IISS 23rd ANNUAL CONFERENCE, Williamsburg, Virginia:
Final Plenary Address by Dr. Henry Kissinger
September 13, 1981

Bob and friends. When Bob was using the word "master" in
relation to my various activities, I thought he was just
beginning to hit his stride; but then he got himself
diverted on other subjects.

I speak with some hesitation to this group about the
American view of international affairs, because one of
my historical achievements is to be one of the strong unifying
factors in America. People may not agree on anything else
but I have united liberals and conservatives in their
common opposition to whatever I may want to put forward.
And so I am sure that those foreign participants not aware
of this reality will be enlightened--as soon as I conclude
my remarks--by the various reviewers of my books who are
here, past and future.

I thought that rather than give you my views as to
the solutions of a whole host of problems, I would talk
to you about some of the complexities that I see ahead of
us on both sides of the Atlantic with respect to national
security. Of course, no one has ever lived in a golden
age; it was always a previous period. But when one thinks
back to the Forties and Fifties and maybe through the middle
Sixties, one is struck by the fact that there was a
substantial consensus about the general direction in
which we intended to go. And there was a considerable
dialogue between groups like this and those in the govern-

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ment, not in the sense that the intellectual community
always agreed with what the people in the government
did--in fact they very frequently disagreed--but they
both operated within a matrix of assumptions which in the
long run could only be helpful. I have the impression
that in almost every country represented here, and in the
national security community in general, these shared assump-
tions have substantially broken down. While it is perfectly
possible to have debates about individual policies, what
seems to be lacking is criteria for what we are trying
to do and what reasonable goals might be.

So let me talk about some of the issues as they now
seem to me to emerge. I think the most fundamental one
in all our countries, and the one that is least susceptible
to intellectual analysis, is that the structure of politics
is in a process of change. The relationship of men to events
is in the process of substantial transformation in almost
all democracies. The effort of getting elected takes so
much of the energies of candidates that it tends to emphasize
qualifications that are not necessarily related to what
has to be done in office; it certainly is an obstacle
to conceptual thinking. As a general proposition, in
this country it is getting to the point where you almost
have to be an unemployed rich egomaniac to run for the
Presidency. And I suspect that this is not a difference
in kind, only a difference in degree, with other societies.

So the intellectual backdrop becomes more important
than ever, and the most difficult problem of statemans-
ship becomes harder and harder to solve: how to take
a society from where it is, from what it is familiar with,
to a future in which it has never been. How to bridge the
gap between the familiar and that which is only conjectural
has always been difficult; it is perhaps more difficult
than ever in our time. It is complicated by the fact
that the machinery of all of our governments--and certainly
our
the machinery of/government--has grown so complex that
servicing it becomes its own objective. It becomes
increasingly difficult to disentangle departmental or
agency self-will from the national interest. Or, more
realistically, they tend to be identified. If one traces
the evolution of debates on weapons decisions in our country--
and I suspect this must happen in other countries as
well--it would be interesting to determine at what point
bureaucratic calculation and at what point strategic
calculation were dominant and to what extent they merged.
I can think during my period of office of any number of
improvements of existing weapons that were rejected because
the services wanted to keep open the option of something
entirely new and they were afraid of precluding themselves
from the entirely new by putting forward improvements of
what existed. The ironical result was that often they
got neither the improvement of what existed, nor the entirely
new. In these various discussions what was really needed
was a strategy that would give one criteria on which to act.

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So what is even more significant is that, finally,
as a result of many factors--of which Vietnam was a
symptom in our society, compounded by Watergate--there
has been a collapse or a weakening of the kind of
intellectual consensus, of the type of dialogue, in
which outside groups could act as a reservoir of reflection
and as the supplier of some criteria.

And so we find ourselves in a position in this country--
and in this respect, I repeat, I think this is a problem
of the modern democratic state--that almost any new
administration that comes in acts as if it could start
from the beginning; as if fundamental American objectives
were never permanently settled; as if one could start
over and over and over and over again. And I want to
make clear that I am not saying this as a criticism of
the current administration, with whose basic thrust I
substantially agree, but as a phenomenon of the contemporary
scene.

For example, I read in the newspapers this morning
and see on television that we are going to propose defense
cuts in a military program in which the Congress has not
yet acted. And if I am asked by newspapers, what does it
mean? what is its significance? I tell you quite honestly
I will be substantially at a loss. Instinctively I am
against proposing a budget and then reducing it within
a six-month period. If we are going to cut it, I would
rather offer that cut in a negotiation and try to get

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something for it. If I had spoken here a week ago and
you had asked me to defend the _increase_ in the defense
budget, I would have taken the position that I agree
with the attitude that it reflects. But to what strategy
it is allied, what it is that will now be stretched out,
what it is we are aiming for in a specific way--I have
totell you honestly I have difficulty. And if I have
difficulty, as somebody who more or less has studied
the problem for a long time, what will the general informed
opinion be? And I suspect many of us in this room are in
substantially the same dilemma.

For example--and here I repeat something I have been
saying ad nauseam to groups like this for years--we have
been talking for over twenty years about the change in
the strategic environment after both sides possessed large
strategic forces. When I first started talking about an
approaching stalemate, as Albert Wohlstetter and others
pointed out, I was premature--or as some would put it less
kindly--I did not know what I was talking about. But
whether strategic parity arrived in the Fifties, or Sixties,
or Seventies--however you measure or define strategic
superiority--we have all known for two decades that the
growth of strategic nuclear stockpiles on both sides
was bound to create a fundamentally new strategic, political,
psychological and moral situation. Whether a leader will
ever feel confident enough with esoteric weapons that never
have been tested in combat conditions to launch a first strike,

whether the vulnerability of one facet of our strategic
forces means a decisive advantage for the other side
or not--these are properly subjects of controversy.
But there is one fundamental fact that nobody who has
thought about the problem can avoid: once the United
States lost a credible counterforce capability, the overall
strategic relationships in the world would inevitably
change. Whether we are now subject to a first strike,
that is something of another debate though I doubt it
seriously. But the fact that we have lost a plausible
first strike counterforce capability creates unprecedented
conditions: How then will we conduct the defense of
areas important to our security?

One of the weird aspects of the current debate about
TNF is that many Europeans insist that they cannot risk
the devastation of their territory; therefore they insist
on being denuclearized. Thus the United States is to
risk the devastation of its own territory on behalf of
people who will not run that risk in the defense of them-
selves. Those who argue, as I would, that it is not
possible for the indefinite future to rely on such a strategy
for the defense of NATO, are accused of undermining American
credibility, or of saying irresponsible things, or of
describing as new what has proved adequate for decades. Yet
every European familiar with the debate in his own country
must know that the same inhibitions he is facing cannot
fail to develop in the United States. We may be able to

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get away with avoiding the issue for some time but sooner or later a price will be paid for the avoidance of reality. The growth of pacifism (which I think is a better word than the growth of neutralism) is the reverse side of a sense of impotence, a situation in which there seem to be no rational alternatives.

We have known all this and we have not done anything significant about it for two decades. All our countries are announcing percentage increases in their defense budgets at regular intervals; rarely has this translated itself into needed forces and never into a qualitative change in the military dispositions or into a change in the strategic concept.

So we are left with a mish-mash of forces in NATO-- for what, it is difficult to say. We have six American divisions on a continent that rejects local defense and no American divisions in the Persian Gulf where we do rely on local defense. We may be lucky: the Soviets have their own problems; there may never be a challenge that we cannot cope with. But I would have to say that we have no intellectual rationale: we have all failed to some extent and we have no agreed doctrine in which either governments or peoples can believe.

One of the problems is that in the Sixties and Seventies the intellectual community split into at least three groups: a group that rejected the very concept of defense or arms control; and a group that identified strategy with strategy; a group that identified strategy with/whatever new weapons could be built. There is no point for me

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to discuss the anti-defense group, but it seems to
me that all our subsequent debates have been affected
by the debates between the other two groups. The
paradox has been that the liberal community on the
whole developed an interest in the most bloodthirsty
strategies: contrary to their natural proclivities they
to
sought/ reduce strategy to an engineering problem: If
you can kill a stated number of civilians, destroy
a stated percentage of industrial capacity, so too
many of them argued, you have achieved deterrence. The
conservative groups favored almost any weapon that could
be built. The first group has opposed almost any new
weapons system that has come along on roughly two grounds:
one, that existing weapons were adequate, and secondly,
that some marvellous weapon was coming along fifteen
years from now that made it unwise, uneconomical and pro-
vocative to build the available new system. The second
group saw the accumulation of arms, usually only in the
strategic field, unrelated to any manner in which they
could be used, as its own justification.

The end result is that we are facing strategies
that involve horrendous consequences and therefore breed
pacifism. We have known the problem of regional defense
and yet in this country we have a volunteer army that
everybody knows cannot possibly meet these necessities.
For the defense of the Atlantic area, we are relying

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on a strategy very difficult to specify, and as far
as the defense of such areas as the Persian Gulf
is concerned, we do not even have a clearly articulated
strategy.

Nevertheless in America we are at least, it seems
to me, trying now to become serious. Whether one agrees
with every conclusion drawn by the Reagan administra-
tion or not, there is a greater consensus in America
now than there has been in fifteen years. This is in
the interest of our friends to preserve, and the basic
direction of the questions that are being asked seems
to me to be valid. But the breakdown in our domestic
debate that I have described, which is being healed to
some extent, is accompanied by a growing breakdown in
discussions with the Europeans.

Traditionally an alliance reflected the perception
of a balance of power; some consensus as to a common
threat; some assumption that you needed the accretion
of power represented by allies in order to meet that
threat effectively. It is rare that alliances perceived
as unilateral guarantees worked indefinitely without
the demoralization of both sides. Alliances in the
past have often broken down either when the threat seemed
to become so overwhelming that the alliance was no longer
seen as a protection, or when the threat was perceived
to lose its menace so that the alliance was no longer
considered necessary. It is a distinguishing feature
of the Atlantic alliance at the current period that both

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of these tendencies are occurring simultaneously: the argument seems to be that the threat is exaggerated, or that if there is a threat it is so overwhelming that the alliance is no answer to it. The endemic disagreement on strategy is compounded by disputes on East-West relations, on Third World relations, and by an insistence that the alliance applies only to those areas which are contained in its legal definition--as if in a crisis the first duty of a statesman were less to define the national interest than to turn first to his legal adviser and assemble lawyers to determine the judicial implication of relevant documents. If there is no perception of common interests and of means to deal with them, how can the Alliance remain vital? How can the attempt to define it by legal exegesis not lead to crisis unless we are lucky and our opponents disintegrate?

Everybody knows that the security of the Persian Gulf is a vital alliance interest, and yet the agreement is widespread that the alliance implies no obligation for the Persian Gulf. And therefore it is possible for allies to pursue totally separate, sometimes contradictory, policies in a key area. Leaving aside who is right on the merits of any one of these issues, I do not believe it will be possible for the indefinite future to maintain present deployments which cannot be explained either in terms of a strategy on the ground for the defense of Europe or in terms of a global strategy for the defense of what is called the free world.

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Let me make in this connection a few observations
about East-West relations. I have the impression in
the United States that the debate about what came to be
called detente was characterized by two broad schools
which, as all broad schools, represent an over-simplification.
There is what may be called the psychiatric school, which
deals with the Soviet Union by the precepts of relations
among people; and this school of thought believes the
Soviets react to what they perceive as our threat, that
reassurance is the answer, that negotiation is the mechanism.
Agreement is its own goal because its very existence
improves the atmosphere. Then there is the theological
school, which sees relations with the Soviet Union as
an aspect of a general ideological struggle and resists
the contamination represented by the compromise inherent
in any negotiation. This school concentrates on
the benefits to the Soviets of any agreement, as if the
Soviets would ever make an agreement in which they had
no benefits. The real problem is whether one can balance
the benefits to us against the benefits to them: to
believe that one can negotiate a series of agreements
of unilateral benefit to us is a nostalgia which reality
will not permit us.

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I think the same division occurs between Europeans and Americans. One now reads constantly about European pressures for negotiation, about the so-called over-militarization of American foreign policy. Now you all know that some of the leading members of this administration have not always expressed themselves about me with the same admiration that I feel. So I can hardly be accused of being an apologist. But I still would like to raise the question: negotiation about what? What is the purpose of it? I favored detente in the Seventies and I favor detente in the Eighties if it can be properly defined. My definition of it is that in a world of two nuclear superpowers one cannot conduct foreign policy as if nuclear weapons did not exist, and statesmen have a responsibility to their publics to demonstrate to them that they are trying to come to grips with this problem. I do not think we can maintain the domestic cohesion of our societies if there are a series of crises in which we have not demonstrated a serious effort to overcome them. We will not be able to keep our alliances together unless this problem that preoccupies mankind is dealt with. But I also do not believe that we can deal with these problems by abstract emotional demands for negotiations which are never reduced to the concrete programs with which we should deal.

I know the argument is made that detente led to a period of American weakness--it is a very convenient argument because

13

it enables both conservatives and liberals to avoid the
responsibility for some of their actions. It makes it possible
to sweep what happened in Vietnam and Watergate under the rug
and to take the symptom for the cause. Vietnam and Watergate
are what weakened our country, not the policies designed to
give us maneuvering room. Nor will a tough administration be
able to avoid negotiating. Our problem is not whether we
should negotiate with the Soviet Union but whether we can do
so without illusion on the basis of some concrete ideas of a
world towards which we are heading.

After every Soviet military move--after Czechoslovakia,
after Afghanistan--there is always the fear that this is the
beginning of a general Soviet military assault; it is in fact
always the beginning of a new Soviet peace offensive; and it is
alwaystreated by too many as if the initial provocation had
never occurred. Here we are,fifteen months after Afghanistan,
and every retaliatory measure that has been taken has already
been dismantled and the major price the Soviets have paid for
it is what the people of Afghanistan, without much help, are
exacting from them. We now see a crisis in Poland, and it has
become a shibboleth that that will have very serious conse-
quences if the Soviets go into Poland. But have we, even in this
room, answered the following questions: in the trade embargo that
everybody seems to be talking about, are we going to apply it
only to new contracts or also to existing orders? And if we
apply it only to new orders, does it really mean anything?
Will it not end--as did the grain embargo--way before it hurts

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the Soviets? Do we apply it to all of Eastern Europe or only
to the Soviet Union? If we apply it to all of Eastern Europe,
do we also apply it to Eastern Germany? And if we haven't
answers to these questions, which have now been before us
for over a year--and I doubt that we have answer to these
questions--how serious is our policy going to be?

I have believed in linkage, both domestic and international.
Domestic, in the sense that I have always found it a pity how
many weapon systems we do away with as a result of budgetary
decisions without ever offering them in arms control negotiations.
International, because I think there is a relationship between
events in different parts of the world and because one has to
be careful not to let the process of negotiations become a
safety valve for expansionism or a means of calming the atmos-
phere rather than of improving objective conditions. Of course,
one can have a merry old time proving that if you link every-
thing to everything nothing will ever happen. And that is a
marvelous intellectual form of pyrotechnics. But the art of
policy-making is to know how to make distinctions and the art
in linkage is to know which events to relate to what other
events. It cannot be sensible that we all announce embargoes,
and then we sell grain and butter and the Europeans build pipe-
lines, so that there is no relationship between our economic
policies and our political policies, not to speak of our strategic
policies. It is certainly rational to debate to what extent
what trade should be related and what should be linked to which
other circumstances, but not to deal with each event separately.

15

Nor do I want to leave the impression that I believe
that the Soviet Union is some mythical superpower operating by
long-range plans of diabolical cunning. The paradox is that
the Soviet Union has great military strength and enormous politi-
cal and sociological weaknesses. It is a system of government
that has no legitimate means of succession, in which I would
bet that it is not only our experts who do not know who is going
to replace Brezhnev; I bet Brezhnev does not know who is going
to replace Brezhnev. The economy is obviously not working.
And all Communist countries, without exception, face the para-
doxical problem of what do you do with the Communist Party in a
developed Communist state? They are not needed for government;
they are not needed for the economy. You have the absurdity
that was in the Soviet press three years ago, that they made
plans on the basis of a tractor factory that was never built
and recently they fired some high official because he reported
the existence of a non-existent refinery. A system in which
you can lose tractor factories and refineries is not likely to
be the wave of the future. And yet it presents a massive prob-
lem when enormous military strength co-exists with the necessity
of fundamental domestic reforms--there may be a temptation to try
to clean up the external environment before dealing with the
domestic one; for example, to deal with China if it should ever
start developing before it became a kind of Japan. Those seem
to me to be the dangers of the Soviet system much more than a
Hitler-like plan of world domination pursued with a specific
timetable. There is a general attempt to expand influence but
I do not believe there is a precise timetable.

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We are facing an adversary that is both strong and weak and with the confusions within the Alliance that accelerate the dangers springing from both strength and weakness. It comes to expression very much in the TNF negotiations. For some reason the TNF negotiations have become in many countries the test of NATO's ability to carry out a decision; whether that decision should ever have been taken is another matter. The argument is made that these weapons are designed to enable us to fight a nuclear war in Europe without destroying us. Of course it is not self-evident to me that our destruction helps European defense but I will put that aside. I would argue that, leaving aside now whether we should have made the decision or not, on a purely technical analysis the one thing these weapons do not do is enable us to escape unscathed. In fact, the one thing these weapons are guaranteed to do is to couple the American nuclear defense to the European nuclear defense if there is a war in Europe, which may in fact be a reason for Americans not to want to do it. If the United States wants to confine destruction to Europe it should stick with its present nuclear deployment.

The reason for the inherent coupling in my view is that the Soviets cannot possibly attack Europe without also destroying these intermediate-range weapons and they cannot accept the casualties of our retaliation without attacking the United States. It cannot possibly permit the United States to remain undamaged and permit our entire retaliatory force to remain

17

intact while a miniature strategic war plays itself out in Europe. But let me go to the argument on TNF negotiations. How it ever happened that a negotiation in which the Soviet Union already has deployed its weapons and we have not deployed even one, in which many of those countries where we are supposed to deploy weapons really do not want them--how that could become a test case of the prospect of negotiations is not very clear to me in historical retrospect. If one looks at the conglomerate of motives that have involved us in this negotiation: there are some who are for TNF negotiations because they want to deploy weapons; there are others who are for TNF negotiations as a means not to deploy weapons; there are some who are for TNF negotiations as a link to SALT and there are some who are for TNF negotiations as a means of forestalling a negotiation on SALT. And there are some who are for TNF negotiations because they like negotiations in general. I would defy this distinguished group to give me a number between zero and 576 that would give us a criterion by which we can tell whether we are making progress or not. And what happens to the SS-20s that are affected? Do they get moved into Siberia?

How was it possible that this absurd Brezhnev proposal, that they would stop deployment in Europe (presumably not in Asia) if we stopped deployment, could be treated as a serious proposition by the Socialist International? My own view is as follows: I have intellectual difficulty with TNF negotiations not related to SALT, and I believe it would be dangerous for us to

18

repeat in SALT what happened in TNF, namely to be dragged
kicking and screaming into a negotiation we do not dominate.
I have paid my price for SALT and I don't feel that I need to
be the cutting edge of this particular debate but I would
like to make a number of general propositions.

First, we are now in the strange situation that we are
observing an agreement that is described as flawed and that
we are not ratifying. For a period of time to enable a new
administration to make its decisions, that is perfectly under-
standable. But it cannot be a permanent state of affairs, for
we will inherit the worst of every course of action. We will
either have to ratify SALT II or explicitly drop it, or at least
agree formally on some limits we are going to observe or not
observe. If one looks at the debate last year, there were
three issues: the Backfire; heavy missiles; and the Protocol.
The Protocol is being taken care of by time; the other two seem
soluble problems. Whether it is worse to try to fix them or
whether it is better to go straight into SALT III, as the
administration has committed itself, is a tactical issue. I
do want to express a view on one particular issue. It has be-
come an article of faith in the debate, unchallenged by the
intellectual community, that what is wrong with previous SALT
agreements is that they ratified existing building programs
and that they did not lead to reductions. And the solution is
reductions. I have never seen that challenged, and I don't
know enough to challenge it, but I do want to point out two

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things. In 1973 and 1974 when I was in government, I was urging that we address the question of counterbalancing asymmetries, that is to relate the warheads to the delivery vehicles, and to relate what we were going to do to what we could restrain, rather than to go for abstract equalities that we had not plan for meeting. That debate was swallowed up in the sanctification of the equal aggregates, which were easy to present to the public, and led to a vast multiplication of warheads.

Now on the issue of reductions. I think members represented here ought to do a serious study of what the implications are at each stage of conceivable reductions. After all, the overwhelming problem of our period in the strategic field is the disproportion between warheads and delivery vehicles. That disproportion does not change at foreseeable levels of reduction, and indeed you can make the proposition that at some levels of reduction, without reducing the proportion of attacking vehicles in relation to the delivery vehicles you increase the vulnerability of the delivery vehicles. I suspect but I do not know that if you plot vulnerability against numbers, you will find a curve in which vulnerability increases for a while before it drops, and I think it would be important to know at what level you reduce your vulnerability by these reductions. I would only go back to my original point, that assuming one achieves with reductions what one sets out to do, namely stabilize the strategic environment, all the other problems I have described will become worse--of regional and other defenses, and have to be dealt with. And how to keep these

20

two in tandem is going to be a very difficult thing.

One aspect about some speeches that has never failed to
interest me is when the speakers reach the end of their speech
they say: "if I had time, I would now deal with the problems
of the Third World." Since you all know that this is a sub-
ject in which I have proved my competence over and over, I can
easily make that observation. I will not deal with it except
to raise two or three questions, which this Institute might
at some time wish to address.

I am interested in the phenomenon in which the salvation
of Western democracies--the problem of their national purpose--
is thought by some to depend on rapport with the Third World.
I am not opposed to doing things for the Third World. I however
would question whether that part of the world most in search
of identity can help us much with our own identity. But that
is not the question I wanted to ask. The question I wanted to
raise concerns the impact of modernization. To the extent that
developing countries are feudal and traditional obligations
break down, political insecurity and instability are almost
inevitable. And it is generally not led by what we in the
West or some in the West would consider the most progressive
forces. But the question I would put to you--without knowing
the answer--is this: Supposing somebody in Saudi Arabia suddenly
became enlightened by our treatises and said, "I'd like to

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avoid what has happened elsewhere as a result of moderniza-
tion; can you help us?" What advice would this group give
him? What would you tell the leader of a semi-feudal country
emerging into modernization as to political structure? I
think you have no answers yet, that I am familiar with, at
any rate, and that may be a sign of unfamiliarity.

I believe that if one analyses what the Marxists call
objective factors on both sides of the dividing line, and the
necessities of those parts of the world that do not consider
themselves a part of this struggle, there is absolutely no
reason why we should not be the more relevant part of the
world and why we should not be able to solve our own problems.
We have torn ourselves apart for a long period. Whether all
of you like the manifestations or not, in this country there
is an attempt now, and a reality, of coming together. What
I believe the group assembled here can do is to begin again
to create the intellectual capital on which some of us drew
in the Sixties and which has in my view not been replenished in
the last ten to fifteen years.

Thank you very much.

IISS 23rd ANNUAL CONFERENCE, Williamsburg, Virginia:
Final Plenary Address by DR HENRY KISSINGER

13 September 1981

How the hell do you introduce Henry Kissinger - particularly
to this group? I mean Henry has been a member of this Institute from
the very earliest days: he was a particularly close friend of
Alastair Buchan as evidenced by the fact that Henry was invited to
be and was the first Alastair Buchan Memorial lecturer, so he is
extremely well known. He is a man of worldwide fame. You know
that Henry was a master of the scholarly and the academic arts, as
a recognised historian he became a master of the political and the
negotiating arts as an international statesman; you realise that
he has recently become a master of the jet set and the popular book
writing arts as a world famous personality. In the middle of it
all he has also acquired a modest title as the hermit of Acapulco.
But seriously, his personal qualities and his own experience you
will agree qualify him uniquely to speak to us this morning on the
United States and the world in the 1980s: the international context
for US security. Dr Kissinger, if you will.

DR HENRY KISSINGER

Bob and friends. When Bob was using the word "master" in
relation to my various activities, I thought he was just beginning
to hit his stride, when he then got himself diverted on other subjects.

2

aware of this reality will be enlightened by the various reviewers
of my books who are here, past and future.

Now I thought that rather than give you my views as to
the solutions of a whole host of problems, I would talk to you
about some of the complexities that I see ahead of us on both
sides of the Atlantic with respect to the area of national security.
Of course, no one has ever lived in a golden age, and it was always
a previous period, but when one thinks back to the Forties and
Fifties and maybe through the middle Sixties, one is struck by the
fact that there was a substantial consensus about the general
direction in which we were supposed to go. And there was some-
mutual reinforcement between groups like this and those in the
government, not in the sense that the intellectual community always
agreed with what the people in the government did - in fact they
very frequently disagreed - but it was within a matrix of assumptions
which permitted a dialogue that in the long run could only be helpful.
I have the impression that in almost every country represented here,
and in the national security community in general, these shared
assumptions have substantially broken down, and while it is perfectly
possible to have debates about individual policies, what seems to be
lacking is criteria for what we are trying to do and what reasonable
goals might be.

So let me talk about some of the issues as they now seem
to me to emerge. I think the most fundamental one in all our
countries, and the one that is least susceptible to intellectual
analysis, is that the structure of politics is in a process of change.
The relationship of men to events is in the process of substantial
transformation in almost all democracies. The effort of getting
elected is so irrelevant to the process of government, it takes so
much of the energies of potential candidates, and it tends to select out

Thank you, Henry. I think you can tell from the length
and the warmth of the applause that we are all most grateful.
If you would be able to respond to a few questions - we have
about ten minutes if there are any questions for Dr Kissinger.
I would be glad to recognise whoever wants to be recognised and
if you will please come down and find one of the microphones and
state your name, please.

? Dr Kissinger, I wonder if I could ask you to amplify on
two things you touched on briefly. One was the situation in
Poland and indeed in Eastern Europe and perhaps in the context
of what American policy should be if the Soviet Union does not
invade and what is happening with Solidarity now becomes more
general. The second is what seems to be a fairly touchy issue
between the United States and Western Europe, which is the East-West
gas pipeline.

DR KISSINGER I do not believe that it will spread from Poland to East Europe, certainly it will not spread, without Soviet intervention.

I cannot believe that the Soviets → I think the Soviets are at the borderline now of feeling themselves compelled to intervene in Poland. And it is an extraordinary problem for them to have a labour union in a workers' state asserting the right to represent the workers against a workers' party-- it is an intellectual monstrosity for them.

And to have a system of elections within the Communist Party so that the Mensheviks defeat the Bolsheviks in Poland thirty-five years after the event, is — so I think → I don't think the second part of your question is likely, that we will face the same problem in Eastern Europe short of such a collapse of Soviet power, that we will be in an entirely new ball game. The more important question is what do we do about Poland if the Soviets do not intervene? And it is really — it depends really on the circumstances that exist. If the Soviets somehow

21

manage to impose another Communist government in Warsaw, or the other, through martial law, if they manage to emasculate Solidarity and manage to establish a Communist government in the traditional sense in Warsaw, should we then extend aid in order to keep them from using their military power inside Poland? I would be uneasy about that. Supposing the present condition continues with a strong Solidarity, a weak Communist government and no Soviet intervention, should we then help? There my inclination is that we should be helpful and try to avoid a situation where economic distress produces such a degree of chaos as to justify later intervention. All the more so as it seems to me that the Soviet strategy, at least, was a Soviet strategy until recently, to have conditions in Poland appear so unattractive and so chaotic that nobody else in Eastern Europe would be tempted to follow it. So it depends really on what the conditions inside Poland are, to answer your question. As for the rest of Eastern Europe, if this should spread into the rest of Eastern Europe we will have a massive international crisis. I cannot believe that the Soviets will acquiesce in this happening anywhere else without attempting to put it down.

BOB GRAY As someone with unique credentials to discuss limitations and anti-ballistic missile systems having negotiated SALT 1, and in view of the increasing discussion of perhaps recessing, renegotiating that treaty in the review period next year, I wonder if you could reflect on whether you think the time is propitious for the United States to examine whether the deterrent relationship might be better furthered by more emphasis on defensive rather than offensive weapons?

# The International Context for US Security

HENRY KISSINGER

There are many complexities ahead of us on both sides of the Atlantic with respect to the area of national security. Of course, no-one has ever lived in a golden age; it was always a previous period. But when one thinks back to the 1940s and 1950s and maybe through the middle of the 1960s, I am struck by the fact that there was a substantial consensus about the general direction in which we were supposed to go. Moreover, there was some mutual reinforcement between groups like the IISS and those in governments, not in the sense that the intellectual community always agreed with what people in the government did – in fact they very frequently disagreed – but it was within a matrix of assumptions which permitted a dialogue that in the long run could only be helpful. I have the impression that in almost every country represented at this IISS Conference and in the national security community in general, these shared assumptions have substantially broken down. Thus, while it is perfectly possible to have debates about individual policies, what seems to be lacking is criteria for what we are trying to do and what reasonable goals might be.

## The Structure of Politics

Let me therefore address some of the issues as they now seem to me to be emerging. I think the most fundamental one in all our countries, and the one that is least susceptible to intellectual analysis, is the fact that the structure of politics is in a process of change. The relationship of men to events is being substantially transformed in almost all democracies. The effort of getting elected is so irrelevant to the process of government, it takes so much of the energies of potential candidates, it tends to select from candidates those with qualifications that are not necessarily related to what has to be done when they are in office, that this in itself is an obstacle to conceptual thinking. Candidates must devote years of their lives focusing on how to get on the evening news, not

on what they will do when they get into office. I suspect that there is not a difference in kind, only a difference in degree, with other societies. So the intellectual backdrop becomes more important than ever, or else the problems of statesmanship become harder and harder to solve.

And the most difficult problem of all is to take a society from where it is, from what it is familiar with, to a future in which it has never been. How to bridge the gap between the familiar, which in a revolutionary period can be highly misleading, and that which is only conjectural, is perhaps more anguishing than ever in our time. It is complicated by the fact that the machinery of all of our governments – and certainly the machinery of American government – has become so complex that servicing it turns into an objective of its own. It grows increasingly difficult to disentangle departmental or agency self-will from the national interest. Or, what is more realistic, they tend to be identified. If one traces the evolution of debates on weapons decisions in the United States – and I suspect this must happen in other countries as well – it would be interesting to determine at what point bureaucratic calculation and at what point strategic calculation were dominant and to what extent they merged. I can think of any number of improvements of weapons systems during my period of office that were rejected because the services wanted to keep open the option of something entirely new and were afraid of precluding themselves from the entirely new by agreeing to improvements of what existed. The amusing thing is that the end result of the process was usually that they got neither the improvement of what existed, nor the entirely new.

What is even more significant is that, in these discussions, there was no sense of a strategy that would give one criteria on which to act. This resulted from many factors, of which Vietnam, compounded by Watergate, was the

most important. There has been a collapse or,
at the least, weakening of the kind of intellec-
tual consensus, of the type of dialogue from
which outside groups could act as a reservoir of
reflection and as the supplier of some criteria.

And so we find ourselves in a position in the
United States - and in this respect, I repeat, I
think this is a problem of the modern demo-
cratic state - that almost any new Adminis-
tration acts as if the fundamental American
objectives were never permanently settled, as if
one could start over and over and over again. I
am not saying this is a criticism of the current
Administration, for I substantially agree with
the direction it is taking, but as a description of
the contemporary scene.

Essentially I agree with the strengthening of
American defence and I agree with the general
attitude that it reflects. But if asked to what
strategy that increased defence expenditure is
allied, what it is we should be aiming for in a
specific way, I have to tell you honestly that I
have difficulty in finding an answer. And if I
have difficulty, as somebody who more or less
has studied the problem for a long time, what
will the general informed opinion be? I suspect
many of us at this Conference are in substan-
tially the same dilemma.

The Strategic Environment

We have been talking for over twenty years
about the change in the strategic environment.
When I first started talking about change, as
Albert Wohlstetter and others pointed out, I
was premature - or, as others have put it less
kindly, I did not know what I was talking
about. But whether there was strategic parity in
the 1950s, or 1960s, or 1970s - and no matter
how you measure strategic power or what the
significance of strategic superiority is - the fact
is that we have all known for twenty-five years
that the growth of strategic nuclear stockpiles
on both sides was bound to create a fundament-
ally new strategic, political, psychological and
moral situation. Whether a leader will ever feel
confident enough with esoteric weapons that
have never been tested in combat conditions to
launch a first strike, and whether the signifi-
cance of the vulnerability of one facet of our
strategic forces achieves a decisive advantage
or not, are subjects of endless controversy. But
everybody who has thought about the problem

has substantially agreed upon one fundament-
al fact: once the United States lost its strategic
superiority, the overall relationships in the
world would inevitably change. Whether we
are inferior, whether we are now liable to be
subjected to a first strike, belongs to another
debate. But the mere fact that a plausible first-
strike counterforce capability has been lost, or
is being lost, has created new conditions. How
then will the defence of other areas be
conducted?

One of the weird aspects of the current
debate about theatre nuclear forces (TNF) is
that Europe insists that she cannot submit her-
self to the devastation of nuclear war on her
territory, and that therefore the pristine, true
strategic doctrine is one that exposes the
United States to the devastation of her own
territory for people who will not run that risk in
the defence of themselves. When I say that it is
not possible for the indefinite future to rely on
strategic nuclear weapons for the defence of
NATO, I am accused of undermining American
credibility, or of confirming only what has
been going on for twenty years anyway. Yet
every European familiar with the debate in his
own country must know that the same inhi-
bitions that he is facing cannot fail to exist in
the United States. While of course we can get
away with avoiding the issue for ten years or
twenty years, the growth of pacifism, which I
think is a better description of what is happen-
ing than the growth of neutralism, is a reflec-
tion of a sense of impotence, a sense that there
are no reasonable alternatives.

All of this is familiar. We have been
debating, talking about it for twenty years so it
is not even worth spending too much time on
the subject except to say that we have known
strategic parity was approaching and we have
not done anything significant about it. We are
increasing defence budgets by some agreed per-
centage at regular intervals, which rarely has
the quality of translating itself into forces and
never into a qualitative change in the military
dispositions or into a change in the strategic
concept.

The Weakness of Analysis

So we are left with the problems of no longer
being able to implement the strategy of the
1950s, of having a mish-mash of forces in

2

NATO (for what, it is difficult to say), and of
having six American divisions on a continent
that rejects local defence but no American
divisions in the area in which we rely on local
defence. We may be lucky: the USSR has her
own problems; there may never be a challenge
that the US cannot cope with. But I would have
to say again that we have no intellectual
rationale for current NATO strategy, that we
have all failed to some extent, and that you
have every right to include me in this catalogue
of criticism. I can tell you that I did ask the
question (I am not saying this as an excuse), but
it is one of the symptoms of modern govern-
ment that you do not always get answers to
your questions in a time span that is relevant to
decision-making.

One of the problems is that, in the 1960s and
1970s, the intellectual community split into at
least three groups: a group that rejected the
very concept of defence or strategy; a group
that identified strategy with arms control; and a
group that identified strategy with whatever
new weapons could be built. There is no point
in discussing here the anti-defence group in
this forum. It sems to me that all subsequent
debates among defence intellectuals have been
affected by the debates between the other two
groups. The paradox has been that it was the
liberal community that on the whole devel-
oped the most blood-thirsty strategies. Con-
trary to their natural proclivities, they would
attempt to reduce strategy to an engineering
problem; they argue that if you can kill a stated
number of individual people and destroy a
given amount of industrial capacity, you have
achieved deterrence. Almost any new weapon
system that has come along has been opposed
by the liberal community on two grounds: first,
that existing weapons were in any case ade-
quate to do the job and, second, that, if they
were not, some marvellous weapon was
coming along fifteen years from now that made
it unwise, uneconomical and provocative to
build the available weapon systems. The con-
servative group on the other hand saw virtue in
the accumulation of arms, usually only in the
strategic field, unrelated to any manner in
which they could be used.

The end result is that we are facing the dan-
ger of strategies which, if they work, involve
horrendous consequences. It is not therefore

irrational for pacifism to develop. We all know
that the real problem is regional defence; yet
this country has a volunteer army that every-
body realizes cannot possibly meet these
necessities. And all European countries are
reducing their terms of service.

Nevertheless in America we are at least, it
seems to me, now trying to become serious.
Whether or not one agrees with every con-
clusion drawn by the Administration, there is a
greater consensus in America now than there
has been in fifteen years, which it is in the inter-
est of our friends to preserve. The basic direc-
tion seems to me to be valid. Yet the break-
down in our domestic debate that I have des-
cribed, which is now being healed to some
extent, is accompanied by a growing break-
down in discussions with Europe.

Traditionally an alliance was an aspect of a
balance of power; it had some common per-
ception of a common threat, and shared some
theory of how you were going to deal with this
threat. Moreover, there was a shared assump-
tion that you needed the accumulation of
power represented by various allies in order to
meet that threat more effectively. It is rare that
alliances which are perceived simply as uni-
lateral guarantees work indefinitely without
demoralization on both sides. In the past,
alliances usually broke down either when the
threat seemed to become so overwhelming that
the alliance was no longer seen as a protection,
or when the threat was felt to have lost its
menace so that alliance was no longer per-
ceived to be necessary. It is a distinguishing
feature of the Atlantic Alliance at the current
period that both of these tendencies are occur-
ring simultaneously: there is either an absence
of belief in a particular threat or, if the threat is
admitted, its menace is considered to be so
overwhelming that it cannot be dealt with by
Alliance procedures.

When one adds to the disagreement on
strategy, which is endemic in our community,
disagreement on East-West relations, disagree-
ment on third-world relations, and insistence
that the Alliance applies only to those areas
which are contained in its legal definition, you
have a recipe for impotence. It is as if, when a
crisis occurs, a President of the United States
must turn first to his legal adviser and collect a
group of lawyers to determine exactly what the

3

text of the document says. If there is no perception of common interests and of means to deal with them, how can the Alliance continue? How can it not lead to crisis unless we are lucky and our opponents disintegrate?

Everybody agrees that the Persian Gulf is vital to everybody's interests in the Alliance; yet everybody also argues that membership in the Alliance implies no obligation for security in the Persian Gulf or for Afghanistan or for any other area you may name, and that therefore it is possible to pursue totally separate and sometimes contradictory policies. Leaving aside what is right on the merits of any one of these issues, I do not believe it will be possible for the indefinite future to maintain present deployments which cannot be explained either in terms of a strategy on the ground for the defence of Europe or in terms of a global strategy for the defence of what is called 'The Free World'.

## East-West Relations

In this connection, let me make a few observations about East-West relations. I have the impression that the debate in the United States about what came to be called 'detente' was characterized by two broad schools which, as with all broad schools, represent an oversimplification. There was what may be called the 'psychiatric school' that dealt with the Soviet Union by the precepts of personal relations. This school believed that fundamentally the Soviet Union reacts to the American threat, that therefore reassurance is the answer and negotiations the mechanism. Then there was the 'theological school' that saw relations with the Soviet Union as an aspect of a general ideological liturgy and resisted any contamination represented by the implication of compromise inherent in negotiation. This school concentrated on pointing out the benefits to the USSR of any agreement that might be made, as if the USSR would ever make an agreement in which she had no benefits. The real problem is whether one can balance the benefits to the US against the benefits to the USSR. To believe that one can negotiate a series of agreements of unilateral benefit to the US is a nostalgia which reality will not permit.

The same division occurs between Europe and America. One reads constantly about

European pressures for negotiation and about the 'over-militarization' of American foreign policy. I can hardly be accused of being an apologist for this Administration but I would nevertheless like to raise the question: negotiation about what? What is it that we are trying to achieve? What is the purpose of it? I favoured detente in the 1970s and I favour detente in the 1980s if it can be properly defined. My definition of detente is that, in a world of two nuclear super-powers, one cannot conduct foreign policy by the maxims of the era of conventional weapons; statesmen have a responsibility to their publics to demonstrate to them that they are trying to come to grips with the nuclear problem. I do not think we can maintain the domestic cohesion of our societies if there should be a series of crises in which we have not demonstrated a serious effort at an alternative. We will not be able to keep our Alliance together unless this problem that preoccupies mankind is dealt with. Yet I do not believe that we can deal with these problems by abstract emotional assertions about negotiations which are never reduced to concrete programmes. The argument that detente led to a period of American weakness is a very convenient argument; it enables both conservatives and liberals to avoid the responsibility for some of their great causes; what happened in Vietnam and Watergate is swept under the rug; symptom becomes confused with cause. An America that went through Vietnam and Watergate was bound to experience a period of uncertainty; nor will a 'tough' Administration be able to avoid negotiating, as is in fact constantly asserted by its representatives. Our problem is not whether we should negotiate with the Soviet Union but whether we can negotiate with her without illusion on the basis of some concrete ideas of a world towards which we ought to be heading.

After every crisis - after Czechoslovakia, after Afghanistan - there is always the fear that this is the beginning of a general Soviet military assault. Instead it always presages a new Soviet peace offensive and it always leads to the same debate in all the NATO countries as if the initial provocation had never occurred. Fifteen months after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, every retaliatory measure that was taken has been dismantled and the major price the

4

Soviet Union has paid for her invasion is what the people of Afghanistan, without much help from the US, are exacting from her. We now see a crisis in Poland, and it has become a shibboleth that there will be very serious consequences if the Soviet Union goes into Poland. But have we answered the following questions? In the trade embargo that everybody seems to be talking about, are we going to apply it only to new business or also to existing orders? And if we apply it only to new orders, does it really mean anything? Do we apply it to all of Eastern Europe or only to the Soviet Union? If we apply it to all of Eastern Europe, do we also apply it to East Germany? And if we have no answers to these questions, which have now been before us for over a year (and I doubt whether we do), how serious is our policy going to be?

I have believed in linkage, both domestic and international. Domestic in the sense that it has always seemed a pity that we do away with many weapon systems as a result of budgetary decisions without ever offering them in arms-control negotiations. I believe in international linkage because I think that there is a relationship between events in different parts of the world and because one has to be careful not to let the process of negotiations become a safety valve for expansionism rather than a means of improving objective conditions. Of course, one can have a merry old time proving that if you link everything to everything, nothing will ever happen. It is a marvellous form of intellectual pyrotechnics. But the art of policy-making is to know how to make distinctions and the art in linkage is to know which events are related to each other. It cannot be sensible, for example, that we all announce great embargoes and then sell grain and butter to the East and that the Europeans build pipelines. It cannot be sensible that we maintain no relationship whatever between our economic policies and our political policies, not to speak of our strategic policies. It is certainly rational to debate to what extent trade should be related to other issues and what circumstances should be linked to which other circumstances, but one cannot and should not deal with each event separately.

super-power carrying out devilish long-range plans in every category. The paradox is that the Soviet Union has great military strength and enormous political and sociological weaknesses. It is a system of government that has no legitimate means of succession. Not only do our experts not know who is going to replace Brezhnev, but Brezhnev probably does not know who is going to replace him. He may know who is going to replace him immediately but not in the longer term, and in any structural sense that is an inherent weakness. The economy is obviously not working, and all Communist countries, without exception, face the problem of what to do with the Communist Party in a developed state. The Party is not needed for government and it is not needed for economy. Under the socialist system you have the kind of absurdity that appeared in the Soviet press three years ago: the system operated on the basis of a tractor factory that was never built and they fired a Minister because he reported the existence of a refinery that did not exist. When you can lose track of factories and refineries, your system is not likely to be the wave of the future. Yet it presents us with a massive problem when enormous military strength co-exists with the necessity of fundamental domestic reforms. We should be concerned lest there be a temptation to try to clean up the external environment before dealing with the domestic one, or to deal with China before it becomes a kind of Japan. Those seem to me to be the dangers of the Soviet system, much more than a Hitler-like plan of world domination pursued with a specific timetable. There is a general attempt to expand influence but I do not believe there is a precise timetable.

## Theatre Nuclear Negotiations

So we face an adversary that is both strong and weak and with the confusion within our systems that I have described. This is a situation crystallized for me by the TNF negotiations. Now for some weird reason the TNF negotiations have become in many countries the test of allied cohesion and of East-West relations. Whether that decision should ever have been taken is another matter. The argument is made that these weapons are designed to enable the United States to fight a nuclear war in Europe without destroying the US. Of

course, it is not self-evident to me that it helps Europe greatly if we are all destroyed together, but I will put that aside. I would rather argue that on a purely technical analysis, the one thing these weapons do *not* do is enable the United States to escape unscathed. In fact these weapons guarantee that, if there is a war in Europe, it will couple the American nuclear defence to European nuclear defence. If we wanted to confine destruction to Europe, America should not change her present nuclear deployment in Europe. It is not, after all, as if these weapons *introduce* nuclear strategy to Europe. In my view, the reason for the inherent coupling is that, if the Soviet Union herself, and especially Soviet weapons, is attacked from Europe in response to a Soviet move against Europe, she cannot possibly permit the United States to stay undamaged and permit the entire United States' retaliatory force to remain unscathed while the whole nuclear strategy plays itself out in Europe.

But let me turn to the argument over TNF negotiations. In historical retrospect, it is not clear to me how we came to make a test case of a negotiation in which the Soviet Union has already deployed hundreds of weapons and we have not deployed one. A conglomerate of motives have involved the United States in this negotiation. Some are for TNF negotiations because they want to deploy weapons; others are for TNF negotiations as a means *not* to deploy weapons; some are for TNF negotiations as a link to SALT; and some are for TNF negotiations as a means of forestalling a negotiation on SALT. Finally there are those who are for TNF negotiations just because they like negotiations. I would defy anyone to give me a number between zero and 572 that would give us a criterion by which we can tell whether we are making progress or not. Moreover, what happens to the SS-20s that are affected? Do they get moved into Siberia? How was it possible that the absurd Brezhnev proposal - that they would stop deployment in Europe but not, presumably, in Asia if we stopped deployment - could be treated as a serious proposition?

Everybody knows America is getting into these negotiations primarily because it was thought that she could not otherwise hold Europe together or to the decision to modernize.

If you negotiate on a subject in which you cannot define what it is you want, you are in trouble. I have intellectual difficulty with TNF negotiations not related to SALT and I believe it would be dangerous for the US to repeat in SALT what happened in TNF, namely to be dragged kicking and screaming into a negotiation that she does not dominate. I have paid my price for SALT and I do not feel that I need to be the cutting edge of this particular debate, but I would like to make a number of general propositions.

## Strategic Arms Negotiations

We are now in the strange situation that SALT II, an agreement that is described as flawed and that we are not ratifying, is being observed. For a period of time that is perfectly understandable, to enable a new Administration to make its decision, but it cannot be a permanent state of affairs lest we inherit the worst of every course. We will either have to ratify it or explicitly to drop it, or at least to agree formally on some limits that we are going to observe. If one looks at the debate last year, three arguments prevailed: *Backfire*, heavy missiles and the Protocol. The Protocol is being taken care of by time; the other two seem soluble problems. I decline to express a view on whether it is better to try to fix these problems now or go straight into SALT III, as the Administration has committed itself to do.

I do, however, want to express a view on one particular issue which has become an article of faith in the debate, unchallenged by the intellectual community, that what is wrong with previous SALT Agreements is that they ratified existing building programmes and that they did not lead to reductions. The argument is that the key to the solution ought to be a SALT that brings about major reductions. I have never seen that challenged and I do not know enough to challenge it but I do think a serious study should be made as to what the implications would be at each stage of conceivable reductions. After all, the overwhelming problem of our period in the strategic field is the disproportion between warheads and delivery vehicles. That disproportion does not change at some levels of reduction. Indeed, you can make the case that, at some levels of reduction, if you reduce the number of delivery vehicles

6

without reducing the proportion of incoming warheads in relation to the delivery vehicles, you actually increase the vulnerability of the delivery vehicles. I suspect but I do not know that, if you study this, you will find a curve if you plot vulnerability against reducing number that vulnerability increases for a while before it drops. I think it important to know at what point and to what level you reduce your vulnerability by reductions. And even if successful, reductions will finally return us to our starting point. Assuming that reductions stabilize the strategic environment – not an easy assignment – the problem of regional defence will re-emerge in more acute form; because stability means strategic war has lost its purpose.

## The Third World

I am interested in the phenomenon in which the salvation of Western Democracies – their sense of identity, as it were – is thought to depend on *rapport* with the Third World. I favour an intensive dialogue with the Third World but I would question whether that part of the world most in search of identity can help us much with our own identity. But this is not the question I want to ask. I want to ask this: what recommendation about political structure should one tell the leader of a semi-feudal country emerging into modernization? We have debated the impact of certain Western policies on the stability of governments in various parts of the world, and we have debated whether arms sales have contributed to destabilization or whether there were other

factors. Whatever the answers, the process of modernization has been a major contributory factor tending towards destabilization. Because these societies are feudal and because traditional obligations are broken down in the process of modernization, political insecurity and instability are almost inevitable. Nor are political insecurity and instability always and generally led by what we in the West or some in the West would consider the most progressive forces. But I have no answer to the question I pose. Supposing somebody in Saudi Arabia suddenly asked: 'I'd like to avoid what has happened elsewhere as a result of modernization; can you help us?' What advice would you give him? As I have said, I think we have no answer yet that I am familiar with.

## Conclusions

I have pointed out some of my concerns. I want to make clear that I believe that, if one analyses what the Marxists call 'objective factors' on both sides of the dividing line, and the necessities of those parts of the world that do not consider themselves part of this struggle, there is absolutely no reason why we should not be the more relevant part of the world and why we should not be able to solve our own problems. We have torn ourselves apart for a long period. Whether you like the manifestations or not, there is in the United States an attempt now to come to terms with reality. What I believe the IISS can do is begin again to create the intellectual capital on which some of us drew in the 1960s and which has not in my view been replenished in the last ten to fifteen years.

# THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT FOR US SECURITY

## Henry Kissinger

There are many complexities ahead of us on both sides of the Atlantic with respect to the area of national security. Of course, no one has ever lived in a golden age; it was always a previous period. But when one thinks back to the 1940s and 1950s and maybe through the middle of the 1960s, I am struck by the fact that there was a substantial consensus about the general direction in which we were supposed to go. Moreover, there was some mutual reinforcement between groups like the IISS and those in governments, not in the sense that the intellectual community always agreed with what the people in the government did--in fact they very frequently disagreed-- but it was within a matrix of assumptions which permitted a dialogue that in the long run could only be helpful. I have the impression that in almost every country represented at this IISS Conference and in the national security community in general, these shared assumptions have substantially broken down. This, while it is perfectly possible to have debates about individual policies, what seems to be lacking is criteria for what we are trying to do and what reasonable goals might be.

## The Structure of Politics

-2-

(LC)

countries, and the one that is least susceptible to intellectual
analysis, is the fact that the structure of politics is in a pro-
cess of change. The relationship of men to events is being sub-
stantially transformed in almost all democracies. The effort
of getting elected is so irrelevant to the process of government,
it takes so much of the energies of potential candidates, it tends
to select from candidates those with qualifications that are not
necessarily related to what has to be done when they are in office,
that this in itself is an obstacle to conceptual thinking. Can-
didates must devote years of their lives focusing on how to get
on the evening news, not on what they will do when they get into
office. I suspect that there is not a difference in kind, only a
difference in degree, with other societies. So the intellectual
backdrop becomes more important than ever, or else the problems of
statesmanship become harder and harder to solve.

And the most difficult problem of all is to take
a society from where it is, from what it is familiar with, to
a future in which it has never been. How to bridge the gap
between the familiar, which in a revolutionary period can be
highly misleading, and that which is only conjectural, is perhaps
more anguishing than ever in our time. It is complicated by the
fact that the machinery of all of our governments--and certainly
the machinery of American Government--has become so complex
that servicing it turns into an objective of its own. It grows
increasingly difficult to disentangle departmental or agency
self-will from the national interest. Or, what is more realis-
tic, they tend to be identified. If one traces the evolution of

-3-

debates on weapons decisions in the United States--and I suspect
this must happen in other countries as well--it would be
interesting to determine at what point bureaucratic calculation
and at what point strategic calculation were dominant and to what
extent they merged. I can think of any number of improvements
of weapons systems during my period of office that were rejected
because the services wanted to keep open the option of something
entirely new and were afraid of precluding themselves from the
entirely new by agreeing to improvements of what existed. The
amusing thing is that the end result of the process was usually
that they got neither the improvement of what existed, nor the
entirely new.

What is even more significant is that, in these discussions,
there was no sense of a strategy that would give one criteria
on which to act. This resulted from many factors, of which
Vietnam, compounded by Watergate, was the most important. There
has been a collapse or, at the least, a weakening of the kind of
intellectual consensus, of the type of dialogue from which out-
side groups could act as a reservoir of reflection and as the
supplier of some criteria.

And so we find ourselves in a position in the United States--
and in this respect, I repeat, I think this is a problem of the
modern democratic state--that almost any new Administration acts
as if the fundamental American objectives were never permanently
settled, as if one could start over and over and over again. I

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am not saying this is a criticism of the current administration,
for I substantially agree with the direction it is taking, but
as a description of the contemporary scene.

Essentially I agree with the strengthening of American
defence and I agree with the general attitude that it reflects.
But if asked to what strategy that increased defence expenditure
is allied, what it is we should be aiming for in a specific way,
I have to tell you honestly that I have difficulty in finding an
answer. And if I have difficulty, as somebody who more or less
has studied the problem for a long time, what will the general
informed opinion be? I suspect many of us at this Conference are
in substantially the same dilemma.

## The Strategic Environment

We have been talking for over twenty years about the change
in the strategic environment. When I first started talking about
change, as Albert Wohlstetter and others pointed out, I was
premature--or, as others have put it less kindly, I did not know
what I was talking about. But whether there was strategic parity
in the 1950s, or 1960s, or 1970s--and no matter how you measure
strategic power or what the significance of strategic superiority
is--the fact is that we have all known for twenty-five years that
the growth of strategic nuclear stockpiles on both sides was
bound to create a fundamentally new strategic, political,
psychological and moral situation. Whether a leader will
ever feel confident enough with esoteric weapons that never have
been tested in combat conditions to launch a first strike,

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and whether the significance of the vulnerability of one facet
of our strategic forces achieves a decisive advantage or not,
are subjects of endless controversy. But everybody who has thought
about the problem has substantially agreed upon one fundamental
fact: once the United States lost its strategic superiority,
the overall relationships in the world would inevitably change.
Whether we are inferior, whether we are now liable to be subjected
to a first strike, belongs to another debate. But the mere fact
that a plausible first-strike counterforce capability has been
lost, or is being lost, has created new conditions. How then will
the defence of other areas be conducted?

One of the weird aspects of the current debate about theatre
nuclear forces (TNF) is that the Europeans insist that they cannot
subject themselves to the devastation of nuclear war on their
territory, and that therefore the pristine, true strategic doctrine
is one that exposes the United States to the devastation of its
own territory for people who will not run that risk in the defence
of themselves. When I say that it is not possible for the in-
definite future to rely on strategic nuclear weapons for the
defence of NATO, I am accused of undermining American credibility,
or of confirming only what has been going on for twenty years
anyway. Yet every European familiar with the debate in his own
country must know that the same inhibitions that he is facing cannot
fail to exist in the United States. While of course we can get
away with avoiding the issue for ten years or twenty years, the
growth of pacifism, which I think is a better description of
what is happening than the growth of neutralism, is a reflection

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## The Weakness of Analysis

So we are left with the problems of no longer being able to
implement the strategy of the 1950s, of having a mish-mash of forces
in NATO (for what, it is difficult to say), and of having six
American divisions on a continent that rejects local defence but
no American divisions in the area in which we rely on local defence.
We may be lucky: the Soviets have their own problems; there
may never be a challenge that we cannot cope with. But I would
have to say again that we have no intellectual rationale for cur-
rent NATO strategy, that we have all failed to some extent,
and that you have every right to include me in this catalogue of
criticism. I can tell you that I did ask the question (I am
not saying this as an excuse), but it is one of the symptoms of
modern government that you do not always get answers to your
questions in a time span that is relevant to decision-making.

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intellectual community split into at least three groups: a
group that rejected the very concept of defence or strategy;
a group that identified strategy with arms control; and a group
that identified strategy with whatever new weapons could be
built. There is no point for me to discuss the anti-defence
group in this forum. It seems to me that all subsequent debates
among defense intellectuals have been affected by the debates
between the other two groups. The paradox has been that it was
the liberal community that on the whole developed the most blood-
thirsty strategies. Contrary to their natural proclivities, they
would attempt to reduce strategy to an engineering problem;
they argue that if you can kill a stated number of individual
people and destroy a given amount of industrial capacity, you
have achieved deterrence. Almost any new weapon system that has
come along has been opposed by the liberal community on two
grounds: first, that existing weapons were in any case adequate
to do the job and, second, that, if they were not, some mar-
velous weapon was coming along fifteen years from now that made
it unwise, uneconomical and provocative to build the available weapon
systems. The conservative group on the other hand saw virtue
in the accumulation of arms, usually only in the strategic field,
unrelated to any manner in which they could be used.

The end result is that we are facing the danger of strategies
which, if they work, involve horrendous consequences. It is
not therefore irrational for pacifism to develop. We all know
that the real problem is regional defence; yet this country
has a volunteer army that everybody realizes cannot possibly
meet these necessities. And all European countries are reducing

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their terms of service.

Nevertheless in America we are at least, it seems to me, trying now to become serious. Whether or not one agrees with every conclusion drawn by the Administration, there is a greater consensus in America now than there has been in fifteen years, which it is in the interest of our friends to preserve. The basic direction seems to me to be valid. Yet the breakdown in our domestic debate that I have described, which is now being healed to some extent, is accompanied by a growing breakdown in discussions with the Europeans.

Traditionally an alliance was an aspect of a balance of power; it had some common perception of a common threat, and shared some theory of how you were going to deal with this threat. Moreover, there was a shared assumption that you needed the accumulation of power represented by various allies in order to meet that threat more effectively. It is rare that alliances which are perceived simply as unilateral guarantees work indefinitely without demoralization on both sides. In the past, alliances usually broke down either when the threat seemed to become so overwhelming that the alliance was no longer seen as a protection, or when the threat was felt to have lost its menace so that alliance was no longer perceived to be necessary. It is a distinguishing feature of the Atlantic Alliance at the current period that both of these tendencies are occurring simultaneously: there is either an absence of belief in a particular threat or, if the threat is admitted, its menace is considered to be so overwhelming that it cannot be dealt with by Alliance

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procedures.

When one adds to the disagreement on strategy, which is endemic in our community, disagreement on East-West relations, disagreement on Third World relations, and insistence that the Alliance applies only to those areas which are contained in its legal definition, you have a recipe for impotence. It is as if, when a crisis occurs, a President of the United States must turn first to his legal adviser and collect a group of lawyers to determine exactly what the text of the document says. If there is no perception of common interests and of means to deal with them, how can the Alliance continue? How can it lead to crisis unless we are lucky and our opponents disintegrate?

Everybody agrees that the Persian Gulf is vital to everybody's interests in the Alliance; yet everybody also argues that membership in the Alliance implies no obligation for security in the Persian Gulf or for Afghanistan or for any other area you may name, and that therefore it is possible to pursue totally separate and sometimes contradictory policies. Leaving aside what is right on the merits of any one of these issues, I do not believe it will be possible for the indefinite future to maintain present deployments which cannot be explained either in terms of a strategy on the ground for the defence of Europe or in terms of a global strategy for the defence of what is called "The Free World".

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## East-West Relations

In this connection, let me make a few observations about East-West relations. I have the impression that the debate in the United States about what came to be called "détente" was characterized by two broad schools which, as with all broad schools, represent an over-simplification. There was what may be called the "psychiatric school" that dealt with the Soviet Union by the precepts of personal relations. This school believed that fundamentally the Soviet Union reacts to our threat, that therefore reassurance is the answer and negotiations the mechanism. Then there was the "theological school" that saw relations with the Soviet Union as an aspect of a general ideological liturgy and resisted any contamination represented by the implication of compromise inherent in negotiation. This school concentrated on pointing out the benefits to the Soviets of any agreement that might be made, as if the Soviets would ever make an agreement in which they had no benefits. The real problem is whether one can balance the benefits to us against the benefits to them. To believe that one can negotiate a series of agreements of unilateral 'benefit to us is a nostalgia which reality will not permit.

The same division occurs between Europeans and Americans. One reads constantly about European pressures for negotiation and about the "over-militarization" of American foreign policy. I can hardly be accused of being an apologist for this Administration but I would nevertheless like to raise the question: negotiation about what? What is it that we are trying to achieve? What is the purpose of it? I favoured détente in the 1970s and I favour détente in the 1980s if it can be properly defined.

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(L)

My definition of détente is that, in a world of two nuclear Superpowers, one cannot conduct foreign policy by the maxims of the era of conventional weapons; statesmen have a responsibility to their publics to demonstrate to them that they are trying to come to grips with the nuclear problem. I do not think we can maintain the domestic cohesion of our societies if there should be a series of crises in which we have not demonstrated a serious effort at an alternative. We will not be able to keep our Alliances together unless this problem that preoccupies mankind is dealt with. Yet I do not believe that we can deal with these problems by abstract emotional assertions about negotiations which are never reduced to concrete programs. The argument that détente led to a period of American weakness is a very convenient argument; it enables both conservatives and liberals to avoid the responsibility for some of their great causes; what happened in Vietnam and Watergate is swept under the rug; symptom becomes confused with cause. An America that went through Vietnam and Watergate was bound to experience a period of uncertainty; nor will a "tough" Administration be able to avoid negotiating, as is in fact constantly asserted by its representatives. Our problem is not whether we should negotiate with the Soviet Union but whether we can negotiate with them without illusion on the basis of some concrete ideas of a world towards which we ought to be heading.

After every crisis--after Czechoslovakia, after Afghanistan-- there is always the fear that this is the beginning of a general Soviet military assault. Instead it always presages a new

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Soviet peace offensive and it always leads to the same debate
in all the NATO countries as if the initial provocation had
never occurred. Fifteen months after the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, every retaliatory measure that was taken has been
dismantled and the major price the Soviet Union has paid for their
invasion is what the people of Afghanistan, without much help
from us, are exacting from them. We now see a crisis in Poland,
and it has become a shibboleth that there will be very serious
consequences if the Soviet Union goes into Poland. But have we
answered the following questions? In the trade embargo that every-
body seems to be talking about, are we going to apply it only to
new business or also to existing orders? And if we apply it
only to new orders, does it really mean anything? Do we apply
it to all of Eastern Europe or only to the Soviet Union? If
we apply it to all of Eastern Europe, do we also apply it to
Eastern Germany? And if we have no answers to these questions,
which have now been before us for over a year (and I doubt whether
we do), how serious is our policy going to be?

I have believed in linkage, both domestic and international.
Domestic in the sense that it has always seemed a pity that we
do away with many weapon systems as a result of budgetary decisions
without ever offering them in arms control negotiations. I
believe in international linkage because I think that there is
a relationship between events in different parts of the world and
because one has to be careful not to let the process of negotiations
become a safety valve for expansionism rather than a means of

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improving objective conditions. Of course, one can have a merry old time proving that if you link everything to everything, nothing will ever happen. It is a marvelous form of intellectual pyrotechnics. But the art of policy-making is to know how to make distinctions and the art in linkage is to know which events are related to each other. It cannot be sensible, for example, that we all announce great embargoes and then sell grain and butter to the East and that the Europeans build pipelines. It cannot be sensible that we maintain no relationship whatever between our economic policies and our political policies, not to speak of our strategic policies. It is certainly rational to debate to what extent trade should be related to other issues and what circumstances should be linked to which other circumstances, but one cannot and should not deal with each event separately.

Nor do I want to leave the impression that I believe that the Soviet Union is some mythical Superpower carrying out devilish long-range plans in every category. The paradox is that the Soviet Union has great military strength and enormous political and sociological weaknesses. It is a system of government that has no legitimate means of succession. Not only do our experts not know who is going to replace Brezhnev, but Brezhnev probably does not know who is going to replace him. He may know who is going to replace him immediately but not in the longer term, and in any structural sense that is an inherent weakness. The economy is obviously not working, and all Communist countries, without exception, face the problem of what to do with the Communist Party in a developed state. The Party is not needed for government

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and it is not needed for the economy. Under the socialist
system you have the kind of absurdity that appeared in the
Soviet press three years ago: the system operated on the basis
of a tractor factory that was never built and they fired a Minister
because he reported the existence of a refinery that did not exist.
When you can lose track of factories and refineries, your system
is not likely to be the wave of the future. Yet it presents
us with a massive problem when enormous military strength
coexists with the necessity of fundamental domestic reforms.
We should be concerned lest there be a temptation to try to clean
up the external environment before dealing with the domestic one,
or to deal with China before it becomes a kind of Japan. Those
seem to me to be the dangers of the Soviet system, much more
than a Hitler-like plan of world domination pursued with a
specific timetable. There is a general attempt to expand in-
fluence but I do not believe there is a precise timetable.

So we face an adversary that is both strong and weak and with
the confusion within our systems that I have described. This is
a situation crystalized for me by the TNF negotiations. Now
for some weird reason the TNF negotiations have become in many
countries the test of allied cohesion and of East-West relations.
Whether that decision should ever have been taken is another
matter. The argument is made that these weapons are designed
to enable the United States to fight a nuclear war in Europe with-
out destroying the US. Of course, it is not self-evident to me

that it helps the Europeans greatly if we are all destroyed
together, but I will put that aside. I would rather argue that
on a purely technical analysis, the one thing these weapons do
<u>not</u> do is enable the United States to escape unscathed. In fact
these weapons guarantee that, if there is a war in Europe, it will
couple the American nuclear defence to European nuclear defence.
If we wanted to confine destruction to Europe, America should not
change its present nuclear deployment in Europe. It is not, after
all, as if these weapons <u>introduce</u> nuclear strategy to Europe.
In my view, the reason for the inherent coupling is that, if the
Soviet Union itself, and especially Soviet weapons, are attacked
from Europe in response to a Soviet move against Europe, it can-
not possibly permit the United States to stay undamaged and permit
the entire United States' retaliatory force to remain unscathed
while the whole nuclear strategy plays itself out in Europe.

But let me turn to the argument over TNF negotiations.
In historical retrospect, it is not clear to me how we came to
make a test case of a negotiation in which the Soviet Union
has already deployed hundreds of weapons and we have not deployed
one. A conglomerate of motives have involved the United States
in this negotiation. Some are for TNF negotiations because they
want to deploy weapons; others are for TNF negotiations as a
means <u>not</u> to deploy weapons; some are for TNF negotiations as
a link to SALT; and some are for TNF negotiations as a means
of forestalling a negotiation on SALT. Finally there are those
who are for TNF negotiations just because they like negotiations.
I would defy anyone to give me a number between zero and 576

that would give us a criterion by which we can tell whether we
are making progress or not. Moreover, what happens to the SS-20s
that are affected? Do they get moved into Siberia? How was
it possible that the absurd Brezhnev proposal--that they would
stop deployment in Europe but not, presumably, in Asia if we
stopped deployment--could be treated as a serious proposition?

Everybody knows the Americans are getting into these negotia-
tions primarily because it was thought that we could not otherwise
hold the Europeans together or to the decision to modernize.
If you negotiate on a subject in which you cannot define what it
is you want, you are in trouble. I have intellectual difficulty
with TNF negotiations not related to SAIT and I believe it would
be dangerous for us to repeat in SALT what happened in TNF,
namely to be dragged kicking and screaming into a negotiation
that we do not dominate. I have paid my price for SALT and I do
not feel that I need to be the cutting edge of this particular
debate, but I would like to make a number of general propositions.

<u>Strategic Arms Negotiations</u>

We are now in the strange situation that SALT II, an agreement
that is described as flawed and that we are not ratifying, is being
observed. For a period of time that is perfectly understandable,
to enable a new Administration to make its decisions, but it
cannot be a permanent state of affairs lest we inherit the worst
of every course. We will either have to ratify it or explicitly
to drop it, or at least to agree formally on some limits that we
are going to observe. If one looks at the debate last year,

-1/-

three arguments prevailed: Backfire, heavy missiles and the Protocol. The Protocol is being taken care of by time; the other two seem soluble problems. I decline to express a view on whether it is better to try to fix these problems now or whether it is better to go straight into SALT III, as the Administration has committed itself to do.

I do, however, want to express a view on one particular issue which has become an article of faith in the debate, unchallenged by the intellectual community, that what is wrong with previous SALT Agreements is that they ratified existing building programmes and that they did not lead to reductions. The argument used is that the key to the solution ought to be a SALT that brings about major reductions. I have never seen that challenged and I do not know enough to challenge it but I do think a serious study should be made as to what the implications would be at each stage of conceivable reductions. After all, the overwhelming problem of our period in the strategic field is the disproportion between warheads and delivery vehicles. That disproportion does not change at some levels of reduction. Indeed you can make the case that, at some levels of reduction, if you reduce the number of delivery vehicles without reducing the proportion of incoming warheads in relation to the delivery vehicles, you actually increase the vulnerability of the delivery vehicles. I suspect but I do not know that, if you study this, you will find a curve if you plot vulnerability against reducing numbers such that vulnerability increases for a while before it drops. I think it important to know at what point and to what

level you reduce your vulnerability by reductions. And even
if successful, reductions will finally return us to our starting
point. Assuming that reductions stabilize the strategic
environment--not an easy assignment--the problem of regional
defense will reemerge in more acute form; because stability
means strategic war has lost its purpose.

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The Third World

I am interested in the phenomenon in which the salvation
of Western democracies--their sense of identity, as it were--
is thought by some to depend on rapport with the Third World.
I favor an intensive dialogue with the Third World but I would
question whether that part of the world most in search of
identity can help us much with our own identity. But that
is not the question I want to ask. I want to ask this: What
recommendation about political structure should one tell the
leader of a semi-feudal country emerging into modernization?
We have debated the impact of certain Western policies on the
stability of governments in various parts of the world, and
we have debated whether arms sales have contributed to destabil-
zation or whether there were others factors. Whatever the
answers, the _process_ of modernization has been a major contributory
factor tending towards destabilization. Because these societies
are feudal and because traditional obligations are broken
down in the process of modernization, political insecurity
and instability are almost inevitable. Nor are political insecurity
and instability always and generally led by what we in the
West or some in the West would consider the most progressive
forces. But I have no answer to the question I pose. Supposing
somebody in Saudi Arabia suddenly asked: "I'd like to avoid
what has happened elsewhere as a result of modernization; can
you help us?" What advice would you give him? As I have said,
I think we have no answer yet that I am familiar with.

## Conclusions

I have pointed out some of my concerns. I want to make clear that I believe that, if one analyses what the Marxists call "objective factors" on both sides of the dividing line, and the necessities of those parts of the world that do not consider themselves part of this struggle, there is absolutely no reason why we should not be the more relevant part of the world and why we should not be able to solve our own problems. We have torn ourselves apart for a long period. Whether you like the manifestations or not, there is in the United States an attempt now to come to terms with reality. What I believe the IISS can do is to begin again to create the intellectual capital on which some of us drew in the 1960s and which has not in my view been replenished in the last ten to fifteen years.