SOURCE: “Doctor at Large,” in The Spectator, Vol. 255, No. 8201, September 14, 1985, pp. 24–5.

In the following review of Observations: Selected Speeches and Essays, 1982–1984, Welch favorably discusses Kissinger's insight into the relations between America and its European allies, yet negatively emphasizes the inconsistency in Kissinger's political theories.

Thrown together as they are in order of emission, Dr Kissinger's Observations amount to no single coherent whole, with all perceptions and arguments directed to one massive conclusion. Yet a noble unifying leitmotiv does underlie all his peregrinations—the prosperity and survival in freedom of America and her allies. And he offers something not less valuable than a coherent thesis: an insight into the workings of a mind at once fair and broad, lucid, powerful, benign and prodigiously well stocked. (How little justice, incidentally, does the photograph on the dust-jacket do to this Metternich of our days! Instead of the customary koala bear, itself...