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Mario Del Pero (Università di Bologna)
“Europeanizing” US Foreign Policy. Henry Kissinger and the Domestic Challenge to Détente
In this essay I will examine the effort of Henry Kissinger to modify the basic practices and
discourse of United States foreign policy, and the domestic reaction this attempt generated. My
argument will be based upon two general assumptions. The first is that the policy toward world
affairs pursued by the U.S. in the early 1970s, and epitomized by détente with the Soviet Union,
represented in many ways a compulsory path. As such it would have been sought even by a
Democratic administration, or by a different National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. The
second assumption is that Kissinger found it convenient and politically expedient to couch the new
approach in realist terms; to present it, that is, as an un-American and very European form of
realpolitik, whose a-historical rules and norms America, finally coming of age, had to learn and
adopt.
The essay is divided in three parts. In the first part I will illustrate the fundamental matrixes of the
crisis U.S. Cold War liberalism and the strategy of “containment” had to face in the late 1960s. In
the second part I will rapidly describe the main achievements of Kissinger’s foreign policy and the
way his approach was presented (and sold) to the American public. Finally, in the last, longer part
of the essay I will examine the successful domestic attack to Kissinger and détente. This attack was
mounted primarily by neoconservatives, who denounced Kissinger’s foreign policy as a very
defeatist and a-moral form of appeasement of the Soviet totalitarian challenge. In other words (and
this is the main conclusion of the essay), Kissinger was successfully criticized for trying to
contaminate U.S. foreign policy with methods and logics supposedly alien to its political culture:
for his counterproductive and ineffective attempt to make Europe out of America. The idea that
America could finally move out of perennial adolescence and be initiated into the harsh realities of
world politics was indeed very popular in the early 1970s. For a short span of time, Kissinger was
1
able to exploit it effectively. At the end, however, the idea that America was not (and ought not be)
Europe was destined to prove much more popular and enduring.
The Crisis of Containment
During the first twenty years of the Cold War, the United States promoted a coherent, though not
always successful, foreign policy. Washington’s main objective was the creation of an
«international liberal order», expressing America’s proclaimed values but guaranteeing also the
protection and expansion of its interests. However, such global and universalistic vision was
challenged, ab origine, by a powerful counter-universalism, and by an alternative teleology to the
one projected by the United States and the West: the one embodied (and projected) by the Soviet
Union and the international Communist movement.1
The Soviet challenge immediately limited the global scope of the U.S.-centered liberal international
regime built and institutionalized after the Second World War. To face such challenge, and to
consolidate and extend its hegemony and dominance within its sphere of influence, the United
States adopted a strategy of global containment of the USSR and of Communism. The strategy was
not implemented monolithically. There were several “strategies of containment”, oscillating
between symmetrical and asymmetrical approaches.2
Many factors contributed to the
discontinuities in the way containment was put into practice: the shifting structural conditions of the
international system in which the U.S. was operating; the political differences of the different
administrations (witness the contrast between Eisenhower’s fiscal conservatism and Kennedy’s and
1
Robert Latham, The Liberal Moment. Modernity, Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order, New
York: Columbia University Press, 1997; Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe. The Passing of Mass
Utopia in East and West, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001.
2
See John L. Gaddis, Strategy of Containment. A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy,
Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, and Ibid., The Long Peace. Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War,
Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
2
Johnson’s expansive Keynesianism); the domestic constraints, budgetary in primis, each
administration had to face.3
The ultimate goal, the general method and the basic preconditions of containment were, however,
consistently the same during this first phase of the Cold War (ca. 1947-1968). The stated goal was,
very simply, to impede any further expansion of the Soviet Union and Communism. What the
various “strategies of containment” aimed at was nevertheless much more ambitious: to contain the
Soviet Union meant also to preserve the freedom to project U.S. power where Moscow and its allies
had not yet put their flags. The world was still filled with not yet “bipolarized” areas, particularly
outside Europe. These were areas that were up for grabs in the bipolar competition. Confining the
Soviet and Communist perimeter within the limits it had reached in 1947 (or 1949, if we include
Communist China) was functional to the expansion of American power and preponderance.
Containment was not a symmetrical strategy aimed at accepting equivalence and preserving parity.
On the contrary, it was an approach finalized at strengthening and expanding U.S. superiority. By
limiting the Soviet Union and reinforcing the United States, it aspired to create an asymmetrical
balance of power, that is an imbalance of power in favor of Washington. Such growing imbalance
could moderate and restrain Soviet behavior in the short run. More importantly, over time it could
weaken the Soviet Union, putting her in a structurally subordinate position, which proved
impossible to overcome. Through containment it would be possible to pressure the Soviet Union,
thus contributing to exacerbate its weaknesses and intrinsic contradictions. Soviet power – diplomat
and strategist George Kennan maintained in 1947 – «like the capitalist world of its conception,
bears within it the seeds of its own decay». Through containment it would be possible to «increase
enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far
3
On how budgetary costraints influenced U.S. overall strategy of containment during the early Cold War years see the
useful considerations in Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War. The United States since the 1930s, New
Haven/London, Yale University Press, 1995; Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron. Harry S.Truman and the Origins of the
National Security State, Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998 and Aaron L. Friedberg, In the
Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and its Cold War Grand Strategy, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000.
3
greater degree of moderation and circumspection ... and in this way to promote tendencies which
must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or gradual mellowing of Soviet power». 4
If this was the ultimate goal, the method followed logically. While different strategies could be
implemented, and different means could be employed, containment rested upon one unitary
methodological premise: the refusal of any interaction and dialogue with the enemy. Indeed, the
negation of any legitimacy of the enemy. Containment, however implemented, was based upon «a
non-dialectical rejection» of the counterpart; a fact, this, that shrewd observers, such as Walter
Lippman, did not fail to notice at the time.5
As historian Anders Stephanson has aptly synthesized «for the United States ... there could be no
real peace ... with the Soviet Union, indeed no real peace in the world as such, unless the Soviet
Union ceased being the Soviet Union and Communism ended». 6 Containment did not therefore
foresee a future “peaceful coexistence” between the United States and the Soviet Union. It
represented instead from the beginning a maximalist strategy. It was designed to provide US leaders
with the tools to put an end to the Cold War, and not just those necessary to live with it.
Like every maximalist and ambitious strategy, containment proved to be very costly. High military
investments, global commitments and perennial mobilization inevitably followed. Four
preconditions were necessary to make such costs tolerable, domestically and internationally.
First: superiority and invulnerability. A global and expansionist foreign policy could be promoted
as long as there were no checks and counter-pressures capable of deterring it, and as long as there
were no serious risks, save those the United States would incur if it tried to touch the vital sphere of
4
George Kennan, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, “Foreign Affairs”, XXV, July 1947, pp.566-82. On Kennan see
Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1989; Wilson
Miscamble, George Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950, Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1994 and John L. Harper, American Visions of Europe, Franklin D.Roosevelt, George F.Kennan, and Dean
G.Acheson, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
5
Walter Lippman, The Cold War, New York, Harper, 1947; historian Anders Stephanson defined containment as a
«non-dialectical rejection» in The Cold War as US Project in Federico Romero and Silvio Pons (eds.), Reinterpreting
the Cold War. Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations, London, Frank Cass, 2005.
6
Anders Stephanson, Fourteen Notes on the Very Concept of the Cold War, in Gearóid Ó Thuatail and Simon Dalby
(eds.), Rethinking Geopolitics, London/New York, Routledge, 1998, p.82.
4
security built by the Soviet Union in Central and Eastern Europe. Superiority and power
preponderance were the obvious ends of containment. But they were also its primary means.
Ambitiousness rested upon the possibility of taking risks without the serious possibility of suffering
retaliation. And this was possible as long as the Soviet Union was no military match for the U.S..7
Second: domestic consensus. A large and unchallengeable support both for the objectives and the
instruments of U.S. Cold War foreign policy was necessary to make its high costs acceptable.
During the first twenty years of the Cold War, the various administrations easily obtained such
indispensable support. They were certainly helped in this by Soviet behavior, and by the brutal
forms of control and dominance Moscow came to exercise within its sphere of influence.
Alternatives to containment were thus easily marginalized, and ended up often being presented –
then and retrospectively – as fancy, bizarre and utopian (but also dangerous) visions of the role the
U.S. should play in world affairs, unconnected to (and unconscious of) the harsh realities of the
Cold War. This was the fate of Henry Wallace’s attempted preservation of the anti-Fascist coalition;
Robert Taft’s hemispheric separatism; and, also, Barry Goldwater’s trigger-happy radicalism.8
Third: U.S. uncontested primacy within its sphere of influence. America’s predominance within
Transatlantia was obviously uncontestable. After the Second World War (and as a consequence of
it), the United States found itself with an unprecedented condition of superiority vis-à-vis allies and
enemies. Containment implied preserving and extending this supremacy. Consolidating a unitary
Transatlantic bloc, and strengthening U.S. hegemony within it, was part of the strategy of
preponderance-building adopted by Washington in the early Cold War. The United States skillfully
7
As we will see, an unchallengeable military superiority lasted at least until the mid 1960s. See Marc Trachtenberg, A
Constructed Peace. The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999
and Ibid., History and Strategy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
8
Thomas G. Paterson (ed.), Cold War Critics: Alternatives to American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years, Chicago,
Quandrangle Books, 1971; J. Samuel Walker, Henry A. Wallace and American Foreign Policy, Westport, Greenwood
Press, 1976. On Taft see the perceptive and useful reflections of Hogan, A Cross of Iron. See also the considerations in
Logevall, A Critique of Containment. Goldwater’s foreign policy manifesto was Why not Victory? A Fresh Look at
American Foreign Policy, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1962.
5
pursued this goal, often accommodating the needs and requests of its partners and of the elites that
came to guide them. America’s preeminence within its European sphere of influence was based
upon hegemony (a «consensual hegemony», according to Charles Maier) and not just outright
domination and coercion, as was mostly the case with the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.
America’s empire – if there ever were one – was not an «empire by invitation», in historian Geil
Lundestad’s fortunate, albeit simplistic definition. It was, instead, an empire based upon an unusual
degree of negotiation between the center and the periphery, and upon the frequent concessions the
latter was able to extract from the former. This concurred in making the Atlantic bloc more solid
and cohesive than its Eastern counterpart, determining an additional element of asymmetry in the
bipolar imbalance of power.9
Fourth: resources and means. An ambitious and global strategy, as containment was, could be
implemented only if the available means allowed it; if it was possible, when necessary, to outspend
– militarily, technologically, economically – the adversaries. And in the early Cold War years, the
U.S. either had these means (its superiority, at that historical juncture, was clear and indisputable),
worked to amplify them (through an effective strategy of preponderance-building) or believed it had
found the way to increase them in the foreseeable future (through a policy of deficit spending that
allowed it to have them all – butter and guns – as stated in NSC-68). As former Undersecretary of
State and Wall Street banker Robert Lovett said in 1950: «there was practically nothing that the
country could not do it if it wanted to».10
9
Geir Lundestad, Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945-52, “Journal of Peace Research”,
23, 2 (1986), pp.263-277; Ivi, The American Empire, Oslo/Oxford, Oxford University Press/Norwegian University
Press, 1990. Charles Maier in Alliance and Autonomy: European Identity and United States Foreign Policy Objectives
in the Truman years, in Michael J. Lacey (ed.), The Truman Presidency, New York/Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1989, pp.273-298.
10
Quoted in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 94. See also Leffler, Preponderance of Power; Hogan, Cross of Iron.
According to the NSC-68 «one of the most significant lessons» of World War II was «that the American economy,
when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian
consumption while simultaneously providing a higher standard of living». NSC-68, “United States Objectives and
Program for National Security”, April 14 1950, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereinafter FRUS), I: National
Security Affairs; Foreign Economic Policy, Washington DC, Government Printing Office, 1977, 264.
6
Containment was a strategy based upon a significant amount of optimism. By the late 1960s this
optimism, and the ensuing hubris, had been badly (though not irreversibly) shaken. The U.S. was
undergoing a deep, and until a few years earlier, absolutely unexpected, crisis. American difficulties
had several matrixes: political, economic, military. The crisis they concurred to catalyze had
therefore multiple faces and challenged several assumptions on which the Cold War optimistic
globalism, embodied in the various strategies of containment, had been based: «In 1968 – historian
Jussi Hanhimäki recently maintained – it seemed that few of the certainties of American Cold War
policy remained intact».11
Each of the four basic preconditions of containment previously mentioned had been challenged and
badly shaken.
America’s uncontested strategic superiority had rapidly evaporated. The intense rearmament
undertaken by the post- Khrushchevian leadership had allowed the Soviet Union to partially fill the
nuclear gap between the two superpowers. There was not yet a situation of nuclear parity: U.S.
technological superiority made that unfeasible, both then and afterwards. But the age of America’s
global spectrum dominance had come to an end. Retaliation was now possible. The U.S. suddenly
found itself vulnerable and insecure. The age of “free security” had ended with World War II, but
for twenty more years America had preserved its invulnerability by buying security at very high
price. Now even expensive and “unfree” security seemed out of reach.12
The domestic consensus on which containment had rested simply disintegrated. The universalist
assumptions of Cold War liberalism were now rejected outright by important sectors of American
public opinion. The human and economic costs of the war in Vietnam proved to be unbearable,
11
Jussi Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect. Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, Oxford/New York, Oxford
University Press, 2004, 30; See also Dana H. Allin, Cold War Illusions. America, Europe, and Soviet Power, 19691989, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.
12
On the notion of free-security see Campbell Craig, The Not-So-Strange Career of Charles Beard, “Diplomatic
History”, n.2, Spring 2001, pp.251-274. See also Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1983; McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival. Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, New
York, Random House, 1988; David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race, New Haven, Yale University
Press, 1983.
7
politically and socially. The demonstrations against the Vietnam War overlapped with other radical
forms of protest that were lacerating American social fabric. American policymakers had to face an
unprecedented sense of disorder and anarchy. The disciplinary code provided by anti-Communism
– the «evangelism of fear» of the previously two decades – was not operating anymore. Rigid
dichotomies, like those offered by Cold War discourse, imposed a straightjacket to the complexity
of a domestic and international situation that was characterized by multiple centrifugal tendencies,
and no longer reducible to the binary categories of the Cold War.13
U.S. difficulties also reverberated throughout the Atlantic alliance. U.S. “hegemonic capacity” in
the Western bloc had drastically diminished. The alliance had seen one important defection, that of
Gaullist France. Most important, several other U.S. allies where trying to pursue an autonomous and
independent foreign policy, within the systemic limits and constraints the Cold War still imposed.
The “invitation” to the United States had now become extremely selective. American military
guarantee was still welcome and talks of U.S. troops reduction generated much anxiety in Western
Europe. However, the exportation of the costs of the Vietnam war – primarily via U.S. inflation –
and the necessity to face domestic public opinions highly critical of American actions in South-East
Asia led many Western European governments to assume a critical stance toward their senior
partner. The economic superiority of the United States was now contested by its partners, Germany
and Japan above all. Bipolarity, the presence of only two powers «which [had] the potential to
become poles for the international system» was not automatically producing bipolarization, «the
extent to which actors are clustered into [two] mutually exclusive camps».14
Finally, the resources available to the United States proved to be neither unlimited nor infinitely
multipliable. The costs of the Vietnam war combined with those of LBJ’s ambitious domestic
13
The expression «evangelism of fear» is frequently used in David Campbell, Writing Security. United States Foreign
Policy and the Politics of Identity, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 2 nd ed.. Cfr. also the ambitious,
but often hastily superficial research of Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest. Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
14
David A. Rapkin, William R. Thompson, Jon A Cristopherson, “Bipolarity and Bipolarization in the Cold War Era”,
The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol.23, No.2, June 1979, 264; see also Thomas Schwartz, Lyndon Johnson and
Europe: in the Shadow of Vietnam, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2003.
8
programs. The gradual transition to a post-Keynesian society put in question the applicability of old
economic recipes on which the optimism of the Cold War consensus had largely been based. The
U.S. «imperious economy» was slowing down vis-à-vis most of its dynamic partners. Choices were
no longer escapable: guns could not promise to multiply butter anymore. A limitation of the
investments in nuclear weapons and ambitious defense programs, unthinkable in the previous years,
was presented as a wise and necessary choice. This opened the dim perspective of a possible Soviet
strategic catch-up. The end of America’s superiority (and uniqueness) suddenly appeared on the
horizon.15
The search for an alternative: Kissingerism as an exit strategy from America’s crisis
U.S. political debate offered various exit strategies from the abrupt disappearance of those moral
and political certainties that had provided the pillars of U.S. Cold War policies and discourse. Old
Cold Warriors – on the Right and on the Left - reaffirmed the validity of traditional Cold War
precepts, urging that nation to wait patiently the end of the storm. «An imperial power is not
allowed to resign», proclaimed James Burnham on the National Review. For democratic senator
Henry Jackson (D, Washington) «A great power inescapably» bore «the responsibility of great
power»: some people in the United States were «suffering from a case of combat fatigue», but the
conflict with the Soviet Union was «not made to disappear» and the preservation of an
advantageous «relationship of forces» vis-à-vis the Soviet Union was therefore still needed.16
In the short term, the attempted reaffirmation of the values, rhetoric and policies of original
containment had little success. Global containment was under assault and there was little one could
15
David Calleo, The Imperious Economy, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982; Charles Maier, Consigning the
Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era, “American Historical Review”, 105, 3 (June
2000), pp.807-831
16
James Burnham, “Finlandization?”, The National Review, May 19, 1970, 506; Henry Jackson, “Perspectives on the
Atlantic Alliance”, speech at the Fifth International Conference in Chicago, March 23, 1968, Henry M. Jackson Papers,
University of Washington Libraries, Manuscripts Collections, Seattle (hereinafter HJP-UWL-MC), Speeches and
Writings, Box 6.
9
do aside from defending it, and hoping for better times, which would arrive sooner than expected.
Before long, conservative and liberal Cold Warriors would join forces, politically and ideologically.
Their challenge would lead to the resurgence of those Cold War topoi that had looked discredited
for good in the late 1960s/early 1970s. However, what would become known as the
“neoconservative vision” had not yet appeared when Nixon was elected President and Henry
Kissinger was surprisingly appointed National Security Adviser. As we will see, the
neoconservative project was articulated primarily in opposition to the policies and strategies
pursued by Kissinger. But in 1968 it was still impossible to accuse credibly Nixon of being soft on
Communism and of promoting a passive policy of appeasement of the Soviet Union.17
At first, Nixon and Kissinger had more trouble with other exit strategies from the crisis, as
those.embodied by the cultural relativism and the third worldism of the New Left, or by the
emphasis laid by many liberal scholars and politicians on the intrinsic interdependence of the
international system, and on the impossibility to pursue unilateral security strategies in the nuclear
age.18
What Kissinger (and Nixon) articulated was in itself (or at least aimed to be) an alternative response
to the difficulties the country was facing. While obviously a product of such difficulties, it aspired
to provide also a solution for them. Lacking the basic preconditions that had permitted global
containment, a new strategy and a new foreign policy were in fact needed: to face the international
challenge; to preserve America’s pre-eminence; most of all, to placate domestic turmoil and build a
new and lasting consensus around a redesigned United States foreign policy.
17
Disaffected liberal Cold Warriors would later provide the backbone of the so-called “neoconservative movement”,
which would effectively challenge the foreign policies promoted by the administrations of Richard Nixon (1968-74) and
Gerald Ford (1974-1976). See John Ehrmann, The Rise of Neoconservatism. Intellectual and Foreign Affairs, New
Haven/London, Yale University Press, 1995 and Mario Del Pero, “A Balance of Power that Favors Freedom”. The
Historical and Ideological Roots of the Neo-Conservative Persuasion, Working Paper, March 2005, Robert Schuman
Center, European University Institute, Florence; Ivi, Da Henry Kissinger ai neoconservatori. Alle radici della politica
estera statunitense, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2006.
18
Caleb Carr and James Chace, America Invulnerable: the Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars, New
York, Summit Books, 1988; John Gaddis, The Long Peace; Paul Buhle and James MacMillian (eds.), The New Left
Revisited, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2003.
10
Kissinger’s strategy, designed to supersede containment, was based upon a few basic assumptions.
The first was that the country had to operate within limits and constraints it had not been
accustomed to. Resources were limited and diminishing. Domestic consensus was shattered and not
to return in the monolithic forms known in the previous twenty years. American bureaucracy and
political system were proving unfit for the promotion of a coherent and effective foreign policy (to
this last aspect Kissinger had indeed dedicated much of his intellectual rumination).19
The second assumption was that the arms race had so increased the destructive capability of the
U.S. and USSR as to render a major war between the two both meaningless and intolerable.
Meaningless because there was no way one of the two sides could avoid immense devastation and
emerge as victor in a conflict. Intolerable, because war could destroy civilization itself, and leave
nothing behind. Kissinger realized this over time and not without difficulty. He had enjoyed playing
Dr. Strangelove in the past, to the point of dedicating one of his first works to the possible use of
tactical nuclear war in a limited conflict (thus anticipating one of the main features of Kennedy’s
flexible response). Nevertheless the risks ran in October 1962 and massive Soviet rearmament
induced a change of attitude in Nixon’s National Security czar. His change of view was later
epitomized by Kissinger’s eruption during a press conference just before Nixon’s resignation; on
that occasion, Kissinger was once again questioned as to the possibility the U.S. could find itself in
a position of strategic inferiority vis-à-vis the Soviet Union: «what in the name of God is strategic
superiority» – Kissinger retorted – «What is the significance of it, politically militarily,
operationally, at these levels of numbers? What do you do with it?».20
The third assumption followed logically from the second. Since Moscow and Washington were the
only two countries that disposed of such unlimited power (i.e. to blow themselves up along with the
rest of the planet), willingly or not they shared a set of common interests and goals that no
ideological divide could forever obfuscate. Avoiding war was the most obvious one. Preserving
19
Henry Kissinger, American Foreign Policy, New York, Norton, 3rd ed., 1979; Ibid., Does America Need a Foreign
Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2001.
20
Quoted in Allin, Cold War Illusions, 58. The book I referred to in the text is Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and
Foreign Policy, New York, Council on Foreign Relations, 1957.
11
stability was the logical precondition. Preventing nuclear proliferation – i.e. containing the possible
spread of the risk outside the original duo – was the unavoidable result. But all this – to maintain
stability and reduce the risk of war – also implied freezing the bipolar status quo at a time when
bipolarism was structurally challenged. The United States and the Soviet Union appear to have had
at the time a mutual interest in avoiding a distribution of power that might bring into question their
hegemonic condominium, particularly in Europe. This added one extra commonality between the
two superpowers, one that was greatly appreciated by Kissinger, although much disliked by his
domestic and international critics.21
Such assumptions reflected an awareness (and a rationalization) of the structural alteration of the
international environment. Whoever had run U.S. foreign policy at the time – democrat or
republican, liberal or conservative – would have had to face such a change. The most famous and
celebrated diplomatic achievements of Nixon and Kissinger had in fact been initiated by their
predecessors.
Negotiations with the North Vietnamese had been attempted well before Nixon’s election. Up to the
last minute, Johnson and Humphrey had hoped to sign a silver-bullet agreement with Hanoi that
might have helped them at the polls (curiously enough, Henry Kissinger, not yet co-opted by
Nixon’s camp, had been involved in these negotiations to the point of often being accused of having
sabotaged them out of political convenience).22
The possibility of an opening to China had also been explored in previous years. Several foreign
policy advisers of Lyndon Johnson explicitly advocated the utilization of the “China card” in
dealing with the Soviets. The mayhem produced by the Cultural Revolution contributed to hinder
21
I have argued elsewhere that Kissinger’s vision of world affairs was distinctly bipolar. Cfr. Mario Del Pero,
“Kissinger e la politica estera americana nel Mediterraneo: Il caso portoghese”, Studi Storici, October-December 2001,
973-988 and Da Henry Kissinger ai neoconservatori, cit.. A different interpretation can be found in Argyris
Adrianopoulos, Western Europe in Kissinger’s Global Strategy, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988; John Gaddis,
Strategies of Containment, 274-344 and Ivi, Rescuing Choice From Circumstances: the Statecraft of Henry Kissinger,
in Gordon Graig e Francis Loewenheim (a cura di), The Diplomats, 1919-1979, Princeton:, Princeton University Press,
1994, 564-592.
22
Robert Brigham, Guerrilla Diplomacy: the NFL’s Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War, Ithaca, Cornell University
Press, 1998; William Bundy, Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency, New York, Hill &
Wang, 1998
12
and defer a U.S.-Chinese rapprochement. It is difficult, however, to believe that a Humphrey
administration would not have moved toward reconciliation with China, exploiting the favorable
situation created by the Sino-Soviet border clashes on the Ussuri river of March 1969. If anything,
the Nixon administration – and Kissinger in particular – was quite slow to grasp the new situation
and react accordingly. Kissinger’s very Eurocentric view of international affairs and of U.S.
national interest induced him to underestimate the importance of building a new relationship with
Communist China. According to former diplomat William Bundy, the China policy of the new
administration was initially «halting, uncertain, and indecisive. A new relationship with China was
far from being a top priority from the start, as both Nixon and Kissinger later tried to suggest».23
Analogously, détente with the Soviet Union had been intermittently sought by Washington for
several years. The Cuban Missile Crisis and, even more, the July 1963 Test Ban Treaty had proved
that the two superpowers shared a common, indeed vital, strategic interest: avoiding war, preventing
proliferation, and preserving a nuclear quasi-duopoly (the Sino-Soviet rift made this interest all the
more pressing for Moscow). One can therefore identify 1963 as constituting a crucial turning point
in the Cold War, providing the real «institutional beginning of détente». 24 Détente with the Soviets
had been pursued both strategically and economically. The Soviets had already been convinced to
start a round of negotiations on nuclear issues by Johnson’s ambassador to Moscow, Llewellyn
Thompson. Nuclear diplomacy had been hindered by the repression of the Prague spring, but might
well have been resumed also with a democratic administration. An economic dètente – putting an
end to the limits still posed to the non-military trade with the USSR – had been advocated for many
years by democratic analysts and policymakers. Indeed, many democratic senators, who called for a
23
William Bundy, Tangled Web, 100. William Burr, The Kissinger Transcripts, New York, Free Press, 1998.
Rodolfo Mosca, “La distensione come modello di diplomazia reazionaria”, Affari Esteri, n.30, Aprile 1976, 209-228.
On 1963 as a crucial turning point see Anders Stephanson, Fourteen Notes and Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed
Peace.
24
13
significant liberalization of East-West trade, had supported the Export Administration Act (EAA),
which provided a crucial tool for Nixon’s policy of economic détente with Moscow.25
«Those on the Right can do what those on the Left can only talk about», Richard Nixon allegedly
declared after his trip to China. However, the opening to China, détente and nuclear diplomacy with
the Soviet Union, and a much-needed solution to the Vietnam imbroglio would have been pursued,
and probably achieved, even by a democratic administration. They were necessities more than
choices, obligatory paths more than selected options. In terms of contents, the foreign policy of
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger was thus much less innovative and original than it was thought
at the time, and than has often been claimed retrospectively.
Nevertheless, Kissinger’s approach, his foreign policy philosophy, and the discourse through which
it was conveyed to the American public represented a major departure from the past and from U.S.
foreign policy traditions. Kissinger couched his strategy, and sold it to the domestic and
international public opinion, in a-moral and realist terms, strikingly dissimilar from the rhetoric and
discourse adopted until then to justify America’s international behavior. In doing so, he embraced a
supposedly continental-European way of conducting foreign affairs: an approach, his, that was
claimed to have no precedents in the United States. According to a recent, popular reconstruction of
the traditions of U.S. foreign policy «the influence of Continental realism did not peak until the
Nixon and Ford administrations, when, as national security adviser and secretary of state, Henry
Kissinger placed American foreign policy on solidly Continental grounds ... the Nixon-Kissinger
approach also took the moral element out of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. It was as if the United States
and the Soviet Union were two great powers like Prussia and Austria, and could reach a détente
based on common interests while setting aside their philosophical differences, just as Catholic
Austria and Protestant Prussia had done».26
25
The EAA conferred on the President discretionary powers to liberalize trade with another country, thus strengthening
executive authority in a crucial field. Michael Mastanduno, Economic Containment: CoCom and the Politics of EastWest Trade, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1992, 135-145.
26
Walter Russel Mead, Special Providence. American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World, New York,
Routledge, 2002, 72.
14
Walter Russel Mead’s is a very stereotyped and caricatured description of Kissinger’s foreign
policy. It is, however, a caricature Kissinger liked and worked hard to cultivate. Kissinger proudly
presented his strategy – and détente overall – as the coherent adoption of a realistic foreign policy
and of a very European way of dealing with world affairs. According to Kissinger, his was a
realpolitik to which even the United States, after much juvenile wandering, had finally to adhere.
The end of preponderance had made global crusades impossible and counterproductive. The lack of
consensus had drastically limited resources and possibilities. The passage from uni/bi-polarity to
some sort of multipolarity – as Kissinger liked to claim publicly (but not privately) – obliged the
U.S. to abide by the traditional balance of power rules. It imposed a much more sophisticated way
of implementing foreign policy and pursuing the national interest, which liberated the action of the
“creative statesman” from the rigidity of a bipolar system, which by nature, Kissinger once claimed,
«loses the perspective for nuance». 27
It is a matter of discussion whether Kissinger was truly a Bismarck-like realpolitiker of the nuclear
age; whether he was a creative and disenchanted statesman who pursued a consistently realist
foreign policy, thus rescuing the United States from its adolescence and its childish tendency to
embrace idealist and global missions. Much indicates the opposite is true. Before joining the
government, Kissinger had been the quintessential product of the peculiarly Cold War National
Security Culture. During the twenty years preceding his tenure as National Security Adviser, he had
followed, timely as much as opportunistically, the various grand-strategic vogues that had come to
shape and dominate U.S. foreign policy discourse. Often resorting to an esoteric and almost
impenetrable prose that only initiates to the arcana of international affairs were able to decrypt, he
was in turn the theorist of limited nuclear war and gradual and symmetrical responses, analyst of
structural transatlantic crises, and, finally, a-ideological and pro-dètente realpolitiker. Developing
27
Quoted in John Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 281. Gaddis (also in Rescuing Choice from Circumstances) claims
that Kissinger’s approach was indeed multipolar, and not dissimilar from that supported in the early Cold War by
George Kennan. I disagree with both assumptions: Kennan’s multipolar vision of the international system developed
slowly and was indeed tripolar in its belief a unified and de-bipolarized Europe should play a role in the international
system. Kissinger had instead a strict bipolar view of the international distribution of power, and, as we will see, worked
actively (and often in agreement with the Soviets) to preserve a bipolar status quo in Europe.
15
scant interest to IR and to the great American tradition in the field, he preferred history and
Bismarck to Morgenthau and theory. His much-broadcasted realism was presented as the product of
his way of studying and interpreting the history of diplomacy; of his attempt to apply «historical
lessons to the real of diplomacy».28
The point here is not to solve the puzzling dilemma of whether and how much Kissinger was a
“real” realist. Nor I am concerned with the even more problematic relationship between realism and
United States foreign policy.29 The point I want to stress here is that, as National Security Adviser
and later Secretary of State, Kissinger found it immensely helpful to present his strategy and his
vision of world politics as a much-needed realist turn of U.S. foreign policy. It was highly
convenient to represent himself as the «European mind in American policy», as one contemporary
commentator called him;30 as the erudite statesman, with a crispy “Strangelovian” German accent,
who was finally teaching immature Americans how to behave in the world arena, providing them
with a fast-forward introduction to the impenetrable as much as perennial and immutable laws of
geopolitics and international relations.
To a country disillusioned with Cold War liberalism, and no longer prone to a-critically accept its
basic axioms or believe its many promises, Kissinger’s realpolitik – real or fictitious – seemed to
offer a way out: an exit strategy from the crisis the country was undergoing, whose basic contours
were either less problematic and complex, or more easily understandable than those of the other exit
strategies, offered up by the interdependent globalism of many liberals or the anti-imperial third
worldism of the New Left.31
The new hegemonic geopolitical jargon, widely adopted by most of the press at the time,
paradigmatically expressed this change. The universalistic slogans of the previous two decades
were replaced by particularistic formulas that had often been on the fringes of U.S. political
28
John Gaddis, Rescuing Choice from Circumstances, 576.
For a classical realist perspective on this see Kenneth N. Waltz, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics: The
American and British Experience, Boston, Little Borwn, 1967.
30
Bruce Mazlish, Kissinger: the European Mind in American Policy, New York, Basic Books, 1976.
31
I tried to deal with these issues in “A Balance of Power that Favors Freedom”.
29
16
discourse. During the era of détente, there was much less talk about freedom, liberty and universal
values than about equilibrium, stability and power. Claims to moral and civilizational superiority
suddenly (though briefly) appeared ridiculous and out-moded. Morality was often associated by
Kissinger with sanctimoniousness and, ultimately, weakness. National interest was dissociated from
national values, while foreign policy was detached from domestic policy and from the unhealthy
influence domestic constituencies and parochial interests aimed at exerting on Washington’s
external relations.
Most of all, the binary and rigid certainties of the Cold War discourse were presented as relics of a
different age. One would struggle to find traditional anti-Communist and anti-Soviet comments, not
only (and understandably) in Kissinger’s public speeches, but also in his private correspondence
and in the copious transcripts of the meetings of his staff.32 The Soviet Union formally remained the
primary adversary (but not the enemy) of the United States. However, this was due not to its
ideology, but to its sheer power, which made it the only possible match for the U.S.. International
Communism was a threat either because it constituted a subservient (and often non-ideological) tool
of Soviet power strategy or, when genuinely independent, because it could threaten a status quo and
an equilibrium the United States intended to preserve and consolidate, particularly within the
European continent. Kissinger, for instance, did not dismiss the possibility that Eurocommunism
could be a genuinely autonomous phenomenon, and that Western European communists were
operating independently from Moscow. This, however, made them all the more dangerous for the
United States, because they could threaten the bipolar condominium that Kissinger wanted to
consolidate, at least in Europe.
32
Among the many collections of documents pertaining to Kissinger’s tenures as National Security Adviser and
Secretary of State recently declassified at the U.S. National Archives and at the Gerald Ford Presidential Library, one of
the richest and most fascinating is certainly represented by the transcripts of the meetings of Kissinger’s staff after he
was appointed Secretary of State in September 1973. See Meetings of Secretary of State’s Staff, National Archives and
Record Administration (hereinafter NARA), General Record of the Department of State, RG 59, Lot File 78D443
(Transcripts of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s Staff Meetings, 1973-1977).
17
When you imagine what Communist Governments will do inside NATO – Kissinger maintained during a
meeting of his staff
– it doesn’t make any difference whether they’re controlled by Moscow or not. It
will unravel NATO and the European community into a neutralist instrument. And that is the essence of
it. Whether or not these parties are controlled from Moscow – that’s a subsidiary issue ... we keep saying
that there’s no conclusive evidence that they are not under the control of Moscow, implying that if we
could show they were not under the control of Moscow we could find them acceptable ... A Western
Europe with the participation of Communist parties is going to change the basis of NATO ... to bring the
Communist into power in Western Europe ... would totally reorient the map of postwar Europe. 33
Neutrality had often been courted by the Kennedy and Johnson administration, which saw in it a
potential intermediate stage toward modernity and Western democracy. With Kissinger it was by
contrast explicitly rejected. Salazarist Portugal, to take one of the most famous cases, was rapidly reembraced as a sort of prodigal son, after one decade of tense relations, caused primarily by the 1961
American embargo on the sale of arms that could be used in the conflicts in the Portuguese colonies
(Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau).34 After the 1974 revolution, Kissinger took a stance
against the new government and, even more, against the new foreign minister, Mario Soares, whom
he labeled, with scant historical inventiveness, the “Portuguese Kerensky”. He never derogated from
this line, even after the harsh defeat of the Portuguese communists at the polls, and despite the fact
he recognized (and stressed with his advisers) the cautiousness with which Moscow was following
the Portuguese events. Again, neutrality and the potential erosion of the bipolar status quo in Europe
was what mattered to him most. Speaking with his staff after the April 1975 elections, which saw the
clear defeat of Alvaro Cunhal’s PCP, Kissinger once more claimed that the main problem for the
United States was:
33
Meeting Secretary of State’s Staff, January 12, 1975 and July 1, 1976, NARA, RG59, Lot File 78D443, Box 6 and
Box 10.
34
I dealt with Kissinger’s policy toward the Portuguese regime and his reaction to the Portuguese revolution in The
Limits of Détente: the United States and the Crisis of the Portuguese regime in Wilfried Loth (ed.), Eastern Europe and
Western Europe in the Cold War, forthcoming.
18
… the impact on NATO of a revolutionary government, in which the Communists are in the key role of
pursuing essentially neutralist policies … the impact of that on other European countries: that’s the key
issue. And that has not, in any remote way, been affected by this election … A Soviet-allied dictatorship
is a better outcome for us … than a Communist-dominated NATO ally, because that one – the heavily
Communist influence on our major allies – has a major impact on other countries. 35
But Europe, and the effort to stabilize the geopolitical status quo there, freezing political changes
and containing centrifugal tendencies, was not the only theater in which this realist and a-moral turn
of U.S. foreign policy was set on display. It was true also of the way détente with the Soviet Union,
rapprochement with China, and negotiations with North Vietnam were implemented and presented
to American public opinion.
Bipolar détente would lead to the Salt agreements on the limitation of nuclear weapons and to a host
of other trade and cultural agreements. Unlike liberal supporters of détente, Kissinger did not
present these agreements as the products (and means) of a structural interdependence that would
unify the globe and create a shared global common interest. Nixon’s National Security Adviser was
obviously conscious of how the arms race and deterrence had modified the bipolar antagonism. He
recognized strategic interdependence and the impracticality of a unilateral quest for security.
However, and due also to his deep ignorance of basic economics, he was much less prone to believe
in interdependence, globalization and liberal “one-worldism”. Negotiating with the Soviet Union,
apart from expressing a recognition of its power, was not part of a process of convergence, which
Kissinger neither recognized nor believed in. Cultural relativism was a mark not only of the New
Left, but also of a true realist. States had to recognized their limits and mortality, but they also
continued to represent the basic units of an anarchic international system, and could not therefore
surrender their sovereignty. For Kissinger, promoting dialogue and reaching accords with the
Soviets were functional to the achievement of other objectives. The most important of them was of
course the stabilization of the European status quo and the “disciplinization” of the centrifugal
35
Meeting of Secretary of State’s Staff, April 26, 1975, NARA, RG 59, Lot File 78D443, Box 3.
19
tendencies shaking the two blocs and putting their survival at risk (neutralism, Eurocommunism and
autonomous European détente in the West; dissidence and human rights campaigns in the East).
Kissinger often denounced Western European attempts (and Ostpolitik in particular) to move
independently and outside the bipolar East/West framework: «with respect to the Europeans» Kissinger told his staff in late 1973 - «the basic problem is ... the attempt to organize Europe, to
unify Europe on an anti-American basis, or at least on a basis in which criticism of the United
States becomes the organizing principle». All the problems were «traceable to one fundamental
cause, which is the cooperation between the French and the British to split off Europe in a manner
in which the organizing principle for European unity becomes their capability of resisting us: and in
which they want us out of any structural arrangement in which we might predominate». 36
A realist and Eurocentric perspective justified and explained also Nixon’s and Kissinger’s policies
toward China and the Vietnamese situation. The opening to China was read and presented through
strict bipolar lenses: not as an instrument to engage China in a web of constraining
interdependences, but as a tool to exert more pressure on the Soviet Union. Establishing a
relationship with China was from this perspective the logical result of a strategic interest
Washington had come to share with Beijing: that of containing the Soviet Union, and avoiding a
Soviet predominance in East Asia. China could indeed help the United States, regionally balancing
the Soviet Union and permitting the U.S. to limit expenditures and commitments. Hardly
surprisingly, the U.S.-China-Soviet triangle was unbalanced from the beginning. It was based – as
William Bundy has emphasized – «not on equal treatment of the Communist powers but on a
pronounced favoring of China».37
36
Meeting of Secretary of State’s Staff, December 26 1973, NARA, RG 59, Lot File 78D443, Box 1. In this sense
(from a geopolitical perspective) détente was indeed a very conservative strategy, at least in Europe. For a different
analysis of the intrinsic conservatism of détente see Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest.
37
William Bundy, Tangled Web, 238. See also Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, China Confidential: American Diplomats and
Sino-American Relations, 1945-1996, New York, Columbia University Press, 2001, 226-227. Kissinger initial
scepticism toward an opening to China was also due to his strong Eurocentric perspective and to his tendency to
downplay the strategic importance of a Sino-American rapprochement. See Jussi Hanhimäki, Flawed Architect, 32-35.
20
As for Vietnam, in the late 1960s/early 1970s no one in the White House still feared a regional
domino in South-East Asia. The public strategic rationale for going to Vietnam, if there ever was
one, was widely discredited. Pulling out rapidly was the only logical option. However, the crucial
issue of credibility – which showed once more Kissinger’s Eurocentric view of international
relations – prevented that from happening. A meaningful peace had to be a «peace with honor»: the
United States, Henry Kissinger claimed, «may have exaggerated the significance of Vietnam in the
early stages of its involvement», but nevertheless «the confidence in American promises» was still
at stake.38 The extension of the war to Cambodia, periodical resumption of the dramatic aerial
bombing of North Vietnam, the mining of Haiphong port and a long and bloody prolongation of the
war logically ensued. That the Vietnamese had no breaking-point was simply impossible to believe
for Kissinger, who would often call for «a savage, decisive blow against North Vietnam»: «I refuse
to believe that a little fourth-rate power like Vietnam does not have a breaking point», he once
famously told his advisers.39
Kissingerism as the un-American betrayal of U.S. venerable foreign policy traditions: the
neoconservative critique of détente and of Kissinger’s realism
Kissinger’s alleged realism was based first and foremost upon recognition of the limits that the
situation imposed to U.S. foreign policy and freedom of action. Scant and decreasing resources,
diminishing domestic support, relative economic and strategic decline vis-à-vis allies and enemies,
all seemed to oblige the U.S. to embark upon a different path. Kissinger himself never stopped
lecturing the country on this: «for the first time in our history – he once proclaimed – we face the
stark reality that the ... challenge is unending ... We must learn to conduct foreign policy as other
38
Quoted in Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century. U.S. Foreign Policy Since 1900, Chicago, Chicago University
Press, 1999, 228.
39
Quoted in Jussi Hanhimäki, Flawed Architect, 62. But on this issue see also George Herring, America’s Longest War,
New York, Wiley, 1979; Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, New York, HarperCollins, 1991, and, more
recently, Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 1998.
21
nations have had to conduct it for so many centuries – without escape and without respite ... this
condition will not go away».40
Arms controls, delegating responsibility to third parties (which was the essential element of the socalled Nixon doctrine, but also of the project of Vietnamization), reducing and eventually ending
the U.S. presence in Vietnam: all aimed at finding a way to operate within these new structural and
contingent constraints. Realpolitik was (or had to be) much cheaper than Cold War liberal
globalism. Via power politics it was possible to preserve, and possibly extend, U.S. influence
without putting its solvency at risk. And some results were indeed achieved: defense expenditures
as a percentage of GNP declined from 8.2% in fiscal 1970 to 5.2% in fiscal 1977; indexed to
inflation, American defense outlays declined at an annual rate of 4.5% between 1970 and 1975.41
More importantly, Kissinger’s realist turn appeared to be the most successful and effective response
to the isolationist impulse many Americans had fallen prey to. It was a way to build a new and
lasting consensus around a reformulated and revised foreign policy. Vietnam and the difficulties the
country underwent during the Sixties seemed to have discredited for good Cold War liberalism and
its moral (and geopolitical) certainties. A new foreign policy doctrine was needed. Initially,
Kissinger’s realpolitik seemed the winning ticket. What it offered was a clear set of a-historical
precepts each great power had to follow. In them there was no room for morality, messianism or,
even, generosity. America was no longer asked to go out “in search of monsters to destroy.
Kissinger would reaffirm this necessity until the end of his time in government (typically, he would
afterwards reverse many of his positions, in the vain attempt to legitimate himself with the new
Right of Ronald Reagan). The world – Kissinger claimed in 1976, under heavy domestic attack –
was still a place «where power remains the ultimate arbiter». While the nation «must be true to its
40
Quoted in Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century, 234. Many scholars have seen in this a proof of Kissinger’s
Spenglerian pessimism. According to Dana Allin «one cannot help but observe Kissinger’s pessimistic conservatism – a
sense that the Western forces of order and stability were at odds with a disintegrating tendency as fundamental as
entropy»; Kissinger’s was «a conservative gloom». Dana Allin, Cold War Illusions, 30. Kissinger’s biographers have
always accepted this interpretation (see Jussi Hanhimäki, Flawed Architect and Walter Isaacson, Kissinger, New York,
Simon & Schuster, 1992). However, Kissinger’s action while in power, and some of his most obvious mistakes, seem to
have been caused by an excessive optimism over the possibility to reverse a certain course of action.
41
Data taken from John Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 321.
22
own beliefs», it must also «survive in a world of sovereign nations and competing wills ... truth
compels a recognition of our limits ... to what extent are we able to affect the internal policies of
other countries and to what extent is it desirable?».42
Realpolitik was thus also, when not primarily, the discursive medium of this effort of consensusbuilding. For some time it seemed to work. Détente was widely appreciated by the American public.
Despite the president’s initial misgivings, his opening to China reasoned well with a large majority
of Americans, who supported it enthusiastically. Much to Nixon’s despair, the popularity of
Kissinger, which he carefully cultivated, increased accordingly. In 1972 a Gallup poll ranked
Kissinger fourth among the most admired Americans, after Nixon, Truman and Billy Graham. The
same poll ranked him first the following year. The mainstream press, which Kissinger cajoled and
flattered incessantly, ran out of hyperbole to describe Kissinger’s achievements and the successes of
détente. Joseph Kraft, in a column entitled “The Virtuoso at 50”, compared Kissinger’s diplomatic
accomplishments to those of the great statesman of the past. The balance created with China and the
Soviet Union – Kraft maintained – was «a diplomatic accomplishment comparable in magnitude to
the feats of Castlereagh and Bismarck». 43
Quite paradoxically, Kissinger’s popularity reached a new peak with the Watergate scandal, which
coincided with his appointment as Secretary of State and with the inevitable decline of presidential
authority. Kissinger appeared (and in many ways was) completely in charge of United States
foreign policy. His reaction to the October 1973 war in the Middle East and, even more, his shuttle
diplomacy were presented as the apogee of the solo-virtuoso performance that had come to qualify
Kissinger’s realpolitik. All in all, shuttle diplomacy was also demonstrating that détente was not a
42
The speech, entitled “The Moral Foundations of Foreign Policy” was a reply to his domestic neoconservative critics.
It is reprinted in Henry Kissinger, American Foreign Policy.
43
Quoted in Walter Isaacson, Kissinger, 501.
23
defeatist one-way road to inferiority, and could well serve the traditional U.S. objective to reduce
Soviet influence in a crucial strategic theatre.44
Kissinger’s actions in the Middle East were in fact revealing the real face of détente. For the U.S. it
was a strategy finalized to crystallize the status quo in Europe in order to relaunch the bipolar
competition elsewhere. Quite ironically, however, in the same period détente began to be
challenged domestically as an ineffective and fatalistic way of dealing with the Soviet threat.
Kissinger’s until then mesmerizing (and very popular) “Europeaness” ceased to be an asset. His
critics, who were able to exploit it effectively, harshly rebuked it. One National Review
commentator went as far as to describe Kissinger as an «unassimilated outsider ... a European by
heritage and cultural choice, a cosmopolitan by circumstance, an American by deliberate (and
hazardous) calculation» who «revealed the derivative nature of his national identity in almost
pathetic fashion».45
Many old-style conservatives denounced the intrinsic contradictions of détente and of the much
broadcasted realist metamorphosis of U.S. foreign policy. According to James Burnham «Secretary
Kissinger scolds Senator Jackson for lousing up a friendly trade agreement with the No.1
Communist power by quibbling over the right to emigrate; Secretary Kissinger then scolds the
congressional leadership for refusing to vote military aid to be used fighting Communists in
Southeast Asia; President Nixon exchange fulsome toasts with the Communist chiefs at Peking and
Moscow; President Nixon authorizes the CIA to destabilize a Chilean regime on the finding that it
would end up under Communist domination ... the Cold War model was ... comprehensible to
ordinary citizens. It gave the reassuring impression that the government knew at least what it was
trying to do ... the citizens have lost confidence because they feel their government doesn’t know
where it is going. And they are right».46
44
William Bundy, Tangled Web, 429-472; Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation. American-Soviet Relations
from Nixon to Reagan, Washington DC, Brookings Institutions, 1985, 360-408; William Quandt, Peace Process:
American Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984, 162-163.
45
Quoted in Walter Laqueur, “Kissinger and the Politics of Détente”, Commentary 56, 46-52.
46
James Burnham, “Detente Contradiction”, The National Review, March 28, 1975.
24
Even more effective, however, was the critique moved to détente by the so-called neoconservatives:
a group of Cold War liberals who intended to reaffirm the moral certainties and the unchallengeable
values of Cold War liberalism, and of the vision and political project that stemmed from them. 47
Neoconservatives led by senator Henry Jackson began to effectively challenge Kissinger, hindering
(and ultimately bringing to an end) détente with the Soviets. One of the main problems Kissinger
had to face was in fact an amendment to the 1973 Trade Reform Act, sponsored by Jackson and by
senator Charles Vanik (a democrat from Ohio). The Jackson-Vanik amendment tied the granting to
the Soviet Union of Most-Favored Nation Status – a crucial element of the set of agreements
achieved by Washington and Moscow – to the lifting of restrictions on the emigration of Soviet
Jews. The amendment represented an obvious interference in Soviet domestic affairs and
contributed to the successive deterioration of U.S.-Soviet relations. In addition, Jackson worked
hard to tack an amendment to the first SALT agreement, which imposed the (meaningless) principle
of quantitative parity (the so-called “equal aggregates”) in any future discussion. Finally,
neconservatives – and Jackson overall – passionately embraced the cause of Soviet dissidents, thus
contributing to creating an additional element of tension with the Soviets.48
Neocons objected to several aspects of détente and of Kissinger’s realpolitik. Before dealing with
each one of them, I would like to emphasize that – ab origine – there was one more general
justification of the neoconservative rejection of détente, one which in many ways contained (and
predated) all the others: the condemnation of the very un-Americaness of Kissinger’s foreign policy
and of the decision to open a dialogue with the Soviets. Or, better, the denunciation of the very un-
47
John Ehrmann, The Rise of Neoconservatism. According to Tod Lindberg «The conservation of liberalism», and the
reaffirmation of its intrinsic «expansionist ... character» defined, ab origine, neoconservatism and what it stood for. See
Tod Lindberg, “Neoconservatism’s Liberal Legacy”, Policy Review, 127, 2004; Online. Available HTTP:
http://www.policyreview.org/oct04/lindberg.html.
48
George Kennan and Henry Kissinger concurred in criticizing Soviet dissidents and their American supporters.
According to Kennan it was not «right for a great government such as ours to try to adjust its foreign policy in order to
work internal changes in another country» («then» – added Kissinger caustically – «you know what would have
happened to them under Stalin»). See Telephone Call George Kennan/Henry Kissinger, September 14, 1973, 8.55 pm,
NARA, Nixon Presidential Material Project (hereinafter NPMP), Henry A. Kissinger Telephone Conversations
Transcripts (hereinafter Telcons), Chronological File, Box 22.
25
Americaness (and Europeaness) of realism itself.49 As American Enterprise Institute scholars Tom
Donnelly and Vance Serchuk recently put it, for neoconservatives realism has always been «deeply
at odds with both American political principles and American national interests»; it reflects «a
dogmatic, inflexible, even reactionary ideology» that «stand[s] opposed to the great liberal tradition
of American strategic culture». Such tradition, oddly enough, would include «Abraham Lincoln,
Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush». 50
What were – according to the neoconservative critique – the main elements that revealed the
unacceptable and un-American “Europeaness” of Kissinger’s approach? I will briefly mention four
possible categories.
I: Détente as a form of (very European) neo-appeasement. Over the years, its detractors presented
détente more and more as a new and updated incarnation of Europe’s (and of U.S.
“Europeanizers’”) traditional penchant for appeasing totalitarian dictators. Not by chance, there was
a progressive rediscovery among disaffected liberals of the «intellectual anchor of the Cold War»:
the politically and intellectually ubiquitous category of totalitarianism. 51 This concept, an analytical
tool and a rhetorical device that had been widely employed during the early post-World War II
years, had faded progressively from the Cold War discourse, particularly after the season of détente
had begun.
Appeasement and the evergreen “lesson of Munich” were therefore the analogical models employed
successfully by neoconservatives to attack Kissinger and the European/realist turn he had allegedly
49
I have argued elsewhere that, when it first appeared, neoconservatism was a quintessential manifestation of a
typically American “exceptionalist nationalism”. See Mario Del Pero, Da Henry Kissinger ai neoconservatori, cit. e Ivi,
A “Balance of Power that Favors Freedom”. The Historical and Ideological Roots of the Neoconservative Persuasion,
European University Institute Working Paper, 2005/22.
50
Tom Donnelly and Vance Serchuk “John Kerry, Reactionary”, The Weekly Standard on-line, July 19, 2004, Online.
Available HTTP: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/306spzzf.asp and Ibid.,
“Unrealistic
Realism”,
AEI
online,
July
9,
2004.
Online.
Available
HTTP:
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.20875/pub_detail.asp. In the pantheon of pre-neoconservatives suggested by the
two authors, one surprising omission is Harry Truman, whom many neocons continue to revere. The absence of the
militarily, fiscally and socially conservative Dwight Eisenhower, and that of traditional conservative George Bush Sr. is
instead emblematic.
51
N. Pal Singh, “Cold War Redux: on the ‘New Totalitarianism’”, Radical History Review, 2003, 171-181; Abbot
Totalitarianism. The Inner History of the Cold War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 190-95.
26
imposed to U.S. foreign policy. Détente – they claimed – placed the U.S. in grave danger, just as it
did with Britain in the 1930s: as Henry Jackson’s sympathetic biographer Robert Kaufman wrote,
«Jackson’s admirers and the senator himself saw a parallel between his relentless campaign against
détente during the 1970s and Winston Churchill’s campaign against appeasement during the
1930s».52
Reference to appeasement flourished in those years and were widely used by opponents of détente.
According to historian of the Soviet Union Richard Pipes, «wishful thinking, reinforced by the fear
of the alternative» was draining «the will to face realities». «Mutatis mutandis» – Pipes maintained
in 1973 – «the mood behind the present attitude is not unlike that of Britain during the appeasement
era of the 1930’s: a combination of a dread of a repetition of a world war (only intensified today
because of the nature of new weapons), plus admiration for the Germans as a technologically
advanced “young” nation combined with some disgust over Britain as a “decadent” country». For
Henry Jackson «the greatest mistake of the Western world» had been «the failure of Britain and
France and America to heed the warnings of Winston Churchill and to stand, firm and early, for the
defense of individual liberty – not merely for territorial security, which proved illusive and nearly
catastrophic, but for the spiritual security of the individual». «I would like to hope» Jackson stated –
that what was «true of Germany in the 1930’s will not turn out to be true of the Soviet Union in the
1970’s. But I am bound to say that I share the apprehensions of those who remain doubtful».53
II: Détente as the renunciation of U.S. traditional search for primacy. In order to present détente as
a neo-appeasement it was, however, indispensable to stress the Soviets’ innate aggressiveness and
expansionist design. It was – in other words – necessary to emphasize the continuity in Soviet
52
Robert Kaufman, Henry Jackson. A Life in Politics, Seattle, Washington University Press, 2000, 243. Conveniently
enough, Jackson tended to forget that Churchill himself had attempted to promote an early détente with the Soviets in
the 1950s. See Fred Logevall, A Critique of Containment. On the “lesson of Munich” see Ernest May, “Lessons of the
Past”: the Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy, New York/Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1973.
53
Richard Pipes to Henry Jackson, February 26, 1972; HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No. 3560-6, Speeches and Writing,
Others, Box 25. Henry Jackson, “Détente and Human Rights”, Commencement, Yeshiva University, New York”, June
4 1973, HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No. 3560-6, Speeches and Writings, Box 11.
27
actions and goals. From this perspective, the intense and accelerated rearmament undertaken by
Moscow in the previous decade seemed to offer compelling evidence. The Soviet Union –
Kissinger’s critics claimed – was intent in achieving a military (and nuclear) superiority, which
could then be used to blackmail the West. This critique was based upon an assumption that
neoconservatives were never willing to abandon: the idea that nuclear superiority still mattered. As
strategist Paul Nitze would later put it, «to have an advantage at the utmost level of violence helps
play at every lesser level». 54 What followed, quite logically, was not just an exhortation to prevent
the Soviet Union to achieve superiority, but also a demand that the United States regained rapidly
the unchallengeable power preponderance it had had in the past. Indeed, parity and MAD (Mutual
Assured Destruction) had been always difficult to swallow for many Americans, including
neoconservatives, for whom they amounted again to a form of appeasement. Security based upon
deterrence was in fact security based primarily, if not exclusively upon fear; and fear could paralyze
will, inhibit courage, blind judgment and lead to inevitable defeat.
Strategic interdependence was thus presented as unacceptable: because it undermined U.S.
credibility vis-à-vis allies and enemies; because it tied American hands and constrained (and
sometimes annulled) its freedom of action; because it was immoral to build peace upon the certainty
of global destruction in case of war. With the rejection of strategic interdependence came the
invitation to regain and extend superiority. «Strategic parity with the Soviet adversary is not good
enough» Henry Jackson claimed. «There is no excuse for any American to ignore the first priority
of American policy. And the first priority in this uncertain and dangerous world is to maintain a
greater nuclear power and strength than the Soviet Union ... the survival of our nation and our
allies’ freedom depends not on a parity of nuclear power but on a margin of advantage in nuclear
power for the peace-keepers over the peace-upsetters (...) Our policy should be to create and
54
Quoted in Dana Allin, Cold War Illusions, 65; see also Strobe Talbott, The Masters of the Game: Paul Nitze and
Nuclear Peace, New York, Knopf, 1988.
28
maintain a relationship of nuclear forces favourable to deterrence of adventurism and aggression».55
Parity and nuclear sufficiency were thus presented as a one-way stop towards inferiority. This
explains the loud call for a return to the safer and more acceptable principle of superiority. Even
more, it explains the rise of a dream that is still very much with us: the creation of a defensive
shield, capable of defending the republic and of making it, once more, unassailable. A shield that
would allow the country to regain its lost sovereignty and, with it, its freedom of action; to
reacquire its independence; to remake the U.S. an exceptional nation, exempt from those laws of
history that the other nations had instead to abide by.56
III: Détente as a Machiavellian (and European) form of amoral politics. Originally,
neoconservatism was the response to the rise of the New Left and to its growing influence in the
Democratic party. It was the sudden emergence of a radical critique of everything Americans had
stood for during the Cold War that catalyzed the emergence of neoconservatism. In its first,
embryonic stages, neoconservatism was, in fact, primarily a reaction to the political, cultural, moral,
revisionism of the mid/late 1960s. Such revisionism was hardly monolithic and consistent. Its
sources of inspiration were multiple and often contradictory. However, to its enemies (and not just
to them), it was based upon a premise that was very difficult to accept: the outright rejection of the
moral certainties and the unchallengeable values of Cold War liberalism, along with the vision and
political project that stemmed from them. Cold War liberals (and soon-to-be neoconservatives)
incessantly denounced New Left cultural, moral and political relativism and the way it was
contaminating mainstream liberalism and the democratic party.57 For neoconservatives, the New
Left was first and foremost “Un-American”. It was a culturally, politically, intellectually and
morally alien phenomenon. Under attack, Jeane Kirkpatrick claimed, was the belief that the U.S.,
55
Henry Jackson “No Time for Rest”, September 24, 1968, Draft speech at the Senate, HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No.
3560-6, Speeches and Writing, Box 6.
56
Francis Fitzgerald, Way Out there in the Blue. Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, New York, Simon &
Schuster, 2000.
57
Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and its Discontents, 222-236; Paul Buhle and James MacMillian (eds.), The New Left
Revisited
29
despite all, was a «decent and successful – though imperfect – society». Irving Kristol asserted that
American «young radicals» were «far less dismayed at America’s failure to become what it ought to
be than they [were] contemptuous of what it thinks it ought to be. For them as for Oscar Wilde, it
[was] not the average American who [was] disgusting; it [was] the ideal American». 58 Eugene
Rostow denounced «the crisis of the American spirit». What was required – Rostow claimed – was
«old testament fire, eloquence and passion, and some old fashioned patriotism as well ... People like
us cannot allow our party to be taken over by mush heads. We don’t want to vote for Nixon next
year».59
Through a curious transfer, the same kind of accusation (i.e. cultural relativism and moral
agnosticism) could be moved also against Kissinger’s realpolitik. Indeed, a basic staple of realism
had been the necessity to separate morality from politics and power. And Kissinger had frequently,
and conveniently, reminded the American public that the time of a moral and messianic foreign
policy had finally passed. However, such approach was producing several consequences
unacceptable both to neoconservatives and to a growing majority of the American public. Stripping
U.S. foreign policy of its uniquely moral dimension (that is, again, “Europeanizing” it) meant
normalizing the U.S. itself, making it just one country among the many. A-moral great power
politics and acceptance of nuclear parity implied – surreptitiously but unmistakably – also moral (or
a-moral) equivalence between the two superpowers. It was in these years – Donnelly and Serchuck
maintain – that «“moral equivalence” between East and West slipped into the mainstream of U.S.
strategic thought, and so a critique advanced by left-wing dissenters during the Vietnam years was
adopted by a right-wing administration in the White House». 60
The quintessential product of the insidious consequences of an amoral (and ultimately immoral)
foreign policy were deterrence and nuclear sufficiency themselves. Accepting deterrence meant to
put the safety of the United States into the hands of others. Or, better, into the hands of the very
58
Jeane Kirkpatrick, “The Revolt of the Masses”, Commentary, 1973, 55: 58-62; Irving Kristol, “When Virtue Loses
All Her Loveliness – Some Reflections on Capitalism and the Free Society”, The Public Interest, 1970, 21: 3-16.
59
Eugene Rostow to Henry Jackson, January 27 1971, HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No. 3560-6, Subject File, Box 85.
60
Donnelly and Serchuk, “John Kerry, Reactionary”.
30
“Other”, the Cold War absolute and, up to a few years earlier, illegitimate enemy of the United
States. It meant, as Henry Jackson claimed, to place faith «in nothing more tangible than a dream of
Soviet self-restraint».61
IV: Détente as the attempt to separate domestic from foreign policy. The immoral and
counterproductive a-moralism of Kissinger’s realpolitik was even more evident in the attitude
Kissinger had towards dissidence in the Soviet bloc. The cause of Soviet dissidents was embraced
with enthusiasm by neoconservatives, and was one of the crucial factors that concurred to derail the
American-Soviet rapprochement of the early 1970s. To Kissinger, Soviet dissidents (just as
Eurocommunists) were a nuisance to the great power diplomacy the U.S. and the USSR had finally
agreed to play. To his domestic critics, instead, the repression of dissidence in the Soviet bloc was
not only the proof that the Soviet Union had not changed, but also dramatic evidence of a shameful
moral abdication on the part of the United States, which had been the only country capable until
then of standing up to the Soviet ideological and civilizational challenge. American foreign policy –
neoconservatives Robert Kagan and William Kristol had recently proclaimed – has to «be informed
with a clear moral purpose, based on the understanding that its moral goals and its fundamental
national interests» were «always in harmony». A «remoralization of America at home» requires
«remoralization of American foreign policy. For both follow from Americans’ belief that the
principles of the Declaration of Independence» are «not merely the choices of a particular culture»,
but «universal, enduring, ‘self-evident’ truths». «For conservatives» - Kristol and Kagan maintained
- «to preach the importance of upholding the core elements of the Western tradition at home, but to
profess indifference to the fate of American principles abroad» is «an inconsistency that cannot help
but gnaw at the heart of conservatism». 62 The lack of moral purpose in foreign policy – AFL-CIO
Henry Jackson, “The Strategic Balance and the Future of Freedom”, American Society of Newspapers Editors. April
14 1971, HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No. 3560-6, Speeches and Writings, Box 8. Simon Dalby, “Geopolitical discourse:
the Soviet Union as other”, Alternatives, 13, 1988, 415-42; Anders Stephanson, “Fourteen Notes”.
62
William Kristol and Robert Kagan, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy”, Foreign Affairs, 75, 1996, 18-32.
61
31
leader George Meany claimed – also undermined «moral purpose at home».63 Not dissimilarly,
Henry Jackson, criticizing Kissinger and Nixon, reaffirmed the impossibility of separating domestic
and foreign policy, and rejected outright the idea the U.S. should not interfere in the internal affairs
of other countries: «indeed even the term “domestic” when applied to our priorities can be
misleading» – he maintained – «for nothing could be more “domestic” than the survival of the
American people and the freedom of our people to choose their way of life free from outside
domination. My parents came from Norway, and it had one of the highest standards of living and
the cleanest environments in the world. But this wasn’t a help to the Norwegian people when the
Nazis crossed the frontier and overran the country». 64
New appeasement. Passive acceptance of weakness and inferiority. Immoral a-moralism.
Expression of an old style and pre-modern tendency to separate external from internal, foreign from
domestic. The opponents of détente presented (and often caricatured) Kissinger’s realpolitik in
many different ways. The common denominator in these criticisms was that Kissinger’s represented
a very unhealthy attempt to hybridize U.S. foreign policy traditions with European concepts and
practices. Whether it was really so is not of interest here. Suffice is to say that Kissinger thought it
was politically convenient and expedient to pretend so.
What is certain is that Kissinger (and Nixon with him) underestimated the strength and persistence
of America’s most august political tradition. They took too lightly the peculiarly U.S. brand of
exceptionalist nationalism and the impact it historically had on the way the United States
represented itself and its role in the international system. Of such nationalism, neoconservatism was
just the latest incarnation.65
63
George Meany, “Foreign Policy Choices for the 1970s and 80s”, Statement before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, December 8, 1975, HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No. 3560-6, Speeches and Writings Others, Box 23.
64
Henry Jackson, “Power and Responsibility”, February 14 1971, Annual Women’s Forum on National Security,
Washington, HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No. 3560-6, Speeches and Writings, Box 8.
65
See for instance Anatol Lieven, America. Right or Wrong. An Anatomy of American Nationalism, Oxford/New York,
Oxford University Press, 2004.
32
Building upon America’s belief in its exceptional and unique role, the neoconservatives were
indeed able to construct a new and lasting consensus on a foreign policy approach (and a foreign
policy ideology and discourse) which proved to be much more resilient and appealing than
Kissinger’s “Europeanizing” realpolitik. They did so by re-launching old moral and ideological
dichotomies; by reaffirming the necessity to seek military primacy and preponderance; by rejecting
the idea that the U.S. could be equivalent – in morality and might – to any other country.
Kissinger’s realism formally adhered to a gloomy and pessimistic philosophy very much alien to
America’s traditions. By contrast, neoconservatives attempted a syncretic amalgamation of
traditional conservatism and globalistic Cold War liberalism. Of the latter, they retained not just the
faith in U.S. intrinsic superiority, but also the conviction that superiority could be used as a force for
good in international politics: anti-Kissingeresque optimism soon became the distinctive mark of
neoconservatism. Neoconservatism was thus unmistakably American and optimistic: «the first
variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the American grain», according to
the intellectual father of the movement, Irving Kristol. It was, therefore, «hopeful, not lugubrious;
forward-looking, not nostalgic», whose general tone was «cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its 20 th
century heroes» were «TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies
as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater» were «politely
overlooked». A Cold War liberal – Henry Jackson proclaimed – is «essentially an optimist»: «if
there is a lesson in our remarkable history, it is that the genius of the American people is best
revealed in times of adversity. I cannot accept the conclusion that events like Watergate, Vietnam or
recession signal the decline of America. Our capacity for continued greatness as a nation is
undiminished; if there is any doubt, it can only be of our will to stay the course ... certainly there is
no other country in the world that has our human, cultural and spiritual resources ... for Americans,
33
whose basic values are shared by so much of mankind, the problems of the present are but
opportunities for new achievements».66
All in all, this optimism proved to be much more in tune with the mood of the country. As a
consequence, Kissinger’s realism ended up being nothing more than a significant parenthesis in the
history of United States foreign policy traditions.
66
Irving Kristol, “The Neoconservative Persuasion”, The Weekly Standard, 47, 2003; Henry Jackson, “What it Means
to be a Liberal”, August 14 1970, Commencement address, University of Puget Sound and Henry Jackson “Is the U.S.
still number 1?”, undated (ca. 1975), HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No. 3560-6, Speeches and Writings, Boxes 7 and 11.
34