Kissinger’s Global Strategy: a Triangular Relationship?

Abstract

Indeed, Kissinger never explicitly outlined his global strategy — to the delight of his critics — but this did not necessarily indicate that he did not have one. Here it will be argued that Kissinger’s policies with respect to major issues — SALT, rapprochement with the PRC, economic detente, and the Vietnam negotiations — did imply some major premises about the emerging international system and about his assumptions concerning how to shape it. These policies (and the implicit assumptions) approximated rather closely to the guidelines for statecraft that Kissinger had articulated in A World Restored, as distinct from his writings on military strategy and foreign policy. As Seyom Brown points out, it was ‘Kissinger’s reluctance to fully share the premises of his actions with his domestic and international audience’ that made his policies appear ‘more as a brilliantly executed series of improvisations than as a “mosaic” [one of Kissinger’s favourite terms] in which each of the parts is integral to the whole conception’.² But the best improvisations emanate from a concept underneath the apparent spontaneity, and this was in fact the case with Kissinger’s most important policies.³

James Reston: When you came to Washington … it was said that you had a concept of how to achieve order in the world, and yet … since you have been here, the tendency has been to say that you have not defined your concept, but that actually what you have been doing is negotiating pragmatic problems and not really dealing with the concept or making clear the concept. What is the concept?

Henry Kissinger: We spend the greatest part of our time at the beginning trying to relate it [a problem] to where America and the world ought to go before we ever discuss tactics.¹