World Order

by Henry Kissinger

  No formal compromise is possible between these views; to keep the disagreement from spiraling into conflict is one of the principal obligations of the leaders of both sides.

  A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck’s nineteenth-century aphorism surely applies: “We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.” North Korea is ruled under no accepted principle of legitimacy, not even its claimed Communist one. Its principal achievement has been to build a few nuclear devices. It has no military capability to engage in war with the United States. But the existence of these weapons has a political impact far exceeding their military utility. They provide an incentive for Japan and South Korea to create a nuclear military capability. They embolden Pyongyang into risk-taking disproportionate to its capabilities, raising the danger of another war on the Korean Peninsula.

  For China, North Korea embodies complex legacies. In many Chinese eyes, the Korean War is seen as a symbol of China’s determination to end its “century of humiliation” and “stand up” on the world stage, but also as a warning against becoming involved in wars whose origins China does not control and whose repercussions may have serious long-range, unintended consequences. This is why China and the United States have taken parallel positions in the UN Security Council in demanding that North Korea abandon—not curtail—its nuclear program.

  For the Pyongyang regime, abandoning nuclear weapons may well involve political disintegration. But abandonment is precisely what the United States and China have publicly demanded in the UN resolutions that they have fostered. The two countries need to coordinate their policies for the contingency that their stated objectives are realized. Will it be possible to merge the concerns and goals of the two sides over Korea? Are China and the United States able to work out a collaborative strategy for a denuclearized, unified Korea that leaves all parties more secure and more free? It would be a big step toward the “new type of great-power relations” so often invoked and so slow in emerging.

  China’s new leaders will recognize that the reaction of the Chinese population to their vast agenda cannot be known; they are sailing into uncharted waters. They cannot want to seek foreign adventures, but they will resist intrusions on what they define as their core interests with perhaps greater insistence than their predecessors, precisely because they feel obliged to explain the adjustments inseparable from reform by a reinforced emphasis on the national interest. Any international order comprising both the United States and China must involve a balance of power, but the traditional management of the balance needs to be mitigated by agreement on norms and reinforced by elements of cooperation.

  The leaders of China and the United States have publicly recognized the two countries’ common interest in charting a constructive outcome. Two American presidents (Barack Obama and George W. Bush) have agreed with their Chinese counterparts (Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao) to create a strategic partnership in the Pacific region, which is a way to preserve a balance of power while reducing the military threat inherent in it. So far the proclamations of intent have not been matched by specific steps in the agreed direction.

  Partnership cannot be achieved by proclamation. No agreement can guarantee a specific international status for the United States. If the United States comes to be perceived as a declining power—a matter of choice, not destiny—China and other countries will succeed to much of the world leadership that America exercised for most of the period following World War II, after an interlude of turmoil and upheaval.

  Many Chinese may see the United States as a superpower past its peak. Yet among China’s leadership, there is also a demonstrated recognition that the United States will sustain a significant leadership capacity for the foreseeable future. The essence of building a constructive world order is that no single country, neither China nor the United States, is in a position to fill by itself the world leadership role of the sort that the United States occupied in the immediate post–Cold War period, when it was materially and psychologically preeminent.

  In East Asia, the United States is not so much a balancer as an integral part of the balance. Previous chapters have shown the precariousness of the balance when the number of players is small and a shift of allegiance can become decisive. A purely military approach to the East Asian balance is likely to lead to alignments even more rigid than those that produced World War I.

  In East Asia, something approaching a balance of power exists between China, Korea, Japan, and the United States, with Russia and Vietnam peripheral participants. But it differs from the historical balances of power in that one of the key participants, the United States, has its center of gravity located far from the geographic center of East Asia—and, above all, because the leaders of both countries whose military forces conceive themselves as adversaries in their military journals and pronouncements also proclaim partnership as a goal on political and economic issues. So it comes about that the United States is an ally of Japan and a proclaimed partner of China—a situation comparable to Bismarck’s when he made an alliance with Austria balanced by a treaty with Russia. Paradoxically, it was precisely that ambiguity which preserved the flexibility of the European equilibrium. And its abandonment—in the name of transparency—started a sequence of increasing confrontations, culminating in World War I.

  For over a century—since the Open Door policy and Theodore Roosevelt’s mediation of the Russo-Japanese War—it has been a fixed American policy to prevent hegemony in Asia. Under contemporary conditions, it is an inevitable policy in China to keep potentially adversarial forces as far from its borders as possible. The two countries navigate in that space. The preservation of peace depends on the restraint with which they pursue their objectives and on their ability to ensure that competition remains political and diplomatic.

  In the Cold War, the dividing lines were defined by military forces. In the contemporary period, the lines should not be defined primarily by military deployment. The military component should not be conceived as the only, or even the principal, definition of the equilibrium. Concepts of partnership need to become, paradoxically, elements of the modern balance of power, especially in Asia—an approach that, if implemented as an overarching principle, would be as unprecedented as it is important. The combination of balance-of-power strategy with partnership diplomacy will not be able to remove all adversarial aspects, but it can mitigate their impact. Above all, it can give Chinese and American leaders experiences in constructive cooperation, and convey to their two societies a way of building toward a more peaceful future.

  Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy. In Asia, it must combine a balance of power with a concept of partnership. A purely military definition of the balance will shade into confrontation. A purely psychological approach to partnership will raise fears of hegemony. Wise statesmanship must try to find that balance. For outside it, disaster beckons.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Acting for All Mankind”: The United States and Its Concept of Order

  NO COUNTRY HAS PLAYED such a decisive role in shaping contemporary world order as the United States, nor professed such ambivalence about participation in it. Imbued with the conviction that its course would shape the destiny of mankind, America has, over its history, played a paradoxical role in world order: it expanded across a continent in the name of Manifest Destiny while abjuring any imperial designs; exerted a decisive influence on momentous events while disclaiming any motivation of national interest; and became a superpower while disavowing any intention to conduct power politics. America’s foreign policy has reflected the conviction that its domestic principles were self-evidently universal and their application at all times salutary; that the real challenge of American engagement abroad was not foreign policy in the traditional sense but a project of spreading values that it believed all other peoples aspired to replicate.

  Inherent in this doctrine was a v
ision of extraordinary originality and allure. While the Old World considered the New an arena for conquest to amass wealth and power, in America a new nation arose affirming freedom of belief, expression, and action as the essence of its national experience and character.

  In Europe, a system of order had been founded on the careful sequestration of moral absolutes from political endeavors—if only because attempts to impose one faith or system of morality on the Continent’s diverse peoples had ended so disastrously. In America, the proselytizing spirit was infused with an ingrained distrust of established institutions and hierarchies. Thus the British philosopher and Member of Parliament Edmund Burke would recall to his colleagues that the colonists had exported “liberty according to English ideas” along with diverse dissenting religious sects constrained in Europe (“the protestantism of the protestant religion”) and “agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty.” These forces, intermingling across an ocean, had produced a distinct national outlook: “In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole.”

  Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who came to the United States in 1831 and wrote what remains one of the most perceptive books about the spirit and attitudes of its people, traced the American character similarly to what he called its “point of departure.” In New England, “we see the birth and growth of that local independence which is still the mainspring and life blood of American freedom.” Puritanism, he wrote, “was not just a religious doctrine; in many respects it shared the most absolute democratic and republican theories.” This, he concluded, was the product “of two perfectly distinct elements which elsewhere have often been at war with one another but which in America it was somehow possible to incorporate with each other, forming a marvelous combination. I mean the Spirit of Religion and the Spirit of Freedom.”

  The openness of American culture and its democratic principles made the United States a model and a refuge for millions. At the same time, the conviction that American principles are universal has introduced a challenging element into the international system because it implies that governments not practicing them are less than fully legitimate. This tenet—so ingrained in American thinking that it is only occasionally put forward as official policy—suggests that a significant portion of the world lives under a kind of unsatisfactory, probationary arrangement, and will one day be redeemed; in the meantime, their relations with the world’s strongest power must have some latent adversarial element to them.

  These tensions have been inherent since the beginning of the American experience. For Thomas Jefferson, America was not only a great power in the making but an “empire for liberty”—an ever-expanding force acting on behalf of all humanity to vindicate principles of good governance. As Jefferson wrote during his presidency:

  We feel that we are acting under obligations not confined to the limits of our own society. It is impossible not to be sensible that we are acting for all mankind; that circumstances denied to others, but indulged to us, have imposed on us the duty of proving what is the degree of freedom and self-government in which a society may venture to leave its individual members.

  So defined, the spread of the United States and the success of its endeavors was coterminous with the interests of humanity. Having doubled the size of the new country through his shrewd engineering of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, in retirement Jefferson “candidly confess[ed]” to President Monroe, “I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States.” And to James Madison, Jefferson wrote, “We should then have only to include the North [Canada] in our confederacy … and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: & I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self government.” The empire envisaged by Jefferson and his colleagues differed, in their minds, from the European empires, which they considered based on the subjugation and oppression of foreign peoples. The empire imagined by Jefferson was in essence North American and conceived as the extension of liberty. (And, in fact, whatever may be said about the contradictions in this project or of the personal lives of its Founders, as the United States expanded and thrived, so too did democracy, and the aspiration toward it spread and took root across the hemisphere and the world.)

  Despite such soaring ambitions, America’s favorable geography and vast resources facilitated a perception that foreign policy was an optional activity. Secure behind two great oceans, the United States was in a position to treat foreign policy as a series of episodic challenges rather than as a permanent enterprise. Diplomacy and force, in this conception, were distinct stages of activity, each following its own autonomous rules. A doctrine of universal sweep was paired with an ambivalent attitude toward countries—necessarily less fortunate than the United States—that felt the compulsion to conduct foreign policy as a permanent exercise based on the elaboration of the national interest and the balance of power.

  Even after the United States assumed great-power status in the course of the nineteenth century, these habits endured. Three times in as many generations, in the two world wars and the Cold War, the United States took decisive action to shore up international order against hostile and potentially terminal threats. In each case, America preserved the Westphalian state system and the balance of power while blaming the very institutions of that system for the outbreak of hostilities and proclaiming a desire to construct an entirely new world. For much of this period, the implicit goal of American strategy beyond the Western Hemisphere was to transform the world in a manner that would make an American strategic role unnecessary.

  From the beginning, America’s intrusion into European consciousness had forced a reexamination of received wisdom; its settlement would open new vistas for individuals promising to fundamentally reinvent world order. For the early settlers of the New World, the Americas were a frontier of a Western civilization whose unity was fracturing, a new stage on which to dramatize the possibility of a moral order. These settlers left Europe not because they no longer believed in its centrality but because they thought it had fallen short of its calling. As religious disputes and bloody wars drove Europe in the Peace of Westphalia to the painful conclusion that its ideal of a continent unified by a single divine governance would never be achieved, America provided a place to do so on distant shores. Where Europe reconciled itself to achieving security through equilibrium, Americans (as they began to think of themselves) entertained dreams of unity and governance enabling a redeemed purpose. The early Puritans spoke of demonstrating their virtue on the new continent as the way to transform the lands of which they had taken leave. As John Winthrop, a Puritan lawyer who left East Anglia to escape religious suppression, preached aboard the Arbella in 1630, bound for New England, God intended America as an example for “all people”:

  We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.

  None doubted that humanity and its purpose would in some way be revealed and fulfilled in America.

  AMERICA ON THE WORLD STAGE

  Setting out to affirm its independence, the United States defined itself as a new kind of power. The Declaration of Independence put forth its principles and assumed as its audience “the opinions of mankind.” In the opening essay of The Federalist Papers, published in 1787, Alexander Hamilton described the new republic as “an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world” whose success or failure would prove the viability of self-governance anywhere. He treated this proposition not as a novel interpretation but as a matter of common knowledge that “has been frequently remarked”—an assertion all the
more notable considering that the United States at the time comprised only the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Georgia.

  Even while propounding these doctrines, the Founders were sophisticated men who understood the European balance of power and manipulated it to the new country’s advantage. An alliance with France was enlisted in the war for independence from Britain, then loosened in the aftermath, as France undertook revolution and embarked on a European crusade in which the United States had no direct interest. When President Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address—delivered in the midst of the French revolutionary wars—counseled that the United States “steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world” and instead “safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies,” he was issuing not so much a moral pronouncement as a canny judgment about how to exploit America’s comparative advantage: the United States, a fledgling power safe behind oceans, did not have the need or the resources to embroil itself in continental controversies over the balance of power. It joined alliances not to protect a concept of international order but simply to serve its national interests strictly defined. As long as the European balance held, America was better served by a strategy of preserving its freedom of maneuver and consolidating at home—a course of conduct substantially followed by former colonial countries (for example, India) after their independence a century and a half later.

  This strategy prevailed for a century, following the last short war with Britain in 1812, allowing the United States to accomplish what no other country was in a position to conceive: it became a great power and a nation of continental scope through the sheer accumulation of domestic power, with a foreign policy focused almost entirely on the negative goal of keeping foreign developments as far at bay as possible.