Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

by Henry Kissinger

Courage summons virtue in the moment of decision; character reinforces fidelity to values over an extended period.

‘In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.’

Adenauer stressed that humility was the road to equality:

The Schuman Plan accelerated German entry into a unifying Europe.

The communist threat began to eclipse the Western democracies’ fear of a resurgent Germany when, in June 1948, the Soviet Union blockaded the access routes to Berlin from the surrounding Soviet occupation zone.

Great leadership is more than an evocation of transitory exultation; it requires the capacity to inspire and to sustain vision over time.

For de Gaulle, politics was not the art of the possible but the art of the willed.

Throughout his leadership of the Free French, de Gaulle’s statements and actions had evoked a common theme: to reconstruct a legitimate and powerful French state, which alone could restore order after the liberation and deal with the Allies as an equal in the endgame against Germany.

It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitor that the danger of war arises. So I believe in a world in which the United States is powerful. I think it will be a safer world and a better world if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance.

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

Negotiating with ideological adversaries from a position of strength would lead to an order favorable to American interests and security aspirations.

he reshaped world order by introducing multipolarity into the global system by the opening to China while advancing American interests and overall stability.

Once again, it is a tale first of exuberant confidence generating overextension and then of overextension giving birth to debilitating self-doubt. Once again, in almost every region of the world, the United States confronts major interlocking challenges to both its strategies and its values. Universal peace, long anticipated, has not arrived. Instead, there is renewed potential for catastrophic confrontation.

Sadat’s primary mission, before and during his presidency, was an expression of the aspiration of Egyptian civilization to secure lasting independence.

In pursuit of pan-Arabism, Nasser had brought about Egypt’s isolation.

But if 1948 was Nasser’s formative conflict, 1967 was Sadat’s; to him, the Six-Day War had illustrated the danger of placing pan-Arab solidarity above the national interest.

Lee articulated a worldview free of anti-American animus and post-imperial resentment. He neither blamed the United States for Singapore’s challenges nor expected it to solve them. Rather, he sought American goodwill so that Singapore, lacking oil and other natural riches, could grow through the cultivation of what he said was its principal resource: the quality of its people, whose potential could develop only if they were not abandoned to communist insurgency, invasion by neighboring countries or Chinese hegemony.

During the war years, Lee learned that ‘the key to survival was improvisation’ – a lesson that would shape his pragmatic, experimental approach to governing Singapore.

Lee’s approach was neither to repress Singapore’s diversity nor to discount it, but to channel and manage it.

The greatest achievement of the Singapore labour movement has been to transform revolutionary fervor during the period of anti-colonialism (i.e. antagonism towards expat employers) in the 1950s to productivity consciousness (cooperation with management, both Singaporean and expat) in the 1980s.

He understood that the global balance of power was a product not only of anonymous forces but of living political entities, each replete with individual histories and culture, and each obliged to make a judgment of its opportunities. The maintenance of equilibrium, on which Singapore’s own flourishing as a trading nation depended, required not only the balancing of the major countries against each other but a degree of comprehension of their diverse identities and the perspectives that followed from them.

In Lee’s view, the great American qualities of magnanimity and idealism were insufficient on their own; geopolitical insight was required as a supplement to enable America to fulfill its role.

Viewing foreign policy in terms of strategic design, he defined great-power balance as the key to international order and, above all, to the security and prosperity of Singapore.

At the time, Lee’s attitude toward China’s rise was ambivalent, as Singapore had ‘conflicting objectives’: to make China strong enough to intimidate communist Vietnam (which Lee thought would provide ‘relief’), but not so strong that it might aggress against Taiwan.

Lee anticipated that the impending change would challenge the prevailing international equilibrium and make the position of intermediate states precarious. Julius Nyerere, the former prime minister of Tanzania, had warned Lee, ‘When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.’ To which Lee, who as we have seen was himself fond of elephant analogies, had responded: ‘When elephants make love, the grass gets trampled, too.’

Lee never tired of reminding his interlocutors that globalization meant that every nation – including (perhaps especially) those that had created the system and written its rules – would have to learn to live in a competitive world.

both appear to have suspended efforts to give coexistence an operational expression and are turning instead toward sharpening rivalry. Will the world slide toward conflict as in the run-up to the First World War, when Europe inadvertently constructed a diplomatic doomsday machine that made each succeeding crisis progressively more difficult to solve until, finally, it blew up – destroying civilization as it was then perceived? Or will the two behemoths rediscover a definition of coexistence that is meaningful in terms of each side’s conception of its greatness and of its core interests?

democratic states with significant ethnic divisions run the risk of succumbing to identity politics, which tend to accentuate sectarianism.

Lee’s statesmanship illustrates that the best determinants of a society’s fate are neither its material wealth nor other conventional measures of power but rather the quality of its people and the vision of its leaders.

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s assertion in 1962 that Great Britain had ‘lost an empire but not yet found a role’[7] became famous – and wounded British pride – because it rang so true.

By articulating her views as clearly and forcefully as possible, she aimed to shift the political center of gravity in her direction.

No British prime minister had a deeper commitment to this transatlantic orientation than Margaret Thatcher. As leader of the Opposition, she had made it her mission to rebuild the relationship with the United States following the disappointments of the Heath years.

Yet, in Thatcher’s case, more often than not, she was prepared to challenge public opinion in order to shape events and, in the end, bring public sentiment along with her.

Thatcher displayed calm nerves and unyielding commitment to her convictions – even when conditions were ambiguous, downside risks loomed large and public support appeared to be waning.

All were known for their directness and were often tellers of hard truths.

They wanted their peoples to follow along the path they led, but they did not strive for, or expect, consensus; controversy was the inevitable by-product of the transformations they sought.

Whereas nineteenth-century aristocrats understood much would be expected of them and the meritocrats of the twentieth century pursued values of service, today’s elites speak less of obligation than of self-expression or their own advancement.

Satellite television has allowed me to follow the American presidential campaign. I am amazed at the way media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him, at least superficially, into a different personality. Winning an election becomes in large measure, a contest in packaging and advertising.

Adenauer for his integrity and persistence, de Gaulle for his determination and historical vision, Nixon for his comprehension of the interlocking international situation and his strength in decision, Sadat for the spiritual elevation with which he forged peace, Lee for his imagination in the founding of a new multiethnic society, Thatcher for her principled leadership and tenacity.

It now seems possible that a liberal and universal rules-based order, however worthy in its conception, will be replaced in practice for an indeterminate period of time by an at least partially decoupled world.

The six leaders discussed here developed parallel qualities despite the profound differences among their societies: a capacity to understand the situation in which their societies found themselves, an ability to devise a strategy to manage the present and shape the future, a skill in moving their societies toward elevated purposes, and a readiness to rectify shortcomings.