World Order is about the philosophy of international relations. Kissinger argues that any stable system of world order needs both legitimacy, which is a belief about what constitutes a just order, and power, which is what holds the order together to keep peace. In this view, power and legitimacy are interdependent: power is unsustainable without legitimacy, and legitimacy cannot maintain order without power. The key is how to strike the right balance. Using this theoretical framework, Kissinger analyzes how the power-legitimacy equilibrium played out in four systems of historic world order.
The bedrock of world order before 1945 was the so-called “Westphalian system”, named after the Treaties of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648. The war was largely fought to settle the legitimacy of Church’s monopoly over individuals’ spiritual relationship with God, and yet, its sheer destruction had convinced Europeans to never again center world order on moral authority. Instead, the focus was shifted entirely to the allocation and balance of power with value-neutral rules, such as mutual respect for the sovereignty of states and noninterference in domestic affairs of other states. It goes without saying that these rules only apply to the states wielding enough power to tilt the order off balance.
If the Westphalian system is all about power, the Islamic order is all about legitimacy. Islam divides the world into the land of believers and the land of infidels. Islamists consider themselves permanently and automatically at war with the world inhabited by unbelievers, and Jihad—the mission of expanding Islam faith through struggles—the only way to bring peace to all humanity. They reject any other form of legitimacy because only Islam can offer the true form of freedom, the “freedom from governance by other men and man-made doctrines”. This feverish commitment to religious imperatives inevitably denies the reality of power dynamics, often with grave consequences. Kissinger noted how it has, for example, “turned coexistence with Israel from an acceptance of reality” into an irreconcilable conflict with their own legitimacy for many Arab governments.
Like Islamism, Confucianism refuses to recognize any sovereigns as legitimate unless they are subordinate to the Chinese emperor, who supposedly rules everything “beneath the sky” with the Mandate of Heaven. There are two important differences, however. First, the Mandate of Heaven is not sanctioned by God, but hinges on the ruler’s willingness and ability to provide good material life to the ruled. Second, China seeks respect, not conversion by force. Instead, the “barbarians” are given a rung on her ladder of tributary, according to proximity to Chinese culture. Therefore, as Kissinger observed, there is no need “to order a world it considered already ordered, or best ordered by the cultivation of morality internally”. To a certain extent, the current regime in China still sees the world the same way: it claims legitimacy from ever-increasing standard of living for its people, and it seeks to dominate not necessarily by physical force but by its achievements and conduct. On paper, China has adopted the Westphalian system since 1949, as evidenced by her commitment to the five principles of peaceful co-existence. That, however, is a practical accommodation to reality, not a reflection of Chinese ideal. Chairman Xi’s vision of China Dream, vague as it may sound to a foreigner, precisely expresses a national nostalgia for that glorious past, real, and imagined, in which Chinese can pretend the world orbits around them for eternity. That said, I think the threat of that vision to world peace has always been exaggerated in the West. The image of an expansionist and missionary China is largely a mirage created from—depending on your propensity for cynicism—either a misunderstanding of or a disagreement with her preferred form of world order.
It would surprise no one that Kissinger thinks Americanism is our best shot at creating an optimal world order, though he made it clear there is still room for improvement. As the cliché goes, America started with an idea. That idea, I think, is as much about liberty and democracy, as about the American insight of world order. Americans like to think they always place “principles” before “selfish interests” when it comes to world affairs. They are not only exceptional in this regard, but also destined to bring the vision to humanity. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “it is impossible not to be sensible that we are acting for all mankind”. Until Woodrow Wilson, however, America refrained from imposing her order on others. Instead, she contented herself with an exemplary role, as “the shining city on a hill”. Ronald Reagan loved to talk about the shinning city, and his depiction of it is simply too good to pass over:
“…in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind swept, God blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace—a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”
To the extent this metaphor advocates leading by example rather than conquest, it bears a resemblance to how China sees her role in the world. It was under Wilson’s watch that America began to embark on the mission to remake the world in her own image. To Wilson, democracy was the source of legitimacy because it is both the best form of governance and the sole guarantee for permanent peace. Thus, only by spreading democracy far and wide can humanity hope to resolve conflicts, achieve the equality of all nations, and maintain world peace and universal harmony. This vision, Ironically, is not that different from Islamism, in terms of the end goal (world peace), the claim to an absolute moral truth and the pledge to convert “unbelievers”. To be sure, America does not openly threaten to wage wars against unbelievers, opting instead to pressure tactics and sabotage campaigns. Yet, she frequently found herself at war with them, not always supported by an airtight casus belli fully consistent with her “principles”. Therefore, while in theory America dismisses any calculations of the Westphalian style balance of power as immoral and dangerous, in practice she always reserves for herself the right to embrace such a calculation on an ad hoc basis. Kissinger apparently thinks this ambivalence is a feature, not a bug, of Americanism, as he writes,
“America’s moral aspirations need to be combined with an approach that takes into account the strategic element of policy in terms the American people can support and sustain through multiple political cycles.”
In other words, the art of practicing Americanism is to find that delicate balance between power and legitimacy, which is probably best illustrated in the famous (or infamous) American doctrine of strategic ambiguity on defending Taiwan. The danger, however, is that Americanism can be seen as opportunistic, if not hypocritical. The lack of transparency and consistency has and will continue to enable America’s enemies to argue that she is, after all, no better than the value-neutral, power-centric imperialism that she purports to displace, and that her professed love for human rights, democracy and peace is but national interests under a fancy new dress.
If you are into geopolitics, you may find this book a real treat. In essence it is a condensed world history, viewed through the lens of world order and filled with interesting details, anecdotes, and quotes that I truly enjoyed. Kissinger had turned 90 when the book was published in 2014, but he remained a cool-headed, clear-eyed, and elegant writer. Perhaps more importantly, he was still the passionate believer and defender of Americanism, who refused to say anything negative at all about any of the twelve postwar presidents of the United States. This lack of self-reflection is somewhat disappointing but understandable given Kissinger was far from an impartial analyst of America’s world order.