President Richard Nixon (left) listens to then-National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger. (GETTY IMAGES)
As a young student of international relations, I both favored and admired the scholarship of Mr. Henry Kissinger, the national security adviser and secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford. Deténte, I believed, was a brilliant yet practical strategy to confront the former Soviet Union in a manner alternative to the status quo.
Since the end of World War II, American administrations had been exhausting strategies resulting in peripheral violence and based upon intense security competition. U.S. foreign policymakers struggled to remain true to the guiding principles outlined by George F. Kennan in the Long Telegram, a document that arrived in Washington D.C. on February 22, 1946, yet dominated U.S. foreign policy toward the Soviet Union for the following two decades.
Through deténte, Mr. Kissinger offered President Richard Nixon a valuable and rare treasure — a new idea. It was a breathe of fresh air blowing through the stale hallways of the White House and State Department, and it worked.
But this is where the pleasantries end, and my critique of the former secretary of state’s recent op-ed must begin. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Kissinger struggled to explain not only the current chaos playing out around the world under President Obama, but also the paralysis and ineffectiveness of the United Nations and various other so-called “forums” for international cooperation.
“A third failing of the current world order, such as it exists, is the absence of an effective mechanism for the great powers to consult and possibly cooperate on the most consequential issues,” Kissinger wrote. “This may seem an odd criticism in light of the many multilateral forums that exist — more by far than at any other time in history.”
To that end, he is correct. The United Nations is, indeed, a failure regarding its stated purpose as a mechanism of international cooperation, and has long taken credit for periods of stabilization resulting from other forces that act outside of its scope of power. However, he’s dead wrong on the irony of its failure, and offers little more than the same empty rhetoric to resolve its ineffectiveness.
Kissinger argues that “the nature and frequency” of U.N. meetings “work against the elaboration of long-range strategy,” and have now merely become “a new form of summitry as ‘social media’ event.”
“A contemporary structure of international rules and norms, if it is to prove relevant, cannot merely be affirmed by joint declarations; it must be fostered as a matter of common conviction.”
While it is certainly true that the formation of nation-states into various coalitions — for example, the now-failed G-7 and U.N. — have served as little more than an excuse for nations’ elitists to rub shoulders and eat caviar, there are two main problems with this argument.
If certain state behavior that challenges global order is to be deterred by means of “naming and shaming” or even by the joint, multilateral use of hard power in the event they violate settled principles of a “common conviction,” then there truly must exist a common conviction between coalition nations. That has always been the great lie regarding the United Nations, particularly the U.N. security council. Matters of common conviction, or a set of agreed upon basic principles, do not currently exist and, in reality, they never have.
The U.S. is unique in its own convictions, as is Europe and even individual nation-states within Europe. As for Russia, the arguably eastern European power holds a set of its own convictions that often resemble those of China and other Asian powers more than Europe. For too long, actually since the formation of the United Nations, we have falsely assumed that European and Asian powers signed on to the U.N. for the same reason as the U.S. — to advance our common convictions.
But this has never been their interest.
A nation-state’s principles and convictions have a habit of changing as often as their interests, making the idea that a lasting global order could ever be predicated on common convictions, at best, terribly difficult to imagine and, at worst, childishly foolish. But the problem is even more fundamental. It lays at the heart of the international state of anarchy that has, and always will, dominate the nature of nation-state behavior in the international system.
As even Kissinger notes, in the U.S., policymakers credit the spread of liberty and democracy with our ability to achieve just and lasting peace. We tend to view people and, as an extension nation-states, as “inherently reasonable and inclined toward peaceful compromise and common sense;” thus, “the spread of democracy was therefore the overarching goal for international order.”
It is from this idea — a simply false idea that does not stand up to empirical scrutiny — which misguided liberal internationalist policies have sprung. “A world order of states affirming individual dignity and participatory governance, and cooperating internationally in accordance with agreed-upon rules,” Kissinger argues, “can be our hope and should be our inspiration.”
The democratic peace theory, which is what Kissinger is arguing for here, is widely praised in the halls of the State Department to this very day. But, ultimately, it has been easily debunked in both intellectual and scholastic exercises. In the real world, states are inherently competitive by nature, an understanding our European counterparts have come to grips with a long time ago.
They have chosen, however, to address this reality through what we now know as the EU, a failing experiment that is finding out the hard way that the bicycle theory, which argues free-riding nation-states will take advantage of a great power’s willingness to pick up the economic slack, isn’t’ just a theory after all.
Meanwhile, Asian powers, to include Russia and China, are the only regional powers who have accepted the fact that balance-of-power politics really do prevail in the international state of anarchy. “The domination of a region by one country militarily, even if it brings the appearance of order, could produce a crisis for the rest of the world,” Kissinger wrote. Regional hegemony, or the domination of a region by a great, hegemonic power is what all great powers seek to achieve, with or without the present of international institutions.
It is almost a non-existent occurrence when academics and real-world practice come to the same conclusion. Still, U.S. policymakers have, to the contradiction of all reason and on full-display in Kissinger’s column, resisted calls to revamp U.S. foreign policy that reflects the reality that other great powers do not want the same things we want. Until U.S. policymakers concede and admit that each great power first desires regional hegemony and their own version of a new world order, which of course is a status quo that they are in charge of keeping, the U.S. will continue to struggle to define its role on the world stage.
And until the intelligentsia, who apparently lack intelligence, pursue dangerous policies of multilateralism, the threat of great power conflict with persist.
