Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

by Henry Kissinger

Leaders think and act at the intersection of two axes: the first, between the past and the future; the second, between the abiding values and aspirations of those they lead. Their first challenge is analysis, which begins with a realistic assessment of their society based on its history, mores, and capacities. Then they must balance what they know, which is necessarily drawn from the past, with what they intuit about the future, which is inherently conjectural and uncertain. It is this intuitive grasp of direction that enables leaders to set objectives and lay down a strategy.

Leadership is most essential during periods of transition, when values and institutions are losing their relevance, and the outlines of a worthy future are in controversy. In such times, leaders are called upon to think creatively and diagnostically: what are the sources of the society’s well-being? Of its decay? Which inheritances from the past should be preserved, and which adapted or discarded? Which objectives deserve commitment, and which prospects must be rejected no matter how tempting? And, at the extreme, is one’s society sufficiently vital and confident to tolerate sacrifice as a waystation to a more fulfilling future?

Moreover, events often move too quickly to allow for precise calculation; leaders have to make judgments based on intuitions and hypotheses that cannot be proven at the time of decision. Management of risk is as critical to the leader as analytical skill.

The penalty for excessive ambition – what the Greeks called hubris – is exhaustion, while the price for resting on one’s laurels is progressive insignificance and eventual decay.

‘Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.’

As Charles de Gaulle observed in his meditation on leadership, The Edge of the Sword (1932), the artist ‘does not renounce the use of his intelligence’ – which is, after all, the source of ‘lessons, methods, and knowledge’. Instead, the artist adds to these foundations ‘a certain instinctive faculty which we call inspiration’, which alone can provide the ‘direct contact with nature from which the vital spark must leap’.

The scientist thus learns truth experimentally or mathematically; the strategist reasons at least partly by analogy with the past – first establishing which events are comparable and which prior conclusions remain relevant.

‘One must become a man of character. The best way to succeed in action is to know how to dominate oneself perpetually.’141 And

Nixon was skillful at formulations that implied a desired goal without committing to a particular implementation. Exploration of options became his way of eliciting information about potential courses of action without involving a confrontation over a decision; this approach enabled the president to separate long-range policy from day-to-day processes. It also permitted him to grasp the range of options as if he were dealing with an abstract intellectual problem, independent of personal preferences or departmental prerogatives. Wherever feasible, Nixon’s actual decision would be conveyed subsequently, when – I can think of no exception – he would not have to confront any disagreement face to face.

‘You pay the same price for conducting policy halfheartedly or hesitantly as for doing it the correct way and with conviction.’

‘There is turmoil under the heavens, but the situation is excellent.’

China did not want Taiwan right away, he explained, because the Taiwanese ‘were a bunch of counter-revolutionaries … We can do without them for the time being, and let it come after 100 years.’56

the communiqué remained equivocal regarding which China would accomplish the postulated wishes of the Chinese people.

Nixon’s leadership consisted in the fortitude to overcome his own latent sense of doom and, amid the anguish of uncertainty, to merge complex geopolitical trends into a broad definition of national interest and to sustain it in the face of adversity. Nixon worked on the conviction that peace was the fragile and dangerously ephemeral consequence of diligent statesmanship within a world where tension and conflict were almost preordained.

I observed that he had ‘advanced the vision of peace of his Quaker youth’. This is true in an obvious and immediate sense: he brought American troops home from Vietnam, helped end wars in the Middle East and South Asia and introduced incentives for restraint in the superpower competition with the Soviets through diplomatic initiatives rather than unilateral concessions.

By adjusting America’s role from faltering dominance to creative leadership, Nixon was, for a time, successful. But the collapse of his administration in August 1974 due to the Watergate tragedy, compounded by the fall of Saigon eight months later, prevented his approach to foreign policy from achieving the influence on American thought it deserved. As a result, the eventual triumph of the United States in the Cold War and the unraveling of the Soviet empire were widely perceived in ideological rather than geopolitical terms and understood as a vindication of America’s confident verities about the world. Those verities, in turn, have guided much of the US approach to the post-Cold War period. Among them is the belief that adversaries will collapse due to their own dynamics or can be crushed; that friction between countries is more often the result of either misunderstanding or malevolence rather than of differing interests or values that each side regards as valid; and that, with only a push by the United States, a rules-based world order will naturally develop as the expression of inexorable human progress. Today, a half-century after the Nixon presidency, these impulses have led the United States to a situation that is strikingly similar to the one Nixon inherited in the late 1960s. 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 wo...

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.

To orchestrate this revolution in governance, Lee established a network of what he called ‘parapolitical institutions’ to serve as a transmission belt between the state and its citizens. Community centers, citizens’ consultative committees, residents’ committees and, later, town councils provided recreation, settled small grievances, offered such services as kindergartens and disseminated information about government policies.

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

An assessment of Lee’s legacy must begin with the extraordinary growth of Singapore’s per capita gross domestic product from $517 in 1965 to $11,900 in 1990 and $60,000 at present (2020).158 Annual GDP growth averaged 8 percent well into the 1990s.159 It is one of the most remarkable economic success stories of modern times.

We live in a time when leaders are often judged more by the stridency of their rhetoric and the coloration of their politics than by the success of their policies. Especially in the developing world, too many people have gone to bed at night with their ears full but their stomachs empty.160

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

A democratic system functions by enabling a majority (variously defined) to create a government through elections, and then to create another government when political opinion shifts. But when political opinions – and divisions – are determined by immutable definitions of identity rather than by fluid policy differences, the prospects for any such outcome decline in proportion to the extent of the division; majorities tend to become permanent, and minorities seek to escape their subjugation through violence. In Lee’s view, governance operated most effectively as a pragmatic unit of close associates untethered to ideology, prizing technical and administrative competence and ruthlessly pursuing excellence.

doing so, he demonstrated the cogency of his conviction that the ultimate test of a statesman lies in the application of judgment as he journeys ‘along an unmarked road to an unknown destination’.167

His aim was for Singapore to develop the leaders and institutions relevant to the challenges ahead and to concentrate on its future rather than on worship of its past. ‘All I can do’, he told an interviewer, ‘is to make sure that when I leave, the institutions are good, sound, clean, efficient, and there is a government in place that knows what it has got to do.’177

Most significantly, 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.

‘if you are just realistic, you become pedestrian, plebeian, you will fail. Therefore you must be able to soar above the reality and say, “This is also possible.”’180

While the Internet and its attendant innovations are unquestionably technical marvels, close attention must be paid to the balance between the constructive and corrosive habits of mind encouraged by new technology.12 Just as the earlier transition from oral to written culture at once yielded the benefits of literacy and diminished the arts of spoken poetry and storytelling, the contemporary shift from print to visual culture brings both losses and gains.

What risks being lost in an age dominated by the image? The quality goes by many names – erudition, learnedness, serious and independent thinking – but the best term for it is ‘deep literacy’, defined by the essayist Adam Garfinkle as ‘[engaging with] an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author’s direction and meaning’.13 Ubiquitous and penetrating, yet invisible, deep literacy was the ‘background radiation’ of the period in which the six leaders profiled in this book came of age.

To the politically concerned, deep literacy supplies the quality Max Weber called ‘proportion’, or ‘the ability to allow realities to impinge on you while maintaining an inner calm and composure’.14 Intense reading can help leaders cultivate the mental distance from external stimuli and personalities that sustains a sense of proportion. When combined with reflection and the training of memory, it also provides a storehouse of detailed and granular knowledge from which leaders can reason analogically. More profoundly, books offer a reality that is reasonable, sequential and orderly – a reality that can be mastered, or at least managed, by reflection and planning.15 And, perhaps most importantly for leadership, reading creates a ‘skein of intergenerational conversation’, encoura...

And since character is essential, a deeper conception of meritocratic leadership would also embrace the definition of virtue provided by the political scientist James Q. Wilson: ‘habits of moderate action; more specifically, acting with due restraint on one’s impulses, due regard for the rights of others, and reasonable concern for distant consequences’.20 From youth to old age, the sheer centrality of character – that most indispensable of qualities – is an unending challenge, to leaders no less than to students of leadership. Good character does not assure worldly success, or triumph in statecraft, but it does provide firm grounding in victory and consolation in failure.