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Speech by Henry A. Kissinger - at the Davos Symposium

January 31, 1980

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I want to express my great appreciation about what
Ted Heath has said. We have been friends for twenty
years and fought sometimes together and sometimes
separately about the future of our societies.

I had the privilege of working with Ted Heath when
he was Prime Minister. The German statesman Bismarck once
said (I paraphrase from memory) that the art of states-
manship is to listen carefully until one can perhaps
discern the footsteps of history and follow for a brief
period in their train. I am convinced that history
will show that Ted Heath understood and heard the footsteps
of history.

He realized that Europe needed unity and identity to
make its contribution to our contemporary period. In office,
he did not always share my own estimate of my infalli-
bility, which made him not always the easiest partner to
be with. But he performed the most important role of an
ally, a friend and a partner: to recall us to our duties,
to advance his view of our future, and, as Winston Churchill
said, he was not always wrong.

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I am speaking to you today in an atmosphere quite different from the one in which I accepted your invitation. At that time, I thought that I would deliver a more or less standard speech about the major elements of international relations. But we find ourselves now in a period of tension, of some confusion: one is asked whether we are facing now a new period of cold war, an end of detente--perhaps the prospect of a new world war. I would, therefore, like to analyze the nature of the contemporary situation as I see it, offer some suggestions and ask some questions to which answers must be found.

First, I do not like the distinction of the post-war period into a period of cold war and a period of detente. The cold war was not so terrible and detente was not so exalted. In the cold war, we had a certain amount of ideological hostility and a number of Berlin crises. In the detente period, we had a number of summit meetings and Soviet rearmament and expansionism. So we should not treat international relations as if there had been a clearly defined period in which we lived with a consciousness of harmony. Indeed, the tendency to deal with East-West relations

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as if they were like relations among individuals, the tendency to attempt to solve the problem of war and peace psychiatrically, as it were, by creating an atmosphere without substance, is in itself a problem of contemporary policy.

Relations between the West and the Soviet Union must be based on two fundamental principles. The first is: we must be strong enough and determined enough to resist expansionism, whatever forms it takes. Second, possessing, as we do, weapons of untold destructiveness, we are also doomed to coexistence, and we must seek means by which this coexistence can be made more tolerable and, in time, less dangerous and perhaps even constructive. The desire for peace must not be permitted to turn into a form of blackmail, but the willingness and necessity to resist expansion must not seek confrontation for its own sake.

One of the difficulties of Western policy has been the oscillation between euphoria and panic; the reluctance to accept the fact that we must be both strong and determined on the one side and prepared to negotiate on the other; the difficulty of relating negotiations to concrete objectives and the unwillingness to face the strategic necessities of containing Soviet agressiveness. And as

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we go into this new period of danger, it is important
to keep in mind that, if we succeed in what must now
be done, we will again confront a period of negotiation
--that is indeed the purpose--and we must prepare
ourselves for it now.

Now let me discuss the international situation as I
see it. I will mention briefly a number of structural,
dynamic changes independent of specific Soviet actions
and then I will address the specific events that have led
to the current situation.

We are living in a world which has seen a major
redistribution of power. Several times, first at the end
of World War II when Europe lost its traditional pre-
eminence, then in the decades afterwards, there developed
a new standard of power including Europe. The world
became transformed first into a bipolar system and then into
a somewhat multipolar system. But it is a curious system,
because for the first time in history economic, political
and military power are not identical. For the first time
in history, it is possible for a country to be militarily
strong and economically stagnant, like the Soviet Union.
It is also possible for a country to be economically very
strong and yet be militarily insignificant, such as most
OPEC countries. Some countries play a major political role,

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for a variety of reasons, without being either militarily
or economically strong. So the incommensurability of
the various elements of power gives a complexity to
contemporary international relations that is unique.

The second is that, for the first time in history,
foreign policy is truly global. Until the end of World
War II, the various continents pursued their policies in
isolation from each other. One could not really compare
China and Europe in the 17th century because, to all
practical purposes, they did not interact.

That condition has changed, and it is compounded by
the loss of economic autarky of the various regions.
Then, for the first time in history, there are many problems
that affect all of humanity: environmental concerns,
proliferation of nuclear weapons, for example. There
is, again for the first time, a discovery of agricultural
incompetence in many parts of the world that cannot feed
themselves any longer, either because they do not have
the technology or because the population has pressed at
the margins of their resources--of which the reverse side
is the near monopoly position of small numbers of countries
having scarce raw materials.

And there is a dilution of confidence in classic
economic models, a challenge to the capitalist system

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due to simultaneous inflation and recession. But also
a demoralization of the socialist systems, which nowhere
have produced the satisfaction of the human personality.
All of these changes are global and would make ours a
period of turmoil--even apart from any specific Soviet
challenge that we face. But we do face a specific
challenge, and I would now like to talk about my assess-
ment of what we are confronting at this moment in the Soviet
Union.

We face, in the Soviet Union, a strange amalgam of
ideology, bureaucratic and economic stagnation coupled
with enormous ability in one limited field--the accumulation
of military power.

The ideology places great stress on the objective
correlation of forces. One can argue forever whether the
present Soviet leaders still hold the pristine version of
Leninism, and almost certainly they do not, but they do
believe that they understand Western trends better than
the West. And therefore, the worst method in negotiations
with Soviet Union is the psychiatric approach, the
sentimental tendency to think that good personal relations
are a guarantee for good inter-state relations. The Soviets
tend to treat our negotiators the ways psychiatrists treat
their patients: No matter what you say to them, they

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think they understand us better than we understand
ourselves.

And if the correlation of forces tilts, in their
judgment, in their direction, we live in a period of
great danger. And this is exactly what has happened in
the last decade in the military field. Indeed, the fact
that the economic performance of the Soviet Union is so
poor compounds our danger, because it creates a temptation
to use the military advantage while it still exists, and
**before** the dilemmas of modernization grow overwhelming.
The Soviet Union faces the dilemma that one cannot run
a modern economy by central planning. But it is not clear
that you can run the Soviet system **without** central
planning. Before they address this issue, they may want
to achieve security in the external environment; so that
we may find a paradoxical combination of the modernizers
and the bureaucrats--the bureaucrats, because when you
have rigid structures, the one that commands large resources,
like the military, its own communications net and its own
transportation system, plays a very important, perhaps
decisive role.

Nobody should deny the Soviet Union its legitimate
security concerns. Up to now, the problem has been that the
Soviet Union is in danger of adopting a definition of