Diplomacy.

In Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger has written another long, weighty, and important book. Swollen to more than 910 pages, some two kilograms of European heft, replete with controversial advice for current or future pursuit and with analyses of strategies suitable or mistaken in the past, it will command an audience of policy wonks. They will find the Kissinger they know--assertive, arrogant, disdainful of his critics, in favor of an imperial presidency and of tough diplomacy, impatient with Congress and the people. Though he dedicates the book to the men and women of the Foreign Service, he faults bureaucracy on several alleged accounts: for impeding innovative policies; for a tendency to avoid decisions by picking a middle course; for taking a segmented rather than holistic view of policy.

In the busy environment of Washington, readers will be tempted to turn at once to the last chapter, the repository of counsel for immediate and future use. They will learn enough there (though without surprises for Kissinger connoisseurs) to equip themselves for intelligent conversation about author and book alike. But even the busy should try to resist the temptation. A learned man, Kissinger is also an authority on diplomacy, a subject he has studied much of his life and practiced in the light of his conclusions. This book reveals the historical sources and contemporary vectors of his thinking. Therein lies its gravitas.

Kissinger writes in a tradition old for Europe but only recently established in the United States, by George Kennan and Walter Lippmann in particular, both of whom he frequently cites in support of his own views. Like Lippmann in several of his later books, and like Kennan in his American Diplomacy, Kissinger does not write as a historian but as a pamphleteer using history to make his case. Kennan, of course, did both, but Kissinger is too much the controversialist to spend his energy in research for the purpose of recapturing the past as it probably was. Diplomacy offers no evidence of sustained or disinterested scholarship. Rather, Kissinger seems to have written a draft about European and American diplomats, subjects familiar to him, in order that his readers may draw lessons Kissinger thinks appropriate. Then he had his research staff provide a sparse documentation for his interpretations.

Kissinger's use of history elucidates his familiar diplomacy. As he sees it, geopolitical realities define national interests. Men in power then make decisions that govern relations among states. Those who are wise protect and advance their national interests by practicing a balance of power diplomacy enhanced, when possible, by the common values, cultural and moral, of necessary allies. Kissinger methodically, at times ponderously, builds an historical structure to sustain those generalities. The figures with whom he identifies invariably act as if they had been he. They succeed. The others do not.

He associates himself with men whose strategies he deems still vital for diplomacy. So we visit with Cardinal Richelieu, who first formulated the concept of raison d'etat--the primacy of the interests of the state; with William III of Britain, who devised the system of the balance of power; with Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill, who taught their reluctant countrymen to keep a hand in Europe. Disraeli and Churchill's leadership, Kissinger holds, "reflected a geopolitical fact of life"--the potential danger to Britain, "an island off the coast of Europe," if all the resources of the continent were arrayed against it. The United States now, Kissinger contends, is an island off the coast of Eurasia and must act accordingly.

In engineering the rise of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, with whom Kissinger especially identifies, practiced a diplomacy that required political control which military chiefs later usurped; restraint which his German successors lacked; and flexibility which became incompatible with "an age of mass public opinion." Kissinger, for his part, also distrusts both the people and the politicians who use them.

Fundamentally a European intelligence, Kissinger falters when his narrative moves, in 1917, to the United States, which he persists in calling "America," perhaps in deference to his simplistic assertion of the country's hegemony throughout the western hemisphere. He derides Woodrow Wilson for what Kissinger defines as a naive belief in the goodness of man, the related harmony of the world, and the resulting faith in a concert of powers to preserve peace by reliance on the moral force of opinion.

While praising Franklin Roosevelt for his insights about foreign affairs and for his leadership, Kissinger makes FDR appear more Wilsonian than he actually was. For example, Kissinger overlooks FDR's effort to tilt the balance of power in both Europe and Asia by recognizing the Soviet Union in 1933. More important, he criticizes FDR for assuming a community of interests that did not exist among the Four Policemen, the powers he expected to preserve the postwar peace. Roosevelt, Kissinger holds, was returning to an unrealistic Wilsonian hope for a concert of powers. But there is a strong case for viewing FDR's proposal as an implicit recognition of spheres of influence, though Roosevelt never considered Eastern Europe as part of a Soviet sphere. Further, Roosevelt's wartime strategy left the United States with sole possession of the atom bomb and with a ring of global bases which the Air Force deemed essential for an attack, if one became necessary, on the Soviet Union. Consequently, Moscow had reason to wonder about American intentions, though Kissinger dismisses that possibility as part of a deluded, "psychiatric" interpretation of the Cold War, a fantasy of Henry Wallace and others like him.

Foreign Pol

In Kissinger's account, Stalin bore exclusive responsibility for the onset of the Cold War. He believes that the United States should have used its monopoly on the atom bomb to deter Soviet expansion in Europe. But how? When Secretary of State Byrnes rattled the bomb, Molotov shrugged him off--an episode Kissinger ignores. Would Kissinger have used the bomb? No--he makes it clear that once the Soviet Union had its own arsenal, nuclear war became unthinkable. Nonetheless, he derides the disarmament experts of the 1970s, whose advice he discounted at the time, as theologians whose work was marginal to the real tasks of diplomacy.

In Kissinger's ideal world, statesmen would manage foreign policy without the interference of public opinion or domestic politics. He is quaintly nostalgic for the days of Bismarck.

And like Bismarck, he often makes sense. With the advantage of hindsight, Kissinger suggests the United States could have won the war in Korea by stopping MacArthur's advance at the thin neck of the peninsula and neutralizing much of the area to the north. He recognizes that the formation of NATO left "two military alliances and two spheres of influence" dividing Europe. In the early days of the Cold War, American strategy was still encumbered by Wilsonian principles. Truman and his successors employed a rhetoric of fear, which Kissinger neglects, to build public support for the time and treasure necessary for containment (this rhetoric also underlay McCarthyism, a factor Kissinger also fails to reckon with). Americans sought total victory over the Soviets instead of accepting, as Churchill did, peaceful coexistence, i.e., detente--Kissinger's own objective when his time came.

As he sees it, Khrushchev's recklessness brought on the crises that exposed the weaknesses of messianic American assumptions. Suez revealed that the interests of the United States and its European allies were not always congruent, and it left the United States with responsibility for preserving the balance of power in the Middle East, as in the rest of the world. Europe could thereafter play a major role. as Konrad Adenauer said at the time, only if it united. And in spite of their talk of liberation, with the revolution in Hungary, "American leaders were not willing to risk American lives for a cause which. . . involved no direct American security." Encouraged by Suez and Hungary, Khrushchev tested American resolve in Berlin and tried to bypass containment by adventuring in the Third World. Then followed the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs and the embarrassment over Berlin that, in Kissinger's opinion, provoked Kennedy to seek compensation in Vietnam, where the United States had already engaged its grandeur.

Once he reaches Vietnam, and especially after he gets to his own years in high office, Kissinger's narrative and his accompanying analyses become self-serving. A proper geopolitical approach would have precluded intervention in Vietnam, he observes, though the United States needed to draw the line somewhere in the region to stop communist expansion there. But he knows that Soviet and Chinese interests in the region were in conflict. Why not let them balance each other? Instead, he suggests the line should have been drawn at Malaya or Thailand, or at worst later by Kennedy in Laos. Why then fight on after 1968, the year Kissinger and Nixon came to power? Thailand at least was then outside communist control. Because by then, according to Kissinger, national honor was at stake; Nixon had to arrange an "honorable extrication." But the terms Nixon and Kissinger eventually accepted in 1973 did not really improve on those Averell Harriman had come to in 1968 Why five more years of war? Why the bombing and invasion of Cambodia, with the dreadful ensuing disaster there? Here Kissinger still fails adequately to answer the charges of William Shawcross, the British journalist who blamed much of the genocide that ensued in Cambodia on Kissinger's policies.

Instead, he offers some bizarre retrospections. For one, that Lyndon Johnson should have run in 1968 to force a referendum on his policy in Vietnam. But what kind of referendum does Kissinger think domestic politics would have allowed in 1968? He sees the antiwar movement as a kind of conspiracy against him and Nixon, a conspiracy of radical youth abetted by a cowardly academia and establishment. He seems unaware that generational issues, cultural differences, and especially the civil rights movement would have disrupted national tranquility even in the absence of Vietnam. After all, the Students for a Democratic Society had criticized American nuclear policy and American adventurism while Kissinger was still a college professor, long before Vietnam became a major issue.

Nixon and Kissinger deserve much credit for the geopolitics they defined and for the balance of power they achieved in the opening to China and in detente with the Soviet Union. But Kissinger replies to none of the telling criticisms of Raymond Gartoff and others about his and Nixon's exaggerated claims of Soviet involvement in the sundry crises they perceived--in Cuba, in Chile, in the Yom Kippur War, in the war between India and Pakistan. He does not even apologize for his own wiretaps--his own invasions, let alone Nixon's, of the privacy of his staff. Watergate remains for him largely a regrettable interference with the management of foreign policy. In this account he offers essentially the hoary asseverations of his memoirs.

Kissinger's partisanship undermines his treatment of the Reagan and Bush years. He concedes that Reagan "treated biblical references to Armageddon as operational predictions," but he finds Reagan's foreign policy one of "extraordinary consistency and relevance." That assessment depends on Kissinger's interpretation of Reagan's truculent moralism--his special use of human rights--as a pragmatic tactic to induce the overthrow of communism and the democratization of the Soviet Union. Kissinger's reading also depends upon crediting Reagan's arms buildup with precipitating the collapse of the Soviet Union. Perhaps, but internal economic and social problems, and unrealistic efforts at external expansion, would probably in themselves have led to Soviet implosion. Further, those subjected to communist rule in the Soviet Union and in the satellite nations discovered how precious were their human rights without lectures from Washington.

About George Bush Kissinger has little to say. He condemned Anthony Eden for demonizing Nasser; he does not mention Bush's demonizing Noriega and Saddam Hussein. And he accepts Bush's moralism as necessary for selling the Gulf War, with its protection of the national interest in oil. He avoids criticism of American arms aid to Iraq before the invasion of Kuwait by not discussing it. Nevertheless, he argues, multilateralism cannot keep the peace. Since the United Nations lacks the means and the will for that essential task, it cannot serve as a substitute for great-power diplomacy. But more than Kissinger allows, the U.N. provides a forum where small nations can express their objections to the conceits of the great powers. Those discussions may not at once temper great power policies, but over time they can help to create the kind of moral climate that Woodrow Wilson considered the hope for the future. Kissinger does not calculate the value of that influence or the expense of losing it.

Indeed, in his general discussion of American policy during the Cold War, not the least during the Reagan presidency, Kissinger never tallies the total cost. It was not just dollars, not just lives, American and others. There were enormous costs also in distortions of the economy, in the underfunding and postponement of needed programs for social justice, in resulting social unrest, in victimization and resentment of peoples on every continent affected by American intrusions.

Though he calculates no such potential costs in looking toward the future, his concluding chapter makes significant observations. As he says, "vast global forces" now at work "will render the United States less exceptional" than Americans have long believed. Power is becoming more diffuse. The nation must tailor its obligations to fit its means for discharging them. Wilsonianism is less and less practical. Not all disputes are justiciable. Ethnic self-determination does not deserve unqualified support, nor do human rights. The interests of the state demand precedence in foreign policy, and they can be served best by flexible applications of the principles of the balance of power, q.e.d.

Kissinger and Tell

Kissinger's applications of those sound conclusions to current problems are more controversial than are the conclusions themselves. He warns that, because a market economy is a long way off in Russia and some communists remain strong there, the United States should be wary about its aid and ties to any Russian regime. So he is critical of President Clinton's support for Yeltsin and recent suggestions for the Partnership for Peace. Kissinger is prepared to risk a confrontation with Russia that Clinton seems eager to avoid. And Kissinger has little to say about the urgency of nuclear disarmament. As he long has, he remains solicitous of China's sensitivities and is less concerned about human rights violations there.

Kissinger ends on an incontrovertible note. The United States will experience only futility and disillusionment if its foreign policy rests on messianic hopes. The essence of diplomacy is not goals but process: "Peace, stability, progress, and freedom. . . will have to be sought in a journey that has no end." That will not come as news to the Clinton administration. As National Security Advisor Anthony Lake recently said at Yale University, the NSC is already trying to avoid both optimism and pessimism in its approach to global problems.

Some of these problems, especially but not exclusively those spawned by demographic and ecological changes, lie wholly outside of Kissinger's historical and contemporary range. There are grave weaknesses in this new tome he has produced. Though Kissinger understands the responsibility of power, he focuses too much on politics and "great men." His use of history is too selective to be convincing. So is his memory, as former members of his staff might attest. In those ways he is less than forthright with his readers. Many of them may conclude that "the arrogance of power," as Senator Fulbright used that phrase, is matched only by the arrogance of Kissinger. He is his own Hegelian Hero. That is the inescapable message implicit in this book.