Diplomacy is a book of history and a long ode to/history of realpolitick, the philosophy of international relations that mandates that each state should do what is broadly in its power, and to the balance of power, they way that, in certain periods, states form in such a way to prevent aggression through the construction of a stable international order. Conversely, Diplomacy is an attack on Wilsonianism, which seeks to create an international order based on law and collective security through universal principles rather than alliances. Kissinger sees his worldview as better equipped to attain lasting peace, since "national interest can be calculated, but altruism depends on the definition of its practitioner." The book is arranged smartly. After starting with a comparison of the foreign policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Kissinger discusses the failure of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations before beginning in a history, starting at the end of the Napoleonic wars and the Concert of Europe (plus a little bit of the Thirty Years War) and proceeding up to the modern day (the end of the Cold War when the book was written). The greatest strength of the book is Kissinger's narrative ability to make major historical events make sense in an interesting way. Not only can he write well, but he has the historical perspective to understand the path of History as one narrative. Kissinger also tells his story geographically as well as chronologically. Each chapter moves the narrative forward in years, but also focuses on a different area of the world (Europe), sometimes focusing even on specific people.
The Rise of Germany
Critical to understanding modern Europe is the creation of Germany. While the Holy Roman Empire existed in the premodern era, it was seriously weakened by the Thirty Years War, which may have killed 20% of Germany's population. This war began with a rebellion in the Empire, but led to major foreign interventions that prolonged the conflict. In many ways, these interventions were funded or prompted by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of France, who was practicing an early form of realpolitick known as raison d'etat. Even though the French and the Germans were Catholics, Richelieu recognized that France could not be strong while the Holy Roman Empire controlled a united Germany, so he focused on weakening the Empire through war, and settling it in a peace that would leave the Empire permanently divided by religion such that it was not really one big state but a confederation of over one hundred small states. Of the Thirty Years War, Kissinger writes that, "The initial phase ... can be viewed as a Habsburg attempt to act as the dynastic unifiers or Germany--much as England had become a nation-state under the tutelage of a Norman dynasty and, a few centuries later, the French had followed suit under the Capetians." But the French led by Richelieu thwarted these ambitions, and the smaller counts won in Germany, which would not be truly unified for over two hundred years. There are few victories in international relations that are so clear. But Kissinger is sure to point out the limits of raison d'etat strategy. The successes of Richelieu under Louis XIII were followed by excesses under Louis XIV, who turned Europe against him because he put no limits on his raison d'etat. If one always does what is in the interest of one's own state, he can make a lot of enemies if he does not set limits. And so Louis XIV alarmed Europe with his many invasions of other lands, bringing together an anti-French coalition that hemmed him in.
Kissinger describes the historic British strategy as one of balance of power, in which Britain has tried to prevent any one power from dominating Europe. And so Britain will typically align itself with whoever was the second strongest power on the continent. Kissinger favors balance of power as a way of ordering states, but it is also a British value, and not one that Germans or French would have favored historically, since the two intended to be as strong as possible and dominate the other. This strategy, when followed rigorously, meant that Britain judged a country based on its foreign policy and was indifferent to its domestic government. For a long time (from the end of the Thirty Years War (1648)), the dominant power on the continent was France. But Under Louis Napoleon/Napoleon III, big changes occurred. The system created by Clemens von Metternich at the Concert of Europe in 1815 collapsed, and Europe broke out into war again. And after the Crimean War (1853), the Piedmont-French war against Austria (1859), Schleswig-Holstein (1864), the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870), France was definitively the second power of Europe, and the newly created Germany was the first.
Kissinger puts the blame and credit, respectively, for France's decline and Germany's rise on the heads of Napoleon III and Otto von Bismarck. As president and then emperor of France, Napoleon III made a critical miscalculation: he thought that Austria was the major German power. In reality, it was Prussia, led by Bismarck. This misjudgment led him to fight against Austria in the 1850s and favor an Italian state in the 1860s. He thought he would be creating a smaller Italian state that would be unable to compete with France, but in fact he created a major power on France's southeastern border. And in doing so, he delivered a powerful blow to Austria, which was already going to struggle against Prussia for control of Germany. Moreover, through erratic adventurism, Napoleon III drove away all potential allies, so that when Prussia finally came for him, he had no one that he could call on for help. At the end of this 1853-71 period of French decline and German ascendance, another casualty was Legitimacy, the organizing principle of European states from the Concert of Europe. After Napoleon I (Napoleon III's uncle) cut through Europe, the coalition that defeated him formed a conservative bloc that responded to the values of the French Revolution that had swept through Europe with Legitimacy, which exalted the rights of the rulers in Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Great Britain. By 1871, it meant nothing. As Napoleon III encouraged upheavals, the new organizing principle was based on a raw power, survival-of-the-fittest calculation. This was especially dangerous for France since it came out of this period significantly weaker than the new Germany. Since then, Kissinger muses, France has struggled to come to terms with its place in the world. Still prideful, the French rarely align themselves with countries more powerful than they are, and seek alliances with smaller countries, as being the junior partner would be incompatible with French grandeur.
So why did the Concert of Europe fall? First, it was based on the assumption that the major eastern powers needed each other to prevent their own internal disturbances. All were afraid of revolution, and it was thought that it would be better to avoid taking advantage of each other during another's revolution, lest a war lead to that revolution spreading. However, this would become irrelevant as Prussia became strong enough that its leaders lost all fear of revolution and didn't need an Austrian alliance anymore by the 1860s. Additionally, the surge of nationalism met a threshold in the latter half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century in which it became unignorable as the only acceptable way to arrange states at the time. Nationalism made it extremely difficult for the Russian and Austrian Empires to survive, and it forced Prussia and Austria to compete for primacy in Germany and for which one of the two could eventually become "Germany." Finally, the Convert of Europe could not contain Prussian aims. While Bismarck portrayed himself as a conservative who would preserve the Concert, he was really trying to go back much further, to the era of the 18th century when might makes right was the organizing principle. His success would raise Germany high during his life, but would bring it crashing down under his successors. Because Prussia had no overseas colonies (at least until the 1880s I think), the Prussians could focus all their energies on central Europe while the English, French, and Russians were focused elsewhere. And after Prussia defeated Austria, even the Habsburgs focused less on Central Europe and devoted their efforts to the Balkans. Finishing his discussion of this period, Kissinger ends with one of his many great passages in the book: "Napoleon [III]'s tragedy was that his ambitions surpassed his capacities; Bismarck's tragedy was that his capacities exceeded his society's ability to absorb them. The legacy Napoleon [III] left France was strategic paralysis; the legacy Bismarck left Germany was unassimilable greatness." Under Bismarck, Prussia/Germany avoided being tied up with other states, and formed and broke alliances strategically based on what worked at the moment. So Germany aligned with Austria to invade Denmark in 1864, but then attacked Austria two years later. After Kaiser Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck, Germany reversed course and formed many alliances. And similarly, Germany reversed fortunes. Whereas Britain and France almost went to war over Egypt in 1898, they would be aligned ten years together, and with Russia too, against German aggression. This time at the turn of the century and the prelude to WWI was the true end of the balance of power.
Kissinger describes balance of power as a system that works when at least one of three conditions pertains: (1) each state feels free to align itself with any other state based on the circumstances of the moment, (2) where there are fixed alliances but a balancer sees to it that none of the existing coalitions becomes predominant, and (3) when there are rigid alliances and no balancer, the cohesion of the alliances I relatively low such that there are frequent compromises or changes in alignments. Based on these criteria, I think it is important to note that the first situation simply does not exist in the current world. Maybe it will come back at some point, but fort he foreseeable future, it is hard to imagine in a world of democracies and nations that states will feel as free to change alignments as they were in the 19th century. Today, domestic considerations like quality of democracy or dictatorial repression and human rights abuses play a major role in alliances and there is no going back to that old world. This system broke down prior to WWI because German bullying of other states and naval development forced Britain from the role of balancer (situation two) to an aligned power (situation three), but without the compromises or changes in alignment. Instead, the blocs became solidified as everyone in Europe teamed up against Germany, and Germany grabbed Austria and the Ottoman Empire as weak powers that it could force into its orbit.
Building Up to and After World War One
Initially, Germany wanted an alliance with Great Britain to balance against the Franco-Russian alliance that threatened Berlin with a two-front war. Germany pressured Britain for a formal security guarantee but ran into a problem--Britain never liked to make formal guarantees. Britain preferred to remain aloof. While not quite isolationist, Britain preferred informal agreements with the continental powers to retain its role as a balancer and its strategic maneuverability. There was a back and forth as Germany pressured Britain into a mutual defense pact, which frustrated both sides. This was all a major error according to Kissinger. Instead of asking for a mutual defense pact, he writes, Germany should have just asked for a promise of neutrality in the case of a major war between Germany and a Franco-Russian alliance. Germany was strong enough to defeat both of them in a defensive war, but "by asking for what it did not need and offering what Great Britain did not want (sweeping commitments to defend the British Empire), Germany led Great Britain to suspect that it was in fact seeking world domination." And while that was not necessarily the case, German leadership was indeed facing greater pressure from the rising middle classes in the German public to have a more assertive foreign policy. At this point, Kissinger goes into an aside about how after WWII, the Junkers, Prussian aristocracy, were blamed for Germany's aggression, but actually those aristocrats were the more measured ones according to him. He says it was the "new industrial managerial and the growing professional classes that provided the nucleus of nationalist agitation without encountering in the political system the sort of parliamentary buffer which had evolved in Great Britain and France over several centuries."
And in the prelude to WWI, it was becoming clear to astute observers that the casus belli for war were changing. The Russian Adjutant General Nikolai Obruchev observed as early as 1892 that what mattered first in the next European war would not be who fired the first shot, but who mobilized first. The Europeans were trapped in a classic security dilemma. Now that mobilization times were so great and war so devastating, if one power waited to mobilize until the other power actually fired a shot or crossed a border, the war would already be lost. And so Bismarck's nightmare question transformed from "what if there's a two-front war?" into Schlieffen's nightmare question of "what is there's not a two-front war?" Now for the Germans, the worst situation would not be to fight against both France and Russia at the same time, but to have to start fighting with one, dedicate resources to that front, and then be invaded by the other once Germany had already committed to the other front. So when the First World War came, Austria declared war on Serbia, prompting Russia (aligned with Serbia) to declare war Austria. Then, Germany, allied with Austria, would be forced to declare war on Russia; but, fearing French invasion due to the Franco-Russian alliance, Germany would also have to invent a reason to go to war with France at the same time. Even though France offered neutrality, Germany ignored it out of fear that it would change, and demanded that it would only regard France as neutral if it would cede a major fortress to Germany, essentially putting itself at Germany's mercy. That was unacceptable and war was declared.
To go back to the beginning of WWI, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. Austria took a month to issue an ultimatum to Serbia over the assassination. Surprisingly, Serbia accepted almost all the demands on July 25. But mobilization schedules outran diplomacy. Austria declared war on July 28, but would not be ready for action until August 12. In the meantime, Russia would go to war with Austria and started mobilizing against Vienna, but only had plans that called for mobilization against both Austria and Germany simultaneously. Russia assured Germany on July 28 that it intended no harm to Germany. But this was not enough for the Germans. German war plans required Germany to deliver a knockout blow to France in the first six weeks, counting on a slow Russian mobilization to allow Germany to beat France before transferring forces east. This is what created the need, mentioned above, to issue an impossible ultimatum to France and then to invade. Germany declared war on August 3, carrying out the Schlieffen plan and invading Belgium the same day, violating its neutrality. The next day, surprising the German leaders, Great Britain entered the war on the side of France. But this should have been no surprise. Britain had an informal alliance with France and had long considered Belgium's borders to be sacrosanct, as part of a critical continental buffer for London. Had Germany had to face only France and Russia, it stood a good chance of winning the war. But with Britain involved, there was already little hope. The irony in all of this is that as this all happened, Austria still had not invaded Serbia. The need for fast mobilization meant that facts were already being established on the ground before diplomats could put out the fire. So Germany was on the march and in Belgium nine days before the real reason for the war, an Austrian invasion of Serbia, had begun.
For France, the collective security ideas emerging at the Versailles conference were worth very very little. France wanted guarantees of military assistance against Germany in the future, as they were clearly aware of what Germany could do. France had now fought Germany with British and Russian support and barely made it out alive. Post-war, Russia was in revolution after making a separate peace, and Britain and America were reluctant to commit to anything with France. So France was in a very insecure position. The result was that the French would demand the most severe terms against Germany. Unlike America and Britain which could defend themselves and were across the sea from Germany, France had no last resort--the French needed to be right the first time. The guarantees France searched for were not forthcoming. This is where Kissinger is the most critical of Wilson, who advocated for self-determination, a League of Nations, and collective security instead of mutual defense pacts between states. Wilson was able to get his way due to the superior American position of having been undamaged by the war and having entered late on the side of the victor, tipping the balance.
Whereas the peace secured by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 (which Kissinger calls a century but I would call forty or fifty years) was based on conciliation towards the loser (France then, Germany in WWI), a balance of power, and a shared sense of legitimacy, the Treaty of Versailles shared none of those pillars. Instead, "its terms were too onerous for conciliation but not severe enough for permanent subjugation. In truth, it was not easy to strike a balance between satisfying and subjugating Germany." And because Wilson promised self-determination, Germany could also not be divided like it was after WWII. France was forced into a difficult trilemma: it could try to partition Germany, form an anti-German coalition, or conciliate Germany. None of these were possible, as the other powers refused to form an alliance with France, and would not partition Germany, and additionally, it was simply too early to conciliate Germany. After such a brutal war, French public opinion would not allow a deferential stance to Germany. The creation of an independent Poland left France even more insecure. It became a buffer state between Germany and Russia, meaning that Russia could not so easily come to France's aid in the next war without violating Poland's neutrality, exactly the issue that would emerge two decades later. France needed that ally in the east, but Russia was now too far (and also in the midst of a Communist revolution) and Poland would be too weak. The creation of many small, weak, national states in the east created a power vacuum and gave Germany a free hand to use against France since there was no country that it would fear on the other side.
Collective security, writes Kissinger, is based on a central premise: "that all nations have the same interest in resisting a particular act of aggression and are prepared to run identical risks opposing it." He claims that no major power's aggression has ever been defeated by applying the principle of collective security, either because the world community refuses to assess the act as aggression, or because it has disagreed over the appropriate sanctions, usually ending up with sanctions so ineffectual that they did more harm than good. I suppose we are seeing this play out right now between Russia and Ukraine. And so he considers it to be one of the biggest failures of the Treaty of Versailles, to discard the tried and true balance of power principles that had always worked, for a new principle that wouldn't. He makes a convincing argument, but I don't think Kissinger pays enough attention to the fact that it is not just a matter of picking an organizing principle. There is a reason why collective security popped up at the time it did and a reason that balance of power declined. I think that as the masses became the nation and took a more active role in politics, it became harder for elites to engage in the smooth and easy transfer of alliances that characterized an earlier period. Now they would have to go to the voters and explain decisions, and the voters have passionate beliefs that might be based on something other than the ideal foreign policy.
World War Two
After Versailles, France wanted an alliance with Great Britain. But Britain made the miscalculation that Napoleon III made in the century before, picking the wrong power as the threat. The Central Department of the Foreign Office write in a 1924 point that a French occupation of the Rhineland was a "jumping-off point for an incursion into Central Europe," and the British spent far too much energy working to make sure France would not become an aggressor that should have been spent containing Germany. So just like Napoleon III thought Austria would be the threat when it was Prussia, Britain thought France would be the threat when it was Germany ... again. Kissinger argues that the smartest thing for the Allies to do after Versailles would be to relieve Germany of the most onerous provisions of the Treaty and to form a firm Franco-British alliance. Winston Churchill was lonely in advocating for this at the time. But Britain once again did not want to commit to the continent, and it would have been difficult to get France to agree to ease up the anti-German provisions. And they were preempted.
Even long before Hitler came to power, the Germans were trying to claw back what they lost at Versailles. For one, they formed an agreement with the Soviet Union in 1922 to recognize one another, renounce claims against each other, and grant one another Most Favored Nation status. Now France would be totally reliant on the tiny Central and Eastern European countries to distract Germany's eastern flank, which would never work. Once Hitler was in power, he set about bringing lands into Germany in essentially two phases: one, which brought back former German territories into Germany, which aroused very little opposition until after the Munich conference that resulted in the acquisition of the Sudetenland; and then another phase after Munich, in which he tried to expand territory significantly, arousing much more opposition. Two things about the lands Hitler conquered made it difficult to muster political support to intervene against Germany. The lands either used to belong to Germany, so people didn't really oppose something they had already known. And second, Germany was seizing a lot of lands in the East where Germany had won the war. Part of what was incomprehensible to Germans about losing World War One was that they had actually won on the Eastern Front, and then had those territories taken from them by the victors of the Western Front.
By 1935, France was stuck in useless alliances east of Germany that would only serve to draw France into a war in the east without providing it with a strong ally to invade Germany from that direction should Germany attack France. So France attempted to make a tripartite pact with Great Britain and Italy. This failed with Great Britain because the British were still reluctant to make a formal commitment on the continent (although they made a pact limiting naval buildup with Germany), and it failed with Italy because Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, avenging an old Italian defeat. The Italian invasion of Ethiopia was a brutal war that used chemical weapons after they had been declared too cruel and sought to create a colonial empire after they went out of style. This is where Kissinger has a pretty hot take, suggesting that fault lay with France and Britain for imposing sanctions on Italy after this invasion, which Kissinger sees merely as a manifestation of realpolitick. While it is true that a pact with Italy would have been helpful in preventing German aggression, it is hard to argue that those amoral goals are achievable in a democratic society. If anything, fault lays with Mussolini for engaging in a criminal invasion that secured his own downfall. The French were collateral damage of his stupidity. And of Great Britain, Kissinger writes that the British should have conciliated Mussolini but confronted Hitler, yet they did the opposite. This is doubtlessly true. It is just unfortunate for history that it was Mussolini who attracted so much negative attention through aggression before Hitler would do even worse. The result of confronting Mussolini was that instead of making a deal that would have retained the independence of part of Ethiopia, Italy took all of it. But I am not sure that we can know whether this counterfactual would have been borne out.
Kissinger also criticizes the French for their inability to get closer to the Soviets, who they signed a pact with in 1935. While that pact was a step in the right direction, French military staff refused to coordinate with the Soviet military, and Stalin made the pact to defend Czechoslovakia dependent on the French intervening first should the Germans do anything to the Czechs. Stalin, meanwhile, was keeping all his options open. It was difficult for the British and French to work with him because while they defended the Versailles order, he wanted to topple it. While they wanted to avoid war, Stalin wanted to extract the maximum possible gains from a war that he felt was inevitable. And so Stalin's strategy was mainly to get all of the capitalist powers (which was everyone but him in Europe) fighting with each other, and he would come in late with the winning side. And so he ended up working with Hitler, who promised him half of Poland for free, something that Stalin could have only gotten from Britain and France in the case of a massive war. It only took three days from first contact to negotiate the Soviet flip to join Germany. Kissinger once again criticizes Western adherence to principles for this diplomatic fumble. The problem was that to ensure Stalin would support Britain and France against Germany, they would need to abandon the principles that Versailles was based on. And then why would they allow the Russians to take over small countries just to stop the Germans from doing so? There is nowhere to go in the "principled" school of thinking. But for the realist, it is obvious: you support Russia because it will help you to defeat your more immediate enemy, Germany. And so "to their moral credit, the democracies could not bring themselves to consecrate another set of aggressions, not even on behalf of their own security." In another one of the great passages with which Kissinger ends his chapters, he wrote that "In 1914, strategists were too reckless; in 1939, they were too self-effacing. In 1914, the military of every country were spoiling for war; in 1939, they had so many misgivings (even in Germany) that they abdicated their judgment to the political leaders. In 1914, there had been a strategy but no policy.; in 1939, there was a policy but no strategy." But Germany conducted itself in the same way: impatiently and foolishly. As history bore out as soon as Germany was unified after the Cold War, it was the decisive nation of Europe. But unwilling to simply wait for its turn to assume this role, both Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler stupidly bullied and lashed out against their neighbors, delaying Germany's inevitable ascent.
In 1940-41, it made a lot more sense for Hitler to go on the strategic defensive. He had seized everywhere he could have wanted (save the USSR for lebensraum) and held an Atlantic wall on the German and French coast against Great Britain, which could not defeat him alone. But he was unable to let a year go by without invading another country, and sent his forces into the USSR in June 1941. Stalin was caught by surprise. Until Hitler invaded France, everything went just as Stalin wanted and predicted: the capitalist countries of Europe were at war with each other, and Russia was able to expand while they were distracted. But what he expected was a protracted fight like WWI, not the blitzkrieg that left France under German occupation within weeks. So Stalin's hope of the Germans, French, and British fighting to exhaustion would come to naught, and he realized too late that he would need to prepare for German aggression to the east, especially clear once Germany, Italy, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact on September 27, 1940, leaving Russia as the odd one out. But it was really Hitler, who was taking the initiative, who was in the worst position, because he had to live (and die) with his own decision-making. Germany had a population of 70 million and the Axis Powers a total of 180 million; by the end of 1941 they were fighting with 700 million people. In another great quote, Kissinger writes that "Stalin had gambled on Hitler's rationality, and he had lost; Hitler had gambled that Stalin would quickly collapse, and he too had lost. But whereas Stalin's error was retrievable, Hitler's was not."
To be fair, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on America in December 1941, the United States had already been masterfully guided from isolationism towards belligerency by FDR. By September 1941, the US was already reporting on German submarine positions to the British and on September 4, an American destroyer was torpedoed by doing so, which Roosevelt denounced as piracy. Roosevelt declared that the Navy would sink "on sight" any German or Italian submarines found in a previously established area of US naval control that extended all the way to Iceland. As late as May 1940, 64% of Americans preferred peace to war with Germany, but by December 1941 (before Pearl Harbor), only 32% felt that way. Roosevelt had successfully moved public opinion. I won't get into how he did that here, but Kissinger describes it plenty in the book in chapter 15.
As it became clear that the Allies would win the war, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin had different ideas about how to structure the post-war world to avoid the mistakes of Versailles. Roosevelt proposed the creation of Four Policemen, which would include the three main allies and China, and who would intervene around the world together in defense of a liberal order. It is most similar to the Security Council established in the UN after the war. But the Americans refused to discuss a political settlement while the war was ongoing, which turned out to be a big mistake. If the Americans had started negotiating with the Soviets in 1943, a lot of places that fell under Communism might not have, since the Russians were more desperate before going back on the counteroffensive after Stalingrad. But Americans famously refused to consider political objectives while making war in Europe, neatly dividing things into a time for generals and a later time for diplomats. But Churchill was trying (in vain) to urge the Americans to move faster through Europe so that the eventual border of the Cold War would be further east. While Americans rejected the balance of power concept, Churchill understood that it was unavoidable. An interesting perspective on the American view is that, like in 1989, Americans thought it was "the end of history." Roosevelt claimed after Yalta that it would be the end of "unilateral action, exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power..." but it would not come to be. Stalin didn't quite see the world that way. Eisenhower wrote directly to Stalin on March 28, 1945, to inform him that he would not advance on Berlin and that he proposed that Americans and Soviets would meet near Dresden. Stalin replied that he agreed, and quickly ordered his troops into overdrive to take as much land west as possible, especially now that he knew Berlin was open for him, giving his generals until mid-April what he assured Eisenhower would take until the end of May.
The Cold War
FDR died on April 12, 1945, seriously affecting the post-war settlement, since negotiations would now be carried out by Truman instead who Kissinger calls an extraordinary president. Kissinger lauds Truman for adopting the containment policy that would later win the Cold War, taking the US into its first peacetime military alliance, building coalitions that formed the core of US foreign policy for four decades, and sponsoring the Marshall Plan. The drift into the Cold War was not unavoidable. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union wanted conflict with the other, but a few factors made it difficult. First, as a response to the USSR's weakness and exhaustion post-WWII, Stalin bluffed that the Soviet Union was acting from strength and refused to concede anything. He conveyed such a ferocious image that some thought he might make a dash to the English Channel. This came back to bite him at the end of his life when he wanted detente with the West, but it was already too late. But he also felt that the Communist Party required confrontation, and not peaceful coexistence to survive. His aggression in the later 1940s led to the establishment of NATO and unity in the West to oppose Soviet aggression. But the Cold War stayed cold. Like the 1914 world, the world of 1945 was divided into rigid alliances. But in 1945, the bipolar world was more stable, since switching between alliances wouldn't mean so much since there were only two great powers, and the superpowers were reluctant to go to war again (and also restrained by the advent of nuclear weapons).
The Korean War began because of mistakes on both sides. The communists analyzed the region in terms of American interests, and found it implausible that America would resist at the tip of a peninsula after already conceding most of mainland Asia to Communism. But America perceived Kim Il-Sung's invasion in terms of principle, and was less concerned about the geopolitical significance of the Korean Peninsula. But once an issue is conceived of in terms of principle, beyond power politics, Kissinger says it get very difficult to define practical war aims. I would be inclined to agree, based on American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. The big loss of the Korean War for Kissinger's geopolitics was that MacArthur didn't stop at the thin point of the Korean Peninsula, which would have been the most defensible part and would have taken Pyongyang from the North Koreans. If that could have been taken, it would be a better geopolitical situation, it would have punished the aggression of Kim Il-Sung, and it would have avoided war with China. That could have possibly been achieved even after China intervened, but the American leadership of the time miscalculated and thought of global communism as a massive conspiracy under control of the aggressive Stalin. In reality, Stalin had no fight left in him, and the Americans could have gotten more out of Korea. In peace talks, the Americans made another cardinal mistake for Kissinger: our leaders made a "classically American gesture" and ordered an end to offensive action when the communists offered armistice terms, a unilateral gesture that would not be rewarded. Kissinger relates something that was also a theme of The Only Language They Understand by Nathan Thrall: "In general, diplomats rarely pay for services already rendered--especially in wartime. Typically, it is pressure on the battlefield that generates the negotiation," writes Kissinger. But the Soviet Union came out as the loser of the Korean War, since the war led the United States to triple defensive expenditures and mobilize its side of the Iron Curtain. There had been a vacuum in Central Europe that NATO started to fill, and the West was now ready to fight Communism around the world, with a new level of cohesion. While Stalin had spent his postwar years playing realpolitick, his gestures were seen by Americans as defection from the international order they were trying to create. Americans resisted his acts in the name of principle, not in defense of a sphere of interest, so they would go much further in fighting now that it had become good versus evil. Stalin underestimated the disillusionment wrought by his Berlin blockade and Korea, and had missed his opportunity for compromise that existed in 1945-48. By the time Stalin came around with the Peace Note in 1952, it was too late. But the Peace Note was also unrealistic. In it, Stalin offered to withdraw forces from Germany and allow an independent, neutral, and armed Germany in exchange for an American retreat across the Atlantic. This would be a retreat of just a few hundred miles for the Soviets, but 3,000 for the Americans. It was not an even deal, and Germany would have probably waited a long time to be reunified regardless.
The portions on Vietnam were especially interesting, of course, due to Kissinger's front-and-center role. He starts with Domino Theory, the idea that the fall of one of the countries in Indochina to Communism would mean the fall of the rest. But Kissinger criticizes the NSC memorandum that produced the theory as offering no analysis of why collapse would be automatic, or why there couldn't be a "firebreak" in Malaya or Thailand, which were more stable. A critical misunderstanding at the time was to see the USSR, China, and even Vietnam as one gigantic red wall of the global Communist conspiracy. But in reality, there were far more divisions than Americans realized, with China fearing invasion by Russia and Vietnam fearing invasion by China. A major gripe Kissinger has is with Vietnam War critics who claimed that he and Nixon expanded the war to Cambodia and Laos. Rather, Kissinger writes, it was North Vietnam who expanded the war as early as the Kennedy Administration, when it began constructing the Ho Chi Minh Trail through neighboring countries. When a deal was reached in 1962 to withdraw forces on all sides from Laos, the United States and Thailand did so, but Vietnam did not comply, withdrawing only 40 military personnel. Eisenhower, writes Kissinger, was the one who saw things the clearest: the bast place to defend Southeast Asia from Communism would not be in Vietnam, but in Laos. Even though the United States had better naval access to Vietnam than landlocked Laos, in Laos, there was no major indigenous Communist movement. So war in Laos would have had Laotians fighting a foreign force from Vietnam. Instead, the United States was caught in a more difficult civil war. Kissinger says that the US would have still been able to get out when Diem was overthrown in the South, but after throwing our lot in with the generals who came after, we were committed.
In a guerrilla war, Kissinger identifies two strategies for the conventional side. One is to be defensive and try to deprive the adversary of control of the population, establishing total security for enough of the population so that the guerrillas' gains among the remainder are not enough. The other is to attack targets that the guerrillas were forced to defend, forcing a major battle. But America adopted a strategy that could never work: of trying to attain 100% security in 100% of the country, seeking to wear down guerrillas in search-and-destroy operations. This was especially difficult to achieve because North Vietnam was taking sanctuary outside of Vietnam and had an incredibly strong will to win and outlast the Americans. Additionally, the United States needlessly feared a Chinese intervention, thinking that what happened in Korea would happen again. But Kissinger points out that Mao had repeatedly made statements that China had no desire to fight.
Ending the war was difficult because Nixon wanted "peace with honor," meaning a negotiated peace that would allow Americans to withdraw in an orderly manner. But a large portion of the anti-war movement wanted an American defeat in the hopes that it would discourage future interventions. Nixon chose to go with Vietnamization because it kept three things in balance: sustaining domestic morale, giving Saigon an honest chance to stand on its own, and giving Hanoi incentive to settle. But Hanoi was never going to settle after all of their leadership had given their whole lives to the Communist, anti-imperialist struggle. Critically, Kissinger points out that Vietnam was so painful for Americans because it signified the first war in which the United States fought for its principles and lost. There was little reason to fight for Vietnam based on raison d'etat. Instead, America was defeated for standing on its principles of democracy, which stung especially hard.
There was more to the book, but I feel like I have written enough here. I am tired.
Miscellaneous:
- Very sus sentence: "For nearly twenty years, Bismarck preserved the peace and eased international tension with his moderation and flexibility. But he paid the price for misunderstood greatness, for his successors and would-be imitators could draw no better lesson from his example than multiplying arms and waging a war which would cause the suicide of European civilization." Yeahhhhh I'm not so sure I would characterize Bismarck that generously.
- A little pearl of Kissinger wisdom: "it is almost always a mistake for heads of state to undertake the details of a negotiation. They are then obliged to master specifics normally handled by their foreign offices and are deflected onto subjects more appropriate to their subordinates, while being kept from issues only heads of state can resolve."
- Thanks to the Versailles Treaty, Bayer Aspirin is an American product instead of a German one.
- Another good statement on Kissinger's philosophy: "Great Britain and France were absorbed in trying to read Hitler's mind. Was he sincere? Did he really want peace? To be sure, these were valid questions, but foreign policy builds on quicksand when it disregards actual power relationships and relies on prophesies of another's intentions." However, it is not too long after in the book that Kissinger engages in some personal analysis of Hitler's inability to wait.
- Something weird is that Stalin held no official government position until May 6, 1941, when he assumed the role of Prime Minister from Molotov. Until then, he had befuddled protocol officers in foreign ministries all over who didn't know how he should be addressed.
- FDR had somewhat progressive views on colonialism, and wanted America to lead in the liberation of colonized areas. He once confided to an advisor that "there are 1,100,000,000 brown people. In many Eastern countries, they are ruled by a handful of whites and they resent it. Out goal must be to help them achieve independence--1,100,000,000 political enemies are dangerous.
- Kissinger calls MacArthur the most talented general of the 20th century.
- Polls shoed that in 1968, 61 percent of Americans still considered themselves hawks on the Vietnam War and only 23% doves. Really, Kissinger says, it was the establishment that stopped supporting the war first.
