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 thirty-first chapter of his book, called "The New World Order Reconsidered".
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.
Wilsonian Triumph and the Return of an Older Diplomatic Problem
At the beginning of the 1990s, Wilsonianism seemed to have won the twentieth century’s central argument. Communism had been morally defeated as an ideology, and Soviet power had collapsed as a geopolitical threat. Because the two struggles had merged during the Cold War, the United States could easily believe that the victory of its principles and the victory of its strategy were the same event. President George H. W. Bush described the coming order in terms of partnership, law, collective action, shared burdens, democracy, prosperity, peace, and arms reduction. President Bill Clinton gave the same impulse a new formula by calling for the enlargement of the community of market democracies. In Kissinger’s reading, both presidents spoke from a recognizably Wilsonian conviction: the American domestic experience contained principles capable of organizing the world.
This was the third time in the twentieth century that the United States had tried to define a new world order by universalizing its own values. In 1918, Woodrow Wilson appeared to dominate the Paris Peace Conference, partly because America’s allies depended too heavily on American power to press their doubts openly. Near the end of the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman also seemed to possess the means to reshape the international system according to American assumptions. After the Cold War, the temptation was even stronger, because the United States was the only remaining superpower and possessed the capacity to act in every region. Nevertheless, Kissinger argues that the new situation was less simple than American rhetoric suggested. Military superiority remained real, but power had become more diffuse, and the number of problems that could be solved by direct military force had narrowed.
The Cold War had supplied an organizing threat that simplified American choices. Once that threat disappeared, states regained room to pursue more immediate national interests. Kissinger therefore compares the post–Cold War world less to an American-led community of law than to the European state system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In such a world, order does not arise automatically from shared ideals. It has to be produced through the reconciliation of competing interests among several major powers and many smaller states. Bush and Clinton spoke as though the new order was nearly present, but Kissinger insists that it was still in formation and that its final structure would not be visible for years.
For Kissinger, every international order must answer three questions: what the basic units of the system are, how they interact, and what goals they pursue. These questions had become unusually unstable after the Cold War. The Westphalian system had lasted about a century and a half, the Vienna settlement about a century, and the Cold War order about four decades. The Versailles settlement barely functioned as a stable system at all. The shrinking duration of international systems suggested that modern change was accelerating. More important, the post–Cold War world was changing the units, methods, and purposes of diplomacy at the same time, and on a global scale.
Earlier upheavals had followed similar transformations in the character of political units. The Thirty Years’ War accompanied the movement toward raison d’état. The French Revolutionary wars marked the rise of the nation-state. The twentieth century’s wars were linked to imperial collapse, Europe’s weakening dominance, and decolonization. The post–Cold War era belonged to the same category of transition, because it multiplied the number of actors while weakening older assumptions about what a nation was.
New Kinds of States in a Global System
Since the Congress of Vienna, diplomacy had usually meant relations among nations. Yet the nineteenth-century European nation-state was a specific historical form, not a universal rule. It assumed a relatively strong connection among territory, language, culture, security, and economic life. Even the appearance of one major new nation, united Germany, had unsettled Europe for decades. After 1945, nearly a hundred new states entered the international system, many of them with very different foundations from the historic European nation-state. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia added still more states, some of which revived violent grievances that long predated the Cold War.
Kissinger distinguishes three broad types of states that all call themselves nations but do not function like the nineteenth-century European model. The first consists of ethnic fragments from disintegrating empires, such as the successor states of Yugoslavia and parts of the former Soviet Union. These states are often preoccupied with identity, memory, territorial claims, and historic injuries. Their leaders and populations may care far more about prevailing in local ethnic struggles than about contributing to any wider international order.
The second type consists of postcolonial states whose borders often reflect administrative convenience rather than national cohesion. Kissinger uses French and Belgian Africa to show the arbitrariness of imperial boundaries: one empire divided a large coastline into many units, while another ruled the vast Congo as one territory. After independence, many such units possessed only one institution with a claim to national reach: the army. Where the army’s claim collapsed, civil war often followed. If Wilsonian self-determination or nineteenth-century standards of nationhood were applied literally, the resulting border revisions would be radical and unpredictable. Yet preserving existing frontiers could also lock societies into fragile states whose alternative was violent fragmentation.
The third type consists of continental states that are likely to be central to the new world order. India, China, the United States, the Soviet Union, and its Russian successor do not fit the old European pattern. India contains many languages, religions, and nationalities; China is held together less by linguistic uniformity than by writing, civilization, and historical memory; the United States created a coherent culture out of a diverse population. The Soviet Union was an empire of nationalities, and the Russian Federation inherited the danger of either disintegration or renewed imperial assertion. These large, composite states blur the old line between domestic and foreign policy.
The global reach of technology has also transformed diplomacy. Earlier civilizations could exist with little direct interaction; the power of France and China, for example, could not meaningfully be compared when neither could directly affect the other. European expansion later made the future of other continents depend heavily on European calculations. By the late twentieth century, however, no previous order had ever contained major centers of power spread across the whole globe. Nor had diplomats ever operated in a world where leaders and publics could experience distant events almost immediately and simultaneously. The problem therefore extended beyond the larger number of states. These states interacted faster, more widely, and under greater public pressure than before.
These changes force the question of whether Wilsonian ideas can replace containment as the guiding principle of American foreign policy. Kissinger answers with a qualified judgment. Wilsonianism inspired some of the most constructive American policies of the twentieth century when reconstruction, alliance defense, containment, and international organization were treated as connected ways to give American power a constructive purpose. At the same time, Wilsonianism also produced serious dangers. Ethnic self-determination, when detached from power realities, encouraged destabilizing claims. Collective security remained weak when it lacked enforcement. Legal renunciations of war, such as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, failed against armed aggressors. The same missionary impulse that produced creativity could also lead to crusades, with Vietnam as the central warning.
Power, Democracy, and the Need for Selectivity
The end of the Cold War encouraged talk of a unipolar world, but Kissinger argues that the United States could not dictate the global agenda. It was more preponderant than before, yet its ability to translate power into outcomes had decreased because power itself had spread across more actors and more forms. Collective security also became harder, not easier, after victory. In the absence of a single dominating threat, major powers did not define dangers in the same way or accept equal risks in resisting them. The international community was more comfortable with peacekeeping, understood as policing an existing agreement, than with peacemaking, which required suppressing a challenge to order. Even Washington had not yet defined what it would resist alone in the post–Cold War world.
Wilsonian foreign policy rests on American exceptionalism: the belief that the United States combines unusual virtue with unusual power and can therefore fight for universal values on a global scale. Kissinger does not deny the importance of this tradition, but he argues that the coming century would make the United States less exceptional in practical terms. Its military power would remain unrivaled, but the willingness to use it in small and ambiguous conflicts such as Bosnia, Somalia, or Haiti would be limited. Its economy would remain large, but wealth and the technology of wealth creation would spread. America would remain the strongest country, but increasingly as first among peers rather than as a solitary power above normal constraints.
This development should not be mistaken for humiliation or decline. For most of its history, the United States was a nation among others rather than a dominant superpower. The rise of Western Europe, Japan, and China should not frighten Americans. American policy since the Marshall Plan had often aimed at helping other societies become stronger and more prosperous. The problem was conceptual: if Wilsonian exceptionalism became less relevant and its usual instruments less practicable, the United States needed a different organizing principle.
Kissinger finds that principle in a combination of national interest, balance of power, and moral purpose. Americans have long disliked Richelieu’s doctrine of raison d’état, according to which state interest justifies the means used to pursue it. They have also been uncomfortable admitting that they practice interest-based policy, even when they plainly have done so. The early republic dealt shrewdly with European powers, and westward expansion was pursued under the language of manifest destiny. Still, American leaders usually explained wars and interventions as struggles for principle rather than interest. Kissinger argues that this reluctance would no longer serve the country well. The next century would require leaders to define national interests publicly and explain how regional equilibria in Europe and Asia served those interests.
The most durable modern order, the one created after the Congress of Vienna, combined legitimacy with equilibrium. Shared values restrained the demands of states, while the balance of power limited their capacity to impose demands on others. Kissinger sees this combination as the missing element in a purely Wilsonian policy. The growth of democracy should remain a dominant American aspiration, but democracy arises under social conditions that vary sharply across regions. Western democracy developed in relatively cohesive societies where the nation, or at least a strong social consensus, preceded the modern state. Political parties could therefore alternate in power because they accepted an underlying national framework.
In many other regions, the state preceded the nation and remained the main agent trying to create one. Political parties often represented fixed communal identities rather than temporary policy coalitions. Majorities and minorities could be permanent, making politics a struggle for domination rather than a system of alternation. Under such conditions, opposition was easily treated as treason, and the idea of a loyal opposition rarely took root. Washington should prefer democratic governments and pay some price for human rights and liberty. However, Kissinger insists that the price must be weighed against security, resources, and the geopolitical balance. Moral commitments that exceed available means weaken credibility and may produce disillusionment and withdrawal.
The necessary balance cannot be fixed abstractly. It begins with defining vital interests: changes in the international environment so dangerous that they must be resisted regardless of the form they take or the justification offered. Britain historically treated control of the Channel ports as such an interest. The Monroe Doctrine once served a comparable function for the United States in the Western Hemisphere. Wilsonianism later shifted the emphasis from interests to opposition to aggression and illegal force. Kissinger finds both formulas insufficient. The Monroe Doctrine is too narrow for a global power; Wilsonian legality is too vague and legalistic. The controversies surrounding post–Cold War military actions showed that no national consensus on where to draw the line yet existed.
Russia, Reform, and Imperial Inheritance
Kissinger defines the basic American strategic danger in geopolitical terms. America is an island off Eurasia, whose resources and population exceed its own. Domination of either Europe or Asia by a single power would remain a threat, even if the dominant power initially appeared benevolent. Intentions can change, and once a hostile power controls a major Eurasian sphere, America’s ability to resist or shape events would be diminished. This principle survived the Cold War because it did not depend only on communist ideology.
Russia therefore occupies a central place in Kissinger’s analysis. American hopes after the Cold War rested heavily on the idea that a democratic and market-oriented Russia would ensure peace. Washington treated support for Russian reform as the main task, often drawing analogies to the Marshall Plan. Kissinger criticizes this approach for focusing on Russian intentions and domestic evolution at the expense of Russian capabilities, geography, and imperial tradition. In his view, American policy had repeatedly sought reassurance in the conversion or moderation of Russian leaders, from Roosevelt’s hopes for Stalin to Cold War debates about whether Soviet purposes had changed. After communism collapsed, Washington too often assumed that hostile interests had disappeared with hostile ideology.
Geopolitical analysis led to a more cautious conclusion. Russia occupied the heartland described by Halford Mackinder and inherited one of the world’s most powerful imperial traditions. Even if a moral transformation occurred, it would require time, and American policy should hedge against unfavorable outcomes. Economic aid could reduce suffering and support reform, but it could not replicate the Marshall Plan. Postwar Western Europe possessed functioning markets, established administrations, democratic habits in many countries, and a common Soviet threat; postcommunist Russia lacked those conditions. Aid and advice were useful instruments, but they were not substitutes for maintaining the balance of power in relation to a historically expansionist state.
The breakup of the Soviet Union resembled the decline of other empires, and managing imperial decline is among diplomacy’s hardest tasks. Collapsing empires create two dangers at once: neighbors try to exploit weakness, while the old imperial center tries to restore authority at the periphery. Both dynamics appeared in the former Soviet space. Iran and Turkey sought influence in Muslim Central Asia, but the dominant movement was Russia’s effort to reassert pre-eminence in territories once controlled from Moscow. Under the language of peacekeeping, Russia tried to recreate tutelage, while the United States, concentrating on the reformist image of the Yeltsin government, tended to acquiesce. Washington offered little support to the independence and international standing of most successor republics, apart from the Baltic states.
Kissinger argues that America had confused two different revolutions. Anticommunism was broadly supported across the former Soviet Union, including in Russia. Anti-imperialism, directed against Russian domination, was popular in the non-Russian republics but deeply unpopular among many Russians. Russian political culture had long understood the state as having a civilizing mission, and many leaders refused to accept the legitimacy of the successor states, especially Ukraine. Kissinger even cites Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s willingness to retain a core of Ukraine, Belarus, and much of Kazakhstan under Moscow’s orbit as evidence that anticommunism did not necessarily imply anti-imperialism. In the former Soviet space, not every anticommunist was a democrat, and not every democrat rejected Russian imperial claims.
A realistic policy would recognize that even Yeltsin’s reformist government kept Russian forces in many former Soviet republics, sometimes against the wishes of those governments. Russian troops participated in civil wars, and Moscow’s claim to a monopoly on peacekeeping in the near abroad resembled an effort to restore imperial control. Russia did have special security interests along its borders, but those interests had to be satisfied without unilateral intervention or military pressure. Cooperation with Russia was possible in areas such as resistance to Iranian fundamentalism in Central Asia. Yet cooperation should not become a script for accepting Russian domination.
Kissinger also doubts that democracy and restraint would automatically develop together in Russia. Russia had missed many formative Western experiences: an autonomous church, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Age of Discovery, and modern market economics. Its leaders had mostly risen under communism and did not instinctively practice pluralism. The transition from central planning to markets was painful, and the social costs of austerity strengthened communist and nationalist parties. The December 1993 parliamentary elections, in which communists and nationalists together won nearly half the vote, showed the fragility of reform. Even sincere reformers might use Russian nationalism as a unifying force, and Russian nationalism had historically been missionary and imperial.
For this reason, American policy should not stake everything on personal relationships with Gorbachev or Yeltsin. Kissinger criticizes Bush for lamenting the breakup of Gorbachev’s Soviet Union and Clinton for tolerating efforts to restore Russia’s sphere of influence. Treating reformist leaders as personal guarantors of peaceful policy made American strategy hostage to Russian domestic politics. A better policy would combine support for Russian democracy and markets with counterweights against expansion. It would welcome Russia into institutions of economic, cultural, and political cooperation while refusing to downgrade the independence of the new republics. Russia had to be integrated into the international system, but integration required disciplines as well as benefits.
The Atlantic Alliance and the European Balance
The policy that came closest to a generally accepted American vital interest was the defense of the Atlantic area. NATO was often justified in Wilsonian language as collective security, but Kissinger emphasizes that it also served a classic geopolitical purpose: preventing Soviet domination of Europe and keeping the power centers of Europe and Asia from falling under hostile control. This was why NATO harmonized moral and strategic objectives more successfully than most American policies. It tied the United States to Europe through permanent consultation and integrated command, creating a coalition structure of unusual durability.
After victory in the Cold War, however, the Atlantic Community began to lose focus. Kissinger regards this as dangerous. The United States seemed to be paying less attention to societies closest to it in institutions and values while becoming absorbed in other regions. The founders of the Atlantic relationship had understood that without ties to Europe, America would face a world in which it had few deep moral and historical bonds outside the Western Hemisphere, forcing it toward a pure Realpolitik inconsistent with its own tradition. Europe had also cooperated with the United States more often than post–Cold War complaints suggested. French and British forces were on the ground in Bosnia when American troops were not, and Britain and France supplied the most important non-American contingents in the Gulf War.
The task was not to preserve NATO and the European Union unchanged, but to adapt them. NATO was created when Soviet forces stood in central Europe and Western Europe depended on American protection. Its institutions still reflected American military command and American resistance to a separate European defense identity. The European Union, by contrast, grew from the need to prevent Europe from sliding into irrelevance and to bind Germany into a Western framework. It began with six members, grew to twelve, and was moving toward expansion into Scandinavia, Austria, and eventually parts of Eastern Europe.
Both institutions had been shaken by Soviet collapse and German unification. The Russian army no longer stood at the Elbe, and an attack on Western Europe was improbable in the immediate term. Yet Russian efforts to reassert influence awakened old fears near Russia’s borders. Their leaders preferred Yeltsin to his opponents but did not treat his reformism as a permanent solution to their insecurity. German unification intensified the anxiety of countries between Germany and Russia, because those two powers had historically either partitioned the lands between them or fought across them. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe therefore wanted American protection through NATO.
German reunification also unsettled the internal bargain of European integration. During the Cold War, West Germany accepted French political leadership in the European Community in exchange for a strong voice on economic affairs, while American leadership anchored it strategically in NATO. Over time, Kissinger expected Europe to become more assertive economically, America to become less willing to sacrifice for European security, and Germany to seek political influence proportionate to its strength. Helmut Kohl still belonged to the Adenauer tradition, with personal memories of war and postwar reconstruction. The next generation would have fewer emotional reasons to defer to America, France, or supranational institutions.
This made American involvement in Europe more necessary, not less. Germany was too strong for existing European institutions alone to balance it comfortably with its neighbors. Europe also could not by itself manage either a Russian resurgence or a Russian collapse. No country benefited from Germany and Russia fixating on each other as main partner or main adversary. Too close a relationship would revive fears of condominium; hostility would generate escalating crises in the center of Europe. Without America, Britain and France could not sustain the Western European balance, Germany might be tempted toward nationalism, and Russia would lack a global interlocutor. Without Europe, the United States would become more literally and psychologically an island off Eurasia.
Kissinger identifies three Atlantic problems: internal relations within the old alliance, relations with the former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe, and relations between the Atlantic nations and the successor states of the Soviet Union, especially Russia. The internal problem was shaped by the long tension between American and French visions. America defended NATO integration as the expression of allied unity, while France sought European autonomy and regarded the integrated command as a sign of American dominance. The disagreement repeated a deeper contrast between Wilsonian assumptions of harmony and Richelieu’s tradition of calculated interests. America thought European autonomy was unnecessary or dangerous if objectives were truly shared; France thought American uneasiness concealed a desire to dominate.
Neither tradition could solve the new problem alone. A purely Richelieuan approach would foster national rivalries inside Europe. Undiluted Wilsonianism would weaken European identity by treating autonomy as suspect. Europe should not define itself by opposition to the United States, because that would damage both European unity and Atlantic cohesion. At the same time, the United States should not fear a stronger European identity within NATO, because large-scale European military action would still require American political and logistical support. Unity ultimately depends less on command machinery than on shared political and security interests.
Eastern Europe, NATO, and the Partnership for Peace
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics posed related but distinct problems. Eastern Europe had been occupied by the Red Army and identified culturally and politically with Western Europe, especially in the Visegrad countries: Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia. Without institutional ties to the West, these states risked becoming a no-man’s-land between Germany and Russia. Their viability required membership in the European Union, while their security required NATO. Kissinger argues that membership in one institution logically implied membership in the other, because most European Union members also belonged to NATO and could hardly ignore an attack on an integrated partner.
The United States and Western Europe delayed both forms of membership, but for different reasons. Europe accepted the principle of eastward European Union expansion while making it dependent on economic reform, which turned the matter into a technical and gradual process. The American hesitation about NATO expansion was more principled. Clinton warned against drawing a new line between East and West and proposed the Partnership for Peace as an alternative framework that included both former Soviet republics and former Soviet satellites. Kissinger interprets this as a mixture of Wilsonian collective security and the old critique of containment: it treated victims and perpetrators of Soviet imperialism as though they belonged in the same security category.
Kissinger sees the Partnership for Peace as analogous to Locarno in the 1920s, not as a genuine way station to alliance. It risked creating two kinds of European borders: those protected by security guarantees and those explicitly left outside them. That ambiguity could tempt aggressors and demoralize exposed states. In trying to avoid confrontation, the West might create the very strategic vacuum in Central and Eastern Europe that had so often produced European conflict. Moreover, attaching the Partnership to NATO could weaken the alliance by diverting it into missions unrelated to a realistic security purpose, while still failing to reassure Eastern Europe or placate Russia.
Kissinger accepts a broader institution for cooperation with Russia and the other successor states. He argues instead for separating security guarantees from cooperative projects. Economic development, education, culture, and political contact could be organized through bodies such as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, perhaps under the Partnership for Peace name. NATO would provide the security umbrella and political framework for the Atlantic area and the new democracies of Eastern Europe. The European Union would accelerate membership for former Soviet satellites. The North Atlantic Cooperation Council and an expanded European security conference would connect Russia and the former Soviet republics to the Atlantic structure. If Russia stayed within its borders, common economic and political projects could gradually dominate East-West relations.
This design reflected a broader view of the Atlantic relationship. Its future did not lie only in the management of East-West relations. It also lay in helping the United States address the uncertain forces of the twenty-first century, whether the main challenge proved to be Russia, China, fundamentalist Islam, or some combination. The old category of “out of area” issues would become central to the alliance, because America’s ability to handle global instability would be stronger when supported by the North Atlantic democracies.
Asia and the Balance-of-Power World
Asia presented a different diplomatic landscape from Europe. Clinton’s proposal for a Pacific Community reflected growing American interest in the region, but Kissinger argues that the term community fit Asia only weakly. Europe possessed common institutions; Asia’s major states saw themselves as distinct, competitive, and historically suspicious of one another. Their relations resembled nineteenth-century European balance-of-power diplomacy more than Wilsonian collective security. Any major increase in one state’s power would likely produce compensating moves by others.
America was the wild card. It had the capacity, though not yet the accepted philosophy, to play a role in Asia similar to Britain’s old role in Europe: maintaining equilibrium by preventing any one power from dominating. Asian stability and prosperity were not automatic facts. They depended on an equilibrium that would require more deliberate tending after the Cold War. Wilsonianism had few adherents in Asia. Even democratic states did not pretend that cooperation rested primarily on shared domestic values. The language of national interest and equilibrium dominated.
China was the central rising power. Kissinger notes its rapid growth, strengthening military, and likely movement toward superpower status. Long before Chinese economic output approached America’s, China’s shadow would affect other Asian states. Southeast Asian countries were already seeking counterweights to both China and Japan. ASEAN’s willingness to include Vietnam, formerly feared by many of its neighbors, reflected this balancing impulse. The same logic explained why Southeast Asian states wanted the United States to remain engaged: American presence helped prevent regional dependence on any single Asian great power.
Japan would also change. During the Cold War, it accepted American protection, subordinated security policy to Washington, and competed intensely in economics. That bargain made sense while the Soviet Union appeared to threaten both countries in similar ways. After the Cold War, however, Japanese planners faced a more complicated environment: China and Korea were gaining military strength, while the strongest remaining part of Soviet military power was located in Siberia. Economic disputes with Washington and repeated American reassessments of policy made it harder to assume permanent identity of interests. Japan’s geography and history also gave it a different view of the Asian mainland.
Japan’s defense budget was already rising. Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s blunt rejection of a North Korean nuclear capability in 1992 raised questions about what Japan would do if it no longer trusted American security guarantees. Would it develop nuclear weapons, or support action to suppress a North Korean threat? The fact that these questions could be asked suggested the possibility of a Japan partially detached from American moorings. For Kissinger, this made a continuing American military presence in Northeast Asia essential. Without it, the United States would lack credibility in Asia, and both Japan and China would be tempted to pursue national strategies that could eventually collide.
American influence in Asia would depend less on large multilateral institutions than on bilateral relationships with major powers. ASEAN and APEC gave the United States channels of influence, but Asian states resisted a European-style Pacific institution. They did not want a framework that might empower China, Japan, or even the United States to intervene too deeply in their affairs. They welcomed American involvement as a stabilizing factor and as emergency support against threats to independence, but they remained wary of formal structures. America therefore had to work through flexible engagement, regional forums where useful, and above all its relationships with Japan and China.
Japanese-American relations required clarification on geopolitical grounds, but economic and cultural obstacles were serious. Kissinger emphasizes the contrast in decision-making styles. American decisions usually follow formal authority: a president or senior official chooses among options and expects action to follow. Japanese decisions emerge through consensus among those who must implement them. When an American president expresses agreement, he signals a decision; when a Japanese prime minister assents, he may be indicating understanding and a willingness to submit the matter to consensus. These differences could turn substantive disagreements into misunderstandings. Long-term cooperation required more American patience and a Japanese capacity to discuss strategic policy more directly.
The Sino-American-Japanese triangle was even more delicate. Japan’s view of China combined admiration, fear, desire for friendship, and the memory of domination. Sino-American confrontation might tempt Japan to distance itself from the United States to preserve influence in China. Yet a purely national Japanese policy could be read in Beijing as renewed Japanese ambition. Good American relations with China were therefore necessary for stable Japanese-American relations and for Sino-Japanese coexistence. The triangle ran against the American preference for clear categories of friend and foe, but abandoning it would be dangerous for all three parties.
China, Human Rights, and Strategic Dialogue
Among the great and potentially great powers, China was the most ascendant. America was already powerful; Europe needed unity; Russia was weakened and unsettled; Japan was rich but cautious. China combined high growth, strong cohesion, historical self-confidence, and a strengthening military. Maoist China had sought great-power status but had been constrained by ideology. Reformist China, by contrast, pursued national interest with skill and persistence.
Kissinger warns that confrontation with China would isolate the United States in Asia. No Asian country would want to support an American conflict with China if it judged that conflict to result from misguided American policy. Many might privately prefer an American balancing role, but they would publicly distance themselves from Washington to avoid provoking Beijing. Asian states looked to the United States to create a stable framework that could integrate both China and Japan. Confrontation with China would forfeit that role and reduce American influence with both powers.
China itself welcomed a degree of American involvement in Asia as a counterweight to Japan, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, India. But a policy that sought friendship with both Beijing and countries Beijing viewed as possible threats required regular strategic dialogue. After Tiananmen Square in 1989, such dialogue was inhibited by America’s refusal to maintain high-level contacts, a measure Kissinger notes had not been used even against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Human rights moved to the center of the relationship.
The Clinton Administration restored high-level contact, but the future depended on the substance of the exchange. Kissinger does not argue that the United States should abandon human rights or democratic values. He argues that making the entire Sino-American relationship conditional on domestic Chinese practices would be self-defeating. China viewed such conditionality as condescending because it implied that the relationship rested on American favor rather than reciprocal interest. In Chinese eyes, this made the United States both intrusive and unreliable, and unreliability was especially damaging.
Chinese sensitivity reflected history. China had long seen itself as pre-eminent in its region and deeply resented foreign prescriptions. Western intervention since the Opium Wars had become associated with humiliation, making equality of status and resistance to foreign dictation moral imperatives for Chinese leaders. China might make some human-rights concessions if they could be presented as sovereign choices emerging from its own process. Public American prescriptions, however, appeared humiliating and suggested that Washington had no serious strategic interest in Asian equilibrium. Paradoxically, Kissinger argues that even progress on human rights required tacit cooperation on global and Asian strategy.
The contrast with Europe is important. In Europe, Washington shared values but lacked adequate post–Cold War institutions and policies. In Asia, it could define a desirable balance-of-power strategy but could not rely on a community of values. The United States had to adapt its diplomacy to both settings rather than assume that one moral language could organize all regions equally.
The Western Hemisphere as a Convergence of Ideals and Interests
Unexpectedly, the Western Hemisphere offered the closest convergence between American ideals and geopolitical interests. Earlier American policy in the hemisphere had often been interventionist in Great Power fashion. Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy in 1933 marked a move toward cooperation. The Rio Treaty of 1947, the Pact of Bogotá of 1948, and the Organization of American States provided a security framework. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in 1961 added economic aid and cooperation, though Kissinger judges that policy to have been undermined by the statist orientation of many recipients.
During much of the Cold War, Latin America was governed by authoritarian regimes and state-controlled economic policies. Starting in the mid-1980s, however, the region moved broadly toward democracy and market economics. Brazil, Argentina, and Chile left military rule. Central American civil wars ended. Countries burdened by debt accepted financial discipline. State-dominated economies opened to market forces. By the early 1990s, the Western Hemisphere seemed capable of becoming a major element in a stable global order.
The Enterprise for the Americas Initiative announced by Bush in 1990 and the successful conclusion of NAFTA under Clinton in 1993 represented, for Kissinger, the most innovative American policy toward Latin America in history. A group of democratic states committed itself to popular government, market economics, and hemisphere-wide free trade. Cuba remained the sole Marxist dictatorship in the hemisphere, while elsewhere protectionist and statist models were giving way to more open economies. The long-term goal was a free-trade area from Alaska to Cape Horn, a concept that had recently seemed utopian.
Such a system would strengthen the Americas regardless of the direction of the world economy. If the Uruguay Round of GATT produced broad free-trade principles, the Western Hemisphere would be a major participant in global growth. If discriminatory regional blocs became dominant instead, a hemisphere-wide market would allow the Americas to compete effectively. An expanded NAFTA could also reward countries outside the hemisphere that accepted open rules and penalize restrictive alternatives. In a world where American policy often had to balance values against necessity, the Western Hemisphere was the place where the two aligned most naturally.
Idealism, History, and the Price of Choice
Kissinger closes by defining America’s main task as a balance between two temptations rooted in exceptionalism. One is crusading overextension: the belief that the United States must remedy every wrong, stop every civil war, and stabilize every dislocation. The other is withdrawal: the belief that America can refine its own domestic virtues while leaving the world to others. The first would drain American strength; the second would surrender security and prosperity to decisions made elsewhere. John Quincy Adams had warned against seeking distant monsters to destroy, but the post–Cold War world contained too many dangers for simple abstention. The problem was to develop criteria for selectivity.
American leaders had usually emphasized motivation more than structure. They tried to change the attitudes of other leaders rather than alter their calculations. This reflected a broader American belief in renewal and transformation, the assumption that the past need not bind nations any more than individuals. Kissinger sees dignity in this tradition, because it gives American life its confidence in new beginnings. Yet he also warns that ignoring history invites repetition of old mistakes. Universal principles do not erase geography, memory, capability, or national character.
America therefore could not base policy only on the balance of power, because its idealistic tradition was real and valuable. Still, equilibrium was the precondition for pursuing its ideals, and higher goals would not be achieved through rhetoric, posturing, or legal formulas unsupported by power. The new international system was more complex than any the United States had previously encountered, while the American political system rewarded immediate responses and emotional images more than long-range analysis. This made the discipline of priorities especially necessary.
Realpolitik by itself was also insufficient. The balance-of-power system worked best after the Napoleonic Wars because equilibrium was reinforced by shared legitimacy among conservative courts. Once shared values eroded after the Crimean War, balance-of-power politics became more brittle and dangerous, especially under the pressure of modern technology and public opinion. The lesson for the United States was not to imitate nineteenth-century Europe mechanically. It was to understand that power and legitimacy must support each other. America should seek moral consensus around democracy without destroying equilibrium in pursuit of that consensus.
If a Wilsonian system of universal legitimacy could not be created, America would need to operate within a balance-of-power world. Kissinger contrasts two nineteenth-century models. The British model, associated with Palmerston and Disraeli, waited until the balance was directly threatened and then usually supported the weaker side. The Bismarckian model tried to prevent challenges through overlapping relationships and influence used to moderate claims before crises became unmanageable. Surprisingly, Kissinger finds the Bismarckian style more compatible with American conditions. The British style required aloofness, ruthlessness, and a strictly power-centered reading of disputes, all of which ran against American habits. Bismarck’s later method of restraining conflict through networks of relationships better matched an interdependent world in which America could neither isolate itself nor create one universal security system.
The most creative American strategy would therefore build overlapping structures suited to different regions and different balances. Some would rest on shared political and economic principles, as in the Western Hemisphere. Some would combine common values with security interests, as in the Atlantic area and Northeast Asia. Others would rely more heavily on economic ties, as in Southeast Asia. This architecture would accept that different regions require different instruments, while preserving an American role in each important balance.
The chapter’s final claim is that America must learn the limits of a power greater than any other but no longer unlimited. During most of its history, the United States faced no mortal foreign threat. When such a threat appeared in the Cold War, it was defeated completely. That experience encouraged the belief that America could prevail through virtue, example, and generosity. In the post–Cold War world, Kissinger argues, that innocence would become self-indulgence if it denied the need for choice.
America could neither dominate the world nor withdraw from it. It should not abandon the ideals that made it powerful and distinctive, but it should also not pretend that other nations were being favored simply by association with it, or that American will could be imposed indefinitely by withholding benefits. Any American use of Realpolitik had to remain connected to the values of a society founded in liberty. Yet survival and progress required choices shaped by contemporary reality. The weight given to ideals, interests, power, and restraint would define the quality of political leadership. The central danger was the claim that choices carried no price or that no balance had to be struck.
Kissinger’s final vision is therefore neither a rejection of Wilsonianism nor a return to cynical power politics. American idealism remained essential, but its role was to sustain the country through ambiguity rather than promise a final harmony. The Cold War had offered clear danger and clear ideology; the emerging order would require more abstract judgments about possibility, hope, and risk. Peace, stability, progress, and freedom would remain the proper goals of American policy, but they would have to be pursued through partial successes, patient adjustment, and a road made by the act of walking rather than by faith in a predetermined destination.