Diplomacy

America’s ascendance as a major player in world affairs began with two presidents: Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. According to Kissinger, Roosevelt was a shrewd student of the balance of power, while Wilson wanted a world united by law and justice. These men and their ideas did not emerge from a vacuum: American foreign policy had traditions of both pragmatism and idealism. It skillfully worked to pit the European powers against each other as it expanded to the Pacific, while also insisting that America had a unique role in spreading democracy and freedom. The Monroe Doctrine did both by claiming the entire Western Hemisphere as the American sphere of influence, defending its newly independent republics from colonial predation, in the book’s view. Its immense size and resources eventually gave it a level of power equal to, if not exceeding, the European Great Powers, and Theodore Roosevelt became the first president to assert a more global role for the US, most famously negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War to validate Japan’s entry into the ranks of the Great Powers without unduly weakening a defeated Russia. No longer president in 1914, he counseled US entry into the First World War in defense of its British ally. But the president at the time was Wilson, who saw his principal aim as the establishment of world peace.

In Wilson’s view, America’s role was purely moral, and when German submarine attacks finally prompted US entry into World War I, it became a crusade for democracy that would replace the balance of power with a “community of power” among peace-loving nations (51). Although the League itself failed, Kissinger regards Wilsonian idealism as having conquered American foreign policy; Wilsonian idealism has ever since been preferred, with Americans choosing to spread democracy over managing shifts in the balance of power. 

In medieval Europe, the Holy Roman Empire represented an ideal of cultural and political unity, but could never quite achieve it, as its territory was limited and its rupture with the papacy prevented the union of temporal and religious power that made for a genuine empire. In the first half of the 16th century, the Holy Roman Empire itself was being contested between the Catholic Hapsburg family and numerous Protestant princes. With Europe now formally divided along religious lines, the idea of the balance of power and raison d’état (“reason of state”) became the new political morality. The great exponent of raison d’état was “an improbable figure, a prince of the Church, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu” (58). While the emperor sought to reimpose Catholicism due to his religious convictions, Richelieu opposed these efforts despite his own religious affiliation, seeing a Hapsburg rule concentrated in Austria and Spain as dangerous to France. For Richelieu, material power mattered more than abstract moral questions, and he helped create the administration of a French state capable of defining and achieving its national interests.

As more states learned this lesson, they all became focused on power, and so the doctrine of the balance of power emerged to prevent these selfish states from engaging in nonstop conflict. Some thinkers aligned the balance of power with Enlightenment ideals of a universe operating in total harmony, but there was frequent warfare among states to help adjust the balance in a favorable direction. Such wars were far more limited than those where Protestants and Catholics had fought to impose their faith on one another. With the Holy Roman Empire divided, France seemed most likely to achieve predominance on the continent, but England and other states helped keep it in check. By virtue of their geographic position, the British were disposed to intervene at a moment of their choosing to counterbalance any rising state, and this role was never more necessary than with the rise of Napoleon in France and the possibility of a French empire over all of Europe. Following Napoleon’s defeat, British Prime Minister William Pitt proposed a coalition of states to contain France, but the specifics would have to be hashed out at the 1814 Congress of Vienna. 

The Congress of Vienna helped avoid a general European war for another century. The main players were Austria, Russia, France, Prussia, and Britain. Austria held the remainder of the old Hapsburg empire, and Prussia was the most powerful of the northern German states. These two German-speaking states were historic rivals, but they had to work together to contain France. At the same time, the Congress did not punish France so thoroughly as to make it aggrieved and determined to challenge the new arrangement. Within the four victorious parties (the Quadruple Alliance), Russia, Austria, and Prussia had an added interest in shoring up the principle of monarchical legitimacy, both to delegitimize Napoleon’s rule and to secure their own positions. The so-called Holy Alliance vowed to work together to stamp out any revolutions that might upend Europe’s precarious stability. The countries also limited their ambitions against one another, as war could also foment social unrest.

Austria, under skilled Foreign Minister Metternich, nonetheless recognized Russia could be a long-term threat, especially under its current Tsar, Alexander I, who dreamed of spreading world peace through Russian expansion. Even as comparatively liberal Britain had no use for the Holly Alliance, Austria sought their support as a potential counterweight against Russia. Vienna established the Concert of Europe, periodic meetings of the major powers, usually in the wake of a crisis. This system functioned well for many years, but it came apart in 1854, as the declining Ottoman Empire forced France and Britain to confront the rising power of Russia. British and French victories prompted Austria to abandon its Russian ally. With both the Quadruple Alliance and Holy Alliance broken, Britain reached the height of its imperial power, although it was loath to use it on the continent and was more interested in checking any aspiring hegemons. Its policy was a ruthlessly practical one, as summarized by Lord Palmerston, of having “no eternal allies and no permanent enemies…our interests are eternal, and those interests it is our duty to follow” (as quoted on p. 96).

The last vestiges of the Vienna system were swept away by Napoleon III, nephew of the previous emperor, and Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The former ended up significantly downgrading France’s position, while the latter helped establish a unified Germany as a world power. Proclaimed emperor in 1852, Napoleon sought to overthrow Vienna-era restraints on France but lacked power commensurate with his ambitions. He led a campaign to liberate Italy from Austrian rule, championed the cause of an independent Poland (then split among Austria, Russia, and Prussia), and supported a Prussian attack in Austria in 1866. In his efforts to weaken Austria, and thereby win some of its Italian holdings, Napoleon was inadvertently helping Prussia become the dominant German state, which would in turn make it a decisive check on France’s continental ambitions. Desperate to head off Prussia’s ascendance, he demanded in 1870 that its royal family renounce the throne of Spain. When the Prussian king rejected the demand, Bismarck leaked the response to the French press, causing an outrage and French declaration of war on Prussia. Within a year, the French army was defeated, Napoleon was a prisoner, and Prussia was now a part of the newly declared German Empire. To this day, there is, in Kissinger’s view, an “inherent gap between France’s image of itself as the dominant nation of Europe and its capacity to live up to it” (119).

Armed with principles of realpolitik (functionally equivalent to French raison d’état), Bismarck integrated conservative domestic politics with a revolutionary diplomatic strategy whereby Prussia would come to dominate Germany rather than share power with Austria. He cultivated a German nationalism focused on national power rather than monarchical legitimacy, convinced that “a careful analysis of a given set of circumstances would necessarily lead all statesmen to the same conclusions” of what constituted the national interest (127). However, when Bismarck left the scene, and power fell to lesser successors, his clever diplomatic maneuverings and conservative nationalism would sour into a Darwinian struggle for power and militant chauvinism. 

The unification of Germany was a sublime outcome of realpolitik and a strategic problem that ultimately doomed the European system. A potentially dominant power in the middle of the continent was bound to prompt enemies on both sides, especially given French eagerness to avenge its 1870-71 defeat during which it lost the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. A weakened Austria looked to the Balkans to retain its status as a Great Power, putting it on a collision course with Russia. Russia had always been surrounded by enemies, infusing it with a sense of both profound insecurity and a messianic urge to overcome its perilous condition. Desperate to avoid enemies on both sides, Bismarck sought ties with the Russian Tsar, reviving an alliance with them and Austria even as the latter two eyed one another warily in the Balkans. In Britain, Benjamin Disraeli tended to regard a Russian threat to Asia (especially Britain’s colonial holdings) as the main threat to the balance of power.

Disraeli supported the Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Russia, but Ottoman atrocities against its restive subjects alienated British public opinion. When Russia and the Ottomans went to war, Disraeli and Bismarck ultimately arrived at a compromise that limited Russia’s gains, prompting lasting Russian resentment, especially against Germany. In response, Bismarck made another alliance with Austria and used the prospect of Russian isolation to bring them in as well to another tripartite alliance among them, the third since Metternich’s time. In this version, they pledged neutrality in case of war between Russia and Britain or Germany and France: “Germany was thus protected against a two-front war, and Russia was protected against the restoration of the Crimean coalition (of Great Britain, France and Austria)” (159). Italy then joined to pledge mutual assistance to Germany against a French attack. However, in all three of the allied states, domestic rhetoric became increasingly heated and nationalistic, especially in Germany where there was a parliament (Reichstag) with so little power its members could say whatever they wanted without consequence. With a fresh round of clashes in the Balkans, Bismarck secured one more “Reinsurance” treaty with Russia, pledging neutrality in any war except one in which the signatories themselves attacked France or Austria. For the moment, Germany had forestalled the dreaded alliance between France and Russia.