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Henry Kissinger’s politics beclouded his fine intellectual achievements. One consistent theme in the writings of this arch realist is that of the legitimacy of the international order.

“It implies the acceptance of the framework of the international order by all the major powers… the desire of one power for absolute security means absolute insecurity for all the others,” he wrote in 1957.

In an essay on Bismarck, Kissinger amplified:

“Security presupposes a balance of power which makes it difficult for any State or group of States to impose its will on the remainder. Too great a disproportion of strength undermines self-restraint in the powerful… Also essential is a ‘moral consensus’ on what is ‘just or reasonable’.”

In Does America Need A Foreign Policy?, he noted that

“for much of the 90s, America’s Atlantic policies oscillated between imperiousness and indifference, between treating Europe as an auxiliary and as a photo opportunity”.

A serious strategic dialogue didn’t materialise. Russia and China hate these trends.
The post-Iraq war international order will lack all legitimacy. So will the regime imposed on Iraq. The Vietnamese hated Diem. But his forcible ouster “affected every tier of civil administration down to the village level”. History teaches us — and Kissinger warns — that the more extensive the eradication of existing authority, the more its successor must rely on naked power to establish themselves. For, in the end, legitimacy involves an acceptance of authority without compulsions.

A. G. Noorani, Hindustan Times