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Now we can turn to Kissingers book Diplomacy (D) (1994) in order to glean
additional insights into his understanding of the intricate interrelationship of
idealist and realist perspectives. Kissinger talks about Trumans approach
to the Soviet Unions expansionism. Even though Truman took a get
tough stance, he did so within the Wilsonian mold. Like Roosevelt,
Truman rejected the balance of power, disdained justifying American
actions in terms of security, and sought to attach them to general
principles applicable to all mankind and in keeping with the new United
Nations Charter. Truman perceived the emerging struggle between the
United States and the Soviet Union as a contest between good and evil,
not as having to do with spheres of political influence. (Kissinger, D, 447)
Thus, for Kissinger, the foundation of Trumans tough realist foreign policy
was Wilsonian idealism as it was reflected in the Charter of the United
Nations.
For Kissinger Kennans Long Telegram is another expression of the mix of
idealist and realist conceptions. It provided the philosophical and
conceptual framework for interpreting Stalins foreign policy and the
impetus for the American conception of the Cold War, which Kissinger
regards as an idealist conception. (Kissinger, D, 447) For Kennan the
source of the Soviets expansionist policy was the communist ideology itself
which controlled Stalins approach to the world. Kissinger quotes Kennan:
Stalin regarded the Western capitalist powers as irrevocably hostile; his
hostility to the West was inherent in the Soviet Unions perception of the
outside world. The communists were instinctively afraid of the outside
world. Dictatorship was the only government that they understood. They
sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. This was
the inheritance from a long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers
who have relentlessly forced [their] country on to ever new heights of
military power in order to guarantee external security of their internally
weak regimes. (Kissinger, D, 448)
Kissinger argues that Kennans analysis led to an American perspective
that was expressed by H. Freeman Mathews. The Soviets must be
encouraged to understand that its expansionism would lead only to its own
destruction. For Kissinger this idealist conception was closely integrated
with a strategic approach that was grounded in realism. The Americans
must counter this expansionism with diplomacy and military might. It should
use the Charter of the United Nations as its justification for this military
opposition to expansion. Kissinger says that Clark Clifford agreed with this,
and expanded it to proclaim a global American security mission embracing
all democratic countries. (Kissinger, D, 449-50) For Kissinger, then, this
American moral idealism, integrated with a thoroughgoing military strategic
realism, was meant to guide its foreign policy throughout the Cold War
period.
Kissinger argues that the Kennan, Mathews, Clifford perspective was an
expression of a desire to transform the enemy rather than to destroy it.
Therefore the goal of American policy was not so much to restore the
balance of power as to transform Soviet society. A significant Soviet change
of heart, and probably an new set of soviet leaders, was required before an
overall Soviet-American agreement would be possible. (Kissinger, D, 45051) The conclusion was that it was pointless to negotiate with the Soviet
Union. After a Soviet change of heart, a settlement would become nearly
automatic. (Kissinger, D, 451) This integration of the ideal and the realistic
marked for Kissinger the essence of the early American Cold War policy.
America now had the conceptual framework to justify practical resistance to
Soviet expansionism. (Kissinger, D, 451-451)
In order to justify American aid to Greece and Turkey against the Soviets,
Truman needed an American statement of policy with regard to the Soviets.
Dean Acheson provided this policy statement. The United States should
take steps to strengthen countries threatened with Soviet aggression; it
should protect freedom itself. (Kissinger, D, 452) This was a global
struggle between democracy and dictatorship which became the heart of
the Truman Doctrine. (Kissinger, D, 452) It was expressed in Wilsonian
terms of a struggle between two ways of life. In the words of Wilson: one
was the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions,
representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty,
freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The
second is based upon a will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the
majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio,
fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. The United
States was acting on behalf of democracy and the world community
guided by the United Nations Charter. (Kissinger, D, 452)
The Truman Doctrine marked a watershed because, once America had
thrown down the moral gauntlet, the kind of Realpolitik Stalin understood
best would be forever at an end, and bargaining over reciprocal
concessions would be out of the question. Henceforth, the conflict could
only be settled by a change in Soviet purposes, by the collapse of the
Soviet system, or both. (Kissinger, D, 452-53) Thus, for Kissinger, even
though Stalins style of Realpolitik was at an end, American policy toward
the Soviets was an integration of both idealism and realism, but a realism
that was not the ruthless Realpolitik of bargaining over reciprocal
concessions, but rather the realism of strategic military containment. Of
course, history shows us that the Truman Doctrine of the rejection of
reciprocal bargaining was abandoned in practice. Bargaining, in fact, did
occur, for example in Kennedys secret deal regarding the missiles in
Turkey in exchange for Khrushchevs removal of the missiles from Cuba,
and as a result, preserved the tense peace. Again, the line between the
idealism and the realism is hard to locate precisely.
For Kissinger the Marshall Plan was another illustration of the idealistrealist synthesis. Once the challenge had been defined as the very future
of democracy, America could not wait until a civil war occurred [within
nations that had been infiltrated by communist elements, as it had in
Greece; it was in the [American] national character to attempt the cure.
(Kissinger, D, 453) This cure took the form of the Marshall Plan, which
committed America to the task of eradicating the social and economic
conditions that tempted aggression [and] which was open even to
governments in the Soviet orbit. (Kissinger, D, 453) In Kissingers analysis,
America had opted for direct aid for European recovery and to impede the
Communist Party and its front organizations which seek to perpetuate
complex that America would nearly tear itself apart trying to fulfill it.
(Kissinger, D, 456) The result was a confrontation between two military
alliances, and two spheres of influence along the entire length of the
dividing line in Central Europe. (Kissinger, D, 457) This spheres of
influence view was, however, not the public interpretation of this policy in
America. Wilsonianism was too powerful to permit America to call any
arrangement protecting the territorial status quo in Europe an alliance.
(Kissinger, D, 457) The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations stated that
this was not balance of power strategy. The NATO arrangement was,
instead, a balance of principle; it was designed for collective security, an
alliance against war itself. The Atlantic Alliance possessed a claim to
moral universality. For Dean Acheson it was advanced international
cooperation to maintain the peace, to advance human rights, to raise
standards of living, and to promote respect for the principle of equal rights
and self-determination of peoples. (Kissinger, D, 460)
For Kissinger, the European balance of power was being resurrected in
uniquely American rhetoric. American leadership of the Alliance guaranteed
that the new international order would be justified in moral, and
occasionally even messianic, terms. Americas leaders made exertions and
sacrifices unprecedented in peacetime coalitions on behalf of appeals to
fundamental values and comprehensive solutions, instead of the
calculations of national security and equilibrium that had characterized
European diplomacy. (Kissinger, D, 461)
In Kissingers opinion, this stance was sincere. No one acquainted with the
authors of the containment policy could doubt their sincerity. Nor could
America have sustained four decades of grueling exertion on behalf of a
policy which did not reflect its deepest values and ideals. (Kissinger, D,
461-62) Never before had a Great Power expressed objectives quite so
demanding of its own resources without any expectation of reciprocity other
than the dissemination of its national values. and these would be achieved
through global reform, not global conquest, the usual path of crusaders.
(Kissinger, D, 463) Kissingers claim to the sincerity of this American
idealist foreign policy can, of course, be disputed, however, such an
investigation is not the purpose of this essay which is, merely, to outline
Kissingers conception of the interrelation of idealist and realist conceptions
of American foreign policy.
The generation which had built the New Deal and won the Second World
War had enormous faith in itself and in the vastness of the American
enterprise. Only a society with enormous confidence in its achievements
and in its future could have mustered the dedication and the resources to
strive for a world order in which defeated enemies would be conciliated,
stricken allies restored, and adversaries converted. (Kissinger, D, 470)
This position overcame the opposition of Churchill, who wanted a
negotiated settlement with Russia while the Americans held the advantage,
and Lippmann, who thought that containment was too reactive and would
involve America in endless wars at points of the Soviets choosing, Wallace,
who wanted to ignore the Soviets and turn national attention inward to its
own needed reforms, and the Dulleses, who accepted containment but
wanted a far more proactive and aggressive, if covert, and realist,
resistance to Soviet attempts at expansion.
Kissinger argues that in time, however, as America became involved in
distant and inconclusive and ambiguous wars of questionable significance
to its interests, this optimism began to fade and controversy accelerated.
Containment was an extraordinary theory at once hard-headed and
idealistic, profound in its assessment of Soviet motivations yet curiously
abstract in its prescriptions, thoroughly American in its utopianism, it
assumed that the collapse of a totalitarian adversary could be achieved in
an essentially benign way. With all of these qualifications, containment was
a doctrine that saw America through more than four decades of
constructions struggle, and ultimately, triumph. The victim of its ambiguities
turned out to be the American conscience. Tormenting itself in its
traditional quest for more perfection, America would emerge, after more
than a generation of struggle, lacerated by its exertions and controversies,
yet having achieved almost everything it had set out to do. (Kissinger, D,
471-72) Thus, for Kissinger, idealism, to be effective, must be carefully
crafted such that it is not allowed to wander over into an abstract and
a wider consensus on where America should draw the line does not yet
exist.( Kissinger, D, 813) Through most of its history America knew no
foreign threat to its survival. When such a threat finally emerged during the
Cold War, [that threat] was utterly defeated. The American experience has
thus encouraged the belief that America, alone among the nations of the
world, is impervious and that it can prevail by the example of its virtues and
good works. In the post-Cold War world, such an attitude would turn
innocence into self-indulgence. At a time when America is able neither to
dominate the world nor to withdraw from it, when it finds itself both allpowerful and totally vulnerable, it must not abandon the ideals which have
accounted for its greatness. But neither must it jeopardize that greatness
by fostering illusions about the extent of its reach. For America, any
association with Realpolitik must take into account the core values of the
first society in history to have been explicitly created in the name of liberty.
Yet Americas survival and progress will depend as well on its ability to
make choices which reflect contemporary reality. In the past, American
foreign policy efforts were inspired by utopian visions of some terminal
point after which the underlying harmony of the world would simply reassert
itself. Henceforth, few such final outcomes are in prospect; the fulfillment of
Americans ideals will have to be sought in the patient accumulation of
partial successes. The Wilsonian goals of Americas past peace, stability,
progress, and freedom for mankind will have to be sought in a journey
that has no end. (Kissinger, D, 835-36)
To conclude then, from the above outline, it seems fair to say that Kissinger
expresses four interrelated conceptions of the idealist conception of
international relations:
The Moral Foundations of Foreign Policy: The first is that the United States
has demonstrated a foreign policy that emerges out of principles that can
be understood as moral: it has espoused a strong belief in the legitimacy of
democratic government, the rule of law, the primacy of stability, respect for
social values and economic prosperity, peaceful relations with other
nations, the negotiated settlement of differences, respect for pluralism,
support for the United Nations and its Charter, support for global
governance and for global social and economic institutions, the reduction of
nuclear armaments, the protection of and support for nations which resisted
communism and colonialism and for modern developing nations. Kissinger
does not argue that American foreign policy has never strayed from such
idealist stances; but he argues that the United States was founded upon
and has largely held to an international stance that is characterized as
moral.
Choice Amidst Ambiguity is Moral: A second conception is that relations
between nations are moral because they necessitate choice in the midst of
the ineluctable and unavoidable reality of ambiguity, rapid change, constant
political, social and economic turmoil, and tremendous military danger. To
choose in the midst of this ambiguity is the essence of a moral stance.
Philosophic Idealism: Third, Kissingers conception of idealism and realism
is rooted in Kantian philosophy and epistemology. International relations
inescapably occur within the context of human experience. They are
constructions of human interpretation. The ideals and the realities of
international relations intrinsically have been, are, will continue to be
formulated from and embodied in our thoughts, emotions and actions. We
are ineluctably the creatures of lived-in time and space. This cannot be
otherwise.
The Inextricable Integration of Idealism-Realism: Fourth, Kissinger regards
idealism and realism as inextricably intertwined. They cannot be conceived
of as separate. International relations require both idealism as guiding
moral purpose and realism as the expression of that purpose. Foreign
policy that trumpets dominant moral claims leads to dogmatism and
authoritarianism; foreign policy that takes pride in total realism (Realpolitik),
pragmatism manifests mere expedience and inhumane efficiency. In this
regard, Kissinger expresses many ideals that echo those of John Rawls.