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Job Name:2176942 Date:15-03-03 PDF Page:2176942pbc.p1.pdf Color: Cyan Magenta Yellow Black KISSINGER'S GRAND DESIGN KISSINGER'S GRAND DESIGN G. Warren Nutter With a foreword by Melvin R. Laird American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research Washington, D. C. Distributed to the Trade by National Book Network, 15200 NBN Way, Blue Ridge Summit, PA 17214. To order call toll free 1-800-462-6420 or 1-717-794-3800. For all other inquiries please contact the AEI Press, 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 or call 1-800-862-5801. G. Warren Nutter is Paul Goodloe Mcintire professor of eco nomics, University of Virginia, adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, and former assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. ISBN 0-8447-318'6-2 Foreign Aftairs Study 27, October 1975 Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 75-33509 ©1975 by American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D. C. Permission to quote from Professor Nutter's essay is granted when due acknowledgment is made. Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS FOREWORD Melvin R. Laird KISSINGER'S GRAND DESIGN 1 Prologue 1 Kissinger's Outlook as a Scholar 2 Kissinger's Outlook as a Public Official 9 A Critique 15 Epilogue 25 APPENDIX: EXCERPTS FROM THE WORKS OF HENRY A. KISSINGER 27 1. International Order and Revolution 27 2. The Present International Context 33 3. Diplomacy in a Revolutionary World 41 4. Limited War 43 5. Alliances and the Atlantic Community 52 6. The German Question 56 7. Arms Control 61 8. Relations with Communist Powers 67 9. Summitry and Personal Diplomacy 78 10. Detente 83 11. Bureaucracy, Creativity, and the Statesman 92 LIST OF REFERENCES 109 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 111 FORE,WORD In the American political system, Congress and the presidency represent coequal branches of government, and both have important roles to play in framing and implementing foreign policy. Our nation cannot long sustain any course of foreign relations not endorsed by both branches and, of course, the citizenry at large. It follows that foreign policy must be shaped by discussion, agreement and public understanding. There are many dimensions to foreign policy: the long-term structure of relationships, the day-to-day conduct of affairs, the management of crises, the mediation of disputes, the projection of influence, and the assessment of realities. Each demands particular skills; it is not enough to master some and not all. But the complex of foreign policy actions will assume coherence and purpose only if it conforms to a grand design. In this era of awesome power, we risk destruction and our national survival if we try to muddle through. What grand design should set the context of our foreign policy? What ultimate objectives should underlie our diplomacy? And how should these be developed and achieved? These issues need discussion, and that is the purpose of this study: to contribute to the competition of ideas in the public policy forum. Consensus on the broad outlines and underlying assumptions of foreign policy is the goal, and it can be reached only if we are willing to listen to criticism as well as praise. The critique presented in this study by Warren Nutter deserves to be read and considered. MELVIN R. LAIRD KISSINGER'S GRAND DESIGN Prologue Rapid change is sometimes revealed more by the receding past than by the unfolding present or future. So it is with our foreign policy. Detente has a negative rather than a positive significance: it marks the end of an old order without symbolizing the beginning of a new one. We are naturally led to wonder whether it is the product of drift or design. There surely was a grand design to containment, the policy now come to an end-a design that was comprehended and, during most of its life, supported by the American public. It grew out of shared experience and came to be formulated by political leaders who in essence were doers, not thinkers. As a people, we recognized the Soviet drive for global hegemony as the dominant menace to a peaceful world order and resolved to contain it-rather late of course, since Soviet power was in no small measure the creature of our own naive and neglectful diplomacy in the years surrounding World War II. To say that there was a grand design to containment is not to argue that it was right then or suited to all time. Alterations in the worldwide configuration of power over recent years have rendered some of its basic postulates obsolete, while Vietnam demonstrateq that the United States will no longer be the lonely grand protector of Western civilization. Some would argue that the entire policy was wrong from the beginning. But all that is quite another matter. The point is that the policy of containment was, until Vietnam, the conse- I am indebted to Clifford Kiracofe and William Nutter for assistance in research, and to Marie-Christine MacAndrew, Anne Hobbs, and Carolyn Southall for help in preparing the manuscript. 1 quence of government by discussion and consensus. It was under stood and implemented by the public, by Congress, and by every component-elected, appointed, and career-of the executive branch, all in open communication with each other. Those who disagreed knew at least what they disagreed with and about. We have, it might seem, even more reason to expect the same today. Our foreign policy is shaped by Henry Kissinger, an articulate thinker of extraordinary intellectual gifts and an ardent advocate of conceptual framework first, policy second. He has filled many pages with briefings, interviews, and expositions explaining the rationale behind a multitude of actions. Yet, through it all, one has the eerie sensation of being told only where we have been, not where we are going. Where, when all is said, are we headed in the domain of foreign affairs? Is there a grand design to our foreign policy? That is the subject of this enquiry, which searches for Kissinger's conceptual framework. Kissinger's Outlook as a Scholar The world outlook of Kissinger the scholar is evident in the main body of his academic writings. It changed little in fifteen years and is perhaps nowhere better summarized than in the crisp opening pages and other concise passages of his first book, A World Restored, written in 1954 and published three years later.1 At base lies the conception of peace as a stability of forces within a legitimate inter national order of comity, custom, and law. The order is legitimate, in Kissinger's lexicon, if its inherent constitutional rules of conduct are respected by all major powers. Unless a stable order is achievable, the quest for peace is bound to be self-defeating. Hence the statesman has the paramount duty of creating and preserving stability. Peace means settlement of problems through a consensual pro cess, he argued, not absence of international conflicts. When the constitutional order itself comes into issue, nations face a revolu tionary situation in which diplomacy can no longer resolve differences. Since the system itself is the object of disagreement, the conflict is ideological and resolvable only through exercise of power. A long established stable order may fall precisely because the status-quo powers, having become so accustomed to spontaneous conformity, find it hard to take a revolutionary power seriously when it proclaims 1 The passages referred to here and other pertinent quotations from Kissinger's works are given in the appendix to this study. 2 its intention to reshape the world. France under Napoleon was such a revolutionary power, and so was Germany under Bismarck's tutelage and again after Versailles. Today's revolutionary powers are the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. Kissinger was fascinated by the prominent diplomatic figures of revolutionary periods in the nineteenth century, but he studied them to discern the innovative nature of their statecraft and to discover the secret of their personal success in shaping the world, not to memorize concrete patterns of diplomacy that might prove useful today. On the contrary, he has always stressed that the revolutionary situation confronting us is unique in both origin and portent. An explosive environment has come into being: international relations have become global in scope, military power has become polarized while other aspects of power-political, economic, and moral-have been diffused among nations, and the implements of war have become potentially holocaustal. A balance of power in its classical sense has lost meaning because marginal adjustments in power have become impossible: strategic nuclear weapons have eliminated the territorial basis of power and endowed military strength with a cataclysmic dimension that cannot be neutralized by gathering together incre ments of counterforce through the traditional process of alliance. Within this environment, major powers are joined in an ideological struggle of epic proportions, while an unassimilated third world of emerging nations contemplates which way to jump. Such a context compels diplomacy to become symbolic if it is to be effective. In a stable world order, power is the handmaiden of diplomacy; in a revolutionary situation, the roles are reversed. Nego tiation becomes a means of building a case, striking a pose, stiffening resolve, and forging coalitions, not of settling disputes. Compromise being alien to the nature of a revolutionary power, only a fool will formulate negotiating positions as points of departure for a genuine bargaining process. They should instead be cast as tactical maneuvers designed to demonstrate to onlookers the intransigence and unreason ableness of the revolutionary power, for nothing short of capitulation can reassure it.