Henry Kissinger’s philosophy, deeply influenced by realist thought, centers on the complexities of international relations and the pursuit of national interest through practical and often pragmatic means. Key elements include:
- Balance of Power: Kissinger stresses the importance of maintaining a balance of power among nations to prevent any one state from becoming too dominant. This concept aims to ensure stability and peace by deterring aggressive actions through the presence of counterbalancing forces.
- Pragmatism Over Ideology: Instead of focusing on moral or ideological agendas, Kissinger advocates for decisions based on practical, strategic considerations. He believes that states should prioritize their own security and interests, often requiring a nuanced approach to diplomacy and statecraft.
- Diplomacy and Negotiation: Kissinger underscores the significance of diplomacy as a tool for managing international relations. He is known for engaging in back-channel communications and secret negotiations to achieve peaceful resolutions, as seen in his efforts with China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
- Realpolitik: A hallmark of Kissinger’s approach is realpolitik, which involves taking a pragmatic, often unemotional view of global politics. He supports the notion that the international system is anarchic, driven by power dynamics and the survival instincts of sovereign states.
- Strategic Alliances: Building and maintaining alliances is crucial in Kissinger’s philosophy. These partnerships help to bolster a state’s strategic position and serve as a counterbalance against potential adversaries. He values the practical benefits of alliances over formal commitments or shared values.
- Use of Force: While emphasizing diplomacy, Kissinger accepts the necessity of military power as a tool of last resort. He believes in using force strategically to uphold the balance of power and deter threats.
- Geopolitical Management: Kissinger emphasizes the management of geopolitical dynamics to prevent conflict. He supports careful orchestration of international affairs to address power shifts, such as the opening of China and détente with the Soviet Union, aiming to create a more predictable, less confrontational world order.
Because information is so readily available, people aren’t taught to sift through it critically—to figure out what’s truly important. It’s like having a library at your fingertips but no guide on which books matter most.
Policymakers, tempted by this flood of instant data, often delay action until a crisis hits instead of planning ahead. They lean on quick fixes or “manipulation” (spin, short-term tactics) rather than reflective, thoughtful strategies.
Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
If there is one recurring criticism of Kissinger, I tell him, it is that he goes to great lengths to preserve access to people in power at the expense of not speaking plainly in public. Isn’t now — of all moments — the right one to burn a bridge or two? Kissinger looks crestfallen.
While his choices were not without controversy, and his behavior — as he operated with single-minded intent to realize his vision — was sometimes maddening to colleagues, Dr. Kissinger was aware of who he was, and owned it. In his own words, “Accept everything about yourself — I mean everything. You are you and that is the beginning and the end — no apologies, no regrets.”
I want to thank you for stopping the applause. It’s impossible for me to look humble for any period of time.
The timeless challenge facing all diplomats, Kissinger observed, is having to make pivotal decisions when time is short, information is incomplete, and consequences are unknowable. Unlike the historian, the academic, or the analyst, Henry wrote, “The statesman is permitted only one guess; his mistakes are irretrievable.”
“What is right?” For Nelson Rockefeller this was the quintessential question, both naïve and profound, at once shaming and uplifting. It was the definition of his integrity. All that was twenty-five years ago. When that phone call came last Friday night, it seemed that our relationship had just started. And now, it was already over.
No one who did not have the privilege of experiencing Nelson’s selfless dependability, his infinite thoughtfulness, can possibly appreciate how desolate our life has now become. And yet we would not trade places with anyone; his friendship will be our badge of honor so long as we live.
He permeated our lives. He was always steadfast. He took enormous pride in the accomplishments of his family, of his friends and of his associates. He asked nothing in return except that they do their best, keep their faith, love their fellow man and set their sights in pursuit of honorable goals.
One of the few times he became impatient with me was over a decade and a half ago when I had just seen President Kennedy and reported that I had told him what I thought wrong with some particular policy. Did I have a remedy, Nelson wanted to know. And when I said no, he chided me: “You should always remember that a President is overwhelmed by problems. Your duty is to offer solutions.”
Some years ago, I said in an interview: “If I were in a position to choose a president, I would select George Shultz.”
George’s defining quality was his wisdom, which was frequently sought by presidents and caused him to be rotated through a succession of Cabinet posts until he became one of the most consequential Secretaries of State. George’s wisdom was of two types: the Greek phronesis, or practical judgment, considered by Aristotle as indispensable for statesmen; and the Hebrew chokhmah, or divine wisdom, for which Solomon prayed. Aristotelian wisdom is concerned with squaring means and ends; Biblical wisdom stresses the importance of choosing worthy ends.
As the decades went by, our paths diverged. Both of us remained true to our convictions, and they were not always the same. Arthur found occasions to express his reservations, though very rarely publicly and never confrontationally. It made no difference to my affection for him and my enormous respect for his work and for what he has contributed to our society. Nor did our differences affect his goodwill towards me. We went to each other’s major birthday celebrations. We met for an occasional dinner or lunch.
He was willing to confront the political leader’s fundamental dilemma that moral aims can be reached only in stages, each of which is imperfect. Morality provides the compass course, the inner strength to face the ambiguities of choice.
So Hans set out to understand what he considered the “real” world of international politics, not as he would like it to be but as he found it. He wrote his seminal work on Politics Among Nations, analyzing international relations in terms of power and national interest. He believed that a proper understanding of the national interest would illuminate a country’s possibilities as well as dictate the limits to which it could push its aspirations.
I would add to what Henry said that in addition to the urgent and the important, you try to keep your eye on the long-term trend lines because what is neither urgent nor important today might become one or the other by next year or the year after. And that’s a whole different set of skills that is required. I’m always reaching down into the building and saying, “What are we doing on energy security and independence? What are we doing to work with Europe so that they will come up with a common policy through the EU on their own energy needs? What are we doing on food security?”
So there’s a matrix of issues. It is exactly how I think about it: the urgent, the important, and then the long term.
I fundamentally agree-the relationship of the president and the secretary is absolutely key. The State Department has a tendency to insist on its prerogative that it is exclusively entitled to conduct foreign policy. My view is that when you assert your prerogatives you’ve already lost the bureaucratic battle. I saw the president every day when we were both in town because I felt it was absolutely essential that we thought along the same lines. I was lucky. I had extraordinarily close relationships with the two presidents I served. In fact, if one looks at the history of the secretaries of state, it’s rare. If they don’t have a close relationship, they don’t last.
Clinton:
What I have found hardest to balance is the amount of travel that is expected today. One would think that in an era where communication is instantaneous, you would not have to get on an airplane and go sit in a meeting. But, in fact, it’s almost as though people are more desirous of seeing someone in person.
Kissinger:
Because they have to have explained to them what is really being thought, which you can’t put through cables.
Clinton:
You can’t. And because press coverage, with all due respect, often raises fears and anxieties that are not rooted in any decision process. People sit around in capitals all over the world reading tea leaves, trying to make sense of what we’re doing. We have to go and meet and talk and listen, and it is a challenge to manage all of the relationships you have to manage when you’re on an airplane as much as I am these days. But that’s why having the trust and confidence of the president means that you can do the travel, check back in, report back in without worrying that you’re not on the same page because you’ve talked at length about where you’re headed before you go.
Because I started life as a professor, I was concerned with doctrines and theory. But professors have a hell of a time getting their concepts relevant to a contemporary situation. They don’t always understand that as a professor, you have all the time in the world to write your book. As a professor, you could come up with absolute solutions. As a secretary of state, there is almost no solution that you could achieve in one blow. You could only achieve it in a series of steps.
I would say the special experience of American wartime policy in the last 40 years, from Vietnam on, is that the war itself became controversial in the country and that the most important thing we need in the current situation is, whatever disagreements there may be on tactics, that the legitimacy of the war itself does not become a subject of controversy. We have to start with the assumption, obviously, that whatever administration is conducting a war wants to end it.
The disaster after Vietnam was that we would not support what had been negotiated. Whatever emerges in Afghanistan has to be supported, and it needs a legal framework internationally, and that couldn’t exist yet. I would think that it’s a big challenge that the secretary faces. But the debate ought to be in that framework and not “Do we want to end the war? How quickly can we end the war?” I take it for granted that the administration wants to end it as quickly as is at all possible. Why would they not?
Users of the internet emphasize retrieving and manipulating information over contextualizing or conceptualizing its meaning. They rarely interrogate history or philosophy; as a rule, they demand information relevant to their immediate practical needs. In the process, search-engine algorithms acquire the capacity to predict the preferences of individual clients, enabling the algorithms to personalize results and make them available to other parties for political or commercial purposes. Truth becomes relative. Information threatens to overwhelm wisdom.
Inundated via social media with the opinions of multitudes, users are diverted from introspection; in truth many technophiles use the internet to avoid the solitude they dread. All of these pressures weaken the fortitude required to develop and sustain convictions that can be implemented only by traveling a lonely road, which is the essence of creativity.
It may be impossible to temper those mistakes, as researchers in AI often suggest, by including in a program caveats requiring “ethical” or “reasonable” outcomes. Entire academic disciplines have arisen out of humanity’s inability to agree upon how to define these terms. Should AI therefore become their arbiter?
Through all human history, civilizations have created ways to explain the world around them—in the Middle Ages, religion; in the Enlightenment, reason; in the 19th century, history; in the 20th century, ideology. The most difficult yet important question about the world into which we are headed is this: What will become of human consciousness if its own explanatory power is surpassed by AI, and societies are no longer able to interpret the world they inhabit in terms that are meaningful to them?
Ultimately, the term artificial intelligence may be a misnomer. To be sure, these machines can solve complex, seemingly abstract problems that had previously yielded only to human cognition. But what they do uniquely is not thinking as heretofore conceived and experienced. Rather, it is unprecedented memorization and computation. Because of its inherent superiority in these fields, AI is likely to win any game assigned to it. But for our purposes as humans, the games are not only about winning; they are about thinking. By treating a mathematical process as if it were a thought process, and either trying to mimic that process ourselves or merely accepting the results, we are in danger of losing the capacity that has been the essence of human cognition.
The implications of this evolution are shown by a recently designed program, AlphaZero, which plays chess at a level superior to chess masters and in a style not previously seen in chess history. On its own, in just a few hours of self-play, it achieved a level of skill that took human beings 1,500 years to attain. Only the basic rules of the game were provided to AlphaZero. Neither human beings nor human-generated data were part of its process of self-learning.
The Enlightenment started with essentially philosophical insights spread by a new technology. Our period is moving in the opposite direction. It has generated a potentially dominating technology in search of a guiding philosophy.
Last December, the developers of AlphaZero published their explanation of the process by which the program mastered chess—a process, it turns out, that ignored human chess strategies developed over centuries and classic games from the past. Having been taught the rules of the game, AlphaZero trained itself entirely by self-play and, in less than 24 hours, became the best chess player in the world—better than grand masters and, until then, the most sophisticated chess-playing computer program in the world. It did so by playing like neither a grand master nor a preexisting program. It conceived and executed moves that both humans and human-trained machines found counterintuitive, if not simply wrong. The founder of the company that created AlphaZero called its performance “chess from another dimension” and proof that sophisticated AI “is no longer constrained by the limits of human knowledge.”
In the medieval period, people interpreted the universe as a creation of the divine and all its manifestations as emanations of divine will. When the unity of the Christian Church was broken, the question of what unifying concept could replace it arose. The answer finally emerged in what we now call the Age of Enlightenment; great philosophers replaced divine inspiration with reason, experimentation, and a pragmatic approach. Other interpretations followed: philosophy of history; sociological interpretations of reality. But the phenomenon of a machine that assists—or possibly surpasses—humans in mental labor and helps to both predict and shape outcomes is unique in human history.
Heretofore, the administration has urged China to press North Korea as a kind of subcontractor to achieve American objectives. The better—probably only feasible—approach is to merge the two efforts and develop a common position jointly pursued with the other countries involved.
Statements defining the U.S. goal as bringing Pyongyang to the conference table reflect the assumption that negotiations are their own objective, operating according to their own momentum, separate from the pressures that brought them about and are needed to sustain them. But American diplomacy will, in the end, be judged by the outcome, not the process. Repeated assurances that the U.S. seeks no unilateral advantage are not sufficient for countries that believe the Asian security structure is at risk.
Similarly, Japan’s history has been linked with Korea’s for millennia. Tokyo’s concept of security will not tolerate indefinitely a nuclear Korea without a nuclear capability of its own. Its evaluation of the American alliance will be importantly influenced by the degree to which the U.S. management of the crisis takes Japanese concerns into account.
A North Korea retaining an interim weapons capability would institutionalize permanent risks:
- that a penurious Pyongyang might sell nuclear technology;
- that American efforts may be perceived as concentrating on protecting its own territory, while leaving the rest of Asia exposed to nuclear blackmail;
- that other countries may pursue nuclear deterrent against Pyongyang, one another or, in time, the U.S.;
- that frustration with the outcome will take the form of mountingconflict with China;
- that proliferation may accelerate in other regions;
- that the American domestic debate may become more divisive.
Not the least significant aspect of Marshall’s speech was that it facilitated Germany’s reentrance into the community of nations as an equal partner. This is why in 1964, Adenauer, concluding his tenure as West German Chancellor, praised Truman for extending the plan’s provisions to Germany “in spite of her past.” The Marshall Plan, Adenauer said, made Germany “equal” to “other suffering countries,” countering for the first time the notion among the Allied powers “simply to efface Germany from history.” The plan gave Germany economic assistance but, more importantly, “new hope.” “Probably for the first time in history,” Adenauer said of Marshall’s speech, “a victorious country held out its hand so that the vanquished might rise again.”
But subsequent generations occasionally took too literally Marshall’s description of the plan as “technical,” emphasizing its economic aspects above all else. In the process, they ran the risk of missing its political, indeed its spiritual, component. When America engaged in nation building in other countries, it found that political legitimacy had different foundations. As the United States tried to establish international order beyond Europe, economies remained vital. But the resolution of civil conflicts followed a rhythm beyond, and more complicated than, economic development. At times, attempts to apply literally the maxims of the Marshall Plan fractured the unity of America at home. Civil wars cannot be ended by economic programs alone. They must be transcended by a more comprehensive political vision.
Amid these tremors, the debate regarding the determinants of U.S. foreign policy is reigniting. Realists judge the events from the perspective of security strategy; idealists see them as an opportunity to promote democracy. But the choice is not between the strategic and the idealistic. If we cannot combine both elements, we will achieve neither.
In that context we must face, and not fudge, the following questions: Do we stand aloof from these internal processes, or do we try to shape them? Do we back one of the contestants or concentrate on advocating electoral procedures (knowing that this may guarantee a strategically repugnant result)? Can our commitment to democracy avoid leading to a sectarian absolutism based on managed plebiscites and one-party rule?
In the summer of 1862, Otto von Bismarck was appointed minister- president of Prussia. His highest previous rank had been ambassador to Russia. He had never held an administrative position. Yet with a few brusque strokes, the novice minister solved the riddle that had stymied European diplomacy for two generations: how to unify Germany and reorganize Central Europe. He had to overcome the obstacle that Germany comprised 39 sovereign states grouped in the so-called German Confederation. All the while, Central European trends were warily observed by the two “flanking” powers, France and Russia, ever uneasy about — and tempted to prevent — the emergence of a state capable of altering the existing European balance of power.
Within nine years, Bismarck untied this knot in what Jonathan Steinberg, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, describes as “the greatest diplomatic and political achievement by any leader in the last two centuries.” He overcame the princes of the German states in two wars and rallied them in a third; won over public opinion by granting universal manhood suffrage — making Prussia one of the first states in Europe to do so; paralyzed France by holding out the prospect of agreeing to the French acquisition of Luxembourg, and Russia by a benevolent attitude during the Polish revolution of 1863. Bismarck accomplished all this “without commanding a single soldier, without dominating a vast parliamentary majority, without the support of a mass movement, without any previous experience in government and in the face of national revulsion at his name and his reputation.”
The man of “blood and iron” wrote prose of extraordinary directness and lucidity, comparable in distinctiveness to Churchill’s use of the English language. The embodiment of realpolitik turned power into an instrument of self-restraint by the agility of his diplomacy. He dominated Germany and European diplomacy from a single power base, the confidence of an aging king, without other institutional backing or great personal following.
Power, to be useful, must be understood in its components, including its limits. By the same token, ideals must be brought, at some point, into relationship with the circumstances the leader is seeking to affect. Ignoring that balance threatens policy with either veering toward belligerence from the advocates of power or toward crusades by the idealists.
Bismarck’s rationalism made him believe that he could distill a doctrine of self-limitation from an analysis of the nuances of power relationships. But power is the most difficult component of policy to analyze. Because its nuances eluded Bismarck’s successors and imitators, the application of his supposed lessons led to an armament race and World War I.
Bismarck was a rationalist, Hitler a romantic nihilist. Bismarck’s essence was his sense of limits and equilibrium; Hitler’s was the absence of measure and rejection of restraint. The idea of conquering Europe would never have come to Bismarck; it was always part of Hitler’s vision. Hitler could never have pronounced Bismarck’s famous dictum that statesmanship consisted of listening carefully to the footsteps of God through history and walking with him a few steps of the way. Hitler left a vacuum. Bismarck left a state strong enough to overcome two catastrophic defeats as well as a legacy of unassimilable greatness.
America’s exceptionalism finds it natural to condition its conduct toward other societies on their acceptance of American values. Most Chinese see their country’s rise not as a challenge to America but as heralding a return to the normal state of affairs when China was preeminent.
America historically has acted as if it could participate in or withdraw from international affairs at will. In the Chinese perception of itself as the Middle Kingdom, the idea of the sovereign equality of states was unknown. Until the end of the 19th century, China treated foreign countries as various categories of vassals. China never encountered a country of comparable magnitude until European armies imposed an end to its seclusion. A foreign ministry was not established until 1861, and then primarily for dealing with colonialist invaders.
America has found most problems it recognized as soluble. China, in its history of millennia, came to believe that few problems have ultimate solutions. America has a problem-solving approach; China is comfortable managing contradictions without assuming they are resolvable.
American diplomacy pursues specific outcomes with single-minded determination. Chinese negotiators are more likely to view the process as combining political, economic and strategic elements and to seek outcomes via an extended process. American negotiators become restless and impatient with deadlocks; Chinese negotiators consider them the inevitable mechanism of negotiation. American negotiators represent a society that has never suffered national catastrophe – except the Civil War, which is not viewed as an international experience. Chinese negotiators cannot forget the century of humiliation when foreign armies exacted tribute from a prostrate China. Chinese leaders are extremely sensitive to the slightest implication of condescension and are apt to translate American insistence as lack of respect.
Americans frequently appeal to China to prove its sense of “international responsibility” by contributing to the solution of a particular problem. The proposition that China must prove its bona fides is grating to a country that regards itself as adjusting to membership in an international system designed in its absence on the basis of programs it did not participate in developing.
The test of world order is the extent to which the contending can reassure each other. In the American-Chinese relationship, the overriding reality is that neither country will ever be able to dominate the other and that conflict between them would exhaust their societies. Can they find a conceptual framework to express this reality?
Each of those wars began with widespread public support. Each developed into a stalemate, in part because the strategy of guerrillas generally aims at psychological exhaustion. Stalemate triggered a debate about the winnability of the war. A significant segment of the public grew disenchanted and started questioning the moral basis of the conflict. Inexorably, the demand arose for an exit strategy with an emphasis on exit and not strategy.
The demand for an exit strategy is, of course, a metaphor for withdrawal, and withdrawal that is not accompanied by a willingness to sustain the outcome amounts to abandonment. In Vietnam, Congress terminated an American role even after all our troops had, in fact, been withdrawn for two years. It remains to be seen to what extent the achievements of the surge in Iraq will be sustained there politically.
The most unambiguous form of exit strategy is victory, though as we have seen in Korea, where American troops have remained since 1953, even that may not permit troop withdrawals. A seemingly unavoidable paradox emerges. The domestic debate generates the pressure for diplomatic compromise. Yet the fanaticism that motivates guerrillas—not to speak of suicide bombers—does not allow for compromise unless they face defeat or exhaustion. That, in turn, implies a surge testing the patience of the American public. Is that paradox soluble?
Every guerrilla war raises the challenge of how to define military objectives. Military strategy is traditionally defined by control of the maximum amount of territory. But the strategy of the guerrilla—described by Mao—is to draw the adversary into a morass of popular resistance in which, after a while, extrication becomes his principal objective. In Vietnam, the guerrillas often ceded control of the territory during the day and returned at night to prevent political stabilization. Therefore, in guerrilla war, control of 75 percent of the territory 100 percent of the time is more important than controlling 100 percent of the territory 75 percent of the time. A key strategic issue, therefore, will be which part of Afghan territory can be effectively controlled in terms of these criteria.
Concurrently, a serious diplomatic effort is needed to address the major anomaly of the Afghan war. In all previous American ground-combat efforts, once the decision was taken, there was no alternative to America’s leading the effort; no other country had the combination of resources or national interest required. The special aspect of Afghanistan is that it has powerful neighbors or near neighbors—Pakistan, India, China, Russia, Iran. Each is threatened in one way or another and, in many respects, more than we are by the emergence of a base for international terrorism: Pakistan by Al Qaeda; India by general jihadism and specific terror groups; China by fundamentalist Shiite jihadists in Xinjiang; Russia by unrest in the Muslim south; even Iran by the fundamentalist Sunni Taliban. Each has substantial capacities for defending its interests. Each has chosen, so far, to stand more or less aloof.
I have generally found that the best negotiating approach is to put before the other side a full and honest account of one’s ultimate objectives. Tactical bargaining – moving through a series of minimum concessions – tests endurance via peripheral issues. But it runs the risk of producing misunderstanding about ultimate purposes. Sooner or later, the fundamental issues have to be addressed. This is particularly necessary when dealing with a country with which there has been no effective contact for three decades.
The tripling in the price of oil from $30 a barrel in 2001 to more than $100 today represents the largest transfer of wealth in human history. The 13 OPEC members alone are expected to earn more than $1 trillion this year from oil sales. Inevitably, this must bring with it major political consequences. Not the least significant aspect of this political and economic earthquake is that it is exacted from the world’s most powerful nations by some of the world’s weakest. Yet the victims stand by impotently as if the price of oil were some natural event determined by a competitive economic market that is uninfluenced and uninfluencable by political forces.
But the price of oil is not determined in a traditional competitive market. Major producers like the members of OPEC can and do raise or lower the price of oil by reducing or increasing their rate of production. And since today’s oil price also reflects expectations of future supply and demand, these monopolistic suppliers are able to manipulate and compound the volatility of the market by statements about their future intentions.
In the United States, oil is used primarily as gasoline for vehicles. Only about one-third of oil consumption is for non-transportation uses, primarily in petroleum-based chemical firms. Outside the U.S., oil is primarily used for heating and electricity generation. Coordinated policies should therefore focus on reducing U.S. gasoline use, while foreign countries could contribute by shifting from oil to hydro, clean coal technology or nuclear power to generate electricity.
Putin remains powerful and highly influential. He is seen by most Russians as the leader who overcame the humiliation and chaos of the 1990s when the Russian state, economy, ideology and empire collapsed; Russia’s economic recovery depended on foreign assistance; and Russia’s foreign policy was passive.
The evolution into a Russian form of democracy is not foreordained, of course, and the motivations for it have not necessarily been produced by theoretical reflections on the nature of democracy. But neither was the democratic evolution in the West. After all, the Magna Carta was a document designed to guarantee the rights of the aristocracy, not of the people at large.
With respect to the long term, ever since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, a succession of American administrations has acted as if the creation of Russian democracy were a principal American task. Speeches denouncing Russian shortcomings and gestures drawn from the Cold War struggle for pre-eminence have occurred frequently.
Proponents of such policies assert that the transformation of Russian society is the precondition of a more harmonious international order. They argue that if the current Russia is kept under pressure, it will eventually implode just as the Soviet Union did. The policy of assertive intrusion into what Russians consider their own sense of self runs the risk of thwarting both geopolitical as well as moral goals.
There are undoubtedly groups and individuals in Russia who look to America for accelerating a democratic evolution. But almost all observers agree that the vast majority of Russians consider America as presumptuous and determined to stunt Russia’s recovery. Such an environment is more likely to encourage a nationalist and confrontational response than a democratic evolution.
The rise of China – and of Asia – will, over the next decades, bring about a substantial reordering of the international system. The center of gravity of world affairs is shifting from the Atlantic, where it was lodged for the past three centuries, to the Pacific. The most rapidly developing countries are in Asia, with a growing means to vindicate their perception of the national interest.
China’s emerging role is often compared to that of imperial Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, the implication being that a strategic confrontation is inevitable and that the United States had best prepare for it. That assumption is as dangerous as it is wrong. The European system of the 19th century assumed that its major powers would, in the end, vindicate their interests by force. Each nation thought that a war would be short and that, at its end, its strategic position would have improved.
Only the reckless could make such calculations in a globalized world of nuclear weapons. War between major powers would be a catastrophe for all participants; there would be no winners; the task of reconstruction would dwarf the causes of the conflict. Which leader who entered World War I so insouciantly in 1914 would not have recoiled had he been able to imagine the world at its end in 1918?
Another special factor that a century ago drove the international system to confrontation was the provocative style of German diplomacy. In 1900, a combination of Russia, France and Britain would have seemed inconceivable given the conflicts among them. Fourteen years later, a bullying German diplomacy had brought it about, challenging Britain with a naval buildup and seeking to humiliate Russia over Bosnia in 1908 and France in two crises over Morocco in 1905 and 1911.
Military imperialism is not the Chinese style. Clausewitz, the leading Western strategic theoretician, addresses the preparation and conduct of a central battle. Sun Tzu, his Chinese counterpart, focuses on the psychological weakening of the adversary. China seeks its objectives by careful study, patience and the accumulation of nuances – only rarely does China risk a winner-take-all showdown.
China, in its own interest, is seeking cooperation with the United States for many reasons, including the need to close the gap between its own developed and developing regions; the imperative of adjusting its political institutions to the accelerating economic and technological revolutions; and the potentially catastrophic impact of a Cold War with the United States on the continued raising of the standard of living, on which the legitimacy of the government depends. But it does not follow from this that any damage to China caused by a Cold War would benefit America. We would have few followers anywhere in Asia. Asian countries would continue trading with China. Whatever happens, China will not disappear. The American interest in cooperative relations with China is for the pursuit of a stable international system.
Attitudes are psychologically important. China needs to be careful about policies seeming to exclude America from Asia and our sensitivities regarding human rights, which will influence the flexibility and scope of the U.S. stance toward China. America needs to understand that a hectoring tone evokes in China memories of imperialist condescension and that it is not appropriate in dealing with a country that has managed 4,000 years of uninterrupted self-government.