On the Balance of Power

How family and neighbor relations apply to foreign relations.

There was a time not so long ago when anyone acquainted with elementary principles of foreign relations understood the doctrine of “Balance of Power.”

“Balance of Power” was the subject of Henry Kissinger’s 1954 doctoral thesis at Harvard University, which he subsequently published in book form under the title A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812–1822.

As Kissinger understood it, the Congress of Vienna in 1812, which concluded the Napoleonic Wars, established a “Balance of Power” in Europe, with the Austrian Foreign Minister (and later Chancellor) Metternich demonstrating exceptional understanding of this concept. British Foreign Secretary Castlereagh understood and appreciated Metternich’s perspective and aspired to cooperate with the Austrian chancellor in maintaining a balance of power on the European Continent.

Our current political and media class struggles to understand this doctrine because—it seems to me—they fail to understand that foreign relations are not categorically different from any other form of human relations.

Imagine a woman who marries young and supports her husband for twenty years as he climbs the career ladder while she primarily cares for their children. Twenty years into the marriage, she discovers that he is having an affair with his young secretary. At the same time, she discovers she has no idea what he has done with much of the money and assets he has acquired over twenty years of marriage with her steadfast support.

When she tells him she is contemplating hiring a forensic accountant to perform an investigation, he replies, “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that. Trust me. I won’t take advantage of you.”

Now imagine that your family has owned a cattle ranch in Montana since the mid 19th century. Because you enjoy ranching, you stick with the occupation, even though it becomes increasingly difficult to make a living at it. One day an extremely rich and powerful real estate developer from California arrives. He aggressively acquires all the property around you, and funds the election campaigns of local and state officials to make zoning changes that favor his development objectives, which have serious, adverse consequences for your land and ranching operation.

You tell the developer that you are feeling threatened about the future of your family property, which you want to pass down to your kids and grandkids. To your concern he replies: “You don’t need to worry about that. Trust me. I won’t take advantage of all the power and influence I have amassed in this county to your detriment. I’m a good citizen.”

Anyone who has ever been in a marital or property dispute will recognize instantly it would be the height of naiveté to trust the untrustworthy spouse or the unscrupulous neighbor.

Consider how few arrangements or deals are maintained on a strictly handshake basis. The vast majority of deals are formalized by legally binding agreements. This is not because people will necessarily behave in bad faith if they aren’t constrained by legal agreements, but because they may be tempted to press their advantage if they acquire an advantage over the course of the relationship.

Reflecting on this general tendency of human nature, Machiavelli observed:

How we live is so different from how we ought to live that he who studies what ought to be done rather than what is done will learn the way to his downfall rather than to his preservation.

Many thought Machiavelli was being cynical. I believe he was being scrupulously honest.

This brings me back to my theme of the Balance of Power in foreign relations. In 1997, George Kennan—the chief architect of the U.S. Cold War policy of containing the Soviet Union—was appalled by the Clinton administration’s 1996 expansion of NATO to the east, in spite of Secretary of State James Baker’s assurance to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not “expand one inch eastward.”

Kennan expressed his protest in a 1997 editorial in the New York Times titled “A Fateful Error.” As he noted:

Russians are little impressed with American assurances that it reflects no hostile intentions. They would see their prestige (always uppermost in the Russian mind) and their security interests as adversely affected. They would, of course, have no choice but to accept expansion as a military fait accompli. But they would continue to regard it as a rebuff by the West and would likely look elsewhere for guarantees of a secure and hopeful future for themselves.

On a personal note, I find Kennan’s reflections especially persuasive because I myself don’t trust the assurances of the U.S. government. This being the case, it seems to me that Vladimir Putin would have been a perfect fool to accept U.S. assurances that NATO enlargement into Ukraine posed no threat to Russian security.

Imagine how the U.S. government would react if Russia consummated a new military alliance with Cuba and began construction of a hypersonic missile base near Havana. Does anyone in their right mind believe that the U.S. government would accept this?

Likewise, imagine if the Russian government had simply accepted NATO’s inexorable expansion eastward, all the way into Ukraine, ultimately placing sophisticated military hardware on Russia’s border as close as 375 miles from Moscow.

Does any reasonable grownup in the world really believe that the U.S. would not press this advantage in innumerable ways (foreseen and unforeseen)?

It seems to me that Kennan was obviously right in 1997, and that the current, ongoing disaster in Ukraine is precisely what he predicted would happen if the U.S. government followed through with its NATO expansion to the east.

It’s time for the petulant children in Washington to grow up and negotiate a settlement with Russia. They must stop thinking about themselves and their old obsessions and Churchillian fantasies and their cronies in the Military-Industrial Complex, and start thinking about the security and welfare of the American people.