Eclipse of a Statesman.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Review

YEAR OF RENEWAL By Henry Kissinger Simon & Schuster, $35

One of the few historical constants is unexpected change. Consider the United States in the 1970s when gloom prevailed. America had been defeated in Vietnam. Richard Nixon had resigned. Stagflation--high unemployment coupled with even higher interest rates--made it appear that the economy was permanently weakened. So pervasive was the view of America's collapse that it stretched into the 1980s, reaching full flower in Yale professor Paul Kennedy's bestseller, The Decline and Fall of the Great Powers, which argued that because of imperial "overstretch" the United States was headed the way of the Habsburg, Spanish, and British empires--into the rubbish heap of history.

Today, apart from the mess in the Balkans, the outlook could not be cheerier. Bill Clinton, having survived impeachment, is riding high in the polls. The 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins bill defined full employment at four percent unemployed; now unemployment hovers at three percent, while interest rates remain at historically low levels. And the real victim of imperial overstretch was, of course, the Soviet Union.

History, especially U.S. history, tends to move in boom-bust cycles, but one question anyone looking at the past few decades has to ask is, "How did American elites get it so wrong?" In any such survey, one of the main culprits has to be Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, as the third and final installment of his memoirs suggests, was the first declinist--a pessimist about America's political system, its social cohesion, and its role in the world. A self-proclaimed realist, the one country Kissinger does not seem to have been very realistic about is the United States.

The mischief rests in Kissinger's embrace of realism. At a moment when the Clinton administration is being bludgeoned for pursuing a haphazard and reactive foreign policy, Kissinger's Years of Renewal offers a useful reminder of what can happen when a procrustean academic theory of politics is rigidly imposed on the messy, recalcitrant world abroad. Though seen as a Harvard liberal in the '60s, Kissinger easily jumped ship from the Rockefeller campaign to join the Nixon administration in 1968 as national security adviser. And the main thing he carried in his toolkit, fresh from the Harvard seminar room, was the doctrine of realism.

What did Kissinger understand by realism? Realism counsels that the world is a Hobbesian one, filled with warring states in which human rights considerations are a pesky, if not frivolous, annoyance. Stability is the highest goal; a balance of power the best possible outcome. Kissinger and Nixon attempted to create such an environment with what they...