Book Review: Diplomacy

Saturday, 10th January 2009

Written at the opening to the post-Cold War world, Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy seeks to explore the coming of George H. W. Bush’s “New World Order.” Official Washington in 1994, busy with an historic change in Congress, probably skipped to the book’s final chapter “The New World Order Reconsidered” for insight by one of America’s most “assertive, arrogant, and disdainful” people to lead the foreign service. Had they skipped ahead, they would have missed a master’s class on statecraft.

The first half of Diplomacy is the story of how France, once an unrivaled leader in European affairs, transformed into the irrelevant actor most Americans recognize today.

Insecure about his purposes and indeed his legitimacy, [Napoleon III] relied on public opinion to bridge the gap. Napoleon conducted his foreign policy in the style of modern political leaders who measure their success by the reaction of the television evening news. Like them, Napoleon made himself a prisoner of the purely tactical, focusing on short-term objectives and immediate results, seeking to impress his public by magnifying the pressures he has set out to create. For in the end, it is reality, not publicity, that determines whether a leader has made a difference (136).

Napoleon III started France’s slide into irrelevance. By World War II, her foreign policy has become nearly schizophrenic. France feared a strong Germany. She was obsessed at the notion. And despite her best efforts to contain it, all of her moves made German unification all-the-more easy. Reduced to a protectorate of Great Britain and later NATO, France was psychologically incapable of standing alone.

The second half of Diplomacy deals with Russia’s rise as a Super Power, and America’s policy of containment. Kissinger delivers tremendous, first-hand insight into Cold War policy, and Nixon’s intercourse with China.

The most interested aspect of Kissinger’s work is the frequent lectures on foreign affairs. Throughout Diplomacy, Kissinger will deliver tremendous analysis on the subjects. Sometimes they are just quips, such as this one about Adolph Hitler’s real objectives.

In the 1930s, British leaders were too unsure about Hitler’s objectives and French leaders too unsure about themselves to act on the basis of assessment which they could not prove. The tuition fee for learning about Hitler’s true nature was tens of millions of graves stretching from one end of Europe to the other. On the other hand, had the democracies forced a showdown with Hitler early in his rule, historians would still be arguing about whether Hitler had been a misunderstood nationalist or a maniac bent on world domination (294).

Although thick, and at times dense, Diplomacy is worth the investment it takes to read 850+ pages.