Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

by Henry Kissinger

At the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, France counted 30 million inhabitants, outstripping any European state except backward Russia. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the figure had increased only to 38.9 million,[20] while the United Kingdom’s population grew from 16 million to 41.1 million[21] and Germany’s from 21 million to 67 million.

France, which suffered two million dead – 4 percent of its population – and the devastation of its northern regions.[24] Russia, heretofore France’s principal ally, was convulsed by revolution in 1917 and was then pushed hundreds of miles to the east by the various peace settlements.

Although victorious in 1918, France knew better than any of its allies how close to defeat it had come. And it had lost its psychological and political resilience. Drained of its youth, fearful of its defeated antagonist, feeling abandoned by its allies and assailed by premonitions of impotence, France experienced the 1920s and 1930s as an almost uninterrupted succession of frustrations.

Alluding to another moment of national peril, he chose as the banner of his movement the two-barred Cross of Lorraine – the symbol of the martyred Joan of Arc, who with her mystical visions had rallied the French five centuries earlier to retake their land from foreign occupiers.

Convinced that France’s divisions had caused its decline, de Gaulle was determined that his country begin the postwar period with a unity worthy of its historic grandeur.

De Gaulle could not restore France’s influence if he behaved as a supplicant seeking admission to international conferences; he had to demonstrate to Britain and the US that France was an autonomous actor with independent choices for whose goodwill it was important to contend. If France were to rejoin the first tier of international diplomacy, it would have to create its own opportunities – beginning with his daring mission to Moscow to parley with Stalin.

Had de Gaulle not been as determined a fighter for French identity during the war years – or had he not asserted his leadership of an internationally based French alternative to Vichy – the myth of continuity would have been implausible.

De Gaulle demonstrated that revolutionary changes did not require a revolution. He stood between communists and free-market liberals, renters and property owners, recalling the equipoise the Athenian lawgiver Solon displayed toward the rich and poor of his society: ‘Before them both I held my shield of might, / And let not either touch the other’s right.’[74]

On October 21, 1945, French voters elected the Constituent Assembly, a provisional legislature tasked with drawing up a new constitution. Three weeks later, it affirmed de Gaulle as head of government by a nearly unanimous vote, which, as he wryly noted in his memoirs, was more a recognition of past services than an understanding of his vision for the future.

The Fourth Republic collapsed in 1958 not so much from domestic challenges as from its inability to establish a policy regarding its colonial possessions. It spent too many of the political gains of the economic recovery on three colonial crises: the effort to hold on to Indochina, the Suez intervention and, above all, the Algerian crisis.

Conquered by France in 1830, Algeria held a special status amongst the French territories overseas. In the decades after annexation, waves of French and Southern European colonists settled along its coastline. By the 1950s, there were approximately one million of them, mostly French and known as the pieds-noirs.

Unlike Tunisia, Morocco or France’s sub-Saharan colonies, the Algerian littoral had been constitutionally treated as an integral component of metropolitan France, with a status comparable to Corsica. It was regarded so much as part of the French homeland that, as late as 1954, Prime Minister Mendès-France planned to move French weapons factories there, out of range of the Soviets.

As de Gaulle well understood, the political constellation in the spring of 1958 had by now brought about what was likely to be his last opportunity to fulfill what he believed to be the task assigned to France by history.

Twice in a lifetime de Gaulle had assumed the leadership of France: the first time in 1940 to rescue it from the consequences of national catastrophe; the second in 1958 as the only means of avoiding civil war.

In this great task de Gaulle envisioned four phases: restoring France’s constitutional structure so as to create a government with authority; finishing France’s colonial adventures in a way that removed them as a canker in the body politic; designing a French military and political strategy which made clear the international indispensability of France in both defense and diplomacy; and, finally, defending that strategic concept against allies, especially a reluctant America.

In the Fifth Republic, control of defense and foreign policy would be reserved to the president, who was elected for a seven-year term by indirect suffrage via electors (modified to direct election in 1962).

de Gaulle turned to the referendum procedure, this time brilliantly linking the ratification of the new constitution to a new arrangement for France’s colonial possessions. Both the metropole and the colonies were invited to vote by universal suffrage on the new constitutional framework. By putting forward the concept of a ‘French Community’, de Gaulle was able to supersede a thorny constitutional debate between two leaders of French colonial Africa: Léopold Sédar Senghor (later president of Senegal), who favored a federal solution in which Africans would become full citizens of France and the colonies would be merged into two regional groupings, and Félix Houphouët-Boigny (former French health minister and later president of the Ivory Coast), who preferred a looser confederation.

For each colony, there was a choice: approve the constitution and join the French Community or be granted immediate independence. All but Guinea under Sekou Touré chose to remain in the French Community –

In 1960, the ‘Year of Africa’, fourteen Francophone states gained their independence, thereby largely avoiding wars of national liberation. The two exceptions were Cameroon, where a bloody contest between nationalist insurgents and the French military raged for nine years, and Algeria, which retained an intermediate status compatible with either a military or a diplomatic outcome.

800,000 French colonists were expelled from Algeria by the new regime – which combined aspects of Islamism, socialism and Arab nationalism – or left to their own devices shortly after the signing of the peace accords. Fearing violence, 150,000 of the remaining 200,000 elected to migrate by 1970.

But in 1958, returning from exile, de Gaulle reversed the policy of centuries by initiating a Franco-German partnership.

de Gaulle reminded Eisenhower that in the First World War, America came to the rescue only after France had endured three years of mortal peril, and that America had entered the Second World War only after France had already been occupied. In the Nuclear Age, both interventions would have come too late.[120]

In March 1959, he withdrew the French Mediterranean fleet from the integrated NATO command; in June of that year, he ordered the removal of American nuclear weapons from French soil; in February 1960, France conducted its first nuclear test in the Algerian desert; and in 1966 he pulled France out of the NATO command structure altogether.[127] He must have judged that Britain and the US would have no choice but to support him in case of Soviet attack while he retained freedom of decision.

The allies did not consider that conventional weapons added significantly to the common strength and never reached their conventional-weapons commitments partly for fear that, in so doing, they could render American nuclear might dispensable.

He sought in the 1960s to rebuild a powerful military complete with an independent nuclear deterrent, which would enable his country to fulfill its duty to shape the future.[134] An auxiliary role would never be appropriate for France. And this was a moral, not a technical, issue:

As a result, de Gaulle was, on the one hand, among the most solid supporters of the Atlantic Alliance when there was an actual Soviet challenge to the international order, as during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 or the Soviet ultimatum over the status of Berlin. But, on the other hand, he never abandoned his insistence on his country’s freedom to judge the consequences of occasions as they arose.

While the French Fifth Republic has launched a number of conventional military operations – especially in Africa and the Middle East – it has never threatened to use its nuclear weapons independently, and US and French nuclear policies have ranged from compatible to coordinated. Continuing on the path set by de Gaulle, France has preserved Gaullist autonomy of its nuclear strategy and close coordination with the United States.

De Gaulle announced from Colombey that he was resigning the presidency the day after losing the referendum, offering no explanation. He would never return to the Elysée Palace or make any public statement. When asked later why he had chosen these particular issues as the occasion for retiring from office, de Gaulle replied: ‘Because of their triviality.’

Yet in his statesmanship, de Gaulle remains exceptional. No twentieth-century leader demonstrated greater gifts of intuition. On every major strategic question facing France and Europe over no fewer than three decades, and against an overwhelming consensus, de Gaulle judged correctly. His extraordinary prescience was matched by the courage to act on his intuition, even when the consequences appeared to be political suicide. His career validated the Roman maxim that fortune favors the brave.

De Gaulle defined his goals in the visionary mode of the prophet, but his execution was in the mode of the statesman, steely and calculating.

It was one measure of Churchill’s greatness to have recognized de Gaulle’s ability immediately upon the latter’s arrival in England without resources, arms, constituency or even language, and to have accepted him as leader of the Free French, then existing as a political force primarily in the imagination of this one Frenchman.

Nevertheless, and despite their occasionally serious conflicts, Churchill stood by de Gaulle on the key issues. Without his support, de Gaulle could not have survived the opposition of Roosevelt – which continued up to the gates of Paris.

While Churchill viewed his leadership as enabling the British people to flourish and to culminate in their history, de Gaulle conducted himself as a singular event destined to lift his people toward an eminence that had been importantly dissipated.

Churchill reflected the quintessence of British leadership, which is based on a high but not exceptional level of collective performance out of which, with good fortune, an exceptional personality can appear at a moment of great necessity. Churchill’s leadership was an extraordinary emanation of a tradition, fitting to its circumstances; his personal style was ebullient and leavened by delightful humour.

De Gaulle’s leadership was not an elaboration of a historic process but a unique expression of a personality and of a special set of principles. His humor was sardonic, designed to stress the distinctness, as well as the distinctiveness, of its subject matter.

De Gaulle died of an aneurysm less than two years after resigning the presidency, on November 9, 1970, at la Boisserie. He was, most appropriately, playing a game of solitaire. He was buried beside Anne in the parish churchyard of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises.

After five and a half years in office, Nixon had ended American involvement in Vietnam; established the United States as the dominant external power in the Middle East; and imposed a triangular dynamic on the previously bipolar Cold War through the opening to China, ultimately putting the Soviet Union at a decisive strategic disadvantage.

American history is replete with raucous domestic controversies, but the situation confronting Nixon was unprecedented in that, for the first time, an emerging national elite had convinced itself that defeat in war was at once strategically inevitable and ethically desirable. Such a conviction implied the breakdown of the centuries-long consensus that the national interest represented a legitimate, even moral, end.

This consistent graciousness was all the more remarkable because, side by side with the decisive and thoughtful Nixon described in these pages, there was another Nixon – insecure about his image, uncertain of his authority and plagued by a nagging self-doubt. This other Nixon was accompanied by a version of Adam Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’: that is, a second ‘you’, standing outside yourself, observing and judging your actions. Nixon seemed to me to have been haunted by such critical self-awareness all his life.

Nixon’s handicaps – his anxiety, the insecurities that prompted his need to extract maximum respect, his reluctance to confront face-to-face disagreements – ultimately damaged his presidency. But the achievements of Nixon’s career require recognition as a stupendous effort to transcend inhibitions that would have defeated a lesser leader.

him into contact with world leaders who sought to understand American thinking and to gauge his own future prospects. In these circles he was treated as a serious figure – an attitude not always in evidence among domestic adversaries or journalists.

he believed in America’s special responsibility to defend the cause of freedom internationally, and especially the freedom of America’s democratic allies.

a nation that did not seek the preeminent world position. It came to us because of what had happened in World War II. But here is a nation that has helped its former enemies, that is generous now to those that might be its opponents . . . that the world is very fortunate . . . to have in a position of world leadership.

Although Europe[*] and Japan never did materialize as powers of comparable capacity during Nixon’s period in office, ‘triangulation’ between China and the Soviet Union became a principle of US policy from Nixon’s tenure until the end of the Cold War and beyond; indeed, it contributed importantly to the conflict’s successful outcome.

Nixon sought to restore the balance-of-power thinking of Theodore Roosevelt to American foreign policy. Like Roosevelt, he considered the national interest to be the defining objective in the pursuit of national strategy and foreign policy.

In Nixon’s foreign-policy vision, the United States should be the principal shaper of a fluid system of shifting balances.

Nixon’s foreign policy emphasized a twofold approach toward adversaries: one was to build American strength and alliances, especially the Atlantic Alliance; the other was to maintain a constant dialogue with adversaries, like the Soviet Union and China, via the ‘era of negotiations’.

Despite being a veteran anti-communist, Nixon did not regard ideological differences with communist states as barriers to diplomatic engagement. Rather, he viewed diplomacy as a preferred method for thwarting hostile designs and transforming adversarial relations into either engagement or the isolation of the adversary.

Thus, the opening to China was based on the conviction that Mao Zedong’s communist rigidities could be offset by exploiting the Soviet threat to China’s security.

These agreements highlighted another term – détente – that came to be associated with Nixon’s foreign policy and evoked controversy. Derived from the French infinitive détendre (‘to loosen’), and therefore shrouded in inscrutable implications, it implied a relaxation of tensions among the superpowers. The primary objection to it was the contention that American diplomacy should focus on undermining and eventually destroying the Soviet system and those of other adversaries.