My Review of Andrew Lambert's "No More Napoleons"

The Balance of Power

King’s College naval historian Andrew Lambert has written an over-detailed evaluation of British geopolitical strategy from 1793-1914. After fighting France for 22 years Britain settled on a strategy of offshore balancing and maintaining order in Europe enforced by the Royal Navy and a small expeditionary force. The initial goal was to prevent a revanchist France from regaining control of Europe. The architects were Prime Minister Lord Liverpool, Foreign Secretary Castlereagh, and the Duke of Wellington. The latter initially as the hero of Waterloo and later as prime minister. Their policies were enhanced by Lord Palmerston as both foreign secretary and prime minister.

Britain’s greatest fear was that a continental power could launch an invasion from the low countries. Hence it was crucial to keep France out of the Scheldt Estuary and the Port of Antwerp. When Belgium split off from Holland the 1839 Neutrality Treaty orchestrated by Palmerston kept France out. The result of that treaty and Britain’s troop presence in Belgium in 1870, kept both France and Germany out of Belgium during their war. This would not be so in 1914.

The linchpin of the strategy was the power of the Royal Navy whose goal was to be at least twice as strong as any two powers. Aside from a quantitative advantage the Royal Navy had the most technologically advanced fleet by taking advantage of steam power, screw propellers, gunnery, and hydrology. The Royal Navy truly ruled the waves and it enabled Britain to become a global power through its colonies, but for that power to be maintained there had to be an offshore balance in Europe.

For most of the 19^th century the policy succeeded largely because France was in a long-term relative decline while Britain was moving to its heights. However, after 1870 Britain entered into a relative decline in relationship to a newly reunified Germany. As a result, it required an alliance with France which severely limited Britain’s freedom of action. Britain learned the hard way in the trenches of France. Given all of Britain’s interest in Belgium, it is a wonder why Germany was unsure about Britain’s entry in World War I after it invaded Belgium.

Although Lambert discusses the 1815 Vienna settlement, he makes little note of Count Metternich of Austria whose interest in a stable Europe was greater than Britain’s. He also does not cite Henry Kissinger’s “A World Restored” on the Congress of Vienna. He also left out a discussion on the 1878 Congress of Berlin where British Prime Minister Disraeli played a leading role in settling, at least for a time, the Balkan question. There is way too much information in this book, and I would only recommend it to history nerds.

 

  

My Amazon Review of Martin Indyk's "Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy"

Metternich in the Middle East

Martin Indyk, two-time ambassador to Israel under President Clinton and special envoy to the middle east under President Obama, has written an homage to Henry Kissinger’s middle eastern diplomacy before and after the October 1973 war. Indyk quotes extensively from Kissinger’s “A World Restored,” a book I read fifty years ago, on the role of Count Metternich at the 1815 Congress of Vienna that established order in Europe for the next 100 years. To Kissinger the role of diplomacy is not so much as to establish peace, but rather to establish a stable order based upon the balance of power and legitimacy.

 

On becoming President Nixon’s national security advisor in 1969 and later Secretary of State, Kissinger’s goal for American foreign policy in the middle east was to get the Russians out of the region and to avoid a return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders. He succeeded in both of those tasks, but it took the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the statesmanship of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to make those goals a reality. Along the way U.S. forces had to go on a worldwide nuclear alert (Defcon 3) fearing a direct Russian military intervention in the region.

 

Indyk gives us a daily play-by-play of Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in the region. First, by disengaging Israeli and Egyptian forces in the Suez Canal area and later the much more difficult negotiation involving the critical passes in the central Sinai. Similarly, Kissinger shuttled back and forth between Israel and Syria dealing with Syrian President Hafez Assad in negotiating a partial disengagement in the Golan area. Further Kissinger was not above being duplicitous by suggesting his ideas as coming directly from the parties involved and vice versa in search of a deal. Further, because Kissinger believed in hierarchy of power both the Jordanians and the Palestinians were largely frozen out of the process.

 

Not only did Kissinger understand the players, but he also understood the geography and the topography of the region to better understand the military situation on the ground. As a result, he created a step-by-step process whose results hold to this day.

 

On the way we meet such key Israeli players as Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin, defense minister Moshe Dayan and he brings out the much unheralded role of Israeli ambassador to the United States, Simcha Dinitz. Indyk relied on recently declassified sources in the United States and Israel and the held numerous interviews with Henry Kissinger.

 

While reading this book one marvels at Kissinger’s stamina shuttling back and forth between Israel, Egypt, and Syria. While all of this was going on Kissinger had to deal with the Russians on nuclear issues, the fall of the Nixon presidency under the strain of Watergate and the collapse of South Vietnam. His plate was more than full.

 

Indyk learned the hard way that potential big deals in the middle east have a way of blowing up. He was directly involved with President Clinton’s proposals with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat in 2000 which blew up into the second intifada and further he was involved with President Obama’s efforts in 2013 which went nowhere. His lesson is that a peaceful order in the middle east will come gradually in small steps and the lure of the big deal is pure chimera.

For the full Amazon URL see: Metternich in the Middle East (amazon.com)

 

 

My Amazon Review of Niall Ferguson's "Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist"

The Rise of Henry Kissinger

Niall Ferguson’s authorized biography ends with Henry Kissinger’s appointment as national security advisor to Richard Nixon in late 1968. Given the controversy that followed it is hard to believe today that his appointment was nearly universally acclaimed by both the Left and the Right. That appointment was a dramatic move up for an Orthodox Jewish kid from Furth, Germany, whose family fled Nazi oppression in 1938.

Kissinger’s family established their household in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Something must have been in the water because out of that neighborhood came Allan Greenspan and my ex-boss at Salomon Brothers, Henry Kaufman. Had not World War II intervened, Kissinger was on his way to becoming an accountant.

The army changes him. He sees combat at the Battle of the Bulge, witnesses first- hand the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and as a sergeant in the counter intelligence corps he works after the war to round up Nazis that have gone to ground. Along the way he leaves his orthodox faith. My guess is that is seeing the violence of the front in World War II enabled him 20 years later to risk is life visiting the war zones of 1965 Vietnam. Not much has been written about his physical courage. Further during his first visit he realized that the Vietnam War was unwinnable and a negotiated settlement was required.

Through some lucky breaks and an active mentor Kissinger ends up in Harvard and it is in undergraduate years he becomes an idealist in the Kantian sense. He truly believes in democracy and human choice. He goes on to his Ph.D. and writes a very remarkable dissertation on the Congress of Vienna and its aftermath which is later published as “A World Restored.” Although not as famous as Keynes’s “Economic Consequences…” about Versailles, he offers a unique insight into the geopolitics of 1815 Europe and the key roles of Metternich and Castlereagh. One can certainly argue that this book offered a window into Kissinger’s later thinking the 1970s with respect to U.S. policy concerning Russia and China. Where he appears to lose his idealism is in seeing up close how policy is really made and the machinations of De Gaulle and the North Vietnamese. He begins to merge Castlereagh with Bismarck to form the foundations of the “realpolitik” that he would become known for.

Kissinger becomes a public figure in 1957 with his publication of “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” which places him in the center of the post-Sputnik foreign policy debate. From there it on to both Kennedy’s National Security Council and the Rockefeller Brothers think tank.  Ferguson demonstrates Kissinger’s adroitness in balancing his loyalties to both the Democrat Kennedy and the Republican Rockefeller. After leaving the administration he works as Rockefeller’s leading foreign policy wonk writing most of his speeches. He is horrified by the 1964 Republican Convention which brought back memories of 1930s Furth and goes on to vote for Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater.

Ferguson highlights the importance of history to the making of foreign policy. Too many practitioners are unaware of the path dependence of the irrevocable decisions they make. He also rightly believes that Kissinger is correct that in analyzing policy it is important to look at the counter factuals. For example had Britain and France stopped Hitler in the Rhineland they likely would have avoided World War II, but they could very well have been blamed for whatever events transpired later. Statesmen have to act with incomplete information, because when you have full information it is too late.

We also see Kissinger as a man with his relationships with his parents, his less than happy marriage and his dog Smokey. In my opinion Ferguson has set the stage for his next volume, where we will see the Kissinger that most of us know, become quite a bit more controversial, to say the least.  

For the full Amazon URL see:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3GQQGDLB7W08O/ref=cm_cr_pr_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00SI0B94K