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 twenty-second chapter of his book, called "Hungary: Upheaval in the Empire".
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.
The Soviet Empire and National Communism
Kissinger begins by placing Hungary in a longer Russian imperial pattern. Since the age of Peter the Great, Russia had tried to prevent neighboring peoples from conducting independent foreign policies. However, each act of domination created a burden: troops had to be stationed, local resentment had to be managed, and Russia paid for control without necessarily gaining security.
Communism repeated that pattern with harsher methods. Stalin recovered territories lost after the First World War and added the Eastern European satellite orbit, occupied by the Red Army and ruled through Soviet-style governments. In those countries, foreign control was joined to central planning, political police, censorship, and the suppression of national traditions. The economic results intensified resentment. Czechoslovakia, once comparable in living standards to Switzerland, was pulled into the bloc’s gray uniformity; Poland’s resources produced little prosperity; East Germans could see that West German recovery was blocked only on their side by communism.
The distinction mattered because communism could claim a native origin inside the Soviet Union, but it appeared in Eastern Europe as an imposed order. Even with control of the police, schools, and media, satellite communist parties remained beleaguered minorities. As Kissinger frames the problem, Eastern Europe was meant to enhance Soviet security, yet it increasingly consumed Soviet resources, attention, and legitimacy.
Stalin’s answer was total control. Tito’s 1948 break with Moscow therefore posed an existential challenge, especially because Yugoslavia was the one communist state in Eastern Europe whose regime had come to power largely through its own struggle. Stalin expelled Yugoslavia from the Cominform, but Tito survived with Western support. Inside the bloc, Stalin answered the danger of independence with show trials against communists such as Rudolf Slansky, Laszlo Rajk, Traicho Kostov, and Wladyslaw Gomulka. For Kissinger, these purges exposed the system’s moral bankruptcy because Moscow destroyed even loyal instruments to prevent national communism.
After Stalin’s death, his successors could neither restore his full terror nor permit genuine independence. They feared that repression would endanger relaxation with the West, but they also feared that reform would unravel the bloc. By 1955, Khrushchev and Bulganin tried to reconcile with Tito and tolerate limited Eastern European nationalism, provided communist rule and Soviet strategic control remained intact. Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of Stalin made this balance more precarious, because satellite leaders now needed national credentials to gain public acceptance.
Liberation Rhetoric Without an Operational Policy
American policy remained fundamentally passive. Containment had avoided a direct challenge to Soviet control in Eastern Europe and left liberation to the erosion of time. During the 1952 presidential campaign, John Foster Dulles attacked that restraint, described the peoples of Eastern Europe as captive nations, and said the United States should make clear that it expected liberation.
Yet Kissinger stresses that Dulles’s policy was less radical than its language suggested. Dulles did not call for uprisings that Soviet power would crush. He envisioned peaceful separation from Moscow on the Tito model, aided by propaganda and other nonmilitary tools. In substance, this differed little from the earlier American support for Tito, except that Dulles gave a balance-of-power policy a universalist vocabulary.
The danger was that the rhetoric outran the policy. Dulles intended no encouragement of suicidal revolts. He also did little to correct literal interpretations of liberation. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, government-financed institutions with formally private voices, broadcast militant appeals that kept resistance alive. For Eastern European listeners, the distinction between official American policy and American-funded exhortation was too fine to matter.
Poland’s Limited Defiance
Poland first tested Moscow in 1956. After riots in Poznan were violently suppressed in June, surviving Polish communist leaders tried to attach themselves to national feeling. In October, Gomulka, purged in 1951, returned to the leadership. Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, imposed as defense minister and Politburo member, was dismissed, and the party announced a national road to socialism.
The Kremlin briefly considered intervention. Soviet tanks moved toward Polish cities, and Khrushchev arrived in Warsaw on October 19 with senior colleagues. The Polish leaders refused to treat the visit as a party meeting and received the Soviet delegation as state guests at the Belvedere Palace. The protocol signaled governmental dignity rather than party subordination.
Khrushchev backed down. On October 20, Soviet troops were ordered back to their bases. Two days later, he accepted Gomulka as party leader in return for assurances that Poland would preserve socialism and remain in the Warsaw Pact. Formally, the Soviet defense system survived, but Poland’s reliability had been weakened. Kissinger attributes Soviet restraint partly to the risks of confronting more than thirty million Poles with deep memories of Russian oppression, and partly to the fact that Hungary was becoming a more dangerous test.
Hungary’s Revolution Outruns Reform
Hungary had endured an especially harsh Stalinist regime under Mátyás Rákosi. After the 1953 East German uprising, Moscow replaced him with Imre Nagy, a reform communist. Nagy was later dismissed, Rákosi returned, and strict orthodoxy resumed. Even so, Nagy survived and published a challenge to Soviet intervention inside communist states. After Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin speech, Rákosi was again replaced, this time by Erno Gero, who was too closely tied to the old order to calm Hungarian nationalism.
On October 23, the day after Gomulka’s formal return in Poland, Budapest erupted. Students demanded freedom of speech, the trial of Rákosi and his associates, the withdrawal of Soviet troops, and Nagy’s restoration. Nagy initially hoped to repair the communist system rather than destroy it, but the moment for controlled reform had passed. Kissinger invokes Tocqueville’s warning that oppression often becomes intolerable when reform first suggests escape. Nagy was gradually transformed by the uprising into a symbol of democratic aspiration, a role that later cost him his life.
On October 24, demonstrations became revolution. Soviet tanks entered Budapest, some were burned, and government buildings were seized. Nagy became prime minister, while Soviet Politburo representatives Anastas Mikoyan and Mikhail Suslov arrived to assess the crisis. By October 28, Moscow seemed ready to accept a Titoist Hungary, and Soviet tanks began withdrawing from Budapest. Yet Hungarian demands had moved beyond the Polish model to multiparty politics, the removal of Soviet troops from all Hungary, and withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact.
American Signals and Soviet Resolve
Washington had not prepared for such a revolt. It appealed to the United Nations Security Council on October 27, but the process moved so slowly that a vote came only after the Soviet crackdown. Radio Free Europe, meanwhile, urged Hungarians to reject compromise and treated Nagy with suspicion even after he moved toward coalition government. Although the station lacked direct administration instructions, Hungarians could hardly separate its voice from American liberation rhetoric.
Official American statements were also miscalibrated. On October 27, Dulles said that any Eastern European country breaking with Moscow could receive American aid without adopting a particular social system and without becoming a military ally. Intended as reassurance, this sounded to Moscow like an invitation for satellites to leave the Warsaw Pact under American economic protection. Eisenhower’s October 31 statement repeated that the United States would not use force and did not seek new military allies. That renunciation of force, unlike the assurances of benign intent, was easy for the Kremlin to understand.
Events in Budapest moved faster than diplomacy. On October 30, revolutionaries seized the Communist Party headquarters and massacred its occupants. Nagy announced a coalition government based on the democratic parties of the immediate postwar period. Béla Kovacs entered the cabinet, Cardinal Mindszenty was released from prison, and new parties opened offices and newspapers. Nagy also negotiated with Mikoyan and Suslov over Soviet withdrawal.
At the same time, Moscow issued a statement suggesting that Soviet troops could be stationed in a Warsaw Pact country only with that country’s consent. But it included warnings that the Soviet Union would defend Hungary’s socialist order against domestic and foreign reaction. Washington emphasized the conciliatory language and neglected the caveats. Nagy, caught between Hungarian demands and Soviet limits, took the decisive step on November 1: he declared Hungary neutral, withdrew from the Warsaw Pact, and asked the United Nations to recognize Hungarian neutrality. No effective answer came.
Suppression, the United Nations, and the Cost Not Imposed
On November 4, Soviet forces struck. János Kádár returned with the Red Army to form a new communist government. Pal Maleter, commander of the Hungarian army, was arrested while negotiating Soviet troop withdrawal. Nagy took refuge in the Yugoslav embassy, accepted a promise of safe passage, and was arrested after leaving it. Cardinal Mindszenty took refuge in the American legation, and Nagy and Maleter were later executed.
Only after the Soviet assault did the United Nations turn seriously to Hungary, having spent the decisive days denouncing Britain and France over Suez. A Security Council resolution demanding Soviet withdrawal was vetoed. The General Assembly passed a resolution affirming Hungarian independence and calling for observers, but it had no effect. On the same day, the United Nations created an emergency force for the Middle East, and that measure was implemented. The contrast sharpened Kissinger’s judgment that Hungary exposed the selectivity of international morality.
Kissinger does not argue that the Western democracies should have gone to war for Hungary. He treats that option as unrealistic and dangerous under nuclear conditions. However, he sharply criticizes Washington for failing to explore serious measures short of war. The United States did not warn Moscow that intervention would freeze East-West relations or impose political and economic costs. It did not tell the Hungarian government clearly where American support ended, and it did not advise Nagy on how to consolidate gains before taking irreversible steps. America and its allies behaved as bystanders, even though American rhetoric had helped create expectations that could not be fulfilled.
The Soviet Union paid little immediate price. A little more than two years later, Harold Macmillan visited Moscow, and within three years Eisenhower and Khrushchev invoked Camp David. For Kissinger, military rescue was impossible. The missed diplomatic opportunity lay in making Soviet repression seem nearly costless.
Suez, Nonalignment, and Realpolitik
The simultaneous Suez crisis intensified the contradiction. Arab states and leading Nonaligned governments, including India and Yugoslavia, condemned Britain and France over Egypt. Yet many refused to condemn the Soviet Union over Hungary. Kissinger argues that the United States should have connected its pressure on Britain and France to reciprocal attitudes toward Soviet repression. Instead, the Soviet Union lost little influence among the Nonaligned, while the United States gained no comparable credit for opposing its own allies at Suez.
The episode also reveals Kissinger’s view of Nonalignment. Earlier neutrality had usually meant passive distance from power blocs. Cold War Nonalignment became active, organized, and moralistic. Its members denounced international tensions while learning to benefit from them, playing the superpowers against each other. Because many feared the Soviet Union more than the United States, they were often harsher toward Western powers than toward Moscow.
India is Kissinger’s main example. On November 16, Jawaharlal Nehru defended India’s refusal to support the United Nations resolution condemning Soviet actions by claiming that the facts were obscure, the resolution badly worded, and United Nations supervision of elections an intrusion on Hungarian sovereignty. Kissinger dismisses this as Realpolitik. India wanted Soviet support and access to arms while facing China and Pakistan. Its leaders spoke the moral language of Wilson and Gladstone, but acted in the strategic tradition of Disraeli and Theodore Roosevelt.
Dulles’s later explanations deepened the problem. In December 1956, he said the United States did not want to surround the Soviet Union with hostile states and hoped for peaceful evolution toward independence. In March 1957, he emphasized that America had no legal obligation to provide military aid to Hungary. For Kissinger, the question of a formal commitment mattered less than whether American conduct matched the implications of its public mission.
The Long Meaning of 1956
The paired crises of Suez and Hungary set the coordinates for the next Cold War phase. The Soviet Union preserved its Eastern European position, while the Western democracies lost ground in the Middle East. Khrushchev could crush Budapest, threaten Western Europe with rockets, and propose joint action with the United States against Britain and France in the Middle East. Hungary was left to historical evolution, and America’s allies were left with a sharper sense of their own impotence.
Yet Kissinger closes by stressing that Soviet success concealed weakness. The revolutions occurring in developed countries were happening inside the communist sphere, not in the capitalist one. Eastern Europe would have served Soviet security better as a ring of Finland-like neutral governments than as an empire requiring permanent coercion. Soviet domination drained resources, frightened the West, and never converted control of government and media into popular acceptance.
Kádár eventually moved partway toward Nagy’s domestic goals, though he kept Hungary inside the Warsaw Pact. Within a decade, Hungary became internally freer than Poland and somewhat more independent in foreign policy. A generation later, Soviet liberalization would again lose control, this time fatally. In 1956, however, Moscow misread the suppression of Hungary and the humiliation of the West at Suez as proof that the balance of forces had shifted in its favor. That confidence helped lead to the next grave Cold War challenge: the Soviet ultimatums over Berlin.
You can read the summary of the next chapter of the book by clicking this link.