Henry Kissinger so bestrides the American foreign policy of the past 50 years that any biography of the man, at this moment and for many years to come, is an act of great intellectual bravery. Indeed, it may be bravery to the point of foolhardiness. For there is not just one Kissinger Myth, but many.

One version, winked at by the man himself, has it that Mr. Kissinger is an American Metternich, Talleyrand, and Bismarck rolled into one. The other extreme makes him out to be a war criminal, personally responsible for the death of millions and the misery of nations on every continent. Whatever the truth, it’s a good bet neither of these myths bears much resemblance to it.

Both man and myth loom so large they obscure an even more important phenomenon, which might be called “Kissingerism”: The application of Continental “realpolitik” to American strategy-making during the middle and late Cold War. Far more than Mr. Kissinger’s actions or policies, this habit of mind is now almost hardwired into the conventional wisdom of the United States policy-making elite. It even has eerie echoes in the policy prescriptions of Senator Kerry, who sometimes sounds as though he favors a kind of detente with the autocrats and terrorists of the greater Middle East. Kissingerism will be with us for decades to come, long after the man himself is gone.

By its title, Jussi Hanhimaki’s new book “The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy” (Oxford University Press, 554 pages, $35) seems to promise an appraisal of the great man’s larger influence. But the passage from which the book takes its title – concluding that Mr. Kissinger’s failure to “seriously challenge” the “conventional wisdom” of the Cold War “does not make him a war criminal. It makes Henry Kissinger a flawed architect” – shows both the scope of the author’s analysis and his political agenda.

The perspective of Mr. Hanhimaki, a Finnish academic who has taught at the London School of Economics and now is at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, is standard-issue European leftist – which means that the American victory in the Cold War is primarily a nuisance to be ignored. Our ultimate victory does not justify every mistake or cruelty of American policy during five decades, but any critique that fails to take the larger strategic picture into account is itself deeply flawed.

Perhaps even more importantly, Mr. Hanhimaki’s arguments take no account of the post-Cold War effects of Mr. Kissinger’s statesmanship. This makes his account of Mr. Kissinger’s secret diplomacy, the opening to China, and the “triangular” strategy for containing the Soviet Union highly unsatisfactory: We get a highly detailed account of who met with whom, when, and where, but no real understanding of whether the policy was a wise one or whether it has had unfortunate consequences under quite different strategic circumstances.

A final complaint is that Mr. Hanhimaki has very little to say about Mr. Kissinger’s formative years and writings or his success as a senior statesman. Thus the reader is left with very little understanding about the foundations of Mr. Kissinger’s thought or how he has remained influential after leaving office, both through the professional success of his acolytes, such as Brent Scowcroft or Lawrence Eagleberger, and by the exercise of his own pen and public presence. The phenomenon of “Kissingerism” would be a complete surprise to a reader who came to know the man only through “The Flawed Architect.”

Nonetheless, the book does give us clues to Mr. Kissinger’s diplomacy through sheer accumulation of detail. One pattern that emerges, almost despite the author, is that Mr. Kissinger is better understood as a tactician than as a strategist. The opening to China, Mr. Hanhimaki reminds us, was driven as much by the desperate need to get out of Vietnam as any larger strategic view of the Soviets. North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho clearly had the advantage of the American Bismarck in the Paris peace talks.

Mr. Hanhimaki has plowed through newly released materials from the Nixon and Ford years to work relative ly barren soil on several points, in particular the question of prolonging the war in Vietnam. In these passages, Mr. Hanhimaki’s bare-bones narrative is an effective way of conveying the tragedy of the United States’ exit from Vietnam. “In 1972-73 Kissinger had gradually given in … to North Vietnamese demands,” Mr. Hanhimaki writes, in a simple, elegant paragraph worth quoting at length:

Through a series of communications with the Chinese and Soviets he had made it clear that soon after the return of American personnel the United States was ready to abandon Southeast Asia to its own devices. He was not searching for a peace with honor but an exit strategy and a decent interval before South Vietnam’s political future was determined. Pressed in part by domestic political considerations, Kissinger’s complicated diplomacy thus managed to produce a remark able role reversal: in 1972 it was South Vietnam’s President Thieu, rather than Le Duc Tho or the North Vietnamese, who became the chief villain for refusing to accept an agreement negotiated over his head. Over the next two years the once steadfast allies would bear the bur den of the end of America’s “Indochinese nightmare.” In 1973, the South Vietnamese would suffer more battle-deaths than they had in any year since 1968. The decent interval was covered in blood.

This bitter requiem for South Vietnam is a reminder of the price of realpolitik and the sanctification of “stability” in international politics, and is all the more ironic for being written by a European, leftist academic. It also serves, perhaps, as a reminder of what the consequences might be of American withdrawal from the greater Middle East.

The final chapters in the Kissinger story remain to be written. In recent years, Mr. Kissinger himself has seemed to renounce the amoral practice of realpolitik – as though the great architect does appreciate his own past flaws. Mr. Hanhimaki’s work is not the deeply considered assessment of Mr. Kissinger and his lasting influence on U.S. foreign policy and strategy I might have hoped, but it points the way toward a larger, more comprehensive study.

Mr. Donnelly is resident fellow in defense and national security studies at the American Enterprise Institute.