“WORLD ORDER” BY HENRY KISSINGER-THE DANGER OF "MESSIANIC VISIONS"
This is one of the most erudite, comprehensive accumulations of wisdom which I’ve ever read.
It reveals the insidious impact of "messianic visions" of one's country
or religion or dogma of any kind that become so "exclusionary" that the rights
of others are ignored or given scant respect and at worst become the rationale
for killing others.
I am not sure there is any antidote to this other than the belief that we are
all creatures of God endowed with God-given rights-- even though history sadly
demonstrates that this antidote is often not strong enough to overcome the
human tendency to seek meaning for one's existence by comparing ourselves as a
group to some "other" group.
I will try to illuminate, using Kissinger’s words, some of these multiple
“messianic visions” which have brought with them great tragedy as well as no small
amount of good.
Today,these “messianic visions", if pursued unilaterally and without recognition of other people's history and culture and respect for the right of everyone to
“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” will continue to lead to enormous
human suffering.
Theme #1. The
messianic ambition of the United States and how it has formed our policy,
leading to great good and considerable harm.
For example:
·
As John Winthrop, a Puritan lawyer who left East
Anglia to escape religious suppression, preached aboard the Arbella in 1630, bound for New England,
God intended America as an example for “all people”:
We shall find that
the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a
thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men
shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New
England.” For we must consider
that we shall be as a city upon a hill.
The eyes of all people are upon us.
None doubted that
humanity and its purpose would in some way be revealed and fulfilled in
America.
·
As the frontiers of the nation crept across the
continent, the expansion of America was seen as the operation of a kind of law
by nature. When the United States
practiced what elsewhere was defined as imperialism, Americans gave it another
name: “the fulfillment of our
manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the
free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
·
The American experience supported the assumption
that peace was the natural condition of humanity, prevented only by other
countries’ unreasonableness or ill will.
·
John Quincy Adams summed up these sentiments in
1821, in a tone verging on exasperation at other countries’ determination to
pursue more complicated and devious courses.
America, in the
assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though
often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendships, or equal
freedom, of generous reciprocity.
She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often
to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of
equal rights. She has, in the
lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the
independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in
the concerns of others even when conflict has been for principles to which she
clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.
·
In 1839, as the official United States Exploring
Expedition reconnoitered the far reaches of the hemisphere and the South
Pacific, the United States Magazine and
Democratic Review published an article heralding the United States as “the
great nation of futurity,” disconnected from and superior to everything in
history that had preceded it:
The American people
having derived their origin from many other nations, and the Declaration of
national Independence being entirely based on the great principle of human
equality, these facts demonstrate at once our disconnected position as regards
any other nation; that we have, in reality, but little connection with the past
history of any of them, and still less with all antiquity, its glories, or its
crimes. On the contrary, our
national birth was the beginning of a new history.
We are the nation of
human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly
power can.
The United States
was thus not simply a country but an engine of God’s plan and the epitome of
world order.
Talk about haughty
presumption.
·
Like many American leaders before him, Woodrow
Wilson asserted that a divine dispensation had made the United States a
different kind of nation. “It was
as if,” Wilson told the graduating class at West Point in 1916, “in the
Providence of God a continent had been kept unused and waiting for a peaceful
people, who loved liberty and the rights of men more than they loved anything
else, to come and set up an unselfish commonwealth.”
Nearly all of
Wilson’s predecessors in the presidency would have subscribed to such a
belief. Where Wilson differed was
in his assertion that an international order based on it could be achieved
within a single lifetime, even a single administration.
Theme #2. The
messianic vision of Islam. Its
ambition to rule the whole world.
For example:
·
Other religions—especially Christianity—have had
their own crusading phases, at times exalting their universal mission with
comparable fervor and resorting to analogous methods of conquest and forced
conversions. (Spanish
conquistadores abolished ancient civilizations in Central and South American in
the sixteenth century in a similar spirit of world-conquering finality.) The difference is that the crusading
spirit subsided in the Western world or took the form of secular concepts that
proved less absolute (or less enduring) than religious imperatives. Over time, Christendom became a
philosophical and historical concept, not an operational principle of strategy
or international order. That
process was facilitated because the Christian world had originated a
distinction between “the things which are Caesar’s” and “the things that are
God’s,” permitting an eventual evolution toward pluralistic, secular-based
foreign policies within a state-based international system.
·
No single society has ever had the power, no
leadership the resilience, and no faith the dynamism to impose its writ
enduringly through the world.
Universality has proved elusive for any conqueror, including Islam. As the early Islamic Empire expanded,
it eventually fragmented into multiple centers of power.
·
In the spring of 1947, Hassan al-Banna, an
Egyptian watchmaker, schoolteacher, and widely read self-taught religious
activist, addressed a critique of Egyptian institutions to Egypt’s King Farouk
titled “Toward the Light.” It
offered an Islamic alternative to the secular national state. In studiedly polite yet sweeping
language, al-Banna outlined the principles and aspirations of the Egyptian
Society of Muslim Brothers (known colloquially as the Muslim Brotherhood), the
organization he had founded in 1928 to combat what he saw as the degrading
effects of foreign influence and secular ways of life.
Though he did not use the terms, al-Banna was arguing
that the Westphalian world order had lost both
its legitimacy and its power. And
he was explicitly announcing that the opportunity to create a new world order
based on Islam had arrived. “The
Islamic way has been tried before,” he argued, and “history has testified as to
its soundness.”
Ambiguities lingered in al-Banna’s text, but the
record of many Islamist thinkers and movements since then has resolved them in
favor of a fundamental rejection of pluralism and secular international
order. The religious scholar and
Muslim Brotherhood ideologist Sayyid Qutb articulated perhaps the most learned
and influential version of this view.
In 1964, while imprisoned on charges of participating in a plot to
assassinate Egyptian President Nasser, Qutb wrote Milestones, a declaration of war against the existing world order
that became a foundational text of modern Islam.
In Qutb’s view, Islam was a universal system of
offering the only true form of freedom:
freedom from governance by other men, man-made doctrines, or “low
associations based on race and color, language and country, regional and national
interests” (that is, all other modern forms of governance and loyalty and some
of the building blocks of Westphalian order). Islam’s modern mission, in Qutb’s view, was to overthrow
them all and replace them with what he took to be a literal, eventually global
implementation of the Quran.
In the purist version of Islamism, the state cannot be
the point of departure for an international system because states are secular,
hence illegitimate; at best they may achieve a kind of provisional status en route
to a religious entity on a larger scale.
·
As Khomeini elaborated, “We must strive to
export our Revolution throughout the world, and must abandon all idea of not
doing so, for not only does Islam refuse to recognize any difference between
Muslim countries, it is the champion of all oppressed people.” This would require an epic struggle
against “America, the global plunderer,” and the Communist materialist
societies of Russia and Asia, as well as “Zionism, and Israel.”
Theme #3. The
messianic vision of China.
·
From its unification as a single political
entity in 221 B.C. through the early twentieth century, China’s position at the
center of world order was so ingrained in its elite thinking that in the
Chinese language there was no word for it. Only retrospectively did scholars define the “Sinocentric”
tribute system. In this
traditional concept, China considered itself, in a sense, the sole sovereign
government of the world. Its
Emperor was treated as a figure of cosmic dimensions and the linchpin between
the human and the divine. His
purview was not a sovereign state of “China”—that is, the territories
immediately under his rule—but “All Under Heaven,” of which China formed the
central, civilized part: “the
Middle Kingdom,” inspiring and uplifting the rest of humanity.
In this view, world
order reflected a universal hierarchy, not an equilibrium of competing
sovereign states. Every known
society was conceived of as being in some kind of tributary relationship with
China, based in part on its approximation of Chinese culture; none could reach
equality with it.
A Chinese foreign
ministry was not established until the mid-nineteenth century, and then
perforce to deal with intruders from the West. Even then, officials considered their task the traditional practice
of barbarian management, not anything that might be regarded as Westphalian
diplomacy.
Russia, too, has had its messianic vision, one rekindled by President Putin in recent years.
Needless to say, Nazi Germany was propelled by Hitler's corrupt messianic vision of an exclusive Aryan race ruling the world
It is from the cloak of
exclusive messianic visions that war and untold human tragedy flow. It is in the failure of these visions to recognize that
we all have endowed God-given rights that need to be respected and honored.
*****
Some other mind-opening reflections from Kissinger:
·
We will usually be better served as Edmund Burke
once wrote, “to acquiesce in some qualified plan that does not come up to the
full perfection of the abstract idea, and to push for the more perfect.”
·
In the United States, the quest for world order
functions on two levels: the salvation of universal principles needs to be
paired with the recognition of the reality of other regions’ history and
culture. We failed the test on
balance many times, including in our relationship with Russia over the past
decade. We failed when we
intervened in Iraq as we did and in Vietnam as we did decades before that.
·
Kissinger relates that, in his youth, he was
brash enough to think himself able to pronounce on “The Meaning of History.” He now knows, he says, “that history’s
meaning is a matter to be discovered, not declared; a question we must attempt
to answer as best we can and recognition that it will remain open to debate;
that each generation will be judged whether the greatest, most consequential
issues of the human condition have been faced, and the decision to meet these
challenges must be taken by statesmen before it is possible to know what the
outcome may be.”
·
Order should not have priority over
freedom. But the affirmation of
freedom should be elevated from a mood to a strategy. The quest for humane values, the expression of elevated
principles is a first step; they must then be carried through the inherent
ambiguities and contradictions of all human affairs which is the task of
policy.
·
Great statesman, or I would say leaders, however
different their personalities, almost invariably had an instinctive feeling for
the history of their societies. As
Edmnud Burke wrote, “People will not look forward to posterity who never looked
back to their ancestors.”
·
There are traps in the all-pervasive technology
that exists today. Approbation has
become the goal, Kissinger says.
Communication risks being reduced to a series of slogans designed to
capture short-term approbation. Foreign
policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead
of an exercise in shaping the future.
The search for perspective may well be replaced by a hardening of
differences, statesmanship by posturing, per Kissinger. We’re seeing a lot of that these
days. The challenge of technology
is captured in a poem of T.S. Eliot:
“Where is the Life
we’ve lost in living it?
Where is the wisdom
we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the
knowledge we have lost in information?”
Kissinger: “Facts are
rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, interpretation, at least
in the foreign policy world, depend on context and relevance.
FM_WorldOrder_HenryKissinger122914
