The Americanization of Henry Kissinger

Abstract

Bruce Mazlish. Kissinger, The European Mind in American Policy. New York: Basic Books, 1976. 330 + xiii pp. When one considers the plethora of terms — everything from isolationism to imperialism — which has been employed to describe United States foreign policy, it is interesting to notice that only one political figure has come to be synonymous with an American foreign policy tradition. That figure is, of course, Woodrow Wilson. Wilsonianism, as much as it may have seemed a dangerously myopic idealism to a George Kennan, has come to be viewed — and more accurately, one might add — as a quest for international stability and world order under United States leadership, safe from the extremes of revolutionary socialism and nationalism which Wilson and his closest associates perceived were tearing apart the interna- tional fabric.