Over at the New Republic, Aaron Friedberg, author of A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia, has a nice essay taking off of Henry Kissinger’s latest and greatest, On China, which I previously subjected to bitter and protracted ridicule here. Since Mr. Friedman knows quite a bit about China, he’s able to slug it out with Henry mano a mano in a satisfying manner. Yet while he cuts down the trees in Henry’s woods with relentless precision, he neglects the forest.
Friedman summarizes Kissinger’s take on China as follows:
‘Out of their many centuries of experience, he [Kissinger] writes, the Chinese have distilled a characteristic style of statecraft “distinctly different from the strategy and diplomacy that found favor in the West.” Rather than attempt to crush an opponent with superior force, traditional thinkers in China “placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.” The Chinese approach to strategy has always stressed “subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage.” This is a style that Kissinger clearly admires. He detects it in contemporary China as well as in ancient Chinese diplomacy.
But even as he describes the insanity of these domestic experiments [the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution], Kissinger retains an odd admiration for Mao’s strategic acumen. In Korea, and again in the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1958, the confrontation with India in 1962, and the border clashes with the Soviet Union in 1969, Mao practiced a form of “offensive deterrence,” first luring in his opponents, then dealing them a sharp and stunning blow. The purpose of these surprise attacks was less to impose a traditional military defeat than to compel the enemy to back down by sending a potent signal of Chinese resolve. Kissinger recounts these maneuvers in loving detail, describing what he sees as a distinctively “Chinese style of dealing with strategic decisions: thorough analysis; careful preparation; attention to psychological and political factors; quest for surprise; and rapid conclusion.”
But Kissinger acknowledges that in each case success came at significant longterm cost. In 1962, for example, Chinese action deterred further Indian probes along their disputed border, but it also “added another formidable adversary … at a moment when relations with the Soviet Union had gone beyond the point of no return.” For all their ancient wisdom and supposed subtlety, Chinese statesmen appear to be fully capable of shooting themselves in the foot.’
What Friedman fails to note is that Kissinger is simply “finding” in Chinese diplomacy is his own preferred form of international swordplay, as practiced by his lord and master, Otto von Bismarck. For Bismarck, as for Kissinger, the purpose of diplomacy is to first create, and then dramatically resolve, an unending series of terrifying international crises that will keep the masses alternately fearful of disaster and grateful for rescue—and always respectful and obedient to their masters. Kissinger, like his mentor Leo Strauss, is driven by a limitless fear of the masses. Strauss regarded “the people” as inherently anti-Semitic (democracy = Hitler), while Kissinger seems to regard them more as oafish morons who will ruin everything fine and true. The Confucian mandarin celebrated by Kissinger is simply Henry in a Hanfu.*
Henry tells us that he complimented Mao on his Confucian subtlety, and I have to wonder how that went across, because it’s pretty well-known that Mao, in his early days at least, saw himself as the anti-Confucius—no silken robes, and lots of robust physical exercise and manual labor, in a conscious effort to overturn the languid mandarin ideal. Kissinger assumed that authoritarians of all eras are of one blood, and, among themselves at least, are not ashamed to recognize themselves as such. While Leo Strauss genuinely despised communism—he saw it as democracy taken to the nth degree, the rule of the very lowest of mankind—Kissinger clearly admired both the Soviets and the Chinese communists. Here were men like himself, men of the world, who would do what needed to be done, without false shame or modesty, with a single purpose in life—to maintain themselves as an elite. Monarchy? Democracy? Fascism? Communism? Simply shadows on the wall, cast to amuse and frighten the masses, who must be amused and frightened, lest they consume us.
*Silk robe from the Han dynasty. I totally had to look this one up, and probably wouldn’t even have used it if I weren’t such a sucker for alliteration.
