Key to Modern Power Politics Still Lies in 17th-Century Europe

Henry Kissinger’s 900-page study Diplomacy remains one of the most influential guides to how states think about power, and its core argument is that the roots of today’s world order stretch back to the courts and battlefields of 17th-century Europe.

Published in 1994, Diplomacy traces the evolution of statecraft from Cardinal Richelieu’s France and the Thirty Years’ War to the Cold War and its aftermath. Running through the narrative is the concept of Realpolitik, the idea that governments should not frame decisions around moral or ideological principle, but around a hard reading of the balance of power and the practical choices available to statesmen.

Kissinger opens his story in mid-17th-century Europe, a continent that could have been described using Thomas Hobbes’s warning that, "Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called War; and such a war as is of every man against every man." In that environment, France began to produce a different kind of political figure. Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, was appointed secretary of state and set about imposing order on a fragmented map through calculated power politics rather than religious sentiment.

For Richelieu, the test for any policy was simply whether it advanced French national interests. He played German-speaking states off against each other to block a strong Prussia on France’s borders, worked to weaken the Habsburgs by siding with Protestant forces in the Thirty Years’ War, despite being a Catholic cardinal, and sent French armies into Northern Italy to keep it from Habsburg control. The outcome was to position France as the dominant power on the European continent for nearly two centuries.

From there Kissinger takes readers through 200 years of European rivalry, introducing a succession of Realpolitik practitioners. William of Orange in the Netherlands, William Pitt in Britain, Klemens von Metternich in Austria, Napoleon III in France, and Otto von Bismarck in Prussia all appear as leaders whose primary concern was to secure their own states while frustrating the ambitions of rivals.

Out of their manoeuvres emerged the classic European balance of power. For almost two centuries the leaders of five great powers decided the fate of much of the world. Whenever one state threatened to become too strong, the others moved to contain it through shifting alliances. Kissinger quotes Lord Palmerston, British prime minister in the 1850s, who captured this logic by saying, “Therefore I say that it is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

By the early 20th century that system had begun to fray. France’s influence had faded, Tsarist Russia was showing signs of strain, a united and industrialising Germany was on the rise, and the United States (US) was beginning to look outward. The bulk of Diplomacy examines how this altered balance gave rise first to the First World War, then to the Second, and finally to the Cold War confrontation between Washington and Moscow.

Kissinger writes about these later chapters not only as a historian but as a participant. Born in Germany in 1923, he fled Nazi persecution to the US in 1938, served in American military intelligence during the war, and completed his studies at Harvard. By the time he finished his doctorate he was deeply embedded in Washington’s foreign policy establishment, later serving as national security advisor to Richard Nixon and secretary of state to Nixon and Gerald Ford.

That experience shapes his reflections on the difference between analysing international systems and building them. “Intellectuals analyse the operations of international systems; statesmen build them. And there is a vast difference between the perspective of an analyst and that of a statesman,” he wrote, arguing that analysts can choose their problems and revise their conclusions, while statesmen face fixed challenges, limited time, and decisions that history will judge as irreversible.

Diplomacy does not stop with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Writing only a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Kissinger tried to anticipate what would follow. He forecast that, in the absence of a common enemy, Western nations would quarrel more openly over their own interests, that adversaries of the West would not vanish, and that a multipolar order would emerge. He also expected that the US, as the remaining superpower, would seek to spread Western liberal governance more widely.

Three decades on, those predictions give Diplomacy a contemporary edge. The book’s central claim, that to understand modern politics one must understand the 17th-century roots of Realpolitik and the balance of power, continues to shape how leaders and analysts read a world that has again become crowded with competing centres of power.