This chapter connects Realpolitik’s internal contradictions to Kissinger’s broader account of power politics.
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 sixth chapter of his book, called "Realpolitik Turns on Itself".
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.
Germany’s New Weight in the Center of Europe
German unification reversed the old geography of European diplomacy. Since the rise of the modern state system, pressure had generally come from the edges of Europe toward its center: Great Britain, France, and Russia acted on a fragmented Central Europe. After 1871, however, the center itself became the strongest force on the Continent. Germany’s industrial and military growth made it the power that others had to measure, and this fact transformed ordinary balance-of-power maneuvering into a permanent security dilemma.
German ambition was only part of the problem. Kissinger’s point is that even a cautious Germany could frighten its neighbors because of its central location. If Germany remained passive, other powers might combine to contain it. If Germany tried to prevent encirclement by preparing against France in the west and Russia in the east, those preparations could accelerate the very coalition Berlin feared. Bismarck called that danger the nightmare of hostile coalitions, and the phrase captured the paradox of German security after unification. Germany could not become a normal great power because its normal interests seemed abnormal to everyone around it.
Two permanent antagonisms replaced the looser Concert of Europe. The first was the hostility between France and Germany. France’s defeat in the war of 1870–71 ended the old French ability to manage Central Europe by playing the German states against one another. The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine turned French humiliation into a concrete territorial grievance, and the desire for revanche dominated French policy for decades. Yet Kissinger emphasizes that recovering Alsace-Lorraine would have satisfied French pride more than it would have restored the strategic balance. France by itself was no longer strong enough to contain Germany. Therefore, it became available as the partner of any anti-German combination, and every German crisis carried the possibility of wider alignment against Berlin.
The second antagonism developed between Austria-Hungary and Russia. Once Austria had been expelled from Germany, it reorganized itself as the Dual Monarchy and shifted its remaining geopolitical ambition toward the Balkans. This move placed Vienna and Budapest directly across the path of Russian ambitions among Slavic peoples and in the territories left exposed by Ottoman decline. Austria had no colonial outlet overseas, so the Balkans became a substitute field of great-power assertion. However, the same region also stirred Russian nationalism, Pan-Slav feeling, and strategic concern over the Straits. The result was a rivalry that Bismarck needed to manage even though Germany had no intrinsic interest in Balkan quarrels.
Germany’s interest in Austria was indirect but vital. Bismarck wanted to preserve the Austro-Hungarian Empire because its collapse would threaten the structure of the new German Empire. German-speaking Catholics from Austria might seek union with Germany and upset Prussia’s Protestant predominance, while Germany would lose its only dependable ally. At the same time, Bismarck had no wish to alienate Russia. The German position therefore depended on maintaining good relations with two empires whose own interests were increasingly incompatible. Ottoman decline made this task harder by repeatedly forcing the great powers to decide how the spoils of the Balkans should be distributed.
Russia as Both Pillar and Threat
Kissinger treats Russia as the indispensable but unsettling power in the European balance. Russia was absent from Westphalia in 1648. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it had become a participant in almost every major European war. By the Congress of Vienna, it was arguably the strongest continental power. Its size, autocracy, military capacity, and distance from Western constitutional restraints made its policy both formidable and unpredictable.
The tsar’s absolute power gave Russian foreign policy an unusually personal and arbitrary quality. Kissinger illustrates this with the Seven Years’ War, when Russia moved from fighting Prussia to supporting Prussia and then to neutrality within a few months of dynastic change. Western statesmen therefore saw Russia as a powerful and difficult-to-read actor. Its rulers could change direction without the constraints of parliament, public constitutional procedure, or divided authority.
The deeper Russian paradox was that a state constantly expanding in every direction also considered itself permanently threatened. As the empire absorbed more peoples, it felt more vulnerable to the influence of their neighbors and more dependent on myths of foreign danger. What began as a search for security gradually became expansion for its own sake. Kissinger follows this logic from the conquest of Crimea to Russian movement into Central Asia, where officials justified advance as a reluctant necessity imposed by unstable frontier peoples. The difficulty, as Russian officials themselves admitted, was knowing where to stop.
This made Russia both a threat to the balance of power and one of its saviors. Without Russian resistance, Napoleon and Hitler might have created universal empires. Yet Russia’s own expansion endangered neighboring states and unsettled every frontier it approached. It was essential to equilibrium but never fully integrated into the European system. It accepted restraints only when they were imposed from outside, and even then it often treated compromise as a temporary frustration rather than a legitimate settlement.
Russian exceptionalism intensified this problem. Kissinger compares it with American exceptionalism but distinguishes the two sharply. American uniqueness was tied to liberty and could be offered, at least in theory, to outsiders. Russian uniqueness grew out of suffering, Orthodoxy, autocracy, and the idea of Russia as a sacred cause. Pan-Slav writers and nationalists described the tsar as heir to Byzantium and Russia as the protector of Slavs and Orthodox Christians. In this vision, liberation easily shaded into domination, because Russia claimed authority to free neighboring peoples and then supervise their future harmony.
This sense of mission outlasted the tsars. Kissinger notes that after the Revolution, the same impulse was transferred into Communist internationalism. The ideological language changed, but the combination of insecurity and universal mission remained recognizable. Russia’s expansion into Poland, the Balkans, and Central Asia created positions that later appeared to require further expansion for their own defense. The empire therefore generated a recurring logic: it advanced to become secure, then found that its new frontier produced fresh insecurity.
Britain’s Uncertain Role and Bismarck’s Burden
Great Britain was the one major power still capable of acting as an external balancer without being trapped by a single continental hostility. However, after German unification, Britain did not immediately identify Germany as the central long-term threat. British statesmen had welcomed German national consolidation for decades, and Germany had achieved unity by developing its own national territory rather than by conquering Europe in the manner of Louis XIV or Napoleon. Britain generally moved when the balance was visibly under attack, not when a future threat was still emerging.
As a result, British attention remained fixed on colonial and imperial issues. France was a rival in Egypt and other colonial theaters. Russia seemed to threaten the Straits, Persia, India, and later China. These were concrete and familiar concerns, while Germany’s potential dominance of Europe was gradual and less obvious. Britain’s policy of “splendid isolation” could work when no single continental state could dominate Europe alone. After 1871, that premise was eroding, but British policy adjusted only slowly.
This left Bismarck as the central figure of European diplomacy. Kissinger portrays him as a statesman who wanted peace for the German Empire and understood that Germany must appear satisfied. He sought no further German territorial expansion in Europe, avoided colonial distractions for as long as possible, and tried not to provoke Britain. His overriding goal was to prevent every power except irreconcilable France from joining an anti-German coalition.
Reassurance alone could not solve Germany’s problem. Bismarck needed both Austria and Russia, although their rivalry made such a grouping inherently unstable. In 1873, he created the first Three Emperors’ League among Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. Outwardly it resembled Metternich’s conservative solidarity, with the three monarchies pledging cooperation against subversion. In reality, the ideological basis of such unity had weakened. Revolutionary republicanism no longer frightened the eastern courts as it once had, France had lost its revolutionary zeal, and each monarchy believed it could manage domestic unrest without outside help. Austria and Russia increasingly saw each other as rivals over the Balkans, not partners in a shared conservative cause.
The failure of that older legitimist bond forced Bismarck to rely more explicitly on Realpolitik. The 1875 war scare revealed how fragile the new situation had become. A German newspaper article asking whether war was imminent, probably encouraged by Bismarck as a warning to France, allowed French diplomacy to create the impression of an impending German preventive attack. Britain and Russia both stirred, and Disraeli even considered cooperation with Russia to restrain Germany. Although Kissinger stresses that the crisis contained more appearance than reality, it taught Bismarck that passive reassurance would not be enough. If Germany did not actively manage alignments, other powers might begin to arrange them against Berlin.
The Eastern Question and the Congress of Berlin
The Balkan crisis that began in 1876 was more dangerous because it exposed the real conflict beneath the Three Emperors’ League. Bulgarian and other Balkan revolts against Ottoman rule provoked brutal Turkish repression. Russian Pan-Slav sentiment demanded intervention, while Britain feared that Russian success would bring control of the Straits and threaten the eastern Mediterranean and the route to India. Austria feared Russian influence over Balkan Slavs. Bismarck feared that any clash among these powers would force Germany to choose between Austria and Russia, destroying his whole policy.
At first, the three imperial courts tried to act together through the Berlin Memorandum, which warned the Ottoman government against continued repression. Disraeli interpreted this as a step toward allowing Russia, Germany, and Austria to settle the Eastern Question without Britain. In response, he moved the Royal Navy toward the eastern Mediterranean and encouraged Turkish resistance. His aim was to break the unity of the northern courts and force the differences among them into the open.
Kissinger uses the crisis to explain British distrust of Russia. In Central Asia, Russian armies had repeatedly advanced toward India while diplomats assured London that no annexation was intended. Samarkand, Khiva, and Kokand followed a pattern in which Russian officials disclaimed conquest before events produced permanent control or practical domination. Gorchakov even distinguished between informal assurances and binding agreements, implying that Russia could not be held to promises it had voluntarily offered. To British leaders, the same pattern near Constantinople would be intolerable.
Disraeli faced domestic pressure because Ottoman atrocities had turned British public opinion against Turkey, and Gladstone denounced the moral emptiness of pro-Turkish geopolitics. Still, the Sultan assumed British support and rejected demands for reform. Russia declared war in 1877, and for a time seemed to have won the diplomatic contest. Russian forces reached the outskirts of Constantinople, but then their leaders overplayed their position. The Treaty of San Stefano would have created a large Bulgaria extending toward the Mediterranean and presumed to be under Russian influence. That outcome threatened Britain with Russian access to the Straits and Austria with Russian predominance in the Balkans.
The resulting pressure forced a wider settlement. Britain threatened war if Russia entered Constantinople, and Austria threatened war over the Balkan spoils. Bismarck reluctantly convened the Congress of Berlin in 1878, though he feared mediation would leave every dissatisfied power angry at Germany. Before the congress met, Britain and Russia had already settled the core questions. San Stefano’s large Bulgaria was replaced by a smaller independent Bulgaria, an autonomous Eastern Rumelia, and a remaining Bulgarian area returned to Ottoman rule. Russia’s Armenian gains were reduced, Austria received support for occupying Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Britain acquired Cyprus as a naval base while guaranteeing Asiatic Turkey.
At Berlin, Bismarck claimed the role of “honest broker,” insisting that Germany had no direct interest in Eastern affairs. Kissinger argues that this neutrality was exactly what made Bismarck vulnerable. Disraeli arrived with most British objectives already secured and wanted Russia’s frustration directed elsewhere. Bismarck generally supported Russia in the eastern Balkans and Austria in the western Balkans, but on a key question involving the Balkan passes he sided against Russia to keep Disraeli from leaving the congress. Germany avoided a general war, but many Russians concluded that Bismarck had betrayed them. The Russian nationalist press turned the Congress of Berlin into a story of German-led European humiliation, even though Britain had organized the effective resistance to San Stefano.
The damage was lasting. Russia had accepted limitations before when acting under conservative legitimacy, but it did not treat checks on expansion as legitimate in themselves. Pan-Slav opinion blamed the Concert of Europe and especially Bismarck for denying Russia the full fruits of victory. The first Three Emperors’ League could no longer survive as a union of conservative monarchs. If any cohesion remained possible, it would have to come from calculated interest rather than shared principle.
Bismarck’s Interlocking Alliance System
The aftermath of Berlin forced Bismarck to reverse his earlier method. In the 1850s and 1860s, he had favored a continental version of splendid isolation: Prussia would avoid fixed commitments and choose its side according to interest. After 1871, that approach was no longer safe. Germany was too strong to remain aloof without frightening others into coalition, and Russia could no longer be assumed to act as a traditional friend. Germany had become, in Kissinger’s phrase, a giant in need of friends.
Bismarck’s solution was to create more relationships than any opponent and to make Germany closer to each partner than the partners were to one another. These alliances were not meant to unleash German power. They were designed to prevent Germany’s adversaries from joining together and to restrain Germany’s friends from reckless action. Their complexity was deliberate. If Austria, Russia, Italy, and Britain all had some relationship with Berlin or with Berlin’s partners, then Germany could veto dangerous combinations and reduce the chance that a local crisis would become a general war.
The first step was the secret Dual Alliance with Austria in 1879. It built a barrier against Russian pressure, but Bismarck also used it to gain influence over Austrian conduct in the Balkans. He wanted to check Russia through alliance and deterrence, not through a German-sponsored crusade against St. Petersburg. Salisbury welcomed the Austro-German alliance because it promised to shift some burden of containing Russia from Britain to Austria. Bismarck, however, had no intention of fighting for other powers’ Balkan ambitions.
Bismarck then rebuilt the Three Emperors’ League on a more realistic basis. The second version, concluded in 1881, made no serious appeal to moral or dynastic solidarity. It promised benevolent neutrality if one member fought a fourth power, such as Britain against Russia or France against Germany. Germany was protected against a two-front war, Russia against a revival of the Crimean coalition, and Austria against direct Russian aggression because Germany’s commitment to Austria remained intact. The arrangement also shifted much of the practical resistance to Russian expansion onto Britain by limiting Austria’s ability to join an anti-Russian coalition.
In 1882, Bismarck widened the system by drawing Italy into the Dual Alliance, creating the Triple Alliance. Italy was angry at France for taking Tunisia, which Italy had wanted for itself, and the Italian monarchy hoped that great-power diplomacy would strengthen it against republican pressures. Germany and Italy promised mutual support against France, while Italy promised neutrality if Austria fought Russia. In 1887, Bismarck encouraged Austria and Italy to join Britain in the Mediterranean Agreements, which aimed to preserve the Mediterranean status quo. At the same time, he encouraged French colonial expansion outside Alsace-Lorraine because overseas rivalries could divert France from Europe and produce friction with Britain and Italy.
For more than a decade, the system worked. France quarreled with Britain over Egypt and with Italy over Tunisia. Britain continued to resist Russia in Central Asia and near Constantinople. Germany remained focused on preserving the continental status quo. Yet the system’s success depended on continual adjustment, secrecy, and Bismarck’s personal control. It also depended on the assumption that cabinets could make hard bargains over territories and peoples without being overwhelmed by public opinion. By the 1880s, that assumption was weakening across Europe.
Public Opinion, Nationalism, and the Limits of Cabinet Diplomacy
Kissinger presents the rise of public opinion as one of the forces that made Bismarck’s Realpolitik increasingly anachronistic. In the pure logic of balance-of-power diplomacy, the Balkans might have been divided into Austrian and Russian spheres of influence. Such a settlement could have reduced uncertainty, but it had become politically impossible. Russia could not openly abandon Slavic peoples to Austria, while Austria would not accept arrangements that strengthened Russian clients among the Slavs.
The most dramatic example came from Britain. In 1880, Gladstone defeated Disraeli in an election fought heavily over foreign policy and then reversed Britain’s Balkan stance. Gladstone judged foreign policy by moral standards rather than geopolitical calculation. He argued that Bulgarian national aspirations were legitimate, that Christian Britain owed sympathy to oppressed Balkan Christians, and that European powers should act collectively to restrain Ottoman abuses. Kissinger sees in Gladstone an anticipation of Woodrow Wilson: the belief that the morality of individuals and the morality of states should converge, and that world opinion could become a tribunal of international conduct.
This rhetoric transformed the meaning of the Concert of Europe. Castlereagh had treated the Concert as a means of enforcing the Vienna settlement, and Palmerston had used it to preserve the balance of power. Gladstone imagined it as an instrument for a new moral order. To Bismarck, moralized collective diplomacy created danger. Because Europe was divided over France and Germany and over Austria and Russia, appeals to collective morality could not resolve the real conflicts. Instead, Gladstone’s approach reduced Britain’s practical role in the Balkans. British imperial policy continued in Egypt and east of Suez, while the British safety net that had helped Bismarck restrain Russia weakened.
Public opinion also weakened the eastern empires. Germany’s constitution gave the Reichstag broad suffrage but little responsibility for government. Deputies could indulge nationalist rhetoric without bearing direct responsibility for foreign policy, and military budget cycles tempted governments to dramatize foreign dangers. Russia faced pressure from Pan-Slav propagandists who demanded aggressive Balkan policy and confrontation with Germany. Austria-Hungary, as another polyglot empire, was vulnerable to nationalist agitation and fearful of Slavic movements. Thus, the very courts once associated with conservative restraint became susceptible to mass passions that made compromise harder.
This change coincided with a new ruler in Russia. Alexander III came to power in 1881 without the conservative ideological affinities of Nicholas I or the personal affection for Germany of Alexander II. He distrusted Bismarck, partly because Bismarck’s policy was too intricate and partly because his Danish wife resented Prussia’s seizure of Schleswig-Holstein. The Bulgarian crisis of 1885 brought this distrust to a head. A revolt created the larger Bulgaria Russia had once sought, but the new Bulgaria was unified under a German prince rather than subordinated to St. Petersburg. Russian opinion blamed Bismarck for an outcome he had not wanted, and Alexander III refused to renew the Three Emperors’ League in 1887.
The Reinsurance Treaty and the Exhaustion of the Balance
Bismarck’s final major initiative was the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia. He understood that if Russia drifted away from Germany, it might eventually align with France. In the circumstances of the 1880s, Russia still had reasons to remain connected to Berlin: France was republican and unlikely to fight over Balkan issues, Britain remained Russia’s imperial rival, and Germany still had a possible British option. These overlapping interests gave Bismarck room to preserve the Russian link, although the room was narrowing.
The treaty promised German and Russian neutrality in a war with a third power unless Germany attacked France or Russia attacked Austria. In theory, both powers were protected against a two-front war if they stayed on the defensive. In practice, the value of the treaty depended on defining aggression. That question became more dangerous as mobilization itself came to resemble a declaration of war. Its secrecy revealed the conflict between old cabinet diplomacy and the emerging age of public foreign policy. A confidential codicil made the problem sharper by suggesting that Germany would not oppose Russian ambitions toward Constantinople and would support greater Russian influence in Bulgaria. Those assurances would have alarmed Austria and Britain if known.
Despite these contradictions, the treaty preserved the indispensable connection between Berlin and St. Petersburg. It reassured Russia that Germany would defend Austria’s existence but not support Austrian expansion at Russian expense. It also delayed the Franco-Russian alliance that Bismarck feared. Kissinger stresses that Bismarck’s purpose remained restraint. When German military leaders suggested preventive war against Russia after the collapse of the Three Emperors’ League, Bismarck rejected the idea and publicly emphasized Germany’s desire for peace with Russia.
The system nevertheless approached its limit. Bismarck’s alliances were intended to restrain all parties, but their secrecy and complexity encouraged suspicion. Other governments could not fully understand Germany’s commitments and therefore hedged against being outmaneuvered. Public opinion reduced the flexibility on which Realpolitik depended. The more elaborate Bismarck’s system became, the more it demonstrated the strain created by unified Germany’s position at the center of Europe.
Kissinger’s final judgment is balanced. Bismarck’s style of diplomacy was probably doomed because it required an extraordinary degree of manipulation, secrecy, moderation, and personal authority. Yet the later descent into rigid alliances, arms races, and war was not inevitable. For nearly twenty years, Bismarck used power politics to preserve peace and reduce tensions. His successors inherited the forms of his system without his restraint, and they turned its intricate flexibility into something closer to a mechanical confrontation. By 1890, the old balance of power had reached the end of its usefulness: it had preserved the liberty of states, but it had not created a stable peace once power, nationalism, and public opinion escaped the control of the statesmen who had tried to manage them.
You can read the summary of the next chapter of the book by clicking this link.