Does America Need a Foreign Policy?
Henry Kissinger
Simon and Schuster, 2001, 318 pages

During the heady days of millennial globalism, some people proposed, apparently seriously, the idea that national identities will be replaced in the 21st century by “brand names” and that iconology, not ideology, will be the principal determinant of national identity. Although American foreign policy is not yet based on brand names and full-page advertisements in The New York Times and Time Magazine, in the past decade American diplomacy, says Kissinger, “has turned more and more into a series of proposals for adherence to an American agenda.” At the same time, unwillingness to act in unabashed national interest in the past decade has been a prescription for paralysis.

Kissinger is one of America's most experienced authorities on geopolitical strategy. He sees the world in terms of power vacuums, balances of power, and long term security interests, Although much of what he says is common sense, because the advice and insight in this book comes from someone with a demonstrated capacity for rational, long-term strategic calculations, his advice is extremely valuable. Here are some of the insights in the book:

• Kissinger urgently recommends putting our stagnant relationship with mainland China back on a cooperative, realistic basis, and abandoning the New Age wishful thinking that dominated America's approach during the 1990s. The alternative is to allow mainland China to drift further into the adversarial role it has recently adopted.
• He suggests expanding NAFTA to include South America and Western Europe.
• The reason for the failure of the Oslo accords and the 2000 Camp David agreement is clearly explained. Although most of the blame arises from the Palestinian attempts to make recognition of Israel a goal rather than a starting point of negotiations, Kissinger explains how the U.S. and Israel, by acting with excessive haste and finality in the attempts by President Clinton to achieve a peace deal before he left office, also offered Arafat a deal he could not accept, resulting in a destructive intifada instead of a peace deal. Kissinger suggests a detailed, workable strategy for creating a more workable peace process.
• He explains why yielding to the urge to apply the principles of humanitarian military intervention followed in the Balkans to Africa is dangerous, and why Clinton, who went from country to country in Africa apologizing for slavery and for America's alleged role in the state of affairs in Africa, and who later went on to apologize for the Crusades, the Indian Wars, the rise of Communism, the Cold War and Vietnam, was spreading nonsense.

Kissinger praises former President Clinton for passing NAFTA but criticizes his excessive attention to polls and media and his belief that the Cold War was somehow caused by America's supposed excessive concern with strategic issues and geopolitics.

Basing foreign policy on domestic politics instead of universal principles applied in a realistic historical context, Kissinger warns, led to acts of naive arbitrary interventionism such as the American bombing of Yugoslavia in defense of Kosovo while ignoring a nearly identical situation in Chechnya, and naive ideas like Clinton's belief that freedom of speech in China could be produced by unilateral demands of the American legislature. It also signifies a revival of sweeping Wilsonianism that risks making America the world's policeman, which will only guarantee America's isolation in the world community and ensure that every dictator and extremist will make it their life's mission to try to undermine it.

dec 23, 2001