The latest literary effort by Henry A. Kissinger ’50, “Does America Need a Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st century,” sheds little light on the latest round of controversy of which he is the center. In fact, a skeptical reader might say it sheds little light on anything at all.

The fifteenth book written or edited by the man who wrote the longest undergraduate thesis at Harvard is itself most notable for its attempt to play it safe.

Unlike his memoirs it is not nearly as much his draft of history—it is hard to accuse him of partial and selective history-making in a book where he focuses almost exclusively on prescriptions for the future. Except for a section that discusses and dismisses the notion of universal jurisdiction, there is also little to connect the book to the argument offered by Christopher Hitchens, author of the new book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, that Kissinger is a “war criminal.”

And while Kissinger’s book may (as the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman suggests) represent a middle course that avoids the pitfalls of both the American Left and Right, it cannot provide what is a necessary synthesis of the old—Kissinger’s typical balance of power geopolitical intuition—with the new—what Kissinger calls the “New Age” issues such as the environment, the economics of globalization, and human rights.

Since Kissinger can hardly hide his disdain for these new issues, the best he does is to again choose the safe course. He covers his bases by paying lip-service to the emerging emphasis on human rights and other new issues, accepting them only as fait accompli.

The book is divided into seven chapters that deal with, in order, America’s role in the world, Europe, the Western Hemisphere, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, globalization and the enforcement of human rights. It is the typical Kissingerian approach, dividing the world up into neat geopolitical spheres each suitable to a policy of Realpolitik.

The only modification is that he elevates in importance the questions of globalization and “Peace and Justice” by granting them space equal to one of the other spheres.

But the organization actually belies Kissinger’s unstated bias—by treating globalization and human rights as yet two more spheres in which to strategize, he puts them on a level beneath the universal dictates of geopolitics: national interest, stability of the system and great power politics.