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# Diplomacy

The Honorable Henry A. Kissinger
Former Secretary of State, National Security Adviser

18 April 1994

Let me talk about what concerns me about the present state of foreign policy. The fundamental problem of United States foreign policy is a conceptual one. It arises from our history and our experience. There is no other nation in the world that was ever consciously created with a clear cut beginning. It was a nation that was explicitly dedicated to the vindication of the idea of liberty. All other significant nations resulted from an evolution. There was no other major nation that had no powerful neighbors ever or was protected by two great oceans. For the greater part of American history, the concerns that dominated the foreign policy thinking of other societies did not apply. Other nations had narrow margins for survival. They had to make careful calculations in which a misjudgment would involve their survival. None of this applied to the United States.

Indeed, there was no need to participate in international affairs at all. We had a ridiculously small military establishment through the nineteenth century. Until about 1890, we had an insignificant navy. Early in the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt attempted to develop, and did develop, a very sophisticated approach that would have made the United States a major power like other countries, concerned with the balance of power, international equilibrium, very relevant to our present period in many respects. But it disappeared from the scene, and it was superseded for the rest of this century by the approach of Woodrow

Wilson, which was peculiarly American. It was peculiarly American in the sense that it said, "Foreign policy is a question of good and evil." Relations between states are normally peaceful, a proposition nobody challenged in spite of the fact that there was not a shred of evidence for it. War has to be caused by evil individuals. There are two approaches for dealing with evil individuals: You destroy them or you convert them. These themes ran through American diplomacy for the rest of this century. By the time America ended World War I, the German emperor had governed for twenty-nine years. About him, Winston Churchill said, "He was a fairly reasonable man who wanted nothing out of life except the victories of Napoleon the First without having to fight his battles." Churchill said further, "If you're on top of a volcano, you might as well smoke."

Until we came into the war, nobody had ever thought of the proposition that they couldn't coexist with him. When we came in, we said, The problem is the emperor; he's got to go. But after he went, we didn't know what to do because now the world was supposed to be automatically peaceful. We had no idea of the structure of the world, something we've repeated over and over again.

## Hitler as a Psychotic Enemy

In World War II, we had a real psychotic in Hitler. There, it was appropriate to overthrow the system. We had as an ally a man with certain paranoid, murderous tendencies. Joseph Stalin managed to kill as many Russians as the Germans did. In fact, I know a man from Georgia who says, "The reason he is so popular in Georgia is because he fulfilled the age old Georgian dream—finally, they managed to kill as many Russians as they had always wanted to." During the war he was transmuted in the American discussion as "Uncle Joe," the benign, almost loveable old gentleman. Harry Hopkins wrote about him from Yalta, "We have no doubt of the moderation and good will of Joseph Stalin, but we do not know what sinister forces might be lurking in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to thwart his design." We can only hope Stalin didn't have good intelligence in our system because if he saw people lurking in the dark recesses of the Kremlin, he would have started another major purge. It took us three years to analyze Russian motivations.

This tendency to look at foreign policy, not from the point of view of structure, but from the point of view of personality has been dominant. I often get criticized because I am supposed to be an advocate of the balance of power. I am not an advocate of the balance of power. It's not something you can advocate. I say this: There is no other nation

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that has brought as much idealism and as much dynamism into foreign policy as the United States. Most of the good things that have happened in this century have been done by American dedication. No other country would have taken it upon herself to rebuild the whole world at the end of World War II.

## Harry Truman and Foreign Policy

When I was a very young professor, I met Harry Truman. I was sort of a peripheral consultant for Kennedy then. He said, "What have you learned?" I said, "I have learned that bureaucracy is the fourth branch of government, and the president cannot do everything he wants." Harry Truman used a word I cannot repeat in the presence of ladies and which I will euphemistically call "nonsense." He said, "The president can do anything he wants provided he really knows what he wants." It's a very idealistic notion. Then I asked him, What did you that you are most proud of? He said, "I'm proud of the fact that we totally defeated our enemies, and then we brought them back as equals to the community of nations. I'd like to think only Americans could do that." He's right, only Americans could have done this.

## Balance of Power

The balance of power was not somebody's invention. It occurred when the universal empire based on the church and on the Holy Roman Empire fragmented into a series of middle size and smaller states. In such a world, you can have peace only in one of two ways—only by one state dominating all the others or by some equilibrium. America lived in an unexplored continent, so idealism was possible. Europe lived in the school of hard knocks where little mistakes could have catastrophic consequences. They had to live with the balance of power. My point now, and why I am going into this historical disquisition is this, the great things in American foreign policy occurred when we had an ideological enemy who was also a geopolitical enemy. We didn't have to choose between security and morality where our values and our interests were conjoined, and this is why we managed to go forth with all the ups and downs, to a tremendous victory.

## No Ideological Enemy Today

Look at the world today. There is no ideological enemy. There is no geopolitical enemy. In the collapse of these empires, ethnic rivalries of an unbelievable kind have come to the surface again. What is the United States supposed to do? What guiding principles can we possibly

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apply? This is our problem. This is what I try to address, but I am not even insisting on my answers. I am insisting on my question. It doesn't do any good to say, Balance of power is something unethical. In the world in which we live today, we can either try to dominate or we must try to create some equilibrium. We have to know why we act. We have to do that in terms of a definition of the national interest.

That's another thing we don't like to do. If you read the statements of American presidents throughout this century, at least since Theodore Roosevelt, we are the only country in the world that prides itself on the fact that we are altruistic. We always pride ourselves on the fact that we have no national interest. At the end of the Gulf War, President Bush said, "The reason everybody cooperated with us was they knew we didn't have any interest in this area, that we were defending international law and resisting aggression." Now these are classical American views but try to apply them in the present period.

## Crisis in Somalia

We did try to apply them in Somalia, resulting in starvation for many. Nobody raises the question, when it hits our television that simultaneously there are ten other starvations in the world. Those other starvations are almost as awful, maybe more awful in some places. But the networks had decided not to cover those. So Somalia became the fashionable crisis of the moment. It was typically American that we tried to ease it. Sending humanitarian aid and financial aid was absolutely a correct expression of the American ethos. But when we sent troops in, we had the problem that only one of two things could happen—either the troops would have to stay indefinitely and not intervene in the clan warfare that had produced the starvation in the first place, or we would try to end the clan warfare and establish some sort of a government. If we did the former, we would have forty thousand troops in a place of the world no American had ever heard of before, forever unsustainable. If we intervened, we would face casualties, and we very soon found the price America was willing to pay for Somalia. It was less than eighteen casualties. Because as soon as we suffered eighteen casualties, we quit. The question everywhere is, What are we trying to do? What is our objective? What price are we willing to pay for it? What strategy will get us there? If we can't answer those questions, we flounder from crisis to crisis, and we will make it worse and worse.

## Crisis in Rwanda

Right now, in Rwanda there are more horrors than in almost any other-

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er part of the world in recent years. Thousands, tens of thousands are being slaughtered, yet I've heard no American say we should send troops there to stop it. And that's correct. I'm against sending troops there to stop it, too, because we cannot be the world's policeman. In the nineteenth century, John Quincy Adams said, "We cannot sally forth to slay distant monsters." It's not exactly true. There are some distant monsters we have to slay. There are some we have to limit, and there are some about which we can't do anything—That we've got to get clear in our minds. We take the situation in Bosnia. It's in many respects a human nightmare. But what is it we are trying to do? It has never been clarified. Nobody understands what we are trying to do. Until a week ago, I, as student of foreign affairs, had never heard of Goradze.

What is the average American to think of these situations? Bosnia has never been a nation in history. It was an administrative subdivision of Yugoslavia which, when Yugoslavia broke up, in a fit of absent mind-edness, was made a nation because all the others were made nations. In Bosnia, you had Serbs, Croats, and Muslims who couldn't live togeth-er in a big Yugoslavia, so what made anyone think they could live together in a small Bosnia? It should have been made a United Nations, or a NATO, or a European trusteeship because one weird attribute of these three nations is they seem to be able to live together as long as not one of them governs the others. It's when you want to put one of them in charge of the others, then all hell breaks loose. I don't want to get into the history of Bosnia.

## American Reaction to Bosnia

I want to talk about the American reaction to Bosnia. Once war start-ed, which anyone knowing Serbian and Bosnian history should have known was nearly inevitable, we had no criteria to operate on. We might have said early on, and maybe should have said, that we will resist eth-nic cleansing and that we will punish anybody who engages in inhu-man-e, genocidal activities. That would have been an understandable objective. But we got ourselves drawn into endless mediation to estab-lish dividing lines between the various nationalities. It is not possible to convince American mothers they should risk the lives of their chil-dren for the precise dividing line in localities they've never heard of and whose relation to American security is so problematical.

In the process of this confusion, we have oscillated between these Wilsonian notions that imply that wherever there is a wrong, Ameri-ca has to engage. We then prudently withdraw. Our prudence has under-mined our morality. We didn't even get the benefit of our moral affir-

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mations. In one week we have gone from saying we will not intervene to two air strikes, to saying now we're going back to diplomacy which creates an impression and a reality of total incoherence. This damages us, not just in Bosnia, but anywhere. I'm not saying there's an easy solution. I'm not even saying that there is a solution. I'm saying that we must know what we are trying to do. We have to explain it to the American public. We have to explain the likely cause. We have to define the strategy over a medium and long period of time, and if we're not willing to do that we are just making ourselves feel good, and we are achieving nothing. We're achieving the opposite of what we want.

## Our National Interest

I'm not saying it is easy to define what our national interest is at the time. This American notion that we have to deal with personalities and not with structure led to the strange situation that having won World War I, we contributed to a peace that left Germany stronger than it was before. Before World War I, Germany was surrounded by big powers. After World War I, it was surrounded by little countries. It was only a question of time until it began to exert pressure on these small East European countries.

## Russian Foreign Policy

We have had the collapse of communism, one of the great diplomatic and political victories of all time. Now we have to deal with Russia, China, and other societies. We've now got to find some nice midwest-ern type American or American equivalent Russian who should gov-ern in Russia. We first backed Gorbachev and then we back Yeltsin, and I know you were all watching me on David Brinkley yesterday so I don't have to explain to you exactly what happened. Even on that sophisticated show someone asked me, Well, if we don't do certain things in Bosnia, will that not help Zhirinovsky? My answer is, Zhiri-novsky is Yeltsin's problem; Yeltsin is our problem.

We deal with Russian foreign policy. We can't take care of the oppo-sition of the government that we are dealing with, especially when that government already has troops all over the former Soviet Union and is already pressuring all its neighbors into joining its defensive arrangement. Only last week that practically ended the independence of Belarus, and at this moment Russia maintains troops in Estonia, Latvia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Moldavia and pressures the Ukraine for the privilege of defending the Ukrainian border which is another way of saying they want to put their troops back on the Polish bor-

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der. That's our problem, the actual foreign policy of Russia.

Yes, I favor friendly relations with Russia. I am not at all opposed to economic assistance to Russia, within certain limits. But I am opposed to this obsession with playing domestic politics in Russia. If we look at the realistic policy of the Russian government, it is an adaptation of Czarist foreign policy. That's what you would expect. When a nation has been carrying on in a certain way for 400 years, you can say it has a certain proclivity in this direction. It will not stop easily. I gave a speech in Moscow about a year ago in which I said to a very high-level group, I want nothing from Russia, no huge demands personally. What I want from Russia is, 'you stay within your borders.' You have eleven time zones going from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok, so you shouldn't feel too claustrophobic. If you stay within these borders, we can have an excellent relationship. It was the most disastrous speech I ever gave. It did not strike what you would call a warm chord with the Russian audience. That's not what they want to do.

Now I'm not saying we need to return to the Cold War. I say we need to deal with the Russians as adults who have their own history, totally different from ours. They've never had a separation of church and state. They've never had capitalism. They've never had an Age of Discovery. Their premise is they've been a feudal society through most of their history and then they were a totalitarian society. We cannot solve our foreign policy problem in terms of domestic change, and we are sliding in Serbia and Bosnia into a weird situation that has similarities to World War I, with Russia on one side backing one Balkan country and us on the other side backing another Balkan grouping. Neither of us have any major interest in the precise issues that are going on there. We need a Russian policy that treats Russia as a great power, uses opportunities for cooperation, and builds economic and cultural ties but also tries to deal with this problem of expansionism.

## Russia and NATO

This is one reason I have opposed this proposition that Russia be given some ties to NATO so strenuously. Because if Russia is a member of NATO in any way, NATO becomes an absurdity. When everybody is allied to everybody, nobody is allied to anybody. Now, that is one problem.

## U.S.-China Relations

Take China. Here's a nation that has governed itself for three thousand years and managed to do it without conspicuous advice from the

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United States. It is not a natural proposition to them that they should adjust their domestic arrangements to American premises. It's not self-evident to Chinese leaders. That's a billion and a half Chinese, or a billion, two hundred million, which is a problem of government that is unique in the world. We have no reason to abandon our human rights convictions. But we have to relate them to certain other realities. Here is a nation that has grown at the rate of 10 percent to 15 percent a year for the last twelve years and is expected to grow at the rate of 8 plus percent for the foreseeable future. That is a tremendous economic reality. To exclude ourselves from it is a wound that we inflict on ourselves and that has to be seen in relation to what we are trying to achieve. In 1957, the Russians cut off China from one day to the next, and they were its only high tech economic supplier. All the Russian technicians were withdrawn. All the Russian factories were closed down. The Chinese tightened their belt, and ever since then Sino-Russian relations have not been restored fully. It's not an easy decision and most important—I'm not even talking economics alone—it is inconceivable to have stability in Asia without at least having some dialogue with China.

Just look at a map. Look at the other elements in Asia. Look at the sixty million overseas Chinese. We will be alone, absolutely alone, if we cut ourselves off from China on these issues. I believe we should make progress on human rights, and I think we can make progress on human rights. But we have to also put it into some relationship that the Chinese can understand, which has to be in the strategic, political, and economic field. It all comes back to my basic proposition. I'm not saying that there's a master recipe you can apply or that you can write out in precise detail what America should do in every situation. I am saying, we need a new way of thinking about foreign policy—not because we have failed but because we have succeeded. We have achieved everything that one can attain with traditional American approaches.