Kissinger

De Gaulle and the United States
Columbia University

April 6, 1990

HENRY KISSINGER

This is the sort of occasion to which one agrees a year ahead of time, then suddenly it's upon you, and, being in the presence of so many experts on the subject, one doesn't quite know how to proceed. My topic deals with De Gaulle. I suppose what the organizers had in mind is that I should describe my dealings with De Gaulle. Unfortunately they were extremely skimpy and confined to two occasions. One was when President Nixon visited Paris in February 1969, and the second was when President De Gaulle came to Eisenhower's funeral in late March 1969 just before he retired from office. So I will speak briefly about those occasions and then talk about the fundamental problem of the dialogue between Americans and De Gaulle, which concerns approaches to international relations, philosophical conceptions of how nations cooperate, analogies with the role of the Soviet Union -- as well as some differences -- and the role of France in De Gaulle's day.

My own initial experience with De Gaulle was limited rather humbly to a reception on the occasion of President Nixon's visit to Paris. We were all in the Elysée when an aide came over and said, "The President would like to talk to you." I went over and, without further introduction or in fact discretion, De Gaulle said to me "Why don't you get out of Indochina?" These were the very

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first words I heard from General De Gaulle. I told him it would
produce a credibility problem. President De Gaulle said "Where for
example would it produce a credibility problem?" So I said, "For
example, in the Middle East." President De Gaulle said, "How very
odd. I thought it was your opponents who had the credibility
problem in the Middle East." That, I suppose, took care of me for
the evening.

The next day, President Nixon took me around to a conversation
with President De Gaulle which I cannot say filled De Gaulle with
unrelieved joy, since he did not believe that heads of state should
be accompanied by aides during their conversations. So he did the
best he could by ignoring me completely. But President Nixon, who
had many great qualities, also had a certain suicidal impulse; at
the end of the meeting he turned to me and said, "Why don't you
tell President De Gaulle what you thought of his presentation?"
(which concerned the organization of Europe). My suicidal impulse,
being even more highly developed than President Nixon's, propelled
me to say "How does President De Gaulle propose to prevent Germany
from dominating the Europe he has just described?" President De
Gaulle looked down at me, as I have described in my own memoirs,
as from some high alpine height to a little foothill, and said,
"Par la guerre." (By war) Next question?

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Then, as we were all having drinks, I again got involved in
a conversation with De Gaulle. We were discussing various
historical figures and somehow the subject got around to Bismarck.
We were discussing Franco-German relations and I made the comment
that one of the sources of the difficulties prior to World War I
was that Germany had made excessive demands on France after the war
of 1870, which I believe is historically true. De Gaulle said,
"I'm glad they did because it gave us an opportunity to take back
by force what they took from us by force." One thing I cannot say
is that I contributed to the education of President De Gaulle.

The only other time I met him was when he came to the funeral
of President Eisenhower. And I won't repeat all the conversations
we had then because some of them were somewhat melancholy and
personal, not that they were personal to me, but I had the sense
that he would not stay in office very long. The point I wanted to
mention is that there was a reception at the White House with some
60 heads of state, plus a heavy sprinkling of Liberal senators who
had expressed disagreement with generals, megalomaniac presidents
of France, among many other things, until General De Gaulle
appeared in the uniform of a Brigadier General. Whereupon they
left the Shah of Iran, and whoever else was there, and dashed for
De Gaulle, forming a circle around him. I remember thinking that
if by chance De Gaulle had moved to a window of that room, it would
have tipped and everyone would slip out. It was a remarkable

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demonstration of the power of a single personality, because he wore
the uniform of a Brigadier General and said nothing. He did not
call attention to himself in any way. As he walked into the room,
Senator Fulbright was the first to charge for him, followed by most
of the Liberal members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He attracted the majority of the people in that room. Anyway,
these are the personal observations I can offer you.

I always had extraordinary respect for President De Gaulle.
I think he was a truly astonishingly great man. If one looks at
the years '62-'65, at the height of the debate between America and
France when De Gaulle was being accused of "folies de grandeur,"
of megalomania, of arrogance, of an excessively assertive France,
they were the days of perhaps his greatest triumph. People had
forgotten the fact that France had had an internal revolution in
1958, that it was engaged in a bitter war in Algeria during that
period, and that there had been several coups against De Gaulle (in
1959, again in 1960 and in 1961). For France to have emerged at
the end of all this as excessively assertive, or to be regarded as
threatening to dominate Europe was in itself a huge achievement
because it showed that De Gaulle had succeeded in restoring
France's self-confidence. His basic problem was how to restore a
sense of identity, and a sense of purpose, and this was at the
heart of the philosophical dispute between De Gaulle and the United
States, as it still is between the United States and other
countries.

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In the United States, we are now in a period in which
international events have fulfilled almost every objective we set
for ourselves in the 1940's and 1950's. These were objectives
which coincided precisely with America's philosophy that
international affairs is a hard struggle to achieve moral values.
The United States prevailed in this struggle not by concentrating
on the operation of the balance of power, but on building an
international consensus in which we could achieve our aims through
the purity of our motives, the excellence of our prescriptions, and
the ability to create cooperative structures. And more or less,
we achieved many of these objectives. Whether it was as a result
of our policy or of the disintegration of the communist world need
not now be discussed. Throughout this period America was
frequently assailed by a temptation to isolationism which was based
on two contradictory impulses. One was the proposition that we
were too good for this world, and the other was the proposition
that we are not yet good enough for this world, and should
therefore strenuously work on our moral improvement. Now we are
in 1990, the communist ideology has disintegrated substantially and
its satellite orbit is collapsing. What does America stand for
now, and what does it want to achieve? What philosophical guides
do we have? How do we visualize how international relations
operate? I am not even talking about our policies. I am talking
about criteria, and I have a great longing for an American version
of De Gaulle -- somebody to appear who would do for us what De

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Gaulle did for Europe in the late 50's and the early 60's.

If we look at the debate that occurred then, the American view was cooperation -- that Europe should unify and become supranational, the same way the United States was formed in 1789. Indeed, this is what President Kennedy specifically invoked when he put forward his declaration of interdependence. We looked at the alliance as if it were a technical problem of assembling a certain number of boards in which burdens were assigned on the basis of a kind of quota. Overall efficiency would be the motive of all the participants of the Atlantic relationship. There would an appropriate division of labor, in which case the United States would take care of the nuclear problem, the Europeans would emphasize conventional weapons, and all the forces would be integrated under a single command. The Americans' view was quite well known and was fundamentally challenged by De Gaulle, but on the philosophical and not on the practical level.

Above all, on that philosophical level because they had totally different problems. The United States emerged from World War II hugely successful. We had nearly 60% of the world's gross national product and had totally defeated two enemies. For the United States, World War II was a culmination of history, but for France the end of World War II and the period which followed was a culmination of an extended period of frustration. France understood clearly that its world had ended in 1918 and that it

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could never withstand Germany alone. Yet now it was being treated
by Britain as if it were the dominant country on the Continent and
all its fears of Germany were imaginary; America simply withdrew
across the Atlantic. Nothing is more poignant than the French
effort of the 20's and 30's to construct the Maginot line, which
was done at a moment when the German army was limited to 100,000
men, when the Rhineland was demilitarized, and when the French army
was the largest in Europe. So what did France do? It built a
defensive line against a German attack that was only possible if
the Germans broke the demilitarization provision of the Treaty of
Versailles -- i.e. the demilitarization provisions of the
Rhineland. Still, France thought that would not be enough to
restrain Germany. It was also totally inconsistent with French
political strategy which had guaranteed the small countries in
Eastern Europe and which could be implemented only by an offensive
military strategy. So the inter-war period in which France was
technically the victor was a period of tremendous frustration for
it. Then came the collapse of 1940, followed by the post-war
period in which France had to fight for its seat at the table,
suffered enormous domestic divisions, was caught in a series of
colonial wars in Vietnam, frustrated at Suez, and caught in a
colonial war in Algeria. The problem of De Gaulle was not how to
relate France to a division of labor, but his conviction that
before France could relate itself to anybody, it had to relate
itself to itself, and that it had to have some sense of its
purpose. He once said in a speech, and I'll just read a few lines

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of it: "Once upon a time, there was an old country all hemmed in by habits and circumspection. At one time they were the richest and mightiest people among those on this end of the world stage. After great misfortunes, it came to withdraw within itself. While other peoples were growing around it, it remained immobile. In an epoque when the power of the state depended on industrial might, the great sources of power were stingily meted out to it. It had little coal, it had no petroleum," and it goes on "....and finally after two World Wars had decimated, ruined and tormented it, many in the world wondered if it would succeed in getting back on its feet." That was the problem that De Gaulle was addressing. Therefore he could never accept the proposition that the division of labor and burden sharing were of themselves a motivation. For him, the philosophical problem was to define the burden as a French burden.

It came down to a philosophical debate about how nations cooperate. The United States stresses the concept of partnership, consensus, and cooperation. De Gaulle always tended to emphasize the idea of the political. Americans had a very optimistic conception of the nature of man. De Gaulle had a less positive one. Man, he said, limited by his nature, is infinite in his desires. Thus the world is full of opposing forces. Of course, human wisdom has often succeeded in preventing these rivalries from degenerating into murderous conflicts. But the competition of efforts is the condition of life. Our country finds itself

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confronted today, as it has for two thousand years, with this law
of the species. Therefore the duty of a leader is to understand the
balance of these forces, and to help to contribute to equilibrium.

American leaders protested their good faith and became
personally angry when De Gaulle wanted physical reassurances. For
his part, he treated them as if they simply did not understand the
nature of history. De Gaulle was not concerned with the good faith
of any one American president that he dealt with, but with the
forces which a future president would have to evaluate. It was his
view that, in the end, the calculations of any president depend
sooner or later on his assessment of the balance of forces. And
this is what De Gaulle addressed.

When Dean Acheson came to France during the Cuban missile
crisis, having ridiculed De Gaulle in many public statements, he
was astonished to find after briefing the various European leaders
that the European leader who was most cooperative and most helpful
was in fact President De Gaulle. He often told the story about how
he had a briefing team present, but first explained to De Gaulle
what he was going to do (not what we were planning to do). My
understanding is that De Gaulle asked, "Are you planning to do it,
or have you decided to do it?" Acheson said, "we are going to do
it, but I have a briefing team outside that will explain to you why
we're doing it." De Gaulle's response was: "When a great ally
acts out of need, I will not act like a police reporter." He

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refused to see the briefing team, and supported us. Because he
understood that if Soviet Russia was permitted to put short or
medium range missiles into Cuba, it would change the balance of
power in the world. And if it changed the balance of power in the
world, France could not be unaffected. To make that calculation,
he did not have to be part of an integrated command.

On the other hand, if he had not agreed with that calculation,
it would have been a somber occasion to be part of an integrated
command in which you go to the edge of nuclear war simply because
you have no other option. Now there was all along a fundamental
difference between De Gaulle and the United States about the nature
of the alliance. For a man like De Gaulle, defense had to be the
essential attribute of something. For American leaders, defense
was measured as a total calculation of what was needed, in which
France had no greater status than any other component. In fact
the American approach was to make foreign countries consultants in
the American decision-making process. De Gaulle was of the view
that consultation is meaningful only if all partners proceed to
have another choice, and he therefore always insisted that he have
another choice. He explained this by saying that France had been
materially and morally destroyed by the collapse of 1940. That is
why with regard to the United States it found itself in a position
of dependence, constantly needing our assistance in order to avoid
collapse. In regard to international undertakings in which French
leaders were taking part, it was often with the view of dissolving

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France in them, as if self-renouncement were henceforth its sole
possibility and indeed its only ambition, while these undertakings
in the guise of integration were automatically taking American
authority as a possibility.

This is why De Gaulle withdrew his forces from the integrated
major command. Of course, the integrated command was in any event
a rather strange phenomenon because all the integrated command does
is to plan joint action; the forces are always under national
command. It was therefore more a symbolic gesture. All that the
NATO command did was to make joint plans for the contingency that
the forces are released to it. And all that De Gaulle did was to
say "I do not promise automatically to release our forces to it,"
and he theoretically stopped integrated planning in which
successive NATO commanders had managed to coordinate their planning
with French planning in quite an effective way. Any of you who
have felt this strategic tension will probably agree with me,
whether you share the French views on strategy or not. I think the
most consistent, the most creative, the most systematic thinking
on strategy in Europe today takes place in France. And I believe
that it is closely related to the fact that the French, at least
in their minds, feel the ultimate responsibility for their own
defense. All of this led predictably to great debates between the
United States and France about their own nuclear weapons with
which, again, we are quite permanently faced as a guarantee of
France's survival. And De Gaulle replied, as I think everybody

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would agree with today, that the credibility of the use of nuclear weapons had to decline and that therefore France had to have the possibility of posing its own threat.

Strangely enough, there was always a consistent philosophical dispute about the Soviet Union. The United States in the post-war period oscillated between periods of intransigence and periods of conciliation. We now read constantly that Gorbachev is on the road to Damascus, that he had an inspiration that turned him into a pluralistic democrat and an adherent to market economics. For all I know, this may be true. I am not going to debate that issue now. But the fact is that we have been saying something like this in every decade since the 40's. In 1943, Senator Connally, not known for his radical sympathies when Stalin announced the abandonment of the Comintern or when the Germans were at the gates of Moscow, remarked that the huge concessions of the Russians proclaimed that for years they had been approaching the abandonment of communism, and that the whole world would be gratified by this happy culmination. The same was more or less said in the 50's. In 1964, Dean Rusk said that Brezhnev had learned the incompatibility between communism and meeting the desires of his people. The point I am making is that America has never abandoned these two propositions: one, that communism is evil and must be destroyed, two, that conversion *is* possible, and that some day some group of leaders will emerge to solve all our foreign policy problems.

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De Gaulle never had such views. De Gaulle looked at Russia as an historic phenomenon, and as an historic phenomenon the Russian empire had expanded from the Duchy of Moscovy to the center of Europe, to the shores of the Pacific, to the gates of India - nor did it get there by plebiscite. In 1961, during the Berlin crisis, De Gaulle said the following: "There is in this uproar of imprecations and demands organized by the Soviets something so arbitrary and so artificial that one is led to attribute it either to the premeditated unleashing of grand confrontations or the desire of leading attention away from great difficulties." This second hypothesis -- of drawing away from great difficulties -- seems all the more plausible to me since, despite the coercions, isolations, and acts of force in which a government insistently encloses the country which bears its yoke, and despite certain collective successes it has achieved by drawing on the endurance of its subjects, its internal failures and its character of inhuman oppression are felt more and more by both the elite and the masses, whom it becomes more and more difficult to deceive and to subjugate. One can go on with quotations from De Gaulle about the character of the communist system which is one of the reasons that during the Berlin crisis America was much more eager to negotiate than France. In sum, De Gaulle was concerned with defining a French national interest.

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He believed the properly understood French national interest required, for the foreseeable future, alignment with the United States. He was not prepared to put this into the service of abstract concepts of integration. Now his view of how to implement this went through several phases. When he thought that there was a global threat to peace, as in 1958, he proposed the Directorate, later ridiculed as the directory -- joint action by France, Britain, and the United States. It was in fact rejected by the United States. In the 1960's he decided to organize Europe, but his primary objective was to create an equilibrium that had to be taken seriously by the other countries. What does this mean for the present day? And, above all, what did it mean for that period?

I believed then, as I believe now, that De Gaulle was extremely helpful to the Western world. For the United States, it was not so important whether France followed every one of the frequently changing prescriptions of the United States' strategic doctrine, but whether France took itself seriously in assessments of the international situation and was compatible with our fundamental objectives. This has on the whole been the situation in the entire post-De Gaulle period. Secondly, I do not think the historic American attitude toward foreign policy is indefinitely sustainable. I do not believe that we can continue to operate foreign policy on the principle that every problem can be settled

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into constituent parts, that these constituent parts can be given
a terminal date, or that this terminal date can be achieved by
organizing forces that operate on the basis of abstract, moral, or
legal principles.

My first experience in government was in 1961 during the
Berlin crisis. At that time the Kennedy White House was dedicated
to the proposition that we could find some negotiating position
which would get the support, not of France, but of India, the
leader of the moral force in the world as it was then perceived.
We struggled very hard to develop some position that would get the
support of the non-committed nations led by Nehru. I was the skunk
at the garden party, saying that there was no conceivable position
which India could support on the subject of Berlin. Why should
India run any risks for a city three thousand miles away with which
it had no historical connection, and which involved no Indian
national interest, even the most broadly conceived?

It is in fact very difficult to develop the concept of the
national interest in the United States. In 1936, when the Germans
reoccupied the Rhineland, President Roosevelt asked the State
Department what that meant. What it meant was that, if it was not
opposed, the French system of alliances was in a shambles and that
the overturning of the Versailles agreement became a largely German
decision from then on. However, the State Department listed only
the legal engagements that Germany had broken in entering the

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Rhineland, and pointed out that the United States had not been a part of any of it and the matter therefore involved no American interest whatsoever. Now this is something British or French statesmen would not have understood, and it would have been totally foreign to De Gaulle's approach to foreign policy. We also see it in the contemporary approach to foreign policy, which is that America is still not clear whether the first persons we turn to when something happens are our lawyers -- to determine the legal framework -- or whether we dare to define a national interest. One of the ironies of the present situation in the world to me is that neither of the two most influential countries in the West, the United States nor Germany, have a vision of the national interest. We, for reasons I have given, and Germany because it was unified so late that it spent all its energies on unifying rather than on defining what it would do with its unity. In all of this, I ask myself, "What would De Gaulle say in present circumstances?" And I've asked that of my French friends here. I think his vision of Europe was one in which France would lead the way politically, and Germany might play a major economic role. I do think he would have attempted to vindicate some such position. How he would have done this, whether it is still possible to do so, whether it was ever possible to do so, I do not know. Would he accelerate the construction of Europe in order to contain Germany, or would he move to the British position of trying to get a veto over the voice of an integrated Europe? I tend to think he might have moved to accelerate the construction of Europe and tried to include the East

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European countries in order to have a counterweight. Would he have tried to implement the idea of a Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals? I don't think so. I believe that he accepted that as a phrase being used while America was overwhelmingly dominant; but creating a balance between the two sides of the Atlantic on largely European resources seemed improbable. My instinct is that his sense of history would be such that he would know that the Urals are not a dividing line, that either Russia is part of Europe up to Vladivostok or it is not a part of Europe at all. But his attitude would have depended very much on his assessment of the trends in the Soviet Union. If his assessment was that the Soviet Union would sooner or later return to the policy of the Czars and repress the nationalities, he would surely have treated it as a potential threat to Europe, and have tried to organize Europe along the Polish-Soviet frontier. If he judged that the Soviet Union was disintegrating, and that at the end of the day all that would be left would be the Duchy of Moscow and Siberia, then he might have tried to add the various pieces falling off to some European construction as a counterbalance to Germany.

Now this looks like a very relativistic approach. On the other hand, I believe that the approach of De Gaulle provided more objective criteria than the changing mood of American politics. Wherever you are in that debate, you need only to review the last 40 years to see how many different strategic dispensations have been put forward as sealed in truth, how many shifts in the

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assessment of the importance of certain countries have occurred,
and the criteria to which these were attached.

I believe that sooner or later the United States will have to
develop some operational concept of the national interest. And
when that happens, we will have to be, whether we like it or not,
students of De Gaulle. Winston Churchill writing about the balance
of power in the 1930's reviewed all the various peoples with whom
Britain had been allied and whom it had opposed. At the end, he
said the key point to remember was that it was not a question of
sentiment or personal preference, but that England was pursuing a
law of public policy to preserve the liberties of Europe. I
believe that De Gaulle's approach to international politics was of
the same school. He was a man who detested Communism, but he was
also not a man given to crusades. He was the leader of a country
that had suffered centuries of upheaval and decades of unfulfilled
aspirations. He had to restore its sense of identity in order to
make it meaningful to others. I believe he will go down as one of
the great men of this century.

DR. KISSINGER'S DE GAULLE ARTICLE (REVISED FINAL) 4/27/90

In this, the 100th year of De Gaulle's birth and the
20th anniversary of his resigning from office, it is fitting
to reflect on how the great French President would have
reacted to the extraordonary upheavals of our time.

My own encounters with De Gaulle were brief and
one-sided. The first occurred at an Elysee reception during
President Nixon's Paris visit in 1969. An aide ushered me
into De Gaulle's presence. The President wasted no time on
pleasantries. Eying me aloofly, he opened with a painful
question: "Why do you not withdraw from Vietnam?" "Because,"
I replied somewhat lamely, "it would undermine our credibil-
ity." "Where?" De Gaulle demanded. "In the Middle East," I

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suggested. Gazing into the distance with seeming melancholy, De Gaulle said: "How very odd. In the Middle East, I thought it was your adversaries who have the credibility problem."

The encounter was quintessential De Gaulle. He did not believe that diplomacy required charm or personal relations but rather, and above all, a proper perception of the relations of forces. If these are correctly calculated, diplomacy can be successful. If not, neither good will nor charm can serve as a substitute. A basic aim of De Gaulle's foreign policy was to liberate France from the vagaries of personality. This embroiled him into frequent clashes with the United States. American leaders were outraged by what they considered doubts about their good faith. But De Gaulle was trying to provide for the time when his American contemporaries would be gone from the scene and America would become absorbed in its own problems or with other continents - a time which may not be too far distant.

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In other words, De Gaulle's clashes with America
reflected entirely different sets of historical experience
and perspective.

At the end of World War II, the United States emerged
from its historic isolation into a position never enjoyed by
any other nation. With less than a fiftieth of the world's
population, it was producing over a third of all the world's
goods and services. It possessed an atomic monopoly. Its
involvement in wars had been to respond to major threats
perceived as temporary after which it seemed safe to with-
draw again into isolation. Its commitment to foreign econom-
ic programs reflected the conviction that domestic strains
result above all from discrepancies between expectation and
reality and can be overcome by the mobilization of resourc-
es.

The two great post-war American initiatives - NATO and
the Marshall Plan - marvelously responded to immediate

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problems even though they were based on premises about the
nature of international relations that were as unique,
indeed idiosyncratic, as America's history: that cooperation
among nations is its own justification, that peace is
natural and that division of labor is adequate motivation
for the conduct of each ally.

De Gaulle emerged from a diametrically opposite histor-
ic experience. He led a country turned cautious by too many
enthusiasms shattered, sceptical by too many dreams proved
fragile, and conditioned not by his nation's sense of power
or cohesion, but by its latent vulnerability.

De Gaulle did not believe that peace was the natural
condition among states. "The world is full of opposing
forces...the competition of efforts is the condition of
life...international life, like life in general is a bat-
tle." Whereas American leaders stressed partnership, De
Gaulle emphasized equilibrium. While Washington wanted to

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assign each ally a part in the overall task, De Gaulle
believed that cooperation was meaningful only so long as
each partner had a real choice. Washington, conscious of
America's stability, focussed on immediate, practical tasks;
it urged an alliance structure which in the name of integra-
tion made separate action physically impossible. De Gaulle,
governing a country wracked by generations of war and civil
conflict, insisted that the manner of cooperation was as
important as the goal itself. France, if it was to recover
its identity, had to be perceived as acting voluntarily and
therefore had to have freedom of choice.

De Gaulle inevitably opposed a NATO in which French
forces were placed under foreign command and a Europe which
dissolved French identity in a maze of supranational insti-
tutions. He warned that supranationalism was incompatible
with France's identity as if "self-renouncement were hence-
forth its sole possiblity and even its only ambition..." He

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considered this view not inconsistent with his advocacy of a
united Europe "so that gradually there may be established on
both sides of the Rhine, of the Alps and perhaps of the
Channel the most powerful, prosperous and influen-
tial...complex in the world." And he never strayed from
affirming the importance of the American alliance even while
doubting that America could, or wanted to, retain indefi-
nitely its commitment to Europe - especially in the nuclear
field. In fact, during the Cuban missile crisis, American
officials were as astonished as they were pleased by De
Gaulle's all-out support.

Americans had a tendency to accuse De Gaulle of delu-
sions of grandeur. The fact was that American leaders,
though personally humble, were cocksure about the future. By
comparison, De Gaulle's arrogant style was in part designed
to reinsure against the French nightmare in which the
unexpected formed the most central historical experience. It

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was in the end a case of personal humility and historical
on the part of Americans
arrogance clashing with personal arrogance and historical
the
humility of De Gaulle.

I bring up these ancient quarrels because the upheavals
of the past year have suddenly given De Gaulle's view a new
relevance. He would not have been surprised by the diffi-
culties in which the Soviet system finds itself. Indeed he
might well claim to have foreseen it at the height of the
Berlin crisis of 1959: "...there is in this uproar of
imprecations and demands organized by the Soviets something
so arbitrary and so artificial that one is led to attribute
it either to the premeditated unleashing of frantic ambi-
tions, or to the desire of drawing attention away from great
difficulties: this second hypothesis seems all the more
plausible to me since, despite the coercions, isolation and
acts of force in which the Communist system encloses the
countries which are under its yoke, and despite certain

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collective successes which it has achieved by drawing upon
the substance of its subjects, actually its gaps, its
shortages, its internal failures, and above that its charac-
ter of inhuman oppression, are felt more and more by the
elites and the masses, whom it is more and more difficult to
deceive and to subjugate."

Yet the suddenness of the collapse would have confront-
ed De Gaulle with a contingency he could neither foresee nor
sardonically dismiss: the sudden emergence of a powerful
united Germany.

In his more exalted moments, De Gaulle implied that his
remedy for that prospect was the force de frappe. "How will
you keep Germany from dominating a Europe based on the
nation state?" I asked him once during another one-sided
conversation. "By war (par la guerre)," shot back De Gaulle.

But as a political leader De Gaulle was both more
supple and more realistic. In the Sixties, he obviously

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believed that it was possible to construct European equilib-
rium based on French political dominance, the division of
Germany, West German economic strength and a continued
though reduced American presence. In this scheme everybody
had some role: the Soviet Union would see to the division of
Germany; the United States would defend Western Europe
against the Soviet Union; and France would in time take over
the political leadership of Western Europe backed by German
economic strength.

The pattern was however too Cartesian, that is to say
too intricate. It left too little scope for the unpredict-
able. At any rate, it has collapsed. De Gaulle would surely
recognize that the Soviet military threat has declined; that
the American commitment to Europe is being reassessed; and,
that France simply does not have the strength to organize a
new European equilibrium by herself. The traditional French
option to contain Germany by rapprochement with Russia is

precluded by either of the foreseeable outcomes of the
Soviet internal conflict: if there is chaos, Russia will be
too weak to act as a counterweight to Germany; if Russian
nationalism prevails, a Soviet Union with thousands of
nuclear weapons might rediscover hegemonial aspirations. Nor
in a Europe of 18th century diplomacy is it a foregone
conclusion that the Soviet Union would opt for France as a
partner. In any event, the least attempt to encircle Germany
would almost surely reawaken the very nationalism that is
France's nightmare. So at the end of the road designed to
make America more dispensable, the United States has emerged
again as the key to the European equilibrium - though it
remains to be seen whether Washington understands that
opportunity.

In these circumstances, I suspect that De Gaulle would
pursue two courses: he would accelerate his long-range goal

-11-

of European political unity. And he would rediscover new
virtues in the Atlantic Alliance.

De Gaulle would not in my view convert to the
supranational concepts of Jean Monnet. More than ever, he
would reject the counsels of integrationists looking to
strengthen supranationalism in the field of economics. [He
would surely oppose a Europe run by functionaries.] His
attitudes in that respect would not differ too much from
those of Prime Minister Thatcher.

But he would part company with the doughty British
Prime Minister with respect to European unity in the politi-
cal and security fields. Given his faith in the primacy of
[political leaders over bureaucrats and of foreign policy
over economics,] De Gaulle would make every effort to build a
united Europe in the political and security fields. Para-
doxically, side by side with resisting a supranational
bureaucracy, he might well espouse a system of majority

[Y]

-12-

decision in the Council of Ministers, calculating that such
a system would give France two options: his preference would
surely be the closest association with Germany. He would go
to great lengths to avoid a Franco-German conflict; to even
greater lengths to achieve common positions. But if despite
all efforts, the temptations of Germany's central position
become too great, De Gaulle might resort to the option of
closer cooperation with the other nations of Western Europe.
Either option would enable France to have a decisive impact
on the majority vote. De Gaulle's goal would be not rivalry,
however, but European unity leading to the creation of a
European defense system under European command to which
France together with Britain might contribute part of their
nuclear forces especially with respect to threats to Germa-
ny.

Ironically, the collapse of Soviet power and the
emergence of Germany would transform De Gaulle's approach to

[Y]

-13-

America's European role. As a cool calculator he would recognize that the French and British nuclear forces are last desperate resorts accentuating rather than attenuating the need for American assistance in all other circumstances. He would understand too that while ethnic rivalries and economic crisis have changed the nature of the Soviet conventional threat, the Soviet nuclear stockpile of over ten thousand warheads is essentially unimpaired. He would therefore seek an American commitment to the nuclear defense of Europe which he would regard as substantially empty without an American presence.

But De Gaulle's reasoning would not be simply or even primarily military. The fear of American domination which governed his actions twenty-five years ago would have largely disappeared under the impact of a greater balance in the world's economy, the imminent withdrawal of a large part

[Y]

-14-

of America's ground forces from Europe and the emergence of
European institutions for foreign policy and defense.

Regarding the American presence in Europe as an essen-
tial component of the European equilibrium, De Gaulle would
see the advantage of relating Germany to a Western superpow-
er and to the confidence inspired in the rest of Western
Europe by the presence of a country that three times in this
century proved essential to preserving the balance of power
in Europe. Yet as a student of history, De Gaulle would also
recognize and fear the strong forces proclaiming that
America has won the Cold War and should now leave Europe to
the Europeans. So he would calculate that America cannot be
present in Europe politically without a revival of a sense
of Atlantic community with some common tasks for all its
members.

Thus De Gaulle would probably come full circle as an
advocate of NATO. He would know that a united Germany could

[Y]

-15-

not remain part of an integrated NATO command indefinitely
unless France joined as well. And this decision would be
eased by the emergence of a unified European voice within
NATO. In such a structure it is likely that some American
troops could again be stationed in France.

Of course, De Gaulle would insist on an equal voice for
Europe in global policies. And he would maintain a friendly
option towards the East designed to counterbalance the
French fears of German aberration and American isolationism
without pushing the Eastern option to the point where it
evokes these dangers.

This is surely an unsentimental picture of a leader
sentimental only about his own country. But De Gaulle was
convinced also that his approach was far from selfish: "The
battle which our country is waging," he said "tends to unite
and not to divide, to honor and not to debase, to liberate

-16-

and not to dominate. Thus it is faithful to its mission
which always was and which remains human and universal."

Perhaps De Gaulle's greatest achievement was to insti-
tutionalize his approach to foreign policy. Every successor
of whatever party has more or less followed his basic
philosophy. So it is possible that much of what is described
here will emerge as French policy in the not too distant
future. Then it remains to be seen whether French rationali-
ty can manage the intangibles: Britain's willingness to join
Europe; German self-restraint; and America's willingness to
play a role at once more modest and more crucial.

DR. KISSINGER'S DE GAULLE ARTICLE (REVISED FINAL) 4/26/90

In this, the 100th year of De Gaulle's birth and the
20th anniversary of his resigning from office, it is fitting
to reflect on how the great French President would have
reacted to the extraordionary upheavals of our time.

-2-

Y

-4-

[Y]

-5-

assign each ally a part in the overall task, De Gaulle believed that cooperation was meaningful only so long as each partner had a real choice. Washington, conscious of America's stability, focussed on immediate, practical tasks; it urged an alliance structure which in the name of integration made separate action physically impossible. De Gaulle, governing a country wracked by generations of war and civil conflict, insisted that the manner of cooperation was as important as the goal itself. France, if it was to recover its identity, had to be perceived as acting voluntarily and therefore had to have freedom of choice.

De Gaulle inevitably opposed a NATO in which French forces were placed under foreign command and a Europe which dissolved French identity in a maze of supranational institutions. He warned that supranationalism was incompatible with France's identity as if "self-renouncement were henceforth its sole possibility and even its only ambition..." He

[y]

-6-

considered this view not inconsistent with his advocacy of a united Europe "so that gradually there may be established on both sides of the Rhine, of the Alps and perhaps of the Channel the most powerful, prosperous and influential...complex in the world." And he never strayed from affirming the importance of the American alliance even while doubting that America could, or wanted to, retain indefinitely its commitment to Europe - especially in the nuclear field. In fact, during the Cuban missile crisis, American officials were as astonished as they were pleased by De Gaulle's all-out support.

Americans had a tendency to accuse De Gaulle of delusions of grandeur. The fact was that American leaders, though personally humble, were cocksure about the future. By comparison, De Gaulle's arrogant style was in part designed to reinsure against the French nightmare in which the unexpected formed the most central historical experience. It

[Y]

-7-

was in the end a case of personal humility and historical
arrogance clashing with personal arrogance and historical
humility.

-8-

-9-

Y

-11-

De Gaulle would not in my view convert to the
supranational concepts of Jean Monnet. More than ever, he
would reject the counsels of integrationists looking to
strengthen supranationalism in the field of economics. His
attitudes in that respect would not differ too much from
those of Prime Minister Thatcher.

But he would part company with the doughty British
Prime Minister with respect to European unity in the politi-
cal and security fields. Given his faith in the primacy of
foreign policy, I am convinced that De Gaulle would make
every effort to build a united Europe in the political and
security fields. Paradoxically, side by side with resisting
a supranational bureaucracy, he might well espouse a system
of majority decision in the Council of Ministers, calculat-
ing that such a system would give France two options: his

Y

-12-

preference would surely be the closest association with
Germany. He would go to great lengths to avoid a
Franco-German conflict; to even greater lengths to achieve
common positions. But if despite all efforts, the tempta-
tions of Germany's central position become too great, De
Gaulle might resort to the option of closer cooperation with
the other nations of Western Europe. Either option would
enable France to have a decisive impact on the majority
vote. De Gaulle's goal would be not rivalry, however, but
European unity leading to the creation of a European defense
system under European command to which France together with
Britain might contribute part of their nuclear forces
especially with respect to threats to Germany.

Ironically, the collapse of Soviet power and the
emergence of Germany would transform De Gaulle's approach to
America's European role. As a cool calculator he would
recognize that the French and British nuclear forces are

[Y]

But De Gaulle's reasoning would not be simply or even
primarily military. The fear of American domination which
governed his actions twenty-five years ago would have
largely disappeared under the impact of a greater balance in
the world's economy, the imminent withdrawal of a large part
of America's ground forces from Europe and the emergence of
European institutions for foreign policy and defense.

-14-

Thus De Gaulle would probably come full circle as an
advocate of NATO. He would know that a united Germany could
not remain part of an integrated NATO command indefinitely
unless France joined as well. And this decision would be

M

-15-

This is surely an unsentimental picture of a leader sentimental only about his own country. But De Gaulle was convinced also that his approach was far from selfish: "The battle which our country is waging," he said "tends to unite and not to divide, to honor and not to debase, to liberate and not to dominate. Thus it is faithful to its mission which always was and which remains human and universal."

-16-

Perhaps De Gaulle's greatest achievement was to institutionalize his approach to foreign policy. Every successor of whatever party has more or less followed his basic philosophy. So it is possible that much of what is described here will emerge as French policy in the not too distant future. Then it remains to be seen whether French rationality can manage the intangibles: Britain's willingness to join Europe; German self-restraint; and America's willingness to play a role at once more modest and more crucial.

FINAL 4/25/90

[Y]

-2-