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 twelfth chapter of his book, called "The End of Illusion: Hitler and the Destruction of Versailles".
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.
Hitler’s Method and the Fragility of Versailles
Kissinger presents Hitler as a revolutionary figure without a coherent revolutionary doctrine. Hitler lacked the intellectual movement through which Marxist or Enlightenment revolutionaries had sought to transform politics. His ideology, as presented in Mein Kampf, drew on radical nationalism, racial fantasy, and right-wing resentments. Its power lay in emotional usefulness more than conceptual originality. Hitler’s real political instrument was demagoguery: the ability to compress humiliation, anger, fear, and hope into a dramatic moment and to make audiences experience submission as liberation.
That skill operated domestically and internationally. In Germany, Hitler exploited social exhaustion, Depression-era chaos, conservative miscalculation, and parliamentary elites’ failure to grasp that he meant what he said. His first cabinet formed on January 30, 1933, and contained only three Nazis. Conservative figures believed they could contain him through office and procedure. Within eighteen months, including the purge of June 30, 1934, he had turned that miscalculation into dictatorship. Kissinger emphasizes that Hitler had not struggled upward from obscurity in order to be restrained by the devices of the very order he despised.
Hitler’s style of government reflected the same pattern. He disliked systematic work and avoided stable administrative routines. He governed through impulses, monologues, and bursts of activity. Policies matching his sudden energies advanced rapidly, while matters requiring sustained attention stagnated. This made him especially dangerous because theatrical timing and psychological domination compensated for analytical disorder.
Internationally, Hitler’s early successes depended on appearing to pursue limited and even plausible objectives. Between 1933 and 1938, the Western democracies could persuade themselves that he sought equality for Germany, the correction of Versailles, or the application of self-determination to Germans left outside the Reich. As long as his actions could be fitted into those categories, the victors’ own doubts about the postwar settlement weakened their will to resist. Once he abandoned the language of rectification and turned to naked conquest, the source of his diplomatic advantage disappeared.
Kissinger ties Hitler’s radical impatience to his personal mythology of 1918. Hitler interpreted Germany’s defeat in the First World War as the result of treachery, conspiracy, and insufficient will, not of military exhaustion or strategic failure. This belief made surrender morally intolerable to him and turned the memory of defeat into an obsession with endurance, betrayal, and apocalyptic struggle. His egomania intensified the danger. Convinced of his unique historical mission and expecting, because of his family history, a relatively short life, he believed that Germany’s goals had to be achieved during his own lifetime. Kissinger’s striking judgment is that no other major war had been launched on the basis of such personal medical conjecture.
That personal timetable distorted opportunities that Germany might otherwise have exploited gradually. Versailles and Locarno had left a powerful Germany facing smaller and exposed states in Eastern Europe. Stresemann and other earlier German statesmen had already created conditions under which Germany might eventually become predominant without a general war, perhaps even with Western acquiescence. Hitler harvested these opportunities at speed, but his megalomania transformed a likely peaceful or noncatastrophic evolution into a world conflict.
Disarmament, Rearmament, and Democratic Hesitation
The Western democracies’ first reaction to Hitler was renewed attachment to disarmament. Germany was now led by a man who openly intended to destroy the Versailles system, rearm, and expand. Yet British policy moved further toward arms limitation, partly because British leaders still believed that peace depended on moral pressure, negotiated restraint, and the force of world opinion. Some British officials even imagined that Hitler’s signature might bind Germany more reliably than the unstable governments that had preceded him.
France could not share this confidence, because its basic problem remained unchanged: it needed security against a rearmed Germany and could not obtain a firm British guarantee. British leaders argued in circular fashion. They called a guarantee unnecessary because Germany would supposedly be restrained by world opinion. They also called it too dangerous because British public opinion would not support it. If Germany rearmed, Britain said, a new situation would arise; yet when evidence of rearmament appeared, Britain continued to seek accommodation and disarmament rather than binding commitments.
Hitler ended some of the evasions himself. On October 14, 1933, Germany left the Disarmament Conference because Hitler feared that negotiated equality might impose ceilings on Germany before it could rearm without restriction. Soon afterward, Germany withdrew from the League of Nations, and in early 1934 it announced rearmament. These acts produced no visible punishment. Instead, the democracies asked whether Hitler had really done anything beyond claiming what many had already conceded in principle: equality of armaments and national defense.
Kissinger argues that this fixation on intention was a strategic error. In the early 1930s, Hitler’s ultimate criminality was still not fully apparent, and his first years were devoted largely to consolidating power. Many British and French leaders saw his anti-communism and economic revival as stabilizing factors. Nevertheless, the balance of power should have supplied the missing clarity. A large and rearmed Germany facing small eastern neighbors would be dangerous regardless of Hitler’s private motives. Foreign policy built on another ruler’s presumed intentions, Kissinger argues, rests on unstable ground; power relationships matter even when motives remain uncertain.
This was the point Churchill tried to make. He warned that German rearmament required a British response, especially in the air. Across the British political spectrum, however, leaders mocked or dismissed him. Liberals, Labour figures, and Conservatives alike treated calls for preparedness as relics of a discredited militarist past. Baldwin continued to hope for limitation and denied that Germany was rapidly approaching parity, even though British defense policy itself remained constrained by faith in disarmament.
France, meanwhile, sought security through arrangements that revealed its demoralization rather than its strength. It turned earlier guarantees to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania into mutual assistance treaties, though those states were too weak to rescue France if Germany struck in the west. France also signed a political agreement with the Soviet Union in 1935 but refused military staff talks, fearing both British suspicion and the difficulty of moving Soviet forces through Eastern Europe. The result looked elaborate and functioned poorly: weak eastern allies, a Soviet partner without military coordination, and dependence on Britain, which refused a real alliance.
Stresa, Abyssinia, and the Collapse of Collective Security
France’s most serious attempt to counter German power involved Italy. Mussolini distrusted Germany, feared German designs on Austria, and worried that Anschluss might revive German claims to the South Tirol. In January 1935, Pierre Laval moved France close to a military understanding with Italy, including consultations over Austria and even discussions of French and Italian troop deployments. After Hitler reintroduced conscription, Britain, France, and Italy met at Stresa in April 1935 and agreed to resist forcible changes to the Versailles settlement. For a brief moment, the victors of the First World War seemed ready to coordinate action.
The Stresa front almost immediately revealed the fragility of that appearance. Two months later, Britain signed a naval agreement with Germany. The agreement allowed the German fleet to reach 35 percent of British strength and granted submarine parity. Its military terms mattered less than its political meaning. Britain had accepted, bilaterally and without its Stresa partners, Germany’s violation of Versailles naval restrictions. In Kissinger’s interpretation, the agreement showed that Britain preferred direct accommodation with Germany over reliance on an anti-German coalition, and it supplied the psychological framework for appeasement.
The Abyssinian crisis then destroyed Stresa altogether. Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 resembled colonial expansion of the pre-1914 kind, but it took place in a world publicly committed to the League of Nations and collective security. Abyssinia was a League member, and the League had already been criticized for failing to stop Japan in Manchuria. Britain and France therefore faced incompatible choices. If Italy was indispensable to restraining Germany and preserving Austrian independence, they needed to compromise in Africa and save the Stresa front. If the League was the indispensable instrument against aggression, they needed to make sanctions effective enough to prove that aggression would not pay.
They chose the middle course and thereby gained the benefits of neither strategy. Under British leadership, the League imposed sanctions. Britain and France avoided measures likely to be decisive, especially oil sanctions, because they feared war. Laval privately reassured Mussolini about oil; Britain inquired whether oil sanctions would provoke conflict and accepted Mussolini’s predictable warning as an excuse for restraint. The slogan became sanctions short of war, which Kissinger treats as evidence of the flawed hope that economic measures could substitute for force when confronting determined aggression.
The Hoare-Laval plan briefly tried to restore a Realpolitik compromise: Italy would receive much of Abyssinia’s fertile territory, while Haile Selassie retained the highland core. Mussolini was expected to accept, but the plan leaked before it could be presented to the League. Public outrage forced Hoare’s resignation, and Anthony Eden returned British policy to collective-security language without the willingness to use force.
The outcome damaged both morality and strategy. Sanctions did not save Abyssinia, and after Italy completed its conquest in May 1936, the League lifted sanctions in July. Two years later, after Munich, Britain and France recognized Italy’s conquest. Kissinger’s judgment is severe: collective security caused Haile Selassie to lose all his country rather than the portion he might have lost under the Hoare-Laval compromise. Strategically, the crisis pushed Mussolini toward Germany. Italy had been too weak to dominate Europe but useful as a barrier to German expansion into Austria and Central Europe. Alienated by Britain and France, and fearful of facing Germany alone, Mussolini began moving toward Hitler.
The Rhineland and the Strategic Loss of Eastern Europe
The remilitarization of the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, was the decisive overthrow of the last major safeguard of Versailles and Locarno. German forces were barred from the Rhineland and from a zone east of it, and this arrangement had been guaranteed by Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy. Its significance went far beyond German territory. As long as the Rhineland remained demilitarized, France could threaten to move against Germany in the west if Germany attacked Eastern Europe. Once Germany fortified the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the other eastern states would be beyond effective French military support.
Hitler again chose a psychologically favorable moment. The League was entangled in the Abyssinian crisis, Italy had been alienated, and Britain had just shown that it would not risk conflict over sanctions at sea, where it was strong. Hitler also framed the move as Germany’s return to its own territory and surrounded it with peace proposals. He offered negotiations, nonaggression arrangements, troop limits, and even a demilitarized zone on both sides of the frontier. These proposals appealed to those who wanted to believe that Germany would be satisfied once equal treatment was restored. They also obscured the strategic fact that Germany was destroying the western lever by which France could defend Eastern Europe.
The gamble was militarily risky. German conscription had been in effect for less than a year, and the German units entering the Rhineland had orders to withdraw if France intervened. French strength was still substantial; even without full mobilization, France had far more troops available than Germany had in the zone. Yet French policy had become psychologically dependent on Britain. French leaders had been warned months earlier by André François-Poncet that Germany might move, but they neither prepared military options nor raised the issue decisively with Berlin. The Maginot Line symbolized this retreat into the defensive. France had guaranteed Poland and Czechoslovakia while organizing its army and its imagination around waiting behind fortifications.
French military advice deepened the paralysis. General Maurice Gamelin exaggerated German strength and argued that any countermeasure would require general mobilization. Political leaders would not mobilize without British support. Britain, however, would recognize only one clear threat to the balance of power: an attack on France itself. It would not fight for Eastern Europe, and it would not fight to preserve the Rhineland as a demilitarized hostage. Eden had already suggested that the Allies might negotiate away their rights in the zone while those rights retained bargaining value. After Hitler’s move, British officials stated plainly that the British public would fight for France against invasion. It would not fight because Germans had entered what many viewed as their own territory.
France’s foreign minister, Pierre Flandin, warned that once the Rhineland was fortified, Czechoslovakia would be lost and general war would become likely. His warning was accurate. His words produced no action. Britain preferred to treat Hitler’s offers as an opportunity for a permanent settlement. Labour voices expressed the same attitude more openly, arguing that Hitler’s olive branch should be taken at face value and that the issue was peace rather than defense. Kissinger notes that this policy was defensible only if its advocates recognized the price: every year of delay would make eventual resistance more costly if conciliation failed.
The consequences were immediate and structural. The Rhineland was fortified; French military assistance to Eastern Europe became increasingly theoretical; Italy moved closer to Germany; and Britain offered only the ambiguous promise of two divisions to defend France if the French border were violated. That pledge did not deter a German attack on France and did not help France defend its eastern allies, because it would not apply if France moved into Germany to honor its own commitments. The mother country of balance-of-power policy, Kissinger argues, had lost contact with the practical logic of the balance of power.
Appeasement Becomes Policy
After the Rhineland, appeasement became an official mental framework. In the West, almost nothing remained to revise except Germany’s eastern claims. Since Britain and France had not defended Locarno, which they had guaranteed, Hitler could reasonably conclude that they would not defend the eastern provisions of Versailles, which Britain had long questioned and never guaranteed with conviction. The passivity of 1936 therefore had both military and psychological effects. Eastern European states saw that France could not defend the Rhineland buffer; if France could not protect itself there, its guarantees to them looked increasingly hollow.
France’s own policy reflected resignation. Léon Blum received Hjalmar Schacht in Paris in August 1936 and tried to move beyond ideological barriers, while Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos described the practical policy as piecemeal concessions to postpone war. Kissinger presents this as the abandonment of the Richelieu tradition: France, which had fought for centuries to shape Central Europe in order to secure itself, now hoped to purchase time through concessions and German goodwill.
Britain pursued appeasement more confidently. In 1937, Lord Halifax visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden and praised Nazi Germany as a barrier against Bolshevism. He named Danzig, Austria, and Czechoslovakia as matters where peaceful change might occur. His caveat concerned method: Britain wanted alterations to happen peacefully and without general disturbance. Kissinger stresses the weakness of this distinction. If Britain conceded the substance of German claims, it was unclear why Hitler should believe that Britain would fight over the procedure by which he obtained them. Collective-security doctrine treated method as decisive. States historically go to war over changes they consider unacceptable, not merely over untidy procedure.
The Spanish Civil War added another sign of Western paralysis. Franco’s revolt, supported by Germany and Italy, raised the prospect of a hostile Spain aligned with fascist powers. France faced the old strategic problem of hostile governments on its frontiers, while Britain either underestimated the balance-of-power stakes or feared a left-wing Spain more. Britain warned that it might remain neutral if French aid to the legitimate Spanish government caused war. France wavered, declared an arms embargo, and tolerated violations inconsistently.
By late 1937, Britain and France were already discussing ways to avoid the implications of France’s alliance with Czechoslovakia. At London in November, Chamberlain asked about France’s obligations, a diplomatic signal that he was looking for escape routes. Delbos responded legally rather than strategically, suggesting that France’s obligations would depend on the gravity and form of German-backed unrest among Czechoslovakia’s Germans. Chamberlain seized the loophole and argued for an effort to reach agreement with Germany over Central Europe, even if Germany meant to absorb some of its neighbors, in the hope that delay might make German plans impractical. Kissinger’s conclusion is blunt: Czechoslovakia was doomed already in London in 1937, before Munich.
Hitler, meanwhile, was moving in the opposite mental universe. At the Hossbach meeting of November 5, 1937, he outlined ambitions far beyond restoration of Germany’s prewar position. He described the conquest of lands in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union for colonization and recognized that Britain and France were Germany’s antagonists. He also believed Germany’s rearmament advantage was temporary and that war had to begin before that advantage faded after 1943. His generals were alarmed but timid. The Western democracies still believed peace was the goal of policy; Hitler feared prolonged peace because it might deprive him of the struggle he considered necessary.
Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Munich
In 1938, Hitler felt strong enough to cross the frontiers created by the postwar settlements. Austria was his first target. Its position was anomalous. Once central to German and Central European politics, Austria had been reduced after the First World War to a small German-speaking state and forbidden to unite with Germany, even though many Germans and Austrians favored Anschluss. This made Hitler’s claim especially useful. It appealed to self-determination while weakening the balance of power, and the democracies were increasingly unwilling to defend the latter principle openly.
After weeks of Nazi pressure and Austrian concessions, German troops entered Austria on March 12, 1938. There was no resistance, and much of the Austrian population welcomed union with Germany. The protests of the democracies were weak and produced no concrete measures. The League remained silent as one member state was absorbed by a stronger neighbor. Britain and France clung even more tightly to the hope that Hitler would stop once all ethnic Germans had been brought into the Reich.
Czechoslovakia became the test of that hope. It was geopolitically important, democratic, economically advanced, and militarily equipped. It also contained large minorities, including about 3.5 million Germans living near Germany. Strategically, Czechoslovakia was difficult to abandon; under self-determination, it was difficult to defend. Hitler exploited that contradiction by presenting Sudeten German grievances as the issue and then threatening annexation by force.
Britain chose appeasement from the start. After Austria, Halifax warned France that Britain’s Locarno commitments applied only to France’s border and might not cover a French effort to honor obligations in Central Europe. Lord Runciman’s mission to Prague advertised British reluctance to defend Czechoslovakia and prepared the ground for concessions. The United States also detached itself from the crisis. Roosevelt suggested negotiation on neutral ground but made clear that the United States would assume no obligations.
Hitler then used psychological pressure to produce diplomatic movement without formal negotiation. After his attack on the Czech leadership at Nuremberg in September 1938, Chamberlain flew to meet him at Berchtesgaden. Hitler ranted about Sudeten Germans; Chamberlain accepted the principle that districts with German majorities should be transferred to Germany and then pressed Prague to accept. At Bad Godesberg on September 22, Hitler raised the terms. He demanded immediate evacuation of the Sudeten territory, left Czech military installations to Germany, and added border claims for Hungary and Poland. Chamberlain and Daladier recoiled from the speed and humiliation of the demand, and for several days war seemed possible.
The difficulty was that Britain and France had already conceded the principle of Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment. The possible war would therefore be fought over the timetable and details of a dismantling already accepted. Mussolini’s proposal for a four-power meeting offered an exit. At Munich on September 29, the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, and Italy met while the Czechs waited outside and the Soviet Union was excluded. Mussolini presented Hitler’s Bad Godesberg terms; Britain and France accepted. They then eased their consciences by offering to guarantee the remaining disarmed fragment of Czechoslovakia, although they had refused to defend the intact and armed state. The guarantee was never implemented.
Kissinger treats Munich as the cumulative result of a long attitude. The victors had admitted the inequity of Versailles and thereby eroded the psychological basis for defending it. The settlement after Napoleon had been generous and defended by a clear alliance; Versailles was punitive and then dismantled by its own authors. The Weimar Republic had shed reparations, control commissions, and occupation of the Rhineland. Hitler had thrown off armament restrictions, conscription bans, and Locarno’s demilitarization. By 1938, decisions had acquired momentum. The democracies had rejected balance-of-power thinking for two decades and promised a higher moral order. When Hitler challenged that order, they felt compelled to exhaust conciliation before their publics could accept resistance.
From Munich to the Polish Crisis
Munich was celebrated by many contemporaries because it seemed to prove that war could be avoided through reason and concession. Roosevelt congratulated Chamberlain, and Commonwealth leaders praised his efforts. Yet Hitler left Munich morose rather than triumphant. He had wanted war, both as a means of fulfilling his ambitions and as a psychological necessity. His generals had been uneasy enough to contemplate opposition if he launched a war over Czechoslovakia, but his success deprived them of any practical justification for action. Kissinger even suggests that Hitler may have been right, by his own logic, to feel cheated. A war over Czechoslovakia might have been hard for the democracies to sustain because the issue was entangled with self-determination and public opinion was not ready for heavy sacrifices.
Paradoxically, Munich marked the end of the diplomatic strategy that had served Hitler so well. Until then, he could appeal to Western guilt over Versailles. After Munich, he had received the main plausible concessions available under that argument. Further demands would rely increasingly on force. In Britain especially, Bad Godesberg and Munich exhausted the remaining reserves of goodwill. Chamberlain returned proclaiming peace. He was also determined to resist further blackmail and began a major rearmament program.
Kissinger’s treatment of Chamberlain is more nuanced than the common image of simple surrender. Chamberlain was wildly popular after Munich and later became associated with failure because the promise of peace collapsed. Democratic publics can punish leaders for carrying out policies those publics initially wanted. Chamberlain gained little credit for using the time after Munich to restore British air strength and preserve national unity. Kissinger treats the appeasers as often naïve rather than dishonorable. They were trying to implement Wilsonian idealism after exhaustion had discredited traditional diplomacy. Their weakness was that they treated foreign policy too much like a problem of suspicion, misunderstanding, and psychological reconciliation.
Hitler destroyed their remaining illusions in March 1939 by occupying the rump of Czechoslovakia. The Czech lands became a German protectorate, while Slovakia became formally independent but effectively a German satellite. This act made little sense in conventional power-political terms. Czechoslovakia had already lost its defenses and alliances, Eastern Europe was adjusting to German dominance, and the Soviet Union had weakened itself through purges. Germany could have waited and gained the region’s submission over time. Waiting, however, was precisely what Hitler’s temperament would not allow.
The occupation of Prague transformed the moral meaning of German expansion. Its main effect was moral rather than geopolitical: it showed that Hitler sought domination, not equality or self-determination. By incorporating non-German populations into the Reich, he violated the very principle on whose behalf previous claims had been tolerated. Britain’s patience had not been simple cowardice or national weakness; it had been tied to a moral framework. Once Hitler unmistakably violated that framework, British public opinion and then Chamberlain’s policy hardened. From that point, Britain would resist Hitler because he could no longer be trusted.
This produced the chapter’s final irony. Wilsonian assumptions had made the democracies pliable by encouraging guilt over Versailles, reluctance to invoke the balance of power, and faith in peaceful revision. Yet once Hitler violated the moral criteria of that same worldview, Wilsonianism generated a sharper intransigence than traditional Realpolitik might have done. The Danzig and Polish Corridor issues in 1939 were formally similar to the Sudeten issue and could, in theory, be discussed under self-determination. After Prague, however, the moral context had changed. The same perfectionist impulse that had encouraged concessions now ruled them out. War became only a matter of time unless Hitler stopped, and stopping was psychologically impossible. Before that war arrived, Kissinger notes, the system still had to absorb one more shock from Stalin’s Soviet Union.
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