Diplomacy

Content Warning: This summary contains some descriptions of the effects of war and follows a Eurocentric, androcentric perspective on global affairs, history, and society. This book also contains problematic and offensive arguments about the United States’ role in global politics and its treatment of such nations as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Chile, minimizing the atrocities of the interventions in these places.

Henry Kissinger is one of the best-known American representatives of the so-called realist tradition of international politics. Dating back to the period between the world wars, but drawing inspiration from philosophers like Niccolò Machiavelli and David Hume, the realist tradition understands itself as studying the often harsh facts of political life, free from any ideological bias. This understanding is often perceived as being especially difficult, and therefore necessary, for the United States, with its public philosophy dedicated to individual rights and a steadfast belief in the power of well-intentioned people to make the world a better place. For early realists, the ultimate manifestation of this impulse was President Woodrow Wilson, whom Kissinger discusses in the Chapter 2 of Diplomacy. With the end of the First World War, Wilson sought an entirely new international system based on the freedom of nations to elect their own leaders, disarmament, free trade, and diplomacy conducted in public rather than secret. These ideals were embodied in the League of Nations, and this organization utterly failed to stop the march of aggressive states such as Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan in the 1930s. Realists concluded that human beings by nature sought power and dominion over others, compelling even well-intentioned leaders to adopt harsh and unpleasant measures to advance their people’s interests or to protect their people against the ambitions of others.

The Cold War helped to inject a degree of realism into American politics. The Soviet threat that loomed at the end of the Second World War removed any possibility of the United States retreating into itself as it did in previous generations. Containing the spread of communism clearly imposed harsh necessities such as fighting the Korean War, spending billions of dollars in aid to threatened countries, and living under the ever-present threat of nuclear war. American Cold War realism reached its peak under Nixon and Kissinger, his national security advisor and later secretary of state, who had no problem sponsoring brutal dictators like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet as long as they were reliably anticommunist; Nixon at the same time made a diplomatic opening with Communist China upon recognizing that the two states were both opposed to Soviet power, no matter their differing ideology.

In Kissinger’s view, the end of the Cold War was a great triumph for the United States, but it posed a problem for the realists. With the Soviet threat gone, the US was left as an unchallenged superpower overseeing a spread of democracy all over the world. A former State Department official named Francis Fukuyama famously published an article called “The End of History?” in the magazine The National Interest, proclaiming liberal democracy was the “final form of human government,” ultimately eliminating the need for rivalries among nations (Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest, 1989, p. 4). Kissinger, among other realists, found this to be a new version of the same Wilsonian idealism, and were certain that new threats would emerge to challenge American power and test its diplomatic skills. Diplomacy is meant to show how the struggle for power has been a feature of international relations for hundreds of years, a time in which many empires have risen and fallen. The fall of the Soviet empire was merely one more chapter in a history still unfolding.