Although the title of Henry Kissinger's book, Does America Need A Foreign Policy? is posited as a question, it is a purely rhetorical one. Former U.S. Secretary of State, Assistant for National Security Affairs in the Nixon Administration, and 1973 Nobel Peace Prize winner Kissinger does not ask a question for which he doesn't already have the answer, and he believes he has the right answers, a view that is made clear in this 2001 book, published a few months prior to the events of September 11. The book, however, does contain an Afterword dealing with the terrorist attack on the U.S.
The subtitle of the book, Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century, is a more apt title for this book. What Kissinger argues for is a complete revamping of American foreign policy to ensure that the United States keeps its prominent and powerful place in international affairs in this post-Cold War century. Kissinger is highly critical of U.S. policy that reacts to one world crisis at a time instead of the development of a long-term diplomatic policy. Overall the book is lucid, well thought out, informative and well written, but it does reveal Kissinger's politically conservative, Republican bias.
The book is divided into seven parts, covering different areas of the world and issues such as globalization (he is all for this), and humanitarian intervention (he basically opposes this). In each chapter, Kissinger analyzes the challenges facing the United States, and explains what he believes U.S. foreign policy should be. He emphasizes that his own foreign policy views are the best there are. Although Kissinger's final statement in this book is that "America's ultimate challenge is to transform its power into moral consensus, promoting its values not by imposition but by their willing acceptance in a world that, for all its seeming resistance, desperately needs enlightened leadership" (p. 288), there is no doubt that Kissinger believes that as the worl...