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 third chapter of his book, called "From Universality to Equilibrium: Richelieu, William of Orange, and Pitt".
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.
From Universal Monarchy to the Fragmented State System
Kissinger begins by locating the balance-of-power system in the wreckage of the medieval aspiration to universality. Medieval Europe had inherited from Rome and the Catholic Church the idea that earthly order should mirror heavenly order. It imagined one God in heaven, one emperor in the secular world, and one pope over the Universal Church. If the Holy Roman Empire had centralized the feudal territories of Germany and northern Italy, France and England would have faced an overwhelming continental structure.
That outcome never materialized. Part of the explanation was practical: communications and transport could not easily sustain centralized rule over such varied territories. The deeper reason was constitutional and religious. In Western Europe, the pope and emperor claimed different kinds of authority, and neither could fully absorb the other. Their rivalry gave feudal rulers room to bargain, evade obedience, and expand their autonomy. As a result, Central Europe became a patchwork of secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. Duchies, counties, cities, and bishoprics operated with practical autonomy. The emperor maintained the language of universal rule, but the machinery of universal monarchy disappeared.
The Habsburgs briefly seemed capable of reversing that fragmentation. By securing a near-permanent claim to the imperial crown in the fifteenth century and acquiring the Spanish crown through dynastic marriage, they gained resources on a scale that could have turned imperial claims into political reality. Under Charles V in the first half of the sixteenth century, a Habsburg-led Central European empire seemed possible. It would have joined Germany and Austria to northern Italy, the Low Countries, Hungary, Bohemia, and parts of eastern France. Such a formation would have prevented the rise of a European balance by giving one dynasty the means to dominate the Continent.
Yet the Reformation undermined this project at the moment when Habsburg power seemed most formidable. When the Papacy had been strong, it had competed with the emperor; when weakened by Protestant revolt, it damaged the emperor in a different way. Protestant princes no longer saw obedience to the Habsburg emperor as a religious duty. To them, the emperor appeared less as the agent of God than as an Austrian ruler tied to a compromised papal authority. Their break with Rome thus became both religious and political. The collapse of unity forced emerging states to find new principles for independence and diplomacy.
Those principles were raison d’état and the balance of power. Raison d’état held that the welfare of the state justified the means required to secure it, replacing universal Christian morality with national interest. The balance of power offered a broader consolation: if each state pursued its own interest, others might prevent domination and preserve general freedom. In Kissinger’s telling, the two doctrines depended on each other. Raison d’état explained why states acted for themselves; the balance of power explained how those selfish actions might be prevented from ending in empire.
Richelieu and the Secularization of French Policy
France had the strongest reason to develop the new approach. It was already one of Europe’s first nation-states, but it was also encircled by Habsburg power. Spain lay to the south, Spanish influence dominated northern Italy, Franche-Comté stood to the east, and the Spanish Netherlands lay to the north. Other exposed frontiers touched territories tied to the Austrian Habsburgs, including Lorraine and strategic areas along the Rhine. If northern Germany were also consolidated under Habsburg rule, France would be reduced to a secondary position.
The architect of France’s response was Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, First Minister from 1624 to 1642. Kissinger treats him as a founder of the modern state system because he made raison d’état the operating principle of French foreign policy. Richelieu’s position was paradoxical. As a Catholic cardinal, he might have been expected to welcome the Counter-Reformation and the Habsburg emperor’s effort to restore Catholic orthodoxy. As a French statesman, he saw the same effort as a geopolitical danger. Ferdinand II’s attempt to stamp out Protestantism and strengthen imperial control over Central Europe threatened to surround France with a revived Habsburg empire.
The Thirty Years’ War created the setting in which Richelieu’s doctrine became policy. The war began in 1618 in Prague and quickly drew the German territories into a struggle between Protestant and Catholic camps. Danish and Swedish armies intervened, Germany was devastated, and by 1648 Central Europe had lost a catastrophic share of its population. Kissinger presents the war as the crucible in which Richelieu grafted raison d’état onto European diplomacy.
Richelieu’s foil was Emperor Ferdinand II, whose outlook remained rooted in religious universality. Ferdinand saw his secular mission as obedience to God and treated compromise with Protestantism as a betrayal of divine duty. In 1629, after eleven years of war, he could have secured Habsburg political predominance by accepting Protestant religious autonomy and possession of seized Church lands. Instead, he issued the Edict of Restitution, demanding the return of lands taken since 1555. For Kissinger, this was zeal defeating expediency. Ferdinand preserved religious consistency but ensured that the conflict would continue.
Richelieu exploited the opening. At home, he reduced the danger of religious civil war by granting French Protestants freedom of worship in the Grace of Alais of 1629. Abroad, he subsidized Protestant German princes and Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden against the Catholic emperor. Later, he was prepared to work even with the Ottoman Empire if doing so weakened the Habsburgs. His alliances were judged by whether they served France’s security and power. France remained formally Catholic, but its foreign policy treated religion as an instrument rather than a binding rule.
In 1635, when exhaustion threatened to bring the war to a compromise before France had achieved its objectives, Richelieu persuaded Louis XIII to enter the war directly. He had spent years using subsidies and alliances to pressure the Habsburgs while preserving France’s strength. Once those allies could no longer continue without French support, Richelieu argued that open intervention had become necessary. His conduct illustrated a central difficulty of raison d’état: success depended on measuring power, timing, means, and ends with unusual precision. Kissinger credits Richelieu with possessing that precision to a rare degree.
The Moral Challenge and the Strategic Cost of Richelieu’s Success
Richelieu’s policy provoked criticism because it severed diplomacy from moral standards many Europeans still regarded as binding. Jansenius condemned the idea that a perishable state could outweigh the claims of religion and the Church, while Mathieu de Morgues accused Richelieu of manipulating religion in the manner of Machiavelli. These critics identified the essence of Richelieu’s revolution, but their criticism did not defeat it. Richelieu’s defenders answered that service to France was itself service to Catholicism because France was the purest Catholic power. Daniel de Priezac pushed the argument further: if the king’s intention was just and France’s security was at stake, harsh means could be excused.
Kissinger emphasizes that Richelieu’s critics were not misunderstanding him. Richelieu did subordinate religion and conventional morality to the needs of the state. His achievement lay in using the available forces to reach his objectives. By the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, France had become the dominant power in Europe. Raison d’état had begun to replace universal moral claims as the practical language of diplomacy.
The consequences for Central Europe were immense. Richelieu prevented the Habsburgs from unifying Germany under imperial leadership, and Kissinger suggests that he delayed German unification by roughly two centuries. The Holy Roman Empire remained divided among more than 300 sovereign entities, each conducting its own foreign policy. Germany turned inward, remained absorbed in dynastic quarrels, became the battleground of later European wars, and missed much of the early European overseas expansion. When Germany finally unified under Bismarck, it lacked long experience in defining a national interest, a deficiency Kissinger links to later catastrophes.
Richelieu’s success also carried danger for France. His analysis of Habsburg encirclement was sound, but raison d’état had no natural stopping point. If state interest justified security, it could also justify expansion in the name of greater security. Louis XIV inherited a strong France, a divided Germany, and a declining Spain, yet treated that position as an invitation to conquest rather than a basis for restraint. The result was overextension. French efforts to dominate Europe alarmed other powers and generated the coalitions that blocked French hegemony.
For two centuries after Richelieu, France remained the most influential country in Europe. Nevertheless, the advantage Richelieu had enjoyed disappeared once other rulers adopted similar premises. Ferdinand had been constrained by religious principle; later adversaries were not. As all states learned to reason in terms of interest, France entered a treadmill of expansion, coalition, and exhaustion. Raison d’état explained individual conduct, but it did not by itself create international order. It could lead either to primacy or to equilibrium, depending on whether others could resist the strongest state.
The Balance of Power as Practice Before Theory
Kissinger stresses that the balance of power did not begin as a fully conscious system. In the world inaugurated by Richelieu, strong states sought advantage and weaker states formed coalitions to resist domination. If the coalition was strong enough, equilibrium emerged; if not, hegemony followed. Europe might have become a French empire, a German empire, or a genuine balance. The outcome was settled through repeated conflict, not by agreement on an abstract theory.
Eighteenth-century philosophers often described the balance of power more harmoniously than statesmen practiced it. Voltaire pictured Europe as a republic of states sharing principles of public law and maintaining equilibrium. Montesquieu treated Europe as a single body of interdependent parts, and Vattel wrote of negotiations binding independent states together for order and liberty. Kissinger argues that such writers confused result with intent. European rulers were not fighting succession wars and territorial contests to implement a philosophical order. They were pursuing dynastic security, territorial expansion, and immediate advantage.
The system became even harder to manage because its components were changing. Spain and Sweden declined into second-rank status. Poland moved toward extinction. Russia, which had been absent from the Peace of Westphalia, rose into major-power status. Prussia moved from insignificance to the same rank. Central Europe remained weakened by the Thirty Years’ War, and France, Russia, and Prussia pressed into that vacuum. Under these conditions, calculating the balance became difficult because relative strength kept shifting.
Frederick the Great’s seizure of Silesia from Austria showed raison d’état in its pure risk-and-reward form. Prussia had friendly relations with Austria and treaty obligations to respect its territorial integrity, but Frederick judged that military opportunity and diplomatic circumstances favored action. He calculated how England, France, Holland, Russia, and other powers might react. Then he concluded that resistance could be managed or neutralized. Moral restraint scarcely mattered. The conquest of Silesia made Prussia a Great Power and triggered efforts by other states to adjust to Prussia’s rise. The War of the Austrian Succession from 1740 to 1748 and the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763 showed that alliances now shifted according to immediate calculations rather than permanent principles.
Even so, equilibrium gradually emerged because no state was strong enough to impose its will on all the others. These eighteenth-century wars did not reproduce the devastation of the earlier religious wars partly because absolute monarchs could not mobilize societies as completely as religion, ideology, or later popular government could. Their fiscal reach and military technology remained limited. The balance operated through conflict, but conflict remained bounded enough for the system to continue.
William of Orange and Britain’s Role as Balancer
The decisive stabilizing factor was the rise of England, later Great Britain, as the manager of the European balance. England did not need territorial expansion on the Continent. Its interest lay in preventing any single power from mobilizing Europe’s resources against the British Isles. Therefore, it could support whichever side was weaker or more threatened, making England the major power whose raison d’état pointed toward equilibrium rather than continental acquisition.
William III gave that policy its first durable form. Born Dutch and ruling the Netherlands as Stadtholder, he had already experienced Louis XIV’s ambitions before he became king of England after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. England had deposed the Catholic James II and turned to the Protestant William, who was married to Mary, James’s daughter. With him, England imported a continental conflict centered on the Spanish Netherlands, roughly present-day Belgium. To William, French control of the fortresses and harbors there would endanger Dutch independence, increase French domination, and eventually threaten England itself.
William therefore organized resistance to Louis XIV. He understood that if France gained Spain and its possessions, it would become a superpower beyond the reach of any coalition. Sweden, Spain, Savoy, the Austrian emperor, Saxony, the Dutch Republic, and England responded through the Grand Alliance. From 1688 to 1713, Louis XIV fought almost continuous wars against it. France remained the strongest European state, but it was prevented from becoming dominant. For Kissinger, this was the balance in its classic practical form: states opposed domination because survival required it.
William’s anti-French policy was not ethnic or sentimental. He was willing to negotiate with Louis XIV when negotiation served equilibrium, and he would have opposed the Habsburgs had they been the main threat. His purpose was to maintain a rough balance between Bourbon France and the Habsburgs. Because France had become the expansionist power after Richelieu, England aligned with the Habsburgs against Louis XIV.
British public opinion did not immediately accept this continental role. Many Englishmen believed that an island state could wait until a threat became direct. William had to persuade an essentially isolationist society that its security depended on preventing domination overseas before it reached Britain. Over time, however, the balance of power became a recognized principle of British policy. Disputes remained over method. Whigs favored intervention only when the balance was actually threatened and only until the threat had passed. Tories argued that Britain needed to shape the balance in advance, using more permanent engagements to prevent aggression from becoming irreversible. Lord Carteret later expressed the Tory case by insisting that Britain had to support Austria as the main counterweight to Bourbon France.
Kissinger treats this debate as practical rather than philosophical. Both Whigs and Tories accepted that Britain cared about the European balance; they differed over the margin of safety and the timing of engagement. Similar arguments later appeared in the United States between isolationists and globalists. In both countries, public opinion resisted permanent commitments until danger seemed unavoidable.
Pitt, Napoleon, and the Conscious Design of Equilibrium
By the early nineteenth century, Britain began turning its pragmatic defense of the balance into a conscious design. France again forced the issue. After the Revolution, French expansion no longer rested on royal glory or Richelieu’s language of raison d’état. It returned to a universal claim, now expressed through republican ideals. Revolutionary France and then Napoleon fought in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, using conscript armies and ideological fervor to project power across Europe. By 1807, France had created satellite kingdoms along the Rhine, in Italy, and in Spain. It had also reduced Prussia to second-rank status and badly weakened Austria. Only Russia remained capable of blocking Napoleon.
Russia, however, inspired both hope and fear. During the eighteenth century, its frontier moved hundreds of miles westward, its armies appeared in Berlin during the Seven Years’ War, and it became central to the partition of Poland. Autocracy made that power more unsettling. Russian policy could swing according to the tsar’s disposition. Alexander I illustrated this volatility: he was briefly influenced by Enlightenment liberalism, then moved toward conservative reaction.
In 1804, Alexander approached British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger with a plan for universal peace. He proposed constitutional reform, the end of feudalism, the renunciation of force, and arbitration for disputes. Kissinger describes the Russian autocrat as an unlikely precursor of the later Wilsonian belief that liberal institutions were prerequisites for peace, while noting that Alexander did not apply such reform at home.
Pitt needed Russia against Napoleon, but he did not want to replace French domination with Russian arbitration. He also could not commit Britain to a war for European political and social reform. British policy cared about continental upheaval only when it affected the balance of power. Pitt therefore ignored Alexander’s call for ideological reform and instead outlined the structure of a future equilibrium. For the first time since Westphalia, a general European settlement was being imagined, and it would rest explicitly on the balance of power.
Pitt identified the weakness of Central Europe as the main source of instability. France had repeatedly exploited the fragmentation of Germany and the vulnerability of the Low Countries. A settlement would therefore deprive France of its postrevolutionary conquests, restore the independence of the Low Countries, and consolidate the hundreds of German principalities into larger “great masses.” Some smaller states would be absorbed by Prussia or Austria; others would be combined into more viable groupings. Pitt avoided proposing a European government. Instead, he wanted the four main anti-French powers to guarantee the new territorial settlement through a permanent alliance against French aggression.
Kissinger presents Pitt’s plan as the bridge between an accidental balance and a designed order. The fear of Napoleon pushed Britain toward a kind of continental commitment it had long resisted. Yet the chapter’s final lesson is that power alone cannot sustain order. Calculating power is too uncertain, and the willingness of states to defend it is too variable. A stable equilibrium requires legitimacy as well as balance. Power prevents the overthrow of order; shared values reduce the desire to overthrow it. The Congress of Vienna combined both elements, creating a European order that avoided general war for a century.
You can read the summary of the next chapter of the book by clicking this link.