Balancing "Real Politic" and Moral Vision as Guides to Foreign Affairs

 There are very few books which I have read that provide more intellectual stimulation and challenge than Barry Gewen’s The Inevitability of Tragedy:  Henry Kissinger and His World.  In a carefully researched and deeply insightful manner, Gewen develops the historical foundation for Kissinger’s “Real Politic” approach to diplomacy and positions it in the context of the history which Kissinger lived, beginning with the formative period of the demise of the Weimar government (showing that democracy does not inevitably win versus a populist tyrant Hitler).  Then on through the overthrow of Allende in Chile, the Cold War, Vietnam and so on.  He grounds Kissinger’s beliefs in the prior work of Hans Morgenthau, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. 

 

Foundational to Kissinger’s philosophy of foreign affairs is the conviction that power and power relationships among nations are of inexorable importance.  Discount them at your own peril.  Allow unbridled idealism, manifest for example in the Wilsonian school of diplomacy; or allow an unfettered application of moralism to drive diplomatic decisions and you’re on your way to pernicious outcomes.  Witness the belief, which I shared for many years,  that the demise of the Soviet Union would lead to the adoption of some form of democracy, even if one different from the U.S., in the previous Soviet Union.  Or, similarly, my belief that the economic development of China would lead to greater democratization. 

 

The recognition of power and the irreducible importance of national interests, formed through history and individual circumstances (e.g. the historic need for control and security in China; the exceptional circumstance of the U.S. being protected by two oceans, having a virtually unlimited expanse of land to expand into, and having friendly neighbors to the north and south)—realities like these must be recognized in the formation of any rational, effective diplomatic policy.

 

We have to be willing and able to view the world as other major powers do, with open eyes and understanding, even as we pursue different values and interests.  For example, it’s entirely appropriate and indeed inevitable that the U.S. will advance the belief in the importance of individual freedom and human rights; but to make this the ultimate litmus test to decide what countries we will work with and how we will do it would be a terrible mistake.  We didn’t do this as we allied with the Soviet Union to combat Nazi Germany because we knew that doing so was in the national interest of the U.S. and the entire world as we could conceive of what would be in our interest.  Similarly today, with regard to our relationships with China, we have every right to advance the importance of human rights but it will be a fool’s errand if we make the top priority of our diplomacy to be changing the way that China operates today with regard to all human rights.  We need to recognize that change takes time and that our overall relationships with China must be based on a rational, pragmatic determination of what will be in the interests of the U.S. and the world,  for example, one that deals with the reality of climate change and the need to avoid nuclear destruction. 

 

Having said all this, he flaw I see in a tightly drawn Real Politik approach to diplomacy is that it itself is too messianic.  By that I mean, it excludes something that Kissinger himself often invokes, and that is the importance of wisdom and intuition.  It took wisdom and intuition to conceive and advance the Marshall Plan.  It might have been argued, incorrectly as it turns out, that this expenditure was not strictly speaking in accord with maximizing America’s national interest. 

 

The creation of the European Community was another act of intuition and foresight.  Those that argued, as many did, that this was contrary to the historical enmity which existed between Germany and France would have missed this opportunity and the elimination of the threat of war that it has enabled.

 

I am reinforced in reading this book that we must hold fast in our commitment to what I regard as universal truths:  the dignity of individual life, the importance of seeking truth, the humility that arises from knowing we will never reach perfection and that we can and must continue to learn from personal relationships founded on mutual empathy, understanding and the commitment to help one another in this passage of life. 

 

It also reinforces the belief I’ve always had about Procter & Gamble and any great institution and that is our responsibility to sustain it for the future in accord with the values and principles which we believe to be correct without ever losing sight of what we need to do, practically, to achieve this outcome of sustainability.

 

Being Patient With One Another

 

 “Being patient with one another.  Being kind.”

 

This reflection hit me as I think about things I need to do better in 2022.

I have to learn and be reminded of the need to be patient with other people. To be kind.

I have to recognize that we all have our quirks and habits which we observe and feel to one degree or another:  “It shouldn’t be this way.  I wish you weren’t doing that.”  There can be times when such a feeling or observation requires us to say something to the other person.  That would be true if we thought that it was perfectly clear it would be to their significant benefit.  But it may not be.  We need to consider that it may be something they’re doing because it represents happiness or brings them satisfaction on their own terms.

 

I pause and reflect.  I have habits or quirks that it would not be unreasonable for another person to look at and say, “That’s not the best use of his time.  I think he should be doing something differently.”  And perhaps I should.  But maybe, it’s something I’m drawing satisfaction from on my terms which the other person, maybe even a family member, doesn’t appreciate.

 

It could be something as simple as my taking the time to dictate this thought and my assistants' time to record it. It may be that I’m watching a movie for the third or fourth time.  Who knows? 

 

The point is this.  I must be conscious of a person’s doing something that may turn me off and be willing to pause.  Is this something that represents their gaining satisfaction on their own terms which I don't fully understand?  I have learned again and again, this can be precisely the case--which will make it a time when my response should simply be--"be patient". 

 

The Joy of Reading and Challenge of Good Writing--Luminous Thoughts from George Saunders

 A Swim in A Pond In The Rain, by George Saunders.

 

I found this a humbling and mind-opening book.  Humbling in realizing even more that I should have spent more time editing everything I have written.  Honing every sentence, deleting the extraneous and the expected.  It was humbling, too, in the intricacy of the Russian short stories which Saunders analyzes.  There is so much more to these stories by Chekhov and Tolstoy and Gogol than I appreciated on the first reading Saunders loved writing this book; that is clear.  He loves reading, too.  Don’t we all?  We write, we read, because we love doing it.  That is how I feel even as I read more slowly, forget more of what I read and write more verbosely.  

 

Saunders practices good writing in this book with great care.  His ability to do that leaps off the page again and again.  “The focus of my artistic life has been trying to learn to write emotionally moving stories that a reader feels compelled to finish.  I consider myself more vaudevillian than scholar.”

 

I identify with his assertion that there is a “vast underground network for goodness in the world”.

 

 He identifies in the book clubs he has known and participated in:  “a web of people who put reading at the center of their lives because they’d often experience that reading makes them more expansive, generous people and makes their lives more interesting.”  That says it.  No more, no less.

 

A new perspective I emerge with: “a story is a linear, temporal phenomenon.  It proceeds, and charms us (or it doesn’t), a line at a time.  We have to keep being pulled into a story in order of it to do anything to us.”

 

Saunders follows in Einstein’s footsteps:  “No worthy problem is ever solved in a plane of its original conception.” 

 

 I believe Saunders is right in writing, “all art begins in that instance of intuitive preference.”  The artist just comes to like it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he had the time or inclination to articulate them.  It just feels right.  It is appropriate.”  When Saunders is writing well, he says, “There is almost no intellectual/analytical thinking going on.”  He is trying different orders of words, looking for the perfect sentence, but mostly the artist “tweaks that which he has already done.  There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but mostly we are adjusting what is already there.  A story is frank, intimate conversation between equals.  We keep reading it because we continue to feel respected by the writer. 

 

When it comes to Saunders universal laws of fiction—“Be specific!  Honor efficiency!, always be escalating.  That is all a story is really:  a continuing system of escalation.”

 

What will keep a reader reading?  The only method, Saunders asserts “is to read what we have written on the assumption that our reader reads pretty much the way we do.  What bores us will bore her.  What gives us a little burst of pleasure will light her up, too.” 

 

He suggests reading the prose in front of us, the prose we have already read a million times, as if it is new to us.  How do we react?  In writing fiction, “we are in conversation with our reader, but with this great advantage:  we get to improve the conversation over and over with every pass.  We get to ‘be there’ more attentively.”

 

Saunders distinguishes those talented writers who go on to publish from those who don’t.  “First, a holiness to revise.  Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality.”  That may not seem sexy, Saunders writes, but it is the hardest thing to learn.  “It doesn’t come naturally, but a story is a series of things that happen in sequence, in which we can discern a pattern of causality.”  “Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter:  a superpower that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing that audience actually shows up for.”

 

Of all the short stories, I found Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov and Saunders’ comments on it and Chekhov to be the most mind-opening. The story is very short, only ten pages.  It is a complex, insightful and ironic story.  It appears to be asking “is it right to seek happiness, knowing that it is ephemeral and he cannot have much of it at all.  His life can be lived for pleasure or duty.  How much belief is too much?  Is life a burden or a joy?”

 

The story cautions against being too judgmental.  Too fixed in our views.  It encourages open-mindedness, for seeing two sides of questions.  “Every human position has a problem with it.  Believed in too much, it slides into error.  It is not that no position is correct; it is that no position is correct for long” (or I would say guaranteed to be correct forever).  “We are perpetually slipping out of absolute virtue and failing to notice, blinded by our desire to settle in—to finally stop fretting about things and relax forever and just be correct; to find an agenda and stick with it.”

 

Chekhov was open to criticism on this point.  Tolstoy accused him of having a “very good heart, but thus far it does not seem to have any very definite attitude toward life.”  But this quality, Saunders avers, is what we love him for now.  In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).

 

Through Chekhov’s short life, he lived to be only 44, he seemed glad to be alive, he tried to be kind.  “His feeling of fondness for the world takes the form, in his stories, of a constant state of reexamination.  Reconsideration is hard; it takes courage.  We have to deny ourselves the comfort of always being a certain person, one who arrived at an answer some time ago that has never had any reason to doubt it.  In other words, we have to stay open in the face of actual grinding, terrifying life.”  And I would add,  new emerging facts.

 

Back to the joy and satisfaction from reading and writing.  “These days, it is easy to feel that we have fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love.  I mean:  we have.  But to read, to write, is that we still believe in, at least the possibility of connection.”

 

At the end, Saunders calls on himself to address the question:  How are we altered by reading?  He gave it a try: 

 

 “I’m reminded that my mind is not the only mind.  

 

I feel an increased confidence in my ability to imagine the experiences of other people and accept these as valid.

 

I feel I exist on a continuum with other people:  what is in them is in me and vice versa.

 

My capacity for language is reenergized.  My internal language, the language in which I think, gets richer, more specific and adroit.  I find myself liking the world more, taking more loving notice of it.

 

I feel lucky to be here and more aware that someday I won’t be.  

 

I feel more aware of the things of the world and more interested in them.

 

That is all pretty good,” Saunders concludes.

 

That is one fine summary.