A bit of a mess

World Order. By Henry Kissinger. Penguin Press; 420 pages; $36. Allen Lane; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

DESPITE being out of office for almost four decades, Henry Kissinger—who left America’s State Department in 1977—still has remarkable influence. Reading this book, you can see why. As Russia plays grandmother’s footsteps in Ukraine, the Middle East falls prey to anarchy and China tests its growing strength, Mr Kissinger analyses the central problem for international relations today: the need for a new world order. He never quite says so, but he is deeply pessimistic.

“World Order” sets out how the modern state arose almost by accident, from the interminable warfare of early 17th-century Europe. Worn down, the architects of the Peace of Westphalia agreed to disagree. Each state pledged to accept the realities of its neighbours’ values. There was no single prevailing truth. Ambition would be kept in check through an equilibrium of power. As imperialism receded, and colonies turned the arguments of Westphalian self-determination against their distant rulers, the European concept of international order spread until, with American sponsorship, it was eventually enshrined in the apparatus of Bretton Woods and the UN.

Today this order is under attack from all sides. Europe and America have come to demand that states everywhere observe a Western set of liberal values. European power, diminished by two world wars, has disappeared down the rabbit-hole of European Union integration. America, still the pre-eminent superpower, may be able to prevent geopolitics from spinning out of control, but it has become reluctant to act as enforcer and balancer. Asia contains rising states, including India and China, which have no tradition of thinking about power in Westphalian terms and may want to revise the system. And in the Middle East, rampaging Islamists are committing mass murder to impose a caliphate run according to the rules of the Koran.

Mr Kissinger is often presented as an arch-realist: an adherent of the supposedly sophisticated idea that foreign policy is purely about power and interests, and that values and morals are for the feeble-minded. But his world view is more subtle. If a system is built on power, but lacks legitimacy, then it will destroy itself; if it asserts moral truths, but lacks the power to enforce them, then it will unravel. The problem today is that from the perspective of almost all sides, power and legitimacy are out of kilter. The West cannot enforce its disputed view of a liberal order. China may not get what it thinks its growing wealth and power should command. Russia sees Western norms as a Trojan horse for the expansion of Western power—at its own expense. The Islamists reject the whole idea of a temporal, secular order.

What is the solution? Mr Kissinger sketches his answer in only four brief pages. It consists of a vague appeal to strike a new balance between power and legitimacy—which, earlier in “World Order”, he acknowledges is very hard, especially on a world scale, in societies struggling with the anarchic effects of new media.

Mr Kissinger is now a wealthy consultant. His failure to drive the bad news home is like his habit of sugaring his criticism of living statesmen with compliments that are, presumably, designed to spare their client’s embarrassment. (“I want to express here my continuing respect and personal affection for President George W. Bush”, he writes, “who guided America with courage, dignity and conviction in an unsteady time.”) That is a pity, as the wit, clarity and concision of his earlier chapters on Europe, America and jihadism are bracing. Perhaps, though, Mr Kissinger supposes that people can read between the lines: you do not need to be Metternich to grasp that this elder statesman thinks the future is bleak.