Speech by Henry Kissinger

given at the U.S. Capitol Historical Society's Dinner honoring the Senate

March 26, 1998

When Clarence mentioned the various positions I've held, I hope you noticed that for a while I was both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. The only reason I mention this is because, never before and never since, have relations between the White House and the State Department been as amicable as they were in those days.

To be here to celebrate the Foreign Relations Committee is something that, in some respects, fills me with ambivalence. I came here when the balance in the Senate was 62 Democrats and 38 Republicans; and you may remember that the admiration for President Nixon was not unmixed, especially among the Democrats. It was the time of the Vietnam War and we had a Foreign Relations Committee headed by Sen. Fulbright, on which there were three or four Presidential candidates, so they had strong opinions. But, having said this, we got through a tragic period in America on a level of not just amity but in an atmosphere of increasing cooperation, and even though, on paper, it should have been a period of great tension. Those senators in this room who remember that period will, I'm sure, agree that the discussions were civilized, very frequently philosophical, and raised some of the fundamental issues of our period.

Of course, there was the day Joe Biden first showed up in a hearing room. He came in and I whispered to Sparkman--he was the chairman-- that this being an executive meeting, I didn't know staffers were permitted in the room. I learned better very soon.

Fundamentally, one of the problems in government is that you always deal with urgent problems and don't often have time to deal with the important ones. You're overwhelmed with the immediate symptoms of crises and don't have enough time or incentive to deal with the fundamental issues.

Now I'm not saying that the Foreign Relations Committee always deals with the fundamental issues. But in the nature of things, it is really the obligation of the Committee to ask questions that the Administration, whichever one it happens to be, ought to deal with but does not always have an opportunity to address.

I can't say that I was always overjoyed in my days in government at the questions that were put to me. And I'm sure that the present administration is not always ecstatic about some of the issues with which it is presented. But

Speech by Henry Kissinger

given at the U.S. Capitol Historical Society's Dinner honoring the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations

March 26, 1998

When Clarence mentioned the various positions I've held, I hope you noticed that the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. The only reason I mention this is that I never since, have relations between the White House and the State Department been so good those days.

Speech by Henry Kissinger

March 26, 1998

if we look, for example, at the recent NATO debate, I think some of the fundamental problems of the alliance in fact were illuminated during this debate. I told the Chairman that I enthusiastically supported the article he wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the various amendments that had been offered and the status of the debate.

The role of raising the fundamental issues is one that is very much needed in our society today. I cannot remember a period, and I don't believe that there was a period, in which so many aspects of foreign policy were changing simultaneously and during which so many assumptions about America's relations with the rest of the world were simultaneously in need of revision.

Through the greatest part of our history, we were protected by two great oceans, we never had a neighbor capable of threatening us, and we could concentrate on refining our domestic institutions and our sense of excellence. When we did involve ourselves, we could define it in terms of a specific task to be overcome in a finite period of time and with clear-cut results. I don't know any other nation that has had that privilege. Even the Cold War provided us with a clear-cut enemy, a two-power world, an ideological challenge, a geostrategic challenge, and a world which could be embraced within that framework.

At present we live in a world in which there is no one overwhelming challenge, either ideological--there are many ideological ones but not a single overwhelming one--or strategic. On the other hand, it is a world to which we are integrally connected. A currency crisis in Thailand that nobody predicted or a month earlier any one even knew of, started a shock wave that has gone through Asia, that has not ended to this day, and for a while seemed capable of threatening our economic stability. We live in a world that is integrated economically, yet politically still operates in terms of national states and in which the political requirements are not the same as the economic requirements. That is the big challenge that we face today.

And so the fundamental question that we have to ask ourselves is, what is the national interest of the United States? What is it that we are trying to achieve? How are we going to accomplish it? What are we trying to prevent? These are tasks for which we have not yet found clear-cut answers.

We have seen it come up in the course of the NATO debate. As the Chairman knows, I am a strong advocate of NATO expansion because I believe that the historic nations of Eastern Europe, deprived of their traditional relationship with the West as a result of the location of the Red Army at the end of the Second World War, should not be prevented forever from restoring their traditions.

But the focus of the debate that has gone on is whether NATO should be a sort of open-ended club that anyone can join provided they simply meet some specific criteria. Some people, like myself, believe that an alliance must have some limit, wherever that limit is. There is no such thing as a totally open-ended relationship. Others seem to want to merge the alliance into something that begins to look like the UN in the sense that anybody can join.

That's really at the core of an underlying debate that hasn't been resolved yet and that will have to be faced in the next round of discussions. It is almost a philosophical problem in that, when you are constructing an alliance you assume it involves a group of like-minded countries protecting themselves against specific dangers - unless we are creating a system of collective security, which is an assembly of nations like the UN that have certain legal criteria for cooperation but no machinery for doing so. This debate has not been concluded. I believe that what the Committee has decided on NATO expansion has charted our course, but there will be another round in which these issues will have to be discussed.

Simultaneously, we've been faced with the situation in the Gulf. And in the Gulf we again have to distinguish between two problems. The first is how to react to Saddam Hussein's challenge of the inspection system; the second, long-term, question is, how do we protect the Gulf against the two strongest nations in the area? Based on relatively the weakest nations in the area, how can we do this as a long-term American commitment? And that cannot be answered by moving aircraft carriers in and out in response to individual challenges. We have to achieve some sense of the process we are seeking.

Similarly--and I'm just basically listing the problems in which the interaction of the Committee and of the Administration is crucial--there is apparently a big debate going on between the Administration and the Israelis on whether Israel should give up 13 percent of the territory it has occupied or 10 percent of the territory it has occupied.

I frankly do not believe this to be a worthwhile debate for the reason that, when the step-by-step approach started -- it was in fact while I was in government, 25 years ago -- there was a lot of territory to be dealt with. Israel was at the Suez Canal. Now we're talking about a small strip of territory, in effect roughly between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. That makes for about 30 to 40 kilometers that are being disputed. The difference between 13 percent and 10 percent is, what - one or two kilometers? It is an essentially trivial issue. The fundamental issue is where are we trying to go?

I was a close friend of Prime Minister Rabin, one of the great men I have known. He was trying to move things forward in a way that I believed held great promise -- very risky, but very promising. That particular approach, of taking little steps at a time, is not now going to work.

I think it is not any harder to discuss what a final settlement should look like than it is to haggle every year about two or three additional kilometers without knowing what the destination is.

The fundamental question we ought to debate is, what is the end result? And - as I have said in Israel - that it must recognize that at the end of the process there will be a Palestinian state. But it also should have the right to ask for some borders that are defensible. Those two aspects, in my view, ought to be brought into relation with each other. And that is a debate worth having. But I defy anyone to tell me what is meant by 13.1 percent as against 10.9 percent, and why we should have a huge clash on that issue. If we are going to have a debate, it should be on a fundamental issue.

Now let me talk about the crisis in Asia. It is truly astonishing that you can read so many profound economic analyses of how it happened. I serve, as Clarence pointed out, on many different boards, and some of them do business in Asia. We get lots of briefings from banks and investment banks and economists, and there wasn't one that predicted anything even remotely like what has happened.

The conventional wisdom was that these countries were fairly well run, that they were growing at the rate of 8 percent a year for 30 years, and that they were the Asian Tigers.

Now I would raise a number of questions that seem to me to be in need of addressing. One is this: we've had a Mexican crisis in the 1980s and the early 1990s. We've had a whole series of Latin American crises. And now we've had the Southeast Asian crisis. We have to ask the question of what is it about the financial system that produces these crises? Because otherwise, one of these days, one of them is going to run away and will not be controlled. What is the relationship between what the funds do, what the banks do, and similar questions?

The second big issue is, what is the relationship between the economic remedies and the political situations in the various countries?

I must tell you quite frankly that I am deeply worried about Indonesia. Here is a country of 210,000,000 people that is composed of maybe 10,000 islands that would never have been formed into one nation in the normal course of events except for the historic accident that they were all governed by the Netherlands in the colonial period. They didn't even have a common language. That had to be invented 40 years ago. Now that country cannot be

treated like an advanced industrial state. And when you go in there, as the International Monetary Fund did, and
try to rip apart the whole economy, you're also ripping apart the whole political system. And when you rip apart
the political system, you have to ask yourself, what is the aftermath?

Of course we prefer democratic outcomes. But unless you can identify some pluralistic institutions that could
emerge, it is a very uncertain prospect.

In the Philippines, when they had a change, there was Aquino, who was a well-known figure. There was the
Church that was on the side of reform. And there was the Army. In Indonesia you don't have any of these
elements. You don't have an Aquino, the army is on the side of the government, and the church -- nobody knows
what the Moslem leaders think, but they're as likely to be fundamentalist as anything else.

What I'm concerned with is that, when we go into these countries with economic prescriptions, that we don't
just turn it over to economists who are applying abstract models they learned in graduate schools in this country to
conditions that have enormous complexity.

When you create a massive change in the economy of Indonesia, the first thing that happens is that the Chinese
leave. More Chinese money has left Indonesia than the International Monetary Fund can possibly put in.

I'm not, however, saying that the Suharto regime is the only possible solution. In fact, I would have to think
that in the next presidential period there, major changes will take place, and that it is desirable that they take place.
What I am saying is that we have to look at the individual structures and think in terms of evolution rather than of
just going in there with economic packages. When you close 15 banks, the question immediately arises, what will
happen to the others? In trying to reform, you can also start a panic.

I would like as well to call attention to one other thing, namely that we've seen the first bounce of the crisis,
which was economic. Those of you who know Asia will probably agree with me that the second bounce of this
crisis will be a very nationalistic reaction to the perceived humiliations of this period. And we in this country
should be getting intellectually ready for how to deal with this and with what could emerge.

We keep talking about a free market for capital, but my impression is that many Asian countries are looking at
China and saying to themselves: they've escaped this crisis by having some controls of capital - perhaps we should
imitate it. I hope it will not get to that point, and I'm not here to give you answers. Rather I am here to say that it
is posing a whole set of issues before us.

Let us take the problem of an emerging China: we keep oscillating with respect to China between demonizing it or having sentimental feelings of eternal brotherhood toward it. Here is a country of a billion and a half people emerging into great power status that has a quite different tradition from ours.

Many Americans have the idea that every foreigner is an aspirant American. I have a friend who thinks there is no such thing as an English accent. He thinks the English put it on to intimidate Americans, and if you could just catch an Englishman unawares, say by waking him up at four in the morning, he would talk like any ordinary Midwesterner.

We have the same sort of attitude towards a lot of foreign societies, including the Chinese. Our history is 200 years old. The Chinese have 5,000 years of history. They have had 14 dynasties, 10 of which have each had a longer history than the United States. If I ask one of you when something happened, you'll give me a date. If you ask a Chinese when something happened in the past, he'll name a dynasty. Now you are getting within, if you're lucky, 200 years. After all, they've governed themselves for 5,000 years, 4,800 of which was without significant input from the United States. So there is clearly a difference in the approach to problems.

Our people here tend to like -- especially those in our current administration -- the so-called soft issues: the environment, nonproliferation, and similar issues. These are all important issues. But the Chinese have been around for 5,000 years, and they're interested, in addition to these, in strategic issues. And so the dialogue between us and them has to include some perception of the management of the emerging balance of power in Asia, especially under current conditions. As far as the United States is concerned, this is not something that should be done with either sentimentality or hostility. It should be done on the basis of a precise assessment of what we are trying to achieve. And we could go in the same way all around the world.

With respect to Russia -- is it a democracy? Can it be a democracy quickly? I must confess that my own aspiration for Russia begins with keeping it within its own borders. They haven't done that for 400 years. And I would say that if they can stay within borders that have 11 time zones, in which St. Petersburg is closer to New York than it is to Vladivostok and Vladivostok is closer to Seattle than it is to Moscow, they should not exactly feel claustrophobic.

Therefore, if we can solve that problem, many other things will follow, including an area to which huge attention has not yet been paid but to which it will be; namely the region of Central Asia, of the Caspian Sea, and its untapped oil reserves. Right now we have a glut of oil but, with the world-wide growth of industrialization and

given any foreseeable crisis in a big oil-producing country, a shortage is quite conceivable. Then, strangely enough, the way in which the pipelines are flowing from that region and who controls the production could become big issues. We not only have all these problems but we have generational problems as well.

I belong to the generation that lived through the Depression, the Second World War and the creation of the basic structures of American post-war foreign policy. We believe that American power is beneficial and capable of doing great things. Many in the Vietnam generation grew up in the midst of a bitter war. They feel that we ought to develop ourselves here at home first and not get ourselves enmeshed abroad. The post-Vietnam generation is again more on the Conservative side, but it has no experience with foreign policy.

How do we mesh these three generations in a period when technology is changing so fast, and the way one learns is changing faster yet? That is the big bipartisan challenge of our time.

Mr. Chairman, I began by saying that I cut my teeth with the Foreign Relations Committee when Sen. Fulbright was chairman and four Democratic Presidential candidates were running around. (You know, somebody said that he went to a tree-planting with Humphrey. By the time Humphrey got through, they were standing in the shade.) Those were great times indeed. And I still think of those discussions with some nostalgia because they raised important questions. And I believe that your committee, Mr. Chairman, has raised fundamental questions in this period.

I've tried to put before this group some of the issues that require national debate. For most administrations will deal with the symptoms of some of the issues I have discussed without getting down to the fundamental problems.

There was a Foreign Service Officer, Diplomat Chip Bolen, whom some of you will know, who was a distinguished ambassador. He always used to say, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." I think what we need is to chart some roads.

A Chinese friend has inflicted a proverb on me. I say inflicted, because I'm not so sure there are as many Chinese proverbs as they tell us. I think they invent them as they go along. But this particular one defines our problem rather well. He said: when there's tumult under the heavens, little problems are dealt with as if they were big problems, and big problems are not dealt with at all. When there is order under the heavens, big problems are reduced to smaller problems, and little problems should not obsess us.

Thank you very much.

Speech by Henry Kissinger

given at the Society's Dinner honoring the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations

March 26, 1998

Clarence and friends, you know this introduction leaves me in somewhat of the position in which I once found myself at a reception when a lady came up to me and said, "I understand you're a fascinating man." She said, "Fascinate me." It turned into one of the less successful conversations.

Now, when Clarence mentioned the various positions I've held, I hope you noticed that for a while I was both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. And the only reason I mention this is because never before and never since have relations between the White House and the State Department been as amicable as they were in those days.

To be here to celebrate the Foreign Relations Committee is something that in some respects, fills me with ambivalence. I came here when the balance in the Senate was 62 Democrats and 38 Republicans; and you may remember that the admiration for President Nixon was not unmixed, among the Democrats especially. It was the Vietnam War and we had a Foreign Relations Committee headed by Sen. Fulbright on which there were three or four Presidential candidates, so they had strong opinions. But, having said this, we got through a tragic period in America on a level not just of amity but in an atmosphere of increasing cooperation, and even though on paper, it should have been a period of great tension, in fact, those senators who are in this room who remember that period will, I'm sure, agree that the discussions were civilized, very frequently philosophical, and raised some of the fundamental issues of our period.

Of course, there was the day that Joe Biden first showed up in a hearing room. He came in and I whispered to Sparkman--he was the chairman--I said this was an executive meeting and I didn't know staffers were permitted in the room. I learned better very soon.

Fundamentally, one of the problems in government is that you always deal with urgent problems and don't often have time to deal with the important ones. You're always overwhelmed with the immediate symptoms of crises and you don't have enough time or incentive to deal with the fundamental issue.

Now I'm not saying that the Foreign Relations Committee always deals with the fundamental issues. But in the nature of things, it is really the obligation of the Committee to ask questions that the Administration, whichever it is, ought to deal with and does not always have an opportunity to address.

I can't say that I was always overjoyed in my day at the questions that were put to me. And I'm sure that the present administration is not always ecstatic about some of the issues with which they're presented. But if I look, for example, at the recent NATO debate, I think some of the fundamental problems of the alliance were illuminated in this debate. I told the Chairman that the article he wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the various amendments that had been offered and the states of the debate is one that I enthusiastically supported.

Now this role of raising the fundamental issue--it's deeply needed in our society today. I cannot remember a period, and I don't believe that there was a period, in which so many aspects of foreign policy have changed simultaneously and which so many assumptions of American relations with the rest of the world were simultaneously in need of revision. Through the greatest part of our history, we were protected by two great oceans, we never had a neighbor capable of threatening us, and we could concentrate on refining our domestic institutions and our domestic excellence. When we did involve ourselves, we could define it as a specific task to be overcome in a finite period of time with clear-cut results. I don't know any other nation that has had that privilege. Even the Cold War had a clear-cut enemy, a two-power world, an ideological challenge, a geostrategic challenge, and the world could be embraced within that framework.

Now we live in a world in which there is not one overwhelming challenge, either ideological--there are many ideological ones but not one overwhelming one--or strategic. On the other hand, it is a world to which we are integrally connected. A currency crisis in Thailand that nobody predicted, that a month earlier no one knows of, started a shock wave that has gone through Asia, has not ended to this day, and for a while seemed capable of threatening even our economic stability. We live in a world that is integrated economically, yet politically it is still in the form of national states and the political requirements are not the same as the economic requirements. That is the big challenge that we face today.

And so the fundamental question that we have to ask ourselves is what is the national interest of the United States? What is it that we are trying to achieve? How are we going to accomplish it? What are we trying to prevent? And what are we seeking to accomplish?

[LY]

That is a task for which we have not yet found clear-cut answers.

We have seen it in the NATO debate, for example. As the Chairman knows, I am a strong advocate of NATO expansion because I believe that the historic nations of Eastern Europe, deprived of their historic relationship with the West as a result of the location of the Red Army at the end of the War, should not be prevented forever from returning to their traditions.

But the debate that has gone on is, is NATO a sort of an open-ended club that anyone can join forever provided they just meet some specific criteria?

Some people like myself believe that any alliance must have some limit, wherever that limit is. There is no such thing as a totally open-ended relationship. Others seem to want to merge the alliance into something that begins to look like the UN which anybody can join.

That's really an underlying debate that hasn't been resolved yet and that will have to be faced in the next round of these discussions. And that is almost a philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem is, are we constructing an alliance, which means a group of like-minded countries protecting against specific dangers, or are we creating a system of collective security, which is an assembly of nations that have certain legal criteria for cooperation but no machinery for doing so, like the UN? This debate has not been concluded. I believe that what the Committee has decided on NATO expansion has set our course, but there will be another round in which these issues have to be discussed.

Simultaneously with this, we've been faced with the situation in the Gulf. And in the Gulf we have to distinguish two problems again. The first one is how do we react to Saddam Hussein's challenge of the inspection system? The second long-term question is how do we protect the Gulf against the two strongest nations in the area? Based on relatively the weakest nations in the area, how can we do this as a long-term American commitment? And that cannot be answered by moving aircraft carriers in and out in response to an individual challenge. We have to get some idea of what the process is that we're trying to achieve.

Similarly--and I'm just listing problems in which the interaction of the Committee and the Administration is crucial--right now there's apparently a big debate between the Administration and the Israelis on whether Israel should give up 13 percent of the territory it has occupied or 10 percent of the territory it has occupied.

I frankly do not believe this to be a worthwhile debate for this reason: when the step-by-step approach started -- in fact, when I was in government, 25 years ago -- there was a lot of territory to be dealt with. Israel was at the Suez

Canal. Now we're talking about a small strip of territory, in effect roughly between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, about 30 kilometers, more or less, are disputed -- 40 kilometers. The difference between 13 percent and 10 percent is what? One or two kilometers? It is an essentially trivial issue. The fundamental issue is where are we trying to go?

I was a close friend of Prime Minister Rabin, one of the great men that I have known. He was trying to move things forward in a way that I thought had great promise -- very risky, but great promise. That particular approach, I think, of doing little steps at a time is not now going to work.

I think it is no harder to discuss what a final settlement should look like than to haggle every year about two or three additional kilometers without knowing what the destination is.

I think the fundamental question we ought to debate is what is the end result? What are -- and I have said this in Israel, I have said you have to recognize at the end of the process there will be a Palestinian state. But what you have also -- have the right to ask for is some borders that are defensible.

Now I begin to talk about the crisis in Asia. And it is astonishing. Now you can read many profound economic analyses of how it happened.

I serve, as Clarence pointed out, on a lot of boards, and some of them do business in Asia. We got lots of briefings from banks and investment banks and economists, and there wasn't one that predicted anything even remotely like what has happened.

Now I would raise a number of questions that seem to me to be in need of addressing. One is this: we've had a Mexican crisis in the 1980s and the early 1990s. We've had a whole series of Latin American crises. We've had now the Southeast Asian crisis. We have to ask the question of what is it about the financial system that produces these crises? Because otherwise, one of these days, one of them is going run away and cannot be controlled.

The second thing is, what is the relationship between the economic remedies and the political situation in the
various countries?

Now I must tell you quite frankly, I am deeply worried about Indonesia. Here is a country of 210,000,000 people which is composed of maybe 10,000 islands that would never have been formed into one nation in the normal course of events except for the historic accident that they were all governed by the Netherlands in the colonial period. They didn't even have a common language. That had to be invented 40 years ago. Now that country cannot be treated like an advanced industrial state. And when you go in there, as the International Monetary Fund did, and try to rip apart the whole economy, you're also ripping apart the whole political system. And when you rip apart the political system, you have to ask yourself what is the aftermath?

In the Philippines, when they had a change, there was Aquino, who was a well-known figure. There was the Church that was on the side of reform. And there was the army.

In Indonesia you don't have any of these elements now. You don't have an Aquino, the army is on the side of the government, and the church -- nobody knows what the Moslem leaders think, but they're as likely to be fundamentalist as anything else.

So what I'm asking for is when we go into these countries with economic prescriptions, we don't just turn it over to economists who are applying abstract models that they learned in graduate schools in this country to conditions that have an enormous complexity.

When you create a massive change in the economy of Indonesia, the first thing that happens is that the Chinese leave. And more Chinese money has left Indonesia than the International Monetary Fund can possible put in.

Now, I'm not saying that the Suharto regime is the only possible solution. In fact, I would have to think that in the next presidential period there, major changes will take place, and are desirable to take place.

All I'm saying is that we have to look at the structure and have an idea of evolution rather than just go in there with economic packages.

When you close 15 banks, the question immediately arises, what happens to the others?

So in trying to reform, you can also start a panic.

And I'd like to call attention to one other thing, namely, we've seen the first bounce of the crisis, which was economic. Those of you who know Asia will probably agree with me that the second bounce of this crisis will be a very nationalistic reaction to the perceived humiliations of this period. And we in this country should get intellectually ready for how to deal with this and what could emerge.

We keep talking about a free market for capital, but my impression is that many Asian countries are looking at China and saying to themselves: they've escaped this crisis by having some controls of capital -- and should they imitate it?

Now I hope it will not get to that point, and I'm not here to give you answers. I am here to say that, it's a whole set of issues before us.

To take the problem of emerging China: we keep oscillating with respect to China between either demonizing it or having sentimental feelings of eternal brotherhood.

Many Americans have the idea that every foreigner is an aspirant American. I have a friend who thinks there is no such thing as an English accent. He thinks the English put that on to intimidate Americans, and if you can only catch an Englishman unawares, like waking him up at four in the morning, he'll talk like a nice Midwestern person.

We have that attitude towards a lot of foreign societies, including the Chinese. Our history is 200 years. The Chinese have 5,000 years. They have had 14 dynasties, 10 of which have had a longer history individually than the United States. If I ask one of you when something happened, you'll give me a date. If you ask the Chinese when something happened in the past, they'll give you a dynasty. Now you are within, if you're lucky, 200 years. They think they've governed themselves for 5,000 years, 4,800 of which was without significant advice from the United States.

So there is a different approach to problems.

Now, our people like -- especially our current administration likes -- the so-called soft issues -- environment, nonproliferation, similar issues. These are important issues. But the Chinese have been around for 5,000 years, and they're interested also, in addition to these, in strategic issues. And so the dialogue between us and them has to

And as far as the United States is concerned, this is not something that should be done with either sentimentality or hostility. It should be done on a precise assessment of what we are trying to achieve.

And so we could go around the world.

Russia -- is it a democracy? Can it be a democracy quickly? I confess my own aspirations for Russia: I'd like to start with keeping them within their borders. They haven't done that for 400 years. And I would say that if they can stay in borders that have 11 time zones, in which St. Petersburg is closer to New York than it is to Vladivostok, and Vladivostok is closer to Seattle than it is to Moscow, they should not feel claustrophobic.

And therefore, if we can solve that problem, many other things follow, including an area to which not huge attention is yet paid, but will be; namely this whole area of Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, which has great untapped oil reserves. While right now we have a glut of oil, with the growth of industrialization in the world, and with any crisis in any big oil-producing country, a shortage is quite conceivable. Then, strangely enough, which way the pipelines are going from that region and who controls the production, could be one of the big issues.

So, in our country now, we have all these problems.

We have also generation problems.

My generation went through the War and through the end of the Depression and through the creation of the structures of American foreign policy. We believe that American power is beneficial and capable of doing great things.

Many of the Vietnam generation grew up in the midst of a bitter war. They feel that we ought to develop ourselves first and not get ourselves enmeshed abroad.

The post-Vietnam generation is again more on the Conservative side, but they have no experience in foreign policy.

So, how to mesh these three things, these three generations, in a period when technology is changing so fast, and the way one learns is changing so fast? That I would say is the big bipartisan challenge of our time.

Now, Mr. Chairman, I began by saying that I cut my teeth with the Foreign Relations Committee when Sen. Fulbright was chairman, and four Democratic Presidential candidates were running around. (You know somebody

said he went to a tree-planting with Humphrey. By the time Humphrey got through, they were standing in the shade.)

So, those were great times. But still, I think of these discussions with some nostalgia because they raised important questions.

Now I've tried to put before this group some of the issues that require a national debate. And most administrations will deal with the symptoms of some of the issues that I have discussed. They can't get to the fundamental problem.

A Chinese friend has inflicted a proverb on me. I say inflict, because I'm not so sure there are as many Chinese proverbs as they tell us. I think they invent them as they go along. But I think it defines our problem. He said -- when there's tumult under the heavens, little problems are dealt with as if they were big problems, and big problems are not dealt with at all. When there is order under the heavens, big problems are reduced to smaller problems, and little problems should not obsess us.

I think the Committee can make sure that we deal with big, not just with little, problems, and thereby contribute to what that proverb calls order under the heavens.

Thank you very much.