‘Leadership’ Review: Tales From a Global Chessboard
Henry Kissinger delivers lessons on big-picture strategy via the challenges faced by leaders from Konrad Adenauer to Margaret Thatcher.
This is an extraordinary book, one that braids together two through lines in the long and distinguished career of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The first is grand strategy: No practical geopolitical thinker has more assuredly mastered the way the modern global system works or how nations use the tools of statecraft to bend an often-resistant world to their will. But Mr. Kissinger is also an astute observer of the personal element in strategy—the art and science of leadership, or how, on the executive level, “decisions [are] made, trust earned, promises kept, a way forward proposed.” In “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy” he presents a fascinating set of historical case studies and political biographies that blend the dance and the dancer, seamlessly.
Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy
Mr. Kissinger’s book is a unique contribution to a literary tradition that includes Winston Churchill’s highly entertaining 1937 “Great Contemporaries” and Paul Kennedy’s magisterial 1987 “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.” The former discusses 21 influential leaders from many walks of life, each captured in a mere dozen pages: Trotsky, T.E. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw as well as Hitler just before the annexation of Austria. Mr. Kennedy’s “characters,” on the other hand, are not individuals but rather the great powers themselves, analyzed in all their glory and failure over 500 years of human history. What Mr. Kissinger does here, expertly, is to synthesize Churchill and Kennedy, giving us great human characters meeting moments of real strategic import. In doing so, he lays out a set of graspable tools that leaders can use effectively today.
A mystery of cosmic proportions, portraits in leadership, the hunt for treasures looted by Nazi Germany and more.
Drawn entirely from the mid- to late 20th century, Mr. Kissinger’s cast of leaders comprises a half-dozen actors, all well known to him personally. He sketches the personality of each, provides a bit of salient biography and outlines the big challenges he or she faced. He then analyzes the leader’s approach and gives it a one-word descriptor (perhaps a bit too slickly, but it’s admittedly a good shorthand). Thus when Konrad Adenauer, chancellor of a defeated Germany, seeks a way forward that reflects his own Christian values and democratic convictions, he adopts what Mr. Kissinger calls a “strategy of humility.” In contrast, Charles de Gaulle, a prison-camp survivor and former political exile striving to find France’s place in the postwar sun, adopts a “strategy of will.” (Some might say “arrogance,” but Mr. Kissinger is polite.)
Between 1969 and 1974 Richard Nixon, the leader the author knows best, “modified the superpower tensions of the high Cold War and led the United States out of the conflict in Vietnam.” To do so, Mr. Kissinger writes, he adopted a “strategy of equilibrium.” Mr. Kissinger does a commendable job contrasting the personal unsteadiness of the 37th president with his sure-footed sense of foreign policy, “opening relations with China, beginning a peace process that would transform the Middle East and emphasizing a concept of world order” based on the balance of power.
The most appealing figure in the book is Lee Kuan Yew, the visionary prime minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990. His vision, persistence and resilience, which transformed “an impoverished, multiethnic port city” into a stable, prosperous “City of Lions,” is indeed laudable—a masterpiece of state-making on a small scale. Mr. Kissinger describes him as having a “strategy of excellence,” a pitch-perfect description of both the man and his creation.
A more nuanced, deeply personal and affectionate portrait is the sketch of Egypt’s fatalistic leader Anwar Sadat. Mr. Kissinger calls Sadat’s attempts to bring peace to the turbulent Middle East, as well as to restore Egypt’s lost territories and self-confidence, a “strategy of transcendence.” The continuing challenges in the region confirm just how remarkable Sadat’s work was: The courageous shift in policy he took regarding Israel laid a foundation that may yet allay the bitter animosities of that troubled region.
The Falklands War is for me, a naval officer, a seminal moment in maritime conflict in the post-World War II period. Critical to that close-fought battle in the southern Atlantic, of course, was the iron will of Margaret Thatcher. Mr. Kissinger’s descriptor for her approach is quite apt: a “strategy of conviction.” As she is the youngest of the group, and the only woman, it is particularly instructive to focus on the special challenges the British prime minister faced—and overcame—in a male-dominated governing structure.
I was disappointed that Mr. Kissinger chose to restrict his profiles to only a half-dozen leaders. It would have been instructive to hear his views on two or three more. I suspect many readers will, like me, play the game of “Who else do you wish Mr. Kissinger had profiled?”
I’d put Deng Xiaoping at the top of my list. Mr. Kissinger knew him well, and the leadership challenges that Deng faced during the 1980s while pulling China into the international system were daunting. His success would make him a logical and welcome choice. His was the “strategy of patience,” perhaps.
Stepping back to the 19th century, a profile of Otto von Bismarck (about whom Mr. Kissinger has written elsewhere) would have been a fascinating addition. For me he embodied a “strategy of balance” not unlike the Nixon-Kissinger approach, constructing a complex but durable set of international alliances. And of figures of the present century, one wonders what Mr. Kissinger would write about Vladimir Putin and his decades-long “strategy of lies.”
Ultimately, “Leadership” is less a work of recent history than it is of leadership now. Mr. Kissinger rightly observes that “leadership is most essential during periods of transition, when values and institutions are losing their relevance, and the outlines of a worthy future are in controversy.” His brilliant concluding chapter, “The Evolution of Leadership,” outlines what leaders today should consider as they try to safely steer their leaking ships of state.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Kissinger puts a high premium on a deep and considered knowledge of history, coupled with a strength of inner character. He observes that five of his six leaders (save only Lee) were devoutly religious (and Lee was deeply grounded in classical Eastern philosophy). This gave them a shared sense of “personal discipline, self-improvement, charity, patriotism and self-belief.” Another leadership trait they shared was the ability to tell hard truths to their followers. “Who do you think lost the war?” Adenauer asked an angry German parliament resistant to the Allies’ demands and deaf to his argument that submission was a virtue.
Mr. Kissinger also underlines his leaders’ boldness, focusing on Nixon’s opening of China and Thatcher’s decision to send a naval task force into uncertain combat. The Romans said “Fortune favors the bold,” and today we see that worthy sentiment debased in tacky cryptocurrency commercials. But through the words of Mr. Kissinger, we see afresh how central boldness is to leadership. Knowing when to risk it all is at the heart of what leaders must do.
Mr. Kissinger concludes this fine book with a glance toward what leaders must consider in addressing systemic disagreements ranging from the Washington-Beijing rivalry to a post-Ukraine-invasion Europe. He ends on a note of cautious optimism, saying that “the grave conditions described here may, in the end, provide the impetus for societies to insist on meaningful leadership.” From his lips to our (and God’s) ears. We’ll need all the help we can get to find such leaders. And they’ll need all the leadership tools Mr. Kissinger describes, and the character and will to put them to use.
Adm. Stavridis, USN (retired), was 16th Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. His most recent book is “To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision.”
Appeared in the July 9, 2022, print edition as 'Follow the Leaders'.