In his latest work, ‘World Order,’ Henry Kissinger purports to analyze prospects for a peaceful world order today and obstacles to it. After a sketchy account of early modern European diplomatic structures, which he describes as a kind of provisional world order among leading Western nationstates, he 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 falls ever further from his actual record and judgments.
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 the consensus that: 1) nation-states are the most legitimate political entities in world affairs, not transnational empires or 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 socio-cultural 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 article early in the NATO campaign suggested that the US should use armed force only where its own vital interests were at stake, not the case in Libya as he pointed out, but still supported NATO’s ‘humanitarian’ military strikes against Gaddafi[/pullquote]
Obfuscations in this Kissingerian model of ‘world order’ lie at many levels. The most obvious concern is historical plausibility. Major conflicts wracking Europe during Kissinger’s supposed ‘world order’ between the mid-17th and late 19th centuries include 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 his imagination: a romance of Western moral unity and superiority. “The statesmen who operated the eighteenth-century European order were aristocrats who interpreted intangibles like honor and duty in the same way, and agreed on fundamentals,” writes Kissinger nostalgically. “They represented a single elite society that spoke the same language (French), frequented the same salons and pursued romantic liaisons in each other’s capitals.” How picturesque. For these statesman, “a sense of overarching common purpose was inherent”, reflecting “moral convictions of a common European outlook”. In Kissinger’s world, European diplomacy achieved an elevated moral consensus and operational success that benighted non-Europeans could only envy and maybe emulate. The ‘Westphalian system’ supposedly involves ‘realism’ as opposed to reckless ideology; respect for ‘sovereignty’ among states declining to interfere with one another’s internal arrangements; ‘international law’ among states; and ‘pluralism’ among value systems, fostering mutual accommodation rather than armed fanaticism.
It would be interesting if these supposed ‘Westphalian’ principles bore some consistent relationship with policies Kissinger has actually pursued or recommended in the course of his long career. In fact, however, Kissinger’s positions have often been the
opposite: reckless, indifferent to sovereignty, lawless and fanatic in conviction that US intervention abroad embodies wisdom and benevolence. In practice, Kissinger’s outlook precedes less from ‘Westphalian’ principles than from something close to Hillary Clinton’s view of America (shared by most prominent Republicans and almost as many Democrats) as the ‘indispensable nation’ in engineering a benign world order. I will desist here from substantiating this point backward over decades, but will instead inspect Kissinger’s recent judgments on crises in Libya and Syria.
The best one could say about NATO’s 2011 Libya military campaign is that it aimed to topple a tyranny and install ‘Arab Spring’ democracy. Unfortunately – but predictably – Gaddafi’s overthrow fomented an ongoing civil war of intensified violence, wasted infrastructure and human devastation. Rather than a democracy, Libya is now a jihadi playground and base for projecting Islamist terror southward into sub-Saharan Africa.
Unlike ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, the Libyan insurgency met violent resistance and soon sought regime overthrow by force of arms. A civil war situation quickly emerged. NATO’s initial intervention on behalf of insurgents was explained as necessary to stymie ‘genocide’ that Gaddafi would unleash in suppressing insurgents.
Tales of air raids on unarmed demonstrators turn out to have been fanciful, however, probably concocted by insurgents themselves. If victorious, Gaddafi would no doubt have dealt harshly with armed insurgents. But there is no ethnic division in Libya to sustain a genocide scenario and no reason to think that Gaddafi contemplated one. A record of jailing and killing dissidents, a la despots everywhere, is no basis for ascribing ‘genocidal’ intent.
The ‘genocide’ projection justified civil war intervention on the side NATO preferred to see win. Was this wise? Winners are jihadis and crime lords, not democracy. Whatever his past sins (real and sometimes imagined), Gaddafi used Libya’s oil bounty to sustain Africa’s highest living standards, with literacy rates even for girls upwards of 80% (from a base somewhere around 20% when he took power in 1969). Since his downfall, the land groans with routinized violence and degraded living standards in a shattered oil/welfare state. In his latter years, Gaddafi cooperated with Western anti-terrorism and non-proliferation priorities. But the recklessly utopian NATO powers preferred a regime change to pedestrian progress. What message does this betrayal of Gaddafi send on the benefits of coming in from the ‘rogue’? As for international law, NATO ignored Security Council calls for negotiations before resorting to armed force, negotiations that Gaddafi agreed to join. Nor did NATO comply with Security Council requirements that armed force be used only to protect civilians, not for regime change.
[pullquote]Obfuscations in this Kissingerian model of ‘world order’ lie at many levels. The most obvious concern is historical plausibility[/pullquote]
Kissinger gets no good marks for fidelity to ‘Westphalian’ state sovereignty in all this of course, nor for judgment or courage. His article
early in the NATO campaign suggested that the US should use armed force only where its own vital interests were at stake, not the case in Libya as he pointed out, but still supported NATO’s ‘humanitarian’ military strikes against Gaddafi. This could only help the insurgents of course. Kissinger overlooked civilian casualties inflicted by insurgents themselves, the fact that Gaddafi retained substantial domestic support, and the fact that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had already called for Gaddafi’s overthrow, thereby rendering a limited ‘humanitarian’ intervention deeply unlikely. In fact, Kissinger had already gone on record worrying that leaving Gaddafi in power would make the US look weak. To be sure, he worried that escalated chaos and violence might follow Gaddafi’s overthrow, but he could not bring himself to speak up against it. Toss out the despot and bring in democracy: can we think of other examples where that has not worked?
Depose despot/deliver democracy, round three: Syria. In a Saudi-funded jihadi insurgency, Obama thought he caught glimpses of ‘Arab Spring’, and in Assad’s violent counter-measures he saw only tyranny suppressing democracy. The bloody dictator must go, he pronounced, and when sarin gas made its ghastly debut, he saw the moment for anti-Assad air strikes. Kissinger waved him on. Neither Obama nor Kissinger (nor McCain and other prominent Republicans in government) seriously considered what many plausibly suspected: that the sarin attacks came from the insurgents, not from Assad, precisely to provoke a pro-jihadi intervention that might hasten Assad’s demise. We may never know which side launched the sarin, but the insurgents had much to gain should the US point its finger at Assad.
For deployment of armed force against a recognized government, Kissinger’s ‘Westphalian’ principles should at least demand a high proof burden of serious crime by the regime, no? Kissinger’s publications recommended no investigation.
The US should strike, urged Kissinger, in accord with the ‘Assad must go’ drift at the time. Fortunately, Putin arranged for dismantling Assad’s chemical arsenal before that could happen. Since then, Islamic State has of course set new lows for jihadi barbarity. Recent evidence of chemical warfare by anti-Assad forces has hiked plausibility that the insurgents were culprits in the earlier sarin episode. Anti-IS hostilities, while remaining committed to Assad’s exit, put the US in the interesting position of actively opposing both sides in Syria’s civil war, a hot theater in the wider Sunni-Shia regional conflict. At the end of the day, this is too much even for Kissinger. In a complete reversal for which we should briefly applaud, Kissinger now urges support for Assad in defeating Islamic State. I do not think America should support Assad or try to defeat Islamic State with armed force: America has neither legitimacy nor competence meddling in that complex and terrible tragedy for which the US invasion of Iraq is partly to blame. But at least Kissinger now correctly identifies the more terrible antagonist and the folly of trying to get both sides to lose. Although clearly no prophet, Kissinger arrives a few minutes ahead of a dawning epiphany in US foreign policy thinking. We hope.