World Order

(by H Kissinger)

World Order is a knotty concept prone to interpretations of violent subjectivity.  On the one hand, we have the seers of doom, who see only a world in chaos and inevitable decline (e.g. Mark Steyn).  Farthest from this on the spectrum are the utopian promoters of one world governance (to whom one recommends an urgent reading of Thomas More).

Along the way are those who deprecate the notion of order at all, preach heterogeneity and the cult of small-as-beautiful, the barrackers of old powers, cultists for the new such as the revived Middle Kingdom or ISIS, or re-badged Marxists and reductionists.

And then there is Henry Alfred Kissinger.  Arch-pragmatist Henry receives either adulation or a right panning (the late Christopher Hitchens was a very vocal and unfair critic) and his construction of global architecture is, surely by definition, predicated on a rickety scaffold in Elysium.  Yet his world-weary, amoral, realpolitik review of this peopled globe is eloquent, elegant and engrossing, containing what is surely a great contextual truth: “Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent.”