PJ#098, ASCENSION OR NEVER-EVER LAND?

[wave]

PJ 98

CHAPTER 9

REC #1 HATONN

FRI., JUN. 17, 1994 11:25 A.M. YEAR 7, DAY 305

FRI., JUN. 17, 1994

MORE ON KISSINGER

And, we'll try to get through the most of this subject as focus, today. Since this man is so important in his shenanigans around your globe as pertains to YOUR NATION OF THE U.S.A., I MUST offer some insights into his thought presentations to fool you and mislead you. He has a "handler" but it is sufficient for you to recognize the personage.

We have written from this article in FOREIGN AFFAIRS [of CFR] on two prior occasions so we will leave you readers to re­fer back to those [see 6/5/94 #1 or 6/8/94 #1 writing] first two printings. We will call this Henry Kissinger, "Reflections on Containment", FOREIGN AFFAIRS, PART 3.

I will remind you that this material is DIRECTLY from Henry Kissinger as is presented in his recent book, DIPLOMACY, Si­mon and Schuster, 1994.

[QUOTING:]

THE CRITIQUES OF CONTAINMENT

As containment slowly took shape, the criticism it encoun­tered emerged from three different schools of thought. The first came from the "realists," exemplified by Walter Lippmann, who argued that the containment policy led to psychological and geopolitical overextension while draining American resources. The spokesman for the second school of thought was Winston Churchill, who objected to the postponement of negotiations un­til after positions of strength had been achieved. Finally, there was Henry Wallace, who denied America the moral right to un­dertake the policy of containment in the first place. Postulating a fundamental moral equivalence between both sides, Wallace argued that the Soviet sphere of influence in Central Europe was legitimate and that America's resistance to it only intensified tension. He urged a return to what he viewed as Roosevelt's policy: to end the Cold War by American conciliation.

As the most eloquent spokesman for the realists, Walter Lippmann rejected Kennan's proposition that Soviet society contained the seeds of its own decay. He considered the theory to be too speculative to serve as the foundation of American policy: containment, argued Lippmann, would draw America into the hinterlands of the Soviet empire's extended periphery, which included, in his view, many countries that were not states in the modern sense to begin with. Military entanglements that far from home could not enhance American security and would weaken American resolve. Containment, according to Lipp­mann, permitted the Soviet Union to choose the points of maxi­mum discomfiture for the United States while retaining the diplomatic, and even the military, initiative. Lippmann stressed the importance of establishing criteria to define areas in which countering Soviet expansion was a vital American interest. Without such criteria, the United States would be forced to or­ganize a "heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets," which would permit America's newfound allies to exploit containment for their own purposes. The United States would be trapped into propping up nonviable regimes, leaving Washington with the sorry choice between "appeasement and defeat and the loss of face, or ... support[ing] them [U.S. allies] at incalculable cost."

[H: The most interesting thing to note here is that this man [H.A.K.] was and is a major, major figure WITHIN the cir­cles planning the EXACT thing he denounces above. You see, he simply cannot resist this reverse presentation to show what he has actually accomplished! Who all do you think has already been to North Korea recently to set up this little cute ploy with Carter? Do you REALLY believe the Korean leaders didn't even "know about inspectors", etc., as CNN has told you? Is it possible that Carter's visit has a lot more to do with CHINA than it did with Korea? STAY ALERT!]

It was indeed a prophetic [H: No, like most "prophecies" it is exactly like it was planned or it would not be mentioned herein.] analysis of what lay ahead for the United States, though the remedy Lippmann proposed was hardly congenial to the uni­versalist American tradition, which was far closer to Kennan's expectation of an apocalyptic outcome. Lippmann asked that American foreign policy be guided by a case-by-case analysis of American interests rather than by general principles presumed to be universally applicable. In his view, American policy should have been aiming less at overthrowing the Communist system than at restoring the balance of power in Europe, which had been destroyed by the war. Containment implied the indefinite division of Europe, whereas America's real interest should be to banish Soviet power from the center of the European continent: [H: Now doesn't this sound good? Well, the facts are that the U.S. and the Soviets--NEVER STOPPED WORKING IN TOTAL JOINT VENTURE WITH ONE ANOTHER. Did Kissinger know as much? Of course, he helped structure it--how do you think he has gotten to be SO BIG in both nations and around the globe? Remember, Kissinger was a KGB agent!]

For more than a hundred years all Russian governments have sought to expand over Eastern Europe. But only since the Red Army reached the Elbe River have the rulers of Russia been able to realize the ambitions of the Russian empire and the ideological purposes of Communism. A genuine policy would, therefore, have as its paramount objective a settlement which brought about the evacuation of Europe. American power must be available, not to 'contain' the Russians at scattered points, but to hold the whole Russian military machine in check, and to exert a mounting pressure in support of a diplomatic policy which has as its concrete objective a settlement that means with­drawal.

From among its intellectuals, America was able to draw on the thinking of both Lippmann and Kennan while they were at the height of their powers. Kennan correctly understood Com­munism's underlying weakness; Lippmann accurately foretold the frustrations of an essentially reactive foreign policy based on containment. Kennan called for endurance to permit history to display its inevitable tendencies; Lippmann called for diplomatic initiative to produce a European settlement while America was still preponderant. Kennan had a better intuitive understanding of the mainsprings of American society; Lippmann grasped the impending strain of enduring a seemingly endless stalemate and the ambiguous causes that containment might lead America to support.

[H: I have recently had to ask that some language and "proposals" for the treatment of politicians be toned down so as to not even remotely represent an idea of insurrection or subversion--a stance to which we HIGHLY OBJECT. My idea might, however, be to cause all politicians to have to sit for some 500 hours in an audience and be required to listen and give accurate accounting to HENRY KISSINGER as he does his typical spell-binding monologue in impassioned manner. This is a man who has absolutely no ability to reach out of his robotic graveltone no matter if he wished to do so. I believe punishment should fit the crime! Further, by "accurate accounting" I mean that every one being disci­plined must give ACCURATE REPORTING ON EXACTLY WHAT IS MEANT WHEN MR. KISSINGER SPEAKS WITH SUCH AUTHORITY ON EVERY SUBJECT AROUND--DO YOU REALLY THINK THIS OLD BIRD GOT SO HOITY-TOITY THROUGH HIS PERSONAL CHARISMA? THIS MAN THROWS TANTRUMS, AND REFUSES TO EVEN JOIN MEETINGS (TO WHICH HE IS ALWAYS LATE) IF SOMEONE, ESPECIALLY A GUEST, SO MUCH AS SITS TEMPORARILY IN HIS CHAIR. "THIS" IS WHAT SETS YOUR NATIONAL IM­AGE AND YOUR FOREIGN INTERCHANGE!]

THE MOST COMPELLING ALTERNATIVE

In the end, Lippmann's analysis found a substantial follow­ing, though mainly among the opponents of confrontation with the Soviet Union. And their approbation was based on only one aspect of Lippmann's argument, emphasizing as they did its cri­tique while ignoring its prescriptions. They noted Lippmann's call for more limited objectives but overlooked his rec­ommendation for more aggressive diplomacy. Thus it happened that in the 1940s the most compelling alternative strategy to the doctrine of containment came from none other than Winston Churchill, then leader of the Opposition in the British Parlia­ment.

Churchill supported containment, but for him it was never an end in itself. Unwilling to wait passively for the collapse of Communism, he sought to shape history rather than rely on it to do his work for him. What he was after was a negotiated set­tlement. His "iron curtain" speech at Fulton, Missouri had merely hinted at negotiations. On October 9, 1948, at Llan­dudno, Wales, Churchill returned to his argument that the West's bargaining position would never be better than it was at that moment. In a much-neglected speech, he said:

No one in his senses can believe that we have a limit­less period of time before us. We ought to bring matters to a head and make a final settlement. We ought not to go jobbing along improvident, incompetent, waiting for something to turn up, by which I mean waiting for some­thing bad for us to turn up. The Western nations will be far more likely to reach a lasting settlement, without bloodshed, if they formulate their just demands while they have the atomic power and before the Russian Commu­nists have got it too.

Two years later, Churchill made the same plea in the House of Commons: the democracies were quite strong enough to ne­gotiate, and would only weaken themselves by waiting. De­fending NATO rearmament on November 30, 1950, he warned that arming the West would not by itself change its bargaining position, which, in the end, depended on America's atomic monopoly:

[W]hile it is right to build up our forces as fast as we can, nothing in this process, in the period I have men­tioned, will deprive Russia of effective superiority in what are now called the conventional arms. All that it will do is give us increasing unity in Europe and magnify the deter­rents against aggression. Therefore I am in favour of ef­forts to reach a settlement with Soviet Russia as soon as a suitable opportunity presents itself, and of making those efforts while the immense and measureless superiority of the United States Atomic bomb organization offsets the Soviet predominance in every other military respect.

For Churchill, a position of strength was already in place; for American leaders, it had yet to be created. Churchill thought of negotiations as a way of relating power to diplomacy. And though he was never specific, his public statements strongly suggest that he envisioned some kind of diplomatic ultimatum by the Western democracies. American leaders recoiled before employing their atomic monopoly, even as a threat. Churchill wanted to shrink the area of Soviet influence, but was prepared to coexist with Soviet power within reduced limits. The Ameri­can leaders had a nearly visceral dislike of spheres of influence. They wanted to destroy and not to shrink their adversary's sphere. Their preference was to wait for total victory and for the collapse of Communism, however far off, to bring about a Wilsonian solution to the problem of world order.

The disagreement came down to a difference between the historical experiences of Great Britain and America. Churchill's society was all too familiar with imperfect outcomes; Truman and his advisers came from a tradition in which, once a problem had been recognized, it was usually overcome by the deploy­ment of vast resources. Hence America's preference for final resolutions and its distrust of the sort of compromise that had become a British specialty. The American view prevailed, be­cause America was stronger than Great Britain, and because Churchill, as leader of the British Opposition, was in no position to press his strategy.

HENRY WALLACE AND THE
RADICAL TRADITION

In the end, the most vocal and persistent challenge to Ameri­can% policy came from neither the realist school of Lippmann nor Churchills's balance-of-power thinking, but from a tradition with roots deep within American radical [H:???] thought. Whereas Lippmann and Churchill accepted the Truman Admin­istration's premise that Soviet expansionism represented a seri­ous challenge and only contested strategy for resisting it, the radical critics rejected every aspect of containment. Henry Wallace, vice president during Roosevelt's third term, former secretary of agriculture, and secretary of commerce under Tru­man, was its principal spokesman.

A product of America's populist tradition, Wallace had an abiding Yankee distrust of Great Britain. Like most American liberals since Jefferson, he insisted that "the same moral princi­ples which governed in private life also should govern in inter­national affairs." In Wallace's view, America had lost its moral compass and was practicing a foreign policy of "Machiavellian principles of deceit, force and distrust," as he told an audience in Madison Square Garden on September 12, 1946. [H: Radi­cal? Do you see that if you had LISTENED--you would be a zillion years up on this bastardized deceit going on through ones just exactly like Henry Kissinger. The statement just made above was when? Sept. 12, 1946--almost half a cen­tury ago.] Since prejudice, hatred and fear were the root causes of international conflict, the United States had no moral right to intervene abroad until it had banished these scourges from its own society. The new radicalism reaffirmed the his­torical vision of America as a beacon of liberty but, in the pro­cess, turned it against itself. Postulating the moral equivalence of American and Soviet actions became a characteristic of the radical critique throughout the Cold War. The very idea of America having international responsibilities was, in Wallace's eyes, an example of the arrogance of power. The British, he argued, were duping the gullible Americans into doing their bidding: "British policy clearly is to provoke distrust between the United States and Russia and thus prepare the groundwork for World War III."

To Wallace, Truman's presentation of the conflict as one between democracy and dictatorship was pure fiction. In 1945, a time when Soviet postwar repression was becoming increas­ingly obvious and the brutality of collectivization was widely recognized, Wallace declared that "the Russians today have more of the political freedoms than they ever had." He also dis­covered "increasingly the signs of religious toleration" in the U.S.S.R. and claimed that there was a "basic lack of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union". Wallace thought that Soviet policy was driven less by expansionism than by fear. In his speech at Madison Square Garden in August 1946, Wallace laid down a direct challenge to Truman, which caused the president to demand Wallace's resignation:

We may not like what Russia does in Eastern Europe. Her type of land reform, industrial expropriation and sup­pression of basic liberties offends the great majority of the people of the United States. But whether we like it or not the Russians will try to socialize their sphere of influence just as we try to democratize our sphere of influence. Russian ideas of social-economic justice are going to gov­ern nearly a third of the world. Our ideas of free enter­prise democracy will govern much of the rest. The two ideas will endeavor to prove which can deliver the most satisfaction to the common man in their respective areas of political dominance.

In a curious reversal of roles, the self-proclaimed defender of morality in foreign policy accepted a Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe on practical grounds, while the administration he was attacking for cynical power politics rejected the Soviet sphere on moral grounds.

Wallace's challenge collapsed after the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin blockade and the invasion of South Korea. As a presidential candidate in 1948, he gained only one million votes against more than 24 million for Truman, placing him fourth. Nevertheless, Wallace managed to develop themes that would remain staples of the American radical critique throughout the Cold War and move to center stage during the Vietnam conflict. These emphasized America's moral inade­quacies and those of the friends it was supporting, a basic moral equivalence between America and its Communist challengers; the proposition that America had no obligation to defend any area of the world against largely imaginary threats; and the view that world opinion was a better guide to foreign policy than geopolitical concepts. When aid to Greece and Turkey was first proposed, Wallace urged the Truman Administration to put the issue before the United Nations. if "the Russians exercised their veto, the moral burden would be on them. When we act inde­pendently, the moral burden is on us." Seizing the moral high ground meant more than whether American's geopolitical inter­ests were being safeguarded. [H: I don't know about YOU, but every time these slimy scum-suckers start pontificating about "morals" and "morality" I want to puke! I believe where they cover themselves is that there are BAD morals and GOOD morals--and they do not distinguish that they ONLY ultimately sanction the BAD ONES!]

Though Wallace's radical critique of American postwar for­eign policy was defeated in the 1940s, its basic tenets reflected a deep strain of American idealism that continued to tug at the na­tion's soul. The same moral convictions that had conferred such energy on America's international commitments also had the potential to be turned inward by disillusionment with the outside world, or with America's own imperfections. In the 1920s, isolationism had caused America to withdraw on the grounds that it was too good for the world; in the Wallace movement and its heirs, it revived itself in the proposition that America should withdraw because it was not good enough for the world.

THE COMPLEXITY OF CONTAINMENT

[H: "Containment" is actually totally simplistic--not complex. The "complexity" happens ONLY when such as Kissinger EXPLAINS IT in the double-speak of his trained deceptive presentations. You will see that he somehow ne­glects to tell you that he, along with such as Scowcroft of the Mormon segment, etc., ARE THE ONES WHO SET THE FOREIGN POLICY FOR ALL THESE PAST YEARS IN POINT.]
One result of the containment policy was that the United States relegated itself to an essentially passive diplomacy during the period of its greatest power. That is why containment was increasingly challenged by yet another constituency, of which John Foster Dulles became the most vocal spokesman. His con­stituents were the conservatives who accepted the premises of containment but questioned the absence of urgency with which it was being pursued. [H: Surely by this time ALL of you read­ers MUST KNOW that ALL of these players are playing the SAME SIDE OF THE GAME--ALWAYS TOGETHER WITH JUST LITTLE APPEARANCES OF DISAGREE­MENTS--BUT ALWAYS AGAINST YOU-THE-PEOPLE IN FAVOR OF THE WORLD ONE WORLD ORDER--AND THAT MEANS: THE FOREIGN INFLUENCE OF THE KHAZARIAN ONE WORLDERS AND BANKSTER THIEVES AND ROBBERS. My own team will come out with something like: "Wasn't Dulles pretty nice and I thought former Secretary of State {George) Shultz was pretty nice...!" NICE? Whatever do you mean by "nice"--you are talking about men who intend to have a One World Government and One World Order--enslaving YOU, run by THEM. There are several FACTIONS--the only question among them is WHO WILL BE BIG DOG!!
Yes indeed I will negotiate "timing" with them because nego­tiation is not the same thing as COMPROMISE. I will, for instance, SHUT UP COMPLETELY ABOUT RONALD REAGAN'S DASTARDLY DECEIT AND LITERALLY MURDEROUS MISUSE OF POWER--until after the new fiscal year and the Government can possibly bring stability into the currency foundation. "I" have plenty of time. In fact, "I", "we", don't have to talk about it at all--but you see, game players, the information is ALREADY RUNNING AROUND OUT THERE--IT IS JUST THAT THE PEOPLE CAN'T BRING THEMSELVES TO BELIEVE IT AND THE CONTROLLED MEDIA HAS MANAGED TO KEEP IT BURIED.
It may be a bit like O.J. Simpson's problems--is O.J. as STUPID as he is beginning to appear--OR WAS HE SET­UP? No, I'm not going to get into it--BUT, it may be inter­esting to you nice uninformed readers TO COME TO RE­ALIZE THAT O.J. SIMPSON WAS RECRUITED INTO THE CIA RIGHT OUT OF HIGH-SCHOOL. Gosh, I "hope" he wasn't trying to do anything about the thugs try­ing to destroy the U.S.A. and all the political intrigue re­volving around the political criminals working out of the West Coast and Chicago. It all begins to take on a very dif­ferent flavor, does it not? Well--perhaps "de Shadow" knows.]

Even if containment did in the end succeed in undermining Soviet society, these critics argued, it would take too long and cost too much. Whatever containment might accomplish, a strategy of liberation would surely accelerate. By the end of Truman's presidency, the containment policy was caught in a crossfire between those who considered it too bellicose (the fol­lowers of Wallace) and those who thought it too passive (the conservative Republicans).

This controversy accelerated because, as Lippmann had pre­dicted, international crises increasingly moved to peripheral re­gions of the globe, where the moral issues were confused and direct threats to American security were difficult to demonstrate. America found itself drawn into wars in areas not protected by alliances and on behalf of ambiguous causes and inconclusive outcomes. From Korea to Vietnam, these enterprises kept alive the radical critique, which continued to question the moral va­lidity of containment. Thus surfaced a new variant of American exceptionalism. With all of its imperfections, the America of the nineteenth century had thought of itself as the beacon of lib­erty; in the 1960s and 1970s, the torch was said to be flickering and would need to be relit before America could return to its historical role as an inspiration to the cause of freedom. The debate over containment turned into a struggle for the very soul of America. [H: Well, I don't know which faction won--but all this surely has cost America her SOUL.] As early as 1957, even George Kennan had come to reinterpret containment in this light when he wrote: "To my own countrymen who have often asked me where best to apply the hand to counter the So­viet threat, I have accordingly had to reply: to our American failings, to the things we are ashamed of in our own eyes, or that worry us; to the racial problem, to the conditions in our big cities, to the education and environment of our young people, to the growing gap between specialized knowledge and popular understanding. "

A decade earlier, before he had become disillusioned by what he considered the militarization of his invention, George Kennan would have recognized that no such choice existed. A country that demands moral perfection of itself as a test of its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security. [H: Well, I guess Kissinger is an authority on this matter for sure.] It was a measure of Kennan's achievement that, by 1957, the free world's parapets had been manned, his own views having made a decisive contribution to this effort. The parapets were in fact being manned so effectively that America permitted itself to in­dulge in a hefty dose of self-criticism.

Containment was an extraordinary theory--at once hard­headed and idealistic, profound in its assessment of Soviet moti­vations, yet curiously abstract in its prescriptions. Thoroughly American in its utopianism, it assumed that the collapse of a to­talitarian adversary could be achieved in an essentially benign way. Although this doctrine was formulated at the height of America's absolute power, it preached America's relative weak­ness. Postulating a grand diplomatic encounter at the moment of its culmination, containment allowed no role for diplomacy until the climactic final scene in which the men in the white hats ac­cepted the conversion of the men in the black hats.

With all of these qualifications, containment was a doctrine that saw America through more than four decades of construction, struggle and, ultimately, triumph. [H: ????] The victim of its ambiguities turned out to be not the peoples America had set out to defend--on the whole successfully [H: ????]--but the American conscience. Tormenting itself in its traditional quest for moral perfection, America would emerge, after more than a generation of struggle, lacerated by its exertions and controver­sies, yet having achieved almost everything it had set out to do. [H: In God's name, people--if you can't see it, it becomes hopeless to struggle. We might as well simply take our peo­ple and get the hell out! Are you NEVER going to see and hear? May GOD have mercy.]
[END OF QUOTING FROM THIS ARTICLE]
Dharma, take this off the computer so others won't be imposi­tioned by the length of our writings today. Thank you. Go, also, and harden up your tum-tum with anti-acids because the next one is worse. It is written by "SIR" Michael Howard who begins his writing: "Henry Kissinger has never written anything less than magna opera, but this 1,000+page blockbuster (DIPLOMACY) must qualify as his maximum opus.... " This ob­server, however, has some rather astute observations.

CHAPTER 10

REC #2 HATONN

FRI., JUN. 17, 1994 1:58 P.M. YEAR 7, DAY 305

FRI., JUN. 17, 1994

KISSINGER ACCORDING TO
"SIR" MICHAEL HOWARD

The following is a review of Kissinger's book from which we just offered excerpts, DIPLOMACY (Simon & Schuster, 1994, 912 pages, $35.00), as published in Foreign Affairs--May/June 1994.

This is by SIR MICHAEL HOWARD, recently retired from the Robert A. Lovett Chair of Military and Naval History at Yale University. Before that, he was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University. My goodness! This will be in­teresting to see how this man handles the subject, which is terri­ble, about a book which is totally indecipherable and how one can, finally, make no credible opinion at all. At any rate, how­ever, it is so much better to have this review than to have to read a thousand pages of "Kissinger" (worse than listening to Kissinger for a thousand hours). If, however, you are depend­ing on this review to help you decide the value of the book in point--DON ' T.

[QUOTING:]

REVIEW ESSAY
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO HENRY
FROM METTERNICH TO ME
by Michael Howard

Henry Kissinger has never written anything less than magna opera, but this 1,000-page blockbuster must certainly qualify as his maximum opus. Its title is modestly deceptive. The term "diplomacy" is normally applied to the techniques and tactics employed in the conduct of international relations, and about these Kissinger is well qualified to write. He is dealing here, however, with a great deal more than techniques and tactics. His topic is the grand strategy, indeed the philosophy, of great power relationships, from the days of Richelieu until our own times.

The proper title of this book would be something like POWER POLITICS, but that is a term that Kissinger seldom al­lows to pass his pen. Instead he refers frequently, and bewilder­ingly, to "geopolitics". He does not use this term as did its Eu­ropean inventors, Rudolph Kjellen, Halford Mackinder and Al­brecht Haushofer, to mean the influence of spatial environment on political imperatives. For Kissinger "geopolitics" is simply a euphemism for power relationships. His use of it is reminiscent of the term "behavioral sciences," which was coined in the United States a generation ago to describe what had hitherto been known as the social sciences, but sounded to suspicious congressmen too much like socialism to qualify for governmen­tal support. In the same way, power politics is a concept (though not a practice) so blatantly un-American that no founda­tion is likely to underwrite its study. [H: Indeed, so you call it "Geopolitics".]

"Geopolitics", on the other hand, sounds conveniently value-free, though the implementation of some of its theories by Ger­man and Japanese statesmen during the first half of this century proves that it is not necessarily anything of the kind. Kissinger would have done better to have come clean and admitted that his subject was neither diplomacy nor geopolitics, as those terms are generally understood, but the subject that he has spent his life studying and much of it practicing: the politics of power.

The subtext of his book, however, explains why he could not do so. Americans do not take kindly to the idea of power poli­tics, even when they are most blatantly engaged in it. From Wilson to Clinton, the rhetoric of American foreign policy has been to deny the need for anything so crude and to denounce the very idea as a European perversion. But for Kissinger, steeped as he is in the European history of the nineteenth century, power politics is both natural and necessary. The statesmen he most respects--Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck, even Stalin [H: PAY ATTENTION!]--were those who recognized this and practiced it most openly. For power politics is not simply Machtpolitik, the accumulation, threat, and if need be use of armed force as an instrument of policy. It is based on the recognition and ac­ceptance of the limits of one's own power.

Statecraft, from the days of Richelieu to those of Nixon, has consisted in the identification of national interests, the realistic assessment of available resources, and the alignment of both in an appropriate relationship within the context of the interests and resources of rival states. If the resources are sufficient, a state may realistically aspire to hegemony, the destruction or subordi­nation of all rival powers. But if they are not, as for the states of Europe from the seventeenth until the twentieth centuries they were not, the statesman must strive to enhance the power of his own state through explicit or implicit alliances. [H: What you overlook is that KISSINGER DOES! You just don't realize WHICH STATE holds his loyalty. Loyalty is a real misde­fined word I use here--for Kissinger HOLDS NO LOYALTY TO ANY STATE!] In Lord Palmerston's oft-quoted words, there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies; there are only permanent interests.

Kissinger has said this often, and here he says it again, defini­tively and at considerable length. For him the European prac­tice, particularly as defined by British nineteenth-century statesmen, was not an aberration, but the norm for the conduct of international relations in any era. The American abjuration of power politics in the nineteenth century was a luxury that only their oceanic isolation enabled them to afford. In the twentieth, however, it was a disaster, whether it took the form of isolationism, as it did in the 1920s and 1930s, or ideological crusade, as it did in the 1950s and 1960s. Richard Nixon, claims Kissinger, was the first American president, with the solitary exception of Theodore Roosevelt, to understand power politics and so to guide the United States back into the main­stream of international relations. (It is a claim to statesmanship for Nixon that could be made as convincingly for Louis XIII of France, Francis II of Austria or William I of Prussia, the pa­trons of Richelieu, Metternich and Bismarck, respectively, but let that pass.) But the United States cannot be Europeanized. The policies of its statesmen, however much they may be guided by a perception of the national interest, must always be made acceptable to an ideologically motivated electorate. [H: That is WHY you have to change the attitudes of the electorate!] That is the problem Kissinger faced when in office, and one to which, in the latter part of this volume, he constantly returns.

[H: Readers, you will have to realize up front here that this poor writer (reviewer) is certainly unaware of the informa­tion you have on HENRY KISSINGER--that Kissinger was an active member of the KGB, is historically a pretender for a throne position in the New World Order and a very dan­gerous puppet. You must understand that these learned professors such as this nice man are totally UNINFORMED AS TO FACTS. He will also not know the REAL relation­ships Kissinger has with such as Brent Scowcroft. This would not be so appropriate an interjection here except for that which is going on as we write, in the Asian sector. These people are recognized for exactly who they are in these oriental areas. You must understand that, for in­stance, it CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO BE KNOWN IN CHINA, KOREA, JAPAN, etc., that Brent Scowcroft is "MORMON". Why? Because in the oriental languages "mormon" is "satan" or "devil" translated from English. No, I am. NOT a bigot--this is FACT. And, the very basis of the New World Order revolves around the emerging Mor­mon "church" and its secret covenants and doctrines. Do the Mormon parishioners realize this? Well, I hope not, for I hate to think that all those nice church-going, tithing citi­zens know what they are doing and do it anyway. The best way to hide deceit is right under your noses. It is the same with Freemasonry--only the ones USING the "Order" KNOW THE TRUTH. The Mormons base their whole rit­ual experience on the ORDER OF FREEMASONRY! I don't care what "they" argue against. Go check it out!]

1648 AND ALL THAT

About a third of this book is devoted to European politics be­fore 1941, from the emergence of the states system after the Thirty Years' War in 1648 to its collapse with the triumph of Hitler. Some academics may lament the absence of more rigor­ous analysis, others the narrow focus on political elites and the little consideration given the social and economic transforma­tions that provided the context for their policies, but it is a mag­isterial narrative, well-spiced with Kissingerian insights and ironies. The author is of course at his best on his familiar ground of post-Napoleonic nineteenth-century Europe. [H: The relating to Napoleon is not far-fetched, readers. Kissinger is programmed to be a Napoleon with deceitful and more devi­ous ways of obtaining POWER. He is typical of that which has become recognized as the "Little Jewish Man Syn­drome". He is little, short, ugly, alien and a puppet of higher POWER of the worst kind. He fits every symptom in the "Syndrome". I did not conjure the "syndrome"; it has become a valid psychiatric TERM.] Whatever the philoso­phers may have said in the eighteenth century about the balance of power, the princes of Europe then still fought for aggran­dizement or survival as nakedly as their predecessors. It was not until Metternich that a statesman appeared who had not only internalized the concept but was given the opportunity to create a new international structure that explicitly embodied it. His less perceptive successors allowed it to collapse. Bismarck recreated it, although on a far less stable basis. Again his suc­cessors allowed it to collapse.

The First World War came about not because of the unstable power balance created by competing alliances (though it is not quite clear whether Kissinger accepts this), but because the German Empire was no longer interested in maintaining a power balance. The Second World War followed because the victori­ous allies were incapable of, or uninterested in, restoring that balance. The withdrawal of the United States, the pariah status of Russia and the dithering of Britain, whose leaders had for­gotten the lessons so sagely taught by their predecessors, left a vacuum that could all too easily be filled by the expansion of German power. When U.S. leaders came to pick up the pieces, their effort was in the belief that the balance of power, far from having prevented those wars, had been their cause. So they set about creating a new world order based on different, and erro­neous, principles.

WOODROW'S WORLD

Like Metternich, Woodrow Wilson had the opportunity, or so he believed, to create a new international system based on a co­herent ideology. The ideology, like that of the balance of power, derived from the eighteenth-century philosophers, who assumed an underlying harmony in nature that was distorted and broken only by human error and misperceptions. International conflict was at best the result of what Marx called "false con­sciousness"; at worst of the sinister activities of monarchs, aris­tocrats, or, a little later, "military-industrial complexes", all of whom, as Kant pointed out at the end of the eighteenth century, had a vested interest in war. For the Wilsonians peace was not a precarious condition maintained only by a constant and con­scious balancing of power and interests, but the normal state of mankind, or at least it would be if only the artificial barriers to its maintenance could be swept away.

In this view American democracy was a microcosm of hu­manity, and nations could and should govern their relations by the same kind of consensus as the Americans did themselves. There should be an international town meeting--the League of Nations--to establish that consensus, and a posse comitatus to enforce it against offenders. As in domestic affairs, the security of one was the security of all. Separate pacts, alliances and military guarantees were as unacceptable on the international plane as they were on the domestic. Peace, in short, was in­divisible. [H: How can one possibly make comment on the "Wilson" era association without even mentioning right up in the front paragraphs the incredible impact of Wilson on the economic destruction of the WORLD--through the damned Federal Reserve System which is nothing more than a foun­dation upon which to build in sure-scavenging of the entire wealth of the WORLD.]

When in 1919 the Congress of the United States was called upon to ratify the covenant setting up the League of Nations, it understandably recoiled from a universalism that would have committed the country to undifferentiated and global interven­tion. But, having no tradition or understanding of power poli­tics, it relapsed into the opposite extreme of isolationism. [H: Readers, can you see how UNINFORMED this writer truly is and this is a knighted PROFESSOR. If you are a sub­scriber-reader of our paper--YOU ARE INFORMED SO MUCH BEYOND THE "EXPERTS" THAT YOU SHOULD BE ROLLING ON THE FLOOR IN HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER AT THIS POINT! I rarely have an opportu­nity to pat you people on the back for your accomplishments as relative to those ACCEPTED experts honored by robes and stripes. The scholars are only exposed and professored, degreed and hoodwinked by the history presented to them for use. Historically, THEY ARE TOTALLY UNIN­FORMED!] When the power balance in Europe collapsed in 1940, President Roosevelt saw that the necessities of the power balance demanded American intervention to prevent a German victory, but his electorate still did not. [H: Say what???] When the issue was decided for them by the actions of their ad­versaries, the American people went to war, not to restore a balance of power, but to punish the aggressors, enforce their surrender and put their leaders on trial. When peace was even­tually reestablished, a new world order was created under American leadership based on Wilsonian principles, except that this time the United States locked itself into the United Nations and tried to provide it with teeth.

THE UNRESTRICTED COLD WAR

When the Soviet Union revealed itself to be, not a loyal part­ner in upholding the American concept of world order, but a potential adversary, such statesmen as George Marshall, Dean Acheson and George Kennan accepted the concept of "containment", which was effectively an update of the tradi­tional balance of power. But in order to gain public support their rhetoric had to be universalist. In fact Stalin, in Kissinger's view, had no serious global ambitions. He was an old-fashioned realpolitiker concerned with the cautious expan­sion of Soviet power, and he expected his adversaries to be playing the same game. He made it clear to the British that he would have no objection to their establishing military bases in Western Europe pari passu with the establishment of Soviet power in the eastern half of the continent. If the Western allies had been similar practitioners of realpolitik, Kissinger suggests, a deal might have been struck immediately after the war along the lines that Churchill himself favored: a Soviet pullout from Germany in exchange for the Finlandization of Eastern Europe. As it was, the American leadership could mobilize the domestic support necessary to achieve even the most limited objective of a power balance in Europe only by proclaiming a crusade, as it did in the Truman Doctrine. The global implications of this cru­sade were to be made suddenly explicit by the purely adventi­tious attack across the 38th parallel by the forces of North Korea in a region in which American statesmen had explicitly and un­derstandably stated that they had no interests to defend.

The United States now found itself committed to a conflict that was not only global but to all appearances permanent. But it was one, Kissinger points out, to which the American people were temperamentally well suited. They were pledged to the defense, against the forces of an evil empire, of a world that, if left to itself, would be free, harmonious and democratic. Any administration, whether that of Truman or Eisenhower, that adopted anything less than a posture of total and undifferentiated hostility to the Communist world was subjected to the un­remitting attacks of its opponents. Young John Kennedy in par­ticular, after the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco, had to show both his domestic and Soviet adversaries that he was prepared to live up to his rhetoric and defend the frontiers of freedom wherever they might be and whatever the cost, and he unwisely chose to do so in Vietnam.

It would be hard to find--apart from Korea--a region where the United States had fewer interests to defend, but it was there that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations believed that American resolution was being tested and that the decisive battle had to be fought. But Vietnam was a battlefield where Wilsonian ideals were as irrelevant as U.S. military power. Re­alpolitikers like Hans Morgenthau joined hands with pacific isolationists like Noam Chomsky to castigate a policy from which even America's closest allies tried to distance themselves. After five years it was clear that the Vietnam involvement was as much a domestic as a military disaster. In consequence, the American people, without quite knowing what they were doing, elected a president who, much as he admired Woodrow Wilson, shared few of his ideals, and Nixon selected as his adviser Henry Kissinger, who shared none of them.

Kissinger has already told us in his memoirs [H: Goodness, don't you just love a humble person who writes his memoirs BEFORE the fact instead of as "memoirs" or maybe he has rewritten the definition of that word also.] how he tried to manipulate the balance of power to extricate his country from the Vietnamese morass. [H: B.S.!! This ass was a prime par­ticipant in setting up Vietnam as it turned out to be.] Al­though his success in doing so was, to put it mildly, limited, he nevertheless transformed the international scene. He treated the Russians not as criminals but as adults with legitimate interest of their own. [H: Well of all the things Kissinger did not have a right to do was to treat anyone else as if HE, HIMSELF, KNEW THE DEFINITION OF "ADULT".] He brought the Chinese into play as independent actors in the international sys­tem [H: Yes indeed, he set up the only accepted businesses in China at the time. Good old Kissinger Associates and American Express, not to mention those nice old banks.] and he destroyed the specter of "Arab nationalism" by regaining Egypt as a Western-oriented power. [H: I marvel that nobody hanged this jerk! I only say this because there is no way to subject him to his own lectures as punishment for his atroci­ties against the world population.] This he has already dealt with very fully in the two volumes of his memoirs. Here he summarizes the process succinctly and dispassionately, with re­markably little reference to the part he played. It was hardly his fault that the Nixon era ended in such humiliating disaster, and neither he nor his successors could prevent the Russians from exploiting the American loss of nerve that resulted from Viet­nam, Watergate and the U.S. humiliation in Iran. [H: Oh my goodness, readers, Kissinger was as near to "deep throat" as any living being in the Nixon downfall and disaster set forth. Do you see how one lie piles upon another--out of the mouths of supposedly informed and brilliant expert authorities and they get bigger, deeper and more grossly expounded with each speaker or writer?] But not only did Soviet triumphalism eventually provoke the Reaganite reaction in the United States, but Kissinger suggests, it produced the over-extension of Soviet resources that led directly to economic and ultimately political collapse. In spite of the Wilsonian rhetoric and the mistakes to which it led, suggests Kissinger, the United States had actually been applying a doctrine of containment throughout the Cold War, and ultimately it worked. Whatever the flights of Wilso­nian poetry in presidential addresses, fundamentally the Ameri­cans had been talking the humdrum prose of power politics, and the Soviets always knew it.
Now, Kissinger believes, we are back in a multipolar world. He had tried to create one in the 1970s, with China, Europe and Japan as potential great powers, together with the Soviet Union and the United States, making possible a Metternichian or Bis­marckian balancing game. Then only China had been willing to play, or rather China produced in Chou En-lai the only states­man who was willing to play; the Europeans were still too dis­united and the Japanese too modest.

Today Kissinger sees better hope of true multipolarity. American military supremacy, though unchallenged, is of lim­ited value in the modern world. Europe and Japan have drawn level as economic powers, and China is likely to do so during the coming century. Without accepting the "declinist" thesis that some of his more apoplectic Harvard associates have at­tributed to Paul Kennedy, Kissinger sees the need for the United States to learn to function as one power in a complex system that it can neither escape nor dominate. The hopes of yet a third new world order in which the United States will be able to im­pose it pluralist-democratic ideology on a grateful world will go the way of those entertained by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Once again America must define her interests and bring them into balance with her resources. "The fulfillment of American ideals," Kissinger concludes, "will have to be sought in the patient accumulation of partial successes." The Clinton administration, which in spite of its necessary rhetoric wants to involve itself as little as possible with the anarchic world beyond the oceans, can only take comfort from such cautious minimal­ism.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

But if the universalist philosophy of Wilson has been an ignis fatuus, a flicker of marsh gas only leading deeper into the quagmire, does that of Metternich furnish the United States to­day with more reliable guidance? [H: Do you see what a "professorship" offers one in ability to sidestep crudeness? How many of you realize the "meaning" of ignis fatuus? Doesn't it sound better than "fart"? Does establishing self as an intellectual personage give right to speak above the heads of readers and listeners? That is ALL it does, my good friends. Kissinger, for instance never EARNED a degree in anything--but is a professor "somehow" with honorary de­grees and B.S.--that is not Bachelor of Science. At least we can find humor and understanding in this particular re­viewer.
I think of Kissinger and his degrees of honor. How many of you watched as Mohammed All (the ex-boxer) was awarded AN HONORARY DOCTORATE OF LAW--DEGREE? This man could barely walk, could not actually talk and the brain damage of his honorable, but battering, career was visibly upon him. Well, I'm glad the Doctorate in "LAW" (as in 'attorney') was bestowed upon him--because somehow this is the way I see ALMOST ALL ATTORNEYS!]
Power politics (or, as Kissinger insists, geopolitics) certainly provided a necessary framework for statecraft in Europe be­tween its two Thirty Years' Wars, that of the seventeenth cen­tury and that of the twentieth century, but how relevant is that experience likely to be to the world of the twenty-first?

My own judgment is: not very. We would not be wise to re­gard that limited slice of world history as a universally applica­ble norm and try to project its values onto the far more diverse yet interdependent world of tomorrow. The prescriptions of Richelieu could be as irrelevant as those of Woodrow Wilson, if not more so. During the two centuries between 1650 and 1850 Europe consisted of what political scientists call "perfect states," whose rulers owned no allegiance upward nor, more to the point, downward. They were absolute in their power to conduct foreign, if not domestic, policy. In their largely self-sufficient agrarian economies, transnational interests were minimal. The conduct of foreign policy was in the hands of small elites who, as Kissinger points out, were often interrelated and shared common values; shared more with each other, indeed, than they did with the peoples ruled over by the dynasties they served. For such elites power politics could be conducted as a game of skill. Even if they lost, the consequences were seldom catas­trophic, and certainly not for them.

This system was badly shaken by the wars of the French Revolution, but not destroyed: it staggered on for another half-century. By 1900, however, it had ceased to work. Political developments within their own countries had destroyed the ca­pacity of the old elites to play nicely balanced games of power politics. Kissinger points out how even within the most auto­cratic of European states, the Russian Empire, the government was running scared of nationalist public opinion. In Germany the Bismarckian system collapsed less because of the lack of diplomatic skill on the part of his successors than because of an increasingly unmanageable Reichstag. As for Britain...

Kissinger is curiously blind to what was happening in Britain in the nineteenth century, and to its consequence. He quotes with understandable approval the statements by Castlereagh, Palmerston and Disraeli about national interests and the balance of power, while regarding their nemesis, Gladstone, as some­thing of an oddball. But Gladstone was the voice of the future, his adversaries that of the past. He was the true avatar of Woodrow Wilson, and he was not alone. He represented a ris­ing tide of liberal internationalism in British public opinion, which by the twentieth century was to become dominant. Ed­ward Grey, Britain's liberal foreign secretary in 1914, knew all about the balance of power and tried, by his alliances with France and Russia, to preserve it. But his efforts had to be al­most as covert as those of Roosevelt in 1940: the parliamentary majority to which he was responsible abjured the whole concept of a balance of power. When it supported British entry into the war in 1914, the rationale was not to preserve the balance of power but to protect the neutrality of Belgium and vindicate the rule of law. And the war aim of the British Liberals was the creation of a League of Nations, an idea proposed by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham and powerfully propagated in the United States by emissaries of the British Union for Democratic Control. The idea of the League may have been, in Kissinger's words, "quintessentially American", but it was far more popular in Britain between the wars than in the United States. If British statesmen between wars failed to pursue "the national interest" in the traditional fashion laid down by their nineteenth-century predecessors, it was not simply because they were more clumsy and shortsighted. It was because public opinion made it impos­sible for them to do so.

I make this point, not out of any British chauvinism, but be­cause it indicates a deep flaw in Kissinger's analysis. The model for the conduct of international relations that he holds up for our admiration had simply ceased to work by the beginning of this century, not because of unskilled statecraft, but because the hermetic system in which it had been effective had ceased to exist. The more democratic societies became, the less possible it was for the system to survive. The Wilsonian illusions that Kissinger regards as uniquely American in fact originated out­side America and have now spread far beyond, and it is ar­guable that the more widely they are spread, the less illusory they become. Further, in a world that is now so inter-depen­dent, it is questionable whether the concept of a purely "national" interest makes sense any longer. Finally--but this takes us into very deep waters--there is now a question mark over the primacy of the state in the international system and its capacity to control those huge economic, social and demo­graphic movements known as transnational flows. Given the prevalence of something like international anarchy, where would a new Metternich begin?

Kissinger's own sagacious prescription is that of all wise old men: surtout, pas trop de zele. It cannot be said that his book furnishes any profound guidance to those who have to pick their way through the new world disorder, but that was hardly its purpose. It is history, on a splendid and massive scale: a mag­nificent survey, not only of the world in Kissinger's own life­time, but of that ancient regime from which he derived his val­ues and to which he now looks back with such understandable nostalgia.

* * *

I do not wish to spoil the impact of such incredibly dull and say-nothing writing. However, I so suggest that if you are going to invest in reading material relevant to Henry Kissinger, you in­vest in the book through Criminal Politics called HENRY KISSINGER, Soviet Agent by Frank Capell. $10.00 plus $1.50 postage and handling. P.O. Box 37432, Cincinnati, OH 45222, or phone: 1-800-543-0486 or 513-621-7100.

Isn't Criminal Politics the group that won't allow us to print their information? Well, yes--sort of, but THEY DO NOT HAVE A CORNER ON TRUTH--THEY DO, I GUESS, HAVE A CORNER ON HENRY KISSINGER.... What do I think of Criminal Politics? As a magazine or about Lawrence Patterson? As a magazine it is too expensive and covers the same thing the other journals and papers of high-caliber re­sources, such as SPOTLIGHT cover. As for Larry Patterson--SPOTLIGHT recently said about enough on the subject of Lawrence Patterson which I am sure he would rather I not print herein.

Readers, these are small-time players--bit players in a game so big you cannot absorb it all. Just when you think you can grasp a bit of it you will find it eluding you again and again. When you speak of powerful persons, important figures--you don't even know the real barons of power. How many of you know who Maurice Templesman is? OH? Never heard of him? If Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis hadn't just died you still wouldn't hear of him. This man is without a doubt one of the most shad­owy and sinister figures in your world today. He is a billionaire many times over and you are not going to find him listed in any Who's Who. However, he served as the king-pin in operations involving the Belgium Congo, Rockefeller, deBeers cartel (Harry Oppenheimer), etc., etc., etc.

No indeed, good readers, I am NOT here to restructure your world or SAVE anything or anyone--I do not even care to de­bate the issues with such as Maurice Templesman and cronies. And where can you find this man, hardly-about-town? New York, predominantly. This is one smart businessman who never tells or shows a thing--he doesn't need to. He will never leave a paper trail to get in his way and you will never find public records of his firm's holdings, transactions, revenues or profits. How is he so smart? Well, it doesn't matter--but YOU could take lessons.

However, he learned and uses the information to protect his pri­vacy--LEGALLY. He was for years an international secret agent (Oh no, not another one!) and a top level covert operator for the Rockefeller consortium. Well, he was genuinely nice to Mrs. Kennedy Onassis and he had the type of understated ego that would rather "have" than "tell about it". Indeed, a lot of you could take some lessons in management.

Ah indeed, there are a lot of infamous persons yet for you to meet, eh what Mr. Jackson?

Salu.