# THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT FOR US SECURITY

## Henry Kissinger

There are many complexities ahead of us on both sides of the Atlantic with respect to the area of national security. Of course, no one has ever lived in a golden age; it was always a previous period. But when one thinks back to the 1940s and 1950s and maybe through the middle of the 1960s, I am struck by the fact that there was a substantial consensus about the general direction in which we were supposed to go. Moreover, there was some mutual reinforcement between groups like the IISS and those in governments, not in the sense that the intellectual community always agreed with what the people in the government did--in fact they very frequently disagreed-- but it was within a matrix of assumptions which permitted a dialogue that in the long run could only be helpful. I have the impression that in almost every country represented at this IISS Conference and in the national security community in general, these shared assumptions have substantially broken down. This, while it is perfectly possible to have debates about individual policies, what seems to be lacking is criteria for what we are trying to do and what reasonable goals might be.

## The Structure of Politics

Let me therefore address some of the issues as they now seem to me to be emerging. I think the most fundamental one in all our

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countries, and the one that is least susceptible to intellectual
analysis, is the fact that the structure of politics is in a pro-
cess of change. The relationship of men to events is being sub-
stantially transformed in almost all democracies. The effort
of getting elected is so irrelevant to the process of government,
it takes so much of the energies of potential candidates, it tends
to select from candidates those with qualifications that are not
necessarily related to what has to be done when they are in office,
that this in itself is an obstacle to conceptual thinking. Can-
didates must devote years of their lives focusing on how to get
on the evening news, not on what they will do when they get into
office. I suspect that there is not a difference in kind, only a
difference in degree, with other societies. So the intellectual
backdrop becomes more important than ever, or else the problems of
statesmanship become harder and harder to solve.

And the most difficult problem of all is to take
a society from where it is, from what it is familiar with, to
a future in which it has never been. How to bridge the gap
between the familiar, which in a revolutionary period can be
highly misleading, and that which is only conjectural, is perhaps
more anguishing than ever in our time. It is complicated by the
fact that the machinery of all of our governments--and certainly
the machinery of American Government--has become so complex
that servicing it turns into an objective of its own. It grows
increasingly difficult to disentangle departmental or agency
self-will from the national interest. Or, what is more realis-
tic, they tend to be identified. If one traces the evolution of

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debates on weapons decisions in the United States--and I suspect
this must happen in other countries as well--it would be
interesting to determine at what point bureaucratic calculation
and at what point strategic calculation were dominant and to what
extent they merged. I can think of any number of improvements
of weapons systems during my period of office that were rejected
because the services wanted to keep open the option of something
entirely new and were afraid of precluding themselves from the
entirely new by agreeing to improvements of what existed. The
amusing thing is that the end result of the process was usually
that they got neither the improvement of what existed, nor the
entirely new.

What is even more significant is that, in these discussions,
there was no sense of a strategy that would give one criteria
on which to act. This resulted from many factors, of which
Vietnam, compounded by Watergate, was the most important. There
has been a collapse or, at the least, a weakening of the kind of
intellectual consensus, of the type of dialogue from which out-
side groups could act as a reservoir of reflection and as the
supplier of some criteria.

And so we find ourselves in a position in the United States--
and in this respect, I repeat, I think this is a problem of the
modern democratic state--that almost any new Administration acts
as if the fundamental American objectives were never permanently
settled, as if one could start over and over and over again. I

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am not saying this is a criticism of the current administration,
for I substantially agree with the direction it is taking, but
as a description of the contemporary scene.

Essentially I agree with the strengthening of American
defence and I agree with the general attitude that it reflects.
But if asked to what strategy that increased defence expenditure
is allied, what it is we should be aiming for in a specific way,
I have to tell you honestly that I have difficulty in finding an
answer. And if I have difficulty, as somebody who more or less
has studied the problem for a long time, what will the general
informed opinion be? I suspect many of us at this Conference are
in substantially the same dilemma.

## The Strategic Environment

We have been talking for over twenty years about the change
in the strategic environment. When I first started talking about
change, as Albert Wohlstetter and others pointed out, I was
premature--or, as others have put it less kindly, I did not know
what I was talking about. But whether there was strategic parity
in the 1950s, or 1960s, or 1970s--and no matter how you measure
strategic power or what the significance of strategic superiority
is--the fact is that we have all known for twenty-five years that
the growth of strategic nuclear stockpiles on both sides was
bound to create a fundamentally new strategic, political,
psychological and moral situation. Whether a leader will
ever feel confident enough with esoteric weapons that never have
been tested in combat conditions to launch a first strike,

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[lc]

and whether the significance of the vulnerability of one facet of our strategic forces achieves a decisive advantage or not, are subjects of endless controversy. But everybody who has thought about the problem has substantially agreed upon one fundamental fact: once the United States lost its strategic superiority, the overall relationships in the world would inevitably change. Whether we are inferior, whether we are now liable to be subjected to a first strike, belongs to another debate. But the mere fact that a plausible first-strike counterforce capability has been lost, or is being lost, has created new conditions. How then will the defence of other areas be conducted?

One of the weird aspects of the current debate about theatre nuclear forces (TNF) is that the Europeans insist that they cannot subject themselves to the devastation of nuclear war on their territory, and that therefore the pristine, true strategic doctrine is one that exposes the United States to the devastation of its own territory for people who will not run that risk in the defence of themselves. When I say that it is not possible for the indefinite future to rely on strategic nuclear weapons for the defence of NATO, I am accused of undermining American credibility, or of confirming only what has been going on for twenty years anyway. Yet every European familiar with the debate in his own country must know that the same inhibitions that he is facing cannot fail to exist in the United States. While of course we can get away with avoiding the issue for ten years or twenty years, the growth of pacifism, which I think is a better description of what is happening than the growth of neutralism, is a reflection

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of a sense of impotence, a sense that there are no reasonable
alternatives.

All of this is familiar. We have been debating, talking about
it for twenty years so it is not even worth spending too much
time on the subject except to say that we have known strategic
parity was approaching and we have not done anything significant
about it. We are increasing defence budgets by some agreed per-
centage at regular intervals, which rarely has the quality of
translating itself into forces and never into a qualitative change
in the military dispositions or into a change in the strategic
concept.

## The Weakness of Analysis

So we are left with the problems of no longer being able to
implement the strategy of the 1950s, of having a mish-mash of forces
in NATO (for what, it is difficult to say), and of having six
American divisions on a continent that rejects local defence but
no American divisions in the area in which we rely on local defence.
We may be lucky: the Soviets have their own problems; there
may never be a challenge that we cannot cope with. But I would
have to say again that we have no intellectual rationale for cur-
rent NATO strategy, that we have all failed to some extent,
and that you have every right to include me in this catalogue of
criticism. I can tell you that I did ask the question (I am
not saying this as an excuse), but it is one of the symptoms of
modern government that you do not always get answers to your
questions in a time span that is relevant to decision-making.

One of the problems is that, in the 1960s and 1970s, the

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intellectual community split into at least three groups: a
group that rejected the very concept of defence or strategy;
a group that identified strategy with arms control; and a group
that identified strategy with whatever new weapons could be
built. There is no point for me to discuss the anti-defence
group in this forum. It seems to me that all subsequent debates
among defense intellectuals have been affected by the debates
between the other two groups. The paradox has been that it was
the liberal community that on the whole developed the most blood-
thirsty strategies. Contrary to their natural proclivities, they
would attempt to reduce strategy to an engineering problem;
they argue that if you can kill a stated number of individual
people and destroy a given amount of industrial capacity, you
have achieved deterrence. Almost any new weapon system that has
come along has been opposed by the liberal community on two
grounds: first, that existing weapons were in any case adequate
to do the job and, second, that, if they were not, some mar-
velous weapon was coming along fifteen years from now that made
it unwise, uneconomical and provocative to build the available weapon
systems. The conservative group on the other hand saw virtue
in the accumulation of arms, usually only in the strategic field,
unrelated to any manner in which they could be used.

The end result is that we are facing the danger of strategies
which, if they work, involve horrendous consequences. It is
not therefore irrational for pacifism to develop. We all know
that the real problem is regional defence; yet this country
has a volunteer army that everybody realizes cannot possibly
meet these necessities. And all European countries are reducing

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their terms of service.

Nevertheless in America we are at least, it seems to me,
trying now to become serious. Whether or not one agrees with
every conclusion drawn by the Administration, there is a greater
consensus in America now than there has been in fifteen years,
which it is in the interest of our friends to preserve. The basic
direction seems to me to be valid. Yet the breakdown in our
domestic debate that I have described, which is now being healed
to some extent, is accompanied by a growing breakdown in dis-
cussions with the Europeans.

Traditionally an alliance was an aspect of a balance of
power; it had some common perception of a common threat, and
shared some theory of how you were going to deal with this
threat. Moreover, there was a shared assumption that you needed
the accumulation of power represented by various allies in order
to meet that threat more effectively. It is rare that alliances
which are perceived simply as unilateral guarantees work in-
definitely without demoralization on both sides. In the past,
alliances usually broke down either when the threat seemed to
become so overwhelming that the alliance was no longer seen as
a protection, or when the threat was felt to have lost its menace
so that alliance was no longer perceived to be necessary. It
is a distinguishing feature of the Atlantic Alliance at the cur-
rent period that both of these tendencies are occurring simul-
taneously: there is either an absence of belief in a particular
threat or, if the threat is admitted, its menace is considered
to be so overwhelming that it cannot be dealt with by Alliance

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procedures.

When one adds to the disagreement on strategy, which is endemic in our community, disagreement on East-West relations, disagreement on Third World relations, and insistence that the Alliance applies only to those areas which are contained in its legal definition, you have a recipe for impotence. It is as if, when a crisis occurs, a President of the United States must turn first to his legal adviser and collect a group of lawyers to determine exactly what the text of the document says. If there is no perception of common interests and of means to deal with them, how can the Alliance continue? How can it lead to crisis unless we are lucky and our opponents disintegrate?

Everybody agrees that the Persian Gulf is vital to everybody's interests in the Alliance; yet everybody also argues that membership in the Alliance implies no obligation for security in the Persian Gulf or for Afghanistan or for any other area you may name, and that therefore it is possible to pursue totally separate and sometimes contradictory policies. Leaving aside what is right on the merits of any one of these issues, I do not believe it will be possible for the indefinite future to maintain present deployments which cannot be explained either in terms of a strategy on the ground for the defence of Europe or in terms of a global strategy for the defence of what is called "The Free World".

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## East-West Relations

In this connection, let me make a few observations about East-West relations. I have the impression that the debate in the United States about what came to be called "détente" was characterized by two broad schools which, as with all broad schools, represent an over-simplification. There was what may be called the "psychiatric school" that dealt with the Soviet Union by the precepts of personal relations. This school believed that fundamentally the Soviet Union reacts to our threat, that therefore reassurance is the answer and negotiations the mechanism. Then there was the "theological school" that saw relations with the Soviet Union as an aspect of a general ideological liturgy and resisted any contamination represented by the implication of compromise inherent in negotiation. This school concentrated on pointing out the benefits to the Soviets of any agreement that might be made, as if the Soviets would ever make an agreement in which they had no benefits. The real problem is whether one can balance the benefits to us against the benefits to them. To believe that one can negotiate a series of agreements of unilateral "benefit to us is a nostalgia which reality will not permit."

The same division occurs between Europeans and Americans. One reads constantly about European pressures for negotiation and about the "over-militarization" of American foreign policy. I can hardly be accused of being an apologist for this Administration but I would nevertheless like to raise the question: negotiation about what? What is it that we are trying to achieve? What is the purpose of it? I favoured détente in the 1970s and I favour détente in the 1980s if it can be properly defined.

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(L)

My definition of détente is that, in a world of two nuclear Superpowers, one cannot conduct foreign policy by the maxims of the era of conventional weapons; statesmen have a responsibility to their publics to demonstrate to them that they are trying to come to grips with the nuclear problem. I do not think we can maintain the domestic cohesion of our societies if there should be a series of crises in which we have not demonstrated a serious effort at an alternative. We will not be able to keep our Alliances together unless this problem that preoccupies mankind is dealt with. Yet I do not believe that we can deal with these problems by abstract emotional assertions about negotiations which are never reduced to concrete programs. The argument that détente led to a period of American weakness is a very convenient argument; it enables both conservatives and liberals to avoid the responsibility for some of their great causes; what happened in Vietnam and Watergate is swept under the rug; symptom becomes confused with cause. An America that went through Vietnam and Watergate was bound to experience a period of uncertainty; nor will a "tough" Administration be able to avoid negotiating, as is in fact constantly asserted by its representatives. Our problem is not whether we should negotiate with the Soviet Union but whether we can negotiate with them without illusion on the basis of some concrete ideas of a world towards which we ought to be heading.

After every crisis--after Czechoslovakia, after Afghanistan--there is always the fear that this is the beginning of a general Soviet military assault. Instead it always presages a new

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Soviet peace offensive and it always leads to the same debate
in all the NATO countries as if the initial provocation had
never occurred. Fifteen months after the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, every retaliatory measure that was taken has been
dismantled and the major price the Soviet Union has paid for their
invasion is what the people of Afghanistan, without much help
from us, are exacting from them. We now see a crisis in Poland,
and it has become a shibboleth that there will be very serious
consequences if the Soviet Union goes into Poland. But have we
answered the following questions? In the trade embargo that every-
body seems to be talking about, are we going to apply it only to
new business or also to existing orders? And if we apply it
only to new orders, does it really mean anything? Do we apply
it to all of Eastern Europe or only to the Soviet Union? If
we apply it to all of Eastern Europe, do we also apply it to
Eastern Germany? And if we have no answers to these questions,
which have now been before us for over a year (and I doubt whether
we do), how serious is our policy going to be?

I have believed in linkage, both domestic and international.
Domestic in the sense that it has always seemed a pity that we
do away with many weapon systems as a result of budgetary decisions
without ever offering them in arms control negotiations. I
believe in international linkage because I think that there is
a relationship between events in different parts of the world and
because one has to be careful not to let the process of negotiations
become a safety valve for expansionism rather than a means of

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improving objective conditions. Of course, one can have a merry old time proving that if you link everything to everything, nothing will ever happen. It is a marvelous form of intellectual pyrotechnics. But the art of policy-making is to know how to make distinctions and the art in linkage is to know which events are related to each other. It cannot be sensible, for example, that we all announce great embargoes and then sell grain and butter to the East and that the Europeans build pipelines. It cannot be sensible that we maintain no relationship whatever between our economic policies and our political policies, not to speak of our strategic policies. It is certainly rational to debate to what extent trade should be related to other issues and what circumstances should be linked to which other circumstances, but one cannot and should not deal with each event separately.

Nor do I want to leave the impression that I believe that the Soviet Union is some mythical Superpower carrying out devilish long-range plans in every category. The paradox is that the Soviet Union has great military strength and enormous political and sociological weaknesses. It is a system of government that has no legitimate means of succession. Not only do our experts not know who is going to replace Brezhnev, but Brezhnev probably does not know who is going to replace him. He may know who is going to replace him immediately but not in the longer term, and in any structural sense that is an inherent weakness. The economy is obviously not working, and all Communist countries, without exception, face the problem of what to do with the Communist Party in a developed state. The Party is not needed for government

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and it is not needed for the economy. Under the socialist
system you have the kind of absurdity that appeared in the
Soviet press three years ago: the system operated on the basis
of a tractor factory that was never built and they fired a Minister
because he reported the existence of a refinery that did not exist.
When you can lose track of factories and refineries, your system
is not likely to be the wave of the future. Yet it presents
us with a massive problem when enormous military strength
coexists with the necessity of fundamental domestic reforms.

We should be concerned lest there be a temptation to try to clean
up the external environment before dealing with the domestic one,
or to deal with China before it becomes a kind of Japan. Those
seem to me to be the dangers of the Soviet system, much more
than a Hitler-like plan of world domination pursued with a
specific timetable. There is a general attempt to expand in-
fluence but I do not believe there is a precise timetable.

## Theatre Nuclear Negotiations

So we face an adversary that is both strong and weak and with
the confusion within our systems that I have described. This is
a situation crystallized for me by the TNF negotiations. Now
for some weird reason the TNF negotiations have become in many
countries the test of allied cohesion and of East-West relations.
Whether that decision should ever have been taken is another
matter. The argument is made that these weapons are designed
to enable the United States to fight a nuclear war in Europe with-
out destroying the US. Of course, it is not self-evident to me

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that it helps the Europeans greatly if we are all destroyed
together, but I will put that aside. I would rather argue that
on a purely technical analysis, the one thing these weapons do
<u>not</u> do is enable the United States to escape unscathed. In fact
these weapons guarantee that, if there is a war in Europe, it will
couple the American nuclear defence to European nuclear defence.
If we wanted to confine destruction to Europe, America should not
change its present nuclear deployment in Europe. It is not, after
all, as if these weapons <u>introduce</u> nuclear strategy to Europe.
In my view, the reason for the inherent coupling is that, if the
Soviet Union itself, and especially Soviet weapons, are attacked
from Europe in response to a Soviet move against Europe, it can-
not possibly permit the United States to stay undamaged and permit
the entire United States' retaliatory force to remain unscathed
while the whole nuclear strategy plays itself out in Europe.

But let me turn to the argument over TNF negotiations.
In historical retrospect, it is not clear to me how we came to
make a test case of a negotiation in which the Soviet Union
has already deployed hundreds of weapons and we have not deployed
one. A conglomerate of motives have involved the United States
in this negotiation. Some are for TNF negotiations because they
want to deploy weapons; others are for TNF negotiations as a
means <u>not</u> to deploy weapons; some are for TNF negotiations as
a link to SALT; and some are for TNF negotiations as a means
of forestalling a negotiation on SALT. Finally there are those
who are for TNF negotiations just because they like negotiations.
I would defy anyone to give me a number between zero and 576

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that would give us a criterion by which we can tell whether we
are making progress or not. Moreover, what happens to the SS-20s
that are affected? Do they get moved into Siberia? How was
it possible that the absurd Brezhnev proposal--that they would
stop deployment in Europe but not, presumably, in Asia if we
stopped deployment--could be treated as a serious proposition?

Everybody knows the Americans are getting into these negotia-
tions primarily because it was thought that we could not otherwise
hold the Europeans together or to the decision to modernize.
If you negotiate on a subject in which you cannot define what it
is you want, you are in trouble. I have intellectual difficulty
with TNF negotiations not related to SAIT and I believe it would
be dangerous for us to repeat in SALT what happened in TNF,
namely to be dragged kicking and screaming into a negotiation
that we do not dominate. I have paid my price for SALT and I do
not feel that I need to be the cutting edge of this particular
debate, but I would like to make a number of general propositions.

Strategic Arms Negotiations

We are now in the strange situation that SALT II, an agreement
that is described as flawed and that we are not ratifying, is being
observed. For a period of time that is perfectly understandable,
to enable a new Administration to make its decisions, but it
cannot be a permanent state of affairs lest we inherit the worst
of every course. We will either have to ratify it or explicitly
to drop it, or at least to agree formally on some limits that we
are going to observe. If one looks at the debate last year,

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three arguments prevailed: Backfire, heavy missiles and the Protocol. The Protocol is being taken care of by time; the other two seem soluble problems. I decline to express a view on whether it is better to try to fix these problems now or whether it is better to go straight into SALT III, as the Administration has committed itself to do.

I do, however, want to express a view on one particular issue which has become an article of faith in the debate, unchallenged by the intellectual community, that what is wrong with previous SALT Agreements is that they ratified existing building programmes and that they did not lead to reductions. The argument used is that the key to the solution ought to be a SALT that brings about major reductions. I have never seen that challenged and I do not know enough to challenge it but I do think a serious study should be made as to what the implications would be at each stage of conceivable reductions. After all, the overwhelming problem of our period in the strategic field is the disproportion between warheads and delivery vehicles. That disproportion does not change at some levels of reduction. Indeed you can make the case that, at some levels of reduction, if you reduce the number of delivery vehicles without reducing the proportion of incoming warheads in relation to the delivery vehicles, you actually increase the vulnerability of the delivery vehicles. I suspect but I do not know that, if you study this, you will find a curve if you plot vulnerability against reducing numbers such that vulnerability increases for a while before it drops. I think it important to know at what point and to what

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level you reduce your vulnerability by reductions. And even
if successful, reductions will finally return us to our starting
point. Assuming that reductions stabilize the strategic
environment--not an easy assignment--the problem of regional
defense will reemerge in more acute form; because stability
means strategic war has lost its purpose.

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The Third World

I am interested in the phenomenon in which the salvation
of Western democracies--their sense of identity, as it were--
is thought by some to depend on rapport with the Third World.
I favor an intensive dialogue with the Third World but I would
question whether that part of the world most in search of
identity can help us much with our own identity. But that
is not the question I want to ask. I want to ask this: What
recommendation about political structure should one tell the
leader of a semi-feudal country emerging into modernization?
We have debated the impact of certain Western policies on the
stability of governments in various parts of the world, and
we have debated whether arms sales have contributed to destabil-
zation or whether there were others factors. Whatever the
answers, the process of modernization has been a major contributory
factor tending towards destabilization. Because these societies
are feudal and because traditional obligations are broken
down in the process of modernization, political insecurity
and instability are almost inevitable. Nor are political insecurity
and instability always and generally led by what we in the
West or some in the West would consider the most progressive
forces. But I have no answer to the question I pose. Supposing
somebody in Saudi Arabia suddenly asked: "I'd like to avoid
what has happened elsewhere as a result of modernization; can
you help us?" What advice would you give him? As I have said,
I think we have no answer yet that I am familiar with.

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## Conclusions

I have pointed out some of my concerns. I want to make clear that I believe that, if one analyses what the Marxists call "objective factors" on both sides of the dividing line, and the necessities of those parts of the world that do not consider themselves part of this struggle, there is absolutely no reason why we should not be the more relevant part of the world and why we should not be able to solve our own problems. We have torn ourselves apart for a long period. Whether you like the manifestations or not, there is in the United States an attempt now to come to terms with reality. What I believe the IISS can do is to begin again to create the intellectual capital on which some of us drew in the 1960s and which has not in my view been replenished in the last ten to fifteen years.