Book Review Podcast:
Henry Kissinger’s ‘World Order’
In The New York Times Book Review, John Micklethwait reviews Henry Kissinger’s “World Order.” Mr. Micklethwait writes:
If you think America is doing just fine, then skip ahead to the poetry reviews. If, however, you worry about a globe spinning out of control, then “World Order” is for you. It brings together history, geography, modern politics and no small amount of passion. Yes, passion, for this is a cri de coeur from a famous skeptic, a warning to future generations from an old man steeped in the past. It comes with faults: It is contorted by the author’s concerns about his legacy and by a needless craving not to upset the Lilliputian leaders he still seeks to influence. It also goes over some of the same ground as previous works. But it is a book that every member of Congress should be locked in a room with — and forced to read before taking the oath of office.
On this week’s podcast, Mr. Kissinger discusses “World Order”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Lawrence Wright talks about “Thirteen Days in September”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.
==================
As
the World Turns
Henry
Kissinger’s ‘World Order’
By JOHN MICKLETHWAITSEPT. 11, 2014
If you want to understand the point
of Henry Kissinger, play this mind game: Imagine that the nonagenarian had run
American foreign policy since Sept. 11, 2001, instead of two groups that had
spent much of the previous quarter-century condemning him. First came the
democracy-touting neoconservatives, who saw his realpolitik as appeasement, and
now liberal Democrats, who insist nation-building must begin at home — and
therefore hate foreign entanglements, let alone grand strategies.
Might a little realism have been useful in Iraq, rather than
the “stuff happens” amateurism of the Bush years? Would a statesman who read
Winston Churchill on Afghanistan (“except at harvest time . . . the Pathan
[Pashtun] tribes are always engaged in private or public war”) have committed
America to establishing a “gender sensitive . . . and fully representative”
government in Kabul? Would Kissinger have issued a red-line warning to Syria
and then allowed Assad to go unpunished when he used chemical weapons? Or let a
power vacuum gradually develop on Vladimir Putin’s borders? Or looked on as the
South China Sea became a cockpit of regional rivalries?
If you think America is doing just fine, then skip ahead to
the poetry reviews. If, however, you worry about a globe spinning out of
control, then “World Order” is for you. It brings together history, geography,
modern politics and no small amount of passion. Yes, passion, for this is
a cri de coeur from a famous skeptic, a warning to future
generations from an old man steeped in the past. It comes with faults: It is
contorted by the author’s concerns about his legacy and by a needless craving
not to upset the Lilliputian leaders he still seeks to influence. It also goes
over some of the same ground as previous works. But it is a book that every
member of Congress should be locked in a room with — and forced to read before
taking the oath of office.
The premise is that we live in a world of disorder: “While
‘the international community’ is invoked perhaps more insistently now than in
any other era, it presents no clear or agreed set of goals, methods or limits.
. . . Chaos threatens side by side with unprecedented interdependence.” Hence
the need to build an order — one able to balance the competing desires of
nations, both the established Western powers that wrote the existing
international “rules” (principally the United States), and the emerging ones
that do not accept them, principally China, but also Russia and the Islamic
world.
This will be hard because there never has been a true world
order. Instead, different civilizations have come up with their own versions.
The Islamic and Chinese ones were almost entirely self-centered: If you were
not within the umma of believers or blessed with the emperor’s
masterly rule, you were an infidel or a barbarian. Balance did not come into
it. America’s version, though more recent and more nuanced, is also somewhat
self-centered — a moral order where everything will be fine once the world
comes to its senses and thinks like America (which annoyingly it never quite
does). So the best starting point remains Europe’s “Westphalian” balance of
power.
For centuries pluralism was both Europe’s strength and its
weakness. After the fall of Rome in 476, no power ruled the whole continent.
Europe’s modus vivendi was competition: Your enemy’s enemy was your friend.
Thus Roman Catholic France allied itself with Protestant German and Dutch
princes and even the Ottomans to prevent the Catholic Holy Roman Empire from achieving
supremacy. Out of all this maneuvering came the brutal Thirty Years’ War, with
faction fighting faction across borders, rather like the modern Middle East.
Eventually, in 1648, a gathering of 235 envoys in separate towns around
Westphalia worked out three different treaties.
The basic bargain was cuius regio, eius religio. A
ruler could set the religion in his country, but it enshrined the nation-state
as the building block of the European order: Each king was called “majesty” and
treated equally. It opened up an age of diplomacy (before then only the
Venetians had what we would call ambassadors). Equilibrium did not always last:
Inevitably, there were rising powers to contain, as well as irrational surges
like the French Revolution’s desire to bring equality to all. After Waterloo,
the dominant British provided the balance by tilting to one side or another.
This is Kissinger’s home territory — and he tells the story
well. His heroes inevitably are realpolitikers, like Cardinal Richelieu,
France’s chief minister from 1624 to 1642, who heretically sided with the
Protestants, explaining that “man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter. The
state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never”; Austria’s Klemens von
Metternich, the architect of the Congress of Vienna; and Britain’s pragmatic
Lord Palmerston (“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual
enemies”). Read Kissinger’s description of Talleyrand, and by the end the
aristocratic French diplomat has assumed a guttural German accent and thick
glasses:
“He started his career as Bishop of Autun, left the Church
to support the Revolution, abandoned the Revolution to serve as Napoleon’s
foreign minister, abandoned Napoleon to negotiate the restoration of the French
monarch and appeared in Vienna as Louis XVIII’s foreign minister. Many called
Talleyrand an opportunist. Talleyrand would have argued that his goals were
stability within France and peace in Europe and that he had taken whatever
opportunities were available to achieve these goals. He had surely striven for
positions to study the various elements of power and legitimacy at close hand
without being unduly constrained by any of them. Only a formidable personality
could have projected himself into the center of so many great and conflicting
events.”
So Europe has given us the most plausible historical model,
but it is no longer the sculptor. It shed its power during two world wars,
half-embraced the idea of a post-Westphalian union and is now too obsessed in
the European Union’s internal construction. It will be of little use on the
world stage until it has resolved that debate, and as Kissinger notes in one of
his more withering asides, unifications in Europe have only been achieved with
a forceful uniter, like Piedmont in Italy or Prussia in Germany.
Kissinger also canters eloquently through Russia. Vladimir
Putin’s nationalism makes more sense once you understand the historical chip on
his shoulder and his country’s centuries-long, remorseless expansion: Russia
added an average of 100,000 square kilometers a year to its territory from 1552
to 1917.
Still, the book stalls a bit with Islam. Religion used to be
one of Kissinger’s blind spots: The word does not appear in the index of
“Diplomacy.” Now Kissinger seems to have swung too far the other way. Islam’s
failure to differentiate between mosque and state suddenly explains virtually
everything (though not, presumably, the success of the largest Muslim-dominated
state, Indonesia). Iran is perfidy personified. By contrast, Israel is a
victim, “a Westphalian state” in a sea of unreason. He does not mention its
unhelpful settlement-building or examine the Jewish state’s own extremists (the
man who killed the peacemaking Yitzhak Rabin is a “radical Israeli student”).
It all feels like a rather belated olive branch to the Israeli right and its
supporters in America’s Congress.
The book recovers speed with Asia. Kissinger compares
Britain’s effect on India to Napoleon’s on Germany: In both cases multiple
states that had seen themselves only as a geographic entity discovered a
national one. There is some repetition here with his last book on China, but he
moves quickly through the Middle Kingdom’s self-absorbed history, where foreign
policy was largely a matter of collecting tribute through the emperor’s
Ministry of Rituals and where soldiery was little valued (“Good iron is not
used for nails. Good men do not become soldiers”). In 1893, even as Western
forces were overrunning the country, the Qing dynasty diverted military funds
to restore a marble boat in the Imperial Palace.
Gradually, though, the full extent of the problem becomes
clear — and its American dimension. Within Asia, two potential balances of
power are emerging, both involving China — one in South Asia, the other in East
Asia. But neither at present has a balancer, a country capable of shifting its
weight to the weaker side as Britain did in Europe. As for China itself,
although it makes some use of international rules, it “has not forgotten that
it was originally forced to engage with the existing international order in a
manner utterly at odds with its historical image of itself.” In 15 cases of
history where a rising and established power interacted, 10 ended in war.
Supposedly America is China’s partner, but “partnership cannot be achieved by
proclamation.”
Is modern America capable of leading the world out of this?
Kissinger never answers this question directly, but the chapters on his own
country read like a carefully worded warning to a treasured but blinkered
friend. America comes to the task with two deep character faults. The first,
bound up with its geography, is a perception that foreign policy is “an
optional activity.” As late as 1890, its army was only the 14th largest in the
world, smaller than Bulgaria’s. This is a superpower that has withdrawn ignominiously
from three of the last five wars it chose to fight — in Vietnam, Iraq (the
younger Bush version), Afghanistan. The second is that the same ideals that
have built a great country often made it lousy at diplomacy, especially “the
conviction that its domestic principles were self-evidently universal and their
application at all times salutary” — the naïveté of Woodrow Wilson’s League of
Nations and the neoconservatives’ forays in the Islamic world.
At its best, America is unstoppable. Theodore Roosevelt, for
instance, both understood the need for his country to be involved and managed
to fashion its idealism to a pragmatic end. In the Cold War, America’s moral
order worked: There was a clear adversary that could eventually just be
outmuscled, there were compliant allies and there were set rules of engagement.
But the current disorder is more complex: chaos in the Middle East, the spread
of nuclear weapons, the emergence of cyberspace as an unregulated military
arena and the reordering of Asia. The challenge is “not simply a multipolarity
of power but a world of increasingly contradictory realities,” Kissinger
writes. “It must not be assumed that, left unattended, these trends will at
some point reconcile automatically to a world of balance and cooperation — or
even any order at all.”
Meanwhile, statesmanship, the craft of “attending” to these
problems, is getting harder. Kissinger rightly mocks the cyber-utopian idea
that greater connectiveness and transparency will make the world safer, as
nations learn about one another: “Conflicts within and between societies have
occurred since the dawn of civilization. The causes of these conflicts have not
been limited to an absence of information or an insufficient ability to share
it.” To the contrary, the immediacy of everything is a test. Every incident is
flashed round the world, everything becomes part of domestic politics,
political careers are molded in public. Boldness, leadership and stealth are
all more difficult.
How do America’s current leaders shape up? Here the book is
both irritatingly coy and implicitly devastating. There is no direct criticism
of the Obama administration and even a slightly comic paragraph expressing
Kissinger’s deep personal admiration for George W. Bush — in the midst of a
section on the cluelessness of his foreign policy. But under the equivocation
and the courtiership, the message is clear, even angry: The world is drifting,
unattended, and America, an indispensable part of any new order, has yet to
answer even basic questions, like “What do we seek to prevent?” and “What do we
seek to achieve?” Its politicians and people are unprepared for the century
ahead. Reading this book would be a useful first step forward.
WORLD ORDER
By Henry
Kissinger
420 pp.
Penguin Press. $36.
John Micklethwait is The Economist’s editor in chief and a
co-author of “The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State.”
A version
of this review appears in print on September 14, 2014, on page BR1 of
the Sunday Book Reviewwith the headline: 'World Order'. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
