PERSPECTIVE

...The first principle was applied in the Middle East, where Kissinger's policy supported neither Israel nor the Arabs but was committed to the principle of balance and equilibrium that made possible the disengagement arrangements separating Israel from Syria and Egypt...

...In many ways, his unique, form of diplomacy is rooted in the intellectual insights of his academic career and represents a remarkable fusion between scholarship and statesmanship...

...First, to be secure, a peace should be based on a negotiated settlement with all sides in equilibrium rather than on a victor's peace...

...Kissinger's policy as Secretary of State is best understood as an effort to transplant these three concepts into the modern world...

...not the early nineteenth century, and the world's center of gravity no longer rests in Europe...

...In the face of these new threats the planet will survive as a whole or not at all...

...He continues to work for a peace settlement without victory or defeat, analogous to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 which ended the Thirty Years' War between Catholics and Protestants...

...Thus, the victor decontaminates the defeated of his revolutionary ardor and transforms him subtly from a "have not" into a "have" nation...

...The Four modern Horsemen of the Apocalypse are the energy crisis, famine, population explosion, and environmental disruption...

...Kissinger has been accused of paying more attention to the adversaries of the United States than to her friends, and of not being sufficiently sensitive to the aspirations of the small and poor nations of the "Third World...

...He will throw his weight on the weaker side whenever an imbalance occurs and by doing so restore the equilibrium and maintain the peace...

...One may agree or disagree with Kissinger's approach to statesmanship...

...India and the Soviet Union...

...This is...

...Most basically, perhaps, the balancing approach may become obsolete in a world in which some of the greatest challenges are global in nature, requiring global responses...

...European statesmen of the early nineteenth century secured the peace of Europe for 100 years...

...Hence, peace, to Henry Kissinger, is a bonus of a successful balance policy in an anarchic world...

...Third, in the absence of a globally controlled system, the best guarantor of peace is balance and, therefore, a balancer is essential...

...Kissinger's hope was that, subtly and over time, a community of economic interests would be established between the capitalist and communist worlds...

...American detente with Russia and China has certainly made the world safer for our generation...

...Third, President Nixon's trip to China in 1972 created a triangle between the Soviet Union, China, and America in which Kissinger attempted to place the United States into the role of balancer, where it would be wooed by both China and the Soviet Union...

...This, at times, has compelled him to sacrifice humanitarian considerations on the altar of a larger strategic vision...

...Thus, no one will try to overthrow the settlement through yet another war, and the relative insecurity of each guarantees the relative security of all...

...Of the two evils, he chose the lesser in an inherently tragic world...

...Henry Kissinger's reorchestration of the global balance has done a great deal to tame the nuclear bomb...

...This doctrine, which rests on three main pillars, emerged very clearly in The World Restored...

...During the war between India and Pakistan in 1971, for example, Kissinger "tilted" toward Pakistan and China because these two allies were weaker than the alliance on the other side...

...But by choosing Pakistan, he gave that government the green light to persecute and chase into exile 10 million Bengalis without arousing any criticism from the United States...

...The weaknesses of the Kissinger diplomacy have flowed from the fact that the transplantation has perhaps been too literal...

...I would always choose the latter...

...But the challenge of the coming generation will be to make sure that the bomb should not become the earth and that the earth should not become the bomb...

...He has also taught us that we can seldom choose between good and evil when we act in history...

...Kissinger responded to this critique by stating that the alternative might have been the greater evil of a major Soviet incursion into the Indian subcontinent...

...John G. Stoessinger...

...Much more often we are compelled to choose between one right and another right, as in the Middle East, or between one wrong and another wrong, as in Indochina...

...In that sense, Henry Kissinger, the historian, has taught Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State, one great existential truth: that the political act is almost always tragic, and that to act nevertheless will always require moral courage...

...He found three answers to this question...

...Kissinger himself has recently become increasingly aware of this and has begun to turn his attention to the global crises concerning energy and famine...

...Kissinger undertook this study because he was interested in the manner in which the From time to time, we will print here extended reactions to our articles...

...And there is no escape from choice itself, for, as Camus reminds us, "not to choose is also a choice...

...Nor can one wait until all the facts are in, because, by then, foreign policy has become history...

...but will ask instead, "Who is weak and who is strong...

...The custody of American foreign policy today, for better or for worse, is in the hands of an historian...

...This balancer will seldom ask the question, "Who is right and who is wrong...

...Second, a victorious power, in order to have peace, will not attempt to annihilate the vanquished but will co-opt it into the established order by giving it something of its own substance...

...To preserve a decent life on earth we must make every effort to perceive the planet as a whole...

...formerly Director of the Political Affairs Division of the United Nations and currently Professor of Political Science at CUNY (Hunter), is responding, at our request, to Garry Wills's article on the Secretary of State in our July/August issue...

...The second principle was applied to the Soviet Union, which received gigantic credits from the United States...

...In short, he has tended to make stability a goal in itself...

...But it is impossible to ignore the fact that his approach is based on a consistent philosophic doctrine that has evolved over a quarter of a century of reflection and experience...

...Everybody is a little bit unhappy, but no one is completely unhappy...

...More fundamentally, perhaps, he has followed the famous dictum of the classical German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "If 1 had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other...

...after all...

...Henry Kissinger differs from most American statesmen in the sense that his policies are based on doctrine and deliberate design rather than on the more pragmatic day-to-day approach that has been more typical of American diplomacy...