Twentieth Anniversary of Dr. Kissinger's Diplomacy by Dilomat Jim Patterson

In the September 1994 issue of the Foreign Service Journal, a publication of my professional union the American Foreign Service Union, Charles Maechling, identified "as an international lawyer who writes frequently on diplomacy" his review of Diplomacy was lukewarm. Maechling died in 2007 at 87.




The reviewer began, "Diplomacy, the latest product of Henry Kissinger's prolific if ponderous pen, is an impressive but uneven work."

Maechling's criticism of the book was based on the author's "heav[iness] on geo-strategic analysis, harsh[ness] on American moralism, and naivete and almost obsessive on worship of power."

"[G]ood history it is not," the reviewer wrote. "Rather, it is the author's frequently strained interpretation of personalities and episodes in history, carefully selected to support his views on foreign policy."

Given Dr. Kissinger's European background it is not surprising the book focuses on European diplomacy, a fact Maechling disliked. "Throughout the book, the diplomacy that counts for Kissinger is European,and central European at that. The entire first century of American diplomacy from Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution to Theodore Roosevelt is ignored, and that goes for the rest of the Western Hemisphere as well," the review wrote. This reader found the focus on European diplomacy fascinating and educational.

"The focus of the first half is on statesmen of extinct European monarchies who exemplify realpolitik - Cardinal Richelieu of 17th century France, Prince Metternich of the Austrian empire and Chancellor Bismarck of imperial Germany, to name the most prominent."

The reviewer then asks a question, I feel ignores the global changes that had taken place shortly before publication of Diplomacy. "Why these exemplars of an absolutist ad dynastic tradition should serve as models for the diplomacy of a modern democracy committee d to world order through multinational institutions will be up to the reader." Dr. Kissinger answers that question in the course of the book. It's a pity the reviewer missed it.

"The book actually begins with a disquisition on the dichotomy between idealism and realism in foreign relations, with Woodrow Wilson cast in the role of moralistic visionary and Theodore Roosevelt the astute and forceful exponent of national interest. This part ignores that moral outrage over German invasion of Belgium and submarine sinkings, not balance-of-power calculation, provoked Roosevelt's passionate interventionism in World War I; it was Wilson who for three years tried to mediate a balanced peace. President Wilson intervened in Latin America as much as Roosevelt --to incursions into Mexico (1914 and 1916) and a U.S. Marine occupation of Haiti that lasted for 20 years." And the reviewer repeated the disquisition.

 "Kissinger next goes back to Cardinal Richelieu who laid the foundation of the French state by crushing feudal nobility and checking the Habsburgs. Kissinger praises the way Richelieu invoked raison d'etat to justify support of the Protestant princes in the Thirty Years War in order to keep Germany divided. But there was no unified Germany, rather only the .fragmented Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg that encircled France from the Spanish Netherlands to the Pyrenees was the king of Spain, whose empire was then at its apogee. Richelieu was a sinister figure whose biographers describe him as mean-spirited and pitiless. Kissinger admires the way Mettenich use the Holy Alliance to unify the monarchies of Europe against a recurrence of the spirit of the French Revolution by creating a Concert of European based on "shared values." But what were these values? For Kissinger, pursuit of stability is an end in itself; the fat that Metternich and his imperial masters (England dropped out and France went its own way) equated  every popular manifestation of liberalism and nationalism with revolution - to be suppressed by bayonets and imprisonment - and that "shared values" boiled down to "legitimacy" and a determination to cling to power and privilege at all costs, is dismissed as secondary. So is the fact that when the lid finally blew off in 1848, taking Metternich with it, the explosion was all the more violent

In the second half of the book, covering the Cold War and Kissinger's own years in high office, the author is master of his material. Unfortunately, he is still so burdened with responsibility for his share in past decisions, and so linked in personal and professional association with past colleagues and

and influential members of the American "establishment," that his judgments on policy disasters like Vietnam and Iran come through as ambiguous and even evasive. In some contexts his faith in "analysis" sounds ridiculous. His only condemnation of Hitler is that he "operated by instinct" and his criticism of Lyndon B. Johnson's advisers in regard to Vietnam is that they "failed to develop criteria to assess a challenge at variance with American experience."

Toward the end of the book, Kissinger seems to recognize that realpolitik must be tempered by American values if policy gets public support. At the same time he deplores allowing policy to be influenced by domestic politics - which in a democracy is where values find expression. Throughout, he is disdainful of human rights. He still clings to the idea that the United States s an autonomous superpower that can pick and choose which of its international obligations like the U.N. and OAS charters.

There is no evidence from the chapter notes that he consulted leading American diplomatic historians. If he had he would have observed how often altruistic American policies have paid off, such as FDR's Good Neighbor policy and hemisphere solidarity in WWII. The theme that threads through Diplomacy seems to be a prescription for unilateralism, isolationism and further deterioration of the American image; this is surely not the result that the author intended."

Jim Note:



Other Reviewers on Kissinger's Diplomacy:

From Kirkus Reviews

The Nobel laureate and former national security advisor and secretary of state (Years of Upheaval, 1982, etc.) presents an engrossing and monumental (in every sense) historical survey of diplomacy from the 17th century to the present. Kissinger begins his narrative after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), when militarily ascendant France strove for dominance on the continent, preventing the fragmented German states from coalescing into a major power. Thereafter Britain, its own internal turbulence quelled and its monarchy restored, sought to check France by creating alliances of weaker European states. Kissinger shows how wily statesmen like Richelieu, Britain's William III, Metternich, and Bismarck frankly pursued their own nation-state's interests without regard for the idealistic concepts of collective security that have motivated American policy since the Wilson administration: only Britain, because of its unique geographical position, actively pursued a policy of promoting equilibrium on the continent. Kissinger extensively discusses the unraveling of the post-Napoleonic arrangements in the decades leading up to WW I, Soviet and German consolidation and French and British demoralization in the years after the Versailles treaty, and the dominance of the Soviet-American rivalry in world politics after World War II. Kissinger draws fascinatingly on his own experiences as President Nixon's chief diplomat to illustrate his arguments about diplomacy. Finally, he argues that the ideal of collective security that American policy has promoted since Wilson's presidency and throughout the Cold War, while sometimes effective, is often weak because it is not strongly grounded in national interests. Buttressing his argument with a sweeping historical survey, Kissinger persuasively contends that leaders of the western democracies, particularly the US, should leaven their idealism in the turbulent post-Cold War era with the realistic pursuit of concrete national interests. Profound and important. (Book-of-the- Month main selection for April; History Book Club main selection) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Michiko Kakutani The New York Times" An elegantly written study of Western diplomacy....Shrewd, often vexing, and consistently absorbing.

Simon Schama The New Yorker: Kissinger's absorbing book tackles head-on some of the toughest questions of our time....Its pages sparkle with insight.

Former Secretary of State (Reagan) George P. Shultz: This is a great book....Brilliant in its analysis and masterly in its sweep.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr." This rich and absorbing work is both a brilliant study of the international crises that have shaped the modern world and a provocative meditation on the American style in foreign affairs.

Walter Laqueur Chairman, International Research Council, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS): The most important work on diplomacy for thirty years.