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 twenty-fourth chapter of his book, called "Concepts of Western Unity: Macmillan, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, and Kennedy".
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.
Europe After the Consolidation of the Cold War Divide
Kissinger begins with Berlin because, in his interpretation, the crisis marked the final consolidation of the two postwar spheres of influence in Europe. Stalin had imposed Soviet control over Eastern Europe, while the Western democracies had created NATO, consolidated their occupation zones into the Federal Republic of Germany, and begun Western European integration. By the late 1950s, both sides had tested the boundaries of this order and failed to overturn them.
Those failures mattered as much as the original division. Stalin’s Peace Note of 1952 tried to lure West Germany out of the Western camp, but it came to nothing. Dulles’s rhetoric of “liberation” collapsed during the Hungarian uprising of 1956, when the United States did not intervene. Khrushchev’s Berlin ultimatum of 1958 also sought to detach the Federal Republic from the West, yet it ended with the Soviet Union tightening its hold over East Germany. After the Cuban missile crisis, Moscow shifted much of its competitive energy toward the developing world.
The result was a strange stability. Europe remained divided in an abnormal and morally unsatisfactory way, but the line was clear enough that neither side had much incentive to test it directly. This clarity made the continent less explosive than many alternatives. It also removed the pressure that had kept disagreements inside the Atlantic alliance submerged. Once the Western powers were less afraid that every dispute might encourage Soviet expansion, they could clash more openly over nuclear weapons, Germany, NATO, and Europe’s future.
Macmillan and Britain’s Transition From Power to Influence
Macmillan is presented as the first British prime minister forced to confront openly that Great Britain was no longer a world power. Churchill’s wartime prestige had still allowed him to act as if Britain could speak to Washington and Moscow from a position of equality, and Eden behaved during Suez as the head of an autonomous Great Power. By the time Macmillan faced the Berlin crisis, that illusion had become unsustainable.
Macmillan embodied Britain’s decline from an Edwardian imperial world to a secondary Cold War role. He understood that Britain’s economy was weakening and that its military capacity could not match the nuclear superpowers. Since aloofness from continental Europe no longer fit the Cold War, he applied for membership in the European Community.
Still, the European turn did not replace Britain’s attachment to the United States. Britain saw itself as more than an exclusively European power, since its dangers had often arisen on the continent while its rescue had twice come from across the Atlantic. Macmillan rejected de Gaulle’s belief that European security required greater distance from Washington. Britain might fight for Berlin with as much firmness as France, but mainly to support the United States against a challenge to the global balance of power.
Suez had taught Britain and France opposite lessons. France concluded that dependence on the United States was intolerable and accelerated its search for independence. Britain concluded that influence required intimacy with Washington. According to Kissinger, British leaders understood that they could no longer shape American policy as an autonomous Great Power. Instead, they made themselves indispensable to American decision-making. Under Macmillan, Britain would no longer command events from the front, but it could influence them from inside the American system.
Berlin, Negotiation, and the Skybolt Test
Macmillan’s conduct during the Berlin crisis reflected this transition from power to influence. He did not think access to Berlin was worth a nuclear holocaust, but he considered the loss of the American connection even more dangerous. He would stand with Washington in an ultimate crisis, while trying to exhaust diplomatic alternatives before reaching that point. Consequently, he presented himself as the Western leader most committed to negotiation.
Kissinger is critical of the way this approach could turn means into ends. Macmillan believed that repeated negotiations might blunt Khrushchev’s ultimatums by extending deadlines. His eleven-day visit to the Soviet Union in February and March 1959 angered Adenauer and produced no substantive concession. Khrushchev repeated his threats; Macmillan still sought conferences, treating dialogue as the safest way to avoid a decisive confrontation.
The weakness of that method was that process-centered negotiation could empower the side most willing to break talks off. Macmillan therefore searched for issues that could be discussed with limited danger. Disengagement schemes in Central Europe seemed to provide such an issue: to him and to some American officials, the location of nuclear weapons appeared largely symbolic. In their view, the real deterrent rested on the American arsenal outside the continent.
Adenauer saw the matter differently. For him, American nuclear weapons stationed in Germany formed a political link between Europe and the United States. If Soviet forces attacked Central Europe, those weapons would almost certainly be destroyed, and their destruction would make an American nuclear response nearly automatic. If the weapons were withdrawn to the United States, however, a conventional attack might appear more thinkable, and Washington might hesitate before initiating nuclear war on behalf of a devastated ally. Thus Berlin diplomacy became a substitute battlefield for the larger debate about NATO strategy.
The Skybolt affair later showed both the danger and the value of Britain’s chosen path. Britain had planned to buy the American Skybolt air-launched missile to extend the life of its bomber force. In 1962, the Kennedy Administration canceled the project with no advance warning, officially for technical reasons and also to discourage an autonomous British nuclear capability. The decision threatened to make Britain’s bomber force obsolete and seemed to confirm French warnings about dependence on Washington.
Macmillan responded by using the capital accumulated through years of partnership. At Nassau in December 1962, Kennedy and Macmillan agreed that the United States would sell Britain Polaris submarines and missiles, while Britain would build its own warheads. Britain accepted that these forces would be assigned to NATO except when its “supreme national interest” was at stake. Kissinger treats this caveat as decisive: Nassau effectively gave Britain the freedom France sought, but through consultation rather than confrontation.
De Gaulle and the Return of Classical Diplomacy
France stood in a different position: it had no realistic prospect of acquiring Britain’s influence in Washington. De Gaulle therefore raised Atlantic cooperation as a philosophical and strategic question. For the United States, European pliability after World War II had seemed normal. Yet in the longer history of Europe, sovereign states, balance-of-power diplomacy, and national calculation had shaped politics for centuries. In Kissinger’s account, de Gaulle represented the return of that older European style.
Kissinger rejects the simple claim that de Gaulle suffered from delusions of grandeur. His problem was closer to the opposite: he was trying to restore identity to a country marked by defeat and vulnerability. France had lost much of a generation in World War I, collapsed in 1940, and then endured the instability of the Fourth Republic and defeat in Indochina and Algeria. Total victory offered America a confidence that France lacked. De Gaulle judged policies by whether they could restore French self-respect and national will.
This difference created persistent misunderstanding between Paris and Washington. American leaders treated consultation as a cure for disagreement, assuming an underlying harmony of Western interests. De Gaulle cared less about consultative machinery than about concrete options in case interests diverged. He believed that harmony among nations had to be created through equilibrium and statesmanship, not assumed through procedures.
For that reason, de Gaulle’s diplomacy often followed a stark pattern. He would submit proposals with minimal explanation, and if they were rejected, he would act unilaterally. France had to see itself, and be seen by others, as acting by its own will. De Gaulle was not anti-American in every circumstance. He gave the United States unconditional support during the Cuban missile crisis and opposed disengagement in Central Europe because it would leave Soviet forces too close and American forces too far away. When French and American interests diverged, he insisted that France must keep its destiny in French hands.
De Gaulle’s larger propositions had practical consequences that weakened the American role in Europe. He argued that the United States could not be counted on to remain in Europe indefinitely and that Europe had to prepare, under French leadership, for a future in which it might stand alone. When Eisenhower asked why he doubted America would identify its fate with Europe, de Gaulle invoked the two world wars: in the first, American help came only after years of danger; in the second, it came after France had already fallen. In the nuclear age, such delayed intervention would be useless.
Germany gave this issue special urgency. De Gaulle wanted Bonn to see France as a more reliable political ally than the United States, especially when American initiatives over Berlin seemed to reopen matters Germans considered settled. He envisioned a Europe of states in which France would direct German strength into a French-led design. Kissinger emphasizes the weakness in this analogy: France was not the strongest state in Western Europe and could not control an equilibrium that included two nuclear superpowers.
Nuclear Strategy and the Alliance Dilemma
The deepest Franco-American conflict concerned nuclear strategy. The nuclear age had transformed power itself. Earlier states accumulated military strength by gradual increments, and war unfolded through mobilization over time. Nuclear weapons created the possibility that a state could possess more destructive power than could serve rational political purposes. The superpowers’ central dilemma was how to limit power already too vast to use safely.
This development changed international politics. Fear of nuclear war contained tensions that might once have led to conventional conflict, preserving a general peace among the major powers. At the same time, the same fear made non-nuclear challenges more plausible when nuclear superiority was hard to invoke. Strategy therefore became deterrence, an intellectual puzzle that could not be tested directly. If war did not occur, no one could prove whether deterrence had prevented it or whether the adversary had never intended to attack.
These uncertainties placed alliances under new strain. Historically, states usually honored alliances when abandoning an ally seemed more dangerous than fulfilling the commitment. In the nuclear age, abandoning an ally could lead to eventual disaster, but nuclear war on behalf of an ally could bring immediate catastrophe. The United States therefore wanted to make deterrence credible while also making any possible war more limited and controllable. Flexible response, discriminating targeting, and centralized command seemed to American defense thinkers to offer a way between surrender and Armageddon.
European allies feared the opposite result. If nuclear war became more calculable, Soviet aggression might become more likely, and the United States might hesitate at the final moment rather than risk its own cities. Europe could then suffer both weakened deterrence and unfulfilled strategy. Yet American fears were also serious. Independent British or French nuclear forces might trigger a conflict that forced the United States into nuclear war against its will.
Kissinger treats this as an insoluble dilemma. Britain and France understandably wanted some control over decisions affecting their survival. The United States understandably wanted to avoid multiplying independent nuclear triggers. Independent European forces complicated an aggressor’s calculations and therefore had deterrent value. Unified control made sense if war had to be conducted in any tolerable way. No procedure could reconcile these concerns: the problem was political before it was technical.
Eisenhower, the Directorate, and the Limits of Procedure
Eisenhower approached the problem by trying to persuade de Gaulle that an independent French nuclear force was unnecessary. He sought a technical solution to the danger of allied nuclear forces operating outside American control. In 1959, he asked de Gaulle how the alliance’s national nuclear forces might be integrated into a single military plan. De Gaulle’s answer showed that he regarded the issue as political, not technical. Eisenhower wanted efficient wartime command; de Gaulle wanted diplomatic freedom before war, when political decisions still mattered.
De Gaulle had already stated his answer in his memorandum of September 17, 1958, to Eisenhower and Macmillan. He proposed a political Directorate within the Atlantic alliance composed of the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and France. It would meet regularly, maintain a joint staff, and design strategy, especially for crises outside the NATO area and for questions involving nuclear weapons. He tied France’s future participation in NATO to the creation of such an arrangement.
At one level, the Directorate sought for France a status comparable to Britain’s special relationship with the United States. At another, it resembled a revised version of Roosevelt’s idea of great-power policemen, with France replacing the Soviet Union as one of the central guardians of world security. Kissinger notes that de Gaulle had identified the real problem: nuclear coordination could not be guaranteed by technical procedures alone. The risks were so vast that only deep political intimacy could make common action plausible. Yet sovereign states rarely achieve such intimacy, and de Gaulle’s manner made it even harder.
The proposal received a cold response. Britain did not want to dilute its special relationship with Washington. The United States did not want to encourage nuclear proliferation by creating a privileged directorate of nuclear powers, especially when France’s nuclear capability was only beginning. Other NATO members rejected the implication that the alliance contained first-class and second-class members. Eisenhower and Macmillan accepted consultation in principle but tried to keep it below the level of heads of government and largely confined to military matters.
This response underestimated de Gaulle. If his proposal was buried in procedure, he would demonstrate that France had alternatives. He ordered the removal of American nuclear weapons from French soil, withdrew the French fleet from NATO’s integrated command, and eventually, in 1966, withdrew France from NATO’s command structure altogether. Before that final step, however, the dispute passed through Kennedy’s effort to redefine the Atlantic alliance.
Kennedy’s Atlantic Community and de Gaulle’s Rejection
Kennedy represented a postwar generation that had fought World War II and inherited the order created afterward. Truman and Eisenhower had focused on preserving the alliance built to resist Soviet aggression. Kennedy wanted a new architecture: an Atlantic Community that would lead a broader liberal international order. His policy had two parts. Militarily, he sought a rational use for nuclear weapons through flexible response. Politically, he called for a partnership between the United States and a united Europe.
Under Robert McNamara, the Kennedy Administration rejected the stark choice between massive retaliation and surrender. It increased emphasis on conventional forces and tried to create nuclear options short of general devastation. Such a strategy, however, required central control, which in practice meant American control. The proposed NATO Multilateral Force placed missiles on mixed-nationality ships under NATO command, but with the United States retaining a veto, it solved neither the political problem of autonomy nor the strategic problem of credibility.
Kennedy’s larger vision appeared in his 1962 Declaration of Interdependence and in later speeches linking Atlantic partnership to European integration. He imagined a cohesive Europe as an equal partner of the United States, sharing burdens and obligations. Yet this vision collided with European ambivalence. Europe had growing economic strength but remained militarily dependent, especially in nuclear matters. The very flexibility that made Kennedy’s strategy attractive to Washington made allies nervous by increasing American freedom to decide whether, how, and when to fight.
The Skybolt controversy brought these tensions to the surface. De Gaulle had always resisted the Anglo-American special relationship because it seemed to elevate Britain while leaving France secondary. Although Kennedy offered France similar assistance, de Gaulle cared about the distinction between integration and coordination. Since the Nassau Agreement had been negotiated by Kennedy and Macmillan and then presented publicly, de Gaulle rejected the offer in January 1963, vetoed Britain’s entry into the Common Market, and rejected Kennedy’s supranational vision of Europe.
A few days later, de Gaulle and Adenauer signed the Franco-German Treaty of friendship, providing for regular consultation on major foreign-policy issues. Its immediate substance was limited, but its symbolism was considerable. After de Gaulle excluded Britain from the Common Market despite American pressure, the German chancellor helped keep France from isolation. France was not strong enough to impose its solutions, but with Germany it could block the solutions of others.
Kissinger’s Judgment and the Post-Cold War Aftermath
Kissinger brings the dispute back to the fundamental question of why nations cooperate. In the American view, reasonable peoples should eventually arrive at common objectives, so institutional machinery becomes the main problem. In the European view, shaped by centuries of conflicting national interests, harmony must be negotiated case by case through statesmanship. This difference underlay the debates over nuclear control, de Gaulle’s rejection of supranational Europe, and later arguments over European integration.
Kissinger does not dismiss de Gaulle’s questions. He argues that they reached the heart of America’s international role, especially the need to recognize that nations cooperate for long periods only when they share political goals. Mechanisms are poor substitutes for common purposes, and a functioning international order must leave room for different national interests rather than assuming them away. Kennedy’s vision of twin Atlantic pillars reflected the Wilsonian and Rooseveltian tradition; de Gaulle’s vision reflected a classical European equilibrium built around a divided Germany, French political leadership in Europe, and American nuclear protection as insurance.
Yet Kissinger also concludes that de Gaulle overreached. His analysis of the political nature of nuclear decisions was often sound, and his Directorate proposal correctly stressed the need to coordinate political purposes outside NATO’s formal area. But he turned valid arguments into permanent confrontation with the United States. France had the power to obstruct American designs. The power to replace them with a French-led order was beyond it. If NATO members had to choose between Washington and Paris, they would choose Washington.
Germany exposed this limit most clearly. De Gaulle made Franco-German cooperation central to his policy, and German leaders sympathized with some of his concerns about Berlin and nuclear control. But no German government could risk facing the Soviet Union with only France behind it. American nuclear power and political backing remained indispensable. By pushing anti-Americanism too far, de Gaulle even risked encouraging the German nationalism he hoped to contain, because Germany might be tempted to maneuver among competing options.
The crises of the 1960s eventually faded without decisive resolution. After the Berlin crisis of 1958-63, the Soviet Union launched no comparable frontal challenge in Europe. After the Atlantic crises of 1960-66, NATO settled into a practical coexistence between the American and French conceptions. Later American efforts, including the Nixon Administration’s “Year of Europe,” ran into similar French resistance, and French attempts to create an independent European military capability remained limited by American caution and German ambivalence.
In the post-Cold War world, Kissinger finds that both the American and Gaullist visions were overtaken by events. The disappearance of communism removed the single threat that had made Wilsonian Atlantic unity easier to imagine, while a more balanced distribution of economic power made national and regional interests harder to subordinate to American leadership. De Gaulle would not have been surprised by the return of nationalism; he would likely have argued that it had merely been hidden by bipolar discipline.
At the same time, German unification and the collapse of the Soviet bloc undermined de Gaulle’s own assumptions. France could not organize Europe by itself, could not count on Russia as a reliable counterweight to Germany, and could not encircle Germany without reviving the nationalism it feared. A unified Germany no longer needed French certification against an East German rival, and Eastern Europe became a set of actors in its own right. Therefore, the United States remained France’s most reliable, if conceptually difficult, partner and necessary reinsurance for France’s friendship with Germany. The chapter ends with a historical irony: the path de Gaulle designed to make America dispensable, and the American effort to integrate France more fully into NATO, both led toward the same conclusion. Cooperation between the United States and France became indispensable to the equilibrium that both had once tried, in different ways, to define without conceding to the other.
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