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Summer 1995, "The Quest for World Order."

Issued as Volume 124, Number 3, of the Proceedings of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

© 1995 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
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Henry A. Kissinger

We Live in an Age of Transition

MANY DECADES AGO, longer than I care to admit, as a young professor I went to hear a lecture by Harold Macmillan, then recently retired as Prime Minister. He began the presentation of his distilled wisdom by saying: "As they left the Garden of Eden, Adam turned to Eve and said, 'we live in an age of transition.'" That is also the theme of my remarks.

I grew up intellectually in the age of the "special relationship," which I believe to have been vital to the creation of the postwar international order. It was not a favor the United States granted to Britain; rather it was earned, first by conduct during the war and later by the enormous contribution in helping shape the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and what generally came to be identified as the Cold War pattern of international relations. Britain brought crucial qualities to that relationship: experience in a multipolar world, a global orientation of mind, an experienced leadership, a commitment to security, overseas ties of not insignificant proportions, and the English language—which today you hear practiced on American television by those who are genuine and those who engage in wishful thinking.

All of those were great assets. But we are facing a new environment, and I would argue that the qualities that had made the special relationship work—broadened now to a European-American relationship—may be even more essential than they were before. This is not sufficiently said, and even when the words are uttered they express little more than respectful deference to yesterday's

Henry A. Kissinger is Chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc.

This essay is adapted from a speech given at the "Britain in the World" Conference in London on March 29, 1995.

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100 Henry A. Kissinger

liturgy. Yet if there is to be a European-American relationship in
the twenty-first century that goes beyond occasional consultation
and a very active commerce, it must be based on something more
than a recollection of times past. It must address the common
interests of the two worlds, interests that were not extinguished
when the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

The United States faces an unprecedented situation where his-
torical roots need always to be recalled. It is the only major
country in the world whose history can be precisely dated; popu-
lated almost exclusively by immigrants, it has never had a power-
ful neighbor along its borders, and has never had to face the
problems of security confronted by less favored nations. The Ameri-
cans' perception of their foreign policy was always one of nearly
limitless choice and, above all, of having the ability to participate
or to withdraw from international engagements at will. Every
American initiative of the postwar period was presented to the
American public as having a terminal date, after which America
could again withdraw, allowing the underlying harmonious pat-
tern to reassert itself.

This explains why almost all of America's foreign policy has
traditionally been presented in alternately psychiatric and theo-
logical terms: either as a means by which relations among nations
could be conducted as they might be if they were relations between
individuals, and, when that did not seem possible, as a crusade to
destroy or, even better, to convert antagonists to the American
perception of international affairs. In that sense, the Cold War and
victory in the Cold War were a culmination of the American
approach to international affairs.

How many historical incidents, if any, can be recalled of a
nation's leaders and allies stating goals that, some forty years later,
were practically all achieved? That is the position in which we now
find ourselves. And it is occurring at the precise moment when, in
the United States, the now dominant leadership groups have alto-
gether different geographic origins from those that shaped the
postwar period. A comparable "generation gap," caused by other
factors, exists in Europe, and both need to be understood in
thinking about the future relations of the two sides of the Atlantic.

The foreign policy of the United States during the Cold War was
formed largely by the so-called Northeastern "establishment."

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We Live in an Age of Transition 101

Present-day leadership and foreign policy direction are drawn mostly from the West, the Southwest, or the South. America's relations with Europe are much less organic today than they were during the generation of Acheson, McCloy, and the other fathers of Cold War policy. This does not mean that the current group is hostile to internationalism; only that it is less identified with recent European history. The previous establishment drew from appeasement the lesson that the democracies around the Atlantic had to be unified; there is no comparable imperative for the new American leaders.

The present generation, with no personal experience of World War II, having never established the kinds of European ties that bound an earlier generation to the Old World, accepts the Vietnam War as its Epiphany. Very few of those who now hold major positions in Washington saw combat in Vietnam; a whole generation of university students stayed aloof, either openly resisting the war, or taking what they thought to be legitimate exemptions from compulsory military service. The Vietnam War, seen by them and by many others as a terrible mistake—the defining experience of their generation—guides much of their thinking about war and peace. Whether their experience in respect to Vietnam has inapacitated them for reflecting objectively about the new post-Cold War world, as many who deplored America's role in World War I used its injustices and cruelties as an excuse for the brands of nonintervention common in the 1920s and 1930s, is a proposition rarely considered. American policy, whether in the Balkans or the Carribbean, in Africa or Asia, can only be understood in the context of a generation that views the contemporary world through a lens largely provided by a local and unsuccessful conflict, Vietnam.

As a result, America is presently going through what I believe to be only the beginning of a national debate. And I really have no right to speak here of an American point of view because the American point of view is still being formed. The seminal debates have not yet taken place. For the first time in its history, America must conduct a global foreign policy without an overwhelming ideological enemy, without a clear-cut strategic plan, and in a world that it can neither dominate nor withdraw from. Thus, the classic maxims of American foreign policy—the invocation of an

102 Henry A. Kissinger

overwhelming ideological challenge in the face of which foreign policy can be transmuted into large-scale enterprises to remedy the immediate crisis—also do not apply.

It is said that the United States is the only superpower left. That is a simplistic description of the situation. It may be the only military superpower left, but the issues susceptible to solution by military action are in decline. The kind of power in which the United States excels is less and less relevant to most foreseeable international crises. On the other hand, in economics, even in technology, the world is becoming much more evenly balanced. Even a cursory glance at the condition of the dollar makes it clear that the relative economic position of the United States is not what it was even a few years ago. Indeed, we are now living in a world composed of six or seven major global players.

In such an international order, the United States faces the more or less traditional foreign policy problem of global players of operationally more or less equal strength. There are only two roads to stability: one is hegemony; the other is equilibrium. Hegemony may not be possible and in any case runs counter to the convictions and public morale of the American people; equilibrium, or the balance of power, is a concept passionately rejected by the American intellectual community as contributing to endless tensions—an attitude Americans have fortunately been able to transcend through much of their history. To say in America that we must define a national interest is considered a revolutionary, if not a reactionary, proposition. And even if one could formulate it as an acceptable formula, the national interest is almost always defined in sweeping, ideological terms. Still, the future of the world will have to be based on some concept of equilibrium or some balance among its various regions.

It is impossible for every participant in an international system to be always perfectly satisfied; that happy condition has never been achieved by humanity. Still, it may be possible for the major regions of the world to be not so dissatisfied that they seek to overthrow the international system by violence, terrorism, economic warfare, or certain other methods so well elaborated in our century, which have proved so destructive. This is the first requirement of the moment, transcending in importance any of the individual crises that so preoccupy the mass media and that occasion-

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We Live in an Age of Transition 103

ally prove useful to politicians who wish to demonstrate their resolve.

In the conduct of policy, I would define the American interest both negatively and positively. Negatively, it is against the American interest that any major region of the world, including either Europe or Asia—and surely both together—should be dominated by a country or group of countries that can then organize themselves to pursue objectives inimical to the United States. Second, the United States must accept to participate in a world community where global concerns, whether in respect to economics, communications, or technology, are acknowledged.

Theoretically, the United States could pursue policy on a global basis in the manner employed by Britain in Europe throughout most of the nineteenth century: adopting a posture of “splendid isolation,” maintaining good relations with everybody but throwing its weight to the side that confers certain advantages at a specific moment (which, in the British case, was generally the weaker side). This would be a latter-day version of balance-of-power diplomacy. While that is theoretically possible, I do not believe the United States has the philosophy, the personnel, or the resources to do this on consistently a global basis, or even to elaborate it as a philosophy. Therefore, the more realistic approach to America’s foreign policy problem in the post-Cold War world is to recognize that there are fundamental differences in America’s relations with Europe, with individual countries in the Old World, and with those that exist in Asia.

Within Europe, the conflicts, rivalries, and historic memories have not wholly evaporated. Still, a strategic conflict among the European powers is out of the question. Whatever the differences in approach among the core countries of the European Union and the so-called rim countries, they are not likely to lead to military conflict.

Such is not the case in Asia. We can talk—as we do periodically—about a Pacific Community, but anybody studying the relations of Japan, China, Korea, the Asian part of Russia, and even India must acknowledge that, at this stage, their relations are more like those that existed between nineteenth-century European states than between twentieth-century European states. And, if we move to the area to the south of Europe, the growth of fundamentalism

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104 Henry A. Kissinger

there poses not just an indirect but an explicit challenge to world order of a kind that does not exist in the heart of Europe. By linking religion and politics in a missionary concept that purports to be the only valid answer to contemporary political, social, and economic issues, in certain respects an explicit reaction to the material philosophies that have been dominant in the West, it challenges Western values across the board.

For this and many other reasons, just as at the end of World War II, the United States and the countries of Europe need to fashion a special kind of relation with each other. It is not so much that both have a common enemy, but that each is confronting comparable problems, both at home and abroad, and these can best be redressed by parallel approaches. It is not just a matter of deciding whether NATO ought to be extended into Central and Eastern Europe or how Russia's legitimate security concerns ought to be regarded, but how the old alliance, which contributed so much to the stability and prosperity of the Atlantic world for half a century, is to be made relevant to the political and economic requirements of the new era. Many parts of the world that drew few benefits from the Soviet-American "standoff" are legitimately demanding today that their interests be considered in something other than a purely military dimension.

At the end of World War II, Britain was the only major European country to have escaped occupation, to manage to preserve its institutions, and to be able to make the transition from power to influence in an extraordinary manner. It took exceptional self-discipline and skill for a nation that had been at the center of world affairs to shift its emphasis in the way that Britain did in the decades after 1945. While the Gaullist approach to the United States was to make disagreements extremely painful, the British approach was to make differences extremely embarrassing. In the long run, through a network of institutions and consultations, a general community of interests was engendered, with enormous benefit to both the United Kingdom and the United States.

Since then, many of the tacit bargains upon which Europe, America, and the European-American relationship were constructed have been altered. The end of the Cold War has been the capital event of recent years. When the division of Germany ended, the world in which France enjoyed a certain political leadership on the

We Live in an Age of Transition 105

European continent, with Germany boasting a certain economic leadership, and America linked to both through its security role, could not be maintained in its old form. West Germany, organically linked to the United States by NATO and to the European Union by France, became an even more consequential European power after unification. Britain, extremely helpful in establishing the overall framework, remained ambivalent about the European Union.

But if a part of the international order is to free itself from reliance on largely strategic considerations, it must use the American relationship with Europe (and the Western hemisphere). This is less an institutional challenge than one of applying the principles of the special relationship between America and the United Kingdom to the North Atlantic area. I do not agree with those who say that America should shift its "special relationship" to Germany. That would not be helpful to Germany and it would not be meaningful for the United States. It is not in the American interest to seek a special continental partner. Nor do I know of a single German leader who aspires to such a relation. What is really needed today is for both the United States and the European Union, together with those democratic states who are not EU members to fashion together a global policy, geared not to enemies—the security danger linked to potential threats—but to global opportunities. These are still insufficiently perceived. Provincialism is not an American monopoly.

Historically, there have been two approaches to European-American relations. One was the Gaullist approach for which in its time I have had considerable sympathy. It reflected the necessities of a country that had passed through tremendous difficulties in the War and during decolonization, that desperately needed to reafirm its identity. The second approach was that of Great Britain, a nation more secure in its identity, which sought to establish a pattern of cooperation that would be difficult to challenge. Over time, it came to reflect the convictions of both sides that their common interests transcended all their minor differences. The British approach reflected a historic tradition of global foreign policy; the French approach was geared more to calculations of the margins on which stability depended in Central Europe—particularly so long as Germany was divided. The British approach

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106 Henry A. Kissinger

was to establish its identity by explicitly postulating common
purposes; the French approach has been to emphasize distinctness.
During the Cold War, when the United States had the dominant
role in security, when there was only one visible international
challenge, it made some sense to define European identity by
trying to wrest it from the United States. Today, nothing is easier
than to induce America to turn away from Europe; nothing is
simpler than to convince Americans that they have no special
interest in Europe. The tasks before Europe are now so manifold
that they do not have to be granted by the United States. Issues
such as participation of the Central European countries in the
European Union will be resolved by the Europeans themselves.
There is no need for the United States to take a position or to
involve itself. Whether Europe follows a multiple geometry—which
I prefer—or becomes more closely integrated cannot and should
not be affected significantly by American pronouncements.

What is important today is that there not be too rigid separa-
tions between areas thought to be exclusively European and others
that are deemed exclusively American. What we ultimately require
is a dialogue between opinion as it has emerged in Europe and
what is beginning to emerge in America. The inventiveness of the
immediate post-World War II years needs to be looked for, but in
contexts very different from those that existed when Stalin and his
Communist successors ruled in the Kremlin. The Western civil war
that started in 1914 and ended in 1945 owes much to the fact that
the United States and its European allies and friends took counsel
together, were prepared to express their differences, but were able
in the end to collaborate, to act together.

In the United States, it is imperative that priority be given to
European relations. This has been lacking, not only in terms of
day-to-day policy, but also in the failure to take longer-range
perspectives and to act on them. Thus, for example, the debate
about NATO membership ought not to be permitted to fester
indefinitely. That issue ought to be resolved one way or the other,
everyone realizing that these are no longer the days of the Cold
War; hence it is no longer possible to build an Atlantic relationship
exclusively on security issues.

What we now need to do more urgently is create some goals for
the North Atlantic nations so that we are able to act again within

We Live in an Age of Transition 107

a common framework. We should seriously begin to examine
some form of North Atlantic free trade association, a free trade
agreement that would go beyond any that now exists. Whatever
America builds in the Western Hemisphere needs to be related to
this Atlantic enterprise, enabling us—in the foreseeable turmoil in
other parts of the world and in the shifts of emphasis that will
inevitably arise as new powers emerge—to act with purpose and
direction.

A succession of American leaders of both political parties, many
not known for excessive sentimentality (a trait not common to
those who rise to the Presidency), have over a period of more than
a generation considered it natural that, on major issues, Britain
and the United States should cooperate. The level of consultation,
though never formalized, was central to the formation of policy in
both parties in both countries. Now, the challenge is to see whether
this can be done in terms of European-American relations as well,
where Britain's experience can make a signal contribution. Europe
no longer needs to wrest its identity from the United States. In the
world of the 1990s, both know their strengths and their weak-
nesses. It serves no purpose to dwell endlessly on either. The more
imperative issue is whether they appreciate their common interests
and are seeking to foster new forms of cooperation to serve those
interests. The nations of the North Atlantic, representing a compa-
rable civilization in a world in which democracy and economic
progress remain our hope but not our guarantee, are required to
do again, this time on a global basis, what they attempted so
successfully to do a generation ago.

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We must, of course, consider the integrating influence of
the industrial system of the latter part of our century. What-
ever the arguments in favor of the maintenance of the nation-
state, it is, economically speaking, becoming increasingly dif-
ficult for the latter to preserve its complete independence
unless it is very large or (paradoxically) very primitive. The
great "automated" factories of our age require huge "home
markets" if they are to sell their goods at a profit. In the long
run the maintenance of tariff barriers around medium-sized
states can produce only unemployment and economic dis-
tress. But if customs unions are formed then more and more
"integration" becomes inevitable. The nation-states concerned
may try to resist this process; but the only choice in front of
them, assuming the process of industrialization continues, is
between union among themselves or absorption by one of the
existing super-states.

Lord Gladwyn

From "World Order and the Nation-State—
A Regional Approach"

*Dædalus* 95 (2) (Spring 1966)