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A. Wess Mitchell: Great Power Diplomacy: The Skill of Statecraft from Attila the Hun to Henry Kissinger. Chapter 8-Epilogue. 

 

In the first years of the 1970s, President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger essayed a two-part geopolitical strategy: detente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China. Mitchell understands the United States as a greater Great Britain in the sense that its home territory extended across a continent. As a commercial republic, it always maintained strong ties with foreign countries: “A policy of true isolationism was never a viable option for a country dependent on outside trade.” And, as he also remarks, this was an imperial republic from the founding until 1890; its “energies were directed primarily inward, to the conquest of [its] own hinterland,” partly thanks to its early enemy, Great Britain, whose powerful navy “kept other powers from dominating Europe and turning their full attention to North America.” As a result of this commercial prosperity and mostly uninterrupted empire-building, “by the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, America was capable of holding her own against the great powers”—very much including the British, about whom Roosevelt said he had no fear of any encroachments because he could counter any such attempt by seizing Canada. 

From 1890 to the First World War, America’s economic, political, and military heft increased materially, as its population became half again as big, its steel production increased nearly two-and-a-half times, its warship tonnage more than threefold. “In 1914, U.S. GDP was already four times that of Imperial Germany; by the eve of World War II, it was larger than all the other major powers combined.” That hardly meant that it faced no dangers by the time the young Nixon began his political career in the years after that war. Having allied with the Soviets against the Nazis, the United States confronted a rival empire that extended its reach into Eastern and Central Europe, hoping for much more. And by 1949, Communists allied with Stalin had seized control of mainland China. Recognizing that “Soviet Russia was a mortal enemy with whom there could be ‘no permanent modus vivendi,'” State Department Russia expert George F. Kennan proposed a policy of “containment” whereby diplomatic initiatives to countries not yet under Communist rule would establish alliances against that threat. President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson set about forming such alliances in Western Europe and East Asia. “Standing U.S. military commitments would replace Britain’s guardianship of the balance of power, backed by U.S. financial aid to thwart Communist subversion and a new international monetary system, brokered at Bretton Woods, that established a gold-backed U.S. dollar as the paramount global currency and created mechanism to prevent currency wars between the United States and her allies.” In Europe, the military alliance was formalized in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, while the Marshall Plan provided financial aid “to rebuild foreign economies shattered by the war” and, not incidentally, to lessen socialist and Communist temptations among the allied nations. Paul Nitze, heading the State Department Policy Planning Staff, put more teeth into containment than Kennan had wanted by writing NSC-68, which recommended a military buildup backing a diplomatic strategy that amounted more or less to a public opinion campaign to reassure American citizens and the citizens in allied countries that war was not imminent and to maintain communications with the Kremlin to prevent war from erupting accidentally, as it had done in 1914 Europe.

During these years, the capital military fact became the acquisition of nuclear weapons arsenals by the Soviet Union, which could now threaten the United States with destruction as readily as the United States could do the same to it. Nuclear weapons “made diplomacy more necessary than ever” but also “more difficult.” Whereas “for millennia, the task of diplomats had been to convert the potential for violence into political outcomes without bloodshed,” the threat of which gave negotiations urgency and often led to compromises that avoided war, against a nuclear-armed state “this logic broke down.” “If negotiation failed, nuclear weapons made war less likely than before, which in turn weakened the necessity to compromise.” Given the sharp regime differences between the Allied and Soviet blocs, including their fundamental disputes over moral principles, the prospects for diplomatic relations worsened. 

As a Harvard political science professor in the 1950s, Henry Kissinger published Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, arguing that the existence of nuclear weapons “made it harder to harness war to political ends in the way Carl von Clausewitz had envisioned.” He recommended American attempts to identify “limited objectives against the Soviets,” objectives that did not raise the all-or-nothing threat of nuclear war—a way of devising,” as he put it, “a framework in which the question of national survival is not involved in every issue.” As an émigré from Germany, Kissinger had studied not only Clausewitz but Kant, whose hope for a League of Nations he also deprecated. And he published a careful study of Metternich’s balance-of-power diplomacy, which he judged more realistic than either Clausewitz’s maxims (now in need of revision) and Kant’s (always in need of revision). Independently, as a practicing politician—a United States senator, then Eisenhower’s vice president—Nixon had arrived “at the same conclusion.” Under conditions of the late 1960s, when they arrived at the White House, the containment policy seemed to them unsustainable. Nixon regarded it as politically and financially unsustainable, especially given the ongoing war in Vietnam and America’s “deteriorating balance of payments position”; Kissinger regarded it as too rigid, leaving too little room for bargaining. 

Mitchell remarks the resemblance between America’s circumstance as understood by Nixon and Kissinger and the British circumstance as understood by Lord Salisbury in 1900. “Like the Edwardians, Nixon wanted to bring his nation’s commitments in line with the new realities not in order to abnegate its global position but to preserve it.” The Pentagon’s attempt to sustain the capacity to fight two major enemies and “a minor contingency in a third theater” was neither practicable nor necessary, given the success of the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the alliance with erstwhile enemy, Japan; those countries could now pay for a more substantial portion of their own defense. The United States devoted eight percent of its GDP to military spending, with 1.1 million troops, most of them in Asia, most of those in and around Vietnam. Victory there would require still more troops, still more expenditures, for which political support was doubtful. Nixon moved quickly, shifting to military policy of financing a war against one major enemy, not two, and cutting the military budget. By the time of his resignation from office in 1974, military spending and force levels had been reduced “to levels not seen since before the Korean War.” The two principles of the “Nixon Doctrine” were continued military commitment to allies with the proviso that “they would be expected to handle internal threats to their security”—a reprise of Westphalia, at least regarding allies. Nixon needed to be careful when insisting that allies increase their military spending; in previous years, France’s president de Gaulle and others had warned that Americans wanted nothing more than to abandon them, and such an insistence might look like a first step toward doing so. 

“Also like the Edwardians, Nixon wanted to reduce tensions with U.S. rivals.” Détente had actually started under the woebegone Johnson administration, which intended to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Overtures to China, however, were all his own. Mao Zedong hadn’t mellowed with age. His brutal ‘Cultural Revolution,’ initiated in 1966, continuing until the tyrant’s death ten years later, was in the process of claiming something along the lines of one to two million lives of a variety of the regime’s ‘class enemies.’ At this point, the old Stalinist was more dangerous to his own people than the Kremlin oligarchs were to theirs. Further, Nixon “had long advocated a policy of maximum pressure against the Red Chinese state.” In his estimation, the time had nonetheless come to reverse course; “engaging with Beijing in some fashion was necessary for U.S. interests,” an important potential component of a rebalance of power in the world. Never at a loss for words of praise for his proposals, Kissinger called this strategy “a subtle triangle” designed to “improve our relations” with both enemy powers. While initially he considered Nixon’s overture to China premature if conceptually sound, he quickly warmed to it.

“For all of Nixon and Kissinger’s creativity, their policy might have miscarried had it not been for the unwisdom of Soviet Russia”—a phenomenon surely not unknown in its history, but not sufficiently prevalent to be depended upon. The Soviets had already worsened their relations with China unilaterally, without any American initiatives. Not only had the Soviets diluted their Stalinism, much to Mao’s contempt; an eager imitator of his beau ideal of a butcher, Mao was “probably” the “biggest mass murderer in history,” his estimated 65 million kills surpassing the numbers racked up by the master himself. More, the Chinese “feared Soviet aggression and wanted to expand their own influence in the Communist world.” (It will be recalled that the American ‘New Left,’ for example, had lionized ‘Chairman Mao’ and his ‘Little Red Book’ of pithy aphorisms.) Just as Nixon had his foreign policy ‘doctrine,’ Soviet Communist Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev had his. The Brezhnev Doctrine upheld the Soviet Union’s prerogative of intervening in any Communist country whose regime was threatened, and its words were not idle; Soviet tanks had rolled into Czechoslovakia a year before Nixon’s inauguration, quelling republican partisans. Sino-Soviet tensions heightened in March 1969 in a series of border clashes, “which the Chinese almost certainly initiated,” and there were even signs that the Soviets might retaliate by striking Beijing with nuclear weapons. That is, statesmen in all three of the major powers needed to worry about a two-front war. 

Mao’s chief diplomat was Zhou En-lai, whose “quiet manner and philosophic bent belied a hardened core of the kind that one finds in people accustomed to having to survive under a brutal and arbitrary regime”—in his case, as “the committed lieutenant of one of history’s most ruthless killers,” having himself “ordered the deaths of many innocent people.” “True to the revolutionary ethos of the Maoist state, Zhou saw diplomacy as an arm of warfare against China’s enemies,” a dialectical “war of words” complementing the “war of swords,” as he put it. “Diplomacy falls within the province of the war of words,” he explained, and “as sure as day turns into night, there will be a constant war of words, every day of the year.”

Nixon and Kissinger wanted Communist Chinese help in getting out of Vietnam on the terms of a ‘peace with honor,’ as the slogan went. Unbeknownst to the Americans but well known to both the Chinese and the Vietnamese, China had little leverage with its fellow Communists in Hanoi, Vietnam being a centuries-long enemy of the Empire of Heaven. For its part, China wanted the U.S. out of Taiwan. In exchange for empty promises of influencing the Vietnamese, Zhou did extract some concessions from the U.S. regarding Taiwan: a drawdown of American troops in the country and, just as crucially, the adoption of Beijing’s ‘One China’ claim, which enables Beijing to claim that any American military defense of the Republic of Taiwan would amount to ‘outside interference in Chinese affairs.’ The two countries agreed to oppose—exactly how was unstated—hegemony in Asia by “any other country,” meaning the Soviet Union. They also agreed to the usual increase in trade, intergovernmental communication, and “people-to-people contacts”—the benefit of the latter to the United States chiefly being the infliction of Shirley MacLaine upon Mao’s personally blameless subjects. The main benefit to the Americans was that all of this made the Kremlin nervous. 

“Without doubt, the world was brought into greater balance, in the sense that Chinese and American power redirected toward the shared Soviet threat.” The three countries nonetheless persisted in “bleed[ing] and harass[ing] one another wherever possible” in what Mitchell calls “a period of strategic rest” intended “to regain strength before resuming the contest on more favorable terms,” which all three expected to find. Mitchell rightly criticizes Kissinger for claiming that Mao was animated by “a motive of order-building.” On the contrary, contemporary documents show that the old tyrant’s intention aimed at “aggravat[ing] the contradictions” between the Americans and the Soviets in order to “divid[e] up enemies and enhance[e] ourselves.” This is Marxist dialectic at work, equally consistent with the traditional Chinese policy of “ally[ing] with the Wu to oppose the Wei.” “All under heaven is in great chaos,” Mao exulted, anticipating the delights of ever-increasing worldwide power, which his regime has continued to accrue, decades after his death. 

These long-term deficiencies aren’t the whole story, however, inasmuch as to get to the next century in good condition one must first survive the current century. “The goal of Nixon’s grand strategy was to alleviate the military and fiscal burdens on the United States without forfeiting the overall U.S. position.” Reduced American expenditures of blood and treasure in Asia enabled Nixon to return America’s foreign-policy focus to “the place that was most important to U.S. national security, which was Europe.” Kissinger’s diplomacy “made the shift from a 2.5 to a 1.5 war standard possible,” in part by putting pressure on America’s Asian allies to put more effort into defending themselves. “Nixon’ pivot was not an end in itself; it was meant to give America an edge against her main opponent, the Soviet Union” by “forc[ing] the Soviets to bear the full brunt of their own two-front dilemma.” America went from a 70-30 ratio of forces in Asia and Europe to a 30-70 ratio, while the Chinese could transfer some of its forces away from its border with Korea to its border with the Soviet Union. His policy of détente with the Soviets, meanwhile, enabled Nixon to reduce military spending overall, as did his policy of ‘Vietnamizing’ the war in Indochina. “His policies allowed America to get her second wind spiritually,” to recover from the intense factionalism attendant to that war, “as well as strategically, at a moment when it might have turned inward,” as de Gaulle had expected. In the longer term, the United States could now put more resources into military research and development, which “resulted in a range of breakthrough technologies that the Soviets could not match.” While the Ford and Carter administrations didn’t take these advantages, they didn’t block the research, and President Reagan “was able to capitalize” both on “Nixon’s early reconcentration of effort to Europe” and on the technological advances Nixon had initiated and Reagan substantially augmented. Reagan also continued to use the Chinese Communists as a counterbalance to the Soviets. “The consequences of his administration’s deepening of ties with China, for good and for ill, remain with us to this day.” [1]

Mitchell draws some lessons for American statesmen. The character of the American regime makes diplomatic maneuvering more cumbersome than it was (for example) in the monarchic Austria of Metternich or the Prussia of Bismarck. It takes more effort to effect a change of course “because the complexity of the U.S. federal system,” to say nothing of its democratic republicanism, “rewards consensuses that, once locked in, are difficult to alter.” Such a regime will exhibit “long periods of inertia that can only be broken by a big jolt.” (It might be ventured that the Trump administration has specialized in such big jolts, initiated by the president himself.) “As Nixon and Kissinger showed, ‘bursts’ of innovation in policy require highly focuses leadership that is willing to devote primary attention to foreign policy and able to rewire aspects of the U.S. system to chart a new course.” 

America’s regime has forged “more alliances than any previous great power,” involving “much deeper commitments” which include “binding treaties that are approved by the Senate and considered to have the force of law.” These alliances “enhance U.S. diplomatic leverage by positioning the country to act as a kind of spokesperson for a large grouping of states,” sometimes even including ever-balky France. This does have the deficiency of setting up “a perverse incentive to free-ride”—another Trumpian concern. “A perpetual dynamic in U.S. diplomacy of trying to both reassure and motivate allies…would have been familiar to Bismarck from his dealings with Austria, but on a much bigger scale.” But “then as now,” America’s allies “lack viable alternatives to the U.S. market and security umbrella,” as President Trump evidently has concluded. 

“Nixon’s successes demonstrate that realist precepts are compatible with republican government.” Roosevelt’s alliance with Stalin against Hitler, Nixon’s simultaneous détente with Brezhnev and his rapprochement with Mao against Brezhnev, Reagan’s sometime support of anti-Communist tyrants against the Soviets, were all “short-lived affairs,” given the regime differences between republicanism and Communist oligarchy and Communist tyranny alike—modi vivendi “that allowed American to tread water and regain her strength.” Despite the fact that “the 20th century is strewn with many U.S. diplomatic tombstones,” notably Wilsonian and Rooseveltian internationalism, “it also saw the triumph of a uniquely American variety of hard-nosed diplomacy that blended aspects of British maritime strategy, continental realism, and homegrown meritocratic pragmatism,” with the use of diplomacy “as a tool of strategy to outlast powerful enemies that would have been recognizable not only to the not only to the classical European statesmen whom Kissinger so admired but also to the descendants of the Chinese emperors who would now succeed the Soviet Union to become the American Republic’s greatest adversary.”

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Mitchell concludes his discussion of great power diplomacy with observations drawn from all of his examples, across centuries, regimes, and civilizations. He has invited readers to consider circumstances in which great powers faced the prospect of a war “beyond the state’s immediate ability to win by force alone,” although its military officers might imagine otherwise. Appeals to the law of nations were futile. But “the diplomat offered a service that neither the soldier nor the jurist could provide: the possibility of rearranging power in space and time to the state’s advantage, s that it did not face tests of strength beyond its ability to bear,” usually “either by augmenting the resources at the state’s disposal externally”—gathering allies—or “by reducing the number of enemies requiring immediate attention, or both.”

Such work entails three strategies: conciliation, enmeshment, and isolation/containment. Conciliating an enemy might involve bribing him, appeasing him (i.e., giving him what he wants), or détente (persuading him that he needs to back off as much as you do). Enmeshment means pulling the enemy closer through trade or identifying shared political priorities. “Most of the examples of enmeshment in this book involved a relatively weak power looking for ways to lighten the load of defense expenditure and maintain empire on the cheap,” as in the cases of Vienna, Nineteenth-century Austria, and Britain after the Treaty of Versailles. Isolation means building coalitions that are militarily, politically, and economically strong enough to deter the enemy because attacking the coalition would be too costly. Mitchell hastens to note that “none of these strategies offers any assurance of success” and that they “are not a first choice but rather a necessity…foisted upon a great power by geopolitical and financial exigencies.” 

To increase his chances of success, a diplomat will need to study history. Admittedly, “diplomatic history does not provide pat lessons for the present any more than military history does.” Such study is rather an extended exercise in prudential reasoning in which errors are instructive instead of ruinous. Nonetheless, Mitchell does offer fourteen “basic principles” drawn from his own study—fourteen in number, perhaps as a counterweight to President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which turned out to be less than prudent.

1. Diplomacy concentrates power.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Diplomacy concentrates power and dilutes the enemy’s power by reducing your “exertions in one place” and “increas[ing] them in another.” You may be weaker or stronger than your enemy, but you must select the more immediate threat for your primary attention, as the Byzantine emperor did when he and his chief diplomat “conciliated Persians to focus on Huns” and when “Americans and Chinese both sought détente with one another to concentrate against Soviets.”

2. Effective diplomacy constrains the enemy.

This requires understanding of the enemy’s geography, his fear of nations other than your own, economic weaknesses, military weaknesses (especially weakness of military technology). Very often, your enemy will know his weaknesses better than you do, so these are points of leverage in negotiation. “Effective negotiation works with the grain of these constraints to narrow the options for profitable aggression and stack the deck in favor of stability.” Do not expect to discover good intentions; do not assume that diplomacy can “transform opponents internally,” making their regime compatible with yours. Regime change is an overly ambitious task for diplomats to undertake. It typically results from harsher methods, overt and covert.

3. Conciliate to constrain, not to appease.

You are unlikely to change your enemy’s motives. Whereas Theodosius the Younger correctly attended to the weaknesses of the Huns, negotiating with them on that basis, Neville Chamberlain “tried to remove the sources of conflict by giving Hitler what he wanted,” namely, the territory which strengthened the tyrant’s military position, enabling him to demand, and seize, still more. 

4. Use enmeshment to restrain your opponent, not you.

“There is a fashionable modern notion,” propounded by the prominent academic, John G. Ikenberry, “that enlightened states use diplomacy to wrap themselves in layers of commitments that restrict their own freedom of maneuver and thereby win the trust of other states” by rendering themselves harmless. Bad idea. You want “to foster economic dependencies”—your enemy’s dependence on you. “Communist China has used the economic enmeshment occasioned by Nixon’s opening and confirmed by post-Cold War U.S. presidents to created dependencies that translate into constraints on the United States in wartime, while the U.S. side has been much less adept, until recently, at using these arrangements to its advantage.”

5. Isolate your enemy to prevent war.

The Communist Chinese rail against ‘encirclement’ and ‘containment’ strategies deployed against them, even as they take every opportunity to push into Latin America. But in fact, containment strategies usually “make war less likely, for the simple reason that it forces a would-be aggressor to diffuse its military attention in multiple directions, therefore reducing its chances of success through conquest.” This puts the enemy on the diplomatic path rather than the military one. “The sine qua non of strategic diplomacy is to foist the multifront burden back onto an opponent in order, as Richelieu put it, to ‘keep your enemies so busy everywhere that they could not win anywhere.'” One suspects that the Chinese Communist Party understands this quite well, happily watching the United States embroiling itself in ‘long wars’ against Muslim terrorists and others. The Party is likely to be less than pleased with America’s successful brief, sharp strikes against its enemies.

6. Generally speaking, interests outweigh moral, religious, and political doctrines.

That is, “the law of self-preservation” usually prevails, inasmuch as a regime cannot advance whatever moral and political principles if reduced to a puff of smoke. This has been true throughout diplomatic history, as seen when states propounded religious principles, risking “the wrath of God” and “their own souls.” “The force that repeatedly led bitter enemies to find common cause was fear of a shared enemy,” a sentiment “that has consistently trumped the dictates of conscience, faith, or creed,” or perhaps consistently informing such dictates with the prudence of serpents. This notwithstanding:

7. Effective diplomacy is imbued with a higher mission than “the science of fear.”

Ideology is one thing, identity another. A nation’s identity depends in large measure on its regime: its purposes, its way of life, the kind of people who rule it, the institutions within which they rule. Byzantium had gold to offer, but it also had Roman law, the Christian Church, and the beauty of its capital city; during the Cold War, American diplomats “had at their back a great democratic republic grounded in the humanizing ideals of the U.S. Constitution.” If foreign countries see that a regime consistently upholds an ethos, a character, that benefits others along with themselves, trust increases. “Many of history’s most disastrous breakdowns of order occurred when a leading state discarded time-proven missions in favor of the power principle,” as when Wilhelm II sacked Bismarck and replaced the alliance system Bismarck had built with Weltpolitik.” Foreign policy realism isn’t necessarily as realistic as its proponents suppose. In contrast, Austria’s Kaunitz and America’s Kissinger “were both able to engineer radical reorientations in their nations’ foreign policies without sacrificing long-standing alliances with smaller states because the great powers they represented were understood to be committed to a mission that was preferable to those of other great powers.”

8. Smaller powers matter.

Sweden was no France, but it forced the Habsburgs to “divert attention and resources away” from France, as did Albania for Venice, menaced by the Ottomans. These kinds of alliances occur when the great power’s interest in fending off another great power coincides with a smaller power’s interest in not getting squashed by that other great power. If, however, the great power aims at detente with its great-power enemy, the smaller ally needs reassurance that it won’t be abandoned, as President Nixon appreciated in attempting “to allay Taiwanese and Japanese fears about rapprochement with China.” 

9. In negotiation, culture counts.

Know your enemy’s ethos. “The Byzantines used conventional treaty diplomacy with the Persians, a literate cosmopolitan civilization like themselves, but used methods of barter and intrigue hen dealing with a nomadic, ego-driven culture like the Huns.” Mitchell’s contrasts here are Wilhelmine Germany, which attempted to terrify the British, who hadn’t built their empire on cowardice, and both Chamberlain and FDR, who imagined “that their autocratic interlocutors” (Hitler and Stalin, respectively) “would negotiate on the basis of consensual give-and-take of the kind that characterized their democratic systems at home.”

10. Superior diplomacy fosters superior technology.

The delays diplomacy arranges gain time for technological innovation, including the development of better weapons systems. Commercial relations generate wealth, and wealth can be used for research, development, and manufacture; alliances can enable their members to “specialize in and therefore get better at, a certain range of technologies that are the most vital for its unique geographic situation.” Resources expended in Vietnam were turned toward the development of computers, missile guidance systems, and an array of other technologies that proved useful in outpacing the Soviet Union, the power the war in Vietnam had been intended to contain.

11. Money is more effective at attraction than deterrence or compulsion.

By this, Mitchell means that financial sanctions work less well than incentives. States have successfully used money “to get someone to do something helpful for them,” but have enjoyed less success in using money “to prevent someone from doing something harmful to them.” The Byzantines and Venetians deployed bribes “to succor the enemies of their enemies.” Britain used its powerful banking system to prop up small states on continental Europe whose interests happened to align with theirs.

12. Effective diplomacy depends on disciplined institutions.

Foreign policy bureaucracies arise in response to the need to keep good records and to gather and assess information on foreign countries, whether they are friendly or hostile. But any bureaucracy can become too big for its own, and its government’s good: “states developed bureaucracy to gain an edge in competition, yet the larger the bureaucracy became, the more it took a life of its own and stifled diplomatic creativity.” A too-large bureaucracy also tends to separate itself from the executive branch of government that it is intended to serve, becoming a government-within-the-government. “Almost every leader in this book wrangled the bureaucracy into alignment with his or her will at moments of international danger, either by creating parallel structures or by radically overhauling the bureaucracy, or both.” More recent American examples include presidents Reagan and Trump.

13. Democracy doesn’t guarantee success.

Better at trade and coalition-building than other regimes, more stable internally and more attractive internationally (partly because they are more inclined to keep faith with treaty partners), democratic and commercial republics enjoy “credibility, which is the foundation of effective diplomacy.” That doesn’t mean that they guarantee progress from one triumph to another, that ‘History’ is ‘on their side.’ “Some of the greatest disasters in this book came about when elected leaders tried to conduct diplomacy on the basis of progressive notions about the way the world should work”: Wilson at Versailles, Chamberlain at Munich, Roosevelt at Yalta. A democratic regime “does not allow great power to transcend power realities or exempt it from the tradeoff that lie at the heart of effective diplomacy.” Susceptible to “mood swings,” democracies need statesmen who are “deliberate about sustaining a focus on the national interest and nurturing the classical repertoire of skills that comprise diplomacy’s professional core, lest these be subsumed by fashionable causes.”

14. Expect no gratitude.

“There are plenty of statues of the West’s most famous generals and admirals, but very few of its great diplomats,” first of all because a Dwight Eisenhower cuts a more esthetically pleasing figure than a Henry Kissinger. The sword will always prove a more dashing accessory than an attaché case. On a more sober level, diplomatic triumphs are less spectacular than military ones. They often inspire “the messy anguish of compromise” rather than the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. 

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Kissinger titled one of his books The Necessity of Choice. In all, Mitchell impresses upon his readers the necessity of diplomacy. Liberalism in its progressivist form “did not expunge geopolitics from human history.” Statesmen still need ways to close “gaps between national-security means and ends” and of “keeping war’s costs and aims subordinate to politics.” The end of national security has become more complex, not simpler to reach “in an age of military balances, mutual nuclear vulnerability, and proliferating conventional military technologies.” Even AI technology cannot replace diplomacy, “cannot formulate preferences or provide the finesse and interpersonal skill that have always constituted the X factor of success in negotiations.” Twenty-first century Chinese Communists have become “adept at using diplomacy to win friends and influence people,” exhibiting “the mixture of political acumen, ideological flexibility, and patience that typically characterize successful great powers.” To counter such an impressive enemy, the United States and its allies will need to jettison the illusions of historical progress that have characterized the modern West for at least two centuries. 

 

 

Note

1. For an extensive discussion of Reagan’s foreign policy, see “Reagan Geopolitics: The First Term” and “Reagan Geopolitics: The Second Term” on this website under the category, “American Politics.” See also “The China Strategy” on this website under the category, “Nations.”