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Survival: Global Politics and Strategy

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Power Shifts
Henry A. Kissinger
Published online: 02 Dec 2011.

To cite this article: Henry A. Kissinger (2010): Power Shifts, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy,
52:6, 205-212
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Closing Argument

Power Shifts

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Henry A. Kissinger

I
Thirty-four years ago, I had the honour of delivering the first Alastair
Buchan Memorial Lecture for the IISS. Alastair had been a friend, an occasional critic and a permanent inspiration. In 1976, I selected as a theme a
quotation by Alastair, as follows: Structural changes, Alastair wrote,
are occurring in the relative power and influence of the major states;
there has been a quantitative change of colossal proportions in
the interdependence of Western societies and in the demands we
make on natural resources; and there are qualitative changes in the
preoccupations of our societies.

He then posed the question: Can the highly-industrialized states sustain

or recover a quality in their national life which not only satisfies the new
generation, but can act as an example or attractive force to other societies?1
In 1976, I answered that question with an emphatic yes.
I would be more ambivalent today. The changes Alastair considered
fundamental, at the time, were the first relatively minor stages towards the
globalised world economy and the world of proliferating nuclear weapons.
Then, the geopolitical or strategic dividing line ran through the centre of
the European continent. Today, it would be impossible to draw one dividHenry A. Kissinger is Chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., an international consulting firm. He was US
National Security Advisor from 196975 and Secretary of State from 197377. This essay is a modified version
of his Keynote Address at the 8th IISS Global Strategic Review, Geneva, 10 September 2010.
Survival | vol. 52 no. 6 | December 2010January 2011 | pp. 205212

DOI 10.1080/00396338.2010.540792

206 | Henry A. Kissinger

ing line, to find a common denominator for all the fault lines that divide
the contemporary world.
The overriding theme of my speech then, based on my experience as US
secretary of state, was how to manage the USSoviet rivalry in a way that
preserved stability and protected nations that relied on us while maintaining the peace. At the time of my Buchan Lecture, the Soviet influence was
strategically advancing into southern Africa. But, in essence, the bipolar
framework prevented a nuclear holocaust and, in time, permitted massive
peaceful changes of the international order.
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Compare this, if you will, with the contemporary world. The centre of
gravity of world affairs has left the Atlantic and moved to the Pacific and
Indian Oceans. European unity has progressed substantially. It has also
accelerated a change in the perception regarding the legitimate exercise of
national power that started with the experience of the two wars.
The European Union has diminished the importance of the sovereign
state, but it has not yet embedded itself in the hearts of its population. With
a reduction in the centrality of the sovereign state, it has become more
difficult to frame policies in terms of national interest and to use force for
specific strategic objectives. Military objectives are being limited to peacekeeping or inflated into universal enterprises, such as promoting human
rights, enhancing the environment or fighting global terror. Military missions and foreign interventions are defined as a form of social work. Wars
in which Atlantic countries have been engaged in the past two decades
have become extremely controversial, tearing the domestic consensus.
Fundamental asymmetries in todays strategic landscape have opened up.
While America was pronounced a hyperpower by a European foreign
minister, a new challenge to the international order arose that challenged
the concept of the Westphalian settlement based on sovereign states, but
which has proved difficult to handle by the Westphalian state system:
the emergence of radical Islamism. Inherently transnational, it rejects the
established notion of sovereignty in quest of a universal system embracing
the entire Muslim world.
A different attitude towards strategy exists in Asia, where major countries are emerging into confident nationhood, and the term national

Closing Argument | 207

interest has no pejorative implication. For example, China has announced

a number of core interests which are, in essence, non-negotiable and for
which China is prepared to fight, if necessary. India has not been similarly
explicit, but it has, by its conduct in the region it considers vital, a propensity for strategic analysis more comparable to early twentieth-century
Europe than the European Unions tendencies in the twenty-first century.
Vietnam has demonstrated a ferocious readiness to vindicate its definition
of national interest.
In these circumstances, the classic concept of collective security is difDownloaded by [Milan Igrutinovic] at 11:32 06 May 2013

ficult to apply. The proposition that all nations have a common interest in
the maintenance of peace and that a well-conceived international system,
through its institutions, can mobilise the international community on its
behalf is belied by experience. The current participants in the international
system are too diffuse to permit identical or even symmetrical convictions
sufficient to organise an effective global collective security system on many
key issues.

II
A good example is nuclear proliferation. The United States and some of
its allies treat the issue as a technical problem. They propose means of
preventing it and offer international sanctions as a remedy. Koreas and
Irans neighbours have a different, more political or geostrategic perspective. They almost certainly share our view of the importance of preventing
nuclear proliferation around their periphery. China cannot possibly want a
nuclear Korea, or Vietnam for that matter, at its borders or a nuclear Japan,
nor Russia nuclear-armed border states likely consequences of the failure
of non-proliferation policy. But China also has a deep concern for the political evolution of North Korea, and Russia for the internal consequences of
a confrontation with Islam. Too many invading armies have entered China
along the Yalu route. Manchurias industrial centres are too close by for
China not to be uneasy lest pressures on proliferation wind up creating a
security crisis along its frontier with Korea, or Russia about a confrontation
with Iran spreading into Russias Islamic regions. Hence, the willingness
to apply pressure on behalf of non-proliferation is limited to measures

208 | Henry A. Kissinger

stopping well short of this outcome. A similar analysis could be applied to

Irans nuclear proliferation, where Russia and China limit themselves to
measures that do not affect their commercial interests.
In this manner, collective security begins to undermine itself. A decade
of United Nations-backed negotiations on Korea and Iran has produced no
significant results, much less an end to the Iranian or Korean programmes.
It becomes a method used by proliferators to gain time. Negotiations on
proliferation and sanctions come to be defined by their attainability, not by
their consequences.
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Time is not neutral. The drift regarding proliferation will, within a

measurable point, oblige the international system to choose whether
to take decisive measures, however defined, or to live in a proliferated
world. We will then have to come to grips with what this world will look
like, how it organises itself, the meaning for alliances and deterrence. At
that point, strategic weapons systems of established powers, now being
somewhat constrained by arms-control negotiations, may become the
principal means of preventing wars between proliferating countries and
of nuclear weapons turning into conventional instruments of warfare. Can
the established nuclear powers permit nuclear exchanges even if they are
not directly involved? I hope it will not become necessary to devote an IISS
conference to that subject a couple of years from now.
Another obstacle to a global collective security system is that the most
destructive existing weapons systems are, to some extent, incommensurable to the tasks assigned to them. The two nuclear superpowers, Russia
and the United States, have developed extremely costly strategic systems
essentially irrelevant to todays military challenges to world order. In
none of the actual wars that have been fought since the end of the Second
World War was the use of strategic nuclear weapons either contemplated
or relevant.
During the Cold War, the two sides, Washington and Moscow, challenged each other through proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Latin
America using conventional army and naval and air power. At the pinnacle of the nuclear era, conventional forces assumed pivotal importance. At
a time when power was supposedly concentrated in the capitals of the two

Closing Argument | 209

superpowers, the critical struggles of the era were taking place on the farflung periphery: Inchon, the Mekong River Delta, Luanda and El Salvador.
The measure of success was not vast arsenals but effectiveness in supporting local allies in the developing world. In short, the strategic arsenals of
the major powers, incommensurable with conceivable political objectives,

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created an illusion of omnipotence belied by the actual evolution of events.

III
These cracks in the system have been obscured, to some extent, by the
dominant role of the United States, by its willingness, sometimes eagerness, to step into the breach unilaterally or with coalitions of the willing.
The scope for so dominant an America is shrinking as a result of a
number of objective factors.
Firstly, America has been involved in three successive wars with vast
domestic consequences: Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. That pattern
will end because, in the future, the American public will insist on clarity
of objectives and unambiguous definitions of attainability. Wars will be
risked only for specific outcomes, not for abstractions like nation-building.
Secondly, economic conditions in the United States and in the Atlantic
Alliance will inevitably bring about pressure on military budgets, constraining the scope for intervention and imposing the need for establishing
priorities.
At the same time, the United States remains the strongest single power
in the world. Constrained in its unilateral capacities, it is still the indispensable component of any collective security system, however defined. But
it is no longer in a position to dominate. It must henceforth practice the art
of leadership not as the sole leader but rather as a part of a complex world.
Ultimately, the United States will have to share the responsibility for
global order with emerging power centres, lest it fall victim to what Paul
Kennedy has called imperial overstretch.
Some observers have forecast a multipolar world, with regional heavyweights, like Russia, China, India, Brazil or Turkey, grouping their smaller
neighbours and building power blocs that can potentially create a global
equilibrium between themselves. I do not believe that it is possible to com-

210 | Henry A. Kissinger

partmentalise the international order into a system of regional hegemons.

The United States is a Pacific country; it cannot be excluded from East Asia,
nor China or India from the Middle East and other resource-rich regions.
Issues like energy or the environment or proliferation cannot be regionalised. They require global approaches.
Niall Ferguson has coined the term apolar world, in which an overstretched United States gradually recedes from its hegemonic role around
the globe but is replaced by nobody. China, in this view, is too focused on
maintaining stability as it modernises its society to take on broad interDownloaded by [Milan Igrutinovic] at 11:32 06 May 2013

national commitments; Europe is hobbled by its long-term demographic

decline. In the absence of a global rule-keeper, religious strife, local internecine conflicts and non-state rogue actors, like al-Qaeda, will rend the
world.
It is said that nature abhors a vacuum; so does the international system.
Chaos, if it occurs, will sooner or later settle down into a new order. It is
the task of statesmanship to try to bring about what must happen ultimately and save humanity untold suffering.
It may be time to look at a functional approach to issues of world
order. The European Union eventually emerged because, in the absence
of a political construction, functional entities were created bringing
together countries with comparable interest into a common enterprise; the
European Coal and Steel Community was a necessary step.
Is it possible to construct a functional approach on a wider than
regional but less than global basis, with those countries most affected
taking a leading role? Afghanistan is a case in point. Virtually no country
within strategic reach of Afghanistan, or certainly in the region, has an
interest in seeing a Taliban victory, the presence of al-Qaeda as a state
within a state and the potential splintering of the country into Pashtun
and non-Pashtun elements. Even Iran, as a Shia country, should wish to
prevent a virulently anti-Shia fundamentalist regime returning to power
in Kabul. For Pakistan, the ascendancy of Islamic jihadists in a neighbouring state would serve to destabilise the Pakistani regime. India has every
incentive to prevent ignition of jihadist fervour and political victories for
them. Former Soviet republics, like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, would be

Closing Argument | 211

destabilised by ethnic unrest and irredentism that would be unleashed

in Afghanistan, should Pashtun fanatics succeed in seizing control of the
country. The impact of radical Islamism on Xinjiang defines a potential
Chinese interest.
All these countries have a more vital interest in a stable and coherent Afghan state than does the United States. For the time being, the
American role is explained to the American public on the grounds that
it serves a vital national interest, and it is acceptable to the parties in the
region because they know we have no design on a permanent presence
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in Afghanistan. But an essentially unilateral American role cannot be a

long-term solution. The long-term solution must involve a consortium of
countries in defining, and then protecting and guaranteeing, that country.
America should be in a sustaining, rather than a central controlling, role.
The key issue is whether it can be built concurrently with the substantially unilateral American effort or has to await its end, either in success or
frustration. It would be a sad outcome were so passive a posture to be the
result.
The relationship of America to China is an essential element of such
an approach and of international order. The prospects of global peace
and order may well depend on it. Many writers have drawn an analogy
between Chinas emergence as a great power and potential rival of the
United States today and Germanys ascendancy in Europe a hundred years
ago, when Great Britain was the dominant international power but proved
unable to integrate Germany.
The case of China is even more complicated. It is not an issue of integrating a European-style nation-state but a full-fledged continental power.
Chinas ascendancy is accompanied by massive socio-economic change
and, in some instances, dislocation internally. Chinas ability to continue to
manage its emergence as a great power side by side with its internal transformation is one of the pivotal questions of our time.
Increased popular participation is not the inevitable road to international reconciliation, as is often asserted. A century ago, Germany was
gradually allowing more and more freedom of speech and press. But that
newfound freedom in the public sphere gave vent to an assortment of

212 | Henry A. Kissinger

voices, including a chauvinistic tendency insisting on an ever more assertive foreign policy. Western leaders would do well to keep this in mind
when hectoring China on its internal politics.
This is not the occasion to review the range of American and Chinese
interactions. I would like to conclude with one general point: both countries are less nations in the European sense than continental expressions of
a cultural identity. Neither has much practice in cooperative relations with
equals. Yet their leaders have no more important task than to implement
the truths that neither country will ever be able to dominate the other, and
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that conflict between them would exhaust their societies and undermine
the prospects of world peace. Such a conviction is an ultimate form of
realism.

Notes
1

Alastair Buchan, Change Without War:

The Shifting Structures of World Power,

The BBC Reith Lectures 1973 (London:

Chatto & Windus, 1974), p. 18.