Kissinger and the Westphalian State: Still Faithful After All These Years

This must surely be the swansong, the final reflection of a lifetime’s thought and action, by the grand old fox who, more than any of his presidents, shaped US foreign policy. Now in his 90s, time is not on Kissinger’s side for another great tome. That in itself would be enough to understand the reverence with which the book has been received in the US, but it is also clear that it is seen as the beginning of a revisionism in US foreign policy, a recognition of a multi-polar world, an admission at last that the US can no longer dominate, or credibly seek to dominate all international relations.

Even in the UK, Rana Mitter saw hints of Edward Said in Kissinger’s thought that the world was no longer to be orientalised and dangerous because of being enigmatic and exotic. The world was no longer within Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilisations. ¹ Mitter, a reader of Kissinger’s manuscript in draft, may be forgiven – having been witness to a change in Kissinger’s thought. But orderly statecraft is still a hallmark of the new work. Kissinger would have no boot with General David Richards’ bravura new book, with the account of how, on a moral point, he disobeyed orders in Sierra Leone. ² Nor with Jonathan Powell’s new book on talking to terrorists ³ – whether or not Powell, as David Cameron’s special envoy to Libya may be, as some of Libya’s multifarious factions claim, talking to the ‘wrong’ terrorists. The point here is that he is not talking to states or state organs, and that David Richards makes a case for ignoring orders of state. For Kissinger, the state remains the centre-point of all his assumptions of a working international universe. It is not a multiverse in which a non-state actor, even one calling itself a state, like Islamic State, can attract dialogue – or have its moral claims recognised in even the sketchiest of manners, before repudiation or, at best, quarantine.

The book works hard to be revisionist of extant US policy, to the point just before radicalism – but always pulls back. It shirks the final step. Palestine is a case in point. Here, Kissinger looks to ‘the possibility of a practical coexistence in which part of the West Bank is granted the attributes of sovereignty pending a final agreement’. ⁴ This is such a conditional halfway house that it essentially seeks a postponement of resolution, and the reason for this lies in Kissinger’s distrust, not of the Palestinians, but of their Arab state supporters – who have, he says, a different and ‘Islamic’ view of the world order. To the contrary, Israel is a Westphalian state – and Kissinger sees the Islamic state as being differently founded in conceptual and operational senses to the Westphalian model; even though Arab states like Saudi Arabia function as if Westphalian states in an almost entirely Westphalian state system. It would seem that US allies, like Saudi Arabia, are allies without being full adherents to the world in which the US sits. This is the essential tension Kissinger diagnoses in his book – a Westphalian and Islamic contradiction on the central issue of how states are organised internationally. To this extent it is more sophisticated than Huntington’s clash of civilisations, but it is still essentially dyadic, binary, and laden with the possibility of simple oppositions in sophisticated dress. It does not resist, therefore, the opportunity embraced by Huntington to configure the world as a struggle that features essentially, if complexly, a two-actor game.

For Kissinger, some version or other of a two-actor world has always anchored his sense of international equilibrium. ⁵ That equilibrium was the cornerstone of both his academic work and his statesmanship. The celebrated rapprochement with China was not only important in itself (and to China, as it allowed its Four Modernisations to have a global ambition unfettered by previous Cold War restrictions) but it allowed the US to view the world as a balancing act in US/USSR terms. That balance would produce equilibrium. Kissinger enthused about the Chinese statesmanship he encountered, especially as personified by Premier Zhou Enlai; ⁶ but, as his new book illustrates, his view of how the Chinese viewed states and the state system is as problematic as his view of the Islamic state and state system.

Kissinger looks at two Islamic variants of world order: that of the Ottoman Empire and what he sees as descendant representatives of that order, such as Saudi Arabia; and that of revolutionary Iran. His key opening sentence on the Iranian revolution is that Khomeini’s doctrine ‘was unlike anything that had been practised in the West since the religious wars of the pre-Westphalian era’. ⁷ He grants an original reformative and democratic impulse in the revolution, but views this as having been overwhelmed by the clerical triumph – notwithstanding the fact that, as Fred Halliday pointed out, this was a most middle-class revolution; ⁸ and, as such, imposed a constant tension within rule and acceptance of rule by the Ayatollahs. Not only that, but the Ayatollahs had to accomplish an intellectual project by incorporating the work of Shari’ati into their own version of the revolution. ⁹ The Iranian constitution, while purportedly that of a theocratic state, is one littered with exceptional clauses – to accommodate a modernity that did not exist in earlier Shia jurisprudence. ¹⁰ So that to ascribe a primarily, almost exclusively, theocratic character to post-revolution Iran is an act of reductionism. A ‘strongly theocratic’ character would have been an acceptable description, but even that is not in itself a determining character.

After a lengthy disquisition about theocratic character and, in this case, its intolerance, Kissinger proceeds to an analysis of Iranian nuclear capacity and ambition. Granted his book was probably complete before recent negotiating successes, but there are two elements to be considered – one of which he mentions, and the other which he does not. He mentions that ‘Iran has brought exceptional skill and consistency to bear on’ what he calls ‘its proclaimed goal of undermining the Middle East state system’. The proclaimed goal is a rhetoric and mirrors Western rhetoric towards Iran. The key words are ‘exceptional skill’, and this exists too in Iranian statecraft and diplomacy. Iran has run rings around Western diplomatic efforts to constrain its ambitions. Such diplomatic skill, for a state that does not accept a Westphalian system, while excelling in its key medium of exchange and negotiation, provides a tension within any easy acceptance of Kissinger’s view. What Kissinger doesn’t mention is of course the Iranian view precisely of equilibrium. A nuclear-capable Iran establishes a balance and equilibrium with a nuclear-capable Israel. Kissinger as the Grandmaster of Equilibrium must at least smile at being hoist a little on a petard he helped construct. None of this is to excuse an Iranian regime which has heinous policies in many respects – not least towards its own citizens. But it is worth pointing out, as Giandomenico Picco did (the former UN Assistant Secretary-General who negotiated the release of several Western hostages from Shia kidnappers), that the latter-day Western world has not seen a major Shia atrocity wreaked against it. ¹¹ Picco’s implication was that the Iranian and other Shia religious leaders have, after all the Kissinger-esque analysis that preceded Kissinger’s book, in fact stepped up to the Westphalian plate and declared limits to how and when to conduct what Kissinger calls ‘undermining’. The same is not true of the Sunni world, with which Kissinger has simultaneously a far more positive as well as also a wary view – even though so many US alliances and interests have been tied up, propagated, and financed in the Sunni world. This becomes a key test of Kissinger’s reputed seeing the world anew. In what we have looked at thus far, his view reiterates the caution and one-eyed nature of US interests and their continuity. However, since the Shah, Iran has not been an ally – but Saudi Arabia is. And Saudi Arabia is seen by some as playing a double game of being a US ally while financing, or allowing its oligarchic families to finance, Jihadist and Wahhabist insurgents in theatres that destabilise, if not US interests, long-term US commitments and expenditures. The precedent is of course the oligarchic Saudi, Osama Bin Laden, who launched 9/11 from Afghanistan. In the current epoch, Iraq is the case in point.

In his book, mentioned earlier, General David Richards calls Iraq ‘a grand strategic error’ – although it is unclear whether he means a strategic error that was grand in its consequences, or an error in grand strategy. The distinction is important, as Kissinger essentially speaks in terms of grand strategy. When this is erroneous or flawed, much leadership and credibility fall away. What Kissinger proposes US grand strategy should rest upon is indeed a recognition of Saudi Arabia which has not hitherto been made explicit in US policy. Kissinger writes, diplomatically but explicitly: ‘It has attempted to co-opt radically resurgent Islamic universalism by a tenuous amalgam of modern statehood and Westphalian international relations grafted onto the practice of Wahhabism, perhaps the most fundamentalist version of the faith, and of subsidizing it internationally’. ¹² Implicit, if not explicit, in this is a support of a clash with the West – and possibly risking a turning of the Wahhabist sword against Saudi Arabia itself. Because Saudi Arabia is Wahhabist in at least partial core, a contradictory core, the conflict with Shia Iran is ‘existential’. ¹³ The enactment of existential conflict in Iraq, with proxy governments and proxy insurgents (Kissinger wrote of Al Qaeda, i.e. he wrote before Islamic State burst onto the scene, to the dismay even of elements within Al Qaeda), is part of this existential conflict. But this means, and here Kissinger finally nuances his Westphalian affections and commitments, the conflict is ‘both religious and geopolitical’. ¹⁴ The secularity of the Westphalian system is what, in fact, is now in existential peril – at least in the Middle Eastern theatre. And, as noted above, if Saudi Arabia is torn into ambivalence between Wahhabism and Westphalianism, Iran according to Kissinger is the theocratic nightmare of Westphalian dreams. He is un-nuanced about Iran, as I suggest above, but Kissinger is at least correct to admit, grudgingly but clearly, that the Westphalian world as he and the US would like to see it is no longer fully triumphant.

Kissinger sees a history of four great world orders: those of the US and Europe are two; that of Islam (even if sub-divided into Sunni and Shia) is one; and the other is Chinese. Kissinger has always been effusive about what he discovered in China. What now, in this new book, is his judgement? He begins with a peroration from Mao: ‘The cycle, which is endless, evolves from disequilibrium to equilibrium and then to disequilibrium again. Each cycle, however, brings us to a higher level of development. Disequilibrium is normal and absolute whereas equilibrium is temporary and relative’. ¹⁵ Kissinger’s anticipation of his first meeting with a Mao who believed the absolute nature of disequilibrium must, therefore, have been fraught. It was Zhou Enlai who revealed the Chinese historical depth and its marriage to a contemporary ambivalence to Kissinger. ¹⁶

Kissinger’s reaction was to form a view of great historical grandeur with a contemporary chip on the Chinese shoulder – born of Western imperialism and the rigours of adapting to a globalisation which China now, notwithstanding ambivalence, would seek to command. But the sense of grandeur, in Kissinger’s estimation, has not gone away. Here there is a certain shallowness to his Chinese view. There never was one historical China. Dynasties waxed and waned. Invaders came and were domesticated. North and south and a myriad kingdoms contended. Outlands were peripheralised and absorbed – not all successfully. The idea of an everlasting central kingdom is a conceit – a deep conceit to be sure – but it masks purposefully a Han nation which has had immense misfortunes and fluctuations. Even the Communist Government and Party Kissinger encountered were there because of military victory over other contenders. Rana Mitter has written masterfully of three simultaneous Chinese governments in the years of the Japanese occupation ¹⁷ – and all were Chinese yet very individualistically so. The syncretic beliefs behind the Taiping uprising of the 19^th century have distant but echoing resonances in the Falun Gong of today ¹⁸ – fully Chinese in its eclecticism from a disparate range of things called Chinese or reinvented to be called Chinese, but an admixture which defies a fixed centrality of rule. However, through all of this, China has successfully maintained an identity by virtue of an easy contradistinction with the identities of all beyond China. It was an almost mythical construct of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The project of the Chinese Government today is to render ‘them’ not mythical but transactable, and it is here, on an operational level, that Kissinger should rightly find Zhou’s ambivalence. Zhou had after all studied and worked in France. If he didn’t find Kissinger a peasant, he and Mao probably found Nixon so, but were too polite to say it.

Kissinger rounds off his contemporary sense of the Middle (or Central) Kingdom with the caveat that the US would not like to see any Chinese hegemony in China’s own East Asian region (even though this would be helpful in constraining the gnomic eccentricities of North Korea and the dangers that spin from them), but is happy that there is ‘something approaching a balance of power… between China, Korea, Japan, and the United States, with Russia and Vietnam peripheral participants’. ¹⁹ He notes the US is geographically far away, but notes not at all China’s purchase of much US toxic debt and other fiscal instruments – so that, in effect, China is part of the balance of economic power and interests within the US. Zhou’s operationalisation is gaining pace. And that is, I think, a key limitation of Kissinger’s Westphalianism: it is geopolitical and secular, and it is not as discussed earlier confessional, and it is not an economic construct. When Kissinger talks about balance of power and the equilibrium that comes from it, he still means a balance of strategic political and military power in which the US remains the key weight on the other end of anybody’s see-saw.

But there are at least other see-saws, and some may not be orthodox and may require unorthodox modes of balance and weighting. And that is the refreshing thing about this book. This is evident in Kissinger’s effort to discourse on a digital age. It is an old man’s effort to recognise a new phenomenom – but a spirited and willing one. He cannot resist, however, comparing cyber-optimism (mass communication and mass transparency) to Woodrow Wilson’s aspirational open world. ²⁰ Wilson, however, spoke of open conduct by states, and cyber-optimism depends on citizens overcoming the constraints of states. It is surprising he does not really discuss cyber penetration by one state of another. But his view of citizens at least is jaundiced. Too much sharing of information could lead to social consensus that is formed without context, formed by shared passions, and foreign policy distortions might result. ²¹ Certainly many instances of US media attitudes towards Muslims (blanket antipathy), towards ebola (blanket panic), and once upon a time towards Communists (blanket perceptions of reds under every Rhode Island and Hollywood bed) are not shining spots in the US lexicon of how to perceive the world. But this is a phenomenom with many uses and citizen action is only one. Voter mobilisation by political candidates is another. Propaganda campaigns a third. And, of course, the vast global electronification of all commercial transactions a fourth. Kissinger seeks, even in the digital world, a nostalgia for order and even domestic equilibrium behind the democratic process. What then of Kissinger’s view of a future? Is this beyond nostalgia? Does he here say something new?

Yes and no. To the end, Kissinger hankers after a Westphalian restoration, but he makes the excellent point that Westphalia ‘dealt with methods of allocating and preserving power; it gave no answer to the problem of how to generate legitimacy’. ²² In a 20^th century world exhausted from great world wars, its reach was extensive but threadbare. Kissinger goes on, in surprisingly lay language, to outline one of the great theoretical concerns of International Relations as an academic discipline. ‘Since the Renaissance the West has been deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer… The Westphalian peace represented a judgement of reality – particularly realities of power and territory’. By great contrast, in other ‘civilizations’, ‘reality was conceived as internal to the observer, defined by psychological, philosophical, or religious convictions’. ²³ It has taken Kissinger the better part of his book to say this, although, as outlined above, he constantly skirts near, around, and over the contrast of ‘realities’ he now makes explicit. So he concludes that world order may be changed by a profound shift in the balance of power – by a disequilibrium – or by redefinitions of legitimacy. It is here that Rana Mitter’s loose comment about Kissinger coming closer to Edward Said resonates. Other views of legitimacy may, at least, no longer be exoticised, no longer ‘orientalised’. But the task, therefore of a great statesman is to find a balance, not of power between Westphalian states, but between power and legitimacy. One assumes that, here, Kissinger thinks of himself as the last hero riding one last time towards a slow sunset, but with sunrise assured for the grateful citizens.

But, even here, he cannot let go of Westphalia. Europe cannot succeed because of its commitment to soft power and humanitarian values. ²⁴ Here, he echoes precisely the critique of Europe aired by Robert Kagan, who described Europe as contemplating a false international paradise whereas the US contemplated and used power, ²⁵ but goes further by saying that this kind of claim to legitimacy requires a strategy – which Europe does not possess. Kissinger’s strategy is a departure from the US being the world’s policeman, enforcer, leading bearer of the torch of liberty. But the US can establish a strategy that will lead to order within discreet regions of the world. Finally, Kissinger’s recipe for renewed Westphalia is segregation and quarantine of those who do not want to be Westphalian but, within this quarantine, wise statesmen will balance power and legitimacy, external and internal realities, bombs and beliefs. Insofar as this is a departure from a standard US view of the world, and insofar as it accepts pluralistic spaces, and insofar as it confers a recognition of the importance of religion in international relations, all this is welcome. It is not clear whether Kissinger has thought his way to this view by studying the world, or by studying Obama’s failure in it, and drawing lessons from the US President who could not win. But Kissinger leaves us with the same problems Obama could not solve or even come close to solving: how will power and belief be balanced in a Middle East where Israel has no real inclination to achieve a just and balanced settlement? How, in this same Middle East, can Shia and Sunni be balanced? How, again in this Middle East, can there be Westphalia when the Kurds were never given a Westphalian state? Or if Caliphates succeed, bringing into being an entirely new (or very old) form of state? How, in East Asia, can China be regionalised when it is patently already a global player economically and has the technological capacity to deploy its military power internationally – but simply has not done so? How can China be militarily balanced, in a somewhat uneven way, if Japan does not develop full military forces? And how does East Asia accommodate four Chinas – the mainland, Taiwan, Singapore and, if the students of 2014 had their way, Hong Kong?

Kissinger, in his effort at a grand sweep of all things in the globe, shirks a key judgement; it could at least have been a ‘what if’ chapter in his book. What if Westphalia is finished, or is itself quarantined, and International Relations is about to become an equilibrium or disequilibrium of beliefs? What if that new world order is already upon us?