The cover image anchors this chapter summary in Kissinger’s larger study of diplomacy and international order.
In 1994, Henry Kissinger published the book Diplomacy. He was a renowned scholar and diplomat who served as the United States National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. His book provides an extensive sweep of the history of foreign affairs and the art of diplomacy, with a particular focus on the 20th century and the Western World. Kissinger, known for his alignment with the realist school of international relations, inquires into the concepts of the balance of power, raison d'État, and Realpolitik across different eras.
His work has been widely praised for its scope and intricate detail. Yet, it has also faced criticism for its focus on individuals over structural forces, and for presenting a reductive view of history. Also, critics have also pointed out that the book focuses excessively on Kissinger's individual role in events, potentially overstating his impact. In any case, his ideas are worthy of consideration.
This article presents a summary of Kissinger's ideas in the tenth chapter of his book, called "The Dilemmas of the Victors".
You can find all available summaries of this book, or you can read the summary from the previous chapter of the book, by clicking these links.
Collective Security Without Collective Resolve
At the end of the war, the scale of destruction made many statesmen and publics receptive to the belief that law and ethics could replace the balance-of-power methods blamed for Europe’s catastrophe. The United States supplied the chief language of this new diplomacy even as it withdrew from the responsibilities that such a system required. Wilson’s influence led Europe to try to preserve stability through collective security rather than through alliances, deterrence, and explicit commitments. Yet Europe adopted this approach without the United States, while Germany remained barred from the system and the Soviet Union stood outside it.
Kissinger distinguishes collective security from alliance diplomacy. An alliance identifies a potential threat, binds a defined group of states, and creates obligations more predictable than a fresh calculation of interest at every crisis. Collective security names no specific enemy, protects no particular state in advance, and claims to defend international law against any violator. It assumes that all relevant powers share a common interest in resisting aggression and will accept comparable risks when aggression occurs. In practice, enforcement therefore depended on political mood, national interest, and the willingness of governments to interpret each crisis in the same way.
This distinction reflected a deeper difference between Wilsonian and European views of international conflict. Traditional diplomacy assumed that national interests often clashed and that statesmanship consisted in reconciling them through incentives, penalties, and equilibrium. Wilson assumed that discord came largely from misguided calculations by statesmen and that the world’s peoples had a natural interest in harmony. At Versailles, however, the conduct of the victors contradicted Wilson’s expectation. Every major European power pressed its own claims, whereas Wilson defended universal principles partly because the United States had no direct European territorial interest at stake.
The influence of Wilson’s ideals was strongest in Great Britain, the country with the deepest balance-of-power tradition. British leaders first used Wilsonian language to keep American support during the war; subsequently, by the 1920s and 1930s, collective security had become a genuine conviction in British public opinion. British defenders of the League of Nations placed extraordinary confidence in world opinion as the ultimate sanction against aggression. Kissinger considers this conversion decisive because it made Britain increasingly uncomfortable with the concrete commitments needed to uphold the settlement.
The weakness of collective security appeared whenever aggression had to be defined and resisted. In Manchuria in 1932, the League lacked machinery for sanctions. Against Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, it approved sanctions but avoided an oil embargo under the formula of “all sanctions short of war.” When Austria was absorbed into Germany and Czechoslovakia was destroyed, the League did nothing. Its last act was to expel the Soviet Union after the attack on Finland in 1939, a gesture that did not alter Soviet policy. Kissinger extends the pattern to the United Nations, which could provide a forum and perform technical functions but could not prevent Great Power aggression when vetoes, fear, or divergent interests blocked common action.
The 1991 Gulf War, in his interpretation, confirmed rather than disproved the point. The United Nations ratified action against Iraq, but the United States had already deployed a major force and turned the coalition into an American-led enterprise. Collective security legitimized a policy backed by power; it did not itself create the will and capability to enforce peace.
France’s Victory and Strategic Insecurity
The country most exposed by this contradiction was victorious France. Its leaders knew that the Treaty of Versailles could not permanently keep Germany weak. Earlier settlements had shown how quickly defeated powers could return to the diplomatic system, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s judgment that Versailles was an armistice for twenty years captured the French fear that victory had only postponed the German problem. France therefore sought security not from confidence in the treaty, but from the fear that the treaty’s restrictions would erode as Germany recovered.
By the mid-1920s, even British military planners recognized that Germany could again become a threat and that France would be vulnerable without an alliance with a first-class power. British political leaders rejected this conclusion. They increasingly saw France as the potentially dominant continental power and Germany as the aggrieved state whose grievances needed conciliation. France wanted a military alliance with Great Britain to replace the Anglo-American guarantee that had disappeared when the United States Senate refused to ratify the peace settlement. Britain instead treated French pressure over the Rhineland, reparations, and Eastern European alliances as evidence of renewed French ambition.
For Kissinger, this was a grave misreading. France’s policy was driven less by arrogance than by fear of Germany’s demographic, industrial, and strategic superiority. Britain was right that a stable order required Germany’s eventual return to the community of nations, but concessions to Germany could not by themselves produce equilibrium while the balance of power moved steadily in Germany’s favor. France exaggerated what it could achieve by coercion, while Britain exaggerated France’s strength and underestimated Germany’s revisionist potential. Meanwhile, Germany and the Soviet Union stood outside the system, resentful of the settlement and increasingly aware that the victorious democracies were divided.
Failed Substitutes for an Alliance
British reluctance to defend the eastern settlement deepened the breach. British leaders doubted the justice and durability of the new map, especially disputes involving Poland, Danzig, and Upper Silesia. They feared that an alliance with France might draw them into obscure quarrels in unstable regions where responsibility would be hard to assign. As a result, talks about an Anglo-French alliance became less a security project than a tactical device by which Britain hoped to calm France and ease pressure on Germany.
France then tried to convert collective security into something resembling a binding alliance. In 1923, the League considered a Treaty of Mutual Assistance that would allow the League Council to identify an aggressor and oblige members to help the victim, by force if necessary, at least within their region. The scheme included escape clauses and depended on prior disarmament, which made it internally contradictory. It implied that states would be protected because they had disarmed, rather than because their survival mattered to the balance of power. Since the victim of aggression was usually the weaker party, the system risked rewarding vulnerability without creating reliable protection.
The United States and the Soviet Union refused to participate, Germany was not consulted, and Britain retreated once it became clear that such obligations might apply throughout its empire. The Geneva Protocol of 1924 attempted a different formula by requiring arbitration and defining aggression through refusal to arbitrate, refusal to accept a settlement, or resort to war. It failed for the same reason. Britain saw the Protocol as a means to draw France toward disarmament, while France saw it as a path to mutual assistance. It went too far for Britain and not far enough for France.
These experiments exposed the debilitating abstraction of the postwar order. The democracies tried to make resistance to aggression depend on legal definitions, arbitration procedures, and disarmament schedules while avoiding the specific geopolitical commitments that had traditionally protected vulnerable regions. Britain kept inventing collective-security formulas because they appeared less binding than an alliance with France. France kept pursuing them because it had no other way to seek British support. The result was neither security nor disarmament, but a growing sense that Versailles could not defend itself.
Disarmament, Reparations, and the Erosion of Versailles
The disarmament clauses of Versailles worsened the Anglo-French split and ultimately eased Germany’s return to military parity. The Allies imposed military limits on Germany without creating effective verification. The Inter-Allied Military Control Commission could ask Germany for information but lacked an independent right of inspection, and it was dissolved in 1926. German violations therefore began long before Hitler openly repudiated the treaty. At the same time, German leaders argued that their own disarmament had been only the first stage of the general disarmament promised by the treaty, and they gained British sympathy for this claim.
The argument placed France in an impossible position. Britain could reduce its army without endangering its core security because it relied on sea power. France depended on a large standing army to offset Germany’s larger population and industrial base. Pressure for either French disarmament or German rearmament therefore reversed the military consequences of Allied victory. By the time Hitler came to power, Kissinger argues, the military clauses were already collapsing and Germany’s underlying geopolitical advantage was becoming visible.
Reparations created a similar pattern of moralism, impracticality, and delay. Earlier victors had imposed indemnities because they had won. After 1919, the Allies felt compelled to justify reparations morally through Article 231, the War Guilt Clause, while postponing the actual amount to later expert commissions. This combination was politically disastrous: the clause enraged German opinion, while the absence of a fixed sum created years of bargaining in which the victors’ leverage steadily declined.
When the reparations figure was finally set in 1921 at 132 billion Goldmarks, it was too high to be realistic. Germany claimed insolvency, and no democratic German government could have survived full acceptance of the terms. Its first payment in 1921 was made by printing paper marks and selling them for foreign currency, a method that accelerated inflation while transferring little real wealth. By the end of 1922, Germany sought a four-year moratorium. Since there was no enforcement machinery for reparations and no verification machinery for disarmament, Versailles had become, in Kissinger’s phrase, less an order than a kind of international guerrilla war.
Lloyd George’s call for the Genoa Conference in 1922 was a sensible attempt to treat reparations, war debts, and European recovery as one problem. Genoa, however, invited Germany and the Soviet Union into diplomacy without resolving the mistrust that surrounded them. France refused to let reparations be placed fully on the agenda, given that it feared pressure to reduce its claims. Germany wanted relief, and the Soviet government feared that the Allies would link tsarist debts to German reparations in ways that would harm Moscow. Instead of restoring order, the conference created the setting in which the two excluded powers could find each other.
Soviet Coexistence and the Return of Realpolitik
Kissinger treats the Soviet Union as a new kind of diplomatic actor, comparable in disruptive force to revolutionary France but more radical in ambition. The Bolsheviks did not merely want to change the character of the state; their ideology envisioned the eventual disappearance of the state itself. Early Soviet leaders believed that world revolution would soon follow the Russian Revolution, so they had little theory for conducting ordinary foreign policy among sovereign states. Trotsky initially imagined diplomacy as a platform for publishing secret treaties, issuing revolutionary appeals, and discrediting capitalist governments.
The realities of power forced a rapid adjustment. At Brest-Litovsk in 1918, Trotsky tried to avoid both peace and continued war through the formula of “no war, no peace.” Germany responded not with ideological debate but with renewed military operations. Lenin argued that revolutionary Russia could not gamble its survival on the uncertain arrival of revolution in Germany. The Bolsheviks accepted harsh German terms because the alternative was destruction. This experience created the Soviet doctrine of peaceful coexistence, but Kissinger emphasizes that the doctrine was tactical rather than a conversion to permanent peace. Coexistence meant using divisions among capitalist powers until the balance of forces became more favorable.
By 1920, Soviet leaders had acknowledged that a modus vivendi with capitalism was necessary for the time being. Survival became the immediate goal, and national interest reappeared inside revolutionary language. The Russo-Polish War then sharpened Soviet grievances. Poland’s advance toward Kiev was defeated, but the final settlement left Poland with territory east of the Curzon Line, while Germany resented Polish gains in Upper Silesia and the corridor to the Baltic. Poland thus antagonized both historic neighbors. The Soviet Union also lost most of the old tsarist borderlands in the Baltic, Finland, Bessarabia, and along the Turkish frontier, even as it later restored control over Ukraine and Georgia.
Germany reached parallel conclusions. General Hans von Seeckt saw Poland as a creation of the Entente and believed that Germany had no interest in helping it against Soviet Russia. The new eastern settlement, which was supposed to contain both Germany and Russia, instead gave them a shared adversary and similar grievances. After Versailles, they were separated by weak states, excluded from the settlement’s inner councils, and united by resentment against the order imposed by the victors.
Rapallo and the Logic of the Outcasts
The Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 arose from the failure of the Genoa Conference and the Western Allies’ mishandling of the two pariah powers. Soviet Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin presented peaceful coexistence in language of economic collaboration between different social systems, while also proposing sweeping disarmament and international schemes that democratic governments could neither implement nor dismiss easily. This technique allowed Moscow to appear peace-minded, appeal to Western public opinion, and complicate any attempt to organize an anticommunist front.
At Genoa, the German delegation was also treated as an outsider. German requests for meetings with Lloyd George were rebuffed, while France proposed consultations with Britain and the Soviet Union from which Germany would be excluded. Both Germany and the Soviet Union feared being used against each other in a settlement over debts and reparations. When Chicherin’s aide invited the Germans to Rapallo on April 16, 1922, the opportunity suited both sides. The agreement established diplomatic relations, renounced mutual claims, and granted most-favored-nation treatment.
Rapallo soon became a symbol of the danger of Soviet-German cooperation. Within a year, the two countries were discussing secret military and economic arrangements. Kissinger nevertheless treats the treaty as both accidental and structurally prepared. It was accidental because neither side had planned that exact moment. It was structurally prepared because Versailles had excluded the two largest continental powers, dismembered their borderlands, placed weak and hostile states between them, and given them powerful incentives to revise the eastern settlement.
The Western democracies were shortsighted, but Kissinger stresses that their choices had become forbidding once Versailles had been drafted. Preventing Soviet-German cooperation would have required Britain and France to make a serious bargain with one of the two outcasts. A bargain with Germany would have required revising Eastern Europe and perhaps accepting German rearmament. A bargain with the Soviet Union would have required concessions in the same region and a willingness to treat Bolshevik Russia as a strategic partner. The victors had neither the unity nor the nerve for such decisions. Therefore, the interwar order remained a fragile construction sustained by legal formulas, hesitant cooperation, and hopes that hostile powers would remain isolated. In the end, Hitler and Stalin would destroy that house of cards by partitioning Eastern Europe rather than joining a coalition against each other.
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