Kissinger on Peace
a punitive peace leads to literally hitler
I am presently reading Henry Kissinger’s A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822. I understand the 1957 book was based upon his PhD dissertation of 1954.
The whole business of the Congress of Vienna run by Metternich, that put Europe together again after the chaos of the French Revolution and Napoleon, is of course one of the extraordinary achievements in world history.
But after Napoleon’s escape from Elba and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the question was whether to impose a punitive peace on France or not.
Kissinger makes his key points. Everybody wants “absolute security” but that leads to “a revolutionary situation within the international community.”
The more punitive the peace, the more insistent will be the demand for a system of collective security…
The apparent weakness of the prostrate power is therefore deceptive, and… may improve its relative position…
Against the victim of a punitive peace, [the victors] must rest their claims on force…
It is no accident that a punitive peace is more demoralizing for the victor than for the defeated.
Experts agree that it was easy to write this after World War I and II and the disaster of the Treaty of Versailles.
But you can see the point. What exactly is the point of “collective security?” That was the Big Idea after World War I, the notion that all the small nations created out of the German Empire and Austria-Hungary would be protected by “collective security” and the League of Nations. Not.
After World War I, NATO was supposed to be a “collective security” alliance. Only it was really the US Hegemon and a bunch of vassal states. Now that the US is not that interested in Europe, NATO is reduced to a bunch of second-rate Euro leaders waffling about Russia. I wonder if there is enough “collective security” to keep the Russians out of Lithuania. Or some damn thing down in the Balkans.
And whatabout “punitive peace.” It’s one thing to lay waste to an enemy’s territory in the days of agriculture, although the Vikings were sensible enough to limit the damage and sail up the odd river in Britain occasionally in the fall and steal the harvest, kill the men and sell the women and children into slavery in Dublin, Ireland. In the modern world we all trade with each other and, since Hiroshima, bombing the enemy back to the Stone Age doesn’t really seem to make sense.
In the event after Waterloo Metternich and Castlereagh imposed a peace with moderate territorial changes and an indemnity that France paid within three years. And peace persisted until the 1860s and Bismarck’s wars of German unification.
So says Henry Kissinger.
Now I developed an anti-conventional wisdom view of history in 2021 that decided that
I regard World War I as a complete bungle…
What in the world did President Wilson think he was doing by imposing a humiliating peace on defeated Germany?
I wonder where I picked that idea up? I didn’t buy my first Kissinger book till 2022, and didn’t really decide to read him seriously till he died in November 2023.
Kissinger is a big “balance of power” guy. That’s what I discussed in “Kissinger Explains Everything.” That’s why he came up with the idea of the Opening to China to create three nodes of power in the world, in the US, the Soviet Union, and China, rather than two nodes with the US against Commuunism.
Meanwhile I just thought of another Maxim:
A punitive peace leads to Literally Hitler.
Anyway, it’s good to know that Metternich and Castlereagh and Kissinger all agree with me on the folly of a punitive peace. I wonder why the noble President of the University of Princeton didn’t agree with us. Perhaps his stroke in late 1919 prevented him from directing foreign policy and his Autopen wife Edith messed the whole thing up.