Abstract
Henry Alfred Kissinger was the 56th Secretary of State (1973–1977) under President Richard Nixon and co-won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in the Vietnam War’s accords. He also served as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs from 20 January 1969 to 3 November 1975. A celebrated former Harvard University Professor, best-selling author and a frequent analyst of current events, Kissinger—the Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany—is truly an American diplomacy success story, a living legend. Over six decades, he has been involved in the making of American foreign policy either as a consultant, policymaker or a critical analyst. Kissinger has written and is the subject of numerous books and articles. Anything he writes is likely to provoke critical and laudatory commentary, and this book is no exception.
To an extent World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History provides the summation on Kissinger’s views on the relations of history and statecraft. The book has a dismal attitude of predicting the fate of the ‘Westphalian system’ and its admiration for personalities such as Richelieu, Talleyrand and Metternich who shaped diplomatic patterns in ways that are difficult to follow today. Consistent with such nostalgia is the mischievous eighteenth-century wording of the book’s subtitle.
The subject of this book is of critical importance. By ‘World Order’, Kissinger means a system capable of sustaining peaceful relations among countries (now numbered around 200) of varying sizes, histories, values and levels of development. This is indeed one of the great challenges of modern politics. The author, apparently concerned by the impact of the uncertainties provoked by globalisation, begins with a pessimistic note about where we are heading. As Kissinger asks: ‘Are we facing a period in which forces beyond the restraints of any order determine the future?’ (p. 2). His ultimate answer is, in a typically Kissingerian style: ‘The contemporary quest for world order will require a coherent strategy to establish a concept of order within various regions, and to relate these regional orders to one another’ (p. 371).
The central thesis of the book is that there has never been a single international order that has encompassed the entire world; rather, most regions have produced their own distinctive orders driven by the leading states in the system. There have been four great world orders: the European, the Islamic, the Chinese and the American. Each of these had its own unique characteristics that continue to influence the world in the twenty-first century. And none, Kissinger somewhat paradoxically notes, has been a ‘true’ world order, but rather a regional system of what in today’s international relations (IR) language would probably be called international governance.
The discussion of the four orders begins with Europe. After a quick study of the millennium that followed the collapse of the (Western) Roman Empire in AD 476, Kissinger argues for the significance of the Westphalian system. He extends the emotional tone about the creation of a balance-of-power system in seventeenth-century Europe. The modern nation state and the idea of a national interest were invented. In the following centuries, Europe’s international order was maintained through a balance of power. Those who violated it—such as Napolean—were annihilated by a coalition of the willing, who followed this up with the treaties that emerged from the Congress of Vienna. The author opines that Europe, which had a near monopoly in the design of global order less than a century ago, is in danger of cutting itself off from the contemporary quest for world order. Kissinger says, Europe self-destructed through the world wars of the twentieth century and is today ‘suspended between a past it seeks to overcome and a future it has not yet defined’ (p. 95).
Kissinger views that the beauty of the Westphalian system was that it rejected universalism in favour of pluralism. In contrast, early Islam was all about bringing mankind under one single political and religious order. In Kissinger’s words, ‘Islam was at once a religion, a multiethnic superstate, and a new world order’ (p. 99). Circumstances have changed greatly the early Islamic state and the superstate is gone, the ‘binary concept of world order’ (p. 102) remains throughout much of the Middle East. It includes particularly the raison d’être of the Islamic Republic of Iran (the bête noire of Kissinger’s view of current world affairs) and various armed groups and terrorists of the region (from Hamas to Taliban and ISIL) that once were part of the broader Islamic world order. The Middle East is essentially ‘A World in Disorder’ governed by competing ‘doctrines of violent intimidation’ (p. 171). In contrast, China practiced, in its vast landmass and over an abundant population, the long lasting, the most clearly defined and the one furthest from Westphalian ideas. China has also taken the most complex journey from ancient civilisation through classical empire, to Communist revolution, to modern great-power status—a course that will have a profound impact on mankind.
Kissinger arrives at the crux of the matter in Chapter 7: The United States. He criticises Americans for their arrogance and moralism. Kissinger writes ‘All twelve postwar presidents have passionately affirmed an exceptional role for America in the world’ (p. 276). That sense of belief in the superiority and universality of American values led to the extraordinary achievements of the Cold War; the United States, now 25 years later is ‘searching for its soul about the moral worth of its efforts to a degree for which it is difficult to find historical parallels’. The author suggests that America’s current problems lie in the country’s ‘inability to resolve ambivalence about force and diplomacy, realism and idealism, power and legitimacy, cutting across the entire society’ (p. 279).
The issue of American foreign policy today or while Kissinger was in office is too much democracy. It has separated Westphalia or Kissinger’s idea of foreign policy from domestic policy. Americans have encountered a hard time in achieving this. In fact, Richard Nixon, the president who comes on top in Kissinger’s analysis of post-war American foreign policy, was undone by Watergate, a domestic debacle that prevented ‘the various strands of Nixon’s [read also Kissinger’s] policy’ from being ‘consolidated into a new long-term American strategy’ (p. 308).
World Order is a good read. The author’s style of approaching broad history along with his nostalgic autobiographical accounts gives an interesting read for most of the readers. Even the readers who are not familiar with events and evolutions may feel enlightened by Kissinger’s way of narrating from continent to continent for different eras.
Nevertheless, World Order just does not deliver. The book lacks a transparency in dealing with certain statesmen and the concepts of ‘the balance of power’ and ‘national interest’. Kissinger’s reflections on the course of history are rather spotty and crude; develop a sense that most professors would not recommend it to their students. He is biased towards Iran, ‘Iran must decide whether it is a country or a cause’, and makes a provocative comment such as: ‘who is Iran?’ (p. 168). Kissinger has not discussed the centuries properly and there is no balance on the detailed descriptions of the statesmen. Diplomacy and statecraft are elevated to a point that can border on the nauseating when Kissinger describes Cardinal Richelieu as the one who apparently ‘invented the idea that the state was an abstract and permanent entity’ (p. 22).
The book’s chapter on the Middle East (Chapter 3) has a number of important flaws. He portrays Israel as a defender of the Westphalian order amid a sea of chaos, while failing to acknowledge how Israel’s occupation policy—such as its attacks on Lebanon and Gaza and its ongoing settlement project in the West Bank—have added to the disorder in the region. His account of the failure of the Arab Spring tends to be reductionist in attributing its cause to the rise of jihadi forces and to the belief that Islamic societies—often described in the book as a single whole—cannot countenance long-term, equal co-existence with non-Muslim states. Similarly, he singles out Iran as the main source of instability in the region. He portrays Iran, almost stereotypically, as a wily state given to dissimulation and tactical manoeuvres and implies that Iranians are insincere about negotiations over nuclear weapons, without providing an account of the domestic and economic reasons why they find themselves at the bargaining table. Interestingly, some regions of the world—notably Africa and South America—are entirely ignored in Kissinger’s account, thus raising questions as to whether they are integral parts of this new global order, or merely subjects of it.
He never comes to grips with the fundamental problems involved in managing the world’s diversity, which is beset by transnational as well as intergovernmental relations. Rather, Kissinger acknowledges American exceptionalism inside a pluralist world system, while seeing no contradiction. He can do this because like many Western policy-makers he elides two categories: the US and its allies on the one hand, and the international community on the other. This is more than a tactical sleight of hand, it is a tragic mistake.
In the end, World Order holds few surprises to those even vaguely familiar with Kissinger’s career and writings. Those unfamiliar to world politics should be cautioned that this is not a reliable textbook for understanding world order.