My review, in the Claremont Review of Books, of Henry Kissinger’s latest book, World Order, consists largely of quotes from Kissinger. Conrad Black characterizes it as “an astonishingly nasty farrago of insults.” Insulting someone by quoting him? Astonishing indeed! My review is also “scurrilous,” “churlish,” and “a shocking outburst.” I, personally, am “overwrought and irrational.” Alas, Black does not illustrate these scholarly judgments by quoting me.
Thus also does he show his critique’s depth: Owing to a typo, a passage in the draft copy that Claremont’s editors had sent him said that the U.S. now “backpeddles in the Pacific.” Conrad Black pounced: “I assume [Codevilla] means ‘pedals,’ as I can’t imagine what even he might think Kissinger and the others are peddling.”
Why the animus? By his vigorous yet unspecific indictment of me, Conrad Black casts a small sandbag into one rivulet of the growing flood of public recognition that, with the partial exception of the Reagan years, America’s foreign policy has been disastrous since the 1960s. Anyone who wishes to understand how come America was safe and respected a half-century ago while now it is cornered and scorned must study Kissinger. Over the past six decades, no other person has had so great an intellectual influence on our foreign-policy establishment as has Henry Kissinger. His persona’s academic authority shielded modern American foreign policy with an aura of legitimacy. His celebrity made him paradigmatic of it, and of our ruling class in general. His World Order summarizes and defends his own legacy. My Claremont review bares his logic and its consequences by excerpting his presentation, chapter by chapter, point by point.
Black does not deny that our ruling class’s foreign policy has been disastrous, but he denies that Kissinger was “complicit by membership in it or just by being contemporaneous with it in some decades.” Almost a bystander, then, Black’s Kissinger is not part of any ruling class. He “had nothing to do with, and, in a number of cases, vocally opposed” the main lines of U.S. foreign policy over this period. He “had nothing to do with the stoking up of the American effort in Vietnam and was quite critical of President Johnson’s strategy.” Black tells us that Kissinger’s inability to make things come out better in Vietnam was due to the prospect “that the secretaries of state and defense, William Rogers and Melvin Laird, would resign and imperil the administration’s ability to get any war policy through the Congress.”
Nonsense. Vietnam unfolded according to Kissinger’s theory of international relations, and substantially under his management. As early as 1957 the Council on Foreign Relations had chosen Kissinger to formulate its opposition to Eisenhower’s strategic policy. That formulation, in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, followed by The Necessity for Choice, was the “limited war” theory by which the Kennedy/Johnson administration chose no longer to confront the Soviet empire with America’s overwhelming technological and economic advantages but rather to confront it with American flesh and blood (Kissinger’s heirs now say “boots on the ground”) in the world’s backwaters. Vietnam was the test case.
According to Kissinger, these were wars that “a great power could afford to lose” and should not try to win. Kissinger inspired Lyndon Johnson’s policy of bombing “pauses” intended to encourage Hanoi to negotiate. On his initiative and on Johnson’s behalf, he started negotiations in 1965 that did not end until 1973. What Kissinger now rues as “academic theories of graduated escalation” were his theories. In World Order he admits that “Bombing campaigns alternating with ‘pauses’ to test Hanoi’s readiness for negotiation tended to produce stalemate.” In Diplomacy (1994) he admitted that America ended up paying the same price for stalemate that it would have had to pay for victory. But abandonment of the objective of victory in war was the essence of “limited war theory,” which is key in all of Kissinger’s writings.
Kissinger thought that he was frying bigger fish — world order based on U.S.–Soviet “détente.” Kissinger and Nixon offered the Soviets strategic equality, the chance to partner with America to run the world, and subsidized food and untold billions of dollars in exchange for the Soviets’ eschewing victory in the world’s peripheries just as America was doing in Vietnam. No dice. The Kremlin let Kissinger/Nixon revel in their own press releases while it redoubled its weapons deliveries to Ho Chi Minh. (Black chastises me: Don’t I know that Ho died in 1969? Sure. But like others in the U.S. military during that war, I shorthand the enemy by the name of their historic leader.)
The Soviets and their allies gave Kissinger only a “decent interval” to claim he had negotiated “peace with honor” and to cash his half of the Nobel Peace Prize (Le Duc Tho, knowing that this was no peace, honorably refused to cash the other half). Kissinger claimed that, at least, he had gotten the American prisoners back. But no. As the Vietnamese had done in 1954 after Dien Bien Phu, they returned about 60 percent of the prisoners and publicly demanded ransom for the rest. In 1954, the French paid and got their men back. In 1973–76, Nixon and Ford refused to ask Congress for the ransom money. To have done so would have impeached the claim that they and Kissinger had salvaged America’s “honor.” So, they left at least 311 Americans to rot in Vietnamese prisons and scrubbed concern for them from the U.S. government, the press, and the ruling class. Sydney Schanberg’s reports in the New York Times are sobering reading.
Conrad Black’s Kissinger reverses yet another reality: “[Kissinger] opposed the Kennedy–Johnson–McNamara–Clifford policy of passively enabling the USSR to gain nuclear parity; [and] worked with Nixon to regain superiority through multiple independently targeted warheads, in what was called ‘nuclear sufficiency’ in the SALT I negotiations.” This is the reality: In 1972, when Kissinger assured the Senate that the SALT I/ABM treaties had forever ended the counterforce threat to America’s strategic forces, that threat consisted of 300 SS-9 missiles. Kissinger, ignorantly equating the size of silos with counterforce capacity, proudly stated that the treaty ensured that there would be no more counterforce warheads because it would prevent 1,000 non-counterforce SS-11s from being converted to SS-9s. Four years later — within the treaty’s terms — the U.S. faced 3,000 warheads mounted on SS-18 missiles, each with ten times as much counterforce lethality as the warheads on the SS-9s, and 5,000 warheads on the SS-17s and 19s that had replaced the 11s, each with the same counterforce lethality as those on the 18s. The threat had grown from 300 missiles to 8,000. Various people (including yours truly) had foreseen this, but Kissinger, backed by the CIA, had denied that it could happen, and assured all right-thinking people that it would not. They knew less and cared less about what real-world technology could do than about their theories of how international affairs should work. Eventually, under Gerald Ford, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board empaneled a B Team that unraveled their unrealistic assumptions. Its report too makes sobering reading.
In World Order, Kissinger is clear in his unwavering support of the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction. In his defense of Kissinger here, Conrad Black contends that the author of treaty provisions that still hamper U.S. missile defense, despite the formal demise of the ABM treaty in 2002, supported missile defense because he supported endless research on the subject. That would be like depicting Hugh Hefner as a supporter of chastity if he were to advocate research about the optimal configuration of chastity belts.
No one has ever been so idolized by America’s bipartisan ruling class and so rejected by the American people as Henry Kissinger.
To believe Black’s contention that Henry Kissinger had done other than to assume the Soviet Union’s eternality and to try to preserve its empire requires a special combination of historical ignorance and credulity. In a nutshell, as I wrote: “Kissinger’s policy had been to ‘normalize’ relations with the Soviet empire, legitimating and facilitating Moscow’s hold on it. Popular recognition of this fact was so strong, widespread, and scornful that it helped lead to Ford’s defeat in the 1976 election.” Note well: Kissinger is the only person, ever, against whom both parties ran national campaigns — simultaneously. In 1976, Jimmy Carter, who won that election, and Ronald Reagan, who lost the nomination that year but won the presidency four years later in a landslide, both campaigned against him. No one has ever been so idolized by America’s bipartisan ruling class and so rejected by the American people as Henry Kissinger.
Many of Black’s points do not seem serious. For example, he does “not agree” with me that the thesis of Kissinger’s book is that nations “pursue international order” over and above the struggles of any given circumstance or that U.S. foreign policy should put world order first. My saying such things, he contends, is just “pedantry and pettifogging.” But Kissinger’ s book, titled World Order, is about precisely that. Kissinger writes: “World order describes the concept held by a region or civilization about the nature of just arrangements and the distribution of power thought to be applicable to the entire world.” “The idea of world order was applied to the geographic extent known to the statesmen of the time . . . each region viewed its own order as unique.” “Our age is insistently, at times almost desperately, in pursuit of a concept of world order.” “The mystery to be overcome is one all people share — how divergent historic experiences and values can be shaped into a common order.” Kissinger also writes that “the frequent [American] exhortations for countries to ‘do their fair share,’ play by ‘twenty-first-century rules,’ or be ‘responsible stakeholders’ in a common system, reflect the fact that there is no shared definition of the system. . . . Thus, while ‘the international community’ is invoked perhaps more insistently now than in any other era, it presents no clear or agreed set of goals.” Kissinger, however, wants Americans to “act for all mankind” by constituting (or reconstituting) world order out of world chaos. Did Black read the book? He gives another reason for doubting that he did by claiming that I “attack[ed] Truman and Acheson for not confronting Stalin over Berlin.” No. Kissinger did that on pp. 281–282.
Black also denies one of Kissinger’s legacies to American diplomacy: the practice of “creative ambiguity” or “constructive ambiguity,” namely, using ambiguous language in diplomatic intercourse to disguise the extent to which the parties’ goals remain far apart or are irreconcilable, so as to enable each side to claim success in the negotiation. This modus operandi — the very opposite of what used to be taught in diplomatic academies — has become American diplomacy’s default way of doing things. Black insists that my attributing it to Kissinger is a “snide claim” and “an outrage.” But the New York Times’s Bill Keller also attributes it to Kissinger (September 12, 2012), and Kissinger’s book Diplomacy, a standard in international-relations courses, touts it. Black asserts that “the arrangements” that Kissinger negotiated “with China over Taiwan and with Syria over the Golan” using this technique “have held.” So would the Paris Peace Accords with North Vietnam have held, except for the heinous Watergate Democrats. But one needs no deeper exposure to history than Wikipedia’s for a catalogue of this technique’s disastrous results.
Black’s stream-of-consciousness style, as well as his lack of quotations, make it difficult to grasp the relevance of his contentions about history — or their truth, for that matter. Rather, they suggest that his references to history are not meant to be looked at closely or taken seriously. Evidence for this attitude may be seen in his characterization of the errors in Kissinger’s book that I point out in my review. He does not argue that Kissinger was correct and I incorrect. Rather, he calls my references “gratuitous stylistic snobbery and pompous reflections on Kissinger’s alleged ignorance of such esoteric figures (in contemporary foreign-policy matters) as Saint Augustine and Hegel.” But Kissinger makes points about Augustine, Hegel, John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, and so on precisely in order to show the reader that he knows things the knowledge of which gives him authority to counsel on contemporary matters.
In my review, I take pains to show that Kissinger does not know what he is talking about regarding such historical figures any more than he knew or cared about SS-9s, 11s, 17s, 18s, or 19s, or about what the consequences would be of prohibiting the use in anti-missile systems of anything other than radars for launching interceptors. Black shows that he knows or cares for such things no more than does Kissinger.
What, then, does Black know and care about? What is the point of his animadversions? He knows that his status as an authority on international affairs is part and parcel of the authority of the class of officials and eminences of which he is part, and who have conducted these affairs in the West for generations. He knows that this class is coming into severe disrepute. He would like to attribute its failures to Democrats at best and, if forced, to Democrats plus G. W. Bush. Henry Kissinger is the most egregius member of Black’s own gregis. Black unleashes his adjectives on me to safeguard Kissinger’s reputation — and hence his own — from association with the last half-century’s events.
— Angelo M. Codevilla professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University and the author most recently of To Make and Keep Peace.