CONVERSATION WITH HENRY KISSINGER

LAQUEUR: Your studies on 19th century diplomatic history are, of course, well known. You now work on your memoirs. What specific problems do you face in your work on the contemporary period? Or, to be precise, what are in your view the main difficulties facing the contemporary historian, who, unlike you, was not a participant in the events he intends to describe.

KISSINGER: I have been struck by the difficulties historians will have in forming reasonable historical judgments about the contemporary period. In the nineteenth century, communication between diplomats and their governments was very difficult and it was therefore necessary for the governments to give rather conceptual instructions and for the diplomats to explain the philosophy of their own actions. It was impossible for the participants at the Congress of Vienna, for example, to receive day-to-day tactical instructions on how they should conduct their negotiations. Historians can therefore read the documents -- which are mercifully not all that plentiful -- and form some impression of what the various individuals wanted to achieve.

Today communication is instantaneous. There is no need for either government or ambassador to give an elaborate explanation of why certain things are being done. Instructions very often simply tell the diplomat what he is supposed to say at a particular session. Moreover, since the danger of leaks

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is overwhelming, anybody who wants to achieve a successful diplomatic career confines his communications to those practical instructions. One result is that an enormous amount of materials accumulates, that can be selectively leaked, that cannot possibly be studied by any one scholar. The instructions go out in so many different channels and under so many different classifications that I daresay that it will be impossible for somebody who has not been a participant to determine what was crucial and what was peripheral, what was written to keep the bureaucracy quiet, what was written for purposes of later disclosure, and what was written to be implemented.

A second result is that the documents do not provide a reliable guide to the ideas and passions of the participants. This will make it terribly difficult for historians and statesmen of the future to use our records as we historians have used those of the past. Whether this will have a deleterious effect on statecraft remains to be seen, for the practice of diplomacy is not something that can be learned from texts, historical or otherwise.

LAQUEUR: It is difficult for the historian to learn about modern diplomacy. Which again raises the reverse question, discussed endlessly and inconclusively, whether the knowledge of the past is necessarily of help to the statesman?

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KISSINGER: Foreign policy is a form of art and not a precise science, something that some professors have great difficulty grasping. On the other hand, the conduct of foreign policy requires in each instance a recognition of comparable situations. We can talk forever about the "balance of power" or "legitimacy" or the "impact of personalities," and yet as every new case arises, that knowledge will be empty if one does not understand what the elements of power are, how legitimacy is conceived, and what the impact of structure on events can be. That requires an intuitive feeling, which can be partly taught from history but which is partly indefinable.

LAQUEUR: In other words, the statesman is seeking to solve the same type of question as the scholar, but without the benefit of leisurely analysis. But it is also true that the statesman faces problems of verification. More often than not he has to guess at the realities he is dealing with. If so, by what principles should he be guided in analyzing foreign policy and what are the main pitfalls to be avoided?

KISSINGER: Yes. The statesman has to make a whole series of judgments that he cannot prove while he is making them. He has to deal with other units (whatever they are called -- nations, regions, groups, institutions, continents), that are not necessarily subject to his will, and he therefore has to strike a balance between the capabilities of the other parties and their intentions. A statesman can escape his dilemma

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by assuming that the other party is always benevolent. If his judgment should turn out to be wrong, however, he may have produced something irretrievable. Consequently, one of the purposes of statesmanship must be to seek to restrict the significance of the other's intentions by one's own actions.

In the abstract, it might appear that it is better to gear policy to the capabilities of the other side rather than to its intentions. Yet if this is carried to an extreme, it leads to a policy that seeks empire or hegemony for oneself. The only way to be sure the other side is not capable of harming you is to reduce it to impotence. Absolute security for one side must mean absolute insecurity for all other sides. For example, the debate that often goes on, over whether the purposes, say, of the Soviet Union are defensive or offensive, could be beside the point. The key question may not be merely whether a country feels threatened, but what it takes to reassure it. If a country is only reassured by the impotence of all its neighbors, then the trend of its policies will be toward hegemony, whatever its motives may be. Defensive motives can therefore lead to aggressive foreign policies.

Any statesman must strike a balance between capability and intention. He cannot rely entirely on the goodwill of another sovereign state, because that would be an abdication of foreign policy. He cannot base his policies on physical preeminence alone, because unless he is willing to establish a world empire, this will only tend to unite his enemies and force

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him to attempt a cynical and dangerous policy of divide and rule, or other such measures. The structural problem of foreign policy is therefore to try to guarantee the relative security and therefore also the relative insecurity of all the parties. Along with this, some common sense of values must be found so that the participants will not constantly attempt to overthrow the international order.

The application of these principles depends on the con-
ception of a sovereign unit, on what the sovereign units are
capable of doing to each other, and on what these units want
to do to each other. One tremendous change in the internation-
al system occurred at the time of the change from the eighteenth
to the nineteenth centuries, when the feudal order broke down
and the nation-state emerged. Every feudal ruler was threaten-
ed, no matter how benevolently he governed, no matter what his
intentions were, because the concept of a legitimate political
unit had changed. The same was true at the end of the Colonial
period. It is clear that all these colonies did not feel op-
pressed at every period in their history. A few thousand
Britishers could not possibly have colonized India without the
support of a significant proportion of the population. The
change in values that made colonialism appear intolerable was
brought in part by the colonizers themselves, and it must be
recalled that the concept of an Indian nation was unheard of
in the eighteenth century. The ideas brought in by the colo-
nizers changed the concepts of legitimate authority, and there-

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fore brought about a revolutionary situation for British rule in India. The same is true in many other parts of the world. If there is a change in the idea of a legitimate unit, you will automatically have a transformation of the international system and a period of upheaval; this is one of the problems of the contemporary period.

The second problems is what nations are capable of doing to each other. In the eighteenth century, it was a matter of total irrelevance whether China was hostile to the West or vice versa. There was no means by which they could interact on each other in any consistent manner. The technical capability for imposing the will of one region on another simply did not exist. The various regions of the world therefore conducted their foreign policy in virtual isolation from each other, without even any real knowledge of each other. Totally different styles of foreign policy were designed in the East and West. In Europe, foreign policy was based on a group of more or less equal sovereign states that balanced off each other's power. In Asia, foreign policy revolved around a hegemonial power, one country that dominated the whole region by its cultural and physical strength and which never had to think of balance of power as it was conceived in the West. And the conduct of foreign policy today, by China, for example, is quite different from that in the West.

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Finally, any analysis of foreign policy must obviously
include an evaluation of other units' intentions: what do they
>want< to do to one another? But underlying this are the more
fundamental dimensions of analysis I have described.

LAQUEUR: Any newsman who wants to write something even modestly
profound about you and the ideas guiding you mentions the enor-
mous debt you owe to Metternich. As a result there has been a
veritable Metternich renaissance. I suspect you may not feel
altogether happy about this; however intrinsically interesting
the Metternich period, he was clearly, after all, within an
international system that came to an end a long time ago.

KISSINGER: The unfortunate problem for the "Metternich theory"
is that I really wanted to write a book about Bismarck, and I only started
writing about Metternich as a counterpoise to Bismarck in order to
understand the context which Bismarck inherited. The discus-
sion of Metternich grew so long, and I was drawn off into so
many other things, that I never got around to finishing the
Bismarck book, which is still only half written and was pub-
lished as an article. So it simply isn't true that I was ex-
tremely influenced by Metternich, who operated under quite
different conditions.

However, there are a number of aspects to that period
that I found fascinating. One is that they managed to create
an international system that lasted a hundred years, which is
a lot better than any of their successors. Paradoxically, all

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of their successors said they were making permanent peace and they were lucky if it lasted a generation. The people who made peace at the Congress of Vienna thought they would be lucky if it lasted a decade, and it lasted a hundred years, which shows that statesmen are not always the best prophets.

The Metternich period had many of the elements that reappeared in later periods. Hundreds of feudal states were being consolidated into larger, national units, which meant that all the traditional power relationships had to be adjusted both physically and conceptually. As always in revolutionary periods, the emerging new forms existed alongside the old ones. Furthermore, when Napoleon's invasion of Russia failed, the question of a major war emerged, because it suddenly became conceivable to defeat French hegemony.

The American approach to war has always been that war and peace are discrete elements of policy: that you fight a war, you defeat your enemy, and then you make peace and live happily ever after. The difference between this naive romanticism and the approach of the statesmen at the end of the Napoleonic Wars is very striking. At the end of World war II General Bradley wrote in his autobiography, very scathingly, that the British were obsessed with the Balkans and with southern Europe. He said that of course there was no great military goal to be sought, but what the British lacked in military goals they made up in political opportunity -- as if there were something wrong with this, as if it were somehow sacrilegious to seek a political objective in a war.

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A problem emerged at the end of the Napoleonic Wars that was quite similar to the one that existed at the end of World War II. As the Russian armies entered Central Europe, they became the dominant factor in European politics; the more territory they acquired, the greater their ability to determine the shape of the settlement. As the end of the Second World War approached, virtually no attention was paid to this issue, and the post-war world has, of course, been profoundly affected by the decisions about the location of lines of demarcation and the exercise of political control in areas occupied by military force. It has taken us thirty years to establish some equilibrium on the continent of Europe, and even then it has required the permanent presence of American forces to maintain the equilibrium.

The chief actors at the Congress of Vienna would not permit any military operations to be conducted without having some political goals met. They did not fight a war for unconditional surrender; they fought a war in which Russia had to agree to some political structure as a price for military advance. In the post-war period these agreements limited the Russian capacity to impose their will. To be sure, this is not a very glorious way to fight a war, but it has the significant advantage of linking the bargaining that follows a war to the actions that occurred during it.

The second interesting aspect was the relationship between legitimacy and equilibrium, between intentions and capabilities. There was an attempt to create a moral consensus

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(on a moral basis that would be quite unacceptable today) that united enough countries in a common approach to give them each a stake in maintaining the peace. There was a rather subtle solution to the German problem. Germany has traditionally been either too strong or too weak for the peace of Europe. When Germany was very weak, as it was in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, it tempted invasions from all sides. When it was very strong, it was tempted to attack all of its neighbors. A Germany strong enough to defend itself against all of its neighbors simultaneously was strong enough to defeat each of them singly.

Therefore, it had a tendency to produce an armaments race by its very existence, quite apart from its intentions. In the period between 1815 and 1860 a loose confederation of German states was created, that was strong enough for defense but too disunited for attack. The Confederation was capable of resisting pressures from the outside without being able to generate pressures of its own.

LAQUEUR: There are interesting lessons to be learned about the relationship between legitimacy and equilibrium and peace. But I am sure you will agree that the modern period in the history of diplomacy starts with Bismarck.

KISSINGER: Of course. Without going into the specifics of his diplomacy, Bismarck essentially believed that an international system can be based entirely on the balance of power. The

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restraints that had been imposed by the common adherence to legitimate principles, along with the convictions that had developed since the eighteenth century, were so much baggage for him. Every state should be free to conduct its own policy based on its own conception of national interest. If it calculated correctly it would understand that there are inherent limits to its strength, and it would produce a rather moderate foreign policy. But at the same time it placed all its energies on the balance of power. Through extraordinarily skillful and extremely moderate foreign policy, Bismarck managed to create a united Germany and maintain the peace for about forty years, even after upsetting the previous system.

Contrary to popular belief, a policy based on pure balance of power is the most difficult foreign policy to conduct. It requires, first of all, a constantly correct assessment of the elements of power. Secondly, it demands a total ruthlessness and means that statesmen must be able to ignore friendship, loyalty, and anything other than the national interest. Third, it requires a domestic structure that will tolerate if not support this strategy. Fourth, it requires the absence of both permanent friends and permanent enemies, because as soon as a permanent enemy exists, freedom of maneuver is immediately reduced.

After Germany defeated France in 1871, the German generals insisted on the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, something that Bismarck fought very bitterly, and which caused him to say,

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"I have achieved much more than I thought desirable in this war."
He was correct: France became a permanent German enemy, and Germany's freedom of maneuver was greatly reduced. Indeed, the paradox of the German victory was that it, along with the German unification which followed, produced the very structural dangers that Bismarck sought to avoid. A united Germany was a threat to each of its neighbors; its very existence forced them into an alliance. Subsequent German leaders tried to be "reliable" and consistent in foreign affairs, but this only compounded their problems, for the more rigid their policy, the more united their neighbors became.

All of this is crucial in understanding the great tragedy in Western history: the outbreak of the First World War. There was no reason for this war that justified the enormous numbers of casualties inflicted, the destruction of material and human values, and the overthrow of practically all the political systems that entered the war. There was an unfortunate combination of circumstances. First, the entry of a major new power -- Germany -- into the international system produced a profoundly unsettling effect. This is inevitable, just as it is today in the instance of the growth of Soviet power. When a country acquires enormous additional resources of power in a relatively short period, it forces adjustments on the other participants in the system. When that country has mediocre leader-

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ship, unaware of the implications of their actions, the situation
can become -- as it became -- highly unmanageable. Bismarck's
balance of power system rested on the existence of great European
statesmen in every generation. Alas, most statesmen are mediocre,
and it was not evil intention but mediocrity that produced World
War I. None of the political leaders of Europe understood that
their system was tending towards confrontation. None of them
understood that a war with modern weapons would be violently de-
structive. None of them understood that they were making military
plans that would spread a war over at least all of Europe. None
of them understood that they were heading into a four-year conflict.
The Germans started out with what was called the "nightmare of
coalitions" and began making military plans to protect themselves
against an attack from both sides. They then modified it to a
plan to knock out one of their opponents quickly so that they
could then turn on the other. By the turn of the century, Ger-
man military plans required that even if one of their neighbors
did not attack, the Germans would have to attack them. Germany
was intent on knocking one neighbor out before the other one
could mobilize.

Each of the European countries had drawn lessons from
history that made a catastrophe highly likely. The Austrians,
for example, decided that Serbia was like Sardinia, and that
they had to knock it out before it organized all of the Balkans.
All of them made military plans according to their individual
judgments of history, and the military decisions ran away with
political judgment in the end.

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At the end of June, 1914, when the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, no European leader thought that there was a serious situation, and they all went on vacation (except, unfortunately, the Austrians). The French went on a state visit to Russia, and the German Emperor went into the Norwegian fiords. By the time they were all back in their capitals, so many military decisions had been taken that the mobilization schedules ran away with political decisionmaking.

There is a lesson to this story, and it regards balance of power. A balance is important -- perhaps even more so today than during Bismarck's lifetime -- but if a balance of power becomes an end in itself it becomes self-destructive. A country without strength will become the plaything of forces out of its control, but a country that makes its decisions only on military grounds will be dragged into adventures with consequences it cannot foresee. We have to learn from World War II, when a preponderance of strength in one country tempted it to attack, but we also have to learn from World War I, when a balance of strength produced a war because nobody got it under political control and put it in the service of foreign policy.

None of the European statesmen had the foggiest idea of going to war in the summer of 1914. They thought they were going into a crisis similar to one they had surmounted many times in the previous decade. Not one leader in Europe would have gone to war in August 1914 if he had known what the world would look like four years later. The great watershed in European politics was this horrible war, which came at the end of a century of be-

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lief in uninterrupted progress, and which led to the slaughter
of ten million people for a purpose that nobody could really de-
fine. It was all very well to say that the Kaiser had to be over-
thrown, but he had never been considered the incarnation of evil
until mounting casualties forced each country to invent war aims
in order to justify what they had already done.

LAQUEUR: Seen in retrospect, what was the purpose (if any) of the First World War and in what way did it constitute the "watershed" you just mentioned?

KISSINGER: If there was any real purpose to World War I, it was that of destroying German hegemony, but the Versailles peace settlement was more favorable to German expansion than the world that existed previously. Before the war Germany had France on one side and Russia on the other, with Britain commanding the seas. After the Peace Conference, Germany came to be surrounded by weak successor states of uncertain domestic strength. None of them was capable of resisting Germany. Moreover, Russia -- the Soviet Union -- was no longer part of the European system, and the weak states were at least as afraid of the Soviet Union as they were of Germany. In short, the diplomats had paid insufficient attention to the structure of the post-war world.

The result was that French vigilance was the only hope
for European peace. Peace could be preserved if France had a
hairtrigger response and if Germany was permanently disarmed.
France had the permanent obligation of becoming the policeman