The point of a moral code was to put an internal brake on humankind’s naturally aggressive tendencies, and the hope for peace was only possible if everyone agreed to behave according to universally accepted rules. I would reply that without the authority of a transcendent power — that is, God — prescribing those rules and perhaps a belief in an afterlife where eternal punishment could be meted out to violators, no permanent agreement was possible, only temporary stopgaps devised by fallible human beings. And so we went round and round.
He saw that democracy was not a universal desire and that, under certain circumstances, it could lead to the worst tyranny imaginable. Sometimes, when people “seize their rights,” they do so in order to deprive other people of their rights. Whereas Rice understands human history as moving in a forward direction with transcendent meaning, for Kissinger history is more like one damned thing after another, unpredictable and uncontrollable; the basis of foreign policy has to be a pursuit of the national interest because, in an uncertain world, that is the anchor of stability. When correctly conceived, it contributes to rational relations among nations, giving them a shared foundation for working out their antagonisms; everyone understands where everyone else is coming from. World order is an end in its own right, and those Americans who insist on trying to impose their democratic values on others are likely be disrupters of peace, hegemonists by another name, or in Kissinger’s language, “crusaders.” One can’t expect too much in foreign affairs. The task for policymakers in his view is a modest, essentially negative one — namely, not to steer the world along some preordained path to universal justice but to pit power against power to rein in the assorted aggressions of human beings and to try, as best they can, to avoid disaster. This is a perspective shaped by pessimism and a dim view of humanity.
He concluded that the country needed both the Kissingers and the Morgenthaus: one type willing to work inside government with all the necessary compromises such a role demanded, the other standing outside to preserve his integrity and speak truth to power.
That said, Morgenthau, unlike so many other oppositional intellectuals standing outside, had an appreciation of both the necessity and limitations of power and, therefore, of the difficulties of Kissinger’s insider’s job. Truth didn’t consist of retreating to one’s library to work out the most desirable position one could come up with and then sticking to it like a prophet sitting on a mountaintop. For Morgenthau, it was a matter of starting with the situation at hand and adjusting one’s ideas to the ever-changing facts on the ground, all for the sake of the national interest. Apparent contradictions or inconsistency didn’t bother him. Morgenthau was a Realist to his bones. For him, it wasn’t even a question of the best being the enemy of the good; the good was an enemy as well. In foreign policy, choices usually come down to the bad and the less bad.
The Chile crisis remains important because it is a classic example, perhaps the classic example, of the potential clash between other countries’ free elections and American security, an agonizing problem that is never going to go away. We can be sure that there will be more such examples in the future and that liberal democratic pieties won’t be of much help to policymakers struggling to make difficult decisions about how to assure America’s security.
With its Spanish and Catholic heritage, Chile looked to the European continent. Spanish plays dominated theater. Italian opera dominated music. In literature, Chileans preferred French novels. The image that Chileans had of the US, when they had any image at all, was of a people that was materialistic, atheistic, and crude.
Throughout the 19th century, Chile was a predominantly agricultural society with a feudal, hierarchical structure. Politics was not so much an expression of issues as a game of who-do-you-know. The political was personal. You sided wit your friends to enjoy the perquisites that power brought and fought to keep your enemies out. But nothing grand was at stake, only patronage and the enjoyment that comes from flaunting your position of power over others. Everyone who ruled or wanted to rule came from the same background and the same class with the same values and the same economic interests. Chile was a decidely provincial country, economically backward, intellectually limited, politically asleep.
But it took almost a century for those changes to work themselvs out. The cities had to grow, the old elites had to lose their feudal control, and working-class parties had to emerge, plant roots, and finally reach the pinnacle of power.
Chilean society throughout much of the 20th century was in serious disarray, caught between rural rigidities and urban chaos, crying out for reform.
Yet Chile’s politicians, still waging their 19th-century battles aover church-state issues, were slow to acknowledge the harsh realities. Why should they? The neediest had no voice, no organization, no expectations.
The Communists were anything but idealistic. Doctrinaire and smug, they were secure in their knowledge that they had a solid base of support in Chile’s mining regions, where workers in closed, tight communities were easily organized; you didn’t need the writings of Marx to conclude that class conflict was the driving force of social relations. What’s more, they had the guaranteed backing of the Soviet Union, a steady source of funding and direction. t/hese facts rendered them disciplined, cautious, and unimaginative; they were bureaucrats at heart, locked in their ideology, excellent at organization but not at welcoming or embracing new ideas or responding to new conditions.
Chile’s Socialists were not European Socialists. Leon Blum was never a guiding light or inspiration for them. They were sui generis, opposed to taking marching orders from any outsider, even refusing to join the Socialist International. They never developed a coherent ideology, and for the most part probably didn’t want one.
Everything, it might be argued, came down to a straightforward formula: Allende = Castro = Communism = Soviet domination. That was the outlook that guided American policy in the 1960s and 1970s.
Such questions will never be resolved. The lines will always remain blurry. But precisely because they are blurry what cannot be dismissed is the Nixon / Kissinger worry that Chile under Allende was a paving stone on the road to Soviet hegemony. Who could say what kind of Socialist Allende was or would become? For that matter, who could say what kind of Communist Castro was?
For him, there is simply no alternative to his dour perspective, and Cassandra-like, he has argued repeatedly in his waning years that any attempt to find a different path will most likely end in confusion and defeat. One doesn’t have to agree with all of this, but Americans would be wise to take his warnings seriously. No one has thought more deeply about international affairs.
It violates the notion that the US does not (or at least should not) interfere with the domestic affairs of another country, especially when that country has not attacked the US and is not considered an immediate threat to American national security. It urges preemption, calling on Washington to take action to forestall an outcome that has not taken place and may never take place. Most of all, it is a profoundly undemocratic statement. No, it is more than that: it is an anti-democratic statement, signaling a willingness to prevent or overturn the result of an election that is universally recognized as free and fair for some other cause — no doubt a malevolent one. The “people” will not be permitted to be the masters of their own fates. Instead, they will be subjected to the dictates of an outside force. Call this the arrogance of imperialism, even the imposition of a kind of subjection to powerful multinational corporations. It is, in any case, an assault on everything America professes to believe in and to stand for in the world.
Communitarianism was a foggy notion — just how foggy would become clear after Frei became president — but it sounded good, especially to voters looking for ways to reconcile economic growth with social justice or political protest with traditional values. That was a lot of people in long-suffering Chile.
To those inclined to react with indignation or outrage at Washington’s intervention, it is important to point out that Chile was hardly virgin territory whose purity was violated only by the intrusive, predatory US. The Soviet Union and Cuba were doing their utmost to back Allende. If virtue was defined by a lack of foreign intervention, then nobody, inside Chile or out, could be said to be clothed in virtue.
Those who prefer their democratic pristine, disconnected from the real world, might shudder. But Washington, as Kennan said, had to “do things that very much needed to be done, but for which the government couldn’t take official responsibility.” In a similar fashion, Richard Helms said, with Chile in mind: “Secret intelligence has never bene for the fainthearted.” Kissinger agreed that “cover operations have their philosophical and practical difficulties and especially for America.” That doesn’t mean extralegal methods haven’t been employed before and won’t continue to be employed. What it does mean is that every time they are exposed, there will be squeals of outrage, recriminations, and vows of change, until the next time.
Assessing Frei’s years in office is a glass-half-full/half-empty affair, and historians differ in their conclusions, but about one thing they do not disagree: by 1970, everyone had found a reason either to be angry or disappointed; politically, at least, communitarianism had failed. Communitarianism had promised something for everyone, but everyone, it turned out, wanted more than the promises could deliver.
American business leaders urged support for him to whoever would listen. But the fact that there were 3 candidates in 1970 instead of 2 and that one of the parties, the Christian Democrats, was Washington’s longterm ally greatly complicated the decision Washington had to make. “We are in a quandary as to what action is wise,” Helms said.
The confusion served to revive an old debate: Just how much of a threat was Allende to American interests in the hemisphere anyway? Even if the Soviet Union and Cuba were backing him with financial and organizational support, should the US bother to get involved at all? The Kissingers and Helmses had no doubt about the answers to those questions, but there were voices within the administration that held different views.
It wall all true. But the question was whether Washington should essentially wait, in the hope that Allende would become more moderate, though at the risk that he would consolidate his power and create a Marxist dictatorship allied with the Soviet Union, or if it should take action before he became entrenched, though at the risk of turning much of the world, and Latin America in particular, against US policy. “In my judgment,” Kissinger concluded, “the dangers of doing nothing are greater than the risks we run in trying to do something.” He recommended a policy of opposing Allende “as strongly as we can,” while “taking care to package those efforts in a style that gives us the appearance of reacting to his moves.”
Allende’s statement that he did not consider himself president of all Chileans was coming true. It’s fair to say that the most impoverished members of the population had unquestionably benefited from his policies: health services for the poor had been improved, infant mortality had been reduced, and free milk was being distributed. Unemployment had fallen to record lows and food consumption had increased by about 25%. As one sympathetic Swedish scholar explains: “In many a modest Chilean family, the Allende years will be remembered as the time when the first school was built, or when the poorly fed children of the family suddenly began to receive medical attention and half a litre of mild a day.” But just about everyone else — especially members of the working class whose wages were falling to keep up with prices and the middle class above all — was suffering.
The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government at a time when society is not yet ripe for the domination of the class it represents. He who is put in this awkward position is irrevocably lost.
“You are on a sinking ship. When are you going to act?” Pinochet reportedly replied, “Not until our legs are wet. If we act too soon, the people from all sides would unite against us.”
Little in foreign policy is hard and fast, black and white. It’s almost always possible to find ambiguity, contingency, shades of gray, reasons for doubt or dispute.
The first outlook is propounded by people who don’t take the idea of American interests seriously. It includes the absolute pacifists who are opposed to the use of power in any case. More significant are those opposed to American interests as a matter of principle, who are, to put it as bluntly as possible, anti-American. Obviously, great number of non-Americans belong in this category, understandably, because the interests of the US are not their concern.
The second group practices a different kind of absolutism. It consists of those who are opposed on principle to American covert action of any kind, who are certainly are opposed to covert action that contains the possibility of toppling a foreign government, and even more certainly opposed to covert action that contains the possibility of toppling a foreign government that has been democratically elected because it violates “the spirit of the American political tradition.”
Washington is not to be condemned when it risks American lives on behalf of “mankind.” It’s only when an intervention is made on behalf of more narrow American interests without an international component that they find reason to object.
Here was the difference: unlike so many of his critics, Kissinger saw international affairs not in terms of high moral principles like self-determination or national sovereignty (in this sense his critics are right to call him unprincipled) but from an assessment of power, and the judgment he was ineluctably drawn to was that Allende represented a diminution of American power and a corresponding increase in Soviet power. The rise of Allende had the potential to affect the American position throughout the world.
From Feb 1917 to Oct 1917, Russia was ruled by a moderate revolutionary and democrat, Alexander Kerensky. But in the turmoil of war and upheaval he was unable to maintain power against the more radical Leninists with their simple answers to complex questions.
Every revolution, in Kissinger’s view, tossed up its Kerenskys — sane, reasonable, well-meaning idealists with no grasp of the realities of power. For them, good intentions were a substitute for weapons. Inevitably, they ended up being devoured.
When the Socialist FM in Portugal’s new government tried to reassure a skeptical Kissinger that Portugal was not about to become another battlefield in the Cold War, Kissinger told him, “You are a Kerensky. I believe your sincerity, but you are naive.”
If Kissinger focused on Allende’s domestic policies, what he saw was not Kerensky but a budding Lenin, who was centralizing all political, economic, and military power and preparing to crush any opponents who stood in his way. Worst of all, if he listened to Allende’s public statements, what he heard was another Castro, who was determined to spread revolution across Latin America, who was prepared to install Marxist regimes by democratic means where the conditions warranted it, but who, like his friend Che Guevara, was ready to use violence if necessary.
What Kissinger knew and most US-born Americans did not, or chose to ignore or forget, was that Hitler was a democrat, a democrat with quotation marks, who climbed to Germany’s highest office strictly through electoral and legal methods. Hitler was no tyrant imposed on Germany. He became between 1933 and 1940 arguably the most popular head of state in the world.
The Germans had imposed the Nazi tyranny on themselves.
The institutions of democracy had not prevented Hitler’s rise; they had facilitated it. Most American policymakers, then or later, had no way of responding to that fact, no way even of incorporating it into their conceptual apparatus. Americans had never suffered disaster and therefore find it difficult to comprehend a policy conducted with a premonition of catastrophe. When Kissinger expressed concern about the irresponsibility of a people, others with narrower perspectives, or the more limited sense of history that has difficulty incorporating an idea of “catastrophe,” who unquestioningly take democracy as an absolute value in international affairs, might react with shock or horror.
He knew that the painful knowledge won through agonizing personal experience made him a Cassandra in a schoolroom of Pollyannas, the policymaker who could never allow optimism to override his sense of tragedy: “Unlike most of my contemporaries, I had experienced the fragility of the fabric of modern society. I had seen that the likely outcome of the dissolution of all social bonds and the undermining of all basic values is extremism, despair, and brutality.”
At key points along the way, Kissinger pauses in his story to examine personalities, motives, possibilities, and alternative courses of action. Generally he does this with the dispassion of the scholar, peering down from the mountaintop. But there is one moment in the book when a ready can definitely feel the temperature rise, when a sense of helpless frustration explodes the cool exterior and it becomes apparent that Kissinger has a personal stake in the story he is telling. “Hitler’s advent to power marked one of the greatest calamities in the history of the world.”
It seems to me inappropriate for a work of history to indulge in the luxury of moral judgment. For one thing, it is unhistorical; for another, it is arrogant and presumptuous. I cannot know how I would have behaved if I had lived under the Third Reich.
His goals were the nationalist ones any confident German politician was likely to pursue, including the union of Germany and Austria, but he was shrewd and moderate, proceeding one step at a time. Hitler, on the other hand, although shrewd, was anything but moderate. His initial policies built on Stresemann’s accomplishments. But, as Kissinger says, his “reckless megalomania turned what could have been a peaceful evolution into a world war.”
But, Kissinger insists, in the tenebrous world of international relations, it didn’t matter. Statesmen can never be sure; they are always forced to act from insufficient knowledge because by the time they can be certain (if that is ever possible), it is probably too late. Reading Hitler’s character and determining his intentions weren’t important. What counted were configurations of power, and “the West should have spent less time assessing Hitler’s motives and more time counterbalancing Germany’s growing strength.” One lesson that Kissinger drew from the West’s trusting, optimistic, wait-and-see policy of appeasement is that “foreign policy builds on quicksand when it disregards actual power relationships and relies on prophecies of another’s intentions.” Foreign policy could not be dictated by the hope that others would do the right thing or by a simple demonstration of goodwill, as attractive as that might be on a human level. It had to be determined by a cold-blooded calculation of power relationships and an ability to project influence.
A long philosophical tradition warns us that there is no necessary connection between democracy and individual freedom. “Freedom has appeared in the world at different times and under different forms,” Tocqueville wrote. “It is not confined to democracies.” In fact, a conflict between freedom and democracy is almost certain when a mobilized majority chooses to tyrannize a powerless minority.
Friends described this mild-mannered, trusting soul as someone who wouldn’t harm a fly. Even his wife termed him “like a child.” His son Henry later said of him that “he couldn’t imagine evil.” And why should he have? Louis was respected, secure, and content. His world made sense.
If a film about the Kissinger family had been made at this time, it would have been shot almost entirely in soft focus. But for Hitler, Kissinger once said, he might have spent his life as a teacher / counselor like his father.
His unswerving loyalty to the Fatherland had been stolen from him, and he had nothing to fall back on. All his assumptions about himself and his life, all his expectations, had been smashed to pieces. He was a broken man. “I am the loneliest person in this big city,” he told his wife.
His father’s fate taught Henry a lifelong lesson about the unpredictability of history and the danger of trusting too much. Hitler seemed to have come out of nowhere to overturn the Kissinger’s secure, comfortable, coherent existence, murdering many of their extended family and sending Louis, Paula, Henry, and Walter into a void of permanent exile.
He perceived what he termed the character of an artist — “the vegetating like a semi-idiot in the lowest social and psychological bohemianism, the arrogant rejection of any sensible and honorable occupation because of the basic feeling that he is too good for that sort of thing.” Like many successful artists (and many unsuccessful ones, for that matter), Hitler had “a vague sense of being reserved for something entirely undefinable.”
The officer who sent him off to school later remarked that when he first met Hitler in May 1919, “he was like a tired stray dog looking for a master, ready to throw in his lot with anyone who would show him kindness.”
The men listened to him. They couldn’t help but listen to him. He was magnetic, addressing them in easily understandable language but with a raw emotion they had never encountered before in a lecturer. Here was no rote recitation of memorized banalities by some midlevel nonentity. This man standing before them threw himself into his message with utter conviction. He meant every word.
Quite simply, the Nazi movement was built on Hitler’s oratory. There are numerous testimonies to the otherworldly spell he could weave with his words. “He had the most formidable power of persuasion of any man or woman I have ever met, and it was almost impossible to avoid being enveloped by him.” Others spoke of “mass hypnotism” at his rallies.
The voice itself was mesmeric. The amazing thing is that the body comes through on the radio. I can’t put it any other way. You feel you’re following the gestures.
The reactions of sophisticated intellectuals tell us we should not be misled by the ranting caricature we so often see in modern movies and documentaries, images that make it easy to reduce him to a Charlie Chaplin parody and to feel contemptuous superiority to the masses that were swayed by him. That is to make the same mistake of underestimating him that his opponents were always making.
Hitler was quick-witted, able to deal handily with hecklers, of whom there were many in the early years. He was so attuned to his audience that he could adapt to any mood. As a speaker, he lived intensely in the moment — and what else does “presence” mean? Hanfstaengl compared him to a “tightrope walker” and “a skilled violinist.”
Hitler rarely if ever disappointed, rousing the assemblage to a state of communal frenzy in which he himself was a full participant. As one follower remarked, “He actually inhaled the feelings of his audience.” He sweated profusely as he spoke, losing, he said, as much as 4 to 6 pounds in an evening. At the conclusion of an address, listeners were often exhausted, satisfied yet wanting more. Women seem to have been particularly attracted by his magnetism. However improbably, he became a German sex symbol.
Part of the magic was that Hitler told people what they wanted to hear. His pronouncements were not a challenge but a confirmation of his followers’ assumptions and preconceptions, an incitement to cast off the dreary restrictions of civility and rationality and allow their emotions full Dionysiac release, above all a permission both to maintain hope in the face of obdurate reality and to hate anyone or anything that was perceived to undermine that hope. Catholics, Socialists, and Communists, with intellectual structures of their own, were not as susceptible to him. He appealed to a devastated populace that, like him, had lost everything, including their established beliefs, felt a profound sense of grievance, and found consolation in a pan-Germanism that was part sentimentality and part utopianism, a sort of forward-looking nostalgia.
Because he dwelled on longings instead of facts, he preferred abstractions to specifics, emphasizing honor, nation, family, loyalty.
More than one commentator has observed that Hitler rallies were like religious revivals, where the crowds went not for the articulation of policy positions but for the release of unbridled emotion.
Now let us contemplate one simple but remarkable fact: the Nazis charged entrance fees to Hitler’s speeches! Is there any other politician of the 20th century who would be considered worth spending money to hear?
For Weber, politics had to be more than the unleashing of mass emotion, more than the spinning of dreams, or, to put it in the way Hitler would have put it, more than the triumph of the will. It was an occupation that required patience, dispassion, and a firm grasp both of what was real and what was possible. “Politics is a matter of boring down strongly and slowly through hard boards with passion and judgment together.” Passion was necessary to define the politician’s goals; judgment provided the detachment required to guide behavior, “the ability to contemplate things as they are with inner calm and composure.”
Outside of earshot, however, his following was small. Hard as it was for him to fathom, he was no more than a local hero. Most important, he had not won over the national army, not even the city police, because he didn’t have the discipline to think in terms of institutions. On the the frenzy of crowds mattered.
The putsch had transformed the old Hitler into the new. It marked the end of Hitler’s political apprenticeship. In fact, strictly speaking, it marks Hitler’s first real entry into politics. In later years, Hitler would look back on his humiliating defeat in 1923 as “perhaps the greatest stroke of luck in my life.”
But there are many instances in US foreign policy — in recent times most notably in the victory of Hamas in Gaza and in the Muslim Brotherhood’s triumph in Egypt — when democracy promotion has conflicted with America’s national interests.
Still, electoral politics is difficult, unglamorous, often frustrating work. In Hitler’s absence, the Nazi movement had disintegrated into a directionless congeries of warring tribes, and once he was released from prison he had to start all over again, this time building not only an ideological movement but a political party as well.
The Nazis paid particular attention to converting the most respected leaders of a community, on the theory that if they could be won over, they would bring dozens of others with them. “If he’s in it, it must be all right” was the attitude.
Not only did the storm troopers intimidate enemies, they also served as an important recruiting tool: their testosterone-fueled marches and muscular demonstrations were useful in winning the support of those who preferred shows of strength to acts of charity. The SA was the primitive, threatening side of Nazism, a contrast to the political cadres’s friendly, smiley faces.
It was the most serious crisis the party has had to go through. Hitler may have needed the SA’s muscle and swagger, but to keep on his straight and narrow path he also had to find some way of maintaining control over this unpredictable Frankenstein’s monster. And a Frankenstein’s monster it was: by 1932, the ranks of the SA had swollen to 400K troopers, 4 times the number of men in Germany’s army. It was no easy task to contain them.
Hitler tried everything with them — quelling incipient rebellions with forceful speeches and the sheer power of his personality, shuffling and reshuffling the SA leadership, demanding that the members take an oath of personal allegiance to him. In 1926, he sidestepped the SA altogether by creating an elite corps, the SS, whose loyalty to him was unswerving. Nothing really worked, and only in 1934, when he was on the verge of becoming Germany’s absolute dictator, did he arrive at his “final solution” to the problem by having his SS henchmen murder the leaders of the SA during the Night of the Long Knives.
More ominously, the centrist parties continued to lose ground, so that middle-of-the-road voters, without any particular ideological commitment and confronted with a choice between ineffectual, wishy-washy liberalism and vigorous, nationalistic Nazism, increasingly chose the latter.
Hitler did not “seize” power. His was not a brute’s hand that reached out to forcibly take hold of the governmental scepter; his was a hand that slipped smoothly into a glove. Hitler was given power because if any Germany politician had cause to say that he represented the will of the people, it was Hitler.
Hindenburg’s own dislike of Hitler had less to do with ideology than with simple snobbery — he was a reversed German general being compared to deal on a level of equality with an anonymous German corporal.
Germany was confronted with a cruel paradox of democracy: the enemies of the constitution could be prohibited only so long as they were insignificant and weak, but when they were insignificant, it seemed more important to uphold democratic principles than to outlaw antidemocratic groups like the Nazis and Communist parties, yet once the Nazis had achieved the significance of broad support, a ban became impossible. It required the most refined political sensibility to say just where the tipping point was.
Indeed, anyone who had lost patience with traditional politics and was looking for a new direction was a potential Nazi. They were the “catchall party of protest,” calling for people to put aside social divisions and class differences for the sake of a larger ideal, the nation, the Volk.
The Nazis’ greatest rivals, the Social Democrats, offered none of that. Instead, their worldview — with its promise of what Orwell called “comfort, safety, short-working hours” only restricted their popular appeal. A perennial problem of democracy was finding a way to enable voters to combine their self-interest with some overarching notion of the public good. Not even the America’s Founding Fathers really had a solution to the conflict: their answer, drawn from their readings in classical antiquity, was to put their faith in a gentlemanly elite inspired by the Roman ideals of integrity, virtue, and disinterestedness, a “natural aristocracy” in Jefferson’s words, or the kind of leaders Madison called “proper guardians of the public weal.” But even if it became clear how to determine who these natural aristocrats and proper guardians were, the larger issue was how to persuade the mass of voters to elect them.
Appeals to nationalism squared this circle for the Nazis.
We have to work on feelings, souls and emotions so that reason wins the victory.
Though no one expected it when Hitler became chancellor, his policies were remarkably successful at first. Within 3 years, Germany went from deep economic depression to full employment. Hitler also rearmed the nation, making it once again the dominant military power on the continent.
But articulating a response was not easy because rejecting Hitler for his faults seemed to require rejecting his achievements as well, and few wanted to go back to the frustrating political paralysis of Weimar. Opponents of the Nazis who had the inner strength to resist the inevitable self-doubt that had to creep in when everyone around them was applauding Hitler for his all-too-obvious achievements found themselves increasingly living in a world of intellectual isolation and muted skepticism.
Kissinger has generally resisted saying much about his life under the Nazis and with reason, as biographers are always ready to reduce the complexities of mature experience to childhood trauma. “Let me tell you, the political persecutions of my childhood are not what control my life.”
On a more personal level, only the most unimaginative or insensitive biographer would deny the impact that the arc of Louis Kissinger’s life had on his adolescent son’s moral development, and it would be hard, even misguided, for any Kissinger biographer to resist the temptation of seeing Kissinger’s attention to the realities of power as compensation for his father’s powerlessness. “Weakness,” he wrote in a letter at the end of WW2, was “synonymous with death.”
Most important, in sharp and self-conscious contrast to his unworldly father, Kissinger had declared: “I had seen evil in the world.” There can be no question that Hitler cast a lingering shadow not only over Kissinger’s moral perspective as a statesman but also over his work as a writer and a teacher. He is intent on conveying a dark lesson about history and human nature to his American readers, innocent and unworldly like his father, therefore susceptible to disaster. “Nothing is more difficult for Americans to understand the possibility of tragedy,” he has said.
The easygoing ways of small-town Bavaria, the idyllic summers on his grandparents’ farm, the security and complacency of a comfortable, middle-class upbringing with an assured future were gone, replaced by the competitive anxieties of the upwardly striving immigrant boy who was starting out a new life in a strange land with literally nothing and with nothing to lose. America was still suffering through the Great Depression, but it did offer opportunities, especially to those willing to work as hard as the young, driven Kissinger.
Kissinger praises Gerald Ford for his strength of character, which Kissinger attributes to Ford’s all-American background and upbringing. “Nowhere else is there to be found the same generosity of spirit and absence of malice as in small-town America.”
He took the nation’s expressed ideals seriously because as a foreign arrival he “always had a special feeling for what America means, which native-born citizens took for granted.” Those native-born were too quick to see the country’s flaws, while too often ignoring its many virtues (and to judge those flaws on the basis of some perfect notion of justice to be found in their imaginations but nowhere on earth). When America made mistakes, as it did with its involvement in Vietnam, Kissinger saw not mercenary motives or imperialistic malevolence but an excess of goodwill. Such an attitude did not always endear him to his colleagues in the academic community, who were more inclined toward distanced neutrality or skepticism or even cynicism about their country.
The negativity he encountered among friends and associates disturbed him, because a similar negativity among Germany’s sophisticates during the Weimar years had helped to undermine social institutions and individual morality, leading to catastrophe. Yes, the US had its faults, but they should not blind native-born critics to “its greatness, its idealism, its humanity and its embodiment of mankind’s hopes.” ***
The US is a land of virtue, but that virtue was mainly to be found in rural America, nourished on naivete, ignorance and ordinary dullness.
But if his patriotism is deep and indisputable, it tells only half the story. The other half comprises his doubts, his fears, his insecurities, his sense of his new countrymen’s blindness and limitations, his uneasiness about humankind in general, his dire forebodings. If he was separated from his academic colleagues by his immigrant’s faith in America, he was separated from most other Americans by his sense of tragedy. His countrymen enjoyed happy endings; he didn’t believe in them. He admired the political institutions of the US, but he couldn’t have full confidence in them because he had seen how the processes of democracy could go disastrously wrong.
He may have seemed naive to his academic colleagues because of his love of his country, but to him they were the naive ones because they lacked the imagination to understand how badly things could turn out, liberty and free elections notwithstanding. Democracy was admirable when the conditions were right, but it was no security blanket, no all-purpose panacea. Even when he was employed by the Council on Foreign Relations in the 1950s and 1960s, working with some of the best minds in the foreign policy establishment, Kissinger felt a “European” superiority to the optimistic Americans, who tended to believe that peace was the normal state of affairs in the world, that the US represented a universal prototype, that every problem had a solution, and that the solution was always the same: democracy, and then more democracy.
Of the 70K who went to Palestine, only a minority did so out of a genuine commitment to building a Jewish state. The true Zionists turned a skeptical eye to the new arrivals and joked, “Did they come out of conviction or out of Germany?”
American culture seemed to the majority of emigres both simplistic and crude. The US may have been a land of liberty, but it was also materialistic, philistine, and coarse. The habits of civilization were in short supply. There were no proper coffeehouses. The beer was weak. Even the bread tasted bad. For a young Henry Kissinger, the problem was shallowness, a lack of seriousness: “The American trait I dislike the most is their casual approach to life. No one thinks ahead further than the next minute, no one has the courage to look life squarely in the eye.”
As an intellectual, Adorno was repelled by the shallow conformity of the US; a thinker, he said, had to “eradicate himself as an autonomous being.” As a Marxist, he rejected what he saw as America’s freewheeling capitalism, going so far as to claim that German was a better language than English for expressing the dialectical thought he and his leftist colleagues engaged in.
They accepted the findings of modern science — indeed, sometimes relied on it in their own arguments against dogmatists, including those dogmatists who happened to be scientists — while denying that it could provide answers to life’s most profound questions or unravel its deepest secrets. Science could not offer values or guidance in how to live one’s life.
Nor could the quantitative methods of empiricism that were so prevalent in American society. Concerned above all with ideas, they did not believe that truth could be arrived at by counting noses in a poll, by taking a vote, or by employing the statistical procedures of contemporary social science. None of that mattered to the freethinker.
Toward the end of his life, Kissinger made it his mission to warn of the dangers of modern technology, he echoed Strauss’s and Arendt’s opposition to quantification as the enemy of genuine thinking: “The internet’s purpose is to ratify knowledge through the accumulation and manipulation of ever-expanding data. But in this way information threatens to overwhelm wisdom, leaving no room for the operation of human consciousness and its associated qualities of subjectivity, agency, responsibility, introspection, and freedom. Numbers were no substitute for thinking.” The strength of Kissinger’s, Strauss’s, and Arendt’s ideas derived from the value they placed on free, detached thought, which, all three concluded, was best achieved in their adopted country.
Their intellectual passion and moral allegiances lay elsewhere. Personal freedom, not majoritarian rule, was what claimed their loyalty and kept them in the country most likely to offer it. But like Tocqueville, they never believed that America’s political institutions were the only ones that could guarantee freedom of thought. Indeed, Strauss argued, the belief that democracy was the one valid political system could lead to Jacobin terror because “the people” would come to be identified with “the virtuous,” endangering anyone who, for whatever reason, was considered an outsider to this potential mobocracy.
Liberalism, the only ideology that ever tried to articulate and interpret the genuinely sound elements of free societies has demonstrated its inability to resist totalitarianism so often that its failure may already be counted among the historical facts of our century.
Her attitude was: “If one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew.” Appealing to justice and universal human rights was what the weak and powerless did.
In that both were critics of modern mass society and consumer culture, opposed the positivist and quantitative orientation common among their academic colleagues, revered classical Greek philosophy, admired America’s Founding Fathers, worried about what they viewed as the threat of contemporary nihilism, affirmed the importance of a private sphere against a liberal hegemony, believed in the autonomy of thought, and perceived an intellectual decline both in the West in general and the US in particular.
Right or wrong, this method has an undeniable virtue: it strips contemporary readers of an almost inevitable tendency to arrogance, undermining their implicit sense of superiority to the great minds of the past that comes from believing there is an intellectual advantage to living in the present. Can there be a more comical — or dispiriting — pedagogical experience than listening to a Harvard undergraduate expatiate on the intellectual shortcomings of Plato and Aristotle? Can such students be said to have learned anything from their reading of the great books? Modern readers do not, Strauss insisted, know more than the ancients did, do not, in his words, “understand the philosophy of the past better than it understood itself.” The preconception of modernity are at odds with with true knowledge. Ten pages of Herodotus, Strauss said, “introduce us immeasurably better into the mysterious unity of oneness and variety in human things than many volumes written in the spirit predominant in our age.” That predominant spirit was the unquestioned belief in progress. “Modern thought is in al its forms, directly or indirectly, determined by the idea of progress.” The way to overcome this modern prejudice is to engage the great books directly, intellectually naked.
Many great philosophers, and in particular his beloved ancient Greeks, concealed their true meaning through a method he called “esoteric writing” in order to avoid confrontation with the political authorities. One had only to recall the fate of Socrates to see the danger of free thought. These thinkers did not simply say what they meant. They spoke obliquely.
One prominent critic disparage Strauss by claiming that he “shows no interest at all in the realities of political and social life, whether ancient or modern.” Strauss’s ideas are seen as hermetically sealed, vacuum-packed.
The essay begins with what is for Strauss a relatively forthright declaration: “In a considerable number of countries which, for a bout a hundred years, have enjoyed a practically complete freedom of public discussion, that freedom is now suppressed.” As Strauss had contended on other occasions, Wilhelmine Germany was a land of freedom of thought. Hitler’s Germany was not. And what was more troubling, “a large section of the people, probably the great majority of the younger generation,” went along with the regime willingly, without compulsion. The Germans had imposed totalitarianism on themselves, leaving the minority of independent thinkers to resort to “esoteric writing” in order to communicate with other “trustworthy and intelligent readers” who had refused to be taken in by the Nazis.
The Third Reich, Strauss believed, was the Rosemary’s baby of contemporary thought, not traditional Christianity, engendered out of the false but dominating notion of progress, which was responsible for the modern crisis of Western civilization. By substituting the alleged movement of history for fixed moral values, replacing the confident language of “good” and “bad” with the relativistic language of “progressive” and “reactionary,” modern historicist thinking had eroded traditional certitudes and opened the public arena to any talented demagogue of the moment who claimed to have history on his side, that is, to “the man with the strongest will or single-mindedness, the greatest ruthlessness, daring and power over his following, and the best judgment about the strength of the various forces in the immediately relevant political field.”
And in his celebrated critique of Max Weber’s separation of fact and value, Strauss traces Weber’s thought forward from its benign origins in neo-Kantianism to a dangerously judgment-free social science. “In following this movement toward its end we shall inevitably reach a point beyond which the scene is darkened by the shadow of Hitler.” Weber’s commitment to objectivity, which translated into a refusal to make value judgments, was a direct path, Strauss maintained, to Nazi nihilism.
The worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope.
In a different context, Strauss called the reasonable man’s understanding “common sense.” He frequently resorted to this notion even if common sense, as Strauss put it, was “prescientific knowledge” and not susceptible to proof. Political science, Strauss said, “is nothing other than the fully conscious form of the common sense understanding of political things.” The Greeks developed the discipline of political science not through pure cogitation but by looking around themselves at how people went about living their lives, which gave them an advantage over modern thinkers because their observations weren’t already encrusted in political theory. They, after all, were the ones who invented political theory. Like the related concept of “decency,” common sense couldn’t be defined according to some abstract, disembodied principle or measured by some standard external to itself; it was “choiceworthy for its own sake,” existing within a social matrix or “a kind of web” that we call “society.”
Rationalists demanding rigorous thinking built on sharp definitions won’t take much satisfaction from Strauss’s appeals to common sense, decency, and reasonableness. “Common sense” is a notoriously squishy phrase, suited to many uses, both legitimate and illegitimate, and often the last refuge of the intellectually helpless. But Strauss had no problem with the vagueness of terms like “common sense.” Political language, he said, is suggestive, subject to penumbras of meaning, and not “perfectly clear and distinct.”
Rauschning, the reformed Nazi and one-time associate of Hitler, condemned his former colleagues for nihilism, a will to power with no aim other than power itself. But Strauss offered a twist on that criticism. The Nazis were not nihilists, if by that was meant destroyers of everything. Their target was something specific — modern civilization — and their movement was in essence a “moral” protest against open societies. In articulating the Nazi point of view, Strauss, the enemy of modernity, is surprisingly sympathetic to it: “The open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.”
Freedom was no end in itself because in its present form it had become an excuse for unrestrained license, divorced from any concept of virtue and social responsibility. Instructed by modern liberal ideas about the rights of man, people thought themselves entitled to pursue their greediest, ugliest, most base, and most perverse desires without no acknowledgment of limit or conscience. It was what Strauss called “the victory of the gutter.” Weimar Germany was a model of this kind of freedom. But “not everything is permitted,” Strauss said, and “restraint is as natural to man as is freedom.” The ancient had a firmer and more nuanced understanding of freedom because they didn’t think only of rights: “Premodern thought put the emphasis on duty, and rights, as far as they were mentioned at all, were understood only as derivative from duties.” Western civilization was as much about limits and responsibilities as it was about liberty.
As with freedom, so with tolerance. The intolerance of the Nazis — which defined their movement and led to industrialized mass murder — was heinous. And yet leaping to the opposite position of tolerance for its own sake was hardly and adequate response to death camps. It was impossible, Strauss insisted, to be tolerance of everything and everyone. Even the most liberal of persons ran up against limits to their goodwill. Our actions are always guided by some notion of good and bad, or at least better and worse. Judgment was built into our humanity, and the necessity for choice could not be evaded by a soothing rubric of “tolerance.” An ecumenical tolerance eradicated personal responsibility and denied individual will.
The concept of tolerance, like that of freedom, had an emptiness at its core. Indeed, in its refusal to make distinctions, tolerance rejected that which Strauss valued above all — critical thinking, consciousness, reason itself. The paradox of absolute tolerance was that it demanded tolerance of the intolerant, and there was no need for Strauss to say where that led. “The relativist rejects the absolutism inherent in our great Western tradition — in its belief in the possibility of a rational and universal ethics.” Contrary to believers in tolerance, one had to take a firm stand in support of reason and against reason’s enemies. As the liberals of Weimar demonstrated, you don’t beat something (totalitarianism) with nothing (tolerance).
Strauss was scarcely a believer in the American credo that all men were created equal. Society was inherently hierarchic. “Not all men strive for virtue with equal earnestness, because the accident of birth decides whether a given individual has a chance of becoming a gentleman.” Object that such views are elitist, and Strauss would imperturbably embrace the label. Life was not fair. Call him antidemocratic, or at least nondemocratic, and he would snidely point out: the “salt of modern democracy” are the people who spend their time reading the sports section or the comics.
But he was stout in his conviction that “the inequality between the wise and the vulgar is a fundamental fact of human nature.” Liberal education, he said, is the effort to establish “an aristocracy within democratic mass society.” Western civilization, as Strauss understood it, was the property of an educated minority. But that didn’t make it unworthy of defense against the nihilistic Nazis. Quite the contrary.
He regretted (though he accepted) the intellectual provincialism that limited education to the classics of the West. In classrooms in New York, London, and Berlin, Plato would by “unfortunate necessity” receive more attention than Confucius and Christianity more than Islam on the principle that you had to know where you came from before you could know where you were going.
A civilization, in contrast to a culture, was the product of its greatest minds, whether Western or Eastern. One of Strauss’s favorite quotations was from Aquinas: “The least knowledge one can have of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge one has of the lowest things.”
The two traditions had many things in common, in particular a shared moral perspective. It is as obvious to Aristotle as it is to Moses that murder, theft, adultery, etc. are unqualifiedly bad.” Yet for all their agreement, their moral outlooks rested on different foundations — reason in the case of Athens, revelation in the case of Jerusalem — and that difference could never be bridged.
And yet, Strauss maintained, this permanent chasm was not a problem. On the contrary, Western civilization was the product of that millennia-long conflict between reason and revelation and, indeed, derived its special vitality from it. “The very life of Western civilization is the life between two codes, a fundamental tension” that was healthy and creative. No one could be both a philosopher and a theologian, “but every one of us can be and ought to be either one or the other,” opting for either Jerusalem or Athens, while remaining open to the claims of the other side.
Philosophy wasn’t an academic discipline or the stepping-stone to a career defined by the structures and customs of higher education. It was a personal commitment, a way of life, inspired by a sense of wonder, much like a religion though without the dogma. Philosophers were devoted to wisdom but didn’t propound doctrines or claim to have discovered the Truth. Their wisdom consisted of an awareness that they knew nothing. Insofar as they could be said to possess knowledge, it was the questions, not the answers, and philosophers ceased to be philosophers when certainty replaced Socratic doubt. Monk-like, they pursued a contemplative life of reasoned discussion and disputation about that which they did not know, far from the meaningless bustle of the everyday world. Their advantage over the ignorant masses was their intellectual humility.
To follow their lives of quiet contemplation, philosophers required others to help with material needs. They depended on society’s division of labor and had to pay for the services or ordinary people with services of their own. But what services could the deeply impractical philosophers offer? Not technical or professional expertise, to be sure, as there was no greater nonutilitarian pursuit than debates among individuals who conceded that they knew nothing. What their life of the mind could provide was “a humanizing or civilizing effect.”
Philosophers needed to be able to think freely and to follow their ideas wherever they might lead. There was a kind of sociopathic madness to their endeavor. They were the ultimate iconoclasts, subversive by their very nature, because social and political activity was based on popular opinion, public dogma, and unexamined tradition, whereas philosophy existed to scrutinize all opinions, dogmas, and traditions. For those bounded by a belief in common morality, which is to say just about everyone, philosophers were immoralists or, at best, amoralists.
Philosophers were not equipped to plunge into the political world, which consisted of “very long conversations with very dull people on very dull subjects.” Neither did they have the power to impose their will on the majority even if they had wanted to, which they didn’t. Instead, they needed the help of gentlemen who appreciate the value of freedom of thought yet could function among the ignorant populace. Philosophers, who were disinterested by definition, could instruct these gentlemen to shun private advantage and personal gain for the common good but it was up to the gentlemen to act as the bridge between the pure thinking of the minority and the material self interest of the majority and to win the support of the citizenry at large. “The political problem consists in reconciling the requirement for wisdom with the requirement for consent.”
That form of government is best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of the natural aristori into offices of the government.” Gentlemen were in what in another era was called “the Establishment” — another common all-American term — and stood against the force of populism.
In calling himself a friend or an ally of democracy, Strauss was steering clear of calling himself a democrat. Strauss went on to say that the advantage of democracy was that, by giving freedom to all, it allowed that small minority that cared for “human excellence” to set up outposts or cultivate their gardens. But as the triumph of the Nazis had shown, there was no guarantee that democratic institutions would permanently protect the innocent few against tyrannical majorities.
Persecution was a threat that could never be eradicated because philosophers lived in a condition of dependency on the powerful.
She was forever admiring American institutions, then questioning their stability, praising Americans’ good sense, then doubting their reliability, learning to feel at home in the US — more comfortable than she could ever be anywhere else, including Germany and Israel — then preparing to leave it if the ominous trends she perceived grew worse.
The US had strengths of its own that Weimar Germany lacked, yet even so she was haunted by a comment made by Huey Long: “Fascism, if it ever should come to this country, will come in the guise of democracy.” It was an observation that made perfect and discomforting sense to her. Even at her most content, she never felt entirely at ease. Friends called her “catastrophe-minded,” and they were right. Whatever disagreements they may have had, on this point, concerning this mood, Arendt and Kissinger were in full agreement.
Not many other would see a “child” in the razor-tongued McCarthy. According to Arendt’s biographer, “If there was one quality in people that attracted Arendt above all others, it was innocence of a special sort: innocence in combination with wide experience, innocence preserved.”
Arendt enjoyed her American friends and respected and leaned on them, even more than she respected many of the European acquaintances with whom she was temperamentally closer. Yet there is no denying that she looked down on them, not with malice but with the affection of someone older and wiser, a knowing parent. Cosmopolitan as they might have been, their experiences as Americans were limited, provincial compared to hers. They had not been jailed an interrogated by the Nazis, forced to flee their native land, imprisoned in an internment camp from which they barely escaped alive, seen the lives of friends and relations destroyed, rendered penniless and desperate, and forced into an exile as stateless refugees with no rights, no protections, no guarantees about what tomorrow would bring.
Unlike the majority of their countrymen, Arendt’s American friends possessed a sense of tragedy but it was largely book-learned tragedy, hopelessly literary and abstract compared to the lived experience of Arendt and other German-Jewish refugees. These Americans were not philosophical, having not even “the slightest inkling of what philosophy is,” as Arendt once explained, and she clung to her “European background in all its details with great tenacity.”
A letter from 1946 contained one of her lengthiest descriptions of “lucky America” with its “basically sound political structure.” There really was “such a thing as freedom here.” As she explained years later, “What influenced me when I came to the US was precisely the freedom of becoming a citizen without having to pay the price of assimilation.” Her detached individuality was what mattered to her. She would never cease being an outsider, but she was comfortable with that.
There was widespread anti-Semitism in the US. But that didn’t mean Americans would stand by and allow Jews to be deprived of their political rights. America was not Germany.
The political instincts of Americans were admirable. They might not be especially thoughtful or intellectual, but they took their responsibility as citizens seriously, something Europeans didn’t, or couldn’t, understand. “With the possible exception of the Scandinavians, no European citizenry has the political maturity of Americans.”
And yet, she always felt that ambivalence, the tug of uncertainty, the frisson of fear. Looking at Eisenhower during the 1952 presidential race, she saw Hindenburg, “a dangerous idiot,” with more ominous figures like McCarthy and Nixon lurking behind him. A year later, with McCarthy on the rampage, she felt “that we’re looking at developments that are all too familiar.”
“Crisis” became a favorite word in her vocabulary (much more than “banality”). Issues that others might see as narrow policy questions to be addressed by specific, wonkish solutions registered with her as symptoms of broader social decay with grand implications.
For government officials, the falsity of image-making was now taking precedence over actual facts, problem solving, and genuine attention to the public welfare, leading first to lying and then, inevitably, to criminality. Politics was becoming theater, and theater had no place in politics. Arendt reached for an analogy familiar to her. Totalitarian governments, she said, were willing to kill millions to conceal unpleasant facts.
Any republic, Arendt had written elsewhere, required “the spirit and the vigilance” of its citizens to survive. “It is the people’s support that lends power to the institutions of a country.”
Arendt pointed out that all societies were a combination of laws and customs. The state was the protector of the law, which guaranteed every individual in the country “his rights as man, his rights as citizen and his rights as a national.” Customs were this province of society, the basis for community and tradition, the common, inherited, not-quite-rational feelings that made a nation a nation, but also a force for oppressive conformity and unreflective orthodoxy. For the sake of public health, the state and society, or law and custom, had to be in balance. But this was not always the case. At those times when the rationality of law was undermined or lost its legitimacy, society could overwhelm the state, with the voice of “the people” drowning out the authority of the law and the freedoms it protected. Laws “are always in danger of being abolished by the power of the many, and in a conflict between law and power it is seldom the law which will emerge as victor.” Under such circumstances, individual rights are crushed for what is perceived to be the common good, as defined by the will of the majority. In Germany in the 1930s, Arendt pointed out, Hitler proudly declared, “Right is what is good for the German people.”
What was more, “a consumer’s society” like the one that had developed in the US, with its stoking of personal pleasure and indifference to the public realm, “spells ruin to everything it touches.”
In times of uncertainty, average middle-class citizens, whose attention was narrowly focused on their families and their careers, with little civic or moral awareness to speak of, “will willingly undertake any function, even that of the hangman” to preserve their self-interested positions and their unreflective tranquility. The ordinary Joe with his ordinary cares was a sleeping menace to republican freedoms. It was a mistake even to call him a “citizen.” He was “mob man,” and under the right (which is to say, wrong) conditions, he was “quite willing to believe — well, just anything.”
A democracy ruled by majority decisions but unchecked by law is just as despotic as an autocracy. And a terrifying and truly tyrannical authority was the tyranny of the majority.
Americans were deluded, Arendt insisted, if they thought their political institutions were meant to establish a democracy. That was never the intent of the Founding Fathers, who had read the ancient Greeks attentively and worried as much about tyrannical majorities as did German-Jewish refugees feeling Hitler’s popular and populist regime. They were kindred spirits. “What men” they were, Arendt exclaimed in breathless admiration of the Founders, and how little understood in modern times, with its ethos of democratic egalitarianism.
It’s a great mistake if you believe that what we have here is democracy, a mistake in which many Americans share. What we have here is republican rule, and the Founding Fathers were most concerned about preserving the rights of minorities.
And her praise of immigration as the means by which the US continually revitalized itself. The magnificence of the country consists in the fact that from the beginning this new order did not shut itself from the outside world.
In their wisdom — which could also be called their fear of majority rule — the Founders had established a system based on the separation of powers. Only division of powers can guarantee the rule of law because only when there were differentiated power bases would discussion, rationality, and persuasion find a place in the process of governing; no single source exercising tyrannical rule could dictate to others without any appeal to the open exchange of ideas and to the instrument of reason. At the national level, the Constitution gave us the horizontal tripartite structure of executive, legislative, and judiciary, but it also gave us a vertical construct of states’s rights, and to Arendt this division was no less important to the preservation of freedom and law.
The basis of her argument was Montesquieu’s distinction between society and the state, custom and the law. It was the duty of the authorities to enforce legal and political equality, not social equality.
Forced integration has left an enduring legacy of hostility to government that soon spread beyond the South and that we have not yet overcome.
But she was concerned with political process, measuring actions not by their immediate outcomes but by their underlying principles. Ideas mattered. Public policy had to take into consideration more than facts on the ground. It especially had to be wary about imposing a particular social ideal.
He insisted that any liberal society depended on a firm distinction between public and private. For liberal freedoms to survive, the private sphere had to be preserved even if that meant the perpetuation of evils like discrimination. Reformers might dream of “clean solutions,” but those solutions invariably failed, or they led to still greater evils.
But they were thinking from a different perspective than most of their countrymen, trying to impart the lessons of Weimar. And so they tended to view contemporary events from a great height. A problem was never simply a problem to be solved by whatever means were at hand in the pragmatic American fashion; it had to be analyzed in terms of its deeper implications. What’s more, they were decidedly anti-utopian, sniffing out unbounded idealism wherever it arose, and skeptical of those who offered solutions to what seemed to them to be part of the human condition. Neither believed that prejudice and discrimination could ever be completely eradicated. Tamp it down in one area and it would reemerge in another. The best one could hope for was to keep it confined to the social realm, to develop or degenerate as it would. People could not — and should not — be forced to be good, since everyone knows what the paving stones are on the road to Hell.
Yet it is an extremely odd expression of appreciation. It is not a fulsome account of the establishment of democracy in the way American schoolchildren are taught about their revolution; indeed, the word “democracy” hardly enters Arendt’s discussion at all, and when it does, it is with a notable lack of enthusiasm. What is more, the books has not necessarily pleased professional historians with its broadly philosophical, less than empirical treatment of events. Once again, Arendt was writing from a great height. She was not interested in the accumulation of facts. Historical detail took second place to the stream of ideas she was analyzing.
But Marx’s influence, whatever his virtues, had been “pernicious” in the long run; he and the disciples who acted in his name were prepared to sacrifice the highest goods, individual freedom and unencumbered thought, for the dead weight of materialism and the stultifying dogma of the dialectic. Everywhere that Marxism took hold, economics trumped politics, and physical need dictated to spiritual freedom. Pushed to its most extreme, this was a prescription for total slavery.
Both had started in the same place, with calls for freedom and the rights of man. The French had even borrowed their revolutionary language from the Americans. But the demand for individual freedom in France was quickly outstripped by other more radical aims. The revolution had “changed its direction.” Equality replaced freedom as the goal of revolution — and not equality as it was understood in the New World, equality before the law, but equality of social condition. The cathartic violence of rebellion held the promise of an end to poverty.
In Arendt’s mind, such a goal could only be met — if at all — by the application of technology and administrative expertise to economic problems; the question of poverty could not be answered by changing the form of government. It was not a political issue. Contra Marx, she did not believe that poverty was caused by capitalist exploitation; she seemed to be more inclined toward Jesus’s position that the poor would always be with us, in good times and bad, under feudalism, under capitalism, under socialism.
It was essential to keep economics and other social matters divorced from political ones. Freedom was not advanced by mixing them. Rather, it was endangered. She felt obliged to remind her American readers that prosperity and private well-being were wholly possible under a tyranny. Once again can be spied the ghost of Adolf Hitler.
Once the masses had seized control of events in France, Arendt wrote, the revolution moved in a catastrophic populist direction. No longer was the goal the founding of a republic but the fulfillment of “the will of the people,” as Robespierre had said.
With abstractions like “le peuple” beclouding their thinking, the French revolutionaries came to see themselves as actors in a struggle of good against evil, of the innocent, well-meaning populace against the predatory few.
The American colonists had grown up with a legacy of rule by law, whereas the French had known only dictatorship, and thinking in each case reflected past political experience. “Nothing, indeed, seems more natural than that a revolution should be predetermined by the type of government it overthrows. Nothing, therefore, appears more plausible than to explain the new absolute, the absolute revolution, by the absolute monarchy which preceded it, and to conclude that the more absolute the ruler, the more absolute the revolution will be which replaces him.” It was not only the French example that lent support to this argument. Her readers had the example of the Russian Revolution right before their eyes.
The masses in France and throughout Europe knew only grinding poverty, poverty that was constant, abject, and dehumanizing, and the call to revolution awakened in them not aspiration for freedom but a salvational, almost apocalyptic hope to end their misery. Inevitably, that hope turned to rage when promises went unkept. If desperation was not a fact of life, someone had to be blamed. This train of thought, with its cold, hard logic, sped on uninterrupted tracks in the pursuit of scapegoats and to the violence and terror that destroyed the French Revolution.
By the same token, Americans who traveled to Europe were shocked at the conditions they encountered. Nothing of what they saw existed among ordinary Americans. Of the 20M people in France, Jefferson said in 1787, “There are 19M more wretched, more accursed in every circumstance of human existence than the most conspicuously wretched individual of the whole US.”
Arendt began by nothing that although the two ideas of “liberation” and “freedom” were often confused and conflated, they were not the same. Liberation consisted of a rebellious breaking of shackles, the dream of political upheavals from the dawn of recorded history, and had always been the focus of historians and other intellectuals because all the drama was contained in the fight against tyranny, or what Arendt called all the good stories. Liberation was enabling, it was exhilarating, it was sexy. Adolescents were drawn to it. But by itself liberation was negation: it had no goal in sight and produced only anarchy as enabled, exhilarated rebels struggled, gun in hand, to gain power for themselves, their cohort, their tribe, their people. This was not freedom but its antithesis, one tyranny confronting another tyranny. And it was not what Arendt meant by revolution: “The end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom.” Most often, liberation crushed freedom.
Freedom, the true goal of revolution, could only be achieved in a second stage of rebellion with the writing of a constitution, the codifying of law, the imposing of limits to liberation. Law did not stand in opposition to freedom but was its very foundation and articulation. It made freedom possible. Constitution-writing, therefore, was “the foremost and noblest of all revolutionary deeds.”
“Power and freedom belonged together,” Arendt said. Separating and balancing power was not intended to curtail government, she argued. Rather, it created an arena for public discourse and rational lawmaking; the point was to acknowledge and channel the reality of power, not deny it. “The true objective of the American Constitutions was not to limit power but to create more power, actually to establish and duly constitute an entirely new power center” as a replacement for the British Crown. And the Bill of Rights, which restrained power? A “supplement,” in Arendt’s mind, really something of an afterthought.
A prominent historian famously sum up the Founding Fathers as an assemblage of “the well-bred, the well-fed, the well-read and the well-wed.”
Authority was a topic that had long obsessed Arendt. It was what endowed rulers with the power to govern, but she was at pain to emphasize, much like Kissinger, that authority was not the same thing as force or compulsion, which depended on violence. Authority, by definition, required the voluntary acquiescence of followers to leaders. Otherwise, it was doomed to failure, leaving only Hobbes’s cruel choice between tyranny and anarchy. Authority implies an obedience in which men retained their freedom. It was not to be confused with authoritarianism. She also wrote that the disappearance of traditional authority has been one of the most spectacular characteristics of the modern world. The modern world that has given us Nazism, Fascism, Communism, and now militant Islam. When a revolution overturned traditional authority, it pushed society to the edge of anarchy, requiring a new authority to restore order.
The new country may have severed its ties to the British Crown, but it hardly destroyed those institutions that stood apart from the king’s authority, namely, the domestic townships, councils, and legislatures. In fact, they had been the engines of rebellion. In Arendtian terms, most modern revolutions, starting with the French, had overthrown the one legitimate authority they knew, sanctified by religion and tradition, and then collapsed in the futile search for a new, broadly acceptable authority that, under the circumstances, had to be imposed from the top down. The American Revolution, by contrast, represented a clash of authorities, with local, bottom-up popular assemblies, dating back a century and a half to the Pilgrim’s Mayflower Compact, prevailing over the distant British monarch. Governing power did not have to be destroyed and then artificially recreated from scratch. It merely had to be transferred and elaborated.
Again like Strauss, Arendt pointed out that common sense was not the same thing as logic. Common sense assumed a lived, quotidian, shared world, what Strauss had called “a kind of web.” Logic existed outside the world and the web, subject to abstract rules beyond the conflicts and contradictions of human experience. The deracinated masses of modern societies had lost the whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense. What had taken its place was logic, and logic was the weapon of the totalitarians, who began with a fundamental premise from which everything else followed. (“If you believe A, then it necessarily follows that you must believe B…,” and so on, down to the deaths of millions.)
Power came from the people interacting in the humane in-between space, but at the same time it was exerted institutionally through law and was limited by law. Without those institutions, the people were powerless — isolated individuals alone in the wilderness. Coming together in popularly constituted bodies is what gave them potency. In this way, power and law were successfully joined together yet kept apart. The power of the people was preserved, but so was the authority of the law.
Voting is not what Arendt meant by participation. The individual in the privacy of the voting booth is not engaged with others in the public arena, putting one’s opinions to the test against differing views and life experiences, but instead is choosing among professional politicians offering to promote and protect his or her personal interests through ready-made formulas, mindless banalities, blatant pandering, and outlandish promises cobbled together as party programs. (And heaven help the elected official who tries to argue against the personal interest of his or her constituents or to communicate bad news.) Leaders are selected on the basis of private, parochial concerns, not the public welfare, producing a mishmash of self-interested demands, or what Arendt called “the invasion of the public realm by society.”
This was almost the opposite of genuine participation. Instead of the kind of intimate interchange of views and the deliberation that might be expected to resolve conflict, which was the practice of the townships and assemblies, isolated voters left to their own devices and with no appreciation of any larger good or of people different from themselves demand an affirmation of their particular prejudices and preconceptions. They have no opportunity, or desire, to come together with the aim of reaching mutual understanding and agreement on shared problems. Centrifugality prevails. American democracy, Arendt writes, had become a zero-sum game of “pressure groups, lobbies and other devices.” It is a system in which only power can prevail, or at best the blight of mutual backscratching to no greater end than mere political survival, lending itself to lies and demagoguery, quarrels and stalemates, cynical deal-making, not public exchange and calm deliberation. To a thinker like Schumpeter, this was the best that democracy had to offer and was not to be despised. He accepted it as the picture of “realism.” Democracy “does not mean and cannot mean that the people actually rule. Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them.” In short, democracy is the rule of the politicians. Arendt hoped for something better.
It may have solved the problem of tyranny because the separation of powers assured that personal freedom was not endangered. But corruption, not tyranny, was the bane of such a system, corruption springing “from the people themselves.” The rottenness extended all the way down. To cynics, corruption was the price to be paid for eace and stability. But the revolutionary spirit of the Founding Fathers had withered to the point of death.
In the end, it has to be said, councils, communes, wards, whatever one called them, were really little more than an escape hatch for Arendt, a device to avoid the gloomy conclusion her ideas about public participation seemed to be forcing upon her. There was always something improvised and contrived about the council idea, making it easy to criticize as unworkable and irrelevant to modern America, just as Strauss’s notions of apolitical philosophers advising “gentlemen” seem equally farfetched in terms of the world we inhabit. Or as one scholar said about Strauss and Arendt, “Their ability to integrate themselves into America involved inventing an America they could love rather than accepting the one they actually found.” But there was a reason for that. They couldn’t genuinely love the America they found. It worried them.
Most of their American readers couldn’t be worried in the same way. Quite the contrary. Democracy for them wasn’t an issue to be addressed, it was a given, and it was even more than that: a good, a virtue, an aspiration, a touchstone, a metric, a cause, a talisman, a foundation, a faith. But these two outsiders couldn’t share that faith. Democracy for them was a question, not an answer.
Although Morgenthau had made his reputation as a rigorous, even cold-blooded analyst of international relations, often condemned for amorality if not immorality, the man Kissinger knew was sweet-tempered, gentle, very shy, and possessed a winning sense of humor. Kissinger called him “a lovable man.”
For better - and for worse — the impractical Louis Kissinger, though he too could be a strict disciplinarian with his boys, had a nurturing softness that Morgenthau lacked. The young Henry Kissinger may have rejected his father’s gentleness. But he never stood in rebellion against him.
Curious, he attended the meeting, where he “had one of the most profound experiences of my life.” Hitler spoke passionately and eloquently, telling the crowd exactly what it wanted to hear. And Morgenthau himself? He said he felt a “paralysis of will” even though he didn’t believe a word of Hitler’s speech. He reproached biographers and historians for giving us all the facts of Hitler’s life without ever capturing the magnetism of the man or the historic phenomenon that he was. Rational categories could not contain him. Perhaps “only a poet could recreate and make plausible” Hitler’s uniqueness, “the sheer force of his personality.”
But he hated Marxism’s “closed intellectual system” — an independent thinker like Morgenthau was temperamentally incapable of giving his allegiance to any ideology.
Wright had drawn on every academic field from anthropology to mathematics in order to develop a precise formula to enable policymakers to calculate the probability of war and then take steps to prevent it. The dictates of mathematics were replacing the contingencies of history.
Even as a young man, Morgenthau resisted the idea that good intentions by themselves could prevail in the anarchic world of international affairs or that written documents could carry the weight of law without a credible threat of force behind them. Soothing words were never enough. Only the potential loss of blood demonstrated conviction. Or to put it another way, any attempt to end war required the possibility of going to war.
We cannot assume to be able to look at the world scene from a vantage point which, as it were, lies outside this world.
Appropriately, the school Morgenthau founded was called Realism, and while there is much dispute the exact meaning of the term — one person’s Realist is another’s war criminal — what is indisputable was its premise: you could not formulate foreign policy based simply on how you wish the world to be or by trying to impose either an abstract theory or your own moral template on a recalcitrant reality. In the end, power was reality.
And of his many students, Henry Kissinger is the most famous: “I never ceased admiring him or remembering the profound intellectual debt I owed him.”
Part of that analysis included a critique of liberalism, which, with its disdain of power, was a superficial philosophy that could not withstand challenges to its own unexamined and unrealistic assumptions about the benignity of mankind. “Liberalism expresses its aim in the international sphere not in terms of power politics, that is, on the basis of the international reality but in accordance with the rationalist premises of its own misconception.” Weimar liberalism presented the sorry spectacle of justice without a sword or of justice unable to use the sword.
The kind of work promoted by the Chicago School, Morgenthau said, was directed to the utopian goal of eliminating uncertainty from political activity, and utter impossibility in his view. Their theories “are in truth not so much theories as dogmas,” dogmas that substituted “what is desirable for what is possible.” For all their claims to be grounded in empirical facts, these scholars, with their models, frameworks, and paradigms, “tell us nothing we need to know about the real world” because their mathematically based methodology was deficient, offering no understanding of actual human beings. Power, the core subject of international relations, was too complex, too integrated and organic, to be quantified or broken down into its alleged component parts. It was, Morgenthau said, like love.
Politics could not be quantified because human beings were not rats; their political perspectives were shaped by values and goals, about which the quantifiers and statisticians had nothing to say. Or when they did try to say something about values, they attempted to measure the immeasurable, reflexively falling back on counting noses to homogenize all ethical differences for the sake of achieving the utilitarian aim of the greatest good for the greatest number. This, Strauss insisted, was not an affirmation of value but a denial of value. It reflected “the most dangerous proclivities of democracy.” It was the tyranny of the majority dressed up as empirical research.
It was not true, Morgenthau argued, that Machiavelli thought ethics had no place in international relations. “He only saw clearly that if you want to be successful in foreign affairs, you must use the instruments by which foreign aims are achieved — that is, power politics.”
Modern theorists of international relations are repelled by history, for history is the realm of the accidental, the contingent, the unpredictable. It revealed people in all their uniqueness and humanity. It was the province of individual choice, of freedom. “In history, man meets himself.” This was “Germanic” thinking indeed — and also evidenced in Strauss and Arendt — if what is meant by that is the affirmation of the role of the “will” in the conduct of human affairs.
If offered essential insights that could be learned in no other way, the most meaningful of which was that men always and everywhere strive for power. History was purgative, performing a cleansing function for the mind by stripping away all optimistic ideals and rationalist utopias. For Morgenthau it was a nightmare from which neither he nor anyone else could ever awaken, and those who did not grasp that fact could never grasp the fundamentals of international relations.
It was almost to be taken for granted that men of high intelligence and sensibility would be enchanted by Hannah. What struck one at first meeting with Hannah Arendt was the vitality of her mind, quick — sometimes too quick — sparkling, seeking and finding hidden meanings and connections beneath the surface of man and things. She had an extraordinarily depth of knowledge combined with rare intellectual passion. As others enjoy playing cards or the horses for their own sake, so Hannah Arendt enjoyed thinking.
Though he didn’t think for himself, his “thoughtlessness” did not absolve him of guilt. Most important, her critics tended to ignore the larger point she was making about the nature of totalitarianism and, by implication, about our modern condition: that is, how so many normal people could be transformed into desk murderers because instead of confronting the reality of their deeds, even when reality was right in front of their eyes, they simply followed the rules of their society. It just so happened that in Nazi Germany the rules of society included the commission of hideous crimes.
Morgenthau saw Arendt’s point entirely and agreed with it. The “banality of evil suggested there exists no correspondence between the evil done and the evildoer. The evildoer can be a minor figure in a bureaucratic machine believing in the presuppositions of the doctrine. He executes almost mechanically, bureaucratically, the mandates of that doctrine. “He did not have to hate Jews in order to murder them.” There were numerous dedicated and opportunistic bureaucrats living in Nazi Germany who would have done what he did without giving it a second thought, as long as they were abiding by society’s rules and advancing their own careers.
He offered support of a kind by acknowledging the quality of pessimism and desperation in her thinking, which was clearly something he liked about her, the only appropriate stance for a thoughtful person living in dark times. “Perhaps one can argue that the theoretical character of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy is a symptom of this impossibility to think creatively in a hopeless political situation.” Arendt tried to keep one small door open for optimism. Morgenthau insisted on slamming it shut. To think, he said, was to suffer. “Consciousness does not save man from perdition, but it makes him understand the source and end of his fate.” The challenge, in his mind, was learning to live in an unpredictable, often savage world without hope. If mankind was catapulting down the road to hell, at least one could recognize the signposts.
The dominant philosophy in the West, Morgenthau declared, was a reliance on reason. Everything he went on to say flowed from this simple assertion. Reason was thought to give man the means to understand the world because the world was inherently intelligible, governed by rational and accessible laws, graspable by the processes of human thought — and those processes, it was held, were the methods of natural science. By defining, quantifying, and measuring, we could understand everything that is, or at least everything that needed to be understood. Every effect had a cause, which itself had a cause, and so on, ad infinitum. Pushed to an extreme but not preposterous limit, this manner of thinking led to the conclusion that “a sufficient great mathematician, given the distribution of the particles in the primitive nebula, could predict the whole future of the world.” In this way, reason was conjoined with science, while the people who insisted on the connection were, in Morgenthau’s language, “liberals.”
There was an obvious utopianism to all this. Perfection was possible, and “the perfect world is the world in which all obey the commands of reason.”
Marx simply transfer the liberal confidence in the rational powers of the individual to the class. And just as Marxists held out the eschatological promise that history would come to an end once the working class prevailed, liberals preached an eschatology of their own. The triumph of freedom and democracy throughout the world would usher in a golden age, its own end of history.
Throughout his career in the US, Morgenthau never stopped trying to explain to Americans that “modern totalitarian regimes, fascist and Communist, have not been imposed by a tyrannical minority upon an unwilling population.” Rather, they have come to power and maintained their rule with the support of populations willing to sacrifice individual freedom and self-government, actual or potential, for order and what they consider to be social justice.
Reason, Morgenthau insisted, was not the only force operative in human history. Men were not only rational beings, but also, and equally, biological and spiritual ones. Reason could never dictate; it could only coexist with the other aspects of human nature.
What is more, by ignoring or denying the questions that philosophy, metaphysics, and religion sought to address, the rationalism of science had left man “impoverished in his quest for an answer to the riddle of the universe and of his existence in it.” Science may have “lightened the burden of living” bu tit had not “lightened the burden of life.” Painless dentistry did not relieve the metaphysical ache.
Fascism was not a retreat into irrationality and reaction. In its mastery of the technological attainments and potentialities of the age, it is truly progressive.
It wasn’t always so. At the dawn of the age of reason, science was opening up the prospect of exciting new discoveries, but with each undeniable triumph, it extended its domain and hardened its approach. What had started out as an empirical, pragmatic philosophy ossified into an ideology that recognized no truth outside its own purview. It claimed to stand for openness but had in fact become exclusionary and dogmatic. This was especially true with regard to human relations, where, instead of taking each problem on its own terms, in all its immediate complexity and with an acknowledgement of the inherent uncertainty contained in freedom of the will, it confronted the world by making logical deductions from its particular abstract rational principles. Answers were easier when the map of reality had already been plotted out as a rule-bound system. But no formula could eliminate the unpredictability of actual life, and too often the liberals’ map pointed in the wrong direction.
Human interactions could be understood through reason, which could encompass un-reason (just as un-reason could encompass reason), but it was a mistake to project reason as a template onto nonrational reality itself by developing mechanical equations to explain and predict behavior. Each situation was unique, to be interpreted according to its own particularity and evaluated on its own terms. Social science could describe broad possibilities but not certainties. “What can stated scientifically in way of prediction on the basis of a ‘social law’ is merely that, given certain conditions, a certain social trend is more likely to materialize than are others — in other words, that the odds are in favor of one trend as over against others.” One could employ the teachings of the social scientists as long as one remembered their unalterable contingency. But inevitably, eager, ambitious politicians would want more from their economists, political scientists, and sociologists, and eager, ambitious economists, political scientists, and sociologists would attempt to give it to them — though in the end, “whoever seeks more will get less.”
A general plans a campaign based upon reasoned assessments of his own strength, the enemy’s strength, and the circumstances under which the battle will be fought. All the proper calculations will be made ahead of time. But history abounds with examples of intentions frustrated by the unexpected. Orders may be wrongly transmitted, misunderstood or not carried out. The enemy may fail to do something the other side expected. The lesson of warfare was to expect the unexpected and use one’s intelligence, one’s presence of mind, to adapt. That, not the application of predetermined formulas, was the mark of a great general. But accepting contingency did not mean forsaking planning or reasoned thinking. It simply mean that rationality was no panacea, that one always stood in the middle of life, not outside it, assessing and reassessing based on immediate circumstances and the best knowledge that was available at any given moment. Improvisation should be employed only when improvisation was required, and then rationality. The quality of independent, unsupported thinking that goes by the hard-to-pin-down name of “intuition” was an important element in victory.
And what was true of generals in warfare was even more true of politicians and policymakers, because military battles came to an end whereas political conflict never did. Policy disputes reflected the Aristotelian truth that we are always and forever political animals. Social problems are never solved definitely. They must be solved every day anew and with no guarantee of success. The social is indeed a chaos of contingencies. Yet it is not devoid of a measure of rationality if approached with the expectations of Macbethian cynicism. Morgenthau’s aim was, Kant-like, to trace the limits of reason, not to abandon it.
For liberalism, international relations reveal their true nature in the harmony of interests, whereas war was a product of irrational emotion, an absolute evil because it violated the natural order of things.
From the liberal perspective, the goal of diplomacy should be to find a way to bring an end to war, which had now become a genuine possibility, whether through treaties like the Kellogg-Briand Pact or institutions like the League of Nations and the UN. Abstract ideals counted for more than harsh realities, and the belief in a natural harmony among nations represented a “foreign policy without politics.” He quoted the French Socialist leader Leon Blum declaring in 1932, “The more danger there is in the world, the more necessary it is to disarm.”
The rule of law worked as long as one didn’t look too closely at its underpinnings. “The middle classes developed a system of indirect domination which replaced the military method of open violence with the invisible chains of economic dependence and which hid the very existence of power relations behind a network of seemingly egalitarian liberal rules.”
If a “community of rational interests and values” existed on the domestic front, then why not in the international community as well?
Because, Morgenthau answered, there was no such things as an international community. Domestic disputes could be resolved — not solved — through discussion and negotiations, or when negotiation failed, by appeals to the sovereignty of the state and the authority of the law. Consensus was possible because within national borders people agreed to disagree. This was the very meaning of “legitimacy.” Disputants could not fail to realize that what they had in common was more important than what they were fighting about. They met, indeed, on the common ground of liberal rationality, and their conflicts, since they arose under the conditions and within the framework of the liberal society, could all be settled through the instrumentalities of liberal rationality.
No such peaceful consensus prevailed in the international arena. Nations were the products of different values, different traditions, different beliefs. Their actions and goals had more to do with geography, history, and national character than with their forms of government. Nations are peace-loving under certain historic conditions and are warlike under others, and it is not the form of government or domestic policies which makes them so. Ultimately foreign affairs were an unending struggle for survival and power.
Every attempt to bring order to the world through parliamentary mechanisms based on Western domestic models succeeded only so long as the various governments saw it as to their advantage to abide by the agreed-upon rules. But if — or more likely when — the rules came into conflict with fundamental national interests, the apparent international consensus fell apart. Conflicts over basic interests — the Romans and the barbarians, the Arab world and the Christian West, Napoleonic France and the rest of Europe, the fascist regimes and the democracies — were not susceptible to rational compromise because these were existential struggles for absolute power. “To enter such a conflict with the equipment of the bargaining negotiator is to give up the struggle before it has really started.”
But if war was not inevitable in international affairs, the preparation for war was. Governments had to be prepared unflinchingly to employ violence when violence was necessary.
Once Morgenthau had stripped away all rationalist ideals and scientific hopes, the foundations of modern thinking, here was the way the world looked: it was one in which violence was both an ever-present threat and a sometimes necessary tool. Without utopian dreams, the power of nation-states was what remained — “violence reigns supreme.” The wise statesman did not deny the reality of power politics. He understood that power and the yearning for power would never disappear from human affairs and therefore he employed violence judiciously, as circumstances dictated. “Peace is subject to the conditions of time and space and must be established and maintained by different methods and under different conditions of urgency in the everyday relations of concrete nations.” Viewing peace as an abstraction was a foolish delusion, an intellectual chimera. “The problem of international peace exists only for the philosopher.”
And because there was no escape from the reality of power politics, Morgenthau concluded, the situation of the statesman was necessarily “tragic.” The choices he faced were not between good and evil, but between bad and less bad. There was always the prospect that people, innocent people, would die because of decisions a statesman made. “Man cannot hope to be good but must be content with being not too evil, or to be as good as he can be in an evil world.”
To operate realistically in the brutal world of social interaction required the acceptance of uncertainty, which was wisdom, not the false assurances of science. And wisdom was reserved not for those plunged into events with the certitude of the fanatic but for those statesmen who maintained their distance, their irony, through a sense of the tragic. For Morgenthau, the ideal statesman was Lincoln, “a man of unique greatness,” whose fatalistic detachment allowed him to view the events and people (himself included) with objectivity, humility, and compassion. Lincoln’s ironic humor was inextricably linked to his melancholy separateness. Morgenthau viewed Henry Kissinger as another statesman who possessed a sense of humor and a sense of irony, who exhibited a fatalistic detachment linked to melancholy separateness.
Morgenthau made a point of demonstrating just how ill-equipped Americans were to shoulder their new responsibilities. Since its founding, the US benefited from having geography on its side. Protected by two vast oceans, it could expand at will across the continent while dominating its weak neighbors to the south. As for Europe, with its age-old rivalries, resentment, and wars, Americans were content to play the role of “spectators,” and smug and self-righteous ones at that. What was a lucky accident of history and geography they took to be a permanent and universal condition, and in their splendid isolation, with no threat to the national interest, they came to believe in their own moral exceptionalism, with a God-given mission to spread an antimilitaristic, antigovernment libertarianism around the world.
In Morgenthau’s terms, this prevailing ideology was not politics but the negation of politics, moralism masquerading as reality, utopian aspirations misconceived as foreign policy.
The men who were in the process of formulating and implementing the Marshall Plan, the NATO, and the containment policy had, in Morgenthau’s words, “played it by ear.” They were reacting to immediate problems, improvising brilliantly it had to be said, but with no theoretical coherence or overarching perspective. Morgenthau arrived on the scene to give them that perspective. Here was a thinker who was charting a path not between but beyond head-in-the-sand isolationism and crusading, big-stick militarism. With his thorough classical grounding in history and philosophy and his awe-inspiring erudition, he provided the requisite intellectual framework for those coping with the new, evolving, dimly understood challenges of the Cold War.
This was the moralistic school, so familiar to Americans. The other, Morgenthau’s Nietzschean school, denied the existence of abstract principles (except in humankind’s dreams and delusions) and looked to the lessons of history for “objective laws that have their roots in human nature.” What it claimed to have found was a distasteful truth: “The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience.”
Because the drive to dominate was “common to all men,” it followed that to focus on kindhearted motives and well-meaning ideals was a mistake. “How often have statesmen been motivated by the desire to improve the world and ended up making it worse.” Robespierre, out of the sincerest of intentions, destroyed the French Revolution. Wilson was always on hand to serve as a useful negative example.
In the cause of freedom and equality, the French marched east and committed all manner of “crimes, murders, wars.” Cynical but sophisticated political leaders make use of ideology to garner popular support and rally the masses behind the government. The risk they ran was that they could be overwhelmed by those who genuinely subscribed to the ideology, the true believers with a sense neither of irony nor tragedy, who were unable to indulge in the kind of hypocrisy that was often a feature of skilled statesmanship. The ideologues knew no limits, and that was when all hell could break loose. It was said of Hitler (by Stalin of all people) that he was a zealot who “didn’t know when to stop.”
Morgenthau may have been the philosopher of power politics, but he was also at pains to explain what power was not. The crucial point, often forgotten even by his own Realist disciples, was that violence was not political power. The threat of force might be necessary in international relations, but its use signaled the failure of political power and its displacement by military power, which was a very different thing. “The actual exercise of physical violence substitutes for the psychological relation between two minds, which is the essence of political power, they physical relation between two bodies, one of which is strong enough to dominate the other’s movements.” Such domination, however, was a crude and temporary tool, unrelated to genuine political power, because “no dominion can last that is founded upon nothing but military force.” Generals usually made lousy diplomats. “The armed forces are instruments of war; foreign policy is an instrument of peace.”
Conquerors who thought only in material and military terms, like the Germans and Japanese of WW2, were bound to pass from the scene, no matter how much damage they might do, whereas those with a more nuanced and restrained notion of power, like the Romans and British, were able to construct successful, long-standing institutions. Hearts and minds constituted the very essence of what Morgenthau meant by political power. “All foreign policy is a struggle for the minds of men.”
To put it bluntly: As there are bums and beggars, so are there bum and beggar nations.
Understanding the differences among peoples, however contrary to liberal pieties, was crucial to wise statesmanship. “National character cannot fail to influence national power; for those who act for the nation in peace and war, formulate, execute and support its policies, elect and are elected, mold public opinion, produce and consume — all bear to a greater or lesser degree the imprint of those intellectual and moral qualities which make up the national character.” Elusive and changeable over time it might be, but national character was a fact of life.
The very idea of politics required consensus and cooperation, demonstrating that Morgenthau’s notion of a fixed and aggressive human nature was nothing more than a “quasi-theological” prejudice. There is something seriously deficient about a theory of politics which reduces the political act to the exercise of one’s man’s power over another. To Morgenthau’s rhetorical question, “Why is it that all men lust for power?” the answer is: “Some don’t.”
For Morgenthau, there was power and there was power. It expressed itself in many ways. “The scholar seeking knowledge seeks power; so does the poet. So do the mountain climber, the hunter, the collector of rare objects.” All were forcing themselves intrusively into the world, often to the great benefit of humankind. Any kind of ambition revealed a yearning for power.” In the domestic societies of Western civilization, the possession of money has become the outstanding symbol of the possession of power. Through the competition for the acquisition of money, the power aspirations of the individual find a civilized outlet.”
But the type of power that primarily concerned Morgenthau, and was also the object of Lichtheim’s argument, was political power. Specifically, in Morgenthau’s terms, political power was the assertion of will not over inanimate objects like books, words, mountains, objects d’art, or even money but over other human beings. Political power was a nuanced and complex interaction that took in every sort of social relationship, down to “the most subtle psychological ties by which one mind controls another.” In civilized societies, this particular power drive was tamed by moral and institutional constraints, but on the world stage it was raw and “barbaric.” Unfortunately, it was also ubiquitous.
Political power was the final determinant in international relations, but that was not the end of the story. There did seem to be restraints on it. Three that merited Morgenthau’s special attention were international law, world opinion, and transcendent morality. All were presented as solutions to the problem Morgenthau had set out, and all might have their place in encouraging global stability. None, ultimately, could guarantee it.
On no issue had humankind been more united than its acknowledgment of the evil of warfare, he pointed out, yet such unanimity had scarcely prevented the loss of millions of lives in the 20th century. People opposed war in the abstract but fervently supported it when their own country was involved. Except in the case of the ineffectual pacifist, the widespread condemnation of war was always to the other people’s wars. “In politics the nation and not humanity is the ultimate fact.” World opinion was a fiction. “Modern history has not recorded an instance of a government having been deterred from foreign policy by the spontaneous reaction of a supranational public opinion.”
Europe was “one great republic,” with common standards of “politeness and cultivation.” A “sense of honor” was not just a phrase of deceitful pose but a quality that leaders took seriously and that imposed real limitations on their national freedom of action. Certain things were simply not done. But humankind had moved so far from this internalized moral code that many decisions made in the past had come to seem incomprehensible in the present. When it was suggested to the Austrian emperor in 1792 that he counterfeit currency in order to disrupt revolutionary France’s economy, he replied, “Such an infamous project is not to be accepted.” Even Bismarck, the master of Realpolitik, “rarely deviated from the rules of the game.” International relations were an aristocratic pastime, the practice of a small elite community, and reputation among one’s social peers mattered even more than national interest, keeping the desire for power in check.
Meanwhile, in the age of mass democracy, behavior based on an aristocratic code of personal honor was being replaced by loyalty to one’s country and to narrow national interests.
Believers in disarmament were guided by the mistaken philosophy that “men fight because they have arms,” when the truth was that “they have arms because they deem it necessary to fight.” The issue, as always for Morgenthau, was one of winning hearts and minds. At the present time, and for as far into the future as one could see, people gave their “highest secular loyalties” to their own countries, which constituted “an insurmountable obstacle” to world government.
There can be no world state without a world community willing to support it, and that world community did not exist.
There was no question that a balance of power arrangement had weakness, dangerous ones. Morgenthau pointed out that the price of the balance of power in Europe was almost continuous warfare, including the horrendous world wars of the 20th century when the system broke down. The driving force of any balance of power arrangement was “constant fear,” as each government tried to gauge the strength of its adversaries and the possibility of alliances with unreliable friends. Calculations were little more than a “series of guesses,” and the uncertainty that was an inevitable element of the balance of power encouraged nations to try to maximize their own strength, even through preventive war. Confrontations testing relative strength were unavoidable and had to be considered the price of living among national adversaries. The inherently unstable balance of power was not a perfect arrangement by any means, and the security it provided was always precarious — something the utopian moralists never tired of pointing out. Its shortcomings were real even in those years when aristocratic statesmen shared a common moral code. But what was the alternative? According to Morgenthau, there was none. As he was later to write, the balance of power “is the very law of life.”
Any balance of power system did not arise by itself or continue automatically. It required human agency to construct the right arrangement and adapt it to changing circumstances. Fallible human beings had to labor constantly to keep the system from breaking down, which they had failed to do before WW1. The people who traditionally performed this function were diplomats, and diplomacy, Morgenthau said, “is the brains of national power.”
Diplomats were the antithesis of the absolutists and true believers, the moral ideologues. The balance of power could only work through accommodation, and the job of diplomats was to reach that accommodation through persuasion and compromise and also, if necessary, through the threat of force. They had to assess the power and objectives of their own country as well as those of other nations and determine the best means of obtaining their goals. They had to be able to distinguish the essential from the merely desirable and to see the world from the point of view of other governments. They required minds that were both “complicated and subtle.” They needed to be true realists, “sensitive, flexible and versatile.”
When diplomacy requires compromise and accommodation, democratic public opinion calls for absolutism and a crusading spirit. Where statesmen must be flexible in pursuit of the long view, the masses demand firmness and immediate results. Little wonder that “the diplomat’s reputation for deviousness and dishonesty is as old as diplomacy itself.” The virtues of one are considered vices by the other, because diplomats must be “horsetraders,” not heroes. Their undertakings dissolve when subjected to the light of mass opinion, and Woodrow Wilson’s “open covenants… openly arrived at” were a prescription for confrontation and war. “Where foreign policy is conducted under the conditions of democratic control, the need to marshal popular emotions to the support of foreign policy cannot fail to impair the rationality of foreign policy itself.”
Foreign policy demand scarcely any of those qualities which are peculiar to a democracy; they required, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those in which it is deficient.”
In one of his more subtle analyses, Morgenthau explained that the wish for a universal ethic to guide behavior has remained constant even as traditional ethical systems have lost their authority. As a result, the masses, sensing the loss of spirituality in the modern age, have translated their particular national values into moral absolutes and seek to impose them onto other people. He called the tendency “nationalistic universalism,” and he observed that the more insecure citizens feel at home, the more “vicarious satisfaction” they take from projecting power abroad.
A genuinely rational foreign policy was an impossibility in a democracy, an ideal that could only be approximated by never fully realized or implemented; any diplomat serving an open society has to bend to the public will, no matter how irrational or shortsighted he considered it to be. Or as Henry Kissinger might say: Welcome to my world.
Americans were materialistic, hedonistic, and apathetic, their only aim in life apparently to consume more and more in a complacent haze of unconstrained appetite. The economy was wasteful, the government paralyzed. The public sphere had virtually disappeared as individuals struggled to grab what they could for themselves and the hell with anyone else or any larger purpose. Public policy was determined by moneyed pressure groups with no concerns beyond their own parochial interests, and morality consisted of what you could get away with. Americans no longer made any distinction between freedom and license, and the consequences for the country were bound to be dire. “No society can go on like this forever without decay following stagnation; the fate of Spain tells us what is in store for such a nation.”
The culprit, in Morgenthau’s analysis, was democracy itself, or rather what most Americans had come to understand by democracy. Authority for them was simple rule of the majority. What the people wanted, they should get, and governance was turning into decision making by opinion poll. There was an emptiness at the core. Morgenthau made a crucial distinction: public opinion, always shifting, frequently ignorant, and predisposed to emotional appeal rather than disinterested, rational consideration, was a source of legitimacy in the modern age — there was no other. But it could not be an arbiter of policy. The majority could restraint rulers but it could not rule, which left the door open for powerful private interest groups to impose their will in what Morgenthau called a “new feudalism.” Worse, when the will of the majority was not restrained, when it gathered enough strength within itself to attempt to rule against the established interests, “the government, and with it the nation, continuously runs the risk that the place of leadership vacated by the government will be occupied by someone else, more likely than not a demagogue or a demagogic elite catering to popular emotions and prejudices.”
And like them, he can be accused of seeing an ideal America he wanted to see rather than the one that actually existed. He applauded what he understood as the idea of America. Contemporary reality deserved no applause. In any case, he found the solution to the country’s current problems in a restoration of what he took to be its extraordinary founding principles. Like Arendt, he was a believer in American exceptionalism, although this was an odd position for the father of Realism to espouse.
All other countries defined themselves by their ethical affinities and historic traditions, but the US defined itself by an idea, with a particular purpose in mind. That idea, that purpose, was what Morgenthau called “equality in freedom.” Admittedly, this was a vague concept, even contradictory, or in Morgenthau’s words “intangible, shapeless and procedural,” as the principles of equality and freedom often came into conflict with each other. Pursued for its own sake, freedom became libertarianism, which necessarily undermined equality because, as Morgenthau said, there was a “natural inequality of man.” And equality by itself led to a repressive “equalitarianism,” or the denial of individual freedom. The two principles had to be forcibly yoked together to avoid extremes and the destruction of the American purpose. This required an “act of will.” Nothing good came automatically.
The ideal of equality in freedom could never be static, frozen in time, because in truth it could never be realized; each generation had to define the concept anew. And so the American Revolution was “an endless process rather than an isolated act,” and the ongoing effort to achieve the ideal constituted “a restless and dynamic search for a state of society that could at best be approximated, never fully attained.” It was a Sisyphean task, but no less real or desirable for that.
But then why bother? Why continue pushing that rock up the hill if you were never going to reach the top? Throughout its history, the country has had its doubters and naysayers, particularly among pessimistic and sophisticated intellectuals and writers like Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James, Adams, and Mencken. Repelled by the country’s ambient, oppressive vulgarity, they “refused to identify themselves with America as they found it.” Morgenthau, who yielded to no one in either pessimism or sophistication, was not unsympathetic to them. They were, in one sense, the best of the best. “They uncovered in America the human condition, drastically at variance with the American dream.” He could admire their rejection of America’s often fatuous optimism and philistine materialism, could share their “tragic sense of life.” But he perceived an aura of irresponsible aestheticism in their anti-American stance. He could not go along with the rejection of the American ideal. Without it, he said, the country would lose its internal coherence and fall apart, and he was too appreciative of what his adopted land had given him to accept that.
The national purpose of equality in freedom was the necessary glue that prevented social disintegration, and the survival of the US as a meaningful entity depended on it. American had no choice: they had to keep pushing that rock up the hill, with no hope of ultimate success. Normally gloomy, stoical at best, Morgenthau counseled a kind of positive pessimism. Rather like Camus, he was able to picture Sisyphus happy.
Looking over the entirety of human history, he said that “to be worthy of our lasting sympathy, a nation must pursue its interests for the sake of a transcendent purpose that gives meaning to the day-to-day operations of its foreign policy.” The Mongols and Huns, for all their undeniable success in their own time, had left nothing but Ozymandius-like ruins for future generations to contemplate, whereas ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel had bequeathed to humankind permanent legacies because they had moved across history’s stage with transcendent goals.
Which would Americans be — Huns or Romans? Actually, once again, Morgenthau insisted that they had no choice. Just as the national purpose of equality in freedom was essential to domestic survival, so too it was necessary to America’s survival in the larger world, and there could be no retreating from it. Like it or not, the US “has become the Rome and Athens of the Western world, the foundation of its lawful order and the fountainhead of its culture.” And not only for the West. America “addresses itself to all the nations of the world.” Its ideal of equality in freedom had taken on global relevance for “if we fail, the nations of the world will look elsewhere for models of social organization and political institutions to emulate, and we will be alone in a hostile world.” Uniquely, America’s national interest was conjoined with transcendent goals. Survival both at home and abroad required the continuing (if ultimately futile) pursuit of the national purpose.
The country had lost its way because in the past Americans had been able to pursue their ideal of equality in freedom under conditions that no longer existed and would never exist again. Morgenthau subscribed to the “safety valve” theory of the American past: the inevitable discontents that emerged in any society had been siphoned off in the US by the call of the frontier. Those unable to make a go of it at home were free to move west and try again, which is what millions of Americans had done for 3 centuries. On the frontier they were both free and equal. There is an anachronistic ring to Morgenthau’s comment that “the experience of endless opportunity was predicated upon the availability of limitless empty land.”
Racism demanded no intellectual effort from him. In the realm of ideas, it was not worth taking seriously; it was all too easy to refute. From his point of view, race relations were a practical matter, a question of policy, not an abstract one requiring theoretical meditation.
The nation was a petri-dish, self-contained, removed from the problems that had bedeviled every other society on earth. Europe’s past was a picture of unfathomable tragedy with nothing to teach Americans about human nature since the US had wiped out history and created a new Adam.
Then history caught up with America. As the US grew into a modern, industrialized, urban society, all of the Old World ills emerged in the New World — and none was more significant than the problem of social stratification. The accumulation of vast fortunes and the power that went with them mocked the very notion of equality.
Equality in freedom had been an apolitical ideal to be realized apart from government and even, if necessary, apart from social contact. Morgenthau referred to Americans as “fugitives from politics.” Now, for the first time, they were confronted by the inescapability of power, power in the form of great wealth.
Wilson had “lifted the American purpose up to the skies,” but “he could not divorce it from the experience of the world.” Most countries, Morgenthau said, “are manifestly unsuited for a democratic system after the American model.”
Yet instead of dying, Wilsonianism repeatedly reemerged throughout the 20th century because it spoke to a fundamental part of the American consciousness. It answered the question of the nation’s place in the world with the claim that the US was obliged to project its values across the globe.
The other response, a reaction to Wilson’s moralistic overreaching, was isolationism. If the US could not change the world, it would withdraw from it. Isolationism was the dominant mood in the country in the 1920s and 1930s, and it assumed a virulent form in the 1950s under the name of McCarthyism, when it became not enough to raise the drawbridges to avoid foreign contamination; the US also had to search out heretics within its midst to preserve its virtue. To vast numbers of Americans, McCarthy’s purgative isolationism spoke to their fears about a nation they saw as endangered by enemies within an without.
For the first time in its history, the US recognized that it had interests that extended beyond the Wester Hemisphere, and it had reacted not with preconceived notions of American virtue but realistically with a calculated and shrewd understanding of the new situation. Specific solutions addressed specific problems, employing American power while understanding the limits of that power, and with no expectation of achieving a permanent peace. The new policy had not only a military component but also economic, political, and diplomatic ones as well. It was multilayered and pragmatic, adapted for the world as it existed. “A whole new system of American foreign policy was devised, derived from a radically new conception of the American purpose abroad.”
China and Korea tested the ability of the US to meet with purposeful action a foreign threat that was not a clear-cut military nature. The US did not pass those tests.
George Kennan shared Morgenthau’s resistance to this “myth of omnipotence” and the over-militarization of American foreign policy, lamenting his country’s “blind militaristic hysteria.” Washington had abandoned subtlety and nuance for guns and bombs, but when sheer force of arms did not work, as it did not in Asia, it had no answer, no plan B, and it fell back into bewilderment. This was coupled with a self-deception that echoed the “stab-in-the-back” complaints heard in Germany after WW1. The American foreign policy that Morgenthau saw in 1960 had lost its sense of purpose, become “aimless and inconsistent,” and faced a “crisis of perplexity.”
But great challenges produced great civilizations. Taking the lead on the issue of curbing nuclear proliferation would give the US the opportunity to reaffirm its national purpose on the global stage. “It will be as it was at the beginning: what America does for itself it also does for mankind, an political experimentation on a worldwide scale in order to save mankind will be in a direct line of succession to the political experiment as which at its inception America offered itself to the world.”
Nuclear power had forever transformed the nature of foreign policy. It was “the only real revolution which has occurred in the structure of international relations since the beginning of history, because it has radically changed the relationship between violence as a means of foreign policy and the ends of foreign policy.” The theorist who grasped this new reality was obliged to “prepare the ground for a new international order.”
The study of history was essential for an understanding of international relations. The past was never past. History taught complexity and contingency, the way political and military leaders went about selecting among indeterminate options in the particular circumstances they faced and the mistakes they often committed as individuals making individual choices. There was no escaping uncertainty; tragedy was an ever-constant presence in human affairs. One obtained from the past not abstract formulas to be applied mechanically to modern-day problems but a flexible awareness of the human condition that could enrich the decision-making process.
Kissinger saw parallels between the Congress of Vienna, which concluded the Napoleonic wars, and the Paris Conference of 1919 that followed WW1 — the first a measured response that resisted calls for vengeance and led to a century of relative calm, the second a self-righteous attempt to impose a punitive settlement that produced a “victor’s peace” and resulted in disaster.
Since the appearance of harmony is one of its most effective weapons, a coalition can never admit that one of its members may represent a threat almost as great as the common enemy and perhaps an increasingly greater one as victories alter the relative position of the powers. Coalitions between status quo and acquisitive powers are always a difficult matter, therefore, and tend to be based either on a misunderstanding or an evasion.
Indeed, Morgenthau’s fingerprints were all over Kissinger’s first book. At the very start, Kissinger warned against policies based on good intentions and urged the pursuit of equilibrium through a carefully constructed balance of power that might be ethically unsatisfactory but never met the requirements of global stability. “Moral claims involve a quest for absolutes, a denial of nuance, a rejection of history.” Kissinger drew a distinction between force and legitimacy. Military methods were necessary in the heat of conflict, but short of extermination, they could never produce peace. “Force might conquer the world but it could never legitimize itself,” especially in the mind of a defeated and resentful enemy that might surrender its immediate claims but could not abandon what it considered its long-term interests. Legitimacy was not something that could be imposed; it was a function of national character, that which is “taken for granted.” States were more than mere collections of individuals. Again, history mattered.
It followed that the construction of peace could not be left to the generals. It was the work of diplomats, who practiced “the art of relating states to each other by agreement rather than by the exercise of force.” While advancing his own country’s interests, the statesman also had to demonstrate an understanding of his antagonists’ concerns, taking them into account. This way of thinking was viewed as traitorous by moral and nationalistic absolutists, but as Morgenthau said, “It is the task of statesmanship to settle disputes in such a way as to minimize the damage to the prestige of the parties involved,” all the parties. The diplomat was the hero of international relations, often unsung and unappreciated, frequently reviled by his own countrymen.
He took the long view. Yet his labors for stability and moderation met with hostility in Britain as, more and more, his work on the continent distanced him “from the spirit of his country.” Britain was an insular nation, proud of its isolation and exceptionalism; it wanted no part of European political intrigues or moral ambiguities. And where Castlereagh sought international engagement to guarantee national security, the British public demanded its withdrawal. Where Castlereagh worked to achieve an enduring peace with a former enemy, the people he was supposed to represent called for vengeance and humiliation. The difference was between a pragmatic statesman who understood the necessity for often unsatisfying compromise and a public that thought in terms of absolutes.
“No one after me understands the affairs of the continent,” he said to the king in 1822. A few days later he committed suicide. Many of his countrymen cheered.
After Kissinger became Nixon’s national security adviser and then secretary of state, a sympathetic Morgenthau expressed surprised that someone he thought he knew so well could exhibit such extraordinary diplomatic skills, able to act as an “honest broker” because he “has persuaded all concerned that he seeks only the satisfaction and reconciliation of their respective interests.”
This was an attempted bluff in a global poker game, and indeed the Soviets bought the bluff: they were willing to make backstage concessions by raising the annual quota of Jews allowed to emigrate. But Jackson and Congress overplayed their hand. For the Soviets, counting numbers behind the scene was one thing, publicly acquiescing to humiliation through American congressional pressure was quite another.
Moral considerations might offer boundaries for policy: “morality limits the interests that power seeks and the means that power employs.” Genocide, therefore, was unacceptable under all circumstances. But moral aims could not dictate policy — lest a natural inclination to view the enemy as “evil” foster genocidal tendencies of its own. Morality could not provide goals.
For many today, the second Iraq war is seen as no less futile and inimical than the war in Vietnam, but it too had the positive consequences of eliminating a vicious dictator and possibly preventing a dangerous nuclear arms race between Iraq and Iran. But no positives came out of Vietnam: the 58K Americans who lost their lives there may indeed be said to have died, as John Kerry put it, for a “mistake.”
But that is the conclusion of hindsight. To those who were actually immersed in the events and making the decisions that drew the country ever deeper into the quagmire, things looked very different. Each step along the way, however reluctantly taken, seemed to be the best choice available among a range of bad options. “In the context of Cold War assumptions, definitions, and constraints, the leaders’ choices always seemed foreordained.”
Dean Rusk, who had been an assistant to Secretary of State Dean Acheson in the Truman administration before becoming secretary of state himself under Kennedy, said in 1951 that Communist China was not an independent nation but merely a vassal of the Soviet Union. In 1968 he was still arguing that the North Vietnamese “took their orders from Moscow.” Naturally, he could view American protests against the war only as Communist inspired. How could anyone be opposed to “freedom”?
Asked why the Vietnamese Communists were fighting so well, Helm didn’t point to culture or local conditions or personal beliefs or what should have been a simple matter for a spymaster to understand, that is, the nationalist impulse to repel a foreign invader. It was “good brainwashing,” he said. In his anguished reassessment of his own role in fomenting the war, Robert McNamara said that he had failed to understand Indochina’s “history, language, culture or values.” And the same, he went on, “must be said to varying degrees about Kennedy, Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, Maxwell Taylor, and many others.” All were blinded by their rigid adherence to the Domino Theory and their belief that Communism was a monolithic, dehumanizing enemy.
Diem was a Catholic, with little or no support among the majority Buddhist population, but that didn’t stop Americans from fawning over him as an anti-Communist savior. He was called a “miracle worker,” the “Winston Churchill of Asia,” and a “modern political Joan of Arc.” On a visit to New York in 1957 he was honored with a ticker-tape parade and awarded the city’s Medal of Freedom by a doting Mayor Robert Wagner, who announced that Diem was a man “to whom freedom is the very breath of life.”
Ideology of any kind was, for him, merely a smoke screen that clouded people’s minds. When he examined the history of the Soviet Union, he noted the inability of the official ideology to match reality and Stalin’s pragmatic willingness to adjust Communist beliefs (or even abandon them when necessary) in order to deal with the facts on the ground.
Morgenthau detested Russian Bolshevism — it was, he said, an “oriental despotism” — but that didn’t preclude admiration for Stalin’s abilities in foreign policy. Building on Churchill’s observation that Stalin operated with “a complete absence of illusion of any sort,” Morgenthau wrote that “absence of illusion is indeed one of the marks of the statesman.” Stalin the pragmatist understood power, and he knew his limits. He also knew that although Communism might have a “quasi-religious” appeal to desperate millions around the world, it was ultimately the Red Army that assured the spread of Bolshevik ideology, and when ideology clashed with national interest, Stalin never had any hesitation about which option to choose. When the situation demanded it, he acted as a moderating force against his more extreme allies. (Kissinger held essentially the same view: Stalin was “a monster, but in the conduct of international relations, he was the supreme realist.”)
The Russians urged the Vietnamese to compromise and later suggested a permanent partition of the country, with both North Vietnam and South Vietnam represented at the UN. The Chinese were equally pragmatic. In 1954, Zhou Enlai told a French diplomat that “he had come to Geneva to make peace, not to back the [Communist] Vietminh.” The North Vietnamese never forgot about the untrustworthiness of their so-called allies; in the end, they could depend on no one but themselves.
That ideology counted for nothing at all was never Morgenthau’s position. Affinities mattered, and “neither of the two major Communist powers can afford to watch the destruction of a fraternity Socialist country” like North Vietnam. But ideological explanations took one only so far; in fact, both Russia and China supported Hanoi for the good Realpolitik reason that they were in competition with each other for influence across the Communist world. Perhaps the most extraordinary paradox, from Morgenthau’s point of view, was that Washington took Communist ideology more seriously than the Communists themselves did. Ever since the annus mirabilis of 1947, Washington had abandoned the pragmatism of containment for the dogma of the “free world.” In the topsy-turvy world of the Cold War, the Americans had become the ideologues, the Russians the Realists. This, Morgenthau remarked, was “one of the great ironies of history.”
In Morgenthau’s history of the Cold War, containment represented a Realist response to the threat that the Soviet Union posed to Europe. The Kremlin was pursuing traditional Russian aims (dressed up and reinvigorated as Communist aims) and the West reacted with a traditional balance-of-power response that it called containment. The only surprise in all this, Morgenthau noted, was that the US had shed its isolationist instincts as smoothly as it did to become a full and necessary participant in the preservation of Western Europe.
Things began to go wrong only when Washington became mesmerized by the idea of containment, a particular solution to a particular problem, and extended the policy beyond the confines of Europe to areas of the world where it had no relevance and was never intended to be employed. The notion of “the free world” eventually encompassed every well-intentioned, idealistic, opportunistic, authoritarian, or simply creepy anti-Communist residing in every corner of the globe.
The Truman Doctrine transformed a concrete interest of the US in a geographically defined part of the world into a moral principle of worldwide validity, to be applied regardless of the limits of American interests and of American power.
Thus did American pragmatism turn into its opposite, an ideology, a dogma of anti-Communism, the old, world-redeeming Wilsonianism now backed up with unprecedented American military might and a self-serving interpretation of history that promised a liberal millennium. This was a vision that was “missionary in theory and crusading in practice.” Just about everyone in Washington joined the anti-Communism crusade, though Morgenthau singled out John Kennedy for his failure to educate the public about the limits of power and the need to retreat from overextended commitments.
Because of the long history of rivalry between China and Vietnam, HCM had the potential to be an Asian Tito. He would “become the leader of a Chinese satellite only if the US forced him to become one.” By contrast, McNamara reported that Kenedy’s inner circle “equated HCM not with Tito but with Fidel Castro,” an ideologue who was attempting to spread revolution across Latin America. The difference was that Morgenthau was looking at international affairs through the lens of history and power relationships while McNamara and Kennedy’s advisers were looking through the lens of ideology and anti-Communist orthodoxy.
Policymakers had to distinguish, first, between what was essential and what was desirable and, second, between what was desirable and what was possible. Triumphalist American policymakers preferred to believe that if something was desirable, it was possible, with no sense of tragedy to their thinking. The prevailing anti-Communist dogma, with its ignorance of Vietnamese history and culture, had failed to make the necessary distinctions and was therefore bound to dictate a course that could lead only to “humiliation and catastrophe.”
Always the German-Jewish intellectual, Morgenthau saw intimations of totalitarianism in the Johnson administration’s efforts to silence him and other dissenters, as well as the willing conformity of most of the nation’s intellectuals.
He also said Morgenthau exhibited “congenital pessimism,” and he wasn’t wrong about that. A little of this hard-earned sense of tragedy might ave saved the US from self-inflicted disaster. As McNamara wrote years later, “It is very hard today to recapture the innocence and confidence with which we approached Vietnam.” The older, chastened McNamara offered a mea culpa about his earlier self: “I had always been confident that every problem could be solved, but now I found myself confronting that could not.”
Alsop wrote a column directed at Morgenthau that began: “One proof of the wisdom of President Johnson’s Vietnamese policy is its marked success to date.” But that success had generated criticism from credulous politicians like Fulbright and “pompous” professors like Morgenthau, whom Alsop labeled an “appeaser” in the mold of “the be-nice-to-Hitler group in England before 1939.”
For the student demonstrators, the US now fell into the “evil” category. The young protesters had passion but no analysis and were unable to formulate any responsible policy for Vietnam. They had allowed morality, or more accurately moralism, to do their thinking for them. Kissinger observed that at the start of the war, the supporters “did so in the name of morality. Before the war was over, many opposed it in the name of morality.” What was once good was now evil, but even if positions had changed, the thinking had not — it never lost its Manichean quality.
Those war supporters who followed the logic of their argument through were left complaining about a coddled and spoiled generation so different from what came to be known as the “Greatest Generation,” a growing decadence, an America gone soft, accompanied by Spenglerian laments about the decline of the West. Nixon thought that modern education was undermining the national spirit. “The more a person is educated, he becomes brighter in the heard and weaker in the spine,” and he said he thanked God that there were still “uneducated people” around to support him and the war. They were “all that’s left of the character of this nation.” Lincoln would have been “ruined” if he had had more education, Nixon said.
During the Nixon years, when he had ceased to be an architect of the war effort, a distraught McGeorge Bundy telephoned Kissinger to complain that he was unable to justify the war policy to his own son. A disgusted Kissinger told Bundy that he should tell the boy it was his father who had gotten us into this mess, and he angrily hung up.
With no genuine knowledge about Vietnam, both hawks and doves were operating out of preconceptions, grounded in generational experience and then applied to the facts at hand. In the case of the members of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, that experience rested on the rise of Hitler, the ill-fated Munich agreement, the purges in the Soviet Union, the grim sacrifices of WW2, the Holocaust, the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, the Communist victory in China, the continuing tensions over Berlin that threatened a new world war, and the North Korean invasion of South Korea. The danger of totalitarianism, first fascist, then Communist, was very real to them, shaping the visions of dominoes and the policies that followed.
The students who were out in the streets in the late 1960s and early 1970s hadn’t experienced any of that, but they had come of age when one of the fundamental tenets of the older generation had been thrown into question and then wholly discredited.
The protesting students had little inclination to pause and consider the lessons of Politics Among Nations and his other writings. There was a war to be opposed, not by carefully sifting through notions of national interest, balance of power, and the distortions of ideological thinking, but by taking a firm moral stand and sticking to it. The war was evil, and nothing more need to be said about it.
“Robert Kennedy was not reflective but emotional.” When he saw evil and suffering in the world, he felt he had to do something. “But since he was unaware of the ambiguity of moral judgments, he was also unaware of the moral and pragmatic ambiguity of the political act performed in emotional response to a moral judgment. His approach was morally fundamentalist and politically simplistic.”
A man who was nothing but “moral man” would be a fool. The students were “moral men” and proud of the fact.
The only times the Soviet Union has used the Red Army since WW2 have been against its own allies.
I found the tone and content of your article extremely painful. We have been friends for long enough so that one should be able to assume that in writing about each other we should avoid the crudest interpretations that can be made.
It wasn’t a happy arrangement. Kennedy failed to be charmed by Kissinger, who was frustrated by his lack of influence with the administration. He resigned after less than a year, complaining to friends that he was being treated as a “kibitzer.”
The German-Jewish intellectual, for whom conceptualization served as a prelude to action, was dismayed to discover that “there was no overall plan, no central concept.” The Americans didn’t know what they were doing. White House officials were optimistic about the war, members of the Pentagon were pessimistic, and top CIA officers were simply clueless.
He considered the American involvement a blunder of the first magnitude and Johnson’s military escalation a disaster. At his Harvard seminars, he said the only good news was that the US was too powerful to suffer the kind of military defeat the French had experienced at Dien Bien Phu.
Nixon had his own, Nixonian way of refuting the notion of monolithic Communism. In the privacy of the Oval Office he said, “No Communist trusts another Communist.”
As long as the rigid Leninists of North Vietnam had a hope for a military victory and the humiliation of the US, they were hanging tough. As the weeks became months and the months became years, the administration’s initial hopefulness and optimism turned into frustration, then desperation.
For the 2 major Communist powers, Vietnam was no longer a prize of the Cold War but an “irritant” or a “collateral issue”, standing in the way of their true national interests.
They had to ask themselves if reaching out to the Russians and Chinese mattered more than preserving a Thieu government that was irrelevant in the larger geopolitical picture.
The warning signs had been there all along, but Kissinger, caught up in a diplomatic rapture, had made the choice to ignore them, though “choice” may not be the right word for his exuberant mental state. After 4 agonizing years, he saw the glow of peace shimmering before him, and he galloped toward it, blind to any obstacles in his path. Nixon and Hai had warned him that Thieu might be a problem, but he didn’t hear them. “I was determined to do my utmost to preserve the prospect of peace against the passions that would soon descend on us.”
As Nixon began pulling back his support in the face of Thieu’s intransigence, Kissinger was left feeling isolated, his paranoia erupting into spasms of suspicion and self-doubt. “I began to be nagged by the perhaps unworthy notion that I was being set up as the fall guy in case anything went wrong.” The student of Morgenthau who had learned that diplomats were often unsung and unappreciated in their own time, the scholar of the Napoleonic wars who had traced Castlereagh’s tragic fate as his countrymen turned against him, was coming to know the loneliness of the statesman. “I’m uniting Vietnam. Both side are screaming at me.” Meanwhile, no one in the WH had his back. “Failure in Washington requires a sacrificial offering. I was the logical candidate.”
Bombing on a scale that had not been seen since WW2 began 4 days later, continuing until December 30 as outrage spread around the world.
But it wasn’t a policy, only a cry of frustration. Policy involves seeing a problem in all its dimensions, examining the pros and cons of different strategies (something neither Kennedy nor Johnson did), trying to estimate the consequences of any given decision (again a point neglected by Kennedy and Johnson), standing in the immediate present with no illusion or preconceived formulas, and trying to calculate the best path to follow, while taking into account Morgenthau’s admonition that in foreign policy, there are no good choices, only less bad ones. “It was rhetorically easy to speak of an abrupt unilateral withdrawal but as a practical matter it was nearly impossible to accomplish.”
But this military concern had to be an element in any plans for a withdrawal though it was not something the antiwar protesters gave any thought to.
At the start of the war, in 1965, there was broad support for Johnson’s escalation, reinforced by rally-round-the-flag enthusiasm whenever he was thought to be taking decisive action against the Communists. Nixon experienced the same bumps in popularity when he was seen as acting aggressively. The protesting students were not only a minority among Americans but also a minority among students.
Polls could take decision makers only so far because what American people said they believed did not add up to a policy. By the end of 1967, the war had become widely unpopular, yet an “overwhelming majority” continued to opposed any withdrawal that suggested defeat.
And in the most important poll of all, the 1972 presidential election, the voters resoundingly rejected the America-come-home message of George McGovern. The American people may have wanted to get out of Vietnam, but they wanted to get out on their own terms, however unrealistic. Even in 1990, more than a decade after the war ended, a Time magazine poll found that 57% thought the US should never have gotten involved in Vietnam in the first place, but about the same percentage thought that once in, “America ought to have employed all its power to prevail.”
Nixon himself was worried about disillusionment, an isolationist reaction against American involvement overseas that would weaken the country’s position in the world. “If we should lose here, the US will never again have a foreign policy. We don’t go fight anyplace.” There would be a general retreat from international commitments.
Given his background, Kissinger seemed less worried than Nixon about an isolationist retreat and more concerned about a stab-in-the-back myth brought on by a sudden American withdrawal that resulted in a more militaristic, even fascistic country.
You’ll still turn out to be the protection of the students who are rioting against you, even though they’ll never thank you for it, because the alternative to you in 1968 was not a liberal Democrat but a Wallace or a Reagan.
In his diary he wrote that he was “struck by the frenzy, the fervor, and the intensity of most delegates and practically the entire audience.”
They could attempt to push on to victory as the hawks wished, perhaps by employing nuclear weapons, which was the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or bombing North Vietnam’s dikes, which would have killed possibly hundreds of thousands of people and left Hanoi under 11 feet of water. Nixon and Kissinger could have pulled out immediately as the protesters demanded, the consequences be damned. Or they could have followed the policy they did in fact pursue. Despite Kissinger’s denial, the evidence is overwhelming that their chosen policy was to find a decent interval, a face-saving agreement that Washington could call “honor.”
The first was cold-blooded, callous, Realpolitik in its cruelest form. Honor, on the other hand, gave an ethical face to what the WH was doing, an impression not only to others but also to the decision makers that the US government was behaving decently, humanely, and living up to its obligations.
To withdraw abruptly in 1969 would, in their view, have been dishonorable. It would have meant that the deaths of 30K Americans to that date had been in vain. Their families would have been left with nothing, in effect inhumanely abandoned with an official shrug of the shoulder. And what of the South Vietnamese who had risked everything on the basis of American promises? They too would have been tossed aside as casually as if one were turning off a light switch. Great powers did not behave like that.
Secrecy? Hypocrisy? Duplicity? What was moral in that? Or honorable? Kissinger explained that the eventual agreement, even if others saw it as a sellout, allowed the bereaved families to “take some solace that it had not all been in vain,” and that result, he insisted, was “essentially moral.”
Finally, and most important of all, was the strategic component, which went by the name of “credibility” or “prestige.” America’s credibility in the world became an inevitable factor in any consideration of withdrawal once Johnson had decided to escalate the war. It was probably the most significant consideration in Nixon’s and Kissinger’s thinking, even if “prestige” and “credibility” were empty words to the war’s opponents and to numerous historians afterward, who dismiss notions of credibility as weightless abstractions, especially when measured against the palpable reality of dead American soldiers.
The commitment of 500K Americans had settled the issue of the importance of Vietnam. For what is involved now is confidence of American promises. However fashionable it is to ridicule the terms “credibility” or “prestige,” they are not empty phrases. A simple withdrawal or a settlement which unintentionally amounts to the same thing could lead to a loss of trust among America’s friends, an outburst of aggressiveness among its enemies, and a more dangerous international situation.
We have suffered long and hard, and God knows how do we get out of it. All it is, is a question of getting out in a way that to other countries — not the Chinese or the Russians so much, they don’t give a damn how it’s settled, just that we’re out — but to other countries, it does not appear that we, after 4 years, bugged out. That’s all we have to do.
Such estimations were open to debate over the particulars of America’s involvement in the world, but most of the war’s opponents weren’t interested in particulars or in debate. They were thinking in terms of moral absolutes, whereas Nixon and Kissinger were thinking geopolitically, or in what Nixon called “a great mosaic,” where no action in foreign policy could be taken in isolation because everything in the world was connected to everything else — not simplistically like dominoes falling but more like the organic interdependence of a skeleton or nervous system. Credibility was an abstraction, and it was difficult for any occupant of the WH to ask young Americans to risk their lives for an abstraction. But abstractions can have a reality of their own, and even if most of the American people were ill-equipped to think in such terms, there was a foreign policy elite whose members appreciated what the idea of credibility entailed. For those who had spent their lives studying international relations, credibility was an abstraction that was very real.
If the question is raised whether this kind of “face” is worth fighting over, the answer is that this kind of face is one of the few things worth fighting for. Whether one called it face or prestige or credibility, it represented a country’s reputation for action, the expectations other countries have about its behavior.
American generals didn’t like it because it placed the US in a defensive crouch — “no one ever won a battle sitting on his ass” — but more important, it depended on the compliance of the Vietnamese, both friends and enemies. Thieu would show in a few years just how difficult it was to bring a supposed ally on board with a plan that seemed to go against the interests of the Saigon government. What South Vietnamese leader would be prepared to negotiate what was, in effect, a suicide pact? And what would an enclave plan mean for the morale of the South Vietnamese army? As for the Communists, Morgenthau insisted that the Vietcong would have to refrain from attacking the enclaves if the plan was to work, and that was hardly a certainty or even a probability. Morgenthau never explained how the details of the enclave theory could be implemented, and on close examination, the Realist’s enclave idea looked anything but realistic.
de Gaulle posed the fundamental question to the new foreign policy adviser: “Why not withdraw?” Kissinger responded that “a sudden withdrawal might give us a credibility problem.” To which de Gaulle drily replied, “Where?” It was hardly a fair response because a unilateral American withdrawal would in fact have shaken countries across Asia from Japan to Singapore to Australia and would have raised doubts among vulnerable allies dependent on American power and reliability like South Korea, West Germany, Taiwan and Israel. Power vacuums invariably got filled by someone or in some way. How many of those countries would have embarked on programs to develop nuclear weapons as a replacement for the American security blanket? And what was more, as Kissinger never tired of pointing out, “It had taken de Gaulle 5 years to extricate France from Algeria and as an act of policy, not as as collapse.”
Any policy of withdrawal would have required what critics — and the troops in the field — would call meaningless sacrifice and needless deaths. There was no “correct” or “just” policy, only bad choices.
There was a tragic gap between South Vietnamese, fighting for their survival, and the US, desperate to find a way out. And there was a domestic gap too, an abyss really, between the leaders in Washington, obliged to think in strategic and geopolitical abstractions, and a generation that was being called upon to kill or be killed for no immediate reason they could fathom.
The statesman has no assurance of success in the immediate task, and not even the expectation of solving the long-range problem. Perhaps the only certainty was that every possible course of action was a bad one, which is why no one looking back on the Vietnam war can derive any sense of satisfaction. Innocent people were going to die in any case, and redemption was not in the offing for anyone involved. As Kissinger might have pointed out, that is the very essence of tragedy.
Kissinger’s popularity reached incredible heights, to levels pollsters had never seen before. ˆn 1972, Playboy Club bunnies voted the squat owlish professor with the kinky hair and sallow complexion the man they would most like to have a date with. Barbara Walter reported that he “made careers” for women who were seen with him. Two years later, the Miss Universe contestants went the bunnies one better, naming Kissinger “the greatest person in the world today.”
A joke made the rounds that Kissinger had better not die because then Nixon would become president. Whereas Kissinger was witty and engaging, winning over audiences and even a notoriously jaded press corps with masterful stroking, the stiff, uneasy Nixon possessed all the charm of a flat tire. Both men were duplicitous manipulators, but Kissinger was successful in his seductions, whereas deviousness was too obviously written across Nixon’s jowly face.
And once Nixon and just about everyone around him began drowning in the Watergate scandal, Kissinger became the irreplaceable last man standing, the only source of continuity in an anxiety-ridden time of tumult and uncertainty, a rock, an anchor. Foreign governments understood just how dangerous the moment was; even the Russians and Chinese refrained from provocative actions that might invite confrontation with an embattled, unstable Nixon and thereby undermine Kissinger. In the US Kissinger was turned into a father figure offering reassurance to a frightened child. The newscaster Ted Koppel said that he “was the best thing we’ve got going for us.” He had become “a legend.” He was “the WH genius in residence.” One congressman proposed a constitutional amendment so that the foreign-born Kissinger could run for POTUS.
A Newsweek cover showed him in a Superman costume. But not even Superman would have been able to sustain the kind of high-flying manic esteem Kissinger enjoyed. In its irrational exuberance, it had all the permanence of a Tulip Mania or some other financial bubble. The same nation that embraced him in an emotional catharsis would soon wake up to a cold morning-after and reject him as an appeaser or an incompetent or a villain or a war criminal.
The fall came practically overnight. “There was a time when Henry Kissinger could do no wrong. Suddenly, Kissinger was accused of doing nothing right.”
With the development of nuclear weapons in 1945, technology, not for the first time or last time, had outpaced strategic thinking. Policymakers had catching up to do. How did the awesome new power fit into the conduct of war? Could the weapons ever be used? And under what circumstances?
But Kissinger had the talent of someone who could look into the mind of the enemy — that is, with the empathy that comes from an absence of self-righteousness. One biographer has called “the intuitive and empathetic” Kissinger “the most psychologically minded of all foreign policy thinkers and actors,” a comment that will come as no surprise to anyone who has read Kissinger’s novelistically rich, incisive portraits of foreign leaders in his three volumes of memoirs.
Reviewers praised it as “thoughtful” and “challenging,” though Kissinger himself had no illusions about the shallowness of his surprise success. He thought his book one of those best sellers that people bought, and even discuss at cocktail parties, but didn’t read.
No one could deny his brilliance, but neither was it possible to ignore his arrogance or his ambition — even among a cohort of nakedly ambitious people. Kissinger himself commented on his “excessively intense personal style,” observing with modest understatement that “the capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait.”
He was “the typical product on an authoritarian background, devious with his peers, domineering with his subordinates, obsequious to his superiors.”
Kissinger’s outsized ambition was equally obvious to those who encountered him on his rise to the top. Fellow students, even his friends, called his determination to succeed “fierce.” An undergraduate roommate said the studied harder than anyone else, working until the early hours of the morning. Words like “drive” and “driven” were common in descriptions of the young scholar. Robert Dallek called Kissinger’s ambition “a ceaseless force.”
Even when he was a mere Harvard graduate student, he was laying the groundwork for later achievement, though his personal goals weren’t entirely clear to him at the time. He may not have known where he was going, but he was determined to get there.
Kissinger himself has said that the most he thought he could aspire to was a position as head of the policy planning staff in the State Department or as an assistant secretary of defense. But even after he had climbed as high as he possibly could without a constitutional amendment, scaling unimaginable heights, his ambition didn’t fade; it simply took a different form. An urge to dominate replace raw striving, and now, with power at his fingertips, Kissinger sought to shape events according to his own Realpolitik principles. He is reported to have told a friend: “What drives me is an awareness of the worth of my ideas and the hope of having an impact on society.” Kissinger put it differently in his memoirs: “There is no more important and personally fulfilling role than public service. No task on the outside can compare in significance.” In any case, he continued to be driven.
And these clashes over turf were matched by clashes of personality. Kissinger was a visionary who had brought a grand conception of foreign policy to his job. Part of his brilliance — and, some would add, a source of his limitations — was to see connection everywhere. “Foreign policy is a seamless web.” The long-term consequences of any decision were always on his mind. Rogers was more of a day-to-day, one-problem-at-a-time kind of guy, whose inability to think conceptually drove Kissinger the German intellectual crazy.
Bismarck one said, in an obvious reference to himself, that patriotism was a less important motive for statesmen than “the desire to command, to be admired and to become famous,” and the ancient Greeks saw nothing wrong with the pursuit of glory for its own sake. Kissinger did not deny the role that opportunism played in his own rise. “Anyone wishing to affect events must be opportunistic to some extent.” And as he wrote in his memoirs, personal vanity and a quest for power were not “entirely absent” form his motives. He was, after all, only human.
In any negotiation it is understood that force is the ultimate recourse. But it is the art of diplomacy to keep this threat potential, to commit it only as a last resort.” In short, “to the statesman, negotiation is the essence of stability.”
How could he go to work for a man who, he said, promised to be a “disaster”? Wasn’t this an unworthy, even objectionable use of his talent? What price was one willing to pay to be close to power? What sacrifices of personal honesty would be involved, not to mention personal dignity? Shortly before his meeting with Nixon, Kissinger was already pondering all this, even if nobody else was.
The commissar/bureaucrat was any administrator “whose world is defined by regulations, in whose making he had no part, and whose substance does not concern him, to whom reality is exhausted by the organization in which he finds himself.” The mentality of the commissar could result in the deaths of thousands, “without love and without hatred.” And even if the outcome was not murderous, the placeholder’s “impact on national policy is pernicious.”
Standing against this entrenched bureaucracy was the autonomous intellectual. Some intellectuals insisted on preserving their freedom by remaining outside the governmental apparatus, but these people Kissinger criticized for “perfectionism,” or for engaging in protest that “has too often become an end in itself.” Kissinger preferred the collaborators who chose public service. Intellectuals, Kissinger insisted, should “not refuse to participate in policymaking, for to do so would confirm the administrative stagnation.” Still, those who did choose public service had their own problems to deal with.
Faced with the demands of the bureaucracy, freethinking individuals were constantly in danger of giving up their independence and becoming cogs in the machine. “In his desire to be helpful, the intellectual is too frequently compelled to sacrifice what should be his greatest contribution to society: his creativity.”
We know that he hoped to continue to be an intellectual who advised on policy inside the WH while still living in the world of ideas and dealing in theories and abstractions; he expected to be able to avoid short-term problems. That expectation, he quickly learned, was a fantasy that could be imagined only by someone who had never had the responsibility of governing. Every problem, it turned out, was short term. There was no time for thinking. “The convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.” People, he observed, do not grow in public office.
Whereas Kissinger knew how to seduce and deceive, Morgenthau was always forthright and outspoken, which was not the way to get ahead in Washington. Once he declared his opposition to American intervention in Vietnam and aired his unorthodox views about Communism, he became persona non grata in policymaking circles. And as the war in Vietnam ground on, he was brought close to despair over his powerlessness.
It would hardly have been surprising if Morgenthau, like so many others, had resented Kissinger, not only for his success but also for the fact that his success had been achieved through the kind of dissembling and calculated ambiguity that did not come naturally to Morgenthau. Yet that wasn’t Morgenthau’s reaction. Kissinger, he said approvingly, was a “first-rate scholar” who was able to acquire and hold “great power with the same brilliance.” To be sure, Morgenthau acknowledged that Kissinger did “very little that was not oriented toward his personal power,” but personal advancement wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in his mind, and he admired Kissinger’s ability to operate successfully in the toxic, backstabbing environment that was the nation’s capital. Kissinger was no ordinary intellectual, helpless in the corridors of power. He knew how to adapt to the exigencies of politics.
Intellectuals were important to policymaking, providing concepts and perspective, but they operated on the basis of different values from politicians. Scholars engaged with ideas, their aim was to be as intelligent as they could and to present their arguments cogently. Statesmen had different goals. The intellectual seeks truth, the politician power. But Morgenthau was quick to add that this difference did not make the intellectual superior to the politician because power was an inescapable reality while the abstruse pursuit of truth carried burdens of its own. The politicians was obliged to deal with facts, not theories, and facts had a tendency to “make mincemeat of the wrong ideas.” Intellectuals could be very smart without necessarily being especially wise, or even wise at all. The politician required “practical wisdom,” whereas the scholar or intellectual “may be intelligent without being wise in the ways of the world.”
Unlike the intellectual, the statesman or politician could not afford to operate from a position of absolutes. The real world was contradictory, unpredictable, untamable, tragic. Morgenthau was fond of a comment of Goethe’s “that the one who acts is always unjust and that nobody has justice but the one who observes.”
Two qualities were essential to the statesman: a sense of limits and “a commitment to a grand design,” which gave his policies an overall purpose. Intellectuals did not necessarily possess either of these qualities, and the ability to combine intellectuality and power was rare indeed.
Morgenthau’s fourth course, perhaps the most difficult, was to participate in government, hoping to influence policy with the intellectual’s conceptual apparatus but accepting the restrictions with which officials were obliged to operate. The result could never be entirely satisfying because compromises with one’s theories were always necessary, sometimes painful ones. Policies always fell short of the theoretical constructs intellectuals came up with. The best that intellectuals in government could do to maintain their integrity was to try to put truth to the service of power, understanding that even if the achievement of perfect justice was never possible, they could still provide practical advice about the uses of power for legitimate ends. It was the job of the intellectuals in the WH to remind the president of the brittleness of power, of its arrogance and blindness, of its limits and pitfalls. For the intellectuals to lose sight of truth was to capitulate to power instead of serving it.
But with all the inevitable compromises and adjustments to reality, how was it possible to know if one had made so many concessions as to become a mere tool of power? It was, Morgenthau said, “only a small step” to the intellectual bankruptcy of capitulation.
Kissinger never stooped to personal attacks and tried to avoid public polemics altogether. More broadly, he was able to retain his integrity as an intellectual in government because for all of the criticism that might legitimately be directed against his particular policies, in the large scheme of things he always acted out of “deeply rooted convictions” as well as a coherent body of doctrine. There was substance behind all of the showmanship and celebrity. Morgenthau would have had no difficulty believing Kissinger when he wrote: “If the moral basis of my service were lost, public life would have no meaning for me.”
It was a quirk of Morgenthau’s analytic style always to break down a subject into components.
All ethical systems lacked foundation. Because abstractions were illusions in affairs of state as in life, all that the policymaker had to work with was the world as it actually was — the core of Realist thinking. There was no escaping it. Trying to force reality to match one’s ideals was a recipe for disruption at best, calamity at worst.
In such a world, where competition among states was never ending, problems could not be solved, only mitigated, and on those occasions when seemingly permanent solutions were found, new problems would inevitably arise to replace them. There was no end to it all, no cessation to the conflicts and contradictions brought on by individuals’ ubiquitous will to power, no prospect for eternal peace. Policymakers exhausted by their killing workloads could be left to feel that they were little more than corks bobbing in a sea of troubles. “The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance. There are no plateaus in foreign policy. Every achievement is purchased by new travail.” Because there were no resting places for a global superpower, the conduct of foreign policy was a full-time, 24/7 job, one that could be performed only by someone prepared to offer total dedication. If you weren’t ready to sacrifice your life to history’s obligations, you weren’t ready to be a player in the deadly game of international affairs.
Historians and other onlookers have expressed astonishment at Kissinger’s grueling work schedule — it leaves them “breathless.” He was at his job 14 to 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. And Kissinger demanded equal commitment from his staff, working them to exhaustion — literally. Lawrence Eagleburger did not have Kissinger’s Olympic stamina and, a few months after becoming his personal aide, he collapsed from overwork.
He understood that his image as a “swinger” was useful to him and he did his best to cultivate it, requesting that he be seated to the most attractive woman at state dinners, confident that he was the most charming personality in a charmless administration, until Nixon put a stop to it. But one frequent date said, “I just don’t think Henry was interested in sex,” and a historian who has surveyed the subject concluded, “All the available evidence points away from actual consummation.” As Kissinger told Hunebelle about his indifference toward material pleasures in general, “You have to live, that’s all.”
Working in the Nixon WH required not only Kissinger’s total dedication but also the kind of patient outlook that enabled him to endure a steady stream of reverses and humiliations, all part of the collaboration problem. Like Metternich and Bismarck before him, Kissing could be successful in pursuing his policies only if he possessed the skill to stroke the ego of the ruler who would ultimately be making the decision.
An effective statesman needed to possess a flexible mind that was in constant, acrobatic motion, always calculating the pluses and minuses of stating one’s opinion openly. How much could one protest without stepping over the line? Confronting Nixon directly was “almost suicidal.” One had to leave one’s ego at the Oval Office door and swallow countless small humiliations for the sake of the larger good. Pride was a self-destructive impulse, whereas Kissinger’s natural talent for manipulation served him well.
But there could be no reply when Nixon called Kissinger “Jew boy” to his face. It’s enough to make anyone cringe. Looked at from one angle, Kissinger’s silence was cowardice; from another it was the heroism of individual sacrifice for a higher good. It’s little wonder that he reserved his greatest admiration for principled survivors like Chou Enlai.
Kissinger quieted down, though as his national prominence grew throughout 1972, the year of the administration’s greatest foreign policy accomplishment, so too did Nixon’s irritation. Too much of the media spotlight was being shone on his national security adviser. At the end of 1972, Kissinger learned that Time magazine was planning to name Nixon and Kissinger together as its “man of the year,” setting off Kissinger’s self-protective alarm bells.
Nonetheless, the Senate was not about to reject the most popular man in America and voted its approval 78-7.
With his freedom to function at stake, passivity had ceased to be an option, especially in the nation’s capital, where “the appearance of the loss of power can quickly translate itself into the reality of it.” At a press conference, he threatened to resign unless his name was cleared.
Detente has been called “the centerpiece of Nixon and Kissinger’s foreign policy.” It was, Kissinger affirmed, “not a starry-eyed quest for cooperation for its own sake, but a method for conducting the geopolitical competition,” representing the unsentimental pursuit of American national interest while at the same time recognizing that there were limits to what Washington can achieve internationally. It was the Realists’ balance-of-power by another name. As Nixon put it, “We must remember the only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended period of peace is when there has been balance of power.”
As long as the US possessed overwhelming military might, it could feel free to assert its hegemony, pulling back, as in Hungary in 1956 or at the end of the Vietnam war, only when countervailing pressures proved too strong even for the world’s foremost power. Otherwise, it was push, push, push in then name of freedom, sometimes to the brink of war. But as the Soviet Union built up its own capabilities, it was only a matter of time before unreflective brinkmanship produced a world-threatening standoff.
But it was also important to recognize that there was a limit beyond which the Soviets would not let themselves be pushed. Whoever was in the WH had to walk a tightrope between confrontation and coexistence, possessing the empathy to grasp the vital interests of the men in the Kremlin by putting oneself in their place, even if such psychological sensitivity was condemned as appeasement by America’s blinkered jingoists. “Disagreements among sovereign states can be settled only by negotiation or by power. The nuclear age has changed both the significance and the role of power.” More than ever, it was important to be concerned with the best that can be achieved, not just the best that can be imagined.
History presented the depressing spectacle of continual warfare, endless enmity among nations and groups. But the development of nuclear weapons represented a profound break with the past. Human nature had not changed and people would continue to be willful, selfish, and aggressive, but without mechanisms of some kind to rein in their natural tendencies, the inevitable result would be nuclear catastrophe.
Even as the Soviets were engaging in a disturbing military buildup, their external and internal weaknesses were piling up, presenting an opportunity for mutual understanding. Kissinger pointed to the recent fragmentation of the Communist world as a sign that Moscow had lost political strength; it now had to worry about the growing hostility of the Chinese and the mounting insubordination of ideological allies and satellite nations. It was no longer “the arbiter of orthodoxy” in the Communist world. A joke made rounds in diplomatic circles that the Soviet Union was the only country in the world surrounded by hostile Communist regimes. Economically, too, the Soviet Union and the other Communist states had fallen far behind the West, with little prospect of catching up or meeting the demands of their restless populations through central planning.
“Time was on the side of the US, not of the Communist world.” Detente was not only Realpolitik by another name; it was also a continuation and extension of George Kennan’s containment policy. If containment was pursued, Kissinger was certain the West would eventually win the Cold War. Kennan himself remarked that Kissinger “understand my views better than anyone at State ever has.”
Detente, as numerous scholars have explained, flew in the face of long-standing American traditions and ingrained American prejudices. It was, one said, “almost impossible to market at home.” Detente, and the larger Realpolitik principles from which it sprang, required acquiescence in the Cold War status quo for the sake of negotiation and global stability. It meant compromising with Communist dictators in Moscow and Beijing instead of trying to overthrow them through regime change. Worse, it conceded that hostile governments would remain strong because a balance of power, not American dominance, was the pathway to peaceful negotiation of conflicts. Detente accepted that even enemies had legitimate interests. Nixon stated explicitly that a “strong, healthy” Soviet Union and China served the aims of American foreign policy.
In Kissinger’s way of thinking, victories and defeats merely led to other wars. Only a settlement without victory or defeat could create stability because America’s enemies would then be acting as agents in their own right, making choices that they perceived were advantageous to themselves. Critics complained that the Soviets agreed to detente only because it was in their interest to do so. Kissinger replied that the Soviets were not going to agree to anything that wasn’t in their interest. Compulsions imposed by a hostile power, even when possible, could produce only festering resentment. As Kissinger was later to say, “Absolute security for one side must mean absolute insecurity for all other sides.” The point was to find areas of agreement that were in the interests of both sides. These were frustrating, even “foreign” concepts that did not come naturally to the politicians in Washington.
The policy of detente asked Americans to opt for uncertainty and nuance over idealism and the pursuit of what they considered to be justice, to give up their utopian aspirations to spread democracy around the world, and to stop seeing rivals as immoral villains.
European statesmen faced with matters of national survival may have been dumbfounded by such hyperbolic utopianism, but Wilson understood his countrymen because he understood himself. He knew that if he was to ask them to shed their blood, he had to give them the grandest of reasons. The country may have been in the process of becoming part of world history, but intellectually and morally, it sought to remain outside of history. Narrow questions of self-interest would not suffice for the sacrifices it was being called upon to make. The US was not like other nations. It would engage in battle for the sake of transcendent, universal values, with the confidence that God, or at least history, was on its side.
Just about every one of these ideas, and all of the preconceptions behind them, went against Kissinger’s own beliefs and his policy of detente. He was ready to concede that Wilsonianism had its good points. “Some of the finest acts of 20th century diplomacy, such as the Marshall Plan and the defense of Western Europe, had their roots in the idealism of Woodrow Wilson. But at the same time, Wilsonian idealism has produced a plethora of problems, including such disastrous crusades as Vietnam.”
Peace, in Kissinger’s anti-Wilsonian, “amoral” view, was not the natural condition of humankind, freedom and self-determination would not necessarily lead to the resolution of differences, and conflicts could not be solved through an appeal to some sort of default moral consensus. Above all, democracy did not guarantee global peace and stability. History showed that democracies did indeed go to war against one another, and they could be as oppressive to their own minorities as any authoritarian regime, if not more so, as rival ethnic and religious groups seeking supremacy tore at each other’s throats. There was no avoiding the hard work and usually incomplete success of diplomacy and negotiation.
The domestic policies of those governments were not their concern, at least not publicly. They would deal with the devil if they thought there was some advantage to be gained — which was exactly what the critics of detente condemned them for. But by demanding a more “moral” policy, the new Wilsonians were led almost ineluctably to a more aggressive global posture in which the US was obliged to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Anything less was callousness or cynicism or selfishness.
To be sure, mere opposition to detente, with vague appeals to morality, did not add up to a policy, but the Wilsonians found their way forward in a simple phrase with enormous resonance. America’s mission in the world would be defined by its adherence to the cause of “human rights.”
For Kissinger, however, the issue was one of proportion. “How hard can we press” the Soviets, without reigniting the Cold War, especially because there was very little Washington could do to bring about internal reform. Domestic change would come through “evolution”, according to the Russians’ timetable, not the Americans’, and he made his familiar appeal to the dictates of the past: “We cannot demand the Soviet Union, in effect, reverse 5 decades of Soviet, and centuries of Russian history.”
Different countries had different values, different national objectives, and different security needs that the US could do very little to change and that required particular approaches to particular situations. Liberals tended to reject a foreign policy based on national interest, calling for more “unselfish” aims, but in a world of widespread human rights violations, the concept of national interest served a purpose by enabling policymakers to prioritize their objectives, choosing among often distasteful alternatives. With no sense of national interest, all that remained was “an undifferentiated globalism and confusion about our purposes.” Similarly, the use of military power made the left uncomfortable, even though it provided a concrete measure of limits, a useful calibration of what Washington could hope to accomplish in the world and probably was the closest one could come to quantifying what were ultimately judgment calls.
Kissinger pointed to a paradox. The liberals’ calls for human rights would have little or no impact on the Soviet Union or other powerful enemies of the US, who were often the worst offenders yet could afford to ignore humanitarian demands from Washington. But allies more dependent on the deployment of American power would be put in a difficult position if they resisted American demands to liberalize their societies, and vulnerable allies, facing immediate internal or external threats, would be in the most difficult position of all. Should America insist on human rights perfection from its friends because it was in a position to hector or pressure them? That was no way to build international coalitions against immediate enemies and would set the US on a path to isolation for the sake of moral purity. Few were the countries that could live up to the abstract standards of the humanitarian campaigners. “The ultimate irony would be a posture of resignation toward totalitarian states and harassment of those who would be our friends.”
Kissinger said he was not unmindful of the moral claims of foreign policy, but he argued that more could be done through behind-the-scenes discussions and pressures than through public and humiliating confrontations. “We have successfully used our influence to promote human rights. But we have done so quietly.”
The war was “evil,” meaning that those who prosecuted it were evil too, and no one was identified more with the war than Henry Kissinger.
The accusation of “war criminal” was an easy way for the left to avoid the responsibility of arriving at a “concept of enlightened national interest.” It made the conduct of foreign policy seem unambiguously easy. Everything came down to simple, emotive conclusions: peace was good, killing people was bad — even though peace was not the natural condition of humankind and killing people was something just about every postwar American president has been compelled to do.
The left saw foreign affairs as “social policy,” Kissinger observed, the right as the opportunity for “American hegemony.”
Of one thing Schalafly and Ward were certain: with his policy of detente, Kissinger had dramatically weakened the US, bringing the country to a condition of near-surrender vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. The SALT agreement gave the Russians “decisive strategic advantages,” even “potential fatal” ones.
For the populists, international affairs were a zero-sum game in which there could be only winners or losers. Concepts of compromises, coexistence, even empathy — detente! — were altogether alien to them; the trade-offs of diplomacy were a pathway to surrender. Kissinger’s chessboard strategies in a contest that he conceded could never end was “defeatism” at best, treason at worst. Only the US had interests that had to be respected; looking at things from the point of view of one’s adversaries, a Kissinger specialty, was the posture of weaklings because the job of the country’s leaders was to see to it that America prevailed on the international stage. “Why not victory?” was the question that Barry Goldwater had asked and that the populist right had adopted as its credo, but that one that had no place in Kissinger’s way of thinking.
Like the Schlaflys of the right, they believed that America’s global influence had been seriously undermined by the Nixon and Ford administrations. A “multipolar world,” they contended, was “far more dangerous” than one dominated by the US.
The populists applauded American power and a policy based on national interest, but they lacked a conceptual framework like Kissinger’s and Morgenthau’s Realpolitik to provide theoretical substance to their nationalism. In truth, they were little more than naifs, at sea when faced with the daunting complexities and multidimensional configurations of foreign affairs. With nothing but patriotic emotion to rely on, they did their thinking viscerally: as long as the country was militarily strong, global challenges would taken care of themselves. Having no taste for diplomacy, they were content to sing the national anthem at football games and wave the flag on July 4th, glaring suspiciously at anyone who didn’t.
What the neoconservatives could offer that the nationalist-populists could not was a world outlooked based on more than mere military power. In their view, Kissinger’s quest for international stability was a fool’s errand. As long as there were tyrannies in the world capable of challenging American democracy, there could be no global peace. That was why Washington had to be concerned about the internal politics of other countries, and why the proper course to pursue with the dictatorships of Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and Iraq was “regime change,” even if the tactics to be followed differed in each case. Anything else was appeasement.
“All serious foreign policy,” Kissinger declared, “begins with maintaining a balance of power,” but the neoconservatives countered that balance-of-power policies left America permanently vulnerable to its enemies and that detente was an “illusion.” It had to be replaced with what they called a “forward-leaning conception of the national interest.”
One of their number, Charles Krauthammer, argued for what he called “democratic globalism,” by which he meant “a foreign policy that defines the national interest not as power but as values.” And the “supreme value” was what JFK called “the success of liberty.”
The neoconservatives considered such an aspiration naive. For them, democracy would arrive not through international debating societies but on the heels of the US military. Force was a necessary component of democracy promotion, just as democracy promotion was a necessary component of American foreign policy. The neoconservatives may have been self-confessed Wilsonians, but, in their own language, they were “hard Wilsonians,” or Wilsonians “on steroids.”
Despite the insults and humiliations he had endured as Reagan rose to dominance in the Republican Party, despite his distance from policymaking circles during the 1980s and his well-known thin skin, Kissinger was to offer a retrospective assessment of the Reagan presidency that was multifaceted to say the least, negative and cautionary in may respects, positive, even admiring, in others. It was impossible to pin Kissinger down on the subject of Ronald Reagan, whom he called “an extraordinarily complex character.”
Reagan, he wrote, had a shallow intellect and little interest in the details of foreign policy. “He absorbed a few basic ideas about the dangers of appeasement, the evils of Communism and the greatness of his own country, but” — as the diplomat Kissinger explained in the most diplomatic of language — “analysis of substantive issues was not his forte.” The notion of balancing power was foreign to him. Global chess was not his game.
His admiration of Reagan was genuine, particularly what he saw as Reagan’s “uncanny talent” to rally the American people behind his policies. Reagan was a master democratic politician in a way that a German-born Jewish intellectual could never be. As Kissinger said, he lacked the political ability to articular a vision that could win widespread public support. “My skills were strategic analysis and diplomacy, not the essentially political task of mobilizing popular constituencies.” His intelligence, his wit, his self-depreciation were for refined tastes like those of the Washington press corps, not the millions of Americans who expressed their views at the ballot box. Irony did not play well on the hustings, and a dour sense of tragedy could scarcely compete with the sunny optimism of “morning in America.”
As a Realist like Kissinger, he spoke in abstractions about such things as a “structure of peace,” not the kind of language to win hearts and minds. Nixon was “probably too cerebral” for the American people. “Reagan had a much surer grasp of the workings of the American soul.” Nixon might inspire respect. Reagan inspired love.
Whatever his intellectual shortcomings, he demonstrated that “a sense of direction and having the strength of one’s convictions are the key ingredients of leadership,” not a complex mind or a high IQ. Millions of Americans identified on a personal level with Reagan, and none of them ever accused him of lacking decency; no one ever described Nixon as having it.
Reagan engaged in “an almost Machiavellian realism,” strategically seeking the collapse of the Soviet system and opposing Communist expansion around the world, tactically working with the Russians through multiple summit meetings for the cause of world peace.
But Kissinger had reached his own conclusion: in his estimation Reagan, far from being the anti-Kissinger, was actually Henry Kissinger in wolf’s clothing.
Zbig said much of the same thing: “As the experience of the Reagan administration shows, there is some real advantage to sustaining first a reputation as a hard-line orge and then softening one’s position.” Reagan’s tough talk during his first term gave him the “political cover” to act like George Kenna in his second.
Kissinger was charmed by Reagan’s good cheer and congeniality, and he came to trust Reagan’s instincts because, for all his hard-line rhetoric, he proved in actuality to be pragmatic, not ideological, a man of “common sense” and “goodwill.” Indeed, the intuitive Reagan may have been more far-seeing than his highly educated advisers in perceiving the brittleness of the Soviet system and understanding that a determined push from the US would send it over a cliff. By contrast, his VP, George H. W. Bush, who was far more experienced in foreign affairs than Reagan, said no one saw the collapse of the Soviet Union coming. Sometimes, it seems, Kissinger thought Reagan had a deeper grasp of the US-Soviet rivalry than the so-called experts around him; sometimes he wasn’t sure. But “in the end, it made no difference whether Reagan was acting on instinct or on analysis. The Cold War did not continue, at least in part because of the pressures the Reagan administration had exerted.”
Kissinger’s implication was that the liberal East Coast elites had to get over their contempt for anyone lacking their Ivy League credentials.
The danger of such triumphalism, Kissinger warned, was not only that it encouraged a “one-sided emphasis on military power” that was “impossible to sustain,” but also that it fostered a kind of national “smugness,” in which “assertiveness” replaced nuance, and hegemony in the form of “freedom” along with democracy promotion became the be-all and end-all of American foreign policy. It wasn’t the idea of democracy that won the Cold War, Kissinger insisted. To believe that was to indulge in “a version of escapism.” Communism collapsed because of its inherent weakness, aggravated, to be sure, by the pressures of the Reagan administration, which in turn were building on the containment policies pursued by every American administration since 1947 — and that, at their core, posited the eventual collapse of Communism. What waited a the conclusion of the Cold War, however, was not “a beneficent status quo” marking the victory of democracy and the end of history, but “virulent” forms of nationalism that would confront the US with a completely different set of problems, “a world for which little in its historical experience has prepared it.”
Unlike so many public figures, he was not about to go gently into that dark night that swallowed up so many retired American statesmen.
In 2014, scholars in international relations were asked to name the most effective secretary state of the last 50 years. Kissinger came first with 32% of the vote. Coming in a distant second was “don’t know.”
Far from emphasizing human rights as his boss did, Zbig channeled Kissinger, declaring that “I felt that power had to come first.”
Democratization was effective in Germany and Japan, he stated, because of the “total defeat of the adversary, long occupation and sustained American investment.” It could not be achieved on the cheap or based on the hope that freedom, as defined by Washington, was an aspiration of people everywhere. When Bush, in his second inaugural, proclaimed a worldwide campaign for freedom, Kissinger told friends that he was “appalled.” And after Bush declared that “freedom can be the future of every nation,” Kissinger called the idea “unmoored from realities.”
He liked the fact that Obama had shown himself to be a Realist by focusing on the national interest but worried that the president was too passive. “Obama prided himself most on the things he prevented from happening,” and he added that Obama lacked a vision for the future — a criticism that might be leveled against almost every aspirant for the WH following the end of the Cold War, particularly if one was looking for a Realpolitik framework to succeed the Reagan “sunset.” According to Kissinger, Obama’s foreign policy was too static, “operating automatically,” and he distinguished his own views in a way that most nonprofessionals would probably find too arcane or at least too abstract.
What was astonishing about this kerfuffle is that it occurred when Kissinger was 93 years old and had been out of government for almost 40 years.
Once he was out of power, Kissinger devoted himself to instructing the American power on the “correct” — that is, the Realistic — way of conceptualizing foreign policy.
He had always stressed the importance of the statesman’s role as an educator of the American public, if only because of the tension between democratic principles and the conduct of a rational foreign policy. A drawback of democracies was that they tended to judge international affairs according to their own domestic values. Indeed, they had “no other standard of judgment.” People living in open societies had great difficulty grasping that traditional authoritarian regimes were functioning according to principles grounded in their own histories and beliefs; in fact, nothing was more difficult for them to understand that the ordinary people of those societies shared those histories and beliefs. Even when revolution or civil war broke out over a government’s injustices, it was rarely the case that the division was between freedom-loving democrats and tyrannical oppressors.
In distinction to JFK’s Wilsonian pledge to “pay any price, bear any burden,” Nixon thought in the more restrained terms of a balance of power. “No American president possessed a greater knowledge of international affairs.”
As Kissinger explained, global events were compelling the US to make a transition from “dominance to leadership.”
Legislators, with their parochial concerns, were possibly the worst public officials to take account of any larger international picture, the give-and-take of diplomacy. Conducting foreign policy through Congressional fiat “translates into a take-it-or-leave-it prescription, the operational equivalent of an ultimatum.” When moral principles are applied without regard to historical conditions, the result is usually an increase in suffering.
What finally brought the slaughter to an end was not military victory but simple exhaustion. Treaties were signed collectively known as the Peace of Westphalia that established agreed-upon limits so that religious absolutism didn’t have to result in the wholesale extermination of peoples. This modern concept of sovereignty was born to resist the absolute claims of religion, allowing the nation-state as we know it to emerge, and along with it the study of international relations as something other than the interpretation of God’s will. The Peace of Westphalia did not promise an end to all hostilities. Regimes would continue vying for power, but they would do so according to a set of principles that served as a kind of lesser evil.
Under this new structure of nation-states, there could be no single guarantor of international peace because no one regime was powerful enough to exert its will over all the others. Just as the nation-state resulted in the pursuit of national interest, national interest resulted in the principle of balance of power. They were inextricably linked. “The concept of the balance of power was simply an extension of conventional wisdom. Its primary 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.”
The concept of balance of power was rare in human history, emerging in Europe in the 17th century because of its diversity and multiple sources of authority: it was “the only part of the modern world ever to operate a multistate system.” Asia and the Middle East were accustomed to religious or political centralized regimes exerting absolute dominion. For Morgenthau, a balance of power was “the only stability obtainable” in a world of diverse political systems, religions, and ideologies. It was “natural” and “as old as political theory itself.”
Not that a world order constructed through a balance of power didn’t have problems of its own, however “natural” it might be. Any balance of power was built on anxiety, not cooperation or good intentions, its cherished equilibrium fragile and unstable. “All nations live in constant fear.” Wherever one insecure ruler — and all rulers are insecure - believed he had achieved dominant power or believed that a rival was about to do so, he might launch a preemptive war. A balance-or-power system was always in danger of collapsing under its own weight. That was exactly what happened in the years preceding WW1, when the accommodations of diplomacy failed and “the nations of Europe transformed the balance of power into an armaments race.” As international conditions change, any balance of power needed to be “recalibrated,” but by the end of the 19th century, the system had become petrified with antagonistic blocs, conditioned by decades of suspicion, facing off against one another with mounting anxiety and hostility. Morgenthau once called diplomats “the brains” of international affairs. By 1914, a muscle-bound Europe, having decided, contrary to Realist teaching, that military might was the only force that really mattered, lost its head.
Undeniably, as Kissinger acknowledged, balance of power promised no ultimate solutions. It resembled a sword of Damocles hanging over the capitals of all nation-states. But what other possibility was there? Visionary one-worlders might yearn for a single sovereign state, a worldwide Pax Romana. But the only way of achieving a global state was through imperial conquest or some other assertion of brute force by the unifying power, corralling unwilling peoples into one governing body. Such a world state would be a totalitarian monster. “Hegemony is not in the American interest.” However benevolent America’s intentions might be (at least in the minds of its own citizens), the exercise of raw power “would gradually unite the world against the US.” Any effort to win the hearts and minds of the unwilling, as the dismal Vietnam experience showed, was bound to collapse in the face of clashing cultures and civilizations. Despite appearances, hegemonic aspirations were antithetical to the national interest. “Order must be cultivated. It cannot be imposed.” The diplomat would always have a more central role than the general in promoting peace.
Any voluntary agreement rested upon the agreement or goodwill of the participants, and no country, certainly no great power, had ever been willing to yield its sovereignty to a world authority. “The UN did provide a convenient meeting place for diplomats and a useful forum for the exchange of ideas. But it failed to fulfill the underlying premise of collective security — the prevention of war and collective resistance to aggression.”
Even if it promoted suspicions that constantly risked war, it also could produce equilibrium and rational relations among nations as each pursued its national interest and was understood by rivals to be doing so. It encouraged the use of reason and calculation to solve problems over the passions of patriotism, presenting the opportunity for world powers to agree to disagree without forcing the issue through arms as each carefully assessed the extent of its influence and power — and with “power” understood to be much more than simple military might.
Unlike the citizens of other nations, advancing national interest through a balance of power has always been repugnant to Americans. To explain why, he turned, as he invariably did, to the dictates of history. The US had grown into a great power under conditions that anywhere else in the world would have been considered artificial. In Darwinian terms, the US faced no natural predators and so was able to expand to fill all the space available to it.
It was a mistake to think of pre-European America as an idyllic wonderland of sweet harmony. As everywhere else around the globe, warfare was a constant of the New World, with the warrior a celebrated figure in his community, at least among those tribes likely to survive the Darwinian competition.
This was history in a petri dish, sanitized, unreal, and it decisively shaped the country’s conception of itself. Because the US didn’t have to concern itself with the rest of the world during its formative years, it could indulge the fantasy that the rest of the world didn’t matter; the only thing that did was homegrown values. The exceptional circumstances of American history were turned into a concept of American exceptionalism. What was actually the result of a passing historic constellation appeared to Americans as a permanent condition.
Kissinger summed up the American outlook as “the conviction that its domestic principles were self-evidently universal and their application at all time salutary; that the real challenge of American engagement abroad was not foreign policy in the traditional sense but a project of spreading values that it believed all other peoples aspired to replicate.” Inevitably, this resulted in a posture that was at once arrogant and missionary.
Even after the US was no longer able to ignore the rest of the world, it didn’t give up its power-denying idealism. The imperialistic ventures that followed the Spanish-American War were carried out with the best intentions in the eyes of the citizenry, with the pacification of the Philippines, which was achieved through torture and extermination, conveniently forgotten, and the two world wars interpreted in the grandest of terms; simple national interest wouldn’t suffice. Throughout the first part of the 20th century, the country oscillated between two extremes — intervention when it thought it could save the world and isolation when the world refused to be saved. In fact, the two extremes were part of the same self-serving perspective, with intervention justified to preserve American idealism and purity. Isolationism is a kind of introverted globalism, and globalism is a kind of isolationism turned inside out. All along, the country had to assure that it was a nation like no other. The US would be in the world but not of it.
A power vacuum had developed in war-devastated Europe, and Stalin’s armies had rushed in to fill it until Washington recognized the need for a counterweight. Balance-of-power thinking demanded nothing less. “The US had to become a European power.” One of the realities of global power is that “vacuums always get filled.”
The beginning of maturity in foreign policy lies in the understanding that a nation has certain unalterable interests which no government can abandon.
Whereas containment had implicitly rested on the concept that the conduct of foreign policy was “a process of never-completed fulfillment” with limited ends, Americans demanded that it have a final destination, a harmonious end-of-time that made all the sacrifices of blood and treasure meaningful. Otherwise, what was the point? Wouldn’t it have been better to retreat behind its two protective oceans as the country had done for a century and a half?
The Cold War had been almost made to order for American preconceptions. No one grasped this better than Ronald Reagan.
Kissinger, who conceded that he had no “previous experience with ethnic conflict,” could initially view Cyprus only through a geopolitical lens that had nothing to do with the facts on the ground. American calls for a “bizonal federation” proved ineffectual, and a resolution of the crisis arrived only through the power of the Turkish army, which established its own form of equilibrium by seizing about 35% of the island.
By the time he wrote his memoirs, Kissinger had come to understand that Cyprus was an ominous vision of the future in which the US would be faced with a contradiction between its Wilsonian principles. It could support majoritarian democracy (the Greek goal) or it could support ethnic self-determination (the Turkish one). It couldn’t have both — and unfortunately it had no clear moral basis for supporting one solution over the other. “Not every problem has a definite solution,” Kissinger wrote, and when he was asked what Cyprus portended for the next half century, he replied, “I’m glad I’m not going to be running part of it. It’s going to be brutal.”
The largest Communist power, China, was casting aside the teachings of Marx and Lenin (not to mention Stalin) for an improvised and pragmatic state capitalism, while other self-professed Communist regimes like Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea were each going their own idiosyncratic way and could hardly have been gathered under any single conceivable label; their so-called Communism had become a useless atavism in the post-Cold War world, bestowing at best a kind of sham legitimacy on shaky regimes with no real foundation.
In this new environment, the promotion of democracy as a goal of foreign policy often had little relevance to societies divided by identity and with no connection to the values of tolerance and reason that were a product of the European Enlightenment. The multitudinous, many-layered conflicts of the Middle East were not about democracy. The tragedy of Syria revolved around questions of who would govern, not how the domestic institutions of government would be arranged. And among the countries of Asia, “Democracy has not been their defining national experience.”
We may talk about international goodwill and mean what we say. But in the ultimate analysis, a government functions for the good of the country it governs.
In Asia, far more than in Europe, not to speak of the Middle East, the maxims of the Westphalian model of international order find their contemporary expression.
Yet if Marxism, as it was understood by Mao, was the official ideology of the state, the man who ruled that state with totalitarian ruthlessness was anything but a Marxist ideologue. He was not a universalist. Unlike Lenin, who hoped for and expected a global workers revolution, Mao pursued a nationalist “China-first” policy. He was less indebted to Lenin than to Sun Tzu, and “less likely to refer to Marxist doctrine than to traditional Chinese works.”
In no other country it is conceivable that a modern leader would initiate a major national undertaking by invoking strategic principles from a millennium-old event.
Power, strategy, and pragmatism, not ideology, would dictate the course of Sino-American negotiations.
On subsequent visits, Kissinger was amused that the Chinese took to lecturing him, of all people, on the importance of national interest. Like Kissinger, the Chinese approach to foreign policy was “conceptual,” understanding it as a process with no final solutions since the resolution of one problem invariably brought new problems to be managed. Because there could never be an end to it all, thinking had to be long term and systematic. Foreign policy had no destination. The only constant was national interest.
What the relationship lacked was a defining shared purpose, such as had united Beijing and Washington in resistance to Soviet “hegemonism.” Without the Soviet Union as a counterweight, disputes - over Taiwan, the South China Sea, Korea — had a greater chance of escalating out of control. Sooner or later, one side or the other would miscalculate.
China was a world unto itself, just as the US was a city on a hill. Both countries considered themselves polestars for humankind, not so much nation-states sharing the planet with other nation-states as ineluctable forces of global civilization with universalist aspirations. The difference was that the US approached others with missionary zeal for its democratic values, whereas China held back.
The beginning of truth is for both countries to recognize the legitimacy and values of the other, what he views as “a common bond.” That is, each has to see the other as it sees itself and accept the fact that there are differences between the two countries unlikely to be bridged in the foreseeable future. The key is to avoid turning those differences into threats that spin out of control. The Chinese need to understand that Americans will never give up their commitment to human rights. And the American must realize that the Chinese will never cease to worry about internal stability, that democracy represents for them not so much an expansion of freedom as a recipe for domestic disorder and chaos. If the US pushed for human rights above all other issues, “deadlock was inevitable.”
If these words sound surprisingly optimistic coming from a dour and ingrained pessimist, it is because the alternative is unthinkable. Statesmen like Kissinger may consider optimism in the international affairs fatuous, but unleavened pessimism can become self-fulfilling and catastrophic.
“Ambiguity is sometimes the lifeblood of diplomacy,” and leaders “need to be judged the the management of ambiguities, not absolutes.” The demand for “solutions” could be the enemy of peace. It was the abandonment of ambiguity that “started a sequence of increasing confrontations, culminating in WW1.” Europe’s leaders “had become habituated to the view that risk taking was an effective diplomatic tool.”
Cold War deterrence between the US and USSR depended in large part on the ability to affect the adversary psychologically, but if rogue states succeed in developing nuclear arms, the deterrence policies of the Cold War would no longer apply.
It took all of Shultz’s powers of persuasion to get Kissinger on board, yet the others knew that without the weight of his name, their article wouldn’t get nearly the attention they thought it deserved. “Whatever problems we have with Henry’s reluctance in some aspects of this mission, these problems are more than offset by the value that he brings to the group.”
The effort to abolish nuclear weapons was akin to climbing a mountain shrouded in clouds. We cannot describe it top nor be certain that there may not be unforeseen and perhaps insurmountable obstacles on the way. Still, that didn’t mean that the task wasn’t worth pursuing. This was not much of a strategy, but it was the best that could be hoped for.
Now it was not specific problems of foreign affairs that concerned him but the intellectual approach required of successful statesmen. This was his final lesson as a self-appointed educator of the American public, and it brought him back to the common themes of those German-Jewish exiles who shared his anti-ideological, anti-quantitative, existential outlook.
Computers, the internet, and other advances in communication had developed a momentum of their own; the thinking behind them was actually no thinking at all, only “the mindset of a researcher.” With unprecedented quantities of information available at the tap of a finger, policymakers were being drawn into a world in which the accumulation of facts was thought to solve their problems for them. Data were fetishized; reason, judgment, and reflection diminished. If answers weren’t immediately apparent from the information available, what was needed was more information.
What happens if technology has become such a part of everyday life that it defines its own universe as the sole relevant one? In this system there was little room for human will or agency or the cultivation of such human qualities as ambiguity and intuition. Hard facts bred a tyranny of their own that prioritized the immediate present over an understanding of the past or a sensitivity toward the future. Focus groups and opinion polls replaced individual decision-making and responsibility; the immediate headline-driven mood of the crowd overrode long-range perspective. Foreign policy was in danger of turning into a subdivision of short-term domestic politics in which the quest is for consensus, less by the exchange of ideas than by a sharing of emotions. The US was in danger of careening through crises without comprehending them. This was no way for a great power to engage with the rest of the world, least of all in a world armed with nuclear weapons.
At this point, one is brought face-to-face with a subject not frequently acknowledged, what might be called Kissinger’s Continental “humanism,” his fervent embrace of the role of human freedom in humankind’s affairs: autonomous individuals with all their experience, emotions, values, quirks, and foibles mattered more to him than the construction of models. Algorithms knew nothing of irony or tragedy.
It is always the individual who acts. Scientific standards were no substitute for political evaluations. What was commonly called rationality devalued thought and misconceived the nature of politics (which was always and everywhere about power). Politics must be understood through reason, yet it is not in reason that it finds its model. It was more art than science.
We expect everything from science, but technology as applied science threatens to destroy man. To break the momentum of the scientific imperative, which has given us medicine and poison gas, nuclear energy and nuclear bombs, demands human intervention, human will, a sense of value. There was no escaping decisions based on man’s place among others. “To be conscious of himself, of his fate in the world, is the specifically human quality in human existence.”
The successful conduct of foreign policy demands, above all, the intuitive ability to sense the future and thereby to master it. Great statesmen possessed sound instinct, foresight, a fingertip feel for the shifting currents of history. These were not qualities to be arrived at through statistical analyses. Facts required context and context demanded a vision “stretching into the indefinite future.” Kissinger knew he would make the confirmed rationalists uncomfortable with a quotation from Bismarck: “The best a statesman can do is to listen to the footsteps of God, get hold of the hem of His cloak and walk with Him a few steps of the way.” But what Kissinger took from Bismarck’s words was less the invocation of a deity than the expression of metaphysical humility, an understanding that mere humans would never know all they needed to know as they engaged in the dangerous game of international affairs. These gaps in knowledge were the spaces for instinct and intuition.
To move beyond the factual was to enter the realm of knowledge, which depended on conceptualization, reflection, and responsibility to sort out the significant detail from the voluminous data blinking through the computer screen. No amount of technical training could provide for this. Knowledge was not empirical, though it drew on the empirical; it came from the cultivation of the mind, developed through conversation and the free exchange of ideas as well as, and perhaps most of all, through reading and books. “Learning from books places a premium on conceptual thinking, the ability to recognize comparable data and eents and project patterns into the future.”
Today’s leaders lacked “cultural preparation,” which could be rectified only by “the study of history and philosophy, the disciplines most relevant to perfecting the art of statesmanship.” Future leaders had to engage with ideas that were “neglected elsewhere” — ultimate and transcendent questions about humankind’s destiny and the meaning of life. Like Leo Strauss, Kissinger seemed to be proselytizing for a curriculum of Great Books. Morgenthau, too, looked to the humanities, to art, religion, and philosophy, to deal with “those perennial problems” that science could not resolve but that provided the statesman with his context and his vision.
Morgenthau called wisdom “the approximation to justice which true statecraft discovers.” Kissinger no doubt agreed with Morgenthau that wisdom could not be taught like knowledge or accumulate like information; it probably could not even be defined with any precision, because it was “the gift of intuition.” Still, it could be recognized — you knew when you saw it. But that meant you had to be willing to see it, to grant that it exists. Because it was an elitist, hierarchical concept that didn’t fit comfortably into an egalitarian age (not everyone could be wise or could hope to be wise), Morgenthau lamented that the recognition of wisdom “has well-nigh disappeared from our culture.”
The wise statesman acted in the world but was shaped and guided by ideas beyond it; he relied on facts but was not captive to them. The source of his decisions, his organizing principles, came from within himself and was determined by his will, his consciousness, and his judgment. There exists in our society a widespread fear of judging. The genuine statesman had no choice but to judge, and judgment demanded character and courage, vision and determination, wisdom and foresight. and where did correct judgment come from? Insofar as policy depended on non-quantifiable choices, there was no avoiding questions of morality. All political actions implies thought of the good.
Power was a basic reality of existence, and it was much more than simple military might. It was an expression of governmental legitimacy, not force. It was an acceptance of authority without compulsion. Power was not a fixed concept; it depended on political and cultural context.
The Realistic statesman couldn’t afford to reason according to externalized moral principles. In the lawless, Hobbesian world of international affairs, the policymaker was always dealing with particulars and exceptions, specific problems situated in the immediate present. “Moral principles are universal and timeless. Foreign policy is bounded by circumstances.” The precept “thou shalt not kill,” for example, was of limited use in plotting a course of action in international affairs. (A more relevant maxim for the statesman would be “thou shalt not kill more than is necessary.”) There was something fundamentally “unprincipled” in the morality of the statesman, who as necessarily engaged with the here and now.
Insofar as the Realist statesman could speak of any abstract principle determining his decisions, it was national survival, which was his “first and ultimate responsibility.” Assessments of national interest and the need to balance power among competing countries grew out of this ultimate responsibility.
Accepting the limits of one’s capacities is one of the test of statesmanship; it implies a judgment of the possible.
Kissinger believed in employing power for limited ends rather than absolute ends. He also believed in:
- incrementalism rather than perfectionism
- continuity rather than upheaval
- pragmatism rather than idealism
- stability rather than justice
- the particular rather than the general
- the less bad rather than the unqualified good
- improvisations rather than solutions
- the hemmed-in restrictions of reason rather than the unleashed exuberance of emotion
- the possible rather than the desirable
- the imminent rather than the transcendent
- history rather than analytics
- partiality rather than completion
- process rather than goal
- the long term rather than the immediate
- the unpredictable and uncertain rather than the mechanistic and formulaic
Above all, he believed that it was necessary to accept evil in the world rather than attempt to eradicate it, and probably no conviction got him into more trouble than this one. He insisted that statesmen couldn’t afford to leap beyond messy actuality into a situation people wished were true.
Life might have no meaning in this godless universe, bu there was still meaningful work to be done, if only to prevent humankind from blowing itself up.
There was no way to avoid doing evil in the conduct of foreign policy, as even the most moral statesman was bound to commit inhumane acts. International relations was not a field for anyone seeking perfection or saintliness. Even the most ethically aware statesman emerged from this endeavors with dirty hands, and if there was any moral satisfaction to be gained from the occupation of diplomacy, it consisted in the possibility of choosing the lesser evil or doing the least evil possible — “as good as he can be in an evil world.”
My friend who said to me that Henry Kissinger was evil wasn’t wrong. All public figures in positions like his could be considered evil. But evaluating Kissinger’s career means that it isn’t enough to determine that he had made bad decisions, employing violence, even violence against innocent people. The question to be asked is whether those decisions had been more evil than they needed to be, and that question can’t be answered by falling back on abstract ideals or moralistic platitudes. It calls for a sense of the immediate situation and for analysis of what could be expected from any possible alternatives.
The very act of acting destroys our moral integrity. Whoever wants to retain his moral innocence must forsake action altogether.