When the Soviet Union collapsed, many people thought international conflicts were coming to an end as liberal democracy triumphed everywhere. But today, China, Russia, and Iran are dissenting from the global status quo, and nations are once again trying to find a “balance of power” in geopolitics.

　　As Americans decide how to respond to the conflicts multiplying around the world, how can they respect both timeless principles and the demands of these particular times? To answer that question, we might reconsider the lessons of Henry Kissinger, one of the greatest students of diplomacy of our age.

　　Woodrow and Otto

　　Since the United States became a global power after World War I, its foreign policy has been framed in the language of universal rights and duties, more or less what we call the “rules-based international order.” This vision was formulated by President Woodrow Wilson and informed the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations that attempted (in vain) to bring peace after the Great War.

　　One can see why Wilson championed this approach.

　　First, it is self-evident that truth, the universal laws of morality, should ground all human affairs. Nations can form leagues based on common history (such as the British Commonwealth) or economic interests (such as NAFTA), but to exclude moral principles from these relationships would deform them. People who help each other rob banks may have common interests, but we would call them accomplices, not friends. Likewise, nations bound only by material interest are not true allies; eventually, they will double-cross each other, as did Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in World War II.

　　Second, as Kissinger says in Diplomacy, Wilson saw correctly that the idealistic United States—and perhaps any large democracy in which the government is answerable to an electorate—cannot enter long-term international agreements not framed in universal principles: only a universal motive could move a majority of tens of millions of voters to support alliances with countries with which they have little to no contact. Wilson failed to gain such support among Americans for the League of Nations, and the Treaty of Versailles failed to prevent World War II; but in the hundred years after Wilson’s death, Americans and Europeans, no matter their political leanings, generally based foreign policy on universal idealism, tacitly accepting his insight.

　　At the same time, Wilsonian idealism was criticized, and for good reason: it refused to acknowledge that, even if men tend to want to act justly—in their long-term moral interests—they tend to prefer short-term material gain. Wilson, Kissinger says, had “faith in the essentially peaceful nature of man and an underlying harmony of the world.” He believed that the establishment of democracy in postwar Germany, and the breakup of Austria-Hungary into smaller, democratic states, were certain to create peace: people would be less warlike after they had experienced the benefits of self-government. But Germany’s Weimar Republic soon gave way to Hitler’s belligerent dictatorship. And the successor states to Austria-Hungary, in the words of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, “[consisted] of people who [had] never previously set up a stable government for themselves”; such small, disoriented nations were easy picking for Nazi Germany.

　　These and other dubious consequences of Wilsonian idealism suggest one might reconsider the value of raison d’état or realpolitik. This was the method of international relations that Wilson detested—the one that had guided Western statesmen before him, ever since Cardinal Richelieu of France. Realpolitik frankly admits that international relations must presume that nations will compete with one another for material resources and security. One cannot trust them to “play nice” according to the rules, no matter how clearly they are defined in a treaty; one must build checks and balances into the international order that a treaty creates, much as the US Constitution does for America’s federal government (Wilson, unsurprisingly, did not admire the Constitution in that regard).

　　Such a theory on its face is unproblematic; checks and balances are necessary in a world of fallen human beings. Moreover, the Christian moral sensibility of Europe mitigated realpolitik in practice, lest it become unprincipled pragmatism. But as Christianity ebbed, realpolitik, lacking a clear commitment to moral truth, subordinated truth to power. Its practitioners embraced Machiavelli’s dictum: the prince must “not depart from good, when possible, but know how to enter into evil, when forced by necessity.” “Necessity” might even require wiping a nation off the map, as “enlightened” monarchs did to Poland in the late eighteenth century.

　　The classic statesman of realpolitik was German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. He politically stabilized central Europe in the 1800s by double-dealing, warfare (diplomacy by “blood and iron” as he called it), and establishing German hegemony. Thanks to him, Europe and the world flourished economically in the belle époque before World War I. But the web of interests on which that world rested was so complex, that only a genius like Bismarck could hold it together. When he retired, the system unraveled; and the countries of Europe, habituated to acting on bald-faced political self-interest, hurtled toward conflict.

　　A country with just cause in war must temper its zeal by accepting what is possible in the circumstances.

　　The excesses of both Wilsonianism and realpolitik continued to bedevil global order after the Great War. Totalitarian regimes, like Germany’s Third Reich and the USSR, pursued a realpolitik of unprecedented brutality. America’s idealism admirably moved it to save Europe from Nazism in World War II; but it also, Kissinger argues, worked to the USSR’s advantage. In the first part of the war, when Germany was invading Russia, a fearful Joseph Stalin offered to negotiate the extent of the communist sphere of influence after the war, in exchange for British and American military aid. But Franklin Roosevelt refused, being “bent on avoiding any semblance of balance-of-power arrangements.” Thus toward the end of the war, when Russia had repelled Germany singlehandedly, and had no more need of Western help, there was nothing to keep Stalin’s armies from rolling through Eastern Europe, establishing Soviet control over millions of people for decades.

　　Idealistic zeal then mobilized Americans to fight, and win, the Cold War against communism. But this idealism was often too demanding, accepting nothing but total victory. In the Korean War, for instance, US forces advanced to the border with China, rather than leave a buffer of a hundred miles, because they refused to leave any part of Korea oppressed by communists. That aggressiveness gave Mao Zedong the excuse to send in massive numbers of Chinese troops, driving the Americans back, and free Korea is today smaller than it might have been.

　　In Search of a New Vision

　　And now, in the face of protracted conflicts with disappointing outcomes (e.g., Afghanistan) and without the unambiguously evil Soviet Union to serve as its rallying point, the internationalist idealism of America’s electorate is waning. American foreign policy seems poised to abandon the timeless principles that can unite the country for sustained engagement in foreign affairs. Yet without America’s continued leadership in the world, it is unclear that genuine political freedom can prevail anywhere against the spread of authoritarianism. Could we reestablish American foreign policy on better footing? Kissinger’s analysis suggests that both Wilson’s idealism and Bismarck’s realism, for all their faults, have something to teach us. Perhaps there is a grand strategy that combines, in Kissinger’s words, “the visionary and the tactical.” Some principles of such an approach might be as follows.

　　To start, as realpolitik teaches, international order must be backed by power. If perfect benevolence ruled men’s hearts, there would be no need to secure law by force; setting up rational rules would be enough. But we live in a fallen world. Even the most rational statesmen inevitably give undue emphasis to their country’s ambitions; hence it makes sense that, in international law, as for the US Constitution, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Larger nations might therefore have a duty to ally with smaller ones, to shield them from aggressors; there should be a balance of power within such alliances, so that no one party predominates, and multiple such alliances should exist to check each other.

　　Second, countries are not obligated to save each other from every distress. Mercy is a noble aspiration; but as Augustine reminds us, mercy is only laudable “if we can” come to the other’s aid. If the apparently merciful act would counteract the agent’s prior duties, it might not be mercy but imprudence—as when a country throws itself into a conflict unrelated to its own security or welfare, and exacerbates the problem. Similarly, a country with just cause in war must temper its zeal by accepting what is possible in the circumstances: as America’s experience in Korea shows, the perfect is often the enemy of the good.

　　But although mercy is not required, justice is: it is never right for a nation to violate universal moral principles, including its particular duties. An extreme realpolitik strategy of “security through domination” of one’s neighbors, as Kissinger called it, is unacceptable. One should go to war only to defend oneself, or one’s allies, against clear and present danger.

　　With a more thorough consideration of morality, Kissinger might have avoided the ethical relativism that lurks beneath much of his thought.

　　Of course, statesmen should be humble in determining what justice dictates: applying universal principles in concrete circumstances is not as easy as Wilson’s idealism might suggest. Human relations are complex; political leaders should exercise circumspection when determining justice between nations of millions of citizens. Such judgments often require messy trial and error: nations must simply try to live together, patiently, until a long-term solution reveals itself. Even then nations cannot be complacent, Kissinger says: “Equilibrium will not supply its own momentum; it must be constantly nurtured and sustained.” If new disagreements separate nations for a time, they must find a way to reestablish dialogue.

　　The Art of Hope

　　Finally, genuine international peace—an order that respects both the interests of truth and the interests of each individual nation—depends also on true religion. Total submission to God (not merely using religion for political ends) stirs men’s consciences to submit to the truths of human nature—in all its material and spiritual aspects—that ground human relations.

　　This idea is perhaps most difficult to square with Kissinger’s thought, in which religion often gets short shrift. In Diplomacy, Kissinger, at times, portrays religion unfavorably, as when he contrasts Richelieu’s “dispassionate foreign policy free of moral imperatives” with the “religious zeal and ideological fanaticism” that characterized Europe in Richelieu’s times. In his discussion of the end of the Cold War, Kissinger ignores the Christian revival among the peoples of Eastern Europe, led by Pope John Paul II, that, as some have argued, was key to communism’s downfall. The pope recognized that, unless international order was grounded in the “moral imperatives” that made Kissinger uncomfortable, it would devolve into extreme realpolitik. With a more thorough consideration of morality, Kissinger might have avoided the ethical relativism that lurks beneath much of his thought better.

　　Other aspects of Kissinger’s thought show that he did believe that great statesmen needed transcendent ideals, which he called “vision to build toward a better future.” He recognized that vision in religious leaders (including John Paul II) and in laymen like the deeply Catholic Konrad Adenauer, who led Germany through the difficult years after World War II. As Kissinger said at the close of his last speech, “A great leader is the giver and protector of our hopes.” He even approved Benedict XVI’s description of diplomacy as “the art of hope.” There are no quick and easy answers to international conflicts. “If we are to avoid permanent conflict” among nations, Kissinger said, we must take “a gradual approach” to foreign relations, which will require “sustained effort.” But one cannot persevere in any effort without faith in the possibility of reaching agreement when its form is still unforeseen. And a sure grounding for such faith is the “benign Providence” that Kissinger once acknowledged, who guides human affairs along the inscrutable paths of history.