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.

Old World Order: The Real Origin of International Relations - Valerie Hansen, Yale University (Foreign Affairs)

Old World Order

The Real Origin of International Relations

Valerie Hansen

 Foreign Affairs, Nova York – Set.-Out. 2022

 

How old is the modern world? Scholars of international relations tend to date the beginning of their field of study to around 500 years ago, when a handful of states in western Europe began to establish colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In their view, the transformations unleashed by European colonialism made the world what it is today. So, too, did the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, two treaties signed by feuding European powers that ended a series of bloody wars. That was the moment international relations truly began, the argument runs. Thanks to this settlement, states for the first time formally agreed to respect their mutual sovereignty over demarcated territories, laying the groundwork for the abiding “Westphalian order” of a world divided into sovereign nation-states.

This rather Eurocentric view of the past still shapes how most international relations scholars see the world. When searching for the history relevant to today’s world events, they rarely look beyond the European world order constructed after 1500. Before then, they reason, politics did not happen on a global scale. And states outside Europe did not adhere to Westphalian principles. As a result, international relations scholars have deemed vast tracts of history largely irrelevant to the understanding of modern politics.

An exclusive focus on a world in which Europeans armed with guns and cannons dominated the various peoples they encountered misses much of what happened outside Europe and the places Europeans colonized. This focus reads history backward from the primacy of the West, as if all that happened before led inevitably to the hegemony of a handful of European and North American states. The rise of non-Western powers, such as China, India, and Japan in recent decades, has revealed how misguided such an approach is.

In Before the West, Ayse Zarakol, a professor of international relations at the University of Cambridge, proposes an ingenious way out of this intellectual impasse. Writing in clear, forceful prose, she considers the experience of earlier non-Western empires that sought to create world orders. Doing so makes it possible to present a new history of international relations beyond the Westphalian order. Her study reveals the telling ways that polities in non-Western parts of the world interacted with one another in the past, shaping how modern political leaders understand the international order today.

Zarakol challenges the view that the modern international system began in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. Instead, she proposes a provocative alternative, dating the beginning of the modern world order to 1206, when Genghis Khan was acclaimed ruler of all the Eurasian steppe peoples. Zarakol chooses to focus on the “Chinggisid order” he and his various successors brought into being. (Genghis Khan’s name in Mongolian is Chinggis Khan, so scholars use the adjective Chinggisid to describe anything associated with him.)

She presents a stirring and original thesis but overlooks some crucial primary sources about diplomacy in the Mongol empire. Such evidence would sharpen her account of precisely how the Mongols and their successors interacted with diplomats from neighboring states in this fledgling world order.

Zarakol is right to point out the importance of the Chinggisid order as a parallel to the Westphalian order. Starting in the thirteenth century under Genghis Khan and his successors, the Mongols created the world’s largest contiguous empire, which extended across the steppe from Hungary in the east to China in the west. Genghis Khan aspired to rule the entire world, and he conducted diplomatic relations with his neighbors on that basis. None of his successors managed to control as large a territory, but taking the Mongols as their model, they would create the Ming, Mughal, Safavid, and Timurid empires respectively in present-day China, India, Iran, and Uzbekistan. Most important for modern international relations today, the peoples now living in the former Mongol empire are fully aware of this past, as exemplified by the ambitions of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

 

THE WORLDS GENGHIS MADE

 

Zarakol’s decision to focus on the Mongols allows her to break with Eurocentric conventions of diplomatic and international history in refreshing ways. Interested in Asian polities, she does not assume that their interactions with European actors were more important than their relations with one another. Nor does she make the mistake of assuming that earlier Asian powers were only regional powers. Genghis Khan and his successors all aspired to rule the globe as they knew it. True, they did not succeed (nor, for that matter, did any European power), but they led sprawling armies powered by mounted warriors and established empires that engaged in diplomacy with multiple neighbors and with states far from the Eurasian steppes—a lasting model for subsequent Asian rulers.

The Chinggisid order, as Zarakol describes it, persisted for nearly 500 years (longer than its Westphalian counterpart to date) and had three different phases. The first was from around 1200 to 1400. It comprised both the unified Mongol empire ruled initially by Genghis Khan and, after the empire broke apart in 1260, its four successor states in modern-day China, Iran, Russia and Ukraine, and Central Asia. The rulers of the three western successor states eventually converted to Islam, while Kublai Khan, the ruler of the easternmost quadrant in modern-day China and Mongolia, supported Buddhists, Daoists, and Confucians, among other religious figures.

The peaceful coexistence of these quadrants in the fourteenth century marked “the beginning of modern international relations . . . when rational state interest trumped religious affiliation.” Here, Zarakol overstates her claim: religious affiliation was often interwoven with “rational state interests” in polities of that time. A ruler’s choice of which religion, or indeed religions, to patronize largely determined the choice of his political allies.

The second Chinggisid world order comprised the Timurid empire of Timur the Lame (also known as Tamerlane), who lived from 1336 to 1405, and the Ming dynasty in China, which reigned from 1368 to 1644. Timur modeled his state on that of Genghis Khan and even married one of his descendants to strengthen his association with the great khan. In sharp contrast, the rulers of the Ming dynasty in China concentrated all their resources on defeating various Mongol and Turkic adversaries (including Timur’s warriors). Even so, the Ming emperors hoped to establish themselves as successors to the land empire of the Mongols, and they dispatched a fleet of treasure ships carrying 28,000 men as far as East Africa to display their might to the world. As different as their views of the Mongols were, Timur and the early Ming emperors all aspired to rule empires as large and as impressive as Genghis Khan’s.

The third world order Zarakol proposes encompassed the millennial sovereigns, or sahibkiran, of the Mughals, the Ottomans, and the Safavids. With no family ties to the Mongols, these rulers did not explicitly style themselves after Genghis Khan, but all hoped to govern the world. They succeeded in harnessing the power of mounted warriors to conquer large spans of territory in modern-day India, Turkey, and Iran respectively, and their empires all posed serious competition to the European colonial powers. Appropriately, Zarakol ends her book with the weakening of these three dynasties around 1700.

Spanning five centuries, these Chinggisid states shared certain key features. Rather than choosing their ruler by primogeniture, as many European powers did, they selected new rulers through a system of “tanistry,” a term (borrowed from the historical practices of Celtic tribes in the British Isles) that means that the best qualified individual should rule the group after the death of a leader. Although this sounds vaguely democratic, it was anything but. In practice, it meant that anyone seeking power had to prevail in a violent free-for-all that could last years before all the warriors gathered to acclaim a new leader. The Mongols believed that heaven, or the cosmos, selected the ultimate victor in these succession struggles, and in their efforts to understand heaven better, the Chinggisid rulers invited foreign astronomers to visit their courts and financed the construction of massive observatories.

According to Zarakol, the Chinggisid rulers over the centuries shared “a particular vision of the whole world” and created, modified, and reproduced “political, economic, and social institutions.” Historians have paid more attention to the granular reality of this political and institutional history, but Zarakol does a service by bringing it to the attention of scholars of international relations. In so doing, she moves beyond a Eurocentric vision of international relations by studying actors, specifically those in modern-day China, India, Iran, Russia, and Uzbekistan, who aspired to create world empires as impressive as that of the Mongols. Getting past narratives that are limited  to a single country, race, or religion, she explains how different rulers in Asia interacted with each other and in the process created a diplomatic system comparable to the Westphalian order.

 

FELT BOOTS AND METAL PASSPORTS

 

Five centuries is a long timespan to cover, and the first part of Before the West bogs down as it recounts the major events of multiple dynasties and explains why they qualify (or do not) as Chinggisid. But rather striking in her survey is the lack of much material about diplomacy, the book’s stated subject.

This omission is surprising because two detailed eyewitness accounts of diplomatic visits to Chinggisid rulers are widely available in English translation. These narratives describe how the Chinggisid diplomatic order actually functioned—in contrast to Zarakol’s often rosy-eyed claims about the efficiency of Mongol rule.

William of Rubruck, a Franciscan monk originally from Belgium, visited the court of Mongke, a grandson of Genghis Khan, near Karakorum in modern-day Mongolia between 1253 and 1255. The French crusader King Louis IX sent William as a missionary—and not an envoy—to the Mongols, but when he arrived at the port of Soldaia on the Black Sea, his Mongol hosts had already heard from local merchants that he was a diplomat. William decided to accept the privileges offered to emissaries rather than try to explain his hope to missionize. Like all Franciscan friars, he wore a brown robe and went barefoot, attire that made his trip across the freezing steppe especially difficult. (Eventually, he gave in and donned fur clothing and felt boots.)

Although much less well known than Marco Polo’s travelogue, which was written some 50 years later, William of Rubruck’s account runs nearly 300 pages in the 1990 translation by Peter Jackson. It offers the most perceptive and the most detailed description of the Mongol empire available today. An attentive observer, William wrote his dispassionate report for a one-person audience, his sponsor, Louis IX. As he explained of the Mongols, “When I came among them I really felt as if I were entering some other world.” His account shows exactly how the Mongols treated the diplomats who entered their realm.

The Mongols granted a metal tablet of authority to all visiting envoys that entitled them to food and fresh horses at the postal stations located every 30 miles or so along the main roads traversing the empire. Those carrying such tablets could also spend the night at the postal stations. The system worked well but not flawlessly, as William discovered when he crossed the Don River and the locals refused him assistance. It took three days for him to obtain a fresh horse. Travel conditions were arduous. Once William began to travel at the pace of a Mongol warrior, he could cover 60 miles each day, changing horses two or three times. Breakfast was either broth or a light grain soup, and there was no lunch; the only solid food travelers received was at dinner.

In July 1253, when he arrived at the court of Batu, a great-grandson of Genghis Khan, William requested official permission to preach among the Mongols (some of whom already followed the teachings of the Church of the East, the branch of Christianity that spread through much of Asia after the fifth century ad.) Batu sent William to the capital at Karakorum, where his father Mongke, the great khan, presided over the Mongol empire. William does not explain Batu’s decision, but presumably Batu, as a regional leader, handled all domestic matters related to his own jurisdiction but had to refer matters of international diplomacy to the great khan. Zarakol overstates the efficiency of Chinggisid rule: only the khan could make decisions on certain topics. If he was not available, no one else could decide for him.

William arrived at Mongke’s winter court on the River Ongin in modern Mongolia; there, the great khan spent the season surrounded by his retinue and his own herds. William made his request to proselytize through an interpreter, but the interpreter and the khan were drunk, and William did not get a definite answer. Initially permitted to stay two months at the court, William remained there for three and spent an additional three at the Mongol capital of Karakorum. He participated in a debate over religion with Muslims, Buddhists, and other Christians—and for once he had a competent interpreter—but the debate was inconclusive, and William left without receiving permission to preach inside Mongol territory.

William’s account captures the reality of Mongol governance. Mongol rulers may have aspired to create a world order, but their empire remained profoundly decentralized despite the efficient postal system that allowed messages and people such as William to cross the empire. The great khan did not administer his empire directly. Instead, he appointed local governors who ruled on their own, largely continuing the policies of whichever authorities had governed before the rise of the Mongols.

About 150 years later, a Spanish diplomat had an experience remarkably similar to William’s. Ruy González de Clavijo visited Timur in Samarkand, a major trading emporium in modern-day Uzbekistan, for two months in 1404. Dispatched by Henry III of Castile, who hoped to form an alliance against the Ottomans, Clavijo and his entourage delivered a letter and gifts to Timur. The wealth of Timur’s capital, where 50,000 of his supporters pitched their tents, impressed Clavijo deeply. Timur hosted the Spaniards generously, offering them ample supplies of meat and wine and inviting them to multiple receptions.

But when Timur fell ill, three of his advisers took over. Unable to exercise any real authority, they urged the Spaniards to return home—which Clavijo resisted because his mission was to obtain a response from Timur for Henry III. Just two months after he had arrived, the unsuccessful Clavijo set off for Spain, only to be caught in the conflicts that broke out among those who aspired to take over Timur’s empire. Clavijo’s experience mirrored William of Rubruck’s: the only person who could decide anything about foreign relations was the khan himself.

Zarakol credits Genghis Khan with “disseminating, through his own example, the norm of the political ruler as the exclusive supreme authority, legitimized by world domination.” She claims that he introduced “an extremely high degree of political centralization . . . subordinating all competing forms of authority to himself.” During military campaigns, the khan had the power to lead, and he rewarded his followers with plunder. But during peacetime, the ruler had much less power. Still, Zarakol’s views do not square with the experience of William of Rubruck and Clavijo. The khan maintained “supreme authority” in the sense that only he could decide on certain matters, such as giving a single Franciscan friar permission to preach or sending a letter to another ruler, but he never enforced policies that integrated the different parts of his empire in a meaningful way.

 

OTHER CENTERS, OTHER WORLDS

 

Scholars can debate whether a given interpretation of the past is accurate, but popular understandings of the past—especially among policymakers—often shape modern international relations. As Zarakol suggests, scholars need to ask of the period she covers, “What logics were operating in this era that are still operating in ours?” Her final chapter explores Eurasianism—a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intellectual movement that identified non-European precedents for world orders spanning both Europe and Asia—and, more specifically, how intellectuals in Japan, Russia, and Turkey understood the long-term impact of Mongol rule on their own societies.

This focus is particularly timely. Since the 1920s, Russian scholars, such as Nikolai Trubetzkoy, George Vernadsky, and Lev Gumilyov, have debated how two centuries of Mongol rule affected modern Russia. They have called for modern leaders to emulate Genghis Khan and to unify Russians so that they can build a new empire that spans Europe and Asia. Such thinking has gained enormous popularity since the collapse of communism, and Putin is regularly compared to Genghis Khan. Putin’s advisers are not concerned with historical accuracy. In making the case for Eurasianism and how it will empower Russia, they invoke traditions that have nothing to do with the Treaty of Westphalia. Zarakol’s point is well taken: the history underlying Eurasianism helps make sense of the events occurring in the territory once ruled by the Mongols.

Vladimir Putin’s drive for a new Eurasian empire seeks to include the heartland of Russian orthodoxy.

Like any genuinely pioneering book, Before the West covers so much new ground that it does not get all the details straight. (In particular, it exaggerates the centralization of the Mongol empire.) Still, Zarakol has provided an important service: she has shown how the history of different parts of the world before 1500 informs the present and the future.

By starting in 1206, however, she risks overlooking the importance of even earlier events. When Prince Vladimir the Great (Putin’s namesake) converted to Eastern orthodoxy in around 988, his capital lay in Kyiv. The Russian president’s drive for a new Eurasian empire seeks to include the heartland of Russian orthodoxy, which formed in the late 900s.

That’s precisely Zarakol’s point: studying societies outside Europe that aspired to create world orders before 1500 reveals much about the modern world. The world orders that earlier rulers outside Europe established remain deeply relevant because the people who live in those regions today recall those past exploits and systems and sometimes try to recreate them. Paying attention to the diplomatic practices that earlier rulers, including the Chinggisids, developed provides a valuable counterbalance to the singular focus on the Westphalian order. In this multipolar world, U.S. leaders spend their days considering the next moves of their counterparts in Ankara, Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, and Tokyo. And yet they rarely consider the histories of these parts of the world. The time has come for more people to follow Zarakol’s lead and study the past of the many political and economic centers outside Europe.

 

VALERIE HANSEN is Stanley Woodward Professor of History at Yale University and the author of The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began.

 

NATO Expansion: A Grand Strategy? - John Lewis Gaddis, Yale University (H-Diplo)

First Note:  The essay that follows was originally prepared for the National Defense University symposium, “Strategy and the Formulation of National Security Policy,” Washington, D. C., October 7, 1997.  It was previously published in Survival as John Gaddis, “History, Grand Strategy and NATO Enlargement,” Survival 40:1 (1998): 145-151, DOI: 10.1093/survival/40.1.145.  © 1998 The International Institute for Strategic Studies, reproduced with permission.  It has been slightly revised for publication on H-Diplo and includes a new preface by the author.

H-Diplo Essay 417: Commentary Series on Putin’s War: NATO Expansion: A Grand Strategy? 

by George Fujii

H-Diplo Essay 417

15 March 2022

Commentary Series on Putin’s War: 

NATO Expansion: A Grand Strategy?^[1]

https://hdiplo.org/to/E417

Editor: Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

Essay by John Lewis Gaddis, Yale University

“Back Pre-Putin to the post-Putin Future.”

I’m teaching a seminar this semester on time travel and have assigned the 1985 film Back to the Future, made well before any of my students were born.  So it seemed somehow appropriate to get an e-mail, on the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, referencing a 1998 article of mine that, as my correspondent put it, “rings true today.”^[2]  I’d long since forgotten it and had to ask for a copy, which he kindly provided.

Two days later Diane Labrosse asked me to contribute to an H-Diplo symposium on the Russia-Ukraine war.  I didn’t have time to write anything new, I replied – teaching obligations are always a good excuse – but might she be interested in something old yet possibly relevant?  She said yes, hence what follows.

Prepared originally for a 1997 National Defense University conference, my article preceded, by two years, the surprise elevation of Vladimir V. Putin to the Russian presidency:  Boris Yeltsin, however precariously, still held that position.  It appeared in Survival shortly before the first stage of NATO expansion brought Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into the alliance.  It benefited from James M. Goldgeier’s preliminary research on that subject, but came out too early to draw on his 1999 book, Not Whether But When.  Nor of course could it have anticipated the now definitive scholarship of Mary Sarotte, reflected in her timely new book Not One Inch.^[3]  What I’d written in 1997/98 was for these reasons, like Yeltsin himself, precariously positioned.

I saw, upon reacquaintance with it, that I’d accepted the need for a post-Cold War security structure in central and eastern Europe, but that I’d questioned using NATO for that purpose in such a way as to exclude Russia.  That in no way justifies Putin’s invasion of Ukraine:  it’s more like criticizing the post-World War I settlement’s exclusion of Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia without in so doing defending Hitler’s subsequent annexations and aggressions.  Short-sightedness may prepare the way for atrocities, but that’s not the same thing as committing them.  

There is, however, no good reason for clinging to short-sightedness, as if it’s some stuffed security teddy bear, as new opportunities arise.  We’re on the verge of one now, I believe, for as Winston Churchill might have put it, rarely has such ruin been inflicted with such speed upon so many with such incompetence by one little man sitting at the end of a long table.   With luck we’ll have a chance soon, with the help of our allies, of Russia’s victims, and of a post-Putin Russia itself, to frame a new future.  It’s not too soon to begin thinking about what it might look like, and a good place to start might usefully be a reacquaintance with past paths not taken.   

*

**

Some principles of strategy are so basic that when stated they sound like platitudes:  treat former enemies magnanimously; do not take on unnecessary new ones; keep the big picture in view; balance ends and means; avoid emotion and isolation in making decisions; be willing to acknowledge error.  All fairly straightforward, one might think.  Who could object to them?

And yet -- consider the Clinton administration’s single most important foreign policy initiative:  the decision to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.  I would not want to be thought disrespectful toward a president whose policies I have generally supported.  But it does seem to me that the NATO enlargement decision manages to violate every oneof the strategic principles I have just mentioned.  That really takes some doing.

Perhaps that is why my normally contentious colleagues in the historical profession are in uncharacteristic agreement:  with remarkably few exceptions, they see the NATO expansion as ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world.  Indeed I can recall no other moment, in my own experience as a practicing historian, at which there was less support, within our community, for an announced policy position.  

A significant gap has opened up between those who make grand strategy and those who reflect upon it:  on this issue at least, official and accumulated wisdom are pointing in very different directions.  I would like to focus here on how this has happened, and that brings me back to my list of basic principles for grand strategy.

First, the magnanimous treatment of defeated adversaries.  There are three great points of reference here – 1815-18, 1918-19, and 1945-48 – and historians are in general accord as to the lessons to be drawn from each of them.  They applaud the settlements of the Napoleonic Wars and of World War II because the victorious allies moved as quickly as possible to bring their vanquished adversaries – France in the first case, Germany and Japan in the second – back into the international system as full participants in postwar security structures.  

Historians tend to criticize (if not condemn) the World War I settlement precisely because it failed to do that for two of the most powerful states in Europe – Germany and Soviet Russia.  The resulting instability, they argue, paved the way for World War II.  It was not for nothing that Churchill, having personally witnessed two of these instances and having studied the third, chose as one of the “morals” of his great history of the Second World War:  “In Victory:  Magnanimity.”

That approach would seem all the more relevant to the fourth great case that now confronts us – the post-Cold War settlement.  The Soviet Union was never an actual military opponent, and the ‘victory’ of the United States finally came, not on the battlefield but as the result of the Kremlin leadership’s change of heart, and then of character, and then ultimately of system.  The use of force, very fortunately for all of us, was not even necessary. 

The process of rehabilitating this adversary – of transforming it from a revisionist or even revolutionary state to one prepared to accept the existing international order – began, thus, even before the Cold War ended.  It was as if the Germans and the Japanese, say at some point in 1943 or 1944, had suddenly laid down their arms, announced that they had seen the light, and begun for themselves the processes of disarmament, democratization, and economic reorganization for which their enemies had been fighting.

It is all the stranger, therefore, that the Clinton administration has chosen to respond to this most fortunate outcome of the Cold War, not by following the successful examples of 1815-18 or 1945-48, but by appearing, at least, to emulate the unfortunate precedent of 1918-19:  one that preserves, and even expands, a security structure left over from a conflict that has now ended, while excluding the former adversary from it.  If the United States could afford to be inclusive in dealing with its actual enemies Germany and Japan after World War II -- just as Napoleon’s conquerors were in dealing with France after 1815 -- then why is it now excluding a country that, throughout the Cold War, remained only a potential adversary?

The answer I have most often heard is that the Russians have no choice but to accept what the US has decided to do -- that having swallowed the loss of their sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, and the eventual breakup of the former Soviet Union itself, their only alternative with respect to the expansion of NATO is to gulp and swallow yet again.  The US, the victor, is free to impose upon them whatever settlement it chooses.

Not only is that view arrogant; it is also short-sighted, for it assumes that defeated adversaries have no choices.  And yet, even the Germans in 1945, as thoroughly vanquished an enemy as there has ever been, had alternatives:  they could have tilted toward either their Eastern or their Western occupiers.  The fact that they chose the West had a lot to do with American and British efforts to make their occupation policies as conciliatory as possible.  The Soviet Union’s failure to understand that need -- its inability to see that wholesale reparations removals and mass rapes were not likely to win it friends among the Germans -- did a good deal to determine the robustness of one postwar Germany, and the brittleness of the other.  The Germans had a choice, and they made it decisively. 

If the US could be that accommodating, in the post-World War II years, to the wishes of a country that had given rise to one of the most loathsome regimes in history but now lacked any further capacity to inflict damage, I find it difficult to understand why the Clinton administration has elected not to accommodate a country that has chosen to democratize itself, but still retains a considerable capacity to do harm.  By insisting on NATO expansion, it seems, the US is violating a second great principle of strategy, which is that one should never take on more enemies than necessary at any given moment. 

For Russia does indeed have a choice:  it is in the interesting position of being able to tilt one way or another in a strategic triangle that is likely to define the geopolitics of the early twenty-first century.  It can continue to align itself, as it has patiently done so far, with the United States and Western Europe.  Or it can do what the United States did a quarter century ago under the guidance of President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger:  it can tilt toward China.

Given the complementarity that exists between Russia’s capacity to export military technology and China’s ability to produce marketable consumer goods, there is nothing inherently implausible in this scenario -- indeed there is a good deal of logic in it.  It would not be the first time Russia and China had linked up out of concern, even if misguided, over American aggressiveness:  we know from Soviet and Chinese documents that this was precisely the reason behind the 1950 Sino-Soviet alliance.^[4]  And of course classical balance of power theory tells us that this is what we should expect to happen:  that if country A feels itself threatened by country B, it is apt to align itself with country C.  Which in this case is a country less likely even than Russia to see its interests as compatible with those of the United States.

That brings me to a third strategic principle that’s being violated here, which is the need to take a global and not just a regional perspective.  General George C. Marshall coined the term “theateritis,” during World War II, to refer to the tendency, among some of his military commanders, to see only the requirements of their own campaigns, not those of the war as a whole.  I am hardly alone in the view that the Clinton administration has succumbed to a kind of geopolitical theateritis:  as Richard Haass has pointed out, “in his second term, the first post-Cold War president has focused most of his foreign policy efforts on NATO, a child of the Cold War.”^[5]  

The temptation to do is certainly understandable.  NATO was the most impressive institutional success of the US during the Cold War, and it’s only natural to want to find some purpose for it in the post-Cold War era.  But does it fit its current needs?  Will US leaders really be able to say in years to come -- can they say now -- that military insecurity in the middle of Europe, the problem NATO was created to solve, was (is) the greatest one that now confronts the United States?  

The sources of insecurity in Europe these days seem, to me, to lie much more in the economic than the military realm:  disparities in living standards divide the continent now, not armies or ideologies.  But the European Union, the obvious instrument for dealing with these difficulties, has come down with its own form of theateritis, the single-minded push to achieve a common currency among its existing members by the end of this decade.  So it’s been left to NATO to try to reintegrate and stabilize Europe as a whole.  This is roughly comparable, I think, to using a monkey wrench to repair a computer.  The results will no doubt be striking, but perhaps not in ways we intend.  

I am fully aware that containing the Russians has never been NATO’s only role.  Its members quickly found it a useful instrument, as well, for restraining the growth of German power (by including the Germans, note, not excluding them); and for ensuring that the Americans themselves remained in Europe and did not revert to their old habits of isolationism.  “Mission creep” was not invented in Mogadishu.

But the likelihood of German aggression today seems about as remote as does that of an American withdrawal from the continent:  neither of these old fears from the late 1940s and early 1950s is even remotely credible now.  If in the effort to ward off these phantoms we should revive another specter from those years that is a real possibility -- a Sino-Russian alignment -- then future generations would have a good case for alleging “theateritis” on the part of our own.

Even if we should grant, though, for the sake of argument, that NATO expansion is, or should be, an urgent priority, there is yet another strategic principle that has been bypassed here, which has to do with providing the means to accomplish selected ends.  We all know the dangers of letting interests outstrip capabilities.  One would surely expect, therefore, that on as important a matter as this -- the designation of three additional countries in the center of Europe as vital to the defense of the United States -- those charged with organizing those defenses would have been consulted, and carefully listened to.

Perhaps I have missed something, but it is hard to find evidence that the Department of Defense, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, played any significant role in making this decision.  The fact that US interests have been expanded but their budget has not been suggests that quite clearly.^[6]  It is true that the military were very much involved in the now-eclipsed Partnership for Peace.  But that initiative was to have included the Russians in a relationship with NATO as originally constituted.  It did not involve enlarging the alliance in such a way as to advertise the Russians’ exclusion.^[7]

One might conclude, from the administration’s failure to match military means with political ends, one of two things.  Either the countries the US is proposing to include within NATO are not in danger, in which case one wonders why it is then necessary to include them.  Or they are in danger, in which case it has yet to prepare adequately to protect them.  Either way, ends and means are misaligned. 

So where did the decision to enlarge NATO come from anyway?  The most authoritative study so far, that of Professor James Goldgeier, of George Washington University, singles out three individuals as having played key roles:  President Clinton himself, who got interested in the issue as the result of an impromptu conversation with Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa at the April, 1993, dedication of the Holocaust Museum in Washington;  former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, who kept the idea alive within the administration through the next year and a half;  and the redoubtable Richard Holbrooke, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, who intervened at several critical moments in the fall of 1994 to inform others within the bureaucracy that NATO expansion was indeed official policy – thereby, or so it appears, making it so.^[8]

With almost no public or Congressional debate – and with remarkably little inter-agency consultation – a momentum built up behind something that seemed a good idea at the time to a few critically-placed individuals.  Why, though, did it seem a good idea?  This is where things get murky, for although we can more or less trace the process by which the decision was made, the reasoning of the principal decision-makers – since they chose not to articulate it – remains obscure.

To be sure, the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians badly wanted their role within the “new” Europe recognized, both symbolically and institutionally.  How did it happen, though, that the Americans responded so much more favorably and rapidly than the members of the European Union did?  The most frequent explanation I have heard is that the Clinton administration, recalling the West’s abandonment of these countries, first to German and then Soviet domination during the 1930s and 1940s, felt an emotional obligation to them.^[9]  

If so, the history behind that sentiment is pretty shaky.  The United States, after all, had no hand at all in the 1938 Munich agreement, and it could have challenged Soviet control of Eastern Europe after World War II only at the risk of World War III, which would hardly have liberated anybody.^[10]  Nor is it clear that the Czechs, the Poles, and the Hungarians suffered more during the past half century than did the people the US proposes to leave out -- the Slovaks, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukrainians, and even the Russians themselves -- all of whom were, in one way or another, victims of German and/or Soviet oppression.  

What we are seeing, then, is a kind of selective sentimentalism.  The historic plight of some peoples moves American leaders more than does that of others, despite the fact that they all have compelling claims as victims.  Emotionalism, but of a surprisingly elitist character, appears to be at work here.

One of the strongest lessons that has emerged from the new Soviet documentation on Cold War history has to do with the dangers of making emotionally-based decisions in isolation.  Joseph Stalin’s authorization to North Korean leader Kim Il-sung to invade South Korea, Nikita Khrushchev’s placement of missiles in Cuba, and Leonid Brezhnev’s decision to invade Afghanistan all took place because leaders at the top responded to events emotionally, and then acted without consulting their own subordinate experts.^[11]  Those who raised doubts were simply told that the decision had been made, and that it was too late to reconsider.

I do not want to be misunderstood here.  I am not claiming that decision-making in the Clinton administration replicates that within the former Soviet Union.  I am suggesting, though, that on NATO expansion emotions at the top appear to have combined with a disregard for advice coming up from below -- and that given what happened in the Soviet Union when decisions were made in this way, that pattern ought to set off alarm bells in our minds.  

Well, you may be right, people will say, in questioning the way the NATO enlargement decision was made.  Maybe it was not the best model of thoughtful, consultative, strategically-informed decision making.  But the decision’s been made, for better or for worse, and going back on it now -- especially having the Senate refuse to approve it -- would be a disaster far greater in its scope and consequences than any disasters NATO enlargement itself will bring.

This sounds to me rather like the refusal of the Titanic’s captain to cut his ship’s speed when he was informed there were icebergs ahead.  And that brings up a final principle of strategy, which is that consistency is a fine idea most of the time, but there are moments when it’s just plain irresponsible.

Only the historians will be able to say with any assurance whether this is one of them.  Their current mood, though, ought not to give the administration much comfort.  So is there anything that might yet be done to avoid the damage so many of us see lying ahead if the United States holds to its present course? 

It is not unknown for great nations -- even the United States -- to acknowledge mistakes publicly and change their policies.  President Ronald Reagan did it in Lebanon:  in 1983 that country’s security was one of the United States’ vital interests; in 1984 (after over 200 Marines had been killed there) it was no longer so.  The US certainly reversed course in Vietnam, although only after years of resisting that possibility.  Surely the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China was an acknowledgement that the long-time policy of isolating that country had been misguided.  John Foster Dulles once threatened an “agonizing reappraisal” of the United States’ whole policy toward Europe if the French did not approve the European Defense Community; they did not approve, Dulles did not reappraise, and the skies did not fall.  And, lest we forget, America’s entire containment strategy after World War II constituted an implicit acknowledgement of error in having believed, as US leaders had during the war, that the Soviet Union under Stalin could be a lasting peacetime ally.  Mistakes happen all the time, and governments usually find ways to survive them. 

In the case of NATO enlargement, though, an acknowledgement of error -- a reversal of course -- is not really necessary:  US leaders could resolve most of the problems their policy of selective enlargement has caused by acting upon the implied premises of their own argument, and enlarging the enlargement process.  They could say that NATO expansion is such a good idea that they think it unfair just to apply the benefits to the Czechs, Poles and Hungarians -- that it will open the alliance to the other East Europeans, and ultimately to the Russians themselves.

But that would totally change NATO’s character, its defenders will protest.  Precisely so -- NATO ought to change to meet the conditions of the new world in which it exists, otherwise it will wind up looking like the British royal family.  But there is no precedent for such a dramatic move, NATO’s advocates will insist.  Precisely not.  Including Russia now could hardly be as dramatic a step as it was to bring France back into the Concert of Europe as early as 1818, or to include Germany as a recipient of Marshall Plan aid as early as 1947.  But Russia is not yet a predictable, democratic state, NATO’s supporters will complain.  Precisely beside the point -- for neither were Greece and Turkey when they were admitted as NATO members, quite uncontroversially, way back in 1952.

There is here illustrated one more lesson from the past, which is that what people think of as radical innovations often actually exist as historical precedents.  People tend to be shocked in rough proportion to the amount of history they have managed to forget.  

George F. Kennan, a man who remembers a great deal of history, was one of the earliest and most vocal opponents of NATO expansion, just as he was of the Vietnam War.  In 1966, commenting on the Johnson administration’s claim that any reversal of course in Southeast Asia would fatally compromise American credibility, Kennan reminded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “there is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant and unpromising objectives.”^[12]

Perhaps, as Kennan’s biographer, I am slightly biased.  But he was obviously right then.  I think he is right now.

 

John Lewis Gaddis is Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University, where he teaches courses on the Cold War, grand strategy, biography, and historical methods.  His most recent books include The Landscape of History:  How Historians Map the Past (2002), Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (2004), The Cold War:  A New History (2005), George F. Kennan:  An American Life (2011), and On Grand Strategy (2018).  Professor Gaddis co-founded and was the first director of Yale's Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy.  He is also a recipient of two Yale undergraduate teaching awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

Notes

[1] The essay that follows was originally prepared for the National Defense University symposium, “Strategy and the Formulation of National Security Policy,” Washington, D. C., October 7, 1997.  It was previously published in Survival as John Gaddis, “History, Grand Strategy and NATO Enlargement,” Survival 40:1 (1998): 145-151, DOI: 10.1093/survival/40.1.145.  © 1998 The International Institute for Strategic Studies, reproduced with permission.  It has been slightly revised for publication on H-Diplo and includes a new preface by the author.

[2] Philip Hardy to John Gaddis February 25, 2022. 

[3] James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether But When:  The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO (Washington: Brookings, 1999); Mary E. Sarotte, Not One Inch:  America, Russia, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Stalemate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 

[4] See John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know:  Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 68-70.

[5] Richard N. Haass, “Fatal Distraction:  Bill Clinton’s Foreign Policy,” Foreign Policy, #108 (Fall, 1997), 119. 

[6] See Paul Kennedy, “Let’s See the Pentagon’s Plan for Defending Poland,” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1977. 

[7] Vojtech Mastny, Reassuring NATO:  Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Western Alliance (Oslo: Institutt for Forsvarsstudier, 1997), 61.

[8] James M. Goldgeier, “U.S. Security Policy Toward the New Europe:  How the Decision to Expand NATO Was Made,” paper delivered at the annual convention of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., August, 1997. 

[9] See, for example, Sherle R. Schwenninger, “The Case against NATO Enlargement:  Clinton’s Fateful Gamble,” The Nation, CCLXV (October 20, 1997), 26.  

[10] Michael Mandelbaum, The Dawn of Peace in Europe (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1996), 55-56. 

[11] Gaddis, We Now Know, 290-91; also, for Afghanistan, Odd Arne Westad, “The Road to Kabul:  Soviet Policy on Afghanistan, 1978-1979,” in Westad, ed., The Fall of Détente:  Soviet-American Relations during the Carter Years (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997), 132-33. 

[12] Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings.  Supplemental Foreign Assistance Fiscal Year 1966 -- Vietnam(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1966), 335-36.