Henry A. Kissinger

The Pitfalls of Universal Jurisdiction

In less than a decade, an unprecedented movement has emerged to submit international politics to judicial procedures. It has spread with extraordinary speed and has not been subjected to systematic debate, partly because of the intimidating passion of its advocates. To be sure, human rights violations, war crimes, genocide, and torture have so disgraced the modern age and in such a variety of places that the effort to interpose legal norms to prevent or punish such outrages does credit to its advocates. The danger lies in pushing the effort to extremes that risk substituting the tyranny of judges for that of governments; historically, the dictatorship of the virtuous has often led to inquisitions and even witch-hunts. The doctrine of universal jurisdiction asserts that some crimes are so heinous that their perpetrators should not escape justice by invoking doctrines of sovereign immunity or the sacrosanct nature of national frontiers. Two specific approaches to achieve this goal have emerged recently. The first seeks to apply the procedures of domestic criminal justice to violations of universal standards, some of which are embodied in United Nations conventions, by authorizing national prosecutors to bring offenders into their jurisdictions through extradition from third countries. The second approach is the International Criminal

Between the Old Left and the New Right

Bythesummer of 1974, when Gerald R. Ford took over as president, Richard M. Nixons foreign policy had become controversial. Liberals chastised him for inadequate attention to human rights. Conservatives depicted his administration as overeager for accommodation with the Soviet Union in the name of d?tente, which, in their view, compounded bad policy with French terminology. Each of these criticisms owed something to the discomfort evoked by Nixons ambiguous personality, but the overriding cause of the complaints was that his foreign policy raised two fundamental philo sophical challenges. Nixon sought to extricate the United States from Vietnam on terms he defined as honorable at a time when most

The Congress of Vienna: A Reappraisal

It is only natural that a period anxiously seeking to wrest peace from the threat of nuclear extinction should look nostalgically to the last great successful effort to settle international disputes by means of a diplomatic conference, the Congress of Vienna. Nothing is more tempting than to ascribe its achievements to the very process of negotiation, to diplomatic skill, and to “willingness to come to an agreement”—and nothing is more dangerous. For the effectiveness of diplomacy depends on elements transcending it; in part on the domestic structure of the states comprising the international order, in part on their power relationship.

The Conservative Dilemma: Reflections on the Political Thought of Metternich.

The conservative in a revolutionary period always represents somewhat of an anomaly. Were society still cohesive, it would occur to no one to be a conservative for a serious alternative to the existing structure would be inconceivable. But a revolutionary period is a symptom precisely of the fact that the self-evidence of the goals of the social effort has disintegrated, that a significant segment of society holds values which either cannot or will not be assimilated. What had been taken for granted must now be defended and the act of defense introduces rigidity. The deeper the fissure, the more inflexible the contending positions and the greater the temptation to dogmatism. Were the “legitimate” structure still universally accepted, it would not be necessary to demonstrate its validity; but the act of defense exhibits the possibility of an alternative. Once the existing legitimacy has been challenged, no real discourse between the contenders is possible any longer, for they cease to speak the same language. It is not the adjustment of differences within a political system which is now at issue, but the political system itself.

Carrots or Sticks? The Question of United States Influence over Israel

The Peace Brokers: Mediators in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1979 by Saadia Touval (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, xiv/3 7 7 pp, us

Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.

3o.oo cloth, us

White House Years

11.50 paper). White House Years and Years of Upheaval by Henry Kissinger (Boston: Little Brown, 1979 and 1982, xxiv11521 pp and xxii/128 3 pp,

Years of Upheaval

25.oo and

Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy

29.95). Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President by Jimmy Carter (New York and Toronto: Bantam, 1982, xvi/622 pp,

The White House Years.

24.95). Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Advisor, 1977-1981 by Zbigniew Brzezinski (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux [Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson], 1983, xviii/ 5 8 7,