Was Henry Kissinger Really a Realist? - Stephen M. Walt (Foreign Policy)

Was Henry Kissinger Really a Realist?

America’s most famous 20th century statesman wasn’t exactly what he claimed to be.

Foreign Policy, December 5, 2023

By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University

 

Henry Kissinger’s death last week produced a predictable flood of commentary, ranging from steadfast admiration to passionate criticism. I published my own assessment of his career on the occasion of his 100th birthday a few months ago, and I stand by what I wrote back then. Here I address a narrower but still salient question: Was Kissinger really a realist?

The issue is not merely one of academic interest. If Kissinger’s world view, his actions in government, and his subsequent career as a pundit, sage, and well-paid consultant are regarded as synonymous with foreign policy realism, that judgment will influence how others regard the entire realist tradition. But if he was either not a true realist or a highly idiosyncratic one, then realism’s core insights can stand independent of however one might judge the man himself or the decades he spent in the public eye.

To be sure, it is not hard to see why the realist label seems to fit him well (and it was a characterization Kissinger did little to dispel). From the very start of his career, he was primarily concerned with relations among great powers and the challenge of constructing stable orders in the absence of a central authority and the inevitable clash of competing interests. He fully appreciated the tragic nature of politics and was wary of naïve idealism. As many critics have noted, he gave scant attention to humanitarian considerations and certainly did not think human rights, the need to preserve the lives of innocents, or the niceties of international or domestic law should stop a great power from pursuing its own selfish interests.

Kissinger was also a ruthless bureaucratic infighter and accomplished practitioner of the darker political arts. He had clearly read his Machiavelli, who taught that to preserve order a prince “must learn how not to be good.” Machiavelli also thought successful leaders “must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the wind,” and when necessary be “a great feigner and dissembler.” Such characteristics fit Kissinger to a T. It is easy to see, therefore, why so many people regarded him as the quintessential American embodiment of foreign policy realism.

Yet it is impossible to be sure if Kissinger was a true realist at his core. Although he wrote thousands of pages about international politics and foreign policy, none of his books present his own distinct theory of international politics in any detail. You can learn a lot about how states behave from Kissinger’s voluminous works, but you can’t find an explicit statement explaining why they compete for power, how much power they want, or which causal forces matter most in the calculations of political leaders.

Moreover, his views were often at odds with those of other most prominent realists. Most realists believed nuclear weapons were useful only for deterrence, for example, but Kissinger’s varied (and admittedly contradictory) writings on nuclear strategy sometimes portrayed them as usable tools for fighting a war. Prominent realists such as George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, and Walter Lippmann opposed the U.S. war in Vietnam—and did so well before public opinion had shifted against the war—but Kissinger supported it before entering government and prolonged it while in office, even though he also recognized that the war could not be won.

After the Cold War, realists were among the loudest critics of NATO enlargement, a policy Kissinger supported despite its predictably negative impact on relations with Russia. And most realists recognized that going to war with Iraq in 2003 was not in the U.S. national interest, but Kissinger backed the war before it began and for several years afterward. As Edward Luce astutely observes in his own thoughtful reflection on Kissinger’s career, “He was a realist when he needed to be, and a neoconservative when the winds changed.”

What explains Kissinger’s singular position within the broader realist community? One can think of many possible reasons, but I think two interrelated elements of his worldview were central to his departures from realist orthodoxy. (For an alternative take on this question, see Paul Poast’s thread here.)

First, whereas most realists (and especially structural realists) emphasize the material elements of power (i.e., population, economic strength, resources, military power, etc.), Kissinger believed ideas were potentially just as powerful and could be especially dangerous. His official (and highly sympathetic) biographer Niall Ferguson goes too far in trying to repackage him as a neo-Kantian idealist, but his account recognizes Kissinger’s enduring belief that dangerous ideas could wreak vast havoc if they gained a following, because the strongest army might not be enough to prevent them from spreading. How else can we understand Kissinger’s exaggerated fear of Eurocommunism or his overwrought reaction to the election of a moderate socialist president (Salvador Allende) in Chile? Kissinger’s concerns about the destabilizing impact of ideas made him hypersensitive to the smallest perturbations in strategically marginal countries and inclined him to overreact to them in ways that other realists opposed.

Second, where most realists believe that states (and especially the major powers) are inclined to balance against powerful or threatening rivals, Kissinger often seemed to believe the opposite was true. Although he frequently invoked balance-of-power logic (and the opening to China was a perfect illustration of such behavior), deep down Kissinger believed that other states would “bandwagon” with America’s rivals at the drop of a hat. As he famously wrote in “The Vietnam Peace Negotiations” (published on the eve of his becoming Richard Nixon’s national security advisor): “nations can gear their actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness.” And he didn’t just mean the relatively weak states of Southeast Asia. He was worried that withdrawing from Vietnam would raise doubts about U.S. power and credibility and lead U.S. allies to opt for neutrality (or even worse, to align with the Soviet Union). This fear explains why he thought the United States had to keep fighting a war he knew it could not win. Kissinger was not alone in that belief—indeed, an obsession with credibility is hardwired into the U.S. national security establishment—but it is at odds with a core tenet of the realist tradition.

With hindsight, it is also clear that Kissinger was dead wrong, and the other realists were right. America’s European allies welcomed the disengagement from Vietnam, in part because the war had diverted U.S. attention and resources from European affairs. It is no accident that NATO’s strength and cohesion improved once the U.S. withdrew from Indochina, rebuilt its war-torn army, and focused once again on the central axis of Cold War competition. Realists like Kennan, Waltz, and Morgenthau were also correct in saying that nationalism was a far more powerful ideology than Soviet communism, and that the marriage of convenience between Beijing, Moscow and Hanoi would break down once the U.S. presence in Vietnam no longer gave these states a reason to collaborate. Instead of dominos falling and forming a unified communist sphere, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia ended up at odds once the U.S. withdrew. Similarly, realist opposition to the war in Iraq and to open-ended NATO enlargement looks wiser today than Kissinger’s endorsement of both these initiatives.

There is one sense, however, in which Kissinger can be regarded as the poster child for post-World War II realism. In Scientific Man Versus Power Politics, the classical realist Morgenthau located the taproot of international conflict in what he called the animus dominandi, or the desire to dominate that he believed was hardwired into human nature. My students are sometimes skeptical when they read this argument, perhaps because most of them don’t see themselves as driven to dominate others in the way Morgenthau describes. But if Morgenthau had been looking for an example to illustrate this concept, he could hardly have done better than Kissinger. As I argued in my earlier piece on him, no one in American history ever worked harder or longer at acquiring and retaining influence and power than Kissinger did, and few people were more successful at it. Morgenthau might also have warned that so long as people like Kissinger can rise to power in powerful countries—and not just in the United States—everyone must be on their guard. I can’t think of a more enduring realist insight than that.

Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University. Twitter: @stephenwalt