Dr. Henry Kissinger's Address to the AHA

November 16, 1978

Mr. President, Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen:

I confess I'm glad you finally sat down because I have trouble looking humble for extended periods of time.

I appreciated the remarks that were made by your distinguished President -- warm, charming, legendary. I don't know why he stopped in the middle of one of my sentences. I never forget any word I say. And then it was especially uplifting to me to hear your Chairman on this platform, because when I see a man who also has an accent reach such elevation... We always have to stick together.

I asked Jerry what I should talk about, and he said talk about what interests me most. I didn't think it was fair to talk about myself all evening. Then I said "How long should I speak?" He said, "Oh, speak about 30 minutes." That's ridiculous. If he had consulted his mother, he would have known that anyone raised in the German language cannot place a verb in 30 minutes. In fact, that is the trouble with the book that I am now writing which deals with my life and other fascinating subjects and in which I have reached page 2,500 and I'm about to enter grade school. You can imagine the suspense when you start reading it finally.

I have come here because Jerry has become a close personal friend and a good friend of our family; because I feel that I have let him down a bit. He's operated on my mother, on my wife, on my brother, or at least under his ______ supervision. They all swear by him. I'm afraid to go to bed at night. I might wake up in the Mass. General.

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But I have appreciated not only the professional skill of Mass. General, which is legendary, but the tremendous humanity he has brought to our relationship and to the various crises which any operation is, in which he involves himself. And so I am very honored to have this opportunity to pay tribute to him and to his family and to this Association which has meant so much to the well-being of America.

I thought that I would talk to you for a bit about various problems of American foreign policy that we read about in the newspapers today. But before I do this, I would like to stress a few fundamental general points. The first is that with all the criticism we make of ourselves, with all the dissatisfaction one sometimes feels, this is the country on which all free peoples depend. Without our commitment there can be no security. Without our dedication there can be no progress. What we do and even what we say, for good or ill, determines the shape of the future and determines the self-confidence people have in trying to achieve their aspirations. Right now we see a rather hopeful development in this respect in the Middle East. I believe that the negotiations between Egypt and Israel, with all their ups and downs, are almost certain, I would say are certain, to lead to a successful conclusion. I think America can be proud of the role that it has played in that through the years as the one party that was trusted by all of the antagonists. There was a time when it was inconceivable that Arabs and Israelis would meet in the same room. Now they are discussing, at least some of them, a treaty of peace for the first time in a generation. After that is accomplished, there will still be enormous problems. There will be the problem of the West Bank. And there will be the problem of how these nations that have never known peace and that have sustained themselves by a siege mentality, how they will fare when they have to generate their own answers to their own problems and can no longer invoke a foreign danger.

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And then, we are facing in the Middle East today, and that is what I really want to talk about mostly, a crisis which may be more fundamental than the crisis between the Arabs and Israel and which has come to particular expression in the upheavals in Iran. Now Iran is a country that is very far away from the United States and there are very few Americans who know a great deal about it. But I can tell you from my personal experience, which is the same as the experience of all of my predecessors in that office, that the United States has had no better friend anywhere in the world than Iran and its leader, the Shah. It was the one oil-producing country in the Middle East that never stopped oil deliveries to Israel. It was the one country in the Middle East that never joined the embargo against the United States. It was the one country bordering the Soviet Union that, in the war of 1973, never permitted Soviet airplanes to fly over its territory to bring war materials and other supplies to the Middle East and later on to Africa. And therefore, if there should be a change of orientation in the government of Iran, it would have profound consequences for our security and for our well being.

The difficulty when you are a great power responsible for faraway areas as we now are, the difficulty is that when you still have a scope for action, the knowledge on which to base such action is often at a minimum. By the time you acquire the knowledge, it is too late to do something about it. In 1936, when the Germans reoccupied the Rhineland, one French Division could have put an end to Nazi aggression and professors would still be arguing today whether Hitler was a misunderstood Nationalist or a maniac bent on world domination. Five years later everybody was certain, but it cost twenty million lives to pay for that certainty. Our obligation now as the leading country in the free world, as the only country in the free world that can conduct a global foreign policy, is to be sure that we ask the right questions, and the group composed of so many researchers and scientists

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needs no instruction in the importance of that attribute, that you never get the right answer unless you ask the right question. And therefore I would like to talk about that part in the crisis in Iran that may have been ______ in my view by American misconceptions, not in order to be critical, but so that we can learn from it for the future.

The fundamental problem to remember is that the distinction that is often made between humane purposes and security purposes is something that is very interesting in political science courses, but is irrelevant to countries that have a long frontier with the Soviet Union on one side and have radical Arab regimes on the other side. Most countries in the world do not have the choice between doing those things that one likes to do and those things that one must do. Their reality is that unless they can do both, they cannot do either.

In the Indian Ocean, the part of the world from which 90% of the oil supply for Europe and Japan comes, in the Indian Ocean the geopolitical, that is to say the security dominance of the United States, has been taken for granted. And those countries who relied on us and who were our special friends, could point to being associated not only with the most powerful, but with the most effective country in the world. Now in recent years we have heard too often that the United States should not see everything in an East/West context; that the United States should concentrate on economic development; that the United States must not be so obsessed with security questions. And in that same time period 50,000 Cuban troops have shown up in Africa. Afghanistan has been taken over by the Communists and so has South Yemen. Now when you are in Iran and you see Ethiopia, South Yemen and Afghanistan taken over by Communists coups in the space of less than a year, without any even verbal opposition by any of the free countries, you have to ask

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yourself whether that special friendship from which you derived such a sense of security is
still operating. And the feeling of uncertainty and insecurity that is spreading thorough
that reason is palpable; and we are not simply speaking here of Iran because it will affect,
in time, as well, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and all the other countries of the so-called Persian
Gulf; the countries which supply 95% of Japan's oil, 90% of Europe's oil and about 35% of
ours. No one ever knows what causes revolutions, because if they did, they would prevent
it. But there is always a certain margin that can be affected by decisions, and it is in that
margin that I am concerned about the impact of the appearance of weakness and
irresolution on the part of the free countries when faced by the Communist expansionists.

The second factor to which I want to call attention, is a program that sounds very
attractive to Americans -- the so-called appeal to human rights. Of course the United
States has to stand for the principles of our constitution and for the principles of human
dignity that have distinguished us through the centuries and made us the hope for
humanity. But all of foreign policy is to relate the ideal to the possible and to have some
understanding of the _______ed conditions in which it can be applied. We found very
rapidly that when human rights slogans that sounded very impressive in political
campaigns were applied to the Soviet Union, that the reaction was rather violent, and I
have not heard great insistence on these principles in recent months so that now these
principles are applied primarily to allies. And this, then, raises a question of
understanding of this stage of historical development.

In Western Europe democracy developed over a period of 300 years. The transition from
feudalism to the parliamentary system was complicated, often violent, and spanned the
centuries. Even in our country we began with a very restricted franchise; the indirect

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election of Senators, for example. And even in our country the franchise was extended on
gradually. Now here you have around the world a host of countries many of which are not
even nations in any traditional sense, that are just beginning to form themselves. Or you
have, in the case of Iran, a country which in 1951 was the first recipient of the so-called
"Point Four Program." That is the program that was given to the technologically most
backwards nations in the world which by 1975 developed a plan of reaching the level of
fringe(?) industry in another ten year period. In other words, in 30 years they tried to
achieve something that in other continents took 300 years to accomplish. And the
upheaval that exists there today is caused by two totally different groups, none of which is
particularly democratic. It is caused by extreme conservatives on the right who think that
the Shah is going too fast and by extreme radicals on the left who think the Shah is going
too slow. Now I recognize and you must recognize that I represent a period of policy-
making that is not as enlightened as my successors, so therefore it is possible that there
are some subtleties that elude me. I do not understand it when I read in the newspapers
and read in public pronouncements that what we want in Iran is a coalition government. I
wish somebody would explain to me who is supposed to coalesce with whom? It isn't clear
to me how the extreme conservatives and the extreme radicals are united by any other
program except to smash what exists in enterprises like this. It is important that our
friends are not confused about where we stand.

And the third factor which is giving the situation its particular urgency is that it should
bring home to us with great poignancy the irresponsible manner with which, over the
years, we have dismantled one of the key elements of any national security apparatus,
namely our Central Intelligence Agency. We do not know today what is going on because
the best people have left or been driven out because it is dangerous under the various

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systems of that force revelations that have been set up to give information to our govern-
ment and because we have to all practical purposes been deprived of the capacity to
conduct covert operations. Those activities in the gray area between military activity and
diplomacy, an area in which our opponents have political parties, newspapers, front
organizations, and thousands of ways to make their influence felt. Can anyone believe
that in a country like Iran, a general strike can start without some system of communi-
cations, that some technically advanced nation is cooperating with? Is it an accident that
in certain parts of the world every newspaper prints substantially the same story? And is
it tolerable that the United States is acting totally impotently in fulfilling obstruct
theories that bear no relationships to any known international reality. Certainly for a
country as unused to intelligence as the United States, stupidities have occurred.

And in any large organization, if you probe long enough, you'll find some errors of
judgment. Certainly many of these actions do not come naturally to graduates from our
better universities. And yet the amazing thing is how little has been found in all these
investigations. What these investigations have accomplished is to destroy our covert
capability and to weaken our intelligence apparatus.

I mention these problems first because I do not believe the situation in Iran is
irretrievable. Secondly, because Iran is not an isolated case. All over the world there are
nations going through the same process of development generating the same forces of
extreme feudal conservatism on one side and extreme totalitarian radicalism on the other
side. And in these situations our friends have to know what they can expect from us and
where we stand and they cannot give the right answer unless we tell them at least what is
the right question. And especially leaders that have stood by us through the decades

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should not, when they are on the verge of drowning, be given lectures on the topography of deserts. What they don't need at this moment is abstract theories of political science. What they need is support and understanding. I say this with some reluctance, but also because we are at a point where we can still get control of events.

And on a positive side, when we look at the competition in which we are engaged with the totalitarian nations, all the assets are on our side. In none of the totalitarian communist nations has there ever been a legitimate succession. No communist ruler has ever left office in any country except by death or by a coup. In no part of the world where market economies have competed... (tape changeover eliminated some words)

... performance to the communist economies. The only field in which the other side has done well is in military hardware and this is a challenge which we must match and can match. And if a man from Mars came to this world and were given an inventory of resources, human and material, of the two sides, he would have no doubt who would prevail. So we are in the curious position in which I must return to our original premise, a continuation of the thought of trend of which Iran is an example, could, despite all the material strength on our side, lead to a gradual erosion of the self confidence and the capacities of the free world. But if we ask the right questions, we have more than the capacity to get the right answers. Very few societies in history have been in the position in which they could say that the solution of their problems is very largely up to them.

Thank you very much.

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