In 1795, Immanuel Kant wrote a book titled Perpetual Peace just prior to the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars. More than a century later, Norman Angell wrote The Great Illusion, which argued that great power wars were becoming obsolete, just prior to the outbreak of World War I. H. G. Wells and Woodrow Wilson described World War I as “the war to end all wars,” when in fact it was the prelude to what Raymond Aron accurately called The Century of Total War. When the Cold War ended, President George H. W. Bush spoke of a “new world order,” while Francis Fukuyama wrote that we were at The End of History, yet the 21st century has experienced lengthy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a Global War on Terror, the Russia-Ukraine War, and warfare between Israel and its enemies in the Middle East. Yet the quest for permanent solutions continues — most recently in proposals for regime change in Iran, which, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham, will result in permanent peaceful relations between Israel and the Muslim world. There is obviously something within the human spirit that longs for a permanent global peace, but that quest is an illusion, a mirage that enters our sight only to disappear in the ashes of war. Henry Kissinger, a brilliant scholar of world history who saw firsthand the tragic side of human nature as a refugee from Hitler’s Germany whose family members died in the Holocaust, as a soldier in the U.S. Army during the Second World War, and as a national security adviser and diplomat during the Cold War, tried repeatedly to educate the American people about the realities of international politics. In one speech in 1976, Kissinger told his audience that “there are no easy or final answers” in global affairs; that the reach of American power “has its limits”; and that “what is attainable at any one moment will inevitably fall short of the ideal.”  Kissinger’s message, which he repeated in other speeches and in his remarkable memoirs and his erudite and scholarly books on h... No hoodwinking or hornswoggling here. Support independent journalism and get unlimited access to quality commentary. Subscribe Already a subscriber? Login here The post The Mirage of Permanent Solutions in International Relations appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.