Dr. Henry A. Kissinger Reflects on Working Toward Peace

The totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century should have brought home to us the fragility of the restraints that embody civilization. The domestic experience of the United States-peaceful, stable, and content-inhibits our capacity to understand the vulnerabilities of other societies or international orders. Blessed by history and a benign environment, we are tempted to view our power as a dispensation and to use it to impose our preferences. Such an attitude runs the risk of being viewed as hegemonic by the rest of the world and will gradually be opposed by it. Excessive reliance on power and excessive insistence on our virtue may wind up corroding the very values in the name of which our policy is being conducted.
For this reason, I am made uneasy by foreign policies largely shaped by ideologues. For ideologues have a tendency to drive societies as well as international systems beyond their capacities. The alleged dichotomy of pragmatism and morality seems to me a misleading choice. Pragmatism without a moral element leads to random activism, brutality, or stagnation; moral conviction not tempered by a sense of reality leads to self-righteousness, fanaticism, and the erosion of all restraint. We must always be pragmatic about our national security. We cannot abandon national security in pursuit of virtue. But beyond this bedrock of all policy, our challenge is to advance our principles in a way that does not isolate us in the long run.
Each generation must discover that sense of proportion for itself. In that regard, the present generation, and even more its successors, encounter a special challenge. For we are living through not only an exceptional period of fluidity in international relations but through an even more profound upheaval in how publics and leaders view the world around them. In its scope and eventual impact, this intellectual change is comparable to, and probably exceeds, the consequences of the invention of the printing press five centuries ago.
The contemporary statesman is constantly seduced by tactics. The irony is that mastery of facts may lead to loss of understanding of the subject matter and, indeed, control over it. Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an adventure in shaping the future.
The problem of most previous periods was that purposes outran knowledge. The challenge of our period is the opposite: knowledge is far outrunning purposes. The task for the United States therefore is not only to reconcile its power and its morality but to temper its faith with wisdom.

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