Prima l'ordine e poi la pace
Attualità della strategia geopolitica di Kissinger in Medio Orient
Un saggio pubblicato nell’ultimo numero di Foreign Affairs a firma di Martin Indyk ed estratto dal libro Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy, spiega che equilibrio e legittimazione nel perseguimento dell’ordine tra le potenze e un approccio incrementale nella costruzione della pace sono stati gli elementi fondamentali della strategia geopolitica di Kissinger in Medio Oriente, che ancora oggi può fungere da riferimento per la gestione delle crisi in altre aree del pianeta.
Dopo la crisi Afgana, gli Stati Uniti, anche se in un contesto di radicale mutamento delle proprie priorità geopolitiche, saranno obbligati a dotarsi di una strategia per il mantenimento dell’ordine in Medio Oriente. E le modalità con le quali Kissinger gestì il processo di pace che concluse il conflitto Arabo-Israeliano iniziato nel 1967 offrono un'utile guida.
It was order, not peace, that Kissinger pursued, because he believed that peace was neither an achievable nor even a desirable objective in the Middle East. In Kissinger’s view, preserving Middle Eastern order required the maintenance of a stable balance of power. In his doctoral dissertation, which was subsequently published in 1957 as A World Restored, Kissinger demonstrated how the Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich and the Anglo-Irish statesman Lord Castlereagh produced 100 years of relative stability in Europe by artfully tending to the balance of power and skillfully manipulating those who tried to disrupt it.
Kissinger sought to replicate that approach in the Middle East when he had the opportunity. But he understood that an equilibrium in the balance of power was not enough. For the order to be sustainable, it also had to be legitimate, meaning that all the major powers within the system had to adhere to a commonly accepted set of rules. Those rules would be respected only if they provided a sufficient sense of justice to a sufficient number of states. It did not require the satisfaction of all grievances, he wrote, “just an absence of the grievances that would motivate an effort to overthrow the order.” A legitimate order, Kissinger argued, did not eliminate conflict, but it did limit its scope.