by Tony Judt
The result of Kissinger’s policies and his style, Bundy concludes, was to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its only credible international supporters—opening up a gap that was widened still further when the U.S. gave its NATO allies no advance warning of the worldwide military alert of October 24, 1973 (at the time of the Middle Eastern war). Like the Japanese government following the political and economic shocks of 1971 (the opening to China, the abandoning of the dollar-gold parity, and restrictions on U.S. imports), Western European politicians in the aftermath of the oil embargo, the Kissinger speech, and the cool response to Ostpolitik began to rethink their relations with Washington. As a result of behaving as though America’s European allies could be relied upon automatically to endorse U.S. actions, Kissinger and Nixon thus released them from the habit of doing so. The damage done to NATO and the Western alliance was still being felt well into the mid-eighties.
To be sure, Nixon and Kissinger had successes too, achievements that can be placed unambiguously to their credit. The opening to China and the first round of arms agreements with the Soviet Union are among these, and William Bundy is scrupulously fair in taking note of them, just as he is careful to defend Kissinger in particular against the more all-embracing condemnations of his critics. It was Alexander Haig, he suggests, who carried the misleading, secret pledges to Thieu and who must take most of the blame for the implementation of the Cambodian schemes. An ambitious officer raised in the MacArthur school of foreign policy, he treated legal and institutional restraints on the maximum use of military force in all circumstances as annoying and dispensable impediments. Bundy’s summary is unusually severe: “That a senior military officer might be so far wrong on a central constitutional point is striking (and disturbing) even at a distance of time.”
As for Kissinger, Bundy gives him full credit for disengaging the Middle East from the volatile stalemate that followed the Yom Kippur War, shuttling tirelessly between Golda Meir and Anwar Sadat, outbidding the Soviet Union for local influence, and building good relations with many important local political leaders. In his dealings with Sadat and others, Bundy writes, “it was the reasoned arguments Kissinger made, the personal rapport he established, and the sense of understanding and respect he conveyed that moved things forward. He was always well-suited to be a mediator, a position in which a diplomat is justified in shading the views of A when he reports to B, in the interest of bringing the two closer.” A barbed compliment, perhaps, but a compliment nonetheless, followed by an unequivocally admiring conclusion: “Rarely has a statesman managed a diplomatic process so fully and to the benefit of his country.” Bundy also praises Kissinger for his well-attested suspicion of Pentagon advocates of the concept of “strategic superiority,” a skeptical position he shared with Robert McNamara, and one he sustained against opposition from the military lobby.
But the fact remains that no one who reads this book is going to think especially well of either Nixon or Kissinger, and certainly not nearly as well as they thought of themselves. Explaining Nixon’s weaknesses may be the easier task; it certainly produces the more familiar responses.12 By the standards of American politicians he was well versed in foreign affairs, and had been active in them ever since Christian Herter put him on a 1947 House committee investigating the impact of the Marshall Plan in Europe. He could be a quick study and in principle, at least, he was open to new ideas and approaches—especially if, like the opening to China, they offered personal political advantage into the bargain. It is true that he was unable to rid himself, when observing the present, of conventional references and examples from the recent past—Munich and the Korean War among them; but this hardly distinguished him from most public men of his generation, John F. Kennedy included.
Nixon’s problem, of course, lay elsewhere. He was so absorbed in the recollection and anticipation of slights and injustices, real and imagined, that much of his time as president was taken up with “screwing” his foes, domestic and foreign alike: Even when he had a defensible plan to implement, such as his “new economic policy” of 1971 (the floating of the dollar and protection against “predatory” imports), he just couldn’t help seeing in it the additional benefit of “sticking it to the Japanese.” He warned even his allies against offering unwanted (critical) counsel— according to Brandt, he justified his bombing of North Vietnam in 1971 as a “preventive measure”—and added “with some irritation, that advice from third parties was not wanted.” Indeed, this aversion to criticism was perhaps the greatest weakness of all—it was why he surrounded himself with yes-men and hardly ever exposed his person or his policies to open debate among experts or more than one adviser at a time.13
In order to ward off criticism and keep his foes at bay, Nixon preferred to tell people—individually and collectively—what they wanted to hear, reserving for himself the privilege of doing just the opposite. One result was that everyone was caught off balance, unable to work out just what it was that the president was truly seeking to achieve. In a recent book Henry Kissinger recalls that the Emperor Napoléon III of France was sometimes referred to as “the ‘Sphinx in the Tuileries’ because he was believed to be hatching vast and brilliant designs, the nature of which no one could discern until they gradually unfolded.” Something of the same thing might be said of Nixon, though the comparison flatters him; but in both cases the sphinx turns out to be an elderly, insecure man frequently overtaken by events. 14
Henry Kissinger’s is an altogether more interesting case, and there is much to be learned from it. Bundy notes the contradiction between Kissinger’s reputation for brilliance and his rather checkered and much oversold record in office. Although this insistence upon the contrast itself will infuriate those for whom the former secretary of state can do no wrong, the book offers little further discussion of the matter. But the question remains: If Kissinger had such a sure grasp of international affairs, was so well versed in diplomatic history and so clear-eyed in his understanding of the tasks of the statesman, how, in the instances of failure described by Bundy, could he have been led so astray by Nixon? Or, alternatively, why did he give Nixon such poor advice?
The conventional response is to investigate the context—the mitigating circumstances of reality, as it were. That is reasonable, and no one would deny that Henry Kissinger, like every statesman before him, inherited the problems he sought to address. But what if the starting assumptions themselves were also at fault?
Henry Kissinger’s first book, A World Restored, was a study of Metternich and Castlereagh, the Austrian and British statesmen who put together the Congress System of early-nineteenth-century Europe, named after the 1815 Congress of Vienna where the international settlement was negotiated following the defeat of Napoléon. Metternich emerges as the hero of that work, and, although Kissinger has since written many other books, in his latest publication, Diplomacy, Metternich and his eponymous system once again come in for some respectful discussion. Count Metternich was without question a resourceful diplomat who served his emperor well. A skeptical student of his times, he maneuvered effectively to protect the interests of a declining Habsburg Empire in an international environment buffeted by domestic revolutions and a rapidly shifting balance of international power. He sustained Austria’s international position for a third of a century, and the system of interstate relations that he helped secure at Vienna contributed to the decades of relative international tranquillity that followed the revolutionary upheavals of the years 1789-15.15
But Kissinger does not admire Metternich as a past statesman alone. He offers him as a model for contemporary emulation: In the aftermath of the fall of Communism, he writes, “One can hope that something akin to the Metternich system evolves.” This is not an isolated, casual aside. The whole cast of American diplomacy, in Kissinger’s view, has been distorted by excessive sensitivity to Wilsonian idealism. What is called for is a return to the laudable realism of an earlier age: “Victory in the Cold War has propelled America into a world whic
h bears many similarities to the European state system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” And if we are back in a nineteenth-century international situation, then there should be no doubt about the correct nineteenth-century response: “The international system which lasted the longest without a major war was the one following the Congress of Vienna. It combined legitimacy and equilibrium, shared values, and balance-of-power diplomacy.”16
The problem with taking Count Metternich and his system as a model, as with many other references to statesmen and policies of the reasonably distant past, is that their world differed from ours in at least one crucial respect—and it is the business of the historian to understand such differences and why they matter. Austria in 1815 was a hereditary empire (though liberal by the continental standards of the time) where all power was vested in the emperor and his ministers. There were no constitutional constraints, no electoral constituencies to placate or inform, no committees to consult. The imperial foreign minister and chancellor answered only to his emperor and to their shared view of the imperial interest. Metternich, who had some inkling of the coming domestic troubles in the sprawling, multinational Central European empire,could confine his attention exclusively to foreign and diplomatic affairs. In his own formulation, “I ruled Europe sometimes, but I never governed Austria.” 17
As a consequence, Metternich could practice diplomacy in the ancient manner, based in large measure on personal relations among noble-men from different lands speaking a common language and with a shared interest in cross-border social and institutional stability. Such intra-aristocratic diplomatic dealings had for Metternich the virtue of calculated imprecision and ambiguity. Kissinger quotes him with approval: “Things which ought to be taken for granted lose their force when they emerge in the form of arbitrary pronouncements. . . . Objects mistakenly made subject to legislation result only in the limitation, if not the complete annulment, of that which is attempted to be safeguarded.”18
Here we begin to see the outlines of the misconceived lesson that Henry Kissinger appears to have drawn from his study of international relations in the past. Secured by his own bureaucratic devices and habits of mind from having to respond to critics or other branches of government, though he could always get his opinion or policy echoed and supported by a well-placed article or interview or congressman, he indeed related to Richard Nixon much as did Metternich to the Emperor Francis II. An ambitious and intelligent courtier with the ear of an absolute ruler is in a position of unique influence, especially if he carries no responsibility for domestic affairs—this much history does indeed teach us. Moreover, although the courtier runs obvious risks if he incurs the ruler’s wrath, it is the ruler himself who is truly vulnerable in a crisis. The cleverest courtiers—Talleyrand comes to mind—will survive the fall of their masters, with some quick footwork and a recasting of the historical record; and Kissinger was among the cleverest of them all.
Henry Kissinger knew perfectly well that his world was not that of Metternich or even of Woodrow Wilson—statesmen in the past had never, he writes, “been obliged to conduct diplomacy in an environment where events can be experienced instantaneously and simultaneously by leaders and their publics.”19 But far from awakening him to an appreciation of a novel set of constraints upon foreign-policymaking, this changed situation seems to have made Kissinger all the more resistant to the constraints of policymaking in a constitutional republic with multiple governingbranches. Unrecorded personal undertakings, unarticulated policy shifts, covert dealings and the deception of friend and foe alike, “secret wars, secretly arrived at” (George McGovern), were undertaken not in ignorance of the claims of pluralist democracy but, in some cases, in order to circumvent them. Of course, a degree of strategic calculation and secrecy is a condition of good diplomacy in any political system; but in a liberal democracy it is the beginning of wisdom to recognize their limits.
But, Kissinger’s defenders might argue, so what if he abused historical analogy? He may have miscalculated or even misunderstood the domestic context in which Nixon had to operate; but he had a sure grasp of the fundamentals of international relations. Relations between states, the argument runs, are based on interest and geopolitical facts. Transformations in the ways in which countries are governed—from monarchies to aristocratic oligarchies, from liberal democracies to Communist dictatorships—may affect the way they talk about their interests and intentions, but the underlying realities remain in place. Once you know this, you can negotiate with anyone and understand the deeper meaning of any particular crisis, secure in your grasp of your country’s long-term interests and the means by which these can be advanced and protected.
In the aggregate, these are untestable propositions—you either believe them or you don’t. Henry Kissinger certainly behaved in accordance with some such set of assumptions. Like Sir Halford Mackinder, the early-twentieth-century British inventor of “geopolitics,” he believed that the Soviet Union/Russia, for example, constitutes a “geopolitical heartland” whose rulers will always be influenced by a certain sort of imperial territorial imperative; hence his various efforts to strike “deals,” with Brezhnev in particular. His admiration for Nixon rests squarely on his view that “among postwar presidents, only Nixon consistently dealt with the Soviet Union as a geopolitical challenge.” Kissinger believed that small countries (like Chile) in unimportant regions (like Latin America) require little attention or respect, so long as they stay in line. He believed, as has been seen, in “linkage”—the notion that U.S. dealings with any one country or region should always be part of a global set of policies, rather than responses to local situationson an individual basis. And he believed in the “balance of power.”
A case can be made for any of these approaches, taken separately. A policy based on maintaining the “balance of power”—a concept deriving from the English strategy for dealing with European states in the nineteenth century, juggling favorites and favors so as to prevent any one continental power from becoming overmighty—could make some sense in a multipolar world. Kissinger’s practice, however, was inconsistent: If unchanging national and geopolitical criteria “trump” everything else, for example, why base a foreign policy on the belief that countries sharing the same ideological form—Communism—will think or behave in concert? Sometimes Kissinger followed the “geopolitical” line, as in his dealings with China; sometimes not, as in his approach based on international Communist links and influence in Vietnam or Cambodia.
Détente, and what Kissinger calls “triangular diplomacy” among the major powers, brought more reciprocal relations with China and the USSR. But they never convinced either China or the Soviet Union to moderate or restrain their “clients” in Asia or Africa—the one thing Nixon and Kissinger sought above all else. “Linkage” secured nothing that was not gained by conventional diplomatic negotiating efforts or military might. And the overall objective—the advancement of the permanent interests of the United States—was probably further from attainment at the end of the Nixon-Kissinger era than at the outset.
Ironically, this is precisely because Kissinger was so caught up in the “big” picture that he and Nixon, as we have seen, made a cumulative series of crucial missteps in the “peripheral” zones whose significance they dismissively underestimated. William Bundy’s summary of the “deplorable” American treatment of Chile in the Allende era can stand for much else: “Nixon and Kissinger never gave Chile the attention required under their own decision-making system, and acted impulsively, with inadequate reflection. Their actions were not only morally repugnant but ran grave risks of the eventual exposure that damaged the United States in Latin American eyes.”
There is a revealing historical precedent for this sort of failed foreign policy, where “realism” is exposed to moral condemnation and ends up disserving its own goals. In the 1870s the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli pursued a policy of great-power “realism” in the Balkans, supporting the declining Turkish empire
in its repression of the claims of national and religious minorities under its control. This policy, carried out in the name of Britain’s strategic interests, was condemned by Disraeli’s Liberal opponent, William Gladstone, who made a series of fiery and effective public attacks on it at the election of 1880, when Disraeli’s government was brought down to defeat.
Gladstone’s rhetoric is dated, but his theme is unmistakable and familiar: “Abroad they [i.e., the government] have strained, if they have not endangered, the prerogative by gross misuse, and have weakened the Empire by needless wars, unprofitable extensions and unwise engagements, and have dishonored it in the eyes of Europe.” Disraeli’s brazen unconcern for the behavior of his friends, or for the interests of others, especially small nations, was inimical to Britain’s long-term interests, Gladstone declared: If British interests were accepted as “the sole measure of right and wrong” in Britain’s dealings with the world, then the same attitude might logically be adopted by any other country, and the result would be international anarchy.
Gladstone was responding in particular to Disraeli’s dismissal of national movements in the Balkans (especially the notorious “Bulgarian massacres” of 1876); at best he didn’t take any interest in them, at worst he attributed the troubles to the work of foreign secret societies. As for his critics at home in Britain, Disraeli dismissed their complaints as “coffee house babble”—a striking anticipation of Spiro T. Agnew’s description of similarly inspired critics of President Nixon as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” But although Gladstone was able to turn Disraeli’s haughty unconcern for informed opinion and public moral distaste to electoral advantage, Britain’s standing as a disinterested interlocutor in European affairs was indeed significantly imperiled.20
