Diplomacy (1994) is a book by the scholar and diplomat Henry Kissinger. After leaving the government in 1977, Kissinger wrote a series of memoirs such as White House Years (1979) and Years of Upheaval (1982). Diplomacy was the first of what would be many books offering a broader view of international affairs and US foreign policy. It has lessons for policymakers but is also accessible to general readers. The book received many positive reviews for its combination of vast scope and intricate detail, but Ernest May also critiqued it sharply in the New York Times for its focus on individuals (practically all men) over structural forces and for a reductive view of history that said more about Kissinger’s own political beliefs than the record of the past. It has also been criticized for focusing too much on Kissinger’s individual role in these events and overstating his impact. The book’s legacy is therefore somewhat controversial.

This study guide is based on the paperback edition by Touchstone Books (New York: 1994).

Content Warning: This summary contains some descriptions of the effects of war and follows a Eurocentric, androcentric perspective on global affairs, history, and society. This book also contains problematic and offensive arguments about the United States’ role in global politics and its treatment of such nations as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Chile, minimizing the atrocities of the interventions in these places.

The book begins by noting that, at the time of its writing, the United States is facing an unprecedented condition. In its early history, the US was able to ignore the harsh power politics that characterized European diplomacy, and as it emerged in the early 20th century as a Great Power, it had sufficient strength to impose its will on a significantly weaker set of allies and adversaries. The end of the Cold War may have seemed to signal a new era of American unipolarity, as no other state was even close to its degree of power and influence, but Kissinger saw an emerging multipolarity with Europe, China, and Russia all bringing to bear their distinct interests and cultural perspectives. In confronting this challenging new world, the US, the book argues, can look to the example of either Theodore Roosevelt, a shrewd practitioner of realpolitik who viewed the national interest in terms of relative power, or Woodrow Wilson, an idealist who sought to impose American notions of democracy and freedom on the entire world, that peace and harmony were the natural order of things. In Kissinger’s estimation, US foreign policy has been almost entirely Wilsonian since; he calls this “an intellectual triumph [that] proved more seminal than any political triumph could have been” (54). Such indulgences may have been permissible in an era of distinct American superiority, but America, he argues, will need to recover a sense of realpolitik if it is to help manage a new and more balanced global order. Kissinger offers lessons from previous orders that may then inform the future.

Kissinger begins in the 17th century, citing the French cardinal and royal advisor Richelieu (the villain in Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and its many film adaptations) as the source of raison d’état (“reason of state”), the principle of working on behalf of whatever advances the interests of one’s state, rather than any set of moral principles. Richelieu helped lay the groundwork for French power in Europe, and his legacy proved too successful when Napoleon made his bid for a continental empire. Following his defeat, Austrian Prince Metternich helped orchestrate a model of how to rebuild international order at Vienna, Kissinger states, expertly balancing the interests of the victors with generosity toward the defeated. The nationalist passions that Metternich struggled to contain eventually burst onto the scene, culminating in the unification of Germany in 1871 under Otto von Bismarck. The presence of a major power in the center of Europe proved too difficult a problem for European diplomacy to manage, and Europe’s balance of power system came to a crashing end with the First World War.

With the end of the war, Wilson and others sought to build a new international order on liberal principles of national self-determination and diplomatic transparency, but these ideals proved incompatible with lingering political realities, particularly the French desire to keep Germany contained. The Treaty of Versailles punished Germany just enough to stoke a desire for vengeance, which it soon became strong enough to act upon, and so the Second World War broke out a generation later to resolve the inconclusive legacy of the First. The war exhausted France and Britain and left Germany defeated and divided, leaving the United States and the Soviet Union as the remaining global powers. The United States regarded the Cold War in principally moral terms but managed to settle for a policy of containing Soviet power rather than seeking to overthrow it.

The urge to stop communism everywhere led to the debacle of the Vietnam War until Richard Nixon, Kissinger argues, managed to extricate the United States from Southeast Asia, albeit at a terrible cost, and ease relations with the Soviet Union and Communist China. The collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to offer the United States the chance to remake the world in its Wilsonian image, but Kissinger counsels that the world will only become more multipolar, with an entirely new set of major powers entering the scene. History does not offer a blueprint for solving these problems, he says; it instead shows how solutions emerge out of the logic of events, provided there are policymakers with the patience and wisdom to align the realities of power with a common conception of legitimacy.