SOURCE: A review of A World Restored: Europe After Napoleon, in Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 5, September/October, 1997, p. 216.

In the following review, Fukuyama favorably discusses Kissinger's A World Restored: Europe After Napoleon, yet asserts that Kissinger fails to recognize the political idealism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Alongside Hans Morgenthau's Politics among Nations (1948), the classic statement of political realism, [is Kissinger's A World Restored: Europe After Napoleon]. Although ostensibly a work about European history, Kissinger lays out the general principles of the balance-of-power diplomacy that would characterize his own policies as national security adviser and secretary of state. Academic realists, most prominently Kenneth Waltz, later sought to boil international politics down to an abstract, highly reductionist model. Kissinger never suffered from this kind of physics-envy; he (and Morgenthau) were always conscious of the fact that foreign policy was made by statesmen who operated in a specific historical...