每章节喜欢的话总结
这篇书评可能有关键情节透露
对我这个国际关系小白有着很好的扫盲效果~ 最大的收获就是进一步理解了Westphalian System, 下面是我觉得每章节的重点：
Chapter 1. Europe: The Pluralistic International Order
By the time Charles V died, revolutionary changes had raised Europe's sights from a regional to a global enterprise while fragmenting the medieval political and religious order: the beginning of the age of discovery, the invention of printing, and the schism in the Church.
A map depicting the universe, as comprehended by educated Europeans in the medieval age, would have shown Northern and Southern Hemispheres stretching from India in the east to Iberia and the islands of Britain in the west, with Jerusalem in the center. In the medieval perception, this was not a map for travelers but a stage divinely ordained for the drama of human redemption.
The fragmentation of Central Europe was perceived by Richelieu as a political and military necessity. The basic threat to France was strategic, not metaphysical or religious: a united Central Europe would be in a position to dominate the rest of the Continent. Richelieu's design would endure through vast upheavals. For two and a half centuries -- from the emergence of Richelieu in 1624 to Bismarck's proclamation of the German Empire in 1871 -- the aim of keeping Central Europe (more or less the territory of contemporary Germany, Austria and northern Italy) divided remained the guiding principle of French foreign policy. For as long as this concept served as the essence of the European order, France was preeminent on the Continent. When it collapsed, so did France's dominant role.
The Peace of Westphalia became a turning point in the history of nations because the elements it set in place were as uncomplicated as they were sweeping. The state, not the empire, dynasty, or religious confession, was affirmed as the building block of European order. The concept of state sovereignty was established. The right of each signatory to choose its own domestic structure and religious orientation free from intervention was affirmed, while novel clauses ensured that minority sects could practice their faith in peace and be free from the prospect of forced conversion.
With the end of the universal Church as the ultimate source of legitimacy, and the weakening of the Holy Roman Emperor, the ordering concept for Europe became the balance of power -- which, by definition, involves ideological neutrality and adjustment to evolving circumstances.
After the Peace of Westphalia, the balance of power make its appearance as a system; that is to say, bringing it about was accepted as one of the key purposes of foreign policy; disturbing it would evoke a coalition on behalf of equilibrium.
Chapter 2. The European Balance-of-Power System and Its End
Looking to the Orthodox Church in Constantinople rather than Rome for spiritual authority, Russia was close enough to Europe to share a common cultural vocabulary yet perpetually out of phase with the Continent's historical trends. The experience would leave Russia a uniquely "Eurasian" power, sprawling across two continents but never entirely at home in either.
The French envoy at the Congress of Vienna represented in his person a metaphor of the era's seemingly boundless upheavals. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord was ubiquitous. He started his career as Bishop of Autun, left the Church to support the Revolution, abandoned the Revolution to serve as Napoleon's Foreign Minister, abandoned Napoleon t o negotiate the restoration of the French monarch, and appeared in Vienna as Louis XVIII's Foeign Minister. Many called Talleyrand an opportunist.
The Congress of Vienna: This enlargement of Prussia placed a significant power on the border of France, creating a geostrategic reality that had not existed since the Peace of Westphalia. The remaining thirty-seven German states were grouped in an entity called the German Confederation, which would provide an answer to Europe's perennial German dilemma: when Germany was weak, it tempted foreign (mostly French) interventions; when unified, it became strong enough to defeat its neighbors single-handedly, tempting them to combine against the danger. In that sense Germany has for much of history been either too weak or too strong for the peace of Europe.
The nature of these challenges was not singular to the 1930s. In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve it. The interwar years' toxic mixture of facile pacifism, geopolitical imbalance, and allied disunity allowed these forces a free hand.
The single currency produced a degree of unity that had not been seen in Europe since the Holy Roman Empire. Would the EU achieve the global role its charter proclaimed, or would it, like Charles V's empire, prove incapable of holding itself together? The new structure represented in some sense a renunciation of Westphalia. Yet the EU can also be interpreted as Europe's return to the Westphalian international state system that it created, spread across the globe, defended, and exemplified through much of the modern age --- this time as a regional, not a national, power, as a new unit in a now global version of the Westphalian system.
Chapter 3. Islamism and the Middle East: A World in Disorder
America's democratic aspirations for the region, embraced by administrations of both parties, have led to eloquent expressions of the country's idealism. But conceptions of security necessities and of democracy promotion have often clashed. Those committed to democratization have found it difficult to discover leaders who recognize the importance of democracy other than as a means to achieve their own dominance. At the same time, the advocates of strategic necessity have not been able to show how the established regimes will ever evolve in a democratic or even reformist manner.
The tensions, turmoil, and violence wracking the Middle East in the first two decades of the twenty-first century should therefore be understood as layers of civil and religious strife carried out in a contest to determine whether and how the region will relate to any larger concept of world order.
Chapter 4. The United States and Iran: Approaches to Order
The first implemantation of radical Islamist principles as a doctrine of state power occurred in 1979, in a capital where it was least expected -- in a country unlike the majority of Middle Eastern states, with a long and distinguished national history and a long-established reverence for its pre-Islanmic past. So when Iran, an accepted state in the Westphalian system, turned itself into an advocate for radical Islam after the Ayatollah Khomeini revolution, the Middle East regional order was turned upside down. Of all the countries of the region, Iran has perhaps the most coherent sense of nationhood and the most elaborated tradition of national-interest-based statecraft.
The doctrine that took root in Iran under Khomeini was unlike anything that had been practiced in the West since the religious wars of the pre-Westphalian era. It conceived of the state not as a legitimate entity in its own right but as a weapon of convenience in a broader religious struggle.
The Balance of power is never static; its components are in constant flux. The United States would be needed as a balancer for the foreseeable future. The role of balancer is best carried out if America is closer to each of the contending forces than they are to each other, and does not let itself be lured into underwriting either side's strategy, particularly at the extremes.
Chapter 5. The Multiplicity of Asia
Japan:
The distinctive combination of overbearing conduct, technological prowess, idealistic humanitarianism, and revolutionary intellectual ferment proved one of the shaping factors of the modern world. Until the end of World War II, most of Asia conducted its policies as an adjunct of European powers or, in the case of the Philippines, of the United States. The conditions for Westphalian-style diplomacy only began to emerge with the decolonization that followed the devastation of the European order by two world wars.
Hierarchy, not sovereign equality, was the organizing principle of Asia's historical international systems. Power was demonstrated by the deference shown to a ruler and the structures of authority that recognized his overloardship, not the delineation of specific borders on a map. Empires spread their trade and their political writ, soliciting the alignment of smaller political units. For the peoples who existed at the intersection of two or more imperial orders, the path to independence was often to enroll as a nominal subordinate in more than one sphere.
Situated on an archipelago some one hundred miles off the Asian mainland at the closest crossing, Japan long cultivated its traditions and distinctive culture in isolation. Possessed of ethnic and linguistic area homogeneity and an official ideology that stressed the Japanese people's divine ancestry, Japan turned conviction of its unique identity into a kind of near-religious commitment. This sense of distinctness gave it great flexibility in adjusting its policies to its conception of national strategic necessity. Within the space of little more than a century after 1868, Japan moved from total isolation to extensive borrowing from the apparently most modern states in the West (for the army from Germany, for parliamentary institutions and for the navy from Britain); from audacious attempts at empire building to pacifism and thence to a reemergence of a new kind of major-power stance; from feudalism to varieties of Western authoritarianism and from that to embracing democracy; and in and out of world orders (first Western, then Asian, now global). Throughout, it was convinced that its national mission could not be diluted by adjusting to the techniques and institutions of other societies; it would only be enhanced by successful adaptation.
Japan drew from the Western challenge a conclusion contrary to that of China after the appearance of a British envoy in 1793. China reaffirmed its traditional stance of dismissing the intruder with aloof indifference while cultivating China's distinctive virtues, confident that the vast extent of its population and territory and the refinement of its culture would in the end prevail. Japan set out, with studious attention to detail and subtle analysis of the balance of material and psychological forces, to enter the international order based on Western concepts of sovereignty, free trade, international law, technology, and military power -- albeit for the purpose of expelling the foreign domination.
Japan's postwar posture was frequently described as a new pacifism; in fact it was considerably more complex. Above all, it reflected an acquiescence in American predominance and an assessment of the strategic landscape and the imperatives of Japan's survival and long-term success.
India:
The Mughal Empireembodied India's diverse influences: Mulism in faith, Turkic and Mongol in ethnicity, Persian in elite culture, the Mughals ruled over a Hindu majority fragmented by regional identities.
The content of nonalignment was different from the policy undertaken by a "balancer" in a balance-of-power system. India was not prepared to move toward the weaker side -- as a balancer would. It was not interested in operating an international system. Its overriding impulse was not to be found formally in either camp, and it measured its success by not being drawn into conflicts that did not affect its national interests.
Short-term moral neutrality would be the means toward long-term moral influence.
Chapter 6. Toward an Asian Order: Confrontation or Partnership?
Of all conceptions of world order in Asia, China operated the longest lasting, the most clearly defined, and the one furthest from Westphalian ideas.
In Europe, the Westphalian system was an outgrowth of a plethora of de facto independent states at the end of the Thirty Years' War. Asia entered the modern era without such a distinct apparatus of national and international organization. It possessed several civilizational centers surrounded by smaller kingdoms, with a subtle and shifting set of mechanisms for interactions between them. The rich fertility of China's plains and a culture of uncommon resilience and political acumen had enabled China to remain unified over much of a two-millennia period and to exercise considerable political economic, and cultural influence -- even when it was militarily weak by conventional standards.
The "rise" of China to eminence in the twenty-first century is not new, but reestablishes historic patterns. What is distinctive is that China has returned as both the inheritor of an ancient civilization and as a contemporary great power on the Westphalian model. It combines the legacies of "All Under Heaven," technocratic modernization, and an unusually turbulent twentieth-century national quest for a synthesis between the two.
The more sweeping the changes the revolutionary seeks to bring about, the more he encounters resistance, not necessarily from ideological and political opponents but from the inertia of the familiar. The revolutionary prophet is ever tempted to defy his mortality by speeding up his timetable and multiplying the means of enforcing his vision. Mao launched his disastrous Great Leap Forward in 1958 to compel breakneck industrialization and the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge the ruling group to prevent its institutionalization in a decade-long ideological campaign that exiled a generation of educated youth to the countryside. Tens of millions died in pursuit of Mao's goals -- most eliminated without love or hatred, mobilized to foreshorten into one lifetime what had heretofore been considered a historical process.
A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck's nineteenth-century aphorism surely applies: "We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity." North Korea is ruled under no accepted principle of legitimacy, not even its claimed Communist one.
Chapter 7. "Acting for All Mankind": The UnitedStates and Its Concept of Order
Theodore Roosevelt: America as a World Power
It was probably inevitable that Roosevelt's attempt to preserve his legacy by running for a third term would destroy any chance for it. Tradition matters because it is not given to societies to proceed through history as if they had no past and as if every course of action were available to them. They may deviate from the previous trajectory only within a finite margin. The great statesmen act at the outer limit of that margin. If they fall short, the society stagnates. If they exceed it, they lose the capacity to shape posterity. Theodore Roosevelt was operating at the absolute margin of his society's capabilities.
Woodrow Wilson: America as the World's Conscience
The distinction Wilson made between alliances and collective security -- the key element of the League of Nations system -- was central to dilemmas that have followed ever since. An alliance comes about as an agreement on specific facts or expectations. It creates a formal obligation to act in a precise way in defined contingencies. It brings about a strategic obligation fulfillable in an agreed manner. It arises out of a consciousness of shared interests, and the more parallel those interests are, the more cohesive the alliance will be. Collective security, by contrast, is a legal construct addressed to no specific contingency. It defines no particular obligations except joint action of some kind when the rules of peaceful international order are violated. In practice, action must be negotiated from case to case. Alliances grow out of a consciousness of a defined common interest identified in advance. Collective security declares itself opposed to any aggressive conduct anywhere within the purview of the participating states.
They submitted an analysis to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee tracing the difference between historic alliances and the NATO treaty, which held that NATO was not concerned with the defense of territory (surely news to America's European allies). Its conclusion was that the North Atlantic Treaty "is directed against no one; it is directed solely against aggression. It seeks not to influence any shifting 'balance of power' but to strengthen the 'balance of principle.'"
Woodrow Wilson's ultimate greatness must be measured by the degree to which he rallied the tradition of American exceptionalism behind a vision that outlasted these shortcomings. He has been revered as a prophet toward whose vision America has judged itself obliged to aspire.
The genius of this vision has been its ability to harness American idealism in the service of great foreign policy undertakings in peacemaking, human rights, and cooperative problem-solving, and to imbue the exercise of American power with the hope for a better and more peaceful world. The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century's decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.
Franklin Roosevelt and the New World Order
Coming from the academy, Wilson had relied on building an international order on essentially philosophical principles. Having emerged from the manipulatory maelstrom of American politics, Roosevelt placed great reliance on the management of personalities: The kind of world order which we the peace - loving Nations must achieve, must depend essentially on friendly human relations, on acquaintance, on tolerance, on unassailable sincerity and good will and good faith.
In Stalin's worldview, decisions were determined by objective factors, not personal relationships. Thus the goodwill of wartime alliance was "subjective" and superseded by the new circumstances of victory. The goal of Soviet strategy would be to achieve the maximum security for the inevitable showdown. This meant pushing the security borders of Russia as far west as possible and weakening the countries beyond these security borders through Communist parties and covert operations.
Great leaders often embody great ambiguities. When he was assassinated, was President John F. Kennedy on the verge of expanding America's commitment to Vietnam or withdrawing from it? Naivete was not, generally speaking, a charge Roosevelt's critics made against him.
Chapter 8. The United States: Ambivalent Superpower
Strategies of a Cold War Order
With the structure (NATO) in place, the historical debates about the ultimate purpose of American foreign policy reemerged. Were the goals of the new alliance moral or strategic? Coexistence or the adversary's collapse? Did America seek conversion of the adversary or evolution? Conversion entails inducing an adversary to break with its past in one comprehensive act or gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process, a willingness to pursue ultimate foreign policy goals in imperfect stages and to deal with the adversary as a reality while this process is going on. What course would American choose? Exhibiting its historical ambivalence on the subject, America chose both.
The Korean War
On one occasion, an eminent Chinese told me that letting Stalin lead Mao into authorizing the Korean War was the only strategic mistake Mao ever made because, in the end, the Korean War delayed Chinese unification by a century in that it led to America's commitment to Taiwan. Be that as it may, the origin of the Korean Was was less a Sino-SOviet conspiracy against America than a three- cornered maneuver for dominance within the Communist international order, with Kim Il-sung driving up the bidding to gain support for a program of conquest whose global consequences in the end surprised all of the main participants.
In the negotiations, as in the origins of the war, two different approaches to strategy confronted each other. The Truman administration expressed the American view about the relationship of power and legitimacy: War and Peace were distinct phases of policy; when negotiations started, the application of force ceased, and diplomacy took over. Each activity was thought to operate by its own rules. Force was needed to produce the negotiation, then it had to stand aside; the outcome of the negotiation would depend on an atmosphere of goodwill, which would be destroyed by military pressure.
The Chinese view was the exact opposite. War and peace were two sides of the same coin. Negotiations were an extension of the battlefield. De-escalation by the adversary was a sign of weakness to be exploited by pressing one's own military advantage. The Communist side used the stalemate to enhance the discomfort of the American public with an inconclusive war.
Vietnam and the Breakdown of the National Consensus
As the containment policy migrated into the fringes of Asia, it encountered conditions quite opposite of those in Europe. The Marshall Plan and Nato succeeded because a political tradition of government remained in Europe, even if impaired. Economic recovery could restore political vitality. But in much of the underdeveloped world, the political framework was fragile or new, and economic aid led to corruption as frequently as to stability.
In one eighteen-month period, during 1972-1973, he brought about the end of the Vietnam War, an opening to China, a summit with the Soviet Union even while escalating the military effort in response to a North Vietnamese offensive, the switch of Egypt from a Soviet ally to close cooperation with the United States, two disengagement agreements in the Middle East -- one between Israel and Egypt, the other with Syria and the start of the European Security Conference, whose outcome over the long term severely weakened Soviet control of Eastern Europe.
The Purpose and the Possible
The essence of historical events is rarely fully apparent to those living through them.
这段对美国21世纪的行动与动机分析的非常棒：There is a special character to a naationa that proclaims as war aims not only to punish its enemies but to improve the lives of their people -- that has sought victory not in domination but in sharing the fruits of liberty. America would not be true to itself if it abandoned this essential idealism. Nor would it reassure friends (or win over adversaries) by setting aside such a core aspect of its national experience. But to be effective, these as［irational aspects of policy must be paired with an unsentimental analysis of underlying factors, including the cultural and geopolitical configuration of other regions and the dedication and resourcefulness of adversaries opposing American interests and values. America's moral aspirations need to be combined with an approach that takes into account the strategic element of policy in terms the America people can support and sustain through multiple political cycles.
Chapter 9. Technology, Equilibrium, and Human Consciousness
Every age has its leitmotif, a set of beliefs that explains the universe, that inspires or consoles the individual by providing an explanation for the multiplicity of events impinging on him. In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was nationalism combined with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the governing concepts of our age.
Is the destructiveness of modern weapons technology so vast that a common fear may unite mankind in order to eliminate the scourge of war? Or will possession of these weapons create a permanent foreboding? Will the rapidity and scope of communication break down barriers between societies and individuals and provide transparency of such magnitude that the age-old dreams of a human community will come into being? Or will the opposite happen: Will mankind, amidst weapons of mass destruction, networked transparency, and the absence of privacy, propel itself into a world without limits or order, careening through crises without comprehending them?
When, in the 1950s, Mao spoke of China's willingness to accept sacrificesof hundreds of millions in a nuclear war, it was widely treated in the West as a symptom of emotional or ideological derangement. It was, in fact, probably the consequences of a sober calculation that to withstand military capacities beyond previous human experience, a country needed to demonstrate a willingness to sacrigice beyond human comprehension. The shock in Western and Warsaw Pact capitals at these statements ignored that the superpowers' own concepts of deterrence rested on apocalyptic risks.
The nuclear balance has produced a paradoxical impact on the international order. The historic balance of power had facilitated the Western domination of the then-colonial world; by contrast, the nuclear order -- the West's own creation -- had the opposite effect. The margin of military superiority of advanced countries over the developing countries has been incomparably larger than at any previous period in history. But because so much of their military effort has been devoted to nuclear weapons, whose use in anything but the gravest crisis was implicitly discounted, regional powers could redress the overall military balance by a strategy geared to prolonging any war beyond the willingness of the "advanced" country's public to sustain it -- as France experienced in Algeria and Vietnam; the United States in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
The Human Factor 不同于之前对历史的总结，下面基辛格写出了非常多很有思考价值的话：
The policymaker undertakes multiple tasks, many of them shaped by his society's history and culture. He must first of all make an analysis of where his socirty finds itself. This is inherently where the past meets the future; therefore such a judgment cannot be made without an instinct for both of these elements. He must then try to understand where that trajectory will take him and his society. He must resist the temptation to identify policymaking with projecting the familiar into the future, for on that road lies stagnation and then decline. To undertake a journey on a road never before traveled requires charcter and courage: character because the choice is not obvious; courage because the road will be lonely at first.
Philosophers and poets have long separated the mind's purview into three components: information, knowledge and wisdom. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation -- at least in the foreign policy world -- depend on context and relevance. As ever more issues are treated as if of a factual nature, the premise becomes established that for every question there must be a researchable answer, that problems and solutions are not so much to be thought through as to be "looked up." But in the relations between states -- and in many other fields -- information, to be truly useful, must be placed within a broader context of history and experience to emerge as actual knowledge. And a society is fortunate if its leaders can occasionally rise to the level of wisdom.
The concept of truth is being relativized and individualized -- losing its universal character. Information is presented as being free. In fact, the recipient pays for it by supplying data to be exploited by persons unknown to him, in ways that further shape the information being offered to him.
非常值得思考：Whatever the utility of this approach in the realm of consumption, its effect on policymaking may prove transformative. The difficult choices of policymaking are always close. Where, in a world of ubiquitous social networks, does the individual find the space to develop the fortitude to make decisions that, by definition, cannot be based on a consensus? The adagy that prophets are not recognized in their own time is true in that they operate beyond conventional conception -- that is what made them prophets. In our era, the lead time for prophets might have disappeared altogether. The pursuit of transparency and connectivity in all aspects of existence, by destroying privacy, inhibits the development of personalities with the strength to take lonely decisions.
整整一周的时间才看完，也算不易，日后读一遍中文版也许会有新的收获~
Chapter 1. Europe: The Pluralistic International Order
By the time Charles V died, revolutionary changes had raised Europe's sights from a regional to a global enterprise while fragmenting the medieval political and religious order: the beginning of the age of discovery, the invention of printing, and the schism in the Church.
A map depicting the universe, as comprehended by educated Europeans in the medieval age, would have shown Northern and Southern Hemispheres stretching from India in the east to Iberia and the islands of Britain in the west, with Jerusalem in the center. In the medieval perception, this was not a map for travelers but a stage divinely ordained for the drama of human redemption.
The fragmentation of Central Europe was perceived by Richelieu as a political and military necessity. The basic threat to France was strategic, not metaphysical or religious: a united Central Europe would be in a position to dominate the rest of the Continent. Richelieu's design would endure through vast upheavals. For two and a half centuries -- from the emergence of Richelieu in 1624 to Bismarck's proclamation of the German Empire in 1871 -- the aim of keeping Central Europe (more or less the territory of contemporary Germany, Austria and northern Italy) divided remained the guiding principle of French foreign policy. For as long as this concept served as the essence of the European order, France was preeminent on the Continent. When it collapsed, so did France's dominant role.
The Peace of Westphalia became a turning point in the history of nations because the elements it set in place were as uncomplicated as they were sweeping. The state, not the empire, dynasty, or religious confession, was affirmed as the building block of European order. The concept of state sovereignty was established. The right of each signatory to choose its own domestic structure and religious orientation free from intervention was affirmed, while novel clauses ensured that minority sects could practice their faith in peace and be free from the prospect of forced conversion.
With the end of the universal Church as the ultimate source of legitimacy, and the weakening of the Holy Roman Emperor, the ordering concept for Europe became the balance of power -- which, by definition, involves ideological neutrality and adjustment to evolving circumstances.
After the Peace of Westphalia, the balance of power make its appearance as a system; that is to say, bringing it about was accepted as one of the key purposes of foreign policy; disturbing it would evoke a coalition on behalf of equilibrium.
Chapter 2. The European Balance-of-Power System and Its End
Looking to the Orthodox Church in Constantinople rather than Rome for spiritual authority, Russia was close enough to Europe to share a common cultural vocabulary yet perpetually out of phase with the Continent's historical trends. The experience would leave Russia a uniquely "Eurasian" power, sprawling across two continents but never entirely at home in either.
The French envoy at the Congress of Vienna represented in his person a metaphor of the era's seemingly boundless upheavals. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord was ubiquitous. He started his career as Bishop of Autun, left the Church to support the Revolution, abandoned the Revolution to serve as Napoleon's Foreign Minister, abandoned Napoleon t o negotiate the restoration of the French monarch, and appeared in Vienna as Louis XVIII's Foeign Minister. Many called Talleyrand an opportunist.
The Congress of Vienna: This enlargement of Prussia placed a significant power on the border of France, creating a geostrategic reality that had not existed since the Peace of Westphalia. The remaining thirty-seven German states were grouped in an entity called the German Confederation, which would provide an answer to Europe's perennial German dilemma: when Germany was weak, it tempted foreign (mostly French) interventions; when unified, it became strong enough to defeat its neighbors single-handedly, tempting them to combine against the danger. In that sense Germany has for much of history been either too weak or too strong for the peace of Europe.
The nature of these challenges was not singular to the 1930s. In every era, humanity produces demonic individuals and seductive ideas of repression. The task of statesmanship is to prevent their rise to power and sustain an international order capable of deterring them if they do achieve it. The interwar years' toxic mixture of facile pacifism, geopolitical imbalance, and allied disunity allowed these forces a free hand.
The single currency produced a degree of unity that had not been seen in Europe since the Holy Roman Empire. Would the EU achieve the global role its charter proclaimed, or would it, like Charles V's empire, prove incapable of holding itself together? The new structure represented in some sense a renunciation of Westphalia. Yet the EU can also be interpreted as Europe's return to the Westphalian international state system that it created, spread across the globe, defended, and exemplified through much of the modern age --- this time as a regional, not a national, power, as a new unit in a now global version of the Westphalian system.
Chapter 3. Islamism and the Middle East: A World in Disorder
America's democratic aspirations for the region, embraced by administrations of both parties, have led to eloquent expressions of the country's idealism. But conceptions of security necessities and of democracy promotion have often clashed. Those committed to democratization have found it difficult to discover leaders who recognize the importance of democracy other than as a means to achieve their own dominance. At the same time, the advocates of strategic necessity have not been able to show how the established regimes will ever evolve in a democratic or even reformist manner.
The tensions, turmoil, and violence wracking the Middle East in the first two decades of the twenty-first century should therefore be understood as layers of civil and religious strife carried out in a contest to determine whether and how the region will relate to any larger concept of world order.
Chapter 4. The United States and Iran: Approaches to Order
The first implemantation of radical Islamist principles as a doctrine of state power occurred in 1979, in a capital where it was least expected -- in a country unlike the majority of Middle Eastern states, with a long and distinguished national history and a long-established reverence for its pre-Islanmic past. So when Iran, an accepted state in the Westphalian system, turned itself into an advocate for radical Islam after the Ayatollah Khomeini revolution, the Middle East regional order was turned upside down. Of all the countries of the region, Iran has perhaps the most coherent sense of nationhood and the most elaborated tradition of national-interest-based statecraft.
The doctrine that took root in Iran under Khomeini was unlike anything that had been practiced in the West since the religious wars of the pre-Westphalian era. It conceived of the state not as a legitimate entity in its own right but as a weapon of convenience in a broader religious struggle.
The Balance of power is never static; its components are in constant flux. The United States would be needed as a balancer for the foreseeable future. The role of balancer is best carried out if America is closer to each of the contending forces than they are to each other, and does not let itself be lured into underwriting either side's strategy, particularly at the extremes.
Chapter 5. The Multiplicity of Asia
Japan:
The distinctive combination of overbearing conduct, technological prowess, idealistic humanitarianism, and revolutionary intellectual ferment proved one of the shaping factors of the modern world. Until the end of World War II, most of Asia conducted its policies as an adjunct of European powers or, in the case of the Philippines, of the United States. The conditions for Westphalian-style diplomacy only began to emerge with the decolonization that followed the devastation of the European order by two world wars.
Hierarchy, not sovereign equality, was the organizing principle of Asia's historical international systems. Power was demonstrated by the deference shown to a ruler and the structures of authority that recognized his overloardship, not the delineation of specific borders on a map. Empires spread their trade and their political writ, soliciting the alignment of smaller political units. For the peoples who existed at the intersection of two or more imperial orders, the path to independence was often to enroll as a nominal subordinate in more than one sphere.
Situated on an archipelago some one hundred miles off the Asian mainland at the closest crossing, Japan long cultivated its traditions and distinctive culture in isolation. Possessed of ethnic and linguistic area homogeneity and an official ideology that stressed the Japanese people's divine ancestry, Japan turned conviction of its unique identity into a kind of near-religious commitment. This sense of distinctness gave it great flexibility in adjusting its policies to its conception of national strategic necessity. Within the space of little more than a century after 1868, Japan moved from total isolation to extensive borrowing from the apparently most modern states in the West (for the army from Germany, for parliamentary institutions and for the navy from Britain); from audacious attempts at empire building to pacifism and thence to a reemergence of a new kind of major-power stance; from feudalism to varieties of Western authoritarianism and from that to embracing democracy; and in and out of world orders (first Western, then Asian, now global). Throughout, it was convinced that its national mission could not be diluted by adjusting to the techniques and institutions of other societies; it would only be enhanced by successful adaptation.
Japan drew from the Western challenge a conclusion contrary to that of China after the appearance of a British envoy in 1793. China reaffirmed its traditional stance of dismissing the intruder with aloof indifference while cultivating China's distinctive virtues, confident that the vast extent of its population and territory and the refinement of its culture would in the end prevail. Japan set out, with studious attention to detail and subtle analysis of the balance of material and psychological forces, to enter the international order based on Western concepts of sovereignty, free trade, international law, technology, and military power -- albeit for the purpose of expelling the foreign domination.
Japan's postwar posture was frequently described as a new pacifism; in fact it was considerably more complex. Above all, it reflected an acquiescence in American predominance and an assessment of the strategic landscape and the imperatives of Japan's survival and long-term success.
India:
The Mughal Empireembodied India's diverse influences: Mulism in faith, Turkic and Mongol in ethnicity, Persian in elite culture, the Mughals ruled over a Hindu majority fragmented by regional identities.
The content of nonalignment was different from the policy undertaken by a "balancer" in a balance-of-power system. India was not prepared to move toward the weaker side -- as a balancer would. It was not interested in operating an international system. Its overriding impulse was not to be found formally in either camp, and it measured its success by not being drawn into conflicts that did not affect its national interests.
Short-term moral neutrality would be the means toward long-term moral influence.
Chapter 6. Toward an Asian Order: Confrontation or Partnership?
Of all conceptions of world order in Asia, China operated the longest lasting, the most clearly defined, and the one furthest from Westphalian ideas.
In Europe, the Westphalian system was an outgrowth of a plethora of de facto independent states at the end of the Thirty Years' War. Asia entered the modern era without such a distinct apparatus of national and international organization. It possessed several civilizational centers surrounded by smaller kingdoms, with a subtle and shifting set of mechanisms for interactions between them. The rich fertility of China's plains and a culture of uncommon resilience and political acumen had enabled China to remain unified over much of a two-millennia period and to exercise considerable political economic, and cultural influence -- even when it was militarily weak by conventional standards.
The "rise" of China to eminence in the twenty-first century is not new, but reestablishes historic patterns. What is distinctive is that China has returned as both the inheritor of an ancient civilization and as a contemporary great power on the Westphalian model. It combines the legacies of "All Under Heaven," technocratic modernization, and an unusually turbulent twentieth-century national quest for a synthesis between the two.
The more sweeping the changes the revolutionary seeks to bring about, the more he encounters resistance, not necessarily from ideological and political opponents but from the inertia of the familiar. The revolutionary prophet is ever tempted to defy his mortality by speeding up his timetable and multiplying the means of enforcing his vision. Mao launched his disastrous Great Leap Forward in 1958 to compel breakneck industrialization and the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge the ruling group to prevent its institutionalization in a decade-long ideological campaign that exiled a generation of educated youth to the countryside. Tens of millions died in pursuit of Mao's goals -- most eliminated without love or hatred, mobilized to foreshorten into one lifetime what had heretofore been considered a historical process.
A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck's nineteenth-century aphorism surely applies: "We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity." North Korea is ruled under no accepted principle of legitimacy, not even its claimed Communist one.
Chapter 7. "Acting for All Mankind": The UnitedStates and Its Concept of Order
Theodore Roosevelt: America as a World Power
It was probably inevitable that Roosevelt's attempt to preserve his legacy by running for a third term would destroy any chance for it. Tradition matters because it is not given to societies to proceed through history as if they had no past and as if every course of action were available to them. They may deviate from the previous trajectory only within a finite margin. The great statesmen act at the outer limit of that margin. If they fall short, the society stagnates. If they exceed it, they lose the capacity to shape posterity. Theodore Roosevelt was operating at the absolute margin of his society's capabilities.
Woodrow Wilson: America as the World's Conscience
The distinction Wilson made between alliances and collective security -- the key element of the League of Nations system -- was central to dilemmas that have followed ever since. An alliance comes about as an agreement on specific facts or expectations. It creates a formal obligation to act in a precise way in defined contingencies. It brings about a strategic obligation fulfillable in an agreed manner. It arises out of a consciousness of shared interests, and the more parallel those interests are, the more cohesive the alliance will be. Collective security, by contrast, is a legal construct addressed to no specific contingency. It defines no particular obligations except joint action of some kind when the rules of peaceful international order are violated. In practice, action must be negotiated from case to case. Alliances grow out of a consciousness of a defined common interest identified in advance. Collective security declares itself opposed to any aggressive conduct anywhere within the purview of the participating states.
They submitted an analysis to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee tracing the difference between historic alliances and the NATO treaty, which held that NATO was not concerned with the defense of territory (surely news to America's European allies). Its conclusion was that the North Atlantic Treaty "is directed against no one; it is directed solely against aggression. It seeks not to influence any shifting 'balance of power' but to strengthen the 'balance of principle.'"
Woodrow Wilson's ultimate greatness must be measured by the degree to which he rallied the tradition of American exceptionalism behind a vision that outlasted these shortcomings. He has been revered as a prophet toward whose vision America has judged itself obliged to aspire.
The genius of this vision has been its ability to harness American idealism in the service of great foreign policy undertakings in peacemaking, human rights, and cooperative problem-solving, and to imbue the exercise of American power with the hope for a better and more peaceful world. The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century's decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.
Franklin Roosevelt and the New World Order
Coming from the academy, Wilson had relied on building an international order on essentially philosophical principles. Having emerged from the manipulatory maelstrom of American politics, Roosevelt placed great reliance on the management of personalities: The kind of world order which we the peace - loving Nations must achieve, must depend essentially on friendly human relations, on acquaintance, on tolerance, on unassailable sincerity and good will and good faith.
In Stalin's worldview, decisions were determined by objective factors, not personal relationships. Thus the goodwill of wartime alliance was "subjective" and superseded by the new circumstances of victory. The goal of Soviet strategy would be to achieve the maximum security for the inevitable showdown. This meant pushing the security borders of Russia as far west as possible and weakening the countries beyond these security borders through Communist parties and covert operations.
Great leaders often embody great ambiguities. When he was assassinated, was President John F. Kennedy on the verge of expanding America's commitment to Vietnam or withdrawing from it? Naivete was not, generally speaking, a charge Roosevelt's critics made against him.
Chapter 8. The United States: Ambivalent Superpower
Strategies of a Cold War Order
With the structure (NATO) in place, the historical debates about the ultimate purpose of American foreign policy reemerged. Were the goals of the new alliance moral or strategic? Coexistence or the adversary's collapse? Did America seek conversion of the adversary or evolution? Conversion entails inducing an adversary to break with its past in one comprehensive act or gesture. Evolution involves a gradual process, a willingness to pursue ultimate foreign policy goals in imperfect stages and to deal with the adversary as a reality while this process is going on. What course would American choose? Exhibiting its historical ambivalence on the subject, America chose both.
The Korean War
On one occasion, an eminent Chinese told me that letting Stalin lead Mao into authorizing the Korean War was the only strategic mistake Mao ever made because, in the end, the Korean War delayed Chinese unification by a century in that it led to America's commitment to Taiwan. Be that as it may, the origin of the Korean Was was less a Sino-SOviet conspiracy against America than a three- cornered maneuver for dominance within the Communist international order, with Kim Il-sung driving up the bidding to gain support for a program of conquest whose global consequences in the end surprised all of the main participants.
In the negotiations, as in the origins of the war, two different approaches to strategy confronted each other. The Truman administration expressed the American view about the relationship of power and legitimacy: War and Peace were distinct phases of policy; when negotiations started, the application of force ceased, and diplomacy took over. Each activity was thought to operate by its own rules. Force was needed to produce the negotiation, then it had to stand aside; the outcome of the negotiation would depend on an atmosphere of goodwill, which would be destroyed by military pressure.
The Chinese view was the exact opposite. War and peace were two sides of the same coin. Negotiations were an extension of the battlefield. De-escalation by the adversary was a sign of weakness to be exploited by pressing one's own military advantage. The Communist side used the stalemate to enhance the discomfort of the American public with an inconclusive war.
Vietnam and the Breakdown of the National Consensus
As the containment policy migrated into the fringes of Asia, it encountered conditions quite opposite of those in Europe. The Marshall Plan and Nato succeeded because a political tradition of government remained in Europe, even if impaired. Economic recovery could restore political vitality. But in much of the underdeveloped world, the political framework was fragile or new, and economic aid led to corruption as frequently as to stability.
In one eighteen-month period, during 1972-1973, he brought about the end of the Vietnam War, an opening to China, a summit with the Soviet Union even while escalating the military effort in response to a North Vietnamese offensive, the switch of Egypt from a Soviet ally to close cooperation with the United States, two disengagement agreements in the Middle East -- one between Israel and Egypt, the other with Syria and the start of the European Security Conference, whose outcome over the long term severely weakened Soviet control of Eastern Europe.
The Purpose and the Possible
The essence of historical events is rarely fully apparent to those living through them.
这段对美国21世纪的行动与动机分析的非常棒：There is a special character to a naationa that proclaims as war aims not only to punish its enemies but to improve the lives of their people -- that has sought victory not in domination but in sharing the fruits of liberty. America would not be true to itself if it abandoned this essential idealism. Nor would it reassure friends (or win over adversaries) by setting aside such a core aspect of its national experience. But to be effective, these as［irational aspects of policy must be paired with an unsentimental analysis of underlying factors, including the cultural and geopolitical configuration of other regions and the dedication and resourcefulness of adversaries opposing American interests and values. America's moral aspirations need to be combined with an approach that takes into account the strategic element of policy in terms the America people can support and sustain through multiple political cycles.
Chapter 9. Technology, Equilibrium, and Human Consciousness
Every age has its leitmotif, a set of beliefs that explains the universe, that inspires or consoles the individual by providing an explanation for the multiplicity of events impinging on him. In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was nationalism combined with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the governing concepts of our age.
Is the destructiveness of modern weapons technology so vast that a common fear may unite mankind in order to eliminate the scourge of war? Or will possession of these weapons create a permanent foreboding? Will the rapidity and scope of communication break down barriers between societies and individuals and provide transparency of such magnitude that the age-old dreams of a human community will come into being? Or will the opposite happen: Will mankind, amidst weapons of mass destruction, networked transparency, and the absence of privacy, propel itself into a world without limits or order, careening through crises without comprehending them?
When, in the 1950s, Mao spoke of China's willingness to accept sacrificesof hundreds of millions in a nuclear war, it was widely treated in the West as a symptom of emotional or ideological derangement. It was, in fact, probably the consequences of a sober calculation that to withstand military capacities beyond previous human experience, a country needed to demonstrate a willingness to sacrigice beyond human comprehension. The shock in Western and Warsaw Pact capitals at these statements ignored that the superpowers' own concepts of deterrence rested on apocalyptic risks.
The nuclear balance has produced a paradoxical impact on the international order. The historic balance of power had facilitated the Western domination of the then-colonial world; by contrast, the nuclear order -- the West's own creation -- had the opposite effect. The margin of military superiority of advanced countries over the developing countries has been incomparably larger than at any previous period in history. But because so much of their military effort has been devoted to nuclear weapons, whose use in anything but the gravest crisis was implicitly discounted, regional powers could redress the overall military balance by a strategy geared to prolonging any war beyond the willingness of the "advanced" country's public to sustain it -- as France experienced in Algeria and Vietnam; the United States in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
The Human Factor 不同于之前对历史的总结，下面基辛格写出了非常多很有思考价值的话：
The policymaker undertakes multiple tasks, many of them shaped by his society's history and culture. He must first of all make an analysis of where his socirty finds itself. This is inherently where the past meets the future; therefore such a judgment cannot be made without an instinct for both of these elements. He must then try to understand where that trajectory will take him and his society. He must resist the temptation to identify policymaking with projecting the familiar into the future, for on that road lies stagnation and then decline. To undertake a journey on a road never before traveled requires charcter and courage: character because the choice is not obvious; courage because the road will be lonely at first.
Philosophers and poets have long separated the mind's purview into three components: information, knowledge and wisdom. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance, analysis, and interpretation -- at least in the foreign policy world -- depend on context and relevance. As ever more issues are treated as if of a factual nature, the premise becomes established that for every question there must be a researchable answer, that problems and solutions are not so much to be thought through as to be "looked up." But in the relations between states -- and in many other fields -- information, to be truly useful, must be placed within a broader context of history and experience to emerge as actual knowledge. And a society is fortunate if its leaders can occasionally rise to the level of wisdom.
The concept of truth is being relativized and individualized -- losing its universal character. Information is presented as being free. In fact, the recipient pays for it by supplying data to be exploited by persons unknown to him, in ways that further shape the information being offered to him.
非常值得思考：Whatever the utility of this approach in the realm of consumption, its effect on policymaking may prove transformative. The difficult choices of policymaking are always close. Where, in a world of ubiquitous social networks, does the individual find the space to develop the fortitude to make decisions that, by definition, cannot be based on a consensus? The adagy that prophets are not recognized in their own time is true in that they operate beyond conventional conception -- that is what made them prophets. In our era, the lead time for prophets might have disappeared altogether. The pursuit of transparency and connectivity in all aspects of existence, by destroying privacy, inhibits the development of personalities with the strength to take lonely decisions.
整整一周的时间才看完，也算不易，日后读一遍中文版也许会有新的收获~
