How to Fix America's Foreign Policy

Henry Kissinger’s new book should be read as a salvo in the ongoing foreign policy struggle for Barack Obama’s soul. It is a book of many parts, but the final third portrays the United States since the cold war as an “ambivalent superpower” oscillating between the “realism” of Theodore Roosevelt and the “idealism” of Woodrow Wilson—a deft and deceptive manipulation of history. In a book in which Kissinger repeatedly praises the craft and subtle strategies of statesmen through the ages, from Richelieu to Metternich, it is impossible to believe that the master statesman himself does not have a more immediate goal in mind than another disquisition on how the world is to order itself.