Of course America needs a foreign policy! The title of Henry Kissinger's newbook suggests that it hasn't had one recently--a thesis supported by his manycriticisms of President Bill Clinton's diplomacy as well as by the statement,early in the book, that "in the face of perhaps the most profound and widespreadupheavals the world has ever seen," the United States has "failed to developconcepts relevant to the emerging realities." The problem with Does AmericaNeed a Foreign Policy?, however, is that the foreign policy Kissinger proposes is flawed. It is so deeply rooted in the past of world politics and in his own conservative conception of Realpolitik that it is only partly relevant to the realities of today.
Kissinger has no peers as a geopolitical thinker. His skill in getting to theheart of issues is particularly evident in his chapter on the Middle East.Describing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he writes that negotiations have todeal with both "the stuff of diplomacy"--territory and strategic issues--and "thestuff of theology," which includes the "mandates of ideology, religion anddiplomacy." His ability to sum up a conundrum in an epigram, to paint acountry's or a continent's history in a few brushstrokes, to get at the essenceof a cultural style, is unmatched: "Japan's culture does not so much seek tobeguile foreigners--as does China's--as to surround them with its pervasivedistinctiveness so that they have no choice but to adjust to its requirements."His brand of realism, like that advanced 50 years ago by University of Chicagopolitical scientist Hans Morgenthau, never forgets that it is the actors, especially the major states, that shape the international system, rather than the other way around. In this view, power is the indispensable coin of the realmof world affairs, force is the most essential component of power, and a majornation must be forever vigilant so that other nations do not dominatestrategically vital regions. A major power must also be forever prudent aboutnot throwing its might around and provoking a coalition of its rivals.
Thus, Kissinger's recommendations about China are sensible (and close toClinton's strategy!): "A policy that is perceived as having designated China asthe enemy primarily because its economy is growing and its ideology isdistasteful would end up isolating the United States." China's passion couldturn out to be nationalism, not communism; hence the need for a cautious Americanpolicy toward Taiwan and one toward China that perceives the United States as "apotential safety net" for the People's Republic. A confrontational strategy at atime when China does not have the capacity to dominate Asia would be a gravemistake. The motto for U.S. policy in Asia ought to be balancing, not bullying:The latter could drive China and Russia together again.
Kissinger offers shrewd insights on many fronts. He warns that there is nointernational consensus to leave nuclear weapons behind and that differentmotives still push nations to want to acquire them. He notes that globalizationcould be set back should a major recession develop in the United States. And heoffers observations about the growing gap between rich nations and poor ones (aswell as between the "globalized" and the "backward" sectors within countries).He delivers a sharp critique of the International Monetary Fund's inability "toapply political and social criteria" and warns of the danger of a "crisis oflegitimacy" for an international economic system that "creates newvulnerabilities to political turmoil." His rather new emphasis on the need for adialogue with India (whose conduct during the Cold War he compares to that of theUnited States at its inception) is welcome. So are--idealists should recognizeit--his observations about the difficulty of implanting "Western democraticprinciples of political organization" in Africa and his reminder that "thepursuit of moral ends in international affairs has a different context from thatin domestic politics." In diplomacy, Kissinger writes, "morality expresses itselfin the willingness to persevere through a series of steps, each of which isinevitably incomplete in terms of the ultimate goal."
With so great a mastery of his subject, so deep an understanding of history,and so convincing a belief that neither Wilsonian messianism nor the outrightchampioning of American hegemony--those two forms of what he calls the"imposition of American solutions on the world's trouble spots"--can lead tosensible policies, why is Kissinger's book ultimately disappointing? For tworeasons: its debatable geopolitical advice and its failure to come to terms withall that isn't pure Realpolitik.
To the first problem, then. Sometimes, Kissinger's acute perception ofpossible threats becomes excessive. He feared a rapprochement between the SovietUnion and the Federal Republic of Germany during much of the Cold War--it nevercame--and he still fears a rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow. His view ofRussia is far less benign than his appreciation of China, and there is no attempthere to map possibilities of cooperation with President Vladimir Putin's regime.A Russia faced with huge external and internal challenges might need the UnitedStates as "a geopolitical option" just as China does, yet Kissinger won't haveit. His endorsement of new antiballistic missile defenses is not based on aserious discussion of the threat from rogue states, perhaps because he advocatesdefenses that could stop "established non-rogue nuclear powers" as well. But ifthis is so, the arguments against a relaunching of the race for offensive nuclearweapons--and concerns about the unraveling of the whole tapestry of nuclear armscontrol if the United States dumps the 1972 AntiBallistic Missile Treaty (whichwas negotiated by Kissinger, who now minimizes its intrinsic importance)--oughtto have been addressed in greater detail and less dismissively. The larger issuesof the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and of terrorism are notdiscussed at all.
At times the measures Kissinger proposes are unlikely to improve matters asmuch as he supposes. Encouraging South Korea to avoid marginalization by takingthe lead in negotiations with North Korea is dubious advice, because the United States cannot leave the nuclear issue entirely to the two Koreas. "Determinedpurposefulness" to preserve the U.S. position in the Persian Gulf is notobviously better than the "thrashing around" of the Clinton administrationtoward Iraq. Leaving African security questions to the Africans--because there isno strategic American security interest there--is a cop-out.
The idea of a new set of interim agreements between Israel and thePalestinians--one that focuses only on territorial issues (other than Jerusalem)and allows the United States to stop being a "broker in legal compromise" as itwas at Camp David--is, on paper, sensible. (Was it really different in the daysof Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy?) But the fact that such issues as the right ofreturn, the future of Jerusalem, and the ultimate fate of the settlements havebeen raised will make it very difficult for the Palestinian negotiators to pourthem back into the bottle.
Some of the contradictions in Does America Need a Foreign Policy? are bizarre. Kissinger criticizes the United States for failing to put enough force behind its policies after the Korean cease-fire in 1951, after the beginning of negotiations with North Vietnam in 1968, and at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. In doing so, he mixes two cases--Korea and the Gulf--in which force was indeed held back (though for very different reasons) with another, Vietnam, in which the United States exercised little restraint in applying force (though it proved singularly ineffective).
Kissinger wants to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (although notto include the Baltic states) but argues that NATO should be seen as a militaryalliance, not as an instrument of collective security. Though he worries thatNATO missions in other parts of the world threaten to dissolve the alliance "intoa multilateral mishmash," he nevertheless wants the NATO nations to go beyond amere "safety net" conception, to define common purposes, and to resolve togethera host of economic and geopolitical issues. Moreover, Kissinger seems unable toconceive of this sprawling enterprise in terms of anything other than thepast--that is, as an unequal partnership in which the United States is thedominant player. He therefore trains his heavy artillery on the notion of anautonomous European military capacity and on the European Union's insistence onreaching decisions without the participation of the United States. The Europeanforce, he writes, "in practice would have to be integrated with NATO." Howattractive is this likely to be to the European Union? Would the EU like to beencased in a transatlantic free trade area and an Atlantic steering group? We arenot very far from Kissinger's 1973 ideas for the "year of Europe"--but howcompatible are those ideas with his warnings against the costs and perils ofhegemony?
The other flaw of the book concerns those "emerging realties" that Kissingeracknowledges at the outset. He is too intelligent to deny the existence ofimportant new aspects of international affairs: Private economic actors(investors, multinational corporations, speculators) and private pressure groups(economic, humanitarian, and social ones) act along with states; terrorists,mercenaries, and mafiosi operate across borders; and foreign policies areactivated not only by the "realism" of state leaders but by the interests, ideas,and passions of citizens and by inside forces mobilized by the revolution incommunications. The map of passions must be added to that of bases and resources.But Kissinger's tendency is either to be blind to or deeply resentful of theimperatives that must be heeded if one hopes to prevent these new forces frombreeding chaos. He retreats into long-established views of power politics amongsovereign states.
Consider his discussion of globalization. He has little to say about how todeal with "the mismatch between the world's political and economic systems." Henotes that "politics divide the world into national units" and understands thatfor the sake of economic growth political leaders "cannot survive as advocatesof near permanent austerity." But he does not stress the fact that globalizationin its present form is an American construction whose economic and culturalmanifestations are largely American, and that they therefore expose the UnitedStates to formidable resentments that it is in the nation's interest to deflect.And precisely because he is not among those who see globalization as a force forindividual emancipation, political accommodation, democracy, and peace, he needsto tell us how the disruptions it entails will be handled in a world in which afew rich individuals can destroy currencies, excessive or ill-considered loanscan destroy economies, and the loss or erosion of states' sovereignty makes itmore difficult for them to prevent or handle crises. One way to address suchinstability would be to have effective global institutions--the World TradeOrganization is a beginning--that can regulate and define norms for world trade, provide "firebreaks" for the international financial system, and impose amodicum of discipline on short-term or speculative investments. In the old orderbefore 1914, the need for international institutions capable of managing theworld economy was not an issue. Kissinger sees the problem but cannot adequatelyface the solution: better agencies for global governance now that governance canbe left neither to a hegemon that is part of the problem nor to the anarchy ofshrinking states.
Kissinger is wise enough to recognize that "two world wars and theinsufficient scale of the European nation-state in the face of global challengeshave made the nineteenth-century balance of power irrelevant" in Europe, but hefails to underline the originality of the European Union and acknowledge itspioneering qualities: All he sees is a complicated process that excludes theUnited States from European decision making. The members of the European Unionhave understood that the EU supplements their power, strengthens their influence,and allows them to recover at the union level much of what they have lost at thenational one. The United States has lost far less sovereignty than most otherstates, and it is wealthier and mightier than all others. Nevertheless, it can'tcontrol the global economy by itself. It needs strong institutions both to helpit try to do so and to avoid becoming the single target of all the world'sdiscontents. Yet Kissinger has never shown much sympathy for internationalinstitutions, which he finds either incompetent or too resistant to Americanpre-eminence. (It's worth remembering that Morgenthau, a realist, thought thatthe predicament of a nuclear world would require a world government.)
Beyond economic globalization, there is political globalization, whichinvolves a widespread movement for human rights. Here Kissinger's attitude is amix of skepticism and hostility. It is not the idea of human rights thatKissinger denigrates--he expresses his support for it many times--but it is theattempt to go beyond the mere aspiration that turns him into a defender of theWestphalian principles of sovereignty and nonintervention. (The Peace ofWestphalia, recall, ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648 and led to the rise ofthe system of nation-states.) In one of his many striking insights, Kissingerpoints out that by removing religious issues from the subjects of contention and"carnage" in world affairs, the Westphalian principle of noninterference in thedomestic affairs of other states was "the human rights slogan of the day."Westphalia, he states correctly, "dealt with the problem of peace and leftjustice to the domestic institutions." But the twentieth-century horrors thatresulted from the practices of totalitarian regimes and from the clashes ofethnic groups within states have led to a demand for new principles that justifycollective interference to protect people from murderous enterprises such as"ethnic cleansing" and genocide. This is a major aspect of the erosion of theborder between what is inside and what is outside the state, and between domesticand foreign policy. It is not true, as Kissinger asserts, that contemporary humanrights activists believe that "peace flows automatically from justice." They knowthat protecting human rights abroad leads to turmoil, just as the exercise ofcollective security against interstate aggression breeds violence. But they alsoknow that the gravest violations of rights require, in Kissinger's words, "somekind of supranational authority, entitled to use force to make its writ run," andthis he deems unacceptable. Why?
In part, he tells us, it is because recent cases of military intervention"reflected no traditional notion of American national interest," since "theiroutcome could in no way affect any historic definition of American security."Kissinger seems to be arguing that the fact that such initiatives "were aresponse to powerful domestic pressures to alleviate human suffering" made themipso facto suspect. He also rejects such military interventions because thedesire to limit risks and casualties for the intervenors reduced the efficacy ofthe endeavors and because the intervenors, when they prevailed, were left withalmost insoluble problems of internal reconciliation and nation building.Finally, Kissinger frowns on humanitarian military intervention because it is"put forward as a universal prescription applicable to all situations without reference to the historical or cultural context." But in many instances--such asRwanda--nothing was done, and in others--Chechnya--little can be done.
It is, of course, true that extending the notion of collective security fromexternal aggression to internal violations of rights is unlikely to be any moreuniversally applied than the UN charter's ban on aggression. But is this a reasonto scrap the prescription, as if the impossibility of arresting all criminalsjustifies giving up on law and law enforcement?
The interventions that Kissinger trenchantly criticizes--especially those inBosnia and Kosovo--are open to challenge. To be sure, in Bosnia the intervenorsare stuck with an artificial, multi-ethnic new state in which the three ethniccomponents live apart and two of them seek to reunite with their respectivebrothers and sisters in Croatia and Serbia. As Kissinger says, the intervenorsgave preference to the principle of nonacquisition of territory by force overthat of self-determination (which Kissinger seems to support even though it hasproved to be a major destroyer of the sovereignty of states). But partition, hispreferred solution, would have rewarded Serb and Croat aggressions and would haveestablished a highly destructive precedent. Concerning Kosovo, Kissinger ignoresformer Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic's plans for ethnic cleansing (forwhich he blames NATO). Kissinger's belief that "the desired outcome of anautonomous Kosovo within Yugoslavia ... could have been achieved at less cost andin a less convulsive fashion" seems very much like wishful thinking.
The post-Westphalian advances that humanitarian interventions represent havebeen ad hoc and tentative, and they have raised more problems than they havesolved. But the problems they tried to address do need to be addressed. Thismeans, once again, strengthening the international and regional organizationsthat give such interventions their legitimacy. That can be done by providing themwith standing forces and with a capacity to effect the nation-building tasks ofmaterial administration and political reconstruction--in cooperation andcoordination with the often discordant nongovernmental organizations whoseparticipation in these tasks is indispensable. The alternative is a world ofchaos, with disintegrating pseudostates and ethnic, religious, and politicalupheavals destroying even more genuine ones. Kissinger himself, having declaredAfrica of no strategic interest for the United States, acknowledges that a"limited military intervention" might have been a duty, and a success, in Rwanda.He thinks that the violations committed there could have been "quickly broughtunder control." But is this more evident than it was in some of the interventionshe criticizes?
Kissinger is rather silent on the possibilities that reformed and strengthenedcollective institutions might offer--even though their members are states, which,as a good Westphalian, he trusts more than he does jurists. He is virulentlyincensed by the role lawyers have been playing in carrying out what he calls the"unprecedented concept" of universal jurisdiction when it comes to human rightsviolations. Whether it be nations authorizing domestic prosecutors to seekextradition and trials of accused war criminals, or the setting up ofinternational criminal courts--so far, for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as thecontroversial International Criminal Court (ICC), which the United States hasrefused to accept--Kissinger is against such developments. He is not wrong inproclaiming that "any universal system should contain procedures not only topunish the wicked but to constrain the righteous." But his defense of Chileandictator Augusto Pinochet and the worst-case scenarios he conjures in the case ofthe ICC are unconvincing. (Is the heat of those pages somehow an anticipation ofhis recent misadventure at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, where he refused to respondafter being summoned by a French court investigating a charge against Pinochet?)
Kissinger is right that there is a tension between the principle of universaljurisdiction and the political need for reconciliation, but there can be no truereconciliation without a degree of justice. He is wrong to think that theadvocates of universal jurisdiction believe that "if law replaced politics, peaceand justice would prevail." What they in fact believe is that law is necessary tocorrect the excesses of politics and power. And Kissinger's own proposals for analternative to the ICC would leave the punishment of the authors of war crimes orcrimes against humanity in the hands of the UN Security Council--that is, in thethroes of politics, often untempered by norms.
Ultimately, Kissinger's case against the new drive for humanitarianinterventions dodges the problem that has plagued realists ever since Morgenthauproclaimed the mantra that national interests are paramount. Is there a clearlydefined and delimited national interest? On security and survival, it is easy toagree--but is everything that a government claims is in its security interestreally necessary? (Think antimissile defenses, or remember Kissinger's rivalZbigniew Brzezinski, who predicted that the outcome of the Cold War might bedecided in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia!) Kissinger is clearly on the side ofJohn Quincy Adams (who said that America "does not go abroad, in search ofmonsters to destroy... . She is the champion and vindicator only of her own"freedom and independence) and of Theodore Roosevelt--not Woodrow Wilson. WhileWilson's hyperbolic statements rejecting a "standard of national selfishness" areeasy to dismiss, his belief that this age requires us also to think about "theinterest of mankind" is not so easily ignored.
Material interdependence; the speed with which political turmoil can betransmitted, if only in the form of millions of refugees (a term not found inthe index of Kissinger's book); the "germ of a universal consciousness" detected by Raymond Aron--all of these factors require broadening the concept of thenational interest so as to include considerations of world order, justice, andhumanity. It is not a matter of imposing them on others who are inevitablysuspicious of neocolonialism or all too ready to see it in all defenses of humanrights. But it is precisely a preponderant power such as the United States thatmost needs norms to constrain the behavior of others, as well as a conception ofinterest that goes beyond traditional strategic and geopolitical issues. Evenrealists recognize the prevention of genocide as a legitimate internationalinterest that justifies intervention. The costs and risks of intervening arehigh; letting thugs go on rampages is even riskier. The sad fact that militaryintervention against the crimes of major powers (Russia in Chechnya, China inTibet) is not possible should not deter us from acting when it is, and fromseeking other forms of pressure or dissuasion when it is not. A concept ofstability or of order that covers up heinous domestic crimes is both immoral andunrealistic in the emerging world society.
Paradoxically, the world is increasingly unified despite its politicalfragmentation; and therefore justice as well as peace needs to be integrated intothe concept of the national interest--a concept that, beyond the often ambiguouscase of state survival and security, has always had a variable content. "Fate,"writes Kissinger, "has propelled a nation convinced of the universal applicationof a single set of maxims into a world characterized by a multiplicity ofhistorical evolutions requiring selective strategies." This makes the task of diplomacy more difficult; it does not invalidate the maxims. Kissinger chooses tosee in the Vietnam War a fiasco resulting from American "values being implementedtoo universally," from "too indiscriminating an identification of its strategicinterests with Wilsonian principles." (He did not say so at the time.) But forevery Wilsonian going overboard in Vietnam, there were Wilsonians who didn't. Andfor every realist who defended the war in purely strategic and balance-of-powerterms, there were realists like Morgenthau and George Kennan who did not. WhatVietnam "proved" was a very Kissingerian point--the need to know some history.But it also showed something that, on the whole, Wilsonians understand betterthan realists do: that what happens within a country is often more decisive thancalculations of power balance. What a given statesman declares to be in thenational interest rests on assumptions about the nation's goals and status thatgo way beyond the strictly geopolitical. The alphabet of realism is too short.Today it is necessary to see the world scene as a contest between a globalpolitical system that is struggling to organize itself and a state system thatfiercely clings to principles that are increasingly challenged. Reducinginternational affairs to the latter is neither wise nor desirable.
