World Order
By Phar Kim Beng
Founder/Chair
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Strategicpipa.com
Twitter: @indo_pan
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Strategicpipa
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Henry Kissinger has always been a household name in the US, if not the world at large. His role as the former Secretary of State of President Richard Nixon, subsequently, the National Security Advisor of President Gerald Ford, in the mid-1970s, both cemented his role as the icon of US foreign policy.
More importantly, Henry Kissinger, actually took the pains of planting some of his students and prodigies in and across the political system in the US, allowing Henry Kissinger to have regular and constant access to all presidents since the days of President John F Kennedy.
Abroad, Henry Kissinger was closest to the late Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore. Not surprisingly, when Henry Kissinger wrote about the world order, or, even China, it often carries the heavy echo of Singapore. That the US is needed in the region, that some basic norms and rules of the international relations are required, that Asia’s 21st century is looking increasingly like the 19th century of Europe, an era marked by the rise of nationalism, only to have the latter inter-mixed with liberalism too.
What makes Kissinger worth listening to, however, especially on topics like “World Order” is his understanding of the limitations at work. Kissinger knows that everything hinges on the balance of power between all great powers. If one of them should turn revisionist, the balance will begin to erode. However, the balance of power is a concept that has eight different definitions and connotations.
Having a balancer in the midst of balance of power is one, a bipolar system is also one shaped by the balance of power, though, one maintained by the balance of terror through mutually assured destruction (MAD), and more importantly, it is a balance of power shaped by some semblance of common identity and values too, without which the balance will not result in harmony, some balance of power also involves the use of the veto in the UN Security Council, though such a balance of power is invariably one based on the politics of trying to frustrate the plans of one another in order to create a stalemate.
Indeed, Kissinger once asked if “international law” was real? By that he meant, which superpower would actually take the pains to comply with the letter and the spirit of the international law, not unless the legal templates first suit the super power’s own interest first.
In “World Order” Henry Kissinger, laments the lack of ‘any central principle in the global international system’, what realists called it the anarchical international system. More importantly, the world has descended into a collection of more than 200 states after the end of the empires in the mid-1940s.
To the degree the US abjures the need to be an imperial power, which it does in no uncertain degree, only to be thrust back into the vortex of international relations time and again, as when Russia and China are both attempting to reassert their preponderance, the world order has often seen a grand contest of their respective political wills.
“World Order” is unique in one sense, though. Henry Kissinger believes that at the very least the key powers have to either agree to disagree or, disagree agreeably, without which the nuclear warheads which they possess by the tens of thousands, can in a short period of time, obliterate the world. By this token, Henry Kissinger, in his late 80s, has become a realist-constructivist, not merely a structural realist, who believes in equal balancing between all powers, like the Congress of Vienna, that formed the basis of his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard University soon after he returned from World War II.
