Does America Need a Foreign Policy?

Toward a New Diplomacy for the 21st Century

Henry Kissinger

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780684855684
• eBook ISBN: 9780743214902
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this timely, thoughtful, and important book, America's most famous diplomat explains why we urgently need a new and coherent foreign policy and what our foreign policy goals should be in this new millennium. In seven accessible chapters, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? provides a crystalline assessment of how the United States' ascendancy as the world's dominant presence in the twentieth century may be effectively reconciled with the urgent need in the twenty-first century to achieve a bold new world order. By examining America's present and future relations with Russia, China, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, in conjunction with emerging concerns such as globalization, nuclear weapons proliferation, free trade, and the planet's eroding natural environment, Dr. Kissinger lays out a compelling and comprehensively drawn vision for American policy in approaching decades.With an Afterword by the author that addresses the situation in the aftermath of September 11, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? asks and answers the most pressing questions of our nation.

SEVEN

Peace and Justice

PROBABLY the most dramatic transformation in the nature of contemporary international affairs has been the general acceptance of the proposition that certain universal principles are deemed enforceable, either by the United Nations or, in extreme situations, by a group of states (for example, NATO in Kosovo). Moreover, such international conventions as those condemning genocide, torture, or war crimes, are said to be enforceable by national judges who increasingly claim the right to demand extradition of alleged violators into their own jurisdictions. In addition, an International Criminal Court (ICC) is in the process of being created that, when ratified by sixty nations, will invest a prosecutor with the power to start investigations of alleged violations of international law at the request of any signatory state and, when backed by three of the eighteen judges, to bring indictments against any suspected transgressor anywhere in the world (including against citizens of nations which have refused to accept the ICC’s jurisdiction). These innovations reflect the new conventional wisdom, according to which traditional principles of sovereignty and noninterference in the domestic affairs of other countries are the principal obstacles to the universal rule of peace and justice.

These views, treated as commonplace in American and much of contemporary West European public discourse—though far less so in the developing world—amount to a revolution in the way the international system has operated for more than three hundred years. They also represent the widespread acceptance of ideas which, until the last decade of the Cold War, had been held almost uniquely in the United States. And they may usher in a new period of global interventionism with unforeseeable consequences.

The international order that America encountered when it engaged itself in world affairs can be dated fairly precisely: it was created by the Treaty of Westphalia, signed in 1648 to mark the end of the Thirty Years’ War. That war had its roots in the Reformation, which split what had heretofore been the universal Catholic Church and challenged the autonomous jurisdiction over its internal administration. Some of the rulers of the various feudal principalities used the opportunity to strengthen their authority by asserting control over the religious allegiance of their subjects and the governance of their churches. The already fragile power of the Holy Roman Emperor, traditionally invested by the Pope, was weakened further. Soon even the princes who had remained Catholic set about restricting the power of the Church to define the reach of political authority.

Whether the various rulers opted for Catholic orthodoxy or Protestant reform, a century of war followed—a mixture of civil war, international conflict, and religious crusade. The Holy Roman Emperor, a Habsburg situated in Vienna, fought to reimpose the Catholic Church throughout Central Europe. The Bourbon rulers of France, though Catholic, allied themselves with the Protestant princes of northern Europe to resist the emergence of a potentially hegemonic Austria. Whatever the motives, the war was conducted in the name of religion, disregarding frontiers. Entire populations were obliged to change their faiths on the basis of whatever army triumphed on the battlefield (with the additional modern Realpolitik twist that Catholic France sided with Protestant allies to weaken Austria by reducing the sphere of Catholic rule in Germany). This mix of religion and power politics endowed the conduct of the war with unprecedented ferocity. As noted earlier, by some estimates, nearly 30 percent of the population of Central Europe was killed during the Thirty Years’ War.

The Treaty of Westphalia reflected a general determination to put an end to carnage once and for all. Its basic purpose (in modern terms) was to stop the merging of domestic and foreign policy or (in the language of the period) of faith and diplomacy. All signatories confirmed the principle cujus regio, ejus religio—whoever rules determines the religion of his subjects. No other country had a right to intervene in this process. Thus was born the concept of noninterference in the domestic affairs of other states, and it was developed for precisely the opposite reason it is being discarded today. It was the human rights slogan of the period; restoring peace and tranquillity was its purpose, not legitimizing domestic oppression. Since the divide between Catholic and Protestant was the most inflammatory issue of the day, the Treaty of Westphalia sought to prevent rulers of one faith from inciting uprisings of their co-religionists ruled by a prince of a different faith. With religion removed as an excuse for domestic subversion, the expectation was that domestic tranquillity would return as well and, with it, more benign government.

On the whole, this expectation was fulfilled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as the European system evolved into an agglomeration of nation-states. The doctrine of nonintervention in the domestic affairs of other countries became one of the keystones, together with the notions of sovereignty and international law regulating the conduct of states in their relations with each other. This did not prevent wars, but it limited their scope. Indeed, in the twentieth century, one of the democracies’ chief criticisms of the totalitarian states—especially of Communism—was that they systematically violated the canons of international order by undermining existing governments through radical movements and parties controlled from abroad—in other words, through a return to the ethos of the religious wars.

The international system based on the Treaty of Westphalia had an answer for the problem of violence between states—that is, recourse to war—but it offered no solution to violence within states arising from civil wars, ethnic conflicts, and the entire range of what are today called human rights violations. It dealt with the problem of peace and left justice to the domestic institutions. The contemporary human rights activists are arguing the opposite. In their view, peace flows automatically from justice, and the nation-state, or perhaps any state, cannot be relied on to deliver justice; it must be put under some kind of supranational authority entitled to use force to make its writ run. On the whole, the human rights activists trust jurists more than they do statesmen. The advocates of the Westphalian principles trust statesmen more than jurists.

THE AMERICAN TRADITION

The United States was one of the most vociferous critics of the subversive interventionism of the Soviet Union. Yet it has itself never fully accepted the principle of nonintervention for its own conduct. To be sure, in the early days of the republic, the Founding Fathers showed that they understood and respected the principles of the European equilibrium. Tilting back and forth between Britain and France, generally in opposition to whichever side seemed ascendant but without ever committing fully to either, they practiced the injunction of Alexander Hamilton: “The coolest calculations of interest” required Americans to modulate their support for the European powers while tying themselves to nobody.¹ In a statement that could as easily have originated in the British Cabinet, Thomas Jefferson articulated an American version of the balance-of-power theory: “We especially ought to pray that the powers of Europe may be so poised and counterpoised among themselves that their own security may require the presence of all their forces at home leaving the other parts of the world in undisturbed tranquility.”²

But even in this Hamiltonian phase when American foreign policy resembled that of the European powers in many respects, the justification for it was quite different: Americans then as now viewed their nation as motivated by principles higher than those of the Old World, which they imagined reflected the basically selfish aspirations of monarchs. By contrast, the American republic was viewed as operating according to the dictates of enlightened rationalism; it was destined to serve as a model for less fortunate peoples obliged to live under less benevolent rule. America’s actions could therefore never be purely selfish; by its very nature, America constituted a universal cause. As James Madison put it in 1804: “The United States owe to the world as well as to themselves to let the example of one government at least protest against the corruption which prevails.”³

This avoided the question of how far that universal cause should be pursued. If America was the hope of the world, did it have an obligation to intervene abroad so that this hope was implemented? And if the answer was in the affirmative, how could the United States pursue its international mission without facing the same practical dilemmas in the application of its power that it condemned in the conduct of the European states?

The quandary acquired some urgency in 1821 when the Greek struggle for independence from Ottoman rule generated a wave of enthusiasm to “do something” to apply America’s principles to the cause of liberating the Greek people. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams both framed the dilemma and resolved it in a manner that would become the lodestar of American foreign policy for the next century:

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be America’s heart, her benedictions, and her prayers. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and by the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standards of freedom. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.⁴

By insisting that the United States performed its distinctive mission best by steering clear of imposing it by force, Adams scrapped the ideological basis for intervention in the European balance of power. Two years later, President James Monroe removed the practical reasons for a Hamiltonian foreign policy—the fear of European intervention in the Western Hemisphere. In the Monroe Doctrine, he boldly expanded Adams’s proposition that the United States refrain from entangling itself in European affairs into a warning to Europe not to entangle itself in American affairs, defined as embracing the entire Western Hemisphere, on pain of having such an intrusion treated “as dangerous to our peace and safety”—in other words, as a casus belli.⁵

The Monroe Doctrine removed two European powers—Britain and Spain—from the power calculus of North America. It was based on a tacit understanding with Britain, which had abjured an imperial role in the Americas, while the Spanish empire in Latin America was clearly collapsing. Liberated from the necessity of participating in the European balance of power, the United States could cultivate its self-proclaimed missionary role.

In the isolation America came to enjoy in the nineteenth century, its statesmen elaborated two themes which would have appeared contradictory to any other society: that America’s values and institutions were applicable universally but, also, that their spread would be all the more certain if America refined them at home without contaminating them by extensive political interaction with the rest of the world.

An unwavering faith in progress and the conviction that history was, or at least ought to be, a steady march toward greater prosperity, freedom, and justice, of which the American experience was the defining symbol, expressed the optimism of the Enlightenment, untempered by the tragedies and adaptations imposed on European nations by their history and geography. “[America’s] ancestors,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, “give them the love of equality and of freedom; but God Himself gave them the means of remaining equal and free by placing them upon a boundless continent.”⁶ The writer John Louis O’Sullivan summed up this confidence at about the same time in the phrase “manifest destiny.”⁷

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the faith in America’s universal mission had evolved into the conviction that the key to international well-being resided in extending to the rest of the world the achievements underlying the American success story. At the turn of the twentieth century, William Jennings Bryan characterized the United States as “a republic gradually but surely becoming the supreme moral factor in the world’s progress and the accepted arbiter of the world’s disputes.”⁸

Harboring these attitudes, the United States disdained the way in which foreign policy was conducted in the rest of the world. The Westphalian state system was castigated and, with it, the acceptance of force as the ultimate sanction. In the period between the Monroe Doctrine and the Spanish-American War, the very notion of foreign policy—its practices and strategies—had little place in American thinking.

ROOSEVELT AND WILSON

The end of the Spanish-American War coincided with the accession of Theodore Roosevelt, the first president since the Founding Fathers to resurrect the Hamiltonian idea of treating the balance of power as the distinctive feature of international relations and to undertake an active American role in shaping it. Unlike his predecessors and most of his successors, Roosevelt did not think of the United States as a messianic cause but as a great power—potentially the greatest. Viewing its mission as that of guardian of the global equilibrium in much the same way Britain was protector of the balance of power in Europe, he was impatient with many of the traditional pieties of American thinking on foreign policy. Roosevelt rejected the supposed efficacy of international law; what nations could not protect with their own strength would not be safeguarded by others. He scorned the concept of disarmament, just emerging on the international agenda: “A milk-and-water righteousness unbacked by force is to the full as wicked as and even more mischievous than force divorced from righteousness.”⁹

Conducting a Realpolitik of his own, Roosevelt in 1908 acquiesced in the Japanese occupation of Korea on the grounds that Korea was unable to defend itself and no other state, or combination of states, was willing to run the risks of defending Korea:

Korea is absolutely Japan’s. To be sure, by treaty it was solemnly covenanted that Korea should remain independent. But Korea was itself helpless to enforce the treaty, and it was out of the question to suppose that any other nation . . . would attempt to do for the Koreans what they were utterly unable to do for themselves.¹⁰

In this spirit, Roosevelt developed what came to be known as the “Roosevelt corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, proclaiming an American right to intervene in the Western Hemisphere—not only to prevent interference from the outside as provided for in the Monroe Doctrine but also, and perhaps above all, to vindicate and protect the national interest of the United States. During Roosevelt’s presidency, the United States intervened in Haiti, fostered a revolution in Panama that led to its secession from Colombia and laid the basis for the completion of the Panama Canal, established a financial protectorate over the Dominican Republic, and, in 1906, sent American troops to occupy Cuba.

Convinced that the United States could not confine its international responsibilities to practicing civic virtue, Roosevelt began to involve the country actively in the operation of the global equilibrium. When Japan and Russia went to war in 1904, he did not stigmatize Japan, which contemporary criteria would label as the aggressor, because he feared that a Russian victory might enable it to dominate Asia and thereby threaten the global balance of power. But neither did he transform this geopolitical concern into a moral crusade against Russia. Instead, applying the rules of the balance of power, Roosevelt, though wanting Russia weakened, resisted carrying the defeat of Russia to the point where a Japanese threat would substitute for a Russian one. He therefore invited representatives of the warring parties to his home in Oyster Bay, New York, where he mediated their dispute, ultimately formally resolved by the Treaty of Portsmouth. The settlement was based on the premise of an Asian balance of power in which Japan, backed by Britain, would offset Imperial Russia, with the United States maintaining the ultimate balance between the two sides in Asia, much as Britain protected the equilibrium in Europe.

The same geopolitical approach characterized Roosevelt’s attitude toward the First World War. By then out of office, he favored intervention on the side of Britain and France long before the incumbent president, Woodrow Wilson, acknowledged the need to do so. Roosevelt feared that a victorious Germany would begin to meddle in the Western Hemisphere, which, in case of a German victory, would have lost the shield of the British navy. Had Roosevelt been in office, he most probably would have sought a settlement analogous to the Treaty of Portsmouth. He would have tried to reduce the capacity of Germany to dominate Europe while retaining it as a factor in the new balance of power. There would have been no attempt to remove the governments of the enemy nations or to recast political boundaries on the basis of such principles as self-determination.

But Roosevelt was no longer in office; instead, at the helm stood a president of an entirely different cast of mind, whose ideas would shape the conceptual basis of American foreign policy for the rest of the twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson led the United States into war for a set of principles more compatible with the Ameri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• One: America at the Apex: Empire or Leader?
• Two: America and Europe: The World of Democracies I
• Three: The Western Hemisphere: The World of Democracies II
• Four: Asia: The World of Equilibrium
• Five: The Middle East and Africa: Worlds in Transition
• Six: The Politics of Globalization
• Seven: Peace and Justice
• Conclusion
• About Henry Kissinger
• Notes
• Copyright