What Joe Biden Could Learn From Henry Kissinger

Last month, President Joe Biden went before the United Nations General Assembly in New York and declared the end of America’s forever wars in the Middle East. “As we close this period of relentless war,” he told the assembled representatives, “we’re opening a new era of relentless diplomacy.”

But Biden’s speech was accompanied by inauspicious diplomatic steps. First came the shambolic and ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan, which left America’s allies feeling that the United States had failed to consult adequately with those who had fought beside it before it rushed for the exits. Then Biden announced a new Indo-Pacific defense pact with Australia and the United Kingdom. France, America’s oldest ally, was shafted in the process, its $60 billion contract to build diesel submarines for the Australian navy abruptly canceled, its role and interests in the Indo-Pacific rendered irrelevant to the Asian power equilibrium that Biden was striving to shore up in the face of a growing challenge from China. Relentless diplomacy was beginning to look like ruthless diplomacy. Indeed, if the art of diplomacy is to tell a person to go to hell and make him look forward to the trip, French President Emmanuel Macron’s outrage suggested that Biden had failed to meet that standard.

Perhaps Biden could learn something from America’s most accomplished diplomat, Henry Kissinger. At 98, Kissinger remains a controversial figure, his realpolitik brand of balance-of-power diplomacy reviled by some for its application in Laos, Cambodia, Chile, and Bangladesh, but revered by others for achieving the opening with China and détente with the Soviet Union. All of those events, however, took place while Kissinger was serving as Richard Nixon's national security adviser. Only when Kissinger became