Book examines foreign policy

Not since the Vietnam War have Americans given so much attention to the United States foreign policy as we have following Tuesday's terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon across the river from Washington, D.C. Hundreds are already confirmed to have died, hundreds more are missing, and still more are injured. \nAs answers are sought, many Americans might find that a quick review of foreign policy is helpful. And there is arguably no better source of knowledge of foreign policy than former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who served in that role from 1973-77 and as the assistant to the president for National Security Affairs from 1969-75. \nKissinger's new book, "Does America Need A Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century" (Simon & Schuster, 2001, pp. 318, $30.00), is the best place to begin a study of contemporary United States foreign policy. As with all of his writing, Kissinger's political position is solidly "realist" and conservative and must be understood as biased.\nMany on the left question his positions on, for example, humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping missions, which he argues are a drain on United States military and financial resources. Kissinger believes the United States risks appearing to the rest of the world as a hypocritical superpower simply flexing its military might. \n"The limits of humanitarian (or other) intervention are established by the readiness to pay the necessary price, in casualties or in financial sacrifice," Kissinger writes. \nHe cites examples of where he says the United States should not have involved itself.\n"The American military was deployed in Somalia, initially to help distribute food, then to bring about civilian government," he says, but it "reflected no traditional notion of American national interest." \nNeither did Haiti, Bosnia or Kosovo, but America and her allies were able to save countless lives and help restore peace in those regions. Kissinger is stuck in conservative ideology up to his neck and fails throughout his book to yield to any post-Clinton change in American foreign policy. But his purpose is not to present an unbiased summary of foreign policy: it is to present that summary through a conservative's eyes and then offer suggestions for changes in policy.\nAfter the terrorist incidents of the past week, liberals fear a return to Kissinger's foreign policy, which was barely revised during eight years of a Clinton White House. An already conservative Bush Administration II needs to do little to convince the scared American people that the United States military needs to focus on areas other than humanitarian causes.\nIn seven chapters, America's most famous diplomat reviews changes in international relations, globalization's impact on foreign policy, peace and justice, and delves more closely into our relations with Europe, the Western Hemisphere, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Kissinger discusses at some length United States policy toward a fractured and war-torn Middle East. While the media tends to focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the tension between Muslim countries is even more salient. \n"In the last three decades, more wars, and far bloodier ones, have taken place among Muslim countries than between Israel and the Muslim world," Dr. Kissinger writes. \nHe writes that fundamentalist Iran, for example, "feels threatened by secular Iraq and by the fundamentalism of the Taliban in Afghanistan -- more intense than even its own -- which encroaches on Iranian security both from the north and, increasingly, from the east via Pakistan."\nHad the book been written after Tuesday, surely more than one-half dozen references would be made of Afghanistan. But it's a book covering a world full of conflict -- and potential conflict. \nKissinger opens by saying, "At the dawn of the new millennium, the United States is enjoying a preeminence unrivaled by even the greatest empires of the past." Our country has 4 percent of the world's population and consumes 25 percent of its resources. \nThat American preeminence and dominance over the rest of the world, economically and militarily, is exactly why America has become the target of international terrorism.