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Notes -
Getting back into Kissinger's Diplomacy after taking a break from it to read Goethe’s Faust.
Kissinger is fairly critical of the containment policy of the Cold War. Committing to fight the expansion of the communist states everywhere meant that the ball was in the Soviets’ court to pick the most inconvenient places possible to start crises which America would be morally obligated to intervene in. The book is just about to start on the Vietnam war and what’s interesting is that the Soviets have not yet purposefully exploited this supposed weak point (he has given hints that Khrushchev was very good at creating difficult situations for the Americans but equally bad at finishing them, there’s an echo to an earlier chapter about Napoleon III here).
Kissinger repeatedly says that the Soviets are simply confused by America’s universal moral declarations and they refuse to take anything other than realpolitik seriously. Stalin gives lukewarm support to the Korean War not because it’s an inconvenient place for the US to defend but because he thinks it just won’t be a big deal. The Americans have said as much when discussing core strategic areas, yet when the war breaks out it becomes a place worth fighting for purely because America is bound by the implications of its stated moral principles.
The core investigation of the book seems to be about how Wilson caused Western leaders to question the old balance of power model in favour of a model based on universal declarations of rights, personal goodwill between leaders, collective security organisations and alliances concerned just as much with agreeable domestic institutions as military advantage. Despite the initial failures of the League of Nations and the misplaced trust in Stalin the Wilsonian style of diplomacy never really went away, and the next decades show Britain being won over by this vision (with Churchill being a solidly old-school exception), America learning hard lessons which temper its idealism and the Soviets being terribly confused at what America is actually willing to start a war over. Kissinger is very critical of the Wilsonian vision but he does give it one piece of high praise: to sustain the kind of long term commitment that fighting the Cold War required the American public needed an ideal which could motivate them.
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