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The Nixon-Kissinger objective has therefore been to shift the focus of revolutionary regimes round the world from ideology to issues of national interest. Both men are turning the criteria of decision making from what some Europeans cynically call "the savior attitude" to the equations of Realpolitik, implicitly abandoning the moralistic considerations that have dominated American foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson. "The world is becoming less ideological," says British Political Scientist Frederick Northedge, "and more concerned with survival."
The classical policy that Kissinger and Nixon are practicing derives from perceptions of national interest that have dictated successful foreign policy in Europe for 500 years. Political thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes contributed to a body of experience and theory that culminated in the 19th and 20th centuries in the effective policies of Metternich, Bismarck, Adenauer and De Gaulle, four statesmen whom Kissinger admires. Metternich claimed that "it is freedom of action, not formal relations" that leads to successful diplomacy. Following that dictum, Kissinger and Nixon have reassessed U.S. relationships, abandoning some ties as out-of-date (Taiwan), remaking others that might inhibit freedom of action (Japan, Western Europe) and forging new ties with old enemies (Russia and China) to expand the field of play. Another dictum of Realpolitik holds that "interests are constant, alliances are not."
For all the successes of the Nixon-Kissinger policies, there have been some missteps even apart from Viet Nam. One evident weakness is that the balance-of-power design has not allowed much of a role for lesser nations. The White House has tried to compensate by declaring that in reality Japan and Western Europe are the two additional poles in a pentagonal relationship. Argues Harvard Government Professor Stanley Hoffmann: "We have, especially in Asia, moved as if the era of horizontal great-power diplomacy had arrived, and our weaker allies are disconcerted. We have, both in Europe and in Asia, behaved as if our principal allies were already part friends, part rivals."
Most of the shocks to American allies were registered in 1971 after the first overtures to Peking. Japan was hardest hit but other Asian allies were similarly disconcerted—South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and, most traumatically, Taiwan. There was also some unease across the Atlantic. In
1972 there was increasing accommodation to the new realities, but inevitably uneasiness remained. Partly to relieve Western Europe's apprehensions about the new American Realpolitik, the White House has declared 1973 to be "the year of Europe," with the intention of mending long-neglected relations there once the U.S. disentangles itself from Viet Nam. The Administration still must formulate a coherent European policy, especially in the area of economics.
The ambiguities and shock of the Viet Nam impasse have led some in Washington to speculate that the extraordinary Kissinger-Nixon relationship was in some trouble. The question was beguiling but difficult to answer, for the two have constructed a working arrangement that is unique in