Kissinger's Diplomacy can be treated as a treatise on international relations at large for the bulk of the book: the remaining quarter of the book can be summarized as a justification for the choices he made during the years of the Nixon administration. One can view Kissinger's Diplomacy as a form of support of realism within the realm of international politics.
The chapters of the book that were examined through this course look closely at western diplomacy and spends time tracing the evolution of certain techniques in diplomatic relations from the ear of Richelieu and Bismarck through the World Wars. When it comes to Kissinger's treatment of the world wars, he points the biggest finger at the hands of the British and their irrational actions and failure to preserve the safety of France, which Kissneger argues pushed France to rectify with shoddy alliances in eastern Europe. Kissinger explains how diplomacy ultimately failed in World War Two as a result of America and Great Britain's failure to engage in Realpolitik. Kissinger makes the argument that by pursuing peace through a certain degree of Wilsonian theories, the entire international system broke down, thus helping to facilitate World War Two. Kissinger spends the bulk of the book arguing that peace would have been guaranteed if only America and the UK had engaged in more decisive action to defeat Hitler when Hitler's troops had more of a presence in...
Kissinger provides a wealth of background material as each point made is set in a nest of facts and extraneous details.
The book is riddled with a tremendous amount of defensiveness as Kissinger explains the choices made during the Nixon administration. Kissinger makes a strong case for the fact that the Detente was effective and was the most appropriate strategy for deterring the Russians. One aspect of Kissinger's summary is that he essentially argues that this was the foreign policy agenda which contributed directly to the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Analysis
The book offers insights by Kissinger that at times feel incredibly speculative and other times illuminating. The book is both an assessment of the international role of the United States and the new world order along with his reasonable analysis. It is also a somewhat narrow and lengthy retrospective on international diplomacy as it's been engaged in since the times of Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis Richelieu and William of Orange.
Kissinger seeks to control the bulk of his argument via his presentation of Theodore Roosevelt as the pragmatic practitioner of Realpolitik, versus his description of Wilson as a delusional idealist who dreamed up the League of nations, the precursor to the UN. Wilson is consistently treated as someone who was given the Nobel Peace Prize, and for no real…
