World Order

by Henry Kissinger

  As America examines the lessons of its twenty-first-century wars, it is important to remember that no other major power has brought to its strategic efforts such deeply felt aspirations for human betterment. There is a special character to a nation that proclaims as war aims not only to punish its enemies but to improve the lives of their people—that has sought victory not in domination but in sharing the fruits of liberty. America would not be true to itself if it abandoned this essential idealism. Nor would it reassure friends (or win over adversaries) by setting aside such a core aspect of its national experience. But to be effective, these aspirational aspects of policy must be paired with an unsentimental analysis of underlying factors, including the cultural and geopolitical configuration of other regions and the dedication and resourcefulness of adversaries opposing American interests and values. America’s moral aspirations need to be combined with an approach that takes into account the strategic element of policy in terms the American people can support and sustain through multiple political cycles.

  Former Secretary of State George Shultz has articulated the American ambivalence wisely:

  Americans, being a moral people, want their foreign policy to reflect the values we espouse as a nation. But Americans, being a practical people, also want their foreign policy to be effective.

  The American domestic debate is frequently described as a contest between idealism and realism. It may turn out—for America and the rest of the world—that if America cannot act in both modes, it will not be able to fulfill either.

  CHAPTER 9

  Technology, Equilibrium, and Human Consciousness

  EVERY AGE HAS ITS LEITMOTIF, a set of beliefs that explains the universe, that inspires or consoles the individual by providing an explanation for the multiplicity of events impinging on him. In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was nationalism combined with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the governing concepts of our age. They have brought about advances in human well-being unprecedented in history. Their evolution transcends traditional cultural constraints. Yet they have also produced weapons capable of destroying mankind. Technology has brought about a means of communication permitting instantaneous contact between individuals or institutions in every part of the globe as well as the storage and retrieval of vast quantities of information at the touch of a button. Yet by what purposes is this technology informed? What happens to international order if technology has become such a part of everyday life that it defines its own universe as the sole relevant one? Is the destructiveness of modern weapons technology so vast that a common fear may unite mankind in order to eliminate the scourge of war? Or will possession of these weapons create a permanent foreboding? Will the rapidity and scope of communication break down barriers between societies and individuals and provide transparency of such magnitude that the age-old dreams of a human community will come into being? Or will the opposite happen: Will mankind, amidst weapons of mass destruction, networked transparency, and the absence of privacy, propel itself into a world without limits or order, careening through crises without comprehending them?

  The author claims no competence in the more advanced forms of technology; his concern is with its implications.

  WORLD ORDER IN THE NUCLEAR AGE

  Since history began to be recorded, political units—whether described as states or not—had at their disposal war as the ultimate recourse. Yet the technology that made war possible also limited its scope. The most powerful and well-equipped states could only project force over limited distances, in certain quantities, and against so many targets. Ambitious leaders were constrained, both by convention and by the state of communications technology. Radical courses of action were inhibited by the pace at which they unfolded. Diplomatic instructions were obliged to take into account contingencies that might occur in the time in which a message could make a round trip. This imposed a built-in pause for reflection and acknowledged a distinction between what leaders could and could not control.

  Whether a balance of power between states operated as a formal principle or was simply practiced without theoretical elaboration, equilibrium of some kind was an essential component of any international order—either at the periphery, as with the Roman and Chinese empires, or as a core operating principle, as in Europe.

  With the Industrial Revolution, the pace of change quickened, and the power projected by modern militaries grew more devastating. When the technological gap was great, even rudimentary technology—by present standards—could be genocidal in effect. European technology and European diseases did much to wipe out existing civilizations in the Americas. With the promise of new efficiencies came new potentials for destruction, as the impact of mass conscription multiplied the compounding effect of technology.

  The advent of nuclear weapons brought this process to a culmination. In World War II, scientists from the major powers labored to achieve mastery of the atom and with it the ability to release its energy. The American effort, known as the Manhattan Project and drawing on the best minds from the United States, Britain, and the European diaspora, prevailed. After the first successful atomic test in July 1945 in the deserts of New Mexico, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who headed the secret weapons-development effort, awed by his triumph, recalled a verse from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

  In earlier periods, wars had an implicit calculus: the benefits of victory outweighed its cost, and the weaker fought to impose such costs on the stronger as to disturb this equation. Alliances were formed to augment power, to leave no doubt about the alignment of forces, to define the casus belli (insofar as the removal of doubt about ultimate intentions is possible in a society of sovereign states). The penalties of military conflict were considered less than the penalties of defeat. By contrast, the nuclear age based itself on a weapon whose use would impose costs out of proportion to any conceivable benefit.

  The nuclear age posed the dilemma of how to bring the destructiveness of modern weapons into some moral or political relationship with the objectives that were being pursued. Prospects for any kind of international order—indeed, for human survival—now urgently required the amelioration, if not elimination, of major-power conflict. A theoretical limit was sought—short of the point of either superpower using the entirety of its military capabilities.

  Strategic stability was defined as a balance in which neither side would use its weapons of mass destruction because the adversary was always able to inflict an unacceptable level of destruction in retaliation. In a series of seminars at Harvard, Caltech, MIT, and the Rand Corporation among others in the 1950s and 1960s, a doctrine of “limited use” explored confining nuclear weapons to the battlefield or to military targets. All such theoretical efforts failed; whatever limits were imagined, once the threshold to nuclear warfare was crossed, modern technology overrode observable limits and always enabled the adversary to escalate. Ultimately, strategists on both sides coalesced, at least tacitly, on the concept of a mutual assured destruction as the mechanism of nuclear peace. Based on the premise that both sides possessed a nuclear arsenal capable of surviving an initial assault, the objective was to counterbalance threats sufficiently terrifying that neither side would conceive of actually invoking them.

  By the end of the 1960s, the prevailing strategic doctrine of each superpower relied on the ability to inflict an “unacceptable” level of damage on the presumed adversary. What the adversary would consider unacceptable was, of course, unknowable; nor was this judgment communicated.

  A surreal quality haunted this calculus of deterrence, which relied on “logical” equations of scenarios positing a level of the casualties exceeding that suffered in four years of world wars and occurring in a matter of days or hours. Because there was no prior experience with the weapons underpinning these threats, deterrence depended in large part on the abilit
y to affect the adversary psychologically. When, in the 1950s, Mao spoke of China’s willingness to accept sacrifices of hundreds of millions in a nuclear war, it was widely treated in the West as a symptom of emotional or ideological derangement. It was, in fact, probably the consequence of a sober calculation that to withstand military capacities beyond previous human experience, a country needed to demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice beyond human comprehension. In any case, the shock in Western and Warsaw Pact capitals at these statements ignored that the superpowers’ own concepts of deterrence rested on apocalyptic risks. Even if more urbanely expressed, the doctrine of mutual assured destruction relied on the proposition that leaders were acting in the interest of peace by deliberately exposing their civilian populations to the threat of annihilation.

  Many efforts were undertaken to avoid the dilemma of possessing a huge arsenal that could not be used and whose use could not even plausibly be threatened. Complicated war scenarios were devised. But neither side, to the best of my knowledge—and for some of this period I was in a position to know—ever approached the point of actually using nuclear weapons in a specific crisis between the two superpowers. Except for the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when a Soviet combat division was initially authorized to use its nuclear weapons to defend itself, neither side approached their use, either against each other or in wars against non-nuclear third countries.

  In this manner, the most fearsome weapons, commanding large shares of each superpower’s defense budget, lost their relevance to the actual crises facing leaders. Mutual suicide became the mechanism of international order. When, during the Cold War, the two sides, Washington and Moscow, challenged each other, it was through proxy wars. At the pinnacle of the nuclear era, it was conventional forces that assumed pivotal importance. The military struggles of the time were taking place on the far-flung periphery—Inchon, the Mekong River delta, Luanda, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The measure of success was effectiveness in supporting local allies in the developing world. In short, the strategic arsenals of the major powers, incommensurable with conceivable political objectives, created an illusion of omnipotence belied by the actual evolution of events.

  It was in this context that in 1969 President Nixon started formal talks with the Soviets on the limitation of strategic arms (with the acronym SALT). They resulted in a 1972 agreement that established a ceiling for the offensive buildup and limited each superpower’s antiballistic missile sites to one (in effect turning them into training sites because a full ABM deployment for the United States under an original Nixon proposal in 1969 would have required twelve sites). The reasoning was that since the U.S. Congress refused to approbate missile defense beyond two sites, deterrence needed to be based on mutual assured destruction. For that strategy, the offensive nuclear weapons on each side were sufficient—in fact, more than sufficient—to produce an unacceptable level of casualties. The absence of missile defense would remove any uncertainty from that calculation, guaranteeing mutual deterrence—but also the destruction of the society, should deterrence fail.

  At the Reykjavík summit in 1986, Reagan reversed the mutual assured destruction approach. He proposed the abolition of all offensive weapons by both sides and the scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, thereby allowing a defensive system. His intent was to do away with the concept of mutual assured destruction by proscribing offensive systems and keeping defense systems as a hedge against violations. But Gorbachev, believing—mistakenly—that the U.S. missile defense program was well under way while the Soviet Union, lacking an equivalent technological-economic base, could not keep up, insisted on maintaining the ABM Treaty. The Soviets in effect gave up the race in strategic weapons three years later, ending the Cold War.

  Since then, the number of strategic nuclear offensive warheads has been reduced, first under President George W. Bush and then under President Obama, by agreement with Russia to about fifteen hundred warheads for each side—approximately 10 percent of the number of warheads that existed at the high point of the mutual assured destruction strategy. (The reduced number is more than enough to implement a mutual assured destruction strategy.)

  The nuclear balance has produced a paradoxical impact on the international order. The historic balance of power had facilitated the Western domination of the then-colonial world; by contrast, the nuclear order—the West’s own creation—had the opposite effect. The margin of military superiority of advanced countries over the developing countries has been incomparably larger than at any previous period in history. But because so much of their military effort has been devoted to nuclear weapons, whose use in anything but the gravest crisis was implicitly discounted, regional powers could redress the overall military balance by a strategy geared to prolonging any war beyond the willingness of the “advanced” country’s public to sustain it—as France experienced in Algeria and Vietnam; the United States in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. (All except Korea resulted in, in effect, a unilateral withdrawal by the formally much stronger power after protracted conflict with conventional forces.) Asymmetric warfare operated in the interstices of traditional doctrines of linear operations against an enemy’s territory. Guerrilla forces, which defend no territory, could concentrate on inflicting casualties and eroding the public’s political will to continue the conflict. In this sense, technological supremacy turned into geopolitical impotence.

  THE CHALLENGE OF NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION

  With the end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war between the existing nuclear superpowers has essentially disappeared. But the spread of technology—especially the technology to produce peaceful nuclear energy—has vastly increased the feasibility of acquiring a nuclear-weapons capability. The sharpening of ideological dividing lines and the persistence of unresolved regional conflicts have magnified the incentives to acquire nuclear weapons, including for rogue states or non-state actors. The calculations of mutual insecurity that produced restraint during the Cold War do not apply with anything like the same degree—if at all—to the new entrants in the nuclear field, and even less so to the non-state actors. Proliferation of nuclear weapons has become an overarching strategic problem for the contemporary international order.

  In response to these perils, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom negotiated a Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and opened it for signature in 1968. It proposed to prevent any further spread of nuclear weapons (the United States, the U.S.S.R., and the U.K. signed in 1968, and France and China signed in 1992). Non-nuclear-weapons states were to be given assistance by the nuclear states in the peaceful utilization of nuclear technology provided they accepted safeguards to guarantee their nuclear programs remained purely nonmilitary endeavors. At this writing, there are 189 signatories of the nonproliferation agreement.

  Yet the global nonproliferation regime has had difficulty embedding itself as a true international norm. Assailed by some as a form of “nuclear apartheid” and treated by many states as a rich-country fixation, the NPT’s restrictions have often functioned as a set of aspirations that countries must be cajoled to implement rather than as a binding legal obligation. Illicit progress toward nuclear weapons has proved difficult to discover and resist, for its initial steps are identical with the development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy specifically authorized by the NPT. The treaty proscribed but did not prevent signatories such as Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Iran from maintaining covert nuclear programs in violation of NPT safeguards or, in the case of North Korea, withdrawing from the NPT in 2003 and testing and proliferating nuclear technology without international control.

  Where a state has violated or repudiated the terms of the NPT, hovered on the edge of compliance, or simply declined to recognize the legitimacy of nonproliferation as an international norm, there exists no defined international mechanism for enforcing it. So far preemptive action has been taken by the United States only against Iraq—a contributing motive for the war a
gainst Saddam Hussein—and by Israel against Iraq and Syria; the Soviet Union considered it against China in the 1960s, though ultimately refrained.

  The nonproliferation regime has scored a few significant successes in bringing about the negotiated dismantlement of nuclear programs. South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, and several “post-Soviet” republics have abandoned nuclear weapons programs that had either come to fruition or made significant technical progress. At the same time, since the end of the American monopoly in 1949, nuclear weapons have been acquired by the Soviet Union/Russia, Britain, France, Israel, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and at a threshold level by Iran. Moreover, Pakistan and North Korea have proliferated their nuclear know-how widely.

  Proliferation has had an impact on the nuclear equilibrium in a differential way, depending on the perceived willingness of the new nuclear country to use its weapons. British and French nuclear capabilities add to the NATO arsenal only marginally. They are conceived primarily as a last resort, as a safety net in case of abandonment by the United States, if some major power were to threaten British and French perceptions of their basic national interest, or as a means to stay apart from a nuclear war between superpowers—all essentially remote contingencies. The Indian and Pakistani nuclear establishments are, in the first instance, directed against each other, affecting the strategic equilibrium in two ways. The risks of escalation may reduce the likelihood of full-scale conventional war on the subcontinent. But because the weapon systems are so vulnerable and technically so difficult to protect against short-range attack, the temptation for preemption is inherent in the technology, especially in situations when emotions are already running high. In short, proliferation generates the classic nuclear dilemma: even when nuclear weapons reduce the likelihood of war, they would gigantically magnify its ferocity were war to occur.