Resident Fellow  David Frum

A protracted war. Divisions at home. Insecure energy supplies. Tensions with allies.

America in 2007? Yes, but also America in 1969. In the introduction to his new study of the foreign policy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Robert Dallek writes: "I am convinced that the many questions raised in this book have relevance for current national and international problems."

The questions faced by Nixon and Kissinger do indeed resonate in our own time. Should Americans promote democracy abroad? How can peace be kept between India and Pakistan? Between Arabs and Israelis? Across the Taiwan Strait? How much deference should Congress show the president in foreign policy?

Nixon and Kissinger articulated forceful and coherent answers to these questions and many more--and Americans have fiercely debated their answers for nearly four decades. The debate continues into our own time. When President Bush charged, in his November 2003 Whitehall Palace speech, that "your nation [Britain] and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability," it was Nixon and Kissinger he was criticizing.

You might imagine that a historian would hesitate to join this voluminous and ferocious controversy unless he had something new and important to say. You would imagine wrong. Robert Dallek has written bestselling books about John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Somebody--his publisher, his agent, his wife, the financial-aid officers at his children's colleges--obviously decided it made sense for him to add another administration to the series. Whoever that unknown adviser was, he did Dallek no favor.

Nixon and Kissinger represents itself as a deep new study of the making of American foreign policy. In reality, it is a hasty summary of newly released memos and phone transcripts from the Nixon and Kissinger archives, lightly seasoned with authorial commentary.

Dallek's researches have unearthed one or two new examples of Nixon and Kissinger's disparaging each other behind their backs. But this is a well-known story, and (to paraphrase an old joke) the quotes that are new are not juicy, and the quotes that are juicy are not new. In fact so little of this book is new that the reader familiar with the period (and who else is going to work his or her way through 600-plus pages of bureaucratic detail?) will find himself flipping through the pages at accelerating speed muttering, "Tell me something I don't know!"

As for Dallek's own personal remarks and asides, all I can say is that if you've been reading the editorial page of the New York Times, they too will be familiar and over-familiar. Dallek champions a kind of prelapsarian liberalism, innocent of all knowledge that any other point of view exists, has existed, or might possibly exist. I'll settle for just a single example, from pp. 140-141. It's complicated, but important in itself--and all too sadly revealing of Dallek's habitual intellectual weaknesses.

First, the necessary background: After the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the Soviets launched a massive nuclear-arms buildup. The Johnson administration did not respond in kind, and, by 1969, America's former nuclear superiority had been definitively lost. While the Soviets built, Americans designed. U.S. weapons technicians devised a brilliant response to the Soviet buildup: Rather than match Soviet missiles one for one, the U.S. could install multiple warheads on each U.S. missile. Better still, these warheads could be independently targeted, allowing the U.S. to hit three Soviet targets at the same price the Soviets paid to strike just one.

This new technology, acronymed MIRV (for multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle), was vehemently opposed by nuclear-arms controllers. The arms controllers asserted as a matter of faith that the Soviets would quit building just as soon as they caught up with the U.S. Their advice: Pause--permit the catch-up--and then see if a new, theoretically more stable equilibrium could be negotiated.

That was one point of view. There was another, advanced by people who studied Soviet politics rather than nuclear game theory: These Sovietologists argued that the Soviets would build regardless of what the U.S. did. A U.S. pause would go unreciprocated. If the U.S. did not adopt MIRV technology, it would soon find itself dangerously vulnerable to a Soviet first strike.

These were the arguments that President Nixon had to weigh as he decided whether to proceed with MIRV or not. And here, in full, is what Dallek has to say about this soul-searching dilemma:

As many as forty Senators urged a moratorium on MIRV testing. The British also weighed in with a recommendation for "a MIRV ban. They argued--as did MIRV-ban supporters at home--" Henry told Nixon, "that unless these weapons are stopped we will have done nothing to prevent a new phase in arms competition." Subsequent events would prove them right.

Sorry, this won't do. It won't begin to do. "Subsequent events would prove them right"? Which subsequent events? Prove it how?

The debate over the sources of Soviet conduct has assumed rich new life since 1991. Many Soviet archives are now open, Soviet principals have given interviews, and we can understand their actions on the basis of evidence, not ideology. Leading scholars of the period, like Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali in their Khrushchev's Cold War (2006), have demonstrated that Soviet decision-making was more reckless and aggressive than even the gloomiest hawks feared. Most historians now accept Carter defense secretary Harold Brown's 1979 assessment of Soviet nuclear strategy: "When we build, they build. When we cut, they build."

Maybe Robert Dallek disputes that assessment. Fair enough. But he needs to provide some evidence, some reason, some grounds to dispute it. Instead, he asserts. And asserts, and asserts again, revolving drearily between regurgitation of familiar facts and repetition of familiar opinions, without literary style or psychological insight. It takes some effort to make Nixon and Kissinger boring, but in this one respect at least Dallek exceeds all past performances.

Nobody will ever accuse Jeremi Suri of lacking style or insight. His study of Henry Kissinger's personality and place in history offers piercing originality--so much so that laying down Dallek for Suri feels rather like that moment in The Prince and the Showgirl when Laurence Olivier, after telling all and sundry that they have too little love in their life, meets his ex-mistress . . . and realizes that she has too much.

Suri fires off insights and theories about Henry Kissinger at a rapid clip. He especially delights in paradox.

Did Kissinger's own historical work emphasize the creative role of the statesman in the shaping of the destinies of nations? Suri argues that in Kissinger's case, the times shaped him much more than he shaped the times.

Was Kissinger's Jewishness an obstacle to his success? Yes--but also, Suri argues, indispensable to it. Not even 25, the young Kissinger found himself entrusted by the U.S. Army with enormous administrative responsibilities in occupied Germany: As a German, he knew the language and the country; as a Jew, he was immune to Nazi sympathies.

Is it not odd that a professor could rise so high in the world of power? On the contrary, Suri argues in a chapter on the "Cold War University," in the 1950s academics found themselves in proximity to power as never before or since.

What about Kissinger's reputation for bloodless amoralism? Utterly wrong, says Suri: "The invocation of moral purpose through force and diplomacy, and faith in strong leaders, were long-standing elements of Kissinger's thought." If he seemed to scant moral concerns, that reflected not amoralism but his "skepticism of democracy, his sense of cultural hierarchy, his faith in state power, and his fear of political chaos."

So he was a great conservative then? Certainly not: "Kissinger was above all things a revolutionary."

Hmm. Well, can we at least say whether he succeeded or failed? No, we cannot. Suri hails Kissinger's achievement in the Middle East: excluding all great-power competitors from the region, suppressing Arab-Israeli wars, securing the American energy supply. On the other hand, Suri also endorses the anti-Kissinger critique that by relying so heavily on iron-fisted dictators, Kissinger's policies accelerated the region's political and economic failure, stoked radicalism, and helped incite instability down the road. So it's all really six of one, half a dozen of the other, isn't it?

Suri's book has real merit despite its lack of strong conclusions. Still, I think most readers will find it only slightly less frustrating--if far less boring--than Robert Dallek's. Much as it's interesting to understand Kissinger as a German, as a Jew, as a refugee, as a writer and thinker, as a self-made man, as an intriguer and schemer, as a visionary and moralist, what most of us want first and above all is to understand him as a maker of American foreign policy.

What are we to think of the difficult choices and moral compromises of the Nixon-Kissinger years? Were Nixon and Kissinger right about democracy and stability? Were they wise to demand so much power and secrecy for the presidency? Can there be any excuse for Chile and Taiwan? Did they deceive the public on Vietnam, on arms control--or did they deceive themselves? Did their ends justify their means? Did they even have ends? Or were they just desperate improvisers, making the best of the very bad legacy they inherited when they entered office in 1969?

We have Nixon's and Kissinger's own answers to these questions, set forth at vast length in their memoirs and other books. We have the accusatory histories of William Bundy, Walter Isaacson, and Christopher Hitchens. But we still await the deep and substantial assessment that those tumultuous years deserve.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.