Word: metternich
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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From his earliest writings on Bismarck and Metternich to the final chapter of this final volume of his 3,769-page trilogy of memoirs, Kissinger has remained true to his realist tilt. "The United States," he concludes, "must temper its missionary spirit with a concept of the national interest and rely on its head as well as its heart in defining its duty to the world...
...century--inventing the international bond market, financing Europe's nations through wars and revolutions and the construction of their railway systems, growing to become the largest bank in the world (a dominance maintained until 1914)--they functioned as a free-lance supranational force. They passed along diplomatic intelligence for Metternich, for example, through their own communications network...
...discussing the century of relative stability after the Congress of Vienna in 1814, Kissinger draws on his published doctoral dissertation on Metternich and Castlereagh (A World Restored, 1957) and an academic paper he wrote on Bismarck. (Like a good professor, he footnotes himself.) One difference between the earlier works and Diplomacy is that Kissinger now puts slightly greater emphasis on the role of justice and values. "The Continental countries were knit together by a sense of shared values," he writes. "Power and justice were in substantial harmony...
Kissinger, a European refugee who read Metternich more avidly than Jefferson, is unabashedly in the realist camp. "No other nation," he writes, "has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism." Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a rather unsettling tribal ritual. The practice of basing policy on ideals rather than interests, he points out, can make a nation seem dangerously unpredictable...
Isaacson's judgments are generally sound, but like other Nixon and Kissinger biographers he is driven to take sides between the two men. He compares Kissinger with Metternich and Nixon with the wily diplomat's slow-witted superior, Austrian Emperor Francis I, but it was Nixon who persuaded Kissinger to encourage West Germany's overtures to East Germany and who initiated the opening to China. Clearly the two men had similar conceptual strengths and personal weaknesses...