World Order is a brilliantly conceived and executed book even by Henry Kissinger’s very high standards. His memoirs of government service with President Nixon and President Ford rival the war memoirs of General Charles de Gaulle as the most stylishly elegant and readable memoirs of any modern statesman. And their accuracy is not encumbered by such an onerous mission as de Gaulle’s “assumption,” in effect personification, of France. Henry Kissinger wrote his memoirs as a foreign policy specialist who was both co-author and executant of an imaginative foreign policy in tumultuous times. His subject in this book, the evolution of the organization of political power in the world, starts for the Western world—including Russia—with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, for the Muslim world with the start of Islam in the Seventh Century, and for India, Japan, and China during the time of the Western Middle Ages.

Henry Kissinger’s expertise in the history of the European Great Powers as nation states and empires has been well known for nearly sixty years in academic terms and for forty-five years as a foreign policy maker, which brought him also to intimate knowledge of Middle Eastern and Chinese concepts of diplomacy and international order. His learned sketches of the origins and philosophy of Indian and Japanese concepts of their national interest and foreign relations are a new and interesting departure for Dr. Kissinger as a writer, as are some of his reflections on the formative stages of militant Islam.