Henry Kissinger's "Diplomacy"

Henry Kissinger's purpose in Diplomacy is to place America's twentieth-century foreign policy firmly in the flow of the history of foreign relations that begins with the reorganization of Europe after the Napoleonic wars. At that time the dream of a European empire was largely abandoned for the more practical balance of power among a varying cast of nations. The Realpolitik of Bismarck and others contains, Kissinger believes, the germ of truth about power and international relations. Kissinger, a professional student of European foreign policy, has promoted the Realist approach to international politics for his entire career. This book demonstrates how he believes America's fate in the twentieth century illustrates the inherent truth of the Realist belief in the primacy of power in international relations.

Kissinger's book is written on a grand scale and in a rapid, flowing prose that keeps the reader going avidly from point to point. He is witty and persuasive, but ultimately his sweeping statements about intentions and his selectivity regarding motivations slows his story and makes the reader ask far too many questions. In a survey of this kind it is necessary to choose the events that seem to be the highlights of the story one is trying to tell. But to avoid, for example, America's undermining of governments it did not approve of, on the grounds, it seems, that covert action is not diplomacy, seems more than a little disingenuous. Such actions were usually pursue

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ssinger sets up Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, at the beginning of the century, as representatives of the conflicting impulses of American diplomacy. This divides everything that came before Roosevelt from everything that came after him. Howard notes that Kissinger's "magnificent survey" covers the world in which he has lived and the world of the "ancien r�gime from which he derived his values and to which he now looks back with such understandable nostalgia" (Howard 140). In their own ways each of these critics pays tribute to Kissinger's amazing achievement in synthesizing so much history into a thoroughly enjoyable and consistent narrative. But the break that happens in the narrative around 1900 makes this two books with, in Garton Ash's opinion, an additional "slim volume, some eighty pages long, about Vietnam" (41). Garton Ash's assessment is important because it focuses on what Kissinger is doing in trying to shape the latter half of the book into the mold that fit the first half so well. Garton Ash goes directly to Kissinger's central view of foreign policy as a matter of "raison d'�tat, Realpolitik, and balance of power" and Kissinger uses them as terms of praise applied "with grudging respect" even to Stalin

Category: Government - H