In the New York Times book review – John Micklethwait, the Editor – in Chief of The Economist commented – “If you think America is doing just fine, then skip ahead to the poetry reviews. If, however, you worry about a globe spinning out of control, then “World Order” is for you . . . it is a book that every member of Congress should be locked in a room with — and forced to read before taking the oath of office.”
Similarly, Hillary Clinton- the former US Secretary of State, while appraising the book stated in the Washington Post – when Americans look around the world they see one crisis after another extending from Ukraine to Middle East and from deadly epidemic in West Africa to escalating territorial tensions in the East and South China seas. Amid these, they find no room for comfort rather than expressing uncertainty and even fear about the American role and its future in the world. She further observed, a global economy that still isn’t producing enough growth or shared prosperity — the liberal international order that the United States has worked for generations to build and defend, seems to be under pressure from every quarter.
In such a situation – “Kissinger, with his singular combination of breadth and acuity along with his knack for connecting headlines to trend lines” that ranges from the Peace of Westphalia to the pace of microprocessing, from Sun Tzu to Talleyrand to Twitter”, can help us develop negotiating strategy, based on divergent historic experiences and values.
Correspondingly, Clinton explains, “a real national dialogue is the only way we’re going to rebuild a political consensus to take on the perils and the promise of the 21st century common order and Henry Kissinger’s book “makes a compelling case for why we have to do it and how we can succeed”, she has further added.
Indeed, the 91-year-old grand statesman, who himself stands as a towering personality with knowledge and experience and who alone can compete with any think tanks on foreign policy and diplomacy, has become a living legend. Surprisingly, while so many presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers go into oblivion after they are freed from their official responsibility, Henry Kissinger, on the other hand, has always claimed the limelight even 37 years after he served his country as the Secretary of State.
His newest 420-page book –“World Order” – 21st in the list of books he has written, does quite justice to his name and fame. For long, he has been writing that acquiring power and increasing or multiplying it may not ensure American interest and American security, unless America discovers a rational and pragmatist approach of its use.
Before the book was released, Kissinger wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal on August 29. The article highlighted some of the pertinent issues he raised in his book and he himself has offered the conclusion of his book – “The concept of order that has underpinned the modern era is in crisis” and only America has the power and authority to reinvent modus vi-ven-di of such an order.
From “A World Restored” to “World Order”
“A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822” was Henry Kissinger’s first book published in 1957. The book based on his 1954 PhD dissertation at Harvard, covers period around Vienna Congress (1815) after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and the remaking of European order under the stewardship of two highly venerable European diplomats , that the history has ever seen. They were- Prince Clemens von Metternich of Austria and Viscount Robert Stewart Castlereagh of Britain. Both these foreign Ministers – Metternich and Castlereagh brought the Europe together against Napoleon Bonaparte – the man who is also acknowledged as the greatest warrior and Empire builder of the World — only after Alexander the Great.
These two prominent figures also prepared strategies for Vienna Congress aimed at finding out adjustments among divergent national interests and groups of the contending parties and reshape a European order. Thus, the vision they reflected in the new European order created by the Vienna Congress was able to manage a century long peace and stability in Europe except a brief war between Prussia and France in 1870-1871.
The same year, saw Kissinger’s next book titled Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. According to Kissinger’s biographer Walter Isaacson, Kisinger argued for a limited nuclear war, because he believed – greater the destructive capabilities, lesser the chance of their applicability and maneuverability in a war. In an essay published in The Atlantic in June 1999, Robert D Kaplan, says, “Kissinger this way opposed the then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s policy of massive nuclear retaliation against a Soviet attack. Instead, he supported for flexible conventional forces and smaller, tactical nuclear weapons.”
Walter Isaacson further states that Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy hit the market unexpectedly, as serious books on defense policy by an obscure writer rarely make the bestseller list. But, for fourteen weeks, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy remained on the top of the list and some seventy thousands copies of the book were printed during this period. Kissinger this way reached into prominence and became a celebrity within weeks. Future US presidents like Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford were much impressed with him during that time and this ultimately opened the gate of White House and State Department for Henry Kissinger.
A man, whose child hood was destroyed under the Nazi rule in Germany, started his life as a refugee in the United States, has this way caught the imaginations of the people interested in foreign policy and diplomacy worldwide. The grand old man, as Isaacson states, remains the most prominent foreign policy intellectual in the world. What he says or writes carries impacts whether in his country – United States or elsewhere.
“Order” whether European or global, created by balance of power, carries much meaning for Kissinger. He produces his logic and arguments based from the depth of history—where few intellectuals have courage to enter. Someone, when versed well on the success and failures of the great men and women who made history, and makes pronouncements based on the lessons of those people, it becomes an inscription on the stone.
As mentioned above, he made a powerful entrant in the intellectual world with his first book “A World Restored” with a European model of balance of power that maintained peace for a century long period. In his last book, “World Order”, he finds the differences between European order and US led global order. While the ‘traditional European approach to order viewed peoples and states as inherently competitive; to constrain the effects of their clashing ambitions, it relied on a balance of power and a concert of enlightened statesmen’, while the American one, considers people -inherently reasonable and inclined toward peaceful compromise and common sense. Hence, Kissinger says, the spread of democracy was therefore the overarching goal for international order and freer markets that would uplift individuals, enrich societies, and substitute economic interdependence for traditional international rivalries.
Between Order and Disorder
“No truly global “world order” has ever existed”, Kissinger claims. However, the principles adopted at a peace conference in the German region of Westphalia nearly four centuries ago, has worked as the basics of the global order that has been accepted as moral charter for nations. Although, no countries of other continents or civilizations had participated at the conference, the decisions it produced have been accepted as a guiding principles for state behavior for all countries since then. The conference, according to Kissinger, was held after a century of sectarian conflict and political upheaval across Central Europe that was culminated into the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648. The war and war related crisis like starvation and diseases were responsible for the death of some one-quarter human population of the Central Europe.
It was a unique conference – without any formal organizer and defined deliberations. Four hundreds and thirteen participants, representing different states and religious sects gathered at two separate towns at a distance of some 48 kilometers, produced two different agreements but almost with similar contents.
“The Peace of Westphalia became a turning point in the history of nations,” Kissinger admits. “The state not the empire, dynasty or religious confession, was affirmed as the building block of European order”, he adds. First time in human history, the concept of state sovereignty was established; the independence of nations in its domestic affairs and inviolability of the state border was accepted unanimously.
The First and Second World Wars ended the European order created by Vienna Congress. Simultaneously, it shattered the political, military, and economic confidence of European powers. The United States and the Soviet Union took the responsibility of maintaining world order. The United Nations – sometimes with its symbolic and while at other times with substantive presence, worked in tandem with the two super powers that stood as a guarantor of the global order.
The Unipolar world system, emerged after the end of Cold War, could not fill the ideological gap remained unattended after the fall of Soviet Union. This generated quite disarray in many parts of the world, as the democratic transformation of these countries needed much resources and care. Unfortunately, the single most powerful country – that has been leading this period remained overjoyed and myopic on its ideological victory over the Soviet Union. In the words of Kissinger “the optimistic assumptions of the immediate post – Cold War era: that the spread of democracy and free markets would automatically create a just, peaceful, and inclusive world”, reached in disaster. The countries in transition failed to achieve their democratic destination and to return to the already fallen socialist model was quite impossible for them. Moreover, this turned out to be a chaos for them.
Unfortunately, countries and societies failing to achieve the democratic aspirations of its people and a descent life conditions for them, suffered at the whims of chaos borne radical forces from religious and ethnic fanaticism to ultra left political inclinations.
This created a number of “failed states” or “ungoverned spaces” in many transitional countries followed by the weakened state authority to use force against radical forces. This led the countries succumb to such forces.
While pointing to some important paradoxes contributing to the structure of twenty first century world order Kissinger has also mentioned, “political and economic organizations of the world are at variance with each other”. The prosperity of any nation is dependent on the success of globalization that demands dismantling of national frontiers to some extent. However, the political forces do have exhibited no intention to abandon their national privileges and risk the domestic support base. Therefore, a fine combination to harmonize international economic and political order coupled with a very effective international mechanism of major world powers that would facilitate them to consult and cooperate regularly on major challenges, is the urgent need of our time.
“The Meaning of History” and American Global Leadership
However, with many predictions, no military, political, and economic powers in near future can replace the present day world order led by America. While regrettably then again, United States is failing to translate so much power and influence in its reserve into pragmatic policies that can transform the whole world and help it to achieve its aims of global order.
This needs a reconstruction of international system that in the words of Kissinger, “is the ultimate challenge to statesmanship in our time”. It requires a “coherent strategy to establish a concept of order within the various regions and to relate these regional orders to one another”.
This can give an innovative impetus to a new concept of global balance of power – the restructured philosophical and geo-political imperatives of our time. This is possible only if America can play a more meaningful role in global affairs. Almost all American leaders from President Obama to Kissinger have admitted that no country with any amount of power can solve the challenges of our time alone. However, “to achieve a genuine world order, its components, while maintaining their own values, need to acquire a second culture that is global, structural, and juridical – a concept of order that transcends the perspective and ideals of any one region or nation.”
In the end of his majestic blueprint of global order of our time, Kissinger with a deep sense of responsibility suggests for the “modernization of Westphalian system informed by contemporary realities”. Further he asserts “The goal of our era must be to achieve that equilibrium while restraining the dogs of war, And we have to do so among the rushing stream of history.”
Let us note one more crucial point, when a person even at 91, can invest so much energy, recall thousands years of history of many countries of the world and still owns a razor sharp intellectual ability to analyze them with the perspective of their contexts with the urgency of our time, we can imagine the amount of his energy when he was a young man.
There is an example, when Kissinger was an undergraduate student at the Harvard in 1950; he submitted 383 pages long thesis – a record in Harvard’s 350-year history. It was on “The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant”. According to Walter Isaacson, in the first page of this thesis, Kissinger wrote – “Whenever peace- conceived as the avoidance of war- has been the primary objective of power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community”. A more proper goal he argued was for the stability based on equilibrium of forces.
With humility after sixty-four years later, he remembers “Long ago in youth I was brash enough to think myself able to pronounce on “The Meaning of History”. I now know the history’s meaning is a matter to be discovered, not declared. It is a question we must attempt to answer as best we can in recognition that it will remain open to debate; that each generation will be judged by whether the greatest , most consequential issues of human condition have been faced, and the decision to meet these challenges must be taken by statesmen before it is possible to know what the outcome may be.”
Nothing is valuable for us than a better world order based on the meaning of history and rationale for a new world order Kissinger explains can work as a mantra for us.
The post Henry Kissinger And His ‘World Order’ – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.
