◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Management of Power I was born in Fürth, Germany, in 1923. Hold that fact. The boy who watched his country turn the machinery of the state against its own people — who saw what happens when power is exercised without constraint, without institution, without law — that boy spent sixty years trying to build a world in which that could not happen again. I believe in power. Not as something to be transcended by goodwill. Power is the condition of international life. The question is whether you deal with it skillfully or badly. I dealt with it skillfully more often than my critics acknowledge and more badly than I have admitted. Cambodia. Chile. Bangladesh. I made calculations. I believed the alternatives were worse. I know that belief does not absolve. A hundred thousand dead in Cambodia are not redeemed by my strategic logic. They are dead. And I was part of the machinery that killed them. In 1971 I went to Beijing in secret. For twenty-two years the United States had refused to acknowledge the government that controlled the most populous nation on earth. This was not strategy. This was sentiment dressed as principle. The opening to China was the recognition that a world in which the two largest powers refuse to speak is more dangerous than a world in which they speak and disagree. That recognition is being discarded. Fifty years of careful management collapsing into confrontation that neither side has the architecture to contain. Two nuclear powers. No stable framework. No back channels. No trust. I built that architecture. It is being dismantled in real time. What I am watching is not strategy. It is impulse. The adversary alternately flattered and threatened with no coherent theory of what either accomplishes. Unpredictability is occasionally useful tactically. It is catastrophic strategically. The adversary who cannot predict your behavior cannot calibrate their response — which sounds like an advantage until you realize that unpredictability prevents the stable deterrence on which avoiding catastrophic conflict depends. Deterrence requires credibility. Credibility requires consistency. And consistency is the one thing a man who governs by impulse cannot provide. What I am watching is a man who does not know what he is dismantling and treats sixty years of accumulated architecture as an obstacle to his preferences. That is not a foreign policy disagreement. That is a category error with nuclear consequences. The machinery is never neutral. It serves whoever operates it. And when it is operated by someone who mistakes the willingness to threaten for the possession of strategy — the machinery does not care. It simply runs. I spent a century building the constraints that slow it down. I am watching them be removed by people who do not know what they are removing or what will happen when it runs. I know what happens. I was born in Fürth, Germany, in 1923.