How The World Works

By WALTER ISAACSON

BOTH FANS AND FOES OF HENRY Kissinger, whose ranks rival each other in fervor, have long agreed on one thing: he is brilliant at analyzing national interests and balances of power. If only he would step back from his corporate consulting and fashion-set socializing, they say, he might produce the grand tome that secures his place alongside George Kennan among the great diplomatic thinkers of our century.

Now he has, and it will. In Diplomacy (Simon & Schuster; 912 pages; $35), a sweeping portrayal of historical forces that begins with Cardinal Richelieu and ends with the challenges facing the world today, Kissinger makes the most forceful case by any American statesman since Theodore Roosevelt for the role of realism and its Prussian-accented cousin realpolitik in international affairs. Just as Kennan's odd admixture of romanticism and realism helped shape American attitudes at the outset of the cold war, Kissinger's emphasis on national interests rather than moral sentiments defines a framework for ^ dealing with the multipolar world now emerging. He has produced one of those rare books that are both exciting to read and destined to be a classic of their genre.

I should make it clear that I come to this book as an interested party. Two years ago, I wrote a biography of Kissinger, for the same publisher, which many of his detractors, and some of his putative friends, said pulled too many punches, and which his fervent defenders (himself among them) decried as too harsh. My conclusion was that Kissinger had a remarkable feel for the interplay of national interests but that he failed to appreciate the strength America derives from the openness of its democratic system. His strategic and tactical brilliance made possible the U.S.'s rapprochement with China, but his secretive style and disdain for the moralism that undergirds America's sense of mission led to a backlash from both the left and the right against detente with the Soviet Union. Diplomacy reaffirms both my respect for his brilliance as an analyst and my reservations about the low priority he places on the values that have made American democracy such a powerful international force.

The world, Kissinger writes, is entering an era when many states of comparable strength will compete and cooperate based on shifting national interests. America has never felt comfortable with such balance-of-power arrangements. So to understand what lessons history may hold for this new order, Kissinger maintains, we should study the diplomatic dances that began in Europe 350 years ago -- a topic that, perhaps not coincidentally, is Kissinger's area of academic expertise.

Cardinal Richelieu, the First Minister of France at the time, developed the concept of national interest while working to prevent the revival of the Holy Roman Empire, which he deemed a threat to France's security even though both were Catholic. No longer were national interests to be equated with religious or moral goals. During the 18th century, balance-of-power diplomacy was perfected by England, an island state with a security interest in preserving equilibrium on the European continent.

In discussing the century of relative stability after the Congress of Vienna in 1814, Kissinger draws on his published doctoral dissertation on Metternich and Castlereagh (A World Restored, 1957) and an academic paper he wrote on Bismarck. (Like a good professor, he footnotes himself.) One difference between the earlier works and Diplomacy is that Kissinger now puts slightly greater emphasis on the role of justice and values. "The Continental countries were knit together by a sense of shared values," he writes. "Power and justice were in substantial harmony."

This relationship between moral concerns and national interest, Kissinger argues, is the dominant theme in American foreign policy. There are the idealists, who believe that spreading American values should be the nation's motive force, and the realists, who emphasize national interests, credibility and power.

Kissinger, a European refugee who read Metternich more avidly than Jefferson, is unabashedly in the realist camp. "No other nation," he writes, "has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism." Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a rather unsettling tribal ritual. The practice of basing policy on ideals rather than interests, he points out, can make a nation seem dangerously unpredictable.

In fact, America's idealism and realism have been interwoven ever since Benjamin Franklin played an ingenious balance-of-power game in France while simultaneously propagandizing about America's exceptional values. From the Monroe Doctrine to Manifest Destiny, the U.S. has linked its interests to its ideals. This was especially true during the cold war, which was a moral crusade as well as a security struggle.

Kissinger's tone shifts from academic to defensive when he discusses Vietnam and his own turn on the world stage, as National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford. He pounds away at the naivete of the peace movement, the hypocrisy of the Establishment and the perfidy of the North Vietnamese. And he dismisses the notion that America's national interests would have been better served if Nixon had set an early withdrawal date (and in the process lands a little jab -- "Would that history were as simple as journalism" -- at the contrary treatment of this point in my book).

Kissinger casts Nixon as a realist, the first in the White House since Theodore Roosevelt. To support this contention, he quotes from Nixon's annual foreign policy reports, which Kissinger himself wrote. But as Kissinger admits, Nixon placed a picture of the unabashed idealist Woodrow Wilson in the Cabinet Room and repeatedly proclaimed the altruism of American policy. It amounted to a combination that Kissinger rather disparagingly calls "novel" but which seems to me quintessentially American.

"By the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century," Kissinger writes, using a typically grandiloquent phrase to say by 1990, Wilsonian idealism "seemed triumphant." This does not please him. He concludes his book with sentences of pro forma praise for America's idealism followed by sentences that begin with But. In the end, the buts win: "American idealism remains as essential as ever, perhaps even more so. But in the new world order, its role will be to provide the faith to sustain America through all the ambiguities of choice in an imperfect world."

Kissinger is probably right that the end of the cold war has made Wilson's emphasis on exporting American values "less practicable." Instead of engaging in a moral showdown with a rival superpower, the U.S. will have to participate in a balancing act with Europe, Japan, China and others. The irony may be that his emphasis on national interests and power balances may turn out to be more politically palatable now than when he had the chance to put it in practice in the midst of the cold war and Vietnam.