Contents

DECISION MAKING IN A NUCLEAR WORLD

I. The Ideological Bases for Decision Making

II. Decision Making in an Alliance

III. Decisions Making America's Foreign Policy

Claremont Colleges Annual Lecture
Bridges Auditorium

November 19, 1963

## Ideological Bases for Decision-Making

I was relieved to learn from the Provost that there are no formal public speaking courses in the Claremont Colleges. I always get nervous when there are students comparing my speaking style with what they are taught is the proper way of public speaking. I simply want to point out that at Harvard mumbling is considered a sign of profundity.

I will speak to you about various aspects of decision-making as it affects our foreign policy today. I will discuss primarily the psychological and ideological aspects of this and not purely organizational ones.

If one looks at American foreign policy in the post-war period in a longer perspective and not in the vantage point of a few months, I think it is fairly obvious that our international position as compared to 1945 or 1950 has substantially deteriorated. In 1945 or in 1950 we still had an effective nuclear monopoly. We still were the strongest nation in the world. We were without doubt the leading partner in NATO. And in many other parts of the world outside the communist block, our policy was the decisive feature. In 1953 or 1954 when I first started consulting in Washington, I remember that we were discussing whether to set up the headquarters for a proposed Middle Eastern treaty organization in Cairo or in Baghdad, as if the choice depended entirely on American policy or on the convenience of American strategists. Today obviously neither of these places would be available for such an establishment.

In many parts of the world our influence has declined. We have a communist state in the Western Hemisphere. We have problems in South-East Asia and Latin America. Many of these changes were inevitable. It would be idle to pretend that American policy can influence and shape the world entirely to its own liking. What I want to talk to you about today are those features where it seems to me that the American mentality has contributed to our difficulty in coming to grips with what one might perhaps call the new diplomacy of this period.

Before I do this, it is important to understand some of the characteristic features of this new period, and perhaps compare them very briefly with some of the characteristics of more stable periods. In the more stable periods, say the period prior to World War I, there was a multiplicity of states but still not so many that they were unmanageable. There was a relatively stable technology. The military technology before 1918 was not fundamentally different from the military technology of 1871. There was a similar outlook of political leaders about the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy. Certain things were not done, not because they were prohibited by law but because in a deeper sense they were really unimaginable.

The governments had limited domestic claims by which I mean that the pro-
portion of the gross national product that could be devoted to national purposes
was limited; and when it is limited, there is a certain limitation placed on the
kind of foreign policy that is possible. When a government has a very small
taxing power and when it cannot intrude into too many affairs of national life,
you have a different kind of policy than when government becomes all-pervasive
and when there are no limits to the claims it can make.

There was once a frontier in the world, permitting compensations. I am
not defending the colonial system, but it did have the one advantage that it
provided an outlet for rivalries that could not be adjusted within what was
then the major arena of world diplomacy, namely Europe. World policy was con-
fined to one continent among states of similar structures in Europe. The
United States stood apart from foreign policy, and many other areas were too
powerless to influence foreign affairs.

So until 1914 the main goal of foreign policy was to deal with the marginal
adjustments, and no state thought that its basic survival was threatened. In
fact World War I could never have occurred except for that conviction. All the
states that entered World War I did so because they believed it would be a

short war for marginal adjustments. The great tragedy of World War I was
that after a year no one knew any more what it started about and that the
states found themselves engulfed in something out of proportion to anything
that they had ever conceived possible.

Today we have, of course, the end of frontiers. Every statesman has to
be able to conduct a world-wide diplomacy covering every part of the globe,
with complexities that were unimaginable even a generation ago. In every
country, including the democratic countries, there has been a substantial in-
crease of state control. In fact there is almost no limit to what the govern-
ment can do whatever the constitutional processes are by which it comes to
its decisions.

We live in a curious world, which is on the one side a two-power world
and on the other has a multiplicity of states. There are 109 sovereign states
with which the United States has to conduct diplomacy, and the drain on
our manpower and on our wisdom is unbelievable. Anybody who has ever been in
Washington and who has seen the flood of cables that arrive from all over the
world every day does not have to ask why it is that we do not conduct long-
range policy. If you have to answer two to three thousand cables a day, you
do not have the energy to ask yourself what should happen the day after tomor-
row. You are grateful if you get through what you have to do on this day.
And this creates a distortion between symptoms and causes. The cables deal
with symptoms, and they never permit a consideration of causes.

For many other countries in the world, the requirement of conducting a
world-wide diplomacy is almost insuperable. Many of the new states have an
almost impossible task in finding enough trained personnel to deal with the
most elementary problems of their own national existence, and yet at the same
time they are required to staff embassies all over the world in parts of the
globe about which they have never thought before and in which they have no
particular confidence. All of this occurs in a world in which there are only
two major nuclear powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. A two-power

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world is almost inherently rigid, because any relative weakening of one side
is an absolute strengthening of the other. There is a limit to imaginative
diplomacy when the penalties of a mistake are so enormous. There is a very
great temptation to persist in what is familiar and what is known.

And finally there is of course the problem of nuclear weapons. Now
there is a great deal one can say about nuclear weapons. But I'd like to
make one chief point here. The most serious difficulty in understanding
nuclear weapons is in the realm of psychology and not in the realm of tech-
nology. We deal with weapons which are essentially untested. We deal with a
technology for which there is no real experience. Nobody knows how people
react to a nuclear attack. No theoretical science can tell us what will
happen when these weapons are actually used. There are endless theological
debates about the nature of superiority, the perplexities of what is called,
in the jargon of the military strategists, "flexible response". And yet
there is no test by which you can prove or disprove the validity of these
theories. This creates an enormous element of insecurity in the minds of all
politicians. This is why some of the foreign policy of the United States is
not as brilliant as some of the more brilliant commentators and the more
learned professors would wish. It is one thing to write a prescription when
you are sitting in a library, and it is another to have the responsibility
for carrying out this prescription when you are dealing with factors, all of
which are in flux, and when you never have the moment of repose which permits
calm consideration.

Now what is it that when you do consider foreign policy you have to
decide? Or, ideally, should like to decide? Again I will speak of general
issues rather than of the specific ones that form the headlines of the day.

First of all perhaps the deepest problem is the problem of conjecture in
foreign policy. It is expressed in the questions of "Where are we?" "Where
are we going?" "What is the significance of certain events?" And the dilemma

here is that no one can be sure. If you ask for certainty, you condemn
yourself to becoming the prisoner of events. Each political leader has the
choice between making the assessment which requires the least effort or making
an assessment which requires more effort. If he makes the assessment that
requires least effort, then as time goes on it may turn out that he was wrong
and then he will have to pay a heavy price. If he acts on the basis of a
guess, he will never be able to prove that his effort was necessary, but he
may save himself a great deal of grief later on.

Let me give you one glaring example, but there are many others. In 1936
no one could possibly know whether Hitler was a misunderstood nationalist,
whether he had legitimate, limited grievances, or whether he was a maniac.
In 1936 when the Germans reoccupied the Rhineland, the leaders of the British
Labor party spoke as follows. (I mention the Labor party because no one can
accuse them of having any ideological affinity to the Nazis.) Attlee said --
Hitler took the Rhineland, then he offered a non-aggression treaty, a tactic
with which we are not completely unfamiliar -- he said, "Herr Hitler's state-
ment ought to be accepted. Herr Hitler sinned with one hand, but he held out
the olive branch with the other and this ought to be taken at its face value.
These may prove to be the most important gestures which have yet been made.
The dominant problem is the problem of peace and not of defense."

Another leader of the Labor party said a year later, "I do not think Herr
Hitler will accuse me of betraying his confidence when I say that almost the
first word of our conversation was on that particular point, and I have never
heard it said more emphatically, more eloquently or more movingly than by Herr
Hitler that another war would mean neither victor nor vanquished, but the ruin
of everybody. The fundamental thing is that Herr Hitler is as convinced as
any other man in the world that another war means collapse and ruin for
everybody."

I have about twenty statements to that effect from both parties in Bri-
tain. The point I am trying to make is that in 1936 and 1937 this is what

wise, balanced, and above all decent people thought. They could not be sure
who Hitler was. If the democracies had moved against Hitler in 1936 and 1937,
there would be many people today who would say it was unnecessary as he was
just a nationalist. At least one would never know whether it was necessary.
By 1941 we knew Hitler was a maniac, but we had to pay a heavy price for the
delay in our knowledge.

This means that every political leader has the problem of deciding where
the nature of certainty resides, when does he want to act. If he acts early,
he cannot know whether it was necessary. If he waits, he may be lucky or he
may be unlucky. It is a terrible dilemma.

We have had the same problem in our relations with the Soviet Union.
Many people say that as the Soviet Union becomes more bureaucratic, as educa-
tion spreads, as industrialization grows, they will become more peaceful. Some
people argue that history will automatically bring about what we most wish.
This cannot be proved true today. One can say that there have been many dic-
tatorships that were not at all peaceful, that were highly bureaucratic, that
Germany and Japan were extremely industrialized countries and nevertheless
conducted an aggressive foreign policy, that there is no necessary relation-
ship in fact between industrialization and democracy. With all due respect,
I know no industrial enterprise that is run along excessively democratic lines.
One can say this, but one cannot prove it. All we can ask of our statesmen is
that they know what they are doing, and that when they decide that history
will do our work for us, they do it with a full awareness that the price they
may have to pay for it is very heavy.

A plausible theory is not necessarily a correct theory when you deal in
foreign policy. It is not true, as some people argue, that history is an in-
evitable advance toward progress. This happens to have been true in our
country. It is not necessarily true in many other areas. There are turning
points and not just progressions. When the Turks took Constantinople, history
altered irretrievably for all the inhabitants of what used to be called

Byzantium. It was no consolation for the inhabitants of Carthage that Rome, 300 years after Carthage was destroyed, became a peaceful status-quo country. We live in time and not only in space, and I will not be particularly reassured by the fact that 300 years from now the erosion of human events is going to take care of communism, if in the meantime we as a society as we know it today have been destroyed.

Another thing a policy maker has to decide is to balance the best thing that can happen against the worst thing that could happen. There are many brilliant theories that cannot be adopted, not because the theory is wrong, but because the consequences of its being wrong are too dangerous. We have at Harvard groups of students who demonstrate their devotion to peace by walking around with blue arm bands and who insist that all weapons ought to be destroyed. They claim to know that if we destroy all of our weapons, the Soviets will destroy all of their weapons. They may even be right. The only thing is if they happen to be wrong, they cannot go back to the undergraduate library and say, "I'll write another paper." If after we destroy all our weapons the Soviets should take it into their head to treat us the way they treated Hungary or Finland or Poland or any of the other countries they dominate to greater or less degree rather than to scrap their own, the President will not be permitted another guess. And as a result there is an inherent limit to what the policy-maker can do. There are some experiments he cannot try, not because they would not be good if they worked, but because they would be so dreadful if they did not work.

This is one of the debates we have with our NATO allies. Many Europeans feel that the overly intellectualized approach of our policy today is risky not because it is inevitably wrong, but because it is so complicated that the penalty for it being wrong is very grave indeed. It does not matter now who is right. I am trying to indicate the issue as it arises.

Another difficulty is, as I have already pointed out, not only the number

of cables that have to be answered, but the amount of time that is available
for them. I got my start in academic life by studying early nineteenth cen-
tury diplomatic history. At that time communications were in transit for
lengthy periods. There would be weeks before they would be answered. And if
you read the diplomatic communications of the nineteenth century, before the
advent of the telegraph and telephone, they are masterpieces of precision.
Every word, if they are well drawn, has a specific and concrete meaning. Today
cables are answered the day that they arrive, almost inevitably -- certainly
the week that they arrive. With the speed of communication, with the rapidity
with which decisions have to be made, precision is inevitably lost, and some
of the subtlety and contemplation of policy that was characteristic of earlier
periods, when policy was much less complicated, also disappear.

Finally as bureaucracies multiply, the process of arriving at a decision
is getting so cumbersome that sometimes the internal operations of the bureau-
cratic machine are more complicated than the purpose which this machine is
designed to serve. So more time is spent in achieving an internal compromise
than in developing a long-range policy. Anyone who has seen Washington policy
cannot help being struck by the fact that many policies that are adopted with
great inward reserves, which are very close and which easily could have gone
either way, are then defended with almost maniacal intensity once a decision
has been made. The reason is that the process of going through decision-
making is so horrible, the vista of having to go through this whole process
again is so unbearable, that most of our policy-makers cannot stand the thought
that this should be imposed on them -- and by foreigners yet!

So much for the problems that any government has to solve. Now let me
deal with some of the psychological and ideological problems that affect the
conduct of our policy. I think that in order to understand this, one has to
ask these questions: "Who becomes a political leader?" "What experience
forms him?" "How are the decisions arrived at?" "What criteria are applied

in arriving at decisions?" "What in fact is considered a reasonable argument?"
And here I think it is important to compare the Soviet leadership group with
the American leadership group in order to understand some of the problems we
have had in our dealings with the communist world.

First of all one has to ask oneself, "Who enters the competition for
political leadership in the Soviet Union?" If you take the roster of the
Politbureau of the Communist Party at the beginning of any decade and compare
it with the roster at the end of any decade, you will come to the conclusion
that this is not a profession for people who want job security. You also
will see that the penalty for failure is very high. People who enter that
competition are not nice mid-western businessmen who have been taught that the
worst thing that can happen to them is transfer to another department. They
are people who are aware of the fact that there are great rewards but also
enormous penalties. They know that their rewards are the exercise of power
and not security.

This is important to remember if we ask ourselves whether these Soviet
leaders have suddenly begun to believe in peace or in stability or in co-
existence or in any other of the values which seem so self-evident to us.
Coming from a society in which ease of human relationships is one of the most
attractive traits, if you want to know how the Soviet leaders are likely to
deal with us, you could do worse than to ask yourself how they deal with each
other. I have never understood why Mr. Khrushchev should be more gentle
towards us than towards his former colleagues in the Politbureau.

Then one has to ask, "What is it that they believe?" And again I am
not suggesting that the Soviet leaders, when they wake up in the morning,
take Marx and Lenin and read it to see what mischief they should do that day.
I say something else -- that people who are brought up in a quasi-religious
framework are affected by this framework in many unconscious ways that they

do not necessarily articulate. I would say further that if the communist leaders want to explain to themselves how it happened that in the space of forty years they could expand their power from an area in which they barely controlled the territory around Moscow to a situation where they can threaten most of the non-communist world, you have to assume that they will give a great deal of credit to the theory on which they operate.

Moreover, they believe, and they never tire of telling us and telling each other, that this theory is true, and it gets them an insight into the structure of the universe denied their opponents. For this reason, too, in negotiations with the Soviets, relationships are particularly frustrating. Negotiations are so frustrating because the Soviets deal with our negotiators the way American psychologists deal with their patients. No matter what we tell the Soviet negotiators, they believe that they understand us better than we understand ourselves. What we say is to them the least significant aspect of our policy. What is the most significant aspect of our policy is what does not show. It is what they would call the objective factors. And by objective factors they mean the material structure of American society. They know, even though no one else does, that the Rockefellers really run the United States, no matter what illusions President Kennedy may have. I must say that this is a fact that has escaped Nelson Rockefeller, but that is a different problem.

They believe they are part of a historical process which enables them to dominate us. And as a result, whether they are right or wrong, they have a sense of continuity of policy, they have a great concern with the nuances of power. To them foreign policy is a process which cannot be determined on a basis of individual decisions. You do not close the book in foreign policy, if you are a communist, every evening the way we are prone to do, to determine whether you were successful or unsuccessful. Above all it gives them both patience and perseverance.

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It is an illusion to believe that these are people who are primarily interested in material advancement. If they were interested in material advancement, they would be running some power plant. The only thing that can make life worthwhile for them is political power. And again it is an American illusion to believe that everybody is more interested in economic well-being than he is in political or ideological strength. If Castro were interested in economical well-being, he would be a bank president in Havana today. He would not have gone into the mountains and suffered whatever was involved. This illusion has caused many misunderstandings. It has led to the spirit of Teheran, Yalta, Geneva, Camp David, and lately Moscow.

Every time the Soviets change their tone, learned editorials in the New York Times, and other newspapers with which I am less familiar, point out, as they said for example in 1955, "There has been a basic change of foreign policy. This is the great achievement of President Eisenhower's Presidency."

In 1943, when the Communists abolished the Comintern, Life Magazine commented, "This marks the end of international communism, and the whole world will applaud the happy results of these efforts." In 1959 there were similar editorials. And last summer when Mr. Harriman came back from Moscow, he announced on "Meet the Press" that the reason the Russians had signed the agreement was to prove to the Chinese that peaceful co-existence worked. Well, anyone who is familiar with communist theory knows that that is the last things you could prove to the communist Chinese. The only thing that would have been impressive to the Chinese communists is if he could have made a demonstration that we would collapse without war, that he had gained such a tremendous advantage that war was unnecessary. Agreement for the sake of agreement is not a meaningful idea to the communists.

The idea of success in the minds of American leaders -- of both parties -- is quite different. Most of our eminent men reach high office on the basis of two fundamental qualities. One is a vote-getting quality. The other one

is executive experience. Now of course vote-getting is absolutely essential
in a democracy. But it is important to understand the fundamental shift that
has occurred in the nature of vote-getting as compared to, say, the nineteenth
century. In the nineteenth century it used to be thought that the way to get
votes was in a calm debate of substantive issues on a very high level, because
the people appealed to, with the restricted franchise, were primarily the
aristocrats or people with a high education. I made a study of the percentage
of people who voted for parliament throughout the nineteenth century. The
cabinet of Cavour, which was supposed to be a model of liberalism, was based
on the vote of 3% of the population. In Belgium as late as 1908, 8% of the
population voted. In Britain as late as 1870, about 20% of the population had
the right to vote. And even that is not to say they all voted. So you had a
completely different pattern.

Today problems have become enormously more complicated, and the franchise
has been vastly extended. This means that most of our politicians are ob-
sessed with mass appeals and tomorrow's headlines. There is an excessive
dependence on polls and editorial opinion. I have never understood why politi-
cal leaders are so worried about what the editorial writer of a newspaper
says the day after they make a speech, because if he had had enough sense to
understand what this man was saying, he would have written it in yesterday's
editorial. And if he is so good, why isn't he in Washington? Why is he writ-
ing editorials? (I hope there are no newspapermen present. Let me say that
no official of the college knew what I was saying.)

This situation creates an enormous unwillingness to stand alone. Many
political leaders like to have the reputation for being bold, but they would
like to have this reputation certified, as it were, by public approval in
next morning's headlines. They forget that men do not only adapt to reality,
that they have to create reality.

Today we think of Churchill as a great leader. If you read the press of

Great Britain in the 1930's, you will find that he stood nearly completely
alone. Great leaders have to be willing to stand alone. And yet this the
kind of man who is now encouraged to come to the top finds it most difficult
to do. He is surrounded by public opinion experts. He reads the polls.
Everybody crowds into the middle of the road, and the result is that long-
range policy, doing the unfamiliar which is always involved in creativity,
becomes more and more difficult.

As for executives, they tend to think in this country that their special
skill consists in choosing among various proposals in the preparation of
which they have no part and with the subject matter of which they are often
unfamiliar. Their skill, as they see it, is in handling men, in an intuitive
ability to reconcile conflicting points of view. But this is not a creative
act. It is in essence a conciliatory procedure, and all of this creates some
of the tendencies which lead to an enormous persistence of the status-quo.
It leads to certain rules of thumb in our negotiations with the Soviets which
are very mechanical.

For example, most Americans believe, based on their domestic experience,
that if two parties disagree, the truth is somewhere in the middle. And very
often in our negotiations with the Soviets we say, "Let's split the difference."
Well, this encourages the Soviets to make the most extreme demands. If they
know that we are going to split the difference, they have no incentive what-
ever to make a responsible proposal. They have a high incentive to make an
extreme proposal, so that our compromise is as close to what they really want
as possible. We believe that it isn't fair -- I have gone through this dozens
of times in Washington -- our State Department simply believes it is not fair
to make unacceptable proposals. We must make negotiable proposals. Well, the
only proposals that are negotiable are the ones that the Russians have said
they would accept, and as a result there is a great tendency always to nego-
tiate on a Soviet agenda. The non-aggression treaty, the status of Berlin --

nearly every item that you can mention has been placed on the agenda by the
Soviets.

Then there is an enormous quest in our society for coming up with new
ideas. If you make the same proposal today that you made last year, people
say you are old-fashioned. You haven't had any new ideas lately. You must
come up with something to break the dead-lock. Well, it isn't clear why if
an idea was good last year it inevitably becomes bad this year. Moreover,
on many complicated issues there are not so many new ideas. There are only
two or three ways you can solve certain problems. And finally, if the com-
munists know that if they hold out long enough, we are bound to come up with
new ideas, they have a very high incentive to hold out.

If you look at the test-ban negotiations, you will see all these ten-
dencies appearing. If you compare our original position with the Soviet
original position and the final positions of both sides, I think it is ob-
vious that we moved much further toward the Soviet position, particularly on
the comprehensive treaty, than they to ours. Maybe they were right to begin
with. Maybe we made excessive concessions. The point is that this process
removes incentives for settlements. In the record of these negotiations,
the American negotiator always has the tendency to say, "We made a concession
to you, now you have to make a concession to us." The Russian operates on
different philosophical premises. You do not make concessions to a person
in communist philosophy. You make concessions to reality. And the invariable
Russian reaction is, "You did not make a concession to us. You made a conces-
sion to the pressures of the peace-loving elements in your own population.
In making this concession you eased your own position. And having made it,
you proved that we were right to begin with, and now you have to make yet
another concession."

Within our government this tendency of executive and political decision-
making has a tendency to turn policy into a series of ad hoc decisions whose

CJD

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inter-relationship is never completely clear -- decisions usually made by
an expert on the kind of difficulty that a particular problem involves. It
is almost as if a patron, in commissioning a painting, got himself one
painter who was a great expert on legs, another who was a great expert on
hands, another one who was a great expert on bodies, and said, "Now you
create for me the best painting of man that has ever been made." No one
would suppose that you would get a coherent painting this way. But we do
believe that you can get a coherent policy this way.

Secondly, I can say this, being considered by some an expert in some
fields, "What is an expert?" I would say an expert, almost by definition,
is at the highest level of what is generally understood. He is a defender
of the status quo. He cannot leave his constituency, or they will stop
thinking of him as an expert. Therefore there is in this cult of expertise
another example of unwillingness to stand alone. Now I admit the dilemma.
Every creative act is lonely. But unhappily, not every lonely act is creative.
And therefore one cannot be sure what real creativity is. One cannot be sure
about the relationship between manipulating the known and shaping reality.

Now all of this suggests that we do have a rather profound national
problem in understanding the nature of policy, and in finding people to
carry out policy. I used to think in the previous administration that if
professors could get to Washington they would improve things dramatically.
And when so many professors were called to Washington in '61, I was a little
worried what they would do in the last two years of the Kennedy Administration,
since they would obviously solve all problems in the first two years. This
has not turned out to be the case, because an academic approach sometimes
overlooks the nuances of policy-making. There is sometimes a certain lack
of humility, particularly among professors from my institution, and a lack
of a sense of continuity. In foreign policy you cannot change your mind

every year as you can in a graduate seminar, because the actions of foreign
governments depend on a certain predictable order of occurrences. How you
can amalgamate the various forms of knowledge, and how you can get the
philosophical depth by which you can acquire the inward certainty to act in
such a perplexing situation, this is the deepest aspect of policy-making.

We have to understand that policy is not something you derive from a
con consensus of what everybody says, but something you contribute to the con-
census, that history will not do our work for us or hand us our deepest de-
sires on a silver platter, but rather that if history does have a sense, we
have to give it that sense.

NEENAH BOND
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-17-
Questions and Answers

Question about cables

I have had occasion to say before on this campus that I do not know the answer to every question that can be asked. But I think one important problem that we have in the government is somehow to get a group of people whose task it is to ask themselves the question of what kind of a world do we want three or five years from now, and to separate them from the problems of day-to-day decision-making.

Now in a way this exists in the Policy Planning staff of the State Department and in various other planning situations. But the problem with the Policy Planning staff of the State Department is that it operates almost as an academic institution, and it has no direct relationship with day-to-day policy. A year or so ago they wrote a long document about national policy of the United States which then was the subject of Congressional inquiry. It was not until Secretary Rusk was to testify before Congress that he read the document which allegedly represented the national policy of the United States. So what is needed is a group of people whose primary task it is to address themselves to an over-all purpose, and yet who have a chance on major decisions at least to see that the daily replies that go out are in conformity with the long-range objective. Right now we save our conscience by writing long, abstract papers on national policy which nobody reads and which have no immediate impact on policy. And you have impact on policy only if you can get to four or five key people in Washington. This is one thing that has to be done.

The second thing that has to be done is really primarily an educational question. The British in their great periods trained their people in Oxford in what were called "The Greats". It was a combination of philosophy, history and politics. They did not teach them too many practical things on the assumption that you can always learn the details of a practical problem when you

face it. Now whether this is the exact model that we ought to follow I would
doubt. But I think that we do need in our educational process a greater em-
phasis, if I may use a big word, on conceptual thinking, so that our people,
when they get into government, are not always obsessed with the immediate
problem, and learn all the ramifications of the symptoms, and never acquire
the skill of penetrating to the causes. These would seem to me to be the two
major areas.

Question on Hitler

Let me take the last part first. If there was a definite Western policy
to turn Hitler eastward, it's remarkable that the West declared war at the
precise moment that he did turn eastward. After all, in order to get at the
Soviet Union he had to destroy Poland, and if there had been this long-range
plot to make sure that Hitler would destroy the Soviet Union, the West could
have welcomed rather than resisted his attack on Poland, since that would
inevitably have put him into confrontation sooner or later -- at least it
would have given him a common border with the Soviet Union. So I do not
believe this argument.

Second, I am not saying that there were not some indications that Hitler
was bent on aggression, but if you look at the performance of the western
statesmen, they behaved not dissimilarly to the way they behave today. Today
when there is an attack in Laos -- every year before the rainy season there is
an attack in Laos in which the communists gobble up 75 miles of territory --
then everybody sais, "Oh, these generals have again gone crazy, poor Khrushchev
is in great difficulty - we have to help him - let's not get too excited here."
Then we get an armistice/line which then exists. And it is instructive to
compare the armistice line which was agreed to two years ago with the one that
exists today.

along the

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Now what happened in '36, '37, '38 was not that Hitler did not engage
in some aggressive actions. People were saying, "Sure, he has a luftwaffe,
but France has an air force, Britain has an air force. Why should not the
Germans have the same thing that everybody else has? Moreover, were not the
Germans very badly treated in the 1920's, and do they not have a right to be
bitter?" In short there was a tendency to make excuses, and one could not be
quite sure what they were up to.

Now Spain was of course the most flagrant case in the first few years,
but even in Spain whenever such a thing happened as the bombing of say
Algeciras, then it would be blamed on a misunderstanding, on a localized dis-
turbance, and there would be some settlement to take care of the immediate
crisis. The case of Czechoslovakia and Austria, after all these were German-
speaking people - at least in the Sudeten areas of Czechoslovakia - people were
saying, "Well, self-determination - Hitler's claims will then be satisfied."

I am not saying that wise people could not have seen what he was up to.
Churchill saw it. Many others saw it. But the predominant opinion of the
people that were sane, balanced and so forth could not imagine that a man
would precipitate World War II. All the reasonable arguments were on the
side of the Establishment. Neville Chamberlain was greeted by enthusiastic
crowds on his arrival at Croydon Airport when he came back from Munich. It
is instructive to remember that if Churchill had been a politician like most
politicians today, and had studied his public opinion polls, he would never
have spoken out in 1938. All I am saying is that the issue was sufficiently
uncertain so that decent people - these were not bad people - they were people
who could not imagine revolutionary foreign policy -- could not imagine that
there existed men who wanted victory rather than peace. And not being able
to imagine that, they put everything into a framework of what they considered
reasonable. I do not believe that they had the ulterior motive of turning
Germany against Russia. That was much too complicated for them, and they
were much too petit bourgeois in their outlook to do that.

Question on waging peace

Well, let me say first of all that I do not like the phrase "waging of
peace" because it gives the impression that there is some kind of terminal
date to one's effort in diplomacy at which one can now say, "Peace has now
broken out, and the whole world will forever after live with a consciousness
of harmony." I do not deny that the millenium might arrive. But history
teaches us that it has not yet arrived, that it has never yet in the past
arrived, and that even in the periods that we now consider peaceful, the world
did not live with a consciousness of harmony. There were always adjustments
to be made. So I think an adult conception of foreign relations would force
us to recognize that in the best of all conceivable circumstances there would
be a continuation of stresses and strains. Particularly is this true if you
consider that we are living in a revolutionary period where new states are
coming into being, and on top of it these states have to get a sense of iden-
tity for their own domestic structure. So the phrase "waging of peace" is
one I am not exceptionally fond of.

Now then the question is, have we waged whatever it is we are waging
effectively? I agree with Sevareid that we have not, but I think there are
two reasons for it. One perhaps the one he gave. The other is a very mechan-
ical approach to peace. There are two dangers of war breaking out -- one is
that one underestimates its dangers, the other is that one develops too sen-
timental an approach to the conduct of foreign policy and therefore gives
other countries the idea that they can expand with impunity, or that they can
substitute rhetoric for foreign policy. Now it is true that there are some
people who do not understand the consequences of war and who may talk in a
very bellicose manner, not realizing what is involved. But it is also true
that we have suffered equally at least from the national disease of assuming
that every time that the Soviets changed their tone, this in itself was a
settlement. There has been an enormous reluctance to come up with concrete

ideas at a time when the Soviets seem to be more peaceful.

Now this is not healthy for our people, because it makes it appear to them that getting a settlement is too easy. It is always some stunt, someone flying off to Moscow and coming back with the bacon and then being the great hero. Or somebody going to Geneva and as the New York Times said about Eisenhower in 1955, "He drew the Russians into the magic circle of his goodwill." Well, this is not the way history is made. And it is demoralizing for the Russians, because they believe that no matter what they do, they can always reverse course simply by changing tone. Nine months after they had missiles in Cuba -- which I would not have considered a friendly act -- American negotiators were falling all over each other to get to Moscow to sign the nuclear test ban treaty. I do not know why that could not have been signed in some neutral capital -- why Moscow had to be exalted as the peace-capital of the world. So there is this danger of a too sentimental approach, of not raising difficult issues, and we have to ask ourselves what kind of a settlement we want.

There is a third problem. In relation to many of the new nations, we like to think as if foreign policy were like a series of popularity contests. We assume that the waging of peace means that these new nations ought to get to like us. Well, of course they ought to get to like us, but the richest and most powerful country in the world is not likely to be liked. Also we have to remember that many of these new countries are terribly confused and in search of identity. Finally, for many of them foreign policy becomes easier than domestic policy. I think the greatest favor we could do to Sukarno to spur domestic development of Indonesia would be to make absolutely clear to him that the next time he steps across a frontier he is going to get slapped down. He can then tell his generals that it is too risky to play around in foreign policy, and they had better turn their energies to building up Indonesia. As long as they can attack various countries bordering them, this is

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always more glorious than the tough and tedious process of building up
Indonesia. As a result there is much de-stabilizing. (I am just picking
an example where the pace is threatened not by a communist nation.) So a
great deal depends on our ability to be concrete, on our willingness to do
things that are relatively undramatic, and on our willingness to admit that
there are not going to be any final solutions and any glorious answers by
which in the year 1965 we can say, "Now we can resign from foreign policy,
having solved all the problems of the world." But this will not happen in
an election year.

Dinner Meeting of the Friends of
the Claremont Colleges
California Club, Los Angeles
November 18, 1963

Decision-Making in an Alliance

Lecture by Henry A. Kissinger

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: I appreciate very much the kind words that our chairman has used in introducing me. I think in fairness to you I should point out what a British reviewer said about one of my books. He said, "I don't know whether Mr. Kissinger is a great writer, but anyone finishing this book is a great reader." I hope that you are great listeners.

I am going to give two talks while I am here. This evening I will speak about decision-making and the problems in our alliance policy, and tomorrow I will speak about the psychological and ideological framework of the decision-making process, comparing our system and the Soviet system.

I have seen in Washington a fair amount of our relations with our allies, and I think at this moment we are in a position where no problem that confronts our foreign policy is more important than how we can relate ourselves to other countries. This is a novel experience for Americans. For the greater part of our history we could afford to live in isolation. We were protected by two great oceans, and we could afford to wait for other countries to make the initial commitment. Today we live in a world where, for good or ill, our decision will be decisive. Everywhere in the world our ability to resist aggression or our capacity to act creatively determines what will be achieved.

For the leader of the free world, a great deal depends on the confidence that we can inspire. Indeed I would say that one of the gravest difficulties we have had is our belief that decisions in foreign policy can be made on an individual ad hoc basis. We may not have sufficiently understood, particularly perhaps in the last few years, that intelligence alone is not enough.

In fact intelligence is not as important as the confidence one can create.

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Other countries have to deal with us as a predictable entity. Other statesmen have to be able to gear their policies to some ordered expectations of events. The leader of any great organization can not constantly be changing his position. He is not conducting a seminar. He is not a professor who is free to write another book when he changes his mind, because every change of policy involves important decisions and fundamental changes for other countries. The basic problem of the leader of any coalition of states is his ability to inspire confidence and his ability to create a framework in which the decisions of others can be related to his decisions.

In this sense, our relations with our Allies are particularly crucial. Our relations with our European allies are perhaps the most important since in Europe we are dealing with a group of nations of a similar cultural background, high industrial development, the greatest concentration of industrial power and the highest level of cultural attainment in the free world outside the Western Hemisphere. Our ability to deal with the countries from which most Americans have come is an acid test.

We often read in the press that these relations are not what they should be. I will not talk to you about the day-to-day difficulties that exist. And there are merits and faults on every side. I would rather dwell on some of the fundamental issues that have brought about the tensions you read of in the press.

In a way what is going on right now has often been described by commentators as a contest of wills between President Kennedy and President De Gaulle. I personally regret that it has come to such an issue. But whatever the causes, the process contains the elements of tragedy. Each of the protagonists, following the laws of his own nature, has produced an impasse which threatens everybody. Each of the protagonists has some merit on his side. I think our government is correct in insisting that the basic interests of the West are indivisible, that purely nationalistic policies can no longer be effective.

I think De Gaulle is correct in pointing out that a partner to be effective has to have a sense of identity and an area of responsibility. I think the danger that exists is that, with the best will in the world, an impasse may be created which can be of no benefit to anybody except the Communists.

I would like to examine some of the causes of the tensions that exist in the Allies. I will obviously stress the areas in which the United States has been deficient, not because we are always wrong and the others are always right, but because as Americans we can do more about our own problems and our own shortcomings than about those of others.

First of all, one of the basic changes that has occurred is due to the success of American post-war policy. At the end of the war Europe was exhausted. It was completely dependent on American assistance. At that time there developed a pattern of relationships in which we rather unthinkingly encouraged European integration in the expectation that they could take the economic burden from our shoulders. Also perhaps we thought they would generally, in political affairs, follow our lead. There developed an attitude on our side by which, since we were economically so predominant, we tended to deal with the Europeans almost psycho-therapeutically. That is, we tried always to quiet down their fears and adopt a father-knows-best attitude. The Europeans in turn developed a pattern of very often behaving like petulant children. It used to be said that we had to reassure Chancellor Adenauer three times a week that we still loved him. One of the jokes that used to be told around Washington was that if we really wanted to convince the Germans that we were on their side there was no sense in sending them a note or an ambassador. The thing to do was to smuggle some beaten-up individual into Bonn and let him say he was a butler in President Kennedy's kitchen and while the swinging door was opening into the dining room he overheard fragments of conversations. The argument always was that that was something the Germans would undoubtedly believe.

This pattern of insecurity on the one side and predominance on the other side has inevitably changed. People now speak of Europe as a third force. But in a way Europe has become a third force through our policy. And the only choice we have is not to prevent it from becoming a third force, but to see whether it can conduct a constructive policy in relation to others.

We face the same problem now with Europe that, I am told, parents face with adolescents. (My children are only five and three, so I am not an expert on that subject.) It is always possible for a parent to say that he knows best; and if his child trusts him, why does it not take his advice and live on whatever he wants to give? On the other hand, one can treat one's adolescents as adults, and give them responsibility. I suspect that we are in this position now - to try to dominate the Europeans is to drive them into rebellion. To treat them as equals is to give us the possibility of real partnership. This is a difficult adjustment to make for us, and it is a difficult adjustment to make for them, but it is the basic problem of our time in the Alliance.

The second problem arises from the nature of power in this period. Many of the discussions in the Alliance concern the question of nuclear strategy. No issue is more complicated than nuclear strategy. It is complicated not because it is technically very difficult. I am supposed to be an expert in the field, and this "position" sometimes causes leaders of industrial corporations to put me through the embarrassing process of showing me their products. As a matter of fact, I hardly know which end of an airplane flies forward. The technical problem is not important. The difficulty of understanding nuclear strategy resides in its psychological aspects.

Last summer we heard a great deal of discussion about the nuclear test ban. There was much argument about the advantages and disadvantages of that agreement. What we should understand, however, is that all weapons in the armories of the major countries today are essentially untested. Never before

in history have the major countries had to rely to such a remarkable extent
on weapons for which there is, to all practical purposes, no operational
experience. We are buying something like a thousand Minutemen. Anyone who
reads the newspapers knows that in case of nuclear war several hundred of
them will probably have to be fired simultaneously. I doubt that we will
have tested fifty of them before we put them into operation. And obviously
we will never have tested firing them in salvos. Nobody knows what happens
when you operate with weapons in which every component is so essentially new
and with consequences for which there is no experience. In every previous war
every weapon that was used was to some degree tested.

Even more importantly, everything depends today not so much on conducting
a war, but on how to prevent a war from arising. In order to prevent a war,
it does not matter so much what you think but what the other side thinks. A
threat which is meant as a bluff but is taken seriously is more useful in
this period than a threat which is meant seriously but which is interpreted
by the other side as a bluff. In the nuclear age almost all discussions in
the Pentagon turn into almost theological discussions. No one has any exper-
ience with these weapons. Having been a general for 25 years is not a guar-
antee that one understands how modern weapons operate.

What is meant by nuclear superiority? We have argued this issue for ten
years without coming to any conclusion about it. Does it mean you have more
nuclear weapons than your opponent? Does it mean you have more powerful
weapons than the opponent? Can you conduct nuclear war by hitting only
military targets? Can you conduct it by confining nuclear weapons only to
the battlefield? There is no answer to these questions that is demonstrative.
The issue is almost entirely a philosophical one. How sophisticated do we
want the opponent to be? What is it that we want to teach him? How do you
threaten with solid fuel missiles? As long as our retaliatory force was com-
posed of airplanes we would fly our airplanes and put them on an increased

state of alert to warn the other side that the situation was getting tense. Solid fuel missiles are supposed to be ready to fire with five minutes' preparation. How can you let the other side know that you have increased your state of readiness when you are always in an extreme state of readiness? What is it that you want to be threatening?

All of these are questions for which there are shifting answers in the Pentagon, and since within our own country we have never come to any final resolution of these problems, it is inevitable that there are no final resolutions of these problems within the Alliance.

Now I am not going to argue which particular answer is the best, except of course I am convinced mine is, but rather to indicate that since these issues are so complicated and so difficult we must have some understanding for the problem of other nations, newer in the nuclear field than we are, in coming to grips with the latest developments of American strategic thought. We also have to be very careful that we do not develop strategic theories which are so complicated that our own political leaders will never believe in them when they have to be carried out and also that our friends develop a complete sense of impotence with respect to them.

I must say frankly that one of the weaknesses of current American military policy seems to me to be not that it is incorrect, but that it is too esoteric. Too many intellectuals, too many research analysts have developed theories which may be quite impressive on drawing boards, but which in my view contain in themselves the danger that our political leaders will not say, as they are intended to, if pressed, this is what I will do -- but rather that they will say, if this is the only thing I can do, I will do nothing. And there is also the danger that we as a rich country can afford very complicated, very elaborate theories, but if our Allies look at these theories, they may become convinced that if this is the road to security, they may have to resign from the field altogether, and put all the responsibility on us, and we may wind up to be the only people in the world who have the responsibility for

the defense of everybody.

Now it is not a severe criticism to say that we haven't looked at this
problem, because in the past, a country never had to ask itself what the psycho-
logical impact of its military policy might be. And yet this is precisely the
issue we face today. We have to ask ourselves what impression our policies make
on our own leaders, what they make on our opponents, and what impression they
make on our allies. One of the great problems that has arisen in our relations
with our European friends is that we have developed the very esoteric theories
which they cannot pursue.

I attended last summer a conference at Harvard to which we invited leading European officials. The theory was that if they were only exposed to our latest strategic theories they would immediately agree with us. It never occurs to people in Washington that people disagree with us not because they do not understand us, but because they understand us too well. At any rate a galaxy of officials from Washington appeared and briefed them for ten hours a day with charts and slides, and they were explaining who goes in the first wave, who goes in the second wave, who goes in the fifth wave. One of our participants from Holland had been almost embarrassingly pro-American when he came -- he did not want to have anything explained because he knew we were right. But at the end of that day he said to us, "Nothing can ever convince me of the French point of view, but if anything could, the briefings I have heard from your officials would." What bothered him was that our theories sounded to him like something developed by slick city-boys for a group of country yokels, who could never carry them out. For this very reason they seemed particularly attractive to us, since it left all the decisions in our hands.

This is in part explained by inevitable differences in perspective between
our European allies and us. We particularly in this Administration have a ten-
dency to look at problems primarily analytically. To us the European nations
are factors in a security arrangement. To themselves they are an expression

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of an historical existence. We have great confidence in theoretical calculations. The Europeans live on a continent which is covered with ruins testifying to the fallibility of human foresight. They have a grave doubt about how much one can rely on purely theoretical calculations.

I talked a few months ago to a French general. He described to me some maneuvers they were engaged in, based on the assumption that several Allies would surrender. The Russian armies would then march into France, and then five French divisions would face those victorious armies in France. I said to him, "Don't you think it is ridiculous if the Russians have come as far as France - what are five French divisions going to be able to do?" He said, "Of course, it is ridiculous, but what should we do? We know that our Allies are going to surrender and therefore we would rather do a little bit of what is right than conduct a policy which we know is entirely wrong."

I am not defending the French point of view on this particular maneuver. But one has to consider what happens to the memory of people who in two wars have been invaded and who remember that some of their Allies like the Belgians and the Dutch have surrendered. The perspective of the Europeans has inevitably to be different from ours. We can take a chance that our theory is wrong. For them, if our theory is wrong, their national existence is destroyed no matter what else happens. This is one of the reasons why there is such a curious dispute between us and the Europeans about the build-up of conventional forces in Europe.

Europeans want above all to be sure that the Russians are confronted with an overwhelming threat, which to them means a nuclear threat. We want to make sure that the war will have the most tolerable strategy. The Europeans are afraid that if we make war too tolerable we may make it attractive. We are afraid that if we rely too much on a destructive strategy nobody will believe us. The credibility of our deterrent will evaporate. Both sides are to some

extent correct; both sides are to some extent incorrect; and both sides are
influenced by the perspective from which they view the issue.

Another factor that creates some of our present problems is due to a
change in communist tactics. In the immediate post-war period we were very
fortunate in the fact that whenever the western alliance started disintegrating,
the Russians would do something aggressive. We were saved time and again by
Russian aggressiveness. In the last year or so Soviet tactics have become
much more flexible. There is no longer a rigid hostility, but a differential
approach to the various allies.

The Soviets appeal to us on the basis of the bellicosity of the Germans
and the intransigence of the French. They appeal to the Germans on the basis
that we will sell them out and that if the Germans want to make a deal, they
should make it directly with the Soviet Union. They appeal to the Scandinavians
with prospects of neutralization. They appeal to every body with trade ap-
proaches. To the discredit of everybody it has to be said that each country
tends to yield to the temptation to attempt bilateral approaches. This happens
partly for domestic reasons and partly because leaders always tend to believe
that they have a peculiar personality that enables them to deal most effectively
with Khrushchev. Whenever there is a separate approach with the Soviets by any-
body, it is used by the Soviets with everybody else to tempt them into bilateral
approaches. The result has been a certain weakening of Allied cohesion.

On the test-ban and the non-aggression treaties we are engaged in bilateral
negotiations with the Soviets. On some trade negotiations the British are. The
Germans are. Everybody has had this temptation.

Another tendency - and there I would be critical of our Administration -
has been an intangible one. I would call it a certain weakness for leftist
European parties. This is not easy to document because it depends on intangi-
bles. But in Europe it used to be said in the thirties, "The enemy is always
on the right. You can not have an enemy on the left." There is a certain way

in which many European political leaders have been made respectable by being able to come to Washington and then return home and pretend that they have American blessing.

The question is, do we do this because we think that the European left represents the wave of the future, or do we make them the wave of the future by establishing links with them? This is one of the problems for which there is no good answer. But whatever the reason, the distinction between friend and foe is being eroded today in Europe. In many European countries those who were the architects of the Western alliance now find themselves attacked as anti-American by the very people who had always opposed the Western alliance. Many European neutralists find themselves in the happy position of pretending to have American blessing while going on attacking the very people whom they attacked five or six years ago as being American tools.

In Italy particularly the situation is extremely dangerous. The left wing socialists, who on the local level are still allied with the communists, are now entering the government pretending that they want to remain within the Western alliance. But even while in the Alliance these same people contend that Italy should work for the abolishing of all alliances. Moreover, there exists just beneath the surface in many countries the polarization of politics between neutralists and nationalists, an extremely dangerous situation.

Finally there is a problem which is not our fault or anybody's fault but which is the result of a change in the very nature of alliances. In the past an alliance had three general reasons. It was (a) to build up an accretion of power, (b) to leave no doubt about the alignment of forces, or (c) to provide an additional incentive for assistance. All of these three characteristics have changed. Today alliances very often do not add to the over-all power, particularly in the nuclear field. And in a two-power world, a formal commitment is often not required to guarantee assistance.

Take the case of India and Pakistan. It may be that India despised

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Pakistan for making a formal alliance with us, knowing that its own security
would be protected by us even without an alliance, and that they could get the
best of both worlds. They may have thought of Pakistan as an old-fashioned coun-
try for being allied to us. We in turn have the difficult problem of explain-
ing to our allies in many parts of the world just what it is that they get out
of being our allies. When you go, particularly in the Indian sub-continent,
and you try to answer to a Pakistani just what it is that Pakistan is getting
that India is not getting, where one of them is an ally and the other one is a
neutral, it is not easy to answer. It is not our fault - it is inherent in
the situation.

Conversely, within each alliance the various members can afford to adopt
postures of independence that in the past would have been unthinkable. France
can afford to disagree with us as much as it wants to because they know no
matter how irresponsibly they might behave, if it comes to a show-down, we will
have to support them. We cannot afford to let Europe be taken over by the com-
munists no matter what happens. And this gives them a freedom of maneuver that
did not exist in the past.

And yet, with all these structural problems, I would like to add one other
mistake on our part to this tendency that I described before. It too contributes to the tensions in the Alliance. I refer to the mercurial nature of United
States policy. It does not matter whether a new United States policy is right or
wrong. Whenever we adopt a new policy it means that people who had committed
themselves to our old policy are discredited unless we behave with great circumspection.

In 1958, for example, we placed intermediate range ballistic missiles in
Turkey and Italy. The responsible Defense and Foreign Ministers of these coun-
tries, particularly in Italy, had enormous difficulties in their parliaments be-
cause they were accused of taking obsolescent weapons and becoming targets for
the United States. Four years later we pulled these weapons out without giving

-12-

these countries sufficient advance notice, or in fact any advance notice. The
result is that whether we were right the first time or right the second time, the
Ministers who were engaged in this action were discredited and our prestige and
our credit for similar action is reduced.

Early in this Administration, in 1961, there was suddenly a great emphasis
on conventional weapons. Whether there should be more conventional weapons or
not is a very complicated issue. The point I want to make is that in 1958 the
American President, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense had convinced
the Europeans that conventional weapons were unimportant, that the crucial weapons
were tactical nuclear weapons. It took much effort to convince the European
leaders. They then went back to their parliaments, and convinced their parlia-
ments of it. Three years later we had changed signals. And now we asked them to
go back to their parliaments and convince them it had all been a mistake. That
was in 1961. Now in 1963 we are beginning to talk about pulling troops out of
Europe again. I am not arguing for or against any of these policies. I am say-
ing that if we change our minds so frequently, we must not be surprised if we
have difficulty selling any policy, right or wrong. More importantly, we are
going to foster European efforts to make themselves independent of so mercurial
an ally.

The cement of international relations has to consist of some expectation of
ordered appearances. If there is great changeability, people are going to wonder
whether they should not exercise more control over their own destiny.

Now these are some of the causes of weakness in the Alliance. They have
been magnified by the policy of President De Gaulle. He has adopted the view that
weakness creates illusions and that Europe must adopt a policy of its own. He is
a difficult and an irritating man. He has a tendency to enunciate appolicy and,
if it is not adopted, simply carry on and try to force his partners into adhering
to it. But difficult men are not inevitably wrong, and there is something to be
said for a measure of European autonomy and European capacity to determine its

own fate.

We usually say that interests are indivisible. This may be true as far as the defense of Europe is concerned. But it may not be true as a general proposition. As far as our interests in Latin America and the Far East are concerned, I think the interests are not indivisible. Anyone who knows anything about Europe knows that if we became involved in a war over Formosa or Cuba, European support for us would be practically non-existent, or at least lukewarm.

To create a system in which every European country has to approve every decision that we may have to make any place in the world may create a paralysis of action. We do have a community of interest as far as confronting the Soviet Union is concerned. We do not have a community of interest as far as facing communist China is concerned. The only way we can get a community of interest is to reduce things to the lowest common denominator, which is to do nothing. Therefore I believe it is better to permit a degree of dissociation on such issues, thus permitting us to act and permitting the Europeans to protect themselves if necessary.

There is also the problem of how you go about making a decision in an alliance. Many European socialists advocate turning all nuclear weapons over to the United States and letting the Europeans participate in our decision-making process. This would mean in effect that we would have the entire responsibility for the defense of the free world. The question then becomes, who has a right to be consulted, and who carries weight?

Anyone who has ever seen the decision-making process in Washington knows that having a right to be consulted is meaningless. Dozens of agencies have a right to be consulted; only three or four are being consulted in a way that makes any difference. A considerable number of people sit around the table in the Cabinet room in the White House when decisions are made. Only four or five opinions count. The issue is not who is consulted, but who matters. The issue

is not whether everybody has a right to express an opinion.

The difficulty is how to get allies whose opinion is weighty enough so
that it is helpful rather than a hindrance. Anyone who has experience with
administration knows that consultation is not the key problem. One can collect
many opinions. The key issue in any political problem is how you go about
making a decision, how you choose among available alternatives, how you can
disregard some advice and act on other advice, how you can avoid getting into
a position where all you can do is to amalgamate conflicting points of view
and come up with the least common denominator.

This problem of decision-making applies not primarily to the conduct of a
war, which is the dramatic arena most frequently discussed. It applies to ordinary
diplomacy. It applies particularly to crisis diplomacy. How do you
form a political structure which, in the face of Soviet pressures against Berlin,
holds together and permits somebody to act decisively? Sometimes the seemingly
most cautious course is the riskiest course. Sometimes the boldest course is
the one that involves least risk. How can you be bold in a committee? These
are problems that face us in a much deeper sense than the problem of permitting
various nations to be consulted. In the Cuban missile crisis a great deal depended
on the fact that we had acted first and asked approval later. If we had
asked approval first before we acted, we would probably still be debating what
the most efficient way is to deal with this issue.

These are some of the difficulties we face in the decision-making in the
Alliance. They can be summed up in this query -- how much unity do we want,
and how much pluralism can we stand? How monolithic do we want to become,
how diverse can we afford to be?

In giving an answer to this question, it is easy to speak of partnership. But it is important to remember in this period that much of what occurs depends upon intangibles which cannot be measured by computers. We think today of our allies as difficult and sometimes hard to get along with. In a way we should treasure this difficulty because only five or six years ago all around

the world these allies were obsessed with a feeling of their impotence.
If you read French literature of the middle nineteen fifties, you will
read endless explanations of why nothing could be done, how nothing mat-
tered, how life had never been so hopeless. Today we think of the French
as too self-assertive. And beneath the surface of self-assertiveness there
is a touch of a sense of impotence. And there is a great danger that by
being too complicated, too self-righteous, too convinced that our latest
strategic and political fad is the only answer to every problem, we come
right back to the original difficulty.

A policy maker is like a gardener. No one can make things grow in a
garden by flailing the ground and demanding that things come up fast. All
he can do is nurture what is there with some respect for the things that
have to grow inevitably. We have to keep in mind that in a country like
Germany, for example, which we are now turning into the balance-wheel of our
European policy, we are dealing with a country that in forty years has had
four revolutions, two inflations, and two lost wars. We are not dealing with
a stable construction. We cannot demand everything. We cannot demand anything.
We are running, in my judgment, a grave risk in trying to isolate France by
relying too heavily on Germany.

In domestic European politics, insofar as we have an influence on affairs,
we have to go back to some of our original policies, which enabled us to dis-
tinguish friend from foe. We need to counteract the clear communist policy of
the moment of creating new popular fronts, which will in time erode the will in
these countries to resist and to cooperate.

In other words it is possible that a very powerful country, with great
resources as we are, may sometimes bring about tragic events, not by failing
to achieve what it wants but by achieving what it wants too completely. But
this also means that there exists an opposite possibility. There exists the

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Questions and Answers

Question about the "hot line"

First of all let me say what I think of the hot line on its merits.
The idea of a hot line is that in case of an accident we can communicate
very rapidly with the Soviet Union and assure them - or they can assure us -
that what went on was unintentional and not the beginning of a serious attack.
It is supposed to prevent an accident from mushrooming into a general war. I
consider this a super-sophisticated argument. If we are really worried that
a certain Soviet action is the beginning of a general war, why should we believe
what they tell us on the hot line that it is not the beginning of a general war,
or vice versa? Moreover, we manage during most crises to communicate quite
efficiently, if necessary by using open radio. I am not violently opposed to
the hot line, but I think in terms of our relationship to the Soviet Union it
means very little.

In terms of our relations with our Allies, it does create the problem in
their minds that there is a hot line between Moscow and Washington, and they
do not know what happens on this hot line. It is conceivable to them that
we want this hot line so we can terminate hostilities very fast and terminate
them in a way in which they cannot participate in the decision. I personally
think a hot line to our Allies is more important than a hot line to Moscow,
but I may have old-fashioned ideas.

Question about the Barghoorn case

I have no explanation really for the Barghoorn case. We always tend to
assume that the Soviets never goof. It is quite conceivable that they ar-
rested Barghoorn not knowing who he was and then did not know how to get out
of it. It is also possible - and I think it is likely - that what they wanted

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was to warn their citizens not to associate too closely with westerners, and
to warn westerners not to be too inquisitive when they were in the Soviet
Union. They then picked a man who they were unaware was very well-known in
the United States. That may have been a mistake. But these are the only
explanations that I have been able to find.

Question about giving De Gaulle our atomic know-how

If one talks about European atomic development, there are only two
European countries that are now in a position to have a nuclear program. They
are Great Britain and France. We are already helping Great Britain. Germany
is barred by treaties from developing nuclear weapons. It has no uranium.
It has no area in which it can test. Italy has neither uranium nor the domestic
structure nor the incentive to develop nuclear weapons. Therefore the only
country we are really talking about is France.

My view has always been that we should encourage Britain and France to
pool their effort and to make it the nucleus of a European effort. We should
then help them along the same lines that we have helped the British since 1955.
I do not believe that what we do with Britain and France needs to guide our
policy vis-a-vis other countries. I think we ought to be able to distinguish
between countries that are close friends and others, and I would confine my
assistance to a pooled European arrangement. I would not help any other
country.

Question about the Common Market.

The Common Market right now is entirely an economic institution. Its
executive organ is the Common Market Commission, sitting in Brussels. On

any political issue the European countries still have to deal with us on a
national basis. There exists no organ that can speak for Europe. On economic
matters the existence of the Common Market inevitably means that negotiations
between the United States and the Common Market become more difficult. The
stronger your trading partner the more weight he can throw around and the more
difficult negotiations are.

Also the Europeans did not create the Common Market in order to abolish
their tariffs. The whole point of the Common Market is to have some tariffs.
I would therefore expect that in the economic field we are going to have rather
difficult negotiations ahead of us. In the political field the problem is to
match the existing economic structure with a political structure.

Question about achieving continuity in U.S. policy in view of Congressional
changes.

One must not make continuity an end in itself. One cannot indefinitely
pursue policies one considers wrong. There have to be some changes made from
time to time, and the structure has to give leeway to this. Is Congress the
chief obstacle? I do not believe that Congress is the chief obstacle to con-
tinuity in foreign policy. Congress has nothing to do with the effective for-
mulation of NATO strategy or with our negotiating positions with the Soviet
Union.

The more serious question is how can we have continuity in our foreign
policy through changes in administrations? How can we have continuity in our
foreign policy when there is such a tremendous premium in our society on always
coming up with new ideas? In Washington one is almost embarrassed to present
an idea that one presented a year before. I have never understood why if an
idea was considered good the year before, it might not be considered good the

following year. But there is a tremendous premium on always coming up with something new. I think the real obstacle is a certain restlessness in our approach, a certain belief that new ideas are always desirable. In the last few years when so many of my colleagues went to Washington, a belief has arisen that foreign policy is very similar to the way you conduct a graduate seminar at Harvard University where you constantly refine your ideas. I think a certain moderation in the brilliance of our intellect sometimes would be healthy.

Question about America's national purpose.

I find it very difficult to talk about this without being platitudinous. The problem when you are talking about national purpose is -- what is it that you can be certain about? In all of foreign policy many of the things you do depends more or less on certain ideological or philosophical assumptions you make about the nature of the world you live in and the nature of the world you want to bring about. And these assumptions you cannot prove true when you are making them. Only history can prove them true, but by the time history has proved them true it is too late to do something about it.

We have to come to some understanding of what it is we confront in Communism. There is no way you can disprove those who say that a basic change has occurred in the communist world. This cannot be demonstrated until it is too late for the demonstration to make any difference. We have to have some understanding of the kind of world we want eight or ten years from now.

One of my friends in Washington says, "We have to make the world safe for diversity. This is the American national purpose." This cannot be the American national purpose. What kind of diversity? There must be some limits to diversity. There must be something we can accept and some things we can not accept. Otherwise it becomes a slogan.

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I know I have not answered the question, but I think it is better that I do not pretend that I have a great national purpose that I can come up with in two minutes, and that the world is in such a mess because no one has given me the two minutes in which I can express my national purpose. I would rather dodge that question.

Question about Germany being a dependable ally.

It is true that our relations with Germany over the last forty years have been tragic. German history during this time has been tragic for herself and for her neighbors. Nevertheless a great problem right now for the West is to integrate Germany into the western community of nations. The great achievement of Chancellor Adenauer, who has just retired, is that for the first time in German history he has given Germany a government which was both democratic and decisive. For the first time in German modern history, it has had a government which did not try to exploit the geographic position of Germany in the center of the continent to play all nations against each other, and therefore magnify the insecurity of everybody.

I therefore support integrating Germany into the western community. I think this is terribly important. At the same time I think it is very dangerous. I have gone through phases in this. Two years ago, when the German crisis started, I thought we were being much too cavalier about German interests on the issue of Berlin. I feared that we would gradually drive Germany out of the Alliance or into some special arrangement. In the last year, since we have become so very angry at De Gaulle, we have had the tendency of wheedling for Germany's favor in a way that may over-strain the German fabric.

I do not think it is healthy for Germany to become the arbiter of all the disputes in the Alliance. I want Germany to be an integral part of the Alliance, but I do not want her to be the key to the Alliance. I think a divided country,

with the history that I have described, with the inevitable pressures that the Soviets have of 70 million Germans which they hold as hostages -- such a country should not be the key element of the Alliance. It should be one of the elements of the Alliance. What I am worried about is that in our desire to isolate France, we may put a strain on Germany that it cannot bear.

Question about the new alliance of France and Germany arranged by Adenauer and De Gaulle.

I have always said the day may come when we will look back with nostalgia to the days when we had these difficult old men to deal with. With all their faults at least they were predictable. They pursued a straight line.

What were Adenauer and De Gaulle trying to do? I think both of them understood that a divided Germany has two choices. It can either find itself part of a larger community, or it can try by any means available to it to attempt to re-unify itself. Since we are not able to re-unify it for very understandable reasons, the temptation is great for Germany to engage in separate negotiations with the Soviet Union. When they do that, then the whole fabric of the West will disintegrate.

So I believe that what Adenauer and De Gaulle were trying to do very deliberately was to weld Germany and France so closely together that Germany could not break away no matter what the advantages were. And while both Adenauer and De Gaulle were irritating to us, I think we should distinguish our irritation with two old men from the long-term purposes of what we ought to try to achieve. In the long term I think it is healthy to have Germany closely tied to France. If it is not closely tied to somebody -- if it pursues a separate policy in the center of the continent -- then all the dangers which led to two world wars are going to re-appear. A purely nationalistic policy in the center of the continent is a disaster. For this reason I think the