Ishaan Nag – My diary of the human society.

I must admit, I may be slightly guilty of making an “exploitation” post, given the background of Henry Kissinger’s death at the age of 100, but honestly, the debates sparking about the effectiveness of his immensely influential contribution to international relations, politics and society is worth commenting on regardless.

Henry Alfred Kissinger was a Jewish German-born American professor in Harvard and later the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under the Nixon administration. The communist-hunting poster boy  of realists and neoconservatives had a tumultuous early life, as he fled from Hitler’s Germany in 1938. He was put in charge of the military administration of the German town Krufeld during the American advance in Germany, despite being a private. He later became a faculty of the Department of Government in Harvard. It is thus safe to say he was a pioneer in shaping the field of international relations as we know today, right along there with Bismarck, Castlereagh and Metternich (the latter two of whom were the unabashed realist’s role models). Kissinger’s realist, pessimistic ideals were evident in his definition of legitimacy, such that it-“should not be confused with justice. It means no more than an international agreement about the nature of workable arrangements and about the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy”. His reservoir of knowledge and political cunning is undebatable, given the broad success he achieved in not only securing détente with communist China but also a strong ally against Soviet influence. Regardless, his success is more than made up by the failures in preventing the former Indo-China region to “fall” to communism despite ruthless, unilateral and even secret bombings of Cambodia and a protracted and ruinous war in  Vietnam, along with the many missteps he took in Africa (evident by the failure of the ruthless anti-communist dictatorship in the Angolan Civil War).

He was dismissive of the State Department of the time, labeling them (quite fittingly derogatively going by the usual realist perspective almost devoid of moral concerns), as “do-gooders”. There is a great mass of both insightful and not-so-fruitful contributions to the debate regarding Kissinger’s, and his specific actions in the geopolitical scenario of the cold war. But there is something which truly deserves our attention. Let us discuss the celebration of pessimism, and a façade of choice between the bad and the worse, and ONLY the bad and the worse.

Realist thought has often been criticized for being too pessimistic, and for the right reasons. Realism has often biased towards military power, violence and hard power generally to maintain order, if not peace, in a world of nation-states and their brittle external sovereignty. Given the cyclical nature of war and peace throughout history, their postulations arguably do make sense. Yet one may interpret the very necessity to place importance on the aggressive definitions and aspects of power as their own doing. For example, offensive realism stipulates that states are predisposed to war and expansionism, as they are essential in ensuring the survival of a state. This would motivate other states and hence, entire societies to adopt a war-like stance, giving great importance to the violent aspects of the military, for defence, thus explaining realist predisposition towards military power.

Moreover, given Kissinger’s rather dystopian, though in some cases relevant, understanding of legitimacy, this perception’s wide acceptance and endorsement is also quite problematic, for it grossly ignores any form of conscience or justice, and almost enables a dog-eat-dog world, compliments of and serving to, again, enhance the acceptability of realism.

Realists may not condemn justice and morality (both of which, although immensely subjective, are essential and mostly common codes of conducts any human society must follow), but their trivializing of these concepts is not only harmful, but also unnecessary. An eye for an eye approach must only be followed when thus provoked, and oftentimes these provocations in the form of invasions and offensives are a result of realism itself, thus resulting in a self-serving cycle reinforcing that pessimistic realism devoid of moral considerations. The game theory may explain our militant world today, armed to the teeth, and realism is rightly employed thus. Yet, we can always start, one by one, through collaboration. We can always try to be more understanding and wise. We can always exercise a little bit of restraint. We can definitely take collective initiative with like-minded peaceful states. We can definitely change, for we aren’t dealing with nature or absolute, objective truths over which we have no control over (also something becoming less true day by day, thanks to human ingenuity), but our own behavior, society and governance which we ourselves carve and can and have changed. We can achieve these ends, we can one day abandon this hopeless pessimism devoid of considerations for intrinsic values and justice. We can surely achieve more than order. We can achieve collective, consensual peace.