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Text of HAK remarks, Bilderberg

Dr. Kissinger: I would like everybody to understand that I can't even say I was the second choice and therefore have to try harder. I don't know what the fifth choice has to do to justify its existence on this platform.

This discussion started before there was a short range issue. The original idea was to have a review of arms control positions wherever the arms control negotiations would be in June, and I told the steering committee that this would get us into endless esoterics; technical issues which would probably miss the basic point of where are we trying to go and it was out of this that the topic grew and it is an accident that it has been involved in the short range nuclear debate.

The reason I suggested it is I was involved in the original formulation of arms control theory in the 50s at seminars at MIT and Harvard, and I've been involved in negotiations and arms control and I've been following it closely ever since. While it is certainly true what, as Ted said, that arms control has become a central component of East-West relations, I have developed increasing doubts whether we know what we are doing, whether there is a clear-cut objective that we're trying to achieve. When this process started in the Nixon administration we had

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political imperatives. We had the peace movement in our country that had to be placated in some manner. We had a Congress that wouldn't increase our defenses so that putting a ceiling met certain needs. As this developed, every arms control agreement became subject of a vicious debate on issues of verification, selling out to the Soviets, and justified in terms that arms control was desirable in itself so that gradually one, in my view, lost a sense of direction and that these arms control agreements have almost become an end in themselves and it is very difficult to explain what exactly they're supposed to do. Every arms control agreement is sold in the United States and in many other countries on the ground that it makes no difference that existing weapons can cover all forseeable targets, and then you wonder why we spent three years negotiating it.

I was, as many here know, very opposed to the INF agreement because I thought it would produce exactly the situation we are discussing today in the political structure of Europe without producing a corresponding military benefit. It became its own end; the carrot of being able to say that one had reduced weapons to zero was so overwhelming that the political implications of putting a German government that had been composed of people whose whole career had been dedication to the Alliance first through the agony of putting these weapons in, and then to the agony of pulling them out plus, as Ted correctly pointed out, the weapons that had always been in Germany. I think this has had a

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major effect on the German political situation and has produced
this extraordinary unanimity that seems now to exist from the CSU
at least through the SPD and maybe even to the right wing of the
Greens -- at any rate, it was a contributing factor.

I don't think it is sensible to go through this debate but I
believe it is essential that we bring arms control into some
relation to the political objectives that we are attempting
(intending?) to serve. With respect to the short range weapons,
I just want to make one observation. I was not in favor of
proposing the modernization when it was made. I thought it was
extraordinarily insensitive to propose, in the year that we
reduced strategic weapons, the modernization of weapons that
would kill primarily the victims of aggression. I think it was
also wrong that once the issue had been raised, to resist so
fiercely the modernization of weapons that were already there.

I want to raise only one or two issues in relation to that
debate. One is that it raises all the issues of nuclear
deterrence that we have avoided studiously for 20 years, ever
since it became apparent that some parity in strategic forces was
on the horizon. I'm not going to quarrel with some of the
arguments that Ted made, but when I read the German media and the
German statements, when I read that the foreign minister of
Germany says he has a special obligation to the East German
population to spare them the horrors of nuclear war, then the

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practical consequence of this is not just aimed at the short
range nuclear weapons but at the use of any nuclear weapons, and
it will lead logically to a position of no first use of nuclear
weapons, and a position of no first use of nuclear weapons means
that NATO is saying that it would rather be defeated with
conventional weapons than resort to nuclear weapons, and may
therefore change all the premises of security policy on which
NATO has been based.

Secondly, I think it's a mistake to compare the short range
weapons on both sides. We made that mistake with the INF. The
INF was not an answer to the SS-20. The INF was an attempt to
couple the strategic defense of Europe to the strategic defense
of the United States. (It) was essentially irrelevant how many
SS-20s, and it is essentially irrelevant how many short range
nuclear weapons the Soviets have. The utility of the short range
weapons in Europe, as of any nuclear weapon in Europe, is to
threaten the Soviets with getting into a realm of warfare that is
essentially unpredictable and perhaps uncontrollable. If we
want to give that up, we should think it through with the
greatest prayerfulness because this would be a huge change in all
the perceptions. There is nothing in European history that
suggests that conventional equivalence (?) produces deterrence,
and I think we are all blithely talking about conventional arms
control and about equal numbers in conventional arms control when
all of European history shows that victories have almost always

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been achieved by equal forces, and frequently been achieved by
inferior forces. So these are issues that we should think
through in the realm of arms control, and I'm so brief only
because I'd like to get to the issue that concerns me even more
than arms control.

Fundamentally, we have four sets of relationships that we need to
think through: the relationship of a unified Western Europe to
the United States, the relationship of Germany to Europe and to
the United States, the relationship of Western Europe to Eastern
Europe, and the relationship of both sides of what used to be
called the Atlantic Community to the Soviet Union. We need a
concept of what we are trying to do. We have escaped into
psychoanalysis of Gorbachev, and I will not join that debate. I
would simply say that we cannot gear our policy to one man whose
life is bound to be transitory, and it has been said correctly
about the Soviet Union -- it is a fact that every Soviet leader
has disavowed his predecessor, and it has been said that the
Communist systems, and especially the Soviet systems, are the
only systems in the world that have an unpredictable past.

So I would say that making the most favorable assumptions about
Gorbachev, one cannot found a notion of peace on anything other
than a perception that rational leaders on both sides of whatever
dividing lines one visualizes would want to implement over an
extended period of time.

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On the relations of Western Europe to the United States, so much has been said and I want only to ride one additonal hobby-horse. I am not excessively worried about fortress Europe in the economic field; I think this depends more on American competitiveness than it depends on other factors and I think that it is manageable. I believe it would be highly desirable for Europe to organize its own defense arrangements within NATO and I do not accept the proposition that such an act would divide the alliance. If we can stand the European economic community where there is no penalty for competitiveness, we should be able to stand the European defense community in a situation in which any threat to European survival would find any sensible European better off with American assistance than without American assistance. All the logic of the situation would lead in that direction.

Let me stress two points here. One: in order to save time, let me associate myself -- I would say completely -- with what Mr. Hirsch (?) has said about the relations between Western Europe and Eastern Europe and between the United States and Eastern Europe. It is undoubtedly true that tremendous changes are taking place in Eastern Europe. However, I think it is a terrible mistake to assume that a great empire will disintegrate by itself and that the United States and the western nations can simply sit there and observe this disintegration and harvest its fruits without any action on their part. I know no historical

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precedent where this has happened, and I see nothing in Russian history or Soviet perceptions to make this likely. It seems to me -- I agree with the various ideas. I think what we have to do is to attempt to separate the economic and political liberalization of Eastern Europe from the Soviet military security problem, and to see that the first part moves faster than the second part and that the issue of membership in the Warsaw Pact arises, in so far as we have anything to do with it, later than the issue of whether these countries can join the European community as associate members on an individual basis, which is what I would greatly favor. Of course we cannot tell them that they must stay in the Warsaw Pact. But I would not encourage a direct challenge to the Soviet system in that respect in so far as we can influence it. Now this has been presented as a second Yalta. That is not the point at all. It is a means of eliminating the consequences of Yalta without creating an excessive danger of conflict. We have now two forums in which issues of this kind are being discussed anyway. One is the European community and its relations to Eastern Europe, and the European community can by itself determine the conditions of association with itself in the economic, and to a limited extent, in the political field. Secondly, arms control negotiations are going on in the conventional field at Vienna. And I would suggest that rather than turn them into the usual numbers game of how many tanks are equal, that we relate them to our desire to reduce the Soviet capacity for repression in Eastern Europe while

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at the same time continuing in the normal way of achieving a
degree of balance. If these countries challenge their membership
in the Warsaw Pact, it would be much better if they did it after
Soviet forces have been substantially reduced as a result of arms
control negotiations, and after restrictions have been put on
their freedom of movement by confining them to base areas and
other matters that ingenious people can raise.

Let me make one final point, if I may, which has to do with the
position of Germany. There are many people here, and certainly
Ted, who know that I have felt particularly close to Germany and
that many of its leaders of all parties are personal friends of
mine. Nevertheless, I think it would be wrong not to admit that
there is a growing concern about Germany. Many Europeans say to
me, but they don't say it to the Germans enough, and so I'm
taking the liberty of saying it here. This has little to do with
the tactics, which were not brilliant, that produced this SNF
decision. I don't want to speak for Europeans -- let me speak
about what concerns me. If one looks at German history, one can
say that the tragedy of Germany is its central location and its
late unification; that throughout its history Germany has been
either too weak or too strong for the peace of Europe. When it
was too weak, it invited constant foreign interventions. When it
was too strong, and it sought to defend itself from its central
location against all its neighbors, it threatened each neighbor
individually and therefore I would describe pre-World War I

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German foreign policy as an extraordinary achievement in bringing about every nightmare that they sought to avoid. If one looks at German military planning before World War I, they started out with saying "What if there is a two front war?", and wound up by saying "What if there isn't a two front war?"

So I think that the problem is that if one studies British or French history, one can discover a clear definition of the national interest. I think German national energies have been so absorbed in achieving unification, which did not come until 1871, that I do not think that one can find in German diplomatic documents -- I certainly haven't been able to find it -- a clear statement of the national interest which would explain its foreign policy, and I'm worried that with the best intentions in the world, and with accepting everything that Ted (?) says, that Germany, assaulted by all its conflicting temptations, will attempt to follow them all, and will thereby create a disquiet and an uncertainty that none of its leaders intend, and the danger is not that Germany will stampede out of the alliance. The danger is that under the pressure of public opinion, of some vague romantic notions of what might or might not be done, there will be pursued policies whose objective result will be to undermine European unity and the NATO alliance.

This frankly worries me. I think it was a tremendous achievement of German policy to integrate itself into the West as it did and

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it was something unique in German history and an extraordinary achievement. I believe Germany has every right to seek the unification of Europe, but I believe that the unification of Europe should be sought in a European framework and that the European community and America owes it to the Germans to come up with a concept that is rational and sustainable, and Germany owes it to itself and to its allies to be willing to do it in a framework, and not just with lip service, but in reality. It is for this reason that I think arms control by itself is not enough.

I've not been able to do justice to the topics, even though Victor glares at me balefully and I have vastly exceeded the time allotted to me. But those were the issues that I wanted to raise, and I will say something that few have heard me say: I do not pretend that I have an answer to all the questions that I raised. Thank you.

lmt

5/23/89