What does statesmanship look like? It has been decades since we’ve seen it consistently at the highest levels in Washington. Over the past two years we’ve witnessed the Biden administration’s sanctimonious mishandling of its relationship with a historic ally, Saudi Arabia; its cavalier treatment of other Middle Eastern friends; and its misconceived Summit for Democracy, which relegated de facto allies in favor of weak, anarchic states. Although the White House has been furiously switching gears of late—mostly on account of its need for allies against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine—its foreign-policy assumptions have been revealed as fundamentally unsound.
Standing in contrast to these misdeeds are the records of three great Republican secretaries of state who shepherded American diplomacy during the middle and late phases of the Cold War:
Henry Kissinger,
George Shultz
and
James Baker III.
Their successes were inextricable from their understanding of America as a nation-state, a worldview that put the needs of the U.S. above all else.
Henry Kissinger holds a press conference at Orly airport before attending the Vietnam peace talks in Paris, Nov. 20, 1972.
Photo:
-/AFP via Getty Images
The first of the three, Mr. Kissinger, is exemplary because he combined two sensibilities. He was a master of the geopolitical chessboard. In 1971 he orchestrated the U.S. move closer to communist China—despite the vast moral outrages of the Cultural Revolution—to balance the Soviet Union’s global influence. A year later he forged a nuclear-arms-limitations deal with the U.S.S.R. Mr. Kissinger found success elsewhere, too. In 1973 he split Egypt from its alliance with Syria against Israel and laid the groundwork for a separate peace between Cairo and Jerusalem. But Mr. Kissinger also brilliantly intuited the passions and psychological needs of leaders from
Zhou Enlai
to
Anwar Sadat
to
Golda Meir.
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