World Order

by Henry Kissinger

  When Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt’s and by now a historic third-term President) and Winston Churchill met for the first time as leaders in Newfoundland aboard HMS Prince of Wales in August 1941, they expressed what they described as their common vision in the Atlantic Charter of eight “common principles”—all of which Wilson would have endorsed, while no previous British Prime Minister would have been comfortable with all of them. They included “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live”; the end of territorial acquisitions against the will of subject populations; “freedom from fear and want”; and a program of international disarmament, to precede the eventual “abandonment of the use of force” and “establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security.” Not all of this—especially the point on decolonization—would have been initiated by Winston Churchill, nor would he have accepted it had he not thought it essential to win an American partnership that was Britain’s best, perhaps only, hope to avoid defeat.

  Roosevelt even went beyond Wilson in spelling out his ideas of the foundation of international peace. Coming from the academy, Wilson had relied on building an international order on essentially philosophical principles. Having emerged from the manipulatory maelstrom of American politics, Roosevelt placed great reliance on the management of personalities.

  Thus Roosevelt expressed the conviction that the new international order would be built on the basis of personal trust:

  The kind of world order which we the peace-loving Nations must achieve, must depend essentially on friendly human relations, on acquaintance, on tolerance, on unassailable sincerity and good will and good faith.

  Roosevelt returned to this theme in his fourth inaugural address in 1945:

  We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” We can gain no lasting peace if we approach it with suspicion and mistrust or with fear.

  When Roosevelt dealt with Stalin during the war, he implemented these convictions. Confronted with evidence of the Soviet Union’s record of broken agreements and anti-Western hostility, Roosevelt is reported to have assured the former U.S. ambassador in Moscow William C. Bullitt:

  Bill, I don’t dispute your facts; they are accurate. I don’t dispute the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man … I think if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.

  During the first encounter of the two leaders at Tehran for a summit in 1943, Roosevelt’s conduct was in keeping with his pronouncements. Upon arrival, the Soviet leader warned Roosevelt that Soviet intelligence had discovered a Nazi plot threatening the President’s safety and offered him hospitality in the heavily fortified Soviet compound, arguing that the American Embassy was less secure and too distant from the projected meeting place. Roosevelt accepted the Soviet offer and rejected the nearby British Embassy to avoid the impression that the Anglo-Saxon leaders were ganging up against Stalin. Going further at joint meetings with Stalin, Roosevelt ostentatiously teased Churchill and generally sought to create the impression of dissociation from Britain’s wartime leader.

  The immediate challenge was to define a concept of peace. What principles would guide the relations of the world’s powers? What contribution was required from the United States in designing and securing an international order? Should the Soviet Union be conciliated or confronted? And if these tasks were carried out successfully, what type of world would result? Would peace be a document or a process?

  The geopolitical challenge in 1945 was as complex as any confronted by an American president. Even in its war-ravaged condition, the Soviet Union posed two obstacles to the construction of a postwar international order. Its size and the scope of its conquests overthrew the balance of power in Europe. And its ideological thrust challenged the legitimacy of any Western institutional structure: rejecting all existing institutions as forms of illegitimate exploitation, Communism had called for a world revolution to overthrow the ruling classes and restore power to what Karl Marx had called the “workers of the world.”

  When in the 1920s the majority of the first wave of European Communist uprisings were crushed or withered for lack of support among the anointed proletariat, Joseph Stalin, implacable and ruthless, promulgated the doctrine of consolidating “socialism in one country.” He eliminated all of the other original revolutionary leaders in a decade of purges, and deployed a largely conscripted labor force to build up Russia’s industrial capacity. Seeking to deflect the Nazi storm to the west, in 1939 he entered a neutrality pact with Hitler, dividing northern and eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence. When in June 1941 Hitler invaded Russia anyway, Stalin recalled Russian nationalism from its ideological internment and declared the “Great Patriotic War,” imbuing Communist ideology with an opportunistic appeal to Russian imperial feeling. For the first time in Communist rule, Stalin evoked the Russian psyche that had called the Russian state into being and defended it over the centuries through domestic tyrannies and foreign invasions and depredations.

  Victory in the war confronted the world with a Russian challenge analogous to that at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, only more acute. How would this wounded giant—having lost at least twenty million lives and with the western third of its vast territory devastated—react to the vacuum opening before it? Attention to Stalin’s pronouncements could have provided the answer but for the conventional wartime illusion, which Stalin had carefully cultivated, that he was moderating Communist ideologues rather than instigating them.

  Stalin’s global strategy was complex. He was convinced that the capitalist system inevitably produced wars; hence the end of World War II would at best be an armistice. He considered Hitler a sui generis representative of the capitalist system, not an aberration from it. The capitalist states remained adversaries after Hitler’s defeat, no matter what their leaders said or even thought. As he had said with scorn of the British and French leaders of the 1920s,

  They talk about pacifism; they speak about peace among European states. Briand and Chamberlain are embracing each other … All this is nonsense. From European history we know that every time treaties envisaging a new arrangement of forces for new wars have been signed, these treaties have been called treaties of peace … [although] they were signed for the purpose of depicting new elements of the coming war.

  In Stalin’s worldview, decisions were determined by objective factors, not personal relationships. Thus the goodwill of wartime alliance was “subjective” and superseded by the new circumstances of victory. The goal of Soviet strategy would be to achieve the maximum security for the inevitable showdown. This meant pushing the security borders of Russia as far west as possible and weakening the countries beyond these security borders through Communist parties and covert operations.

  While the war was going on, Western leaders resisted acknowledging assessments of this kind: Churchill because of his need to stay in step with America; Roosevelt because he was advocating a “master plan” to secure a just and lasting peace, which was in effect a reversal of what had been the European international order—he would countenance neither a balance of power nor a restoration of empires. His public progam called for rules for the peaceful resolution of disputes and parallel efforts of the major powers, the so-called Four Policemen: the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China. The United States and the Soviet Union especially were expected to take the lead in checking violations of peace.

  Charles Bohlen, then a young Foreign Service officer working as Roosevelt’s Russian-language translator and later an architect of the Cold War U.S. policy relationship, faulted Roosevelt’s “American conviction that the other fellow is a ‘good guy’ who will respond properly and decently if you treat him right”:

  He [Roosevelt] felt that Stalin viewed the w
orld somewhat in the same light as he did, and that Stalin’s hostility and distrust … were due to the neglect that Soviet Russia had suffered at the hands of other countries for years after the Revolution. What he did not understand was that Stalin’s enmity was based on profound ideological convictions.

  Another view holds that Roosevelt, who had demonstrated his subtlety in the often ruthless way in which he maneuvered the essentially neutralist American people toward a war that few contemporaries considered necessary, was beyond being deceived by a leader even as wily as Stalin. According to this interpretation, Roosevelt was biding his time and humoring the Soviet leader to keep him from making a separate deal with Hitler. He must have known—or would soon discover—that the Soviet view of world order was antithetical to the American one; invocations of democracy and self-determination would serve to rally the American public but must eventually prove unacceptable to Moscow. Once Germany’s unconditional surrender had been achieved and Soviet intransigence had been demonstrated, according to this view, Roosevelt would have rallied the democracies with the same determination he had shown in opposition to Hitler.

  Great leaders often embody great ambiguities. When he was assassinated, was President John F. Kennedy on the verge of expanding America’s commitment to Vietnam or withdrawing from it? Naïveté was not, generally speaking, a charge Roosevelt’s critics made against him. Probably the answer is that Roosevelt, like his people, was ambivalent about the two sides of international order. He hoped for a peace based on legitimacy, that is, trust between individuals, respect for international law, humanitarian objectives, and goodwill. But confronted with the Soviet Union’s insistently power-based approach, he would likely have reverted to the Machiavellian side that had brought him to leadership and made him the dominant figure of his period. The question of what balance he would have struck was preempted by his death in the fourth month of his fourth presidential term, before his design for dealing with the Soviet Union could be completed. Harry S. Truman, excluded by Roosevelt from any decision making, was suddenly catapulted into that role.

  CHAPTER 8

  The United States: Ambivalent Superpower

  ALL TWELVE POSTWAR presidents have passionately affirmed an exceptional role for America in the world. Each has treated it as axiomatic that the United States was embarked on an unselfish quest for the resolution of conflicts and the equality of all nations, in which the ultimate benchmark for success would be world peace and universal harmony.

  All presidents from both political parties have proclaimed the applicability of American principles to the entire world, of which perhaps the most eloquent articulation (though in no sense unique) was President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address on January 20, 1961. Kennedy called on his country to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” He made no distinction between threats; he established no priorities for American engagement. He specifically rejected the shifting calculations of the traditional balance of power. What he called for was a “new endeavor”—“not a balance of power, but a new world of law.” It would be a “grand and global alliance” against the “common enemies of mankind.” What in other countries would have been treated as a rhetorical flourish has, in American discourse, been presented as a specific blueprint for global action. Speaking to the UN General Assembly one month after President Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson affirmed the same unconditional global commitment:

  Any man and any nation that seeks peace, and hates war, and is willing to fight the good fight against hunger and disease and misery, will find the United States of America by their side, willing to walk with them, walk with them every step of the way.

  That sense of responsibility for world order and of the indispensability of American power, buttressed by a consensus that based the moral universalism of the leaders on the American people’s dedication to freedom and democracy, led to the extraordinary achievements of the Cold War period and beyond. America helped rebuild the devastated European economies, created the Atlantic Alliance, and formed a global network of security and economic partnerships. It moved from the isolation of China to a policy of cooperation with it. It designed a system of open world trade that has fueled productivity and prosperity, and was (as it has been over the past century) at the cutting edge of almost all of the technological revolutions of the period. It supported participatory governance in both friendly and adversarial countries; it played a leading role in articulating new humanitarian principles, and since 1945 it has, in five wars and on several other occasions, spent American blood to redeem them in distant corners of the world. No other country would have had the idealism and the resources to take on such a range of challenges or the capacity to succeed in so many of them. American idealism and exceptionalism were the driving forces behind the building of a new international order.

  For a few decades, there was an extraordinary correspondence between America’s traditional beliefs and historical experience and the world in which it found itself. For the generation of leaders who assumed the responsibility for constructing the postwar order, the two great experiences had been surmounting the recession of the 1930s and victory over aggression in the 1940s. Both tasks lent themselves to definite solutions: in the economic field, the restoration of growth and the inauguration of new social-welfare programs; in the war, unconditional surrender of the enemy.

  At the end of the war, the United States, as the only major country to emerge essentially undamaged, produced about 60 percent of the world’s GNP. It was thereby able to define leadership as essentially practical progress along lines modeled on the American domestic experience; alliances as Wilsonian concepts of collective security; and governance as programs of economic recovery and democratic reform. America’s Cold War undertaking began as a defense of countries that shared the American view of world order. The adversary, the Soviet Union, was conceived as having strayed from the international community to which it would eventually return.

  On the journey toward that vision, America began to encounter other historic views of world order. New nations with different histories and cultures appeared on the scene as colonialism ended. The nature of Communism became more complex and its impact more ambiguous. Governments and armed doctrines rejecting American concepts of domestic and international order mounted tenacious challenges. Limits to American capabilities, however vast, became apparent. Priorities needed to be set.

  America’s encounters with these realities raised a new question that had not heretofore been put to the United States: Is American foreign policy a story with a beginning and an end, in which final victories are possible? Or is it a process of managing and tempering ever-recurring challenges? Does foreign policy have a destination, or is it a process of never-completed fulfillment?

  In answering these questions, America put itself through anguishing debates and domestic divisions about the nature of its world role. They were the reverse side of its historic idealism. By framing the issue of America’s world role as a test of moral perfection, it castigated itself—sometimes to profound effect—for falling short. In expectation of a final culmination to its efforts—the peaceful, democratic, rules-based world that Wilson prophesied—it was often uncomfortable with the prospect of foreign policy as a permanent endeavor for contingent aims. With nearly every president insisting that America had universal principles while other countries merely had national interests, the United States has risked extremes of overextension and disillusioned withdrawal.

  Since the end of World War II, in quest of its vision of world order, America has embarked on five wars on behalf of expansive goals initially embraced with near-universal public support, which then turned into public discord—often on the brink of violence. In three of these wars, the Establishment consensus shifted abruptly to embrace a program of effectively unconditional unilateral withdrawal. Three times in two generations, the United Stat
es abandoned wars midstream as inadequately transformative or as misconceived—in Vietnam as a result of congressional decisions, in Iraq and Afghanistan by choice of the President.

  Victory in the Cold War has been accompanied by congenital ambivalence. America has been searching its soul about the moral worth of its efforts to a degree for which it is difficult to find historical parallels. Either American objectives had been unfulfillable, or America did not pursue a strategy compatible with reaching these objectives. Critics will ascribe these setbacks to the deficiencies, moral and intellectual, of America’s leaders. Historians will probably conclude that they derived from the inability to resolve an ambivalence about force and diplomacy, realism and idealism, power and legitimacy, cutting across the entire society.

  THE BEGINNING OF THE COLD WAR

  Nothing in Harry S. Truman’s career would have suggested that he would become President, even less that he would preside over the creation of a structure of international order that would last through the Cold War and help decide it. Yet this quintessentially American “common man” would emerge as one of the seminal American presidents.

  No president has faced a more daunting task. The war had ended without any attempt by the powers to redefine international order as in the Westphalian settlement of 1648 and at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Therefore, Truman’s first task was to make concrete Roosevelt’s vision of a realistically conceived international organization, named the United Nations. Signed in San Francisco in 1945, its charter merged two forms of international decision making. The General Assembly would be universal in membership and based upon the doctrine of the equality of states—“one state, one vote.” At the same time, the United Nations would implement collective security via a global concert, the Security Council, designating five major powers (the United States, Britain, France, the U.S.S.R., and China) as “permanent members” wielding veto power. (Britain, France, and China were included as much in homage to their record of great achievements as in reflection of their current capacities.) Together with a rotating group of nine additional countries, the Security Council was vested with special responsibility “to maintain international peace and security.”