Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

by Henry Kissinger

Because of the complexity of reality, truth in history differs from truth in science. The scientist seeks verifiable results; the historically informed strategic leader strives to distill actionable insight from inherent ambiguity. Scientific experiments support or cast doubt on previous results, presenting scientists with the opportunity to modify their variables and repeat their trials. Strategists are usually permitted only one test; their decisions are typically irrevocable.

For a person like me, whose family had fled the small Bavarian city of Fürth six years earlier to escape racial persecution, no greater contrast with the Germany of my youth could have been imagined. Then, Hitler had just annexed Austria and was in the process of dismembering Czechoslovakia. The dominant attitude of the German people verged on the overbearing. Now, white sheets hung from many windows to signify the surrender of the population. The Germans, who a few years earlier had celebrated the prospect of dominating Europe from the English Channel to the Volga River, were cowed and bewildered. Thousands of displaced persons – deported from Eastern Europe as forced labor during the war – crowded the streets in quest of food and shelter and the possibility of returning home.

under the chancellorship of Otto von Bismarck (1871–90). From then until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the German empire was hounded by what Bismarck would call the ‘nightmare’ of hostile external coalitions provoked into existence by Germany’s military potential and intransigent rhetoric. Because unified Germany was stronger than any of the many states surrounding it and more populous than any save Russia, its growing and potentially dominant power turned into the permanent security challenge of Europe.

Although a known dissenter, Adenauer had been unwilling to join with anti-regime conspirators, whether civilian or military, largely because he was skeptical of their possibilities of success.[9] On the whole, as one scholar describes it, ‘he and his family did their best to live as quietly and inconspicuously as possible’.[10]

The following month, Adenauer helped to imbue the CDU with its political philosophy as the party of democracy, social conservatism and European integration, rejecting Germany’s recent past as well as totalitarianism in any form. At a January 1946 congress of the CDU’s important members in the British occupation zone in Herford, Westphalia, Adenauer elaborated on these principles and consolidated his leadership of the nascent party.

They had then committed ‘great crimes’, he said, and the Germans could find their way toward a better future only by coming to terms with their past.[13] Such an effort would be necessary for their country’s revival. From this perspective, Germany’s attitude after the Second World War needed to be the opposite of its reaction to the First. Instead of indulging in self-pitying nationalism once again, Germany should seek its future within a unifying Europe. Adenauer was proclaiming a strategy of humility.

On May 23, 1949 – four years after unconditional surrender – the new German constitution (the Basic Law) took effect, and the Federal Republic was formally established, comprising the three Western zones. The German Democratic Republic, replacing the Soviet occupation zone, would be formally constituted several months later.

Adenauer had the inner resources to transcend these tensions. His strategy of humility was composed of four elements: accepting the consequences of defeat; regaining the confidence of the victors; building a democratic society; and creating a European federation that would transcend the historic divisions of Europe.

Adenauer shared the SPD’s democratic principles, but there was also a strategic rationale for his embrace of democracy. He was determined to turn submission into a virtue, and he saw that a temporary inequality of conditions was the precondition to equality of status. During parliamentary debates in November 1949, he emphasized this by shouting (which was highly unusual for him): ‘Who do you think lost the war?’[26] Submission was the only way forward: ‘The Allies have told me that the dismantling of factories would be stopped only if I satisfy the Allied desire for security,’ he explained before wryly asking: ‘Does the Socialist party want dismantling to go on to the bitter end?’[27]

I believe that in everything we do, we must be clear that we, as a result of total collapse, are without power. One must be clear that in the negotiations, which we Germans must conduct with the Allies in order to come progressively into ever-greater possession of power, the psychological moment plays a very large role. One cannot demand and expect trust from the outset. We cannot and must not assume that with the others there has occurred suddenly a complete change in mood toward Germany, but that instead trust can only be recovered slowly, bit by bit.[31]

Was I aware, Adenauer asked, that in the judgment of serious observers a split between China and Russia was imminent? In the face of such evolving challenges, he continued, the West should take special care not to weaken itself by inter-Allied disputes. Since an overt Sino-Soviet split was not a widespread expectation at that time, I refrained from commenting.

Brandt traveled to Warsaw in 1970 and visited the memorial for the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, where Polish Jews had fought the Nazi attempt to deport them to death camps only to be brutally put down. Brandt did penance before the memorial, placing a wreath and then falling to his knees.

For his part, Konrad Adenauer did not linger over posterity’s judgment. When asked how he wanted to be remembered, he replied simply: ‘He has done his duty.’[84]

De Gaulle grasped early in the war that America would eventually be drawn in, thereby tipping the balance of forces against the Axis powers. Woe to the side that would array America against it. ‘In the free world, immense powers have not yet made their contributions,’ de Gaulle proclaimed in July 1940, adding: One day, these powers will crush the enemy. On that day France must be on the side of victory. If she is, she will become what she was before, a great and independent nation. That, and that alone, is my goal.[15] But, in a repeating pattern, de Gaulle was alone among his French military contemporaries in getting this analysis correct.

he set out for Bayeux, the largest town (pop. 15,000) in British-captured territory. There, de Gaulle refused a glass of champagne from the Vichy sub-prefect still in place, greeted the local Vichy dignitaries aloofly and proceeded to the center square for his main purpose, which was to deliver his first speech on the soil of metropolitan France. In the shadow of Bayeux’s magnificent medieval cathedral, he addressed the assemblage as if they had been members of the French Resistance through the entire war (‘You have never stopped [fighting] since the beginning of the war’) and as if he had the legitimacy to give them orders: We will continue to wage war with our forces of land, sea, and air as we do today in Italy, where our soldiers have covered themselves with glory, as they will do tomorrow in metropolitan France. Our Empire, fully gathered around us, provides tremendous help . . . I promise you that we will continue the war until the sovereignty of every inch of French territory is restored. No one will stop us from doing it. We will fight alongside the Allies as an Ally. And the victory we will win will be the victory of freedom and the victory of France.[58]

De Gaulle is often remembered by Americans today – if he is remembered at all – as a caricature: the egotistical French leader with delusions of grandeur, perpetually aggrieved over slights real and imagined. As often as not, he was a thorn in the side of his peers. Churchill occasionally raged about him. Roosevelt schemed to marginalize him. In the 1960s, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations constantly feuded with him, believing his policy was chronic opposition to American goals. The criticisms were not without foundation. De Gaulle could be haughty, cold, abrasive and petty. As a leader, he radiated mystique, not warmth. As a person, he inspired admiration, even awe, but rarely affection. 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.

Serving as an assistant to Nixon required an awareness of this modus operandi: Not every comment made or order issued by the president was intended to be interpreted or carried out literally. The instruction to Haldeman to install a direct phone line to my office at the end of our first meeting is one example: he wanted to convey to his staff that he was going to seek to add me to his team, but he was not yet ready to offer me the position in circumstances in which I might refuse it in the hearing of others. Another more consequential example: in August 1969, an American airliner en route from Rome to Israel was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists and flown to Damascus. When I communicated the news to Nixon, who was enjoying a Saturday-evening dinner with old friends in Florida, he replied, ‘Bomb the airport of Damascus.’ Rather than serving as an official directive, this statement was intended to impress both his advisors and his dining companions with his determination to put an end to hijackings.

In this connection, Eisenhower taught me an essential lesson about serving in Washington. In mid-March 1969, when the former president was clearly weakening, Nixon invited me to join in briefing his predecessor on a recent NSC meeting regarding the Middle East, which had discussed the growing Soviet military presence in the region and the balance in our response between diplomatic and other measures. As he was in the process of coming to a decision, Nixon asked me to outline for Eisenhower the options discussed by the NSC. The next morning, the content of the NSC meeting appeared in the media. General Robert Schulz, Eisenhower’s military aide, called very early that morning to connect me with the former president. Unleashing a torrent of expletives not commonly associated with his benign public persona, Eisenhower castigated me for the constraint on Nixon’s options brought about by the leakage of NSC deliberations. When I asked whether he thought my office had done the leaking, he went through another catalog of invectives to underline that my assignment was to protect the secrecy of classified information throughout the entire national security system. I had not carried out that assignment if I construed it as only applying to the security of my own office. My reply – that we had been in office for only two months and had done our utmost to control the leaking during that time – found no greater favor. ‘Young man’ – I was then forty-six – ‘let me give you one fundamental ...

Nixon’s view of America’s international duties was put forward during an address on July 6, 1971, as he explained the US obligation in Vietnam in essentially nonpartisan terms, blaming neither his Democratic predecessors nor the antiwar left. He acknowledged and specified the then-prevalent criticisms of US policy: the United States can’t be trusted with power; the United States should recede from the world scene and take care of its own problems and leave world leadership to somebody else, because we engage in immorality in the conduct of our foreign policy.[7] Accepting that the US had made initial missteps in Vietnam, as it had in other wars, he then asked the central question: ‘What other nation in the world would you like to have in the position of preeminent power?’ America was: 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.[8]

Nixon’s perception was more dynamic. He viewed peace as a state of fragile and fluid equilibrium among the great powers, a precarious balance that in turn constituted a vital component of international stability. In an interview for Time in January 1972, he stressed a balance of power as a prerequisite for peace: 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.[9]

Nixon was never tempted by the conceit that establishing personal rapport with foreign leaders could transcend conflicting national interests. ‘We all must recognize that the United States and the Soviet Union have very profound and fundamental differences,’ Nixon said during a 1970 speech to the UN General Assembly, explaining that to think otherwise ‘would slight the seriousness of our disagreements. Genuine progress in our relations calls for specifics, not merely atmospherics. A true détente is built by a series of actions, not by a superficial shift in the apparent mood.’[13] Negotiating with ideological adversaries from a position of strength would lead to an order favorable to American interests and security aspirations.

At the time, I was uneasy with Nixon’s decision. Over the years, in reflecting on the alternatives, I have concluded that Nixon had chosen the wiser course. Had he followed his first instincts, he would have had a cabinet crisis, compounded by national paralysis from protest demonstrations in major cities. The opening to China was still only an idea; the first reply from Beijing had not yet been received.[*] The Soviet Union had not yet been faced down in the Middle East or over Berlin, and negotiations with it were still in an exploratory stage. Also, earlier in that crucial year, our European allies had displayed their distaste for war in Southeast Asia during Nixon’s trip to Europe. So, despite my initial reservations, I implemented Nixon’s decision in the years to come with conviction. Both Nixon and I were convinced that the stability of the evolving international structure had to be buttressed by American strategic credibility – not squandered, especially when it came to China and Russia. The scorn of the elites notwithstanding, Nixon strove to deliver on his promises to America’s ‘silent majority’, both to avoid a humiliating defeat in Vietnam and to cease sending their sons into inconclusive combat. Whether these objectives were compatible was at the heart of an ongoing national debate, prompting constraints imposed by an atmosphere of upheaval on campuses and in the streets as well as constant reflection in Nixon’s entourage.

For twenty years following Nixon’s visit, the United States and China conducted a broad-range collaborative policy to contain Soviet power. During this period, US–China cooperation even extended to the intelligence field, albeit to a limited extent. Demonstrating the degree of China’s commitment during a subsequent visit in February 1973, Mao urged me to balance my time in China with time devoted to Japan, lest the Japanese feel neglected and become less dedicated to the common defense against the Soviet Union: ‘Rather than Japan having closer relations with the Soviet Union,’ Mao said, ‘we would rather that they would better their relations with you.’[58]

Today, China has become a formidable economic and technological competitor to the United States. In the prevailing circumstances, the question is sometimes raised whether Nixon, were he alive today, would regret the opening to China. It is a challenge he anticipated. His July 1971 Kansas City speech betrays an acute awareness of China’s potential to impact the international system: The very success of our policy of ending the isolation of Mainland China will mean an immense escalation of their economic challenge not only to us but to others in the world . . . 800 million Chinese, open to the world, with all the communication and the interchange of ideas that inevitably will occur as a result of that opening, will become an economic force in the world of enormous potential.[60]

Pakistani-occupied portion of Kashmir – the Himalayan province that had itself been partitioned in 1947, with India holding the larger and most historically significant part – Nixon became increasingly active. India, backed by Soviet military and diplomatic aid, had the capacity to dismember Pakistan province by province. And if Pakistan were on the verge of dissolution as a result of an Indian–Soviet alliance, China might become directly involved in the fighting, leading to a major war that would rend the global order. In any event, such a sequence of events would demonstrate a kind of American irrelevance in a strategically important region.

Then, in the summer of 1942, he attempted to send messages to associates of General Erwin Rommel, who was leading the Nazi offensive from Libya into Egypt. In this he was not alone: in February 1942, crowds in Cairo had shouted support for Rommel and his troops.[25] But Sadat’s messages were intercepted; he was arrested by the British and imprisoned.

Perhaps because the establishment of Israel was perceived by many Egyptians as a further European imposition on the region, even greater Egyptian identification with Arab causes and fiercer resentment of the West followed.

Moreover, in prison he had undergone a profound transformation. Rather than languishing in his solitary confinement, he had developed what he later recalled as an ‘inner strength’. Already formed by the slow rhythms of his rural childhood, he professed to have found still greater serenity in prison. But his was not a serenity that lent itself to stillness. It was, rather, ‘a capacity . . . for change’.[27] In his memoirs, Sadat would reflect: ‘My contemplation of life and human nature in that secluded place had taught me that he who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality, and will never, therefore, make any progress.’[28]

Having won the army, Nasser was free to pursue his ambitions. In October 1954, as he was speaking at a podium, eight bullets were fired toward him. All miraculously missed. Unhurt, Nasser finished his speech: ‘Go ahead and shoot me,’ he extemporized. ‘You can’t kill Nasser because all the Egyptian people will become Nassers.’[33]

On the occasion of a visit to Egypt in April 1983, I paid my respects at Sadat’s tomb. I was the only mourner present.

In an address delivered in May 1979 at Ben-Gurion University, where he was receiving an honorary degree, Sadat called for a revival of the spirit of relative tolerance of Islam’s medieval Golden Age. He added: The challenge before us is not one of scoring a point here or there; rather, it is how to build a viable structure for peace for your generation and for the generations to come. Fanaticism and self-righteousness are no answer to the complex problems of today. The answer is tolerance, compassion, and magnanimity. We will be judged not by the hard positions we took but by the wounds we heal, the souls we saved, and the suffering we eliminated.[219]

he said at the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty signing ceremony in March 1979: let there be no more wars or bloodshed between Arabs and Israelis. Let there be no more suffering or denial of rights. Let there be no more despair or loss of faith. Let no mother lament the loss of her child. Let no young man waste his life on a conflict from which no one benefits. Let us work together until the day comes when they beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. And God does call to the abode of peace. He does guide whom He pleases to His way.[220]

As he reflected on those years in his memoirs: Inside Cell 54, as my material needs grew increasingly less, the ties which had bound me to the natural world began to be severed, one after another. My soul, having jettisoned its earthly freight, was freed and took off like a bird soaring into space, into the furthest regions of existence, into infinity . . . My narrow self ceased to exist and the only recognizable entity was the totality of existence, which aspired to a higher, transcendental reality.[221]

Lee’s views during his Cambridge years were firmly socialist and anti-colonialist, even anti-British. Some of this was personal: he was occasionally turned away from hotels in England because of the color of his skin,[37] but much more of it was to do with what he later called the ‘ferment in the air’. The independence struggles of India, Burma and other colonies were leading Lee to ask: ‘Why not Malaya, which then included Singapore?’[38] Convinced that ‘the welfare state was the highest form of civilised society’, Lee was an admirer of the postwar reforms of Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s Labour government as well as Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s statist economic policies.[39]

The new Housing and Development Board (HDB) soon began constructing high-rise residential projects on a massive scale, with the goal of giving all Singaporeans access to affordable housing of essentially the same type; residents had the right to purchase their apartments from the HDB at established rates. Lee appointed a competent and dynamic businessman, Lim Kim San, to lead the board; at Lim’s direction, it built more housing in three years than the British had in the preceding thirty-two.[48] In time, Singapore grew into a fully urban society of homeowners, providing every family with a stake in Singapore’s future in the form of property.[49] As Lee pointed out in his memoirs, closely linking individual economic prosperity to the state’s well-being also ‘ensured political stability’, which in turn reinforced economic growth.[50] Later, a system of racial quotas on Singapore’s housing districts first put a limit on ethnic segregation. By living and working together, Singaporeans from disparate ethnicities and religions began to develop a national consciousness.

Lee was passionately concerned about public order. When he first came to power, the counterculture and general relaxation of morals had not yet arisen in the West, but later Lee would reflect on this as freedom run amok. ‘As a total system, I find parts of it totally unacceptable’, he told Fareed Zakaria in 1994: The expansion of the right of the individual to behave or misbehave as he pleases has come at the expense of orderly society. In the East the main object is to have a well-ordered society so that everybody can have maximum enjoyment of his freedoms. This freedom can only exist in an ordered state and not in a natural state of contention and anarchy.[69]

For example, Lee observed in 1994: if you look at societies over the millennia you find certain basic patterns. American civilization from the Pilgrim Fathers on is one of optimism and the growth of orderly government. History in China is of dynasties which have risen and fallen, of the waxing and waning of societies. And through all that turbulence, the family, the extended family, the clan, has provided a kind of survival raft for the individual. Civilizations have collapsed, dynasties have been swept away by conquering hordes, but this life raft enables [Chinese] civilization to carry on and get to its next phase.[119]

In the American people, Lee discerned an unusual generosity and openness of spirit, reminiscent of elements in his own Confucian commitments. In the immediate postwar period, he observed, America did not abuse its nuclear monopoly: Any old and established nation would have ensured its supremacy for as long as it could. But America set out to put her defeated enemies on their feet to ward off an evil force, the Soviet Union, brought about technological change by transferring technology generously and freely to Europeans and to Japanese, and enabled them to become challengers within 30 years . . . There was a certain greatness of spirit born out of the fear of Communism plus American idealism that brought that about.[122]

Certain basics about human nature do not change. Man needs a certain moral sense of right and wrong. There is such a thing called evil, and it is not the result of being a victim of society. You are just an evil man, prone to do evil things, and you have to be stopped from doing them.[125]

I don’t see the Chinese as a benign power as the Americans. I mean, they say bu cheng ba (won’t be a hegemon). If you are not ready to be a hegemon, why do you keep on telling the world you are not going to be a hegemon?[137]

Lee envisioned an apocalyptic scenario for war between the US and China. Weapons of mass destruction guaranteed devastation; beyond that, no meaningful war aims – including especially the characteristics of ‘victory’ – could be defined. So it is no accident that, toward the end of his life, Lee’s appeals to China were persistently addressed to the generation that had never experienced the turmoil of his generation and that might be too reliant on its technology or power: It is vital that the younger generation of Chinese, who have only lived during a period of peace and growth in China and have no experience of China’s tumultuous past, are made aware of the mistakes China made as a result of hubris and excesses in ideology. They have to be imbued with the right values and attitudes to meet the future with humility and responsibility.[153]

Politics demands that extra of a person, a commitment to people and ideals. You are not just doing a job. This is a vocation; not unlike the priesthood. You must feel for people, you must want to change society and make lives better.[162]

In her memoirs, Thatcher recalled a conversation with Deng Xiaoping that reveals the tense nature of their negotiations: He said that the Chinese could walk in and take Hong Kong back later today if they wanted to. I retorted that they could indeed do so; I could not stop them. But this would bring about Hong Kong’s collapse. The world would then see what followed a change from British to Chinese rule . . . For the first time, he seemed taken aback.[59]

Whatever its faults, middle-class nationalism provided a common ground, common standards, a common frame of reference without which society dissolves into nothing more than contending factions, as the Founding Fathers of America understood so well – a war of all against all.[7] Another factor common to each of the leaders (except Lee) was a devout religious upbringing – Catholic for Adenauer and de Gaulle, Quaker for Nixon, Sunni Muslim for Sadat and Methodist for Thatcher. For all the differences among these faiths, they uniformly served certain secular purposes: training in self-control, reflecting on faults and orienting toward the future.[*] These religious habits helped to instill self-mastery and a preference for taking the long view – two essential attributes of statesmanship which these leaders exemplified.

China in the twenty-first century seems embarked on an international role to which it thinks itself entitled by its achievements over millennia. The United States is acting to project power, purpose and diplomacy around the world to maintain a global equilibrium rooted in its postwar experience, responding to tangible and conceptional challenges to that order. For the leaders of each side, these requirements of security seem self-evident. And they are supported by public opinion. Yet security is only part of the equation. The key issue for the future of the world is whether the two behemoths can learn to combine inevitable strategic rivalry with a concept and practice of coexistence.

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. Faith in the future was to them indispensable. It remains so. No society can remain great if it loses faith in itself or if it systematically impugns its self-perception. This imposes above all the willingness to enlarge the sphere of concern from the self to the society at large and to evoke the generosity of public spirit which inspires sacrifice and service.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote long ago, ‘We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.’[26] It is the role of leaders to help guide that choice and inspire their people in its execution.