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| Version 3 | Version 4 |
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| We Forget Henry Kissinger’s Effectiveness at Our Own Peril | We Forget Henry Kissinger’s Effectiveness at Our Own Peril |
| (about 3 hours later) | |
| Henry Kissinger was the pre-eminent statesman of post-World War II America. He was not just a policymaker, he was a strategist who thought about the world in conceptual terms and drew on a nuanced understanding of history and geopolitics to guide U.S. statecraft. Mr. Kissinger adhered to a realist intellectual framework that produced enormous strategic payoffs, enabling the United States to pivot from a failing war in Vietnam to a much more limited and restrained version of the Cold War that promoted international stability and restored domestic consensus. | Henry Kissinger was the pre-eminent statesman of post-World War II America. He was not just a policymaker, he was a strategist who thought about the world in conceptual terms and drew on a nuanced understanding of history and geopolitics to guide U.S. statecraft. Mr. Kissinger adhered to a realist intellectual framework that produced enormous strategic payoffs, enabling the United States to pivot from a failing war in Vietnam to a much more limited and restrained version of the Cold War that promoted international stability and restored domestic consensus. |
| In the aftermath of Mr. Kissinger’s recent death, a chorus of critics has contended that he trampled on American values as he played by the rules of realpolitik, sacrificing human rights and democratic ideals in the service of geopolitical gain. He is guilty as charged. During his tenure as national security adviser and secretary of state from 1969 until 1977, Washington often aided and abetted human suffering and cozied up to odious regimes. | In the aftermath of Mr. Kissinger’s recent death, a chorus of critics has contended that he trampled on American values as he played by the rules of realpolitik, sacrificing human rights and democratic ideals in the service of geopolitical gain. He is guilty as charged. During his tenure as national security adviser and secretary of state from 1969 until 1977, Washington often aided and abetted human suffering and cozied up to odious regimes. |
| Yet Mr. Kissinger’s immoral excesses do not compromise his accomplishments as a statesman. The pragmatic realism that anchored his effective diplomacy rested on two fundamental principles. First, he understood that international stability depends on preserving an equilibrium of power, which in turn rests on the practice of strategic restraint and the forging of a set of ordering rules that all major states deem to be legitimate. Second, he understood that good strategy means keeping commitments and resources in balance by pursuing attainable ends that are in sync with available means. The result is a brand of statecraft that yields success abroad and support at home. | Yet Mr. Kissinger’s immoral excesses do not compromise his accomplishments as a statesman. The pragmatic realism that anchored his effective diplomacy rested on two fundamental principles. First, he understood that international stability depends on preserving an equilibrium of power, which in turn rests on the practice of strategic restraint and the forging of a set of ordering rules that all major states deem to be legitimate. Second, he understood that good strategy means keeping commitments and resources in balance by pursuing attainable ends that are in sync with available means. The result is a brand of statecraft that yields success abroad and support at home. |
| Today Washington has lost touch with these conceptual anchors and with Mr. Kissinger’s pragmatic realism. Fueled by the ideological hubris that emerged at the Cold War’s end, the United States is coming off two decades of strategic overreach in the Middle East. Mr. Kissinger tamed relations with China and Russia while dividing the Communist bloc, but the United States is now in a dangerous rivalry with both powers that pushes them together. The ends of U.S. policy are today outstripping its political means, exacerbating polarization and the appeal of an “America First” neo-isolationism. As Mr. Kissinger presciently warned in 1957, “the acid test of a policy … is its ability to obtain domestic support.” Washington would now be wise to rediscover the practice of realpolitik as a fractured America seeks to navigate a fractured world. | Today Washington has lost touch with these conceptual anchors and with Mr. Kissinger’s pragmatic realism. Fueled by the ideological hubris that emerged at the Cold War’s end, the United States is coming off two decades of strategic overreach in the Middle East. Mr. Kissinger tamed relations with China and Russia while dividing the Communist bloc, but the United States is now in a dangerous rivalry with both powers that pushes them together. The ends of U.S. policy are today outstripping its political means, exacerbating polarization and the appeal of an “America First” neo-isolationism. As Mr. Kissinger presciently warned in 1957, “the acid test of a policy … is its ability to obtain domestic support.” Washington would now be wise to rediscover the practice of realpolitik as a fractured America seeks to navigate a fractured world. |
| Mr. Kissinger’s approach to global affairs was heavily influenced by his interpretation of the history of the Concert of Europe, a diplomatic forum that preserved great-power peace in Europe for much of the 19th century. The subject of his first book (“A World Restored”), the Concert was founded in 1815 by Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria after they had finally defeated Napoleonic France. This great-power directorate had the good sense to admit France in 1818, turning a vanquished adversary into a stakeholder in the postwar peace. | |
| The Concert preserved a stable equilibrium of power by providing a forum in which its members could exercise mutual restraint and resolve their disputes peacefully. Restraint applied to ideology as well as to power. Concert members had their political differences, but the five powers agreed to disagree about the merits of liberal reform versus absolute monarchy, thereby preventing matters of ideology and domestic governance from impairing international cooperation. As Mr. Kissinger concluded in “A World Restored,” the architects of the Concert were “statesmen of the equilibrium, seeking security in a balance of forces. Their goal was stability, not perfection.” |