There is a real danger of politics becoming a theater of managing perceptions, judged by the number of Twitter followers and ‘Likes’ rather than decision-making processes that, in theory at least, maximize the general benefit of a certain nation. Kissinger also asserts that he is skeptical of the ability of political leaders to rise above the pressures that the Internet and social media place on their decision-making processes. This point aside, his apprehension about the way the Internet is changing social functioning lies in his skepticism of humans’ reasoning and their ability to control their behavior in a world in which the virtual will increasingly merge with the psychical. Kissinger, of course, is savvy enough to refrain from putting forward propositions regarding who is to effect this regulation-or how.
He subtly supports the need for regulating this virtual world, which, in his view, if left unstructured, could usher in an era of utter disarray in the functioning of societies. Though he does not say so directly, he sees the Internet’s evaporation of barriers among societies, and its gradual changing of individuals’ sense of belonging, as potentially threatening to political, economic, and social stability. The last section of the book-in which Kissinger reflects on the impact of modern communications, the Internet and social media, on the notion of state sovereignty, human privacy, and societies’ cohesion-revolves around his unshakeable belief that the world needs an order through which states interact with one another. The objective of the journey is not to prove that one “order” is superior to another, but to argue that “an order” is needed for the world to avert a descent into chaos. He presents as a series of “reflections” in World Order a journey from the moment that the world’s powers agreed on “an order” to organize international relations-the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 at the end of the Thirty Years War-through to our current day. Henry Kissinger divides the world geographically, but analyzes it through a cultural lens.
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