MILITARY POLICY IN THE COLD WAR

Lecture by Henry A. Kissinger
at the University of New Mexico

March 27, 1964

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen -- Before you get too impressed by the list of publications that were mentioned, I should point out what a British Reviewer wrote about one of my books. He said, "I don't know whether Mr. Kissinger is a great writer, but anyone finishing this book is a great reader". I am always a little bit reluctant to speak at universities which have an active Speech Department, and I can only point out that at Harvard mumbling is considered a sign of profundity. Now I must say, that I received a letter from a friend of mine here a few weeks ago, when he said I was speaking in the hall where there was the bomb scare. I must say, frankly, the news of the bomb scare had not yet penetrated to me in Cambridge, and I had to wonder whether there would be a conventional or a nuclear one. I hope you won't carry hospitality quite to this point.

I will speak to you tonight about the relationship between military policy and foreign policy in the nuclear period. This is a very difficult and complicated problem. Instinctively, most of us recoil before the prospects of any kind of war, and particularly before the prospect of nuclear war, and yet without a careful and dispassionate analysis of the requirements of security in the nuclear age there is a great danger that one brings about what one most fears. I have many students at Harvard who try to demonstrate their dedication to peace by marching around with placards asserting the desirability of peace. I respect their motives, but I have to say that the desirability of peace is not an issue. The problem in the nuclear age is how to maintain the peace and yet preserve our freedom.

The problem is difficult because we live in a world which has many potentially dangerous situations and because we are dealing with weapons which

are extremely destructive and very novel. As far as the political situation is concerned we are dealing first of all with the Soviet Union and with other communist states. Anyone who has studied communist theory must come to the conclusion that their way of looking at international affairs differs in significant respects from ours. I am not saying that Mr. Khrushchev wakes up every morning and reads Lenin in order to see what mischief he can perform during the day. Rather, the fact that they have been trained from their early years as Marxists-Leninists gives them certain basic interpretations that are almost automatic. Most communists believe that what people say and what the statesmen think is the least significant aspect of politics. What matters is the correct assessment of what they call the objective factors, namely, the social structure, the economic conditions and the physical power relationships of states. Khrushchev said within the last year that conferences reflect in their decisions an established balance of forces, depending upon victory or defeat in war or similar characteristics of an objective nature.

In other words the communists are extraordinarily sensitive to what they take to be the strategic balance in the world. They are not particularly impressed by protestations of good faith; indeed in negotiations with us the communists tend to adopt a posture very similar to that of an American psychiatrist towards his patient. No matter what our statesmen tell us, the communists believe that they understand them better than they understand themselves.

The repeated attempts by American presidents of both parties to try to prove that they were regular fellows have therefore always been beside the point. It is no accident that the recent period of relaxation of tension began not as the result of any particularly conciliatory pronouncements on the part of the United States but rather as a result of the missile crisis in Cuba in 1962, where the limitations of Soviet strength became apparent.

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This is one level which makes military policy important. Another is that all over the world more and more new states are coming into being. Many of them are in the curious position that they are states because they were administrative subdivisions of colonial empires. They don't represent a common history, or a common tradition, or a common language. They reflect the fact that the colonial power found it administratively convenient to rule in a certain way or that the imperial powers divided up, say, Africa in a particular manner. The Belgians, for example, found it desirable to govern their territories in Africa as one unit, and so today we have one state called the Congo. The French divided up their territory into some 30 administrative units and so they had 13 African states growing out of these administrative subdivisions. All of these countries have a very serious problem in establishing a sense of national identity and it is usually easier for them to establish the sense of identity **against** someone rather than **for** someone. In too many of these countries demagogues have found it desirable or possible to use foreign policy and military policy as a means of diverting the energies and concerns of their people. We have today Indonesia attacking Malaysia, Somalia attacking Ethiopia. In many parts of the world we can expect crises which are not caused necessarily by the communists and which cannot be inevitably avoided by the restraint of the Great Powers, and this is another reason why the kind of force we can bring to bear on the issues that confront us becomes of crucial importance. Much as many people, therefore, rebel against the thought of any military policy, it becomes of crucial importance for our security and for the stability of the whole free world, and for the entire world for that matter.

However, designing an adequate military policy today is complicated by a number of factors. Weapons have never been more destructive. They can be

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delivered with a speed which is unprecedented, and technology is changing at an extraordinary rate. In the past a weapons system would last for a generation. Today it is often obsolescent when it has barely gone into production. The weapons of 1945, which seemed so horrendous at that moment, are now small-yield tactical weapons. The means of delivery of 1953 are already totally obsolete. Every 5 years there has had to be a revolution in technology. At the same time the expertise which is developed is usually relevant to the previous order of technology, or to the one before that. There are therefore inevitable disputes within the military establishment and within the political leadership about the significance of the weapons with which they are dealing. The weapons that are now in the arsenals of the great countries are entirely new. In every previous period when countries went to war or threatened war they did so with weapons almost every one of which had been tested in maneuvers. Today, we have to rely on weapons which are essentially untested. It is not only that the development of the warheads is affected by the nuclear test ban. The whole weapons system is in an important way untested. We are putting into our arsenal thousands of missiles, I doubt that as many as 100 of them will have been fired. The hardness of the silos where the minutemen are located has not been tested. It depends entirely on theoretical calculations.

Now this puts an enormously great burden upon policy-making. It makes it extremely hard to develop a military policy which is adequate to our time, and it is particularly difficult because the disputes are almost all philosophical disputes and because what we are trying to achieve is something negative. It is often said, and correctly, that the purpose of our military policy is to prevent war. The term that is applied to our military strategy is "deterrence". Deterrence tries to prevent an opponent

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from taking a certain course of action. But deterrence is tested negatively by things which do not happen. Any of you who have studied logic will know that it is never possible to prove why something does not occur. Is there no war because the communists are really basically peaceful? This is what the pacificists would say. Is our military policy the best possible policy? Or is it still a barely tolerable policy? It is hard to demonstrate. And what makes the problem particularly difficult is that the only experience one has is usually with weapons which are becoming obsolescent very rapidly. So that it is possible that a certain strategy has been effective and has become dangerous, and yet it isn't possible to prove that it has become dangerous.

Every military policy has to meet several tests. First of all it has to be technically adequate. That this is not an easy matter is proved by the fact that yearly we have the most violent disputes in the Pentagon about the correct mix of our weapons system. I always tell my European friends that if they doubt the fighting spirit of the American military services they should go to the Pentagon at the time that budgetary decisions are made.

The second hurdle is after you have a technically adequate policy you have to be able to convince the political leadership that it is in fact useable, and this is becoming an increasingly difficult task. I always tell my friends who are concerned with weapons analysis that when they design a weapon system they should ask themselves, not only whether it makes sense to them, but whether the policy-maker for whom it is designed can believe in it. The disparity now between the months and years that are spent designing weapons systems and the minutes and hours that a president has available to study these weapons systems is getting to be a very grave danger. It means a military strategy that is too sophisticated and too

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esoteric and too complicated may be very satisfying to people who are
spending all their time working on weapons systems, but it may be useless
to those who had to execute the policy politically.

Thirdly, no matter how useful the policy is to us and no matter
how much our political leadership believes in it, in order for it to be
effective we have to convince our allies that it is a useful policy. In
order to prevent the chaos that I was describing before in the uncommitted
areas we have to convince the neutrals that we have in fact the capabilities
to effective ends.

And finally most crucially, the test of the effectiveness of our
military policy is not what we think about it, but what our antagonists are
thinking about it. Deterrence is effective, not because we think we have
made a formidable threat, but because the communists have believed that we
have made a serious threat. In fact, for purposes of deterrence a threat
which is meant seriously but interpreted as a bluff is less useful than a
threat which is intended as a bluff but which is taken seriously. Any
analysis, therefore, has to look very seriously into the political and
psychological problems. It is about those that I will speak mostly today.

Let me speak first of all about some of the basic assumptions of our
current military policies. When the new administration came in it based its
strategy on a method and four propositions. (Incidentally I don't quite
understand why in the fourth year of office the administration should still
be called a new administration. It may well be that by '68 they are still
a new administration). The method has been described as the "cost effectiveness"
method and what this attempts to do is to analyze the expense of destroying a
particular target in relations to the available weapons, and the test a new
weapon has to meet is whether it is so much more effective in destroying the

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target that its expense can be amortized over a reasonable period of time. Now I must say quite frankly I have serious doubts about this method. The doubt I have about this method is not that it is not very intelligent, but that it overlooks some of the most important historical experiences. If weapons systems had been designed on this basis in the past I do not believe that any weapons over the last 50 years would ever have been replaced. The German 88 was maybe 5% better than the French 75. According to the cost-effectiveness method the argument would have been you are always better off buying 10 75's than two new 88's. Well the fact is that it was just enough better to defeat the French, and in military history small margins have been decisive. We have been used to thinking of big margins. But this is not the burden of what I want to address myself to.

The basic assumptions of our current military policies are four. They are: (1) that if there is a general nuclear war it should be fought on the basis of flexible response, which means that the weapons should be directed primarily at military targets and not against cities; (2) That tactical nuclear weapons are to be reduced in significance; (3) that we should oppose the national nuclear forces of some of our allies -- particularly the nuclear forces of Great Britain and France, and (4) that we should enhance reliance on conventional forces. Now the people who designed this military policy are extremely intelligent, and it represents perhaps the most sophisticated analysis of military strategy that has been made. Nevertheless I would like to explain to you why some of the thinking in this strategy has produced certain problems.

Some of the problems are inherent in the nature of the situation. Never before in history have nations possessed this enormous capability of

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destruction. War has become a less and less reliable instrument for nat-
ional policy, and therefore the urgency to come to a settlement has been
very great. On the other hand, precisely because the recourse to war has
become so difficult diplomacy has become so sterile. Precisely because
political leaders know that they are not running a very great risk of war,
they also have no very deep incentive to change the status quo. The
rigidity of weapons technology or the rigidity of race? has produced
a rigidity in diplomacy.

Now the concern that I have about the postulates of American
strategic thought has not so much to do with their adequacy in terms of
pure military analysis. My concern is that our analysis has become so
esoteric and so complicated that I am not sure that it is possible for
our political leadership to carry it out in the crisis situations that
are likely to arise, for our allies to base their policy on it, or for
our opponent to understand what we are up to. It is all very well to
speak of central command and control, and everybody has to be in favor
of fighting a general war, if it does break out, on the basis of sparing
the civilian population if this can be done. On the other hand, if one
is realistic, one has to realize that when nuclear weapons are exploding
in a country it is going to be extremely difficult for the other side to
understand just what it is that its opponent is doing. If we try to drop
a few nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union concentrated on military targets,
will it be possible for Khrushchev to put together an adequate picture of
what we are doing, and even if he could would his incentive be the same as
ours? There is a danger in getting so complicated that one subordinates
all other considerations to what is essentially a war gaming exercise for
experts but not something that political leaders are likely to carry out.
I mention this because many of the disputes that you read about in our

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relationship with our allies are due to this difference in perspective.

As all of you know we have been embroiled in rather severe
debate with both Great Britain and France over the possession by our
allies of national nuclear forces. The American point of view has
been that the national nuclear weapons of our allies are prone to
obsolescence and dangerous and should therefore be abolished. This
has produced rather severe strain. First of all the leaders of these
allied countries are not particularly eager to read American exposit-
ions proving that a policy that they have been pursuing for ten years
is extremely foolish. Political leaders are never very eager to be described
as wasteful and foolish, and to the degree that we are trying to interfere
in what to them seems to be their internal affairs we are creating
inevitable counter-pressures. But the real issue is that we are talking
essentially strategic theory while our allies are talking about something
entirely different. They are talking about historical experience. We
ask our allies whether they can tell us any circumstance in which they
could not rely on us. But our allies live on a continent which is
covered with ruins testifying to the limitations of human foresight.
Everybody in Europe, if he looks back over what happened in centuries,
must feel that it was impossible at the beginning of any decade to
foretell what the end of that decade would look like. Our allies do
not feel that they have to know exactly all the circumstances that
might happen in order to try to reserve a measure of control over
their destinies. To them their national nuclear forces are an
insurance policy, and they feel that somebody who takes out fire
insurance does not for that reason necessarily light a fire or have
to be able to describe how the fire in a house might start. I am

not defending their view. I am simply arguing that they are
looking at the problem as a political problem.

They are looking at the problem also from the point
of view of consultation and of how they can have an impact on
our policy. We like to say that they can consult with us in
any event. Now anybody who has been in Washington knows that
there are many agencies that have a right to be consulted, but
there are only a few agencies whose views are taken seriously.
Those who are taken seriously must have some competence and
they must have some capability of independent action.

Another level of dispute has arisen with respect to
how many conventional weapons should exist. Again, this is a
very complicated technical question, and I am not going to
rehearse all the arguments for or against any particular force
levels. The problem arises in part out of a difference in
perspective. To us a conventional war inevitably looks more
attractive than a nuclear war. To our allies the memory of
conventional wars is not all that happy. The Europeans do
not see any particular reason for making very vast expenditures
for the privilege of being able to fight World War I all over
again. Again, I am not saying that they are right. I am
saying that the impact on their foreign policy of our strategy
is different from what we expect. Above all it is different
because there has been a rather severe misunderstanding over
the last 13 years. When our alliances were established we
lived in a period where the American strategic nuclear arsenal

was predominant. Most of our allies had a very great interest
in transforming their defense into unilateral American guarantees.
They were above all interested in getting the United States committed
to use nuclear weapons in their defense. At that time the Soviet
Union could not yet attack the U. S. with nuclear weapons, but
many of them were very dubious that the United States would in fact
use nuclear weapons for countries thousands of miles away. For this
reason they became very eager to have American troops stationed in
Europe. They wanted these troops, not because they were militarily
significant, but for the same reason that Marshal Foch wanted
British troops at the beginning of World War I. He was asked,
"How many British troops do you want?" and he said, "Give me one
soldier, and I'll make sure that he gets killed on the first day
of the war". The French wanted a British hostage. In the nuclear
age the price of a nuclear commitment has gone up to five divisions.
The Europeans wanted our army in Europe in order to make sure we
would use nuclear weapons. When we started developing a strategy
according to which these forces were to be militarily significant
we shook the whole basis of the military policy of the alliance.
Up to that point they had made their contributions as a form of
entrance fee to our nuclear guarantee. From that moment on they
thought they began to believe that our nuclear guarantee was de-
clining in effectiveness. But fundamentally what I'm saying is
that the range of modern weapons has introduced into alliance
discussion a completely new dimension. In the past a country that

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wanted to be defended had no choice except defending itself at its borders. It could not make defense dependent on some other country suffering devastation. Today the range of modern weapons is such that every country has the technical possibility of trying to shift the theatre of operations to some other place. Much of what goes on right now in the debate between us and our European allies concerns an argument over where a war should be fought if deterrence fails. To us a war fought in Europe is relatively more attractive. To the European, if worst came to worst, a war fought on American soil would be preferable to one which destroyed their country. There is an inevitable difference in perspective which foreign policy has to attempt to reconcile.

Then the rigidity of diplomacy that modern weapons produces leads to a phenomenon which has been called multipolarity. Now this does not mean that power is getting physically distributed around the world. It means rather the opposite. Under modern conditions, with the two great nuclear countries confronting each other, neither of them can permit a major advance by its opponent. As a result alliances have lost some of their significance. In 1962 when India was attacked by China it received the same kind of American support that Pakistan would have received under similar circumstances, even though Pakistan was formally an ally. In one of his less saintly moments Prime Minister Nehru before the Indian Parliament explained his decision to remain neutral with the

argument that by waiting until he was actually attacked he got
American weapons at next to nothing while the Pakistanis had
to pay going prices for them. If countries are protected
whether they are part of an alliance system or not, then the
incentive to become part of an alliance system is reduced.
By the same token, as long as allies know that they are going
to be protected no matter what they do they can conduct rather
independent foreign policies. One reason that President
de Gaulle can afford to be so intransigent towards the United
States is not because he doubts that the United States will
support him but because he knows the United States has no
choice except to support him. He is in the position that he
can use the American Strategic Air Command to support his own
foreign policy. Lots of American emissaries have been sent
to France to prove to the French President that strategy in
the nuclear age is indivisible, and our people generally
believe that if foreigners don't agree with us it is due to
the inevitable ignorance of foreigners. (And I am as patriotic
as the next fellow. I do not want to deny that our people are
more intelligent.) On this particular point, however, on the
indivisibility of the alliance, it is quite conceivable that
de Gaulle caught on to this before we did. It is precisely
because he knows that strategy is indivisible that he can con-
duct a separate foreign policy. We live in a curious age, in
which neutrals have the same protection as allies, and allies
can conduct the kind of foreign policy that used to be character-
istic of neutrals.

Now this is a set of structural problems which in-
dicates how intimately military policy and diplomacy connected
in the field of alliance. In the case of other areas of the
world outside of Europe we face yet another problem. We are
in the curious position of having more power than any country
has ever possessed before in history, and yet overall strength
does not guarantee particular strength. The military superi-
ority of the United States over the countries in the under-
developed portions of the world is incomparably greater than
the military superiority of the European powers over those
very areas at the time that the European countries established
colonies all over the world. And yet we have not yet found
an efficient way to bring our power to bear on these areas.
In Zanzibar a motley crew of a few hundred people is estab-
lishing a peoples republic, which may someday subvert all of
Africa. Yet our strategic arsenal is completely useless as
applied to that particular problem. In Cyprus, a country
with a population of 600,000 and no military forces never-
theless has been able to jockey us from one position to
another. We have seen in Cuba and in Panama that overall
strength does not at all guarantee particular strength,
and even in Viet Nam, where American forces are engaged,
it has proved extremely difficult to bring our power to
bear.

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I might say a few words about why it is so difficult
in an area like Viet Nam. The other day I read in an infantry
journal an account of how we were going to win the Vietnamese
war. It was described that we had trucks and helicopters, and
therefore we had great mobility and, this journal said, "We
are bound to win. Because how are the Viet Cong going to move?
They don't have trucks. They don't have helicopters". Well,
one way they are going to move, which has been forgotten in
the American army, is with their feet, and this in a country
where there are no roads is not a bad means of getting around.
But above all if you read, as I have done over the last few
weeks, the account of the past 14 years of how the Vietnamese
war was going to be won, first of all you will see that the
French accounts are almost word for word the same as the
American accounts today. And in each case the attempt is to
construct a classical military situation and to win the war
through attrition. Now the trouble in a country like Viet Nam
is that it is not at all a military problem. The targets for
the Viet Cong in the first instance are not military. Between
1959 and 1962, 12,000 village officials were killed in Viet Nam.
This means that the incentive to enter the civil service is not
particularly high. If you consider that there are only 8,000
villages in all of Viet Nam, it means that nearly two officials
for each village has been killed. Now another interesting aspect

[Lc]

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of the problem is that for the first two years of this attack
on the village officials the Vietnamese Army refused to do
something, because they thought at first it was a crime wave
and that this had to be handled by the police. There is no
way you can protect a village unless you have a very large
armed force. The Vietnamese Army today has 300,000 men,
trained by us to protect itself against a military invasion
from the north, organized into corps, divisions, of American
size with American equipment, none of which is of the slightest
relevance to the particular problem that they are facing. If
you distribute 300,000 men over 8,000 villages, which you can
do, you will find that the number of people to a village is
about 30. Therefore the problem for the Viet Cong is to get
more than 30 people against any one village, and that is easy.
The guerrillas by definition do not have to fight unless they
are ready. They need fight only where they are militarily
superior. Their goal is not to hold any particular territory.
Their goal is to create so much insecurity that orderly admin-
istration becomes impossible. People speak about the corrup-
tion of the Diem regime. And it certainly was a corrupt regime.
On the other hand it is a miracle that there was any regime at
all. When you have this rate of attrition of officials it is
very hard to see why anybody except a corrupt person would want
to be a government administrator. In Malaya the British had to
fight ten years, using 200,000 troops against 8,000 guerrillas

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that were racially different from the Malayan population -- they
were Chinese. They did not have an outside base of supply and
even then it took over ten years and it required 200,000 men.
In Viet Nam today there are 15,000 Americans and about 300,000
Vietnamese. I think it is structurally impossible to win that
war at the present scale of effort. Our method of thinking
about military force in relation to Viet Nam is almost totally
irrelevant. Large American divisions, with corps organizations,
have no applicability in this area. Our over-mechanization is a
handicap rather than a help. Above all a war like the Vietnamese
war cannot possibly be even stabilized unless a means is found to
give security to the local population, and that is not merely a
question of popularity. It has two aspects. It has the aspect
first of all of making sure that people can work for the existing
government without running the risk of assassination. No one will
work for us, no matter how much they like us, if they do not have
that elementary security. And secondly, of course, it requires a
political program which wins the loyalty of the affected population.
Now this, I would suggest, is a very difficult and subtle and
complicated task, and I do not think that we have even begun to
deal with it. This is not said critically, because it is unprecedented
situation in which all over the world we have to assume major respon-
sibilities and in which security everywhere depends on our wisdom and
our readiness. But what Viet Nam illustrates is that the way military

policy affects diplomacy is very largely today through symbolic,
almost psychological, action. What is at stake in Viet Nam is
the expectation of the people of Viet Nam. What makes it possible
for Indonesia to challenge us over Malaysia is the conviction of
the Indonesians that if they maintain their course long enough
they will be able to make us back down. Every country, and
particularly the United States, has therefore a very difficult
problem. In foreign policy any leader has the choice between
relying on his judgment of the trends of a situation and between
wanting to be certain. At the moment that action can be most
effective it isn't possible to prove that it is necessary. By
the time it is possible to prove that it is necessary a very
large effort is required. In the middle 1930's no one could
know whether Hitler was a misunderstood nationalist, whether
he had legitimate grievances, or whether he was a maniac. By
wanting to wait until one knew, the democracies had to pay a
fearful cost. They learned that he was a maniac. By the time
they were certain it was almost too late. We face this situa-
tion all over the world. No one can be certain today whether
Zanzibar is going to turn into a menace, or whether it is going
to turn into another nationalist state. No one knows whether
Indonesian plans will be satisfied after they have smashed
Malaysia, or whether it will be simply the prelude to new
demands. No one can prove the necessity of these actions at
a time when action is still effective.

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It is clear to me, however, that one of the important uses of our military policy might be to make it clear that it is risky to be an opponent of the United States constantly. As long as we always act defensively it is never clear whether what we are doing is the result of generosity or whether it is the result of panic. But how to design a military force that can be effective, and how to use it with wisdom in such a situation, is a very difficult problem.

Now there are many people who say it is so difficult that one should disarm. All I want to say with respect to disarmament is that its problems are as complicated as the problems of strategy. And again, to cast the debate in terms of whether you are for disarmament or against disarmament is meaningless. Let me give you a very crude example. Supposing tomorrow morning there were an agreement that all nuclear weapons would be abolished. What is it that then the American President would have to do. I would suggest that the American President would have to make a study of how many nuclear weapons the Soviets might be able to hide, given whatever inspection system exists -- and in a country the size of Russia there is some number they would be able to hide. He would then have to decide whether he wanted to rely on the word of the people who after all arrested the leaders of the Hungarian resistance movement while negotiating an armistice with them, and who executed them after giving them a promise of safe conduct,

or whether he would hide a few weapons of his own in order to protect
himself against those that the Soviets might be hiding. I would
think he might well do the latter, in which case he would have
substituted a secret for an open arms race. This might be edifying
to some of my students who march around with placards, but it does
not change the essential problem. The kind of analysis I have made
here would have to exist in a disarmed world as well as an armed
world. One would always have to study what the possibility of
violation is, what possibility of remobilization exists, what
problems of blackmail exist, what the problems of inspection are.
One always has to study, in an armed or a disarmed world, what
kind of a diplomatic posture is most effective. And here we
come to a very curious paradox. If we assert, for example,
that war is absolutely impossible and it is the most terrible
thing that could happen to us, we create an incentive to
threaten us with war. We face a paradox to which I do not
know whether there is an easy answer. Is it the better diplomacy
always to say that we are calm, we are collected, we are rational,
we are reasonable, we are always willing to talk -- or is it a
better diplomacy to give the impression that if you are pushed
very hard you might do something unpredictable? The former
policy is more in conformity with our values, but it also gives
an antagonist a guarantee that no matter what he does you are
going to be very collected. The latter policy is instinctively
repugnant to us. On the other hand it makes it riskier to
pressure us.

These seem to me some of the questions that have to
be answered by military policy, and I admit, and deliberately,
that I have posed more questions than I have given answers.
We are no longer in an age in which military specialists can
concentrate on weapons systems and diplomats can concentrate
on diplomacy. It is no longer possible to separate military
policy and diplomacy or arms policy and disarmament. We live
in a period in which, unless it is possible to conduct all of
these measures simultaneously, it will not be possible to
conduct any of them individually.

Comments on Dr. Kissinger's Lecture,
made by Professor Hoyt at the discussion
meeting on March 28:

In opening this discussion I would like to step for a
moment out of my role as chairman or moderator, and raise a few
questions in the form of comments on Dr. Kissinger's Lecture.

We are dealing here with a very important question:
What is the proper role of military force as a tool of foreign
policy? It seems to me that its usefulness is for deterrence
of aggression. That is, it is essentially a defensive tool.
It can be used if more or less overt aggression occurs, and in
various degrees proportional to the scale of the attack.
Conversely, it is not an answer to the problem of revolution.
To a large extent, if revolution takes place, we may have to
recognize that we have lost a round in the Cold War. All we
can do then is to adjust to it and try to influence the
revolution by non-military means in the direction of independence
and individual freedom.

Of course, it is possible that what is really external
aggression may sometimes be disguised as internal revolution.
Mr. Dulles used the term, "indirect aggression", to describe
this sort of thing. The essential difference remains, however.
To the degree that a disturbance is an external attack, military
assistance to the attacked nation may be effective. To the

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degree that what we confront is an indigenous national
revolution, military intervention does not provide an answer.
The test may be contained in the question: Which is the
national side? Or, on which side is local nationalism?

Dr. Kissinger did not talk about the Cuban problem,
but for the above reasons it seems to me that force is not an
answer to the problem of how to deal with Castro in Cuba.
He mentioned Indonesia's attacks on Malaysia. To the extent
that this is external aggression, which will arouse a
Malaysian national response, forcible intervention in defense
of Malaysia may provide the answer. The same would certainly
apply in the case of a renewed Chinese attack on India.

Dr. Kissinger mentioned the case of Zanzibar. I
wonder whether he meant to imply that "Gunboat Diplomacy"
might somehow have been advantageously used by the United
States in that instance?

Coming to the case of Viet Nam, Dr. Kissinger
suggested that the problem there was more political than
military. I was not sure that I understood how he felt we
should deal with it. There seemed to be a suggestion that
it might be advantageous to "raise the ante" by gradual
degrees in the hope of forcing a political showdown. I
have the feeling, however, that in such a showdown we might
find that China's cards were politically stronger than ours.

I wonder if Mr. Kissinger would comment a little
further on some of these points?