World order

In Global Order, Henry Kissinger writes a lucid narrative about regional geopolitics c. 2014. As with any work about contemporary events, some aspects of this work are now dated (e.g. his analysis of ISIL). However, there remains a number of important insights that we can grasp about the history of European attempts to forge regional and global order, and American foreign policy today.

The work is divided geographically into chapters that explore Europe, the Greater Middle East, Asia, and the United States. His discussion of Europe focuses on the Treaty of Westphalia and the Congress of Vienna which supported a global order based around the sovereign nation-state as a legitimate political unit and the use of balance-of-power geopolitics to restrain war. Kissinger then turns to the Greater Middle East and an exploration of Islamism. Specifically, Kissinger presents Islamism as an inherent challenge to the secular, value-neutral “Westphalian System.” His exploration of Asia, writ large, focuses primarily on Japan, India, and China. Finally, he turns to American foreign policy with a synopsis of major trends from the time of George Washington until Barack Obama’s presidency.

Some readers will take issue with Kissinger’s analysis of American foreign policy. In particular, he treats all of the twentieth and twenty-first century presidents with kid gloves and remains adamantly unapologetic about American interventions in Vietnam and 2003 Iraq. To be fair, Kissinger is arguing here that intentions do matter in foreign policy. The United States intervened in Vietnam and Iraq in an effort to promote the ideals of democratic self-government, secularism, and political pluralism. Although it “failed” in this regard because American presidents failed to grasp American impatience with lengthy nation-building projects, it still remained clear that the United States operated in both cases to defend civilian populations against repressive, murderous regimes. I remain ambivalent about this overall point. I do agree that the United States, as Kissinger writes, needs to continually wed its ideals to a sense of realism (both in terms of American support and the specific histories and cultures of the regions the United States proposes to operate in). I also agree that in both Vietnam and Iraq the United States was attempting to protect (or rescue?) populations from extremely oppressive regimes.

On the other hand, the aphorism that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” holds in both of these cases. The South Vietnamese government during the 1960s lacked legitimacy and became a clear threat to its own people. One need not look further than Diem’s oppression of Buddhists, or the bloodshed initiated by a series of military coups, to see that Saigon was hardly a paragon of American ideals. At the same time, one can temper that hard analysis against the reality that Le Duan’s regime in Hanoi was hell-bent on thwarting negotiations with the United States and prolonging a deadly conflict to exhaust American popular will. As Kissinger rightly notes, the American War in Vietnam as not simply a matter of Johnson/Nixon imposing war on a peace-loving Vietnamese population. In the aftermath of American withdrawal from South Vietnam and the subsequent communist unification of the country, clear and overt atrocities were committed against political and ethnic minorities in Vietnam and then later in both Cambodia and Laos.

In the final chapter, Kissinger focuses thematically on emergent technologies that have altered the nature of collective security in the post-World War II era. He first discusses the advent of nuclear weapons and the concomitant necessity of non-proliferation in the modern world.

He also spends time writing about the Internet and social media in the twenty-first century. Whereas prior technological achievements that had revolutionary effects in the realm of war (e.g. airplanes, nuclear weapons) were generally physical in nature, the Internet and “Cyber warfare” has created an entirely new realm of aggression that international systems have failed to clearly define and address. Aside from requiring cyber security at the national level, social media and human interconnectedness has spawned an entirely new host of problems for global order. How will the nature of truth change in a world of unlimited data and information? Can politicians afford to take bold and decisive action, if that means acting alone? Does social media increase the human proclivity for admiration and conformity? Kissinger warns that the new Information Age may lead to less knowledge, and even less wisdom, and promote narcissistic, charismatic leaders on the world stage. (We have seen this already with Trump and Trumpism).

In concluding, Kissinger broadly summarizes that between 1945 and 1989, the world was governed by an American articulation of the Westphalian System. As Kissinger writes:
“The United States has made a significant contribution to this evolution. American military power provided a security shield for the rest of the world, whether its beneficiaries asked for it or not. Under the umbrella of an essentially unilateral American military guarantee, much of the developed world rallied into a system of alliances; the developing countries were protected against a threat they sometimes did not recognize, even less admit. A global economy developed to which America contributed financing, markets, and a profusion of innovations.” This, Kissinger, concludes, was the rise of the first “incipient global world order” that combined the best of Wilson’s idealism and T. Roosevelt’s balance-of-power geopolitics.

During this era, the operative assumption was that “democratic values” would spread across the world by fiat and gradually control the dogs of war as an interconnected and economically interdependent world of representative governments avoided war out of self-interest. In 1989, this view seemed to triumph with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the “End of History.” Now, though, it seems less than certain. Democracy has failed to spread naturally throughout the world as the United States has been unable to reconcile its ideals with the reality of regional histories and cultures. While we still maintain a pure Westphalian System of value-neutral rules (inviolability of borders, respect for national self-determination, etc.), there remains the future threat that the “global order” will devolve into multipolar regional orders centered around competing philosophies (Westphalian/Islamism / etc.) that may witness the rise of regional competition. The United States, as Kissinger perceives it, has yet a role to play it mitigating future harm by wedding its best ideals to a firm assessment of reality and remaining a key actor in the international community to forge a balance-of-power and spread virtuous ideals.