Rebecca Jordan

From: AFNEIL@aol.com
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 12:43 PM
To: rjordan@kmaglobal.com
Subject: Andrew Neil's interview with Henry Kissinger

HK wants to check quotes. It will go to press tomorrow night London time for both our London and Edinburgh broadsheet newspapers so I'll need any possible changes by 1pm your time tomorrow (Friday). I am faxing it as well.

[Lian: download and fax this + attachment to Rebecca Jordan @ 00 1 212 759 0042]

10/25/2001

25-OCT-2001 17:54

FROM SUNDAY BUSINESS

TO 90012127590042

P.02/05

"I have never seen the American people so united in determined defiance," said Henry Kissinger in his familiar slow, deep, throaty voice. "The terrorists have not realised that the more they try to do to us, the more violent will be our response."

We were sitting in the former US secretary of state's office in a mid-town Manhattan skyscraper far above Park Avenue - a modest office but one decorated with pictures of Kissinger and just about every famous world leader from the second half of the 20th century from Chou en Lai to Margaret Thatcher.

As he spoke I noticed through his window an airliner glide silently yet ominously in the distance through the clear blue morning sky. Since September 11 the commonplace has become the potentially dangerous in New York, conjuring the scare of further atrocities to come in even level-headed folk. The plane continued peacefully about its business.

"Americans were shocked and surprised by what happened on September 11," continued the 20th century's most famous diplomat, at 78 a little slower than I remember him when we last met five years ago but his mind as agile as ever.

"Even here in my own office I sensed people floundering, unable to comprehend what had happened. But we have not been shocked into inaction. There was never any doubt that we would go after the terrorists and those who support them with all the force at our command."

Nobody in America, bar a few of Hollywood's loony left and a handful of university campus peaceniks, would dissent from that. Unlike in Britain, there is no nascent peace party taking shape in the United States and no prospect of one in the foreseeable future.

"The Democrats are sounding even more hawkish than the Republicans," remarks Kissinger with a wry smile. Indeed they are. On last Sunday morning's television talk shows Tom Daschle, the Democrat leader in the Senate, had sounded as robust as any right-wing Republican. But the senator has been the recipient of an anthrax-infected letter. It was an attempt to assassinate him. That sort of thing tends to make hawks of even committed doves.

"The crucial test for America and its allies," cautions Kissinger "will come after Afghanistan. It is not enough just to destroy [Osama bin Laden's] al Qaeda terrorist network in Afghanistan, though we have to do that and demolish the Taleban government which sustains it too."

"But then we have to go after the terrorists, their camps and infrastructure wherever they are to be found in other parts of the world - and threaten other governments which sustain them too."

US intelligence believes that part of the al Qaeda network has already relocated to places like Somalia, Sudan and the Yemen. I suggest to Kissinger that American public opinion would be solidly behind any necessary widening of the war but that many of America's allies would drop by the wayside. He does not demur.

25-OCT-2001 17:54

FROM SUNDAY BUSINESS

TO 90012127590042

P.03/05

"You might be left with only Britain in support," I venture.

"You might be right," he replies quietly. "But keeping the existing coalition together must not become the primary purpose of US policy; winning the war against terrorism must be our primary purpose."

He confirms my impression that, such is the current resolve in America, that it is prepared to do whatever it takes and go wherever it is required to win this war, with or without allies.

Kissinger's latest book "Does America need a foreign policy?" has just been published in Britain. It is a distillation of much of what he has written before – and it was published in America before September 11 – but it is nonetheless interesting and important because it is being regarded as a foreign policy primer for the new Bush administration.

It contains a masterly exposition of the tension between the Wilsonian and Jacksonian strands in American foreign policy. The Wilsonians (after President Woodrow Wilson who intervened in World War One to make the "world safe for democracy") want US policy to be guided largely by human rights and humanitarian causes, the Jacksonians (after President Andrew Jackson, a backwoodsman who fought the British and the Indians) believe foreign policy should be dictated by "the coolest calculations of [American] interest" (in founding father Alexander Hamilton's words).

Kissinger recognises that, given its history and ideals, there will always be an element of Wilsonianism in American foreign policy. But he is glad to see it in retreat after its high tide in the Nineties under President Clinton when America intervened in places like Bosnia, Kosovo and Somalia, where it had no great national interest at stake, for largely humanitarian reasons but not always with success (vide Somalia). The biggest risk of Wilsonianism is that intervention for the best of intentions often has terrible unintended consequences: Vietnam, for example, was a Wilsonian war.

September 11 has put the Jacksonians back in the driving seat: global terrorism is a clear and present danger to the national interest. But the Wilsonians do not disagree with that so that, as there was during the Second World War, there is a Jacksonian-Wilsonian consensus, which is when American foreign policy and military purpose are at their most formidable.

I ask him, however, about Tony Blair's speech to the Labour party conference in Brighton earlier this month which, with its idealistic emphasis on intervening to right the world's wrongs from the Congo to Afghanistan, from Rwanda to Kosovo was clearly Wilsonian in tone and inspiration.

"In terms of your country's foreign policy traditions," agrees Kissinger "it was positively Gladstonian."

"Reminiscent of Gladstone's Midlothian speech, designed to stir up opinion against atrocities in the Balkans?"

25-OCT-2001 17:55

FROM SUNDAY BUSINESS

TO 90012127590042

P.04/05

"Yes, it was," laughs Kissinger "though I doubt if one senator out of a hundred here has ever heard of Midlothian or would have a clue what you are talking about!"

But what about the Blair speech?

"I have been both impressed and surprised by the prime minister since September 11," says Kissinger. "He has rallied his party and country behind America. He has rallied Europe in a manner which has tied it tightly to our cause. And he has proved a useful bridge to the Middle East. We could not ask for more."

Fair enough. But Kissinger surely cannot approve of the Wilsonian sentiments in that Brighton speech. I push him again.

Ever the diplomat, he is reluctant to criticise in any way America's staunchest ally in time of war. In his book, however, Kissinger lays down four conditions which must be met if humanitarian intervention is to be successful: it must be in pursuit of principles that we are already trying to apply universally, otherwise it will seen as the arbitrary exercise of power or even selfish hypocrisy; you must be able to carry domestic opinion with you; there must be resonance for it within the international community; and the purpose of the intervention must keep in mind the historical context of the crisis.

Kissinger points out that the principle America and Britain intervened to uphold in Kosovo – stopping a ruling country maintaining its hold over a province of different ethnic composition – was not one we have sought to uphold in Chechnya. So it fails the universal test. America could not carry domestic opinion with it when Somalia led to casualties: it left with its tail between its legs because of that. Kosovo continues to simmer because we have not reconciled our policy of autonomy for the province within Serbia with the Albanians' long-held and still extant desire for independence (thus failing the "historical context" test).

Suddenly the simple verities and idealism of Blair's Brighton speech crumble before the complicated realities of international diplomacy. This book should be a primer for 10 Downing Street as well as the White House.

"Can Blair maintain a special relationship with America and place Britain at the heart of Europe?" I ask, changing tact. "When the going gets rough in the war against terrorism the Europeans will soon slip out of the coalition."

Kissinger has more faith in the Europeans: "September 11 has been an important lesson for them too. Europe is just as vulnerable to global terrorism as America; given its proximity to the Middle East and Mediterranean, perhaps more so. If Islamic fundamentalists overthrew a Middle Eastern government they could make all sorts of unacceptable demands on Europe, backed by the threat of terrorism. Both France and Germany have given us solid support: France is worried that unchecked terrorism could cause it problems with its own Muslim population; Germany sees the war against terrorism as the chance to resurrect its Great Power credentials."

The re-emergence of Germany, with its new post-war generation of leaders at the helm, as a great power is just one of the fundamental changes Kissinger sees post-

25-OCT-2001 17:56

FROM SUNDAY BUSINESS

TO 90012127590042

P.05/05

September 11; another is a "new relationship" with Russia; a third is that China is seen in a different perspective: "the prospect of a major confrontation with China has gone".

These trends were already underway before September 11 but the terrorist attack has given them a fillip. One immediate consequence, according to Kissinger, is that President Bush will win round Russia's President Putin (whom Kissinger met recently) to the idea of nuclear missile defence (NMD).

"Let me tell you this," says Kissinger with a mischievous grin on his face. "President Putin will be reconciled to NMD before America's liberal-left media!"

I learn later that a breakthrough is anticipated when Putin visits Bush at his ranch in Texas next month. Blair will be watching closely: after an initial reluctance he has begun to back NMD despite widespread misgivings on his own backbenches. If Bush can square Putin then the Labour critics will find the ground crumbling beneath them.

I return to the inevitable tension between Blair's European and transatlantic ambitions. Before I develop my point Kissinger interrupts: "The special position of the UK has been of great utility to both our countries. I am a child of the era when the special relationship was born. I can tell you that Britain has *never* been supine in its dealings with the US - and no other country has the wealth of relationships with the American government that Britain enjoys."

Fair enough, again. But at the moment in a major international crisis the person in the Oval Office can call 10 Downing Street direct where the prime minister can give America whatever military or diplomatic support he sees fit. British forces can be committed without reference to any other country. What happens to the special relationship if in 10 years time the British prime minister has to tell the president that the British Army is now part of a European army and foreign policy is largely in the collective hands of Brussels?

Kissinger's eyes narrow and he lowers his voice: "Such a change in the status of Britain would be a very fundamental change for America."

"A change for the worse?"

Kissinger repeats himself. He is back in diplomatic mode. I repeat the question. There is a long silence.

"Yes," he says eventually. "It would be a change for the worse."

*Does America need a foreign policy? Toward a diplomacy for the 21st century.* By Henry Kissinger. Published by Simon & Schuster. 318pp. £20.

Ends

TOTAL P.05

We were sitting in the former US secretary of state's office in a mid-town Manhattan skyscraper far above Park Avenue – a modest office but one decorated with pictures of Kissinger and just about every famous world leader from the second half of the 20th century from Chou en Lai to Margaret Thatcher.

"Even here in my own office I sensed people **floundering**, unable to comprehend what had happened. But we have not been shocked into inaction. There was never any doubt that we would go after the terrorists and those who support them with all the force at our command."

"The crucial test for America and its allies," cautions Kissinger, "will come after Afghanistan. It is not enough just to destroy [Osama bin Laden's] al Qaeda terrorist network in Afghanistan, though we have to do that and demolish the Taleban government which sustains it too."

"But then we have to go after the terrorists, their camps and infrastructure wherever they are to be found in other parts of the world – **and threaten other governments which sustain them too.**" change not necessarily with military means.

Kissinger's latest book "Does America need a foreign policy?" has just been published in Britain. It is a distillation of much of what he has written before - and it was published in America before September 11 - but it is nonetheless interesting and important because it is being regarded as a foreign policy primer for the new Bush administration.

"A change for the worse?"

Ends