Diplomacy

The founder, for Kissinger, is Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIII of France from 1624 until his death in 1642. Here was a prince of the Catholic Church who, in the middle of Europe's great religious war, sent French money and eventually French armies to help the Protestant side. The Thirty Years' War was tearing the continent apart along the fault line of faith, and the most powerful clergyman in France chose to weaken the Catholic Habsburgs rather than strengthen his own church.

Richelieu had a phrase for what governed his choices: raison d'état, the reason of state. The interests of France came before the interests of religion, before dynasty, before conscience. What mattered was that the Habsburg empire, straddling Spain and Austria and half the German lands, was too strong — strong enough to encircle France. Everything else, including the confessional loyalties that most of Europe still treated as sacred, was subordinate to keeping that one power from becoming supreme. It was, Kissinger notes, a genuinely new idea about how a state should reason.

The inheritor, Kissinger argues, was Britain — and Britain's genius was to make the balance of power a matter of geography and temperament rather than doctrine. An island off the coast of Europe, protected by its navy, England had no interest in territory on the continent and every interest in making sure no single power controlled it. So it appointed itself the balancer: the state that threw its weight against whoever was strongest at the moment, and only against them.

This produced a foreign policy of spectacular inconsistency that Kissinger admires precisely for its consistency of purpose. Britain fought the Spain of Philip II, then the France of Louis XIV, then Napoleon, then eyed a rising Germany — always the leading land power, whoever it happened to be. Allies were disposable. A country Britain subsidized in one war it might oppose in the next. Lord Palmerston gave the doctrine its motto in the nineteenth century: Britain had no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies, only interests that were eternal and perpetual, and it was Britain's duty to follow them.

The step back Kissinger takes is really an argument with his own country. America, he says, entered the twentieth century convinced that the whole European tradition of balance and interest was a corrupt game it wanted no part of. Woodrow Wilson, arriving at the Paris peace talks in 1919, offered a different vision: a world governed not by shifting alliances but by collective security, self-determination and international law — the League of Nations, a community of states that would judge aggression rather than merely balance it. It was, Kissinger acknowledges, the most influential idea any statesman contributed to the century.

He also thinks it was dangerous. Collective security assumes nations will fight for principle even where they have no interest at stake, and Kissinger doubts they ever reliably will. He sets against Wilson the figure of Theodore Roosevelt, an American who thought in terms of power and rivalry as naturally as any European, and who has almost no heirs in American memory. The tragedy, as the book frames it, is that Wilson's language won while the world kept running on Roosevelt's logic — leaving America to conduct realist policy while denying, even to itself, that it was doing so.

Kissinger ends where he began, with a country he served and never fully persuaded. America, he argues, has always oscillated between Wilson's crusade and Roosevelt's calculation, embarrassed by the second even as it practices it. His book is a long case for taking power seriously — for building settlements the losers can accept, for measuring rivals coldly, for treating peace as an equilibrium to be maintained rather than a virtue to be earned. The four centuries from Richelieu to the Cold War are, in his telling, one continuous seminar in that discipline.