Books of the Times: Henry Kissinger and his world order (podcast)

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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.

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SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

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.

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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

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