In his latest work, ‘World Order’, Henry Kissinger purports to analyze prospects for a peaceful world order today and obstacles to it. He starts out with a sketchy account of early modern European diplomatic structures, which he describes as a kind of provisional world order among leading Western nation-states.
He then moves through 19th-21st century events so as to ruminate about current possibilities and challenges. As he does so, his over-hyped theory of world order departs more and more glaringly from his actual record and recommendations.
Praise for Kissinger’s latest opus is as ponderous as it is predictable: “words of wisdom” (Nicholas Burns, Condoleezza Rice’s Chief State Department advisor), “brilliantly conceived and executed” (Conrad Black, New Criterion), “panoramic appreciation of larger historical trends” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times), “singular combination of breadth and acuity” (Hillary Clinton). In truth, the book amounts to an historical skit yielding a pre-cooked conclusion on the “indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order” (Hillary Clinton). More worrisome than Kissinger’s personal outlook is the fact that it is broadly shared in US foreign policy circles, ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ alike.
Kissinger describes his provisional model for world order as the ‘Peace of Westphalia’: an enduring consensus supposedly emerging upon the termination of the devastating Thirty Years War (1618-1648) with its intricate struggles among rival dynasties and competing polities, overlaid by Catholic- Protestant animosities. What Kissinger sees emerging from that desperately needed peace was consensus that: 1) nation-states are the most legitimate political entities in world affairs, not transnational empires nor minor principalities, much less family dynasties or religious faiths; 2) sovereign nation-states should be left free of outside interference in ordering their own political and sociocultural arrangements; 3) ‘ideology’ like religious creed should be excluded as ground for armed conflict, which should be confined to ‘real’ like matters wealth, territory and military advantage; and 4) a ‘balance of power’ should prevent–through military coalitions among states if need be—the emergence of any single dominant power.
[pullquote]Kissinger’s bipolar grid skates past the complexity of crises besetting the region and consistently finds merit in US commitments and interventions that confound aspirations for peaceful order.[/pullquote]
Where does one begin pointing out the obfuscations in this Kissingerian model of ‘world order’? The best start I can make is to list some of the major conflicts that wracked Europe during Kissinger’s supposed ‘world order’ between the mid-17th and early 20th centuries: three Anglo-Dutch wars; the Franco- Dutch War; the Franco-Spanish War of Devolution; the War of the Augsburg League; the two so-called ‘Northern’ wars; three Austro-Turkish wars; the War of the Quadruple Alliance; the wars of the Spanish, Polish and Austrian successions; the Seven Years War; the seven or so ‘French Revolution’ and ‘Napoleonic’ wars; the insurrectional nationalist uprisings in Italy, Hungary, Greece, Poland and Germany; the Crimean War; and the Franco-Prussian War. What Euro-centric ‘world order’ could Kissinger be talking about?
Of course, Kissinger does not claim that his ‘world order’ guarantees perfect peace. But it blocks any single power from gaining persistent hegemony through ‘balance of power’ coalitions among weaker players against the strongest at any moment. It is, of course, a strategic commonplace at all times and forever that the weaker will tend to join forces against the stronger. (See Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.) On such banality rests Kissinger’s great reputation as scholar and statesman? Kissinger’s ‘Westphalian system’ is little more than a figment of imagination.
The ‘Westphalian system supposedly involves ‘realism’ as opposed to visionary world-transforming ideology; ‘sovereignty’ of nation-states declining to interfere with one another’s internal political and social arrangements; ‘international law’ as developed and enforced by voluntary compliance and collective recognition among nation-states; ‘human rights’ as the norm for how governments should treat their citizens and the norm by which the international community should evaluate events; and ‘pluralism’ among value systems favoring mutual accommodation rather than armed fanaticism.
Something like this Westphalian order somehow proceeds from Europe out into the wider world, pulling its disparate players by the hair into benign embrace. Today, the wide world aligns itself more or less along Westphalian principles at least incipiently, thinks Kissinger. There is a nemesis, however: Islamism (my term, not Kissinger’s) with its toxic mix of ideology, religion, fanaticism, utopianism and rights denying absolutism. Kissinger contends that confrontation between ‘Westphalia’ and Islamism is the Middle East’s most critical current reality.
Kissinger’s bipolar grid skates past the complexity of crises besetting the region and consistently finds merit in US commitments and interventions that confound aspirations for peaceful order. With much clearing of throat, Kissinger urges ongoing confrontation with Iran and ongoing support for Saudi Arabia. As the Shia-Sunni cold war heats up, worse advice would be hard to come by. Convolutedly, Kissinger tries to reconcile these status quo commitments with his characterization of both Iran and Saudi Arabia as aggressively Islamist players, albeit on opposite sides of the Shia-Sunni divide. He greatly underplays the fact that Sunni and Shia Islamisms are far busier challenging each other than challenging the ‘Westphalian’ West. He fails to consider that Iran, while rhetorically supporting Islamist expansion, promotes it but little in practice and functions these days more like his idealized ‘Westphalian’ state than does the Saudi regime, which actively supports the region’s most aggressive Islamist players even as home-grown Sunni fanaticism threatens its own domestic order.
Kissinger’s signal anti-Iranian recommendation is for repudiation of President Obama’s nuclear deal. As in the past, he continues to argue the dubious positions that Iran actively seeks nuclear weapons and that Obama’s inspection regime cannot impede such a quest if it exists. He continues to insist that outside pressure, including air strike threats, could coerce Iran into abandoning a uranium enrichment program consistent with peaceful nuclear power. Kissinger elides the possibility that Obama’s nuclear deal could pave the way toward more cooperative US-Iran relations. He sees no Iranian incentive for cooperation, not even commercial engagement, which he dismisses as an insubstantial Iranian interest. He is flatly wrong about that, of course. Iran’s import bill is seven or eight times its export earnings, with pistachio nuts as its leading export after oil products. With falling oil prices after a decade of crippling international sanctions, Iran clearly needs and hopes for closer US commercial engagement. While nodding at possibilities of reduced tension, Kissinger essentially treats Iranian anti-Americanism as an unalterable Islamist commitment. This downplays widespread goodwill towards America among Iranians today, and ignores the historical basis for past and residual Iranian hostility.
[pullquote]As usual, Kissinger fails to reckon whether US efforts to engineer ‘world order’ through alliance, armament and onslaught might unleash hell so much the faster, so much the worse.[/pullquote]
First, a US-supported 1953 coup–Kissinger never mentions it–threw Iran’s democratically- elected president, Mohammed Mossadegh, from power for nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, thereby threatening perceived Western interests. Kissinger avoids explaining how Mossadegh’s removal, followed by the installation of the non-elected Shah Reza Pahlevi, comports with supposed ‘Westphalian’ principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. Second, under Kissinger’s guidance as secretary of state, the US actively supported the Shah through arms transfers amounting to what has been called the most rapid military buildup in world history. This Cold War-inspired plan went sour of course when the Shah was overthrown and one of the world’s mightiest militaries fell into the hands of unfriendly ayatollahs. Oops. Third, and with Kissinger’s applause, the US funded the Shah’s escalating domestic repression through the SAVAK secret police, notorious intimidators and torturers. Why doesn’t supporting repression of dissent count as violating Kissinger’s ‘Westphalian’ norm of non-interference with domestic national arrangements?
Fourth, when overthrown in 1979, the Shah received US amnesty at Kissinger’s personal urging. Anger over this amnesty led more or less directly to Iran’s seizure of American diplomats: the ‘hostage’ episode that poisoned US-Iran relations for a generation. Little wonder that, in view of all this, career diplomat George Ball came to sum up Kissinger’s overall Iran policy as ‘folly’.
While shoring up the Shah, Kissinger also engineered a Saudi military build-up nearly as large as Iran’s. If World War III breaks out in the Gulf or maybe in Syria, Kissinger’s labors in building ‘world order’ should get their due credit. Today, the US remains wedded to the House of Saud, even as oilsecurity rationales vanish in the rear-view mirror. A short list of recent Saudi embarrassments might include funding for jihadi madrasses in foreign lands, weak effort to constrain the Islamic State and covert support for it, sentencing a Sri Lankan worker girl to die by stoning for having a love affair, beheading a cleric for criticizing the regime’s treatment of Shiites, and using US-furnished hardware for a dirty war inflicting death, destruction, disease and deficient nutrition on Yemen.
Kissinger endorses the ongoing Saudi embrace even as Iran shows itself far more useful in containing the Islamic State. He lauds longstanding ‘Westphalian’ cooperation between such disparate regimes as the US and the Saudis. He pleads that the Saudis, as custodian of Islam’s holy sites, must uphold fundamentalist orthodoxy. (Why? Ottomans saw no such need when they controlled Mecca.) He sympathizes with the complex array of internal and external challenges facing the Saudis (extending no such sympathy to Iran), and concludes euphemistically that active US support must continue indefinitely, essentially because without the House of Saud all hell will break loose in the Middle East. As usual, Kissinger fails to reckon whether US efforts to engineer ‘world order’ through alliance, armament and onslaught might unleash hell so much the faster, so much the worse.