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 seventeenth chapter of his book, called "The Beginning of the Cold War".
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.
Roosevelt’s Death and the End of Wartime Unity
Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, when Allied armies were already deep inside Germany and the struggle against Japan was entering its final phase at Okinawa. His death did not save Nazi Germany, despite the temporary fantasy of Hitler and Goebbels that history might repeat the “miracle of the House of Brandenburg.” Nazi crimes had created one Allied purpose that remained firm until the end: the destruction of Nazism. Once that aim was nearly achieved, however, the disappearance of the common enemy exposed a power vacuum in Europe and a basic divergence among the victors.
Kissinger presents the breakdown of the wartime alliance as the consequence of incompatible purposes. Churchill wanted to prevent Soviet domination of Central Europe. Stalin wanted territorial compensation for Soviet victories and for the immense suffering of the Soviet people. Truman, newly elevated to the presidency, initially tried to continue Roosevelt’s policy of maintaining Allied unity. By the end of Truman’s first term, that unity had disappeared, and the United States and the Soviet Union faced each other in the center of Europe rather than cooperating as distant guarantors of world order.
Truman seemed, at first glance, an improbable figure to manage that transformation. Unlike Roosevelt, he came from the rural middle class of the Midwest and had not attended college. He had risen through the Kansas City political machine and received almost no preparation for the diplomatic decisions he inherited, including no briefing on the atomic bomb. Yet Kissinger treats him as one of the decisive presidents of the twentieth century. Under Truman, Roosevelt’s Four Policemen gave way to American-led coalitions, former enemies were encouraged to rejoin the democratic world, and recovery programs such as the Marshall Plan expressed his belief that America could defeat enemies and then help rebuild them as partners.
Truman’s Inheritance and the Limits of Goodwill
Truman admired Roosevelt, but he did not share Roosevelt’s emotional commitment to Allied unity. As a senator, he had viewed Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as morally comparable dictatorships, although he did not want Hitler to win. As president, he first tried to deal with Stalin, partly because American military leaders still wanted Soviet help against Japan. His early reaction to Soviet behavior was typically American in Kissinger’s view: he treated Soviet intransigence as immaturity or bad manners rather than as the expression of incompatible geopolitical interests.
The world Truman inherited was already divided by the lines reached by advancing armies. France was prostrate, Britain victorious but exhausted, and Germany was being divided into four occupation zones. The German problem had reversed itself: German strength had haunted Europe after 1871, but German collapse now threatened to produce chaos. Meanwhile, Stalin had pushed Soviet power westward to the Elbe, and a vacuum was opening in front of him because Western Europe was weak and American forces were expected to withdraw.
Despite these facts, Truman began by reaffirming Roosevelt’s vision of collective security. In April 1945, he declared that the great powers had a special duty to preserve peace and that international disputes should not be settled by force except in defense of law. The same theme appeared at the San Francisco conference that organized the United Nations. The language reflected America’s belief that a world community could replace power politics, but Kissinger argues that the facts on the ground were already being shaped by a leader who understood diplomacy very differently.
Stalin returned to the methods that had guided his foreign policy before the war. He wanted payment in the only currency he trusted: territorial control. He understood precise bargains, spheres of influence, and exchanges of concessions, but he did not understand foreign policy based on collective goodwill or legal principle. In Kissinger’s account, Stalin could not grasp why American leaders cared about free institutions in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, where the United States had no conventional strategic interest. Because American objections seemed to him detached from material advantage, he suspected ulterior motives.
Stalin therefore consolidated the bargaining chips already created by the Red Army’s occupation. He might have made concessions in response to a clear calculation of risk and reward, but he saw no reason to yield to moral appeals. Kissinger compares his behavior in 1945 to his behavior toward Hitler in 1940: in both cases, Stalin faced a stronger potential adversary, pretended to be less vulnerable than he was, and tried to make the other side believe that retreat was less likely than further advance. In both cases, he misjudged the reaction. Molotov’s hard line had helped convince Hitler to invade the Soviet Union, and in 1945 it helped turn American goodwill into confrontation.
Churchill’s Realpolitik and Washington’s Resistance
Churchill understood the logic of Stalin’s position more clearly than Truman’s advisers did. He wanted an early summit to force political issues before Soviet control hardened in Eastern Europe. That urgency depended on Western leverage: Allied troops had advanced farther east than expected and temporarily controlled territory assigned to the Soviet occupation zone in Germany. Churchill therefore proposed delaying withdrawal until the political future of Central and Eastern Europe was addressed.
The Truman administration rejected this approach as firmly as Roosevelt had. It accepted the idea of a summit at Potsdam but remained unwilling to use occupation lines as bargaining instruments. At the end of June 1945, American forces withdrew to the agreed demarcation line, leaving Britain little choice but to follow. Truman also refused Churchill’s invitation to stop in Britain before Potsdam, avoiding the impression of an Anglo-American bloc against Stalin, yet he still sought his own direct contact with Stalin. This continued the American tendency to act as mediator between London and Moscow rather than as Britain’s partner in balancing Soviet power.
The emissaries Truman sent before Potsdam revealed the confusion of American policy. Joseph E. Davies, a former ambassador to Moscow who had internalized much Soviet propaganda, was sent to London despite being unusually unsuited to appreciate Churchill’s view of the postwar world. He treated Churchill’s concern about Soviet expansion as an imperial British attempt to preserve influence, reinforcing the American suspicion that balance-of-power policy threatened peace rather than protected it.
Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s close adviser, went to Moscow and repeated the habits of wartime diplomacy. He emphasized understanding and goodwill, while Stalin pressed his case with calculated complaints about Lend-Lease and the cooling of Soviet-American relations. Stalin professed not to understand why the United States was so concerned about elections in Poland and the Danube basin when these areas lay close to Soviet borders. Hopkins failed to convey that the United States regarded Eastern European self-determination as a serious issue rather than as an irritant that could be managed through gestures.
The result, in Kissinger’s judgment, was damaging ambiguity. Hopkins asked Stalin to modify Soviet behavior enough to ease American domestic pressures, but Stalin offered only token additions of democratic figures to a communist-dominated Polish government. The real issue was free elections, and Hopkins could not even provide names for the democratic representatives he wanted included. Behind that exchange stood an older Russian tradition of demanding a free hand near its borders and resisting outside intervention until confronted by the threat of war. Truman was thus trying to steer between Roosevelt’s universalist vision and his own growing resentment of Soviet behavior, but he had not yet accepted the balance of power as a necessary part of peace.
Potsdam and the Collapse of the Four Policemen
The Potsdam Conference, held from July 17 to August 2, 1945, marked the end of Roosevelt’s dream of the Four Policemen. The American delegation arrived with a briefing paper that denounced spheres of interest as power politics and argued that the real task was to remove the causes that made states think such spheres were necessary. Kissinger points out that this Wilsonian view did not explain what, in the absence of pressure, would cause Stalin to compromise. Truman nevertheless tried to reassure Stalin that the United States sought only peace, security, and friendship. Stalin had no frame of reference for leaders who claimed to be disinterested in the issues before them.
The conference agenda was too large for a brief summit: it bundled Germany’s reparations problem with peace treaties for former Axis partners and Soviet ambitions around the Straits, including a proposed base in the Bosporus. That overload quickly became a dialogue of the deaf. Stalin wanted to consolidate his sphere, while Truman and Churchill wanted principles vindicated through free elections and legal settlement. Each side used its veto where it had power: the Western Allies rejected Stalin’s demand for massive German reparations, while Stalin continued strengthening communist parties in Eastern Europe.
The Polish-German frontier showed how faits accomplis replaced agreed principles. Yalta’s language about the Oder and Neisse rivers had been ambiguous, and Stalin used the ambiguity to push Poland’s border to the western Neisse, including Breslau. This meant the expulsion of millions more Germans. The United States and Britain reserved a formal right to reconsider the frontier later, but the reservation had little practical value and increased Poland’s dependence on Soviet protection.
Potsdam produced limited agreements and many postponements. A four-power mechanism was created for German questions, Truman got Stalin to accept that each occupying power would take reparations from its own zone, and Stalin promised to enter the war against Japan. Yet the crucial political questions remained unresolved, and after Churchill’s electoral defeat during the conference, the unresolved issues passed to foreign ministers with less authority and even less room to compromise.
The most significant moment at Potsdam occurred outside the formal agenda, when Truman told Stalin that the United States possessed the atomic bomb. Stalin already knew this from Soviet espionage and treated Truman’s disclosure with studied indifference, saying only that he hoped it would be used effectively against Japan. Kissinger sees this as the beginning of a Soviet tactic that lasted until Moscow had its own bomb: Stalin would minimize nuclear weapons publicly and refuse to admit intimidation.
Churchill later suggested that, had he remained in office, he would have forced matters to a settlement at Potsdam. Kissinger regards this as plausible only if Stalin had been confronted with pressure severe enough to make retreat seem necessary. American leaders, however, were unwilling to risk confrontation over Eastern European political pluralism or borders, much less nuclear war. The American public wanted demobilization and the return of soldiers. The practical result was Europe’s movement into two spheres of influence, precisely the outcome American leaders had hoped to avoid.
Failed Conferences and the Growth of Suspicion
The foreign ministers’ conference in London in September and October 1945 confirmed the breakdown. Its purpose was to prepare peace treaties for Finland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Byrnes demanded free elections, and Molotov refused. Byrnes had hoped the atomic bomb would strengthen America’s bargaining position after its use against Japan, yet Molotov remained rigid. The bomb had not changed Soviet conduct because Washington had not integrated it into a diplomacy of pressure.
Truman still tried to preserve the old vision. In October 1945, he insisted that the United States sought no territory or bases and that its policy rested on righteousness, justice, and refusal to compromise with evil. He also said there were no conflicts of interest among the victorious powers so deep that they could not be resolved. In Kissinger’s account, this moral language expressed a genuine American tradition, but it did not supply the leverage needed to alter Stalin’s behavior.
The December 1945 foreign ministers’ meeting produced a Soviet gesture that Kissinger treats as cynical. Stalin proposed that Western commissions advise Romania and Bulgaria on broadening their governments. George Kennan saw such concessions as democratic cover for Stalinist dictatorship. Byrnes nevertheless recognized Bulgaria and Romania before the peace treaties were finished, interpreting Stalin’s move as a partial acknowledgment of Yalta’s democratic language. Truman was angry that Byrnes had accepted the compromise without consulting him, and the episode began the estrangement that led to Byrnes’s resignation within a year.
In 1946, further foreign ministers’ meetings completed some subsidiary treaties, but tensions increased as Stalin turned Eastern Europe into a political and economic appendage of the Soviet Union. Kissinger emphasizes the cultural gap behind the stalemate. American negotiators believed that reciting legal and moral rights should produce the desired result. Stalin regarded such language as empty or deceptive unless backed by force. His own vision combined Russian strategic control, Pan-Slavic solidarity, and communist ideology.
Stalin’s Weakness, Soviet Ideology, and the Nuclear Misreading
The drift toward the Cold War was accelerated by Stalin’s awareness of Soviet weakness. The Soviet Union had suffered catastrophic devastation and more than twenty million wartime deaths. It also carried the additional trauma of purges, forced collectivization, famine, and camps. Now it faced an undamaged United States with an atomic monopoly. A normal leader might have chosen respite, but Stalin believed that visible weakness would invite demands abroad and questions at home.
He therefore acted as if the Soviet Union were stronger than it was. He kept the Red Army in the center of Europe, encouraged the creation of puppet governments, and projected such ferocity that many Western observers feared a Soviet drive to the English Channel. Kissinger calls that fear largely illusory. Stalin’s purpose was less likely immediate conquest of Western Europe than the strengthening of his position for an eventual diplomatic showdown. Because the democracies challenged Soviet control mostly with rhetoric and not with risks Stalin considered serious, Soviet occupation gradually hardened into satellite rule.
Stalin also worked to belittle the atomic bomb. Soviet propaganda classified nuclear weapons as a temporary factor rather than a decisive strategic transformation. Ironically, parts of the Western strategic debate moved in the same direction. Scientists who feared nuclear war and American military services defending their institutional roles both tended to downplay the bomb’s decisiveness. As a result, the period of greatest Western relative strength produced a misleading belief that the Soviet Union was militarily superior because it possessed larger conventional armies.
Inside the Soviet Union, Stalin converted victory into renewed ideological mobilization. In May 1945, he briefly thanked the Russian people for trusting the government during the retreats of 1941 and 1942. Soon afterward, he returned to communist formulas, addressed the people as comrades, and credited the party with victory. In his February 9, 1946 speech, he declared that the Soviet social system had proved superior and that war arose from the contradictions of capitalism rather than from Hitler alone. This logic implied that peace with the capitalist world was only an armistice.
The domestic consequences were severe. Stalin demanded heavy industry, continued collectivization, repression, and production targets requiring several new Five-Year Plans. For survivors of the purges and the war, normal life would not return. Kissinger’s interpretation is that Stalin re-established confrontation before Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech and while American troops were leaving Europe because the party system he had created could not survive either domestic relaxation or genuine peaceful coexistence.
Churchill, Kennan, and the Road to Containment
Churchill, now out of office, again tried to warn the democracies. At Fulton, Missouri on March 5, 1946, he described an “Iron Curtain” stretching from the Baltic to the Adriatic. He argued that the Soviet Union had installed pro-communist governments wherever the Red Army had stood. He called for an alliance between the United States and the British Commonwealth to meet the immediate danger, while also advocating European unity and reconciliation with Germany as the long-term solution. His central point was urgency: the longer a settlement was delayed, the harder and more dangerous it would become.
Kissinger portrays Churchill as a prophet whose warnings were rejected until events made them undeniable. In the 1930s, he had urged rearmament while others sought negotiation. In the late 1940s and 1950s, he urged a diplomatic showdown while others, convinced of their weakness, concentrated on building strength. That weakness was partly self-induced, because Stalin was less capable of risking direct confrontation than Western opinion imagined.
Kennan’s “Long Telegram” helped clarify the logic. Kennan emphasized that Stalin would view foreign pressure as dangerous because it could delay the reconstruction and consolidation of Soviet socialism. Kissinger draws from this the conclusion that Stalin could not rebuild the Soviet Union and risk war with the United States at the same time. A Soviet invasion of Western Europe was therefore unlikely; the more probable outcome was that Stalin would test Western resolve but recoil before a serious confrontation.
The satellite system, in this reading, emerged gradually. In the first two years after the war, only Yugoslavia and Albania became communist dictatorships outright. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania still had coalition governments, though communists were powerful and noncommunist parties were harassed, especially in Poland. Even in 1947, Andrei Zhdanov’s categories for Eastern Europe had not fully reduced every state to the same satellite model.
This ambiguity raises Kissinger’s final question about whether Stalin might have accepted something like Finland’s status for parts of Eastern Europe: national and partly democratic governments that respected Soviet security interests. The evidence remained uncertain. Stalin had told Hopkins in 1945 that he wanted friendly but not necessarily communist governments, but Soviet officials on the ground were already imposing the opposite. In April 1947, after the United States had committed itself to aid Greece and Turkey and had begun consolidating the Western occupation zones in Germany, Stalin told Secretary of State George Marshall that compromise was possible on all major questions.
If Stalin meant it, Kissinger argues, he had waited too long. He had destroyed American trust through threats, unilateral moves, and the steady conversion of Eastern Europe into a Soviet sphere. The result was the Marshall Plan, the Atlantic Alliance, and the Western military buildup, none of which could have been part of Stalin’s intended design. Churchill had probably been right that the best chance for a political settlement came immediately after the war, before American withdrawal reduced Western leverage and before Soviet control hardened.
By 1947, however, Western leaders believed a dual policy of negotiation and consolidation was too dangerous. Communist parties were strong in France and Italy, West Germany was divided over neutralism, and peace movements challenged containment. Marshall therefore concluded that European recovery could not wait while diplomats searched for compromise. The United States chose Western unity over East-West negotiation, fearing Stalin would use talks to weaken the order America was building. Containment became Western policy’s guiding principle for forty years.
You can read the summary of the next chapter of the book by clicking this link.