Niall Ferguson - Kissinger, Volume 1

Asked in 1976 to assess his own achievement as a statesman, Kissinger replied, “I have tried — with what success historians will have to judge — to have an overriding concept.” There is no question, as we shall see, that Kissinger entered the White House in 1969 with such a concept. He had indeed spent most of the preceding twenty years devising and defining it. 105As he famously observed, “High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.” 106But to an extent that says much about modern standards of scholarship, remarkably few of those who have taken it upon themselves to pass judgment on Henry Kissinger have done more than skim his published work, which prior to 1969 included four weighty books, more than a dozen substantial articles for magazines such as Foreign Affairs, and a fair amount of journalism. The first task of a biographer who undertakes to write the life of a scholar — even if that scholar goes on to attain high office — ought surely to be to read his writings. Doing so reveals that Kissinger’s intellectual capital had a dual foundation: the study of history and the philosophy of idealism.

Kissinger’s wartime mentor, Fritz Kraemer, once described his protégé as being “musically attuned to history. This is not something you can learn, no matter how intelligent you are. It is a gift from God.” 107His Harvard contemporary John Stoessinger recalled an early meeting with Kissinger when they were both first-year graduate students: “He argued forcefully for the abiding importance of history. Quoting Thucydides, he asserted that the present, while never repeating the past exactly, must inevitably resemble it. Hence, so must the future…. More than ever… one should study history in order to see why nations and men succeeded and why they failed.” 108This was to be a lifelong leitmotif. The single thing that differentiated Kissinger from most other students of international relations in his generation was that he revered history above theory — or rather, Kissinger’s theory of foreign policy was defined by the insight that states and statesmen act on the basis of their own historical self-understanding and cannot be comprehended in any other way.

Yet there was something that preceded Kissinger the historian, and that was Kissinger the philosopher of history. It is here that the most fundamental misunderstanding has occurred. Like nearly all Kissinger scholars, Oriana Fallaci took it for granted that Kissinger was “much influenced” by Machiavelli and was therefore an admirer of Metternich. Kissinger gave her a frank and illuminating answer:

There is really very little of Machiavelli that can be accepted or used in the modern world. The only thing I find interesting in Machiavelli is his way of considering the will of the prince. Interesting, but not to the point of influencing me. If you want to know who has influenced me the most, I’ll answer with the names of two philosophers: Spinoza and Kant. So it’s curious that you choose to associate me with Machiavelli. People rather associate me with the name of Metternich. Which is actually childish. On Metternich I’ve written only one book, which was to be the beginning of a long series of books on the construction and disintegration of the international order of the nineteenth century. It was a series that was to end with the First World War. That’s all. There can be nothing in common between me and Metternich. 109

To my knowledge only one previous writer has fully understood the significance of that candid response.* Far from being a Machiavellian realist, Henry Kissinger was in fact from the outset of his career an idealist, having immersed himself as an undergraduate in the philosophy of the great Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. Indeed, as the historian Peter Dickson pointed out as early as 1978, Kissinger considered himself “more Kantian than Kant.” 110His unpublished senior thesis, “The Meaning of History,” is at root an overambitious but deeply sincere critique of Kant’s philosophy of history. More than a quarter of a century after its completion, Kissinger was still citing Kant to explain why he discerned “a clear conflict between two moral imperatives” in foreign policy: the obligation to defend freedom and the necessity for coexistence with adversaries. 111Though habitually categorized as a realist, Dickson argued, in reality Kissinger owed much more to idealism than to the likes of Morgenthau. 112I believe this is correct. Indeed, it is compellingly borne out by Kissinger’s World Order, published in his ninety-first year, which quotes Kant at length. 113I also believe that the failure of writer after writer to understand Kissinger’s idealism has vitiated severely, if not fatally, the historical judgments they have passed on him.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that the young Kissinger was an idealist in the sense in which the word is often used to characterize the tradition in U.S. foreign policy that emphasized the subordination of “might” to supranational laws and courts. 114Rather, I am using the term “idealism” in its philosophical sense, meaning the strand of Western philosophy, extending back to Anaxagoras and Plato, that holds that (in Kant’s formulation) “we can never be certain whether all of our putative outer experience is not mere imagining” because “the reality of external objects does not admit of strict proof.” Not all idealists are Kantian, it need hardly be said. Plato regarded matter as real and existing independently of perception. Bishop Berkeley insisted that reality was all in the mind; experience itself was an illusion. In Kant’s “transcendental” idealism, by contrast, “the whole material world” was “nothing but a phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of ourselves as a subject,” but there were such things as noumena, or “things in themselves,” which the mind shaped into phenomena on the basis of experience rather than “pure reason.” As we shall see, Kissinger’s reading of Kant had a profound and enduring influence on his own thought, not least because it made him skeptical of the various materialist theories of capitalist superiority that U.S. social scientists devised as antidotes to Marxism-Leninism. He showed no interest whatever in the version of idealism developed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as a comprehensive theory of history, in which the dialectical fusion of theses and antitheses propelled the world inexorably onward. For Kissinger, the burning historical question was how far Kant’s view of the human predicament — as one in which the individual freely faced meaningful moral dilemmas — could be reconciled with the philosopher’s vision of a world ultimately destined for “perpetual peace.” It was no facile allusion when Kissinger referred to Kant’s essay in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, 1973, just two days after he had been confirmed as secretary of state:

Two centuries ago, the philosopher Kant predicted that perpetual peace would come eventually — either as the creation of man’s moral aspirations or as the consequence of physical necessity. What seemed utopian then looms as tomorrow’s reality; soon there will be no alternative. Our only choice is whether the world envisaged in the [United Nations] charter will come about as the result of our vision or of a catastrophe invited by our shortsightedness. 115

As we know, the Cold War did not end in catastrophe. In its aftermath, though still a long way from perpetual peace, the world has become a markedly more peaceful place, with striking declines in the levels of organized violence in all regions of the world except the Middle East and North Africa. 116How far that outcome owed anything to Henry Kissinger’s vision is, to say the least, a question that has not hitherto received an adequate answer. Suffice for now to say that, having escalated alarmingly during the 1960s, global violence, as measured by total deaths due to warfare, fell sharply between 1971 and 1976.