Diplomacy

"Kissinger’s book is called Diplomacy, but it is really a monumental historical work where the conduct of international relations is interwoven through every one of the different aspects of it that he talks about. That was really the basis on which I chose the books that I have mentioned to you. Much of the book is devoted to Europe, and especially to European power struggles and relationships in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. In fact, in doing that, Kissinger is really addressing the unfolding of American foreign policy in the 20th century, and especially the direction it should now take. He talks about the singularities that America has ascribed to itself throughout its history, which have produced two contradictory attitudes towards foreign policy: one of them being the desire to perfect democracy at home and act as a beacon for the rest of mankind, and the other one being the view that America’s values make it obligatory to crusade for them around the world. However, he pays absolutely no attention to the post-war construction of the European community and to the influence that it exerted on the economic and political development during that period. It’s an immense canvas that he covers, and there are lacunae and you can criticise a certain amount of it – but I reckon that it’s an exceptionally interesting book. It’s a remarkable intellectual achievement. I got to know him really rather well, and he’s always taken a fairly Gaullist view of Europe; he’s very much affected by the Europe of the past, by 18th- and 19th-century politics. Now if you talk to him about it, he understands perfectly, but when he wrote this book he wasn’t really thinking in terms of Western Europe’s economic and political development. He once said about Europe, ‘I don’t know, if I pick up the telephone, who I should talk to.’ Of course, he did actually know. The person he should have talked to, because that was the way Europe was developing, was the Danish foreign minister, because Denmark was in the Chair in the six-month period during which he wanted to make his call. He didn’t like the Danish foreign minister and, anyway, he didn’t think Denmark was important enough. So he had a blind spot about Western Europe but, nonetheless, it’s a very remarkable book. When I tell the younger members of my family that I’m going to see Henry Kissinger, they say, ‘Oh! The merchant of death!’ He is a very controversial figure, and much of his political activity was pretty controversial, but, whether one likes it or not, and whether one approves of the methods or not, there is no doubt that he and Nixon established a relationship with China and he and Nixon got America out of Vietnam at a time when America had to get out of Vietnam. One can take a positive or negative view of that, but, on the whole, I take a positive view. One forgets that this is a German, born in Germany, who left as a boy, a Jewish boy in the early 30s, and then became a really extraordinary figure in American intellectual, political and historical life. Unlike some of the others of his time, he could never be president because he was not born there. Yes, I do like him. I do. I may be a bit exceptional, but I do. An awful lot of people abhor him, but as an individual I find him entertaining and intelligent and amusing to talk to. I saw him not long ago, and, like all of us, he’s getting old – but he’s still very good value!"

"The importance of Kissinger’s book is that it is fundamentally about power. It’s amazing how seldom people – newspapers, blogs, speeches – talk about power, but power is the raw thing at the heart of every political unit. The central unit in international affairs is the national government; in political affairs, there is no higher level of decision-making in the world than the national government. All the supranational stuff that goes on in the EU, the UN and NATO, is always a grouping of nation states. The councils of all these supranational bodies are representatives of the nation states. Even in the EU, in pillar one, countries can back out of things, if they really want to, as nation states. What Kissinger does is relate diplomacy to power and to relationships between people of power. He does that by describing various stages that he’s observed of 20th-century American history – how Americans have tried to enlarge their interests and protect their nation and national sovereignty through diplomacy. He looks at the relationship between diplomacy and the use of force and the importance of individual leaders who hold power, and he talks particularly about the great power holders of the 20th century – Nixon, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, Reagan, Gorbachev. He goes back to Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to talk about the collective effort after World War I. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Kissinger is a great figure of 20th-century diplomacy and therefore it is about his experience – you’re looking at diplomacy through the eyes of a great exponent of the diplomatic art. It’s about what went on around him, what went on that he had to try to promote, rearrange, manipulate and steer and how that worked and what the effects were. It’s about what he observed other people doing when he was subordinate to them – because he was only a foreign minister, not a head of state. He then relates his experience of the 20th century and his own diplomatic career to the new world order that he sees forming in the post-Cold War period. He is, above anybody else, the great link between the Cold War period and the post-Cold War period in terms of the practice of diplomacy and the effect of diplomacy. I think it is his realpolitik message. You can follow a diplomatic line of principle, as Woodrow Wilson did, and try and create a doctrine for collectivism – but power will always intervene, particularly at the national level and therefore you have to be prepared to create enough power to hold your own interests against competition from others. You have to be able to ward off, before there is the use of force – through persuasion, through words rather than weapons – the attacks that there may be on your interests and on your lines of activity. Increasingly, in the post-Cold War period, this is coming through in areas like trade, and attention being paid to the developing world, rather than between the great powers. He’s trying to explain how it needs to be adapted in this new era. But this book was published in 1995, and global change is running away from him. His example of how you relate power to interests and how you arrange a peaceful structure of international relationships round the circumstances of the age, is relevant in its lessons – but increasingly the world is looking different from the one he was looking at when he wrote the book. The importance of the book is understanding the effect of power and the input of those who understand how to use power."

"Kissinger was an academic before he was a diplomat and negotiator. He brought with him the knowledge and baggage of a historian. He was fascinated by the Congress of Vienna and clearly saw himself as a modern-day Talleyrand or Metternich, the French and Austrian representatives at the Congress. Modern foreign policy divides into what I call the ‘realos’ and the ‘fundis’, the terminology used to describe the different factions in Germany’s Green Party. The ‘realos’ believe you have interests and you’re trying to achieve the balance of power. The ‘fundis’ are trying to create a better world through foreign policy and negotiation. Kissinger is the patron saint of the ‘realos’. He took on the Wilsonian doctrine – the original American idealistic doctrine – and argued it was a mistake. He said that people should be more realistic about what they were trying to achieve. This was, of course, what he did as a practitioner and why he became slightly discredited. He’s still the grand old man of foreign policy and has been consulted by numerous presidents since leaving office. He was one of the leading practitioners in the Vietnam peace talks and in opening up to China. He was almost the inventor of that sort of shuttle diplomacy; he would get on a plane and rush back and forth between Egypt and Israel. Some of the lessons he draws from that are useful talking points for today’s negotiators. I admire him, but I’m not sure I admire what he did."