Since the book was published, we had a limited war in Vietnam, in which a sector of the U.S. population wanted to lose the war in order to purify America’s soul.

We must be more willing, not only to accept the prospect of limited war but, as Kissinger does in his book of a half century ago, to accept the prospect of a limited nuclear war between states.

The catastrophe of the second world war, and decades of living with limited sovereignty, taught the Germans the virtues of soft power and multilateralism.