Two years before declaring the independence of the United States of America, representatives of twelve English colonies along the eastern seabord of North America (all but Georgia) met in Philadelphia and signed their Articles of Association. Describing themselves as “his majesty’s most loyal subjects” and “avowing our allegiance to his majesty, our affection and regard for our fellow-subjects in Great-Britain and elsewhere,” the delegates nonetheless expressed “the deepest anxiety, and most alarming apprehensions, at those grievances and distresses, with which his Majesty’s American subjects are oppressed.” This “unhappy situation” had been caused by “a ruinous system of colony administration, adopted by the British ministry about the year 1763, evidently calculated for enslaving these colonies, and, with them, the British Empire.” Components of this system included revenue-raising measures; depriving some colonists of “the constitutional trial by jury”; and, by extending the border of Quebec to the western border of Massachusetts, making it possible to set the Catholic population of one side against the Protestants on the other. These acts against the colonists “threaten the lives, liberty, and property of his majesty’s subjects, in North-America.”

To meet these injustices and unjust threats, the delegates declared their intention, “under the sacred ties of virtue, honor, and love of our country,” to frame “a non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation agreement” among the colonies they represented. More specifically, they refused to import “any goods, wares, or merchandise whatsoever” from Great Britain or Ireland, along with various commodities (especially tea) from other parts of the empire. They would also discontinue the importation of slaves. Indeed, beginning in December 1775 the delegates would “wholly discontinue the slave trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it.” The delegates further intended both to increase the domestic production of the colonies and to reduce their demand for “every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of games, cock fighting, exhibitions of shows, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.” Finally, the delegates directed that “a committee be chosen in every county, city, and town, by those who are qualified to vote for representatives in the legislature, whose business it shall be attentively to observe the conduct of all persons touching this association”—committees of censors, in the classical sense. “When it shall be made to appear, to the satisfaction of a majority of any such committee, that any person within the limits of their appointment has violated this association, that such majority do forthwith cause the truth of the case to be published in the gazette; to the end, that all such foes to the right of British-America may be publicly known, and universally contemned as the enemies of American liberty; and thenceforth we respectively will break off all dealings with him or her.” In sum, “we do solemnly bind ourselves and our constituents, under the ties aforesaid.”

Threats to life, liberty, and property are threats to the principal natural rights enumerated in John Locke’s Essay on Civil Government. But the Articles of Association does not identify these rights as natural or unalienable, even if there is no reason to suppose that they did not so regard them. The delegates to this Continental Congress appealed primarily to civil rights guaranteed under the unwritten British constitution—”the rights of freemen” and “the liberties of [our] country.” They did not declare their independence from Great Britain, and so did not need to emphasize the natural character of the rights they asserted. Nor did they frame their declaration ‘philosophically,’ in the universal terms of rational argumentation. They clearly intend the Articles of Association to stand as a legal document for and by citizens who remain within the constitutional confines of the British regime and empire.

The 1776 Declaration of Independence is another matter. It repeats the charges made in the Articles of Association and indeed adds more, but these charges now find their place in a logical syllogism, an argument that in principle can be understood by human beings as such, by rational animals, rational creatures, and not only by those familiar with British constitutional law. A logical syllogism is an argument guided by the principle of non-contradiction, a principle first enunciated by Socrates in Plato’s Republic. There, Socrates says, “the same thing won’t be willing at the same time to do or to suffer opposites with respect to the same part and in relation to the same thing.” So, for example, I can draw a circle and a square; I might even inscribe one inside the other. But I cannot draw, or even conceive of, a square circle. Logical syllogisms consist of three parts: the major premise, the minor premise, and the conclusion. So, famously: all men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. One need not syllogize in words; geometrical proofs are syllogisms in lines. Modern ‘symbolic logic’ is just that; it consists of syllogizing with symbols instead of words. 

A syllogism can be theoretical or practical—proving what is or what one must do. A practical syllogism concludes with a call for action, or at least a choice, a resolve. The Declaration of Independence is in one way theoretical, describing what “these United Colonies” are (free and independent of Great Britain), and in another way practical, stating what Americans have chosen to do (to act as free and independent states under one people). In his seminal article, “The Declaration of Independence and Eighteenth-Century Logic,” the historian Wilbur Samuel Howell explained that the Declaration follows the rules of logic set down by the most widely-used text of that time, the The Elements of Logick by William Duncan, first published in 1748. [1]. As per Duncan, the Signers first set down the major premises of their argument, the truths they hold to be self-evident; they then list the minor premises of the argument, the several charges against their “British brethren”; they conclude with their actual declaration of freedom and independence.

In law, a declaration is a formal complaint. In foreign policy, it is a formal announcement sent by an ambassador, under the law of nations—that combination of natural laws and conventional agreements and customs which in principle govern international relations. In the first paragraph here the delegates—now representing all thirteen colonies—say what it is that they are declaring and why they are declaring it. [2]

The Declaration of Independence begins with the phrase, “When in the course of human events….” Why don’t they say, more economically, “When in history…?” At the time of the American Founding, ‘history’ meant the historia rerum gestarum—the account or narrative of things that are born and pass away, the story of the course of human events. A ‘history’ was a literary genre, a narrative, and also a mode of inquiry. Philosophy and poetry are also modes of inquiry. In Plato’s Republic philosophy is the rational ascent from the cave of convention, into the daylight of truth, which is permanent. Poetry is the imitation of ‘imaging’ of true things—”holding the mirror up to nature,” as Dr. Johnson described it. History, however, put into words what had been seen, after inquiry, in human events; only then can those ever-changing events endure, be remembered. History fixes events, making them comprehensible to the intellect, which can understand only that which lasts long enough to be perceived and considered. Thus Thucydides writes a work “for all time” about what he calls “the greatest war of all time.” He chose for his inquiry a course of events that revealed something permanent in human nature.

In the middle of the eighteenth century ‘history’ increasingly came to be defined no longer as the historia rerum gestarum but as the res gestae, the course of events itself. To use a term invented later, ‘history’ was redefined ‘phenomenologically.’ ‘History’ was now said to be the ‘secularized’ and ‘rationalized’ equivalent of biblical Providence—secularized, because no personal God guided it; rationalized, because it was said to be governed by discernible laws by which events unfolded in predictable patterns. The name now used for this philosophic doctrine is ‘historicism.‘ 

This change in the definition of ‘history’ coincided with a moral and political crisis in philosophy. Where do moral and political right come from? In the ancient world, God or the gods were said to have laid down the moral and political law. Philosophers disagreed, some claiming that all moral and political right derives from convention, custom, human invention, others claiming that genuine moral and political right derives from nature, and especially from the nature of human beings. Insofar as the philosophers of the modern Enlightenment were thoroughgoing materialists, denying the existence of God or gods, they could not find right in them; insofar as those philosophers were atomists, defining ‘nature’ as nothing more than matter in motion, they could not longer find right in nature, either. This led some back to forms of conventionalism, as seen in the thought of David Hume and his well-known claim that no ‘ought’ can be derived from any non-conventional ‘is.’

Other philosophers deployed contemporary historicism as a solution to the ‘is-ought’ problem. They began to regard the course of events as the unfolding of human freedom in man’s conquest of nature—nature as understood to be without purpose or intrinsic worth. History is human progress. The greatest of the historicist philosophers was G. W. F. Hegel, a younger contemporary of the American Founders. But the Founders showed no interest in historicism. Natural right remains their standard, a standard Abraham Lincoln would defend nearly a century later.

The Declaration says that sometimes in the course of human events it “becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” Since the dissolution of political bands is an act of choice, “necessary” here means moral necessity, not physical necessity. But what is a “people,” the entity making this choice? A people must be somehow distinct from certain kinds of “political bands.” If a people were constituted by the political bands that link an empire together, then independence would mean self-immolation. And undoubtedly the English people distinguished themselves from the Irish, the Amerindian, and the Asian-Indian peoples, all of whom lived in their vast empire. Nor could a people be an ethnic group, simply. Of those living in the British colonies declaring their independence, even the ‘white’ population was heterogeneous, although not so heterogeneous as it would become. Approximately eighty percent were English and Welsh; seven percent were ‘Scotch-Irish’; six percent were German; five percent were Dutch; two percent were Irish Catholic. There were also free persons ‘of color,’ both Amerindian and African. 

Although the Declaration does not define a “people,” it does mention four characteristics of any people. A people is capable of declaring the causes for its actions; a people holds a separate and equal “station” or status among the “powers of the earth,” and is entitled to do so according to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God; a people is entitled to undertake reform and revolution of its government according to self-evaluated means to the natural or Creator-given ends of safety and happiness; a people can be represented by individuals elected by it, individuals thus empowered and legitimized to declare the causes for the people’s action, in its name. A people is not, therefore, any one person, family, or class. According to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, a people is synonymous with a nation or political community. That is, although it isn’t constituted by the political bands of empire, it is constituted in part by the political bands of some kind. These turn out to be the result of a free choice, the choice to join together into such a community. An individual or group may choose to reject that choice at the time it is offered, choose not to enter into a given civil society. Only free men and women can truly choose. Slaves are not part of the contract, and are therefore morally entitled to rebel against their masters, in accordance with natural right. Under a historicist doctrine, slavery presents a dilemma: Is slavery progress? If it is, then few if any such rebellions could be morally right. This is precisely what many apologists for slavery would contend in the years between the Founding and the Civil War.

If human beings were not entitled to rebel against tyranny, then the claim that they were revolutionizing colonial government by dissolving the political bands connecting them to Great Britain would make no sense. But the standard of natural right not only entitles human beings to rebel against tyranny, it also limits such rebellion. Political choice speaks through majority vote, but a majority of freemen, or a majority of slaves, might be mistaken. Popular sovereignty therefore must remain within the limits of natural right. 

What is the distinction between the “Laws of Nature” and the laws of “Nature’s God”? The Laws of Nature are those discoverable by the power of the human mind unassisted by revelation; to the Founders, the most impressive of these was Newton’s law of gravity. Neither the pious man nor the skeptic will reject such a law outright, although either could inquire after it and possibly refute it. The Laws of Nature are both rational and rationally discoverable; natural law was discovered before the Christian era and independently of the revelations to Moses at Sinai. The laws of Nature’s God (an Enlightenment formula) are mentioned in divine revelation but need not be discovered by perception of that revelation. An example of such a law is the ‘argument from design’—the argument made by the Apostle Paul, but also by non-Christians before and after him, that the order of the world implies an intelligent Creator or at least Maker. Nature and nature’s God give laws to peoples, not only to individuals. They can therefore be civil-social and political. This is important because in 2 Corinthians 6:14 Paul tells the Church not to be “bound together with unbelievers” within God’s Kingdom. But God’s Kingdom is not the same as man’s civil government; in a political community of the latter kind, Christians and ‘secularists’ can indeed be bound together in defense of their commonly-held natural rights ordained by the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. 

Why do the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle a people to a separate and equal station among the Powers of the Earth? Because, as seen in the Declaration’s second paragraph, individual human beings are created equal. Therefore, if naturally equal individuals freely choose to aggregate, to form a political community, that civil society or nation must be morally equal to any other such aggregation. This is why the 1787 Constitution requires that whenever a new state is admitted to the Union it comes in on an equal footing with the other states. This is also why “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” requires a people which intends its independence to “declare the causes which impel them to the separation” from the empire in which they have been a part, the causes for dissolving the imperial political bands. 

Along with this political claim the Founders make a geopolitical claim. The moral necessity to sever imperial political bonds brings with it the moral necessity entails a moral necessity or duty to declare the reasons for that choice. Why show “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind”? Practically speaking, it obviously makes sense to persuade other “powers of the earth” that your actions are just. More, unlike some of the modern philosophers (particularly the monarchist, Thomas Hobbes, and the democrat, Jean-Jacques Rousseau) the Founders affirmed the natural sociality of human beings. If human beings are social animals, opinion matters morally as well as rhetorically or tactically. A respect for opinion bespeaks regard for the nature of human beings—for what the Founders act to defend. A good example of this regard is George Washington’s list of the rules of civility. Also contra Hobbes, the Founders do not consider the state of nations to be a state of war, even though there is no common human sovereign. Wars will never disappear from the course of events, but neither will peace; the Founders aim at civil and international peace, even as they declare their independence under what they regard as a condition of war with the British regime and seek allies in that struggle. 

What exactly is the moral necessity for declaring independence? In declaring their independence the Founders also declare their dependence—their dependence upon the Laws of Nature and of nature’s God. They begin the second paragraph of the Declaration with the major premises of the syllogism. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….” In her book On Revolution, Hannah Arendt argues that the phrase “We hold” is either superfluous or contradictory; if the truths are self-evident, do not all rational beings “hold” them? What does it mean to say a truth is self-evident?

In his principal philosophic work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke defines self-evident truths as statements about sense perceptions, which he calls “simple ideas.” ‘Black is not white.’ ‘Round is not square.’ “All men are created equal” is what Locke calls a “complex idea,” an idea that combines more than one sense perception; no such complex idea is self-evident. However, in Locke’s Essay on Civil Government, Locke writes of the condition or “state” of nature. The state of nature is a state of equality, “wherein all the Power and Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than any other: there being nothing more evident than that Creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without Subordination or Subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all, should by any manifest Declaration of his Will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted right to Dominion and Sovereignty.” This natural equality of human beings, along with their “perfect Freedom to order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the Law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man,” is “evident in itself, beyond all question.” “Being furnished with like Faculties, sharing all in one Community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such Subordination among us, that may Authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of Creatures are for ours.” [3] Borrowing almost word-for-word from Algernon Sidney, Thomas Jefferson phrased it more vividly: “the mass of men has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” [4] This isn’t a self-evident truth in Locke’s precise, philosophic sense, but it is a straightforward deduction from such truths. Human beings are by definition all the same species; if so, on some level every individual within that species, that ‘kind,’ is equal to every other member. That is, as the saying goes, close enough for government work. [5]

“Created equal” also means that human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” “Unalienable” means you can’t give them away, even if you want to. Who or what is the Creator endowing all men with rights they cannot alienate from themselves? The question is crucial to the alliance between Bible-believing Americans such as John Witherspoon and Enlightenment secularists such as Benjamin Franklin. “Creator” undoubtedly can mean the God of Abraham, who created the cosmos ex nihilo and created man and woman (but not ex nihilo). “Creator” can also mean, much more generally, the god of the Deists, a non-providential god who formed the cosmos but no longer governs it. With some stretching, “Creator” might also mean “Nature,” and on a political terrain that requires hanging together lest all hang separately, theological disputes might well be laid aside in defense of the right to live at liberty, pursuing happiness. 

Many commentators have observed that the Declaration’s references to God parallel the three ‘branches’ of government seen in the United States Constitution. God is the chief legislator, laying down the laws of nature; He is the chief justice, the “Supreme Judge of the world”; and He is the chief executive, invoked as the protector of Americans in the Declaration’s last sentence. Philosophically considered, the three rights specifically named—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—parallel the three parts of the soul identified by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, life being the desire for bodily health and satisfaction, liberty being one purpose of thumos or spiritedness, and the pursuit of happiness being a purpose of logos, of the fulfillment of the nature of human beings as rational beings. In Locke, the right to liberty serves the right to life and the right to the pursuit of happiness. While in Locke the pursuit of happiness means the enjoyment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, pleasure and pain need not be understood merely in terms of the body, as the distinctively human soul consists of more than bodily desires. 

The purpose of government is “to secure these rights.” Government is not natural in the sense that God endows us with a specific kind of government—the claim of divine-right monarchists. God has made human beings naturally social beings with unalienable natural rights; the governments human beings institute among themselves “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Given the nature of human beings, “consent” cannot mean mere ‘assent’; it must mean rational assent, assent consistent with Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. “Whenever any Form of Government”—any regime—”becomes destructive of these ends”—the rights government is intended to secure—”it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” This right to regime change or revolution follows logically from the purpose of government, just as the purpose of government follows logically from the existence of unalienable natural rights in all human beings.

How can revolution against an imperial or even tyrannical regime justified in Christian terms? In Romans 13 Paul wrote, “Let every man be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.” Governing authorities, as ministers of God, avenge Him for men’s evil practices, “wherefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience’s sake.” Very pointedly, given the Founders’ circumstance, Paul went to to write, “because of this you also pay taxes.” To this teaching of conscience and Scripture, the Founders replied, true government secures God-given unalienable rights; a government that assaults natural right is no true government. They do not resist paying taxes; they resist paying taxes to a government in which they are not represented in the supreme legislature.

The individual conscience that perceives unalienable rights, and the political and perhaps individual conscience that perceives duties, require the overthrow of false government and the establishment of true government, both actions to be governed by prudence or practical wisdom. After saying that safety and happiness are the ends to be effected by government, the Founders’ very next word is “prudence”: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Such is the power of habit over human conduct. Sophia (as in philo-sophia) means theoretical wisdom, attained by rational consideration of permanent things, including the principles or laws that govern change; phronēsis or prudence means rational consideration of contingent things, things we deliberate about, things we choose. Prudence is not mere calculation of advantage. It aims at finding the means of securing safety and happiness, of living well. It is not theory but relates to theory, because theoretical reasoning tells us what ‘living well’ is. Prudence guides us to the means of obtaining the ends of human life that theoretical reasoning discovers.

Prudential reasoning is itself an exercise of human virtue. Prudence becomes severed from theory by Hobbes, who replaces the summum bonum of happiness with a summum malum—the fear of violent death. Hobbes associates prudence primarily with experience, inasmuch as he charges that theorizing—thinking about what is good for human beings as such—breeds sedition, especially conflict over religion. The Founders show the way toward establishing a regime that defines the human good in terms that are self-evident, recognized by most (though not all) religious believers and by most (though not all) ‘secularists.’ As for prudence, Jesus of Nazareth Himself sends His disciples “out as sheep in the midst of wolves”: “therefore,” he commands, “be as prudent as serpents, and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16). The Declaration silently rejects pacifist or nonresistant Christianity, not on the grounds of absolute fidelity to moral principle—Christianity no less than the Founders requires that human actions be governed by prudence—and not in deference to governing authorities—Christians do not consent to obey evil-doing rulers—but with respect to the proper response to evil. Nonresistant Christianity turns the other cheek, personally and politically. The Declaration does not extend the precept “Resist not evil” to political matters, to the actions of peoples, and in this it stands with the vast majority of Christians, then and now.

Under a tyrannical regime, prudence aims first at revolution, but then no less at reconstruction, the founding of a new regime. That was the work of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. There, prudential reasoning led to a work of architectonic political science, the United States Constitution, which constitutes a regime capable of maintaining civil peace for American citizens and international peace with other powers of the earth, a regime strong enough to sustain violent challenges domestic and foreign but more usually engaged in peaceful commerce in all goods, whether they are material, spiritual, or intellectual.

In what way did prudential reasoning guided by the principles of unalienable natural right affect the institution of slavery, the most obvious contradiction of those principles? In 1776 slavery existed in all thirteen states. Of the 2.1 million Americans, slightly less than twenty percent were slaves. In 1798 slave importation had been abolished in all of the states, although South Carolina renewed the practice in 1808. In that year Congress abolished the slave trade, and by 1810 eight states had abolished slavery itself. Even in the South, where the slavery was most ingrained in civil society, numerous manumissions occurred. In 1776 there were 27,000 free blacks in the North, 32,000 in the South; by 1810 there were 78,000 free blacks, 27,500 slaves in the North, while in the South there were 108,000 free blacks and 1.2 million slaves. It was the generation after the Founding that saw a turn away from gradual emancipation, beginning around 1830. The presence of such large numbers of slaves in the South presented Americans with a fundamental political problem, and not only a moral and economic one. As James Madison observed in the 1790s, “in proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part instead of the whole, in the hands of property, not of numbers. All the ancient popular governments were, for this reason, aristocracies. The majority [of the population’ were slaves…. The Southern States of America are, on the same principle, aristocracies.” [6] Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution requires a republican regime in every state; as the regime difference between the Northern and Southern states deepened in the 1840s and 1850s, civil war ‘between the states’ (more precisely between a confederacy of some states against the federal government) became unavoidable, despite the Founders’ best efforts and the several attempts (temporarily successful) to find a compromise solution to an uncompromisable political contradiction.

In 1776 the more general form of oppression facing all Americans, free and slave, emanated from the regime of the British Empire. “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” The eighteen injuries and usurpations listed in the Declaration constitute the minor premises of the syllogism. Because they enumerate actions by a monarch (each begins with the phrase “He has”), they stand as a description of the things monarchs do when they intend to establish tyranny. This makes the Declaration permanently useful, a warning for any time.

The list is orderly, part of the overall syllogism. It is a list of weightier and weightier evils, going from bad to worse to worst—from violations of liberty to violations of the right to life itself. The list also moves from legislative abuses (the first seven) to judicial abuses (the next two) to executive abuses (the final nine). The thirteenth abuse has ten subdivisions, an enumeration of George III’s “pretended acts of legislation,” that is, executive acts disguised as legislative acts.

The legislative abuses consist of royal attempts to interfere with the colonial assemblies’ operations—requiring the monarch’s approval of the colonists’ legislation, a process in which he often proved dilatory; long-delayed reapportionment legislative districts to enable new settlers representation (“a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only”); allowing royal governors to call legislative sessions “at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures”; dissolution of colonial legislatures altogether; refusing to permit new elections for long periods of time after such dissolutions; and impeding population increase in the colonies by “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.” Taken together, these abuses amounted to a refusal to allow the colonists to govern themselves according to the rule of law.

The judicial abuses consist of royal attempts to deprive the colonists of self-government in the courts by refusing to approve laws for establishing judiciary powers in North Carolina and making “Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.” The monarch thus intends to control both the legislatures that make laws and the courts that adjudicate cases under those laws.

The monarch’s abuses of executive power are the most immediately damaging. Beginning with the Townsend Acts of 1767, he has established what we would call a bureaucracy—”a multitude of New Offices” filled with “swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” He keeps standing armies on American soil in times of peace, without the consent of American legislatures, and in Massachusetts appointed a military governor. The multi-part thirteenth abuse flows from the monarch’s alliance with the British Parliament in passing the Declaratory Act of 1766, asserting the right to rule the colonies by executive orders and Parliamentary legislation—a Parliament in which the colonists have no representatives. This has empowered the British state to quarter troops in America at the colonists’ expense; to protect the troops from punishment for crimes committed against Americans by holding the trial in England while also trying Americans accused of treason in England; to restrict American trade and impose taxes on Americans without Americans’ consent; for enacting the 1774 Quebec Act, which established French civil law in Quebec and extended Quebec’s borders to the Ohio River—”enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies” in contravention of English common law. In addition, monarch and Parliament devised the Massachusetts Government Act of 1774, vastly increasing the monarch’s direct control over all branches of that colony’s government, down to the municipal level and suspended the New York Assembly for failing fully to implement the Quartering Act of 1765. 

The Founders reserved the five most damaging charges for last. “He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us” at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. That is, the monarch has done more than change the regimes of the American colonies; he has done more than attempt to convert the British Empire into a modern, centralized state complete with a professional bureaucracy and a standing army. He has gone from civil government to warfare, having “plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.” On land, he has hired “foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation,and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation”—acts undermining not only government but civil society. He has coerced American citizens to bear arms against their country by conscripting American sailors on ships seized under the Restraining Acts of 1775. Finally, “he has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”—dissolving the American colonies into a sort of chaos. If unalienable natural rights are endowed by our Creator, the monarch has effected a sort of anti-creation.

The phrase “merciless Indian Savages” today is often taken to refer to all Amerindian nations and tribes then in contact with American colonists. This is wrong. Americans distinguished between civilized and savage Amerindians. The “Five Civilized Tribes” in the South were quite unlike the Iroquois (for example), who did indeed wage warfare as described. With regard to the incitement of slave rebellions, Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration put the matter in much stronger language, language which completed the list of charges: “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers”—several Muslim monarchs had abolished the slave trade—”is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,he has prostituted his negative [i.e., his veto power] for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

With this eighteenth charge against the monarch, the minor premises of the syllogism have been stated. These minor premises cite acts contradictory to the major premises, specific violations of the fundamental principles of natural right. The Founders now draw three logical conclusions. First, because petitions for redress of grievances by the colonists “have been answered only by repeated injuries,” this “Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” Second, the British people themselves “have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity”; Americans “must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity” to separate from them, holding them, “as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.” Even if, per impossibile, the monarch were to abdicate, separation from the English people themselves would stand. Finally, “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions”—something only the omniscient God can see—Americans declare “that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States,” with no more “political connection” with the British state. “As Free and Independent States,” the American colonies therefore “have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” Since the monarch by his tyrannical actions has abdicated government of these colonies, they are independent in fact; having done so by violating the colonists’ natural rights, he has made them independent in right. The Americans are merely declaring the independence that the monarch has granted them in action while denying it in words. 

Reinforcing the prudential as well as the ‘theoretical’ character of their declaration, the Founders conclude: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” They request divine protection while swearing to mutual protection. Divine protection will guide the course of events invoked in the first sentence. To pledge lives is to pledge bodies, to fight to the death in defense of the right to life. To pledge fortunes is to pledge the material means of supporting lives, the property the right to liberty protects and enhances. To pledge honor, and to hold it sacred, is to pledge something entirely non-material, recognizing that loyalty to one another, fidelity to human beings paralleling fidelity to God, can sustain a free people in its freedom.

 

 

 

 

Notes

1. Wilbur Samuel Howell: “The Declaration of Independence and Eighteenth Century Logic.” William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 18 (1961), 463-484.
2. For a discussion of the several meanings of ‘declaration,’ see David Armitage: The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 14-18, 30-40.
3. John Locke: Essay on Civil Government, II.ii.4-5. The scholar who first drew attention to this passage was Harry V. Jaffa: How to Think About the American Revolution: A Bicentennial Cerebration (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1978) III. 75-122. This reading is broadly consistent with Duncan, who defines a self-evident truth as one that “admits not of any Proof, because a bare Attention to the Ideas themselves, produces full Conviction and Certainty” (Duncan: The Elements of Logick, VI.119). 
4. Thomas Jefferson: Letter to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826. Paul Leicester Ford, ed.: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons), VIII.3.
5. And again, it resembles Duncan’s discussion, cited above.
6. James Madison, “Notes for the National Gazette Essays.” The Papers of James Madison, XIII.163.

 

 

Barry Gewen: The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and the World. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2020.

 

Although George Marshall and and George Kennan framed American foreign policy in the aftermath of the Second World War, as a scholar and statesman, Henry Kissinger gave it much if not all of its substance, often working against the ideology of Wilsonian progressivism or ‘liberal internationalism,’ sometimes against the conservative nationalism whose most distinguished practitioner was Ronald Reagan. Against these so-called ‘Idealist’—but as much ‘formalist’ or ‘institutionalist’—approaches to world politics, Kissinger advanced the theory and practice of geopolitical ‘Realism,” which Barry Gewen defines as “thinking in terms of national interest and a balance of power” in the world.

Gewen has designed the architecture of his book with uncommon judiciousness. Knowing that most of his readers adhere to one or the other non-Kissingerian schools of thought, he draws them in by stating their opinions for the most part fully and fairly, giving them due weight. He then leads those readers through Kissinger’s way of thinking, both in theory and practice, showing why the ‘Realist’ way has a political and even moral heft of its own, one not to be dismissed by those who wish the world were, or could be, a much better place than it is. He  engages Kissinger’s critics in dialogue with him, a dialogue sustained over seven chapters.

Of these, six chapters register the dialogic mode because they are paired. He begins with an explanation of Kissinger’s policy of supporting regime change in Chile when he served as National Security Adviser in the Nixon administration in the early 1970s, an explanation he grounds in Kissinger’s witness to the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. The second pair of chapters moves from practice to theory, clarifying the theoretical foundation of Kissinger’s thought with lucid discussions of Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Morgenthau, fellow German-Jewish immigrants to America. The final pair, “Kissinger in Power” and “Kissinger Out of Power,” not only account for Kissinger’s many policy positions over his long career but highlights the care with which a knowledgeable and responsible sometime academic, sometime public official, ought to undertake those related but quite distinct modes of conduct. The chapter Gewen sets by itself is the one on the Vietnam War, during which American ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’ fought one another with more passion than in any other event during the second half of the century, when he and many of his other readers came of age. 

In 1970, the Chilean Socialist Party was poised to win the presidential election. Its candidate, Salvador Gossens Allende, a Marxist admirer of Fidel Castro, cultivated a protean image as ‘a man of the Left’ about whose specific intended policies he made little known. Kissinger said, notoriously, “I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its people.”

“Has any American public official ever uttered a more ‘un-American’ statement?” Gewen asks. “It violates the notion that the United States does not (or at least should not) interfere in the domestic affairs of another country, especially when that country has not attacked the United States and is not considered an immediate threat to American national security.” And “it is a profoundly undemocratic”—more, “anti-democratic”—statement, “signaling a willingness to prevent or overturn the result of an election that is universally recognized as free and fair for some other cause—no doubt a malevolent one.” “Call this the arrogance of imperialism.” Many did. Many still do.

But foreign policy isn’t that simple. Chile in 1970 “represents with utmost clarity the possible conflict that can exist between the promotion of democracy and the demands of national security.” More recently, the electoral victories of Hamas in Gaza and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt exemplify circumstances in which “democracy promotion has conflicted with America’s national interests.” The Declaration of Independence put the matter plainly: governments are designed to secure natural rights. The question remains whether a given form of government and the regime in which it exists do in fact secure those rights. In a given place, at a given time, democracy might fail to do so. And while “the world would indeed be a far better place if it were made up of an assemblage of nation-states” with republican regimes, “it is a long way from here to there,” as the UN General Assembly has demonstrated for more than seven decades and counting. 

Founding and sustaining any regime, good or bad, requires attention to the circumstances of the people it will rule. Gewen begins his consideration of Chile in 1818, when Chile declared independence from Spain. At that time, and for most of the nineteenth century, the geographic distance between Chile and the United States guaranteed little or no conflict between them. During the Madison administration, the House of Representatives passed a resolution applauding Latin American independence movements, but in its actions the American government remained neutral. After Chile won its sovereignty, plantation owners took control. Catholic, Spanish, aristocratic, they might be said to have had affinities with some elements of the American South, but little else; the bulk of their international trade was with Europe. “Nothing that concerned the United States concerned Chile. Nothing that mattered to Chileans mattered to North Americans.” On one faintly comic-operatic occasion, America rattled its sabers at Chile when two drunken Yankee sailors got killed in a bar brawl. Chile was forced to indemnify the families, and that humiliation rankled for a long time. Otherwise, “Chile once again receded from sight and mind” in the United States. 

In the first half of the next century American corporations owned substantial copper mines in Chile. Although the Left would portray this as an instance of heartless capitalist and imperialist exploitation, “Chileans knew that copper miners for American companies were earning higher wages than their countrymen in other sectors of the economy and that copper companies were paying extraordinarily high taxes for the privilege of extracting minerals from the nation’s soil, as high as 70 percent according to some calculations”; these taxes “accounted for as much as 50 percent of Chile’s total tax revenues.” Who, one might ask, was exploiting whom?

What changed Washington’s attitude toward Chile, and towards all Latin America, was the Castro revolution in Cuba. And not only Washington’s attitude: the Soviet Union hoped that the Cold War “would now be won in the third world, with Cuba as the ‘bridgehead,'” as KGB planners put it. “‘The world is going our way,’ declared one KGB official, and nowhere did that seem truer than in Chile, which had the oldest and largest Communist Party in South America.” Although Allende’s Socialist Party competed with the Communists electorally, Allende himself had close ties not only with Castro but with the Kremlin; as in Europe, Communists and Socialists were capable of forming a ‘popular front’ coalition whenever they judged it useful to do so. We know this, not only because we have the KGB files from that period but because Allende said as much: “Cuba in the Caribbean and a Socialist Chile in the southern cone will make the revolution in Latin America.”

Marxist parties had drawn support in Chile because rapid and poorly-managed urbanization in the first half of the twentieth century had resulted in malnourishment, polluted drinking water, alcoholism, and illegitimacy; a Marxist ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ became thinkable because there now was a proletariat—an urban working class. In 1925 a new constitution separated church and state. This enabled “religious landowners and the less religious industrialists” to coalesce “into a unified right dedicated to social cohesiveness and stability” or, as the Left would have it, “safeguarding privilege.” The more democratic constitution also opened opportunities for political organizing by the Left: not only urban workers but peasants and even a substantial portion of the middle class joined the recently-formed or soon-to-be-formed Communist, Socialist, and Christian Democrat parties. The 1958 institution of the secret ballot proved “a devastating blow to the landowners in the countryside,” who could no longer monitor the votes of ‘their’ peasants. “Ominously, at the same time that Chile was becoming a genuine democracy, economic conditions, already bad, had crumbled even more. By the early 1960s the country was in crisis.

While the Communist Party tend toward a staid statism, Allende’s Socialists gathered together “Trotskyists, anarchists, Titoists, Peronists, Maoists, anyone who yearned for social justice ASAP.” Chilean socialists were nationalists, not internationalists, except—and this was crucial to the calculations of both Washington and Moscow—for their devotion to Castroism and their intention to bring Marxist regimes to all of Latin America. When Castro visited Chile shortly after his revolution, Allende accompanied him on a tour of the country, averring that they were “marching toward a common goal.” While Allende remained a Socialist and a sometime rival of the Communists, “what cannot be dismissed is the Nixon/Kissinger worry that Chile under Allende was a paving stone on the road to Soviet hegemony.” Castro himself had played his cards close to his vest upon assuming power, before announcing, a year later, that “Moscow is our brain and our great leader.” Why wouldn’t Allende be doing the same thing?

At Kissinger’s urging, then, the Nixon administration planned an intervention in Cuba’s “internal affairs,” the character of which might likely affect its external affairs. “To those inclined to react with indignation or outrage at Washington’s interventions, it is important to point out that Chile was hardly virgin territory whose purity was violated only by the intrusive, predatory United States. The Soviet Union and Cuba were doing their utmost to back Allende.” The Kennedy and Johnson administrations saw the same dangers in the previous presidential election, and intervened more extensively than Nixon would do. In this, they were following Truman administration policy in Italy, “one of America’s great postwar foreign policy triumphs,” “the CIA’s first major covert action,” when American aid averted a Communist Party takeover in that country.

And what exactly did the 1970 American “intervention” consist of? It didn’t involve any attempt to foment a coup; at the time, the Chilean military “had no taste for overturning the constitutional order” of their country. Nixon cut off military aid and denied credits to Chile, aid the Soviets and Cubans struggled to make up. Given Allende’s stated “objective”—”total, scientific Marxist socialism”—followed by state seizure of mineral resources, banks, fishing and textile industries, eventuating in “more than 90 percent of Chile’s GDP under government control” by 1973, there seems to have been little reason for any regimes other than Communist ones to subsidize his efforts. “And it wasn’t just the economy that Allende was trying to control. He was also trying to centralize the government and restrict political freedom.” His proposals included moving from a bicameral to a more easily controlled unicameral legislature; presidential power to override judicial decisions; and “chang[ing] Chile’s education curriculum to instill ‘values of socialist humanism’ among young people.” (“The minister of education explained that the program had been modeled on the school system of East Germany.”) The avowed populist lacked the popular support to ram his reforms through; finally, when the top army officers saw that the people were fed up, they removed Allende—needing no help from the Americans to do it.

Gewen defends the Nixon administration’s limited and non-violent actions against Allende. “Doing what could be done to weaken Allende made sense within a Cold War context. Even if Allende’s intentions were unclear, providing aid to his opponents was a reasonably cautious response to a potential threat, a legitimate hedging of bets.” Gewen points to Kissinger’s ‘Realism’: He “saw international affairs not in terms of high moral principles like self-determination or national sovereignty (in this sense his critics are right to call him unprincipled) but from an assessment of power, and the judgment he was ineluctably drawn to was that Allende represented a diminution of American power and a corresponding increase in Soviet power.” At worst, Allende might have become a more stupid version of Castro or Lenin; at best, in Kissinger’s judgment, he might have been a Kerensky, a leftist weakling who would clear a path for a leftist strongman. What he really did was to clear the path for a rightist strongman, General Pinochet. There being no longer a geopolitically important Right, Pinochet’s rule was tough on Chilean leftists but unthreatening to American interests. 

What about democracy? Kissinger had a ready response, his family having fled Germany for the United States in 1938. “He understood that democratic procedures could not prevent catastrophe” in all circumstances. “Henry Kissinger was not going to let the mere fact of a free election stand in his way of dealing with a potential threat to the United States.” His refusal “to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people” “looks a lot different if one has the rise of Adolf Hitler in mind.”

Gewen does not need to recount in detail the well-worked-over story of Hitler’s road to establishing himself as Germany’s tyrant and the scourge of Europe. He limits himself to showing how Hitler did so by exploiting the vulnerabilities of a democratic regime. “Hitler made a career of fooling everyone.” Kissinger’s judgment cut to real point: the statesmen of the 1930s didn’t need to divine the Führer’s intentions. “Statesmen can never be sure; they are always forced to act from insufficient knowledge because by the time they can be certain (if that is ever possible), it is probably too late.” Kissinger writes, “the West should have spent less time assessing Hitler’s motives and more time counterbalancing Germany’s growing power.” That was discernible.

Further, in Kissinger’s view, “democracy has no sure answer to the demagogue.” Hitler succeeded because he was a spellbinder on the platform. “Over time, he developed the full vocabulary of the rhetorician’s art—voice, inflection, timing. His speeches were structured to build to carefully controlled crescendos,” using sentiment, irony, flattery, sarcasm, even humor. “William Carr, a scholar who has examined Hitler’s speaking style closely, writes: “By any objective standard Hitler must rank as one of the great orators of history, perhaps the greatest in the twentieth century,” a century which included Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan. Above all, Hitler’s audiences found in his rallies “an incitement to cast off the dreary restrictions of civility and rationality and allow their emotions full Dionysiac release, above all a permission both to maintain hope in the face of obdurate reality and to hate anyone or anything that was perceived to undermine that hope.” His rallies were rock concerts before rock music had been invented. Indeed, the Nazi party made money by charging entrance fees—a gimmick few if any other politicians have been able to venture.

Hitler understood that tyrants cannot live by words alone. He assigned the chore of ‘institutionalizing’ Nazism in Germany to Gregor Strasser, who built the party with provincial organizations throughout the country, “establish[ing] bureaus for foreign policy, health, and justice—in effect a shadow government preparing the Nazis for the day when they would take power,” and setting up a variety of civil-social associations consisting of the professions, veterans, farmers, workers, and students. The Nazis ran food and clothing banks, soup kitchens, first aid facilities. The party became “something the unimaginative, bureaucratic plutocrats and Marxists who dominated the political scene from the right and the left never could be”: a people’s party. “This was democracy in action.”

The only way to have stopped the Hitlerites was the way in which Allende (who of course was no Hitler, as Gewen acknowledges) was stopped, or some similar way that “would have overturned the Weimar constitution and established an authoritarian regime, but one without any popular legitimacy whatsoever.” And in Germany’s case this would have been “an invitation to civil war.” Further, in 1933 no one knew how malignant Hitler would turn out to be. German conservatives were confident that their control of the cabinet had “box[ed] Hitler in,” as one of them put it, while simultaneously countering “the greater threat, the long-term threat” of Marxism backed by Soviet Russia. That is, they believed that Hitler was a ‘domestic’ threat, controllable by experienced politicians such as themselves, whereas Stalin was a foreign threat, in command of an enormous population and with an international network that had penetrated deep into Germany—far less manageable. This proved a mistaken calculation in the short and medium terms, although not a stupid one. In the event, initially “it seemed more important to uphold democratic principles than to outlaw antidemocratic groups like the Nazi and Communist parties, yet once the Nazis had achieved the significance of broad support, a ban became impossible,” precisely in light of those democratic principles. The other parties couldn’t compete; the Marxist Social Democrats failed to see that “internationalism was a vacuous aspiration and an electoral loser”; the Communists were too obviously subservient to a foreign power.

Gewen claims that “not even America’s Founding Fathers really had a solution to the conflict: their answer, drawn from their readings in classical antiquity, was to put their faith in a gentlemanly elite inspired by the Roman ideals of integrity, virtue, and disinterestedness”—Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy” of virtue and talent. The problem was “how to persuade the mass of voters to elect them.” This ignores the Founders’ political architectonics, their system of federalism, separation and balance of powers in the federal government, and their encouragement of a commercial-republican ethos—none of which Weimar Germany, built on the ruins of indigenous monarchy and martial oligarchy, had or could have had for a long time.

“The most depressing chapter of this history” consists of the fact that “the majority support that Hitler was never able to attain as a democratic politician he now achieved as a brutal dictator.” Hitler Germany saw full employment during the Great Depression, rearmament, restoration of order, and perhaps above all the reinvigoration of German national pride after the humiliation of a military defeat never adequately explained or accepted by the people. Kissinger “was intent on conveying a dark lesson about history and human nature to his American readers” and to the statesmen he worked for and against. “Nothing,” he wrote, is more difficult for Americans to understand than the possibility of tragedy.”

Kissinger learned about Americans in the Army during the Second World War. His family had settled in New York City, where he met many of his fellow-refugees and immigrants, but draftees represented a cross-section of people he might never otherwise have known. “Heartland Americans,” he called them, “real middle-Americans.” “Many things distinguished Kissinger from the cosmopolitan, sophisticated, urban, and urbane friends and associates he developed through the years, but one of the most significant, certainly, was what it meant to him to be an ‘American.'” His collaboration with Richard Nixon (who made a calculated appeal to ‘middle-Americans,’ and especially with Gerald Ford (who was one) makes more sense in the light of that. He sympathized with the real Americans, but he was not one of them. Understandably, he supposed he could bring a needed sense of reality to such innocents when they ventured abroad.  

Gratitude toward America as the refuge from tyranny, along with an indelible sense of distance from Americans, characterized the German-Jewish thinkers Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt. They too were “freethinking individuals who opposed tyranny but nursed a deep suspicion of democracy and its majoritarian processes,” and a certain philosophic questioning of “the traditional moral foundations” that they took to undergird the American regime. At the same time, suspicion of democracy did not entail rejection of democracy. “It would be more accurate to call them ademocratic, or nondemocratic, or at worst undemocratic.” They did find the progressive form of liberalism animating the American democrats of their time philosophically dubious. Like all German intellectuals of their generation, they had read Nietzsche.

Gewen offers a very fair and somewhat innovative reading of Strauss, considering his thought in some ways a response to the searing experience of modern tyranny or ‘totalitarianism’ in Germany. “Hitler is the ghost at Strauss’s banquet, usually unmentioned, often unseen, but flitting grimly through the essays and books or hovering ominously over them, a menacing presence framing their approach and shaping their conclusions.” This goes too far if intended to deny Strauss’s capacity to get out of the cave of the regimes of his time, but I doubt Gewen means it that way. It is also important to see that Strauss reacted not only to the rightist tyranny of Hitler but the leftist tyranny of Lenin and Stalin, as easily seen in his exchange with Alexandre Kojève.

Consider Strauss’s well-known and in some circles notorious discussion of exoteric writing—the literary techniques whereby philosophers embed their real teachings in clouds of indirection, including allusion, symbolism, irony, and dialogue. [1] Such writing was “required by the failure of Weimar’s democracy,” by the regime of Hitler—its censorship of heterodox writings, its persecution of heterodox writers. Or consider Strauss’s critique of the new liberalism or progressivism which animated the Weimar regime. The Third Reich was “engendered out of the false but dominating notion of progress, which was responsible for the modern crisis of Western civilization.” Progressivism replaced moral principles with “the alleged movement of history,” a movement that denied the fixity of such principles, “replacing the confident language of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ with the relativistic language of ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary.’ Such historicism “eroded traditional certitudes and opened the public arena to any talented demagogue of the moment who claimed to have history on his side,” whatever demi-Nietzschean ambitieux with a stronger will, a “greater ruthlessness, daring, and power over his following, and the best judgment about the strength of the various forces in the immediately relevant political field,” as Strauss put it.

The historicist dispensation perverted even philosophy itself. Strauss unhesitatingly called Martin Heidegger the greatest philosopher, perhaps the only true philosopher, of his generation. But Heidegger joined the Nazis, became mesmerized by Hitler. “The father of existentialism drew a stark, gloomy, and unforgettable picture of the human condition,” man’s “thrownness” into “the world condemned to knowledge of the certainty of death in a meaningless universe.” In such a universe, “authentic” human beings can make no good or bad choices, as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are illusions; rather, we make only resolute or irresolute choices, and who was more resolute than the Führer? As both a philosopher and a Jew, Strauss could make his own resolute, but not merely resolute choice to reject Heidegger ‘in theory and in practice.’

Much less impressive than Heidegger were the social scientists in Europe and the United States, who equally undermined ethics and ethical politics but in a sub-philosophic, pedestrian way. No existentialist angst or irrationalism in that. Only a complacent and narrowly-conceived rationalism that supposed it could push commonsense understanding of practical matters aside and substitute for it the certainties of mathematics. Strauss did not claim that common sense was the equivalent of traditionalism. Nazism, Communism, and social-science relativism all made universalist claims, which could only be resisted with universalist counterclaims. What Strauss called “the conscious culture of reason”—prudential reason in practice, theoretical reason in philosophy—serve as anti-toxins to such false universalisms.

“Finally, with regard to the principle of equality, Strauss was scarcely a believer in the American credo that all men were created equal. Society was inherently hierarchic,” since “not all men strive for virtue with equal earnestness” and social distinctions of some sort are ineradicable, even if only for that reason alone. Here Gewen fundamentally misunderstands Strauss and the “American credo” as stated in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration never claims that human equality has anything to do with any society, or with society as such. Human equality is equality of natural rights, equal innate possession of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness regardless of economic, social, or political conditions. The distinction between natural right and historical right, between rights founded in human nature and rights founded in history (whether conceived as tradition or as progress) one of the fundamental political-philosophic distinctions Strauss makes, throughout his writings. Oddly, Gewen does recognize this feature of Strauss’s thought later on, but misses it here, in his discussion of America.

On the practical level, Gewen also misses an important consonance between Kissinger and Strauss; their rejection of world government. As his exchange with Kojève shows, Strauss vigorously rejected world government, which he understands as a pervasive bureaucracy scientistic and/or ideological elites. Such a government would provide no escape from tyranny; Strauss could flee Nazi Germany to French, then England, then America, but he couldn’t become a refugee on some other planet.  As citizen and as philosopher, such a comprehensive world order was anathema to him. Kissinger never thought about the conditions of philosophy, but he knew firsthand the conditions of citizenship, and he saw nothing like them in a world government.

Arendt shared Strauss’s worries about democracy, preferring the republicanism of the American founding, and especially its federalism, to it. This was a Tocquevillian point. To have genuine civic life, people must have the liberty not only to speak, to write, and to pray but to govern themselves. Within the modern nation-state, federalism gives citizens the chance to do that in civic associations, municipalities, and counties. Also like Tocqueville, she understood such political liberty as a counterbalance to the democratic desire for the ever-increasing social egalitarianism which inclines souls to prefer the strong, equalizing despots, or administrative elites, to social inequalities liberty causes to occur. Any regime requires authority, that is, rulers; the question is whether the rulers will rule by the consent of the governed or by violence. “America was different” from many European nations because “its revolution did not throw the colonists back into a Hobbesian state of nature,” “a war of all against all.” “Most modern revolutions,” by contrast, “starting with the French, had overthrown the one legitimate authority they knew, sanctified by religion and tradition, and then collapsed in the futile search for a new, broadly acceptable authority that, under the circumstances, had to be imposed from the top down.” The Founders never severed themselves from common sense because they had the extensive experience in self-government European populations lacked. Their practical wisdom enabled them to continue the practice of the rule of law within their society, even as they overthrow the legal system of the British Empire. 

For Strauss and Arendt, then, “the problem that was of the greatest urgency to the two German Jews as they surveyed the United States” was “the problem of democracy itself,” the possibility that it might tyrannize or lend itself to tyranny, despotism ‘hard’ or ‘soft.’ This ‘problematizing’ of democracy “provokes the hostility each encountered from true believers in democracy.” Sharing their reservations, Kissinger also brought down the same kind of hostility upon himself.

In Hans Morgenthau Gewen finds a thinker whom Kissinger knew personally and esteemed intellectually. “We shared almost identical premises,” Kissinger said, considering Morgenthau to be “one of those rare thinkers whose ideas have so suffused modern discussion that many in the years since his death adopted his intellectual framework for international affairs without even realizing it.” As Gewen puts it, “Few scholars can be said to have invented an entire discipline, but Morgenthau comes close.” I am more inclined to say that Morgenthau took Bismarck’s notion of Realpolitik from his native Germany, restating it in systematic form for American scholars and policymakers, and articulating it with cogent examples taken from the first half of the twentieth century, when the realities of international ‘relations’ repeatedly and often brutally undercut Wilsonian-progressive illusions.

Morgenthau knew and admired Strauss’s 1932 article on Carl Schmitt, in which he took Schmitt’s critique of liberalism and deepened it, observing that while Schmitt’s Hobbesianism better captured the reality of politics than the progressive-historicist form of liberalism, it too remained within the ambit of liberalism. With Strauss, Morgenthau considered political life irreducible to such sub-political categories “as economics, psychology, or any of the other departmentalized fields of social science or the humanities.” At the University of Chicago, where Morgenthau successfully supported Strauss’s application for a position, the two scholars aligned themselves against The “Chicago School” of political science, led by Charles E. Merriam. The Chicago School advocated precisely the kind of reductionism they detested, attempting to reduce politics to measurable or ‘quantifiable’ elements. But “power, the core subject of international relations, was too complex, too integrated and organic, to be quantified or broken down into its alleged components parts.” With perhaps a touch of irony, Morgenthau said power is like love, that way.

When married to John Dewey’s ambition to use modern-scientific knowledge to control human evolution, Chicago-School analytics could take political scientists beyond mere collection of data (a task to which Morgenthau made no objection), permitting them to put on “the robes of philosophers to make the argument that only measurable knowledge was genuine knowledge, with its implicit denial of individual free will.” But that sort of claim was beyond their intellectual pay grade. “Politics could not be quantified because human beings were not rats; their political perspectives were shaped by values and goals about which the quantifiers and statisticians had nothing to say.” The preoccupation with the quantitative perforce issued in a preoccupation with quantity; “it was the tyranny of the majority dressed up as empirical research.” American political scientists were creatures of their own democratic social conditions, without knowing it.

Morgenthau and Strauss diverged, however, regarding Morgenthau’s claim that power defines political life. This is still too Hobbesian for Strauss. Strauss argues that Hobbes, with Machiavelli looking over his shoulder, fails to see the ethical dimension of political life; to do that, one needs to recur to the classical political philosophers and historians. Nor did Strauss endorse the ‘spiritualized’ version of power-politics seen in Nietzsche’s will-to-power. Further, as seen in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and before them Hegel, “history had become a doctrine in its own right, a tsunami that washed away any absolutes with the argument that all knowledge was relative, dependent on a particular time and place, and that there were no permanent truths”—the doctrine of historicism. On the contrary, Strauss insisted: History is nothing more than a “‘meaningless web’ in which there were no eternal verities or universal principles, and therefore, no natural rights.” However, as Gewen remarks, Morgenthau was far from being a full-blown historicist, preferring to deploy history not as a source of right but as a mine of examples and counter-examples illustrating the reality of power-politics as against the progressive-historicists’ ‘idealism.’ Strauss was on firmer ground in criticizing Morgenthau’s claim that he taught “the philosophy of international relations.” International relations are a matter of practice, not of theory. “The essential task of the philosopher,” Strauss wrote, “was to examine fundamental issues concerning the good life and the best state”—what is justice? what is ‘the good’? 

Personally and intellectually, Morgenthau got on better with Arendt. He defended her controversial claim that Adolf Eichmann, manager of Nazi death camps, exemplified “the banality of evil,” by which she meant that this bureaucrat of murder, and others like him, “did not have to hate Jews in order to murder them.” He was ‘only following orders.’ This made him no less guilty, no less evil, than Hitler; it only meant that for him murder had become a routine of administrative management. Morgenthau disagreed with his friend only in his more thoroughgoing pessimism in regard to politics. Arendt defended Tocqueville’s civil associations as defenses against the overbearing modern, centralized administrative state. Morgenthau denied that such entities could resist statist power.

Gewen offers excellent summaries of Morgenthau’s three main books: Modern Man Versus Power Politics (1946), Politics Among Nations (1948), and The Purpose of American Politics (1960). The first book criticizes the contemporary misconception of the right use of scientific reasoning. “Reason was thought to give man the means to understand the world because the world was inherently intelligible, graspable by the processes of human thought—and those processes it was held, were the methods of natural science.” In principle, a great mathematician, or better still a supercomputer, could, in Morgenthau’s words, “predict the whole future of the world” based upon “the distribution of the particles in the primitive nebula.” This, he maintained, is nonsense. There are too many variables, and therefore many, not one, possible outcomes. And of course scientific reasoning isn’t the only kind. To rely on such thinking, as thinkers from Marx to Bentham to Wilson and Dewey were wont to do, easily leads to rationalist overconfidence in scientific human control over the course of events and the concomitant supposition that ‘ideals’ are realizable. But “the liberal, Wilsonian ideals of democracy and self-determination had the potential to undermine the prospects for peace by unleashing the anarchic tendencies of aggressive nationalism and genocidal ethnicity.” “A victim of its limitations, modern rationalism was caught in a ‘vicious circle,’ doomed to repeat its mistakes over and over again.” That is, there would be no historical progress, only the cyclical fatality of the ancients.  

And so, contra Wilson and his followers, “there was no such thing as an international community.” The ‘values,’ traditions, and beliefs of different nations differ, and when it comes to international conduct their “actions and goals had more to do with geography, history, and national character than with their forms of government.” No matter what the form of government a nation may have, vis-à-vis other nations it will engage in what Morgenthau calls “an unending struggle for survival and power.”

This being so, the statesman will always live in tragedy, facing choices “not between good and evil, though Americans were always inclined to think in such terms, but between bad and less bad. There was always the prospect that people, innocent people, would die because of decisions a statesman made.” Real decisions in real time in real-world circumstances don’t lend themselves to mathematical predictability and precision. They are matters of prudential judgment, usually learned by experience, including the experience gained by reading histories, records of the experiences of others.

Politics Among Nations became a widely-adopted textbook within a year of its publication, and remained one for decades thereafter. “There was the crucial fact of the book’s timing,” just after the Second World War, when Americans stopped assuming that “the lucky accident of history and geography” which had enabled Americans to avoid foreign wars, could “be a permanent and universal condition.” America’s geographic condition, especially after 1890 when the frontier closed with the end of the Indian wars, allowed Americans to formulate foreign policies based sometimes on the continuance of isolation, sometimes on Wilsonian crusading, and sometimes on “big-stick militarism.” This “was not politics but the negation of politics, moralism masquerading as reality, utopian aspirations misconceived as foreign policy.” Morgenthau proposed to replace such niaseries with policies that “looked to the lessons of history for ‘objective laws that have their roots in human nature,'” not in supposed historical laws. And human nature as Morgenthau conceived issued in “the struggle for power,” which he termed “an undeniable fact of experience.” In this, Morgenthau took his bearings from Hobbes, but even more from Nietzsche, inasmuch as he understood political power not as physical or material strength alone but preeminently as “the psychological relation between two minds.” International law, world opinion, and transcendent morality all restrain power relations, but weakly. This is why, as Morgenthau wrote, “In politics the nation and not humanity is the ultimate fact.” ‘Humanity’ wields no material power and only a modest moral power. This is Nietzsche minus the suggestion of a future planetary aristocracy, which Morgenthau may have regarded as being no less utopian than Tocqueville’s civil associations as seen in Arendt’s local “voluntary council systems.”

Intentionally or not, Morgenthau adopted one of Tocqueville’s other observations, the replacement of aristocracy with democracy in Western civil societies. Up to and including Bismarck, “international relations were an aristocratic pastime, the practice of a small elite community, as reputation among one’s social peers mattered even more than national interest, keeping the desire for power in check.” Some of the old “moral limitations that grew out of threat aristocratic ethos remained recognizable in the present (respect for civilian noncombatants in time of war, rights of prisoners of war), but “times have changed irreversibly.” New technologies—aerial bombing, nuclear weapons—wiped out the distinction between soldiers and civilians. Tyrant-demagogues destroyed the remnants of aristocracy. “In the age of mass democracy, behavior based on an aristocratic code of personal honor was being replaced by loyalty to one’s country and to narrow national interests.” In such a world, disarmament won’t work and world government won’t happen. Absent such unrealizable ideals, the best statesman will be able to do is to maintain a balance of power among the nations, a balance founded not on moderation but mutual fear.

This is why Morgenthau regarded modern democracy as “the opponent of peace.” By ‘democracy’ he evidently meant what Tocqueville means: equality of social conditions, not regime. A modern tyranny is as democratic, in that sense, as a modern republic. Under either regime, “democratic public opinion calls for absolutism and a crusading spirit,” eschewing “the long view” typical of aristocrats, whose ancient lineage and concern for carrying on family tradition habituates them to thinking in terms of decades and even centuries. Morgenthau shared with George Kennan the conviction that diplomacy as a profession continues to think ‘aristocratically,’ even if its practitioners no longer enjoy any birthright to rule. Diplomats proceed by indirection, negotiation, hints, even “deviousness and dishonesty.” ‘Open covenants, openly arrived at’ make them roll their eyes. When democrats and diplomats meet, “the virtues of one are considered vices by the other.”

And diplomatic virtues do have some genuine ethical content. Morgenthau held “that the wish for a universal ethic to guide behavior has remained constant even as traditional ethical systems have lost their authority.” “The masses, sensing the loss of spirituality in the modern age, have translated their particular national values into moral absolutes and seek to impose them onto other people.” They indulge in what Morgenthau called “nationalistic universalism.” In words that echo Nietzsche, Morgenthau wrote: “Carrying their idols before them, the nationalistic masses of our time meet in the international arena, each group convinced that it executes the mandates of history, that it does for humanity what it seems to do for itself, and that it fulfills a sacred mission ordained by Providence, however defined. Little do they know that they meet under an empty sky from which the gods have departed.” Such an ethos makes “a genuinely rational foreign policy” “an impossibility in a democracy.” By contrast, the diplomats’ aristocratic meliorism may be unheroic but it is moderate, prudent, and more just.

In The Purpose of American Politics Morgenthau contended that “Americans no longer made an distinction between freedom and license, and the consequences for the country were likely to be dire.” In Aristotelian terms, they defined freedom as democrats usually do, as doing as one wants. “What the people wanted, they should get, and governance was turning into decision making by opinion poll.” “Emotional appeal” instead of “disinterested, rational consideration” had become “a source of legitimacy in the modern age”—indeed, the source, as “there was no other.” Since majority opinion cannot rule directly, it “left the door open for powerful private interest groups to impose their will”; Morgenthau called this “the new feudalism.” On those occasions when the people became frustrated by their new, unlordly lords, they would “more likely than not” elevate “a demagogue or a demagogic elite catering to popular emotions and prejudices.”

In 1947, Morgenthau looked on with no little astonishment as American policymakers instituted Kennan’s containment policy against Soviet ambitions, the Marshall Plan to stabilize the economic and social foundations of America’s allies, and the Truman Doctrine, which provided military aid to allies threatened by communist insurgents. With a military component, but also economic, political, and diplomatic dimensions, Truman’s policy was “multilayered and pragmatic, adapted for the world as it existed.” It was, in Morgenthau’s judgment, much too sensible for a democratic nation to sustain for long. Sure enough, when the Truman administration shifted from backing South Korean independence against North Korean aggression to an attempt to liberate North Korea, thus prompting Communist Chinese intervention, it revealed a typically democratic, “delusionary sense of omnipotence.” “Diplomacy was disdained, history ignored.” 

“And then came Vietnam,” which the Nixon administration, with Henry Kissinger as the head of the National Security Council, inherited from that over-optimistic, democratic Democrat, Lyndon Johnson. The war was fought within the framework of the ‘Domino Theory,’ first enunciated by President Eisenhower, which held that if one country ‘fell’ to the communists, the surrounding countries with also fall, “just like a row of dominoes.” “A better metaphor might have been an infectious disease and a global contagion,” Gewen suggests, and that was in fact the way President Truman had characterized it, previously. Like all metaphors, it shouldn’t be taken literally; what Truman and Eisenhower had in mind was a geopolitical point: A country ruled by communists will scarcely respect the Westphalian principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, but will rather lend ‘fraternal aid’ to the communists in that country, hoping to change its regime. Communism was, after all, an international movement. To ‘lose’ an American ally to communist rule was to alter the geopolitical forces in a way unfavorable to the United States, quite apart from the question of whether there were divisions within the ‘Communist World’ itself.

Morgenthau visited South Vietnam in 1955. He found its ruler, Ngo Dinh Diem, to rely excessively on force against the communist Viet Cong, attempting “to bring about stability without efforts to establish popular legitimacy.” Diem had no backing in the countryside, “where the overwhelming majority of the people lived.” This enabled the Viet Cong to pose as friends of the peasants; Morgenthau warned Diem of this danger, telling him that “his policies were leading to a ‘bipolarization’ in which Communism might seem a better choice to the peasants in the countryside.” Diem was deposed and murdered in 1963.

Morgenthau went further. He denied that ideology, communist or not, was anything more than “a smoke screen that clouded people’s minds.” “If the Bolshevik Revolution and its consequences in the form of the Soviet Union teach anything,” Morgenthau wrote, “they teach the irrelevance of the teaching of Marx.” Marxist internationalism having been falsified by the proletarians themselves during the First World War, when they lined up with their respective nation-states, not with their fellows across borders; the triumph of communism in Russia having falsified Marx’s prediction of a revolution led by proletarians, since Russia was a predominantly agricultural society; fascism having appealed to the masses as much as communism did; and communism having become polycentric, not Moscow-centric, as seen first of all in Tito’s Yugoslavia; Morgenthau leapt to the conclusion that communist ideology, all ideology, only concealed the libido dominandi of those who wielded it. Stalin, in his analysis, “wasn’t a true believer in a new faith”; “he was a cynic,” a “pragmatist [who] understood power, and he knew his limits.” 

The problem with all that is that Stalin murdered tens of millions of his own countrymen, even as Hitler consolidated power in Germany. He did so because he believed that this would hasten ‘History’ forward, remake the Russian into “Bolshevik Man.” Nor does cynicism explain the efforts of Lenin, Stalin, and their successors to promote their ideology worldwide, at considerable expense to their own national coffers. Another way of putting it is that in his admiration for Morgenthau’s ‘Realism,’ Gewen never mentions Solzhenitsyn or Bukovsky, both of whom have documented the ideological framework under which the Soviets labored. If ideology “clouds” minds, then it evidently clouds the minds of those who espouse it. 

It is therefore absurd to claim, as Morgenthau did (with Gewen applauding) that the Truman Doctrine “translated the confrontation in Europe into a global ideological struggle.” Lenin, Stalin, and Marx before them had already done that, decades earlier. Morgenthau deplored a circumstance into which “American pragmatism turn[ed] into its opposite, an ideology, a dogma of anti-Communism, the old, world-redeeming Wilsonianism now backed up with unprecedented American military might and a self-serving interpretation of history that promised a liberal millenium.” But in Morgenthau’s eyes, Ho Chih Minh, the tyrant of North Vietnam, “had the potential to be an Asian Tito”; he would only allow his country to become a Chinese satellite “if the United States forced him to become one.” In the event, he became not a Chinese satellite but a Soviet one. As usual in Marxist regimes, national and international-‘ideological’ appeals combined. This should surprise no reader of Marx, who insists on the unity of theory and practice. Marx is the would-be supreme pragmatist, claiming that the course of world events will swerve dialectically toward socialism and communism. If Marxist rules swerve toward nationalism as part of their calculations on which way the dialectic of progress needs to swerve to advance toward those ends, so be it.

For some reason, Gewen supposes that Morgenthau served as “inspiration” for campus dissent against the war in the 1960s. It is true that he participated in a nationally-televised ‘teach-in’ against the war in 1965. But, as Gewen immediately points out, Morgenthau disliked the New Left, with its combination (as Morgenthau put it) of “vulgar economic determinism” and “moral absolutism,” both generating a “dangerously naive” attitude toward “the threat posed by the Soviet Union and Communist China. To be fair to the New Left, it ascribed vulgar economic determinism to its enemies on the Right and especially on the moderate Left (progressives like Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey); it reserved moral absolutism for itself. The real self-contradiction of the campus New Left was more fundamental. While claiming moral absolutism or ‘idealism,’ it was in fact motivated by fear of violent death. The students didn’t want to get shot in a rice paddy in Southeast Asia. President Nixon saw them for what they were, ended conscription, which caused the campus protests to dry up. Morgenthau missed this entirely, and so does Gewen.

None of this necessarily means that Morgenthau was wrong in opposing the war. One might well argue that the warfighting strategy, badly conceived by General William Westmoreland and Pentagon officials generally, and foolishly approved by President Johnson, should never have been implemented, that the escalation of American troop levels in the mid-1960s exemplified exactly the sort of foreign entanglement that presidents Washington and Jefferson had warned against. Acting according to his own ‘Realist’ lights, Morgenthau surprised his University of Chicago colleagues by supporting Nixon in 1968 against Humphrey, doing so because Nixon too was a ‘Realist,’ indeed something of a cynic, with no emotional commitment to the war. Also, and crucially, Morgenthau figured Nixon could head off the far-Right, racist and populist candidate, George Wallace, whose campaign recalled some unlovely features of Weimar Germany.

Nixon also advocated a new strategy in the war, “Vietnamization,” whereby American troops would increase training and supplies for the South Vietnamese forces, backed by U. S. air power, while concurrently orchestrating a gradual withdrawal of American soldiers. This wasn’t fast enough for Morgenthau, who would have preferred a rapid withdrawal, not much caring if South Vietnam was overrun and its regime deposed by the communists. 

For his part, Kissinger had visited South Vietnam three times during the Johnson administration. He had concluded that the Americans stationed there, both the military and the diplomats, were ignorant of Vietnam, that the United States had no workable strategy for winning the war; that Westmoreland’s optimism was baseless, and that the South Vietnamese government, now rid of Diem, remained incompetent. As National Security Adviser and Secretary of State for Nixon, Kissinger supported Vietnamization, despite sobering evidence both he and Nixon understood indicating that the training of South Vietnamese civilian and military personnel wasn’t going well. “We’ve given them everything,” Nixon said, and “they’ve fouled everything up.” Meanwhile, Kissinger found that Vietnamization weakened his hand at the bargaining table, where he faced the smart, tough North Vietnamese diplomat, Le Duc Tho. “How can you win?” Mr. Le asked. Kissinger had no answer. “The North Vietnamese demanded nothing less than a callous sellout,” and for a long time remained confident they could force one. They knew what regime they wanted in the South: “Someone ultimately had to be in charge of any coalition and to Hanoi, and that meant the Communists, not [Nguyen Van] Thieu,” the man who ruled the South from 1967 until the Communists did take over, in 1975.

But the Vietnamese communists were also over-optimistic. In spring 1972 they launched what they expected to be their final military offensive against the Saigon government; the campaign “ended ignominiously” for them, as “the United States responded with massive bombing and the mining of North Vietnam harbors, while the often hapless South Vietnamese army, with the assistance o American air support, this time managed to hold its own on the battlefield as the North Vietnamese overreached militarily.” Even Moscow and Beijing began to push their ally to settle. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho came to an agreement on power-sharing between Saigon and the communists, but Thieu quite sensibly balked, understanding that the communists would have no interest in sharing power once the Americans got out. Negotiations broke down again, but the so-called ‘Christmas bombing’ of North Vietnam by the U. S. Air Force induced Hanoi to make some cosmetic concessions; “Hanoi was much better at thinking in the long term than Washington,” Gewen claims, although he also makes clear that Nixon and Kissinger did have a long-term goal, namely, to extricate the United States from Vietnam and to turn their attention to great-power relations with the Soviet Union and the ‘People’s’ ‘Republic’ of China. “When South Vietnam fell to the Communists two years later, in a precise fulfillment of all Thieu’s fears, almost no one in the United States cared, with the notable exception of Henry Kissinger.” By “almost no one” Gewen evidently means almost none in the elite circles of Washington, Manhattan, the news media, and academia. In point of fact, the scenes of desperate South Vietnamese refugees attempting to escape the communist onslaught in flimsy boats—fleeing, because Congress, controlled by antiwar Democrats, cut off funding for military aid to the South Vietnamese—evoked widespread sympathy among the Middle Americans Kissinger had met during World War II.

To his credit, Gewen does explain the reason why Morgenthau’s policy of rapid withdrawal never appealed to his fellow-Realists, Nixon and Kissinger. Militarily, they knew that the South Vietnamese army itself might turn on the American soldiers. More significantly, despite the student protesters’ grandiose claims to represent ‘the people,’ the American people as a whole supported the war from beginning to end. Domestically, too, immediate withdrawal “would have meant that the deaths of 30,000 Americans”—as of 1969, when Nixon took office—”had been in vain.” Internationally, it would have meant betraying the South Vietnamese and shaking the trust other allies—especially those in Asia—had in America’s commitment to their defense. It would have been one thing to pull the troops out when there weren’t many of them there, but after President Johnson escalated the war there was no way to get out precipitately without a serious loss of honor and credibility. “Innocent people were going to die in any case, and redemption was not in the offing for anyone involved. As Henry Kissinger might have pointed out, that is the very essence of tragedy.” It is also the very essence of the ‘Domino Theory,’ stripped of its imagery. An outright American military defeat in South Vietnam would have caused the other Asian rulers, erstwhile U. S. allies, to reconsider and perhaps to recalculate their alliances in the Cold War.

The other major foreign-policy strategy Kissinger addressed while serving in the Nixon and Ford administrations was the Cold War, which continued apace throughout his time in office. In his first book, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22, published in 1954, Kissinger contrasted the settlement of the Napoleonic Wars—”a measured response that resisted calls for vengeance [on France] and led to a century of relative calm”—to the Peace of Versailles following the First World War—”a self-righteous attempt to impose a punitive settlement that produced a ‘victors’ peace’ and resulted in disaster.” Foreign-policy realism had resulted in a morally better result than foreign-policy idealism. Kissinger brought this lesson with him to the White House and the State Department, years later.

In his 1957 book, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Kissinger worried that the military stand-off, based on the ‘mutual assured destruction’ that would have resulted in a nuclear war, did not, and had not, precluded military moves around the world by the Soviets and their allies. Granted the unlikelihood of another world war, communist regimes could still eat away at the United States and its allies while maintaining the Soviet empire. The immediate exhibit was the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, when the communist regime there was briefly overthrown by patriots who chafed under Soviet imperial domination and communist tyranny. While “the United States was practicing all-or-nothing reasoning… the more subtle Russians would employ salami tactics, pushing for advantage in ways that stopped short of provoking a nuclear confrontation.” Kissinger recommended that the United States meet this dilemma by deploying “tactical”—i.e., short-range, small, battlefield-usable—nuclear weapons to meet Soviet attacks on allies in places where the United States and its allies lacked sufficient regular troops and aircraft to oppose them. Gewen reports that Morgenthau and others immediately, Kissinger eventually, thought this too risky; that “any use of a nuclear weapon, however limited, risked inexorable escalation and universal annihilation.” Evidently, this argument didn’t much impress the Carter administration, which threatened to use just such weapons when the Soviet Union, having invaded Afghanistan and installed a puppet regime there, massed troops in the border of Iran, then an American ally. this incident in American diplomatic history Gewen, along with most others, seems to have forgotten. In the event, the Soviets backed off. Kissinger’s suggestion wasn’t as bad as his critics, and Kissinger himself, had come to suppose.

Gewen discusses Kissinger’s 1959 article, “The Policymaker and the Intellectual,” another indication of how he would approach his tenure in the White House and at the State Department. He began by concurring with Morgenthau’s observation that modern societies “had become increasingly bureaucratized with government departments divided into specialities and jobs stripped down to routinized tasks defined by organizational imperatives.” Bureaus were ruled by “committees of ‘experts’ who arrived at their decisions through consensus and compromise,” a form of government in which little or no overall strategic planning could occur, since the sense of personal responsibility esteemed by the American Founders was impossible in such an impersonal setting. 

Against this stood “the autonomous intellectual,” typically outside of government but sometimes inside it. The outsiders tended toward what Kissinger termed “perfectionism”—absolutist moral judgment delivered from high up on academia’s ivory tower. Those who tried their hand on the inside, however, “were constantly in danger of giving up their independence and becoming cogs in the machine.” Since “foreign policy is a form of art and not a precise science,” intellectuals risked disabling themselves from “what should be their greatest contribution to society”—what Kissinger called their “creativity,” their ability conceive of policies and strategies which had nothing to do with organizational imperatives or the management of short-term crises. At the time, he recommended that intellectuals alternate between academia and public service, research and advising, thinking and acting. Academia was for theorizing, public service for the needed ‘reality check.’

Experience at high levels of government compelled him to revise this recommendation. Once in office, the intellectual has little time to think. He will need to deal with crises, whether he wants to or not. He will consume the “intellectual capital” he has amassed beforehand, period. He won’t be able to think deeply again, until retirement. 

Kissinger brought to high office not only his foreign-policy theories about the importance of realistic compromise in the aftermath of war and the challenges of military strategy under conditions of nuclear deterrence. He had also developed a set of moral precepts adapted to contemporary circumstances. “First, and most important, was the goal of minimizing the risk of nuclear war,” which would cause millions of death and likely destroy the societies afflicted by it. To this end, he subscribed to the Metternichean goal of the balance of power, which had served much better than Wilson’s Kant-inspired liberal internationalism, animated by a version of Hegel’s historicism. To implement the balance-of-power strategy, Americans and other nations needed to recognize that very nation has its “own vital interests, which a rational foreign policy was bound to respect.” Finally, Kissinger hoped to find ways of stabilizing the international balance by ‘institutionalizing’ these now-recognized “common interests.” Gewen hears “the voice of Nietzsche” in Kissinger’s warnings about “the folly of idealism” and even Heidegger’s notion that human beings are ‘thrown into’ existence with no “transcendent values” to guide them, that “all ethical systems lacked foundations.” This takes Kissinger into a metaphysical land congenial to what came to be called ‘postmodernism,’ but it makes very little sense to do so. Kissinger’s foreign policy is obviously based not on Nietzsche’s call to ‘live dangerously,’ or Heidegger’s valorization of ‘authenticity.’ It is kin, rather, to the pre-progressive, pre-historicist liberalism seen in Hobbes and Locke, with its emphasis on survival as an end, prudential reasoning as the means to that end. Even the Realist emphasis on power is as much Hobbesian as Nietzchean, in light of Hobbes’s description of human life as a grasping at “power after power, which ceaseth only in death.” Finally, the Morgenthau-Kissinger esteem for pragmatism scarcely comports with either Nietzsche or Heidegger, who despised any such thing.

Gewen is better on explaining the Nixon administration’s, and Kissinger’s, signature policy, détente with the Soviet Union. This was, he writes, “the Realists’ balance-of-power strategy by another name.” In Kissinger’s estimation, “until 1969 the policy of the United States had been to use its unrivaled superiority following World War II to try to dominate through steadfast and unyielding toughness.” The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 showed that this strategy, or mindset, might lead uncomfortably close to cataclysm. By the end of the decade, the Soviet nuclear arsenal equaled that of America; both sides now had intercontinental ballistic missiles which gave rulers no time to deliberate or negotiate, once they were launched by either side. First formulated by Charles de Gaulle, détente meant the relaxation of these tension by finding “areas of mutual understanding” wherein mutually beneficial agreements could be reached. “A process, not a goal,” détente did not aim at changing the Soviet regime but at finding a modus vivendi whereby both regimes would survive in the new, and newly dangerous, circumstances of nuclear-weapons parity. Since, as Kissinger wrote, “Disagreements among sovereign states can be settled only by negotiation or by power,” and since settling such disagreements by the power of nuclear weapons was no longer sane to any regime that intended to survive, negotiation was the only realistic means by which to conduct foreign policy. In Gewen’s words, “With nuclear holocaust as the backdrop, what was the alternative to détente?”

Kissinger also thought that the Soviet empire could not be sustained, nor its economy avoid stagnation, in the long run. If Soviet rulers could be turned away from war, they would lose power slowly and more safely. Time was on America’s side; ergo, temporize. Somewhat contradictorily, perhaps rhetorically, Nixon averred that “strong, healthy” Soviet Union and China would “serve the aims of American foreign policy.” Feeling more secure, their rulers would be increasingly less ready to fight, and liberalization of their regimes might occur over time. And even if it didn’t Kissinger argued that such change was unnecessary so long as the balance of power was maintained. More, “Kissinger insisted, that, contrary to what the Wilsonian idealists wished to believe, democracies did indeed go to war against one another, and they could be as oppressive to their own minorities as any authoritarian regime, if not more so, as rival ethnic and religious groups seeking supremacy tore at each other’s throats.”

This last Kissingerian admonition was ill-founded. No serious thinker had every claimed that “democracies” don’t fight one another. Montesquieu’s famous assertion is that commercial republics, often miscalled ‘liberal democracies,’ don’t fight one another. So long as commercial republics are understood as popular-based representative governments, not de facto aristocracies like Renaissance Venice or the states of the American South prior to the Civil War, Montesquieu’s claim has proven generally sound, as in many cases longtime military antagonists such as England and France, France and Germany, have stopped fighting as soon as they established and maintained such regimes. A poorly-founded, unstable commercial republic, a Weimar Germany, might vomit up a malignant tyranny, but that was a regime change, no refutation of Montesquieu.

On the basis of his dismissal of Montesquieu, Kissinger criticized his critics, ‘Left’ and ‘Right,’ as ‘Wilsonian idealists.’ Both brandished the term ‘human rights,’ which Gewen regularly puts between scare quotes, indicating a philosophic nullity in the ‘postmodern’ universe he inhabits. Kissinger charged the Right with “expect[ing] the collapse of the Soviet Union to usher in a golden age of democracy in places where it had no roots”; attempt to “bring pressure on the Soviets” to initiate internal changes, such as respect for human rights, were “futile” and “dangerous.” As for the Left, its advocacy of human rights issued from a Kantian morality of unselfishness that would require America to become “the world’s policeman,” and an ineffectual one at that, since we would have no effect on our rivals and undermine those allies whose regimes were unscrupulous with regard to the protection of those rights. Both left and right were unpragmatic. 

But how unpragmatic was Ronald Reagan? Gewen dismisses him as “a B-move actor” a populist simpleton, another Wilsonian idealist. So did Kissinger, at first. Reagan, he said, “had no strategic thinking at all,” which was consistent with his “shallow intellect” and uninterest in “the details of foreign policy.” Increasing the U.S. military budget would never drive the Soviet Union to submission, Kissinger predicted. Communism in Russia could never be defeated, only contained in the hope that Russians would someday liberalize their regime on their own. By the end of Reagan’s first term, however, Kissinger was more impressed; Reagan was exhibiting “an almost Machiavellian realism.” Fair enough, but wouldn’t Machiavelli want not merely to contain but to defeat his enemies? That had been Reagan’s plan from the beginning, taking his strategy not from Kennan, Morgenthau or Kissinger but from James Burnham. [2]

“Kissinger was even ready to concede that in the desire to ease Cold War tensions, he may have taken détente too far and that Reagan’s confrontational style was a useful corrective.” And unlike many on the Left, Kissinger credited Reagan, not Gorbachev, substantial credit for “turning history around” by precipitating the collapse of an already unsteady regime.

After the Cold War, Kissinger rightly expected the return of nationalism, worldwide. Supportive of President G. W. Bush’s removal of Saddam Hussein from Iraq, he doubted that the United States could succeed in democratizing the regime because, unlike postwar Germany, Iraq had not been subject to “total defeat,” “long occupation,” and “sustained American investment.” He didn’t believe that political freedom was likely to take root, worldwide and predicted that prolonged U.S. hegemony in the world would unite much of the world against us. At the same time, he worried that neither the United States nor China, the two greatest powers of the post-Cold War period, lacked experience in working within a balance-of-power system. This being so, he expressed relief that he wouldn’t be running U.S. foreign policy in the decades to come. “It’s going to be brutal.” Nuclear proliferation and cyber warfare were among the principal threats, and there was no known solution to either problem.

In his 2011 book, On China, Kissinger argued that communist China’s founder, Mao Zedong, “was anything but a Marxist ideologue”; he was a nationalist, not an internationalist, “less indebted to Lenin than to Sun Tsu,” a statesman who considered the Soviet Union “a greater threat to his country than the capitalist West.” In Kissinger’s words, “American conservatives would have approved of him” and, for that reason, “Nixon was in his element” when the two men visited Beijing. It is, however, highly unlikely that Nixon, or American conservatives generally, would have countenanced the murder of millions of their own, or indeed of any, people in order to remake human society. Mao did. Since this genocide was committed by Chinese against Chinese, it is impossible to explain it in terms of nationalism. It is of course easily explicable in terms of Marxism-Leninism. Hitler’s mass murders of Jews and Gypsies were genocidal strictly speaking: race murder, nationalism gone malignant. Not so the even vaster death campaigns not only of Lenin and Mao but Stalin and Pol Pot.

This is not to reject the Nixon-Kissinger rapprochement with China. As Gewen remarks, they were “doing no more than replicating Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II policy of supporting the totalitarian Soviet Union against totalitarian Nazi Germany.” However, once the Soviet empire collapsed, both countries recalibrated. “The United States risked becoming locked into an adversarial bipolar relationship rather than a triangular one,” at least until such time as Russia “reestablished itself as a great power.” Further, “both countries considered themselves polestars for humankind, not so much nation-states sharing the planet with other nation-states as ineluctable forces of global civilization with universalist aspirations.” They differed in America’s tendency to enact that role with “missionary zeal,” “whereas China held back.” Either way, a catastrophic confrontation is inevitable unless both countries “redefine themselves and their place on the global stage.” For their part, the Chinese will “need to understand… that Americans will never give up their commitment to human rights.” And Americans “must realize that the Chinese will never cease to worry about internal stability, that democracy represents for them not so much an expansion of freedom as a recipe for domestic disorder and chaos.” But even given this, one must ask whether this would really change the geopolitical dimension of the problem. Communist China “held back,” to some extent, in the past, but by 2011 it was holding back no longer, seeking to achieve military dominance of crucial land and sea trade routes and engaging in virulent anti-American propaganda.

In latter years Kissinger has also addressed the question of the politics of cyberspace, a place of “growing anarchy, which he equated with a Hobbesian state of nature in which the prospect of world order receded ever further from view.” Added to this anarchy, however, was a defect seen among bureaucrats, those systematizing enemies of anarchy. “Computers, the internet, and other advances in communication had developed a momentum of their own; the thinking behind them was actually no thinking at all, only ‘the mind set of a researcher.'” On the internet, “data were fetishized; reason, judgment, and reflection diminished.” This is clearly the same problem Kissinger, Strauss, Arendt, and Morgenthau saw in ‘social science.’ Techno-scientific knowledge threatens, in Kissinger’s words, to “become such a part of everyday life that it defines its own universe as the sole relevant one,” one with “little room for human will or agency or the cultivation of such human qualities as ambiguity and intuition.” In the three realms of information, knowledge, and wisdom, how could such technical knowledge supply wisdom? Or even knowledge, which requires the rational act of ‘abstracting from’ data, putting them into a coherent framework? Data can supply arguments, but they cannot make them. To conceive life in terms of data collection is to dehumanize the persons who collect it and attempt to use it.

Gewen concludes his impressive book with more ruminations on the supposed “sway” of Nietzsche on Kissinger. “Life might have no meaning in this godless universe, but there was still meaningful work to be done, if only to prevent humankind from blowing itself up.” To do that, and indeed “to act at all what had to be accepted was the imperfectability of man, the unpredictability of consequences, the prospect of arriving at no permanent solutions, the inevitability of tragedy.” Readily agreeing that humans are not perfectible, consequences unpredictable, solutions impermanent, one must still ask: If life has no meaning, why is it tragic? Kissinger himself offered a better account of his own moral foundation when he rejected historicism and nihilism in attempting to preserve “a humanity whose inherent nature and experience of reality were timeless and unchanging.” 

 

Notes

1. See Arthur M. Melzer: Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
2. James Burnham: The Coming Defeat of Communism. New York: The John Day Company, 1950 and Burnham: Containment or Liberation? The Aims of United States Foreign Policy. New York: The John Day Company, 1953.