MEET THE PRESS

MR. MONROE: Our guest today on MEET THE PRESS is former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Dr. Kissinger, the singlemost controversial aspect of President Carter's program of retaliation against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is his embargo on grain. Almost every single presidential challenger to the president has opposed his embargo on grain, including Reagan, Connally, Baker, Bush, Crane, Dole, Kennedy, and Brown. Is President Carter right on this, and all those opponents wrong?

DR. KISSINGER: I think President Carter is right in the decision. I regret the circumstances that made it necessary. I think it is the right decision. I think it should be the first step of a reconsideration of overall policy, but I support that decision.

MR. MONROE: How do you account for the fact that virtually every presidential challenger, with the exception of Congressman John Anderson, is not supporting the president?

DR. KISSINGER: Partly because they are all very conscious of the caucuses in Iowa, which is a farm state, partly because the decision was announced at a time when it was not yet known what the other grain exporting countries would do, and therefore there was some plausibility to the argument that a disproportionate burden might fall on the American farmer, but I believe it was the right decision, and I believe that the other candidates will come to see it that way when they put it in perspective.

MR. MONROE: President Carter seems to be leaning increasingly toward a pullout of the U.S. from the Olympics—for changing the site of the Olympics, if that turned out to be possible. Do you favor that idea?

DR. KISSINGER: I think the major necessity now is to develop a long-range and hopefully nonpartisan foreign policy and not to concentrate on individual pinpricks. On the whole, I do not think this is a good year to hold the Olympic Games in Moscow, in a period of such tension, and so I lean towards moving them to a more neutral site. Perhaps what one should do is to move them permanently to Greece, where they originated, and not have this rotating system. I find it hard to see how the Olympic ideal is likely to be served in Moscow this year.

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MR. SEMPLE: Dr. Kissinger, was there anything inherently wrong in our foreign policy over the last three years, maybe the last half dozen years, which includes your tenure as Secretary of State, that led the Soviet Union to believe that they could intervene in Afghanistan with impunity?

DR. KISSINGER: I think that we have suffered as a nation for the better part of a decade by national divisions which made us unclear about the role of our power in the world, the relationship—the appropriate relationship with other countries, and made other countries uncertain about the degree to which they could rely on us. In the last three years, I believe there has been an excessive attempt to apply what I think were the wrong lessons of the Vietnam War, and we have seen Cuban troops in South Yemen, a Communist coup in Afghanistan, the collapse of Iran, the occupation of Cambodia by Vietnam with Soviet support, all of which must have created an impression in the Soviet minds and in the minds of some of those countries that were threatened about American resolve and American geopolitical understanding.

MR. SEMPLE: What would you now advise President Carter to do to reverse that trend in Soviet policy?

DR. KISSINGER: I think it is now essential to recognize that we face a grave danger which requires a long-range foreign policy that can be supported on a nonpartisan basis that is not perceived around the world as depending on changes in administration in this country, and which, in my view, could gain the support of an overwhelming majority of the American people, that makes clear that we do take the question of expansionism seriously, and that we are going to stick to it for an indefinite period of time—and don't tear ourselves apart again with the self-flagellation which has been so dangerous to us.

MR. SEMPLE: More specifically, are there any military options which you would advise the president to take to demonstrate our credibility?

DR. KISSINGER: I would advise against any one measure that has the impression of a gimmick. What we need is some definition of what the threat is and some definition of the strategy by which we are going to meet the threat.

Take, for example, the issue of Pakistan. Here we have a country that is now at the front line of the Soviet advance. It has a super power on one border and a very heavily armed India on the other border. Simply to pour arms into that country—it is hard to imagine that one could give it enough arms to be able to resist alone. Therefore, what we have to define is the relationship of the United States to Pakistan and the role of arms deliveries within that context.

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What is our position with respect to the integrity of Pakistan? How are we going to achieve the protection? These are the questions that must be answered, rather than to think of one military gimmick.

I do believe that an increased American military presence in the Indian Ocean is now imperative, but that, too, has to be related to the overall strategy, as I indicated.

**MRS. HOUSE: What steps can we take now to protect Pakistan without pushing India closer to the Soviet Union?**

**DR. KISSINGER:** I have thought somewhat about this question during the last week, because there is a difficult problem: first, to try to get clear what sort of armaments would make any sense; and, secondly, how one can avoid the problem that for Pakistan to be substantially armed would still leave a gap of many years during which either the Soviet Union or India, or the Soviet Union and India in concert, as in 1971, might start bringing pressure on Pakistan.

I have come to the perhaps somewhat reluctant conclusion that in addition to whatever arms we may give Pakistan that we ought to discuss with Pakistan the possibility of establishing some American air and maybe naval bases in that country, for the reason that American military power will be clearly perceived by India as not suitable for a war of aggression against India, or should be able to be perceived, and that it would be available for defensive purposes.

Secondly, it is essential that we make some national declaration by the president, hopefully supported by the Congress, of our national interest in the territorial integrity of Pakistan because, without this, an arms program in the abstract simply will not make any sense.

**MRS. HOUSE:** Should we provide arms to the rebels in Afghanistan, because that is obviously going to increase the pressure on Pakistan?

**DR. KISSINGER:** Of course, I was in office during the Vietnam war, and the Soviet Union supplied billions of dollars of arms to the Vietnamese that were fighting us.

I think the first issues to settle are those that I have mentioned: How are we going to prevent a further expansion of the Soviets' sphere, either by Soviet forces or by proxy forces? How are we going to give threatened countries the confidence that this is not just an election year sense of excitement in this country, but a long term, settled national policy. This is why I think a bipartisan effort is essential. It is only in that context that we could really deal with the question of giving arms to those who are resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

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