Text of Dr. Henry Kissinger's Remarks

William E. Simon Lecture, The Gerald Ford Foundation
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Wednesday, January 31, 1990

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

President De Gaulle of France toward the end of his term in office said on one occasion, "We go through life looking for hidden treasures, and then we find that there are no hidden treasures, and that the most important thing left to us is friendship." I say this because I have had the great privilege of working under President Ford. I was Secretary of State during the period just preceding his coming into office, and when he said "Our long national nightmare is over", there's no one for whom he spoke more deeply than for me. To conduct foreign policy when the executive authority of the United States is disintegrating is a really nightmarish prospect.

Then President Ford came into office, and with calm dignity assumed his responsibilities. Right now we are talking about, and we are all thrilled, by the changes that are going on in the world. But it is not often enough recognized that most of them had their origins in the Ford administration. The structure of arms control negotiations was established by President Ford at Vladivostok, and all agreements that have come afterwards have substantially followed what was outlined there. Everybody now talks about the changes in Eastern Europe, but what laid the basis for the changes in Eastern Europe were the Helsinki Agreements, for which at the time President Ford and his associates were villified. People didn't recognize that these agreements laid the basis on which one could appeal on the subject of human rights in Eastern Europe. It made human rights an international and not a domestic issue, and it gave all the fighters for democracy behind the Iron Curtain a forum and a rallying ground. (And) I think it may have been the most significant agreement that was signed in the last 30 years, and it was signed against violent opposition by people who are now embracing it. And there's no longer any dispute about the fact that this was decisive.

But the calm dignity with which our affairs were being conducted at that time will earn the thanks of our nation so long as American history is being written. I reciprocate strongly the warm feelings that President Ford expressed about our relationship. One serves in government under great pressure. There's always more to do than you can possibly accomplish. It is rare that the relationships in government survive the period afterward. I am proud to say that Nancy and my friendship with Betty and President Ford has grown in the interval since we worked together. And so it's of course a great honor to be here. If you think back to the cabinet that President Ford had assembled, you will see that he did not feel threatened by not exactly shrinking egos.

Of course, Bill Simon who endowed this series is a close friend of both of us. I've

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almost forgiven him for having said once that my knowledge of economics was one of the best arguments against universal suffrage he had ever seen. Of course, he proved his knowledge of politics shortly afterwards at the height of the oil crisis by calling the Shah of Iran a nut. So I called him up and expressed my uneasiness at this manner of expressing himself and he said, "Oh you political scientists, you get too excited. I'll have it solved by the end of the day." At the end of the day he put out a statement that he had been quoted out of context. The Shah of Iran went to his grave trying to figure out in which context he could be called a nut that was not offensive.

But, it was a really interesting Cabinet in a very important time, and of course, there's one thing that the President didn't mention in listing my various positions. He didn't list the fact that for three years I was simultaneously Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. The reason I mention that is for students of public administration that may be here, because never before and never since have relations between the White House and the State Department been as harmonious as they were in that period.

Now I will talk to you for a bit about the current situation in East-West relations, and after I finish my remarks I'll take a few questions before I dash off to the airport. You can ask about any subject that interests you -- of course I'll answer on any subject that interests me. We'll see whether we can mesh the two.

I started out with a quotation from President De Gaulle, and there was one characteristic of his for which I had always particular admiration. When he had a press conference, he did not believe that he should let the French version of Sam Donaldson tell him what he should talk about. He arrived with five prepared answers, and whatever the question was, he would work through his five answers, which led a French newspaper to publish a cartoon of De Gaulle opening a press conference by saying, "Would somebody like to ask a question to my answers?" And that's really true -- that is how the De Gaulle press conferences were conducted. They were a way for him to deliver five brief speeches. Well, we'll see what happens in our question period.

Let me talk about the current situation in East-West relations. I'd like to make two propositions. One: on many levels, this is one of the most exciting periods through which anyone can live. It's the culmination of what Americans have wanted in the whole postwar period. On the other hand, it confronts the United States with a type of foreign policy we have never had to conduct in our entire history. It's the end of our -- of what we've dreamt about, because it does mark the philosophical collapse of Communism as an ideology, and also the disintegration of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. It marks a new period for American foreign policy because since the early period of our country, at least since the War of 1812, the United States has not had to conduct foreign policy like other nations. First we were protected by two great oceans, then we had an atomic monopoly, then we had a huge economic superiority, and then we were in an ideological struggle with a hostile philosophy. All of this meshed with

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the American notion of what the world should be like. Americans have never known hostile neighbors in terms of countries. America has been able to concentrate on its domestic affairs. When we were challenged overseas, we could intervene, solve the problem, and return to the United States. And when that ended more or less after World War II, we still confronted a hostile philosophy so that the idea developed that, if that philosophy ever changed, we could return to our original vocation of concentrating on our own affairs.

Because of the factors that I've described, Americans have had a tendency to be split into two groups. One group tended to think of foreign policy as a subdivision of psychiatry and another group thought of foreign policy as a subdivision of theology. The psychiatric group took the view that relations among nations were like relations among people, and if you proceed with good will... making concessions to establish good will. If you look at the American wars in the post-World War II period, it was an article of faith in almost all of our media that by bringing pressure you weakened your prospects of negotiation. In the Korean War we stopped military operations as soon as negotiations started. In the Vietnam War, there was enormous pressure to stop military operations, or at any rate bombing, in order to encourage negotiation. The fact is in both those cases we removed the incentive to negotiate by those actions. The theological group tended to think that if you simply asserted your ideology strongly enough a day would come when the walls of Jericho would crumble. The other side would see the light, and we would live with a consciousness of harmony.

And all of this is reinforced by the fact that when one is in an area like this, the middle of the country, one really isn't very conscious of foreigners, one isn't really aware of dangers, and there's a great temptation to believe that all foreigners are like Americans, or maybe misunderstood Americans. I have a friend who thinks there's no such thing as an English accent. He thinks the English put this on to intimidate Americans, and if you can only catch an Englishman unaware, like waking him up at 4:00 in the morning, he'll talk like a normal human being. That's often our attitude toward foreign leaders. We've been waiting for some Russian to come along who'd be like a midwestern American, and we think once that happens, all our problems have disappeared. And so Gorbachev, to the American mind -- or to many an American - comes as an answer to all of our problems.

But I think we have two problems in the Soviet Union. One is Communist ideology, the other is Russian history. If a nation has followed a certain pattern for 400 years, you can't say they'll never change, but you can say they have a certain propensity, a certain direction. Now Russia has been expanding for 400 years. They started out in the area around Moscow, and pushed East and West to the center of Europe and to the shores of the Pacific incorporating more and more nationalities. The special trade-off the Russian empire has been that when European states won a war, they annexed a province. When the Russian state won a war, they annexed the country, and that's why

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they have so many nationalities. Barely 50% of the population of the Soviet Union is Russian. Barely 50% speak Russian. So you have many nationalities, many religions, all living together, and various religions live in discreet units, and that is one of the big problems they have today.

I mention all of this because, even though I think Communism is in trouble, the United States will have to deal with Russia as a major factor in international relations. I think we have to be careful to be so obsessed with one personality in the Soviet Union. I give Gorbachev great credit for having recognized the weaknesses of his system; I give him great credit for attempting to reform it, and probably he's doing it with more flair and verve than any other Russian leader. But he did not have a sudden flash of inspiration on the road to Damascus. He faced real necessities, and any other Soviet leader would face the same necessities. They might do it a little less well, but this idea that if Gorbachev went that we would face a totally new challenge is in my view wrong. I hope it's wrong, not because I want him to leave -- I would just as soon have him stay -- but because if it were true that he alone is responsible for this policy then we are building on very uncertain foundations because Soviet domestic politics are violent, and Gorbachev is mortal.

But I'd like to discuss a few of the factors that will drive any Soviet leader in the same direction. The first is the colossal mess in the Soviet economy. A modern economy cannot be run by central planning. In the Soviet economy every article in commerce moves by allocation. The managers make an arrangement with the planning agency and with the ministry that buys their product to establish quotas. There is no market. There is no credit system. There is no objective basis on which anybody can judge why anything is being produced, and for whom. There's no way of determining cost because all prices are fixed, and there are huge subsidies. Electricity is free. Health service is dirt cheap, and some people may think all of this is terrific, except that somebody pays for it. There are no free lunches. The result is that the whole infrastructure has run down. I talked to a leading Soviet individual a few weeks ago. We were talking about a possible food shortage in the Soviet Union this winter, and I said I thought there was no question that the American people would support relief supplies going into the Soviet Union, if that happened. He said that doesn't help our problem very much because our distribution system has broken down. For example, we are missing 20,000 railway cars which we can't find. Now can you imagine a superpower that has lost 20,000 railway cars, and can't find them? So that is the extent of the crisis.

And in fact, every economic reform that Gorbachev has undertaken has made matters worse. He tried to cut down the consumption of alcohol in order to increase productivity which in itself is a laudable objective. But the result of this was that the alcohol tax, which was one of the largest sources of revenue in the Soviet Union, was no longer being collected. They have no other easy sources of taxation, so they had

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to print money and inflation got very bad. They started ordering -- which you may have read in the newspapers -- that every enterprise had to sell a certain percentage of its production on the market. But there is no market, so a kind of criminal Mafia took over the distribution.

In other words, until they establish markets, and credits, and some cost accounting they cannot know what they're doing. And yet in order to do that they will have to go through a period of rising prices, closing inefficient businesses, unemployment, and that they have been afraid to do. They've been afraid to do it for this reason: in a democracy faced with such a crisis, if it's a healthy democracy, you produce a Lincoln or a Roosevelt or a Churchill or a De Gaulle who incarnates the values of the society and tells the people what sacrifices they must bring. But in a Communist system, the Soviet Union, the leaders have been in power now -- the system has been in power - for 70 years. The first generation could still say that they won the revolution so they must have had some public support, but after that, every succeeding leader has emerged from a contest which nobody knew was going on, which was fought by criteria which nobody can describe, and which was settled by calling the loser a criminal or a fool. And that's been going on for 70 years. No Soviet leader has ever retired with honor. In fact, no Soviet leader has ever retired. They have all died in office, except one, who made the mistake of going on holiday without his colleagues. He was purged. Every Soviet leader has become a non-person as soon as he left office. When President Ford and I met with Brezhnev, there was a degree of obsequiousness on the Soviet staff side that you'd never see in an American entourage. Today, everybody is dumping on Brezhnev. His family has been kicked out of their house, his son-in-law has been put into prison, and it's a cruel fate to lose power in the Soviet Union.

So they do not have anybody that can embody the values of the society because nobody knows what they are. Gorbachev is a great hero in many foreign countries, but not in the Soviet Union, and so this is one problem.

The second problem they have is you cannot be a true Communist and a true democrat. Those two concepts are incompatible. If you're a true democrat you believe that the conflict of ideas generates an approximation to the truth. If you're of communist belief, you know the truth and that it is your duty to instill it, impose it, on your environment. That was the quarrel between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks to begin with. So in every Communist state, a small group of people imposes its will on the population. They are unthinkable without a secret police. Now to the extent that the terror ends, the Communist parties crumble because they have no mechanism of contesting for the beliefs of people. They've never had to do it.

It is after all amazing that these parties that have been in power in Eastern Europe for 40 years, with a monopoly of education, patronage, police, propaganda, that they can be swept away in a week or two. And Gorbachev faces the problem inside the Soviet Union.

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Union that on the one hand he preaches glasnost, but on the other hand the end of glasnost has to be the destruction of the Communist party. There is no other outcome for it. He put his own man in as party chief of Azerbaijan, but in order to govern that man has to reflect what the people there want. What the people there want doesn't happen to be what the Communists want. So he's caught either with losing all support, that local fellow, or becoming a spokesman for the Azerbaijani nationalists.

Same happened in the Baltics. The local Communist ruler in Lithuania has decided that if he sticks with Moscow he'll get 3% of the vote, and he's got an election coming up. And the fact that Gorbachev doesn't fully understand his problem is shown by his visit to Lithuania when he said that in order to get a divorce both parties have to agree. But the Lithuanians -- (mumbled: may not even be true) -- but the Lithuanians say, "But we are not married!"

The premise is wrong. And every leading Russian that I talk to tells me about the great economic advantages that these nationalities get from Russia. I always tell them, being a great diplomat I always say -- uh, "that's what every imperialist nation always says - that's what the Europeans said in their colonies, that they'd be better off with help from Europe." It never works, because these people want to have their own national identities.

So those are the problems that the Soviet Union has, and in a way they are insoluable in the present framework. And this is why you read all these stories about the precariousness of Gorbachev's position. I don't know how precarious his position is. On the face of it, I would not be surprised if he faced the usual dilemma of reformers - that he's going too fast for some people, and too slow for other people, and also that in trying to fix the problems of the day, he doesn't necessarily create a pattern for the future. Is he a great statesman, or is he the best runner on a log that we've seen? We don't know yet. Take Eastern Europe. Was he trying to achieve what has happened, or was he trying to get friendly Communist governments into power? And as soon as he started the process, it ran away from him.

But whatever he tried to do, one fact is certain -- the Communist parties in Eastern Europe have all disintegrated. The funny thing is the only slight hope they have is that since they have killed all the democratic parties it may not be possible to organize the democratic parties fast enough for the elections that are scheduled for the next few months. So that the first election results may prove misleading. But take Poland, about which we owe it to President Ford to point out he happened to be right in the 1976 question -- take Poland. The Solidarity leaders did not want to come into power at this time, because they know the economic mess is so great that they did not want to assume responsibility for cleaning it up. They wanted the Communists to try to begin the process of the economic changes. And they agreed to an electoral system that in any normal situation the Communists could not have lost. They gave half the seats to the Communists provided the Communists got 50% of the votes of those voting in an unopposed election, and that should be easy to do, since who would vote when

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there's no opposition? And then they contested the other half of the seats, and the expectation was that the Communists would get all of the unopposed seats, and would get a few of the opposed seats, and thereby have a majority. In fact, the Communists could not get half the votes in an unopposed election -- they got only 15% of the votes where they had no opposition, and among the 150 candidates where they had opposition, they won one who ran under a different label. So that shows something about public opinion in Eastern Europe. Now, if one wanted to be sophisticated, one would go country by country because there are obviously differences in Romania and Bulgaria where it looks to me as if the Communists probably will hold power, not by election but by rigging the system.

The Soviets cannot go back into Eastern Europe -- into dominating Eastern Europe - without finding, and we have seen in Azerbaijan, that they cannot call reservists and they cannot fight both in their own country, holding it together, and abroad. But they still have hundreds of thousands of troops in Eastern Europe, and one of the challenges for American foreign policy is to get those troops out of Eastern Europe because once there are democratic governments in those countrees, nobody wants these troops there. And in fact we have to be careful in our arms control negotiations that we don't establish ceilings which permit the Soviets to keep more troops there under agreement than they could keep on their own because they've already been asked to leave Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and I think they'll sooner or later be asked to leave Eastern Germany.

So we have a very tricky problem in the next few years. Now there are a lot of people who say if they withdraw their troops from Eastern Europe, we ought to get out of Western Europe and dismantle NATO. I think that's a very dangerous course. (If) They withdraw only about 800 miles, and we go back to this side of the Atlantic, the balance of power in Europe would be totally destroyed, so we have to negotiate a system, which can be done, in which certain areas of Europe become like Austria, neutral zones between the Soviet Union and Germany, and I think Germany will obviously be unified, if only because with the frontiers between the two countries now being opened, if they don't equalize economic conditions very rapidly, the population of East Germany will emigrate to West Germany. As it is, 4% of the population is leaving now -- 2000 people a day are moving from East Germany to West Germany -- that cannot go on indefinitely.

So those are some of the challenges to our foreign policy, but the most important one is this: in our recent history, we have been involved in foreign policy either when there was some immediate danger or when there was a philosophical challenge. But the era into which we are moving now is different. There is not necessarily a philosophical challenge, there is not necessarily an immediate danger, and yet we have to remain involved in the world. Why? Because with 400 years Britain realized that it had to keep the continent of Europe from being unified under a hostile power because

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otherwise it would be too weak to resist. We have to prevent all the resources of Eurasia from being organized by a hostile power. Winston Churchill in the 1930s wrote an article about British foreign policy in which he said that it was the policy of Britain to oppose whichever country seemed to be the dominating tyrant on the continent. He listed all the various rulers that had existed, and he said it did not matter to us whether it was Napoleon or Hitler or Phillip II of Spain. We were not pursuing a policy of sentiment, we were pursuing a settled national policy, and it was in this manner, he said, that we preserved the liberties of Europe.

And that is the challenge for the United States today. We don't want anything from the Soviet Union. (If) The Soviet Union stays within its national boundaries, we have no quarrel with it. And it has 11 time zones in its national boundaries: Vladivostok where the President and I were is closer to Seattle than it is to Leningrad, and Leningrad is closer to New York than it is to Vladivostok. So they need not suffer claustrophobia if they stay at home. On the other hand, for 400 years, they have been threatening and attempting to disintegrate every power center within reach, sometimes withdrawing when they had domestic chaos which happened periodically, but always coming back. So of course, we want them to be peaceful, and of course we should encourage it, but we also have to keep in mind that states have permanent interests that do not change with personalities, and there may be other factors emerging. I have been opposing sanctions against China because I think we need China as a potential counterweight to the Soviet Union and as a balancer vis-a-vis Japan. It's in our own national interest. I don't like what went on there, but we're not doing them a favor by having normal relations, we're doing ourselves a favor.

And one could review the international situation from this basis. That's not easy for America -- that's the great educational task that's before us. But I want to stress one key factor: all the problems I've described are really exciting problems to have. The whole international environment is changing -- it's changing in the direction of our values. It is reducing the dangers against us, and we're in a position to work on building a structure of peace in the world that while it will require constant vigilance, will be a lot less tense than what we've known for a generation. I have a Chinese acquaintance who claims that there exists the following Chinese proverb...as he claims - because I don't believe there are as many Chinese proverbs as they lay upon us - but he claims that it goes like this: when there is turmoil under the heavens, little problems are dealt with as if they were big problems, and big problems are not dealt with at all. When there is order under the heavens, big problems are reduced to little problems, and little problems should not obsess us. The great opportunity of our period is that we can in our lifetime reduce big problems to littler problems, and thereby contribute to what my Chinese acquaintance has called order under the heavens. And now I'll take a few of your questions. Thank you very much.