out in that shrill debate on strictly moralistic issues as if it were a question of the personal evil of a whole succession of American leaders of both parties.

BL

Could America go isolationist - not necessarily in a very dramatic way...

HK

Yes, I think America could go isolationist... and er, in fact it's more isolationist today than it has been in my view in the entire post war period, because America has been isolationist in two modes either by claiming that it was morally too good for this world, or by claiming that it was not yet good enough to engage itself in this world, it must therefore concentrate on self-improvement and that second kind of isolationism is now the slogan of the radical opposition for example to the nuclear strategy and general orientation of foreign policy ; that coupled with disillusionment with European policies and Japanese policies to some extent could produce a kind of isolationism.

BL

Well, looking at it from the European point of view obviously one of the things running through Europe like a bacillus at the moment is the ....

people wondering whether the United States would in fact risk herself to come to the aid of Europe in a really serious confrontation.

HK

That is true, and part of the problem

there is that the various NATO countries
for a variety of reasons have tied
themselves to a strategy that is
inherently less and less credible
but have not been willing to make the
sacrifices to develop a more terrible
strategy ...

BL Is that a failure of leadership?

HK I think it's a failure of leadership, yes.

BL Well it's a very serious one is it not?

HK It could be a catastrophic one because you
cannot make strategic nuclear war credible
by reaffirming the same slogans at every
NATO meeting, er and the result is these
mass demonstrations.

BL O.K., what can we do about it?

HK I think we have to tell the public what is
needed, somebody has to put before the
public that mass extermination is not a
strategy, that er the limitation of war is
the pre-condition of defence, but we
also have to explain to the public that if we
stigmatize nuclear weapons in all their
applications we, what ever our view on
conventional weapons, there will be an
interim period before we can build them
up, we will bring about a unilateral
disarmament that has two consequences.
One, it may encourage nuclear blackmail
by the other side if we are considered
to be that terrified, and secondly
it may create the impression that we would
rather be defeated by conventional weapons

than to resort to the other, to nuclear weapons, and history shows that to calculate a conventional balance concisely is nearly impossible, so on both of these grounds we need a stronger leadership in all of our countries to put up...I think in this respect the United States has done better than its allies.

BL Do I take it then that you think the decision on the neutron bomb was a mistake?

HK I think it was a mistake, yes. I don't understand the agitation about it, I don't understand the moral benefits of being incinerated on top of the other consequences which is the advantage of the non-neutron bomb. I mean nobody claims that they are more humane but there is this paradox that the liberal humane people seem to have developed a vested interest in the most awful theories of warfare because they don't trust their governments. They are afraid that if you give them any alternative that saves human lives they'll go to nuclear war so they write these scenarios as if killing 500million people or 300million people were the most natural form of deterrents and don't tolerate intellectually addressing means of limiting the dangers, of course its a difficult problem to limit it, and of course we should prefer conventional defence but we cannot disarm ourselves even if all nuclear weapons were destroyed, the guilty secret would remain in the minds of men and therefore deterrents of the factories would exist or the knowledge how to build the factories would exist. So it simply isn't possible, it, the problem of deterrents will be with us no matter what we do.

BL You said, not long ago that the age of the super powers is drawing to its end. What's going to follow?

HK Well,

BL What makes you so sure that's happening?

HK Well, like all general statements it has its limitations. I believe the complexity of the contemporary balance of power is that it is no longer a margin as it was in the 19th and early 20th Century. Then, military, economic and political power were more or less the same. Now in the military field the equilibrium is more or less determined by the super powers. But, they cannot impose their political will even on countries much weaker than they, so there are many more players in the political field and they are not the same. In the economic field you have yet a new group of players who are economically very powerful, like the OPEC countries, and yet can be militarilly, and even politically, extremely weak. So the statesman has always to know which of these various circus rings he is playing in and each has its own rules.

BL In the world that's coming then, is there a place for men like you? Well never mind men like you, for you. Do you, do you dream of returning to some kind of public office?

HK In America....

BL I can't believe, and I won't believe, even if you maintain it with mighty oaths, that you're content to spend the rest of your life writing books and giving lectures.

when you first leave office you go through a,
at least I went through a considerable
withdrawal period. Then there comes an
intermediate period where you more or less
consciously think of returning in some form.
Finally, in America, you have to understand
that there is nothing you can do about getting
into office, and if you do aim for it as a
central purpose of your life, you will destroy
yourself. You will become totally
opertunistic and you will really then constantly
calculate to whom to attach yourself. So I
will have to tell you I am now conducting
my life as if I will never return to office.
Could it happen? In America it depends
entirely on personalities. There is no
normal way it can happen and no normal way
it can be precluded. It depends who will be
President, it depends what the perception of the
dangers is. Nobody could have predicted what
would happen to me in '69 and had I aimed for
it I would never have reached it. So I will
have to tell you that I really am conducting
my life today without thinking of it and it
may be hard to believe but the alternative
really would be to make myself prey of forces
that are totally accidental.

BL Well, of your achievements to date of which are
you the most proud?

HK The one of which I'm most proud is probably
having made a contribution to holding our
country together during the collapse of its
executive authority in 1973 and 1974. It
was not a foregone conclusion that a country
whose President was visibly loosening the
authority to act in either to promise or to
threaten would not be challenged, and to
conduct a strong foreign policy in these
conditions, in the middle of a Middle-East war,
and to bring that to a conclusion not

incompatible with our interests, that I
consider my most difficult assignment.

BL: And of what, which of your achievements do you have the greatest regret? If any.

HK: Well, I think probably I would say two.
Probably we should have, when we came in, in
1969, faced exclusively what it took to win
the Vietnam war and decided whether we wanted
to pay that price rather than go through the
slow process of gradual withdrawal which we
managed, as it turned out, rather successfully
in terms which we'd set ourselves, but which
cost a great deal in our domestic region.
The second is a more specialised problem. I
think we had an opportunity in 1974 to draw
Jordan on to the West Bank of the Jordan river
and establish thereby an Arab presence, other
than the PLO, on the West Bank and it coincided
with the, the opportunity coincided with
the resignation of Nixon and the taking of
office of a non-elected President not yet
firmly confident in foreign policy. But that,
I believe, would have changed the history of
the subsequent negotiations.

BL: Henry Kissinger, thank you very much.