Book review henry kissingers world order

unexpectedly – Edward Said's critique of ‘Orientalism’.”3 Mitter’s mention of Metternich is a firm nod tothe book’s reemphasis of the need for a legitimate order, first expounded in Kiss

BOOK REVIEW: HENRY KISSINGER’S WORLD

ORDER

CORNELL UNIVERSITYGOVT 6847

Book Review: Henry Kissinger’s World Order

Between May and August 1963, a major series of civil unrest swept through South Vietnam,pitting elements of the majority Buddhist population against the government led by a Catholic, PresidentNgo Dinh Diem On September 6, American President John F Kennedy dispatched two men – U.S.Marine Corps Major General Victor Krulak and State Department officer Joseph Mendenhall – toundertake an emergency fact-finding mission to determine the impact of this unrest on Americancounterinsurgency efforts in the region Reporting back to Kennedy on September 10, Krulak wasgenerally optimistic, believing that the Vietnamese army had maintained its loyalty to the government.Mendenhall disputed Krulak’s account, painting a much bleaker picture of the failures ofcounterinsurgency and of the Diem government and magnifying the threat of a Communist takeover Atone point, a bemused (and often misquoted) Kennedy interjected their testimonies, asking, “You bothwent to the same country?”1

Those who have not quite had the chance to peruse Henry Kissinger’s latest volume wouldexperience Kennedy’s state of puzzlement if they went in the meantime to consult a selection of the

many book reviews that came out in the wake of World Order’s publication In The Telegraph, Jonathan

Powell contextualizes the book as Kissinger’s swansong, characterizing it as “an attempt to justify all that

he has done… or argued, over nearly seven decades”.2 Writing in The Guardian, famous Oxford historian

of China Rana Mitter chooses to focus more on Kissinger’s description of the three contendingconceptions of world order, opining that “this may sound like Samuel Huntington's idea of the ‘clash ofcivilisations’, but actually it is more like a bracing mixture of Metternichian pragmatism and – more

1 “Meetings: Tape 109 Meeting on Vietnam, 10 September 1963,” accessed May 8, 2015,

http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-MTG-109-004.aspx

2 Jonathan Powell, “Henry Kissinger’s World Order, Review,” September 13, 2014,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11092958/Henry-Kissingers-World-Order-review.html

unexpectedly – Edward Said's critique of ‘Orientalism’.”3 Mitter’s mention of Metternich is a firm nod tothe book’s reemphasis of the need for a legitimate order, first expounded in Kissinger’s doctoral

dissertation at Harvard and eventually published in 1957 as his first major work, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22 4 By contrast, writing for The New Republic,

Princeton Professor and former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department under the firstObama Administration Anne-Marie Slaughter reveals her ignorance of Kissinger’s oeuvre when shelabels his argument for legitimacy to be “an apparent conversion” from power politics For Slaughter,the book is “a salvo in the ongoing foreign policy struggle for Barack Obama’s soul.”5 Even formerSecretary of State and lately Democratic frontrunner for the 2016 Presidential elections Hillary RodhamClinton weighed in, arguing in the Washington Post that “[Kissinger’s] analysis, despite some differencesover specific policies, largely fits with the broad strategy behind the Obama administration’s effort overthe past six years to build a global architecture of security and cooperation for the 21st century.”6

Did they all read the same book? In a way, no Like South Vietnam in the early 1960s, World Order is a very complex and nuanced work that fits many narratives in one Like Krulak and Mendenhall,

reviewers of Kissinger’s book come with preconceived notions and personal motives, and theirtakeaways are greatly influenced by these cognitive factors This long essay seeks to address the many

issues raised in World Order and highlighted by the reviewers in three parts First, I reconstruct the

broad sweep of the book’s arguments, point out its various strengths, and explore the overall purpose ofthe book in the context of Kissinger’s work, life, and times Second, I explore Kissinger’s descriptions of

3 Rana Mitter, “World Order by Henry Kissinger – Review,” The Guardian, accessed May 3, 2015,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hillary-clinton-reviews-henry-kissingers-world-the three international orders – http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hillary-clinton-reviews-henry-kissingers-world-the Westphalian, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hillary-clinton-reviews-henry-kissingers-world-the Asian, and http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hillary-clinton-reviews-henry-kissingers-world-the Islamic, arguing that http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hillary-clinton-reviews-henry-kissingers-world-they aresomewhat removed from the contemporary academic debates, and ponder over how this shouldinfluence the way we read Kissinger’s project Third, I point out certain flaws in Kissinger’s historical

narrative, and contextualize his project from a historian’s perspective I conclude that while World Order

often fails to engage with many of the major academic debates of our time, it remains an importantwork in the canon of Realism for successfully summarizing Kissinger’s oeuvre in the service of the busypolicy practitioner and the interested public

Context, content, and target audience

World Order is likely to be Henry Kissinger’s final work for several reasons At 92 this year, even

the seemingly indefatigable American elder statesman must no doubt be feeling the effects of old age.While nothing precludes the publication of a few more essays and reviews, as well as mediaappearances, it is unlikely that Kissinger’s health will allow any new project approaching the scale of

World Order or even more monumental works in the past But even more tellingly, World Order’s overarching argument for a legitimate order backed by the balance of power is so reminiscent of that first outlined in A World Restored that we must view the two as bookends for Kissinger’s oeuvre, serving much the same purpose that Genesis and Revelation do for the Holy Bible Like in A World Restored,

Kissinger starts out defining his terms precisely:

World order describes the concept held by a region or civilization about the nature of

just arrangements and the distribution of power thought to be applicable to the entire

world An international order is the practical application of these concepts to a

substantial part of the globe – large enough to affect the global balance of power

Regional orders involve the same principles applied to a defined geo-graphic area

Any one of these systems of order bases itself on two components: a set of commonly

accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action and a balance of power that

enforces restraint where rules break down, preventing one political unit from

subjugating all others.7

While according to Kissinger “no truly global ‘world order’ has ever existed,” there are todaythree major contenders for that status First is the European order established in 1648 at the Treaty ofWestphalia that ended the Thirty Year’s War, which serves as the foundation for the West’s conception

of international relations It recognizes “a multiplicity of political units, none powerful enough to defeatall others, many adhering to contradictory philosophies and internal practices, in search of neutral rules

to regulate their conduct and mitigate conflict.”8 Kissinger then gives a shortened version of his grand

narrative in Diplomacy to describe the evolution of this system from Cardinal Richelieu’s emphasis on raison d’état to Russia’s integration into the European order, from the Congress of Vienna to its

breakdown under Bismarck’s Germany and the two World Wars, and the nascent European Union thatthreatens this Westphalian order altogether.9 Second is the Islamic order, which distinguishes between

the dar al-Islam (the House of Islam and realm of peace) with the dar al-Harb (the realm of war beyond Islamic control) The Islamic order is defined by expanding faith through struggle (jihad) to incorporate the dar al-Harb into dar al-Islam and thus bring about universal peace.10 Finally, out of a mulplicity ofsystems in Asia, Kissinger focuses on those of China, Japan, and India, all of which form their present-daypolicies based on a traditional hierarchical view of international relations.11 China’s hierarchical tradition,

in particular, is singled out as making it an ambivalent participant in the Westphalian system it is nowsupposed to help anchor.12

The latter half of World Order is dedicated to an updating of his arguments on American foreign policy as found in Diplomacy Kissinger charts America’s path from isolationism to superpower

7 Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 9.

8 Ibid., 2–3

9 Ibid., 11–95; Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

10 Kissinger, World Order, 99–102.

11 Ibid., 211

12 Ibid., 212–33

engagement, and the ever-present tension between this latent isolationism and the belief that its liberal

principles should apply to the wider world As in Diplomacy, the general trend is that those leaders who

seek to impose a liberal vision upon the world almost inevitably end up pursuing policies that backfire.Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations was too weak to stand up to Hitler’s rise Franklin Roosevelt’s NewWorld Order relied too much on his personal relationship with Stalin and allowed the Soviets to imposeCommunism upon Eastern Europe Douglas McArthur’s attempt to go beyond the 50th parallel in Koreaturned victory into near-defeat Lyndon B Johnson’s conviction of the need of “defending a free peopleagainst the advance of totalitarianism” led him into the quagmire of Vietnam And though Kissingerprofessed personal friendship with George W Bush, he castigated the moralistic terms of the 2002National Security Strategy that led to the Second Gulf War On the other hand, practitioners of

Realpolitik including Theodore Roosevelt, George Kennan, Richard Nixon, and himself (Kissinger) have

generally been met with success.13

Citing nuclear proliferation and information technology as the two areas of potentially disruptivetechnological change, Kissinger ends by identifying “a reconstruction of the international system [as] theultimate challenge to statesmanship in our time.”14 While pessimistic at the beginning of the book aboutthe prospects of success, by its end Kissinger offers a more sanguine reminder that:

The Westphalian system was drafted by some two hundred delegates, none of whom

has entered the annals of history as a major figure, who met in two provincial German

towns forty miles apart (a significant distance in the seventeenth century) in two

separate groups They overcame their obstacles because they shared the devastating

experience of the Thirty Years’ War, and they were determined to prevent its

recurrence Our time, facing even graver prospects, needs to act on its necessities

before it is engulfed by them.15

13 Ibid., 234–329

14 Ibid., 330–60; 371

15 Ibid., 373

Considering that it had been 37 years since Henry Kissinger left office when World Order came

out, it was a testament to the public’s enduring fascination with the man and his ideas that his swansong

stayed on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for four straight weeks, peaking at number 6.16 Amajor strength is the clear and simple prose, with the notes tucked away at the back without resort toin-line numerical citations Instead of having to plough through Kissinger’s very substantial oeuvre, the

uninitiated reader can derive his main tenets from the very reasonable 377-page World Order (excluding index) For the interested public or professional politicians less well-versed in international relations theory and history, World Order does a good job of summarizing the major developments in

international relations and American foreign policy in an accessible way It covers the history ofinternational relations from ancient times to 2014’s headlines of the Ukraine conflict, the Syrian CivilWar, and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) Unlike Kissinger’s earlier theoretical works,

World Order also boasts a global perspective in branching out from the Westphalian order and exploring

the Asian and Islamic worldviews It is little wonder that a number of policy-makers and big-name

academics want to weigh in on the book and, in the case of Hillary Clinton, to use World Order as verification for her and President Obama’s policies Clearly, the book appeals most greatly to aspiring foreign policy makers and the interested public, with John Micklethwait quipping in the New York Times

that “it is a book that every member of Congress should be locked in a room with — and forced to readbefore taking the oath of office.”17

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Jonathan Powell, and Rana Mitter all see World Order as Kissinger’s

grudging acceptance of the role of justice and legitimacy in foreign policy, following widespreadcriticisms of Kissinger’s actions while in office.18 As National Security Adviser for Richard Nixon and

16 “Best Sellers: Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction,” The New York Times, October 19, 2014,

http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/2014-10-19/combined-print-and-e-book-nonfiction/list.html

17 John Micklethwait, “Henry Kissinger’s ‘World Order,’” The New York Times, September 11, 2014,

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/books/review/henry-kissingers-world-order.html

18 Slaughter, “How to Fix America’s Foreign Policy”; Powell, “Henry Kissinger’s World Order, Review”; Mitter,

“World Order by Henry Kissinger – Review.”

Gerald Ford (1969-1975) and Secretary of State (1973-1977), Kissinger had been a leading proponent of

an amoral Realist approach to foreign policy This approach led to several spectacular triumphs,including the 1972 Sino-American rapprochement, the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the SovietUnion, and the 1975 Helsinki Agreements with its Basket III on Human Rights that became a rallyingpoint for several Eastern European democratic movements.19 But it also led to many controversialpolicies in the Third World Kissinger’s role in the 1968 Nixon Presidential Campaign’s sabotage of peacetalks in Vietnam; the Nixon Administration’s expansion of the Vietnam War before forcing SouthVietnam to sign a peace agreement that doomed their state; his support of Pakistan during the 1971Bangladeshi War of Independence, of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet’s bloody 1973 coup against thepopularly elected Allende government, of Indonesia’s 1975 annexation of East Timor; and several otherepisodes have opened Kissinger and his brand of politics to widespread criticism.20

But Slaughter, Powell, and Mitter might have fundamentally misunderstood Kissinger’s use ofthe word “just” Justice and legitimacy for Kissinger are merely “commonly accepted rules” and notabsolute moral standards Even though Kissinger does acknowledge that the spread of liberty is one ofthe core American values, he often highlights how this zeal has led American policy makers to unwise

decisions In fact, World Order is a step back from Kissinger’s position in 2001, when he had

acknowledged that, “The real challenge is to merge [Idealism and Realism]; no serious American maker

of foreign policy can be oblivious to the traditions of exceptionalism by which American democracy hasdefined itself.”21 No such clear affirmation of a role for Idealism is present in World Order And while

there was certainly some explaining of his actions while in office, it was confined to just seven pages onthe Nixon and Ford Administrations as part of an overview of the evolution of American foreign policy.22

19 Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 316–54.

20 Christopher Hitchens and Ariel Dorfman, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Reprint edition (New York: Twelve, 2012).

21 Henry Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?: Towards a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (New York:

Simon & Schuster, 2001), 20

22 Kissinger, World Order, 302–9.

This is dwarfed by Kissinger’s far more concentrated efforts to rehabilitate his image in his three massivememoirs and elsewhere.23 So Slaughter, Powell, and Mitter are right in a way: Kissinger has at various

times in his career tried to fix the damage sustained during his days in office, but World Order is not a key part of that project Rather, the main purpose of this final book is to sum up much of Kissinger’s

previous theoretical and historical work on the Western order and places them into the broader context,i.e the search for a truly global world order It does not offer anything radically new and is certainly not

an apology

Problems of theory

A number of reviewers, including Rana Mitter, James Traub for the Wall Street Journal, and Tom Rogan for the Washington Times treat World Order as a serious academic study.24 They have good

reason to do so: World Order does indeed have many elements of a serious academic work Kissinger

advances a coherent and compelling thesis for the necessity of a global order His positioning of theacknowledgements at the back, sparse citations, and choice of rather informal endnotes without in-textnumeration and a bibliography are all quite unusual in academia, but is not unprecedented, especially

among scholars advanced in distinction and age (see Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes, for

example).25 While relatively free of academic jargon, Kissinger’s language is sufficiently formal andacademic to distinguish itself from just an opinion piece This is an extremely ambitious book in scope

23 Henry Kissinger, White House Years, 1st ed (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979); Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982); Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999); Jussi M Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (Oxford ; New York: Oxford

University Press, 2004)

24 Mitter, “World Order by Henry Kissinger – Review”; James Traub, “Book Review: ‘World Order’ by Henry

Kissinger,” Wall Street Journal, September 5, 2014, sec Life and Style, world-order-by-henry-kissinger-1409952751; Tom Rogan, “World Order by Henry Kissinger,” The Washington

http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-Times, October 13, 2014,

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/oct/13/book-review-cultivating-order-in-a-changing-world/?page=all

25 E J Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, 1st American ed (New York: Pantheon

Books, 1994)

and it would, on balance, be unfair to criticize Kissinger too much for his rather simplistic accounts of thethree world orders, or his very brief and not too critical treatment of major episodes in history.

None of these features disqualify World Order from being a serious addition to Kissinger’s academic oeuvre Nevertheless, I am still not wholly convinced that World Order is meant to be a

substantial addition to the academic literature, because it systematically shirks the major academicdebates on many of the subjects which it touches This is despite the fact that Kissinger’s notes drawfrom a veritable wealth of primary and secondary sources from many perspectives, not just theEuropean ones Rather than dispute the quality of Kissinger’s sources, his encyclopedic knowledge, or

his extensive first-hand experience, my uneasiness stems from World Order’s tendency to sweep often

acrimonious academic disagreements under the rug in the interest of a coherent and flowing narrative

This becomes evident as soon as Kissinger launches into analysis of the three world orders Hisarguments for the importance of both legitimacy and balance of power, as well as the prioritization ofstability over justice have a lot of affinity to the English School of International Relations, sometimesreferred to as Institutional Realism Over several generations of scholars, Martin Wight, Hedley Bull, TimDunne, Edward Keene, Barry Buzan, and many others have developed a very robust theory of theinternational society that exists alongside systemic anarchy They have defined and elaborated on thecommon norms and institutions that provide the framework for this international society in much thesame way Kissinger envisions a working world order.26 And yet, like in his previous works, in World Order

Kissinger has once again stubbornly refrained from identifying with any particular school of thought

26 Martin Wight, Gabriele Wight, and Brian Ernest Porter, International Theory: The Three Traditions (New York: Holmes & Meier for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 1992); Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society:

A Study of Order in World Politics, 4th ed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Timothy Dunne, Inventing International Society: A History of the English School, St Antony’s Series (Houndmills : New York: Macmillan ; St

Martin’s Press in association with St Antony’s College, Oxford, 1998); Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical

Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics, LSE Monographs in International Studies (Cambridge ;

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Barry Buzan, From International to World Society?: English School

Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation, Cambridge Studies in International Relations 95 (Cambridge ; New

York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

While this preserves to some extent his professed neutrality (even when it is clear that he is a Realist), it

is a missed chance to plug his theory into the broader theoretical debate in IR, and raises seriously

questions about World Order’s academic relevance.

Kissinger’s fluency in German and impressive background in European history allowed him toconstruct a very detailed account of the creation of the European order after the end of the Thirty Years’

War in Diplomacy, which he summarizes in World Order.27 Kissinger is particularly strong in noting theuniqueness of the pluralistic European order, the conditions by which it arose, why it is so difficult forthe Asian or Islamic worlds to adapt fully to this multilateral concept, and its advantages in our worldtoday where no clear hegemon reigns:

The history of most civilizations is a tale of the rise and fall of empires Order was

established by their internal governance, not through an equilibrium among states:

strong when the central authority was cohesive, more haphazard under weaker rulers

In imperial systems, wars generally took place at the frontiers of the empire or as civil

wars Peace was identified with the reach of imperial power

… although it was comprehensible as a single civilization, Europe never had a single

governance, or a united, fixed identity… For more than a thousand years, in the

mainstream of modern European statecraft order has derived from equilibrium, and

identity from resistance to universal rule It is not that European monarchs were more

immune to the glories of conquest than their counterparts in other civilizations or more

committed to an ideal of diversity in the abstract Rather, they lacked the strength to

impose their will on each other decisively In time, pluralism took on the characteristics

of a model of world order.28

In constructing this description, Kissinger consulted a single work, Kevin Wilson and Jan van der

Dussen’s The History of the Idea of Europe This is fine enough, but one wonders whether he is failing to engage fully with the literature without dealing with the debate between Paul Kennedy, Jared Diamond, and Kenneth Pomeranz On the one hand, Kennedy and Diamond argue that it is this pluralism that

27 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 56–77; Kissinger, World Order, 11–48.

28 Kissinger, World Order, 11–2.

created the institutions that allowed European states to overtake Asia from the 1500s onwards; on theother, Pomeranz contends that the period of most rapid divergence did not occur until the 1800s, andthen it was differences in resource endowments (specifically coal ore and the bounty of the New World)that enabled Europe to attain industrialization sooner.29 If Kissinger deals with this literature rather thanignores it, he could go beyond the distinction between the worldviews of the various civilizations andperhaps give his implicit argument about the efficacy of a pluralistic order more bite It is unlikely that ascholar of East-West relations of Kissinger’s acumen is ignorant of this famous debate Far more likely isthat he made the choice to dispense with it, perhaps in the interest of highlighting his central argumentthat there is a diversity of conceptions of world order over discussions of the merits of each While this

is a defensible choice to make, it does serve like many such choices Kissinger makes throughout the

book to distance World Order from the burning academic debates of his time.

Another major academic debate that Kissinger completely ignores is that over the importance of

the Treaty of Westphalia World Order rehashes an old dictum taught in IR101 classes around the world

that the principle of sovereignty – non-interference in other states’ affairs – was affirmed for the firsttime in 1648 in the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War This narrative is central to

Kissinger’s book, not least because Westphalia is supposed to have vindicated the raison d’état

approach of the French chief minister Cardinal Richelieu during the war Westphalia is also cited at theend of the book to show decision-makers today that it is possible if improbable to construct a globalorder from a great diversity of views as the delegates at Westphalia did three and a half centuries ago.30

While this was a compelling argument in 1994 when he wrote Diplomacy, by 2014 the academic

consensus had left Kissinger behind In 2001, Andreas Osiander published an important article

29 Paul M Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to

2000, 1st ed (New York, NY: Random House, 1987); Jared M Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W Norton, 2005); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, The Princeton Economic History of the Western World (Princeton, N.J:

Princeton University Press, 2000)

30 Kissinger, World Order, 20–35; 373.

challenging what he calls the “myth of Westphalia” Osiander points out that the famous treaty (orrather, two near-identical treaties) only applied to the Holy Roman Empire, and was therefore not at allconsequential since “never before or during the war was the emperor in a position to threaten the long-established independence of actors outside the Holy Roman Empire” and that “there is no indicationthat, even at the height of his military power in the late 1620s, the emperor intended to change that.”Osiander traces scholars’ obsession with Westphalia to their “nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryfixation on the concept of sovereignty.”31 Meanwhile, Stephen Krasner has published another influentialchallenge of the concept of sovereignty in IR, arguing that states have never been truly sovereign andthat the concept was peddled by the “organized hypocrisy” of powerful states.32 Osiander’s paper issufficiently well-known and well-cited, its critique having entered several mainstream IR textbooks, that

it is once again very unlikely that a scholar of Kissinger’s caliber would not be at least aware of itsexistence and the resultant shift in the academic consensus regarding the subject And Kissinger ishimself such a routine violator of the concept of sovereignty while in office that he must be well aware

of its hypocrisy as described by Krasner His conscious choice to paper over these two important debates

on sovereignty, instead painting a very traditional and largely uncritical account of the Westphalianorder is a failure to engage in serious academic debate

Another major development which ought to concern Kissinger and any other defender of theWestphalian order greatly is the rise of supranational organizations, with the European Union by far themost advanced There is a great body of academic literature on regional integration, including DavidMitrany’s Functionalism which argues for the creation of supranational regulatory bodies fortechnocratic aims that would eventually develop towards a robust framework of internationalgovernance; Ernst Haas’s expansion of that concept into a more predictive and prescriptive framework

31 Andreas Osiander, “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth,” International Organization

55, no 02 (March 2001): 251–87, doi:10.1162/00208180151140577

32 Stephen D Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton University Press, 1999).