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THE ENERGY PROBLEM AND INTERNATIONAL
CONFLICTS

Henry Kissinger

I AM HERE because of my high regard for the Weizmann Institute, but I am above all here because I have not yet found the means of refusing anything that Shep Stone asks me to do. He gave me a title and he said I should talk about energy and international affairs. I said I have proved conclusively in the conduct of my office that I am not an expert on energy, and there is a school of thought that claims that I am not one on international affairs — but I have written two long books disputing this. So Shep said, talk about anything you want. I notice I am still on the program as talking about energy and international affairs!

I notice that the overall topic of the conference is related to science, and I see there even a talk about Mozart. Therefore, I feel that with such a wide range of topics I might talk in a more general way.

For me, speaking to you is a rather moving occasion. To be here, to see the flag of the Bundesrepublik, the flag of Berlin and the flag of Israel side by side is a very symbolic event, especially for somebody with my background. I was born in Germany and though it was a difficult period, I have never lost the special relationship that is born in one's youth and have always maintained a particular interest in Germany.

I have an honorary degree from the Weizmann Institute, and as I wrote in the second volume of my memoirs, I have never denied that Israel has a very particular sentimental significance for me. It was my duty to conduct American foreign policy, but it was also a fact that the future of the State of Israel is in my view of great consequence for the possibilities of justice and decency in this world. And of course, as an American one is inevitably involved in global concerns.

Reluctantly America has been transposed into a position where its judgement on world affairs will be decisive for both stability and peace and progress. Those of us who have been either engaged in the

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conduct of affairs or in reflection about affairs, or both, have the
special duty to consider the implications of this state of affairs for a
society to which this insight does not come naturally at all.

The United States has practically no experience with the world of
international politics that is familiar to almost every other country.
A country like Israel with a narrow, if not non-existent margin of
survival, cannot afford a single mistake, and therefore its policies are
cautious — sometimes, to outsiders, to the extreme. But on the other
hand any mistake Israel makes is likely to be irrevocable. I have often
said that it seemed to me the tactic of Israeli negotiators to drive
their counterparts from the United States so close to the edge of ner-
vous collapse that all they had, the only capacity they had left, was
to sign a document that the Israelis submitted to them. I cannot say
that there were not moments of exasperation in the relationship, but
in calmer moments one recognizes that whether one agrees with any
particular Israeli position or not, there is an inherent necessity in the
status of a very small country wholly dependent on another state.
Recall during World War Two, when Churchill was asked to be flex-
ible and said "I am too weak to be flexible." This is one problem.
But even a country like Germany, throughout its history, being a
much larger state than Israel of course, has never known absolute se-
curity. No European nation has known absolute security. They have
only known relative security, a balancing of interests and of power.
The United States until very recently has had the luxury of not being
able to make irrevocable mistakes. Anything that one could do, any
policy in the United States, could always be compensated for by re-
doubling one's efforts later on.

As late as 1950, the United States had 52% of the world's gross
national product. Over half of the goods and services produced in the
world were American. Every ten years since then it has declined by
10%, and now the United States possesses only about 20-22% of
the world's goods and services. That is still a rather large fragment of
the total, larger than any other nation possesses, but it also means
that we are now, in relation to the rest of the world, in the same po-
sition that Britain was to the European continent through the 18th
and 19th centuries. If the rest of the world were to unite against us,
it would be an unconscionably dangerous world. We therefore have
an American national interest in the balance of power. I mention all
of this because the psychological and intellectual opposition to this
state of affairs characterizes the current American debate.

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American intellectuals are divided into two groups. The first is the group of those who believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry, that one can achieve results through strenuous exercise of good will, and that every negotiating impasse can be broken by some splendid new idea, whether on arms control, or on Berlin, or on Israel. The precise issue does not really make any difference; you give this group a national crisis, and they will come up with a proposal. But they have more answers than there are questions and they think it is purely a matter of tactical issues.

The other group thinks foreign policy is a subdivision of theology. They argue that the walls of Jericho will tumble down if you only blow the right trumpet.

In between is the reality as I see it. The world known to most Europeans and other countries has to be inherently somewhat relativistic in the sense that nobody can achieve everything that he wants. Anybody who wants absolute security for himself will produce absolute insecurity for his neighbors. To live in such a world has been the American rebellion and trauma for almost the last 15 years. It masqueraded as a debate about the Vietnam war, but the Vietnam war made it easy for everybody. If you analyze the substance to the rational positions on the Vietnam war, there was not a dispute that was worth tearing the country apart. Everybody wanted to get out of Vietnam; the question was how to do it without undermining the credibility of the United States on a global basis. That was a very difficult practical problem. But it was not conducted as a practical debate, it was conducted as a moral debate, as if there were people who were eager to encourage any war, who were fulfilling psychiatric drives for power. In the process one undermined the intellectual framework of any foreign policy. There was of course a small group that knew what they were doing. They wanted America defeated in Vietnam, because they knew very well that it would undermine our position in many other parts of the world, and they wanted to give America a sense of inadequacy; but that was a tiny group among the conscious people, the rational people. The real issue was a rebellion against the concept of equilibrium, against the balance of power, against the America that had now become like any other nation, and that had to conduct foreign policy the way other nations had to pursue it.

If you read Roosevelt's speeches during World War Two, or Wilson's during World War One, the constant theme of American leaders

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was: We are not going to go back to the European balance of power, we are not going to go back to all these outmoded concepts, we are going to create a new world in which they will all work together. Which led to the absurdity that on the one hand, we imposed unconditional surrender on Germany and Japan, which created a vacuum in power, and on the other hand, we organized the world in our mind on a permanent coalition between Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, as if the only threats to peace could be the disarmed Germany and Japan, and as if allies could not turn into enemies or at least adversaries. It has taken us a generation to work our way out of this intellectual problem, and it is the overwhelming American problem.

So if you permit me in this conference to talk about energy as a secondary issue — not that it is a secondary issue, but the technical side has been excellently presented — I would like to talk about the intellectual problems of foreign policy in American today, and it seems to me to have four components.

The first is, and I believe it is true in all Western countries, there is a loss of relationship of men to events. That is to say, the most difficult problem of statesmanship is to move from a world that is familiar, to a world in which one has never been. To bridge a gap between a people's experience and what is going to happen. The temptation of every leader is to do the familiar. The advice of every bureaucracy is to project the present into the future. I used to say when I was in office that I would give my successor the advice that whenever he was given three options by the bureaucracy, he should pick the middle one, and 90% of the time, even if it was written in Swahili, the middle one was usually what the bureaucracy wanted. No matter what the problem was, they would say: You have three choices: nuclear war, unconditional surrender, or whatever it is you propose, that we want. There is a tendency to project the familiar into the future, but we are living in a world which is discontinuous, in which there are entirely new problems.

Here we run into the complexity that in many democratic countries, the process of getting elected is so different from the problem of government that the qualities it takes to get into office are not necessarily the qualities you need in office. I exempt the mayor, who is an old friend; I am speaking as a general proposition. But even when the requisite qualities exist, the absorption with getting into office is tremendous. In the United States it is a three-year process that takes

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the candidate's total energy for that period, after which he reaches that position in a state of more or less exhaustion and without the capacity to have built up intellectual capital. Everybody else can draw whatever lessons about his country, but as a fundamental problem, it is very real.

And in addition, there are two other problems.

One is that the urgent tends to drive out the important, and there are always more issues that are before one than one can possibly deal with. There is a great temptation to put away the ones that don't require the most immediate consideration and to deal with the crisis. And the crises often result from having made the same decision three years earlier.

The second problem is a sort of subconscious one: That if you can push the insoluble problems into some other administration, you can at least survive, which is the first duty of a political leader. You see it all over the world. I think the Falklands crisis has this aspect. The Israelis here know that the same is true in the Middle East, that there is always a temptation to believe any time gained is that much capital accumulated.

Speaking about energy, when I wrote my memoirs and collected all the documents, it was nearly inexplicable to me in retrospect why we did not know that an energy crisis was coming in 1973. But not only I did not know, none of the oil experts that had access to the top government seemed to know that an energy crisis was coming, and the few who knew could not get any hearing.

In 1972, the United States for the first time produced to capacity. Up to that time the United States limited its production. As long as the United States had surplus production it could keep prices at desirable levels, because we could always put more oil on the market. And as late as the time that I came into office, in 1969, Middle East governments were competing in Washington for us to buy more oil. In 1969 the Shah of Iran offered us a ten-year deal of oil at a dollar a barrel — a million barrels a day at $1 a barrel, for ten years. I had no idea what it meant, so I went to our oil experts. I asked them: what about it? They said: Turn it down; it's ridiculous; he is trying to undervide the Iraqi and Libyan oil production. And so we turned it down. That was the basis of my friendship with the Shah; he never forgot the favor I did him. So there is this problem.

This gets to the further problem that governments are getting so cumbersome that most high officials are spending more time manag-

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ing their bureaucracies than thinking about what the bureaucracy
is supposed to do. When I read the American press today and see
somebody has "lost," and then when you read the proposals on
which they have won or lost, you cannot consider the bureaucratic
victories necessarily as victories for humanity, because you know
that three weeks later they will have another battle. There is no final
solution of these issues, and this is, for a group like this, the most im-
portant thing.

There is what I would call the breakdown of the intellectual con-
sensus or of rational intellectual thought, and this affects almost all
areas of politics. In the 1950s, when I was a professor at Harvard, a
number of us formed seminars on strategy and arms control, and one
of the things we always said was, if the government would only
spend a fraction on arms control of what it spends on armaments,
there is no telling what we would achieve. It turned out that the best
thinking on arms control was done when we didn't have any money
and when a few people were thinking about the problems as a coher-
ent whole. There has not been any really new thought about arms
control since the 1950s. Since a lot of money became available,
people keep rewriting the same papers over and over again with dif-
ferent variations of the same theme, but intellectually there is no
huge progress. One of the things that has happened is this. When I
came into office I thought that being a professor, knowing so many
of the great men in intellectual life, it would be very easy for me to
call upon them to provide a great idea. But after a year or two in of-
fice — I do not want to be insulting here — I came to the view that
most of the professors were as political as I was and that I could de-
termine the result of what they were going to recommend by whom I
chose as advisor. For example it is quite possible in the field of arms
control to identify the group that are emotionally committed to
arms control and their position on new weapons systems is absolute-
ly predictable. There has been no American weapon over the last 20
years that they have not rejected on two grounds, one that the exist-
ing weapon is good enough, and the second that some super duper
great weapon is coming along in ten years and that therefore we
should not build the new weapon that we could build but wait for
the great new weapon that was going to come in 10 years.

On the other hand, you had another group that would prove
to you that any weapon that could be built regardless, even if
you could not imagine any conceivable use for it, has to be built, in

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order to keep technology going. It was quite a predictable outcome.

What you did not get is a debate on what we were trying to ac-
complish in the world. What is it exactly we are trying to achieve
with this strategy? Who are all these professors and intellectuals who
are supporting the various peace movements? That nuclear weapons
are a disaster for mankind if they are used on a large scale has been
known to most thinking people for thirty years. You do not need
teach-ins to prove that many people will be killed or to show scienti-
fically, allegedly, that hospitals will run out of plasma. They will run
out of plasma in a conventional attack on a city also. You do not
need this demonstration of the terror of nuclear weapons.

What is not analyzed — and of course I will admit that some of our
governments contribute to this by making exuberant statements
about how relatively simple it is to conduct nuclear war — but the
real dilemma we face happens to be at least three-fold. One, the dan-
ger of war. Whether the peace movements like it or not, the danger
of war is not the Western governments but the Eastern governments,
and therefore the movements are appealing to the wrong govern-
ments. In the last 5-6 years, the danger of war has not arisen be-
cause of any American action. It has arisen because of Cuban troops
in Africa, the suppression of freedom in Poland, the annexation of
Afghanistan, the occupation of Cambodia and the support of every
terrorist movement around the world one way or another from Mos-
cow. That is a fundamental fact of life. If we are not willing to face
that as intellectuals, we are never going to get to the core of the stra-
tegic problem.

Consequently, rightly or wrongly, the defence of the west has
been based on nuclear weapons. For thirty years no Western govern-
ment is going to be prepared, at a time when they are getting social
services, to increase their defenses or extend their term of service by
huge amounts. By marginal amounts of course. So it is not so easy to
come from the world as it is to the world-one might prefer. I think
we should build up conventional forces. I think we should get alter-
natives to nuclear weapons. But when you take the proposal of the
four eminent Americans for no first use of nuclear weapons, what it
implies is that we would rather be defeated by conventional weapons
than use nuclear weapons. We may therefore invite an attack with
conventional weapons and then still be forced to use nuclear wea-
pons. And it stigmatizes the weapons on which our defenses have
been built.

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