The West needs a new Henry Kissinger

A few years ago, a senior and old-fashioned civil servant startled a dinner table by announcing that he was a Freudian. “Nothing to do with sex,” he hastily announced. “On that, I think he writes some fair-old nonsense. But he’s good on politics and government. Think about it: the id and the ego – the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Most politicians are constantly tempted to indulge their ids. As officials, it’s our job to prevent over-indulgence.”

I would like to ask him how he would classify Boris Johnson, who proves that it is possible to have a rampant id and a giant super-ego (though that may not be the correct Freudian usage of super-ego). But in general, the mandarin had a point, as the Tory leadership contest has demonstrated. I detect a growing leadership fatigue, especially among the high-minded (yes, I do have some high-minded friends).

No one would have gathered from the general tenor of the Tory debates that we are living in a dangerous world and that the West has not been weaker since the 1930s, when we did not have to deal with nuclear threats and other methods of disrupting an advanced society. A friend of mine recently asked a chap near the top of the CIA what would wake him at four in the morning and leave him unable to get back to sleep. “The thought of a cyber Pearl Harbor,” he replied. I wonder whether our civil defence authorities would agree and if so, what they are doing about it.

As well as leadership fatigue, we are witnessing Ukraine fatigue. Remember the early days, when the West girded its loins. Increased defence spending, weapons shipments, moves towards energy self-sufficiency: with their armoured column stymied on the road to Kyiv, the Russians were unpleasantly surprised and there were suggestions that the Chinese too were taken aback. Suddenly, the humiliation of the scuttle from Kabul did not seem to be a permanent statement of Western defeatism.

But is that still the case? One can understand why the Russians and the Chinese might have concluded that they could always out-resolve us: that today’s democratic electorates have short attention spans and that when they choose their leaders, there is a tendency to be substance-averse.

It will not be easy to induce Moscow and Beijing to revise that judgment. “Speak softly and carry a big stick” – Theodore Roosevelt’s maxim is still one of the best guides to wisdom in foreign affairs. But in recent years there has been a tendency to replace measured speech with wild and whirling words while the stick has been sold off to fund the peace dividend.
To put this right, it would help if we could discover a new Henry Kissinger. To adapt Wordsworth: “Kissinger, thou shouldn’t be young at this hour. The West hath need of thee.”

Someone once tried to persuade David Cameron to describe himself as a neo-Kissingerian realist. Although one can understand why he was not hired as a speech-writer, he had a point, and realism was at the core of the Cameron approach to foreign affairs.

That was especially true of China. The photograph of the then PM buying Xi Jinping a pint in an Oxfordshire pub may now arouse laughter, yet there was no reason not to try. Richard Nixon was never accused of a naive and sentimental approach to geopolitics, but in the late ’60s he concluded that we had to try to entice China into an international diplomatic and economic order. The alternative was to leave it on the outside, resentful and disruptive, a threat to its neighbours and to the wider world.

There was a time when the “Nixon to China” approach seemed to be working. China was becoming a growth-ocracy, using higher living standards to win its people’s loyalty. There were, of course, problems. The Chinese did not understand the ethos of free trade. The belt and road initiative owed more to mercantilism and indeed to neo-imperialism than to Adam Smith. That said, it might have been assumed that Xi would be at least a cautious moderniser. Alas, this was not so. He proved impervious to good English bitter. The treatment of Hong Kong owed nothing to economics and everything to barbarism.

Yet there will come a moment for a renewed attempt at constructive engagement and that must also be true of Russia, though obviously not under Putin. The difficulty is self-evident. How can we open diplomatic channels without leading these current adversaries to assume that we are doing so out of weakness? They have to be encouraged to believe that if they insist on a new Cold War, they shall have one. We would all be happier, richer – and safer – if that could be avoided, but if they reject detente, so be it. They should also be reminded – in private – that their societies are more fragile than ours.

Not that we should take infinite comfort at the thought of a crumbling society with a nuclear arsenal, but there it is. So we need a grand Kissingerian global strategy. Failing that in any short order, a good American President would be a considerable help.

There is little that we on this side of the Atlantic can do to expedite that, but the Tory party’s members can do their bit. In a brief lapse into Freudian terminology, choose ego over id. In normal English, choose the more grown-up candidate.