“Diplomacy” by Henry Kissinger is a comprehensive examination of the art and practice of diplomacy throughout history, focusing on its role in shaping international relations and resolving conflicts. Kissinger draws on his extensive experience as a diplomat and scholar to provide insights into the strategies, tactics, and principles that have guided diplomatic efforts over the centuries.
Kissinger begins by tracing the origins of diplomacy to ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, where emissaries were used to negotiate treaties and establish diplomatic relations between states. He highlights the role of diplomacy in maintaining stability and order in the international system, even in times of conflict and turmoil.
The author then explores the development of diplomacy in Europe during the Renaissance and the early modern period, when the balance of power among European states became a central focus of diplomatic efforts. Kissinger examines how diplomats like Cardinal Richelieu and Metternich used diplomacy to advance their countries’ interests and preserve the peace in a volatile and fragmented Europe.
Kissinger also discusses the impact of nationalism and revolution on diplomacy in the 19th and 20th centuries, as emerging nation-states sought to assert their independence and influence on the world stage. He examines how diplomacy adapted to the changing geopolitical landscape, from the Congress of Vienna to the Treaty of Versailles, and the challenges of managing great power rivalries and ideological conflicts.
The author explores the role of diplomacy in the two world wars and the Cold War, highlighting the efforts of statesmen like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill to build international coalitions and shape the postwar order. Kissinger analyzes how diplomacy was used to manage crises and prevent conflicts from escalating into full-scale wars, as well as the role of diplomacy in negotiating arms control agreements and détente during the Cold War.
Kissinger examines the challenges facing diplomacy in the post-Cold War era, including the rise of non-state actors, transnational threats, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. He discusses the role of multilateral institutions like the United Nations and the European Union in promoting peace and security, as well as the limitations of international law and humanitarian intervention in addressing complex conflicts.
The author also reflects on the changing nature of diplomacy in the digital age, where technology has transformed the way information is shared and diplomatic negotiations are conducted. Kissinger discusses the opportunities and challenges of digital diplomacy, including the use of social media and cyber warfare as tools of statecraft.
Kissinger emphasizes the importance of strategic thinking and long-term planning in diplomacy, as well as the need for diplomats to understand the cultural, historical, and geopolitical context in which they operate. He argues that effective diplomacy requires a balance between realism and idealism, as well as a willingness to engage in compromise and negotiation to achieve diplomatic objectives.
In conclusion, “Diplomacy” offers a comprehensive overview of the history, theory, and practice of diplomacy, highlighting its central role in shaping international relations and resolving conflicts. Kissinger’s insights into the strategies, tactics, and principles of diplomacy provide valuable lessons for policymakers, scholars, and practitioners alike as they navigate the complexities of the modern world.
When, in 1812, John Quincy Adams warned Americans against the penchant to slay “distant monsters,” he could not have imagined the sheer number and magnitude of monsters that would exist in the post-Cold War world. Not every evil can be combated by America, even less by America alone. But some monsters need to be, if not slain, at least resisted. What is most needed are criteria for selectivity.
The American refusal to be bound by history and the insistence on the perpetual possibility for renewal confer a great dignity, even beauty, on the American way of life. The national fear that those who are obsessed with history produce self-fulfilling prophecies does embody a great folk wisdom. Still, Santayana’s dictum that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it can be supported by even more examples.
A country with America’s idealistic tradition cannot base its policy on the balance of power as the sole criterion for a new world order. But it must learn that equilibrium is a fundamental precondition for the pursuit of its historic goals. And these higher goals cannot be achieved by rhetoric or posturing. The emerging international system is far more complex than any previously encountered by American diplomacy. Foreign policy has to be conducted by a political system that emphasizes the immediate and provides few incentives for the long range. Its leaders are obliged to deal with constituencies that tend to receive their information via visual images. All this puts a premium on emotion and on the mood of the moment at a time that demands rethinking of priorities and an analysis of capabilities.
A policy of confrontation with China risks America’s isolation in Asia. No Asian country would want to be - or could afford to be - supportive of America in any political conflict with China which it considered to be the result of misguided US policy. In such circumstances, the vast majority of Asian nations would dissociate from America to a greater or lesser degree, however much they might inwardly dislike doing so.
China finds condescending the implication that Sino-American relations are based not on reciprocal interests but on American favors which can be pursued or shut off at Washington’s discretion. Such an attitude makes America appear both unreliable and intrusive, and unreliability is the greater failing in Chinese eyes.
A statesman can always escape his dilemmas by making the most favorable assumptions about the future; one of his tests is his ability to protect against unfavorable and even unforeseen contingencies. The new Russian leadership is entitled to understanding for the anguishing process of trying to overcome two generations of communist misrule. It is not entitled to be handed the sphere of influence that tsars and commissars have coveted all around Russia’s vast borders for 300 years. If Russia is to become a serious partner in building a new world order, it must be ready for the disciplines of stability as well as for its benefits.
Downgrading the relationship with Europe has become all too fashionable. The emphasis on the enlargement of democracy notwithstanding, America now seems to be giving less attention to societies that have similar institutions and with which it shares common attitudes on human rights and other basic values than to other regions of the world. The founders of the Atlantic ties - Truman, Acheson, Marshall, and Eisenhower - shared most Americans’ reservations about the European style of diplomacy. But they understood that, without its Atlantic Hemisphere - it has few moral bonds or common traditions. In these circumstances, America would be obliged to conduct a pure Realpolitik, which is essentially incompatible with the American tradition.
At this writing, the vast Russian empire acquired over the course of two centuries is in a state of disintegration - much as it was in the period 1917-23, from which it recovered without interrupting its traditional expansionist rhythm. Managing the decline of a decaying empire is one of diplomacy’s most formidable tasks. 19th century diplomacy slowed the unraveling of the Ottoman Empire and kept it from spilling over into a general war; 20th-century diplomacy proved unable to contain the consequences of the disintegration of the Astro-Hungarian Empire. Collapsing empires generate two causes of tension: attempts by neighbors to take advantage of the weakness of the imperial center, and efforts by the declining empire to restore its authority at the periphery.
The precise balance between the moral and the strategic elements of American foreign policy cannot be prescribed in the abstract. But the beginning of wisdom consists of recognizing that a balance needs to be struck. However powerful America is, no country has the capacity to impose all its preferences on the rest of mankind; priorities must be established. Even if the resources for it existed, undifferentiated Wilsonianism would not be supported once the American public clearly understood its corollary commitments and involvements. It runs the risk of being turned into a slogan to escape difficult geopolitical choices by means of pronouncements involving little apparent risk. A gap is threatening to open up in America’s policy between its pretensions and its willingness to support them; the nearly inevitable disillusionment too easily turns into an excuse for withdrawing from world affairs altogether.
In the post-Cold War world, American idealism needs the leaven of geopolitical analysis to find its way through the maze of new complexities. That will not be easy. America refused to dominate even when it had the nuclear monopoly, and it disdained the balance of power even when conducting, as during the Cold War, what was in effect a spheres of interest diplomacy. In the 21st century, America, like other nations, must learn to navigate between necessity and choice, between the immutable constants of international relations and the elements subject to the discretion of statesmen.
Wherever the balance is established between values and necessity, foreign policy must begin with some definition of what constitutes a vital interest - a change in the international environment so likely to undermine the national security that it must be resisted no matter what form the threat takes or how ostensibly legitimate it appears.
Geopolitically, America is an island off the shores of the large landmass of Eurasia, whose resources and population far exceed those of the US. The domination by a single power of either of Eurasia’s two principal spheres - Europe or Asia - remains a good definition of strategic danger for America, Cold War or no Cold War. For such a grouping would have the capacity to outstrip America economically and, in the end, military. That danger would have to be resisted even were the dominant power apparently benevolent, for if the intentions ever changed, America would find itself with a grossly diminished capacity for effective resistance and a growing inability to shape events.
At the same time, Wilsonian idealism has produced a plethora of problems. As embodied in the Fourteen Points, the uncritical espousal of ethnic self-determination failed to take account of power relationships and the destabilizing effects of ethnic groups single-mindedly pursuing their accumulated rivalries and ancient hatreds. The failure to give the League of Nations a military enforcement mechanism underlined the problems inherent in Wilson’s notion of collective security. The ineffectual Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, by which nations renounced war as a means of policy, showed the limits of exclusively legal restraints. As Hitler was to demonstrate, in the world of diplomacy, a loaded gun is often more potent than a legal brief. Wison’s appeal to America to go forth in the pursuit of democracy produced acts of great creativity. It also led it to such disastrous crusades as Vietnam.
The end of the Cold War has created what some observers have called a “unipolar” or “one-superpower” world. But the United States is actually in no better position to dictate the global agenda unilaterally than it was at the beginning of the Cold War. America is more preponderant than it was ten years ago, yet, ironically, power has also become more diffuse. Thus, America’s ability to employ it to shape the rest of the world has actually decreased.
Victory in the Cold War has made it far more difficult to implement the Wilsonian dream of universal collective security. In the absence of a potentially dominating power, the principal nations do not view threats to their peace in the same way, nor are they willing to run the same risks in overcoming those threats they recognize. The world community is willing enough to cooperate in “peacekeeping” - that is, in policing an existing agreement not challenged by any of the parties - but it has been skirting about peacemaking - the suppression of actual challenges to world order. This is not surprising, since not even the US has as yet developed a clear concept of what it will resist unilaterally in the post-Cold War world.
Starting with Brezhnev, I’d dreamed of personally going one-on-one with a Soviet leader because I thought we might be able to accomplish things our countries’s diplomats couldn’t dow because they didn’t have the authority. Putting that another way, I felt that if you got the top people negotiating and talking at a summit and then the two of you came out in arm saying, “We’ve agreed to this,” the bureaucrats wouldn’t be able to louse up the agreement. Until Gorbachev, I never got an opportunity to try out my idea. Now I had my chance.
Reagan’s bland veneer hid an extraordinarily complex character. He was both congenial and remote, full of good cheer but, in the end, aloof. The bonhomie was his way of establishing distance between himself and others. If he treated everyone with equal friendliness - and regaled them all with the same stories - no one would have a special claim on him. The repository of jokes that were recycled from conversation to conversation served as protection against being blindsided. Like many actors, Reagan was the quintessential loner - as charming as he was self-centered. As individual widely perceived to have been an intimate of his said to me once that Reagan was both the friendliest and the most distant man he had ever known.
Like Woodrow Wilson, Reagan understood that the American people, having marched throughout their history to the drumbeat of exceptionalism, would find their ultimate inspiration in historic ideals, not in geopolitical analysis.
Nixon had had a far better understanding of the workings of international relations; Reagan had a much surer grasp of the workings of the American soul.
Reagan rejected the “guilt complex” which he identified with the Carter administration, and proudly defended America’s record as “the greatest force for peace anywhere in the world today.” In his very first press conference, he labeled the Soviet Union as an outlaw empire prepared “to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat,” in order to achieve its goals.
Reagan’s was an astonishing performance - and, to academic observers, nearly incomprehensible. Reagan knew next to no history, and the little he did know he tailored to support his firmly held preconceptions. He treated biblical references to Armageddon as operational predictions. Many of the historical anecdotes he was so fond of recounting had no basis in fact, as facts are generally understood. In a private conversation, he once equated Gorbachev with Bismarck, arguing that both had overcome identical domestic obstacles by moving away from a centrally planned economy toward the free market. I advised a mutual friend that Reagan should be warned never to repeat this preposterous proposition to a German interlocutor. The friend, however, thought it unwise to pass on the warning, lest it drive the comparison all the more deeply into Reagan’s mind.
The details of foreign policy bored Reagan. He had absorbed a few basic ideas about the dangers of appeasement, the evils of communism, and the greatness of his own country, but analysis of substantive issues was not his forte. All of this caused me to remark, during what I thought was an off-the-record talk before a conference of historians at the Library of Congress: “When you talk to Reagan, you sometimes wonder why it occurred to anyone that he should be president, or even governor. But what you historians have to explain is how so unintellectual a man could have been dominated California for eight years, and Washington already for seven.”
The media avidly pounced on the first part of my statement. Yet, for the historian, the second part is by far the more interesting. When all was said and done, a president with the shallowest academic background was to develop a foreign policy of extraordinary consistency and relevance. Reagan might well have had only a few basic ideas, but these also happened to be the core foreign policy issues of his period, which demonstrates that a sense of direction and having the strength of one’s convictions are the key ingredients of leadership. The question of who drafted Reagan’s pronouncements on foreign policy - and no president drafts his own - is almost irrelevant. Folklore has it that Reagan was the tool of his speech-writers, but that is an illusion fostered by many a speech-writer. After all, Reagan had himself selected the people who crafted his speeches, and he delivered them with extraordinary conviction and persuasiveness. Any acquaintance with Reagan leaves little doubt that they expressed his actual views and, on some issues, such as the Strategic Defense Initiative, he was far ahead of his entourage.
In the American system of government, in which the president is the only nationally elected official, coherence in foreign policy emerges - if at all - from presidential pronouncements. These serve as the most effective directive to the sprawling and self-willed bureaucracy and supply the criteria for public or Congressional debates. Reagan put forward a foreign policy doctrine of great coherence and considerable intellectual power. He possessed an extraordinary intuitive rapport with the wellsprings of American motivation. At the same time, he understood the essential brittleness of the Soviet system, a perception which ran contrary to most expert opinion, even his own conservative camp.
Reagan had an uncanny talent for uniting the American people. And he had an unusually pleasant and genuinely affable personality. Even the victims of his rhetoric found it difficult to take it personally. Though he savaged me during his failed bid for the presidential nomination in 1976, I found it impossible to hold a lasting resentment.
In the American system, the president is the only nationally elected figure; he is also the sole focus for defining national purposes. Other institutions can make pronouncements on foreign policy, but only the president is in a position to implement policy over an extended period of time. The Congress, as a legislative body, tends to segment issues into a series of individual decisions, which it then seeks to resolve through reciprocal compromises. The media can recommend a course, but they are in no position to deal with the nuances of day-to-day execution. But the essence of foreign policy is precisely the ability to accumulate nuances in pursuit of long-range goals. Thus, it falls to the president to chart the course. And although the other institutions are in a position to modify or even to thwart it, they are unable to bring about a coherent alternative.
A president facing impeachment was not likely to be accepted as the leader of an effort to reshape traditional thinking.
It was also the case that Nixon and his associates had put forward their approach in a manner that was too jarring to America’s ideological traditions. Twenty years earlier, John Foster Dulles had clothed his realistic analyses in the rhetoric of exceptionalism; ten years later, Ronald Reagan would move the American public in support of a foreign policy which, in its operational details, did not significantly differ from Nixon’s, by giving it an idealistic cast. Governing as he did during the Vietnam era, Nixon’s dilemma was that the Dulles - or Reagan - style of rhetoric would have been like pouring oil on the fire. Then too, even in more tranquil times, Nixon was probably too cerebral to have adopted Dulles’ or Reagan’s style of rhetoric.
When a country abjures its intention of exploiting a conflict between two other parties, it is in fact signaling that it has the capacity to do so and that both parties would do well to work at preserving that neutrality. So too, when a nation expresses its “deep concern” over a military contingency, it is conveying that it will assist - in some as yet unspecified way - the victim of what it has defined as aggression. Nixon was unique among American presidents in this century by thus showing his preparedness to support a country with which the US had had no diplomatic relations for twenty years, with which his own Administration had as yet had no contact whatsoever on any level, and whose diplomats and media were vilifying American “imperialism” at every turn. It marked America’s return to the world of Realpolitik.
To emphasize the new approach, the importance of improved relations between China and the US was stressed in each of the annual presidential reports on foreign policy. In February 1970 - before there had been any direct contact between Washington and Beijing - the report called for practical negotiations with China and stressed that the US would not collude with the Soviet Union against China. This was, of course, the reverse side of the warning to Moscow; it implied that Washington always had the option if driven to it.
But arms control introduced complexities of its own. The subject was so esoteric that it multiplied the anxieties of both policymakers and the public at large. For one thing, it over-simplified the nature of the problem. The decision to initiate nuclear war would not be made by scientists, who were familiar with these weapons, but by harassed political leaders, aware that the slightest miscalculation would destroy their societies, if not civilization itself. Neither side had any operational experience with the new technology and, in order to prevail in a nuclear war, thousands of nuclear warheads would have to be launched simultaneously. During the entire Cold War, however, the Soviet Union had never tested more than three missiles simultaneously, and the US had never launched even one from an operational silo (because America’s operational silos were located in the center of the country, and Washington was afraid of a forest fire if a test missile fell to Earth. So much for confidence).
Thus, the danger of surprise attack was in fact exaggerated by two groups with conflicting objectives: those who wanted substantial defense budgets to protect against the danger of surprise attack, and those who invoked the fear of surprise attack as a reason for shrinking the defense budgets. Since the issues were so complex, a premium was placed on skills in briefing. And emotions ran so deep that it was not easy to tell whether experts had been led to their conclusions by scientific study or whether they invoked science to support preconceived conclusions - too often the latter. Pity the policymaker who became hostage to the advice of scientists with widely divergent views, and who had devoted more years of study to nuclear issues than the statesman had hours available in which to consider them. Debates about such esoteric subjects as vulnerability, accuracy, and calculability attained the complexity of medieval disputes about theology while being, in fact, surrogates for long-standing philosophical disagreements dating back to the earliest days of containment.
Our objective, in the first instance, is to support our interests over the long run with a sound foreign policy. The more that policy is based on a realistic assessment of our and others’ interests, the more effective our role in world can be. We are not involved in the world because we have commitments; we have commitments because we are involved. Our interests must shape our commitments, rather than the other way around.
The internal order of the USSR, as such, is not an object of our policy, although we do not hide our rejection of many of its features. Our relations with the USSR, as with other countries, are determined by its international behavior.
We must remember the only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended periods of peace is when there has been balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitor that the danger of war arises. So I believe in a world in which the US is powerful. I think it will be a safer world and better world if we have a strong, healthy US, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance
Perhaps the most serious, and surely the most hurtful, domino which fell as a result of the Vietnam War was the cohesion of American society. American idealism had imbued both officials and critics with the misconception that Vietnamese society could be transformed relatively easily and quickly into an American-style democracy. When what optimistic proposition collapsed and it became apparent that Vietnam was far from being a democracy, disillusionment was inevitable.
First, before the US commits itself to combat, it should have a clear understanding of the nature of the threat it will be confronting and the objectives it can realistically reach. It must have a clear military strategy and unambiguous definition of what constitutes a successful political outcome.
Second, when America commits itself to military action, there can be no alternative to victory, as General Douglas MacArthur advised. Qualms cannot be stilled by hesitant execution; prolonged stalemate will sap the endurance and hence the will of the American public. This requires a careful elaboration of political goals and the military strategy to achieve them before the decision is made to go to war.
Third, a democracy cannot conduct a serious foreign policy if the contending factions within it do not exercise a minimum of restraint toward each other. Once victory over domestic opponents becomes the sole objective of a policy, cohesion evaporates.
The Vietnamese communists were no more capable than Stalin had been a generation earlier of coming to grips with the equally unrealistic hope for a negotiation separate from some underlying balance of forces, or one simply left to the negotiating process itself. Johnson’s frequent assurances that he would be flexible and open-minded seemed to Hanoi both naive and irrelevant.
Ironically, America would have to pay the same price for compromise as it would for victory. Hanoi would accept compromise only if it felt too weak to win - that is, after it had been defeated. America would only be able to show moderation after the war, not during it.
The real choice before America was not between victory and compromise, but between victory and defeat. The practitioners of Realpolitik in Hanoi were convinced that the fate of Vietnam would be settled by the balance of forces on the ground - not at the conference table.
To the tough, dedicated leaders in Hanoi, the concept of stability had no operational meaning. They had spent their adult lives fighting for victory, first against France, now against a superpower. In the name of communism they had brought incredible suffering to their people. “Leaving their neighbor alone” was the one thing Hanoi’s leaders were inherently unable to do. Bismarck had once said that German unity would never come about through talk but by “blood and iron,” which was precisely Hanoi’s views on Vietnamese unity.
Having established one of the world’s most rigorous dictatorships, the Hanoi Politburo would never accept becoming simply one political party among many in the South. Hanoi had no conceivable incentive to stop using force; after all, it was bound to win as long as it did not lose, and it was certainly not losing.
Democracy was neither one of their objectives nor a system they admired. The joys of peaceful construction held no temptation for these hardened veterans of French solitary confinement and decades of guerrilla war. The American version of reform evoked their contempt. They had fought and suffered all their lives to establish a united, communist Vietnam and to expel foreign influence. Revolutionary war was their sole profession. If America had searched the world over, it could not have found a more intractable adversary.
The Kennedy Administration embarked on its journey into the Vietnamese morass in May 1961 with a mission to Saigon by Vice President Johnson in order to “asses” the situation. Such missions almost invariably signal that a decision has already been reached. No vice president is in a position to make an independent judgment about a decade-old guerrilla war in a visit of two or three days. Though his access to intelligence and reporting cables is unusually extensive, he does not have staffs adequate for extensive analysis, and none for follow-up. Vice presidential overseas missions are generally designed to stake American prestige, or to supply credibility for decisions that have already been made.
Leaders of so-called freedom movements are typically not democratic personalities; they sustain themselves through years of exile and prison with visions of the transformation they will bring about once they seize power. Humility is rarely one of their attributes; if it were, they would not be revolutionaries. Installing a government that makes its leader dispensable - the essence of democracy - strikes most of them as a contradiction in terms. Leaders of independence struggles tend to be heroes, and heroes do not generally make comfortable companions.
Confucianism is essentially hierarchical and elitist, emphasizing loyalty to family, institutions, and authority. None of the societies it has influenced has yet produced a functioning pluralistic system (with Taiwan in the 1990s coming the closest).
Single-minded devotion to the French national interest shaped de Gaulle’s aloof and uncompromising style of diplomacy. Whereas American leaders stressed partnership, de Gaulle emphasized the responsibility of states to look after their own security. Whereas Washington wanted to assign a portion of the overall task to each member of the Alliance, de Gaulle believed that such a division of labor would relegate France to a subordinate role and destroy the French sense of identity:
“It is intolerable for a great State to leave its destiny up to the decisions and action of another State, however friendly it may be… The integrated country loses interest in its national defense, since it is not responsible for it.”
De Gaulle treated the humiliation of 1940 as a temporary setback to be overcome by stern and uncompromising leadership.
To de Gaulle, sound relations among nations depended on calculations of interest, not on formal procedures for settling disputes. He did not view harmony as a natural state, but as something that had to be wrested out of a conflict of interests:
“Man ‘limited by his nature’ is ‘infinite in his desires.’ The world is thus full of opposing forces. Of course, human wisdom has often succeeded in preventing these rivalries from degenerating into murderous conflicts. But the competition of efforts is the condition of life… In the last analysis as always, it is only in equilibrium that the world will find peace.”
Suez had seemed to provide an occasion for remedying this defect and for bringing policy into correspondence with principle. The very pain associated with the act of turning on its closest allies had the effect of penance in that it served to reconsecrate America’s moral purity.
Hungary was a more complex case, for it would have required the application of power in some form. Yet America’s leaders were not willing to risk American lives for a cause which, however offensive to their conscience, involved no direct American security interest. Principle permits no ambiguity and no gradations. In Suez, America could insist on the pure application of its maxims because the consequences involved no immediate risk. In Hungary, it acquiesced to Realpolitik, just as other nations do, because insistence on principle would have carried with it the unavoidable risk of war, perhaps even nuclear war. And when lives are at stake, the statesman owes it both to his people and to himself to explain the relationship between the risks and the interests, however broadly and generously these may be defined. The Soviet Union was clearly prepared to run bigger risks to preserve its position in Eastern Europe than the US was willing to brave in order to liberate Hungary. Nothing could get around this equation. In terms of its rhetoric prior to the uprising, America’s policy on Hungary was weak indeed; in terms of its interests, the refusal to run the risk of war was both inevitable and fitting - though it does not explain the reluctance to raise the cost of Soviet intervention by nonmilitary means.
What was not clear at the same time was the inherent weakness of the Soviet Union. Ironically, the communist proponents of the relationship of forces had launched themselves on an enterprise they would prove incapable of sustaining. The communist leaders might declaim about objective factors to their hearts’ content, but the fact remained that the only revolutions taking place in developed countries were occurring inside the communist sphere. In the long run, the Soviet Union would have been safer and economically stronger if it had surrounded itself with Finnish-style governments in Eastern Europe because it would not have needed to assume responsibility for internal stability and economic progress of those countries. Instead, imperialism in Eastern Europe drained Soviet resources and frightened the Western democracies, without enhancing Soviet strength. Communism could never translate its control of government and media into public acceptance.
…experience suggests that the most dangerous moment for an evil government is usually when it begins to reform itself. Only great ingenuity can save a prince who undertakes to give relief to his subjects after long oppression. The sufferings that are endured patiently, as being inevitable, become intolerable the moment it appears that there might be an escape. Reform then only serves to reveal more clearly what still remains oppressive and now all the more unbearable.
Nagy was to pay with his life for the vision of democracy that overtook him so belatedly. After the Soviets crushed the revolution, they offered Nagy the opportunity to recant. His refusal and subsequent execution assured him a place in the pantheon of those martyred to the cause of freedom in Eastern Europe.
By 1955, a decade after Roosevelt’s death, the postwar settlement in Europe was emerging at last, not by negotiation among the victors of the Second World War but as a result of their inability to negotiate a settlement. It was precisely what Roosevelt had tried to avoid: two armed camps facing off in the center of the Continent and a massive American military commitment to Europe - a sphere-of-influence arrangement in every sense of the word. Yet it was an arrangement that provided for a certain stability.
Whenever Stalin recycled his familiar litany of the inevitability of war among the capitalists, the faithful understood that he meant to reassure them. According to Stalin’s convoluted reasoning, the prospect of conflict among the capitalists meant that war between them and the Soviet Union was not imminent. Stalin’s article was therefore an instruction to Soviet diplomacy to delay a showdown until the capitalists’ internal conflicts had sufficiently weakened them.
This heavy theoretical chaff was Stalin’s way of conveying a calming message to the capitalists, especially the US. In effect, he was saying that the capitalists had no need to engage in pre-emptive war because the Soviet Union had no intention of posing a military challenge:
“…the capitalists, although they clamour, for “propaganda” purposes, about the aggressiveness of the Soviet Union, do not themselves believe that it is aggressive, because they are aware of the Soviet Union’s peaceful policy and know that it will not itself attack capitalist countries.”
In other words, the capitalists should not misunderstand the rules of the game he was playing: Stalin wanted to enhance Soviet power and influence, but he would stop his pressures well short of war.
It was a classically American gesture. Because of their conviction that peace is normal and goodwill is natural, American leaders have generally sought to encourage negotiations by removing elements of coercion and by unilateral demonstrations of goodwill. In fact, in most negotiations, unilateral gestures remove a key negotiating asset. In general, diplomats rarely pay for services already rendered - especially in wartime. Typically, it is pressure on the battlefield that generates the negotiation. Relieving that pressure reduces the enemy’s incentive to negotiate seriously, and it tempts him to drag out the negotiations in order to determine whether other unilateral gestures might be forthcoming.
This was exactly what happened in Korea. American restraint enabled China to end the process by which its army was being ground down by American technical and material superiority. Henceforth, and without significant risk, the Chinese could use military operations to inflict casualties and to magnify America’s frustrations and domestic pressures to end the war. During the pause, the communists dug themselves into nearly impregnable positions across forbidding and mountainous terrain, gradually eliminating the American threat to resume hostilities. This led to a drawn-out war of attrition, which was brought to a halt only because of a painful equilibrium emerged between China’s physical limitations and America’s psychological inhibitions. Yet the price of stalemate was that the number of American casualties during the negotiations exceeded those of the preceding period of full-scale war.
It seems to me that the reputed objective of UN forces in Korea which is “to repel aggression and restore peace and security to the area” is much to vague under present circumstances to give the Supreme Commander in the field a military objective, the attainment of which would bring hostilities to a close… Already many British and American officers and other ranks have asked such questions as “When will the war in Korea end?” “When do you think the UN forces can be withdrawn from Korea?” “What is our object in Korea?” Such questions tend to make me believe that, unless the British and American forces in Korea are given some definite goal at which to aim, the commander on the field will have the greatest difficulty in maintaining morale…
In opting for stalemate, America incurred the first big postwar wrench in its foreign policy consensus. To MacArthur and his supporters, the Korean War was a frustration because its limits guaranteed military and political stalemate. To the Truman Administration, the Korean War was a nightmare because it was too big a war for its political objectives, and too small a war for its strategic doctrine. MacArthur sought a showdown over Korea even if it involved going to war against China, whereas the Administration sought to husband America’s strength to resist the Soviet thrust against Europe postulated by the containment theory.
The Korean War thus revealed both the strengths and the limits of containment.
The general definition which for many decades has been accepted that war was the ultimate process of politics; that when all other political means failed, you then go to force; and when you do that, the balance of control, the balance of concept, the main interest involved, the minute you reach teh killing stage, is the control of the military… I do unquestionably state that when men become locked in battle, that there should be no artifice under the name of politics, which should handicap your own men, decrease their chances for winning, and increase their losses.
In the American government, option papers nearly always urge the middle among three options. Because the foreign policy establishment tends to position its recommendations between the course of doing nothing and the course of general war, experienced bureaucrats know that the morale of their subordinates is enhanced if they pick the middle road.
To my own countrymen who have often asked me where to best apply the hand to counter the Soviet threat, I have accordingly had to reply: to our American failings, to the things we are ashamed of in our own eyes, or that worry us; to the racial problem, to the conditions in our big cities, to the education and environment of our young people, to the growing gap between specialized knowledge and popular understanding.
A country that demands moral perfection of itself as a test of its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.
Containment was an extraordinary theory - at once hardheaded and idealistic, profound in its assessment of Soviet motivations yet curiously abstract in its prescriptions. Thoroughly American in its utopianism, it assumed that the collapse of a totalitarian adversary could be achieved in an essential benign way. Although this doctrine was formulated at the height of America’s absolute power, it preached America’s relative weakness. Postulating a grand diplomatic encounter at the moment of its culmination, containment allowed no role for diplomacy until the climatic final scene in which the men in the white hats accepted the conversion of the men in the black hats.
With all of these qualifications, containment was a doctrine that saw America through more than four decades of construction, struggle, and, ultimately, triumph. The victim of its ambiguities turned out to be not the people of America had set out to defend - on the whole successfully - but the American conscience. Tormenting itself in its traditional quest for moral perfection, America would emerge, after more than a generation of struggle, lacerated by its exertions and controversies, yet having achieved almost everything it had set out to do.
The very idea of America’s having international responsibilities was, in Wallace’s eyes, an example of the arrogance of power.
Containment, argued Lippmann, would draw America into the hinterlands of the Soviet Empire’s extended periphery, which included, in his view, many countries that were not states to begin with in the modern sense. Military entanglements that far from home could not enhance American security and would weaken American resolve. Containment, according to Lippmann, permitted the Soviet Union to choose the points of maximum discomfiture for the US while retaining the diplomatic, and even the military, initiative.
Lippmann stressed the importance of establishing criteria to define areas in which countering Soviet expansion was a vital American interest. Without such criteria, the US would be forced to organize a “heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents, and puppets,” which would permit America’s newfound allies to exploit containment to their own purposes. The US would be trapped into propping up nonviable regimes, leaving Washington with the sorry choice between “appeasement and defeat and the loss of face, or… supporting them [US allies] at incalculable cost.”
It was indeed a prophetic analysis of what lay ahead for the US, though the remedy Lippmann proposed was hardly congenial to the universalist American tradition, which was far closer to Kennan’s expectation of an apocalyptic outcome. Lippman asked that American foreign policy be guided by a case-by-case analysis of American interests rather than by general principles presumed to be universally applicable. In his view, American policy should have been aiming less at overthrowing the communist system than at restoring the balance of power in Europe, which had been destroyed by the war. Containment implied the indefinite division of Europe, whereas America’s real interest should be to banish Soviet power from the center of the European Continent.
Though essentially passive with respect to diplomacy with the Soviet Union, containment evoked tenacious creativity when it came to building “positions of strength” in the military and economic realms. This was because merged in containment were the lessons and beliefs derived from the two most important American experiences of the previous generations: from the New Deal came the belief that threats to political stability arise primarily from gaps between economic and social expectations and reality, hence the Marshall Plan; from from the Second World War America learned that the best protection against aggression is having overwhelming power and the willingness to use it, hence the Atlantic Alliance. The Marshall Plan was designed to get Europe on its feet economically. The NATO was to look after its security.
At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful, agricultural people trying to live on a vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russian came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was on which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.
The reason prophets are so rarely honored in their own country is that their role is to transcend the limits of their contemporaries’ experience and imagination. They achieve recognition only when their vision has been turned into experience - in short, when it is too late to benefit from their foresight. It was Churchill’s fate to be rejected by his countrymen except for a brief time when their very survival was at stake. In the 1930s, he had urged his country to arm while his contemporaries were seeking to negotiate; in the 1940s and 1950s, he advocated a diplomatic showdown while his contemporaries, mesmerized by the self-induced illusion of their weakness, were more interested in building up their strength.
Stalin could not have simultaneously reconstructed the Soviet Union and risked a confrontation with the US. The much-advertised Soviet invasion of Western Europe was a fantasy; the likelier probability was that Stalin would have recoiled before a serious confrontation with the US - though surely not without first carrying it quite a distance to test the seriousness of Western resolve.
With almost reckless bravado, Stalin chose to pretend that the Soviet Union was acting from strength, not weakness. Volunteering concessions was, in Stalin’s mind, a confession of vulnerability, and he viewed any such admission as likely to generate new demands and pressures. So he kept his army in the center of Europe, where he gradually imposed Soviet puppet governments. Going even further, he conveyed an image of such implacable ferocity that many thought him poised for a dash to the English Channel - a fear widely recognized by posterity as chimerical.
The dream of the Four Policemen died hard. The US, he said, sought neither territory nor bases, “nothing which belongs to any other power.” American foreign policy, as a reflection of the nation’s moral values, was “based firmly on fundamental principles of righteousness and justice,” and on refusing to “compromise with evil.” Invoking America’s traditional equation of private with public morality, Truman promised that “we shall not relent in our efforts to bring the Golden Rule into the international affairs of the world.” The emphasis Truman placed on the moral aspect of foreign policy served as a prelude to another appeal for Soviet-American conciliation. There were no “hopeless or irreconcilable” differences among the wartime Allies, affirmed Truman. “There are no conflicts of interest among the victorious powers so deeply rooted that they cannot be resolved.”
Stalin saw Hopkins on six separate occasions in late May and early June. Applying his usual technique of placing his interlocutor on the defensive, Stalin complained about the termination of Lend-Lease and the general cooling off of Soviet-American relations. He warned that the Soviet Union would never yield to pressure - a standard diplomacy ploy that is used when the negotiator is searching for a face-saving means of determining what concessions are wanted without suggesting that he will accept them.
Stalin, a master practitioner of Realpolitik, must have expected America to resist the new geopolitical balance established by the Red Army’s presence in the center of the European Continent. A man of iron nerves, he was not given to make pre-emptive concessions; he must have reasoned that it was far better to consolidate the bargaining chips he already held while sitting warily in possession of his prizes, and to leave it to the Allies to make the next move. And the only moves Stalin would take seriously were those possessed of consequences which could be analyzed in terms of risk and reward. When the Allied failed to exercise any pressure, Stalin simply stayed put.
Stalin displayed toward the US the same taunting manner he had adopted toward Hitler in 1940. In 1945, the Soviet Union, debilitated by tens of millions of casualties and the devastation of a third of its territory, faced an undamaged America possessing an atomic monopoly; in 1940, it had confronted a Germany in control of the rest of the Continent. In each case, rather than offer concessions, Stalin consolidated the Soviet position and tried to bluff his potential adversaries into believing that he was moer likely to march farther west than to retreat. And in each case, he miscalculated the reaction of his opponents. In 1940, Molotov’s visit to Berlin had strengthened Hitler’s decision to invade; in 1945, the same Foreign Minister managed to transform America goodwill into the confrontation of the Cold War.
Churchill understood Stalin’s diplomatic calculation and sought to counter them by making two moves of his own. He urged an early summit of the three wartime Allies to bring matters to a head before the Soviet sphere was consolidated. Pending that, he wanted the Allies to get into their hands as many bargaining chips as possible.
I recount this brief conversation because it captured so completely Truman’s quintessentially American nature: his sense of for the majesty of the presidency and the responsibilities of the president, his pride in America’s strength, and, above all, his belief that America’s ultimate calling was to serve as a fount of freedom and progress for all mankind.
Truman embarked on his own presidency from deep within the shadow of Roosevelt, who had by his death been elevated to near-mythic stature. Truman genuinely admired Roosevelt but, in the end, as every new president must, he shaped the office he had inherited from the perspective of his own experiences and values.
Upon becoming President, Truman had a far less emotional commitment to Allied unity than Roosevelt had had; to the on of the isolationist Midwest, Allied unity represented more of a practical preference than an emotional or moral necessity. Nor had Truman experience the exaltation of wartime partnership with the Soviets, whom in any event he had always viewed warily. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, the then Senator Truman rated the two dictatorships as being morally equivalent, and recommended that America encourage them to fight to the death: “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them think anything of their pledged word.”
America’s most significant military experiences had been its own Civil War, which had been fought to the finish, and the First World War. Both of which had ended in total victory. In American thinking foreign policy and strategy were compartmentalized into successive phases of national policy. In the ideal American universe, diplomats stayed out of strategy, and military personnel completed their task by the time diplomacy started - a view for which America was to pay dearly in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
By contrast, for Churchill, war strategy and foreign policy were closely linked. Since Great Britain’s resources were far more limited than those of the US, its strategy had always been obliged to focus on means as much as ends. And, having been nearly bled white by the First World War, British leaders were determined to avoid another similar carnage. Any strategy which held the promise of minimizing casualties appealed to them.
Almost as soon as America had entered the war, Churchill therefore proposed an attack on what he called the soft underbelly of the Axis in Southern Europe. At the end of the war, insistently though in vain, he urged Eisenhower to capture Berlin, Prague and Vienna ahead of the Soviet armies. To Churchill, the attractiveness of these targets was neither the vulnerability of the Balkans (which are, in fact, extremely difficult terrain) nor the military potential of the Central European capitals, but their utility in limiting postwar Soviet influence.
Cooperation with Hitler had made him no more sympathetic to Nazism than his subsequent alliance with the democracies impelled him to appreciate the virtues of free institutions. He would take from each temporary partner whatever was possible from diplomacy, and seize by force whatever had not been granted to him freely - as long as he could do so without risking war. His lodestar remained the Soviet national interest as refracted through the prism of communist ideology. To paraphrase Palmerston, he had no friends, only interests.
For nearly a year after the fall of France in June 1940, Great Britain had stood alone against Hitler and had been in no position to reflect on postwar aims. Sheer survival was absorbing all of its energy, and the outcome of the war was quite uncertain. Even with massive American material help, Great Britain could not have hoped to win. If America and the Soviet Union had not entered the war when they did, Great Britain would have eventually been driven to compromise or defeat.
Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Hitler’s bizarre declaration of war on the US a few days later guaranteed that Great Britain would be on the winning side no matter how long and painful the war turned out to be. Only from that moment on could Churchill realistically begin to deal with war aims.
The interplay between leaders and their publics in a democracy is always complex. A leader who confines himself to the experience of his people in a period of upheaval purchases temporary popularity at the price of condemnation by posterity, whose claims he is neglecting. A leader who gets too far ahead of his society will be come irrelevant. A great leader must be an educator, bridging the gap between his visions and the familiar. But he must also be willing to walk alone to enable his society to follow the path he has selected.
There is inevitably in every great leader an element of guile which simplifies, sometimes the objectives, sometimes the magnitude, of the task. But his ultimate test is whether he incarnates the truth of his society’s values and the essence of its challenges. These qualities Roosevelt possessed to an unusual degree. He deeply believed in America; he was convinced that Nazism was both evil and a threat to American security, and he was extremely guileful. And he was prepared to shoulder the burden of lonely decisions. Like a tightrope walker, he had to move, step by careful, anguishing step, across the chasm between his goal and his society’s reality in demonstrating to it that the far shore was in fact safer than the familiar promontory.
Roosevelt the statesman might warn against the impending danger; Roosevelt the political leader had to navigate among three currents of American opinion: a small group advocating unambiguous support for all “peace loving” nations; a somewhat more significant group that went along with such support as long as it stopped well short of war; and a vast majority supporting the letter and the spirit of the neutrality legislation. A skillful political leader will always try to keep open as many options as possible. He will want to present his ultimate course as his own optimum choice rather than as having been imposed by events. And no modern American president was better at this kind of tactical management than Roosevelt.
For contemporary political leaders governing by public opinion polls, Roosevelt’s role in moving his isolationist people toward participation in the war serves as an object lesson on the scope of leadership in a democracy. Sooner or later, the threat to the European balance of power would have forced the US to intervene in order to stop Germany’s drive for world domination. The sheer, and growing, strength of America was bound to propel it eventually into the center of the international arena. That this happened with such speed and so decisively was the achievement of FDR.
All great leaders walk alone. The singularity springs from their ability to discern challenges that are not yet apparent to their contemporaries. Roosevelt took an isolationist people into a war between countries whose conflicts had only a few years earlier been widely considered inconsistent with American values and irrelevant to American security.
No president, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, has made a more decisive difference in American history. Roosevelt took the oath of office at a time of national uncertainty, when America’s faith in the New World’s infinite capacity for progress had been severely shaken by the Great Depression. All around him, democracies seemed to be faltering and antidemocratic governments on both the Left and the Right were gaining ground.
After Roosevelt had restored hope at home, destiny imposed on him the obligation of defending democracy around the world. No one has described this aspect of Roosevelt’s contribution better than Isaiah Berlin:
“Roosevelt looked upon the future with a calm eye, as if to say ‘Let it come, whatever it may be, it will be all grist to our great mill. We shall turn it all to benefit.” … In a despondent world which appeared divided between wicked and fatally efficient fanatics marching to destroy, and bewildered populations on the run, unenthusiastic martyrs in a cause they could not define, he believed in his own ability, so long as he was at the controls, to stem the terrible tide. He had all the character and energy and skill of the dictators, and he was on our side.”
Many leaders, among them de Gaulle, Churchill, and Adenauer, have been impelled to come to terms with the loneliness inherent in the journey toward greatness by a period of withdrawal from public life. Roosevelt’s was imposed on him when he was struck down by polio in 1921.
Stalin certainly did not fail to deflect an attack from Germany for lack of trying. On May 6, 1941, the Soviet people were informed that Stalin had taken over the position of Prime Minister from Molotov, who remained as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. It was the first time that Stalin emerged from the recesses of the Communist Party to assume visible responsibility for the day-to-day conduct of affairs.
Only circumstances of extreme peril could have propelled Stalin to abandon the aura of mysterious menace that was his preferred method of government. Andrei Vyshinsky, then Deputy Foreign Minister, told the Ambassador of Vichy France that Stalin’s emergence in public office marked “the greatest historical event in the Soviet Union since its inception.” Von der Schulenburg thought he had divined Stalin’s purpose. “In my opinion,” he told Ribbentrop, “it may be assumed with certainty that Stalin has set himself a foreign policy goal of overwhelming importance for the Soviet Union, which he hopes to attain by his personal efforts. I firmly believe that, in an international situation which he considers serious, Stalin has set himself the goal of preserving the Soviet Union from a conflict with Germany.”
Since foreign ministers were rarely members of the Politburo (Gromyko only became a member in 1973, after 16 years as Foreign Minister), their domestic base was weak and they were always in danger of becoming scapegoats for negotiations gone wrong. Moreover, since the Soviets assumed that history was ultimately on their side, they were more inclined to stonewall than to seek broad solutions. Every negotiation with Soviet diplomats turned into a test of endurance; no concession would ever be forthcoming until the Soviet negotiator had convinced himself - and particularly those who read the cables in Moscow - that every last ounce of flexibility had been extracted from the other side. On the basis of this kind of diplomatic guerrilla warfare, they obtained whatever could be had through persistence and pressure, but they usually missed the opportunity for a real breakthrough. Soviet negotiators - with Gromyko as the master of the game - became extremely adept at wearing down opponents who were saddled with preconceived idesa and impatient for a settlement. On the other hand, they tended to miss the forest for the trees.
It is not possible to imagine two men less likely to communicate than Hitler and Molotov. Hitler was not in any event suited to negotiations, preferring to overwhelm his interlocutors with extended monologues while exhibiting no sign of listening to the response, if indeed he left time for a response. In dealing with foreign leaders, Hitler usually confined himself to passionate statements of general principle. On the few occasions he did participate in actual negotiations, he adopted a bullying manner and put forward peremptory demands which he rarely modified. Molotov, on the other hand, was less interested in principles than in their application. And he had no scope for compromise.
When Cripps argued that the fall of France had made it necessary for the Soviet Union to take an interest in restoring the balance of power, Stalin replied icily:
“The so-called European balance of power had hitherto oppressed not only Germany but also the Soviet Union. Therefore the Soviet Union would take all measures to prevent the reestablishment of the old balance of power in Europe.”
Stalin reacted in nearly stereotypic fashion. At no point in his career did he react to danger by displaying fear, even when he must have felt it. Convinced that an admission of weakness would temp an adversary to raise his terms, he always tried to obscure strategic dilemmas with intransigence. If Hitler tried to exploit his victory in the West by applying pressure against the Soviet Union, Stalin would make the prospect of extracting concessions from him as unattractive and painful as possible. As excruciatingly careful calculator, he failed, however, to take into account Hitler’s neurotic personality and thus excluded the possibility that Hitler might respond to a challenge with a two-front war, no matter how reckless such a course.
He noted that if Great Britain sacrificed the Continental nations to Germany, it would sooner or later be attacked on the British Isles. Nor would Great Britain take seriously a “guarantee” for its Empire. No German leader ever grasped the British view that any nation capable of protecting the Empire was also capable of conquering it.
Churchill, of course, was far too sophisticated and had studied too much history to have any illusion that, at the end of the war, Great Britain would still be the premier world power or even in the front rank. Either Germany or the US would claim that position. Churchill’s intransigence toward Germany in the summer of 1940 can be therefore be interpreted as a decision in favor of American over German hegemony. American pre-eminence might prove uncomfortable at times, but at least its culture and language were familiar and there were no ostensibly clashing interests. Finally, there was always the prospect of that “special” relationship between Great Britain and America that would have been inconceivable with Nazi Germany. By the summer of 1940, Hitler had maneuvered himself into the position where he himself had become the casus belli.
Landing operations had not been a part of German prewar planning, and the plan was abandoned because of a shortage of landing craft and the inability of the Luftwaffe to destroy the Royal Air Force. By the end of the summer, Germany again found itself in a position no so very dissimilar from the one it had been in during the First World War; having achieved major successes, it was unable to translate them into final victory.
Hitler, of course, was in an excellent position to go on the strategic defensive - Great Britain was not strong enough to challenge the German army alone; America would have found it nearly impossible to enter the war; and Stalin, however he might play with the idea of intervention, would in the end always have found some reason to postpone it. But waiting for others to take the initiative was against Hitler’s nature. It was therefore inevitable that his mind would turn to an attack on the Soviet Union.
The largest land war in the history of mankind was unleashed, in effect by the will of one man. It is no small irony that the 20th century - the age of popular will and of impersonal forces - should have been forged by so few individuals, and that its greatest calamity might have been avoided by the elimination of a single individual.
As the German army smashed Poland in less than a month, the French forces, confronting only under-strength German divisions, watched passively from behind the Maginot Line. A period appropriately nicknamed the “phony war” followed, during which France’s demoralization became complete. For hundreds of years, France had been fighting wars for specific political objectives - to keep Central Europe divided or, as in WWI, to regain Alsace-Lorraine. Now it was supposed to be fighting on behalf of a country which had been conquered and in the defense of which it had not lifted a finger. In effect, France’s dispirited population faced another fait accompli and a war which lacked an underlying strategy.
For how did Great Britain and France propose to win the war against a country which had nearly prevailed against them when Russia and the US were on the side of the Allies? They were acting as if it were possible to wait behind the Maginot Line for the British blockade of Germany to squeeze Hitler into submission. But why should Germany hold still for this slow strangulation? And why should it attack the Maginot Line when the road through Belgium lay wide open, this time to be taken by the full German army since there was no longer an Eastern front? And if defense was indeed as dominant in war as the French general staff believed - despite the contrary lesson of the Polish campaign - what other fate could await France than a second war of attrition in a generation and before it had recovered from the first?
In 1914, Russia had gone to war to preserve its honor; in 1939, it encouraged war to share in the spoils of Hitler’s conquests.
Germany, however, conducted itself in exactly the same manner prior to the outbreak of both world wars - with impatience and a lack of perspective. In 1914, it had gone to war to break up an alliance which almost surely would not have held together in the absence of German bullying; in 1939, it was unwilling to wait for its inevitable evolution into the decisive nation of Europe. And that would have required the precise opposite of Hitler’s strategy - a period of repose to permit post-Munich geopolitical realities to sink in. In 1914, the German Emperor’s emotional imbalance and lack of a clear concept of the national interest had prevented him from waiting; in 1939, an ingenious psychotic determined to wage war while still at the height of his physical powers swept all rational calculations aside. The needlessness of Germany’s decision to go to war in both instances has been illustrated by the fact that, despite two major defeats and after being deprived of about a third of its pre-WWI territory, Germany remains Europe’s most powerful, and probably most influential, nation.
As for the Soviet Union in 1939, it was ill-equipped for the struggle that was about to take place. Yet, by the end of WW2, it counted as a global superpower. As Richelieu had in the 17th century, Stalin in the 20th century took advantage of the fragmentation in Central Europe. The ascent of the US to superpower status was foreordained by America’s industrial might. The Soviet ascendancy had its origin in the ruthless manipulation of Stalin’s bazaar.
Unwilling to show his hand until he knew precisely what was being offered, Stalin turned up the pressure on Hitler another notch. Molotov was instructed to express appreciation for Ribbentrop’s enthusiasm but to say that an agreement in principle was needed before the utility of a visit could be determined. Hitler was invited to frame a precise proposal, including a secret protocol to deal with specific territorial questions. Even the obtuse Ribbentrop must have understood the purpose of Molotov’s request. Any leak of the proposal would be a German draft; Stalin’s hand would remain clean, and failure of the negotiations could be ascribed to a Soviet refusal to go along with German expansionism.
By now, Hitler’s nervousness had reached a fever pitch. For a decision to strike Poland had to be reached in a matter of days. On August 20, he wrote directly to Stalin. The letter itself posed something of a challenge for German protocol officers. Since Stalin’s only title was “General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” and he held no governmental position, they could not decide how to address him. Finally, the letter was dispatched simply to “M. Stalin, Moscow.”
Stalin had won his gamble on keeping Soviet options open until the last second. For Hitler was clearly about to offer him for free what, in any alliance with Great Britain and France, he could only have gained after a bloody war with Germany.
Showing eagerness rarely speeds up negotiations. No experienced statesman settles just because his interlocutor feels a sense of urgency; he is far more likely to use such impatience to try to extract even better terms.
The Soviets’ interest in preserving the status quo in Eastern Europe ended with the 18th Party Congress. Crucially, Stalin did in fact have the option of turning to Hitler and, after the British guarantee to Poland, could play his Nazi card with considerable safety. His task was eased because the Western democracies refused to grasp his strategy - which could have been quite clear to Richelieu, Metternich, Palmerston, or Bismarck. Quite simply, it was to make certain that the Soviet Union was always the last major power to commit itself, thereby achieving the freedom of action for a bazaar in which either the Soviet cooperation or Soviet neutrality would be offered to the highest bidder.
The response of the various nations once again demonstrated the essential weakness of the doctrine of collective security - the assumption that all nations, and at a minimum all the potential victims, have the same interest in resisting aggression. Every Eastern European nation presented its own problems as a special case and emphasized national, not collective, concerns. Greece made its reaction depended on Yugoslavia’s; Yugoslavia inquired as to Great Britain’s intentions - bringing matters back to their starting point. Poland indicated that it was not prepared to take sides between Great Britain and Germany, or to enlarge itself in the defense of Romania. Poland and Romania would not agree to Soviet participation in the defense of their countries. And the response of the Soviet Union was to propose a conference in Bucharest of all the countries to which the British inquiry had been addressed.
This was a clever maneuver. If the conference took place, it would establish the principle of Soviet participation in the defense of countries that were as afraid of Moscow as they were of Berlin; if its initiative was rejected, the Kremlin would have an excuse to stay aloof while pursuing its preferred option of exploring accommodation with Germany. Moscow was in effect asking the countries of Eastern Europe to identify Germany as the principal threat to their existence, and to challenge it before Moscow had clarified its intentions. Since no Eastern European country was prepared to do this, the Bucharest conference never came about.
For its part, Poland, whose romantic overestimation of its military capacities Great Britain seemed to share, refused joint action with the Soviet Union, facing Great Britain with a choice between Poland and the Soviet Union. If it guaranteed Poland, Stalin’s incentive to participate in the common defense would decline. Since Poland was situated between Germany and the Soviet Union, Great Britain would be committed to go to war before Stalin needed to make any decision. On the other hand, if Great Britain concentrated on a Soviet pact, Stalin was sure to demand his pound of flesh for helping the Poles by pushing the Soviet border westward, toward the Curzon Line.
At the 18th Party Congress, the delegates’ feelings must have been dominated by relief at still being alive, for the purges had decimated their ranks: only 35 of the 2,000 delegates from five years before were now in attendance; 1,100 of the remainder had been arrested for counterrevolutionary activities; 98 of the 131 members of the Central Committee had been liquidated, as had been 3 out of 5 marshals of the Red Army, all 11 deputy commissars for defense, all military district commanders, and 75 out of the 80 members fo the Supreme Military Council. The 18th Party Congress was hardly a celebration of continuity. Its attendees were vastly more concerned with the requirements of their own personal survival than with the arcane subtleties of foreign policy.
In spite of that, when it came to foreign policy, Stalin proved himself the ultimate cold calculator and took great pride in not letting himself be provoked into any rash moves, especially by capitalist leaders whose understanding of the correlation of forces he rated far below his own.
If ideology necessarily determined foreign policy, Hitler and Stalin would never have joined hands any more than Richelieu and the Sultan of Turkey would have three centuries earlier. But common geopolitical interest is a powerful bond, and it was pushing the old enemies, Hitler and Stalin, inexorably together.
When it happened, the democracies were incredulous; their stunned surprise indicated that they had no better understanding of Stalin’s mentality than they had of Hitler’s. Stalin’s career, like Hitler’s, had been forged on the fringes of society, though it took him much longer to reach absolute power. Hitler’s reliance on demagogic brilliance caused him to stake everything on a single throw of the dice. Stalin prevailed by undermining his rivals from deep within the communist bureaucracy, where the other contenders for power had ignored him because they did not at first view the sinister figure from Georgia as a serious rival. Hitler succeeded by overwhelming his associates with elemental single-mindedness; Stalin accrued power by dint of implacable anonymity.
Hitler transposed his Bohemian work habits and mercurial personality into decision-making, endowing his government with a fitful and occasionally dilettantish quality. Stalin incorporated the rigorous catechisms of his early religious training into the brutal exegeses of the Bolshevik world view, and transformed ideology into an instrument of political control. Hitler thrived on the succor of the adoration of the masses. Stalin was far too paranoid to rely on so personal an approach. He craved ultimate victory far more than immediate approbation, and preferred to achieve it by destroying, one by one, all of his potential rivals.
Hitler’s ambitions needed to be fulfilled within his own lifetime; in his statements, he represented only himself. Stalin was equally megalomaniacal but viewed himself as a servant of historical truth. Unlike Hitler, Stalin had incredible patience. Unlike the leaders of the democracies, he was at all times prepared to undertake a meticulous study of power relationships. Precisely because he was so convinced that his ideology embodied historical truth, Stalin ruthlessly pursued the Soviet national interest unencumbered by what he considered hypocritical moral baggage or sentimental attachments.
Stalin was indeed a monster; but in the conduct of international relations, he was the supreme realist - patient, shrewd, and implacable, the Richelieu of his period. The leaders of the democracies confused Stalin’s ponderous, mildly theological speeches with rigidity of both thought and policy. Yet Stalin’s rigidity extended only to communist ideology. His communist convictions enabled him to be extraordinary flexible in his tactics.
Beyond these psychological aspects, Stalin’s character had a philosophical core which made him nearly incomprehensible to Western leaders. As an old Bolshevik, he had suffered imprisonment, exile, and privation on behalf of his convictions for decades before coming to power. Priding themselves on having a superior insight into the dynamics of history, the Bolsheviks saw their role as helping along the objective historical process. In their view, the difference between themselves and non-communists was akin to the difference between scientists and laymen. In analyzing physical phenomena, the scientist does not actually bring them about; his understanding of why they occur enables him occasionally to manipulate the process, though never according to anything but the phenomena’s own inherent laws. In the same spirit, the Bolsheviks thought of themselves as scientists of history - helping to make its dynamics apparent, perhaps even to speed them up, but never to change their immutable direction.
Communist leaders presented themselves as implacable, beyond compassion, and as unswerving from their historical task as they were unswayable by conventional arguments, especially when these came from nonbelievers. The communists felt they had an edge in the conduct of diplomacy because they thought they understood their interlocutors better than they could ever understand themselves. In the communist mind, concessions could only be made, if at all, to “objective reality,” never to the persuasiveness of the diplomats with whom they were negotiating. Diplomacy thus belonged to the process by which the existing order would eventually be overturned; whether it would be overthrown by a diplomacy of peaceful coexistence of by military conflict depended on the assessment of the relation of forces.
One principle in Stalin’s universe of inhuman and cold-blooded calculation was, however, immutable: nothing could justify fighting hopeless battles for dubious causes. Philosophically, the ideological conflict with Nazi Germany was part of a general conflict with the capitalists that, as far as Stalin was concerned, embraced France and Great Britain. Which country ended up bearing the brunt of Soviet hostility depended entirely on which one Moscow considered the greater threat at any given moment.
Morally, Stalin did not distinguish among the various capitalist states. His true opinion of the countries extolling the virtues of universal peace was evident in his reaction to the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928:
“The talk about pacifism; they speak about peace among European states. Briand and Chamberlain are embracing each other… All this is nonsense. From European history we know that every time that treaties envisaging a new arrangement of forces for new wars have been signed, these treaties have been called treaties of peace… [although] they were designed for the purpose of depicting new elements of the coming war.”
By his conduct at Bad Godesberg and at Munich, Hitler used up the last reserves of British goodwill. Despite his fatuous statement of having brought “peace for our time,” when he returned to London, Chamberlain was determined never to be blackmailed again, and launched a major rearmament program.
In fact, Chamberlain’s conduct in the Munich crisis was more complex than posterity has depicted it. Wildly popular in the wake of Munich, he was ever after associated with surrender. The democratic public is unforgiving in the face of debacles, even when these result from carrying out its own immediate wishes. Chamberlain’s reputation collapsed once it became clear that he had not achieved “peace for our time.” Hitler soon found another pretext for war, and by then Chamberlain could not even garner credit for having managed the process by which Great Britain was able to weather the storm as a united people and with a restored air force.
In retrospect, it is easy to disparage the often naive pronouncements of the appeasers. Yet most of them were decent men earnestly seeking to implement the new dispensation contrived by Wilsonian idealism under the cloud of general disillusionment with traditional European diplomacy, and the pervasive sense of spiritual and physical exhaustion. In no previous period could a British prime minister have justified an agreement, in the way Chamberlain had Munich - as a “removal of those suspicions and those animosities which have so long poisoned the air” - as if foreign policy belonged to a branch of psychology. Still, these views had all sprung from an idealistic effort to transcend the legacies of Realpolitik and European history by appealing to reason and justice.
By conceding that the Versailles settlement was iniquitous, the victors eroded the psychological basis for defending it. The victors of the Napoleonic Wars had made a generous peace, but they had also organized the Quadruple Alliance in order to leave no ambiguity about their determination to defend it. The victors of WW1 had made a punitive peace and, after having themselves created the maximum incentive for revisionism, cooperated in dismantling their own settlement.
For two decades, the balance of power had been alternately rejected and ridiculed; the leaders of the democracies told their people that, henceforth, the world order would be based on a higher morality. Then, when the challenge to the new world order finally came, the democracies - Great Britain with conviction, France with doubt tinged by despair - had no recourse but to drain the cup of conciliation to demonstrate to the peoples that Hitler could not in fact be appeased.
But if procrastination did not work, what was Great Britain going to do? Having conceded that Germany would revise its eastern border, would Great Britain go to war over the timetable? The answer was self-evident - countries do not go to war over the rate of change by which something they have already conceded is being achieved. Czechosolovakia was doomed not at Munich but at London, nearly a year earlier.
Neville Chamberlain, who had replaced Baldwin as prime minister, came straight to the point. He invited discussion of the obligations inherent in France’s alliance with Czechoslovakia. This is the sort of query diplomats initiate when they are looking for loopholes in order to escape honoring their commitments. Presumably, the independence of Austria was not even worth talking about.
The democracies still believed that they were dealing with a normal, if somewhat excessive, national leader who was seeking to restore his country to a position of equality in Europe. Great Britain and France were absorbed in trying to read Hitler’s mind. Was he sincere? Did he really want peace? To be sure, these were valid questions, but foreign policy builds on quicksand when it disregards actual power relationships and relies on prophesies of another’s intentions.
With his uncanny ability to exploit his adversaries’ weaknesses, Hitler chose precisely the right moment to reoccupy the Rhineland. The League of Nations, bogged down in sanctions against Italy, was far from eager to take on a confrontation with another major power.
In retrospect, it is easy to ridicule the fatuousness of the assessment of Hitler’s motives by his contemporaries. But his ambitions, not to mention his criminality, were not all that apparent at the outset. In his first two years in office, Hitler was primarily concerned with solidifying his rule. But in the eyes of many British and French leaders, Hitler’s truculent foreign policy style was more than counterbalanced by his staunch anticommunism, and by his restoration of the German economy.
Statesmen always face the dilemma that, when their scope for actions is greatest, they have a minimum of knowledge. By the time they garnered sufficient knowledge, the scope for decisive action is likely to have vanished. In the 1930s, British leaders were too unsure about Hitler’s objectives and French leaders too unsure about themselves to act on the basis of assessments which they could not prove. The tuition fee for learning about Hitler’s true nature was tens of millions of graves stretching from one end of Europe to the other. On the other hand, had the democracies forced a showdown with Hitler early in his rule, historians would still be arguing about whether Hitler had been a misunderstood nationalist or a maniac bent on world domination.
The West’s obsession with Hitler’s motives was, of course, misguided in the first place. The tenets of the balance of power should have made it clear that a large and strong Germany bordered on the east by small and weak states was a dangerous threat. Realpolitik teaches that, regardless of Hitler’s motives, Germany’s relations with its neighbors would be determined by their relative power. The West should have spent less time assessing Hitler’s motives and more time counterbalancing Germany’s growing strength.
Stresemann died on October 3, 1929. He proved irreplaceable because Germany had no other leader of comparable talent or subtlety and, above all, because the rehabilitations of Germany and the pacification of Europe had in such large part been due to the confidence the Western powers had place in his personality. For quite a long time, the prevailing view was that Stresemann had embodied all the qualities of the “good European.” In this sense, he was treated as a precursor of the great Konrad Andenauer.
Unlike the German nationalists, however, he saw no need for a violent revision of Versailles. Stresemann’s opportunity to pursue his policy was inherent in Germany’s resources and potential. The war had not crippled Germany’s power, and Versailles had enhanced its geopolitical position. Not even a vastly more catastrophic defeat in WW2 would succeed in eliminating Germany’s influence in Europe.
Over the next five years, Germany paid out about $1B in reparations and received loans of about $2B, much of it from the US. In effect, America was paying Germany’s reparations, while Germany used the surplus from American loans to modernize its industry. France had insisted on reparations in order to keep Germany weak. Forced to choose between a weak Germany and a Germany capable of paying reparations, France had opted for the latter, but then had to stand by as reparations helped to rebuild Germany’s economic and, ultimately, its military power.
The fulfillment policy produced an insoluble quandary for both France and the entire European order. French security required a certain amount of discrimination against Germany in the military field; otherwise, Germany’s superior potential in manpower and resources would prevail. But without equality - the right to build armaments like any other European country - Germany would never accept the Versailles system, and fulfillment would come to a halt.
Germany’s new democratic leaders received no credit for preserving their country’s substance under the most difficult of circumstances. In politics, however, there are few rewards for mitigating damage because it is rarely possible to prove that worse consequences would in fact have occurred.
Just as, two generations later, it took a conservative American president to engineer America’s opening to China, only a leader with the impeccable conservative credentials of Stresemann could have even thought of basing German foreign policy on cooperating, however ambivalently, with the hated Versailles settlement.
Stresemann was the first postwar German leader - and the only democratic leader - who exploited the geopolitical advantages which the Versailles settlement conferred on Germany. He grasped the essentially brittle nature of the Franco-English relationship, and used it to widen the wedge between the two wartime allies. He cleverly exploited the British fear fo a German collapse vis-a-vis both France and the Soviet Union. An official British analysis described Germany as a crucial bulwark against the spread of Bolshevism, using arguments which would show that “fulfillment” was making progress.
Finally the bargaining position of the victor always diminishes with time. Whatever is not exacted during the shock of defeat becomes increasingly difficult to attain later - a lesson America had to learn with respect to Iraq at the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
The demoralization of the Versailles international order and of France, its leading European pillar, was now far advanced. No enforcement machinery existed for reparations, and no verification machinery for disarmament. Since France and Great Britain disagreed on both issues, Germany was disgruntled, and the US and the Soviet Union were out of the picture, Versailles had in effect led to a kind of international guerrilla war rather than to world order. Four years after the Allied victory, Germany’s bargaining position was becoming stronger than that of France.
Nothing remotely resembling the Soviet Union had appeared on the horizon of European diplomacy since the French Revolution. For the first time in over a century, a country had dedicated itself officially to overthrowing the established order. The French revolutionaries had striven to change the character of the state; the Bolsheviks, going a step further, proposed to abolish the state altogether. Once the state had withered away, in Lenin’s phrase, there would be no need for diplomacy or foreign policy.
Perhaps the most important reason for Great Britain’s rejection of a French alliance was that its leaders did not in their heart consider the Versailles Treaty just, least of all the settlement of Eastern Europe, and feared that an alliance with France, which had pacts with the Eastern European countries, might draw them into a conflict over the wrong issues and in defense of the wrong countries.
When Austria was forcibly united with Germany and Czechoslovakia’s freedom was extinguished, there was no League reaction at all. The last act of the League of Nations, which no longer contained Germany, Japan, or Italy, was to expel the Soviet Union after it attacked Finland in 1939. It had no effect on Soviet actions.
During the Cold War, the United Nations proved equally ineffective in every case involving Great Power aggression, due to either the communist veto in the Security Council or the reluctance on the part of smaller countries to run risks on behalf of issues they felt did not concern them. The United Nations was ineffective or at the sidelines during the Berlin crises and during the Soviet interventions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan. It was irrelevant in the Cuban Missile Crisis until the two superpowers agreed to settle. America was able to invoke the authority of the United Nations against North Korean aggression in 1950 only because the Soviet representative was boycotting the Security Council and the General Assembly was still dominated by countries eager to enlist America against the threat of Soviet aggression in Europe. The United Nations did provide a convenient meeting place for diplomats and a useful forum for the exchange of ideas. It also performed important technical functions. But it failed to fulfill the underlying premise of collective security - the prevention of war and collective resistance to aggression.
This has been true of the United Nations even in the post-Cold War period. In the Gulf War of 1991, it did indeed ratify American actions, but resistance to Iraqi aggression was hardly an application of the doctrine of collective security. Not waiting for an international consensus, the US had unilaterally dispatched a large expeditionary force. Other nations could gain influence over America’s actions only by joining what was in effect an American enterprise; they could not avoid the risks of conflict by vetoing it. Additionally, domestic upheavals in the Soviet Union and China gave the permanent members of the UN Security Council an incentive to maintain America’s goodwill. In the Gulf War, collective security was invoked as a justification of American leadership, not as a substitute for it.
The gravest psychological blight on the Treaty was Article 231, the so-called War Guilt clause. It stated that Germany was solely responsible for the outbreak of WW1 and delivered a severe moral censure. Most of the punitive measures against Germany in the Treaty - economic, military, and political - were based on the assertions that the whole conflagration had been entirely Germany’s fault.
18th-century peacemakers would have regarded “war guilt clauses” as absurd. For them, wars were amoral inevitabilities caused by clashing interests. In the treaties that concluded 18th-century wars, the losers paid a price without its being justified on moral grounds. But for Wilson and the peacemakers at Versailles, the cause of the war of 1914-18 had to be ascribed to some evil which had to be punished.
Had not the new diplomacy been explicitly created to do away with this type of national commitment? Had America fought the war only to end up in a traditional alliance? House wrote in his diary:
“I thought I ought to call the President’s attentions to the perils of such a treaty. Among other things, it would be looked upon as a direct blow at the League of Nations. The League is supposed to do just what this treaty proposed, and if it were necessary for the nations to make such treaties, then why the League of Nations?”
It was a fair question. For, if the League performed as advertised, the guarantee was unnecessary; and if the guarantee was necessary, the League was not living up to its design and all postwar concepts would be in doubt.
Wilson’s absence from Washington aside, it is almost always a mistake for heads of state to undertake the details of a negotiation. They are then obliged to master specifics normally handled by their foreign offices and are deflected onto subjects more appropriate to their subordinates, while being kept from issues only heads of state can resolve. Since no one without a well-developed ego reaches the highest office, compromise is difficult and deadlocks are dangerous. With the domestic positions of the interlocutors so often dependent on at least the semblance of success, negotiations more often concentrate on obscuring differences than they do on dealing with the essence of a problem.
This proved to be Wilson’s fate at Paris. With every passing month, he was drawn more deeply into haggling over details which had never concerned him before. The longer he stayed, the more the sense of urgency to bring matters to a conclusion overrode the desire to create an entirely new international order. The final outcome was made inevitable by the procedure used to negotiate the peace treaty. Because a disproportionate amount of time was spent adjusting territorial questions, the League of Nations emerged as sort of deus ex machina, to straighten out later the ever-widening gap between Wilson’s moral claims and the actual terms of the settlement.
In 1920, France had a population of 41 million and Germany a population of 65 million, causing the French statesman Briand to answer critics of his conciliatory policy toward Germany with the argument that he was conducting the foreign policy of France’s birthrate.
France’s relative economic decline was even more dramatic. In 1850, France had been the largest industrial nation on the Continent. By 1880, German production of steel, coal, and iron exceeded that of France. In 1913, France produced 41 million tons of coal compared with Germany’s 279 million tons; by the late 1930s, the disparity was to widen to 47 million tons produced by France against Germany’s total of 351 million tons.
The residual strength of the defeated enemy marked the essential difference between post-Vienna and post-Versailles international orders, and the reason for it was the disunity of the victors after Versailles. A coalition of power defeated Napoleon and a coalition of powers was needed to surmount imperial Germany. Even after losing, both of the vanquished - France in 1815 and Germany in 1918 - remained strong enough to overcome any one of the coalition members singly and perhaps even a combination of two of them. The difference was that, in 1815, the peacemakers at the Congress of Vienna stayed united and formed the Quadruple Alliance - an overwhelming coalition of four powers that would crush any revisionist dreams. In the post-Versailles period, the victors did not remain allied, America and the Soviet Union withdrew altogether, and Great Britain was highly ambivalent as far as France was concerned.
Germany learned too late that there can be no certainty in war that its obsessive quest for a quick and decisive victory had landed it in a draining war of attrition. In implementing the Schlieffen Plan, Germany dashed all its hopes for British neutrality without succeeding in destroying the French army, which had been the purpose of taking the risks in the first place. Ironically, Germany lost the offensive battle in the West and won the defensive battle in the East, much as the elder Moltke had foreseen. In the end, Germany was obliged to adopt Moltke’s defensive strategy in the West as well after having committed itself to a policy which excluded the compromise political peace on which Moltke’s strategy had been based.
Krivoshein’s argument was supported by a dispatch from the Russian Ambassador in Sofia to the effect that, if Russia backed down, “our prestige in the Slav world and in the Balkans would perish never to return.” Heads of government are notoriously vulnerable to arguments that question their courage.
Yet Durnovo’s strongest reason for opposing the war was his prediction that war would inevitably lead to social revolution - first in the defeated country and then spreading from there to the victor:
“It is our firm conviction, based upon a long and careful study of all contemporary subversive tendencies, that there must inevitably break out in the defeated country a social revolution which, by the very nature of things, will spread to the country of the victor.”
German leaders resented the reluctance of other countries to ally themselves with a nation that was already the strongest in Europe, and whose strength was generating fears of German hegemony. Bullying tactics seemed to Germany’s leaders the best way to bring home to their neighbors the limits of their own strength and, presumably, the benefits of Germany’s friendship. This taunting approach had quite the opposite effect. Trying to achieve absolute security for their country, German leaders after Bismarck threatened every other European nation with absolute insecurity, triggering countervailing coalitions nearly automatically. There are no diplomatic shortcuts to domination; the only route that leads to it is war, a lesson the provincial leaders of post-Bismarck Germany learned only when it was too late to avoid a global catastrophe.
Paradox was Russia’s most distinguishing feature. Constantly at war and expanding in every direction, it nevertheless considered itself permanently threatened. The more polyglot the empire became, the more vulnerable Russia felt, partly because of its need to isolate the various nationalities from their neighbors. To sustain their rule and to surmount the tensions among the empire’s various populations, all of Russia’s rulers invoked the myth of some vast, foreign threat, which, in time, turned into another of the self-fulfilling prophecies that doomed the stability of Europe.
As Russia expanded from the area around Moscow toward the center of Europe, the shores of the Pacific, and into Central Asia, its quest for security evolved into expansion for its own sake. The Russian historian Vasili Kliuchevsky described the process as follow: “…these wars, defensive in their origin, imperceptibly and unintentionally on the part of the Muscovite politicians became wars of aggression - a direct continuation of the unifying policy of the old [pre-Romanov] dynasty, a struggle for Russian territory that had never belonged to the Muscovite state.”
Russia gradually turned into as much of a threat to the balance of power in Europe as it did to the sovereignty of neighbors around its vast periphery. No matter how much territory it controlled, Russia inexorably pushed its borders outward. This started out as an essentially defensive motivation, as when Prince Potemkin advocated the conquest of Crimea from Turkey in 1776 on the reasonable ground that this would improve Russia’s capacity to defend its realm. By 1864, security had become synonymous with continuous expansion.
The situation of Russia in Central Asia is similar to that of all civilized states that come in contact with half-savage nomadic tribes without a firm social organization. In such cases, the interests of border security and trade relations always require that the more civilized state have a certain authority over its neighbors…
The state therefore must make a choice: either to give up this continuous effort and doom its borders to constant unrest… or else to advance farther and farther into the heart of the savage lands… where the greatest difficulty lies in being able to stop.
Paradoxically, it is also true that for the last 200 years the European balance of power has been preserved on several occasions by Russian efforts and heroism. Without Russia, Napoleon and Hitler would almost certainly have succeeded in establishing universal empires. Janus-like, Russia was at once a threat to the balance of power and one of its key components, essential to the equilibrium but not fully a part of it. For much of its history, Russia accepted only the limits that were imposed on it by the outside world, and even these grudgingly. And yet there were periods, most notably the forty years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when Russia did not take advantage of its vast power, and instead put this power in the service of protecting conservative values in Central and Western Europe.
The two revolutionaries who stood at the beginning of the contemporary European state system incarnated many of the dilemmas of the modern period. Napoleon, the reluctant revolutionary, represented the trend of gearing policy to public relations. Bismarck, the conservative revolutionary, reflected the tendency to identify policy with the analysis of power.
Napoleon had revolutionary ideas but recoiled before their implications. Having spent his youth in what the 20th century would call protest, he never bridged the gap between the formulation of an idea and its implementation. Insecure about his purposes and indeed his legitimacy, he relied on public opinion to bridge that gap. Napoleon conducted his foreign policy in the style of modern political leaders who measure their success by the reaction of the television evening news. Like them, Napoleon made himself a prisoner of the purely tactical, focusing on short-term objectives and immediate results, seeking to impress his public by magnifying the pressures he had set out to create. In the process, he confused foreign policy with the moves of a conjurer. For in the end, it is reality, not publicity, that determines whether a leader has made a difference.
The public does not in the long run respect leaders who mirror its own insecurities or see only the symptoms of crises rather than the long-term trends. The role of the leader is to assume the burden of acting on the basis of a confidence in his own assessment of the direction of events and how they can be influenced. Failing that, crises will multiply, which is another way of saying that a leader has lost control over events. Napoleon turned out to be the precursor of a strange modern phenomenon - the political figure who desperately seeks to determine what the public wants, yet ends up rejected and perhaps even despised by it.
Bismarck did not lack the confidence to act on his own judgments. He brilliantly analyzed the underlying reality and Prussia’s opportunity. He built so well that the Germany he created survived defeat in two world wars, two foreign occupations, and two generations as a divided country. Where Bismarck failed was in having doomed his society to a style of policy which could only have been carried on had a great man emerged in every generation. This is rarely the case, and the institutions of imperial Germany militated against it. In this sense, Bismarck sowed the seeds not only of his country’s achievements, but of its 20th-century tragedies. “No one eats with impunity from the tree of immortality,” wrote Bismarck’s friend von Roon about him.
Napoleon’s tragedy was that his ambitions surpassed his capacities; Bismarck’s tragedy was that his capacities exceeded his society’s ability to absorb them. The legacy Napoleon left France was strategic paralysis; the legacy Bismarck left Germany was unassimilable greatness.
I stand or fall with my own Sovereign, even if in my opinion he ruins himself stupidly, but for me France will remain France, whether it is governed by Napoleon or by St. Louis and Austria is for me a foreign country… I know that you will reply that fact and right cannot be separated, that a properly conceived Prussian policy requires chastity in foreign affairs even from the point of view of utility. I am prepared to discuss the point of utility with you; but if you pose antinomies between right and revolution; Christianity and infidelity; God and the devil; I can argue no longer and can merely say, “I am not of your opinion and you judge in me what is not yours to judge.”
This bitter declaration of faith was the functional equivalent of Richelieu’s assertion that, since the soul is immortal, man must submit to the judgment of God but that states, being mortal, can only be judged by what works. Like Richelieu, Bismarck did not reject Gerlach’s moral views as personal articles of faith - he probably shared most of them; but he denied their relevance to the duties of the statesmanship by way of elaborating the distinction between personal belief and Realpolitik:
I did not seek the service of the King… The God who unexpectedly placed me into it will probably rather show me the way out than let my soul perish. I would overestimate the value of this life strangely… should I not be convinced that after thirty years it will be irrelevant to me what political successes I or my country have achieved in Europe. I can even think out the idea that some day “unbelieving Jesuits” will rule over the Mark Brandenburg [core of Prussia] together with a Bonapartist absolutism… I am a child of different times than you, but as honest a one of mine as you of yours.
Bismarck was indeed the child of a different era from that of his erstwhile mentor. Bismarck belonged to the age of Realpolitik; Gerlach had been shaped by the period of Metternich. The Metternich system had reflected the 18th-century conception of the universe as a great clockwork of intricately meshing parts in which disruption of one part meant upsetting the interaction of the others. Bismarck represented the new age in both science and politics. He perceived the universe not as a mechanical balance, but in its modern version - as consisting of particles in flux whose impact on each other creates what is perceived as reality. Its kindred biological philosophy was Darwin’s theory of evolution based on the survival of the fittest.
Driven by such convictions, Bismarck proclaimed the relativity of all beliefs, including even the belief in the permanence of his own country. In the world of Realpolitik, it was the statesman’s duty to evaluate ideas as forces in relation to all the other forces relevant to making a decision; and the various elements needed to be judged by how well they could serve the national interest, not by preconceived ideologies.
Yet Bismarck disagreed with Gerlach not because he did not understand him, as Gerlach supposed, but because he understood him only too well. Realpolitik for Bismarck depended on flexibility and on the ability to exploit every available option without the constraint of ideology. Just as Richelieu’s defenders had done, Bismarck transferred the debate to the one principle he and Gerlach did share, and one that would leave Gerlach at a distinct disadvantage - the overriding importance of Prussian patriotism. Gerlach’s insistence on the unity of conservative interests was, according to Bismarck, incompatible with loyalty to their country:
“France interests me only insofar as it affects the situation of my country and we can make policy only with the France which exists… As a romantic I can shed a tear for the fate of Henry V (the Bourbon pretender); as a diplomat I would be his servant if I were French, but as things stand, France, irrespective of the accident who leads it, is for me an unavoidable pawn on the chessboard of diplomacy, where I have no other duty than to serve my king and my country. I cannot reconcile personal sympathies and antipathies toward foreign powers with my sense of duty in foreign affairs; indeed I see in them the embryo of disloyalty toward the Sovereign and the country I serve.”
Frivolity is a costly indulgence for a statesman, and its price must eventually be paid. Actions geared to the mood of the moment and unrelated to any overall strategy cannot be sustained indefinitely. Under Napoleon, France lost influence over the internal arrangements of Germany, which had been the mainstay of French policy since Richelieu. Whereas Richelieu had understood that a weak Central Europe was the key to French security, Napoleon’s policy, driven by his quest for publicity, concentrated on the periphery of Europe, the only place where gains could be made at minimum risk. With the center of gravity of European policy moving toward Germany, France found itself alone.
The responsibility of statesmen, however, is to resolve complexity rather than to contemplate it. For leaders unable to choose among their alternatives, circumspection becomes an alibi for inaction. Napoleon had become convinced of the wisdom of inaction, enabling Prussia and Austria to settle the future of the Elbe duchies.
A statesman’s test is whether he can discern from the swirl of tactical decisions the true long-term interests of his country and devise an appropriate strategy for achieving them.
We could scarcely comprehend that this man, having reached the pinnacle of honor, unless he was mad, or afflicted with the madness of gamblers, seriously could consider, having no understandable motive, joining in another adventure.
Napoleon never succeed in assembling another congress to redraw the map of Europe, for one basic reason, which the British ambassador, Lord Clarendon, pointed out to him: a country that seeks great changes and lacks the willingness to run great risks dooms itself to futility.
To defend the balance of power, Great Britain was neither categorically interventionist nor noninterventionist, neither a bulwark of the Viennese order nor a revisionist power. Its style was relentlessly pragmatic, and the British people took pride in their ability to muddle through.
Yet any pragmatic - indeed, especially a pragmatic policy - must be based on some fixed principle in order to prevent tactical skill from dissipating into a random thrashing about. And the fixed principle of British foreign policy, whether acknowledged or not, was its role as a protector of the balance of power, which in general meant supporting the weaker against the stronger. By Palmerston’s time, the balance of power had grown into such an immutable principle of British policy that it needed no theoretical defense; whatever policy was being pursed at any given moment became inevitably described in terms of protecting the balance of power. Extraordinary flexibility was conjoined to a number of fixed and practical objectives. For instance, the determination to keep the Low Countries out of the hands of a major power did not change between the time of William III and the outbreak of WW1.
Like Wilson, Castlereagh thought that the best way to defend that interest was to have a hand in shaping the decisions affecting international order and in organizing resistance to violations of the peace.
The weakness of collective security is that interests are rarely uniform, and that security is rarely seamless. Members of a general system of collective security are therefore more likely to agree on inaction than on joint action; they either will be held together by glittering generalities, or may witness the defection of the most powerful member, who feels the most secure and therefore least needs the system. Neither Wilson or Castlereagh was able to bring his country into a system of collective security because their respective societies did not feel threatened by foreseeable dangers and thought that they could deal with them alone or, if need be, find allies in the last moment. To them, participating in the League of Nations or the European Congress system compounded risks without enhancing security.
Sobriety of spirit and moderation of objective were the Metternich style: “Little given to abstract ideas, we accept things as they are and we attempt to the maximum of our ability to protect ourselves against delusions about realities.” And, “with phrases which on close examination dissolve into thin air, such as the defense of civilization, nothing tangible can be defined.”
With such attitudes, Metternich strove to avoid being swept away by the emotion of the moment. As soon as Napoleon was defeated in Russia, and before Russian troops had even reached Central Europe, Metternich had identified Russia as a potential long-term threat. Metternich’s attitude was the exact opposite of the position taken by the democracies during the Second World War, when they found themselves in comparable circumstances vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. Like Castlereagh and Pitt, Metternich believed that a strong Central Europe was the prerequisite to European stability.
Paradoxically, this international order, which was created more explicitly in the name of the balance of power than any other before or since, relied the least on power to maintain itself. This unique state of affairs occurred partly because the equilibrium was designed so well that it could only be overthrown by an effort of a magnitude too difficult to mount. But the most important reason was that the Continental countries were knit together by a sense of shared values. There was not only a physical equilibrium, but a moral one. Power and justice were in substantial harmony. The balance of power reduces the opportunities for using force; a shared sense of justice reduces the desire to use force. An international order which is not considered just will be challenged sooner or later. But how a people perceives the fairness of a particular world order is determined as much by its domestic institutions as by judgments on tactical foreign-policy issues. For that reason, compatibility between domestic institutions is a reinforcement for peace. Ironic as it may seem, Metternich presaged Wilson, in the sense that he believed that a shard concept of justice was a prerequisite for international order, however diametrically opposed his idea of justice was to what Wilson sought to institutionalize in the 20th century.
Creating the general balance of power proved relatively simple. The statesmen followed the Pitt Plan like an architect’s drawing. Since the idea of national self-determination had not yet been invented, they were not in the least concerned with carving states of ethnic homogeneity out of the territory reconquered from Napoleon. Austria was strengthened in Italy, and Prussia in Germany. The Dutch Republic acquired the Austrian Netherlands (mostly present-day Belgium). France had to give up all conquests and return to the “ancient frontiers” it had possessed before the Revolution. Russia received the heartland of Poland.
In Great Britain’s concept of world order, the test of the balance of power was how well the various nations could perform the roles assigned to them in the overall design - much as the US came to regard its alliance in the period after WW2. In implementing this approach, Great Britain faced with respect to the Continental countries the same difference in perspective that the US encountered during the Cold War. For nations simply do not define their purpose as cogs in a security system. Security makes their existence possible; it is never their sole or even principal purpose.
Austria and Prussia no more thought of themselves as “great masses” than France would later see the purpose of NATO in terms of a division of labor. The overall balance of power meant little to Austria and Prussia if it did not at the same time do justice to their own special and complex relationship, or take account of their countries’ historic roles.
After the Habsburgs’ failure to achieve hegemony in Central Europe in the Thirty Years’ War, Austria had abandoned its attempt to dominate all of Germany. In 1806, the vestigial Holy Roman Empire was abolished. But Austria still saw itself as first among equals and was determined to keep every other German state, especially Prussia, from assuming Austria’s historic leadership role.
Raison d’etat provided a rationale for the behavior of individual states, but it supplied no answer to the challenge of world order. Raison d’etat can lead to a quest for primacy or to establishment of equilibrium. But, rarely does equilibrium emerge from the conscious design. Usually it results from the process of thwarting a particular country’s attempt to dominate, as the European balance of power emerged from the effort to contain France.
In the world inaugurated by Richelieu, states were no longer restrained by the pretense of a moral code. If the good of the state was the highest value, the duty of the ruler was the aggrandizement and promotion of his glory. The stronger would seek to dominate, and the weaker would resist by forming coalitions to augment their individual strengths. If the coalition was powerful enough to check the aggressor, a balance of power emerged; if not, some country would achieve hegemony. The outcome was not foreordained and was therefore tested by frequent wars. At its beginning, the outcome could as easily have been empire - French or German - as equilibrium. This is why it took over a hundred years to establish a European order based explicitly on the balance of power. At first, the balance of power was an almost incidental fact of life, not a goal of international politics.
Curiously enough, this is now how it was perceived by the philosophers of the period. Products of the Enlightenment, they mirrored the 18th-century faith that out of a clash of competing interests harmony and fairness would emerge. The concept of the balance of power was simply an extension of conventional wisdom. Its primarily goal was to prevent domination by one state and to preserve the international order; it was not designed to prevent conflicts, but to limit them. To the hard-headed statesmen of the 18th century, the elimination of conflict (or of ambition or greed) was Utopian; the solution was to harness or counterpoise the inherent flaws of human nature to produce the best possible long-term outcome.
The success of a policy of raison d’etat depends above all on the ability to assess power relationships. Universal values are defined by their perception and are not in need of constant reinterpretation; indeed they are inconsistent with it. But determining the limits of power requires a blend of experience and insight, and constant adjustment to circumstance. In theory, of course, the balance of power should be quite calculable; in practice, it has proved extremely difficult to work out realistically. Even more complicated is harmonizing one’s calculations with those of other states, which is the precondition for the operation of a balance of power. Consensus on the nature of the equilibrium is usually established by periodic conflict.
Richelieu had no doubt about his ability to master the challenge, convinced as he was that it was possible to relate means to ends with nearly mathematical precision. “Logic,” he wrote in his Political Testament, “requires that the thing that is to be supported and the force that is to support it should stand in geometrical proportion to each other.” Fate had made him a prince of the Church; conviction put him in the intellectual company of rationalist like Descartes and Spinoza, who thought that human action could be scientifically charted; opportunity had enabled him to transform the international order to the vast advantage of his country. For once, a statesman’s estimate of himself was accurate. Richelieu had a penetrating perception of his goals, but he - and his ideas - would not have prevailed had he not been able to gear his tactics to his strategy.
With the concept of unity collapsing, the emerging states of Europe needed some principle to justify their heresy and to regulate their relations. They found it in the concepts of raison d’etat and the balance of power. Each depended on the other. Raison d’etat asserted that the well-being of the state justified whatever means were employed to further it; the national interest supplanted the medieval notion of a universal morality. The balance of power replaced the nostalgia for universal monarchy with the consolation that each state, in pursuing its own selfish interests, would somehow contribute to the safety and progress of all the others.
In Western Europe, the potential and, from time to time, actual conflict between pope and emperor established the conditions for eventual constitutionalism and the separation of powers which are the basis of modern democracy. It enabled the various feudal rulers to enhance their autonomy by exacting a price from both contending factions. This, in turn, led to a fractionated Europe - a patchwork of duchies, counties, cities and bishoprics. Though in theory all the feudal lords owed fealty to the emperor, in practice they did what they pleased. Various dynasties claimed the imperial crown, and central authority almost disappeared. The emperors maintained the old vision of universal rule without any possibility of realizing it. At the fringes of Europe, France, England, and Spain did not accept the authority of the Holy Roman Empire, though they remained part of the Universal Church.
Not until the Habsburg dynasty had laid near-permanent claim to the imperial crown in the 15th century and, through prudent marriages, acquired the Spanish crown and its vast resources, did it become possible for the Holy Roman Emperor to aspire to translate his universal claims into a political system. In the first half of the 16th century, Emperor Charles V revived the imperial authority to a point which raised the prospect of a Central European empire, composed of what is today Germany, Austria, Northern Italy, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Eastern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands - a grouping so potentially dominant as to prevent the emergence of anything the European balance of power.
At that very moment, the weakening of the Papacy under the impact of the Reformation thwarted the prospect of a hegemonic European empire. When strong, the Papacy had been a thorn in the side of the Holy Roman Emperor and a formidable rival. When on the decline in the 16th century, the Papacy proved equally a bane to the idea of empire. Emperors wanted to see themselves, and wanted others to see them, as the agents of God. But in the 16th century, the emperor came to be perceived in Protestant lands less as an agent of God than a Viennese warlord tied to a decadent pope. The Reformation gave rebellious prince a new freedom of action, in both the religious and the political realms. Their break with Rome was a break with religious universality; their struggle with the Habsburg emperor demonstrated that the princes no longer saw fealty to the empire as a religious duty.
In Roosevelt’s estimation, only mystics, dreamers and intellectuals held the view that peace was man’s natural condition and that it could be maintained by disinterested consensus. To him, peace was inherently fragile and could be preserved only by eternal vigilance, by the arms of the strong, and by alliances among the like-minded.
Neither Wilson nor his later disciples, through the present, have been willing to face the fact that, to foreign leaders imbued with less elevated maxims, America’s claim to altruism evokes a certain aura of unpredictability; whereas the national interest can be calculated, altruism depends on the definition of its practitioner.
Envisioning America as a beneficent global policeman, this foreshadowed the containment policy, which would be developed after the WW2.
Even at his most exuberant, Roosevelt would never have dreamt of so sweeping a sentiment portending global interventionism. But, then, he was the warrior-statesman; Wilson was the prophet-priest. Statesmen, even warriors, focus on the world in which they live; to prophets, the “real” world is the one they want to bring into being.
In a world regulated by power, Roosevelt believed that the natural order of things was reflected in the concept of “sphere of influence,” which assigned preponderant influence over large regions to specific powers, for example, to the US in the Western Hemisphere or to Great Britain on the Indian subcontinent. In 1908, Roosevelt acquiesced to the Japanese occupation of Korea because, to his way of thinking, Japanese-Korean relations had to be determined by the relative power of each country, not by the provisions of a treaty or by international law.
By 1885, the US had surpassed the Great Britain, then considered the world’s major industrial power, in manufacturing output. By the turn of the century, it was consuming more energy than Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Japan, and Italy combined. Immigration contributed to the doubling of the American population. And the process of growth was likely to accelerate.
The European powers fought innumerable wars to prevent potentially dominant powers from arising. In America, the combination of strength and distance inspired a confidence that any challenge could be overcome after it had presented itself. European nations, with much narrower margins of survival, formed coalitions against the possibility of change; America was sufficiently remote to gears it policy to resisting the actuality of change.
This was the geopolitical basis of George Washington’s warning against “permanent” alliances for any cause whatsoever. It would be unwise, he said, “to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her [European] politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities. Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course.”