A diplomacy tutorial

The man who made me want to spend my life studying and teaching about international politics died Nov. 29 at the appropriately imposing age of 100.

I was one of those ubiquitous “prelaw” students in college, with about the same level of seriousness about it as Otter in “Animal House,” until I took a seminar on Henry Kissinger in my senior year.

I remember the books we read because I still have all of them: “A World Restored” (Kissinger’s doctoral dissertation and still the best study of the Congress of Vienna and how the “classical balance of power” it established kept the peace in Europe for the next century), “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” (one of the first serious efforts to formulate what would come to be called “nuclear strategy”), the then recently released first volume of Kissinger’s memoirs, “White House Years” (the best diplomatic memoir since at least Dean Acheson’s “Present at the Creation,” perhaps ever), “American Foreign Policy” (a collection of Kissinger’s more important speeches), and one non-Kissinger work, Stephen Graubard’s “Portrait of a Mind” (which explored how Kissinger’s ideas molded his diplomacy).

The main writing assignment for the seminar was a research paper addressing a particular concept or policy of Kissinger’s. Although the recommended length was 20 pages, mine, on Kissinger’s conception of “linkage” in détente, came in at over 50, and was thus accompanied by a note of apology to the professor for being so absurdly wordy.

It actually took me longer to type out the thing than to research and write it, using an old manual typewriter and that almost translucent onion-skin paper. Despite the grading burdens its length undoubtedly imposed, the paper was well-received and would later turn out to be a useful piece of supporting evidence in my doctoral program application.

By the end of that seminar, the law school plans had been shelved and I’d decided that a career in academe was the only one I’d be happy with, where I could read books and talk about them for a living (the professor who presided over the seminar was instructive in that regard as well, having left Harvard Law to get a Ph.D. in American diplomatic history at Berkeley instead).

I continued to devour through grad school and beyond whatever Kissinger wrote, including the second and third volumes of his memoirs (“Years of Upheaval” and “Years of Renewal”) and “Diplomacy,” his sweeping overview of world politics from the 17th century on, which found a regular spot on my National Security Policy and International Conflict course syllabi.

The word “unique” is seldom used correctly, because it’s so often applied to things that aren’t, but Kissinger might be in the sense of being the only person I can think of who both formulated a tremendously influential set of ideas while in academe and then got the opportunity to put those ideas into practice from the highest levels of power, for the most part, successfully and faithfully. (Ironically, in that respect, in terms of the theory-practice nexus, his closest American counterpart might be his great philosophical nemesis Woodrow Wilson, another prominent academic who ended up taking both the study of international politics and American foreign policy in a direction, “Wilsonian idealism,” that Kissinger spent much of his career deriding.)

The assumptions I have always carried with me when teaching and writing about world affairs are largely the assumptions I acquired from reading Kissinger: that foreign policy choices usually involve bad and worse (rather than good and bad), that deterrence and the maintenance of a balance of power are conducive to peace while hubris and moralism undermine it, that defense of the national interest is the primary obligation of diplomats (as opposed to pursuit of abstract conceptions of justice), and that the establishment of order and stability must come before all else because nothing else can be pursued in their absence.

All that and much else came together to add up to what would be known as the “realist” school of thought, of which Kissinger was undoubtedly the most famous adherent and which to this day I still believe is the proper way of understanding the relations between nation-states.

One can talk all one wishes to about a “rules-based international order,” “collective security” and “soft power,” but nothing positive can be achieved, as Kissinger long argued, without first accepting that nation-states act primarily out of self-interest and seek to enhance their power to protect their security in an essentially anarchic system.

Put differently, there can be successful diplomacy or persuasive explanations of international events that don’t begin with considerations of power and interests.

Niall Ferguson, another favorite historian, has famously, if not especially persuasively, challenged the standard view of Kissinger as supreme theorist and practitioner of “realpolitik” in the first volume of his authorized biography, to the point of giving it the provocative title “The Idealist.”

Ferguson now says he was sorry to not have completed the second volume before his subject’s 100th birthday, but that expression of regret suggests that he’s at least working away at it.

I hope he takes his time. I will need lots of time to first reread the roughly 4,000 pages of those magnificent memoirs.

Kissinger