Kissinger’s debt to Bismarck

If one American statesman can be considered a truly Janus-like figure, applying the lessons of history to the strategic landscape of the present, it must be Henry Kissinger. In 2012, the former National Security Advisor (NSA) wisely informed Harvard students that ‘the best preparation for government is to study philosophy or political theory and history’. Without his initial academic forays into relevant historical territory, his name would never have become so synonymous with realpolitik. Indeed, his public persona has always been affiliated with historical actors, including Otto von Bismarck of the German Empire and Klemens von Metternich of the Habsburg Empire in particular.

Yet Kissinger’s extensive writings on these leaders require greater attention. More often than not, reporters and academics alike have invoked Kissinger’s historical works, suggesting that his research into these great men of the 19th century inspired his approach to diplomacy and foreign affairs. In a 1969 profile on the new NSA, readers of the Atlantic were informed that ‘Prof. Bismarck Goes to Washington’, while a prominent contemporary historian briefly describes the two giants of the 19th century as Kissinger’s ‘heroes’.

This is not exactly correct. As with all things Kissinger, it is not so black and white. While his corpus betrays immense respect for each figure, he ultimately derives cautionary tales from both Metternich’s and Bismarck’s biographies. One of the remarkable features of Kissinger’s writings on these figures is that each of their stories ends in definitive failure.

We may begin with ‘The Conservative Dilemma: Reflections on the Political Thought of Metternich’, published by Kissinger in The American Political Science Review in 1954, and later developed into chapter 11, ‘Metternich and the Conservative Dilemma’, of his now-famous A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace, 1812-1822. According to Kissinger: ‘The conservative in a revolutionary period always represents somewhat of an anomaly’, as his defence of the status quo is redundant, yet he is unable to surrender to the ferment of upheaval. For Kissinger, this dilemma is embodied by Metternich, characterised as the ‘last champion’ of ‘the Enlightenment’ in the 19th century. In Kissinger’s estimation, the same intellectual rigour and ordering impulse that enabled Metternich to stabilise the European balance of power after Napoleon’s defeat also rendered him incapable of responding to rising popular sentiment in favour of liberal reform. This rigidity proved fatal. Metternich’s worldview was already anachronistic before the continent was swept up in the popular Revolutions of 1848. He opposed any popular concessions in their entirety, restricting press freedom and refusing to expand the franchise. Both his outmoded, interpersonal diplomacy and his restrictive domestic policies alike betrayed a statesman unable to adapt to the political realities of a modern Europe plunged into the morass of mass democracy. For this, he was ultimately forced into exile to the cheers of the student mob.

The impact of this message in A World Restored is blunted, partly because the reader has learned of Metternich’s ingenious European congress system over the preceding 200 pages, and continues to do so afterward. Indeed, relatively few paragraphs are dedicated by Kissinger to explicitly identifying defective elements inherent to Metternich’s worldview and linking them to his defeat in the revolution of 1848, which lies beyond the purview of the thesis.

Nonetheless, when the passage is read as a standalone piece, as it was first published in 1954 in the American Political Science Review, Kissinger’s analysis takes on increased force; the article becomes a protracted criticism of Metternich’s psychological rigidity. We learn, for example, that Metternich ‘went back to the doctrines of the age in which he had been brought up, but interpreted them with an inflexibility totally unnecessary’; that Metternich’s attempts at popular suppression were ‘a futile contest’, ‘a tour de force leading to self-destruction’, and ‘an effort to recapture a lost innocence.’ Easily missed in A World Restored is a reference to the Austrian statesman as a ‘trivial mind’.

Even in his exile, he remained one-dimensional: ‘As late as 1851, Metternich could give no better advice to the then Minister, Schwarzenberg, than to strengthen the landed aristocracy, as if the middle class could still be crushed.’ Thus, Kissinger effectively finds Metternich guilty of defying the immortal counsel of another great statesman of the Congress of Vienna, the Prince de Talleyrand, who declared that ‘the art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and expedite its occurrence’. Metternich resisted the inevitable and lived out his final days in exile, a tragic warning of the dangers of obstinacy.

Conversely, Bismarck’s fatal flaw in Kissinger’s writing is the exact opposite – ‘a counterpoise’ – to that of Metternich’s: he was too revolutionary. And, for his sins, Europe paid the ultimate price. This pronouncement defines Kissinger’s conception of the Iron Chancellor to a far greater extent than many understand. To date, it seems that only Niall Ferguson has acknowledged this. Speaking in 2015, upon the release of his Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist, Ferguson quipped that ‘[Kissinger] was far from a Machiavellian or Bismarckian realist. What I did was this slightly old-fashioned thing: I read what he’d actually written… rarely done by younger historians… most of his work… is a critique of realism’. Indeed, his book dedicates an entire chapter to asserting that Kissinger resolved to be (in the latter’s words) the ‘anti-Bismarck’, averting international calamity.

Ferguson benefitted from unfinished drafts of Kissinger’s work in this regard, but even in Kissinger’s most notable published essay on Bismarck, ‘The White Revolutionary’ of 1964, the verdict is clear. Kissinger saw Bismarck as a ‘demoniac’ embodiment of will, whose masterful and intricate pursuit of national hegemony at the expense of the status quo derailed in his wake, culminating in the catastrophe of 1914.

Bismarck felt (perhaps rightly) that it was at Prussia’s expense that the European balance of power between its five ‘great masses’ had been maintained and, therefore, consolidated her position in a series of short wars with her neighbours, expanding territory and incorporating German-speaking regions. In a relatively short span, a novel country burst onto the scene with greater martial and industrial might than any other European state. Ultimately, however, the raw, unsentimental pursuit of national predominance ended in disaster. Kissinger’s conclusion here needs no supplement:

When the novelty of Bismarck’s tactics had worn off and the originality of his conception came to be taken for granted, lesser men strove to operate his system while lacking his sure touch and almost artistic sensitivity. As a result, what had been the manipulation of factors in a fluid situation eventually led to the petrification of the international system which produced World War I… [Germany] remembered the three wars that had achieved their unity. They forgot the patient preparation that had made them possible and the moderation that had secured their fruit.

His ‘less imaginative successors’ failed to carry forward ‘the delicate, constantly shifting balancing of Bismarck’s policy’, and merely institutionalised a dangerous militarism. Thus, in 1961, Kissinger could write to Michael Howard that he ‘was puzzled by your suggestion that we should return to a diplomacy like Bismarck’s. Having once planned to write a book on Bismarck’s diplomacy… I could think of few policies more likely to lead to catastrophe in present circumstances’. Though these ‘circumstances’ were the brinksmanship of the early 1960s, we see a weariness of raw, unsentimental American power-plays in the defining actions of Kissinger’s career. Instead, he pursued détente, ensconcing Nixon’s ‘subtle triangle’ between the US, China and the Soviet Union to avoid a war so catastrophic it would dwarf the one bequeathed to Europe by the Iron Chancellor.

This theme, above all others, was Kissinger’s north star in thought and action: he was informed less by the greatest triumphs of 19th-century realism than by a dogged fixation upon the avoidance of catastrophe.

The takeaway of this article, however, is emphatically not that Kissinger disliked Bismarck and Metternich. Even in his criticisms, he was often equivocal. We are variously told that ‘in all [Metternich’s] obtuseness there was an element of grandeur’, and Bismarck is still identified as ‘Germany’s greatest modern figure’, even if he sowed ‘the seeds of its twentieth-century tragedies.’ Rather, Kissinger learned from their failures as he did from their triumphs. We can equally flip the script and find that Kissinger channelled Metternich when he forged an international balance through a legitimate system of invested stakeholders. And, like Bismarck, he pursued his aim by radically shirking established norms, aiming to advance his country’s interests through negotiations with longtime adversaries, earning the ire of both left and right in the process.

Again, Henry Kissinger is not a black and white character. It was Bismarck himself who declared that ‘Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.’ As a scholar and a statesman, Kissinger certainly followed his counsel.