Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.
Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy.
It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.
In crises the most daring course is often the safest.
We cannot always assure the future of our friends; we have a better chance of assuring our future if we remember who our friends are.
A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.
Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.
If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.
He warned Kissinger not to emulate “clevering” intellectuals and their bloodless cost-benefit analyses. Believing Kissinger to be “musically attuned to history,” he told him, “Only if you do not ‘calculate’ will you really have the freedom which distinguishes you from the little people.”
From these thinkers, Kissinger cobbled together his own view of how history operated. It was not a story of liberal progress, or of class consciousness, or of cycles of birth, maturity, and decline; rather, it was “a series of meaningless incidents,” fleetingly given shape by the application of human will. As a young infantryman, Kissinger had learned that victors ransacked history for analogies to gild their triumphs, while the vanquished sought out the historical causes of their misfortune.
Arendt worried that post-colonial nations, rather than choosing to copy American political institutions, were following the Communist script of economic liberation through revolution. Kissinger argued that the US needed to better broadcast its ideology, and he did so with an evangelical fervor that went beyond anything Arendt intended. “A capitalist society, or, what is more interesting to me, a free society, is a more revolutionary phenomenon than 19th-century socialism. I think we should go on the spiritual offensive.”
In an increasingly bourgeois society, diplomacy could no longer be tailored to the whims and rivalries of a royal court; prudent foreign policy required marshalling everything at a state’s disposal — public support, commerce, law — in order to project the image of power toward its rivals. The irony is that these doctrines were at root an attempt to codify something that their adherents believed Anglo-American statesmen already did instinctively. “We Germans write fat volumes about Realpolitik but understand it no better than babies in a nursery. You Americans understand it far too well to talk about it.”
For Morgenthau, war was not inevitable in international affairs, but the preparation for war was. Wars waged by realists would be less destructive than ones waged by idealists who believed themselves to be fighting for universal peace.
Instead of being shaped by wars of religion and the death spasm of the Holy Roman Empire, Europe’s international system was thenceforth based on independent nation-states, each sovereign over religion and other issues in its own territory. States would not interfere in the internal affairs of other states, and order would, ideally, be maintained by clever statesmen who focused on national interests and curated a balance of power.
Kissinger became an exemplar of the realist, as opposed to idealist, school of diplomacy, someone who believed that a foreign policy that is overly guided by moral impulses and crusading ideals was likely to be dangerous. “The most fundamental problem of politics is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.”
Kissinger was attacked my moral idealists of the left and, more notably, by the nascent neoconservatives and ardent anticommunists on the right. Reaction against his realism contributed to the elections of both Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan.
Kissinger ends his latest book on a different note, one of humility — a trait that for most of his career he was better at humorously feigning than at actually possessing.
It is not often that nations learn from the past, even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.
The state is a fragile organization, and the statesman does not have the moral right to risk its survival on ethical restraint.
It is one of history’s ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.
A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution and that too great an emphasis on total mastery over specific events could upset the harmony of the universe.
Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation — at least in the foreign policy world — depend on context and relevance.
In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.
Because complexity inhibits flexibility, early choices are especially crucial.
The war is just when the intention that causes it to be undertaken is just. The will is therefore the principle element that must be considered, not the means… He who intends to kill the guilty sometimes faultlessly shed the blood of the innocents.
In short, the end justifies the means.
I want to thank you for stopping the applause. It is impossible for me to look humble for any period of time.
Empires have no interest in operating within an international system; they aspire to be the international system.
Politicians are like dogs. Their life expectancy is too short for a commitment to be bearable.
“Woe to the statesman whose arguments for entering the war are not as convincing at its end as they were at the beginning,” Bismarck had cautioned.
Because information is so accessible and communication instantaneous, there is a diminution of focus on its significance, or even on the definition of what is significant. This dynamic may encourage policymakers to wait for an issue to arise rather than anticipate it, and to regard moments of decision as a series of isolated events rather than part of a historical continuum. When this happens, manipulation of information replaces reflection as the principal policy tool.
Policy is the art of the possible, the science of the relative.
If Chinese exceptionalism represented the claims of a universal empire, Japanese exceptionalism sprang from the insecurities of an island nation borrowing heavily from its neighbor, but fearful of being dominated by it.
What distinguishes Sun Tzu from Western writers on strategy is the emphasis on the psychological and political elements over the purely military.
For the greatest part of humanity and the longest periods of history, empire has been the typical mode of government.
In effect, none of the most important countries which must build a new world order have had any experience with the multistate system that is emerging. Never before has a new world order had to be assembled from so many different perceptions, or on so global a scale.
And history teaches this iron law of revolutions: the more extensive the eradication of existing authority, the more its successors must rely on naked power to establish themselves. For, in the end, legitimacy involves an acceptance of authority without compulsion; its absence turns every contest into a test of strength.
Realpolitik for Bismarck depended on flexibility and on the ability to exploit every available option without the constraint of ideology.
It is a melancholy fact that the countries which are most humanitarian, which are most interested in internal improvement, tend to grow weaker compared with the other countries which possess a less altruistic civilization.
Anyone wishing to affect events must be opportunist to some extent. The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.
Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union.
A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
The art of crisis management is to raise the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner that avoids a tit for tat.
Is the marketing effort designed to convey the candidate’s convictions, or are the convictions expressed by the candidate the reflections of a “big data” research effort into individuals’ likely preferences and prejudices? Can democracy avoid an evolution toward a demagogic outcome based on emotional mass appeal rather than the reasoned process the Founding Fathers imagined?
Order should not have priority over freedom. But the affirmation of freedom should be elevated from a mood to a strategy.
If chess is about the decisive battle, wei qi is about the protracted campaign. The chess player aims for total victory. The wei qi player seeks relative advantage.
For Roosevelt, if a nation was unable or unwilling to act to defend its own interests, it could not expect others to respect them.
Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The bargaining position of the victor always diminishes with time. Whatever is not exacted during the shock of defeat becomes increasingly difficult to attain later.
Any system of world order, to be sustainable, must be accepted as just — not just by leaders, but also by citizens. It must reflect two truths: order without freedom, even if sustained by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as independent. Can today’s leaders rise above the urgency of day-to-day events to achieve this balance?
Chess teaches the Clausewitzian concepts of “center of gravity” and the “decisive point” — the game usually beginning as a struggle for the center of the board. Wei qi teaches the art of strategic encirclement.
New methods of accessing and communicating information unite regions as never before than project events globally — but in a manner that inhibits reflection, demanding of leaders that they register instantaneous reactions in a form expressible in slogans. Are we facing a period in which forces beyond the restraints of any order determine the future?
The genius of this system, and the reason it spread across the world, was that its provisions were procedural, not substantive.
Especially when ultimate decisions of peace and war are involved, a strategist must be aware that bluffs may be called and must take into account the impact on his future credibility of an empty threat.
When statesmen want to gain time, they offer to talk.
The basic premise of collective security was that all nations would view every threat to security in the same way and be prepared to run the same risks in resisting it. Not only had nothing like it ever actually occurred, nothing like it was destined to occur in the entire history of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. Only when a threat is truly overwhelming and genuinely affects all, or most, societies is such a consensus possible — as it was during the two world wars and, on a regional basis, in the Cold War. But in the vast majority of cases — and in nearly all of the difficult ones — the nations of the world tend to disagree either about the nature of the threat or about the type of sacrifice they are prepared to make to meet it.
She had interviewed leading personalities all over the world. Fame was sufficiently novel for me to be flattered by the company I would be keeping. I had not bothered to read her writings; her evisceration of other victims was thus unknown to me.
Empires persist if repression gives way to consensus.
This body of thought represents an almost total inversion of Westphalian world order. In the purist version of Islamism, the state cannot be the point of departure for an international system because states are secular, hence illegitimate; at best they may achieve a kind of provisional status en route to a religious entity on a larger scale. Noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs cannot serve as a governing principle, because national loyalties represent deviations from the true faith and because jihadists have a duty to transform dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers. Purity, not stability, is the guiding principle of this conception of world order.
Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy.
The goal of the tribute system was to foster deference, not to extract economic benefit or to dominate foreign societies militarily.
Love of kindness, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by foolishness. Love of knowledge, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by loose speculation. Love of honesty, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by harmful candor. Love of straightforwardness, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by misdirected judgment. Love of daring, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by insubordination. And love for strength of character, without a love to learn, finds itself obscured by intractability.
Where Western strategist reflect on the means to assemble superior power at the decisive point, Sun Tzu addresses the means of building a dominant political and psychological position, such that the outcome of a conflict becomes a foregone conclusion. Western strategists test their maxims by victories in battles; Sun Tzu tests by victories where battles have become unnecessary.
The kowtow was symbolically voluntary: it was the representative deference of a people that had been not so much conquered as awed. The tribute presented to China on such occasions was often exceeded in value by the Emperor’s return gifts.
In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve it.
Still, China is not a missionary society in the Western sense of the term. It sought to induce respect, not conversion; that subtle line could never be crossed. Its mission was its performance, which foreign societies were expected to recognize and acknowledge. It was possible for another country to become a friend, even an old friend, but it could never be treated as China’s peer.
When urged to adhere to the international system’s “rules of the game” and “responsibilities,” the visceral reaction of many Chinese — including senior leaders — had been profoundly affected by the awareness that China has not participated in making the rules of the system. They are asked — and, as a matter of prudence, have agreed — to adhere to rules they had had no part in making.
The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that bequeathed to the 20th century’s decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.
Moreover, with every new conquest, the character of the state changed as it incorporated another brand-new, restive, non-Russian ethnic group. This was one of the reasons Russia felt obliged to maintain huge armies whose size was unrelated to any plausible threat to its external security.
Tradition matters because it is not given to societies to proceed through history as if they had no past and as if every course of action were available to them. They may deviate from the previous trajectory only with a finite margin. The great statesmen act at the outer limit of that margin. If they fall short, society stagnates. If they exceed it, they lose the capacity to shape posterity.
Its requirement of frequent daily prayers made faith a way of life; its emphasis on the identity of religious and political power transformed the expansion of Islam from an imperial enterprise into a sacred obligation.
When Germany declared itself ready to discuss an armistice, Wilson refused to negotiate until the Kaiser abdicated.
The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general equilibrium of power.
So long as strategic nuclear weapons were the principal element of Europe’s defense, the objective of European policy was primarily psychological: to oblige the US to treat Europe as an extension of itself in case of an emergency.
Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, told Ambassador Murphy that if Great Britain did not confront Nasser now, “Britain would become another Netherlands.”
To me there is not only right or wrong but many shades in between. The real tragedies in life are not in choices between right and wrong. Only the most callous of persons choose what they know to be wrong. Real tragedy comes from a dilemma of evaluating what is right. Real dilemmas are difficulties of the soul, provoking agonies, which you in your world of black and white can’t even begin to comprehend.
For the balance of power is never static; its components are in constant flux.
If there is a God, the Cardinal de Richelieu will have much to answer for. If not… well, he had a successful life.
Historically, alliances had been formed to augment a nation’s strength in case of war; as WW1 approached, the primary motive for war was to strengthen the alliances.
Yet after withdrawing from three wars in two generations — each begun with idealistic aspirations and widespread public support but ending in national trauma — America struggles to define the relationship between its power (still vast) and its principles.
Too many of our young were in rebellion against the successes of their fathers, attacking what they claimed to be the overextension of our commitments and mocking the values that had animated the achievements. A new isolationism was growing. Whereas in the 1920s we had withdrawn from the world because we thought we were too good for it, the insidious theme of the late 1960s was that we should withdraw from the world because we were too evil for it.
In recent decades, Europe has retreated to the conduct of soft power. But besieged as it is on almost all frontiers by upheavals and migration, Europe, including Britain, can avoid turning into a victim of circumstance only by assuming a more active role.
Balance-of-power diplomacy was less of a choice than an inevitability. No state was strong enough to impose its will; no religion retained sufficient authority to sustain universality. The concept of sovereignty and the legal equality of states became the basis of international law and diplomacy. China, by contrast, was never engaged in sustained contact with another country on the basis of equality for the simple reason that it never encountered societies of comparable culture or magnitude.
You must never forget that the unification of Germany is more important than the development of the EU, that the fall of the Soviet Union is more important than the unification of Germany, and that the rise of India and China is more important than the fall of the Soviet Union.
The president should ask, “What are we trying to achieve, even if we must pursue it alone?” and “What are we trying to prevent, even if we must combat it alone?” The answers to these questions are the indispensable aspects of our foreign policy, which ought to form the basis of our strategic decisions.
The world is in chaos. Fundamental upheavals are occurring in many parts of the world simultaneously, most of which are governed by disparate principles. We are therefore faced with two problems: first, how to reduce regional chaos; second, how to create a coherent world order based on agreed-upon principles that are necessary for the operation of the entire system.
- What are America’s perpetual, eternal interests?
- I would begin by saying that we have to have faith in ourselves. That is an absolute requirement. We can’t reduce policy to a series of purely tactical decisions or self-recriminations. The fundamental strategic question is: What is it that we will not permit, no matter how it happens, no matter how legitimate it looks?
I respect John Kerry for his courage and persistence. In Syria, he is striving for a coalition government composed of groups that have been engaged in a genocidal war with one another. Even if you could construct such a government, unless you identify a dominant actor, you have to answer this question: Who will settle disputes when they inevitably arise? The existence of a government does not guarantee that it will be perceived as legitimate or that its pronouncements will be obeyed. Kerry has come to understand that other pressures are needed to achieve the stated objective—a change from his position in the Vietnam War. The use of force is the ultimate sanction of diplomacy. Diplomacy and power are not discrete activities. They are linked, though not in the sense that each time negotiations stall, you resort to force. It simply means that the opposite number in a negotiation needs to know there is a breaking point at which you will attempt to impose your will. Otherwise, there will be a deadlock or a diplomatic defeat. That point is dependent on three components: the possession of adequate and relevant power, tactical willingness to deploy it, and a strategic doctrine that disciplines a society’s power with its values.
After its early years, America was lucky enough not to be threatened with invasion as it developed, not least because we were surrounded by two great oceans. As a consequence, America has conceived of foreign policy as a series of discrete challenges to be addressed as they arise on their merits rather than as part of an overall design.
Not until the post–World War II period did we begin to think of foreign policy as a continuous process, even in seemingly tranquil circumstances. For at least 20 years, we forged alliances as a way to put down markers as much as to design a strategy. Henceforth, we must devise a more fluid strategy adjustable to changing circumstance. We must therefore study the histories and cultures of key international actors. We must also be permanently involved in international affairs.
Kissinger himself puts it in this book: “In the past the major problem for strategists was to assemble superior strength; in the contemporary period the problem more frequently is how to make the available power relevant to objectives likely to be in dispute.”
Others, however, may enjoy a comparable access and even linguistic skill, but few others have the remaining necessary equipment. There is simply no substitute for insight, perception, sensitivity, and what simply has to be called “political sense.” These Kissinger has in abundance, and in this field the combination is rare. It is really hard to understand why they should be so rare. So many articulate people study international politics; so few of them grasp so well its essence — especially where issues of military significance are involved. The latter is indeed a most complicating factor, and Kissinger no doubt owes something to pure luck that he happened at the beginning of his academic career to turn his attention seriously and deeply to military problems. With his knowledge of military affairs goes, however, an even rarer thing, a sense for the implication of power — its potentialities and its limitations. He can speak of military force and its use without inducing a reviewer to remark, as one British reviewer once did in reviewing, on the whole favorably, Herman Kahn’s Thinking about the Unthinkable: “One sometimes wonders what has happened to Mr. Kahn’s sense of anguish.”
Kissinger is an extremely complicated guy. He is ungracious, he yells at his staff, he is intolerable in terms of human feelings. Dictatorial. ‘Get people here.’ ‘Have those people here,’ ‘Where are they?’ ‘Why do I need these papers?’ ‘Where are my papers?’ And yet all those petty little unpleasant characteristics fade away when you hear him discussing the world situation. He comes alive in public. Walk up the steps and the salute rings out from the PLA guard. He literally is so alive within, you can see it on the outside very clearly. He is like a politician with a roar of a crowd on election eve or the athlete running out at the 50-yard line just before the kickoff. The public turns him on.
“He does a first-class job on that whole press operation,” Bush assesed. But “clearly he is not an administrator.”
Kissinger said of Ford at his funeral, “According to an ancient tradition, God preserves humanity despite its many transgressions because at any one period there exist 10 just individuals who, without being aware of their role, redeem mankind.”
In addition to the history of ideas, Kissinger was as much interested in statesmen and statesmanship — and the role of the individual in managing and mitigating trends in international relations. The test of a statesman, argued Kissinger, was “his ability to recognize the relationship of forces and to make this knowledge serve his ends.”
What was more, Germans had also learned the wrong lessons from him. “They remembered the wars that had achieved their unity” but forgot “the patient preparation that had made them possible and the moderation that had secured their fruits.” German nationalism, he wrote, “unleavened by liberalism turned chauvinistic.” The exclusion of the liberals was also damaging. Liberalism without responsibility “grew sterile.”
The unification of Germany caused Realpolitik to turn in on itself, accomplishing the opposite of what it was meant to achieve.
The challenge of statesmanship was “to define the component of both power and morality and strike a balance between them.” This was not a one-time effort but required “constant recalibration.” It was as much an artistic and philosophical as a political enterprise and demanded a willingness to manage nuance and to live with ambiguity. The practitioners of the art must learn to put the attainable in the service of the ultimate and accept the element of compromise inherent in the endeavor. Bismarck defined statesmanship as the art of the possible.
“Putin, meanwhile, is a character out of Dostoyevsky. He is a man with a great sense of connection, an inward connection, to Russian history as he sees it.”
The Kremlin took it as a compliment. “Kissinger knows our country really well, he knows our writers and our philosophers so such comparisons from him are quite positive. He has deep knowledge, not superficial.”
Kissinger: To settle the Ukraine crisis, start at the end.
These are principles, not prescriptions. People familiar with the region will know that not all of them will be palatable to all parties. The test is not absolute satisfaction but balanced dissatisfaction. If some solution based on these or comparable elements is not achieved, the drift toward confrontation will accelerate. The time for that will come soon enough.
Ukraine has been independent for only 23 years; it had previously been under some kind of foreign rule since the 14th century. Not surprisingly, its leaders have not learned the art of compromise, even less of historical perspective. The politics of post-independence Ukraine clearly demonstrates that the root of the problem lies in efforts by Ukrainian politicians to impose their will on recalcitrant parts of the country, first by one faction, then by the other.
Once Kissinger moves to examples that his audience is more aware of, the emptiness of the idea of the “national interest” is laid bare. The phrase becomes almost tautological — states do best when statesmen do what’s best for them. The question that is glossed over is how to systematically discover what those true national interests are. Kissinger seems to think that some people have a talent for it and some do not.
Kissinger’s emphasis on national interest as a guide to policy — to the near exclusion of moral and humanitarian interests — irks many, but it offers a stable lens for guiding policy in a world where morality isn’t absolute. He believes that any world order is a web of international understanding providing a tenuous and fragile balance of current national interests, constantly threatened by changes in perceived interests and departures from agreed-upon rules, and not greatly affected by sporadic attempts to build good will — good will is fine but it doesn’t bring home the bacon. To Kissinger, a stable world order requires 2 things: legitimacy (the acceptance of each state by other states) and power (the ability to redress aggressions by individual states).