JAN 25 1994

HILMAR KOPPER
MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF MANAGING DIRECTORS
DEUTSCHE BANK AG

NEW POSTCODE AND
TELEPHONE NUMBER:
DEUTSCHE BANK AG
60262 FRANKFURT
TELEPHONE (69) 9 10-3 30 05
FAX (69) 9 10-3 55 05

December 13, 1993

Dear Dr. Kissinger,

My colleagues and I would like to thank you most sincerely once again for
holding such an interesting and informative speech at the meeting of our
Southern German Regional Advisory Councils in Munich.

You probably noticed how closely all participants followed your remarks. Your ideas also stimulated many discussions among smaller groups.

I am happy to comply with your request for a transcription of your recorded
speech and enclose the manuscript herewith.

With kind regards and my best wishes for Christmas and 1994,

Encl.

JAN 25 1994

BEIRATSSITZUNG DER DEUTSCHEN BANK IN MÜNCHEN,
29. NOVEMBER 1993, REDE KISSINGER (ORIGINAL)

Herr Vorsitzender, Herr Kopper,
sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

ich werde mir erlauben einige wenige Sätze auf deutsch zu sprechen nur damit Sie sich befreit fühlen, wenn ich dann auf englisch weitermache. Wie viele von Ihnen wissen, bin ich in der Nähe von München in Fürth geboren - und so sollte ich an sich auf deutsch eine Rede halten können. Aber ich habe zwei Probleme: das erste ist, daß mein Akzent nördlich des Mains nicht immer als das freundlichste empfangen wird, sodaß ich gewisse Komplexe entwickelt habe. Zweitens ist meine ganze Erziehung auf englisch geschehen - ich denke über diese Probleme auf englisch und wenn ich auf deutsch eine Rede halte, übersetze ich während ich spreche und es wird immer schwieriger je länger die Rede dauert, und sie dauert dann auch endlos lange.

Mir sagte sogar mein deutscher Verleger, daß alle Bücher, die auf deutsch übersetzt werden 20% länger seien als sie auf englisch sind. So werde ich mir erlauben, auf englisch weiterzumachen. Aber wenn am Ende irgend jemand eine Frage stellen will, kann das auf deutsch geschehen und ich werde dann entscheiden, ob ich auf deutsch oder auf englisch antworte.

Now I will talk to you about American foreign policy in the Clinton era. This is not a political speech which focuses on the personality of the American President. It is rather that the Clinton administration is the beginning of a new generation in American politics, and of a new way of thinking about foreign policy issues. Whether the Democrats or the Republicans had won the

election, this policy would have had to be faced by our
friends and adversaries around the world. If Bush had
won the election it would have been delayed by four
years because he is of the older generation - my
generation. But the fundamental problem would be before
us in any event. And the problem seems to me to be as
follows:

The post-war generation of American leaders grew up in
the depression and in the war. And they were associated
with great achievements: they overcame the depression,
they won the war, and they constructed a post-war
world. The present generation of American leaders - in
both parties - grew up in the Viet Nam period, in a
period of profound division, with the result that in
the Democratic party the radical wing has gained the
upper hand, and in the Republican party the
conservative wing has gained the upper hand. And
American conservatism is not like European
conservatism. American conservatism is nationalistic
and isolationistic in many respects. Therefore, in the
recent debate on NAFTA, the right wing of the
Republicans and the left wing of the Democrats were
both opposed to the ratification and President Clinton
had to gain his majority from a minority of Democrats
and a majority of Republicans. But still, there were
about 50 Republicans who voted against it. About a
third of the Republicans in the House of
Representatives voted against it. So this is a
fundamental change that has occurred.

My generation came mostly from the East. For us,
relations with Europe were an emotional necessity. In
addition to the fact that I was born in Europe, people
like Atchinson, McCloy, Dulles, David Bruce were
oriented towards Europe.

The generation that has grown up from the South-West
and West is not anti-European, but also has no

2

[c]

particular ties to Europe. If they look anywhere, it is
towards Asia. But relations with Asia, for cultural and
other reasons, which I will discuss, are bound to have
other reasons than the Atlantic relations in the
previous era.

Then there is another fundamental difference in which
America may be ahead of what will happen in Europe,
too. This is that my generation was brought up on
books. The new generation is brought up on computers
and on television. And that creates a totally different
attitude towards politics and towards knowledge. When
you are brought up on books, you learn by concepts.
When you're brought up on pictures, you learn through
sentiments and impressions. When you're brought up on
books, you can re-create the experience any time you
want. When you're brought up on pictures, it is very
difficult to know what exactly it was that formed your
impressions. And therefore the politics of television
are certain to be different than the politics of
newspapers and of books.

When I came to America, Franklin Roosevelt was
President. I came in 1938. I did not know until 1945
that he was crippled. You never saw a picture of
President Roosevelt as a paraplegic, which in effect he
was. In any newspaper, he was always shown standing up
and it was never written about. And of course, there
was no television. Today, I doubt that he could become
president - in fact, I am certain he could not.

Now, therefore, the whole style of foreign policy can
change dramatically. In the middle of October I would
have bet anything that NAFTA could never pass the
Congress. In three weeks, partly because the President
went on television with two or three leading
Republicans, he turned the mood of the country around
totally. In March it looked as if we would go into
Bosnia. Today, it is inconceivable. Nothing particular

3

has happened. But the moods can change - and,
incidentally, I agree with the decision not to send
ground troops to Bosnia, so I don't say this as
criticism. I am saying that the style of foreign policy
and the style of domestic policy has fundamentally
changed.

A few years ago I was asked by the Republican party of
New York to run for Governor. I said that I don't know
anything about New York State politics. They treated me
with total contempt. They said: "You don't have to know
anything about politics in New York State. We'll give
you the issues, we'll raise the money, and you can run
for office."

This will affect the foreign policy of all our
countries fundamentally. And it has to be taken into
consideration especially at this moment, because all
the basic premises of American and, I would suspect,
European policy, are all in flux simultaneously. The
temptation is to settle them from conference to
conference, because they are shown on television. The
necessity is to try to think through where we are going
and what we are trying to accomplish - and that, for
the United States, is at this moment extremely
difficult. It isn't just that conditions have changed,
it's also that the American role has changed. Let me
explain this:

If you look at American history you will see that in
the first 120 years the United States was in effect
isolationist. In 1884 the American navy was smaller
than that of Spain. The American army was ridiculous.
The United States did not become a world power until
World War I. Until then America was isolationist. It
conducted no significant foreign policy, and none at
all outside the Western hemisphere. In 1917 America
entered World War I in a very American way. President
Wilson said: "We have nothing against Germany, we have

[Lc]

nothing against the German people, we have no quarrel
with Germany, our quarrel is with the German Kaiser,
who has imposed an immoral regime." The Kaiser had
governed for 28 years at that point. It had never
occurred to anyone that he was governing in an immoral
way, although there were many things to criticize. But
our point was to change the German government. So once
the Germans changed their government we didn't know
what to do. We had no war aims left.

My point is that America did not conduct foreign policy
on the basis of national interest, the way other
societies have conducted it. American leaders prided
themselves of the fact that they had no national
interests.

I reviewed for a book I have been writing all the
speeches on foreign policy of American presidents since
1900. In that nearly a century there have been only two
who talked about the American national interest:
Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. All the others
insisted that the United States acts on principle, on
behalf of moral causes, or on behalf of legal
institutions to resist aggression, to defend
international law, to create the world community. But
God forbid, never for the United States as such.

Now you can say this is of course hypocrisy, there were
many American interests involved, and you would be
right. But the fact is that they meant it. And when
President Bush explained the Gulf War to the American
people, he said the reason we had so much support is
because the whole world knew that we had no interests
in the Gulf. All we were doing was to resist aggression
and stand for the rule of law.

In the Cold War this had a certain validity. We had a
conflict of ideology. We had a real threat from the
Soviet Union. In a two-power world it is a sort of a

5

[L]

zero-sum game. And we could apply the lessons of the
New Deal and the lessons of World War II. The lesson of
the New Deal was that you can achieve political
stability by raising the standard of living. And the
lesson of World War II was that if you find an
aggressor you must resist or the problem will get worse
and worse. But now, we're in a different world.

I don't know anybody who expected the collapse of
communism in this form. I don't know any prediction - I
have never heard any prediction - that not only the
satellite countries would collapse, but also the
communist regime. And that on top of it, the Russian
empire would disintegrate. So now America finds itself
in a world in which there are three, four, five power
zones: Europe, something of the territory of the former
Soviet Union, China, Japan, and ourselves. Five power
centers to which in time India could join that are
ideologically more or less equivalent. China may be
not, but nobody wants to lead a crusade. None of these
power centers by itself present a threat to the United
States right now in the middle of an economic recession
and of growing competition between various parts of the
world. So what is American foreign policy supposed to
be?

The classical version was based on containment of the
Soviet Union. The radical alternative was based on the
rejection of any individual American role and to do
everything on a multilateral basis. None of them really
fit the present circumstances. And so now we have to
conduct a search for a new American foreign policy - at
a moment when we do not have the benefit of the leading
classes that existed at the end of World War II. At the
end of World War II there were people like Harriman,
Atchison, McCloy, Bunker, Bruce - people whose
experience was formed before the War, who were inwardly
secure and who had certain set ideas of some of which I
was critical. But that doesn't matter, because they

6

were substantial ideas. Today you don't have such a
group, and current politicians in all parties are so
obsessed with the middle and short term that it is very
difficult to generate a fundamental debate. This is our
real problem. I have said to some of the Clinton people
that one of the great ironies of the period is that
they would like to be known as great reformers of the
American domestic scene. But their destiny is that they
will either go down as great reformers of American
foreign policy or they will produce a catastrophe,
because this is the decade in which some approach has
to develop. It is very similar to the period after 1945
when there was an empty sheet that could be filled in.

Now let me talk about various areas of the world,
specifically Europe, Russia, the former Soviet Union,
Asia, and then a few comments about the Western
hemisphere:

In many respects the most difficult problem is the
relationship with Europe. The most difficult, because
in Europe there are institutions for cooperation with
the United States and there are institutions for
cooperation within Europe. But it is also the area
where the legacy of the past is the most severe. Take
NATO, for example. NATO is the only institution that
links Europe to America, institutionally. It is the one
place where foreign ministers are obliged to meet twice
a year to discuss foreign policy and in which there is
a military framework of cooperation. The only problem
is that there is no enemy and we don't know where the
front line is of NATO. Right now the front line of NATO
is at the Oder, which is absurd, because there is no
enemy on the other side of the Oder. And by the time an
enemy appears at the other side of the Oder, so many
things will have happened that the traditional NATO
will be of no importance.

7

[10]

This has led to all kinds of so-called solutions. NATO invites all the former members of the Soviet Union to periodic meetings together with the East European states. Basically, I think, this is an absurdity. If Usbekistan is a part of NATO, why not India? There is no common ground, for that matter, between Russia and the West on these military matters.

The real function of NATO should be twofold: One, to help fill in a vacuum in the East, about which I will speak in a minute. Second, for the United States and Europe to attempt to agree on cooperation on crises outside of Europe - in the case of a Middle East crisis, for example, or a crisis in the Islamic world. And I would think that if there were a crisis in Algeria, for instance, France would be more interested in joining the action than normally the United States would be. But the long-term future of the European:American relationship depends on whether Europe and America can agree on some common actions in some other parts of the world. If that is not possible I fear that we will gradually drift apart.

This brings us to the European internal organisation. The unification of Germany has created an entirely new situation for European unity. I will not get into the issue of whether Europe should be a confederal union or a cooperation among nations - I think that is an issue Europeans ought to decide. The real problem is that there are new challenges. When Germany was divided, the West, the Federal Republic, had every interest to subordinate itself to the United States in the security field and to France or the European Community in the political field in order to enhance its legitimacy vis-a-vis the German Democratic Republic. With Germany united, the next generation of German leaders can have no possible reason to subordinate their policy in order to become more legitimate. Therefore, inevitably, German foreign policy will be driven more by national

8

[L]

considerations than has been the case in the past. I
don't say this in a bad sense.

The alternative would be to create some institutions of
genuine cooperation between Western Europe and Germany,
and between the United States and Europe. Now, in this
respect, it is important to make some delimitation of
Europe and to define what we mean by Europe. And there,
in my view, we will face a serious debate.

I believe that Europe, for this political purpose,
begins at the Russian border and does not include all
of Russia. There are others who believe that it must
extend from Vladivostok to Vancouver if it includes the
United States. And there are others in the United
States who believe that we should base our foreign
policy on Russia and not worry about Europe.

I believe that if the definition of Europe or of the
Atlantic Community becomes so all-inclusive it will
water down our institutions in a way in which joint
action becomes meaningless or in which we will be
conceived as a grouping of white races against the
Asian societies, neither of which is in our interest.
Secondly, I believe that if the border of Europe
remains on the Oder, in the long term the position of
Germany will become very difficult and the temptations
to Germany will become too great. And there should not
be a no-man's land east of Germany. Therefore I
believe, both for NATO and the European Community, an
effort must be made to bring Poland, the Czech Republic
and Hungary into some organic relationship on the
security side, so one can ease the Russian concerns.
For example by having the same provisions as in East
Germany, stating that no integrated forces can enter
those territories. But structurally it is extremely
dangerous to grant Russia a veto over political and
military developments east of the Oder and west of

9

[Lc]

their borders. And this gets me to the problem of
Russia:

Russia has undergone two huge revolutions in the space
of less than two years. A revolution against communism
and a revolution against imperialism. The revolution
against communism, in my mind, was primarily a
revolution against stagnation and the deadening
economic system. It was not in my view, except in
isolated pockets, a revolution for democracy. The
revolution against imperialism undid 300 years of
Russian history since the day of Peter the Great.

There are two different phenomena. Those who made the
anti-communist revolution do not all agree on the anti-
imperalist revolution. I know many eminent Russians in
and out of government. I do not know one who accepts
the break-up of the former Russian empire. This may be
a reflection on my acquaintances. But whenever I go to
Russia I ask the American embassy to collect for me 20
yuppies - people who are not in government, but in
business, television, medical professions, anything but
government, and I take them to dinner. I have never met
one person at these dinners who said: "Thank God, we
are rid of the Ukraine." Or who said: "We Russians, we
died of indigestion, and now that we are together - and
we still have 11 time zones, for God's sake, from St
Petersburg to Vladivostok and nearly 200 million people
- we are going to build up our country." I don't know
any Russians who say this.

So I believe that nationalism is the unifying element
in Russia - an imperialism of a certain kind is its
expression. We have the weird situation today that the
Russian armies are in Moldavia, in Georgia, in
Aserbaidjan, in Tadchikstan, in fact, everywhere,
members of the United Nations, and nobody asks them to
leave. What do they do? They keep civil wars going.
Why? To tire out those areas until they say "To hell

10

[Lc]

with independence, we'll go back to Mother Russia". And
this doesn't even include the Ukraine.

On top of it, inside Russia there is certain to be
endless turmoil, in my view almost certain to end in
some form of dictatorship, a Pinochet-type form of
government.

I say all of this not to be critical of Russia, but to
make two points: Especially in the United States, in
each administration (this is not a Clinton peculiarity,
although he carries it further than his predecessor,
who himself carried it pretty far) there is an old
American belief, which is this: Everybody in the world
is really a kind of American. And if they don't act
like Americans, it's due to some misunderstanding.
Sooner or later they will become some kind of American,
however.

President Reagan, at the height of his anti-communism
campaign, when he was talking of the "evil empire",
when you talked to him privately, he would tell you
about his secret dream. What was his secret dream? He
would take Brezhnev or Andropov, or Chernjenkov, or
Gorbachev, it depended on what time you spoke to him,
on a helicopter ride around Washington. And he would
show him where workers lived. And they would see that
workers had swimming pools. And when they landed they
would have understood that communism was bad. And then
they would become like us.

You can read this now - I heard it often - in
biographies of Reagan, in great detail. He once spent
an hour with me, planning how to get into a helicopter
so that Brezhnev, who was still alive, would understand
that he was not being shown a Potemkin village.

In other words, the secret American dream has been:
conversion. Not a foreign policy problem, but rather

11

[10]

the wish that one day the Russians would realize that we are really the same. Now, that was applied first to Gorbachev, and now to Yeltzin. And so there is an obsession with helping democracy win in Russia. And believing that free market institutions will make a peaceful Russia.

My view is that certainly Russia will have an authoritarian regime - Russia has now an authoritarian regime! They vote next week on the new constitution, and Yeltzin has just prohibited criticism of the new constitution on television. So they will have an authoritarian regime. And they will certainly try, one way or another, to get the former Republics back under their control - if only because if Yeltzin wants to be popular at all and get the support of the army and the establishment, he will have to do this. From this I draw the following conclusions:

1. We in the West must not let ourselves get drawn into the morass of Russian domestic politics and into the arguments about Russian republics. We should treat Russia as a great power with respect, with support where necessary, but if we cannot draw the border of Europe and if we cannot find a basis for cooperation between Europe and America on Russia, I am not worried that Europe, as I used to be 30 years ago, and as I used to have my arguments with Dr. Christian, might go excessively towards Russia. I am worried that we will go excessively towards Russia, and neither of us will achieve something fundamental.

I am not saying that Russia will be like it was under communism. Russia will be like it was under the Zars - and that was also a problem. And therefore Russian policy for America and for Europe will become a matter of great importance. Any of these ideas of Europe from Vladivostok to Vancouver,

12

[Lc]

of partnership for peace in which everybody joins
everybody, have to be looked at with the greatest
care. But I tell you frankly, and this has nothing
to do with the parties in America, because the
right-wing Republicans will also be happy with
Russia as a partner: This is the looming problem for
American foreign policy and also for European
policy, as time goes by.

2. Now let me talk about Asia - and I recognise that I am doing all of this from the American point of view and you have to interpret this into your context. There's a huge difference between Europe and America in this sense. Europe has cooperative institutions: the European Community, the European Security Conference, NATO, so it is absolutely inconceivable to me that the nations of Europe, as I define it, west of Brestlitovsk will ever fight another war with each other except maybe in the Balkans. But the major nations of Europe will never fight another war with each other.

Europe may disintegrate, in which case it will be a
squabbling collection of states afraid of Germany
and making all kinds of combinations, but nothing
significant will happen affecting world peace. Asia
is quite different. There are no cooperative
institutions. There is no history of cooperation.
Japan, China, Korea, Russia in Asia have no
experience with each other except as enemies.

I talk regularly to a leading representative of a
major country who I have been meeting periodically
for 20 years, and I always ask him what are his
biggest worries. He always mentions three - they are
always Asian nations, never European nations or
America. He puts them in in different order every
once in a while, but that's all.

13

[1c]

These nations are now going to develop even greater identities. Japan is an ally of the United States, but not like NATO. There are no regular, formal consultations. There is no joint military institution. There is a unilateral American obligation to defend Japan. But against what? What is the danger?

As long as Russia was the danger, you could imagine that Japan would build itself into an American system. But with Russia gone, there is a danger Japan will not believe that we will view Korea, China, South-East Asia the same way as they do. Therefore, over the next 10 years, it is certain that Japan's military forces will grow. They are already spending much more than the Federal Republic, and they already have the third largest military expenditure - if you exclude Russia, the second largest. They are building their armed forces the way Germany did in the Versailles period, so that they can expand very rapidly.

When you talk to leading Japanese you realize that to them Korea, China, South-East Asia are strategic problems, and they are very active in Viet Nam. I am sure this is partly for economical reasons, but this is also a way for them to contain China and to exercise some pressure on South-East Asia. And therefore the relations in Asia will be more similar to 19th-century Europe than to anything else in the modern period. But then there is China which is undergoing a fantastic evolution. At 8 percent growth, which after all they have maintained for 15 years, their total GNP will match that of the United States in just another 15 years. It will be distributed among a much larger population, but still. If they should in 20 years get as many cars per capita as Thailand has today, they will produce over a third of all the cars in Asia. It will be a

14

[L]

huge economic and political giant, and it is
impossible to conceive any stability in Asia without
a dialog with China. This in turn creates two issues
for the next 20-plus years:

The problem will be how to balance China, Japan, to
some extent Russia, to some extent Korea, in Asia.
In 25-30 years, the problem may become how to
balance China alone. I won't be around to do this,
but one can visualize that Japan could become an
appendage, almost like Switzerland, of a heavily
industrialized China. But that's 30 years in the
future.

In my view the American role - and really, the
American/European role, because I think our
interests are identical there - should be to be on
good terms with everybody. And like the British in
the 19th century, we should support the weaker
against the stronger. I know that this is not a very
elevated policy, but it will keep the peace.

The United States has the problem at the moment -
again part of American history - that it is an
article of faith in America today, in both parties,
that we won the Cold War because of democracy. And
therefore we must bring democracy everywhere
including China. So we could end up in a position
where we are quarreling with Japan on trade, and
quarreling with China on human rights. Anybody who
has dealt with China knows that while they may
adjust some of their policies on foreign advice they
will never hold still and let us insist on puralist
democracy, which probably doesn't even work under
the special conditions in China. So for the United
States as well as for Europe the problem of the next
10-15 years is to stay on good terms with Japan and
with China, and not to choose between them. Not to
encourage one at the expense of the other. And then

15

we will have to see what happens, for we cannot
predict the entire future.

Now let me say a word about the Western hemisphere: One
of the results of the present period that is also
unexpected is that the one area in the world where the
Cold War American ideas can still be applied quite
literally is the Western hemisphere. Cold War ideas in
the sense that we prefer to deal with democracies which
we like to engage in economic reconstruction. By some
coincidence or design, every major Latin American
country is more or less democratic today. Every major
Latin American country has market economics. All of
them have understood that development capital these
days has to be private, that the real competition is to
create attractive conditions for development capital.
And therefore the United States has been able to create
the North American Free Trade Association with Canada
and Mexico, and will probably or at least should try to
expand it to include most of Latin America, which in
turn, again almost miraculously, at least in Argentina,
Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, is very
eager to do this. And in a way it is good for the
United States to have one area of the world where more
traditional American foreign policy can be carried out,
a policy which can perhaps be an influence for more
general free trade, and a base from which to operate if
general free trade is not possible.

I have sketched a rather broad picture in which my
basic point is not intended to mean whether a
particular policy is right or wrong. Rather, I wanted
to point out that they do have a government in America
today facing a problem of philosophical reorientation
of American policy. And it is a tough assignment if you
remember that America came out of World War II an
isolationist country, then reconstructed Europe,
reconstructed Japan, conducted the Cold War, and now
it's asked to do it all over again with a different set

16

of partners and a different philosophy. So this is a
huge assignment which one can only be hopeful about
because of the basic optimism of the American people
and, as with all the things I have said, their basic
vitality. This is why I consider it quite possible that
the Clinton administration, which was not my first
choice and which doesn't want to conduct foreign
policy, may wind up like the Truman administration as
having brought about a fundamental turn for the next
phase of international order.

Thank you very much.