, discussed. In Chile and the Philippines, Kissinger points out, Reagan's policies also forced "conservative" regimes to hold democratic elections. This supposedly demonstrates the impartiality of Reagan's idealism, but he does not mention how these tyrannical governments originally came to power and it is very convenient to call them "conservative, a privilege he would never allow to supporters of the Sandinistas, for example, who wished to call them "liberal."
Chile and Angola may not occupy center stage in a discussion of super power relations. But by mentioning only what he judges to be beneficial American actions in these places, Kissinger arouses the reader's suspicions about his motives. It is not so much, however, that he wishes to deny that such events took place it is just that he does not choose to be particularly realistic about such events because they would undermine his basic thesis. The essential point is that Kissinger wants to tie America's twentieth century destiny into the strand of history that proceeds from the Congress of Vienna onward. The trouble is that while the nation-state and personality-based approach works in the description of earlier history -- it simply is not applicable to the twentieth century and grows less so as the decades pass in review. Where the fate of African and South American nations was incidentally of great importance to the nations of Europe prior to 1914, their particular problems did not have an impact on the balance of power. Thus, for example, in 1905 Germany tested the Entente by upholding the notion of Morocco's independence from France (190). But this was a move in the juggling of the balance of European power and Morocco's own interest in the question was utterly unimportant since this independence was a fiction anyway.
Can the same be said of the importance of such nations today? While they are certainly not players on the larger stage and do not even represent...