Lessons from the master to the general
By Thomas Plate
On the American political stage, a truly superior foreign-policy vicar can make a significant difference, as did Dean Acheson for Truman, John Foster Dulles for Eisenhower and Henry Kissinger for Nixon and Ford.
By contrast, President Clinton's first secretary of state, Warren Christopher, was little more than a glorified negotiator, though highly skilled; his second, Madeleine Albright, was an articulate foreign-policy mouthpiece in search of microphones and a photo op.
The early returns on the much-admired Colin Powell, working for a president who appears a lot like Ronald Reagan in his penchant for bromidic policy prescriptions, are good; but the jury is still out. It's just too soon to tell about him.
But not, certainly, about Kissinger, who deserves to be rated as the most intellectually forceful foreign-policy virtuoso since Acheson. Just in time for Powell's visit to Asia, beginning next Sunday, Kissinger has a new book out, and it's well worth reading even if you're not the secretary of state.
In the penetrating pages of ''Does America Need a Foreign Policy?'' Kissinger's long-held obsession with China is transformed into a newly acquired general obsession with Asia, China's historic stomping ground. The Asia chapter is even longer than the one on Europe — an interesting literary and political twist from America's foremost Europeanist.
For starters, Secretary Powell, please, take note! Your administration's blunderbuss anti-China, pro-Taiwan tack gets failing grades from the former Harvard professor: ''The issue is not whether to oppose Chinese attempts to dominate Asia; if they occur, they must be resisted,'' he sighed, almost in exasperation. ''But at a moment when the capacity for it does not exist, what is the purpose of a confrontational strategy conducted for its own sake?''
A foreign policy conducted Cold War style is even older, and colder, than yesterday's pizza, he suggests, but U.S. pushiness on the Taiwan issue could convert the new cold war into a hot one. War with China will be ''probable ... if the U.S. chips away at the 'one-China' principle.'' He's right.
For Kissinger, the ideological values of American public opinion are enduring forces that Asia must accept as unavoidable facts of life with Uncle Sam. For these forces may also prove, alas, substantial obstacles to U.S. rationality. Kissinger brilliantly takes apart America's overwrought reaction to India's 1998 nuclear testing. New Delhi went nuclear for solid reasons that most nations should have easily understood, especially America, which, after all, remains the only nation to have actually used nukes — and in Asia, too.
Like most Americans, Kissinger doesn't quite get the hang of Japan, but he is clear on the need for the United States to encourage this postwar pacifist state to become involved militarily in regional collective action before domestic forces gather more strength and push Japan in frightening unilateral directions.
''It is no accident,'' he wrote, before the rise of Koizumi-Tanaka, ''that the Japanese defense budget has been creeping steadily upward. ... In the political realm, Japan is certain to try to reclaim a considerable degree of freedom of action.''
In other words, America either goes with Japan's flow and seeks to guide it to peaceful and positive ends or risks being irrelevant to Japan's evolution. Right again.
But, wrongly, Kissinger expects a classic 19th-century balance-of-power approach to be enough to guide U.S. policy in Asia for the 21st century. With no Great Britain in Asia to play the clever Machiavellian role of forging amoral alliances simply to level the playing field and keep everyone even up, there's no great leveler on the regional turf with which to play that kind of ball.
Japan, the likeliest candidate, will never have a supple enough diplomacy for that. Moreover, global economic integration increasingly overrides the power of nation-states, cheapening the currency of traditional realist approaches to security policy.
The key to Asian stability is a willful wave of regional economic, political, media and cultural institution-building: transnational structures in Asia for Asians. It's true that a more unified region could prove a threatening competitor to America, as does today's European Union.
But a fragmented, war-plagued, hostile Asia is a threat to everyone, including itself. The greatness of Colin Powell, in Asia or elsewhere, will depend not only on how well he has learned his lessons from Kissinger, but also on how well he appreciates the need to move beyond them.
Thomas Plate, a columnist for The Honolulu Advertiser and the South China Morning Post, is also a professor at UCLA.
