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HENRY KISSINGER

(The following are edited excerpts from an informal talk given by Dr. Kissinger at a luncheon at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston on October 31, 1991.)

I recall with great pride and warmth my brief association with the Kennedy administration. It was an extremely exciting period. I had the privilege of knowing the President and Robert Kennedy, and I attempted to associate myself with their combination of a progressive domestic policy and a strong foreign policy. Later on our paths diverged somewhat.

In 1968 I met Senator Robert Kennedy in Paris and introduced him to some French people knowledgeable about Vietnam. I was more or less in agreement with the minority plank of the Democratic Party in 1968. [As sacrilegious as it may seem to you, I still suffer from the illusion that we carried it out in the first year of the Nixon administration.] The people who had supported this plank went on to do things that I did not agree with, but philosophically we had many areas of agreement in those days.

I believe that in the conduct of foreign policy, every nation sooner or later develops some fundamental concept of its national interests and values, and these do not change every four or eight years. There will always be enough disagreement to go around, even when there is a consensus about how to apply this perception of interests and values; but we should bring to an end the sort of ideological civil war we have been fighting in this country since the middle 1960s, which has destroyed a number of people and caused too many others to destroy themselves.

In historical terms we now have an opportunity to do that. We have this opportunity because we have achieved what we set out to do in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The United States and the things we stood for have won the Cold War. There is an extraordinary correspondence between what American leaders were saying between 1948 and 1954 about what they wanted to do, and what in fact happened.

We are moving into a world for which we have had very little historical experience. The problem is well expressed in a phrase of George Bernard Shaw's which says something like: "There are two tragedies in life: one is not to achieve your heart's desire; the second is to achieve it."

If we look back at American history, there was never a significant concern with foreign policy after the initial period in which the founding fathers rather skillfully used the European balance of power to achieve a large margin of independence for the United States. From the time of the Monroe Doctrine to our participation in World

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War I, we had our back turned to the European way of doing things. The expansion across our own continent was, from some points of view, a foreign policy enterprise, although it was not conceived as such ideologically.

Then in 1918 we appeared at the WWI peace settlement. It is astonishing that a country that had not conducted foreign policy for 120 years could have shown up and proclaimed certain principles of foreign policy to be universally true, even though there was not the slightest shred of evidence that that was the case. Rather, it was an expression of American idealism and of the concept of collective security that all nations of the world should view aggression in the same way, be willing to run the same risks to stop it, or that international law reduces all problems in one way or another to a legal definition.

For America there was never any debate about the various approaches to foreign policy because the alternative to Wilsonianism was isolationism. Almost everybody who believed America had any role to play became more or less Wilsonian. You find that most American Presidents in this century have followed variance of this approach, with the exception of Richard Nixon.

So this is where we are coming from: a very moralistic approach to foreign policy, very value-oriented, and focused on collective security and a belief in international law. The perception is one of foreign policy as a series of conflicts caused by evildoers with whom one deals with in one of two ways -- by either destroying them or by converting them to the American way.

If you look at the debates in the post-World War II period between various wings of foreign policy, you find there were two schools of thought: One treated foreign policy as a sort of sub-division of psychiatry, casting relations among nations in the same mode as relations among people; the other treated foreign policy as a kind of sub-division of theology and transformed everything into a conflict between Good and Evil. These two approaches to foreign policy had a tendency to overlap. For instance, those who were opposed to what was identified as "Cold War foreign policy" used to argue that there was no threat to begin with, or that if there ever was a threat, it had long since passed because Soviet leaders had become concerned primarily with domestic affairs.

The point I want to make is that the world into which we are moving does not fit into these stereotypes. One of the big problems we now have in this country is that the two schools of thought are actually merging. The "theologians" believe the defeat of communism leaves no role for America in the world at large, and therefore say, "Come home, America." The "psychiatrists" feel they can do everything that needs to be done, if we need to do anything at all, by advocating democracy and human rights which will automatically solve all the problems that in the past were identified with power politics.

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There is also no longer any definable ideological enemy, at least one that is physically threatening to the United States. We live in a world in which several power centers are emerging that will be more or less equal in strength: Japan, Europe (or Germany), the United States and something on the territory of what used to be the Soviet Union, because even if it goes to the absolute and breaks up into 15 republics, which I do not believe will happen, the Russian Republic has a larger population, far greater territory, and many more resources than any single European country. So, sooner or later it must organize itself, as will China and possibly India. In fact, India is in a better position for rapid development than most of the other developing nations.

What should the United States be doing in such a world of more or less equal power centers? On some levels that world is quite similar to nineteenth century Europe. On others, it is quite different because communications today are instantaneous and our economy is truly global. Certain problems now exist that simply cannot be dealt with on a national or even regional basis. But these genuinely global problems belong to a world which has no ostensible global perceptions.

So what is to be the role of the United States? Well, the slogans of the last 50 years are now substantially irrelevant. On the level of the new world being most similar to that of the nineteenth century, we have to think in terms of equilibrium, which has always been preceded by a derogatory adjective in American history and textbooks on international affairs. But if we do not want hegemony, for which we have neither the physical control nor, above all, the psychological resources, there has to be some idea of equilibrium. We have never had to do this in our history, or to submit to the endless process of necessary accommodation.

I would also argue that we have no leadership group at this moment, and possibly never did, that has any experience with this; nor do we have a national consensus. Still, there are the other problems which cannot be dealt with by equilibrium alone, such as nuclear proliferation, environmental problems, and the problem of development. For these, there are no historical precedents.

Many people now say the United States is the only superpower left. Much of that is derived from the experience of the Gulf War. Yet the Gulf War was the glorious sunset of a previous period, not the dawn of a new era. We will not have the military capability to do something like that again. Nor will we easily find again a country in which we can build up troops that is one huge gasoline station and has no large population. And we can never fight a war again -- or should never fight a war again -- with other people's money. The wars we fight for which Americans die have to be paid for with our own resources.

(Incidentally, I do not want to leave you with the wrong impression. As you

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may know, I strongly supported the administration from the very beginning of our
involvement in the Gulf War and never wavered in this support. So I am not saying
this as a criticism of what was done, but as an assessment of our role as a
superpower.)

Now when we talk about the Soviet Union, what is it exactly that we want in
the Soviet Union? If you look at Russian history, there has always been a strong
central government there as oppressive as it was aggressive. I know of no exception
to that rule in Russia. But there are limits to what we can do there. In fact, we will
have to decide what it is only we can do, what is desirable to do, and then, if it is
desirable, whether it is among our top priorities. These are all new issues for us.

So this seems to me the foreign policy challenge of our period. I said at the
beginning that the early years of the Kennedy administration were a tremendous
experience for me because I thought that President Kennedy -- whether I agreed with
him on everything or not --tried to mobilize the best people in the country. He tried
to lift our sights. He raised some objectives that I thought represented the best in
America and he attracted an extraordinarily distinguished group of collaborators.
What we need now in this country is an inspiration, and we have to deal with the
problems that I outlined.

These are some of my general reflections on our contemporary era, to which I
obviously could not do justice in such a brief talk.

*Footnote on Nixon:* I thought Richard Nixon was an outstanding president when it came to foreign policy. He showed great courage and strong moral convictions because he could have blamed the Vietnam War on the previous administrations, having inherited an appalling mess. He also defended the principle of confidentiality of government in the Pentagon Papers case, whether wisely or unwisely, even though not one of the documents would have embarrassed his administration, all of them being from preceding Democratic administrations.

But the point I want to make is that the distinction between Nixon and all the
other presidents I know something about was this: Richard Nixon did not believe the
world was moving automatically toward collective security, world government and
international law. His confidence in Americans was limited enough and he was
hardly about to trust foreigners. He had a tendency to think in terms of reward and
punishment, of incentives and disincentives. He also tried to think in terms of
interests, which was repugnant to many American thinkers.

I notice, for example, that President Bush explained our participation in the
Gulf by saying, "The great thing about our role in the Gulf is that we have no
interest, that we are totally disinterested. We are fighting for the rule of law there."

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I think that was a frightening comment for foreigners to hear, nor was it a reliable basis for our own foreign policy because if you have no interest you can also afford to be capricious. Hopefully, you have noble interests, enlightened interests, interests related to those of others. This is what I meant about Nixon. He did not believe the obligation to have no interest in order to be worthwhile.

(Question and answer period)

QUESTION: Could you give us your assessment of the current administration's ability to deal with equilibrium in foreign policy?

HK: Well, the administration, like all Americans, is going through an intellectual crisis over this issue. I think President Bush knows more about foreign policy than any current leader in either party. He is extraordinarily skillful in the tactical handling of issues as they arise. One problem that any President has is to make sure that he deals with the important, in addition to the urgent. There is a tendency for the urgent to drive out the important. So I would have to say in fairness that there is probably not as much time given to reflection on where we are going than to how to deal with the manifestations of the changes.

One sees some of this in attitudes toward the Soviet Union. We find it hard to accept the fact that as a nation, and, therefore also as a government, it is disintegrating. We find it hard to understand that there are two simultaneous revolutions going on over there -- one against 75 years of communist rule and the other, secondary trend, against 400 years of Russian imperialist rule. The second is really an uprising against colonialism. Therefore, it is not correct to speak about the benign function of the central government -- even if it is benign, and even if it is progressive -- because it runs counter to the revolutionary trends on that secondary level.

Neither we nor the Europeans have intellectually addressed what we really want to do on the territory of the former Soviet Union, because huge changes are about to take place, whether all these republics become independent or not, and that is more or less out of our control.

There will also be 60 million Muslims in the southern republics. Whether they are part of the Soviet Union or not, they are going to be heavily influenced by events there and in turn will influence what goes on in Turkey and Iran. A struggle for Central Asia -- something the world has not seen for 200 years -- could easily start again. I talked a few months ago to a member of the Turkish government about creating a free trade region between Turkey and the Central Asian republics of the

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Soviet Union. If anyone had talked about that even three years ago, he would have been thought to be insane.

I have great confidence in President Bush. But every President has the problem of how to get himself organized so that next year's problems get the right level of attention. And it is an even greater problem if you are successful in your day-to-day activities, because you might be using up valuable capital without knowing it.

**QUESTION:** What was your intellectual and other relationship with George Kennan?

**HK:** I consider George Kennan a great man. He is a personal friend of mine, with whom I meet regularly to learn from him. I think his "X" Article in *Foreign Affairs* was one of the great public documents of our period. If you read that today, you see what an astonishing contribution it is because it seems as contemporary today, though more comprehensible, than it was in 1947.

**QUESTION:** Could you give us your assessment of what is happening in Southern Africa and in the surrounding areas?

**HK:** I am less familiar with this area than I should be. I therefore tend to view events in South Africa almost in the same category as those of Eastern Europe in the sense that I do not expect such a rapid evolution. I did not imagine an Africaans President could go as far as de Klerk has gone. Now, whether he can go the rest of the way, I do not know. I think what happens in South Africa could be of importance for the rest of Africa because if the economy could be maintained while the distribution of power is altered to reflect democratic values, then South Africa could orient itself more to Africa as a whole than it has in the past, and it would have tremendous influence.

Now, I have no precise idea how they can do this. Philosophically, I have to say that the British parliamentary system does not seem to me ideally suited for a multiracial society, because it produces absolute power for whoever has the temporary majority, and if you are in a system in which the minority never has a chance to become a majority, you are then really in a semi-totalitarian state and you will not get the necessary consensus.

Power could also be distributed through a federal system, as we have in the United States, or, possibly altogether new forms are needed that are better linked to the various constituencies. There certainly has to be one house that represents the population. I am normally not a great fan of coalition government, but it may be that the only way you can really reassure people in a society like South Africa is to have a coalition government in which all the groups are represented. But these are really

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very tentative ideas. I plan to go to South Africa soon to educate myself, and perhaps I could give you a more sophisticated answer at that point.

**QUESTION:** My questions are based on your comment about the need for an external enemy to define national character or identity. If the Russians are no longer the enemy and communism is dying, what do you see as filling this vacuum? What do you think we should be doing now with the Soviet Union in terms of balancing their need for money and food and our internal domestic problems?

**HK:** Historically the United States has been at its best when it has had either an enemy or a huge task before it. At the end of World War II we had both. Would we have had a Marshall plan without an enemy? I don't know.

The first President I met was Truman. I was working in the Kennedy Administration, and he said, "Well, young man, what have you learned?" And I repeated something I had heard Arthur Schlesinger say: "I've learned that the bureaucracy is the fourth branch of Government." "Bullshit!," said Truman. I didn't think presidents used such language, but, at any rate, I then asked him what he was most proud of - what achievement he considered most significant. And he said something very American: "We defeated two enemies totally, and we brought them back into the community of nations; only America could have done that."

What he didn't say was "we did it because of the Soviets." (Though I think that was a major element.) I cannot imagine any other nation would have transferred technology the way we did to enable Japan to become such a competitor. Most other nations might have helped on relief, but it was very American to take the position that the stronger other nations were the better it would be for us. Now, can we do it alone on the basis of great tasks? We will have to see.

In terms of the new world based on equilibrium, there may no longer be enemies but there will certainly be adversaries. If you look at the history of nations of the world today, I think that Japan has no concept of international cooperation. Culturally as well it lacks any concept of conducting a real dialogue with other people, much less with nations, because it always has to be strained through some consensus system. That does not mean Japan will be our enemy, but it does mean that ours will be a more complex relationship.

I should add that our security guarantee becomes less important as our forces are shrinking. I am not talking about Japan now, but globally. And as the nature of the threats becomes more complicated, various other nations will have increasing incentives to develop their own military capabilities which will in itself produce differential approaches. This is an educational task now before us. We really have to build a consensus and I do not see that the type of leadership group that has

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existed since the end of World War II in this country will do that very easily.

QUESTION: Could you comment on the situation in the Middle East? You praised President Bush for the Desert Storm coalition, which was highly effective. But when the military operation was suddenly halted, President Bush urged the uprising of Shiites and Kurds to unseat Saddam Hussein. They engaged in that uprising and Hussein sent the armed helicopter gunboats against them. The president ordered no attack on those gunboats and the uprising collapsed and the rule of Saddam Hussein was perpetuated.

Now, we move from these unresolved problems to the current situation with the Peace Treaty efforts in Madrid and, it seems, we have an administration with an uncertain strategy in the area.

HK: I just knew there would be at least one partisan Democrat here to come after me!

The United States has no great record of how to end wars because whenever it engaged itself militarily, victory was the only objective. We never liked to think that there could be any problems left after the opponent had been defeated. So in World War I and to some extent in World War II, in Korea, and in Vietnam, we were not good at elaborating political objectives, and even less good at gearing our actions to achieving them.

I do not think we should have gone to Baghdad at the end of the war. We would not have known whom to install there and we would have placed the American army in a city of four million exposed to what we had already faced in Beirut before. I think we should have defined cease-fire terms more strictly, so that Saddam could not move large units of the Iraqi army until he left office.

Many of those criticizing the administration for ending the war too soon were opposed to entering the war at all. And, as you can see from the book *The Commanders*, there was profound division within the Administration. President Bush decided he wanted to clinch whatever he had achieved without running into later difficulties. My own personal view is that we should have been more strict in setting the terms of the cease-fire.

I do not believe they were thinking of the Shiites or the Kurds when they were calling for rebellion. They were thinking about the military overthrow of Saddam because our tendency is always to think of these countries as we do of the Soviet Union now -- as being unified and centrally run. They did not realize that the group that runs Iraq is really a minority, and that the Shiites are more numerous and the Kurds nearly as numerous as the Sunnis.

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Now, on the Middle East -- and these are but very abbreviated comments. Fundamentally, my view is that the Israelis are getting hoisted by their own petard. They don't really want to give up territory. I do not agree with them, but their reasons are understandable. Therefore, for twenty years they have been inventing objectives, peace talks and direct talks, call it what you will, but they do not mean anything.

Almost all wars in history started between countries that were at peace. It is a peculiarity of the Middle East that wars there start between countries that are already technically at war. The legal phrase "peace" is not the key issue. The key issue is -- who is doing what and who is obligated to do what. What label you put on top of the document seems to me a secondary problem.

Therefore, there is a danger that these negotiations will slide into an exchange of "land for peace," which is really just a legal phrase so that the Arab side does not have to undertake any concrete obligations other than to recognize Israel. Now that is where diplomacy usually begins. I think the Israelis are partly to blame for this but, whoever is to blame, this is what concerns me the most about these negotiations.

My view of the negotiations is that Israel cannot stay where it is or it will end up like South Africa. And it cannot go back to the 1967 borders or it will end up like Lebanon. That is the reality. Now, where, in between those extremes, the line should be drawn -- in a territory that is very small to begin with -- is what must be addressed explicitly. Unfortunately the Israelis are not willing to admit that any territory has to be given up. And they are hiding behind the autonomy proposal, which is well suited to their domestic situation and means they don't have to face the hard problems. But it guarantees that they will lose everything, even if they do not believe it now.

The Israeli proposal is that there should be elections and autonomy. But where to hold elections? It must be in the whole territory because they will not admit that it can be partitioned. Now, it is my view that any territory in which elections have been held will become independent. There is no other solution because once they have had elections, we, the Europeans, and everybody else will send emissaries to whatever authority emerges and then it will go the way of the Baltic states -- as it should once this has been done.

As soon as somebody says, "Okay, we will discuss autonomy" -- which I think the smart Arabs will do, and which I believe the American side will also do -- then the Israelis will say, "We are talking only about personal, not territorial, autonomy." There is nobody outside Israel who can even understand this. You have to be a Talmudic student to understand the concept behind that distinction.

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But, since I also believe that anti-Semitism is on the rise in this country, I think that this will result in disaster, especially if they get battered back and forth from one legalistic position to another. Then the issue will move to the Arabs in Jerusalem. Can they vote? "Well," the smart boys will say, "the way to handle that problem is to have an absentee ballot in Jerusalem." Now the Arabs, not ever having seen a ballot, do not really care whether it is an absentee ballot or not.

Anyway, that is not the key issue, because once the Arabs in East Jerusalem have voted, the same principle applies there that I have indicated before. Now, we cannot save the Israelis from themselves, but if I am right, returning to the 1967 borders will lead to the same conditions as prevailed in Czechoslovakia after Munich - namely, that the psychological essence of the state disappeared. Thus, not addressing the key problems will lead to a debacle.

I am surely not blaming our administration for this, but I would prefer if we got away from all the slogans and said, "What land for what peace?" Then we might have a sensible debate. I believe that Israel has to give up territory. So this is my own assessment of the current situation.