Niall Ferguson on Kissinger's "World Order" [Part Three]

Niall Ferguson on Kissinger's World Order  [Part Three]

Thomas Riggins

Ferguson points out a basic question that Kissinger asks regarding our ability to understand international order. “Is there a single concept and mechanism logically uniting all things, in a way that can be discovered and explicated … or is the world too complicated and humanity too diverse to approach these questions through logic alone, requiring a kind of intuition and an almost esoteric element of statecraft?”  

This is a meaningless jumble of words. Logic is a method for determining the validity and soundness of arguments not a method for discovering how the world works. Discovery is basically an empirical affair of data collection from which generalizations can be made based on the coherence and correspondence of the data to our experience and understanding of its significance.

Kissinger does not think that "logic" can do the trick of understanding the world order but his alternative is not likely to do the trick either. Ferguson says Kissinger opts for “intuition” (the Muslims are yearning for us to intervene in their part of the world—oops wrong intuition) and the almost “esoteric” or the secret mysterious  ways of seeking out the truth. If we follow these ideas, I don’t think we will be seeing an improvement in US foreign policy any time soon.

Ferguson gives an example of Kissinger’s intuition— it can’t be demonstrated, but here it is. The “players” in “the great game of foreign policy” make their moves based on their understanding of history made by a “deep study of the past.” Since the US has made so many foreign policy mistakes it must be due to a “shallow” study or no study of the past. But wait— it doesn’t seem to be the history of the world or other countries that is the issue, but rather “self-understanding “ of your own history.

The US only needs to know its own deep history not, for example, the history of the Middle East to play the game there. Kissinger says, “For nations, history plays the role that character confers on human beings.” So don’t trust those Germans, Adolf, you know who, is still there lurking about in their esoteric intuitional subconscious. This is bad intuition. We get nowhere with the equation Tsar = Stalin = Putin or Russian Empire = Soviet Union = Russian Federation. 

Nations are not people anymore than corporations are and the human character cannot be applied to them. It is not an esoteric element we need to master but concrete social forces that can be studied in a scientific way. Looking at class struggles and economic interests and who wants to exploit whom will better explain how the “great game” is played. 

At this point there follows a long section about earlier works by Kissinger and more indulgent fawning over his ideas. To show what a great thinker Kissinger is I will resume this review with Ferguson's discussion of his views on Islam. 

From it's very beginnings Islam was, Kissinger says, "a religion, a multiethnic superstate, and a new world order."  In dealing with the Islamic Middle East today Ferguson says he has never seen Kissinger so critical of Bush and Obama as well as of Saudi Arabia. Here is his critique of the Saudis. The Saudi's have a very reactionary fundamentalist form of Islam as their state creed (Kissenger calls it "austere") and they have been supporting jihadists and fundamentalists around the world (some of whom are enemies of the US).

Kissinger says they have been making a great "error" in thinking they could support reactionary Islamist groups abroad and not have these groups also turn against them. The US, by the way, had this experience: it supported the most horrible Islamist terrorist groups you could imagine against the Soviets in Afghanistan only to have them turn against it after the Soviets were gone. 9/11 was an act of the US's Frankenstein's monster. The Saudi's can expect the same.

What isn't mentioned in this review is that Saudi Arabia is a medieval despotism that denies even basic democratic rights to its citizens. But the US is an ally of the Saudi state and thus itself a big supporter, de facto, of medieval despotism. Kissinger's criticism of the Saudis applies as well as to his and his successors attitudes toward that barbaric kingdom. It is love of oil, however, that is the true religion motivating US policy not engaging with  Islam.

Ferguson says Kissinger thinks the greatest problem for world order today is the sinking of the Middle East into sectarian strife. He doesn't mention that US policy is one of the major causes and supports of this strife which it promotes to justify its continued political (and military) interference. War and war profiteering is big business domestically. 

Instead, Ferguson says, regarding Kissinger's views,  "Even as the Sunni monarchies struggle to defend themselves against a rapidly metastasizing jihadist 'cancer'  that is in a large measure their own creation, Shia Iran edges steadily closer to being a nuclear-armed power."  What does one have to do with the other?

The main struggle of the Sunni monarchies is, however, against their own people who want democratic rights--- a struggle the US does not support as the case of Bahrain shows. The  "jihadi" threat is a cover for the repression of democracy. All talk about Iran's drive for nuclear weapons is meaningless blather as long as Israel is allowed to have nuclear weapons with no protest from the West.  

We will continue this review in part four.