For anyone interested in history, Henry Kissinger’s 900-page magnum opus, Diplomacy, is a must read. Diplomacy was written in 1994 and attempts to chart the history of diplomacy from Cardinal Richelieu’s France in the mid-17th century to the era immediately after the collapse of the Soviet system.

Underlying his historical analysis is the application of the idea ofRealpolitik, in which states do not (and should not) make decisions based on moral or ideological principle, but that instead decisions of state must be taken by a hard-nosed reading of the balance of power and the practical options that present themselves to statesmen.

The book begins in mid-17th century Europe, a time and place that would be aptly described using Hobbes’s quote 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 France a man emerges who begins to assert an order over his anarchic continent, Armand Jean du Plessis, commonly known as Cardinal Richelieu. The king of France appoints Richelieu as his Secretary of State and thus begins the formalised practice of Realpolitik in European diplomacy.

Only question

When it came to decisions of state the only question for Richelieu was whether his actions advanced France’s national interest. His schemes included playing off the various German-speaking states against one another to prevent a Prussian reunion on his borders, destabilising the Hapsburgs by allying with Protestant forces (despite France being a Catholic country and the Cardinal a Catholic religious leader) in the Thirty Years War, and invading Northern Italy to keep it out of Hapsburg control. The result of this was that France became the most powerful state on the European continent for nearly two centuries.

After Cardinal Richelieu’s France, readers are taken on a two-century journey through European diplomacy meeting the various 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. These statesmen were laser-focused on trying to secure the interests of their states while trying to deny the interests of their enemies.

What emerged out of these warring rivalries was a system based on the balance of power between rival states. For almost two centuries it was the leaders of five European states who decided the fates of almost every person in the world. If any one state became too powerful, its rivals would ally with one another in order to keep it in check. A quote Kissinger cites from Lord Palmerston, Prime Minister of the UK from 1855 to 1858, sums up this system perfectly, “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.”

Balance of power

However, by the turn of the 20th century the balance of power had shifted. France was a pale reflection of itself, Tsarist Russia was beginning to crumble, the German industrial giant was rising, and America was starting to cast its eyes around the world. The bulk of the book deals with this new world order which emerged in the 20th century. We are taken through the history of the both the First and Second World Wars and then into the Cold War and its various diplomatic crises.

Born in 1923 in Germany, Kissinger fled Nazi persecution to the United States as a Jewish émigré in 1938. In 1943 he was drafted into the army and worked in military intelligence for a few years. Afterwards, he attended Harvard where he received his undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees.

By the time he was graduating from Harvard he had already become deeply plugged in to the foreign policy apparatus of the United States. Kissinger even served as Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor from 1969 and 1973 and then both Nixon and Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State from 1973 and 1977.

This lends Kissinger’s analysis of the Cold War an important biographic element, as he was actively involved in most of the American foreign policy debates of the period.

As Kissinger wrote: “Intellectuals analyze 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. The analyst can choose which problem he wishes to study, whereas the statesman’s problems are imposed on him. The analyst can allot whatever time is necessary to come to a clear conclusion; the overwhelming challenge to the statesman is the pressure of time. The analyst runs no risk. If his conclusions prove wrong, he can write another treatise. The statesman is permitted only one guess; his mistakes are irretrievable. The analyst has available to him all the facts; he will be judged on his intellectual power. The statesman must act on assessments that cannot be proved at the time that he is making them; he will be judged by history on the basis of how wisely he managed the inevitable change and, above all, by how well he preserves the peace.”

Past the Cold War

Diplomacy does not end with the Cold War though, as Kissinger wrote it five years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Soviet communism. Kissinger tried to look forward to what the new world order may be and his predictions are eerily prescient.

Kissinger saw that without a common enemy to unify Western nations they were likely to divide over questions of their individual national interest (as it has), he saw that the enemies of the Western world were not gone and therefore, a multipolar world order would emerge (as it has) and that America was likely to use its role as the global hegemon to try and spread Western-liberal governance around the world (as it has).Kissinger’s career is a testament to the idea that the best way to understand the world is to understand its history.