CORNELL UNIVERSITY
GOVT 6847

BOOK REVIEW: HENRY
KISSINGER’S WORLD
ORDER


Hoang Minh Vu

GOVT 6847

May 8, 2015

Book Review: Henry Kissinger’s World Order

Between May and August 1963, a major series of civil unrest swept through South Vietnam,
pitting elements of the majority Buddhist population against the government led by a Catholic, President
Ngo Dinh Diem. On September 6, American President John F. Kennedy dispatched two men – U.S.
Marine Corps Major General Victor Krulak and State Department officer Joseph Mendenhall – to
undertake an emergency fact-finding mission to determine the impact of this unrest on American
counterinsurgency efforts in the region. Reporting back to Kennedy on September 10, Krulak was
generally optimistic, believing that the Vietnamese army had maintained its loyalty to the government.
Mendenhall disputed Krulak’s account, painting a much bleaker picture of the failures of
counterinsurgency and of the Diem government and magnifying the threat of a Communist takeover. At
one point, a bemused (and often misquoted) Kennedy interjected their testimonies, asking, “You both
went to the same country?”1
Those who have not quite had the chance to peruse Henry Kissinger’s latest volume would
experience Kennedy’s state of puzzlement if they went in the meantime to consult a selection of the
many book reviews that came out in the wake of World Order’s publication. In The Telegraph, Jonathan
Powell contextualizes the book as Kissinger’s swansong, characterizing it as “an attempt to justify all that

he has done… or argued, over nearly seven decades”. 2 Writing in The Guardian, famous Oxford historian
of China Rana Mitter chooses to focus more on Kissinger’s description of the three contending
conceptions of world order, opining that “this may sound like Samuel Huntington's idea of the ‘clash of
1 “Meetings: Tape 109. Meeting on Vietnam, 10 September 1963,” accessed May 8, 2015,
/>2 Jonathan Powell, “Henry Kissinger’s World Order, Review,” September 13, 2014,
/>
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civilisations’, but actually it is more like a bracing mixture of Metternichian pragmatism and – more
unexpectedly – Edward Said's critique of ‘Orientalism’.” 3 Mitter’s mention of Metternich is a firm nod to
the book’s reemphasis of the need for a legitimate order, first expounded in Kissinger’s doctoral
dissertation at Harvard and eventually published in 1957 as his first major work, A World Restored:
Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22. 4 By contrast, writing for The New Republic,
Princeton Professor and former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department under the first
Obama Administration Anne-Marie Slaughter reveals her ignorance of Kissinger’s oeuvre when she labels
his argument for legitimacy to be “an apparent conversion” from power politics. For Slaughter, the book
is “a salvo in the ongoing foreign policy struggle for Barack Obama’s soul.” 5 Even former Secretary of
State and lately Democratic frontrunner for the 2016 Presidential elections Hillary Rodham Clinton
weighed in, arguing in the Washington Post that “[Kissinger’s] analysis, despite some differences over
specific policies, largely fits with the broad strategy behind the Obama administration’s effort over the
past six years to build a global architecture of security and cooperation for the 21st century.” 6
Did they all read the same book? In a way, no. Like South Vietnam in the early 1960s, World
Order is a very complex and nuanced work that fits many narratives in one. Like Krulak and Mendenhall,

reviewers of Kissinger’s book come with preconceived notions and personal motives, and their
takeaways are greatly influenced by these cognitive factors. This long essay seeks to address the many
issues raised in World Order and highlighted by the reviewers in three parts. First, I reconstruct the broad
3 Rana Mitter, “World Order by Henry Kissinger – Review,” The Guardian, accessed May 3, 2015,
/>4 Henry Kissinger, A World Restored; Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-22 (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
5 Anne-Marie Slaughter, “How to Fix America’s Foreign Policy,” The New Republic, November 18, 2014,
/>6 Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Hillary Clinton Reviews Henry Kissinger’s ‘World Order,’” The Washington Post,
September 4, 2014, />
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sweep of the book’s arguments, point out its various strengths, and explore the overall purpose of the
book in the context of Kissinger’s work, life, and times. Second, I explore Kissinger’s descriptions of the
three international orders – the Westphalian, the Asian, and the Islamic, arguing that they are somewhat
removed from the contemporary academic debates, and ponder over how this should influence the way
we read Kissinger’s project. Third, I point out certain flaws in Kissinger’s historical narrative, and
contextualize his project from a historian’s perspective. I conclude that while World Order often fails to
engage with many of the major academic debates of our time, it remains an important work in the canon
of Realism for successfully summarizing Kissinger’s oeuvre in the service of the busy policy practitioner
and the interested public.

Context, content, and target audience
World Order is likely to be Henry Kissinger’s final work for several reasons. At 92 this year, even

the seemingly indefatigable American elder statesman must no doubt be feeling the effects of old age.
While nothing precludes the publication of a few more essays and reviews, as well as media
appearances, it is unlikely that Kissinger’s health will allow any new project approaching the scale of
World Order or even more monumental works in the past. But even more tellingly, World Order’s
overarching argument for a legitimate order backed by the balance of power is so reminiscent of that
first outlined in A World Restored that we must view the two as bookends for Kissinger’s oeuvre, serving
much the same purpose that Genesis and Revelation do for the Holy Bible. Like in A World Restored,
Kissinger starts out defining his terms precisely:
World order describes the concept held by a region or civilization about the nature of
just arrangements and the distribution of power thought to be applicable to the entire
world. An international order is the practical application of these concepts to a
substantial part of the globe – large enough to affect the global balance of power.
Regional orders involve the same principles applied to a defined geo-graphic area.
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Any one of these systems of order bases itself on two components: a set of commonly
accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action and a balance of power that
enforces restraint where rules break down, preventing one political unit from
subjugating all others.7

While according to Kissinger “no truly global ‘world order’ has ever existed,” there are today
three major contenders for that status. First is the European order established in 1648 at the Treaty of
Westphalia that ended the Thirty Year’s War, which serves as the foundation for the West’s conception

of international relations. It recognizes “a multiplicity of political units, none powerful enough to defeat
all others, many adhering to contradictory philosophies and internal practices, in search of neutral rules
to regulate their conduct and mitigate conflict.” 8 Kissinger then gives a shortened version of his grand
narrative in Diplomacy to describe the evolution of this system from Cardinal Richelieu’s emphasis on
raison d’état to Russia’s integration into the European order, from the Congress of Vienna to its
breakdown under Bismarck’s Germany and the two World Wars, and the nascent European Union that
threatens this Westphalian order altogether. 9 Second is the Islamic order, which distinguishes between
the dar al-Islam (the House of Islam and realm of peace) with the dar al-Harb (the realm of war beyond
Islamic control). The Islamic order is defined by expanding faith through struggle (jihad) to incorporate
the dar al-Harb into dar al-Islam and thus bring about universal peace. 10 Finally, out of a mulplicity of
systems in Asia, Kissinger focuses on those of China, Japan, and India, all of which form their present-day
policies based on a traditional hierarchical view of international relations. 11 China’s hierarchical tradition,

7 Henry Kissinger, World Order (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 9.
8 Ibid., 2–3.
9 Ibid., 11–95; Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
10 Kissinger, World Order, 99–102.
11 Ibid., 211.

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in particular, is singled out as making it an ambivalent participant in the Westphalian system it is now
supposed to help anchor.12

The latter half of World Order is dedicated to an updating of his arguments on American foreign
policy as found in Diplomacy. Kissinger charts America’s path from isolationism to superpower
engagement, and the ever-present tension between this latent isolationism and the belief that its liberal
principles should apply to the wider world. As in Diplomacy, the general trend is that those leaders who
seek to impose a liberal vision upon the world almost inevitably end up pursuing policies that backfire.
Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations was too weak to stand up to Hitler’s rise. Franklin Roosevelt’s New
World Order relied too much on his personal relationship with Stalin and allowed the Soviets to impose
Communism upon Eastern Europe. Douglas McArthur’s attempt to go beyond the 50 th parallel in Korea
turned victory into near-defeat. Lyndon B. Johnson’s conviction of the need of “defending a free people
against the advance of totalitarianism” led him into the quagmire of Vietnam. And though Kissinger
professed personal friendship with George W. Bush, he castigated the moralistic terms of the 2002
National Security Strategy that led to the Second Gulf War. On the other hand, practitioners of
Realpolitik including Theodore Roosevelt, George Kennan, Richard Nixon, and himself (Kissinger) have
generally been met with success.13
Citing nuclear proliferation and information technology as the two areas of potentially disruptive
technological change, Kissinger ends by identifying “a reconstruction of the international system [as] the
ultimate challenge to statesmanship in our time.” 14 While pessimistic at the beginning of the book about
the prospects of success, by its end Kissinger offers a more sanguine reminder that:

12 Ibid., 212–33.
13 Ibid., 234–329.
14 Ibid., 330–60; 371.

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The Westphalian system was drafted by some two hundred delegates, none of whom
has entered the annals of history as a major figure, who met in two provincial German
towns forty miles apart (a significant distance in the seventeenth century) in two
separate groups. They overcame their obstacles because they shared the devastating
experience of the Thirty Years’ War, and they were determined to prevent its recurrence.
Our time, facing even graver prospects, needs to act on its necessities before it is
engulfed by them.15

Considering that it had been 37 years since Henry Kissinger left office when World Order came
out, it was a testament to the public’s enduring fascination with the man and his ideas that his swansong
stayed on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list for four straight weeks, peaking at number 6. 16 A
major strength is the clear and simple prose, with the notes tucked away at the back without resort to
in-line numerical citations. Instead of having to plough through Kissinger’s very substantial oeuvre, the
uninitiated reader can derive his main tenets from the very reasonable 377-page World Order (excluding
index). For the interested public or professional politicians less well-versed in international relations
theory and history, World Order does a good job of summarizing the major developments in
international relations and American foreign policy in an accessible way. It covers the history of
international relations from ancient times to 2014’s headlines of the Ukraine conflict, the Syrian Civil
War, and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Unlike Kissinger’s earlier theoretical works, World
Order also boasts a global perspective in branching out from the Westphalian order and exploring the
Asian and Islamic worldviews. It is little wonder that a number of policy-makers and big-name academics
want to weigh in on the book and, in the case of Hillary Clinton, to use World Order as verification for her
and President Obama’s policies. Clearly, the book appeals most greatly to aspiring foreign policy makers
and the interested public, with John Micklethwait quipping in the New York Times that “it is a book that

15 Ibid., 373.
16 “Best Sellers: Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction,” The New York Times, October 19, 2014,
/>

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every member of Congress should be locked in a room with — and forced to read before taking the oath
of office.”17
Anne-Marie Slaughter, Jonathan Powell, and Rana Mitter all see World Order as Kissinger’s
grudging acceptance of the role of justice and legitimacy in foreign policy, following widespread
criticisms of Kissinger’s actions while in office. 18 As National Security Adviser for Richard Nixon and
Gerald Ford (1969-1975) and Secretary of State (1973-1977), Kissinger had been a leading proponent of
an amoral Realist approach to foreign policy. This approach led to several spectacular triumphs, including
the 1972 Sino-American rapprochement, the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union, and
the 1975 Helsinki Agreements with its Basket III on Human Rights that became a rallying point for several
Eastern European democratic movements. 19 But it also led to many controversial policies in the Third
World. Kissinger’s role in the 1968 Nixon Presidential Campaign’s sabotage of peace talks in Vietnam; the
Nixon Administration’s expansion of the Vietnam War before forcing South Vietnam to sign a peace
agreement that doomed their state; his support of Pakistan during the 1971 Bangladeshi War of
Independence, of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet’s bloody 1973 coup against the popularly elected
Allende government, of Indonesia’s 1975 annexation of East Timor; and several other episodes have
opened Kissinger and his brand of politics to widespread criticism. 20
But Slaughter, Powell, and Mitter might have fundamentally misunderstood Kissinger’s use of the
word “just”. Justice and legitimacy for Kissinger are merely “commonly accepted rules” and not absolute
moral standards. Even though Kissinger does acknowledge that the spread of liberty is one of the core

17 John Micklethwait, “Henry Kissinger’s ‘World Order,’” The New York Times, September 11, 2014,

/>18 Slaughter, “How to Fix America’s Foreign Policy”; Powell, “Henry Kissinger’s World Order, Review”; Mitter,
“World Order by Henry Kissinger – Review.”
19 Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 316–54.
20 Christopher Hitchens and Ariel Dorfman, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Reprint edition (New York: Twelve, 2012).

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American values, he often highlights how this zeal has led American policy makers to unwise decisions. In
fact, World Order is a step back from Kissinger’s position in 2001, when he had acknowledged that, “The
real challenge is to merge [Idealism and Realism]; no serious American maker of foreign policy can be
oblivious to the traditions of exceptionalism by which American democracy has defined itself.” 21 No such
clear affirmation of a role for Idealism is present in World Order. And while there was certainly some
explaining of his actions while in office, it was confined to just seven pages on the Nixon and Ford
Administrations as part of an overview of the evolution of American foreign policy. 22 This is dwarfed by
Kissinger’s far more concentrated efforts to rehabilitate his image in his three massive memoirs and
elsewhere.23 So Slaughter, Powell, and Mitter are right in a way: Kissinger has at various times in his
career tried to fix the damage sustained during his days in office, but World Order is not a key part of
that project. Rather, the main purpose of this final book is to sum up much of Kissinger’s previous
theoretical and historical work on the Western order and places them into the broader context, i.e. the
search for a truly global world order. It does not offer anything radically new and is certainly not an
apology.

Problems of theory

A number of reviewers, including Rana Mitter, James Traub for the Wall Street Journal, and Tom
Rogan for the Washington Times treat World Order as a serious academic study.24 They have good reason
to do so: World Order does indeed have many elements of a serious academic work. Kissinger advances
21 Henry Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?: Towards a Diplomacy for the 21st Century (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2001), 20.
22 Kissinger, World Order, 302–9.
23 Henry Kissinger, White House Years, 1st ed (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979); Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1982); Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999); Jussi M.
Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (Oxford ; New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004).

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a coherent and compelling thesis for the necessity of a global order. His positioning of the
acknowledgements at the back, sparse citations, and choice of rather informal endnotes without in-text
numeration and a bibliography are all quite unusual in academia, but is not unprecedented, especially
among scholars advanced in distinction and age (see Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes, for
example).25 While relatively free of academic jargon, Kissinger’s language is sufficiently formal and
academic to distinguish itself from just an opinion piece. This is an extremely ambitious book in scope
and it would, on balance, be unfair to criticize Kissinger too much for his rather simplistic accounts of the
three world orders, or his very brief and not too critical treatment of major episodes in history.
None of these features disqualify World Order from being a serious addition to Kissinger’s
academic oeuvre. Nevertheless, I am still not wholly convinced that World Order is meant to be a

substantial addition to the academic literature, because it systematically shirks the major academic
debates on many of the subjects which it touches. This is despite the fact that Kissinger’s notes draw
from a veritable wealth of primary and secondary sources from many perspectives, not just the
European ones. Rather than dispute the quality of Kissinger’s sources, his encyclopedic knowledge, or his
extensive first-hand experience, my uneasiness stems from World Order’s tendency to sweep often
acrimonious academic disagreements under the rug in the interest of a coherent and flowing narrative.
This becomes evident as soon as Kissinger launches into analysis of the three world orders. His
arguments for the importance of both legitimacy and balance of power, as well as the prioritization of
stability over justice have a lot of affinity to the English School of International Relations, sometimes

24 Mitter, “World Order by Henry Kissinger – Review”; James Traub, “Book Review: ‘World Order’ by Henry
Kissinger,” Wall Street Journal, September 5, 2014, sec. Life and Style, Tom Rogan, “World Order by Henry Kissinger,” The Washington Times,
October 13, 2014, />25 E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, 1st American ed (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1994).

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referred to as Institutional Realism. Over several generations of scholars, Martin Wight, Hedley Bull, Tim
Dunne, Edward Keene, Barry Buzan, and many others have developed a very robust theory of the
international society that exists alongside systemic anarchy. They have defined and elaborated on the
common norms and institutions that provide the framework for this international society in much the
same way Kissinger envisions a working world order. 26 And yet, like in his previous works, in World Order
Kissinger has once again stubbornly refrained from identifying with any particular school of thought.

While this preserves to some extent his professed neutrality (even when it is clear that he is a Realist), it
is a missed chance to plug his theory into the broader theoretical debate in IR, and raises seriously
questions about World Order’s academic relevance.
Kissinger’s fluency in German and impressive background in European history allowed him to
construct a very detailed account of the creation of the European order after the end of the Thirty Years’
War in Diplomacy, which he summarizes in World Order.27 Kissinger is particularly strong in noting the
uniqueness of the pluralistic European order, the conditions by which it arose, why it is so difficult for the
Asian or Islamic worlds to adapt fully to this multilateral concept, and its advantages in our world today
where no clear hegemon reigns:
The history of most civilizations is a tale of the rise and fall of empires. Order was
established by their internal governance, not through an equilibrium among states:
strong when the central authority was cohesive, more haphazard under weaker rulers. In
imperial systems, wars generally took place at the frontiers of the empire or as civil wars.
Peace was identified with the reach of imperial power.
26 Martin Wight, Gabriele Wight, and Brian Ernest Porter, International Theory: The Three Traditions (New York:
Holmes & Meier for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 1992); Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society:
A Study of Order in World Politics, 4th ed (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Timothy Dunne, Inventing
International Society: A History of the English School, St. Antony’s Series (Houndmills : New York: Macmillan ; St.
Martin’s Press in association with St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 1998); Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical
Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics, LSE Monographs in International Studies (Cambridge ;
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Barry Buzan, From International to World Society?: English School
Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation, Cambridge Studies in International Relations 95 (Cambridge ; New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
27 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 56–77; Kissinger, World Order, 11–48.

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… although it was comprehensible as a single civilization, Europe never had a single
governance, or a united, fixed identity… For more than a thousand years, in the
mainstream of modern European statecraft order has derived from equilibrium, and
identity from resistance to universal rule. It is not that European monarchs were more
immune to the glories of conquest than their counterparts in other civilizations or more
committed to an ideal of diversity in the abstract. Rather, they lacked the strength to
impose their will on each other decisively. In time, pluralism took on the characteristics
of a model of world order.28

In constructing this description, Kissinger consulted a single work, Kevin Wilson and Jan van der
Dussen’s The History of the Idea of Europe. This is fine enough, but one wonders whether he is failing to
engage fully with the literature without dealing with the debate between Paul Kennedy, Jared Diamond,
and Kenneth Pomeranz. On the one hand, Kennedy and Diamond argue that it is this pluralism that
created the institutions that allowed European states to overtake Asia from the 1500s onwards; on the
other, Pomeranz contends that the period of most rapid divergence did not occur until the 1800s, and
then it was differences in resource endowments (specifically coal ore and the bounty of the New World)
that enabled Europe to attain industrialization sooner. 29 If Kissinger deals with this literature rather than
ignores it, he could go beyond the distinction between the worldviews of the various civilizations and
perhaps give his implicit argument about the efficacy of a pluralistic order more bite. It is unlikely that a
scholar of East-West relations of Kissinger’s acumen is ignorant of this famous debate. Far more likely is
that he made the choice to dispense with it, perhaps in the interest of highlighting his central argument
that there is a diversity of conceptions of world order over discussions of the merits of each. While this is
a defensible choice to make, it does serve like many such choices Kissinger makes throughout the book
to distance World Order from the burning academic debates of his time.
28 Kissinger, World Order, 11–2.
29 Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to

2000, 1st ed (New York, NY: Random House, 1987); Jared M. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human
Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making
of the Modern World Economy, The Princeton Economic History of the Western World (Princeton, N.J: Princeton
University Press, 2000).

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Another major academic debate that Kissinger completely ignores is that over the importance of
the Treaty of Westphalia. World Order rehashes an old dictum taught in IR101 classes around the world
that the principle of sovereignty – non-interference in other states’ affairs – was affirmed for the first
time in 1648 in the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War. This narrative is central to
Kissinger’s book, not least because Westphalia is supposed to have vindicated the raison d’état approach
of the French chief minister Cardinal Richelieu during the war. Westphalia is also cited at the end of the
book to show decision-makers today that it is possible if improbable to construct a global order from a
great diversity of views as the delegates at Westphalia did three and a half centuries ago. 30
While this was a compelling argument in 1994 when he wrote Diplomacy, by 2014 the academic
consensus had left Kissinger behind. In 2001, Andreas Osiander published an important article
challenging what he calls the “myth of Westphalia”. Osiander points out that the famous treaty (or
rather, two near-identical treaties) only applied to the Holy Roman Empire, and was therefore not at all
consequential since “never before or during the war was the emperor in a position to threaten the longestablished independence of actors outside the Holy Roman Empire” and that “there is no indication
that, even at the height of his military power in the late 1620s, the emperor intended to change that.”
Osiander traces scholars’ obsession with Westphalia to their “nineteenth- and twentieth-century fixation
on the concept of sovereignty.”31 Meanwhile, Stephen Krasner has published another influential

challenge of the concept of sovereignty in IR, arguing that states have never been truly sovereign and
that the concept was peddled by the “organized hypocrisy” of powerful states. 32 Osiander’s paper is
sufficiently well-known and well-cited, its critique having entered several mainstream IR textbooks, that
it is once again very unlikely that a scholar of Kissinger’s caliber would not be at least aware of its
30 Kissinger, World Order, 20–35; 373.
31 Andreas Osiander, “Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth,” International Organization
55, no. 02 (March 2001): 251–87, doi:10.1162/00208180151140577.
32 Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton University Press, 1999).

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existence and the resultant shift in the academic consensus regarding the subject. And Kissinger is
himself such a routine violator of the concept of sovereignty while in office that he must be well aware
of its hypocrisy as described by Krasner. His conscious choice to paper over these two important debates
on sovereignty, instead painting a very traditional and largely uncritical account of the Westphalian order
is a failure to engage in serious academic debate.
Another major development which ought to concern Kissinger and any other defender of the
Westphalian order greatly is the rise of supranational organizations, with the European Union by far the
most advanced. There is a great body of academic literature on regional integration, including David
Mitrany’s Functionalism which argues for the creation of supranational regulatory bodies for
technocratic aims that would eventually develop towards a robust framework of international
governance; Ernst Haas’s expansion of that concept into a more predictive and prescriptive framework of
“ever closer union” that has become the unofficial motto for supporters of European integration;

Andrew Moravcsik’s pushback in the form of Intergovernmentalism, a theory of integration based on
agreements between states rather than the machinations of Eurocrats; and most recently Liesbet
Hooghe and Gary Marks’s Postfunctionalism which seeks to rationalize the rise of Euro-skepticism. 33
Kissinger deals with none of this literature. In fact, his entire section on “The Future of Europe” is
confined to four pages and has no citations whatsoever, filled instead with sixteen largely unanswered
questions and his rather incoherent musings on the subject. 34 It is perhaps the most disappointing
section of the entire book.
33 David Mitrany, A Working Peace System; an Argument for the Functional Developmental of International
Organization, 4th ed, NPC Pamphlet, no. 40 (London: National Peace Council, 1946); Ernst B. Haas, The Uniting of
Europe: Political, Social, and Economic Forces, 1950-1957, Contemporary European Politics and Society (Notre
Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004); Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and
State Power from Messina to Maastricht, Cornell Studies in Political Economy (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press,
1998); Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, “A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From Permissive
Consensus to Constraining Dissensus,” British Journal of Political Science 39, no. 01 (January 2009): 1–23,
doi:10.1017/S0007123408000409.
34 Kissinger, World Order, 91–5.

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Even the chapters on Asian conceptions of world order dodge some important academic
debates. While Kissinger’s studies of India and Japan are interesting and backed by impressive
scholarship, there is little hiding that the centerpiece of his analysis rests on China. He has good reason
to do so: China is now the emerging giant that is posing many questions for Asian security, and its vision

of world order is, if unlikely to ever be universally adopted in full, is at least the most likely among the
Asian powers to be placated in part. Kissinger is a renowned expert on China and the Chinese psyche,
having engineered the Sino-American rapprochement in the early 1970s and produced a celebrated
study On China in 2011.35 Unfortunately, as Kissinger does not himself read Chinese, much of his sources
on China come from personal experience and secondary sources, and he misses out on many of the
important research being carried out in Chinese or other Asian think-tanks.
Like many other authors, Kissinger presents the standard narrative of China’s imperial past and
its traditional self-conception as the Middle Kingdom endowed with a heavenly mandate to govern over
others.36 This narrative ignores certain complexities such as that introduced in Jonathan Spence’s classic
The Search for Modern China, which Kissinger cites but does not seem to have read very closely. One of
Spence’s important arguments early in the book is that because its Manchu worldview differed from that
of the Han-race dynasties that preceded it, the Qing Dynasty had felt the need to conquer and hold
physical territory rather than just collect tribute from its periphery long before the Europeans
supposedly forced the Westphalian order upon the Chinese. 37 While a sad omission in academic terms,
that might not on balance be a great deficiency in policy analysis terms, as Chinese policy makers today
largely subscribe to Kissinger’s version of events.

35 Henry Kissinger, On China (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).
36 Kissinger, World Order, 213–20.
37 Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 1st Paperback edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
1991), 26–73.

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Simplistic narrative aside, Kissinger’s analysis of the effects of this heritage on present-day policy
is very nuanced and accurate:
To speed up this dramatic [economic] transformation – if not necessarily by conviction –
China entered international institutions and accepted the established rule of world
order.
Yet China’s participation in aspects of the Westphalian structure carried with it an
ambivalence born of the history that brought it to enter into the international state
system. China has not forgotten that it was originally forced to engage with the existing
international order in a manner utterly at odds with its historical image of itself or, for
that matter, with the avowed principles of the Westphalian system. When urged to
adhere to the international system’s “rules of the game” and “responsibilities,” the
visceral reaction of many Chinese – including senior leaders – has been profoundly
affected by the awareness that China has not participated in making the rules of the
system… But they expect – and sooner or later will act on this expectation – the
international order to evolve in a way that enables China to become centrally involved in
further international rule making, even to the point of revising some of the rules that
prevail.38

Unfortunately, Kissinger fails to follow up with analysis of China’s ongoing attempts to shape the
rules of the game, through the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea; forums such as the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization, the G20, and the BRICS grouping; and new institutions such as the New
Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the Free Trade Area of the AsiaPacific.
His recommendation for a partnership backed by a balance of power between the U.S. and China
is a welcome alternative to John Mearsheimer’s strident call for aggressive policies to delay the rise of
China by any means possible.39 Yet, despite his insights on China and his appreciation of “a concept of
partnership,” or rather because of them, Kissinger’s analysis of the East Asian order is overly U.S.- and
38 Kissinger, World Order, 225.
39 John J. Mearsheimer, “Can China Rise Peacefully?,” Text, The National Interest, accessed May 11, 2015,
/>

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China-centric and ignores the role of international organizations in building common norms and values.
The issue of nuclear proliferation in the Korean peninsula is treated exclusively in terms of Sino-U.S.
bilateral relations, with the U.N. merely a meeting place for them to play out their political battles, and
the positive role of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) entirely ignored. 40 Kissinger also only
mentions the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) once in his entire book, comparing it
unfavorably to the European Union, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the Commission on
Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). For Kissinger, ASEAN and other Asian institutions “deal with
security and economic issues on a case-by-case basis, not as an expression of formal rules of regional
order.”41 As a result, he describes the present-day East Asian order as particularly ambiguous and fragile:
In East Asia, something approaching a balance of power exists between China, Korea,
Japan, and the United States, with Russia and Vietnam peripheral participants. But it
differs from the historical balances of power in that one of the key participants, the
United States, has its center of gravity located far from the geographic center of East
Asia – and, above all, because the leaders of both countries whose military forces
conceive themselves as adversaries in their military journals and pronouncements also
proclaim partnership as a goal on political and economic issues. So it comes about that
the United States is an ally of Japan and a proclaimed partner of China – a situation
comparable to Bismarck’s when he made an alliance with Austria balanced by a treaty
with Russia…
Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy. In Asia, it must
combine a balance of power with a concept of partnership [between the U.S. and

China].42

This analysis of the Asian order is generally sound and fits well with Kissinger’s warning that a
global order must be arrived at soon, or “disaster beckons.” 43 But his dismissive attitude towards the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a regrettable consequence of his book’s disconnect
40 Kissinger, World Order, 230–1.
41 Ibid., 210.
42 Ibid., 232–3.
43 Ibid.

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from academics. Several leading scholars of Asian security have in their latest works shone the spotlight
on critical role of ASEAN in hosting the bulk of the regional security infrastructure through the ASEAN
Regional Forum (ARF), ASEAN Plus Three, and East Asia Summit (EAS). 44 Unlike the directionless
organization which Kissinger describes, ASEAN has a very clear set of core values that broadly adhere to
an idealized Westphalian order, as enshrined in the 1971 Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality
Declaration, the 1976 Bali Declaration of ASEAN Concord, the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties
on the South China Sea, and the 2007 ASEAN Charter. 45 Driven by this very clear vision of the equality of
states, mutual non-interference, and preservation of the territorial status quo, ASEAN-sponsored forums
are currently some of the only places where external powers including China and the U.S. can discuss
important issues of Asian security and trade on a multilateral basis. Kissinger’s dismissal of this
organization when speaking about Asian security is but a continuation of his general disdain for

international organizations that are not backed by power. But it is one thing to deride ASEAN for being a
talking shop without teeth, a statement of justifiable opinion; an altogether different thing to accuse it of
lacking in direction, which is simply false. Kissinger’s failure to engage with the security literature on the
region and his dismissive attitude towards international organizations leads him to confuse the two and
exaggerate the degree of anarchy in the Asian security sphere.

44 Jurgen Haacke, ASEAN’s Diplomatic and Security Culture: Origins, Development and Prospects (Routledge, 2013);
Amitav Acharya, Constructing a Security Community in Southeast Asia: ASEAN and the Problem of Regional Order
(Routledge, 2014); Richard Stubbs, “ASEAN’s Leadership in East Asian Region-Building: Strength in Weakness,” The
Pacific Review 27, no. 4 (August 8, 2014): 523–41, doi:10.1080/09512748.2014.924229.
45 “1971 Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality Declaration Signed on 27 November 1971 in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia by the Foreign Ministers | Centre for International Law,” accessed April 20, 2015,
“1976 Declaration of ASEAN Concord Signed on 24 February
1976 in Bali, Indonesia by the Heads of State/Government | Centre for International Law,” accessed April 20, 2015,
“Declaration on the Conduct of Parties on the South China Sea” (ASEAN,
November 4, 2002), “The ASEAN Charter,” November 20, 2007, />
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Perhaps because of Kissinger’s clout as an expert on Europe and Asia, my above criticisms have
not found many echoes in the reviews. Much of the rare criticisms leveled against World Order have
more predictably targeted Kissinger’s treatment of issues relating to the Islamic world, the region with
which he has the least (but still very substantial) experience among the three. Kissinger characterizes the
struggle between Iran and the U.S. as over a fundamentally different view of world order. Iran’s vision is

a combination of its imperial legacy stretching back to the Archaemenid Empire and the Islamic call for
jihad to expand the dar al-Islam, which is fundamentally opposed to America’s promotion of the
Westphalian order. Rana Mitter takes issue with Kissinger’s pessimism over Iran, especially World Order’s
dismissal of the parallel between China in the 1970s and Iran in the 2010s because Iran does not face
such a threat to its survival as China did from the Soviet Union. 46 Mitter argues that fast-moving events in
the Middle East in the summer of 2014 and the Iranian regime’s capacity for change through elections
make the prospects for a lasting agreement more likely than Kissinger makes it out to be. 47 While it is still
too early to tell whether the agreement achieved on April 2, 2015 would stand the test of time, as things
stand I am more inclined to agree with Mitter’s optimism.
For Tom Rogan, Kissinger’s discussion of Sunni-Shia dynamics is inadequate for explaining the
problems the U.S. faced in Iraq. Both Rogan and John Micklethwait charge Kissinger for being too soft on
present-day policy makers, with Micklethwait postulating that Kissinger values his position as an insider
and is unwilling to burn bridges.48 They are right: it is obvious from Kissinger’s analysis of the Iraq War
that he found American policy makers at grievous fault for believing that they can impose their liberal
system by force upon a people with no prior experience in democracy – this is actually a main argument
of World Order.49 But Kissinger’s opting to pull his punches is a trade-off which we must accept in
46 Kissinger, World Order, 165–6.
47 Mitter, “World Order by Henry Kissinger – Review.”
48 Tom Rogan, “World Order by Henry Kissinger”; Micklethwait, “Henry Kissinger’s ‘World Order.’”
49 Kissinger, World Order, 322–7.

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exchange for the book’s wider readership in policy circles, and for the continuation of Kissinger’s
generally positive influence on policy makers in recent years. This consideration does, however, drive
home my overall point that Kissinger is not the average academic, and World Order not the most typical
example of a purely academic publication.
Kissinger’s other major omissions should rightly have come in the section “Technology,
Equilibrium, and Human Consciousness.” Here, Kissinger identifies only two major issues – nuclear
proliferation and the digital revolution – as the main challenges of the 21 st century requiring a global
order to resolve. While these are clearly serious challenges, it is baffling why climate change, civil wars,
refugees, financial crises, natural disasters, piracy, trans-national crime, genocide, or even terrorism do
not make the list. These are all hot-button topics in the 2000s, all requiring united global action for both
prevention and mitigation. Perhaps the omissions are more telling than the inclusions. Kissinger here
reveals himself as Metternich incarnate, an old soul who wishes for a return to 19 th century diplomacy
and dedicates his attention solely to questions of high politics. Indeed, technology only makes the list
because of its implications for cyber warfare. 50 This narrow view of diplomacy would seem to some at
odds with his rather radical call for a truly global and legitimate world order, which is perhaps the cause
for some reviewers’ confusion of World Order as a sort of apology. Kissinger’s loyal readers would realize,
however, that all of this is entirely consistent with his past works. In the end, though, Kissinger’s choice
to fixate on a very narrow narrative and avoid engaging in the major academic debates has proven
detrimental to the scholarly value of World Order.

Problems of history

50 Ibid., 330–60.

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As a diplomatic historian who has often had to defend his subfield’s ambitions to influence policy
against certain purists in the department who prefer that history remain exclusively an art, Henry
Kissinger’s generally successful integration of history and theory to produce a coherent call for action is
an inspiration. World Order has come out at a moment of great soul-searching for the history profession,
with a particularly heated debate surrounding two prominent historians’ publication of The History
Manifesto in the American Historical Review. Worried that historians are becoming overly-specialized in
ever more narrow areas of interest, and thus are ceding ground in the great debates of our time to the
universally reviled economists, David Armitage and Jo Guldi call for historians to combine a knowledge of
the longue durée with big data to regain a convincing prescriptive voice in policy. Their Manifesto has
encountered fierce and very public criticism from Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler, who allege quite
rightly that Armitage and Guldi’s call to action cannot apply to the great diversity of historical work, and
that Armitage and Guldi have not followed their own prescription to use big data and as a consequence
have severely exaggerated the problem of over-specialization. 51 That being said, The History Manifesto
remains a compelling work. Any young historian heeding its call and looking for a model would view
World Order and Diplomacy as successful examples of the use of longue durée history, if not the use of
big data, to construct a persuasive policy recommendation.
But World Order also highlights an inevitable tradeoff between detailed and considered history
and a broad scope. In the course of my discussions, a number of historical problems have been raised,
Osiander’s challenge to the Westphalian myth and the question of the Qing’s imperial conception among
them. Kissinger’s penchant for clichéd accounts of the past extends to Russia as well:

51 Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press,
2014); Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler, “The History Manifesto: A Critique,” The American Historical Review 120,
no. 2 (April 1, 2015): 530–42, doi:10.1093/ahr/120.2.530; David Armitage and Jo Guldi, “The History Manifesto: A
Reply to Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler,” The American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (April 1, 2015): 543–54,
doi:10.1093/ahr/120.2.543.


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Its policy has pursued a special rhythm of its own over the centuries, expanding over a
land-mass spanning nearly every climate and civilization, interrupted occasionally for a
time by the need to adjust its domestic structure to the vastness of the enterprise – only
to return again, like a tide crossing a beach. From Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin,
circumstances have changed, but the rhythm has remained extraordinarily consistent. 52

This narrative of the ever-expansionist and ever-autocratic Russia may well be true, but Kissinger
again does not entertain the contrary arguments from those who might dispute his account. George
Kennan, one of Kissinger’s professed heroes and seasoned Russia hand, does not see totalitarian
government as inherent in the Russian character. 53 As for the question of Russian expansionism, there is
a wealth of scholarship on the origins of the Cold War in Europe that deals with this issue. Whereas the
Traditionalists argued that Soviet aggression led to containment from the West in response, Revisionists
have pushed back against this narrative and argued that Stalin merely sought a legitimate defensive
buffer against a potential third invasion coming from the West. 54 The battle lines in this debate are being
revived today over the question of EU and NATO expansion in Eastern Europe and the conflicts in the
Caucasus and the Ukraine. Given the prominence of these events in the recent news, and Kissinger’s own
extensive experience with Russia, it is puzzling why he fails to engage with this important debate. It is
also a strange choice, given these civilizations’ relative powers, to exclude Russia’s conception of world
order from the triumvirate of 21st century contenders while including Islam’s.
Many issues pepper Kissinger’s overly coherent account of the evolution of American foreign
policy as well. Theodore Roosevelt is presented as the consummate Realist trying unsuccessfully to herd

his flock of hard-headed Liberals.55 In fact, Teddy Roosevelt always maintained that morality is as
52 Kissinger, World Order, 50.
53 George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950, Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1951), 112.
54 John Lewis Gaddis, “The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History
7, no. 3 (July 1, 1983): 171–90, doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.1983.tb00389.x.
55 Kissinger, World Order, 247–56.

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important as raison d’état, and behind his hard-nosed actions is the ideology of the civilizing mission. 56
Kissinger’s Franklin Roosevelt is a man too blinded by his personal friendship with Stalin to sense the
postwar Soviet danger.57 But historian Robert Dallek’s Roosevelt, as derived from an extensive study of
primary sources, is far more ambiguous, at once idealistic, at once attuned to the relevance of power in
his conduct of World War II.58 American involvements in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq are written off
by Kissinger as liberal civilizing projects gone awry. 59 But in reality, strategic and Realpolitik principles
were much more prominently cited as justifications for these wars. 60
As a specialized historian, I am well aware of how messy and contingent history can be, and thus
of the magnitude of the challenge of distilling millennia of numerous civilizations’ histories into a
coherent narrative in a short space. Combined with the context of the crisis of the history profession I
have earlier outlined, I am inclined to read World Order charitably as far as historical accuracy goes.
While it would be amiss to not point out a few of the more problematic historical narratives in World
Order, I do so while reminding the reader that the context and purpose of the book are extenuating

circumstances that partially absolve Kissinger from my nitpicking.

Conclusion

56 Frank Ninkovich, “Theodore Roosevelt: Civilization as Ideology,” Diplomatic History 10, no. 3 (July 1, 1986): 221–
45, doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.1986.tb00459.x.
57 Kissinger, World Order, 269–75.
58 Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945: With a New Afterword (Oxford
University Press, 1995), 317–528.
59 Kissinger, World Order, 295–329.
60 Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999); William Maley, The Afghanistan Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002);
Jane K. Cramer and A. Trevor Thrall, eds., Why Did the United States Invade Iraq?, Routledge Global Security Studies
(Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge, 2012).

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Long reviews like this are often more critical than they need to be. In the preceding pages, I have
pointed out a great number of theoretical and historical problems in World Order. Mostly, they are not
errors of fact, but rather a consistent failure to deal with the academic debate. We should keep in mind,
however, that Kissinger is an accomplished scholar and statesman who probably has a far better grasp of
all of this literature and then some than a graduate student like myself. At the end of the day, it was his
conscious choice to dispense with cumbersome debates on every point in the interest of a smoother,

more coherent narrative for a target audience of policy makers, the interested public, and academics, in
that order. That Kissinger made this choice does not mean that the theoretical and historical problems
go away, thus validating my quest to identify them in this essay. It is my hope that this review will be a
useful reading companion to critical readers of World Order.
Perhaps discussions of the book’s merit have been spread too thinly over the course of this long
essay to have made much of an impression. Overall, I must emphasize, Kissinger had done an extremely
good job of aggregating an impressive amount of events and viewpoints over vast spans of time and
space into a cogent argument. His argument for a legitimate world order backed by a balance of power is
as compelling today as when Kissinger first wrote it as a wide-eyed graduate student not too unlike
myself tonight.

Word count: 8060

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