Henry Kissinger’s World Order—the silk stocking full of shit at 90

Henry’s actually 91 rather than 90, but I doubt if he’ll miss the extra birthday. And, in any event, I always choose euphony over accuracy when given the choice.

Since we’re talking accuracy, Napoleon was in fact talking about, and to, Talleyrand when he delivered the memorable insult given above, while Henry’s fave rave was always Klemens von Metternich rather than the French guy. But Klemens and Talleyrand, are, to my mind, peas in a pod.

So, not to beat around the bush any longer, how does Henry come off in his latest effusion, World Order? Well, not entirely terrible, I would say. It’s interesting that Kissinger’s ultimate bad guy is Otto von Bismarck, the anti-Metternich, who discarded Metternich’s system of clockwork balances for the Darwinian pursuit of power for its own sake, power without limit.

Kissinger acknowledges that Bismarck was driven, in large part, to invent conservative nationalism as the only way to head off liberal nationalism, but Henry’s longing for the days when a relative handful of aristocrats could hold all the strings of power in a society is so great that he can’t admit how completely ungrounded in reality that longing is. The Congress of Vienna could deliver “A World Restored” in 1813 because most of Europe was still essentially feudal in nature. The commercial revolution had transformed the cultures on either side of the English Channel, but had scarcely penetrated Central Europe at all, while the Industrial Revolution consisted almost entirely of cotton mills. For the most part, the landed aristocracy was still the only game in town.

Fifty years later, all’s changed. Nationalism, nationalism as a replacement for religion, has replaced “traditional deference” (of which Kissinger speaks frequently, and always with loving reverence) as the glue that holds society together. The nationalist bourgeoisie, not Henry’s beloved “cosmopolitan”¹ aristocrats, control the means of production and are grasping fiercely to clutch the reins of power as well. World War I, understandably for Kissinger the ultimate cataclysm, was the last desperate attempt of the old aristocracy to wrest victory from the jaws of defeat.

Kissinger’s wish for the continuation of pre-World War I society is so great that he continues the myth the conflagration of August 1914 was all an accident, a product of deplorable diplomatic bungling.

“It came to be taken for granted that maneuvering for tactical victories to be cheered in the nationalist press was a normal method of conducting policy—that major powers could dare each other to back down in a succession of standoffs over tangential disputes without ever producing a showdown.

“But history punishes strategic frivolity sooner or later. World War I broke out because political leaders lost control over their own tactics. For nearly a month after the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince in June 1914 by a Serbian nationalist, diplomacy was conducted on the dilatory model of many other crises surmounted in recent decades. Four weeks elapsed while Austria prepared an ultimatum. Consultations took place; because it was high summer, statesmen took vacations. But once the Austrian ultimatum was submitted in July 1914, its deadline imposed a great urgency on decision-making, and within less than two weeks, Europe moved to a war from which it has never recovered.”

Reading Kissinger’s account, one would never know that the “dilatory” pace of diplomacy was the result of the fact that Germany and Austria were lying about their intentions. Austria seized on Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination as an opportunity to wage a “splendid little war” of annihilation that it had been plotting against Serbia for some time. The assassination did not cause the war but rather served as a pretext for it.

The preparation of the ultimatum took four weeks because the original plan called for no ultimatum at all but rather a surprise invasion of Serbia, with the intent of conquering the country and dividing the country into three pieces, each to be given to a neighbor, so that Serbia would no longer exist. The Austrian government, “forgetting” that it was now a dual monarchy, and that acts of war required the prior approval of Hungarian officials, was unable to deliver the coup it envisioned, and had to settle for an ultimatum as a compromise. But even then, the ultimatum was once more merely a pretext; Austria intended to go forward with the invasion regardless of how compliant the Serbians proved to be. World War ! was the product, not of dilatory diplomats, but conniving ones, seeking to roll back the forces of democracy and nationalism. Unfortunately, the plans of the German and Austrian autocrats crashed directly into those of the Russian autocrats, who were planning a rollback of their own and could ill afford a diplomatic humiliation that would enrage Russian nationalists, who felt that Mother Russia had a sacred duty to defend Slavic nationalism throughout the Balkans.

Despite the massive wreckage of World War I, Kissinger simply never gives up on his belief in the ability of traditional elites to maintain themselves indefinitely through indirect manipulation and “subtle” (a favorite word, unsurprisingly) gamesmanship. He has high praise for the Saudi ruling family, for example, scarcely noting that its continuing hold on power might have more to do with its fabulous oil wealth rather than subtle statecraft, nor that said statecraft has, to a large extent, consisted of buying off extreme right-wing groups (even more extreme than the Saudis themselves) with tens of billions of dollars of subsidies, which they have largely expended on endless outpourings of disgusting anti-Semitic propaganda. Hey, whatever it takes to get the job done, right?

With all his faults (and there are plenty more that I’m not going to mention), Kissinger does at least offer a few words of caution directed towards tempering the obsession with American “exceptionalism,” suggesting that it’s neither necessary nor wise for the U.S. to insist on always having its way in every situation –“cautious” words of caution, of course, because Henry doesn’t want to piss off his many neocon friends.

It would be nice if the notion that “restraint” can be both a virtue and an effective policy were to gain even a modicum of acceptance within the Beltway “mind”. But I’m afraid that only the “logic of events” will convince the U.S. to temper its enthusiasm for intervention. Preventive war, which reminded Bismarck of a man whose fear of death prompts him to commit suicide, has become a way of life for us. The bloody noses we’ve received in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us nothing. Let’s hope that 10,000 deaths, rather than 100,000, will be enough.

Afterwords
Over at the New Republic, Ann-Marie Slaughter offers an extended, intelligent take on Henry’s book, but attempts to refute Henry’s words of caution by, well, completely ignoring our recent disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Like so many high-minded interventionists, Ann-Marie assumes that the conflicts in other nations are easily resolvable because they’re disputes over “nothing”—that is to say, the issues are meaningless to us, though, somehow, not to those actually involved. She’s sure that if the U.S. had intervened in Uganda or Syria, thousands of lives would have been saved. But intervention seems to work better as a hypothesis. In real life—in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya—good intentions always seem to lead to more blood.Over at the Washington Post, Mark Lynch points out that the intervention in Libya, which he supported, has turned out to be an absolute disaster.

Afterwords II
In the summer of 1988 I was a reporter (of sorts) covering the 1988 National Governors’ Conference, which you probably missed. The guest speaker was Henry Kissinger. During the session, Henry pooh-poohed the idea that this Gorbachev fellow might be a different kind of communist. Nope. They’re all alike, Henry explained. Gorby won’t lower the temperature of the Cold War by one degree.² About three years later, I happened to be seated at dinner next to Ray Scheppach, then the executive director of the NGA. Ray had been on the dais with Henry that afternoon. “You know,” Ray told me, “he spoke for two and a half hours without a single note.” “Yes,” I said, “and everything he said was wrong.” Moral: Never predict the future.

Afterwords III
I previously denounced Henry’s wickedness here.