World Order

HENRY Kissinger is like Marmite: you love him or hate him. Some people accept Kissinger as an international relations guru, Nobel Peace Prize winner, confidant of world leaders, inventor of ‘shuttle diplomacy when he was US secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and the man who brought China back into international relations.

For others, Kissinger is the personification of all that’s been wrong with Western foreign policy in the last 70 years. The late journalist Christopher Hitchens’s book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, presented the case for Kissinger’s involvement in international war crimes, not least his alleged role in the 1973 coup in Chile, which brutally overthrew a democratically elected government. Kissinger’s Nobel Peace Prize is popularly supposed to have led to satirist Tom Lehrer’s retirement.

If Kissinger could get a Peace Prize, Lehrer said, satire was dead.

When someone who evokes such strong emotions writes a book it is hard to review the book and not the person. Unfortunately, Kissinger does not make the task of reviewing the book and not the man easy. The book is readable and sometimes informative. However, it is ultimately an argument for having more Henry Kissingers and for doing things the Kissinger way. In the end, no matter how objective, all a reviewer can do is say whether or not he/she wants more Kissingers.

The book’s premise is that the problem with international relations is a crisis in the concept of world order. Kissinger is what international relations scholars call a ‘realist’. Order, for ‘realists’, is creating an equilibrium between different parts of the world that protects, or at least does not harm, the national interests of states.

To work, order as equilibrium must be based on a consensus to adhere to “a set of commonly accepted rules that define the limits of permissible actions”. It must also be based on “a balance of power that enforces restraint where rules break down, preventing one political unit subjugating all others.”

A world order won’t be a world without conflict. But it will be a world where conflict is limited in scope, a world where conflict is about adjusting equilibrium rather than being wracked by major conflagrations. The problem, of course, is how to achieve this equilibrium.

For Kissinger, the world is further from equilibrium than it has been for some time. This is because of the decline and crisis of the closest thing that we have had to a world order, the Westphalian system.

The Westphalian system was an international order (a system that covered part, but not all, of the globe) that emerged in Europe after the end of the Thirty Years War, in 1648. The signatories of the Treaty of Westphalia were not creating a balance of power. They had a more limited aim, that of stopping continent-wide religious war, but a balance of power emerged in the Treaty’s wake.

The Westphalian system, Kissinger argues, was far from perfect, but it limited conflict. It was thrown into crisis, because of German unification in the 19th century, and because of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

German unification destabilised Europe by creating a powerful state whose interests could not be accommodated in the European balance of power. The Russian revolution brought to power an ideology that was determined to overthrow the international order, to free people everywhere from what the Bolsheviks saw as the tyranny of the capitalist state.

Two world wars, the division of Germany into East and West, and nuclear stalemate after 1945 restored order, and an armed peace to Europe. The Cold War division of the world into communist ‘East’ and capitalist ‘West’ spread elements of the Westpha

lian balance of power across the globe. Between them, the USA and the USSR ‘managed’ conflict by supporting client states across the globe in a dangerous and precarious balancing act.

The collapse of the Soviet Union ended this version of international order. The US could not manage the world on its own, despite some pretension at being the global policeman of a “new world order”.

As US power failed to impose a world order, regional ideas of how order should be maintained, among states that had been kept in check by the Cold War, re-emerged. These ideas, Kissinger argues, are based on regional traditions of culture and governance that are not democratic and not accepting of pluralism, of the existence of many states with equal rights, as in international relations.

Kissinger identifies two emerging regional orders as problematic: an Islamic notion of order ensured by the spread of religious community, and an Asian order that values hierarchy between states based on their economic and military power, rather than respect for other states as equals.

Via the Iranian revolution of 1979, the Islamic order rejected Western ideas about how international politics should be conducted, and has continued to reject international order through Al-Qaeda, and now, and most violently, through the Islamic states in Syria and Iraq. The Asian idea of order has unsettled global politics, thanks to the rise of China, economically and militarily.

Kissinger’s tendency to see contemporary problems as manifestations of deeper cultural patterns is broad-brush-stroke history and a little too neat to be convincing.

Many of the contemporary problems that Kissinger identifies as having roots in older notions of international politics could as plausibly be described as failures of recent policies that were based on ideas about balance of power, the very thing that Kissinger wants to promote.

The Middle East is a case in point.

The politics of keeping the balance of power ‘stable’ in the Middle East are as much a source of the region’s problems as historical ideas about international politics. Balancing power led to the West supporting regional dictatorships that were corrupt and repressive. Balancing Soviet power in the regions led to foreign policy misadventures, such as the undermining of democracy in Iran in the 1950s.

Kissinger ignores these issues, and is thus somewhat selective in his treatment of contemporary history, because Kissinger wants Western politicians to be free to do these kinds of things in the future.

The penultimate chapter of the book is ostensibly about the internet and how it will change politics. Actually, it is an argument for having foreign policy run by elites.

The danger of the internet, Kissinger argues, is that it gives information and not wisdom. Armed with information, but not wise, everyone thinks they know what should be done about foreign policy problems.

Emotion, rather than reason, takes hold.

Politicians no longer take time to make reasoned decisions that might be bold and unpopular, but offer knee-jerk solutions. Domestic politics and foreign policy become entwined, to the detriment of the latter. Foreign policy becomes about “endorsing a mood of the moment”.

This is an argument against democracy, and for foreign policy run by technocrats, intervening from Olympian heights, with their wisdom to maintain the balance of power and equilibrium in international politics.

This might be attractive to Kissinger, who sees such a technocrat when he looks in the mirror. But it promises nothing more than more of the same: cynical policy made in the name of national interests and reasons of state that are too often divorced from the moral foundations that legitimate state power in democratic societies.

I’m all for experts. I occasionally claim to be one.

But the public — like they did on the anti-war marches that preceded the invasion of Iraq — needs to be able to tell us to butt out now and again, and to develop policy that is truer to popular ideas about justice than can be captured by expert’s ideas about the balance of power.

Neil Robinson is professor of politics at the University of Limerick