Diplomacy

CHAPTER ONE

The New World Order

Almost as if according to some natural law, in every century there seems to emerge a country with the power, the will, and the intellectual and moral impetus to shape the entire international system in accordance with its own values. In the seventeenth century, France under Cardinal Richelieu introduced the modern approach to international relations, based on the nation-state and motivated by national interest as its ultimate purpose. In the eighteenth century, Great Britain elaborated the concept of the balance of power, which dominated European diplomacy for the next 200 years. In the nineteenth century, Metternich's Austria reconstructed the Concert of Europe and Bismarck's Germany dismantled it, reshaping European diplomacy into a cold-blooded game of power politics.

In the twentieth century, no country has influenced international relations as decisively and at the same time as ambivalently as the United States. No society has more firmly insisted on the inadmissibility of intervention in the domestic affairs of other states, or more passionately asserted that its own values were universally applicable. No nation has been more pragmatic in the day-to-day conduct of its diplomacy, or more ideological in the pursuit of its historic moral convictions. No country has been more reluctant to engage itself abroad even while undertaking alliances and commitments of unprecedented reach and scope.

The singularities that America has ascribed to itself throughout its history have produced two contradictory attitudes toward foreign policy. The first is that America serves its values best by perfecting democracy at home, thereby acting as a beacon for the rest of mankind; the second, that America's values impose on it an obligation to crusade for them around the world. Torn between nostalgia for a pristine past and yearning for a perfect future, American thought has oscillated between isolationism and commitment, though, since the

CONTENTS

1 The New World Order

2 The Hinge: Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson

3 From Universality to Equilibrium: Richelieu, William of Orange, and Pitt

4 The Concert of Europe: Great Britain, Austria, and Russia

5 Two Revolutionaries: Napoleon III and Bismarck

6 Realpolitik Turns on Itself

7 A Political Doomsday Machine: European Diplomacy Before the First World War

8 Into the Vortex: The Military Doomsday Machine

9 The New Face of Diplomacy: Wilson and the Treaty of Versailles

10 The Dilemmas of the Victors

11 Stresemann and the Re-emergence of the Vanquished

12 The End of Illusion: Hitler and the Destruction of Versailles

13 Stalin's Bazaar

14 The Nazi-Soviet Pact

15 America Re-enters the Arena: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

16 Three Approaches to Peace: Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in World War II

17 The Beginning of the Cold War

18 The Success and the Pain of Containment

19 The Dilemma of Containment: The Korean War

20 Negotiating with the Communists: Adenauer, Churchill, and Eisenhower

21 Leapfrogging Containment: The Suez Crisis

22 Hungary: Upheaval in the Empire

23 Khrushchev's Ultimatum: The Berlin Crisis 1958-63

24 Concepts of Western Unity: Macmillan, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, and Kennedy

25 Vietnam: Entry into the Morass; Truman and Eisenhower

26 Vietnam: On the Road to Despair; Kennedy and Johnson

27 Vietnam: The Extrication; Nixon

28 Foreign Policy as Geopolitics: Nixon's Triangular Diplomacy

29 Detente and Its Discontents

30 The End of the Cold War: Reagan and Gorbachev

31 The New World Order Reconsidered

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

Henry Kissinger was the fifty-sixth Secretary of State. Born in Germany, Dr. Kissinger came to the United States in 1938 and was naturalized a US citizen in 1943. He served in the US Army in Europe in World War Two and attended Harvard University on a scholarship, where he later became a member of the faculty. Among the awards he has received are the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Medal of Liberty. He passed away in 2023 at the age of 100 at his home in Connecticut.

Simon Schama "The New Yorker" Kissinger's absorbing book tackles head-on some of the toughest questions of our time....Its pages sparkle with insight.

Michiko Kakutani The New York Times An elegantly written study of Western diplomacy....Shrewd, often vexing, and consistently absorbing.