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Keynote Luncheon Address - Kissinger

described so eloquently yesterday, compounded by the fact that we're moving as a civilization from a world in which concepts were formed through writing into a world where concepts are formed through visual images.

When one acquires information through writing (books), one has to operate by concepts and is taught to understand the relationship of events to each other. When one learns from pictures, one reacts to essentially unrepeatable impressions; analysis is often replaced by sentiment and reflection by instantaneous perception which cannot, as I said, be repeated. That is the world into which we began to move at the beginning of the Nixon period and which in many ways is culminating in its debates in this period, a good example of which are some of the discussions that took place here.

Some of the controversies about what should motivate American foreign policy - which were underlying yesterday's discussions - have their origin in two contradictory propositions. The first proposition is that America should base its foreign policy on a

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clear perception of the national interest, to which most American
academics react with horror because they interpret interest as
something selfish that is beyond America and therefore appeals to
its least objective aspects.

Those of us who embrace this proposition -- and I believe I speak
here for President Nixon as well -- would believe that the national
interest, properly understood, has to encompass the relationship
of a society which always claimed its values had universal validity
to other societies; and that forming an international consensus was
part of America's mission. But they would also say this: if
American leaders are convinced that something is essential for
American security or American values, they should pursue that
objective alone, if necessary, and form consensus as they go along.
While they would prefer not to do it this way, in the extreme, they
would be prepared to do it.

The opposing point of view, which now claims to be
internationalist, really started out as an isolationist philosophy.

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It considers the American role in the Cold War to have been presumptuous, excessive, and even potentially evil. This group has sought to discipline American power by reining it in through international institutions, adopting the view that America could act internationally only as a result of multilateral consensus.

That is what the debate is all about at this moment and the congressional backlash -- whatever one's view about the specific measures that have been adopted to express it -- is, in effect, saying that, in the end, America cannot derive its motivation from international consensus but must develop its own specific purposes and then try to shape an international consensus.

Until fairly recently, this was not considered a philosophical problem. There is no dispute about the role of the U.N. in Korea or in the Gulf. In both of those cases, the United States made it quite clear that it would act unilaterally if necessary according to its perception of what the global security required. It invited the participation of others, which is the prudent thing to do, and

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it achieved the participation of others. But Brent Scowcroft, who guided the effort so skillfully in the Bush administration, will confirm that one reason support was achieved so quickly was that it was the only way to gain influence over American actions which, in all likelihood, would have been taken in any event. Once we had sent 200,000 troops to Saudi Arabia, we had crossed our Rubicon and everybody understood this.

The problem arises when one moves from peacekeeping to peacemaking, from preserving an already accomplished agreement to the imposition of an agreement onto reluctant parties. And if one does that not on the basis of an American definition of the interest but on the basis of a vote in the Security Council, then the question as to how one explains the casualties and other sacrifices to an American public becomes unavoidable. That, in essence, is what is producing the congressional backlash. Nation-building in Somalia has not yet attained, in the American mind, the level of an American national interest.

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Another problem arises when difficult decisions taken for their
own reasons are justified as being required by the United Nations.
Though I have sympathy for the administration's view on the embargo
on Bosnia -- especially under current conditions though maybe not
two years ago -- to justify it as if it were required by the votes
of others and did not reflect an American preference produces a
conflict with those who are led to believe that the Administration
would deliver arms but for the UN. If indeed it is an
Administration preference to end the embargo, we are, in effect,
saying that we are changing our definition of the national interest
for a Security Council vote, which everybody knows we have a major
influence in shaping.

Haiti was another problem of this kind. Haiti was an essentially
domestic American issue in which people with strong convictions —
that may well be valid — believed that the democratization of
Haiti was essential. It served no purpose to pretend that we were
mandated by the United Nations to carry out a military mission,

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especially as it ran counter to a century and a half of the Monroe
Doctrine, to the effect that the problems of the Western Hemisphere
should be settled within the Americas.

So the issue is not freedom of maneuver with respect to the U.N.
but whether the American interest and the general interest can be
reconciled in the minds of the American people. And if that cannot
be done, it simply cannot be expected that the American people will
agree to sacrifices which are declared not to be in the national
interest and only in the interest of the United Nations. This is
the issue that seems to me to have been at the heart of the debate
yesterday between Senator Dole and President Clinton. And it
cannot be ended by deferring to executive prerogative, whatever one
thinks of this or that specific proposal which has originated in
the conference.

Similar conceptual problems underlie other areas of foreign
policy. One of the topics that was discussed this morning concerns
NATO expansion. Now I don't want to go into all the abstruse

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technical issues that were raised,

but would like to touch on a number of philosophical concerns.

First, what do we conceive to be the relationship between Europe
and America in the coming decades? How should NATO be adapted to
the new conditions to represent fully the only institution which
organically links Europe and the United States?

With the collapse not just of Soviet control of Central Europe
but of the division of Germany, many of the previous assumptions
in which French political dominance was traded for German economic
dominance no longer apply. But there has to be a role for America
in Europe if Europe is not to fragment into traditional rivalries.
But there also has to be space for a European unity. And that, of
course, raises the fundamental question of where does Europe begin
- a question we have systematically fudged. Part of the reason is
that the same people who thought the Cold War unnecessary really
do not believe in alliances in the traditional sense. They believe
in collective security, affirming that they don't want dividing

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lines; and they think in terms of a NATO which runs from
Vladivostok to Vancouver.

But an alliance has a line of separation, by definition as it
were. It has to have organized units, command systems, and
specific obligations. Collective security is a legal concept which
has to be negotiated from case to case. One cannot have both
simultaneously, as we have been attempting to do, hence we have to
choose. In addition, to declare we are for a policy but that the
when, how, who and where remain to be decided merely means that we
are evading the key issues.

The future of NATO is not some abstract seminar; one has to
define where Europe begins and one has to recognize what Russia is.
Russia is a great power which has expanded for 400 years. Now I
do not know whether nations can ever change. Certainly, in America
we have many movies in which some evil character has an automobile
accident or undergoes a major transformation to emerge as a saint.
(Laughter.) But one rarely sees this sort of thing in real life.

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[LC]

All I'm saying is that 400 years of foreign policy indicate a certain proclivity. (Laughter.) Russia, which borders Europe, the Middle East, and Asia is in its scale not a European country -- nor is it in terms of its geography. It represents many European traditions but has always been torn.

In the Nixon administration we were accused of being too permissive toward Russia in our policy of détente. But the objective was the same as I avow here: to treat Russia as a great power respectfully, recognizing its interests but not deluding ourselves that it represents some kind of social welfare challenge.

I have respect for Yeltsin but his survival is his problem, not our problem. Our problem is to encourage Russia to stay within its borders, which one would think, since St. Petersburg is closer to New York than it is to Vladivostok and Vladivostok is closer to Seattle than to Moscow, should not induce claustrophobia. (Laughter.) So our role, vis-a-vis Russia, is not psychiatric. Our role, vis-a-vis Russia, is to respect its interests and to see

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whether we can balance theirs against ours to encourage a humane
evolution. And I support, as President Nixon did, economic
assistance to Russia for that reason.

But we also have to keep in mind that imperial Russia, whether
Tsarist or Communist, has often been a menace to its neighbors. The
independence of Ukraine is, for that reason, a key to European
stability. With respect to other former republics of the Soviet
Union and central Asia, we may have many common objectives --
especially with respect to resurgent Islam - provided they are
recognized as independent nations and provided it does not become
a normal feature of the international scene that Russian armies
should be on the territory of member states of the United Nations
who have not invited them but simply because they are there as
remnants of the Soviet Union. Those seem to me the preconditions
for good relations with Russia, and those are the conceptual issues
at the heart of the current debate.

Asia is in many ways the most difficult problem for America

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because it is an almost classic 19th Century European situation.

There are major countries which consider themselves competitive with each other not only economically but also strategically, which do not have a sense of community in the way the Europeans do, and which direct their policies in part against each other. America is in fact in a strong position vis-a-vis Asia because it has better relations with each of its players than they have with each other. So we should be able to achieve an equilibrium provided we understand this to be our objective.

Of course, we have sometimes made it difficult for ourselves to have better relations with each of them. There were some great moments when we were assaulting China and Japan simultaneously, first in human rights and then in the name of an equal playing field. This is the hard way of conducting Asian foreign policy since one of its basic axioms should be never to confront both at the same time. But if one agrees with that proposition, as I basically do, one also has to admit that we have no great natural

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talent in conducting that sort of foreign policy, even though I
believe that Asian relations and Korean relations cannot be
understood except in such an analysis.

But let me go back to something Newt Gingrich said yesterday
that I thought was very important. When you look at the great
transitions in international affairs, they occurred when there was
a simultaneous shift in economics, in politics and in the human
consciousness. In the late 18th Century, it would not have
occurred to anybody that a ruler was a foreigner because he spoke
a foreign language. Fifty years later it was conventional wisdom
that those who spoke the same language should be organized in the
same state, and 100 years of political adjustments followed. They
coincided, as Newt pointed out yesterday, with changes in
technology and economic organization.

In our period, there have been huge changes in technology and
economics but these have not been accompanied by comparable changes
in the human consciousness. I tremble at the thought that the man

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who brought down Baring might represent the wave of the future, or
that technicians manipulating computers can shape our world in a
way over which there is no political influence. Therefore I would
say that one of our major tasks is to get some hold over the
various instruments we have created.

With respect to the Mexican crisis, for example, I don't think
anybody fully understood the volatility of investment funds being
moved into a country for purely speculative purposes by
institutions which, unlike the banks, have no permanent interest
other than to maximize their immediate profits and which are
therefore the most likely to pull out at the slightest sign of
difficulty. We have no institutions to monitor this adequately,
much less to control it.

As far as the United States is concerned, the change in political
consciousness that I believe is ahead of us is also a reorientation
of our thinking from East-West to North-South, at least in the
Western Hemisphere. If that had been fully understood, we would

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have presented the Mexican loans not as a way of keeping unwanted
immigrants from coming to the United States or as a way of
promoting American jobs, but in the way that I conceive it, namely
this:

Conventional wisdom holds that the world will become a global
trading system. Though I think that is a proposition which
requires examination, it is in any event apt to develop through the
stage of a series of regional trading systems. I also believe that
the United States, powerful as it is, will, in the face of the
foreseeable global combinations, not prove sufficiently powerful
to act on a purely national basis. It is therefore in our interest
to create a grouping within the Western Hemisphere of nations with
more or less similar histories that are committed to the free
market. And if we could be imaginative and relate Europe to this
scheme as well in some sort of economic relationship then we would
have a vision for the future that would respond to some of the
challenges that have been described.

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We have done the right thing with Mexico, but we have justified
it in a way and tied it to conditions that are so onerous that our
justification may undo the courageous actions we have taken -
partly because we have not settled in our own minds that it was not
charity but a concept of common destiny that impelled us.

So we are back to where President Nixon started: trying to solve
a war that had been inherited and that he did not abandon because
he believed it was the moral duty of America to stand by those who
had entrusted their fate to us, even if it had occurred during a
different political administration. Since then, there have been
huge successes and transformations which nobody could have foreseen
but these only brought us back to the original questions. And it
is for raising these questions that I would like to congratulate
Dimitri Simes and John Taylor. For I would like to think that
President Nixon, had he been here, would have felt that his legacy
has been carried out.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

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JOHN TAYLOR, Executive Director, Nixon Library: Ladies and gentlemen, Chairman Kissinger has consented to take just a few questions. To make that easier for you, I'd like everyone to please sit so that four geopolitical geniuses-in-the-making can identify themselves by raising their hands. Marie-Rose, Joel, David and Jamie. You see these young people holding microphones? It's your responsible to make yourself known to them.

Begin with Marie-Rose. Please identify yourself so that Dr. Kissinger can run a security check. (Laughter.)

QUESTIONER: Thank you. Alan Gerson. Dr. Kissinger, should President Clinton go to Moscow to celebrate the Russian celebration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war?

DR. KISSINGER: In a normal world, except for Chechnya, there would be overwhelming reasons to go to Moscow. I actually have great sympathy for his wanting to go there. Still, I would find it painful and I think most of our European allies would find it painful if he went there while the war is still going on in

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Chechnya and ignored Britain, which fought from the beginning.

MR. TAYLOR: Joe.

QUESTIONER: Harry Arad from Jerusalem. Dr. Kissinger, as someone who had many, many hours with President Assad in a grueling shuttle over 20 years ago, do you believe that Washington should become much more actively involved in the peace process between Israel and Syria?

DR. KISSINGER: Twenty years ago there were no communications between Arab nations and Israel, and the most trivial messages had to be carried by us. It was at the end of a war, and it was important for the United States to be the shaping element in the negotiation. I believe that at this point in time it's fairly clearly understood what needs to be done by the various parties in order to come to an agreement, and whether an agreement is reached or not really depends more on the domestic considerations of all the parties than on anything the United States could do.

Therefore I don't believe it is wise for the United States to go

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beyond what it is doing, in my view quite effectively.

MR. TAYLOR: David?

QUESTIONER: Elaine Sciolino from The New York Times. Dr. Kissinger, if President Nixon were alive today and in the White House and you were in the White House with him, what would you be doing differently? (Laughter.)

DR. KISSINGER: That's an impossible question to answer because, when you make a decision in the White House, it is not an academic exercise. It's the cumulative result of months and sometimes years of nuance that has built up. Almost certainly there would be less of a multilateral emphasis in justifying American policies. If one takes the expansion of NATO, I tend to think that a decision would have been made one way or another, leaving the timing to the future.

Nor do I want to second-guess every move of the Clinton administration; indeed I have supported it on Mexico, on NAFTA, and in several instances. I am of the opinion that one's basic

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attitude ought to be - as in the case of President Nixon's aid
program to Russia - to try to offer support when one can.

MR. TAYLOR: Jamie, you have a victim.

QUESTIONER: Dr. Kissinger -- (unintelligible) -- Rheinsicher
Merkur and -- (unintelligible) -- Weekly. I understood that you
think the situation in Russia is basically stable with borders I
think many Russians devise as historically unjust borders. Do you
really think the situation in which Kiev is a foreign city to much
of Russia is a stable situation which America could play on?

DR. KISSINGER: We did not break up the Soviet Union. Yeltsin
broke up the Soviet Union. The borders of Ukraine are the borders
that were recognized in the CIS when the Soviet Union broke up.
So I have no fixed view on where the borders of Ukraine should be.
I do have a fixed view that the borders of a nation of 58 million
and a member of the United Nations cannot be challenged without
violating accepted rules of international conduct. One therefore
simply hopes that Russia will have good relations with Ukraine,

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and, most importantly, respect the borders it was the first to establish and that are now recognized by the United Nations.

MR. TAYLOR: Our final question --

QUESTIONER: Oh, this is a hard one. You've talked several times in the last few days about the fact that we had a concept, a framework, a theory, about what to do in the Cold War, and we are lacking to that. How do we proceed without this kind of a theory or a framework? Does it fall back on individual interest, incidents case by case in accepting the inconsistencies that arise from that?

DR. KISSINGER: Well, one can, of course, be too idealistic, as Brent pointed out, about the history of the Cold War. It took nearly five years for the containment concept to be accepted. And if you read the debates between Henry Wallace and President Truman or the argument in Congress over NATO and the Marshall Plan, you will see that it was far from self-evident. But then, in the next period there were debates about how to implement it. In the Korean

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War, there was no disagreement about our being there, only about whether we should pursue the war more strenuously than we did. This gradually broke down -- and probably would have broken down without the Vietnam War -- with the consensus finally disintegrating in the '70s. Then came the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which engendered a totally new situation.

Today, it is much harder to reconstruct the same consensus because there is no single overarching concern. When I was a young professor, none of us ever thought that we would be in high office. We thought that the only way to influence events was to write reflective books or articles. Sometime in the '60s the academic and intellectual community splintered into two groups: the revolutionaries and the job applicants. (Laughter.) The intellectual leadership gradually eroded because the job applicants were writing more or less the same papers which were already being written within the government. It's very rare that you get a seminal paper such as Sam Huntington's, whether one agrees with it

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or not and I happen to agree with much of it.

One would like to think that whatever administration is in office
would help to shape [the consensus.] Thus the proposal for a
national, bipartisan commission on strategy, if it were redefined
and broadened, might provide a good beginning. But I know the need
better than the solution.

MR. TAYLOR: Thank you, Dr. Kissinger. (Applause.) One moment, please, sir. A brief presentation.

Dr. Kissinger, you spoke of all that has changed in the world
since at an age not much older than young Christopher a future
president lay awake at night in his bedroom in Yorba Linda and
dreamed of going to far-away places when he heard the train
whistle. On April 26th, we will mark the first anniversary of that
young lad's final return to Yorba Linda, and on that occasion the
United States Postal Service will release a postage stamp in his
honor. We believe you need this for the wall of Kissinger
Associates in Manhattan. We hope you'll take it with the

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Let me also say that it is pointless and banal to give the least of Mr. Kissinger's numerous jobs, titles, books, accomplishments, because that is not what he is about. He is an institution. He carries his own weight on his shoulder, and he is much bigger than any job, any mission, any book he was associated with.

Let me finally say something about his relationship with President Nixon. As someone who was fortunate enough to know President Nixon well during his last years, I had many discussions with him about Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, George Shultz, Alexander Haig, Bill Simon. And Nixon was a very remarkable man. He was accused often of being insecure; yet he collected the most remarkable, most talented, most ambitious, most assertive group of Cabinet members. And he was proud of them all their life.

I will never forget the conference which we had three years ago, where President Nixon and Henry Kissinger had a serious disagreement about American policy toward Russia, and as President Nixon left the room -- and they had a serious debate; they were very respectful of each other, but intellectually they were not pulling their punches -- I thought that he would say to me: "What is Henry up to? Why is he doing that?" And he said: "What do you think of Kissinger's reasons? He had to have some very serious reasons. I have to think about them."

Ladies and gentlemen, Henry Kissinger. (Applause.)

HENRY KISSINGER, 56th Secretary of State:

I would like to congratulate the Center for Peace and Freedom for organizing a nonpartisan, bipartisan conference. I shudder to think what would happen if they organized a partisan conference. (Laughter)

All of us who worked with President Nixon read all these pettifogging stories of this or that incident or comment. But anyone who knew Nixon's foreign policy reflections will be aware that the consuming interest of his life was to make America worthy of the huge changes he understood to be taking place in the international environment, and to enable America to make the complicated passage from a position of predominance - a nuclear monopoly and economic supremacy - to a world in which America would still be the strongest nation though no longer in a position simply to impose its views. And he spoke a lot about the balance of power.

But it is also true that the president Nixon admired most was Woodrow Wilson; when he moved into the Oval Office, he asked for Wilson's desk. It wasn't his fault that the curator of the White House produced the desk of Horace Wilson, who was Grant's vice president. (Laughter.)

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President Nixon understood what Newt Gingrich said so eloquently yesterday - that America is composed of Romantic, idealistic, and pragmatic elements and that each without the other becomes self-defeating. Excessive pragmatism leads to paralysis. Idealism in the abstract can generate self-righteousness and the attempt to believe that adopting a posture can transform humanity. This is especially so when we live, as Sam Huntington and others have described, in an era of conflicts which in many areas coincide with the fault lines of civilization.

And it is also the case, though President Nixon was very reluctant to make it evident, that he had an almost naive faith in fundamental American institutions. When there were student demonstrations at Harvard early in his term, he said to me that he was so glad it was happening at Harvard because, he said, as the greatest university in the country, it would set an example that others could follow. As a recent member of the Harvard faculty, I suffered from no such illusions. (Laughter.) In fact, I told him that within two days my ex-colleagues would have the situation so confused that nobody would know who had done what to whom. (Laughter.)

But this necessity for America -- to be idealistic and pragmatic at the same time -- is a particular challenge when we're moving into a world for which, as a nation, we have relatively little preparation. We are the only major country whose history begins on a specific date. We are the only major country populated almost entirely by immigrants. We are the only major country that has never had a powerful neighbor. We are the only major country which, except for the Civil War -- which, from that point of view, affected only one part of the country -- has never known national tragedy.

To live in a world that is moving from bipolarity to multipolarity, in a world in which communications are instantaneous and the economy global, but in which conflicts are ethnic, even civilizational, is something for which few of our leaders have been systematically prepared. It took a loner from Yorba Linda who loved to read and who didn't really enjoy politics in the form of glad-handing to develop his own approach. Still, as a country we have great difficulty facing some of the realities Newt Gingrich described so eloquently yesterday, compounded by the fact that we're moving as a civilization from a world in which concepts were formed through writing into a world where concepts are formed through visual images.

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[L]C

Some of the controversies about what should motivate American
foreign policy - which were underlying yesterday's discussions -
have their origin in two contradictory propositions. The first
proposition is that America should base its foreign policy on a
clear perception of the national interest, to which most American
academics react with horror because they interpret interest as
something selfish that is beyond America and therefore appeals to
its least objective aspects.

The opposing point of view, which now claims to be
internationalist, really started out as an isolationist philosophy.
It considers the American role in the Cold War to have been
presumptuous, excessive, and even potentially evil. This group has
sought to discipline American power by reining it in through
international institutions, adopting the view that America could
act internationally only as a result of multilateral consensus.

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Haiti was another problem of this kind. Haiti was an essentially domestic American issue in which people with strong convictions - that may well be valid - believed that the democratization of Haiti was essential. It served no purpose to pretend that we were mandated by the United Nations to carry out a military mission, especially as it ran counter to a century and a half of the Monroe Doctrine, to the effect that the problems of the Western Hemisphere should be settled within the Americas.

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LCJ

Similar conceptual problems underlie other areas of foreign policy. One of the topics that was discussed this morning concerns NATO expansion. Now I don't want to go into all the abstruse technical issues that were raised, but would like to touch on a number of philosophical concerns. First, what do we conceive to be the relationship between Europe and America in the coming decades? How should NATO be adapted to the new conditions to represent fully the only institution which organically links Europe and the United States?

With the collapse not just of Soviet control of Central Europe but of the division of Germany, many of the previous assumptions in which French political dominance was traded for German economic dominance no longer apply. But there has to be a role for America in Europe if Europe is not to fragment into traditional rivalries. But there also has to be space for a European unity. And that, of course, raises the fundamental question of where does Europe begin - a question we have systematically fudged. Part of the reason is that the same people who thought the Cold War unnecessary really do not believe in alliances in the traditional sense. They believe in collective security, affirming that they don't want dividing lines; and they think in terms of a NATO which runs from Vladivostok to Vancouver.

The future of NATO is not some abstract seminar; one has to define where Europe begins and one has to recognize what Russia is. Russia is a great power which has expanded for 400 years. Now I do not know whether nations can ever change. Certainly, in America we have many movies in which some evil character has an automobile accident or undergoes a major transformation to emerge as a saint. (Laughter.) But one rarely sees this sort of thing in real life. All I'm saying is that 400 years of foreign policy indicate a certain proclivity. (Laughter.) Russia, which borders Europe, the Middle East, and Asia is in its scale not a European country -- nor is it in terms of its geography. It represents many European traditions but has always been torn.

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I have respect for Yeltsin but his survival is his problem, not our problem. Our problem is to encourage Russia to stay within its borders, which one would think, since St. Petersburg is closer to New York than it is to Vladivostok and Vladivostok is closer to Seattle than to Moscow, should not induce claustrophobia. (Laughter.) So our role, vis-a-vis Russia, is not psychiatric. Our role, vis-a-vis Russia, is to respect its interests and to see whether we can balance theirs against ours to encourage a humane evolution. And I support, as President Nixon did, economic assistance to Russia for that reason.

Asia is in many ways the most difficult problem for America because it is an almost classic 19th Century European situation. There are major countries which consider themselves competitive with each other not only economically but also strategically, which do not have a sense of community in the way the Europeans do, and which direct their policies in part against each other. America is in fact in a strong position vis-a-vis Asia because it has better relations with each of its players than they have with each other. So we should be able to achieve an equilibrium provided we understand this to be our objective.

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basically do, one also has to admit that we have no great natural talent in conducting that sort of foreign policy, even though I believe that Asian relations and Korean relations cannot be understood except in such an analysis.

In our period, there have been huge changes in technology and economics but these have not been accompanied by comparable changes in the human consciousness. I tremble at the thought that the man who brought down Baring might represent the wave of the future, or that technicians manipulating computers can shape our world in a way over which there is no political influence. Therefore I would say that one of our major tasks is to get some hold over the various instruments we have created.

As far as the United States is concerned, the change in political consciousness that I believe is ahead of us is also a reorientation of our thinking from East-West to North-South, at least in the Western Hemisphere. If that had been fully understood, we would have presented the Mexican loans not as a way of keeping unwanted immigrants from coming to the United States or as a way of promoting American jobs, but in the way that I conceive it, namely this:

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MR. TAYLOR: Joe.

Therefore I don't believe it is wise for the United States to go beyond what it is doing, in my view quite effectively.

MR. TAYLOR: David?

Nor do I want to second-guess every move of the Clinton administration; indeed I have supported it on Mexico, on NAFTA, and in several instances. I am of the opinion that one's basic attitude ought to be - as in the case of President Nixon's aid program to Russia - to try to offer support when one can.

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[L]

**DR. KISSINGER:** We did not break up the Soviet Union. Yeltsin broke up the Soviet Union. The borders of Ukraine are the borders that were recognized in the CIS when the Soviet Union broke up. So I have no fixed view on where the borders of Ukraine should be. I do have a fixed view that the borders of a nation of 58 million and a member of the United Nations cannot be challenged without violating accepted rules of international conduct. One therefore simply hopes that Russia will have good relations with Ukraine, and, most importantly, respect the borders it was the first to establish and that are now recognized by the United Nations.

**MR. TAYLOR:** Our final question --

**QUESTIONER:** Oh, this is a hard one. You've talked several times in the last few days about the fact that we had a concept, a framework, a theory, about what to do in the Cold War, and we are lacking to that. How do we proceed without this kind of a theory or a framework? Does it fall back on individual interest, incidents case by case in accepting the inconsistencies that arise from that?

**DR. KISSINGER:** Well, one can, of course, be too idealistic, as Brent pointed out, about the history of the Cold War. It took nearly five years for the containment concept to be accepted. And if you read the debates between Henry Wallace and President Truman or the argument in Congress over NATO and the Marshall Plan, you will see that it was far from self-evident. But then, in the next period there were debates about how to implement it. In the Korean War, there was no disagreement about our being there, only about whether we should pursue the war more strenuously than we did. This gradually broke down -- and probably would have broken down without the Vietnam War -- with the consensus finally disintegrating in the '70s. Then came the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which engendered a totally new situation.

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written within the government. It's very rare that you get a seminal paper such as Sam Huntington's, whether one agrees with it or not and I happen to agree with much of it.

Dr. Kissinger, you spoke of all that has changed in the world since at an age not much older than young Christopher a future president lay awake at night in his bedroom in Yorba Linda and dreamed of going to far-away places when he heard the train whistle. On April 26th, we will mark the first anniversary of that young lad's final return to Yorba Linda, and on that occasion the United States Postal Service will release a postage stamp in his honor. We believe you need this for the wall of Kissinger Associates in Manhattan. We hope you'll take it with the compliments of the Nixon family. Thank you, Dr. Kissinger. (Applause.)

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AFTER VICTORY:

DEFINING AN AMERICAN ROLE IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD

A NATIONAL POLICY CONFERENCE

PRESENTED BY
NIXON CENTER FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM

AND
THE RICHARD NIXON LIBRARY AND BIRTHPLACE

LUNCHEON KEYNOTE ADDRESS

AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY AND THE POST-COLD WAR ERA

SPEAKER:

THE HONORABLE HENRY A. KISSINGER
56TH SECRETARY OF STATE

MAYFLOWER HOTEL, WASHINGTON, DC

THURSDAY, MARCH 2, 1995

DIMITRI SIMES, President, Nixon Center: Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure and privilege to introduce the Chairman of this conference, Chairman of the Nixon Center Advisory Council, and a man without whom this Center, this conference, could never take place: Henry Kissinger.

I have an enormous personal debt to Secretary Kissinger, because first of all, without his and President Nixon's policy of détente, I would never be able to come here.

You know, we have a lot of moralists in Washington who constantly tell us how good is their heart but somehow are not terribly concerned with results of their efforts. The policy of détente enabled hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews to come to the United States. I was one of them. I think that was not the most important outcome of the policy of détente, but it is one illustration how what is in the national interest sometimes is also morally right.

I am also very grateful to Secretary Kissinger because, of course, without him, I could never get to know President Nixon, because without being exposed to your accent, he would never be able to deal with mine. (Laughter, applause.)

Let me get serious. As a historian, I was usually uncomfortable as a TV commentator when somebody would say, "This is a historic event" or "This is a historic figure." I always had the sense that perhaps we were trivializing history. Henry Kissinger is a historic figure. It is just as simple as that. He was widely praised. He was brutally criticized. But everybody knows that he was one of a few chosen people of this century, and not just of this century, who were fortunate enough to shape history.

I also know that he had to shape history during one of the most difficult periods of American history: when this country has discovered the enemy and the enemy were ourselves. To be national security advisor and secretary of state during that period and to perform with flying colors is next to unbelievable.

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**JOHN TAYLOR, Executive Director, Nixon Library:** Ladies and gentlemen, Chairman Kissinger has consented to take just a few questions. To make that easier for you, I'd like everyone to please sit so that four geopolitical geniuses-in-the-making can identify themselves by raising their hands. Marie-Rose, Joel, David and Jamie. You see these young people holding microphones? It's your responsible to make yourself known to them.

**QUESTIONER:** Thank you, Alan Gerson. Dr. Kissinger, should President Clinton go to Moscow to celebrate the Russian celebration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war?

**DR. KISSINGER:** In a normal world, except for Chechnya, there would be overwhelming reasons to go to Moscow. I actually have great sympathy for his wanting to go there. Still, I would find it painful and I think most of our European allies would find it painful if he went there while the war is still going on in

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MR. TAYLOR: Joe.

MR. TAYLOR: David?

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AFTER VICTORY:

A NATIONAL POLICY CONFERENCE

PRESENTED BY

AND

LUNCHEON KEYNOTE ADDRESS

SPEAKER:

56TH SECRETARY OF STATE

THURSDAY, MARCH 2, 1995

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(Laughter)

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President Nixon understood what Newt Gingrich said so eloquently
yesterday - that America is composed of Romantic, idealistic, and
pragmatic elements and that each without the other becomes self-
defeating. Excessive pragmatism leads to paralysis. Idealism in

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MR. TAYLOR: Joe.

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MR. TAYLOR: David?

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AFTER VICTORY:

A NATIONAL POLICY CONFERENCE

LUNCHEON KEYNOTE ADDRESS

SPEAKER:

THURSDAY, MARCH 2, 1995

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HENRY KISSINGER, 56th Secretary of State: Dimitri, Tricia, ladies and gentlemen. Some of you may have heard me tell this story before, but Dimitri leaves me in the same position as when a lady came up to me at a cocktail party and said: "I understand you're a fascinating man. (Laughter.) "Fascinate me," she said (Laughter.) It turned into one of the less successful conversations I have had. (Laughter.)

I would also like to congratulate the Center for Peace and

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Freedom for organizing a nonpartisan, bipartisan conference. I
shudder to think what would happen if they organized a partisan
conference. (Laughter.)

All of us who worked with President Nixon read all these
pettifogging stories of [minisule incidents]. But anyone who knew
Nixon's foreign policy reflections [will] be aware that the
consuming interest of his life was to make America worthy of the
huge changes he understood to be taking place in the international
environment, and to enable America to make the complicated passage
from a position of predominance - a nuclear monopoly and economic
supremacy - to a world in which America would still be the
strongest nation though no longer in a position simply to impose
its views, [by sheer weight]. And he spoke a lot about the balance of
power.

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President Nixon understood what Newt Gingrich said so eloquently yesterday - that America is composed of these strengths, the elements of Romantic, idealistic, and pragmatic, and that each one, without the other, becomes self-defeating. Excessive pragmatism leads to paralysis. Idealism in the abstract can lead to self-righteousness and the attempt to believe that adopting a posture can transform humanity. This is especially so when we live, as Sam Huntington and others have described, in an era of conflicts which in many areas coincide with the fault lines of civilization.

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When one acquires information through writing (books), one has
to operate by concepts and is taught, or at least some are taught,
to understand the relationship of events to each other. When one
learns from pictures, one reacts to essentially unrepeatable
impressions; analysis is often replaced by sentiment and reflection
by instantaneous perception which cannot, as I said, be repeated.
That is the world into which we began to move at the beginning of

[Y]

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The opposing point of view, which now claims to be internationalist, really started out as an isolationist point of view. It considers the American role in the Cold War to have been presumptuous, excessive, and even potentially evil. This group has sought to discipline American power by reining it in through international institutions, adopting the view that America could act internationally only as a result of multilateral consensus.

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Until fairly recently, this was not considered a philosophical problem. There is no dispute about the role of the U.N. in Korea or in the Gulf. In both of those cases, the United States made it quite clear that it would act unilaterally if necessary according to its perception of what the global security required. It invited the participation of others, which is the prudent thing to do, and it achieved the participation of others. But Brent, who guided the effort so skillfully in the Bush administration, will hopefully agree with me if I say that one reason support was achieved so quickly was that it was the only way to gain influence over American actions which, in all likelihood, would have been taken in any event. Once we had sent 200,000 troops to Saudi Arabia, we had crossed our Rubicon and everybody understood this.

The problem arises when one moves from peacekeeping to peacemaking, from the observation of an already accomplished agreement to the imposition of an agreement onto reluctant parties.

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And if one does not on the basis of an American definition of
the interest but on the basis of a vote in the Security Council,
then the question ~~is raised~~ as to how one explains the casualties
~~because unavoidable~~ and other sacrifices to an American public. That, ~~again,~~ is what
~~in essence~~ is producing the congressional backlash. Nation-building in
Somalia has not yet attained, in the American mind, the level of
an American national interest.

Another problem arises when difficult decisions taken for their
own reasons are justified as being required by the United Nations.
Though I have sympathy for the administration's view on the embargo
on Bosnia -- especially under current conditions though maybe not
two years ago -- to justify it as if it were required by the votes
of others and did not reflect an American preference produces a
~~will those who are led to believe that~~ conflict that ~~has to be reconciled.~~ If ~~it is an American~~
~~the administration would deliver arms before the UN~~ preference to end the embargo, we are, in effect, saying that we
are changing our definition of the national interest for a majority
~~vote or for a Security Council vote, which everybody knows we have~~

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a major influence in shaping.

Haiti was another problem of this kind. Haiti, whatever one ~~feels~~ was an essentially ~~American domestic~~ issue in which people with strong convictions - that may well be valid - believed that the democratization of Haiti was essential. It served no purpose to pretend that we were mandated by the United Nations to carry out ~~military~~ an active mission, especially as it ran counter to a century and ~~& the effect~~ a half of the Monroe Doctrine, by which it had been believed that the problems of the Western Hemisphere should be settled within the Americas.

So the issue is not freedom of maneuver with respect to the U.N. but whether the American interest and the general interest can be reconciled in the minds of the American ~~public~~. And if that cannot be done, it simply cannot be expected that the American ~~public~~ will agree to sacrifices which are declared not to be in the national interest and only in the interest of the United Nations. This is the issue that seems to me to have been at the heart of the debate

[Y]

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yesterday And it cannot be ended by deferring to executive prerogative, whatever one thinks of this or that specific proposal which has originated in the conference.

It is thus in nearly every area that we face certain conceptual problems. One of the topics that was discussed this morning concerns NATO expansion. Now I don't want to go into all the abstruse technical issues that were raised, but would like to touch on a number of philosophical concerns. First, what do we conceive to be the relationship between Europe and America in the coming decades? How should NATO be adapted to the new conditions to represent fully the only institution which organically links Europe and the United States?

With the collapse not just of Soviet control of Central Europe but of the division of Germany, many of the previous assumptions in which French political dominance was traded for German economic dominance no longer apply. But there has to be a role for America in Europe if Europe is not to fragment into traditional directions.

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merely means that we are backing the key issues, which make up a
policy.

But this is not some (intellectual seminar; one has to define
abstract)
where Europe begins and one has to recognize what Russia is.
Russia is a great power which has expanded for 400 years. Now I
do not know whether nations can ever change. Certainly, in America
we have many movies in which some evil character has an automobile
accident or undergoes a major transformation to emerge as a saint.
(Laughter.) But one rarely sees this sort of thing in real life.
All I'm saying is that 400 years of foreign policy indicate a
certain proclivity. (Laughter.) So Russia, which borders Europe,
the Middle East, and Asia is in its scale not a European country
-- nor is it in terms of its geography. It represents many
European traditions but has always been torn.

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But we also have to keep in mind that the independence of
Ukraine, for example, is a key to European stability. With respect
to other former republics of the Soviet Union and central Asia, we
may have many common objectives -- especially with respect to
resurgent Islam - provided they are recognized as independent

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Now, with respect to Asia in many ways the most difficult
problem for America because it is an almost classic 19th Century
European situation there are major countries that consider
not only economically but also strategically themselves competitive with each other, that do not have a sense
of community in the way the Europeans do, and that direct their
policies in part against each other. Now as we heard here yesterday, which I agree with - America is in a strong position
vis-a-vis Asia because it has better relations with each of its
players than they have with each other. So we should be able to
achieve an equilibrium provided we understand
that our objective is to be one objective.

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Of course, when we try to play on an equal playing field, we make it difficult for ourselves to have better relations with each of them. There were some great moments when we were assaulting China the first in human rights, the second in the name of an equal and Japan simultaneously, which is the hard way of conducting Asian foreign policy. But if one agrees with that proposition, as I am sure me if it be in any sense正当 he never basically do, one also has to admit that we have no great natural talent in conducting that sort of foreign policy, even though I believe that Asian relations and Korean relations cannot be understood except in such an analysis.

But let me go back to something Newt Gingrich said yesterday and which I thought was very important. When you look at the great transitions in international affairs, they occurred when there was a shift in economics as well as a shift in the human consciousness of who was related to whom. In the late 18th Century, it would not have occurred to anybody that a ruler was a foreigner because he spoke a foreign language. Fifty years later it was conventional wisdom that those who spoke the same language should be organized

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They coincided, as Newt pointed out yesterday, with changes in technology and economic organization, which luckily coincided with a change in human consciousness.

Many mistakes were made with respect to Mexico. For example, I don't think anybody fully understood the volatility of investment funds being moved into a country for purely speculative purposes by institutions which, unlike the banks, have no permanent interest other than to maximize their immediate profits and which are

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As far as the United States is concerned, the change in political
consciousness that I believe is ahead of us — of which I spoke
briefly yesterday, and Professor Kirk this morning — is also a
reorientation of our thinking from East-West to North-South, at
least in the Western Hemisphere. If that had been fully
understood, we would have presented the Mexican loans not as a way
of keeping unwanted immigrants from coming to the United States or
as a way of promoting American jobs, but in the way that I conceive
it, namely this:

Conventional wisdom holds that the world will become a global
trading system. Though I think that is a proposition which
requires examination, it is in any event apt to develop into a
series of regional trading systems. I also believe that the United
States, powerful as it is, will, in the face of the foreseeable

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We have done the right thing with Mexico, but we have justified
it in a way and tied it to conditions that are so onerous that our
justification may undo the courageous actions we have taken -
partly because we have not settled in our own minds what our view
not clearly but a concept common destining
to be killed in
of the future should be.

There are areas of the world that I have not covered, such as
Islam, because I don't fully understand all the movements going on
there. But in a foreseeable future, Europe and America will have
to react to either its possibilities or its frustrations. When

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refugees start showing up, when terrorism becomes global, when
vital interests are threatened, it will become necessary to develop
common positions.

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**QUESTIONER:** Thank you. Alan Gerson. Dr. Kissinger, should
President Clinton go to Moscow to celebrate the Russian celebration
of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war?

**DR. KISSINGER:** In a normal world, except for Chechnya, there
would be overwhelming reasons to go to Moscow. I actually have
great sympathy for his wanting to go there. Still, I would find
it painful and I think most of our European allies would find it
painful if he went there while the war is still going on in
Chechnya and the Russian Army has killed so many people.
Nevertheless, I understand the need for symbolically showing that

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we knew how to cooperate once. It's certainly not an easy question for him.

MR. TAYLOR: Joe.

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MR. TAYLOR: David?

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DR. KISSINGER: We did not break up the Soviet Union. Yeltsin broke up the Soviet Union. The borders of Ukraine are the borders that were recognized in the CIS when the Soviet Union broke up. So I have no fixed view on where the borders of Ukraine should be. I do have a fixed view that when you are a nation of 58 million and a member of the United Nations, your neighbors cannot challenge your borders without violating accepted rules of international

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