1166. “Um congresso de Viena para o século 21?: Kissinger e o
‘sentido da História’”, Publicado,
sem o subtítulo, em Mundorama
(8/03/2015; link: http://mundorama.net/2015/03/08/um-congresso-de-viena-para-o-seculo-21-por-paulo-roberto-de-almeida/); divulgado neste blog Diplomatizzando
(link: http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2015/03/um-congresso-de-viena-para-o-seculo-21.html). Relação de
Originais n. 2779.
The World According to Kissinger
How to Defend Global Order
Foreign
Affairs, MARCH/APRIL 2015 ISSUE
How many authors could title their book simply World Order without
sounding utterly presumptuous? Henry Kissinger still plays in a league of his
own. For admirers and critics alike, he is more than just a former U.S.
secretary of state and previous national security adviser. Some see him as the
quintessential wise man of U.S. foreign policy; others, as a diehard
realpolitiker hanging on to yesterday’s world; and still others, as a perennial
bête noire. To all, he remains larger than life. And regardless of how one
views Kissinger, his new book is tremendously valuable.
To call World Order timely would be an understatement, for
if there was one thing the world yearned for in 2014, it was order. In the
Middle East, the Syrian civil war has killed hundreds of thousands and allowed
jihadist groups to threaten the stability of the entire region. In Asia, an
economically resurgent China has grown more assertive, stoking anxiety among
its neighbors. In West Africa, the Ebola pandemic has nearly shut down several
states. And even Europe, the most rule-bound and institutionalized part of the
world, has seen its cherished liberal norms come under direct assault as
Russian President Vladimir Putin reclaimed military aggression as an instrument
of state policy.
Even
more ominous, the traditional guardians of global order seem to have become
reluctant to defend it. Following long, costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
the United States and other Western powers are suffering from intervention
fatigue, preferring instead to focus on domestic concerns. And the rising
powers have so far proved either unwilling or unable to safeguard international
stability.
Enter
Kissinger. A strategist and historian by training, he takes the long view. The
core of the book is his exploration of different interpretations of the idea of
world order and competing approaches to constructing it. Kissinger opens the
book by defining the term “world order” as “the concept held by a region or
civilization about the nature of just arrangements and the distribution of
power thought to be applicable to the entire world.” As he is quick to point
out, any system of this kind rests on two components: “a set of commonly
accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action and a balance of
power that enforces restraint where rules break down, preventing one political
unit from subjugating all others.”
Kissinger’s
world, it turns out, is not just about power derived from economic wealth and
military might but also about the power of ideas—although for him, the ideas
that matter most are those of the powerful. In his view, traditional notions
such as sovereignty and noninterference still reign supreme, having buttressed
the international system for almost four centuries. Today that system is very
much in flux, however, as powerful actors promote alternative ways to order it,
from theocracy to autocratic capitalism to borderless postmodernity. But only
the prevailing structure, Kissinger argues, fulfills the two main objectives of
world order: legitimacy and a balance of power. Among the book’s many messages,
then, perhaps the clearest of all is a warning: do not dispose of an organizing
principle if there exists no ready alternative that promises to be just as
effective.
WESTPHALIA
2.0
For
Kissinger, today’s international system owes its overall resilience to the
astuteness of seventeenth-century European statesmen. The modern state system
emerged in 1648 after a century of sectarian conflict, when the bitter Thirty
Years’ War brought together representatives of the European powers to establish
the Peace of Westphalia. The treaties they concluded codified the idea of
sovereign states as the building blocks of international order. A century and a
half later, at the Congress of Vienna, in 1814–15, diplomats such as the French
envoy Talleyrand and the Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich
explicitly spelled out the principle of balance of power as a way of managing
the international system. In recounting these events, Kissinger is on his home
turf. Although some contemporary historians and political scientists might
object to his idealization of Westphalian institutions, one of Kissinger’s
gifts is a knack for revealing the relevance of historic structures to
present-day politics.
There
are limitations to that exercise, of course: Western ideas about states and
politics have been foisted on other regions ever since colonial times, and they
still compete with other, older visions of order and power that cannot be
ignored. This is particularly true in the Middle East. Thus, the book examines
the enduring impact of the Shiite-Sunni schism on the contemporary Muslim world
and the emergence of secular states there after the Westphalian system expanded
beyond Europe. Today, the regional order—still composed of European-style
nation-states—is threatened by transnational political Islam, in the form of
both political movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadist groups
such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. The
latter’s rise illustrates a new danger, according to Kissinger: a
“disintegration of statehood into tribal and sectarian units” that risks
tipping the region into “a confrontation akin to—but broader than—Europe’s
pre-Westphalian wars of religion.”
Kissinger’s
survey of the Middle East also takes in the relationship between the United
States and Iran, a rivalry that pits the putative guardian of the liberal world
order against a state that has deliberately placed itself outside of that
system. Kissinger traces the tradition of Iranian statecraft back to the
Persian empire, emphasizing how Iran has always aspired to be more than just a
normal state in the Westphalian sense, struggling to “decide whether it is a
country or a cause.” This tradition heavily influences multilateral
negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. Kissinger suggests that the United
States should foster cooperative relations with Iran based on the principle of
nonintervention. Where constructive diplomacy is not enough, however, the
United States should employ balance-of-power politics to cajole Iran into
cooperation, using alliances with the region’s Sunni powers as leverage. The
outcome
of Washington’s current attempt at rapprochement with Tehran might
determine “whether Iran pursues
the path of revolutionary Islam or
that of a
great nation legitimately
and importantly lodged in the
Westphalian system of
states.”
Asia
is another region where Western concepts of world order have long competed with
indigenous visions. Even the very idea of an Asian region is itself something
of a Western import: prior to the arrival of modern Western powers in the
fifteenth century, none of the region’s many languages had a word for Asia, and
their speakers shared little sense of belonging to a single continent.
Kissinger pays particular attention to China and goes to great lengths to
distill the traditional Chinese worldview, which posited that the country was
not one power center among many but the “sole sovereign government of the
world,” where the Chinese emperor ruled over “all under heaven.” According to
Kissinger, the rise of China in the twenty-first century comes with refrains of
these traditional views, as Beijing searches for a synthesis between its
ancient tradition and its new role “as
a contemporary great power on the
Westphalian model.” He warns that China and the United States hold incompatible
views on democracy and human rights but stresses that the two countries share a
common interest in avoiding conflict. Indeed, World Order suggests
that U.S.-Chinese relations may be less risky than China’s relations with its
Asian neighbors. East Asia, he reminds readers, is a region where “nearly every
country considers itself
to be ‘rising,’ driving disagreements
to the edge of
confrontation.”
RULES
OF ENGAGEMENT
Kissinger
is at his most interesting when considering the country he knows best: the
United States. World Order offers some pointed commentary on
the current debate in Washington over the United States’ proper role in the
world. But Kissinger is no mere pundit, and his analysis rests on a deep
exploration of two competing strands of thought that have historically shaped
U.S. foreign policy: the pragmatic realism of President Theodore Roosevelt and
the liberal idealism of President Woodrow Wilson.
Although
Kissinger sometimes couches his views in abstract terms, it is easy to
comprehend what he thinks of President Barack Obama’s critics, who blame the
president for not offering enough leadership. Pointing to a number of wars with
far-reaching goals that the United States first waged and then had to abandon
midstream, Kissinger does not hide his skepticism over idealistic enterprises that
fail to recognize the limits of U.S. power, leading to disappointments, if not
full-fledged foreign policy disasters. “Critics will ascribe these setbacks to
the deficiencies, moral and intellectual, of America’s leaders,” he writes.
“Historians will probably conclude that they derived from the inability to
resolve an ambivalence about force and diplomacy, realism and idealism, power
and legitimacy, cutting across the entire society.”
Even
though Kissinger strongly takes the side of restraint in the ongoing tug of war
between the Rooseveltian and Wilsonian impulses in U.S. foreign policy, he
acknowledges the important role that liberal values play, too. “America would
not be true to itself if it abandoned this essential idealism,” he writes. And
although he recognizes Washington’s special role as a defender of Western
norms, Kissinger also emphasizes that “world order cannot be achieved by any
one country acting alone.” The European powers remain the United States’ most
natural partners, and Kissinger stresses that they all are best served when
they cultivate their relationship, working not only to maximize the overall
level of Western influence in world affairs but also to restrain one another’s
worst impulses.
Kissinger
is certainly right to warn of the excessive self-righteousness that democracies
sometimes demonstrate. But he is perhaps too skeptical of some more recent
forms of liberal internationalism. He argues, for example, that the
“responsibility to protect” doctrine—which holds that a state forfeits its
sovereign right to noninterference if it fails to protect its population from
mass atrocities, requiring the international community to act on this
population’s behalf—could destabilize the international system. But liberal
societies devised this principle in order to prevent ruthless leaders from
manipulating and making a mockery of Westphalian norms in their efforts to
escape punishment for abusing their own people. On balance, applying the
doctrine properly would do more to protect the liberal order than to undermine
it.
Although
he might take issue with such thinking, Kissinger acknowledges that it will
become increasingly difficult for Western democracies to pursue policies that
undercut their basic commitment to liberal values. And he points out that
long-term stability based on oppression is an illusion, as the Arab revolts of
2011 demonstrated. The coming decades will see plenty of argument over this
basic dilemma, as Western powers weigh how much liberalism is too much—or too
little.
A WHOLE
NEW WORLD?
As
far as Kissinger is concerned, nation-states are still the main players in the
international system. Neither international institutions nor nonstate actors
play an important role in his book. In this view, not all that much has changed
since 1814, when the European powers convened in Vienna to forge a sustainable
system that, minor outbreaks of violence aside, preserved peace on the
continent for a century. Nor is today much different from 1914, when the same
major powers drove Europe over the cliff, unleashing a major war that became
the first truly global conflict. Kissinger’s notes of caution, repeated
throughout the book, serve as a warning for those who think that humanity has
nearly overcome the old patterns of power politics and state rivalry.
That
message is particularly pertinent for the EU, whose most enthusiastic
cheerleaders promote it as the vanguard of a borderless, post-Westphalian
world. The EU has without a doubt fundamentally transformed Europe: rising
right-wing nationalism notwithstanding, young people in EU states tend to
identify with both their home countries and the union as a whole. However, it
would be imprudent and dangerous to expect the rest of the world to eagerly
follow Europe’s lead. Although regional integration projects are advancing
elsewhere, the breadth and depth of the European experience may remain unique.
Europe, the birthplace of the Westphalian model, might be ready to move on. But
the rest of the world isn’t—and, Kissinger argues, that’s for the best. As he
puts it, “Westphalian principles are, at this writing, the sole generally
recognized basis of what exists of a world order.”
But
Kissinger is fully aware that the international system is influenced by factors
other than great-power politics and that there are other powerful sources of
order and disorder—most notably the global economy, the environment, and
technological change. However, some of these factors take a secondary role in
Kissinger’s work.
The
broad reach of globalization and the resulting degree of complex
interdependence come with new challenges. For instance, the spread of
capitalism and free trade has lifted millions out of poverty but has also
generated unsustainable degrees of inequality. And the economic interdependence
produced by globalization acts as both a stabilizing and a disruptive force,
encouraging growth but also expanding the reach of economic shocks. Such
interdependence has changed the politics of coercion, as Western states now
commonly use their economic power to force other countries to comply with
international rules. This strategy might not always produce good results, but
it has brought Iran back to the negotiating table and remains the only option
the West has available for pressuring Russia to change course
in Ukraine.
World
order will also be subject to climate change, a phenomenon that is largely
man-made but that lies outside policymakers’ control. It is too late to prevent
climate change from affecting the lives of billions of people—a fact that can
cut both ways when it comes to global stability. An environmental catastrophe
could bring the world together, just as the devastation of World War II
compelled countries to forge a more durable international system, create the
United Nations, and establish the Bretton Woods institutions, which have
functioned fairly well since 1944. Alternatively, a climate crisis could
magnify existing tensions, undermine global governance, and further erode the
capacity of weak states to responsibly administer their own territories.
When
it comes to technological change, it is obvious that Kissinger does not feel
completely comfortable in this brave new world. He recognizes that the Internet
has enabled many of the contemporary era’s great achievements, but he faults it
for giving rise to a less substantive, more cursory way of thinking about the
world’s true complexity. “Knowledge of history and geography is not essential
for those who can evoke their data with the touch of a button,” Kissinger
writes. “The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident
to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on
Facebook.” He likens today’s digital optimists—those who believe that
cyberspace can solve the world’s most pressing problems—to the naive Wilsonian
idealists of a century ago.
Younger
analysts tend to have a different view, of course. And although Kissinger’s
skepticism is well intentioned and not unjustified, it is indisputable that new
technologies have already fundamentally changed the practice of diplomacy and
statesmanship. Today’s diplomats must be prepared to speak to a global audience
and to constantly contend with an international media circus. They must be both
hard-nosed negotiators and global communicators: tweeting Talleyrands, ready to
defend their interests in the real world and the virtual world alike. Most
notably, recent cyberattacks and hybrid warfare have demonstrated that
cyberspace has already become a battlefield on which familiar concepts such as
deterrence and even defense need to be defined anew.
Kissinger’s
secret wish might be to stage a Congress of Vienna for the twenty-first
century. And although world politics is complicated by a host of factors that
don’t fit easily into the Westphalian model—transnational identities, digital
hyperconnectivity, weapons of mass destruction, global terrorist
networks—Kissinger is still right to insist that the management
of great-power
relations remains of paramount importance. Indeed, there should not need to be
another Thirty Years’ War to provide the impetus for a new Westphalian peace
and a world order that is at once legitimate and reflective of the new
geopolitical realities. Kissinger’s book is a gift to all of those who care
about global order and seek to stave off conflict in the twenty-first century.
No one else could have produced this masterpiece.
