Our So-Called Foreign Policy: So JFK on Cuba Should be Trump’s North Korea Model?

Tags

Bay of Pigs, Cold War, Cuba, Cuban Missile Crisis, Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy, Kim Jong Un, Michael Dobbs, Nikita Khrushchev, North Korea, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Robert E. Kelly, Soviet Union, The National Interest, Trump, Turkey, Vienna summit

The race for this year’s foreign policy chutzpah award couldn’t be tighter. Just when I thought political scientist Robert E. Kelly had grabbed an insurmountable lead with his new National Interest article downplaying the horror of a possible North Korean nuclear strike on the United States, along came Michael Dobbs with a jaw-dropping venture into fake history-land masquerading as an op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post.

Dobbs’ achievement? An article comparing President Trump’s performance in the North Korea crisis so far with former President John F. Kennedy’s in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that failed to mention either the April, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion: the June, 1961 U.S.-Soviet summit in Vienna: or the way in which the October, 1962 U.S.-Soviet showdown in the Caribbean actually ended.

According to Dobbs, a former Post correspondent turned historian (chiefly of the Cuban crisis), Kennedy was a model of reasonableness and restraint whose unique, “overarching sense of history” led him “to consider the interests of future generations of Americans, and ultimately all of humanity” and thus deserves much credit for preventing the showdown from turning into an apocalyptic nuclear war.

As Dobbs put it (employing terminology used in a contemporary letter from Kennedy’s wife, Jackie), the former president acted like a “big man” who knows “the needs for self-control and restraint.” Mr. Trump, however, has “indulgently” decided to “play chicken” and respond in kind to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s “explosive rhetoric” – a dangerous effort to “out-crazy” Pyongyang that reflects a “little man” outlook “moved more by fear and pride.”

But the Bay of Pigs invasion is kind of important because Kennedy’s support for this disastrously failed attempt by CIA-supported Cuban exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro persuaded Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to reach a secret deal with Havana to deploy medium-range missiles in Cuba in the first place – in part to deter another attack either by Cubans or by the United States. So the former President’s actions (which, to be sure, continued a policy of his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower) were largely responsible for creating the Soviet gambit in the first place.

Just as bad, as Kennedy admitted, his failure to order nearby American forces to come to the overwhelmed exile army’s rescue “no doubt” convinced “his superpower rival…that ‘I’m inexperienced. Probably thinks I’m stupid. Maybe most important, he thinks that I had no guts.'” The source for this passage? Dobbs’ own missile crisis history.

Has President Trump approved any similarly reckless blunders that sent such dangerous messages? No.

The Vienna conference is kind of important because this first meeting between the American and Soviet leaders reinforced Khrushchev’s impression of his Cold War counterpart as a weakling. According to one account of the summit and its aftermath:

“‘Roughest thing in my life,’ Kennedy had told James Reston of The New York Times, after it was all over. ‘He just beat the hell out of me.’ Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was contemptuous of his boss’s performance. ‘Khrushchev scared the poor little fellow dead,’ he told his cronies. British prime minister Harold Macmillan, who met with Kennedy shortly after he left Vienna, was only slightly more sympathetic. He thought that the president had been ‘completely overwhelmed by the ruthlessness and barbarity of the Russian Chairman.'”

The source for this passage? That same Dobbs missile crisis history.

Have any of President Trump’s exercise in personal diplomacy failed so utterly? No.

Finally, the Cuban crisis’ resolution is kind of important because Kennedy had a relatively easy out: an offer to remove U.S. missiles stationed in neighboring Turkey that Moscow (understandably) viewed as too close for comfort. This central element of crisis-ending deal struck by Kennedy and Khrushchev was kept secret (at Washington’s insistence), but it’s importance is now recognized by the historical community – including Dobbs.

Does President Trump have a comparable option? Evidently not – unless you count my proposal to pull American troops out of South Korea, which would remove any remotely plausible reason for North Korea to threaten U.S. territory, and turn the problem of handling North Korea’s nuclear forces over to its powerful and wealthy neighbors. Yet no American political leaders on any point on the political spectrum have expressed any support.

Dobbs of course has every right to idolize Kennedy and slight Trump. What he has no right to do after this piece of propaganda is to present himself as anything but a hack.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: That North Korea Nuclear Threat? Time to Buck Up!

Tags

deterrence, foreign policy establishment, missile defense, national security, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Robert E. Kelly, South Korea, The National Interest

Yesterday, I wrote (again) about how America’s foreign policy establishment continues trying to keep the wool over their compatriots’ eyes about how the main U.S. security alliances (especially with South Korea) are exposing the nation to the threat of nuclear attack (in this case, from North Korea). Now I’m wondering if this same (bipartisan) group may start to change tactics. The evidence? An absolutely stupefying post in The National Interest that tries to assure Americans that such an attack wouldn’t really be so bad.

Let me repeat that: A (rightly) respected foreign policy journal has just posted an essay arguing that it’s “risky threat inflation” to believe that North Korea’s nuclear weapons represent an “existential” danger to the United States – i.e., one that could destroy it as a functioning society.

In a literal sense, the author, political scientist Robert E. Kelly, is right. Even when the North Korean dictatorship builds nuclear-tipped missiles capable of hitting the American homeland, the United States would probably survive as a political entity. The main reason, as the author notes, is that for the time being, the North’s arsenal will almost certainly remain too small to land on more than a few targets inside the geographically vast continental 48 states and their “widely dispersed population.” So just as Manhattan withstood the September 11 attack, the nation in more or less its current form could probably withstand a North Korean strike.

But this kind of literalness, of course, is the literalness of children. And nothing makes the terrible truth clearer than Kelly’s own words. For example, he writes that

>“The humanitarian costs of even one nuclear detonation would be enormous, of course, and the national psychological shock would be akin to nothing in U.S. history, bar perhaps the Civil War. But this is not the same thing as hitting the United States hard enough that its society begins to fragment and its government collapse.”

>“Large numbers of civilian casualties, even in the millions, and the loss of several American cities is not existential. Horrible, yes. A dramatic reorientation of American life, absolutely. But not the end of America.”

>“Even Imperial Japan in 1945, after months of punishing U.S. bombing, managed to ride out the nuclear detonations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki without a national breakdown.”

>“Assuming…that North Korea strikes Washington and America’s other large cities, it is not obvious that the United States would then fall into some manner of political anarchy or revolution.”

There is, to be sure, a weird twist to Kelly’s analysis. The “threat inflation” risk that’s principally troubling this South Korea-based analyst is not the kind that would cow Washington enough to prevent U.S. nuclear retaliation against North Korea following an unprovoked Northern strike against American territory. Instead, what he’s worried about is that American leaders could grow so (mistakenly) terrified of the North Korean nukes’ destructive capability that the Trump administration would try to take them out with preemptive airstrikes and thus “ignite a disastrous regional conflict.”

Which means that he’s worried mainly that South Korea and its neighbors would come under destructive attack, not the United States. But the arguments he marshals could certainly be used, at least in theory, to stiffen allegedly flaccid public spines in the event of any kind of U.S.-North Korea showdown. And as I have written repeatedly, such a confrontation would be practically unthinkable were the United States not committed to protect the militarily free-riding South, and worse, were tens of thousands of American troops and their families not deployed right in the line of Korean fire, expressly to deny a President any real choice about using nuclear weapons (and invite retaliation) once they were attacked.

Kelly’s article, however, does have one (unwitting) virtue. His description of the likely devastation from even a smallish North Korea-scale attack should be enough to make any reader wonder what possible upside to defending South Korea could come close to justifying this completely unprecedented kind of downside. The question holds even for those who insist that such an attack is unlikely (because North Korea must know that the United States would respond with an annihilating all-out retaliatory strike) and that therefore the risk is worth running in order to maintain deterrence on the peninsula. And it especially holds for missile defense optimists. For if all of them are wrong, America will suffer literally millions of deaths, countless wounded, long-term radiation poisoning of survivors and the environment, and gargantuan material losses. Even a single warhead penetrating anti-missile systems would wreak virtually unimaginable physical and psychological havoc.

Whether running such risks to deter attack – nuclear or not – on the United States itself is debatable, and although I disagree with them, pacifists and anti-nuclear activists have long made counter-arguments that deserve consideration.

But running such risks to deter attack on another country, whose loss, however terrible, Americans unmistakably could withstand (in spades) strikes me, anyway, as lying far outside the bounds of rationality. At the very least, it demands the type of open, explicit debate that the foreign policy establishment remains determined to avoid. If Kelly’s post brings this debate closer, however unintentionally, I’ll be the first one to thank him.

Im-Politic: How I Scooped The Times on Trump and Nationalism 25 Years Ago

Tags

America First, Democrats, elites, environmentalists, foreign policy, globalism, globalization, Im-Politic, Immigration, internationalism, interventionism, middle class, minoriites, nationalism, politics, Populism, Republicans, sovereignty, The National Interest, The New York Times, Thomas Edsall, Trade, Trump, working class

However conceited it sounds, it really is time – again – 🙂 to pat myself on the back. This morning’s New York Times featured a long analysis by contributor Thomas Edsall titled “The End of Left and Right as We Knew Them.” The main thesis (as per a quote from the director of the “International Institutions and Global Governance Program” at the Council on Foreign Relations):

“The most salient political division today is not between conservatives and liberals in the United States or social democrats in the United Kingdom and France, but between nationalists and globalists.”

Edsall himself elaborates:

“By now it has become quite clear that conservative parties in Europe and the United States have been gaining strength from white voters who have been mobilized around issues related to nationalism — resistance to open borders and to third-world immigration. … On the liberal side, the Democratic Party and the center-left European parties have been allied in favor of globalization, if we define globalization as receptivity to open borders, the expansion of local and nationalistic perspectives and support for a less rigid social order and for liberal cultural, immigration and trade policies.”

Moreover, at the heart of these new divisions are class distinctions: The nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic are likeliest to be relatively poor and relatively uneducated – although Edsall does present research findings showing – unconvincingly in my view – that classic “racial resentment, more than economic anxiety, influenced the [U.S.} presidential election.”

Yet the author also unmistakably believes that the left “In recent decades…both in Europe and in the United States [has] begun to include and reflect the views of large numbers of well-educated elites — relatively affluent knowledge or creative class workers….” Indeed, he coins a nice phrase: “The rise of the affluent left.”

So what does this have to do with yours truly? Plenty. Because nearly 25 years ago, I predicted the development of exactly the same trend. My forecast came in an article for the journal The National Interest that was called (wait for it) “Beyond Left and Right” – and it got a fair amount of media attention from both liberals and conservatives. (The National Interest itself is on the right end of the spectrum.) 

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find versions on-line that aren’t behind pay walls, but here are a few excerpts from a dog-eared xerox:

“…a new underlying fault line [replacing the old left-right divisions] is already emerging in American foreign policy, dividing what might best be called nationalists and internationalists. In terms of American diplomacy, this new alignment will pit a generic model of foreign policy-making that long predates the Cold War – one based at bottom…on the belief that international activism itself is the key to American security and prosperity – against a rival approach…whose supreme goal is consolidating American military and economic strength, and enhancing America’s freedom of action. In the realm of economic policy, those who argue that the nation-state, as an economic player, is obsolete or dangerous will vie with those convinced of its continuing relevance and legitimacy. In electoral politics, sharp differences in economic interests and cultural outlooks will produce a widening rift between business, professional,and government elites on the one hand, and wage-earners on the other. The issue of class, in other words, is re-emerging in American politics.”

I added that these divisions were arising from “the different impact of world economic trends on different classes” and were producing “a foreign policy debate [that] increasingly pits social and economic classes against each other, focusing on the questions of who pays the costs and who incurs most of the risks involved in competing economic and security policies.

“Polls repeatedly show that the best educated and wealthiest Americans are the staunchest internationalists on both security and economic issues. The surveys also show strong support for internationalist policies to be lacking nearly everywhere else on the social spectrum. “

And there’s more. I wrote that “At the mass public level,” the nationalist faction would be comprised of “blue collar union members, white collar middle managers and small businessmen from the Perotista ranks; family- and community-oriented immigrants; and grassroots environmental activists.”

As for their rivals, “The social base of internationalism would include many big multinational businesses and their upper level managers, financiers, professionals, and retailers. Journalists and the rest of the mass media, as well as academics, also tend to support an idealistic globalism. Other members of a new internationalist coalition might include minorities whose fear of cultural conservative nationalists outweighs their qualms about job-destroying internationalist free-trade economics, and affluent, mainstream environmentalists.”

And there was more on the role of the media: “Much of what they lack in numbers, the internationalists would make up for in money, influence, and the aura of respectability that their media allies will continue to provide.”

What would happen to liberal and conservative internationalists in the process? The former

“may wind up permanently alienating labor, minorities, and the white-collar middle class whether they intend to or not – and lose their identity as champions of the underdog and as agents of progressive change in the process. Internationalists of the Right will face similar problems. Without offering their voters something more than NAFTA, the continuing “creative destruction” of their jobs, endless foreign interventions, and Marilyn Quayle’s definition of family values, it is difficult to see them avoiding George [H.W.] Bush’s political fate.”

For good measure, I added that if they do crystallize, the resulting new coalitions are likely to be “less inclined to compromise than their predecessors….”

Clearly, I didn’t get everything right. But I’m kind of amazed at how many developments I absolutely nailed. Further, we’re only a few months into the Trump era. In other words, the American political realignment I anticipated still probably has a long ways to go.

Making News: New Lifezette China Trade Column, a New Podcast – & More!

Tags

America-Trends.com, automotive, Cato Institute, China, Connecticut, Germany burden-sharing, Immigration, Larry Rifkin, Lifezette.com, Making News, Mexico, NATO, Norman Matloff, North Attantic Treaty Organization, Ted Galen Carpenter, The National Interest, Trade, Trump, Upon Closer Inspection, Waterbury, WATR-AM

I’m pleased to announce the appearance of my newest article published outside RealityChek – a piece for Lifezette.com on the U.S.-China trade conflict that could break out over the automotive sector. Click on the link to find out why autos are an unusual focus for an early Trump administration China trade offensive, but also why it could signal that the current, offshoring-dominated phase of U.S. trade policy could be coming to an end.

In addition, a podcast is now up of my recent interview with Larry Rifkin about what the Trump victory in November portends for U.S. trade policy. Larry is the former host of a long-running talk show on Waterbury, Connecticut’s WATR-AM and one of my favorite broadcast journalists. I was thrilled to find out that he’s come out of a short-lived retirement to start a new venture – America-Trends.com – that will give him much more freedom to explore his passions (like globalization!) in greater depth. I hope you’ll visit Larry’s site to investigate other samples of his work.

Yesterday, Lifezette quoted my views in this news report about a possible China-Mexico team-up on auto trade and manufacturing issues that looks focused on leaving America out in the cold.

On March 26, the Cato Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter cited some research of mine in a National Interest post on the recent dust-up over whether Germany is contributing its rightful share to the defense of the West and specifically to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

And on March 25, one of America’s leading authorities on immigration, Norman Matloff, gave me and RealityChek a wonderful shout-out on his Upon Closer Inspection blog. Alert RealityChek readers will note that Norm’s blog is on my recommended list, and he really is a must-read on all immigration issues.

Also, keep checking back with RealityChek for news of recent and upcoming media appearances and other events.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: America’s Real Russia Policy Scandal

Tags

allies, Baltics, corruption, Jeffrey Goldberg, Leon Hadar, Moldova, NATO, NATO expansion, North Atlantic treaty Organization, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, The Atlantic, The National Interest, think tanks, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin

Scandalous charges have abounded recently in connection with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s support for recasting U.S.-Russia relations into a more cooperative mold. Trump has been accused to seeking rapport with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in return for promoting his business interests in the former Soviet Union. Some of his top aides have been identified as lobbyists for Russian interests. (As with China, even those that are called “private” are subject to state control.) And suspected Russian cyber-hacks that have revealed politically damaging material about the Democratic Party have fueled speculation that Moscow is working actively to put him in the White House.

Plenty of evidence shows significant business ties between Trump and his aides, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other. An especially thorough job of reporting on Trump himself can be found at this link. Of course, though it’s gone almost completely unreported, there are years’ worth of much more evidence of extensive relationships between the offshoring businesses that have lobbied very effectively for China in recent decades, and Trump’s rivals and critics. These include many of this year’s Republican presidential candidates, the so-called conservative intellectuals who work at think tanks funded heavily by these multinational companies, and Democratic Party leaders (chiefly from the Clinton wing) who have dependably backed Beijing-friendly policies. (See this Congressional testimony of mine on how the corporate funded think tanks have served as highly effective “idea launderers” for offshoring-happy business interests.)

In other words, there are few virgins in America’s political and policy establishment when it comes to serving unfriendly foreign interests, whether directly or indirectly.

All the while, however, an even more important scandal has been enveloping U.S.-Russia relations. It entails the way all these accusations are preventing an urgently needed national substantive debate – over whether the course of American policy has been boosting the odds of an East-West military clash that could be as completely unnecessary as it would be dangerous.

Specifically, the insinuation that only Putin toadies would oppose efforts to raise the military ante to prevent further Russia’s expansionism in European areas around its border has obscured a crucial reality: how Washington’s bipartisan decision to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance to Russia’s doorstep has created deadly risks to the U.S. homeland. Both Democratic and Republican presidents enthusiastically supported a policy that has saddled the nation with commitments to risk nuclear war over countries that (a) have never been considered important U.S. interests, largely because (b) they are located so close to Russia that they are completely indefensible with conventional forces.

Even worse, in recent years, the bipartisan Washington establishment has doubled down on this policy. In the face of Putin’s efforts to reestablish Russian hegemony in its so-called “near abroad,” American leaders have insisted not only that Washington reaffirm its intent to abide by its NATO commitment to view any attack on new members like the Baltic countries as a casus belli with Russia. Both Democratic and Republican establishmentarians have also called for admitting into NATO – and thereby extending American security guarantees over – countries like Ukraine and Moldova, which are even less defensible. (Indeed, during the 2008 presidential campaign, the Ukraine champions included major party nominees Barack Obama and John McCain.)

And because Western forces have no hope of defeating the Russian military in its own neighborhood, if Moscow did move in those circumstances, the United States and the rest of NATO would be placed in the position of threatening nuclear weapons use (and possibly following through, as per U.S. military doctrine) or suffering a humiliation that could dwarf that experienced in Vietnam (with all of its domestic and international repercussions).

To his credit, President Obama hasn’t accused Trump of pushing his Russia views for self-seeking reasons. But he’s played his own part in trying to ostracize Trump-like views by attributing them to the Republican nominee’s supposed ignorance about foreign policy matters generally, and about the ostensibly indisputable value of alliances like NATO.

Weirdly, however, although he has repeatedly endorsed the decades-long American commitment to risk nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland to protect any and all NATO members – however new and vulnerably located – as well as treaty allies in Asia, Mr. Obama also recently argued, in a lengthy interview with The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg, that forcibly attempting to resist Russia’s moves around its littoral would be foolhardy at best:

“‘The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,’” he said.

“I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.

“‘It’s realistic,’ he said. ‘But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.’”

And the president stated even more emphatically:

“[I]f there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years.”

What the president doesn’t seem to understand, though, is that these sensible arguments and cautions also apply to the Baltics – which Putin has frequently targeted. Yes, they’ve been admitted into NATO. But they have never been viewed as “core interests” of the United States. And for good reason. In fact, they were actually occupied by Moscow in 1944, as the Soviet military was fighting its way to Berlin during World War II, and turned into Soviet “republics” until the USSR disintegrated. Do any Americans genuinely believe that the tragedy unmistakably suffered by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania ever affected America’s security or prosperity in the slightest?

My good friend, journalist and foreign policy analyst Leon Hadar, has just written compellingly in The National Interest that Trump’s Russia and overall foreign policy positions – however crudely and vaguely expressed – overlap with President Obama’s to a vastly underappreciated degree:

“[B]oth the liberal internationalist Obama and the conservative nationalist Trump are pragmatists and not ideologues by nature when it comes to foreign-policy issues. They both eventually gravitate towards choices based on cost-effectiveness calculations. The two have rejected the grand Wilsonian designs of promoting democracy and nation building pursued by George W. Bush under the influence of his neoconservative advisors, and believe that Washington needs to readjust its global strategy to the changing international balance of power and under the pressure of diminishing economic and military resources.”

The only problem with this theory is that precisely he is a liberal internationalist at heart, the president not only backs the basic structures of post-World War II U.S. foreign policy – the security alliances in Europe and Asia. He has both supported the aforementioned dangerous post-Cold War expansion of the former, and has ordered concrete measures to buttress them militarily.

But because, as Mr. Obama himself admits, America’s stake in the security of NATO’s newest members is anything but vital, it’s all too likely that the increased U.S. military presence in Eastern Europe could leave the nation in the worst of all possible circumstances – more deeply tied than ever to a military mission almost certain to fail,, and in all likelihood disastrously. (For somewhat different reasons, as I’ve contended most recently in this post, a similar argument can be made for America’s Asia policy under Mr. Obama.)

Trump, by contrast, is both spotlighting the risks created by U.S. alliances and similar policies and questioning the worth of these alliances and policies themselves. There’s a perfectly respectable argument to be made that Trump is wrong because the continuing nuclear commitments – and the U.S. forces deployed in harm’s way precisely in order to narrow America’s choices and ostensibly cow U.S. rivals – are protecting the allies at a risk to American territory that’s completely acceptable. But that’s not the argument being made by supporters of the foreign policy status quo – who also, perhaps not so coincidentally, never mention in public the nuclear dangers.

Instead, both the Democratic and Republican mainstays of the foreign policy establishment, and the Mainstream Media journalists who faithfully parrot their views, prefer to demonize Trump. And all of course in the name of “responsibility.”

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Wisdom and Blind Spots of Henry Kissinger

Tags

China, economics, Henry Kissinger, idealism, international order, interventionism, Iran deal, Jacob Heilbrunn, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, power, Putin, realism, Russia, strategy, The National Interest, Ukraine, World War II

When I was helping to edit FOREIGN POLICY magazine, I used to say that the only authors whose articles I would ever accept sight unseen were those by U.S. and other present and former heads of major national governments, and Henry Kissinger. I never had the pleasure and honor of working with this former Secretary of State and presidential national security advisor, and disagreed with him strongly on major issues then and now. But I still haven’t seen any reason to doubt that Kissinger boasts a combination of hands-on policy experience (in what a well known Chinese curse understatedly calls “interesting times”) and deep historical knowledge that’s been unique.

So I would strongly urge everyone interested in U.S. foreign policy or world affairs to read the interview with Kissinger just published in The National Interest. I was, to be sure, disappointed that Editor Jacob Heilbrunn didn’t ask his subject about the Iran deal – especially since Kissinger and one of his successors, George Shultz, wrote an op-ed in April highly critical of President Obama’s efforts to deny Tehran nuclear weapons, but not flatly dismissing the possibility that the president could conclude an acceptable agreement. Now we have a final deal. What does Kissinger think? Maybe he’s still holding his cards close to his vest, and ruled the topic out of bounds in advance?

In fact, the only headline issue on which Kissinger comments is Russia’s grab for more power in Ukraine and elsewhere along its European borders. If you think Vladimir Putin is the devil incarnate, or the second coming of Stalin, you need to learn about Kissinger’s notably evenhanded interpretation of how this crisis emerged – with which I broadly agree. His ideas for easing East-West tensions deserve much more attention, too.

Ultimately, however, what I found most interesting about the interview has to do with what I have always found most disappointing about Kissinger – his failure to help develop a distinctly American version of “realist” diplomatic thinking.

At the start of the interview, Kissinger does a good job of defining the debate between realists (supposedly like himself) and “idealists” that has shaped much of American foreign policy since the end of World War II: “The way the debate is conventionally presented pits a group that believes in power as the determining element of international politics against idealists who believe that the values of society are decisive.” As this statement suggests, he (correctly) views the dichotomy as “simplistic” and “artificial,” but does (also correctly) acknowledge that these terms can influence how leaders order their priorities and strike balances among competing objectives.

Yet however important these concepts to American strategists, as I’ve pointed out, even avowed realists like Kissinger have consistently overlooked the single most important ingredient for successfully pursuing this approach – understanding geography and its implications. In fact, wherever they’ve stood on the realist-idealist spectrum, U.S. leaders have for decades followed a strategy that’s almost willfully defined geography out of existence. Both Democrats and Republicans alike, during and after the Cold War, have carried out policies of military intervention, alliance building, and economic integration, that are much more appropriate for a small, highly vulnerable country than for a continent-spanning power protected by two wide oceans.

From a geopolitical perspective, even Kissinger’s well known preoccupation with creating and preserving “international order” is a sign of diplomatic hubris rather than a hallmark of prudence and pragmatism. Why, after all, would such a serious and knowledgeable student of the past believe that disorder, including widespread chaos, is a natural – much less achievable – goal for a world lacking consensus on fundamental values and norms of behavior? And as a result, why has Kissinger been so thoroughly convinced – along with so many other political friends and foes – that for a country with the advantages enjoyed by the United States, surviving and prospering amid this tumult is a much more feasible aim than bringing it to an end, or even significantly moderating it?

Finally, the National Interest interview also confirms another big weakness of both Kissinger’s version of realism and post-World War II foreign policy – a refusal to think seriously about economics. The word isn’t even mentioned. In principle, anyway, neglecting wealth and its creation was understandable for America for most of the Cold War. The United States was predominant, it had no challengers on this front, and the chief threats Americans faced seemed overwhelmingly military. Since the early 1970s, however – not so so coincidentally, when Kissinger was most prominent – keeping this spot blind has been inexcusable. For in this material world, from where does Kissinger think power in all of its tangible forms ultimately springs?

Still, with the exception of China policy (where his consulting business has compromised his analysis, in my view), I’m glad Kissinger remains active on policy issues and continues advising politicians. He may be 92, but he’s orders of magnitude wiser, deeper, and sharper than virtually anyone else in America’s foreign policy establishment.