by Greg Grandin
For all of that, Brzezinski and Hoffmann were only half right when they labeled Kissinger a Spenglerian. Spengler wrote as if decline was inevitable, as if the cycle he described—in which each civilization experiences its spring, summer, autumn, winter—were as unavoidable as the spinning of the earth. Once societies pass their great creative stage and the logicians, rationalists, and bureaucrats arrive on the scene, there is no turning back. Having lost a sense of purpose, civilizations lurch outward to find meaning. They get caught up in a series of disastrous wars, propelled forward to doom by history’s cosmic beat, power for power’s sake, blood for blood’s. “Imperialism is the inevitable product” of this final stage, Kissinger wrote, summing up The Decline of the West’s argument, “an outward thrust to hide the inner void.”
Kissinger accepted Spengler’s critique of past civilizations but rejected his determinism. Decay was not inevitable. “Spengler,” Kissinger said, “merely described a fact of decline, and not its necessity.” “There is a margin,” he would write in his memoirs, “between necessity and accident, in which the statesman by perseverance and intuition must choose and thereby shape the destiny of his people.” There were limits to what any political leader could do, he said, but to hide “behind historical inevitability is tantamount to moral abdication.”10
Based on his reading of Spengler (and other philosopher-historians, such as Arnold Toynbee, who warned of the “suicidalness of militarism”), Kissinger might have come to the conclusion that the best way to avoid decline was to avoid war altogether, to put America’s great resources to building a sustainable society at home rather than squander them in adventures in places far and wide. But Kissinger took a different lesson from Spengler: it wasn’t war that was to be avoided but war fought without a clear political objective. He in fact advocated fighting wars far and wide—or at least advocated for a willingness to fight wars far and wide—as a way of preventing the loss of purpose and wisdom that Spengler identified as taking place during civilization’s final stage.11
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By late 1950, Kissinger, having finished his undergraduate studies and started the doctoral program in Harvard’s Department of Government, had advanced a searing critique of “containment,” a policy associated with another “realist,” George Kennan, which committed Washington to limiting the global spread of Soviet influence. Kissinger conceded, in a series of memos he composed in December 1950 and March 1951 for his adviser, the intellectual historian William Y. Elliott, that “our ‘containment’ policy contained the germs of a profound idea.”12 But Washington’s “timidity” prevented those germs from sprouting. The problem, according to Kissinger, was that containment was applied in too literal a fashion as an effort to “physically counter every Soviet threat where it occurred.” Such an application had the effect of both fragmenting the United States’ strength and granting Moscow the power to decide where and when Washington would fight. Thus containment, Kissinger wrote, had effectively become “an instrument of Soviet policy.”
The Soviets, Kissinger argued, had to be disabused of their idea that “any adventure could be localized at their discretion.” The United States should make it clear that it might retaliate anywhere in the world. Importantly, Washington should reserve the right to wage war “not necessarily” at “the point of aggression.”* Rather than fighting in Korea, say, Washington could hit Russia at the place and time of its choosing, preferably with “highly mobile” strike forces. Moscow also had to be convinced that “a major war with the United States”—which he called “the only real deterring threat” (Kissinger’s emphasis)—was a significant possibility.
Kissinger composed these memos just a few months after he had completed “The Meaning of History,” at a moment when Washington’s three-year-old Cold War stance was being tested in Korea. In them, Kissinger was essentially applying Spengler’s criticism of the risk aversion inherent in bureaucratic structures to a concrete policy: containment. One of the problems of bureaucracies, Kissinger pointed out, is that they tend to compartmentalize functions, which in the case of foreign relations meant severing diplomacy from warfare. For the rest of his career, Kissinger would insist that you can’t practice the first without the possibility of the second; diplomats needed to be able to wield threats and incentives equally. Here, in analyzing the weaknesses of containment, Kissinger was arguing that statesmen had to overcome their caution and think of containment as both a military and a political doctrine, remaining alive to putting into place whatever combination of war and diplomacy was required to check Soviet expansion, to see the whole globe and be willing to act in any part of it, and not in reaction but proactively. They cross a line in Korea, we strike in Baku. “Hit-and-run actions” aimed “to disperse their armies,” Kissinger said.
By the middle of the 1950s, Kissinger, having finished his doctorate, had established himself among an influential cohort of defense intellectuals. At Harvard during these years, he published a lively journal, Confluence, and helped run a prestigious International Seminar, which afforded him the opportunity to build a network of intellectuals and politicians, including Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook, Arthur Schlesinger, Daniel Ellsberg, and Reinhold Niebuhr, among others.* As a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, he researched nuclear strategy and advised the liberal Republican patrician Nelson Rockefeller. He maintained his contacts in the military intelligence community, serving on a number of government committees related to covert operations and psychological warfare: the Operations Research Office, the Psychological Strategy Board, and the Operations Coordinating Board. In 1953, Kissinger also approached the Boston Division of the FBI, telling one of its agents that he was “strongly sympathetic to the FBI” and was willing to pass along information on his Harvard colleagues. “Steps will be taken,” the interviewing agent wrote in his report, “to make Kissinger a Confidential Source of this Division.”13
In a series of essays and his 1957 book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Kissinger expanded his earlier critique of containment to cover Eisenhower’s doctrine of massive nuclear retaliation.14 The problem with that doctrine, Kissinger argued, was its “all-or-nothing” absolutism, which posited using nuclear weapons only in retaliation against a Soviet or Chinese strike. Such a policy “makes for a paralysis of diplomacy,” Kissinger said, for as time went on, the advantage would steadily tilt away from the United States toward its adversaries: “As Soviet nuclear strength increases, the number of areas that will seem worth the destruction of New York, Detroit or Chicago will steadily diminish.”15 There was very little Moscow or Peking could do over which Washington would risk total nuclear war (as, Kissinger said, the impasse in Korea demonstrated).
Washington, Kissinger wrote, had to find a way to divide the unified risk of massive retaliation into smaller, credible units of threats. Kissinger here was drawing directly from his Harvard colleague Thomas Schelling, who argued that if a threat “can be decomposed into a series of consecutive smaller threats, there is an opportunity to demonstrate on the first few transgressions that the threat will be carried out on the rest.”
One way to do so was to overcome a reluctance to use nuclear weapons. Here’s Kissinger in 1957: to convey the “maximum credible threat, limited nuclear war seems a more suitable deterrent than conventional war”; the United States needs “a diplomacy” that can “break down the atmosphere of special horror which now surrounds the use of nuclear weapons, an atmosphere which has been created in part by skillful Soviet ‘ban-the-bomb’ propaganda.”16 Another way was to demonstrate a willingness to fight “little wars” in the world’s “grey areas”—that is, those parts of the globe outside of the Eurasian heartland, which for Kissinger by the mid-1950s included Indochina, as the French had renamed Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.17
In the wake of the Korean stalemate, Kissinger wasn’t alone in making the case that Washington needed to develop a strategy to wage “little wars”—he was part of a shift among a cohort of hawkish defense i
ntellectuals including General Maxwell Taylor, General James Gavin, Robert Osgood, and Bernard Brodie. But the totality of Kissinger’s vision set him apart. His assessment of the inadequacies of Eisenhower’s defense strategy was just the tip of a broader analysis of American society: insulated by two oceans and exhilarated by two victories in world wars fought on foreign soil, the United States, Kissinger said, lacked the self-awareness required of a world power. An absolutist sense of morality—“so purist and abstracted”—absolved American leaders from having to make “decisions in ambiguous situations.” American politicians didn’t know how to conduct the “minutiae of day-to-day diplomacy.” Everything was “all-or-nothing.” Kissinger believed that the United States needed to be willing to fight a “major” war. That, though, was impossible since all that its leaders could imagine was a “massive” conflict of total destruction. Added to the problem was the country’s technological fetishism, its tendency to respond “to every Soviet advance in the nuclear field by what can best be described as a flight into technology, by devising ever more fearful weapons.”
This dependence on weapons reinforced the fundamental “dilemma” faced by the United States. Washington could dot the globe with strategic air bases. It could sign defense treaties with two-thirds of the world’s nations. And it could build more than enough nuclear warheads to destroy the planet many times over. But “the more powerful the weapons,” Kissinger wrote in 1956, “the greater becomes the reluctance to use them.”18 By telegraphing its refusal to deploy its atomic warheads in a limited strike and its unwillingness to engage in small wars, Washington had turned America’s strength (its nuclear supremacy) into a weakness. This impotence was captured in a phrase used by Eisenhower that seemed to particularly grate on the Harvard professor: “there is no alternative to peace.” It was clear to Kissinger that if the West was to triumph in the Cold War, more than technological strength was needed.
By this point, Kissinger had begun to invest the word doctrine with a Spenglerian mysticism, with the idea that civilizations need to be self-aware, that they need to know their “purpose” in order to transform brute force and material dominance into an effective diplomacy. “It is the task of strategic doctrine,” he wrote in 1957, “to translate power into policy.” Kissinger continued: “Whether the goals of a state are offensive or defensive, whether it seeks to achieve or to prevent a transformation, its strategic doctrines must define what objectives are worth contending for and determine the degree of force appropriate for achieving them.”19 Without a strategic doctrine that encapsulated America’s larger purpose, Washington’s reactions to crises would always be both tentative and overreactive.
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There was a problem with this formulation. Already in his early writings, well before he had a chance to apply his ideas as a government official, a close reading finds Kissinger struggling to break out of his own circular reasoning. He repeatedly urged America’s leaders to state their vision and make clear what they meant to accomplish with any given policy or action—to not, as he put it, exalt the technique of American power over the purpose of American power.* But he found it difficult to define what he meant by purpose. At times, Kissinger appears to mean the ability to play a long geostrategic game, to imagine where one wants to be, in relation to one’s adversaries, in ten years’ time and to put into place a policy to get there. At other times, he seems to mean the need to figure out ways to divide the threat of massive nuclear retaliation into more manageable, credible units of deterence, to be able to better balance punishments and incentives. And at still other times, purpose might refer to the need to create “legitimacy,” demonstrate “credibility,” or establish a global “balance of power.” But these are all instrumental definitions of purpose. They still beg the question, why? If the projection of power is the means, what is the end?
It was not to accumulate more objective power, for he had consistently argued that there was no such thing. Kissinger is perhaps most well known for the concept “balance of power.” But there’s a fascinating and rarely cited passage in his 1954 doctoral dissertation where he insists that what he means by this is not “real” power: “a balance of power legitimatized by power would be highly unstable and make unlimited wars almost inevitable, for the equilibrium is achieved not by the fact but by the consciousness of balance” (Kissinger’s emphasis). He goes on to write that “this consciousness is never brought about until it is tested.”20
In order to “test” power—that is, in order to create one’s consciousness of power—one needed to be willing to act. And the best way to produce that willingness was to act. On this point at least, Kissinger was unfailingly clear: “inaction” has to be avoided so as to show that action is possible. Only “action,” he wrote, could void the systemic “incentive for inaction.”21 Only “action” could overcome the paralyzing fear of the “drastic consequences” (that is, nuclear escalation) that might result from such “action.” Only through “action”—including small wars in marginal areas like Vietnam—could America become vital again, could it produce the awareness by which it understands its power, breaks the impasse caused by an overreliance on nuclear technology, instills cohesion among allies, and reminds an increasingly ossified foreign policy bureaucracy of the purpose of American power.
By the mid-1950s, then, Kissinger had come full around to embrace the object of his criticism: power for power’s sake. He had built his own perpetual motion machine; the purpose of American power was to create an awareness of American purpose. Put in Spenglerian terms, “power” is history’s starting and ending point, history’s “manifestation” and its “exclusive objective.” And since Kissinger held to an extremely plastic notion of reality, other concepts he was associated with, such as “interests,” were also pulled into the whirlpool of his reasoning: we can’t defend our interests until we know what our interests are and we can’t know what our interests are until we defend them.*
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For most of the 1960s, Kissinger was on the margins of formal power, serving as a part-time adviser to the National Security Council, first during Kennedy’s administration and then Johnson’s. But his hawkish positions lowered the public debate, feeding the anti-Communism that propelled deeper involvement in Vietnam.
Kissinger contributed to the false idea that Moscow was poised to overtake Washington in the nuclear arms race. Indeed, that it had already done so. “There is no dispute about the missile gap as such,” he wrote in 1961, helping to justify the Pentagon’s massive arms buildup that year, including thousands of Minuteman and Polaris missiles. Alarmism was then, as it is today, a good career move: “We must not delude ourselves about the gravity of our position,” he said, for “our margin of survival has narrowed dangerously.”22 Such “extravagant claims,” notes a review of Kissinger’s scholarship from this period, were reinforced by other hard-liners and in time “became part of the intellectual baggage of the Kennedy Administration, and they explain in part the willingness of the United States to overcommit its power and prestige in Vietnam.”23
Kissinger had hopes for Kennedy. He told Arthur Schlesinger a few months before the 1960 election that what the country needed more than anything was “someone who will bring about a big jump—not just an improvement of existing tendencies, but a shift into a new atmosphere, a new world.” Someone, he said, who will not just “manipulate the status quo” but create a new reality.24 Once in office, JFK disappointed Kissinger, who complained that the new president proved too cautious and too ad hoc in his response to crises.
There was, though, one event that captured his imagination. In August 1962, the White House received intelligence that the Soviets had placed long-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, leading Kennedy, in a speech broadcast to the nation on TV, to announce that he was sending warships to blockade the island. Kissinger was entranced. He called the speech, in an essay published immediately after the crisis had passed in late 1962, a brilliant “stroke”: Kennedy “boldly sei
zed an opportunity given few statesmen: to change the course of events by one dramatic move.” In forcing Khrushchev to back down, the president achieved much more than the dismantling of Soviet missiles: he “exploded the myth that in every situation the Soviets were prepared to run greater risks than we.”25 Again, note the importance of avoiding “inaction,” having less to do with advancing hard interests (the removal of missiles from Cuba) than with proving that “action” was possible.
We now know that the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the world to the brink of the nuclear abyss, was settled not with dramatic televised displays of resolve but with back-channel compromises. No matter. For Kissinger, the lesson to be drawn from the crisis was twofold: first, “initiative creates its own consensus,” and, second, statesmen shouldn’t wait until all the facts are in before they seize that initiative.* “Conjecture,” Kissinger wrote in his tribute to Kennedy, is a preferable foundation for action than data and facts, for an overreliance on information can be paralyzing. “The dilemma of any statesman is that he can never be certain about the probable course of events.” Kissinger continued: “In reaching a decision, he must inevitably act on the basis of an intuition that is inherently unprovable. If he insists on certainty, he runs the danger of becoming a prisoner of events.”
