["At I could resort to platitudes, but I really don't know\nhow to change it. Obviously at some point we ought to get some\nbipartisan perception of what our national objectives are so\nwe don't begin each administration with a complete\nreexamination of every foreign policy, an act which is itself\nunsettling for all the people who deal with us. But that's\ntheory. The need is great. Probably the most useful thing that\nReagan could do in the last two years is try to establish some\nrelationship with senior Democrats that would permit\ncontinuity no matter who is the next President.", "Q: Doesn't the election campaign itself almost thwart that? -\nThey must become enemies during that period?", "At Americans believe that every problem has a solution, so\ncampaigns are conducted by people offering final solutions to\nexisting problems. But in foreign policy, you're ensased in an\nendless process that you can ameliorate, that you can perhaps\nperhaps channel in a constructive direction, like a stream.\nbut each so-called solution is the admissions price to a new\nset of problems. That has to be understood by a nation and it\nrequires an educational process. It would be interesting to\nsee what would happen if a candidate came up and spoke the\ntruth. Is it possible that at some point the American people\nwill decide that they've heard all the glib answers? I don't\nknow.", "Forty years ago, at the end of World War II, a politician\ndidn't have to be an expert on such things, but he had to have\nsome relationship with substance; he wasn't a creature of\npublic relations machines, and he had to take a basic\nposition. Then, too, as long as party bosses picked the\ncandidate, they might not pick the best one, but they at least\npicked someone they thought could run the country because\ntheir survival depended on it. Now you have people running for\noffice whose principal motivation is that they look at\nthe competition and they think they're as good as the others.\nYou have a whole slew of candidates who never ran anything and\nwhose first job in life would be president. And they run by\ntaking careful public opinion polls, so their relation to\nsubstance is very tenuous and very fleetful.", "When I was asked to run for governor of New York last year,\nthe people who were urging me to do it seemed to have no doubt\nwhatever that in two or three months they could get me ready\nto fight and campaign on issues, and I had never claimed that\nI had given any systematic attention to the problems of New\nYork State.", "Q: If Gorbachev is not ousted early, he's likely to be\nthere for maybe two decades, during which we could have as\nmany as five presidents. Would that make our world posture\nworse because of this loss of memory?", "As they have their own problem, of course. Every Soviet\ndynasty, which is what you really have to call it, begins\nwith a purse and ends in stagnation. Somewhere along that\ncurve of Gorbachev, if he maintains his job, his imminent\ndecline will affect the conduct of their policy and they will\nbecome more and more ossified. When that will occur, of\ncourse, it's impossible to predict. The loss of memory on our\nside has two aspects: When people with technical\nqualifications leave the Administration, all you lose is a lot\nof short-term memory. The more serious problem is that there\nis no settled view of what it is we're supposed to do in the\nworld, so that inherently every time we change the secretary\nof state or a chief of staff, we can get a totally new\napproach to an issue and that settled view is never analyzed\nin terms of its essence.", "Delete: \"itself\"/Insert: \"deeply\"", "Insert: "--especially for allies.\"", "Delete: \"people\"/Insert: \"candidates\"", "Extra: \"perhaps\"", "Delete: \"like a stream,\"", "Insert: \"in the end\"", "Delete: \"a nation\"/Insert: \"our people\"", "Insert: \"a process no candidate has\nbeen willing to undertake.\"", "Delete: \"take\"/Insert: \"have\"", "Delete: \", and I had never claimed that\nI had given any systematic attention\nto the problems of New York State.\"", "Insert: \"I had never considered.\"", "Delete: \"these\"/Insert: \"the reign of\neach party chairman\"", "Insert: \"national\""]

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HENRY KISSINGER INTERVIEW

March 9, 1987

Q: Do we root for Gorbachev to succeed? If he is successful, especially domestically, does that pose a greater threat or a lesser threat to us?

A: It's characteristically American to believe that when your adversary becomes stronger the prospects for peace increase. I would say that if Gorbachev succeeds in his domestic program and does not chanse his foreign policy, he will be much more formidable. Indeed, it would be a paradox: The Soviet reform program unaccompanied by foreign policy adjustments, can be a greater threat to us whether it succeeds or fails. If it succeeds, the Soviet Union will be stronger and in a position to be much more insistent. If it fails, they may have to decide before they slip into a position of relative underdevelopment whether they should not use the capacities in which they are best, namely their military strength; not so much to attack us, but to create security belts around them—in China, the Middle East, and elsewhere. So, the Gorbachev revolution is a major challenge to us and the major challenge is to define what we mean by peaceful order and to try to negotiate it now and not slide along on the old and well-worn grooves.

Q: Was life was easier for us when we were dealing with old Chernenko or old Brezhnev than it is at the moment?

A: Life is more complicated for us now, but it also has more opportunities. Gorbachev has a more interesting mind than his predecessors. It is more fascinating to deal with him. It would have been inconceivable that Gromyko would run around the South Pacific as Shevarnadze has been doing. I have just returned from Asia, and I found a combination of worry and fascination with Soviet activity in those countries. That would have been nearly inconceivable under Gromyko. So, there is a bigger challenge, but if Gorbachev would put that interesting mind to work on foreign policy programs, it might be possible to arrange with him a code of coexistence that would last a decade or two. I do not believe that any of the issues now being negotiated will lead in that direction. That is my worry.

Q: Is your code of coexistence something that Shultz should raise when he goes to Moscow next month?

A: Soviet leaders have to balance conflicting bureaucratic considerations, and you cannot automatically assume that domestic reform is equated with a Peaceful foreign policy. Nor can you assume that they have a very long range foreign policy. They run a bureaucracy that is even more high-level than our own. They have to deal with that bureaucracy, you see, as issues come up to the leadership, deal with questions of bureaucratic survival. Questions of balancing administrations must weigh at least as heavily as substantive ones.

So I have always felt, even with Brezhnev, that a dialogue with the Soviets should begin on the philosophical level. You tell the Soviets what it is you're trying to accomplish and why and that enables their leader to go to the Politburo and say, "this is what the Americans say they are trying to achieve. Why don't we at least examine it?" The other way, when you kick up numbers on nuclear weapons, first through our bureaucracy, and then through theirs, what starts out as an American compromise goes over to their side where all their sharpshooters set a crack at it. And by the time it reaches Gorbachev or whoever, he will find it difficult to determine what the purpose is. So to answer your question, yes, we could have a really confidential level of conversation maybe during the time that Shultz is there. I think the most useful thing he could do is say, "Yes. I acknowledge that you are concerned with your domestic situation and that's your problem. As to common problems, here is our analysis of the situation. This is where we think we ought to try to go in the next 10 to 15 years. Obviously, whatever is done has to be in the common interest." And I would conduct the conversation on that level.

Q: Are we correct in perceiving that perhaps the Eastern satellite nations are feeling more reluctant than Gorbachev's own Politburo about his reforms?

A: He has a massive problem. The inherent dilemma of Communism is that the Communist Party is a great instrument for seizing power, but, not a good instrument for exercising power, in the sense that it establishes a monopoly of power but has no function. It spends most of its energy staying in power once power has been seized. The second dilemma of Communism is that it may not be possible to run a modern state by central plan. But it also may not be possible to run a Communist state without central planning, so somewhere along the line they face the question of what you do with a Communist Party in a Communist state. What is its function? How do you avoid party leaders becoming like the Buddhist monks in Tibet, a sort of a sub-numerary class that has prerogatives but no role.

Gorbachev is showing great courage in handling that problem in the Soviet Union. One of the most striking aspects of my visit to the Soviet Union was to find leading Soviets avowing that they didn't know the answer to the problems they themselves had posed. So, if you asked them how are you going to do this whatever it was that they were describing, they would quite frankly tell you, ""We don't know." That problem is serious enough in the Soviet Union, but it's nearly insoluble in Eastern Europe. In the Soviet Union, at least, there's no visible alternative to the Communist Party at this moment because they've been in power so long and have suppressed their opposition so effectively. But in Eastern Europe there's the nationalist alternative and the Communist Party is still grafted onto the system and probably could not win an election in any East European country with the conceivable exception of Bulgaria. For them to go down that route that Gorbachev has sketched would pose a real threat to Party Preeminence. And if they don't have Party Preeminence, what happens to all these leaders? The East German Press reported the visit of Shevarnadze to explain the program, but they never endorsed it, even though the East German leadership made generally friendly statements in Shevarnadze. Apparently the same happened in Czechoslovakia.

At Let me say here that I think Gorbachev is a considerable man, so whatever comments I make about our challenge are not produced by trivialities. I think Gorbachev understands this problem: With a Communist system, and with great sufferings, you can produce a 19th-century and early 20th-century type of industrial state—heavy industry, steel, tractors, things of this kind. But the system cannot go from there to high-tech information-sharing and those elements that make the difference in modern industry because for that you need a level of initiative and imagination that central planning has not been able to generate anywhere. So, if he continues along orthodox lines, the gap between the Soviet Union and Western Europe, Japan and the United States will widen. The rate of growth of the Soviet Union will be even less than that of Brazil, India and, maybe, China. This could lead to an historic joke, that 300 years after Peter the Great, after untold sufferings of czars and commissars, the Soviets will be right back where they started, a huge country, relatively backward compared to its neighbors. He wants to avoid that. He wants to become relatively even with us or Japan or Western Europe. But to do that, he's jeopardizing the existing system of control and he's launching himself onto uncharted seas. I would not be amazed if he didn't last, if somewhere along the line he was turned out of office..

Q: There is usually an exodus in the last two years of any Administration and, clearly some of the National Security Council's problems come from a lack of institutional memory because every President comes in with new people. Is there something an intelligent democracy could do to rectify this loss of memory?

A: Each Administration also starts with empty file cabinets, because the previous President takes all the files with him.

A: I could resort to platitudes, but I really don't know how to change it. Obviously at some point we ought to set some bi-artisan perception of what our national objectives are so we don't begin each administration with a complete re-amination of every foreign policy, an act which is itself un-settling for all the people who deal with us. But that's the way. The need is great. Probably the most useful thing that Reason could do in the last two years is try to establish some relationship with senior Democrats that would permit continuity no matter who is the next president.

Q: Doesn't the election campaign itself almost thwart that? They must become enemies during that period?

A: Americans believe that every problem has a solution, so campaigns are conducted by people offering final solutions to existing problems. But in foreign policy, you're ensased in an endless process that you can ameliorate, that you can perhaps perhaps channel in a constructive direction, like a stream, but each so-called solution is the admissions price to a new set of problems. That has to be understood by generation and it requires an educational process. It would be interesting to see what would happen if a candidate came up and spoke the truth. Is it possible that at some point the American people will decide that they've heard all the slib answers? I don't know.

Forty years ago, at the end of World War II, a politician didn't have to be an expert on such things, but he had to have some relationship with substance; he wasn't a creature of public relations machines, and he had to take a basic position. Then, too, as long as party bosses picked the candidate, they might not pick the best one, but they at least picked someone they thought could run the country because their survival depended on it. Now you have people running for office whose principal motivation is that they look at the competition and they think they're as good as the others. You have a whole slew of candidates who never ran anything and whose first job in life would be president. And they run by taking careful public opinion polls, so their relation to substance is very tenuous and very fleetful.

When I was asked to run for governor of New York last year, the people who were ursins me to do it seemed to have no doubt whatever that in two or three months they could set me ready to fight and campaign on issues, and I had never claimed that I had given any systematic attention to the problems of New York State.

Q: If Gorbachev is not ousted early, he's likely to be there for maybe two decades, during which we could have as many as five presidents. Would that make our world posture worse because of this loss of memory?

A: They have their own problem, of course. Every Soviet dynasty, which is what you really have to call a dynasty, begins with a purse and ends in stagnation. Somewhere along that curve of Gorbachev, if he maintains his job, his imminent decline will affect the conduct of their policy and they will become more and more ossified. When that will occur, of course, it's impossible to predict. The loss of memory on our side has two aspects: When people with technical qualifications leave the Administration, all you lose is a lot of short-term memory. The more serious problem is that there is no settled view of what it is we're supposed to do in the end, so that inherently every time we change the secretary of state or a chief of staff, we can set a totally new end to an issue and that settled view is never analyzed in terms of its essence.

Q: Is the rush at the Pentagon to set any kind of a co-action into space as soon as possible the kind of SDI program you signed up for?

At No. I'm for an SDI program because I believe that unopposed offensive forces as the principal element of the mutual assured destruction [MAD] strategy will lead to pacifism and unilateral disarmament. That is not a new view for me, but SDI is a new view for me. The Pentagon is trying to force the decision by setting something into place and it is driven to do that because the opponents, somewhat disingenuously, are putting what is an opposition in principle in terms of feasibility studies. Most of the significant opponents of SDI are against SDI because they think it is not a good idea, not because they think it won't work. So, in order to overcome the feasibility argument, the Pentagon wants to put some contraption into place. What we really need is a concept of the relationship between offense and defense.

Reagan confused the issue by speaking of a leak-proof defense as a way of abolishing nuclear weapons. I don't believe nuclear weapons can be abolished. Their effect can be mitigated and resort to them can be made more and more difficult. If defenses complicate the calculations of an attacker, they force the attacker into a scale of attack that he is reluctant to undertake, if they can absorb accidental attacks, they make limited blackmail more difficult, if not impossible. These are all useful objectives and if, then, defense is related in scale to offense so that it can be scaled down in arms control negotiations as offense is scaled down. I think all of these are important objectives. I don't think that the issue can be solved by throwing something into space and forcing the issue technologically. I also think, however, that the distinction between research and deployment is disingenuous and that the people most of the people who advocate it, do so because they think they can then protract research indefinitely. So right now we have a dialogue of the deaf. I'm against early development. I'm against making a distinction between research and deployment and I would proceed at a measured pace, offering at all times to negotiate the scale of deployment. I am even willing to negotiate the scale of research that is to say, I would not approve qualitative limitations on research, but if one could come up with a number of tests to be conducted in space in any one year, so that you would have progress but not the kind of acceleration that would foreclose the issue.

Q: SALT II is done, the ABM Treaty may be goins, and SDI research chugs along. How long can we go on that way?

A: SALT II is something of an absurdity. Where is the restraint in an unratified treaty that would have lapsed if it had been ratified? The irony is that the United States, by not ratifying the treaty, save the Soviets 300 extra missiles because they were not required to scrap missiles as they would have if the treaty had been in effect. So they're selling us the 300 missiles a second time in their 50 percent cut proposal.