Portrays six postwar leaders whose statesmanship transformed the international (or at least regional balance of power) so as to promote stability and domestic order by establishing common purpose (not factional triumph). Framing the era as successor to the ‘second 30 Years War’, thereby sidelining the ‘ideological’ contest between Communism and liberalism, and establishing a typology of responsible and reckless politicians (i.e., statesmen and prophets), Kissinger asserts leaders must address tragedy – the nation’s history and limitations. Later chapters underline the importance of incrementalism – raison d’état trumps ideas – although why de Gaulle in particular is not a prophet (of grandeur) but only a self-appointed exponent of lost glory is unaddressed. Leadership requires analysis, strategy, courage, and character (possibly religious). The author disdains the views of Reagan, the hidden antagonist, which happened to sideline the author and his considerable sense of self-importance.

Adenauer: perhaps the best chapter, demonstrating his success in establishing Germany’s contrition, which certainly was to precede reunification and possibly not come until the USSR’s decline, and commitment to harmonious Europe. Christianity is the source of European civilization. Adenauer opposed Kurt Schumacher’s leftist populism, submissive to the ‘will of the people’, which raised the specter of interwar fanaticism. Suez showed America would not inevitably protect Europe, which therefore must unite; Cuba demonstrated further divergence.

De Gaulle: where Churchill saw his role as fulfilling English (British) history, de Gaulle his as resurrecting. attempting to recover historic grandeur, the failed quest for European preeminence (counterpoised by British commitment to the balance of power). He was very effective at persuading the public of a vision of independence with little connection to reality. However, the more pronounced the Cold War challenge, the more supportive of the Atlantic alliance (e.g., Cuba).

Nixon: governing at a time when (liberal) elites had lost faith in national interest as a legitimate or even moral end of policy, he sought to retore Theodore Roosevelt’s balance of power, and ‘never succumbed to the conceit of leadership’ as personal agency. Sometimes rambling in defense of his own role, Kissinger nonetheless makes a fair point that the US was excoriated for not interceding in Bangladesh even while condemned for warring in Vietnam. The liberal consensus arrived at the dubious view that ‘bad’ regimes will collapse if only pushed; friction results from ‘misunderstandings’; a Kantian rules-based order is inexorable. In this sense, Kissinger’s incrementalism is a middle ground. Nonetheless, his understanding of American exceptionalism is poor, overlooking liberalism as its basis in favor of identity and geography, with a dash of natural law.

Sadat: the Six Day War dramatized the danger of placing pan Arabism in front of the Egyptian national interest (for which he had been imprisoned) in the Mediterranean and world system. Breaking with Nasserite orthodoxy could only be sustained by continuing progress: Sadat was the closest of these half-dozen to a prophet. America isn’t the Middle East’s mediator but a benevolent power, given to republicanism as well as its economic interests (e.g., oil, shipping.) NB: the UN condemned Camp David for ignoring the resolution of Palestine, voting against 102-37, an example of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

Lee: Singapore required growth to sustain its population, domestic (cultural) cohesion, and a nimble foreign policy balanced among Russia, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Civil services were famously scrutinized for corruption, with salaries pegged to 80 percent of the private sector; the army made small but professional (with all subject to reserve service); and racial classification abjured. ‘It is only when you offer a man – without distinctions based on ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and other differences – a chance of belonging to this great human community, that you offer him a peaceful way forward to progress and to a higher level of human life’ (p. 295). And: ‘Certain basics about human nature do not change. Man needs a certain sense of moral right and wrong. There is such a thing called evil, and it is not a result of being a victim of society. You are just an evil man, prone to do evil things, and you have to be stopped from doing them’ (p. 304). Is technocracy not an ideology? Kissinger elides the question.

Thatcher: a ‘conviction’ leader who fought the battle of ideas but not to the ends of imposition, as did the Communists, and her achievement was to make the ‘middle ground’ see her view. She believed in international law up to the point where sovereign states cede their moral authority to the UN: the Falklands reasserted the validity of territorial sovereignty, as opposed to national interest (masquerading as ideology) and as an alternate to the post (anti) colonial quest for rules. Disraeli saw German unification as a greater political event than the French Revolution. Thatcher’s opposition to reunification stemmed from here personal experience of World War II, and her antagonism to the proto-European Union on grounds of its transformation from a trading community to socialist statism.

Western elites have moved from a public-minded aristocracy, embodying the virtues of their nation-states, to a meritocracy strayed into a vague internationalism, technocracy (Lee?), and class interest.