World Order

by Henry Kissinger

  Order should not have priority over freedom. But the affirmation of freedom should be elevated from a mood to a strategy. In the quest for humane values, the expression of elevated principles is a first step; they must then be carried through the inherent ambiguities and contradictions of all human affairs, which is the task of policy. In this process, the sharing of information and the public support of free institutions are important new aspects of our era. On their own, absent attention to underlying strategic and political factors, they will have difficulty fulfilling their promise.

  Great statesmen, however different as personalities, almost invariably had an instinctive feeling for the history of their societies. As Edmund Burke wrote, “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” What will be the attitudes of those who aspire to be great statesmen in the Internet age? A combination of chronic insecurity and insistent self-assertion threatens both leaders and the public in the Internet age. Leaders, because they are less and less the originators of their programs, seek to dominate by willpower or charisma. The general public’s access to the intangibles of the public debate is ever more constrained. Major pieces of legislation in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere often contain thousands of pages of text whose precise meaning is elusive even to those legislators who voted for them.

  Previous generations of Western leaders performed their democratic role while recognizing that leadership did not consist of simply executing the results of public polls on a day-to-day basis. Tomorrow’s generations may prove reluctant to exercise leadership independent of data-mining techniques—even as their mastery of the information environment may reward them with reelection for pursuing cleverly targeted, short-term policies.

  In such an environment, the participants in the public debate risk being driven less by reasoned arguments than by what catches the mood of the moment. The immediate focus is pounded daily into the public consciousness by advocates whose status is generated by the ability to dramatize. Participants at public demonstrations are rarely assembled around a specific program. Rather, many seek the uplift of a moment of exaltation, treating their role in the event primarily as participation in an emotional experience.

  These attitudes reflect in part the complexity of defining an identity in the age of social media. Hailed as a breakthrough in human relations, social media encourage the sharing of the maximum amount of information, personal or political. People are encouraged—and solicited—to post their most intimate acts and thoughts on public websites run by companies whose internal policies are, even when public, largely incomprehensible to the ordinary user. The most sensitive of this information is to be made available only to “friends” who, in practice, can run into the thousands. Approbation is the goal; were it not the objective, the sharing of personal information would not be so widespread and sometimes so jarring. Only very strong personalities are able to resist the digitally aggregated and magnified unfavorable judgments of their peers. The quest is for consensus, less by the exchange of ideas than by a sharing of emotions. Nor can participants fail to be affected by the exaltation of fulfillment by membership in a crowd of ostensibly like-minded people. And are these networks going to be the first institutions in human history liberated from occasional abuse and therefore relieved of the traditional checks and balances?

  Side by side with the limitless possibilities opened up by the new technologies, reflection about international order must include the internal dangers of societies driven by mass consensus, deprived of the context and foresight needed on terms compatible with their historical character. In every other era, this has been considered the essence of leadership; in our own, it risks being reduced to a series of slogans designed to capture immediate short-term approbation. Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an exercise in shaping the future. If the major countries conduct their policies in this manner internally, their relations on the international stage will suffer concomitant distortions. The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of differences, statesmanship by posturing. As diplomacy is transformed into gestures geared toward passions, the search for equilibrium risks giving way to a testing of limits.

  Wisdom and foresight will be needed to avoid these hazards and ensure that the technological era fulfills its vast promise. It needs to deepen its preoccupation with the immediate through a better understanding of history and geography. That task is not only—or even primarily—an issue for technology. Society needs to adapt its education policy to ultimate imperatives in the long-term direction of the country and in the cultivation of its values. The inventors of the devices that have so revolutionized the collection and sharing of information can make an equal if not greater contribution by devising means to deepen its conceptual foundation. On the way to the first truly global world order, the great human achievements of technology must be fused with enhanced powers of humane, transcendent, and moral judgment.

  Conclusion

  World Order in Our Time?

  IN THE DECADES FOLLOWING WORLD WAR II, a sense of world community seemed on the verge of arising. The industrially advanced regions of the world were exhausted from war; the underdeveloped parts were beginning their process of decolonization and redefining their identities. All needed cooperation rather than confrontation. And the United States, preserved from the ravages of war—indeed, strengthened by the conflict in its economy and national confidence—launched itself on implementing ideals and practices it considered applicable to the entire world.

  When the United States began to take up the torch of international leadership, it added a new dimension to the quest for world order. A nation founded explicitly on an idea of free and representative governance, it identified its own rise with the spread of liberty and democracy and credited these forces with an ability to achieve the just and lasting peace that had thus far eluded the world. The traditional European approach to order had viewed peoples and states as inherently competitive; to constrain the effects of their clashing ambitions, it relied on a balance of power and a concert of enlightened statesmen. The prevalent American view considered people inherently reasonable and inclined toward peaceful compromise, common sense, and fair dealing; the spread of democracy was therefore the overarching goal for international order. Free markets would uplift individuals, enrich societies, and substitute economic interdependence for traditional international rivalries. In this view, the Cold War was caused by the aberrations of Communism; sooner or later, the Soviet Union would return to the community of nations. Then a new world order would encompass all regions of the globe; shared values and goals would render conditions within states more humane and conflicts between states less likely.

  The multigenerational enterprise of world ordering has in many ways come to fruition. Its success finds expression in the plethora of independent sovereign states governing most of the world’s territory. The spread of democracy and participatory governance has become a shared aspiration, if not a universal reality; global communications and financial networks operate in real time, making possible a scale of human interactions beyond the imagination of previous generations; common efforts on environmental problems, or at least an impetus to undertake them, exist; and an international scientific, medical, and philanthropic community focuses its attention on diseases and health scourges once assumed to be the intractable ravages of fate.

  The United States has made a significant contribution to this evolution. American military power provided a security shield for the rest of the world, whether its beneficiaries asked for it or not. Under the umbrella of an essentially unilateral American military guarantee, much of the developed world rallied into a system of alliances; the developing countries were protected against a threat they sometimes did not recognize, even less admit. A global economy developed to which America contributed financing, markets, and a profusion of innovations. From perhaps 1948 to the turn of the century marked a
brief moment in human history when one could speak of an incipient global world order composed of an amalgam of American idealism and traditional concepts of balance of power.

  Yet its very success made it inevitable that the entire enterprise would eventually be challenged, sometimes in the name of world order itself. The universal relevance of the Westphalian system derived from its procedural—that is, value-neutral—nature. Its rules were accessible to any country: noninterference in domestic affairs of other states; inviolability of borders; sovereignty of states; encouragements of international law. The weakness of the Westphalian system has been the reverse side of its strength. Designed as it was by states exhausted from their bloodletting, it did not supply a sense of direction. It dealt with methods of allocating and preserving power; it gave no answer to the problem of how to generate legitimacy.

  In building a world order, a key question inevitably concerns the substance of its unifying principles—in which resides a cardinal distinction between Western and non-Western approaches to order. Since the Renaissance the West has been deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data—the more accurately the better—and that foreign policy success depends on assessing existing realities and trends. The Westphalian peace represented a judgment of reality—particularly realities of power and territory—as a temporal ordering concept over the demands of religion.

  In the other great contemporary civilizations, reality was conceived as internal to the observer, defined by psychological, philosophical, or religious convictions. Confucianism ordered the world into tributaries in a hierarchy defined by approximations of Chinese culture. Islam divided the world order into a world of peace, that of Islam, and a world of war, inhabited by unbelievers. Thus China felt no need to go abroad to discover a world it considered already ordered, or best ordered by the cultivation of morality internally, while Islam could achieve the theoretical fulfillment of world order only by conquest or global proselytization, for which the objective conditions did not exist. Hinduism, which perceived cycles of history and metaphysical reality transcending temporal experience, treated its world of faith as a complete system not open to new entrants by either conquest or conversion.

  That same distinction governed the attitude toward science and technology. The West, which saw fulfillment in mastering empirical reality, explored the far reaches of the world and fostered science and technology. The other traditional civilizations, each of which had considered itself the center of a world order in its own right, did not have the same impetus and fell behind technologically.

  That period has now ended. The rest of the world is pursuing science and technology and, because unencumbered by established patterns, with perhaps more energy and flexibility than the West, at least in countries like China and the “Asian Tigers.”

  In the world of geopolitics, the order established and proclaimed as universal by the Western countries stands at a turning point. Its nostrums are understood globally, but there is no consensus about their application; indeed, concepts such as democracy, human rights, and international law are given such divergent interpretations that warring parties regularly invoke them against each other as battle cries. The system’s rules have been promulgated but have proven ineffective absent active enforcement. The pledge of partnership and community has in some regions been replaced, or at least accompanied, by a harder-edged testing of limits.

  A quarter century of political and economic crises perceived as produced, or at least abetted, by Western admonitions and practices—along with imploding regional orders, sectarian bloodbaths, terrorism, and wars ended on terms short of victory—has thrown into question the optimistic assumptions of the immediate post–Cold War era: that the spread of democracy and free markets would automatically create a just, peaceful, and inclusive world.

  A countervailing impetus has arisen in several parts of the world to construct bulwarks against what are seen as the crisis-inducing policies of the developed West, including aspects of globalization. Security commitments that have stood as bedrock assumptions are being questioned, sometimes by the country whose defense they seek to foster. As the Western countries sharply reduce their nuclear arsenals or downgrade the role of nuclear weapons in their strategic doctrine, countries in the so-called developing world pursue them with great energy. Governments that once embraced (even while occasionally being perplexed by) the American commitment to its version of world order have begun to ask whether it leads to enterprises that the United States is in the end not sufficiently patient to see to their conclusion. In this view, acceptance of the Western “rules” of world order is laced with elements of unpredictable liability—an interpretation driving the conspicuous dissociation of some traditional allies from the United States. Indeed, in some quarters, the flouting of universal norms (such as human rights, due process, or equality for women) as distinctly North Atlantic preferences is treated as a positive virtue and the heart of alternative value systems. More elemental forms of identity are celebrated as the basis for exclusionary spheres of interest.

  The result is not simply a multipolarity of power but a world of increasingly contradictory realities. It must not be assumed that, left unattended, these trends will at some point reconcile automatically to a world of balance and cooperation—or even any order at all.

  THE EVOLUTION OF INTERNATIONAL ORDER

  Every international order must sooner or later face the impact of two tendencies challenging its cohesion: either a redefinition of legitimacy or a significant shift in the balance of power. The first tendency occurs when the values underlying international arrangements are fundamentally altered—abandoned by those charged with maintaining them or overturned by revolutionary imposition of an alternative concept of legitimacy. This was the impact of the ascendant West on many traditional orders in the non-Western world; of Islam in its initial wave of expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries; of the French Revolution on European diplomacy in the eighteenth century; of Communist and fascist totalitarianism in the twentieth; and of the Islamist assaults on the fragile state structure of the Middle East in our time.

  The essence of such upheavals is that while they are usually underpinned by force, their overriding thrust is psychological. Those under assault are challenged to defend not only their territory but the basic assumptions of their way of life, their moral right to exist and to act in a manner that, until the challenge, had been treated as beyond question. The natural inclination, particularly of leaders from pluralistic societies, is to engage with the representatives of the revolution, expecting that what they really want is to negotiate in good faith on the premises of the existing order and arrive at a reasonable solution. The order is submerged not primarily from military defeat or an imbalance in resources (though this often follows) but from a failure to understand the nature and scope of the challenge arrayed against it. In this sense, the ultimate test of the Iranian nuclear negotiations is whether the Iranian professions of a willingness to resolve the issue through talks are a strategic shift or a tactical device—in pursuit of long-prevailing policy—and whether the West deals with the tactical as if it were a strategic change of direction.

  The second cause of an international order’s crisis is when it proves unable to accommodate a major change in power relations. In some cases, the order collapses because one of its major components ceases to play its role or ceases to exist—as happened to the Communist international order near the end of the twentieth century when the Soviet Union dissolved. Or else a rising power may reject the role allotted to it by a system it did not design, and the established powers may prove unable to adapt the system’s equilibrium to incorporate its rise. Germany’s emergence posed such a challenge to the system in the twentieth century in Europe, triggering two catastrophic wars from which Europe has never fully recovered. The emergence of China poses a comparable structural challenge in the twenty-first century. The
presidents of the major twenty-first-century competitors—the United States and China—have vowed to avoid repeating Europe’s tragedy through a “new type of great power relations.” The concept awaits joint elaboration. It might have been put forward by either or both of these powers as a tactical maneuver. Nevertheless, it remains the only road to avoid a repetition of previous tragedies.

  To strike a balance between the two aspects of order—power and legitimacy—is the essence of statesmanship. Calculations of power without a moral dimension will turn every disagreement into a test of strength; ambition will know no resting place; countries will be propelled into unsustainable tours de force of elusive calculations regarding the shifting configuration of power. Moral proscriptions without concern for equilibrium, on the other hand, tend toward either crusades or an impotent policy tempting challenges; either extreme risks endangering the coherence of the international order itself.

  In our time—in part for the technological reasons discussed in Chapter 9—power is in unprecedented flux, while claims to legitimacy every decade multiply their scope in hitherto-inconceivable ways. When weapons have become capable of obliterating civilization and the interactions between value systems are rendered instantaneous and unprecedentedly intrusive, the established calculations for maintaining the balance of power or a community of values may become obsolete.

  As these imbalances have grown, the structure of the twenty-first-century world order has been revealed as lacking in four important dimensions.