This article is taken from the August/September 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

In the course of his 99 years, Henry Kissinger has met many world statesmen both during and after his time as US National Security Adviser (1969-75) and Secretary of State (1973-77). This book is about six of the greatest of them, and what can be learned about their differing styles of leadership. As is often the case with Kissinger’s books, lain over that basic framework are profound thoughts about the nature of history, philosophical musings about the human condition and warnings about the future of the West, with insights such as “No society can remain great if it loses faith in itself or if it systematically impugns its self-perception.” New Yorkers who have recently pulled down the statues of Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt should take note.

Kissinger posits the concept of what he calls a “Second Thirty Years War” coming almost exactly three centuries after the first one of 1618-48. The two wars against Germany and her allies from 1914 to 1945 “challenged the entire international system to overcome disillusionment in Europe and poverty in much of the rest of the world with new principles of order”.

Just as the first Thirty Years War ended with the Peace of Westphalia, which created the system of nation states that we know today, so Kissinger believes that the post-1945 rules-based international order, based on the economic model agreed at Bretton Woods and Dunbarton Oaks, the political model based on the UN Charter, and the military model based on a strong United States and NATO, has served the world well in producing “new principles of order”.

His six leaders — Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew and Margaret Thatcher — all played an important part in protecting the rules-based international order that Kissinger, a Jewish teenage refugee from Nazi Germany, recognises as the prime guarantor against renewed direct great power conflict. Yet he now fears that such an order “will be replaced in practice for an indeterminate period of time by an at least partially decoupled world”. History shows that this must be avoided at all costs. 

Kissinger considers what he calls history’s “wider sea of vast and ineluctable tides”, asking whether we are the mere playthings of huge impersonal forces where humanity is denied all choice or whether, as he passionately believes, the tides of history have to be “applied through human agency and filtered through human perception”. He concludes, “leading thinkers have imbued inchoate forces with the strength of destiny. Ironically, there has been no more efficient tool for the malign consolidation of power by individuals than theories of the inevitable laws of history.” It is refreshing to read such a takedown of Marxism, Determinism and the Whig interpretation of history.

Of this book’s six leaders, none were aristocrats

Kissinger is on similarly strong philosophical ground when he considers the virtues of aristocracy as a form of pre-modern government, stemming from the fact that “Aristocrats did not understand themselves to have acquired their status through individual efforts. Position was inherent, not earned”. 

Despite the defects of aristocracy — nepotism, inefficiency, “wastrels and incompetents” — he points out that “The creative aspect of aristocracy was bound up in the ethic of noblesse oblige, as in the phrase ‘To whom much is given much is expected’. Since aristocrats did not achieve their station, the best of them felt an obligation to engage in public service or social improvement.” It takes a thinker who owed everything he achieved to his own widely acknowledged merit in Harvard and Washington to make such a welcome counter-cultural case.

Of this book’s six leaders, none were aristocrats, although Charles de Gaulle hailed from the upper gentry. They were strivers, like Kissinger himself, and the author brings each alive superbly, with anecdotes about his relations with them and illuminating insights into their leadership styles. Thus, Konrad Adenauer is hailed for his “strategy of humility”, which brought defeated Germany back into the comity of nations in extraordinarily short order considering the scale of his country’s crimes during the Second World War. 

Kissinger shows how Adenauer “was determined to turn submission into a virtue” and recounts a moment in November 1949 when, during a parliamentary debate, Adenauer (highly unusually) shouted at opponents of continued cooperation with the Allies, “Who do you think lost the war?” 

Charles de Gaulle led a country that had ended up on the winning side of the Second World War largely because of him. Kissinger calls his leadership technique “the strategy of will” and points out how much of Gaullism came down to the General’s sheer belief in “the eternal France” rather than the realities of the political situation at the time. 

De Gaulle’s willpower saw France through the immediate postwar period, and Kissinger — who has a sixth sense for where genuine power lies — is clearly impressed by the way de Gaulle played a tremendously weak hand so dexterously. 

The chapters on Lee Kuan Yew’s “strategy of excellence” and Margaret Thatcher’s “strategy of conviction” are similarly full of aperçus gleaned from personal knowledge, and, in the case of those two, friendship. The warmest pen portrait, however, is of Anwar Sadat and his “strategy of transcendence”, which for all its statesmanship and courage led to his assassination in October 1981. Kissinger walked behind Sadat’s coffin at his funeral, but noted he was the only mourner present two years later when he returned to pay respects at Sadat’s tomb.

The world leader to whom Kissinger was closest was, of course, Richard Nixon, who appointed him National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State. Nixon increasingly relied on him to run US foreign policy as his presidency became mired in Watergate, and kept him in place until he was forced to resign, whereupon President Ford kept Kissinger on as a signal of American stability and continuity. Kissinger’s analysis of what he calls Nixon’s “geopolitical concept of the national interest” is described as “the strategy of equilibrium”.

This refers to the balance of power between the West, Soviet Russia and a China that was emerging globally in large part due to Nixon’s and Kissinger’s policy of re-engagement. Whether this proves to be beneficial in the long run is yet to be seen. “The opening to China,” Kissinger writes, “like every strategic success, was not only a response to contemporary problems but also an admissions ticket to future challenges.” 

As a result of space and cyber weapons and AI robots that can “seek their own targets and learn from experience”, Kissinger regards permanent dialogue between the great powers as “imperative to ensure the stability of world order — and perhaps the survival of world civilization”. The Dr Strangelove figure that Peter Sellers supposedly based on Kissinger in the eponymous movie is worlds away from the man himself. 

The warning of an apocalypse is repeated in the book’s conclusion. After a sobering appreciation of the role that cyber weapons and autonomous AI systems already play, he points out, “Because the threshold of their use is so low, and their destructive capacity so great, resorting to such weapons — or even their formal threat — may turn a crisis onto a war or transform a limited war into a nuclear one through unintended or uncontrollable escalation.”

New paragons must be part-statesman and part-prophet

It is through this prism that Kissinger’s controversial recent calls for the Ukraine war to end with a return to the status quo antebellum — leaving Putin in control of Crimea and the two Donbas breakaway republics — ought be regarded. Kissinger clearly regrets that “the essentially bipolar Cold War distribution of destructive capacities has been replaced by a more complicated and potentially less stable kaleidoscope of high-tech options”, some of which he mapped out in his 2021 book The Age of AI and Our Human Future, co-authored with Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt. It is to orienteer us through the kaleidoscope of options that we still need leaders. 

Three months before his death in 1967, Adenauer asked Kissinger whether leadership was even possible in the modern world. This book is an attempt to answer the question in the affirmative, though Kissinger decries several aspects of the modern world such as our collective attention deficit disorder, wryly observing how “reading a book carefully and engaging with it critically” seems today to be “a counter-cultural act”.

Kissinger believes the last great comparable transformation of the world was the Enlightenment, which he writes “replaced the age of faith with repeatable experiments and logical deductions. It is now being supplanted by reliance on algorithms, which work in the opposite direction, offering outcomes in search of an explanation. Exploring these new frontiers will require a committed effort from leaders to narrow, and ideally to close, existing gaps between the worlds of technology, politics, history and philosophy”. He argues persuasively that such paragons need to be part-statesman and part-prophet. Joe Biden, anyone?