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of Europe. But France had just lost two million young people -- five percent of its population -- in the war and was in no condition to carry out this role. Britain was even less inclined to police Germany, because the English had always supported the weaker against the stronger on the continent and were instinctively led to support Germany against France.

Given this political and military problem, the French built the Maginot line, thus guaranteeing that Germany sooner or later would become predominant in Europe. The Versailles agreement could only be maintained through an offensive French strategy, and as soon as the French withdrew behind the Maginot line, they invited the Germans to expand towards the East. The Versailles settlement was, as we all know, very onerous for the Germans and was bound to inflame Germany, but that is not the issue. The central point is that statesmen can misconceive their structural problems and their balance of power interests. When Hitler took over in Germany, he had a relatively easy task. He had only to rearm and reoccupy the Rhineland, and Eastern Europe lay defenseless before him. When France did not move following the occupation of the Rhineland, it was all over. From a structural point of view, it was just a question of time and method of how Eastern Europe would fall under German hegemony.

There used to be a myth in America that the Europeans were peculiarly petty and peculiarly prone to produce wars by their approach to foreign policy. The American approach was

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considered morally superior. The fact of the matter was that the European countries margin of survival was so much narrower than the American margin that Europeans felt threatened by changes that were bound to be peripheral to the United States. The control of Alsace-Lorraine was not a matter of great importance to the United States, but for a long time it was vitally important to France and Germany. The Europeans would begin to defend themselves long before American security was threatened, creating the illusion in this country that there was something superior in our approach to foreign policy.

Now we have found that a basic problem of foreign policy is that at a time when there is a capacity for action, you have insufficient knowledge. By the time you have certain knowledge, you may have lost the capacity for action. This was the case in the German invasion of the Rhineland in 1936. Morally it would have been indefensible for France to attack, because the Germans were moving troops in their own territory, something every national state had a right to do. Such was the argument. But once there were German troops in the Rhineland, the French capacity to intervene in Eastern Europe disappeared. To repeat, once the French permitted the Germans to fortify the Rhineland, it was simply a question of time before Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland fell -- and indeed a moderate German leadership would probably have brought about this domination without a World War. All of this stemmed from the Versailles agreement, which put a burden on France that could not be met.

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LAQUEUR: And then there was the Second World War, another "watershed." But again, as in World War I, few if any people thought at the time of the structure of peace that would follow the war except perhaps in the most general terms of friendship, mutual trust and the other noble sentiments mentioned in wartime programmatic speeches about the United Nations and related topics. If so, what are the "lessons" of the most recent period of history?

KISSINGER: After World War II the problem of German hegemony disappeared, but another colossal country spread itself into the center of Europe. In contrast to the period of the Congress of Vienna, none of the statesmen of the war years, except perhaps Churchill, gave any attention to what would happen after the war. Americans were determined not to discuss the post-war period while the struggle was going on. We were determined that we were going to base the post-war period on good faith and getting along with everybody. The victors in World War II would work together in the post-war period. I do not know whether anything else could have been done; we will probably never know. We do know, however, that practically no attention was paid to the issue of the structure of the post-war peace until the Soviet Army was in the center of Europe. Once Eastern Europe was under Communist domination, for the first time in European history there was no chance to balance Russian power through European sources.

In addition to the sudden expansion of Russian hegemony, the elements of power became incongruous with each other. In the

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past there had almost always been a direct relationship between
economic, military and political power. It was very rare that
a country could be very strong economically and very weak mili-
tarily. In the post-war world, it is possible to be militarily
very strong and economically of moderate strength. It is also
possible, as in the case of Japan, to be economically very strong
and militarily feeble.

What can be learned from history in the post-war epoch?
You cannot learn how to handle the Middle East crisis that broke
out in 1973, but you CAN learn from the structural problems that
I have very superficially discussed. In each period we must
decide which of these structural problems is relevant. History
is not a cookbook which gives recipes; it teaches by analogy and
forces us to decide what, if anything, is analogous. History gives
us a feel for the significance of events, but it does not teach
which individual events are significant. It is impossible to
write down a conceptual scheme and apply it mechanically to
evolving situations. Certain principles can be developed, cer-
tain understandings can be elaborated, but it is impossible to
predict in advance how they apply to concrete situations.

One of the problems of contemporary leadership is that
in all democracies that I know, and perhaps in all dictatorships
as well, the struggle of winning office is so intense that
people have no time to reflect about the sort of issues I have
raised. By the time they get into office it is much to late to
think about them, because they then have to make decisions.

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Nobody would believe that he can go onto a tennis court and play, just because somebody has given him a few principles, but many people seem to think that foreign policy can be conducted after reading a few briefing papers. What was the difference between men like Churchill and De Gaulle and their contemporaries? It wasn't superior intelligence. They had a feel for the course of events and how they could influence it, and I know no great leader who did not study history and try to get an understanding of problems that other nations and other leaders have faced.

It is dangerously arrogant to believe that foreign policy can be conducted effectively without knowing something of how other generations have faced comparable problems -- the compromises they have had to make, how their best judgements turned out to be disastrous, and how limited human foresight is, even in the best men and under optimal circumstances. We always tend to think of historical tragedy as failing to get what we want, but if we study history we find that the worst tragedies have occurred when people got what they wanted...and it turned out to be the wrong objective.

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