similar apprehensions might assign themselves a special role in guaranteeing the peace and form an alliance—as they had, for example, after the defeat of Napoleon. Such arrangements were always designed to deal with specific strategic threats, either named or implied: for example, a revanchist France after the Congress of Vienna. The League of Nations, by contrast, would be founded on a moral principle, the universal opposition to military aggression as such, whatever its source, its target, or its proclaimed justification. It was aimed not at a specific issue but at the violation of norms. Because the definition of norms has proved to be subject to divergent interpretations, the operation of collective security is, in that sense, unpredictable.

The balance-of-power system collapsed with the outbreak of World War I because the alliances it spawned had no flexibility, and it was indiscriminately applied to peripheral issues, thereby exacerbating all conflicts. The system of collective security demonstrated the opposite failing when confronted by the initial steps toward World War II. The League of Nations was impotent in the face of the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the Italian attack on Abyssinia, the German derogation of the Locarno Treaty, and the Japanese invasion of China. Its definition of aggression was so vague, the reluctance to undertake common action so deep, that it proved inoperative even against flagrant threats to peace. Collective security has repeatedly revealed itself to be unworkable in situations that most seriously threaten international peace and security.

Woodrow Wilson’s ultimate greatness must be measured by the degree to which he rallied the tradition of American exceptionalism behind a vision that outlasted these shortcomings. He has been revered as a prophet toward whose vision America has judged itself obliged to aspire. Whenever America has been tested by crisis or conflict—in World War II, the Cold War, and our own era’s upheavals in the Islamic world—it has returned in one way or another to Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a world order that secures peace through democracy, open diplomacy, and the cultivation of shared rules and standards. The genius of this vision has been its ability to harness American idealism in the service of great foreign policy undertakings in peace-making, human rights, and cooperative problem-solving, and to imbue the exercise of American power with the hope for a better and more peaceful world. Its influence has been in no small way responsible for the spread of participatory governance throughout the world in the past century and for the extraordinary conviction and optimism that America has brought to its engagement with world affairs. The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century’s decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt’s and by now a historic third-term President) and Winston Churchill met for the first time as leaders in Newfoundland aboard HMS Prince of Wales in August 1941, they expressed what they described as their common vision in the Atlantic Charter of eight “common principles”—all of which Wilson would have endorsed, while no previous British Prime Minister would have been comfortable with all of them. They included “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live”; the end of territorial acquisitions against the will of subject populations; “freedom from fear and want”; and a program of international disarmament, to precede the eventual “abandonment of the use of force” and “establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security.”

Stalin’s global strategy was complex. He was convinced that the capitalist system inevitably produced wars; hence the end of World War II would at best be an armistice. He considered Hitler a sui generis representative of the capitalist system, not an aberration from it.

While the war was going on, Western leaders resisted acknowledging assessments of this kind: Churchill because of his need to stay in step with America; Roosevelt because he was advocating a “master plan” to secure a just and lasting peace, which was in effect a reversal of what had been the European international order—he would countenance neither a balance of power nor a restoration of empires. His public progam called for rules for the peaceful resolution of disputes and parallel efforts of the major powers, the so-called Four Policemen: the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China. The United States and the Soviet Union especially were expected to take the lead in checking violations of peace.

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.

Another view holds that Roosevelt, who had demonstrated his subtlety in the often ruthless way in which he maneuvered the essentially neutralist American people toward a war that few contemporaries considered necessary, was beyond being deceived by a leader even as wily as Stalin. According to this interpretation, Roosevelt was biding his time and humoring the Soviet leader to keep him from making a separate deal with Hitler. He must have known—or would soon discover—that the Soviet view of world order was antithetical to the American one; invocations of democracy and self-determination would serve to rally the American public but must eventually prove unacceptable to Moscow. Once Germany’s unconditional surrender had been achieved and Soviet intransigence had been demonstrated, according to this view, Roosevelt would have rallied the democracies with the same determination he had shown in opposition to Hitler.

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. It was thereby able to define leadership as essentially practical progress along lines modeled on the American domestic experience; alliances as Wilsonian concepts of collective security; and governance as programs of economic recovery and democratic reform. America’s Cold War undertaking began as a defense of countries that shared the American view of world order.

Truman made a strategic choice fundamental for American history and the evolution of the international order. He put an end to the historic temptation of “going it alone” by committing America to the permanent shaping of a new international order. He advanced a series of crucial initiatives. The Greek-Turkish aid program of 1947 replaced the subsidies with which Britain had sustained these pivotal Mediterranean countries and which Britain could no longer afford; the Marshall Plan in 1948 put forward a recovery plan that in time restored Europe’s economic health. In 1949, Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, presided over a ceremony marking the creation of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) as the capstone of the American-sponsored new international order.

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.

This belief is what Dean Acheson, the model and seminal Secretary of State to many of his successors (including me), practiced. From 1949 to 1953 he concentrated on building what he called “situations of strength” via NATO; East-West diplomacy would more or less automatically reflect the balance of power. During the Eisenhower administration, his successor, John Foster Dulles, 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. Valid interests existed in both spheres, yet the manner in which they were described tended to obscure attempts to define strategic priorities. Even NSC-68, which codified Truman’s national security policy as a classified document and was largely written by the hard-line Paul Nitze, avoided the concept of national interest and placed the conflict into traditional moral, almost lyrical, categories. The struggle was between the forces of “freedom under a government of laws” (which entailed “marvelous diversity, the deep tolerance, the lawfulness of the free society … in which every individual has the opportunity to realize his creative powers”) and forces of “slavery under the grim oligarchy of the Kremlin.” By its own lights, America was joining the Cold War struggle not as a geopolitical contest over the limits of Russian power but as a moral crusade for the free world.

Contemporary research has shown that the motivation on the Communist side was complex. When the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung asked Stalin’s approval for the invasion in April 1950, the Soviet dictator encouraged him. He had learned from the defection of Tito two years earlier that first-generation Communist leaders were especially difficult to fit into the Soviet satellite system that he thought imperative for Russia’s national interest. Starting with Mao’s visit to Moscow in late 1949—less than three months after the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed—Stalin had been uneasy about the looming potential of China led by a man of Mao’s dominating attributes. 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.

In an encounter between two different conceptions of world order, America sought to protect the status quo following Westphalian and international legal principles. Nothing ran more counter to Mao’s perceptions of his revolutionary mission than the protection of the status quo. Chinese history taught him the many times Korea had been used as an invasion route into China. His own revolutionary experience had been based on the proposition that civil wars ended with victory or defeat, not stalemate. And he convinced himself that America, once ensconced along the Yalu River separating China from Korea, would as a next step complete the encirclement of China by moving into Vietnam.

Truman stressed the containment concept: the major threat was the Soviet Union, whose strategic goal was the domination of Europe. Hence fighting the Korean War to a military conclusion, even more extending it into China, was, in the words of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, a combat leader in the war against Germany, “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”

In the negotiations, as in the origins of the war, two different approaches to strategy confronted each other. The Truman administration expressed 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. In that spirit, American forces were ordered to confine themselves to essentially defensive measures during the talks and avoid initiating large-scale offensive measures. 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. The Communist side used the stalemate to enhance the discomfort of the American public with an inconclusive war. In fact, during the negotiations, America suffered as many casualties as it had during the offensive phase of the war.

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 public’s willingness to support it. America was left with the gap in its thinking on strategy and international order that was to haunt it in the jungles of Vietnam.

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. Besides this, as the containment policy migrated into the fringes of Asia, it encountered conditions quite opposite of those in Europe. 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.

Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of the Singapore state and perhaps the wisest Asian leader of his period, was vocal in his firm belief, maintained to this writing, that American intervention was indispensable to preserve the possibility of an independent Southeast Asia. The analysis of the consequences for the region of a Communist victory in Vietnam was largely correct. But 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. European instability came about when the economic crisis caused by the war threatened to undermine traditional domestic political institutions. In Southeast Asia, after a century of colonization, these institutions had yet to be created—especially in South Vietnam, which had never existed as a state in history.