{"id":88426,"date":"2024-08-20T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-19T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=88426"},"modified":"2024-08-19T21:24:44","modified_gmt":"2024-08-19T11:24:44","slug":"conception-and-conjecture-in-statecraft-insights-from-henry-kissinger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/conception-and-conjecture-in-statecraft-insights-from-henry-kissinger\/","title":{"rendered":"Conception and conjecture in statecraft: insights from Henry Kissinger"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/figure>\n

Henry Kissinger made his name in the 1950s as a scholar of \u2018statesmen\u2019, always using the masculine noun.\u00a0He was especially interested in the intellectual \u2018conceptions\u2019 that guide the actions of statesmen, and how they have to use \u2018conjecture\u2019 in the absence of certainty.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Before he was appointed in January 1969 to be the United States national security adviser, Kissinger wrote a number of iconoclastic papers that still speak to us today.\u00a0Thanks to Niall Ferguson\u2019s biography, <\/span>Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist<\/span><\/i> (2015), we have been reintroduced to those papers.\u00a0While they should be seen for what they are\u2014the thoughts of a brilliant but self-regarding intellectual\u2014they nonetheless contain enduring insights on statecraft and policymaking.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Among the insights relevant today is that the essence of ‘statesmanship\u2019 is to be found in having the courage and the character to take consequential decisions and act boldly, when opportunities and threats are of necessity only incompletely glimpsed, and when probabilities and consequences cannot be calculated precisely. The ultimate test of such statesmanship is to grapple with the prospect of war\u2014both deterring it and being ready for it\u2014and to persuade the public of the conception on which the nation\u2019s grand strategy is founded.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The system that empowers such a statesman needs to support this conjectural thinking and the statesman\u2019s ability to communicate the possible consequences\u2014both of action and inaction\u2014to the public. Bureaucracy, for Kissinger, leads to decisions being avoided until a crisis, or some other imperative, forces an issue, when events have largely removed ambiguity. Such crisis is also the moment when the scope for creative action is certain to be at a minimum.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When the scope for creative action is greatest, by contrast, bureaucracies are typically anxious that knowledge upon which to base action is minimal, or ambiguous.\u00a0As a result, they are hidebound and inert. When relevant knowledge becomes available to a standard that is deemed to be acceptable to a risk-averse bureaucracy, the capacity of the statesman to affect events is usually at a minimum.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For Kissinger, the best statecraft involves acting successfully in accordance with a long term conception. This means not just recognising the trends of the times, but the act of conceiving an optimal world order, and then harnessing the trends of the times in the pursuit of that conception. For Kissinger, thought and action has to be integrated. That is why, for him, the term \u2018conception\u2019 means, simultaneously, the mind\u2019s capacity to conceive and imagine; the purposive act of devising a design; and the resultant idea that can both explain a reality and inform actions within that reality, such as the idea of a balance of power.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, while Kissinger lauded the virtuosity of the statesman who is able to turn ideas into action, he also understood that they are nonetheless prisoners of their time. This is especially so in relation to the \u2018problem of politics\u2019, as Kissinger termed it.\u00a0Statesmen are always political leaders, and as such are constrained by the prevailing domestic structure of politics.\u00a0As politicians, their focus, especially in modern democracies, is on the domestic needs and aspirations of their citizens, who hold the ultimate power over their ability to function\u2014namely, being able to deny them office.\u00a0Issues of statecraft typically hold no interest for parochially minded citizens, who prefer tranquillity over foreign entanglements.\u00a0The politician-as-statesman who outruns the people will fail in achieving a domestic consensus, however wise their policies.\u00a0 Kissinger was, of course, writing during the Vietnam War.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Given their personal traits (always seeking political power, ever calculating their electoral interests), politicians are too often inclined to use known methods\u2014those they use to achieve high office\u2014when they turn their hand to statecraft.\u00a0Such methods are, however, often ill-suited for this purpose.\u00a0Domestic levers and tools, and domestic experience, are not applicable when dealing with international situations, which are often far removed from the typical politician\u2019s expertise and knowledge.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The civic consciousness of the politician\u2014which Kissinger saw in the lawyers and businesspeople who went into government service in the 1950s and 1960s, and which today might also be seen in those who go into national politics through university politics, local government, community activism, and so on\u2014is often ill-suited to comprehending and acting in the world of diplomacy, alliances, and war.\u00a0Here, completely different conceptions are required.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The politician, who should be no stranger to making difficult decisions, finds the contingency of statecraft especially challenging and unnerving.\u00a0Here success depends on making conjectural estimates about a future in the absence of comprehensive data, which are more readily available in domestic policy areas.\u00a0For instance, deterrence aims to cause something not to happen.\u00a0Its success can only be measured conjecturally, and over a longer time horizon than the typical span of political achievement.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We come here to the second of Kissinger\u2019s key notions, \u2018conjecture\u2019.\u00a0Conjecture requires an ability and willingness to project beyond what is known, with often very little to guide the statesman, apart from convictions, common sense, and historical perspective.\u00a0The problem of conjecture means that actions have to be geared to assessments that cannot be proved when they are made.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In this regard, Kissinger was scathing of bureaucracies, and especially the US departments and agencies of the 1950s and 1960s.\u00a0Bureaucracies typically resist conjecture.\u00a0Decisions that need to be made do not typically get considered until they appear as an administrative imperative. Perhaps departments and agencies cannot agree, major budget or procurement decisions have to be taken, international visits or meetings loom, and so on.\u00a0 Statecraft, however, requires conjecture about the future, and the consideration of hypothetical cases. Administrators are too busy with actual cases to devote time to what they consider to be hypothetical cases.\u00a0They tolerate policy planning only insofar as it has no practical consequence.\u00a0Studying a policy problem at lower organisational levels becomes a substitute for coming to grips with it.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, the workload in managing the bureaucratic machine means that even when the most profound issues are surfaced, they are reduced to brief, focused discussions in committees that are overly reliant on the consideration of succinct papers and presentations, which inevitably brings a reductive approach to inherently complex problems. (Kissinger wrote presciently about this problem in 1959.)\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Kissinger was especially scathing of policymaking-by-committee.\u00a0In any committee process, the quest for consensus becomes the test of the validity of ideas.\u00a0Committees act as consumers of ideas rather than creators of them.\u00a0 Policymaking-by-committee involves the distillation of differences that are finely balanced, where the merits seem fairly even.\u00a0 However, this is likely to mean that bolder ideas have already been discarded before the commencement of the committee stage proper, because when consensus, conformity, and collegiality are privileged as an absolute value, boldness of conception, risk-taking, and daring are filtered out, like the outlier scores of judges in a sporting competition.\u00a0Policy thus becomes an averaging activity, on the assumption that the correct course is likely to be found in the moderation of already moderated viewpoints.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The bureaucrat is a neutral personality in this process, neither brimming with ideas, nor given to boldness of action.\u00a0When policymaking becomes an administrative process\u2014rather than a creative one, characterised by virtuosity\u2014it can only move at the pace of the conversation.\u00a0The worst of all possible worlds is thus achieved.\u00a0The significance of issues is not appreciated until it is too late.\u00a0 Then events force decisions to be hurriedly taken under pressure, which extinguishes the opportunity for creative action.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, Kissinger thought that \u2018the intellectual\u2019 could assist.\u00a0Whereas bureaucracy involves projecting the familiar into the future, rather than risking new departures, the intellectual can provide \u2018boldness of conception\u2019, through subject mastery, analysis, conceptual frameworks, analogies from history, and so on\u2014all of which are likely to be more useful than the inert thinking of the bureaucracy.\u00a0 He was concerned, however, that once drawn in\u2014and typically too late in the process\u2014intellectuals could find themselves burdened by having to operate at the hurried pace of executive action, which by that stage is often meaningless and ineffectual.\u00a0The intellectual\u2019s task is to provide creative perspectives, without becoming as harassed as those they advise, while at the same time avoiding being entranced by an academic quest for universality, which leads to dogmatism in the gritty and parochial world of imperfect policy choices.\u00a0They have to be brilliant and practical, at the same time.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Looking back on these insights, we can appreciate their force without accepting them in full.\u00a0 Not all committees make, or recommend, bad decisions.\u00a0 Not all brilliant mavericks are correct.\u00a0There are many bureaucrats who, when enabled and supported, are able to engage in both bold thinking and daring action. There is an intrinsic value in the process of orderly and collective deliberation, even where some participants are engaged uncritically, perhaps in the pursuit of the sectional interests of their departments.\u00a0A leadership style that is cautious, prudent, analytical, and geared to the moderation of ideas and policies has its place, if only to temper and head off the unforeseen and unintended consequences of bold conceptions. Think here of Churchill and the Dardanelles campaign of 1915.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The more important issue, and the challenge at the core of Kissinger\u2019s critique of the feckless politician and the inert bureaucrat, is the question of how best to gear the decision process such that effective action can be taken conjecturally ahead of time\u2014that is,\u00a0when still more analysis, and more bureaucratic steps and meetings, would not add to the prospects of bettering the outcome and might even open the door to worse.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Kissinger\u2019s last book, <\/span>Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy<\/span><\/i> (2022), written after a lifetime of engagement with these issues, provides a more rounded view than the papers that he wrote before he went into the arena himself in January 1969.\u00a0In his compelling portraits of Adenauer, de Gaulle, Nixon, Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, and Thatcher, he focused on the \u2018courage\u2019 that they displayed in making bold and daring decisions, and the traits of \u2018character\u2019 that enabled them to hold to difficult courses of action.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Grappling with the issue of war is perhaps the greatest test of the politician as \u2018statesman\u2019\u2014that is, acting to avoid war without compromising vital national interests, while being prepared, if required, to fight one with resolve.\u00a0Few come equipped for this test with the mettle of Churchill, de Gaulle, or Eisenhower\u2014all of whom were, of course, soldiers.\u00a0In the Australian context, Curtin is considered to be someone who met the test of wartime leadership.\u00a0However, his decision space was significantly constrained.\u00a0Australia was marginalised as the US war machine sprang into action after the attack on Pearl Harbor. MacArthur treated Curtin with respect, and accommodated his concerns, but not to the point of impairing the US campaign in the Pacific.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Further, while venerated as a symbol of an independent military action in the defence of Australia, the Battle for Kokoda, properly understood, was in fact a heroic action in a subsidiary area of operation in a wider US-led theatre-wide war.\u00a0As David Horner has shown in his masterful account, <\/span>The War Game: Australian War Leadership from Gallipoli to Iraq <\/span><\/i>(2022), Australian strategic and war leadership has always been a function of alliance constructs and imperatives.\u00a0In the main, Australian politicians have had to make difficult and solemn decisions about whether to go to wars that were being conducted by others, and to what level of commitment.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Australian political leaders have never been tested in the way that a modern-day war in the Indo-Pacific might yet test the nation.\u00a0While the Second World War comes closest, its lessons are principally concerned with what happened when a nation in denial, as Australia was from at least 1937, had to scramble suddenly to ready itself for a foreseeable war without having an opportunity to contribute to allied strategic decision-making, much less being able to influence it.\u00a0While the times do not call, yet at least, for a Churchill or a de Gaulle, they certainly cry out for more than the inert leadership that was demonstrated by the Lyons government in 1937 when, in the face of the formation of the Axis, and Imperial Japan\u2019s full-scale invasion of China, too little was done while there was still time.\u00a0Today, were a Churchill or a de Gaulle to stride onto the national stage, a puzzled and bemused population would wonder what the spectacle was all about.\u00a0Some would protest at the beating of the \u2018drums of war\u2019. However, having a Joseph Lyons on the stage would be far worse.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Drawing on Kissinger\u2019s lifetime of insights, how might the dilemma be navigated?\u00a0How best do we sensibly prepare for a war, while lessening its risk and, in doing so, avoid both the performative affectation that would be involved in channelling Churchill or de Gaulle on the one hand, or the listless inertia of Lyons on the other?\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Kissinger\u2019s insights into statecraft and policymaking, and specifically conjecture and conception, can assist.\u00a0Leaden bureaucratic processes have to be cast aside, for the reasons that Kissinger dissected.\u00a0Today\u2019s politicians will need to display the courage and character of the successful \u2018statesmen\u2019 of the past.\u00a0This will involve devoting a great deal of time to thinking conjecturally about the most consequential strategic problem of the age\u2014the possibility of war in the Indo-Pacific.\u00a0Hypothetical cases will need to be considered, using wargaming techniques and simulated decision exercises.\u00a0Urgent decisions will need to be taken on how to best prepare for war, while working at the same time to lessen its risk.\u00a0Such decisions will have to be based on assessments that could not be proved, for now.\u00a0 Intellectuals could have great impact here, as the defence intellectuals of the Australian National University\u2019s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre had in the 1970s and 1980s.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These decisions will need to be carefully explained by the government, and articulated with clarity\u2014not through a patchwork of meaningless euphemisms to be found in government talking points.\u00a0This could be done with proper regard to military secrecy.\u00a0Such purposeful public explanation would maintain optionality, leverage and ambiguity, where this suited our interests. Having a clear conception of Australia\u2019s grand strategy would be critically important in this process.\u00a0Current defence and foreign policy constructs are too rooted in earlier conceptions such as defence self-reliance, or \u2018security in Asia\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One aspect of Australia\u2019s strategic dilemma\u2014and apparent response\u2014especially cries out for the touch of a modern Kissinger, namely, what is the conception of how Australia sees US military power being projected from and through its territory?\u00a0Future historians will have to reconstruct a remarkable change through which Australia is being transformed, in fits and starts, into a secure operating base for US military power projection against China.\u00a0This transition from the declared policy of defence self-reliance to one of alliance-based power projection and, potentially, warfighting is as extraordinary in its steady realisation as it is breathtaking in its lack of transparency.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Not that the elements have been withheld from the public.\u00a0Since 2014, there has been a steady stream of bare announcements regarding initiatives to enable the US to operate militarily from or through Australia, across sea, land and air.\u00a0What would not be clear to future historians from those announcements was the extent to which this was done purposefully, according to a clear conception.\u00a0Those historians, working with the records, might\u2014like archaeologists of knowledge\u2014have to discover a conception, if it existed.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

US Congressman Michael McCaul is not in doubt.\u00a0 He told <\/span>The Weekend Australian <\/span><\/i>(17 August 2024) that Australia has become \u2018the central base of operations\u2019 for deterrence of China militarily.\u00a0Even if one disagrees strongly with him on the policy merits of this change, one can only agree with Paul Keating that this is being done without adequate debate.\u00a0On questions such as the purpose of providing a base for these US forces or, relatedly, how the ANZUS Treaty might apply in the event of attacks on US forces in the \u2018Pacific Area\u2019\u2014a term that is used, but not defined, in the Treaty\u2014there have been no meaningful ministerial statements in the Parliament.\u00a0With every AUSMIN communique, yet more building blocks of this new approach are announced.\u00a0What is the underlying conception?\u00a0 We are not told.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bringing the public along in relation to fundamental changes in the character of a military alliance is crucial, and especially so when there is no obvious threatening neighbour\u2014something that focuses the mind in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Israel, Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states, Finland, Sweden, and elsewhere.\u00a0For many Australians, local defence and an avoidance of distant entanglements would make a great deal of sense.\u00a0The rationale for military alliances, and their evolving character, have to be explained, especially when an alliance seeks to achieve strategic effects over vast, oceanic distances, as distinct from providing protection against a threatening neighbour, of which Australia has none.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

No matter how wise the policy, public acceptance is crucial, and never more so than when a nation faces the prospect of war. Given the decline in historical knowledge, the atomising effects of technology, the fragmentation of the media, and what Kissinger termed the \u2018impugning\u2019 effect of identity politics\u2014which undermines national self-perception\u2014public discussion is becoming increasingly vacuous, and unconcerned, in meaningful ways, with substantive issues.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Unless courage and character are shown by our \u2018statesmen\u2019 in addressing the related issues of a possible war in the Indo-Pacific, and a changing US alliance, an anxious Australian public\u2014unconvinced by vacuous euphemisms, and apprehensive about a faraway war\u2014might one day voice its opposition to Australia\u2019s contributing to the military deterrence of China.<\/span><\/p>\n

No matter how brilliant their conjectures and conceptions, or how wise their policies, the \u2018statesman\u2019 cannot outrun the people.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Henry Kissinger made his name in the 1950s as a scholar of \u2018statesmen\u2019, always using the masculine noun.\u00a0He was especially interested in the intellectual \u2018conceptions\u2019 that guide the actions of statesmen, and how they have …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1703,"featured_media":88428,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2047,1123,346,1110,207],"class_list":["post-88426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-australia-us-relations","tag-henry-kissinger","tag-leadership","tag-winston-churchill","tag-world-war-ii"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nConception and conjecture in statecraft: insights from Henry Kissinger | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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