Thinking with Kissinger about World Order

In tranquil times or troubled times reflective persons have asked why our world is where it is today. E. H. Carr wrote about the troubled years between the two world wars. The years of the Soviet–American confrontation, made frightfully deadly by the possession of nuclear weapons by the two antagonists, prompted many scholars and statesmen to think of the different kinds of world order that could spare humanity a nuclear holocaust.

Henry Kissinger was one of the influential scholars and opinion makers in the 1960s and 1970s. The then Soviet–US rivalry, with each rival armed with nuclear weapons, formed the backdrop of much of his writings. Kissinger believed then that a Soviet–US war was a possibility.