Kissinger and Today

Last week, Foreign Policy ran a long profile on Brett McGurk, the former United States National Security Council Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa. It was written with admiration, so the negative comments were attributed to vague detractors, and praise was specific. The piece chronicled McGurk’s rise to service under four presidents, from Supreme Court clerk on 9/11, wartime Iraq, four administrations across both parties, and a reputation as the (notorious?) architect of regional policy.

The profile has two glaring issues. First, while proposing him as “The Man Who Shaped Washington’s View of the Middle East”, the article praises him for understanding “American Power” while noting twice that he doesn’t know the region well, never learning the language, not following the Palestine issue, and seeing the Middle East through the lens of the Iraq war. So, to be a Middle East expert, you need to only understand projecting power? A disturbing takeaway.

The second issue is the one I want to address. Several times in the article, it mentions Realpolitik, either by McGurk’s own statements of it or people describing Washington’s MENA policy. It tries to paint McGurk as a figure with his own policy doctrine, when in fact he is merely the modern face of a decades-old inheritance. McGurk is simply the latest iteration of the Kissingerian playbook Washington has been using for the Middle East and, mistakenly, called Realpolitik.

This is mislabeling and, at worst, misinformation. Once we see the word correctly, we can see why the doctrine keeps failing, why it has reshaped Arab governance in its image, and how this intellectual foundation of Washington’s framework keeps failing

The Middle East has not been suffering from too much realpolitik. It has been suffering from a foreign policy that is not actually realpolitik at all.

Three Things You Should Know

1. The Realpolitik

Realpolitik has acquired its historic reputation and real-life practice through Otto von Bismarck, the 19th-century chancellor of the German Empire. Realpolitik took on a life of its own through the policies and strategies of Bismarck. The concept and the man cannot be separated.

Bismarck played an important role in the unification of Germany in 1871. However, the 19 years afterward are the ones to examine here. With a strong unified Germany under his control, Bismarck could have chosen to continue expanding and consolidating power across Europe. Instead, he spent his chancellorship building intricate alliances to prevent a possible European coalition provoked by a strong Germany.

Bismarck’s restraint was cold and calculated. He understood how fragile power is, that preventing state collapse is achieved through understanding the limits to its power, and most importantly, Bismarck understood how societal consent is the basis for state power, something that has been absolutely scrubbed from the contemporary Realpolitik doctrine. But this was why Bismarck created the modern welfare system.

The welfare system he built (health insurance, senior pensions, workers’ compensation) was all designed to bind citizens to the state and guarantee durable state power. We think of these social benefits as a progressive or even leftist position. But they were designed as pro-state power plays to build legitimacy at home. Legitimacy is what makes states endure.

In short, Bismarckian Realpolitik had three main pillars: Restraint in the exercise of power. Popular legitimacy makes state power more durable. Historical literacy is the precondition for understanding how any crisis can unfold.

In the twentieth century, the US removed these three but kept the name.

2. Kissinger’s not-so-Realpolitik

It is impossible to hear Kissinger’s name without hearing about Realpolitik. Part of this was Kissinger’s relentless self-promotion, his writing (especially Diplomacy, which directly ties his career to Metternich and Talleyrand). Kissinger introduced Bismarck’s vocabulary of balance of power, national interests, and strategic calculations over ideology or populism. But Kissinger’s foreign policy was very driven by anti-communist ideology (separate from power competition with the USSR), and used concepts like ‘credibility’ as a national interest to justify poor policies. The key policy of his was Vietnam.

Vietnam is a key example of how Kissinger used Realpolitik to cover up shaky policy positions. The Bismarckian emphasis on restraint was replaced by a belief in power that was unlimited in ambition and only tactically restrained in achieving those ambitions. Entering into the French post-colonial struggle in Vietnam, the US gradually got pulled in more and more, citing a domino theory, that other Asian states would become communist if Vietnam did, and the issue of US credibility, that nations would be less likely to side with the US in the Cold War if US power was seen as insufficient or unreliable. Domino theory and credibility are not hard interests protected in real-world circumstances and factors. They were speculative ideological positions driven by domestic fears. (Again, keeping actual power competition with the USSR separate).

Also, Bismarck’s cultural fluency and historical literacy gave way to a new model of analysis that disregarded local societies and saw them as background noise in a global power contest. The Cold War policy is the clearest example. Citizens of East Germany, Poland, Lithuania, or Romania were treated as people to be freed from a communist yoke. Human rights and freedoms were paramount. Printing presses, promotion of dissidents, and religious freedoms were priorities. But in Chile, Vietnam, Laos, Congo, or Cambodia, the citizens were just pawns in the struggle to prevent communist ideology from spreading, maintain US political and economic dominance, and protect US credibility. (There is a book by Christopher Hitchens titled The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which is a case for the prosecution in a never-occurred trial for war crimes. Coups became a strategy. Mass murder, unspeakable violence, was strategic if it served the balance of power, or was at least overlooked.

The case for Kissinger and Realpolitik was his move to engage China. This is a case study in Realpolitik, and the anti-communist ideology took a backseat to actually containing Soviet expansionist power. But many more case studies show how little he actually followed Bismarck.

Continued apartheid in South Africa cannot be argued as a US strategic interest, nor can Suharto’s intense violence against his own people, or that of Mobutu in Zaire. Kissinger sending guns to anti-Allende fighters in Chile via diplomatic pouches cannot be argued as strategic, or restraint, or reacting to real-world factors. Instead, this was a redefining of Realpolitik to make it digestible for Washington, academics, and international partners. (“This isn’t cold-blooded racist violence, this is strategic power dominance!”). Later, US strategic thinkers and policy makers created a political framework around Kissinger’s legacy where anything from US reputation to oil reserves was treated equally as a strategic interest in a tough environment.

3. Consequences and Today

The above sounds like a harsh take on the US because Kissinger is such a beloved political icon from the New York Times to Hilary Clinton to Wall Street. But in the Middle East, especially the Levant, this history is our lived reality. McGurk comes back into focus because he is promoted as a legacy of Kissinger and someone who shapes thinking about our homelands for US policymakers.

After 9/11, a new generation of American Middle East experts entered the region and its politics. Policymakers approached our region focused on crisis and security, whether they were older from the Vietnam era (Rumsfeld and Cheney) or just starting (McGurk). Kissinger’s legacy was a foundation with half a century of practice.

The Middle East is one of the regions where the citizens are treated like pawns rather than people to be communicated with and helped. Elite-to-elite bargains are how business is conducted. Popular movements are seen as potential risks rather than political and social activists pursuing their own demands. Stability is measured only by a lack of crisis, not whether anyone living under these arrangements actually consents to them.

The key problem is that while Europe, East Asia, and parts of Latin America are partners to do business with, the Middle East (along with South Asia and parts of Africa) are issues to be managed. So, a media compliment for a policy maker covering MENA, like McGurk, Sullivan, Blinken, Bremer, or Schenker, is that they understand ‘power’ and ‘projecting US power’. This is not said about policymakers covering Scandinavia or Canada.

Arab governments adapted to this. Autocrats like Mubarak offered their services in ‘management’ on behalf of the U.S. They used it as a path to American approval, weapons, and political cover. Counterterror partnership replaced legitimacy building at home. Political opposition became a security liability. Instead of dissidents being suspected of communist sympathies, they were accused of extremist sympathies.

Yes, this is some moral outrage. But this also led to serious strategic mistakes which entrenched tyrants, caused humanitarian tragedies, destroyed economies, and gamified Middle East policy among DC administrations.

Kissinger’s policy, blending domestic pressures, global reputation, ideological positions, and some national security concerns, became the operating procedure. We were told for fifty years this was realism. It was the opposite.

My Take

For half a century, analysts who looked at issues of legitimacy, identity, religion, history, and popular sentiment in understanding the Middle East were treated as soft. Insufficiently hardheaded. Insufficiently “realist.” The people considered ‘serious’ in the room were the ones managing crises, containing threats, and postponing the political questions to a future that never came. This comes from some misguided assumptions.

The Middle East is not a region to be managed. This war is further evidence. The war’s architects did not predict Iran’s response because they never studied what Iran actually rests on. They could not account for the narrative vacuum the war opened, because they never believed narratives were a serious variable. It has no answer for the delivery crisis now hitting every state in the region, because elite bargains cannot solve the problem of products tripling in price. The serious people were not serious. They were comfortable and lacked strategy. Our region was a problem to manage, not a group of nations to understand and partner with.

Bismarck practiced policies and governance that were centered on knowing what a situation could bear. He understood state power and how fragile legitimacy is. He built the modern welfare system because he knew states that ignore their populations are built on sand. But states that made their citizens dependent had power. That understanding has been absent from American Middle East policy for decades. Public buy-in is dismissed, elites get the attention, and in turn, the region’s elites mirrored Washington because that is what got rewarded.

You cannot read the world without understanding identity formation, legitimacy, and meaning. Without these three, we risk being “surprised” by what comes next. And surprise has been most of our last two decades.

For Jordan specifically, this is not an abstract intellectual debate. Jordan has been affected by regional tensions because it has always been in the middle and has always taken on the responsibility of mediation. But continued external shocks and constant positioning to adapt are exhausting to the populace.

Today, we are living the consequences of this revised Realpolitik, and we are seeing the consequences in real time. Jordanians are living through shelter-in-place orders, rising food prices, and a tourism sector that has been hollowed out. The average income in this country is around $4,600. These are not conditions that can absorb another month of Hormuz being closed. We see our neighbors in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Gulf suffer. What Jordanians are living through is not simply a security crisis. It is also a dignity crisis. A crisis of dignity cannot be managed. It needs to be supported by a partner.

In my previous pieces, I wrote about three crises unfolding in parallel: the strategic theory that drove this war, the narrative vacuum it opened, and the delivery gap now stressing every social contract in the region. Each is Kissinger’s realpolitik reaching its conclusion. The strategy assumed hardline regimes would fragment under pressure. The narrative vacuum exists because this doctrine never had an account of legitimacy. The delivery gap is what happens when elite bargains are asked to do the work that only legitimate states can do.

I always recommend avoiding breaking news and looking at the long-term trends. The trend here is clear. Kissinger’s realpolitik produced a region where policymakers manage threats but are unprepared for managing legitimacy. It trained a generation of American policymakers to see the Middle East as a set of crises to be contained rather than a civilizational system to be understood.

This policy is built on refusing to accept that you can coerce, you can topple, you can install, but you cannot sustain. We saw that in the Arab Spring. Power without legitimacy has a short shelf life.

So, while Mr. Brett McGurk has garnered notoriety among many in the region, he is not the villain of this story. He is its latest practitioner of a decades-old, flawed doctrine. What is surprising is the praise for the policies. What is surprising is calling it Realpolitik. We suffer the consequences, but know the history. We hope that those who have worked to understand us will partner with us and not manage us.