With all due respect Professor, there is just too much irony in a paragraph focused on both election influence and the things that made Clinton unpopular not to respond - particularly because I have never seen these two topics discussed together. With only another sentence or two you could have created a pretty neat endless loop of the two subjects by adding how unpopular - no, more like offensive that it was to many potential voters of all parties that she tied her cart to Henry Kissinger - seeking his approval, support, and mentorship (to include photo ops of her sitting in his lap) as the person she felt should help continue to shape foreign policy under her administration if elected. Well....he was certainly good at influencing foreign elections on a scale we have not seen since. But how many millions of innocent civilians across the globe might still be alive if he had only tried to use a $100,000 Facebook ad to influence those elections instead of the CIA.
There are at least two kinds of power theorists.
When transitioning from mechanical engineering, my undergraduate major, to social science I took graduate seminars at Harvard in the summers of '58 and '59. One of the four seminars was a course in Theories of International Politics taught by the great power theorist, Hans Morgenthau, whose writings along with others, including George Kennan, reoriented scholarship in the United States toward the quest for power in international politics as opposed to searchers for peace in the interwar period called "idealists." The latter emphasized international law. To some extent the orientation of scholars in this debate was opportunistic in that politicians were searching for academic support, as were the academics themselves, that fitted what were perceived as problems in their respective times. Isolationist America became globalistic. We are now undergoing another whim-wham because of the Iraq War and other interventions.
Morgenthau was always consistent in class and later when he publicly resigned as a consultant to the Pentagon during the Vietnam War years. He asserted there is a moral element in defining politics as the quest for power, "it must always be expedient." The Vietnam War was inexpedient from the standpoint of American national interest.
Kissinger's expedience, in retrospect so similar to Trump's, seems to apply only to what is opportunistic for him.
I think it was an in-depth article in the
New Yorker where we learn Kissinger's first contact with our military in Germany was as a translator or propagandist urging his fellow Germans to cooperate with the Allied forces. His rise to prominence as an advisor to the Pentagon came with his monumental,
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, in which he touted the use of these weapons in so-called "limited engagements." Later he disavowed such use. As National Security Advisor to Nixon and later Secretary of State, he advocated so-called "triangular" diplomacy among the three great powers, China, Russia, and the United States. He must have viewed himself as a kind of Metternich, the key player in his doctoral dissertation.
Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism
Raymond Garthoff was a key advisor to Kissinger during negotiations for SALTI. He's written books highly critical of Kissinger, especially his naiveté in dealing with the Russians. One easy verification is the assumption the Russians' understandable concern about nuclear weapons could be leveraged into a more moderate position on Vietnam, human rights, or interventions in Eastern Europe or the Middle East.
American foreign policy will continue to be mucked up by advisors who don't know excrement from Shinola, as my dad used to say, about foreign countries which follow
their own national interest. When great powers try to walk on water they should take a careful look at where the stones are in each step.
By default in homeland security we need the wisdom of teenagers to provide peace at home, first. Likewise the minor powers, like North and South Korea, are leading to peace on the peninsula by doing an end run around the United States, with the cooperation of China, Russia, and Japan. We should wish them well, but Pence seems to be upholding the status quo as a good soldier for Trump. We need a bully to bully. Unfortunately for Trump, it appears the new Kim is smarter about his country's national interest, and knows how to fold when the media is focussing world attention on the Olympics. A sideshow, maybe, but still....
My two graduate mentors in U.S. diplomatic history, one at Colgate, the other at Claremont, both stressed the U.S. hardly made a mistake in international affairs, until the Spanish American War. There must be a corollary to Lord Acton: Great powers are corrupted by their great power, it blinds them to reality. For them perception is not reality, to turn a phrase from an enlightened scholar.
