Book Review: ‘World Order’ by Henry Kissinger from The Wall Street Journal by James Traub

“The tragedy of Wilsonianism,” Mr. Kissinger writes, “is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century’s decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.” It is hard to argue with the claim he makes here that Americans find it easier to see foreign policy as a teleological struggle for justice than as a “permanent endeavor for contingent aims.” The idea that history is tragic does not come naturally to Americans.

Mr. Kissinger, nonetheless, lavishes praise on the most reckless Wilsonian of them all,George W. Bush, claiming that “his objectives and dedication” in Iraq “honored his country even when in some cases they proved unattainable within the American political cycle.” President Bush and his chief advisers were Kissingerian realists right up to Sept. 11, 2001; the terrorist attacks persuaded them that Westphalian agnosticism was a dead letter. Since events had shown America to be terribly vulnerable to ideologies that incubated in failed and repressive states, as the president said in his second inaugural, it was plain that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” Noninterference, that is, was not only morally suspect—as it has always been—but strategically unaffordable.

Was Mr. Bush right? Or is promoting liberty abroad a Wilsonian chimera, no matter how deeply it might be in America’s interests to do so? Mr. Kissinger does not say so in “World Order,” though elsewhere—in his 2001 book “Does America Need a Foreign Policy?,” for example—he has made short work of both democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention. The dismaying trajectory of the Arab uprising of 2011, and especially the terrifying rise of the apocalyptic army of ISIS, does not offer much encouragement to those who would like to tinker with the insides of Middle Eastern states.

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