Henry Kissinger: Implementing Bush's Vision

Washington Post ^ | May 16, 2005 | Henry A. Kissinger

[RWR8189]

To Effectively Spread Democracy, We Must Balance Values and Geopolitical Challenges

Extraordinary advances of democracy have occurred in recent months: elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine and Palestine; local elections in Saudi Arabia; Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon; the opening up of the presidential election in Egypt; and upheavals against entrenched authoritarians in Kyrgyzstan. This welcome trend was partly triggered by President Bush's Middle East policy and accelerated by his second inaugural address, which elevated the progress of freedom in the world to the defining objective of U.S. foreign policy.

Pundits have interpreted these events as a victory of "idealists" over "realists" in the debate over conduct of American foreign policy. In fact, the United States is probably the only country in which "realist" can be used as a pejorative epithet. No serious realist should claim that power is its own justification. No idealist should imply that power is irrelevant to the spread of ideals. The real issue is to establish a sense of proportion between these two essential elements of policy. Overemphasis of either leads to stagnation or overextension.

Values are essential for defining objectives; strategy is what implements them by establishing priorities and defining timing.

Strategy must begin with the recognition that the freedom agenda does not make geopolitical analysis irrelevant. There are issues for which crusading strategies tend to be off the mark. The rise of China is, in essence, a geopolitical challenge, not a primarily ideological one.

U.S. relations with India are another case in point. During the Cold War, India saw no imperative to support the cause of democracy against communism. Its national interest was not involved in issues such as the freedom of Berlin. Now India is, in effect, a strategic partner, not because of compatible

[gaspar]

"Values are essential for defining objectives." And absent a strategy drawn from ideology and/or geopolitics foreign policy and thus diplomacy is inherantly chaotic. You gotta love Henry, in old age he has become an Idealorealist.

[spintreebob]

To Effectively Spread Democracy, We Must Balance

Balance? That concept is precisely what was wrong with Kissinger when he was writing his books from Harvard and then when he became SOS. Reagan and Dubya change the world for the better because they take the offense and upset the balance and tilt things towards freedom where a new balance will be developed.

Now we only need for Kissinger's Rockefeller wing of the GOP to understand that Balance is not the way to advance freedom domestically either. We must take the offense and upset the balance.