Book by Hongshan Li: Fighting on the Cultural Front: U.S.-China Relations in the Cold War - Review by Zeno Leoni (H-Diplo)

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• H-Diplo Review Essay 597: Leoni on Li, _Fighting on the Cultural Front_

H-Diplo: New posted content

H-Diplo Review Essay 597: Leoni on Li, _Fighting on the Cultural Front_

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H-Diplo Review Essay 597

Hongshan Li. Fighting on the Cultural Front: U.S.-China Relations in the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780231207041 (hardcover, $150.00); 780231207058 (paperback, $37.00); 9780231556781 (e-book, $36.99).

27 November 2024 | PDF: https://hdiplo.org/to/E597 | X: @HDiplo | BlueSky: @h-diplo.bsky.social

Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Kevin Grimm | Production Editor: Christopher Ball

Review by Zeno Leoni, King’s College London

At the end of the 1940s, shortly after the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), William Johnstone Jr., director of the Office of Education Exchange within the Department of State, “proposed a meeting with presidents from more than a dozen universities to solicit their views on how to deal with Chinese students [in the US] so as to ‘strengthen and encourage democratic forces in China’” (43). As part of an “anti-communist ideological campaign,” US legislation offered financial support for Chinese students who were stuck in the United States in the aftermath of the civil war (41). This also involved, among many other things, “helping liberal Chinese writers publish periodicals, pamphlets, and books in Chinese,” or “strengthening the Voice of America (VOA).” Not long before that, meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was keen to “establish absolute control over all cultural institutions and activities in the newly liberated areas” as the Chinese civil war was approaching the end (17). The rationale for this was the principle of dasao fangzi—“cleaning house,” in the sense that China was “like a dirty house” that was “filled with trash, dirt, flea, bedbugs, and lice”—a metaphor for imperialist forces and their friends (16).

In 1950, furthermore, 961 faculty and staff from Peking University “signed a convention refusing to listen to the VOA and issued a statement to call on the people of the nation to do the same” (56). Later on, the CCP pursued an “alliance between Beijing and several radical African American leaders” in the United States, which is reminiscent of China’s critique of the United States when on 25 of May 2020, George Perry Floyd, Jr. was murdered by a police officer while held on the ground, while the United States issued a travel ban to “American leftists” (242-245). Considering that “[w]hen American and Chinese merchants met for the first time in 1784, they knew practically nothing about each other” (2), there was quite a lot going on during the Cold War. Yet these are just a handful of examples extracted among many other anecdotes that Hongshan Li discusses in his rich history of cultural war, Fighting on the Cultural Front: US-China Relations in the Cold War.

One is tempted to say that, overall, nothing has changed between the United States and China since then. Nor had anything changed then compared to the previous century. On the one hand, the United States—like other Western countries, especially the United Kingdom—has sought to influence China and to open it up to the global economy, ultimately for their own benefit, since the time of the Open Door policy at the end of nineteenth century and with even greater energy and success since the rapprochement in 1972. On the other hand, China continues to be ruled by elites who seek to control both the material and ideological dimensions of state borders, and to protect a relatively closed society and culture whose “fundamental precepts,” as the US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger put it, “endured, tested by the strain of periodic calamity.”[1]

Aficionados of the study of US-China relations will be able to relate to the essence and the continuity of this relationship in the longue durée in light of Li’s statement that the United States and China “kept viewing each other as their most dangerous enemy” while they also “became aware that it was extremely difficult if not impossible for either side to win a prolonged military confrontation against the other” (85-86). In other words, the United States and China, back then as much as nowadays, have continued to be entangled in what seems to be a forced coexistence. Rivalry has never disappeared though, and if nowadays there are references to a divide marked by democracy versus authoritarianism, in the past Beijing and Washington clashed as the United States was said to be “built on clearly articulated ideals and values,” while China had an “enduring cultural legacy” (2).

This overall picture emerges from a very thorough analysis which offers many more nuances and details than those that can be captured in a review. The author endeavors to answer three main questions in this book: first, “why were the [positive] historical trends in Sino-American cultural relations reversed during the Cold War, and why did the United States and the PRC become mortal enemies on the cultural front?”; second, “[h]ow did the two sides utilize cultural interactions as weapons against each other in the Cold War years?”; and third, “[w]hat impact did the Sino-American confrontation on the cultural front have in shaping US-China Cold War relations and rebuilding bilateral cultural ties during as well as after the rapprochement?” (4). Ultimately, by addressing these questions, Li aims to provide the very first study of this kind on US-China cultural exchanges during the Cold War that considers both state and non-state actors. 

The book is structured chronologically and divided in three parts. Part 1 focuses on the aftermath of World War II and, in particular, on the shift from cultural engagement to “termination of existing cultural ties” (8). The “cultural front” arises in the aftermath of the Second World War, during which the United States had supported the Chinese nationalists, when the “limited collaboration” with communists against Japan ended (14-15). Prior to the late 1940s, there were “three clear trends,” such as the “constant expansion of Sino-American cultural interactions [,]…. increasing government involvement in bilateral cultural interactions …[and] continued improvement in mutual knowledge and understanding” (2-3). But as the Communists were getting closer to victory in the civil war, they started to “prohibit foreigners from publishing newspapers or magazines” that were produced in liberated areas (17). These tough restrictions brought “immediate and drastic changes” to US-China cultural relations (20). The United States became the enemy because it was imperialist and supported the Nationalists in an anti-communist perspective. The CCP was determined to establish “absolute control” over all cultural institutions and activities in the newly liberated areas” (17). 

Since then, the author tells us, “Sino-American cultural relations [have been] transformed from mostly a constructive force in the making of bilateral relations into sharp swords constantly wielded in hot as well as cold wars since the late 1940s” (1). Part 1 explores how the United States and China became “open enemies” since the late 1940s; the involvement in the Korean War (25 June 1950–27 July 1953); and competition for influencing “Chinese students and scholars stranded in the United States” (8-9). Part 2’s focus is on the cultural front “at the height of the Cold War” (9). Chapters in this part cover issues such as the US cultural offensive against China by supporting Chinese students in Taiwan; the relationship between Beijing, Washington, and American journalists, and efforts in the 1950s to keep the cultural relationship “as dead as could be”; Beijing’s efforts to control and influence US citizens, for instance by inviting “a carefully selected small group of American citizens to China for a short amount of time”; and the fascinating history of efforts by Beijing to spread communist ideology to the United States through African American activists (9-11). 

Part 3 of the book covers less ground, as it seeks to capture a mild “brief de-escalation” in the early 1970s, in line with the process of rapprochement and normalization which was happening during those years (11). The epilogue maintains that the business of cultural confrontation continued as usual, with China seeking to prevent “bourgeois spiritual pollution”—jingshen wuran—while seeking to access US technology (page citation). With an emerging pragmatism dictated by China’s need for modernization and US interests at including China in the global economy, cultural confrontation might have been a relief valve for tensions.

The book puts forward three arguments. First, the United States and China competed in the cultural front after the 1940s not only because they were “foes” in “hot” wars, but specifically because they “each viewed the ideas and values espoused and disseminated by the other as real threats to its security and survival” (4). Second, because of these competing political systems and social values, the United States and China confronted one another in different approaches, the United States through laws and regulation and China through “violent political movements and tight ideological control.” Third, such cultural confrontation had a “profound and lasting impact” on the Cold War experience of US and Chinese people and on US-China relations before and after normalization (6-8).

The narrative of the book is successful in smoothly merging specific details with international events and the diplomatic development of US-China relations, which is always in the background. Li introduces the geopolitical context at the start of each chapter, and is very careful to provide a clear signposting for the reader. From a methodological viewpoint, while also relying on secondary sources, the book is distinguished by the author’s gathering of a rich amount of primary sources from archives in the United States, the PRC, and Taiwan, including local and national archives, institutional archives, and libraries.

This book makes for a rare contribution to the literature. The study of cultural relations between the United States and China remains underexplored, not only with regard to the Cold War era, but also with respect to more recent events, as the hard diplomatic dimension tends to gather greater interest. At the same time, it could have been even more engaging. a summary of the literature on this or closely related topics would have offered a background to readers who are not familiar with the topic. More to the point, it would have been interesting to get a sense of how the author sees this work situated in the context of previous publications on the history of US-China relations during the Cold War.[2] Some of these contributions are those of Hongshan Li himself.[3] There have been publications focusing specifically on a cultural perspective of the relationship between the US and China. One paper provided an analysis of the wartime years of WWII.[4] Others have looked at the Cold War period more broadly.[5]

This would emphasize even more the book’s value. While Fighting on the Cultural Front is based on rigorous historical research, it would have been interesting to see the author’s personal viewpoint emerge more from the narrative. The book could bear even greater contemporary relevance had it contained a reflection on the “so what” for current US-China relations, at a time when ideology appears again to have become a battleground, albeit in a much less prominent manner compared to the confrontation between NATO and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Nonetheless, Hongshan Li’s exploration of the relationship between the United States and China with this sort of long term perspective reveals a positive message in the sense that it shows that the relationship has had highs and lows; that this has been going on for a long time; that the two countries often managed to move on from dangerous impasses; and that they need each other to achieve important interests.

Zeno Leoni is a Lecturer at the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London, and an Affiliate to the Lau China Institute of the same university. His latest work is A New Cold War: US-China Relations in the 21st Century (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2024).

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[1] Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2014).

[2] Rosemary Foot, The Practice of Power: US Relations with China since 1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Gregg A. Brazinsky, Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War(Chapel Hill: The University of North Caroline Press, 2017); Yafeng Xia, Negotiating with the Enemy: U.S.-China Talks during the Cold War, 1949–1972 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

[3] Xiaobing Li and Hongshan Li, China and the United States: A New Cold War History (New York: University Press of America, 1998).

[4] Frank Ninkovich, “Cultural Relations and American China Policy, 1942–1945,” Pacific Historical Review 49: 3 (1980): 471-498.

[5] Ellen D. Wu “‘America's Chinese’: Anti-Communism, Citizenship, and Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War,” Pacific Historical Review 77:3 (2008): 391-422.

Book: Zeno Leoni. Grand Strategy and the Rise of China (2023) - Review by Zhiqun Zhu (H-Diplo)

H-Diplo: New posted content

• H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 101: Zhu on Leoni, _Grand Strategy and the Rise of China_

H-Diplo: New posted content

H-Diplo|RJISSF Review Essay 101: Zhu on Leoni, _Grand Strategy and the Rise of China_

H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum

Review Essay 101

Zeno Leoni. Grand Strategy and the Rise of China. Newcastle: Agenda Publishing, 2023. ISBN 9781788216029 (paperback, $30.00).

Reviewed by Zhiqun Zhu, Bucknell University
 

4 June 2024 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/RE101 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo

Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Masami Kimura | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
 

Observers can hardly reach a consensus about contemporary China. Scholars, journalists, and government officials often present totally different images of China. Some foresee China’s impending replacement of the United States as the global power; others predict China’s looming economic collapse and political breakdown.[1]Like the six blind men in an Indian parable who draw their conclusions about an elephant by only touching parts of the giant animal, many observers only see some aspects of China and rush to their conclusions about the vast country. 

In Grand Strategy and the Rise of China, Zeno Leoni asserts that it is not possible to study modern and contemporary China in isolation from its relationship with the West (vii). The aim of this book is to help Western citizens reflect critically on China with a sober, historically and theoretically informed view of the drivers and implications of its rise (2-3). Leoni rejects using the dichotomy of liberal democracy and autocracy as a superficial and very American perspective from which to analyze a highly complex phenomenon of China’s rise. Informed by his post-doctoral research on China and his teaching at the Defense Studies Department of King’s College London as well as extensive archival work, Leoni goes beyond Western-centrism and presents a diverse world order in which China and the rest of the world have co-existed.

After analyzing the successes and limits of China’s engagement with the global economy and discussing the dilemmas of the China-West engagement, Leoni offers some recommendations for western governments for developing their policies on China, taking into account China’s long interactions with the West, its relationship with the liberal international order (LIO), and its achievements and failures at home. For a brief book (only 103 pages), the author does a remarkable job in presenting and defending his main thesis. 

The author’s analysis of the tensions between sovereignty and globalization and between economic and security interests is particularly informative and insightful. Due to its humiliating history since the Opium Wars in the 1840s, China today is super-sensitive to issues concerning national sovereignty. For example, while many outsiders view developments in Hong Kong in recent years as issues of human rights and democracy, the Chinese government views them as the efforts by some locals and hostile foreign governments and individuals to erode China’s sovereignty over a former British colony that has already been returned to China.[2]

Indeed, the post-Mao China has taken full advantage of globalization and has been integrated into the LIO. China is arguably the country that has benefited the most from the current LIO and has emerged as a strong defender of globalization.[3] Yet, the friction between sovereignty and globalization is real, and it has been a challenge for China and others to reconcile the inherent contradictions. The competition between security and economic interests was on full display during the November 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco. After US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping spent hours discussing military dialogue, AI governance, climate change, and other security-related issues, Xi spoke at a reception and was warmly welcomed by over 300 American business executives, officials, and other individuals who favor strong commercial and cultural ties between the two countries.[4]

As the author correctly points out, such inherent tensions help us understand many of the problems between China and the Western governments. For example, when China defends its sovereignty in the controversial South China Sea, Western governments tend to accuse China of not following the rules-based international order. Ironically, China has a better record of adhering to the UN Charter than some Western countries such as the United States, Greece, and France.[5]

The fact is that China has been an essential part of the LIO. Without US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China that fundamentally changed the course of the Cold War, and without post-Mao leader Deng Xiaoping’s reforms that resulted in some 800 million Chinese being lifted out of abject poverty, the so-called LIO would not have been complete and successful. Given China’s deep interdependence with the global economy and its self-identity as a capitalist champion, for Western countries, rejecting, containing, or fighting China implies “challenging [the Western] way of life” (3), the author reasons.

Leoni urges Western countries to be “honest and pragmatic” and to “avoid picking fights over issues China does not intend to negotiate on and that are highly symbolic, such as Taiwan” (101). This is spot on and reveals a fundamental and potentially explosive problem in China’s relations with the West, especially in US-China relations today. The Taiwan issue is left over from the unfinished Chinese Civil War in the 1940s. After being defeated on the mainland and after Communist leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of a “new” China—the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Nationalist Party (KMT) leader Chiang Kai-shek left the mainland and moved his Republic of China (ROC) government to Taiwan temporarily, vowing to “retake” the mainland (光复大陆) in the future. Meanwhile, Mao believed the PRC succeeded the ROC as the only legitimate government of China and was prepared to “liberate” Taiwan (解放台湾). The Korean War that broke out in June 1950 disrupted Mao’s plan and prolonged Chiang’s rule in Taiwan. Since then, Beijing and Taipei have engaged in a diplomatic battle over who is the real representative of China.[6]

France became the first Western country to recognize the PRC over the ROC in 1964. After Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972, it became clear that the United States would switch diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, which it eventually did at the end of 1978 while acknowledging that Taiwan was part of China. Since then, Taiwan has gradually democratized, and a growing number of Taiwanese today enjoy Taiwan’s status as a de factoseparate entity from mainland China. Nevertheless, the two sides of the Taiwan Strait have never become two independent states as agreed upon by themselves and accepted by the international community.[7] 

Many observers in the West view China’s long-standing policy of seeking reunification with Taiwan as an aggressive and expansionist behavior. Without providing the historical context, some scholars tend to use “invasion” to describe Beijing’s potential use of force to take Taiwan, as if China will attack and occupy a foreign country.[8] From Beijing’s perspective, this is purely a Chinese internal matter, but foreign intervention has perpetuated the separation of Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. Beijing’s preferred policy has been pursuing reunification peacefully. If unprovoked, Beijing is unlikely to use force against Taiwan.[9] One does not have to agree with Beijing’s views, but it is important to understand where Beijing comes from in order to appreciate the complexity of the Taiwan issue and develop a reasonable and balanced approach.

Taiwan is highly symbolic in Chinese politics. It brings back bitter memories of imperialism. Taiwan was ceded to Japan as a colony after the Qing dynasty lost the 1894–1895 war with Japan. It was returned to China in 1945 when Chiang was still in power on the mainland. Taiwan is closely tied to the so-called “century of humiliation” in Chinese history, therefore, no Chinese leader can afford to “lose” Taiwan permanently under his watch.[10] The current LIO includes recognition by the UN and other international organizations and vast majority of UN members that Taiwan is a part of China, not an independent state. However, some countries, especially the United States, seem to have upgraded their “unofficial” relations with Taiwan in recent years, leading Chinese leaders to question whether these countries are serious about their official “one China” policy. “If the international order cannot help protect China’s sovereignty over Taiwan, most Chinese would not find any reason for China to care about that order,” a leading international relations scholar in China recently declared.[11]

China’s rise inevitably challenges the Western-dominated LIO, although it is debatable whether China is a status quo power or a revisionist power. After becoming the second largest economy in 2010, China has proposed several initiatives in global development, such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Some observers cite these as evidence that China is disrupting the LIO and seeks to replace the United States as the global power.[12] However, one can argue that such initiatives are being implemented within the current global system and have been supported by many countries and the United Nations. Some countries have decided not to be part of these Chinese initiatives, yet interestingly, they have developed similar programs to counter or compete with China, such as the Biden administration’s “Build Back Better World” and the proposed India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor.[13]

Going beyond the dichotomy of democracy vs. autocracy that is prevalent in some analysis of world affairs today, especially by the Biden administration and some Western scholars,[14] Leoni suggests that in fact “socio-political hybridity” has been part of the international system (12). China is such a case of hybridity. Different societal and economic models may co-exist in a country or region. China, with all its internal dynamics and regional gaps, is not a monolithic entity, even though it is controlled by the Communist Party. 

Leoni is correct in suggesting that China has been grappling with the three Cs—Confucianism, Communism, and capitalism (26). Indeed, Chinese officials have always been fascinated by capitalist successes. China has learned much from Singapore’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew’s model of paternalistic or “soft” authoritarianism. It has also imitated the “developmental state” model first practiced in Japan and then in the four Asian Tigers.[15] The term “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is a helpful interpretation of the state the Chinese government has been trying to create. Or perhaps China is moving towards building “capitalism with Chinese characteristics.” China’s development trajectory is categorically different from those of the Western models.[16]

To develop a viable China strategy, foreign governments need to have an objective and comprehensive understanding of contemporary China that is grounded in the history of China and its interactions with the West. China’s rise is concurrent with the emergence of a multipolar world, in which non-Western countries, or the Global South, are playing a more prominent role in modifying the international order that reflects the rising voices of developing countries. Like other powers, China has agency in contributing to and shaping the international system. The BRI and AIIB are examples of China’s contributions to the emerging new international order that is increasingly multipolar. If Western powers do not recognize China’s agency, they will not be able to develop a realistic and viable China strategy. 

Though Leoni points out problems in Western thinking about China, he does not indicate what exactly the West can do in dealing with the China challenge. His narrative also leaves undiscussed China’s agency to change for the better. As a stake-holder in the current LIO, China has actively pursued economic engagement in the LIO while maintaining a rigid political structure at home. Is this in China’s best interest? Can China do better?

The Chinese government argues that it does not reject democracy and human rights as universal values but emphasizes a path to human rights development that suits China’s own conditions.[17] Yet one sees no sign that China is moving in the direction of greater freedom and democracy now. While the West must be sensitive to China’s history and culture and should not provoke China on issues such as Taiwan, China also has a responsibility to reciprocate and meet the West half-way. The West must continue to apply pressure while remaining engaged with China, perhaps more diplomatically, to achieve a successful outcome for both China and the rest of the world. In other words, the West should not just develop a China strategy passively; it can seek a more proactive approach to shape the environment conducive for China’s political transformation.

In short, the West faces two challenges in developing a practical China strategy. First, it needs to acknowledge and welcome China’s contribution to global development, including its effort to introduce a more inclusive international system. Second, it must keep the pressure on without triggering strong nationalist responses from Beijing so that China can move in the direction of a more liberal society. Leoni’s book alludes to these challenges and mentions that countries should “retaliate where Beijing restricts the space for freedom and to expand (cooperation) where Beijing is willing to compromise” (102), but it is unclear where the Goldilocks point is. Essentially, how will the Western governments balance their security and economic interests? Leoni’s book does not provide clear answers but points in the right direction. Perhaps therein lies the significance of this succinct book.

 

Zhiqun Zhu, PhD, is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Bucknell University. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on Chinese foreign policy, US-China relations, and East Asian political economy. 

 

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[1] For competing perspectives on contemporary China, see for example, Ann Lee, Will China’s Economy Collapse?(Boston and New York: Polity, 2017). Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (Ashland, OR: Blackstone, 2015). Keyu Jin, The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism (New York:Viking, 2023). Barry J. Naughton, The Chinese Economy, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). Justin Yifu Lin, Demystifying the Chinese Economy (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

[2] Lindsay Maizland, “Hong Kong’s Freedoms: What China Promised and How It’s Cracking Down,” Council on Foreign Relations, 31 January, 2024. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hong-kong-freedoms-democracy-protests-china-crackdown#:~:text=Under%20the%20Basic%20Law%2C%20Hong,and%20Political%20Rights%20(ICCPR). Vivian Wang and Tiffany May, “Hong Kong Pushes New Security Law to Root Out ‘Seeds of Unrest’,” The New York Times, 30 January, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/world/asia/hong-kong-security-law-unrest.html

[3] See for example, Huiyao Wang and Alistair Michie, eds. Consensus or Conflict?: China and Globalization in the 21st Century (New York: Springer, 2021).

[4] Ana Swanson, “Pandas, Ping-Pong and Profits: Chinese Leader Woos U.S. C.E.O.s,” New York Times, 16 November, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/business/economy/china-us-business-xi-jinping-ceos.html.

[5] Jeffrey D. Sachs and Guillaume Lafortune, “Adhering to the UN Charter: Barbados First and the United States Last,” Common Dreams, 13 November, 2023, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/multilateralism-index-united-nations.

[6] Zhiqun Zhu, “‘One China’ in the Beijing-Washington-Taipei Trilateral Relationship,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 20, Issue 2, Number 3 (January 15, 2022): https://apjjf.org/2022/2/Zhu.html, accessed 19 February, 2024. 

[7] Zhu, “’One China’ in the Beijing-Washington-Taipei Trilateral Relationship.” 

[8] For example, Robert Manning, “Is a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan the Most Likely Scenario?” The Stimson Center, 23 October 2023, https://www.stimson.org/2023/is-a-chinese-invasion-of-taiwan-the-most-likely-scenario/.

[9] See for example, Jessica Chen Weiss, “Don’t Panic about Taiwan: Alarm Over a Chinese Invasion Could Become a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,” Foreign Affairs (21 March, 2023): https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/taiwan-chinese-invasion-dont-panic, accessed 19 February, 2024.

[10] Chen Weiss, “Don’t Panic About Taiwan.”

[11] Qingguo Jia, “Reconstructing China’s Role in Regional Security,” East Asia Forum (6 November 2022): https://eastasiaforum.org/2022/11/06/reconstructing-chinas-role-in-regional-security/, accessed 19 February, 2024.

[12] See for example, Simon Curtis and Ian Klaus, The Belt and Road City: Geopolitics, Urbanization, and China’s Search for a New International Order (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024).

[13] Keith Johnson, “Belt and Road Meets Build Back Better,” Foreign Policy, 4 October 2021. Jean-Loup Samaan, “The India-Middle East Corridor: a Biden Road Initiative?” The Atlantic Council, 6 October 2023. 

[14] Robert Manning, “Does Biden’s ‘Democracy v. Autocracy’ Framework Make Sense?” The Hill, 13 June, 2022.

[15] John B. Knight, “China as a Developmental State,” The World Economy 37:10 (October 2014): 1335-1347.

[16] Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

[17] Qin Gang, “Following a Chinese Path of Human Rights Development and Contributing China’s Strength to Global Human Rights Governance,” Remarks at the High-level Segment of the 52nd Session of The United Nations Human Rights Council, 27 February 2023, https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/wjdt_665385/zyjh_665391/202302/t20230228_11032426.html. 

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From Amazon: 

During four decades of fast-paced economic growth, China’s ascent has reverberated across the full social spectrum, from international relations to technology, from trade to global health, from academia to climate change. Despite disrupting the long-established cultural and political constructs of the postwar liberal international order, Beijing’s power remains uneven and limited internationally, whereas the rise of China has been the object of much frenzied reaction within Western civil society. The hostility and new cold war with the United States is a major factor in fuelling debate and speculation.

This book explores the uncertainties and dilemmas China’s rise has fuelled for both the US-sponsored liberal order and the Chinese communist elites that are responsible. It provides the tools to understand the contemporary political and media turmoil about China, its causes and its trajectories. It interprets the rise of China through the lenses of global politics and the uneven and combined development of capitalism and its encounter with the authoritarian, one-party system of the Chinese polity.

Book review: Ruth Elizabeth Gordon: Development Disrupted: The Global South in the Twenty-First Century, by Fathimath Musthaq (H-Diplo)

Impossível fazer uma análise coerente, adequada, significativa, de duas coisas inexistentes: um Global South, que é um conceito fantasioso, não uma realidade, e UMA economia desse Sul Global, coisa absolutamente sem sentido. Uma terceira coisa totalmente sem sentido é pretender falar de um "processo de desenvolvimento" – o que é isso, para uma multitude de 150 países? – em "ruptura", ou interrompido NO SÉCULO XXI, que está apenas começando.

Loucuras acadêmicas acontecem. Essa pode ser uma delas.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

H-Diplo: New posted content

Musthaq on Gordon, 'Development Disrupted: The Global South in the Twenty-First Century' [Review]

H-Net Reviews

Gordon, Ruth Elizabeth.  Development Disrupted: The Global South in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 254 pp. $105.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781108424172.$27.99 (paper), ISBN 9781108439527.

Reviewed by Fathimath Musthaq (Reed College)
Published on H-Diplo (May, 2024)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=59722

September 11, 2023, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the CIA-assisted overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. In his short time as president, Allende worked tirelessly to secure technology sovereignty for Chile, something that countries of the Global South continue to struggle with to this day. Allende was an ardent advocate of the 1969 Andean Pact, signed between Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, to create a free trade bloc to collectively pursue industrialization. Central to the pact was finding ways to access technology more affordably, by curbing the influence of multinational corporations and fostering the domestic market. Inspired by the Santiago School of Technology’s thesis that countries needed technology sovereignty for realizing growth, Allende nationalized the State Development Corporation (Corfo) that housed the powerful Institute for Technological Research, tasked with assisting private firms and government ministries in acquiring technological capacity.[1] During this time, Allende launched the National Electronics Company whose goal was to build a semiconductor plant. While these plans unfortunately never came to fruition, the necessity of technology sovereignty to development became well established in the development discourse coming out of Latin America during this time.

Ruth Elizabeth Gordon’s Development Disrupted: The Global South in the Twenty-First Century echoes the centrality of technology to development but approaches the issue from a less state-oriented and more market-based perspective. Gordon begins with the claim that “development is ripe for disruption,” thanks to rapidly advancing technology. The book seeks to uncover these disruptions, which Gordon argues is “a very good news story, not perfect by any means, but progress nonetheless” (p. 1). People in the Global South are configuring new ways to have basic needs met, thanks to technology: digital wallets provide payments systems for unbanked masses, while online platforms provide the latest market prices for rural farmers, allowing them to obtain better prices, and digital platforms allow teachers and students to acquire knowledge and training from afar. As a self-avowed “techno optimist,” Gordon celebrates the proliferation of technology-aided solutions to long-standing development challenges (p. ix).

Gordon begins the book by providing an account of the history of development, starting in the 1940s with US president Harry Truman’s IV Point Program. In chapter 1, she introduces the reader to various international actors and ideologies that have shaped development over the decades, which she dubs as cycles of “conventional wisdom” (p. 8). In chapter 2, she juxtaposes development models espoused by international financial institutions (IFIs), primarily the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to the East Asian developmental (EAD) state, with the conclusion that the latter was more successful in facilitating development, thanks to active industrial and financial policy and competent bureaucracies, among other things. The account in this first part of the book does not touch on the contentious issue of technology transfer, surprising given that from the perspective of the Global South, technology transfer was a longstanding issue in the period covered here, for example, in the Andean Pact mentioned above and in the 1974 New International Economic Order that explicitly called on rich Global North countries to share technology with the Global South.[2] Similarly, in the discussion of EAD states, the centrality of technology-management to the success of the development state, through the acquisition of foreign licenses and investment in research and development, is overlooked.[3] Locating the failures and shortcomings of existing development models to resolve the sticky issue of technology transfer would have nicely motivated the rest of the chapters.

Part 2 of the book is where Gordon begins to engage with the concept of “disruption.” Interestingly, however, the disruption she alludes to here is not technological but more cultural and ideological. In chapter 3, she introduces the actors that are disrupting development: middle-income Global South countries, of which China is treated as a special case, and philanthropic organizations and donors primarily based in the West. Along with a vast and burgeoning literature, Gordon details how Chinese lending differs from IFI lending, the subject of chapter 4. Whereas IFIs turned to “soft infrastructure such as free market reforms, good governance, human rights, and other matters” in the 1990s, Chinese lending has primarily focused on large infrastructure projects and resource extraction, rendering them appealing partners to many African countries seeking such investment (p. 91). China, along with other Global South lenders, Gordon argues, embraces a lending model built on horizontal ties and partnerships, which is, in turn, informed by “mutual benefit, non-interference, and respect for the sovereignty of their partners/recipients” (p. 83).

Chapter 5 introduces the second disrupter: private Western donors that operate considerably differently from traditional donors. Identifying this new trend as “philanthrocapitalism,” Gordon contends that while there are many criticisms to be made of philanthrocapitalism (for example, lack of accountability, absence of transparency), she is more interested in articulating its “positive impacts” since the traditional development model is in severe need of disruption (pp. 110, 111). For Gordon, what is exciting about the turn to philanthrocapitalism is how it has energized a range of financial flows to yield various blended finance instruments, such as public private partnerships that hold the promise of meeting basic needs in the Global South. She agrees with proponents of such models who assume a double coincidence between “business principles” and “social transformation” (p. 110). The optimism Gordon espouses, however, seems unwarranted in light of the growing literature in political economy that identifies “de-risking” as a poor development strategy, given that it prioritizes profit incentives over social purpose in the execution of development projects. Gordon highlights some of these concerns in the chapter but appears to subordinate these to the benefits provided by an increase in financial flows (in her words, “more resources”) to the Global South (p. 122). This argument would have benefited from a demonstration of more specific instances where philanthropists take on risky projects avoided by governments. In practice, what we tend to see more often, under a “de-risking” logic, is states taking on various risks associated with development projects in order to entice investors, which carries with it fiscal implications and equity concerns.[4]

Gordon’s optimism extends not only to new initiatives inaugurated under the banner of philanthrocapitalism but also to the capitalists themselves. One of the running assumptions in this chapter is that tech billionaires can innovate (or “disrupt”) philanthropy just as well as they innovate for the market. The book includes a very short case study of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which, Gordon claims, has “literally disrupted the [global health] space” (p. 122). She notes generous funding, new technologies, and new methods of service delivery as underpinning this disruption. However, the application of the idea is cursory, and the role of technology in the disruption process is not examined.

Part 3 is the heart of the book, which is why it is unfortunate that it comes so late. Here is the first time Gordon provides a definition of “disruption,” and only in a footnote (p. 149n1). For a concept that appears in the title and in the introduction as a central idea, it would have been helpful to the reader if there was a more complete discussion of this concept much sooner. Some of the key markers of “disruption” are that products or services are offered to “non-consumers” (for example, the unbanked) even if the product is a lesser version of the more established version, but because it is also more adaptable and simpler, it triggers a migration from incumbents to the disruptive innovator. Before describing her case studies, in chapter 6, Gordon provides a sweeping account of how technology shapes development through its exponential rate of progress, digitization, and leapfrogging in a so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution. In chapter 7, she summons evidence for technology-led disruptions in finance, education, agriculture, and health care. Throughout, she centers the power of the mobile phone as a platform for information sharing and enabling basic service delivery.

The book first outlines the case of M-Pesa, which was introduced in Kenya in 2007 to provide banking services to a largely unbanked population. Its rapid success was evident in the fact that within 2.5 years of its inauguration, the platform enrolled 8.5 million users and registered 3.7 billion US dollars in transactions (p. 158). She also identifies mobile learning through Text2Teaching (first inaugurated in the Philippines), MoMaths (in South Africa), and Dr. Maths projects (in South Africa) as effective teaching and learning models. The assessment of these platforms, however, seems prematurely optimistic. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous studies have documented an association between remote learning and decline in student learning and academic behavior.[5] While remote learning may be the only option for some in the Global South, it is important to note the downsides of remote learning so that a vision of collective learning can be defended, nurtured, and foregrounded, and not sidelined because mobile learning is more cost effective and easier to implement.

Chapter 8 is different from the rest of the book. It is a stand-alone chapter on climate change, it is mostly descriptive, and it covers some elementary facts about climate change and international coordination over climate action. A few pages at the end of the chapter touch on the ideas of “environmental leapfrogging” and “energy leapfrogging,” noting the importance of China and India moving from a simple model of technology transfer to strengthening domestic innovative capacities to make technologies more context suitable (pp. 209, 210).

One of the defining aspects of the book is how it (re)conceives development. Gordon espouses a development that is centered on the delivery of basic needs, an approach that in many ways resonates with Amartya Sen’s “capabilities approach” (in Development as Freedom [rep. ed. 2000]) that places emphasis on human well-being. The subject of Gordon’s book, however, is more about how we get there, which involves technology developed in local contexts. In the final chapter of the book, Gordon acknowledges a major issue with pursuing technology-led development: jobless growth. For countries in the Global South, premature deindustrialization, thanks to technology, “removes a rung in the development ladder” (p. 229). But she remains optimistic, positing the possibility that Global South countries could potentially “leapfrog” over industrialization. Local innovators that respond to local problems, she portends, may be one way to do this. She writes, “Rather than depending on the robust R&D that produces the state of the art technology that is found in Global North environs, emerging countries must ... focus on solving practical problems” where the solutions may be “quite basic” (p. 233). In fact, in her own words, “one of the most exciting things about the technological revolution” in the Global South is “that it is bottom-up rather than top-down, thus returning power to local entities, individuals, and entrepreneurs” (p. 235).

While offering a unique view of development, Gordon’s conception of development through technology carries with it problematic assumptions. First is the assumption that a profit-oriented private sector can be a long-term solution to development woes. Meeting basic needs is certainly part of the development agenda, but for many in the Global South, development means more than that. According to 1950s Latin American structuralists, it is about creating the conditions for the delivery of basic and complex needs on a long-term sustainable basis. In other words, development has to be about building the capacities of countries to carve out autonomous development paths by reducing dependence on external sources. As a result, the state often plays an important role, even if that role changes over time. Gordon’s account in the second half of the book is largely silent on the role of the state, which is surprising since she champions EAD states in the first part of the book. Private tech-led solutions also introduce precariousness to basic service delivery. For example, with privately delivered services such as M-Pesa, there is no guarantee that terms of service will evolve over time to deliver a better, more accessible product. One thing we have observed with platforms like Uber is that once they acquire a considerable market share, prices go up.[6] Reliance on the private sector for basic service delivery makes uncertain the continuity of the service and its accessibility.

Second, the assumption that locally produced technologies can address development issues at the needed scale seems premature. Throughout the book, there is little acknowledgment of the contentious geopolitics around technology production and access. In the 1950s, Latin American structuralists identified lack of technological capacity as a major impediment to autonomous industrialization.[7] Technological capacity itself is determined, as Evgeny Morozov argues, by the history of geoeconomic and geopolitical struggles, that is, how much power and sovereignty a country possesses in the global economy.[8] Without technology sovereignty, southern economies face falling terms of trade and endure unequal exchange. The dependency school posited that the South’s technological dependence reinforced the development of the center at the expense of the periphery. The case of Indonesia, recently highlighted in the scholarship as a success story, is instructive. After China and India, Indonesia has the largest share of labor in global value chains (GVCs) and has significantly increased the share of value added manufacturing driven by foreign direct investment (FDI).[9] Yet Indonesia’s industrialization is hemmed in by hierarchical structures of foreign corporate control, the result being that industrialization in Indonesia reflects the interests of Japanese multinational corporations (MNCs) more than the needs of the Indonesian economy.[10] The recent trade war between the United States and China over semiconductor chips (with the US government banning the sale of chips made in the United States or involving US technology to Chinese company Huawei) demonstrates the importance of geopolitics to the acquisition of technology. A third issue is how our privacy may be compromised by migrating basic service delivery to privately owned online platforms that mine data for sale. While loss of privacy may be increasingly treated like a forgone conclusion in a world so interconnected, it remains a central issue to our capacity to live free lives, as Shoshana Zuboff argues in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019).

Gordon’s book is heavy on details and sparse on analysis. A stronger analytical framework that centers technology could have helped avoid some of the book’s oversights, such as the contentious issue of technology transfer and the geopolitics of technology production. Notwithstanding these lacunas, the book is a serious invitation to consider the power and possibilities of technology for the Global South.

Notes

[1]. Evgeny Morozov, “The Lessons of Chile’s Struggle against Big Tech,” New Statesman (blog), September 9, 2023, https://www.newstatesman.com/the-weekend-essay/2023/09/salvador-allende-fight-big-tech.

[2]. UN General Assembly, Resolution 3201, Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order, 1974, https://investmentpolicy.unctad.org/international-investment-agreements/treaty-files/2775/download.

[3]. Alice H. Amsden, Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

[4]. Daniela Gabor and Ndongo Samba Sylla, “Derisking Developmentalism: A Tale of Green Hydrogen,” Development and Change 54, no. 5 (2023): 1169-96, https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12779.

[5]. Jill V. Klosky, Julie A. Gazmararian, Olivia Casimir, and Sarah C. Blake, “Effects of Remote Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic on Young Children’s Learning and Academic Behavior in Georgia: Perceptions of Parents and School Administrators,” Journal of School Health 92, no. 7 (2022): 656–64, https://doi.org/10.1111/josh.13185.

[6]. Len Sherman, “Uber’s New Math: Increase Prices and Squeeze Driver Pay,” Forbes, January 16, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/lensherman/2023/01/16/ubers-new-math-increase-prices-and-squeeze-driver-pay/.

[7]. Raúl Prebisch, “The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems,” Sede de la CEPAL en Santiago (Estudios e Investigaciones), Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), April 27, 1950, https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/ecrcol093/29973.htm.

[8]. Morozov, “Lessons of Chile’s Struggle.”

[9]. Intan Suwandi, “Value Chains: The New Economic Imperialism,” Monthly Review (blog), September 3, 2019, https://monthlyreview.org/product/value-chains/.

[10]. Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven, “Beyond the Stereotype: Restating the Relevance of the Dependency Research Programme,” Development and Change 52, no. 1 (2021): 76–112, https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12593.

Fathimath Musthaq is assistant professor of political science at Reed College, Portland. Her primary interests are in central banking and financialization in the Global South, development and dependency, and international monetary reform.

Citation: Fathimath Musthaq. Review of Gordon, Ruth Elizabeth. Development Disrupted: The Global South in the Twenty-First Century. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. May, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=59722

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Henry Kissinger and the Angel of Applied History - Sean M. Case, Yale University (H-Diplo)

Kissinger era o próprio arauto da história aplicada, inclusive com bombas e assassinatos. 

H-Diplo|RJISSF Commentary II-4: "Henry Kissinger and the Angel of Applied History"

Christopher Ball

H-Diplo|RJISSF Commentary

Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Seth Offenbach | Production Editor: Christopher Ball

10 April 2024 | Vol. II: No. 4 

Henry Kissinger and the Angel of Applied History

https://hdiplo.org/to/CII-4

Essay by Sean M. Case, Yale University 

The news alerts declaring the death of former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger flashed across my iPhone in a feverish pitch matching my flu-induced fever. I felt utterly speechless—it did not seem real. Kissinger had most recently celebrated his centenary in May. The obituaries and the post-mortems similarly appeared in a feverish pace shortly after his passing. The New York Times and the Washington Post carried headlines declaring the death of a statesman who shaped the history of the Cold War in the United States and remained a “player on the world stage” until his death.[1] His explicit involvement in world affairs as national security adviser and then secretary of state under the administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford, Jr. bore special mention. National security journalist Spencer Ackerman, channeling the spirit of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s 1983 The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, condemned Kissinger as a “war criminal beloved by America’s ruling class” in an obituary that was celebratory in tone.[2] The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft conducted a symposium debating Kissinger’s legacy of peace or destruction, and Jacobin Magazinecommissioned essays from prominent historians who condemned Kissinger as the “top strategist of America’s empire of capital.”[3] The divisions over his policy legacy reflected those within international relations (IR) theory. While Kissinger was often hailed or condemned as a foreign policy realist and a consummate practitioner of nineteenth-century realpolitik in the twentieth century, recent intellectual trends sought to shift his theoretical position. Diplomatic historian Thomas Otte exhorted Kissinger as the “ultimate realist,” yet other academics sought to label him as an “idealist” or even a “moralist.”[4] On the other hand, contemporary international relations realists, working in transatlantic solidarity, rejected him as an “occasional realist” who prolonged and expanded conflict in Southeast Asia and destabilized Latin America, thus demonstrating how power politics had corrupted him and his strategic outlook.[5]

These obituaries and memorials collectively omit one of Kissinger’s most enduring policy legacies: his self-perception as a historian, which was bolstered by the same perception from his friends, colleagues, and students. He is thoroughly woven into the warp and weft of both how applied history is understood and taught. Due to his nearly 60 years in official and unofficial government service, Kissinger appeared to both exist within and outside of time. How apt for an individual who was thought of as a statesman and a historian, an image which Kissinger had cultivated ever since the completion of his undergraduate thesis The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant at Harvard University in 1950.[6] His 1957 monograph A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, which was based upon his 1954 doctoral dissertation, and “The White Revolutionary: Reflections on Bismarck,” his 1968 biographical sketch of the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, further cemented him as a historically oriented thinker.[7] Rather than subscribing to the policy consensus that the threat of nuclear weapons in the 1950s ushered in a new paradigm, Kissinger believed their existence highlighted deficiencies within policymakers’ historical knowledge.[8] He fluidly moved between the disciplines of history, political science, and philosophy in order to show how nineteenth-century concerns directly correlated with twentieth-century anxieties. His identity as a historian raises the following questions: Why did Kissinger consider himself to be a historian? How did he employ history? What did he believe was the purpose of historical inquiry? A consideration of him as a philosopher of history or a historian demonstrates the far more pernicious aspect of his historical thinking: history-as-analogy. This method of thinking divorced national histories from their contexts and mapped them onto other states and contexts. Kissinger’s privileging of historical analogy ultimately transformed history from an examination of the past to a strategic resource to be mined for executive benefit. 

Historians have debated the “meaning of Kissinger” since the 1970s, creating what one historian referred to as “Kissingerology” and another to the “Kissinger Wars.”[9] The controversial statesman’s role in international affairs invited multiple interpretations that often fell into two polarized camps. In The Trial of Henry Kissinger, journalist and writer Christopher Hitchens accused Kissinger of being a war criminal because of his willful ignorance of human rights and his enabling of atrocities in Cambodia, Chile, and Bangladesh; he was not alone in his assessment.[10] Foreign affairs journalist Robert D. Kaplan, on the other hand, argued that history would ultimately exonerate Kissinger as a misunderstood defender of the international system.[11] Going further than Kaplan had in defending Kissinger, historian Niall Ferguson used the first volume of his biography, Kissinger, 1923–1968: The Idealist to dismantle what he perceived as myths concerning Kissinger, whom he considered to be a friend. Primarily addressing Hitchens’s charges of war crimes, Ferguson argued that a double standard existed between Kissinger and his colleagues in the federal service, particularly Kissinger’s predecessor as secretary of state, John Foster Dulles.[12] He subsequently praised Kissinger for introducing the insight that “states and statesmen act on the behalf of their own historical self-understanding,” which foreclosed any future criticisms of policy.[13] Kissinger’s personal view of himself as a “historian more than as a statesman” led historian William T. Weber in 1978 to seek the intersections between Kissinger’s historical scholarship and his policies.[14]Yet the sheer breadth and depth of Kissingerology paid scant attention to Weber’s line of inquiry until the adoption of “applied history” as a mode of inquiry and advising in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Ferguson’s assessment coincided with his then-recent institutional project at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Nearly 30 years after Kissinger left the White House in his position as secretary of state in 1977, political scientist Graham Allison and Ferguson published their 2015 “Applied History Manifesto,” calling for the creation of a “White House Council of Historical Advisers,” which, in turn, led to the creation of Harvard’s Applied History Project. The impetus for their proposal stemmed from Ferguson’s recent biographical treatment of the former secretary of state. Over the course of his decade-long research into Kissinger’s life, Ferguson discovered a purported “history deficit” within US foreign policy. He and Allison endorsed Kissinger’s judgment that policymakers knew “almost nothing not just of other countries’ pasts but also of their own. Worse, they often do not see what is wrong with their ignorance.”[15] Four decades after Kissinger’s previous appearance at Harvard, Allison, in turn, hosted a discussion with Kissinger in 2012. In that forum, Kissinger recommended history and philosophy as the essential disciplines for a career in foreign policy. Allison and Ferguson ultimately judged Kissinger as an applied historian par excellence for his use of historical analogies as he invoked a usable past for the Cold War era. Ferguson’s proposed two-volume biography of Kissinger was thus meant to enable both the policymaker and the private citizen to understand the “meaning of Kissinger.”[16]

Johns Hopkins University also staked a claim to Kissinger’s meaning and legacy in 2015. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg endowed his alma mater with the initial funding for the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs. By 11 October 2016, matching funds to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies totaled more than $50 million, making Bloomberg’s gift, at the time, the largest combined gift in the university’s history.[17] “Henry has helped shape our history not only as a statesman but a teacher,” Bloomberg declared. “After all, he was a renowned scholar before he became a public official, and throughout his career he has never stopped learning or teaching.”[18] The center focuses on the application of history to contemporary international affairs, with ten endowed chairs, including two Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships.[19] In the wake of Kissinger’s death, the Kissinger Center hailed him as the “epitome of the scholar-statesman” and stated that it would continue to pursue “his vision for a deep engagement with history to meet the challenges of the future.” The Belfer Center, on the other hand and in a similar fashion to the Quincy Institute, focused on Kissinger’s “mixed” policy record, acknowledging how his diplomacy with China and within the Middle East decreased conflict while noting his neglect of peace and human rights in Southeast Asia and Latin America.[20] Both centers also praised Kissinger for his historian’s eye, a characteristic that bears interrogation. 

Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, Kissinger’s most recent and final book served as the culmination of his historical and intellectual thought. It formed a loose trilogy with A World Restored (1957) and Diplomacy (1994), and encapsulates Kissinger’s thinking from The Meaning of History, which marked the start of his academic life, to the end of his natural life.[21] Leadership most importantly revealed how his thought remained in stasis for 70 years because he continued to view the world according to binary categories. Yet it also demonstrated how his thinking shifted from advising and analyzing to the naked pursuit of his personal power and influence. Kissinger, in A World Restored, initially defined diplomacy as the “art of restraining the exercise of power.”[22] At the close of the 1950s, he espoused the consensus belief from the late 1940s that the European and thus the international political system stemmed from the Westphalian system of sovereign states. This line of historical reasoning argues the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the religiously fueled Thirty Years’ War in Europe following the Protestant Reformation, functioned as the purported seventeenth-century origin for the twentieth-century international system.[23] Kissinger, in turn, viewed the balance of power that was institutionalized in Europe at the 1815 Congress of Vienna as analogous to early Cold War. Over the next 27 years, his understanding of diplomacy shifted from a system that applied restraint on power to one which entailed personalized negotiations on the individual level.[24]

Kissinger then took his investment in the personal to the hyper-personal in Leadership, with his focus on six world leaders whom he had interacted with in his role as secretary of state: former chancellor of Germany Konrad Adenauer; former president of France Charles de Gaulle; former US president and foreign policy mentor Richard Nixon; former president of Egypt Anwar Sadat; former prime minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew; and former prime minister of Great Britain Margaret Thatcher. Kissinger had already displayed a penchant for mining his personal history through his three-volume memoir of his government service: The White House Years; Years of Upheaval; and Years of Renewal.[25] Taken as a whole his federal career revealed how he transformed his concept of a usable past derived from nineteenth-century European diplomacy to one that was grounded in his personal experiences as a policymaker. Kissinger’s memoirs and other writings frequently displayed declassified and sanitized policy memoranda and/or telephone transcripts. He used them to elaborate on policymaking in a general sense and to establish his authority as scholar-diplomat. Kissinger frequently modified these documents in order to display himself in the most positive light.[26] In his convenient formulation, only statesmen could correctly interpret the past. The inherent danger of his proposal rested in the construction of a highly insulated conception of the past that was grounded in a singular perspective. This perspective could not be questioned because it was the interpretation of an individual’s life based upon the unique experience of having lived it. Kissinger long argued that history “teaches by analogy, through the ability to recognize comparable situations.”[27] Yet these comparisons could only be teased out and applied by historically informed statesmen, creating a closed feedback loop of individuated historical reasoning. It was not for later generations to judge the decisionmaking of previous generations. A privilege granted by experience, according to Kissinger, enabled statesmen to interpret history for their citizens; he argued that they operated on the public’s behalf in order to safeguard a nation-state’s respective national interests.[28]

The six individuals who constitute Kissinger’s case-studies exemplified the executive and insulated qualities that Kissinger most admired in world leaders. He placed them in the generation of the “Second Thirty Years’ War,” which began with the First World War in 1914 and ended with the Second World War in 1945. Kissinger viewed these three-decade time blocks as acting as cyclical engines of social transformations: the first Thirty Years’ War ushered in secular national sovereignty while the second one instituted international order upon the rest of the world.[29] The obscured seventh figure in these case studies was Kissinger himself—he operated as interlocutor of events and narrator of lessons learned. He, after all, also belonged to that generation, and his prior experience as a statesman, in his framing, granted him the unique ability to comment on and investigate these world leaders as they conducted themselves during the Cold War and after. His penchant for historical analogy thus extended from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century, and it placed Europe as the world’s unbroken center of modernity for 300 years. Kissinger also transformed his ideal categories of the “stateman” and the “prophet” or “visionary” from A World Restored to his investigation into world leaders of the Cold War. He framed international relations and international history as a philosophical debate over the “statesman,” who “manipulates reality” through incrementalism, and the “prophet,” who “creates reality” through the upheaval of the existing social and political orders. The social and political changes highlighted by this tension between these ideal categories became a central concern for Kissinger’s historical thinking.[30] The statesman and the prophet collapsed historical actors and movements into easily digestible categories, simplifying and sacrificing complexity for sake of summary. It paid scant attention to the why and the how of historical events.

History does not teach by analogy. Kissinger consistently argued for the eminence of historical analogy as the guiding form of history. He surmised that history served as the memory of an individual nation-state while analogy described the interactions between nation-states. The domestic and the foreign existed as hermetically sealed separate spheres in his thought.[31] He further ignored the fact that a state is a palimpsest, a continuously revised narrative, and perhaps even a fiction. Although Kissinger demonstrated a facility with biography, his historical analysis was based upon personal concerns and not an appreciation of the past as an alien environment. His focus upon sovereignty as an outgrowth of the Peace of Westphalia promulgated an originalist interpretation that was akin to contemporary concerns with constitutional originalism. Legal historian Jonathan Gienapp astutely observed that historical thinking means knowing how to respect the “assumptions, values, and logics that framed the very different mental universe of those living in a different time and place.”[32] More recently, historian Joseph Stieb rejected the prevailing historiographical trend of examining the past as a breeding ground for lessons to learn. He instead argued that history should remain “central to the education of national security professionals not for lesson-learning but for enriching their understanding of the world and themselves while cultivating the wisdom to inform sound decisions.”[33] Kissinger bracketed the first half of the twentieth century as the “Second Thirty Years’ War,” yet we in the twenty-first century find ourselves quickly closing in on the 30-year mark in our current era of endless war (2001-?). History situates us in worlds that are familiar yet alien. It becomes even more necessary and urgent to interrogate how we apply history and historical thinking to decisionmaking. Let us cast a critical eye on the unexpected errors and willful mistakes lest we repeat them. Let us no longer be haunted by ghosts from foreign policies’ past and lay those ghosts to rest. Let us now reserve our attention, questions, and criticisms for the institutions and systems that perpetuate Kissinger’s ways of thinking and the ideologies that animate them.

 

Sean M. Case is a Henry A. Kissinger Vising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University’s Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy and International Security Studies. He received his doctorate in 2023 from Boston University’s American & New England Studies Program. His current book project, based upon his dissertation, traces the transfer of American geopolitical and strategic thinking from military intellectuals in the interwar period to university-trained defense intellectuals in the early Cold War. Prior to his doctoral studies, he served for approximately twelve years in the US Army as an officer with key assignments in Germany, Afghanistan, and the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is interested in the intellectual history of international relations and critical security studies.

 

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[1] David E. Singer, “Henry Kissinger Is Dead at 100; Shaped the Nation’s Cold War History,” The New York Times, 29 November 2023; Thomas W. Lippman, “Henry Kissinger, Who Shaped World Affairs under Two Presidents, Dies at 100,” The Washington Post, 29 November 2023; and Peter Baker, “Kissinger: A Player on the World Stage Until the Very End,” The New York Times, 30 November 2023.

[2] Spencer Ackerman, “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies,” Rolling Stone Magazine, 29 November 2023 and Spencer Ackerman, “My Kissinger Obit for ‘Rolling Stone’,” Ghost, 30 November 2023. For Hersch’s earlier scathing response to the first two volumes of Kissinger’s memoirs, see The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Touchstone, 1984).

[3] Andrew Bacevich, et al., “Symposium: Peace or Destruction—What Was Kissinger’s Impact?” Responsible Statecraft, The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, 1 December 2023; and René Rojas, Bhaskar Sunkara, and Jonah Walters, eds., The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger, introduction by Greg Grandin, (New York: Jacobin Magazine/Verso Books, 2024), 4.

[4] T. G. Otte, “Kissinger: The Ultimate Realist,” Engelsberg Ideas, Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, 12 December 2023. Kissinger’s official biographer Niall Ferguson placed Kissinger as an adherent to Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s theory of ethics while historians John Bew and Francis J. Gavin argue that his thought aligned with the moral philosophies Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau. All three based their observations on Kissinger’s undergraduate thesis. See Niall Ferguson, Kissinger, 1923–1968: The Idealist(New York: Penguin, 2015) and John Bew and Francis J. Gavin, “Foreword” to Henry A. Kissinger, The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant (Stockholm: Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2022).

[5] For the Realist rejection of Kissinger, see Michael Desch and Stephen Walt in “Symposium: Peace or Destruction—What Was Kissinger’s Impact?”; Patrick Porter, “The Man Who Loved Power,” The Critic, 30 November 2023; and Justin Logan, “Henry Kissinger as ‘The Man Who Loved Power’,” Cato at Liberty, The Cato Institute, 4 December 2023.

[6] Henry A. Kissinger, The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee and Kant (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1950).

[7] See Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822(Gloucester, MA: Houghton Mifflin, first ed. 1957, second ed. 1973) and “The White Revolutionary: Reflections on Bismarck,” Daedalus 97.3 (1968).

[8] See John G. Stoessinger, Henry Kissinger: The Anguish of Power (New York: Norton, 1976), 3, 9. In the transition from dissertation to first book, the title changed from “Peace, Legitimacy, and Equilibrium: A Study of the Statesmanship of Castlereagh and Metternich” to A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace. The change highlighted Kissinger’s shifting emphasis from an exclusive academic readership to an appeal to policymakers and an informed public.

[9] See Jussi M. Hanhimäki, “‘Dr. Kissinger’ or ‘Mr. Henry’? Kissingerology, Thirty Years and Counting,” Diplomatic History 27.5 (2003): 637-676 and Barbara Keys, “The Kissinger Wars,” Process: A Blog for American History, November 2016.

[10] See Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (New York: Verso, 2001) and the more recent 2021 re-release from Atlantic Books. Gary J. Bass’s The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (New York: Vintage, 2014) critcized the Nixon White House’s policy toward Bangladesh during the Bangladeshi 1971 war for independence from Pakistan. Greg Grandin more recently held Kissinger responsible for the current War on Terror in Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman (New York: Picador, 2016).

[11] For Kaplan’s defenses of Kissinger, see Robert D. Kaplan, “Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism,” The Atlantic Monthly, June 1999 and “The Statesman in Defense of Kissinger, The Atlantic Monthly, May 2013.

[12] Niall Ferguson, Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist (New York: Penguin, 2015), 11. See the H-Diplo roundtable at https://networks.h-net.org/system/files/contributed-files/roundtable-xviii-3_1.pdf.  

[13] Ferguson, The Idealist, 26. Ferguson’s treatment of Kissinger is a far cry from the developing twenty-first century biographical consensus. Jussi Hanhimäki, in a similar fashion as Ferguson, argued for the importance of historical context when examining Kissinger’s policy record, especially how he consistently pursued peace. See Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford UP, 2004), 489. Jeremi Suri, on the other hand, placed Kissinger in the context of the Jewish diaspora from Nazi rule in Germany, and teased out Kissinger’s antidemocratic principles from the failures of the Weimar Republic. See Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 2007), 4-6. In one of the most recent biographical studies, Thomas A. Schwartz viewed Kissinger in the context of his fellow Cold Warriors and positioned Kissinger as a remarkable political operator both in and outside of government service. See Schwartz, Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography (New York: Hill and Wang, 2020), 14-15.

[14] William T. Weber, “Kissinger as Historian: A Historiographical Approach to Statesmanship,” World Affairs141.1 (1978): 40-41, JSTOR.

[15] Graham Allison, “The Key to Henry Kissinger’s Success,” The Atlantic, 27 November 2015; See also and Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson, “Applied History Manifesto: Establish a White House Council of Historical Advisers Now,” Applied History Project, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, October 2016.

[16] Niall Ferguson, “The Meaning of Kissinger: A Realist Reconsidered,” Foreign Affairs 94.5 (2015): 134-143.

[17] Hub staff report, “Johns Hopkins Launches Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs,” The Hub, Johns Hopkins University, 11 October 2016.

[18] Hub staff report, “Johns Hopkins Launches Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs,” The Hub, Johns Hopkins University, 11 October 2016. 

[19] Dennis O’Shea, “New Johns Hopkins Global Affairs Center to Honor Henry Kissinger,” The Hub, Johns Hopkins University, 9 April 2015.

[20] See “The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs Mourn the Passing of Dr. Henry Kissinger,” The Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs/JHU SAIS, 30 November 2024, and Meghan L. O’Sullivan, Graham Allison, Rana Mitter, Fredrik Logevall, and Joseph S. Nye, “The Impact of Henry Kissinger,” The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs/Harvard University, 30 November 2024.

[21] See Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822(Gloucester, MA: Houghton Mifflin, first ed. 1957, second ed. 1973); Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); and Kissinger, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy (New York: Penguin, 2022).

[22] Kissinger, A World Restored, 2.

[23] Leo Gross, an international lawyer and early expert in international relations, popularized the concept of the Westphalian system among Western academics with his “The Peace of Westphalia, 1648–1948,” The American Journal of International Law 42.1 (1948), 20-41, JSTOR. Beginning in the 1990s, political scientists increasingly questioned the veracity of the concept, leading some to label it as a myth. See Stephen D. Krasner, “Compromising Westphalia,” International Security 20. 3 (1995–1996), 115-151 and Andreas Osiander, “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth,” International Organization 55.2 (2001), 251-287. Historian Brendan Simms most recently argued in favor of the Westphalian model as a means to foster peace in the Middle East. See Simms, “Towards a Westphalia for the Middle East,” Engelsberg Ideas, 19 June 2020, and, in particular, the rejoinder from Suzanne Maloney, “Dreams of Westphalia Can a Grand Bargain Solve the Middle East’s Problems?” Foreign Affairs 99.1 (2020), 148-153.

[24] Kissinger, A World Restored, 2, 138, 187, and Diplomacy, 276. For a particularly insightful and astute deconstruction of the “Westphalia myth,” see Claire Vergerio, “Beyond the Nation-State,” Boston Review, 27 May 2021, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/beyond-the-nation-state/.

[25] See Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979); Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982); and Years of Renewal (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999). Simon & Schuster reissued all three volumes in 2011. 

[26] Barbara Keys focused on Kissinger’s investment in the personal in Barbara J. Keys, “Henry Kissinger: The Emotional Statesman,” Diplomatic History 35. 4 (2011): 587-609; Keys and Claire Yorke, “Personal and Political Emotions in the Mind of the Diplomat,” Political Psychology 40.6 (2019), 1235-49; and Keys, “The Diplomat’s Two Minds: Deconstructing a Foreign Policy Myth,” Diplomatic History 44.1 (2020), 1-21. The National Security Archive also released a trove of documents to depict Kissinger’s policy legacy more accurately, including his complicity in foreign atrocities. See “Henry Kissinger: The Declassified Obituary,” National Security Archive, 29 November 2023, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile-cold-war-henry-kissinger-indonesia-southern-cone-vietnam/2023-11-29/henry, and “The Kissinger Telcons: The Story Behind the Story,” National Security Archive, 13 February 2024, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/henry-kissinger/2024-02-13/kissinger-telcons-story-behind-story.  

[27] Henry Kissinger, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy (New York: Penguin Press, 2022), xvii.

[28] See Kissinger, A World Restored, 316-7 and 331-2.

[29] Kissinger, Leadership, xix.

[30] See Henry A. Kissinger, “Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy,” Daedalus 95.2 (1966): 503-5, 514, 526-7. See also Henry A. Kissinger, “The White Revolutionary: Reflections on Bismarck,” Daedalus 97.3 (1968): 888-924 for how Bismarck and de Gaulle functioned as “conservative revolutionaries” willing to upend the international system for the national interests of Prussia and France, respectively.

[31] In a surprisingly frank admission near the end of his life, Kissinger disclosed his frustration with being excluded from the Nixon administration’s deliberation over domestic policy and the election process. One wonders what purpose it would have served to include a national security adviser on these discussions. This revelation demonstrated a deep and abiding interest in accumulating personal power. See Kissinger, Leadership, 130.

[32] Jonathan Gienapp, “Constitutional Originalism and History,” Process: A Blog for American History, 20 March 2017.

[33] Joseph Stieb, “History Has No Lessons For You: A Warning for Policymakers,” War on the Rocks, 6 February 2024.