American politics are usually domestic politics, or as domestic as they can be in a country so vast and various as to render its people strangers to one another. Foreign affairs only intrude in times of disaster or war. This being one of those times, most American politicians have no idea what to do about Ukraine, other than rattle a sabre and preach about freedom. But they should be asking: “What would Kissinger do?”

Freedom is an ideal. Foreign policy is about the national interest. Ideals tend towards morality, the national interest to amorality. The US was founded by idealists; so, in its fashion, was the EU. The insults of reality are often insufficient to break the faith of the idealist.

Bismarck, who fixed the peace of Europe with Disraeli, was once asked what the secret of foreign policy was. His reply? “First, make a good Russia treaty.” The West failed to achieve a good Russia treaty after 1990. This was an American-led failure, conducted on American terms and ideals: it was a bipartisan foul-up of triumphalism.

George Kennan, the realist architect of the “containment” policies that helped win the Cold War, was aghast when the Clinton administration pushed NATO’s borders up against Russia’s. But Henry Kissinger, the realist architect of the foreign policy that also helped win the Cold War, favoured NATO expansion. This may be surprising in retrospect, but such was the excitement of victory in the 1990s that it was possible for Francis Fukuyama to make a career out of declaring that liberal democracy was the last word and that history as a battle of ideas was over.

He’s now 98 years old, but what would Kissinger do, were he in the State Department today? His history as the globe-trotting player of the Cold War suggests he would consider the American interest in the most hardheaded manner possible, prepare to get on a plane to do some “shuttle diplomacy” – and, above all, advise against the folly of idealism.

The Biden administration has already made the Kissingerian move of rallying its allies and proxies. Kissinger famously asked whom he should call if he wanted to speak to Europe. The Europeans now seem to be speaking with one voice. The question is, to what end?

During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Kissinger and Nixon did just enough to ensure that Israel won convincingly. But they made sure that negotiations were still needed – as these could be used to bounce Egypt back into the American orbit, breaking Soviet power in the Middle East. The Biden administration is starting from a weaker position in today’s geopolitical order. The EU, its ally in the region, lacks the military capacity to defend its eastern borders.

The problem for Kissinger in Ukraine would be this: It’s one thing for the US to pour arms into a faraway country, another for the Europeans to do so on their own doorstep. It’s a recipe for escalation that could provoke Putin into acts of aggression against EU states.

“An alliance is effective only to the extent that it reflects a common purpose and that it represents an accretion of strength to its members,” Kissinger wrote in his landmark 1957 book Nuclear Weapons And Foreign Policy. Now, in the West, the fear is that the alliance’s common purpose does not run deep, and the strength has run to seed.

Kissinger would see that Putin has played a long game, and that he was well past halfway to winning it before we took it seriously. The old Cold Warrior would play for time. It will take years to rebuild the Europeans’ military forces and consolidate their deterrent power. The immediate interest is to avoid military confrontation on NATO territory and to affirm the credibility of the American-led alliance.

Kissinger would seek to talk with Putin and his ministers directly, and establish a balance of power that could contain the war within Ukraine and set a path for its end. He would trade lifting sanctions for demilitarisation, and an American declaration that Ukraine should not enter NATO or the EU for a Russian commitment to respect the EU’s borders. He might accept a federated Ukraine, which the French and Germans proposed in 2015 and the Obama administration opposed.

Kissinger would also accept the repression of Ukraine’s people as the price of achieving a balance in Europe that, if not peace, was at least an absence of war. This would be a defeat for Western ideals in Ukraine. 

Kissinger would advise that we be as realistic as possible about the alternative, and that we prepare for the long haul.

Dominic Green is the editor of The Spectator’s world edition.