Cover of Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy, used as the shared image for this summary series.
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 sixteenth chapter of his book, called "Three Approaches to Peace: Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in World War II".
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.
Victory Made the Postwar Question Unavoidable
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union turned the European war into the largest land conflict in history. German armies devastated Soviet territory, but they failed to destroy the Soviet state. They were stopped before Moscow in the winter of 1941, then broken at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942–43, where the Sixth Army was lost and the German war effort suffered a decisive blow. Once the Axis could no longer plausibly win the war in Europe, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin had to think about victory’s political consequences.
For Kissinger, each leader approached that problem through his country’s memory and interests. Churchill wanted to reconstruct a European balance of power. That meant reviving Great Britain, France, and eventually even a defeated Germany as counterweights to the Soviet Union, with the United States lending strength to the arrangement. Roosevelt imagined a different system, in which the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China would act as the “Four Policemen,” supervising peace and restraining future aggressors. Stalin pursued a mixture of communist ideology and traditional Russian security policy: the Soviet Union would turn its victories into influence over Central and Eastern Europe, creating buffer zones against any revived German threat.
These goals represented more than different preferences within a shared settlement. They rested on conflicting assumptions about how peace was preserved. Roosevelt thought Hitler’s defeat would remove the main obstacle to a cooperative world order. Churchill believed peace required equilibrium among powers, because goodwill alone could not restrain the strongest state. Stalin assumed that the safest peace was the one secured by armies, frontiers, and compliant governments. The alliance could defer these contradictions while Germany remained dangerous. Once Germany weakened, the contradictions became the substance of the future Cold War.
Roosevelt’s Four Policemen and the Rejection of Balance
Roosevelt had perceived earlier than most Americans that Hitler’s victory would threaten the United States. However, Kissinger stresses that Roosevelt did not take the United States into the war in order to restore the old diplomacy of Europe. He rejected the balance of power, spheres of influence, secret bargains, and colonial empires as part of the system that had repeatedly failed. His objective was a postwar order based on harmony, collective security, and the shared responsibility of major powers.
This idealism shaped Roosevelt’s practical plans in ways Kissinger considers deeply consequential. Roosevelt did not intend to keep American troops in Europe after Germany’s defeat. He told Churchill in 1944 that he could not leave American forces in France and that Britain would have to carry the European burden. He also rejected an American responsibility for the economic reconstruction of France, Italy, and the Balkans, describing that task as naturally British because of Britain’s proximity and interest. In Kissinger’s judgment, this position vastly overestimated Britain’s postwar capacity. It also underestimated the strategic vacuum that would emerge if the United States withdrew while Germany was disarmed and France remained weak.
Roosevelt’s disdain for France intensified the problem. At Yalta in February 1945, he mocked Churchill’s effort to restore France as a major power and treated French recovery as an artificial British project. Yet, for Churchill, a strengthened France was one of the few available means of resisting Soviet dominance in Europe. Roosevelt instead imagined that the victors could supervise Germany, disarm potential threats, and police the world collectively. In that design, even France might be treated as a country subject to control rather than as a pillar of European recovery.
The “Four Policemen” were Roosevelt’s compromise between pure Wilsonian universalism and Churchill’s balance-of-power realism. Compared with the League of Nations, the new system would have enforcers. The great powers would remain armed, most others would disarm, and the armed victors would cooperate to preserve peace. Kissinger notes that the design resembled Metternich’s Holy Alliance more than American liberals would have liked to admit, because both systems imagined a coalition of victors preserving peace through shared responsibility. The difference was decisive: Metternich’s system rested on a real balance of power and on some shared values among the principal states, while Roosevelt’s system emerged from a war that had destroyed equilibrium and joined powers divided by ideology.
Roosevelt’s concept had no serious answer to the possibility that one of the policemen, especially the Soviet Union, might refuse to enforce the peace as Roosevelt imagined it. If that happened, the balance of power would have to be rebuilt after the elements of equilibrium had already been discarded. Kissinger sees this as the central flaw in Roosevelt’s approach. The more thoroughly American policy denounced balance-of-power thinking during the war, the harder it became to create a balance after the Soviet Union occupied the territories in dispute.
Stalin’s Security Belt and Soviet Realpolitik
Stalin could hardly have been more different from Roosevelt. Kissinger describes him as a practitioner of Old World Realpolitik, not as a convert to the cooperative language of the wartime alliance. Stalin defined peace as Russian statesmen had often defined it: the widest possible security belt around the country’s exposed frontiers. He welcomed unconditional surrender because it would remove Germany, Italy, and Japan as diplomatic actors in a peace conference and prevent any defeated power from playing the role that Talleyrand had played after Napoleon.
Communist ideology reinforced, rather than replaced, Russian strategic tradition. Stalin did not distinguish morally between fascist and democratic capitalist states in the way Roosevelt did, though he understood that the democracies were less ruthless and perhaps less formidable. In Kissinger’s view, he had no reason to trade territory for goodwill or to treat declarations of principle as more important than armies on the ground. Stalin had negotiated with Hitler without becoming a Nazi sympathizer, and he allied with the democracies without accepting democratic assumptions. He took whatever diplomacy offered and intended to seize by force whatever could be taken without risking a new war.
This explains why Stalin was most willing to discuss postwar aims when the Soviet Union was weakest. In December 1941, with German forces near Moscow, he raised postwar questions with Anthony Eden. In May 1942, he sent Molotov to London and Washington to pursue similar discussions. Stalin wanted recognition of the Soviet Union’s 1941 borders, including the Curzon Line in Poland and the incorporation of the Baltic states. He also favored Germany’s dismemberment and Poland’s westward movement. In return, he was willing to acknowledge British demands for bases in Western and Northern Europe. These were brutal terms, but Kissinger argues that they were still less sweeping than the settlement that later emerged through Soviet occupation.
At that early stage, Stalin had shown flexibility on Poland and had only limited demands about regimes across Eastern Europe. Kissinger emphasizes that the price Stalin might have paid for recognition of the 1941 frontiers is unknowable because Roosevelt prevented the negotiation from developing. Churchill was prepared to explore a quid pro quo. Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull resisted any arrangement that looked like the secret diplomacy and territorial bargaining of the First World War. Hull treated such negotiations as violations of the Atlantic Charter and of America’s historic opposition to conquest. Stalin, receiving this refusal, eventually understood that the United States was not asking him for concessions on Eastern Europe before victory. From that point, delay served Soviet interests.
The Molotov visit to Washington in May 1942 exposed the gulf between Roosevelt’s and Stalin’s categories. Roosevelt offered a new world order built around collective security and the Four Policemen. Molotov accepted the idea in principle, just as he had entertained Hitler’s earlier offer of a tripartite arrangement, while keeping Soviet territorial aims intact. His concerns stayed concrete. Border recognition mattered first. So did Soviet influence in Bulgaria, Romania, and Finland. The same bargaining frame covered special rights in the Straits. Kissinger’s point is that Stalin understood the bargaining value of waiting. If the Western powers would not discuss political settlement while Germany was still strong, the Soviet Union could improve its position by advancing its armies.
Churchill Between Two Behemoths
Churchill’s position was the most historically familiar to Kissinger and the least powerful in material terms. Great Britain had stood alone against Hitler after the fall of France in 1940, and only after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and Japan attacked Pearl Harbor could Churchill begin to think seriously about war aims. Even then, Britain was fighting alongside two larger powers that threatened British interests from different directions. Roosevelt’s anticolonialism challenged the British Empire, while Stalin’s advance into Central Europe threatened the balance on which British security had long depended.
Churchill therefore tried to preserve Britain’s traditional policy from a position of weakness. He believed that peace required equilibrium, because a world left to the strongest and most ruthless power would not remain free. He also understood that Britain could no longer defend its vital interests without American participation. That dependence made his diplomacy difficult. To Roosevelt and many American officials, Churchill’s efforts to think in terms of balances, spheres, and imperial interests looked like evidence of British backwardness. To Churchill, American reluctance to think geopolitically risked handing Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union.
The Anglo-American dispute over colonialism sharpened this distrust. Roosevelt was determined that the war against fascist domination should also weaken British and French imperial rule. He believed that Asian and African peoples would eventually rebel against white colonial rule and that the United States should lead the transition toward self-determination before it became a racial struggle. British officials rejected this interpretation of the Atlantic Charter, insisting that the charter applied to nations liberated from Nazi tyranny, not to the internal arrangements of the British Empire. The United States, however, had already decided to grant independence to the Philippines, which made its anticolonial argument more credible than London expected.
The colonial quarrel had limited wartime effect, but the dispute over military strategy mattered immediately. American leaders tended to separate military victory from postwar political design. Their model came from wars fought to decisive victory, especially the Civil War and the First World War. Diplomats would define aims, soldiers would defeat the enemy, and only afterward would political arrangements be settled. Churchill thought this separation was dangerous. Britain’s limited resources had long forced its strategists to connect means and political ends, and the memory of the First World War made British leaders eager to avoid another frontal slaughter if maneuver could achieve both military and diplomatic results.
That difference explains the controversy over the Mediterranean and the second front. Churchill favored attacking the Axis through North Africa, Italy, and the “soft underbelly” of Southern Europe. He later urged the Western armies to seize Berlin, Prague, and Vienna before the Soviets. In each case, he saw military operations as instruments for shaping the postwar map. American commanders, especially those committed to a direct cross-Channel assault, regarded these proposals as diversions that risked American lives for British political purposes. Roosevelt supported the North African landing in November 1942 and the Italian campaign in 1943, but he opposed a Balkan strategy and ultimately accepted the Normandy landing in June 1944 as the decisive second front.
Stalin also wanted a second front in France, and his reasons extended beyond military relief. Early in the war, he needed relief from German pressure. After Stalingrad, however, the strategic logic changed. A Western landing in France would keep Anglo-American armies far from Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the regions where Soviet ambitions were concentrated. Kissinger rejects the argument that Stalin’s later intransigence resulted mainly from Allied delay in opening the second front. The organizer of the purges, the Katyn massacre, and the Nazi-Soviet pact was unlikely to have been made cynical by Allied strategy. Stalin’s anger over the second front served his diplomacy, but his policy toward Eastern Europe came from deeper aims.
The Missed Settlement and Unconditional Surrender
Kissinger presents the refusal to discuss postwar aims during the war as the fateful decision that made the Cold War inevitable. In his view, states seeking stability should settle essential peace terms while the enemy remains in the field. The enemy’s remaining strength indirectly strengthens moderate allies because no one can yet claim the prizes outright. Once victory is complete, the most determined power in possession of disputed territory can be displaced only by confrontation.
This problem was intensified by the Casablanca policy of unconditional surrender in January 1943. Roosevelt supported that formula partly to prevent divisive peace discussions with Germany, partly to reassure Stalin that there would be no separate peace, and partly to avoid another German claim that the nation had been betrayed rather than defeated. Yet unconditional surrender also meant that the Axis powers would have no place in a political settlement. Without a prior Allied agreement on postwar aims, the vacuum would be filled by the armies that arrived first.
Roosevelt’s approach produced detailed plans for the cooperative institutions of the postwar world while leaving geopolitical questions unresolved. Conferences at Dumbarton Oaks, Bretton Woods, Hot Springs, and elsewhere developed arrangements for the United Nations, world finance, food and agriculture, and relief and rehabilitation. These were the Wilsonian components of order. However, there was no comparable settlement on Eastern Europe, the balance of power, or the criteria by which liberated countries would choose governments under occupation.
Kissinger suggests that a negotiated arrangement in 1941 or 1942 might have produced something like the Finnish model for parts of Eastern Europe: respect for Soviet security, perhaps including bases or mutual assistance, combined with domestic autonomy and nonaligned foreign policy. That outcome was never certain, and the Baltic states posed a particularly difficult problem. Nevertheless, it would have been easier to pursue before Soviet armies controlled the region. By postponing negotiation, the Western powers left Stalin free to convert military advance into political control.
Teheran and the Personalization of Diplomacy
The Teheran Conference of November 28 to December 1, 1943, was, in Kissinger’s view, the more important missed opportunity than Yalta. By then, Stalingrad had been won, Soviet survival was secure, and a separate Soviet peace with Hitler was highly improbable. Soviet armies were still short of imposing their system across Eastern Europe. If the postwar settlement was to be negotiated at a summit, Teheran was the moment for a negotiated settlement.
Stalin controlled much of the setting. Teheran was close to Soviet territory, and Roosevelt accepted Stalin’s invitation to stay in the Soviet compound after security concerns were raised. Roosevelt meant the gesture as a sign of trust. Stalin treated it as useful and secondary. He kept pressure on the Western leaders over the delayed second front, secured a promise for a French landing in 1944, and agreed to Germany’s demilitarization and occupation zones. Discussion of postwar arrangements came late and remained tentative.
Roosevelt conceded much of Stalin’s Polish framework. He accepted moving Poland westward and indicated that the United States would not force the Soviets out of the Baltic states if the Red Army occupied them, though he suggested plebiscites. These comments were politically cautious and not framed as a hard settlement. Roosevelt’s central aim at Teheran was to establish the Four Policemen and to cultivate Stalin’s confidence. He even distanced himself from Churchill in Stalin’s presence, believing that personal rapport could break through Soviet suspicion.
Kissinger treats this reliance on personal relations as one of Roosevelt’s characteristic errors. Roosevelt’s reinvention of Stalin as “Uncle Joe” reflected not only his own political style but also an American tendency to see foreign leaders as potentially reasonable partners if approached with sufficient goodwill. Stalin’s dissolution of the Comintern in May 1943 reinforced that impression, although Kissinger treats it as a low-cost gesture made when formal world revolution was not a realistic Soviet priority. American confidence in Stalin’s moderation would survive even when Soviet behavior contradicted it.
After the Normandy landing in June 1944, Stalin’s demands hardened as Germany’s defeat became certain. What had begun in 1941 as a demand for borders became by 1945 a demand for political control beyond those borders. On Poland, he moved from possible recognition of the London-based Polish government-in-exile to criticism of its composition, then to sponsorship of the Lublin Committee, and finally to recognition of that communist-dominated group as the provisional government. Churchill saw the meaning of this progression but lacked the power to stop it alone. In October 1944, he tried to settle Eastern Europe directly with Stalin through a crude percentages arrangement: British predominance in Greece, Soviet predominance in Romania and Bulgaria, and divided influence in Hungary and Yugoslavia. Kissinger treats the episode as pathetic and ineffective, because percentages could not be enforced against armies in possession. Greece remained outside Soviet control, while most other states became Soviet satellites; Yugoslavia’s partial freedom came from its own guerrilla liberation and brief Soviet occupation, not from Churchill’s note.
Yalta and the Settlement Already Being Lost
Yalta in February 1945 later became the symbol of the lost peace, but Kissinger argues that much of the outcome had already been determined before the conference began. Soviet armies had crossed the 1941 borders and occupied much of the disputed region. They were already intervening in the internal politics of liberated countries. By then, negotiation occurred under conditions created by possession.
The three leaders arrived with unchanged priorities. Churchill wanted to discuss the European settlement, restore France as a major power, resist Germany’s dismemberment, and limit Soviet reparations demands. Roosevelt sought agreement on United Nations voting procedures and Soviet entry into the war against Japan. Stalin welcomed both topics because they consumed time that might otherwise have been spent on Eastern Europe. He also understood how to turn Roosevelt’s categories to Soviet advantage, answering calls for democracy by insisting that neighboring governments must be friendly to the Soviet Union.
The results reflected the military situation. Churchill and Roosevelt accepted the Soviet Union’s 1941 borders, a painful concession given Britain’s original commitment to Poland’s territorial integrity. Poland would move westward toward the Oder and Neisse rivers, though the exact frontier remained unresolved. The Soviet-backed Lublin government would be broadened to include some democratic figures, and Stalin accepted the Joint Declaration on Liberated Europe, promising free elections and democratic governments. Kissinger emphasizes that Stalin understood such language through Soviet assumptions, especially while the Red Army controlled the ground. Americans, by contrast, treated legal commitments with seriousness and later viewed Soviet violations as proof of bad faith.
Yalta also exposed the contradiction in Roosevelt’s view of spheres of influence. To secure Soviet participation in the war against Japan, Roosevelt secretly granted Stalin concessions in Asia. Some claims, such as southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands, had a loose relation to Russian history and security. Other concessions came straight from older tsarist imperialism. They included rights in Port Arthur and Darien as well as the Manchurian railways. Kissinger regards this as one of Roosevelt’s least comprehensible decisions: he accepted a Soviet sphere in northern China to induce Stalin to join a world order meant to abolish spheres of influence.
After Yalta, Roosevelt presented the conference to Congress as the beginning of a permanent structure of peace through the United Nations. He emphasized the end of unilateral action, exclusive alliances, spheres of influence, and balances of power. Hope still dominated public interpretation, and advisers such as Harry Hopkins believed Stalin could remain reasonable if not undermined by harder-line colleagues. Kissinger notes that this pattern would recur in American thinking: the Soviet leader was often imagined as a moderate who needed help against more intransigent forces, even when policy came from the structure of Soviet power itself.
Occupation, the Final Vacuum, and Kissinger’s Judgment
As Soviet armies advanced, Stalin acted according to the principle later attributed to him by Milovan Djilas: whoever occupies a territory imposes his social system as far as his army can reach. The final military decisions in Europe therefore had direct political consequences. In April 1945, Churchill urged Eisenhower to seize Berlin, Prague, and Vienna before the Soviets. American chiefs of staff rejected the proposal as an improper mixing of political objectives with military planning. Eisenhower even informed Stalin that he did not intend to advance on Berlin and proposed an Allied meeting near Dresden. Stalin accepted the gift, downplayed Berlin’s importance, and then concentrated major Soviet forces to capture it.
By April 1945, Soviet violations of the Yalta promises were already clear, especially in Poland. Churchill appealed to Stalin for inclusion of Polish figures not fundamentally hostile to the Soviet Union, but Stalin’s criteria effectively meant governments dominated by communists loyal to Moscow. The gap between Western hopes and Soviet practice had become visible before the war in Europe ended.
Kissinger still asks whether a different democratic strategy was feasible. He acknowledges that preventing restoration of the 1941 Soviet frontiers would have been extremely difficult. Some modifications, and perhaps a special status for the Baltic states, might have been possible only when the Soviet Union stood near catastrophe in 1941 or 1942. After Stalingrad, however, the West could have pressed for the political structure of Eastern Europe without seriously risking Soviet collapse or a separate Soviet peace with Hitler.
The fear of a separate peace, in Kissinger’s view, was exaggerated. Stalin never explicitly threatened one, and the known episodes suggesting possible Soviet-German feelers are ambiguous. A separate peace would not have solved Stalin’s or Hitler’s core problems. Stalin would have faced a still-powerful Germany and the future distrust of the democracies. Hitler, for his part, remained committed to destroying the Soviet Union and would likely have treated any truce as temporary.
The Four Policemen failed because the supposed policemen did not share a definition of order. Stalin’s combination of paranoia, communist ideology, and Russian imperial ambition turned collective security into either an opportunity for Soviet expansion or a trap. Britain was too weak to police Europe alone. China was too weak and divided to anchor Asia. The United States, meanwhile, was not prepared to accept the global obligations implied by Roosevelt’s own concept, since Roosevelt continued to promise that American troops and resources would not remain in Europe.
Kissinger’s final judgment is deliberately double-edged. Churchill’s geopolitical analysis proved more accurate than Roosevelt’s, because he saw that peace required a balance against Soviet power. Yet Roosevelt’s refusal to think in purely geopolitical terms was tied to the idealism that had brought the United States into the war and would later sustain resistance during the Cold War. Had Roosevelt adopted Churchill’s language too early, he might have improved the Western bargaining position but weakened the moral appeal necessary for American leadership. The war therefore ended with a geopolitical vacuum: the old balance of power had been destroyed, a comprehensive peace treaty had not been achieved, and the world was divided into ideological camps. The postwar struggle would become an extended effort to create the settlement that the Allies had failed to secure before victory.
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