Henry Kissinger
Footnotes to myself
I’ve kept reading notes for years - quotes, ideas, etc. Some make it into my writing, but most don’t. This series is a way to use the leftovers; not quite reviews, not quite summaries - just what I underlined, and why. Enjoy.
Henry Kissinger: An Intimate Portrait of the Master of Realpolitik, by Jérémie Gallon
In the conclusion, Gallon reveals he has written this book partly in the hopes of revitalising European statecraft. As such, it is probably more timely than he expected; Trump’s new National Security Strategy has put Europe on notice. Washington’s policy is now for Europe to stand on its own feet and operate as a group of aligned sovereign nations, including by taking primary responsibility for its own defence, without being dominated by any adversarial power.
Since the Greenland debacle, it has become increasingly clear that an “adversarial power” may, in fact, also America itself. Our leaders ignored the warnings issued by Trump in his first term in the presumption that sanity would soon be restored; they were rewarded with Trump 2. The anguished mewling of our leaders over Trump’s actions in Ukraine owes more to their helplessness than any reckoning with the responsibilities of power or statecraft. To quote the Emperor Justinian;
The conquerors of the Avars solicit our alliance; shall we dread their fugitives and exiles? The bounty of our uncle was granted to your misery, to your humble prayers. From us you shall relieve a more important obligation, the knowledge of your own weakness
de Gaulle was an ally who could not accept his country and Europe becoming an American protectorate. The French president had assigned himself the role, according to Kissinger, of ‘teaching his people and perhaps his Continent attitudes of independence and self-reliance’. A transatlantic relationship or a supranational body that would constrain Europe and France too rigidly was not compatible with the feeling of grandeur that he wished to impart to the French people. It was therefore to reinspire his country and give his fellow citizens ‘a specifically French sense of purpose that de Gaulle pursued the vision of an independent foreign policy.
de Gaulle’s foreign policy has, much like Enoch Powell’s, been largely vindicated. I believe that Trump’s actions in Greenland will see this strain of foreign policy thought re-emerge as the default for the right, but it will of course be subordinate to the more pressing national issues we are focussed on.
Kissinger had already set out a similar analysis in an article headlined ‘Strains on the Alliance’, published in Foreign Affairs in January 1963. ‘We have treated what is essentially a political and psychological problem as if it were primarily technical, he wrote, before going on to say: We have shown little understanding for the concerns of some of our European allies that their survival should depend entirely on decisions made 3,000 miles away.’
We now see the effect in the aforementioned anguished mewling over Trump’s Ukraine schemes. I also think that the expansive, inflexible rhetoric which European leaders have deployed over Ukraine has been a function of this; they were conscious that their capacity to arm Ukraine was limited, and language became a surrogate for concrete military support. Or, perhaps, it is simply that the bravest men are always found the furthest from the battlefield.
Although Kissinger spent very little time with de Gaulle while in office, the man who Nixon dubbed ‘the giant’ left a deep impression on him. In his account of his years at the White House, Kissinger sketches a laudatory portrait of the French president in just a few lines: ‘He had performed the dramatic feats required by the crises that had brought him to power. He had consolidated new political institutions. He had achieved the decolonization of French Africa while maintaining French self-confidence at home and its prestige in the former colonies.
Barely overcoming incipient civil war, he had restored French pride by giving it a central role in the policies of Europe and the Western Alliance. One of the principal purposes of his challenge to the United States was to inspire French self-assurance. The rest of Kissinger’s analysis is as interesting for what it conveys of his own vision of power as it is for his thoughts on the French leader. ‘But the student upheavals of 1968 had shaken de Gaulle. And the challenges facing him thereafter were not of a magnitude he considered relevant to his vision of himself. To ensure a growing economy, to arbitrate contending claims on limited resources, to organize and manage a bureaucratic state - these were tasks for what he half-contemptuously called “ quartermasters” , not for heroic figures.
When de Gaulle is looking back on 1940, whilst talking to the British ambassador in the 1950s, he said he was “frightened that the French would survive as a nation of cooks and hairdressers.”
That is the spirit of Gaullism we must appropriate; the recognition that survival without greatness is still a defeat.
Our current era has seen many young leaders take office. Often in their thirties or forties, they give the impression that the race to reach the highest echelons of power has become a sprint. They relentlessly seek the limelight; products of a culture of immediacy in which public relations is all. But many of them are just shooting stars, destined to fade away as fast as they appeared in the political and media firmament. Such people may be gifted in leveraging the fleeting mood of a nation to attain power, but their lack of intellectual depth or emotional intelligence prevents them from retaining it for very long. Their terms of office are either insignificant or marked by shallow gambles - such as that made by David Cameron with the Brexit referendum - which deal lasting damage to their nations. Few manage to achieve re-election or merit more than a footnote in the history books.
The contrast with Henry Kissinger is striking. He entered the White House a few weeks shy of his forty-sixth birthday but would turn fifty before becoming the leading US diplomat. The man who took the oath of office on 22 September 1973 as the fifty-sixth secretary of state of the United States had already experienced trials and tragedies aplenty.
Certainly, one cannot look at Britain’s recent history of quick-fire Prime Ministers and disagree. Likewise across Europe, it would be a struggle to name a European leader over the last 20 years who has genuinely made as lasting or as sizeable impact on the world as Kissinger (or, indeed, de Gaulle). The aforementioned Cameron will only, probably, be remembered as the engineer of Brexit; he will be, historiographically speaking, downstream of the event. Likewise Merkel and the Syrian migration wave.
In this new environment, Henry devoted himself to his studies, body and soul. He would rise at seven in the morning to study in the library, not returning to his room before late afternoon, whereupon he would ensconce himself in a deep armchair and work his way through borrowed books, griping whenever the authors evinced erroneous reasoning. He read the New York Times and the Boston Globe every day, though not the editorials, considering that he should form his own opinions.
I refer you to this piece I wrote for The Critic some time ago on Viktor Orban, who is also able to spend time reading. It is, obviously, beneficial to our leaders to do so, and we should engineer political systems that allow for it by expanding their political time horizons.
On 15 July 1975, when the two men, speaking 900 miles apart, laid out two irreconcilable visions of American foreign policy.
Standing before Congress, the Soviet dissident made a concerted attack on the policy of Détente in which he saw the creeping ‘spirit of Munich’. In his eyes, the Helsinki conference marked nothing less than ‘the funeral of Eastern Europe.
Employing his metaphorical verve, the Russian poet went on to describe it as ‘an amicable agreement of diplomatic shovels ‘that will inter in a common grave bodies that are still breathing’ These words could only find favourable echo on both the Republican and the Democrat benches. In a gesture of defiance to the Ford administration, and Kissinger in particular, the members of Congress rose to their feet and gave Solzhenitsyn a standing ovation.
At the same moment, in Minneapolis, in the heart of the Midwest, Henry Kissinger was preparing to give one of the most important speeches of his career.
On that 15 July, Kissinger knew that his audience feared that Helsinki would be a new Yalta. The American people suspected their leaders of being prepared yet again to sacrifice the citizens of Eastern Europe on the altar of peace with Moscow.
In his speech titled “The moral foundations of foreign policy”, Kissinger recalled the motivations of Détente, empha-sising that, in an age of thermonuclear threat, statesmen had no other choice but ‘to seek a more productive and stable relationship between the Eastern and Western blocs despite the basic antagonism of our values. Moreover, Kissinger in no way denied the Realpolitik that guided his actions: ‘We no longer live in so simple a world (..) Consequently our own choices are more difficult and complex’ On a geopolitical chessboard ‘where power remains the ultimate arbiter’, the policy of Détente was therefore one that allowed the ‘furthering of America’s interests’.
For Kissinger, who had personally suffered so much from the barbaric Nazi regime, the ultimate moral goal was to preserve the stability of the world. In the nuclear age this meant reducing as much as possible the risk of a direct confrontation between the two superpowers while also avoiding the disintegration of the ‘free world’ in the face of the Soviet menace.
Kissinger knew that to achieve this objective, he had no choice but to tread a delicate path as regards both bilateral relations between Washington and Moscow and the various conflicts that might break out across the world.
Kissinger was convinced that the Soviet system would crumble progressively as soon as its leaders were no longer able to extend their sphere of influence or invoke imminent foreign threats to justify the oppression of the peoples under their boot. It was this reasoning that led Kissinger to develop and implement the policy of Détente - a policy that earned him fierce opprobrium, both from hawks calling for direct confrontation with Moscow and from isolationists and doves who wished to cease the political, military and ideological struggle with the Kremlin. But in the long term it was indeed Détente that brought the USSR to its collapse and enabled the United States to win the Cold War.
Can you imagine two such competing intellects at work in the world today? We have the Trigonometry podcast.
Whatever judgement one may make regarding the actions of Henry Kissinger, it is undeniable that he sought constantly to root his diplomacy in a long-term vision that left little room for the diktats of emotion. Like George Kennan before him, Kissinger had understood that, when it comes to the geopolitical chessboard, those who let themselves be guided by their feelings and their emotions always end up in checkmate.
But at a time when the foreign policy of our Western democracies seems to fluctuate according to public opinion, or even the vagaries of social media, Kissinger’s cold and rational realism upsets many sensibilities. As prompt as such people are to criticise and vilify the former secretary of state, they rarely ask themselves a fundamental question: what would have happened otherwise?
I have written before of the biological drivers I suspect were driving bellicosity amongst male commentators of a certain age over Ukraine. Richard Hanania has also written on the increasing feminisation of political participation. For these reasons, amongst others, we are totally unable to deal coldly or rationally with foreign policy developments. This has reached a fever pitch over Gaza and Trump, where even the most rational of people have lapsed into emoting instead of separating national interest from personal sympathies (in the former example), or formulating a coherent British strategy in the face of substantial geopolitical changes (as in the latter).
As we painfully move on from being the agents of history to being mere bystanders to the world as it evolves around us, we no longer wish to make the difficult decisions incumbent on a great power. Our societies demand immediate gains that are often incompatible with long-term strategy. Even more revealing is our tendency to shun statesmen and stateswomen. Their courage and their sense of responsibility endlessly remind us that reality imposes a permanent tension between our moral values and our interests.
Now, more than ever, Europe needs leaders who are also strategists if it wishes to pull itself out of the pit into which it has sunk. Such individuals need to be capable of developing new analytical frameworks to conceive diplomacy over the long term and understand the strengths and weaknesses of their adversaries. They also need to have the character and talent to put this diplomacy into practice and bear the weight of responsibilities that will accompany their actions.
It is time Europe becomes serious about self-defence again, and I have little hope that our leaders are up to it. Whilst Britain would be an excellent place to foster the kind of thinking and leadership it would require, we have domestic problems that are simply too pressing to allow for it. We are also outside the EU, who have proved themselves time and time again to be unserious partners for defence co-operation by holding our participation to ransom over fishing.
Kissinger always struggled more to form relationships with Israeli leaders than with Arab leaders, despite the shared Jewish heritage of the former and anti-demotion of the later.
Many Israelis and American Jews had trouble understanding how the first ever Jewish secretary of state could not at least appear to be a zealous defender of Israel’s interests.
The reasons behind Henry Kissinger’s attitude are twofold.
He explained the first to the leaders of the principal American Jewish organisations just a few days before he left office. After recognising the ‘very complicated relationship’ he had with his fellow Jews, he went on to say: From my point of view, probably no criticism has hurt me more than if it came from this community. And probably from your point of view, it was especially painful if disagreements occurred between the Jewish community and the first Jewish secretary of state in American history’ Nevertheless, he said: ‘I thought it was important for the future of Israel and for the future of the Jewish people, that the actions that the United States Government took were not seen to be the result of a special, personal relationship, but that the support we gave Israel reflected not my personal preferences alone, but the basic national interests of the United States.”
As for the second reason, it is summed up in what Kissinger told Golda Meir one day: ‘Golda, you must remember that first I am an American, second I am secretary of state and third I am a Jew.’
In The Critic, I recently wrote that “British politics has become a venue for proxy foreign policy disputes imported wholesale from elsewhere” driven by migrants who retain primary loyalties to their countries of origin. The result has been a growing habit among some diaspora groups of conflating Britain’s national interest with that of their homeland or sectarian causes.
As with many second order consequences of migration, cases of exemption can be found at the individual level, but never in the aggregate.
Questioned about this split decades later, Kissinger would say: Like the ancient prophets, he [Kraemer] made no concessions to human frailty or to historic evolution; he treated intermediate solutions as derogation from principle. And therein lay the source of our later estrangement... For the prophet, there can be no gap between conception and implementation; the policymaker must build the necessary from the possible... The prophet thinks in terms of crusades; the policymaker hedges against the possibility of human fallibility.”
Not much to say here, I just thought this was a lovely quote and I wanted to share it. Which is the whole point of this series.
As the British historian John Bew reminds us, the term appeared for the first time in 1853, used by the German political activist August Ludwig von Rochau. Rochau defined Realpolitik as a method of action based upon a rational analysis of the factors determining a given situation. This analysis relies upon an understanding of the historical and political circumstances and of the power mindsets at work, as well as a precise evaluation of the strength of ideas and emotions involved. Devoid of any sort of self-delusion, inasmuch as that is possible, it facilitates decision-making to achieve not ideals but a concrete objective.
For Rochau, the objective was none other than the unification of Germany in a Europe jarred by the opposing forces of nationalism and liberalism. It is natural, therefore, that Realpolitik was initially embodied by the father of German unity, Otto von Bismarck. But in personifying it, the Iron Chancellor, whom Kissinger himself described as being ‘unencumbered by moral scruples’, would also imbue this concept with certain characteristics commonly associated with him - namely Mach-iavellianism, immorality and cruelty - thus shifting Realpolitik away from its original definition.
It was only after the First World War that Realpolitik entered the arena of American political and intellectual debate.
The liberal internationalism espoused by President Woodrow Wilson set its own idealism against the supposed ‘cynicism’ of Realpolitik. Later, in the years following the Second World War, the concept became central to American foreign policy, promoted by the writings of German-born academics such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans J. Morgenthau, and diplomats such as George Kennan. Consequently, in current everyday use, the term is synonymous with power politics stripped of all moral considerations and supported by a pessimistic view of human nature.
With the world that is coming, we must hope that we can engage with realpolitik’s original definition, not as it is incorrectly interpreted. Thanks to the enduring popularity of Bew, it’s more than possible.
Castlereagh had conceived and tirelessly promoted a style of British diplomacy steeped in realism because of his conviction that doing so would best preserve Britain’s interests. But what his detractors saw as a form of Realpolitik earned him the scorn of the liberal British intelligentsia, who reproached his cynicism. Indeed, the romantic poet Lord Byron described Castlereagh brutally as an
“intellectual eunuch’, a ‘cold-blooded, smooth-fac’d, placid mis-creant! (...) Cobbling at manacles for all mankind.
Poor Castlereagh. If anyone today attempted realpolitik with the same morally detached focus on British interests as him, they would be treated even worse than he was. We did not deserve him then, and we do not deserve him now.
In his memoirs, the former secretary of state commented:
From that meeting onward, I knew I was dealing with a great man.’° Then, to emphasise all the respect and admiration he had for the Egyptian leader, he wrote: “The great man understands the essence of a problem; the ordinary leader grasps only the symptoms. The great man focuses on the relationship of events to each other; the ordinary leader sees only a series of seemingly disconnected events. The great man has a vision of the future that enables him to put obstacles in perspective; the ordinary leader turns pebbles in the road into boulders.”
Again, nothing particular to say (other than this was about Anwar Sadat) other than it’s a lovely quote. I think it’s slightly overwrought given Sadat’s achievements, but it’s interesting that Kissinger seems to have had an instinctive interest in great figures of his own time.
For far too long, the European Union has lost its way in a diplomacy shot through with morals and idealism, but which serves only to isolate and diminish us. Out on the great geopolitical chessboard, we Europeans are no longer writing history. When it comes to the crises unfolding at our door, those that directly affect our stability, we are not even invited to the negotiating table... worse, we are lying to ourselves. With every outraged declaration by European diplomats condemning the human rights violations and crimes committed by other leaders against their own people, our own leaders boast of having fulfilled their moral contract. But the truth is that our foreign policy has become amoral through its own tragic impotence. Isn’t it time to recognise that too few lives have been saved, too few political prisoners released and too few autocrats toppled purely through the magic of our well-intentioned diplomacy?
I agree with this, with two codifiers. To start, it is a very particular view of the effects of European foreign policy failures; “too few political prisoners released, too few autocrats toppled”. More Alaa Abd El-Fattahs, more post-Saddam Iraqs! But it also misplaces the root cause of these problems; it is not a lack of statecraft that causes this marginalisation in our own backyard, but a lack of military power. Military weakness breeds marginalisation, and marginalisation breeds intellectual atrophy: leaders who cannot shape outcomes have little reason to think seriously about how to do so. Only when Europe address its military weakness will it address its own impotence. Unfortunately, it isn’t just a matter of more money; it means addressing huge socio political blockers to building up defence capability. Recruitment crises, expensive energy, competing demands for spending. Don’t hold out hope.