Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger is presented as a contemporary voice of Western power whose analysis of foreign policy revives, in modern terms, a division Said identifies with Orientalist thought. In an essay on domestic structure and foreign policy, Kissinger contrasts the developed West with the developing world, assigning each a different relation to empirical reality. Said’s criticism is not simply that this scheme misdescribes other societies: its apparently neutral categories rank them, establish a boundary between them, and make Western control seem necessary.

Identity and Political Position

Kissinger enters the argument as a prominent contemporary counterpart to Arthur James Balfour and Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of Cromer. Said recognizes that Kissinger is addressing an actual difficulty: the United States must conduct foreign policy under pressures from domestic forces and foreign realities. But Kissinger does so as an authoritative voice for a major Western power whose dominance is not readily accepted around the world. The position from which he speaks therefore matters to the structure of his analysis: his account describes international difference while also speaking from within the power relationship it organizes.

Kissinger regards the industrial, developed West as easier for the United States to deal with than the developing world. Said notes that the latter includes China, Indochina, the Near East, Africa, and Latin America, and that relations between the United States and this broadly grouped world are full of difficulties. The designation “developing” thus does not merely name a set of countries. In Kissinger’s framework, it marks a contrast with the West that shapes how those countries become legible as objects of foreign policy.

The Developed and the Developing Worlds

Said identifies binary opposition as the organizing method of Kissinger’s essay. The argument sorts foreign policy into two styles, prophetic and political; sets out two kinds of technique and two periods; and finally divides the contemporary world into developed and developing halves. This sequence matters because the division is not an incidental label applied at the end. It is the form through which Kissinger’s account makes global difference intelligible.

The West is described as committed to the belief that the real world exists outside the observer and that knowledge consists in recording and classifying data with increasing accuracy. Kissinger associates this outlook with the Newtonian revolution. He contrasts it with a supposedly pre-Newtonian view, attributed to cultures that did not undergo that revolution, in which reality is largely internal to the observer. In this formulation, a historical account of differing intellectual traditions becomes a broad judgment about how whole societies know the world.

Kissinger further argues that empirical reality has a different significance for new countries because, in a certain sense, they never underwent the process of discovering it. Said stresses the asymmetry of this assertion: the West’s own intellectual history becomes the measure of reliable thought, while societies assigned to the developing category are described through what they supposedly lack. The difference is presented as a description of cultural outlook, but its terms already privilege one side.

The Orientalist Pattern and Its Modification

Said compares Kissinger’s division with the distinctions drawn by Balfour and Cromer. More than sixty years separate Kissinger from those British imperialists, and intervening wars and revolutions complicate the older claim that the prophetic mode is simply ineffective. Kissinger’s account therefore differs in one respect: unlike the earlier imperialists as Said characterizes them, he feels obliged to acknowledge that the pre-Newtonian perspective can offer flexibility amid contemporary revolutionary turmoil. The qualification registers changed historical circumstances, but it does not dissolve the hierarchy between the two sides.

Kissinger’s contrast still repeats the established Orientalist separation between Westerners and Orientals. Said argues that it is not value-free despite the tone of neutrality. Terms such as prophetic, accuracy, internal, empirical reality, and order distribute desirable and troubling qualities across the divide: one side is associated with familiar and attractive virtues, the other with peculiar or disorderly defects. The vocabulary turns a proposed difference in historical experience into a ranking of intellectual and political capacities.

Containment and the Argument’s Significance

At the close of the historical part of the essay, Kissinger’s division supplies a frame for confronting the contemporary world. He argues that people in the post-Newtonian world must construct an international order before crisis makes one necessary. Said reads the proposed order in light of its political implication: the developing world is to be contained. He compares this logic with Cromer’s vision of a smoothly functioning machine ultimately serving a central authority. The comparison does not make the two men identical; it identifies a continuity in the governing relation their frameworks permit.

For Said, the force of Kissinger’s example lies in the way a scholarly-sounding classification connects knowledge to power. As with Orientalist thought, cultural difference is made into a battlefront and then used to invite Western control, containment, and governance of the Other through supposedly superior knowledge and accommodating power. The terms have shifted from imperial administration to an account of development, empirical reality, and international order, yet the structure remains recognizable: the West defines the categories, assigns the developing world its position within them, and claims authority to manage the consequences.

Said places this argument within a wider warning about rigid East–West divisions. When such categories become both the starting point and the conclusion of analysis and policy, they intensify the distinction they purport merely to describe: the Oriental becomes more Oriental and the Westerner more Western. Kissinger’s essay serves as a contemporary illustration of how that polarization can persist in the language of foreign-policy expertise, restricting encounters among societies while lending Western power the appearance of scientific judgment.