SPECIAL REPORT

**Reflection:** The former secretary of State argues that too many Democrats and Republicans view China through the prism of the past, rather than analysis of what our national interest requires. BY HENRY A. KISSINGER

# No Room for Nostalgia

CHRIS STOWERS - PANOS PICTURES

The old and the new: A statue of Shanghai's first mayor stands in front of the city's modern new skyline

I CANNOT RECALL WHEN A PRESIDENT HAS LEFT ON A MAJOR foreign trip amidst so much controversy. The right wing of the Republican Party and the left wing of the Democratic Party either oppose the trip to China or state conditions for it that are more compatible with confrontation than with stabi-lizing, much less improving, the relationship with the world's most populous country and second largest economy.

Republicans see China as a threat; Democrats view it as a labo-ratory for the spread of American values. Both view China through the prism of their parties' experiences over the last 30 years.

Republicans rightly see themselves as the party that has most consistently attended to U.S. security in recent decades. Demo-crats are justly proud of their long advocacy of civil and human rights. But with respect to China, too many in both parties substi-tute nostalgia for analysis of what our national interest requires.

I have often been critical of the foreign policy of the Clinton ad-ministration, disturbed about its discomfort with the role power plays in international affairs—most recently in the calamitous han-dling of the gulf crisis—and dismayed with its tendency to conduct foreign policy as an aspect of domestic politics. But on the trip to

China, the president deserves bipartisan support. In the present global turmoil, nothing is to be gained by turning China into an en-emy; much by exploring potential areas of common interest.

Unfortunately, too many Republicans have substituted China for the collapsed Soviet Union and seek to deal with it by the methods that accelerated the collapse of the Soviet empire: diplomatic con-frontation, economic ostracism and ideological warfare. Too many Democrats act as if the principal goal of American policy should be to replicate our institutions and principles in China, even at the cost of our many other interests at stake in Asia and without regard for the complexities of Chinese history.

Still, each group has raised a number of serious issues.

Chinese proliferation of missile and some nuclear technology has been worrisome (though less so than that of countries with which we continue to cultivate friendly relations, such as Russia). Chinese human-rights practices have often fallen far short of desir-able standards. Clearly, if China continues to grow at anything like the rate of the past two decades, it will be in a stronger position to oppose American interests politically.

No serious student of history can doubt that the emergence of

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China as a world power presents a serious challenge to American foreign policy. Such a process is never smooth (witness the emergence of Germany in the last century). Yet it will not go away by railing against it. It must be in our interest that China emerge as a responsible member of the international community with interest in regional and global stability and progress.

To be sure, this will not depend on American actions alone. And if, despite our most serious efforts to bring about a cooperative relationship, China should come to pose a direct threat to U.S. security or seek hegemony in Asia, we would surely resist that at any cost.

But our ability to sustain such an effort, were it to become necessary, would depend on having explored alternatives that are reasonable and, I believe — on the basis of recent conversations with Chinese leaders — available. It is an abdication to base America's policy toward China on the assumption that U.S. actions and policies cannot affect the evolution of Chinese policies, or that China is destined to be congenitally hostile to American interests. Such a course could lead to a disastrous self-fulfilling prophecy.

In its 5,000-year history of independence, China has resisted foreign pressures with extraordinary tenacity and intelligence. Do we really want to turn the world's most populous nation and second largest economy into an enemy at a time when Japan is in economic

crisis. South Asia is entering the nuclear age, Indonesia is in turmoil, the Russian evolution is uncertain, the Persian Gulf unsettled and the Balkans on the brink of war? Should we treat China as an enemy when it has, on the whole, behaved responsibly on most of these issues?

China is seeking to improve relations with the United States in pursuit of its own interests, notably to sustain its economic reform. In pursuit of that goal, it has been prepared to adjust its policies in many areas. On human rights, considerable progress has been made in the years since the death of Mao Zedong. Abuses continue. Are they more likely to be improved by all-out

confrontation or by the further integration of China into the international community?

Between great powers, a complete confluence of interests is rarely achieved. For example, more remains to be done on such issues as nuclear proliferation. But do these gaps justify the provocative needling implicit in so many congressional measures and of some of our public discourse? Why shouldn't the differences be the subject of a serious diplomatic dialogue? Are we so unsure of ourselves that we assume that such an approach is bound to fail to achieve our objectives?

It cannot be an accident that every former president, secretary of State and national-security adviser—the people with the longest experience in dealing with the nation's foreign policy—reject the confrontational strategy urged by both the left and right wings of American politics. Nor would any other major power—or, for that matter, any country—join us in such a course.

Before going further, let me state that I head a consulting firm that advises a few clients with business interests in China. Anyone who, despite my record of fostering Sino-U.S. relations for nearly three decades (for most of which nobody did any business in China), believes that my views are for sale should stop reading here.

CHARLES LING-GAMMA LISONSON

A world power: Chinese missile proliferation has been worrisome

IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN the old Soviet Union and today's China. The Soviet Union avowed an ideology fundamentally hostile to our values, actively propagated it around the world and backed it up by supporting communist revolutionary parties bent on undermining the domestic cohesion of governments friendly to the United States. Moscow had deployed thousands of missiles and tens of thousands of warheads capable of reaching the United States. And it espoused a foreign policy that directly challenged American interests, occasionally including the threat of force.

None of this has been true of America's relations with China. Though Beijing describes its ideology as communist, in practice it bears no similarity to Moscow's Stalinist state-run economy. The economy in China is increasingly market-oriented; Beijing is making strenuous efforts to get rid of its state-run enterprises; its reform depends crucially on linking China to the world economy. China supports no political movement hostile to American interests and, except for Taiwan, does not challenge the existing world order. And Taiwan, as will be discussed below, is not considered a foreign-policy issue in Beijing.

There are overwrought scenarios that sketch an increasing Chinese military threat to the United States. Thirteen missiles are reported to be aimed at American cities and Chinese anti-ship missiles

are supposed to pose a threat to our Navy. But can one seriously believe that China will take on the United States with 13 obsolescent liquid-fueled missiles in the face of 2,000 American strategic weapons and perhaps 15,000 warheads, not to speak of the thousands of ship-based warheads on cruise missiles and U.S. planes on aircraft carriers? (At any time, the U.S. has 96 Trident missiles on submarines, each with at least 10 warheads.) No doubt, Chinese military capacity will grow in tandem with its economic development. But it will not be a global military power for at least a quar-

ter of a century. Is the United States so unsure of its capacity to maintain its supremacy that we must take pre-emptive action based on hypothetical perspectives?

Little in China's current or even historical performance justifies such an assumption. China's responsible conduct in the Asian crisis has demonstrated its interest in the region's economic and political stability. It has resisted strong pressures to devalue its currency, has kept its promise not to suppress political expression, including demonstrations commemorating Tiananmen in Hong Kong, and has supported the American objective of maintaining stability on the Korean peninsula.

China has adhered to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, as well as test-ban, biological and chemical-weapons conventions. It follows most of the guidelines of the Missile Technology Control Regime (though it is not a signatory and the U.S. has some legitimate complaints in this area). China has extended some nuclear help to Pakistan in ways that we cannot condone. But its purpose was not mischief-making, as is often alleged, but to establish some balance of power on the Indian Subcontinent after the Indians tested nuclear explosives in 1974. This perhaps unwise policy is com-

JUNE 29, 1998 NEWSWEEK

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parable to America's direct assistance to Britain, indirect help to France and acquiescence in the nuclear program of Israel. China has also proposed resumption of talks with Taiwan.

Should all this progress be jettisoned for the sake of preventing what China might do 25 years from now? Undoubtedly, if China continues to grow at the rate of the past 20 years, it will become perhaps the most powerful country in Asia. Its impact on its neighbors would magnify. But do we really want a showdown now to block what is inherent in the existence of China rather than its policies? It would be an unprecedented objective of American foreign policy to prevent the emergence of any potential major power. Such a neo-imperialist course would, sooner or later, unite China with the rest of the world against us.

No country has ever grown indefinitely at China's recent rate. And China is not doing so at this moment. But were Beijing, at whatever juncture, to pursue hegemonic policies, it would have to contend around its borders with many states of considerable strength. A wise America could forge a determined resistance among them. Which is the better course: to make Chinese hostility a self-fulfilling prophecy by the confrontational and provocative measures now being advocated; or to seek to establish a cooperative pattern at a moment when Chinese leaders seem uniquely receptive to it?

A
COOPERATIVE
relationship
should be given
a chance, and
the president's
trip should be the occasion
for working on the sub-
stance of such a relation-
ship. Neither side should
act as if the visit itself is a
concession or an opportu-
nity to gain a unilateral
advantage.

These principles should
guide the presidential trip:

* The United States and China are two great powers seeking to adjust potential differences and to fortify common purposes. The test of the meeting is the ability to harmonize interests and to take the sting out of disagreements. The key principle is reciprocity. A full and candid explanation by each side of its views of the international situation is an essential component of this process.

* High priority must be given to encouraging restraint in troubled regions of Asia, especially in the Korean peninsula and the Indian Subcontinent.

The U.S. and China are already pursuing largely parallel policies on the Korean peninsula. These should be strengthened by discussions designed to synchronize attitudes toward accidents, irrational acts (such as military offensives) and political upheavals.

With respect to the Indian Subcontinent, the U.S. and China should avoid giving the impression that they have established a condominium to deprive the two emerging nuclear powers of their newfound capability. Rather, they should try to enlist Delhi and Karachi in a nonproliferation regime Washington and Beijing are themselves practicing. And they should use their influence to defuse political tensions between India and Pakistan.

* The two sides should strengthen their efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and missile technology.

China has already joined a number of the international nuclear agreements described above. It has agreed to stop nuclear and missile cooperation with Iran. I have reason to believe that it is possible to persuade Beijing to take further steps, particularly toward developing bilateral arrangements for more stringent controls over the exports of nuclear, chemical and biological materials.

* Efforts by both countries to calm the economic crisis in Asia should be coordinated to the greatest extent possible. This implies a full discussion of trade relations. The presence in Clinton's entourage of Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin and Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky should allow a full discussion of global economic issues of key concern to both countries. Chinese prosperity and Chinese cooperation are essential to Asian recovery. If the economy of Asia stays flat, and surely if it declines, the global economy would risk a worldwide recession.

Secretary Rubin could help allay Chinese concerns that America opposes Chinese devaluation while acquiescing to, or even encouraging, Japan's, which threatens to undermine the exports of both China and Korea. This is a particular problem at a moment when China is beginning to confront many of the institutional problems common to other Asian countries: capital allocation on

the basis of political, not
commercial, criteria; asset
inflation, especially in real
estate; a shaky banking
system, and huge loss-
making state enterprises.

For its part, China
needs to do much more to
create an open and free
market and to take effec-
tive measures to reduce its
growing trade surplus
with America.

* China must recognize that human-rights pressures are not generally intended as instruments of harassment but reflect America's deepest values and necessities. No administration that fails to take account of this reality can maintain public support. The president speaks for all Americans when, with due regard to the na-

tional pride of an ancient civilization, he affirms these concerns.

* For China, Taiwan is the most sensitive issue. It cannot be put aside, and a realistic discussion is essential. To China, Taiwan is not a foreign country but a secessionist province. It must therefore be handled with great sensitivity.

Six U.S. presidents from both parties have affirmed the unity of China and rejected a two-China or China-Taiwan solution. The same presidents have endorsed peaceful resolution of the issue.

The United States has therefore an implied obligation to oppose Taiwanese independence or membership in the U.N. or its institutions made up of sovereign states. Within that framework, constructive, close U.S.-Taiwan relations should be maintained.

The above agenda defines the president's trip as an opportunity to point Sino-American relations in a positive direction. Keeping the journey from turning into nothing more than a photo opportunity is a matter of choice, not necessity. And for the critics at home, the time has come to give the relationship a chance before we throw ourselves into a new set of confrontations that guarantee decades of tensions with an uncertain outcome. ■

ARCHIVE PHOTOS

Give cooperation a chance: With Zhou planning Nixon's 1972 trip

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NEWSWEEK JUNE 29, 1998

[LC]

# World of Wonder

by Henry A. Kissinger

Newsweek - June 12, 2006

Pelé in 1970. Maradona in '86. Zidane in '98. Every four years, one World Cup player makes history. Henry A. Kissinger—Nobel Peace Prize winner, former secretary of State, soccer fan—shares his golden moments before this year's June 9 kickoff.

On June 9, host country Germany will inaugurate a month of football frenzy by playing Costa Rica in the opening match of the 2006 soccer World Cup. For two weeks, there will be three matches a day as the 32 survivors of a global competition (involving more than 100 teams over a period of three years) are whittled down to 16.

In eight groups of four, each team plays the others in its group. The top two teams of each group advance to a sudden-death round also lasting two weeks and culminating in the final on July 9 in Berlin. Billions around the world will be glued to their television sets at all hours of the day and night; millions will find ways to interrupt their work schedules to watch at least some of the 64 matches. National morale in winners and losers will be affected, particularly as the competition nears its end.

I will be one of those viewers and have arranged my schedule to accommodate its necessities. Most fans would find it difficult to describe what it is about soccer that so enthralls them. They would probably identify it with their passionate adherence to their favorite club team—a passion that, in America, is matched only by the most fanatical adherents of football teams.

I grew up in Fuerth, a little town in southern Germany where soccer had the status of football in Green Bay, Wis. Though playing with local amateurs, its team inexplicably won the German championship three times during my boyhood. I have not lived in Germany for many more decades than I care to admit, yet I still follow the fortunes of that team which, in the age of high-salary professionalism, has been relegated to the second division. Fuerth periodically seems on the verge of rising to the top league but, as happened this year, always manages to fall just short—guaranteeing the mixture of misery and hope that is the soccer addict's lot.

The emotions evoked by club teams are, compared to those inspired by the national team, like a raging stream to Niagara Falls. Club teams play at least

2

once a week between August and June. National teams play only a fraction
of that number a year and, for the highest prize, only once every four. There
is no margin for error or for deferred passions. Victors are heroes; losers are
treated as if they have inflicted a personal insult. A Colombian player who
had contributed to the elimination of his team in the 1994 Cup by scoring on
his own goal was murdered when he returned home.

Manipulating a ball by foot along a 110-yard-long field into an opposing goal requires skills analogous to ballet. Teams that concentrate on individual skills, like the Brazilians, astonish with their virtuosity and abandon. On the other hand, they sometimes are so infatuated by their individual artistry that they forget to score goals and are overcome by more single-minded, strategically oriented teams.

Only the rarest players—like Maradona for Argentina, dribbling past four or five English players in the 1986 World Cup—are able to score by essentially solitary efforts. Typically, games are won by team efforts. The seductive quality of soccer resides in the almost intellectual focus with which the best teams move the ball down the field to solve the riddle of how, with each side moving at high speed, to get a ball past 11 opponents, one of whom (the goalie) is permitted to use his hands to intercept the ball. This turns the game into a kind of geometry of finding uncovered open spaces from which to launch an unimpeded shot on the goal. The great field generals like Zinedine Zidane of France or Franz Beckenbauer of Germany are blessed with the uncanny skill of distributing the ball among their teammates in a manner that seems unimaginable in the abstract and self-evident in execution. Soccer at its highest level is complexity masquerading as simplicity.

Over the decades, the game has become increasingly strategic: when I first
became a fan, the 10 field players were distributed as five forwards, three
midfield players and two defenders. As a result, the attackers usually
outnumbered the defenders—especially as the players, not as well
conditioned as today, more or less stayed in their assigned positions. Since
then, a radical change in deployment has taken place. Forwards rarely
exceed two, and the remaining players are deployed in various ways
available to the defense, of which the 4:4:2 system is among the most
widely used. One of the most dramatic changes was the introduction of the
"sweeper," charged with reinforcing the most threatened position on the
field. Beckenbauer gave this role an additional significance by acting like an
American football free safety on defense and like a quarterback in directing
the attack with his subtle passing. The result was a kind of total football:
whatever the assigned position of the player, he had the additional task of

3

reinforcing the center of gravity, attack or defense, depending on the
situation.

The practical consequence is that goals are harder and harder to come by
and that defense tends to dominate over offense. Teams—especially national
teams—play first of all not to lose. Since the number of points on the field
from which a shot on goal has a prospect of succeeding is finite, a disciplined
defense can occasionally thwart a technically superior team. Thus a superbly
coached Greek team defeated a Portuguese team of probably superior
individual players in the final for the 2004 European Football Championship,
and a very disciplined German team overcame a marvelous team from the
Netherlands in the World Cup of 1974.

I have attended seven World Cup finals (and I have firm plans to attend one of the semifinals and the final in Berlin this year). Each has produced a distinctive drama. My first exposure was in 1970 in Mexico City, and it introduced me to the exuberant style of Brazilian soccer. Led by the incomparable Pelé and an all-star cast of irrepressible virtuosos, the Brazilians overwhelmed a very good Italian team by a score of 4-1. Pelé scored first—then the Italians responded. This should have given the so-called Azurri (because of their blue jerseys) an opportunity to apply their Machiavellian skill in frustrating the opponent into rash errors by a give-no-quarter defense. But Brazil did not play by the book. It abandoned whatever theoretical formation with which it had entered the game and threw every player into a wild offense, literally running the Italian team into the ground. Brazilian panache was aided no little by the high altitude of Mexico City, which wore down the defenders already exhausted from a brutal semifinal between Italy and Germany. This match was won by Italy, 4-3, in overtime (with five of the goals scored in that 30-minute period), and was so rough that Beckenbauer, having dislocated his shoulder, completed the game with his arm in a sling.

While offense triumphed in 1970, an unintended shift of emphasis helped
turn the tables in 1974 between the Netherlands and Germany in Munich.
The Dutch team was elegant and offense-minded, inspired by one of the all-
time greats, Johan Cruyff. A penalty kick gave it the lead in the first minute
before a stunned crowd. It proved a poisoned chalice. For it tempted the
Dutch team to abandon its finely tuned offense in favor of protecting the
lead. The Germans, led by Beckenbauer, thereupon threw everything into
attack, reinforced by a frenzied home public. This led to a 2-1 lead just
before halftime, which Germany defended tenaciously through the second
half against an increasingly frantic Dutch side.

4

In 1978, the Netherlands found itself once more in a final before a rabid hometown crowd in Buenos Aires. In a game of wild fluctuations, the Dutch, in the last minute, tied an Argentine team playing with Brazilian flair and European killer instinct. But as happened four years earlier, the Dutch could not stay the course and lost in overtime. The Argentine victory produced a moment of respite from the near civil war conditions and brutal official repression racking Argentina. For 48 hours, Buenos Aires celebrated with such tumultuous abandon as to hide the bitterness of the national divisions.

In 1982, the drama came before the final. In a second-round group match, under the different Cup rules of the period, Italy overcame the most attractively playing of all Brazilian teams by one of its deadly counterattacks, exploiting the recklessness of the Brazilians, who played to win, not satisfied with the tie that was their admission ticket into the final—and which was only minutes away. In one semifinal, Germany defeated France, scoring two late goals after falling behind by two goals in overtime to send it to a penalty kick shootout against a French team demoralized when one of its star players was flattened by the German goalie as he was heading for a score.

I regretted not being able to attend the '86 final due to other obligations I had at the time. In 1990, in a very tactical defensive game, I witnessed a systematic German team overcome an Argentine side that substituted toughness for its usual dexterity. Argentina reached the final primarily because of the uncanny ability of its goalkeeper to parry penalty shots in shootouts, saving two against Italy. What added particular piquancy to that feat was that the goalkeeper was a substitute for the injured first-team goalie.

The most disappointing match for me was the final of the 1994 World Cup at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. As honorary chairman of the American organizing committee, I had hoped for a high-scoring match that might do for American soccer what the Giants-Colts football game of 1958 did by generating public interest in pro football. Unfortunately, the game was decided in a penalty shootout after 120 minutes of scoreless tactical maneuvering.

The final in 1998 in Paris supplied a mystery. An elegant French team defeated a Brazilian squad which, after a brilliant semifinal victory over the Netherlands, turned inexplicably lethargic. Its star player, Ronaldo, was scratched from the public lineup amid injury rumors an hour before the game and then re-inserted without participating actively.

Altogether, in the seven finals I watched, I saw Brazil, Germany and Italy three times each, the Netherlands and Argentina twice. The only other start

5

went to France. Will this elite be broadened in the World Cup about to begin? Not having seen most of the national teams of this tournament, a prediction is difficult. The United States plays in a very tough initial group. To reach the elimination round, it will have to overcome at least one of two powerhouse European teams, Italy and the Czech Republic, as well as a talented team from Ghana. England has the players to reclaim a major role, though the recent injury of its star forward, Wayne Rooney, reduces its prospects. In qualifying, Argentina won more games than any South American team, including Brazil. But its composure is not always equal to its talent. Italy looked overwhelming when defeating Germany a few months ago, and could advance unless it is held back by a developing scandal regarding refereeing. The German team has been a puzzle. It has an inventive new coach and passionate public support. But in the preliminary games, it had trouble against major opponents. This may be the year for African teams to emerge; their technical brilliance has so far been thwarted by lack of international experience. In the last World Cup, two Asian teams—Korea and Japan— showed great progress. This World Cup will reveal how much of this is owed to the fact that the Cup was played before admiring home fans. And there is always Brazil, which will guarantee excitement and exuberant fans. We will know the answer by July 9. In the meantime, 64 games in a month are guaranteed to slake the thirst of even the most frenetic fans—myself included—if only very briefly.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13123847/site/newsweek/

NEWSWEEK
November 8, 2004

# America's Assignment

What will we face in the next four years? The former secretary of State on the global challenges ahead.

## Special Report

BY HENRY A. KISSINGER

AS THESE LINES are being written, the election process is still in full swing. But this week, barring another deadlocked outcome, the campaign that has mesmerized America will be over. What will remain are the challenges that gave rise to this occasionally frenzied battle and the responsibility of dealing with them. No president has faced an agenda of comparable scope. This is not hyperbole; it is the hand history has dealt this generation. Never before has it been necessary to conduct a war with neither front lines nor geographic definition and, at the same time, to rebuild fundamental principles of world order to replace the traditional ones which went up in the smoke of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The newly elected president's task is perhaps most analogous to that inherited by President Truman at the end of the Second World War. In 1945, the Soviet Union was emerging as a threat to the global equilibrium,

while the war had left a vacuum in Central Europe. But the Soviet challenge was concrete and geographically definable. Today's principal threats are abstract and mobile. Terror has no fixed address; it has attacked from Bali to Singapore, Riyadh, Istanbul, Moscow, Madrid, Tunis, New York and Washington. In the 1940s, the solution to the crisis was straightforward, albeit difficult: to construct a defensive line in the center of Europe and an economic program to close the gap between public expectation and the reality of shortages that threatened domestic stability.

The contemporary security challenge arises from two unprecedented sources: terror caused by acts until recently considered a matter for internal police forces rather than international policy, and scientific advances and proliferation that allow the survival of countries to be threatened by developments entirely within another state's territory. Truman could take the legitimacy of the international system for granted; the Atlantic alliance rallied America's West European allies from the Second World War. The newly elected president

will have to lead an effort to define and then maintain an international system that reflects the new, revolutionary circumstances.

I supported President Bush during the campaign and hope for his success. But whatever the outcome, the United States cannot tackle this agenda except in the context of a commitment by all sides to healing. All concerned with the future of the country must find ways to cooperate so that the world will again see Americans working toward a common destiny both at home and in the community of nations. It is to such an effort that this article seeks to make a contribution.

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Special Report

in too mechanical a manner. In Vietnam, it took far longer to make units ready for combat than simply fulfilling the requirements of a training manual. The effectiveness of Iraqi forces will depend not only on their military training but on the degree to which the emerging Iraqi institutions gain domestic legitimacy. Units without political allegiance are generally least reliable when most needed.

The first national elections scheduled for the end of January are the next step. They should be viewed not as a culmination but as the first and perhaps least complicated achievement in the quest for Iraqi self-government. Democracy in the West evolved over centuries. It required first a church independent of the state; then the Reformation, which imposed pluralism of religion; the Enlightenment, which asserted the autonomy of reason from both church and state; the Age of Discovery, which broadened horizons; and finally capitalism, with its emphasis on competition and the market. None of these conditions exists in the Islamic world. Instead there is a merging of religion and politics inimical to pluralism. A genuine democratic government has come about only in Turkey, paradoxically through the imposition of democratic forms by an autocratic leader. The emergence of democratic institutions and of the arrangements which hold them together cannot be engineered as an act of will; it requires patience and modesty.

It is particularly important to understand the obstacles to democracy in a multiethnic and multireligion society such as Iraq's. In the West, democracy evolved in homogeneous societies. There was no institutional impediment to the minority's becoming a majority. Electoral defeat was considered a temporary setback that could be reversed. But in societies with distinct ethnic or political divisions, minority status often means permanent discrimination and the constant risk of political extinction.

This is a particularly acute issue in Iraq. The country is composed of three major groups: Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis, with the Shiites representing about 60 percent of the population and the other two groups about 20 percent each. For 500 years, the Sunnis have dominated by military force and, during

Saddam's rule, with extraordinary brutality. Thus national elections, based on majority rule, imply a radical upheaval in the relative power and status of the three communities. The insurgency in the Sunni region is not only a national struggle against America; it is a means to restore political dominance. By the same token, the political process means little for the Kurds if it does not ensure a large measure of autonomy. The Shiites tolerate the U.S. presence—sometimes ambivalently—to achieve the goal of reversing the historic pattern of Sunni rule and as a first step to Shiite dominance. To what extent they will continue to support our role as the transfer of power progresses remains to be seen.

The January elections in Iraq, therefore, must be regarded as the beginning of an extended contest among the various groups, involving the constant risk of civil war, or of a national struggle against the U.S., or both. All factions maintain militias for precisely such eventualities. It will be necessary to augment the national electoral process with a significant element of federalism and to establish clear-cut constitutional protections for those who might

find themselves in the permanent minority. Democracy must not be seen as a suicide pact by the Sunnis and the Kurds. Federalist structures and the assurance that free speech, freedom of conscience, and due process of law are constitutionally beyond the reach of any majority might provide some guarantee for the concerns of the various groups and a safety net if national reconciliation proves impossible.

In the potential cauldron after the January elections, some degree of internationalization is the only realistic path toward stability inside Iraq and sustained domestic support in America. The survival of the political process depends in the first instance on security—for which the United States retains the major responsibility—but ultimately on international acceptance to enable the Iraqi government to be perceived as representing indigenous aspirations.

During the political campaign there has been much talk of beginning this process with an effort to induce our European allies to increase their military participation and to lure recalcitrant allies into joining the security effort. Such a course cannot succeed in a time frame relevant to the immediate necessities. Germany and France—the two most difficult allies on Iraq—will not reverse their stand in sending troops to Iraq at the beginning of a process of reconciliation. (The German Foreign Minister has said so explicitly.) And countries that have sent troops have enough domestic difficulties maintaining their participation and little, if any, scope for increasing it.

Meaningful internationalization requires a focus other than security and the participation of countries other than—or in addition to—NATO. After the January elections, an international contact group, under U.N. auspices, to advise on Iraq's political evolution is therefore desirable. Logical members would be countries that have experience with militant Islam and much to lose by the radicalization of Iraq—countries such as India, Turkey, Russia, Algeria, in addition to the United States and Britain. This is not an abdication to consensus. The United States, by virtue of its military presence and financial role, would retain the leading position. The issue of military contribution by other nations, including

NATO, can be raised again at a later stage in a more favorable political environment as a means to protect the governmental process.

## Pre-emption

IN ITS FIRST MONTHS IN OFFICE, THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION challenged conventional wisdom when it proclaimed the concept of pre-emption as if it were an American invention. In fact, pre-emption is inherent in the structure of the new international order, regardless of who serves in the White House. The international system of the 20th century was established by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Seeking to avoid a repetition of the Thirty Years' War, during which nearly 30 percent of the population of Central Europe was killed in a conflict nominally over religious belief, the rulers based the new system on the principle of sovereignty within state borders and noninterference across them. Threats to international order were defined as movements of military units across established frontiers. Because weapons were relatively small and technology moved slowly, national security

> If a radical government emerges in Baghdad, the entire Islamic world will find itself in chaos

JAN MACMILLAN—49

**On a mission:** In Iraq in late October, U.S. Marines charge a building

Special Report

could generally be protected by awaiting the actual aggression.

September 11 marked the end of that option. Threats, it taught, were no longer identical with state action; they could be organized by private groups operating from the territory of sovereign states for goals transcending the purposes of the host countries. Cold War strategies ceased to apply, since deterrence cannot work against an adversary with no territory to defend; and diplomacy does not work when the adversary rejects any limitation of objective and seeks the overthrow of societies. In the Westphalian system, the balance of power could generally be upset only by conquest. In the world of privatized terror and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, the balance can be upset and survival threatened by developments entirely within the borders of a sovereign state.

Inevitably the concept of pre-emption leads to a clash between new realities and traditional notions of order. Countries used to established patterns find it difficult to accept the new necessities, and all nations will seek some rules of conduct that do not leave decisions on pre-emption to the unilateral, unconstrained determination of a single state. When implemented by a power with the overwhelming military preponderance of the United States, the doctrine prompts claims of hegemony by some on the American side and increasing resistance by others, particularly members of traditional alliances.

The new president will want to make a distinction between power and the claims made on its behalf. No nation, no matter how powerful, can organize the international system by itself; over an historical period it is beyond the psychological and political capacity of even the most dominant state. The goal of U.S. foreign policy must be to turn dominant power into shared responsibility—to conduct policy, as the Australian scholar Coral Bell has written, as if the international order were composed of many centers of power, even while we are aware of our strategic pre-eminence. It implies the need for a style of consultation less focused on imposing immediate policy prescriptions than achieving a common definition of long-range purposes.

It is not in America's interest to encourage every state to define pre-emption in purely national terms. The response to 9/11 was imposed by requirements of an emergency. The newly elected president could contribute greatly to a new global order by indicating a willingness to discuss international principles of pre-emption—even while reserving the right to defend national security alone as a last resort.

## Nuclear Proliferation

WHILE MILITANT ISLAM IS THE MOST immediate and obvious challenge to international order, nuclear proliferation is the most long-range and insidious threat to global survival. Heretofore nuclear weapons have spread relatively slowly and remained in the possession of countries with everything to lose and nothing to gain from assaulting the international order. But the international system is now confronted by the imminent spread of nuclear weapons into the hands of two countries with a worrisome agenda: the odd, isolated regime in North Korea, which is responsible for multiple assassinations and kidnappings and meets every definition

of a rogue regime; and Iran, whose current regime started by holding American diplomats as hostages and has since supported a variety of terrorist groups in the Middle East and continues to declare America its principal enemy.

The possession of nuclear weapons by these countries would constitute a momentous step towards stripping the international order of the remaining restraints of the Westphalian system. Deterrence will lose its traditional meaning even with respect to state-to-state relations. With such a variety of nuclear powers, it will no longer be clear who is responsible for deterring whom and by what means. Second-order issues can escalate into nuclear conflict. The possibilities of miscalculation grow. Even if the new nuclear countries do not use their weapons, they can become a shield behind which to step up terrorist challenges. Finally, the experience with the so-called "private"

distribution of Pakistan's nuclear technology to other countries shows that this may be the last moment to keep proliferation from spinning out of control. North Korea is so short of foreign exchange that its diplomats often revert to counterfeit currency; it might find the temptation to trade nuclear material for foreign exchange irresistible. In Iran, extremist elements have frequently demonstrated their ability to find specious Islamic justification for unconscionable acts in support of terrorism.

The international community has been torn between premonition of nuclear catastrophe and the escapism of treating warnings about proliferation as an example of American bellicosity. In some quarters on both sides of the Atlantic, the issue is presented as a case for testing whether pressure or diplomacy should serve as a principal tool. There is a debate as well about appropriate mechanisms for diplomacy. With respect to the North Korean nuclear program, the issue is whether negotiations should be conducted bilaterally between the United States and North Korea or in the existing six-party forum in Beijing, comprised of North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.

If progress is to be made, the newly elected president will have to cut through these disputes to impose a unified policy. In practice, the distinction between diplomacy and pressure is academic since diplomacy is never

abstract; it inevitably involves an amalgam of both. The challenge is to determine the proper mix.

Invariably, proliferating countries claim that they are seeking merely to participate in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy or to enhance electricity production or both. Countries determined to prevent proliferation are therefore tempted to provide incentives in the form of guaranteed alternative sources of energy or of nuclear fuel for power plants. Yet this approach generally fails, because the ultimate objectives of the proliferating country are political and strategic, not economic. Iran, an oil-producing country, has no economic need for nuclear power plants. What it seeks, as does North Korea, is a shield behind which it can conduct the revolutionary aspects of its foreign policy while reducing the risk of intervention by great powers.

A policy of offering material incentives in return for denuclearization is likely to fail, however appealing it may be in the abstract. For the incentives in one way or another increase the dependence of the proliferating country on the states against which the proliferation is really directed. Progress is unlikely unless it involves, at

## Iran's regime, which has long seen America as its principal foe, is a problem which we must face

Complex threat: An Iranian missile on parade in Tehran

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the least, the implication of pressure and a goal that addresses the security concerns of all interested parties. Multilateral talks, including the proliferating country, are essential.

With respect to North Korea, each of the parties in the six-party talks has special political and strategic objectives in the back of its mind: China, concern about nuclear weapons in all of Korea and the deployment of forces in North Korea in case of unification; Japan, its position as a non-nuclear country in an increasingly nuclear environment; South Korea, its aspirations to unification and the balance it seeks between China and the United States. Thus the technicalities of nonproliferation pale compared with the objective of elaborating a security system for Northeast Asia. A similar analysis could be made in the case of Iran, for which a forum does not yet exist.

Care must also be taken lest the fact of dialogue becomes its only substance, enhancing the prestige of the proliferating country without ensuring its cooperation. In any event, the solution cannot be left to bilateral U.S. talks with the proliferators. The insistence on U.S.-North Korea bilateralism would leave America as the sole enforcer of any agreement at the borders of China. And it would invite Pyongyang to use the new agreement for future blackmail—the pattern it followed after the bilateral agreement of 1994. The same applies in a different context to relations with Iran.

All of this is an academic exercise, meanwhile, if the concerned nations do not recognize that time is short, that the stately process of arms control negotiations is on the verge of being overwhelmed by events. To impart a sense of urgency, an answer must be found to these four questions: How much time do we actually have before the process of proliferation in North Korea and Iran has become irreversible? What incentives and assurances are we prepared to offer? What pressures are we prepared to undertake if incentives do not work? And how do we prevent negotiation and implementation from becoming a means to legitimize proliferation rather than avert it?

Reality therefore imposes a time limit on these negotiations—or else the newly elected president is likely to leave a fearsome legacy by the end of his term. The all-consuming queries then will be: How does a society react to a nuclear explosion of undetermined origin? How should the world react to a nuclear war between emerging nuclear countries or

the use of nuclear weapons by emerging nuclear countries against non-nuclear adversaries? At what point do the existing nuclear powers decide that a world of unrestrained nuclear proliferation is too dangerous and that they must impose nonproliferation for the survival of humanity?

The Long Challenge

FOR ALL THEIR IMPORTANCE, THE REGIONAL crises—Iraq, North Korea—are dwarfed by the fundamental transfer of power within the international system. Historians agree that the emergence of a unified Germany over a century ago unbalanced the European system by introducing a state stronger than each of its neighbors. Disraeli called the event of greater significance than the French Revolution, because he sensed that the emerging structure would either imply German hegemony or that

equilibrium could be restored only by an increasingly rigid alliance system depriving diplomacy of maneuvering room.

In our age, the rise of China as a potential superpower is of even greater historical significance, marking as it does a shift in the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific. To be sure, China is unlikely to rely on military power as its principal instrument to achieve international status. For one thing, China's leaders are (or at least have been) more careful, more deliberate, more prone to accumulate advantages by nuance than the impetuous German leaders after Bismarck's retirement. More importantly, with modern technology war between major powers is an absolutely last resort, not a political option. America should maintain its traditional opposition to hegemonial aspirations over Asia. But the long-term relationship with China should not be driven by expectations of a strategic showdown. China

will not conduct as imprudent a policy as the Soviet Union, which threatened all its neighbors simultaneously and challenged the United States to a contest of survival. The special case of Taiwan aside, it will seek influence commensurate with its growth by diplomatic and political means.

An interesting recent article compared the difference in the diplomatic style of China and the United States to their intellectual games—the West's chess and Chinese neiji, better known by the Japanese name of go. Chess has only two outcomes: draw and checkmate. The objective of the game is absolute advantage—that is to say, its outcome is total victory or defeat—and the battle is conducted head-on, in the center of the board. The aim of go is relative advantage; the game is played all over the board, and the objective is to increase one's options and reduce those of the adversary. The goal is less victory than persistent strategic progress.

No one can predict what judgment leaders will make decades from now. But leaders in both Beijing and Washington have a responsibility to help shape the judgments of emerging generations. With respect to China, the priority should be to keep the nationalism that is replacing Communism from taking a confrontational turn. In America, it is to transcend the temptation to view history through the prism of the most recent experience rather than of the long-range view.

China and the United States require a permanent strategic dialogue at a high level seeking a common definition of long-range purposes—to make them compatible where possible, and to reduce the dangers of confrontation when that effort fails. They need to keep the Taiwan issue from undermining the relationship while remembering the importance of solving it by peaceful means. In Sino-American relations, the future of Korea will play an increasingly prominent role. It is not simply a nonproliferation issue but a challenge for a security system for all of Northeast Asia.

China's renaissance, the rapid growth in India and the globalization in every corner of the world, beneficent as these conditions are for individuals, at the same time bring about massive issues of policy that can be postponed only at peril to the world economy. The equitable management of access to energy and raw materials is beyond the capacity of the international system as

Nuclear proliferation may soon become irreversible in North Korea—and elsewhere

Odd and isolated: Kim Jong Il's regime has nuclear ambitions

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presently constituted. If nothing is done, there is the real risk of a return to the rivalries of the colonial era—the contest over the direction of pipelines replacing the contest over territory—and a commodity pricing crisis that could drive the world into general recession. These issues must be addressed with great urgency by the newly elected president—in concert with directly affected trading and financial partners.

All this will bring us back to Atlantic relations. The political campaign has cast Atlantic disagreements in terms of American short-term tactical errors. This is a misreading of reality. Tact has not always distinguished every U.S. pronouncement. But the problem goes deeper than personalities. The impasse is partly due to the fact that the generation that formed the Atlantic relationship has passed from the scene. In the United States, the new leadership group is preoccupied with the challenge of radical Islam; our European allies either do not share America's assessment of that threat or, to the extent that they do, believe themselves capable of dealing with it outside the Atlantic framework. In the United States, the political center of gravity has shifted to parts of the country whose representatives have fewer personal connections with Europe and less experience with its internal challenges than their predecessors who created the postwar structure.

Across the Atlantic, leaders have been concentrating on transferring national sovereignty to new European institutions. This involves a host of technicalities and legal issues which are both arcane and elusive for most Americans. More fundamentally, the United States conducts its policies as the sovereign states of Europe did in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. The European nations having invented the concept of the nation-state are now in the process of seeking to abandon their sovereignty to a European Union not yet possessing the traditional attributes of the state. They find themselves in a halfway house between their history and a future still in the process of evolving.

All this has generated a witches' brew of mutual misunderstandings. In America, critics describe European attitudes as faint-hearted, querulous and, on occasion, duplicitous. In Europe the media (and too many political figures) revel in descriptions of America's racial tension, the death penalty, differences over the environment and mistreatment of prisoners as if aberrations reflected the ultimate meaning of the United States. Shifting their priority from the Atlantic alliance to the U.N. Security Council, Europeans feel no special obligation to support U.S. policy, on occasion actively opposing it.

These conditions cannot be removed by consultation on any one individual issue, and require a fundamental change of attitude on both sides of the Atlantic. The nations bordering the North Atlantic need to ask themselves the fundamental question that has always underpinned the alliance—that is, what will the allies do for the relationship beyond the international consensus reflected at the United Nations? Much of European debate today implies that the answer is “very little.” To subject common

military action to prior approval of the Security Council is incompatible with the very concept of alliance, which implies a special set of obligations. It spells the ultimate disintegration of a world order with the Atlantic partnership as its centerpiece. The Atlantic relationship, to be meaningful, needs to have a special character. The United States and Europe should be prepared to do things for each other in the sphere beyond the immediate dictates of national interest and without insisting on universal consensus.

A deepening of the dialogue between the two sides of the Atlantic is imperative. In a world of jihad, transformation of the balance of power, demographic change, mass migration and economic globalization, the ultimate challenge to the alliance will be the quest for some common purpose. The dialogue over Iraq and Iran described earlier should be supplemented by a new approach to the Palestine-Israeli problem.

For decades the diplomatic stalemate has been deepened because Europe was perceived to champion the Palestinian claims and America the goals of Israel. But new circumstances permit envisaging how the two positions can be brought closer. Israel has implied that settlements beyond its new security fence are negotiable; the fence is already being brought into a relationship to the 1967 frontiers and some compensatory territory from present-day Israel has been discussed in Camp David and Tabba. At the same time, a few moderate Arab leaders have called for new initiatives. An effort to develop a European-U.S. position as part of a reinvigorated peace process might encourage reluctant parties to break the deadlock. In this process, the Atlantic alliance could rediscover its common purpose.

The debate between unilateralism and multilateralism must be transcended with this perspective in mind. Unilateralism for its own sake is self-defeating. But so is abstract multilateralism. The former absorbs purpose into a sense of special national mission; the latter waters down purpose in a quest for a formal consensus. The challenge for America is to reconcile consultation with vast power. The question for Europe is whether it

views Atlantic relations as a partnership or as part of an international system of multipolarity very similar to pre-World War I Europe, in which major power centers engaged in shifting coalitions to maximize their advantage from case to case. That system broke down in the early 20th century; its 21st-century version is likely to be even less successful.

Opportunity for world order presents itself to each generation disguised as a set of problems. The dilemma of our age was perhaps best summed up by the philosopher Immanuel Kant over two hundred years ago. In his essay “Perpetual Peace,” he wrote that the world was destined for perpetual peace. It would come about either by human foresight or by a series of catastrophes that leave no other choice. Which it will be is the ultimate question the newly elected president will have to face.

The rebirth of
China raises
massive global
economic
challenges
that cannot
be ignored

On the rise: China's growth signals a shift in gravity from West to East

[Y]

2639 WORDS (partial count)

10/16/04

## ARTICLE

In a few days, the election process that has mesmerized America for three months will be over. The focus groups, the pollsters, the spinners on talk shows combining eagerness to please with congenital insecurity, will vanish until another election cycle calls them forth again.

What will remain are the challenges that generated all the brouhaha over the privilege of dealing with them.

[And] these are formidable. No president has ever faced [an agenda] of comparable scope. Never before has it been necessary to reconstruct an international system on a global basis; to conduct a war without front lines and geographic definition; to develop principles to

2

replace those of the Westphalian order, which went up in the smoke of
the World Trade Center.

The [challenge perhaps] most [analogous] to that [facing] the
[next] president is that inherited by President Truman when the end of
the Second World War in 1945 left a vacuum in Central Europe and the
Soviet Union emerged as a threat to the global equilibrium. But
Truman's task was largely centered on the Atlantic [sphere]. The
Soviet challenge was concrete and geographically definable. [Today's]
principal threats are abstract and mobile; they have generated attacks
from Bali to Singapore, to Riyadh, Istanbul, Moscow, Madrid, Tunis,
and New York. In the 1940s, the solution was straightforward, albeit
quite difficult: to construct a defensive line in the center of Europe
and an economic program to close the gap between expectation and
reality, which constituted the greatest threat to domestic stability.

3

[y]

The challenge [to] the [next] president will be to achieve a domestic and international consensus regarding the nature of the threat and the means to deal with it. Truman could take the legitimacy of the international system for granted; the newly elected president will have to lead an international effort to define and then maintain it.

As [he] embarks on this task, all those concerned with the future of the country should find ways to cooperate. The controversies of the campaign testified to the vitality of our democracy. The time has come to give expression to what unites rather than divides us. As these lines are being written, the electoral outcome is still some days away. I supported President Bush during the campaign and hope for his success. But whatever the results, the US must not remain in campaign mode. The rest of the world must see that on the

4

fundamentals, America [is giving] itself a chance to implement a
common ________ until it can be tested in another electoral cycle.

It is to this effort that this article seeks to make a contribution.

Every international system reflects the ability to deal with two
sets of challenges: security and legitimacy. Both are unprecedented
in the present period.

The security challenge arises from two sources: the gravest
from acts until recently considered the task of internal police forces
rather than international policy; or it grows out of a scientific evolution
enabling countries to pose threats to survival as a result of
developments entirely *within* a state's territory.

Both threats make to some extent irrelevant the prevailing
concept of international elections. The legal basis of the existing
international system was established by the Treaty of Westphalia in

5

1648. Seeking to avoid a repetition of the Thirty Years' War during which [nearly] 30 percent of the population of Central Europe was killed in a conflict at least formally over religious belief, the rulers based the new system on the principle of sovereignty, which

postulated noninterference across national borders. Hence threats to the international order were defined as the movement of military units across established borders. At the same time, weapons were relatively small, requiring mobilization before war, and technology moved sufficiently slowly, allowing at least the theoretical opportunity for countermeasures.

September 11 marked the end of that period. Threats, it taught, could be organized by private groups and did not require mobilization. These private groups would operate from the territory of sovereign states, but their motives transcended the purposes of the host

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countries. These objectives were not under the control of the host
state and not subject to negotiation since they arose at the overthrow
of the political and social structures of the societies against which the
terror was directed.

The threat to the social structure is compounded by the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In the Westphalian
system, the balance of power could generally be upset primarily by
conquest. In the world of privatized terror and proliferating weapons
of mass destruction, threats to survival are inherent and can no longer
be dealt with after the event. Preemption is therefore [an essential
component of] the new international system. Inevitably this leads to a
clash between traditional concepts of order and new realities. The
nations used to the traditional pattern find it difficult to accept the new
necessities, and all nations will insist on some rules of conduct that do

7

not leave the decision on preemption to the unilateral, unconstrained
determination of a single state. Nor can it be in America's interest to
encourage every nation to define preemption in purely national terms.
How to relate legitimacy to preemption is therefore a key challenge for
the emerging international order.

Iraq

No issue has been more frequently raised in the campaign
[nearing its] end than the American effort in Iraq, most of it focusing
on the decision to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime. I supported
that [course], but the debate about it is no longer relevant to the task
[at hand]. The 9/11 Commission has wisely pointed out that terrorism
is a method, not a policy. The basic adversary is radical,
fundamentalist, militant Islam, aiming to overthrow both moderate

8

Islamic societies and all others it perceives as standing in the way of restoring an Islamic caliphate. For that reason, many societies that questioned America's decision nevertheless have a stake in a successful outcome of the Iraqi crisis. If a radical government emerges in Baghdad because the United States is defeated or [tires] of solitary exertions, even more if Iraq falls into Taliban-fed chaos, the entire Islamic world will be in turmoil. Moderate governments will topple or fight for their existence; countries with substantial Islamic minorities, such as India, will [witness] a mounting violent challenge. Terrorism will spread across Europe. The challenges to America will multiply.

The international community therefore has a major stake in the outcome. The US acts as the custodian of global stability even while domestic obstacles prevent the admission of these realities in many

9

countries - though it is not possible such a one-sided arrangement
[can continue] indefinitely or indeed much longer.

There is no shortcut around the necessary next steps: the
restoration of security, especially in areas that have become terrorist
sanctuaries, and the holding of elections. These tasks cannot wait for
an international consensus. And with respect to them, America has a
global responsibility.

Having experienced the challenges of creating local security
forces in Indochina, I would warn against approaching that enterprise
in too mechanical a spirit. In Vietnam, it took longer to make units
combat-ready than simply fulfilling the requirements of a training
manual. And many units that were prepared to risk their lives in
defense of their home regions were far less effective when used as a
strategic reserve to support an overall design - though, in the end, the

10

South Vietnamese forces beat back an all-out North Vietnamese
invasion so long as they had American air support.

[Ultimately] the effectiveness of Iraqi forces will depend not only
on their military training but above all on the degree to which the
emerging Iraqi institutions gain domestic legitimacy. Units without
political allegiance risk degenerating into unstable mercenaries least
reliable when most needed.

But national elections are only the first and perhaps least
complicated step on the road to Iraqi self-government. Democracy in
the West evolved over centuries. It required first a church
independent of the state; then the Reformation, which imposed
pluralism on religion; the Enlightenment, which asserted the autonomy
of reason from both church and state; the Age of Discovery, which
broadened horizons; and finally capitalism, with its emphasis on

11

competition and the market. None of these conditions exists in the
Islamic world. Instead there is a merging of religion and politics
inimical to pluralism. A genuine democratic government has emerged
only in Turkey and there only on the basis of imposition over 20 years
by an autocratic leader. This is not to say that individually Muslims
are incapable of operating democratic institutions, only that their
emergence faces great cultural obstacles and overcoming traditional
temptations. It also should cause us to be modest in expectations and
patient in the execution of political reform.

Special understanding is needed of the obstacles to democracy
in a multi-ethnic and multi-religion society such as Iraq. In the West,
democracy evolved in homogeneous societies. There was therefore no
institutional obstacle to the minority becoming a majority. Electoral
defeat is considered a temporary setback capable of being reversed.

12

But in societies with distinct ethnic or political divisions, minority status turns into permanent discrimination, implying the threat of political extinction. In such conditions, political contests are over constitutional arrangements to protect the minority by means beyond the electoral process or civil war.

This is a particular issue in Iraq. The country is composed of three major groups: Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis, with the Shiites representing about 60 percent of the population and the other two groups about 20 percent. For 500 years, the Sunnis have dominated the other groups by military force and, during Saddam's rule, with extraordinary brutality. To them, the democratic process implies a radical change in status. The insurgency in the Sunni region is not only a national struggle; [it] is a means to restore political dominance. By the same token, the political process for the Kurds means little if it

13

does not assure their autonomy while the Shiites support it to some
[degree] to reverse the historic pattern of Iraqi rule. The Shiites
tolerate the American presence - ambivalently - to achieve this goal.
But it remains to be seen to what extent they retain this posture as
the transfer of power progresses.

The January elections [in Iraq], therefore, are not the end of a
process but the beginning of an extended [contest among] the various
groups with the constant risk that [they] will resort to civil war or to a
national struggle against the US to obtain legitimacy, or both - indeed,
they [all] maintain militias as a last resort. It thus seems necessary to
supplement the national political process with a significant element of
federalism. This would give the various factions a democratic
expression that coincides with an operational democratic consensus; it

14

might provide some guarantees for the concerns of the various groups
and a safety net if national reconciliation proves impossible.

The nature of the political evolution also suggests that it is
neither in America's interest nor that of the affected countries that it
be conducted together with other states. If the US insists on being the
sole interlocutor for the Iraqi government regarding its political
evolution. . . .

Some degree of internationalization is desirable. This is not
because of an abstract concern with multilateralism. Rather it is the
only realistic course toward political stability. The survival of the
institutions emerging from the political process depends in the first
instance on security but ultimately to a significant extent on its
international acceptance. The United States would signal a
commitment to international cooperation by asking the United Nations

15

to create a contact group to advise on Iraq's political evolution after
the January elections. Logical members would be countries [having]
experience with military Islam and much to lose by the radicalization
of Iraq, such as India, Turkey, Russia, Algeria, together with the
United States, Britain, and other nations to be agreed. In the context
of common approach to a political evolution, the issue of military
contribution by other nations, including NATO, can be raised.

Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction

Militant Islam is the most immediate challenge to international
order; nuclear proliferation is the most insidious threat to the survival
of civilization. In a world of multiple nuclear powers, the principles of
deterrence will erode for at least three reasons: it will not always be
clear who is seeking to deter whom; the calculus of deterrence may no

18

about the appropriate forum detract from the main task, which should
be to decide on a precise program to be negotiated. In Europe, the
discussion about the method for dealing with Iran too often is
presented as a means to restrain American bellicosity instead of as an
elaboration of common purposes. And on North Korea, the dispute
concerns whether the United States should negotiate bilaterally with
Pyongyang.

It goes without saying that the nonproliferation issue cannot be
resolved diplomatically without the direct participation of the
interested parties, including the proliferating country. But [in the case
of] Iran, care must be taken lest proliferation assume a symbolic
character in an ongoing Atlantic controversy. And with respect to
North Korea, the insistence on US-North Korea bilateralism would
leave America as the sole enforcer of any agreement at the borders of

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China. And it would enable Pyongyang to use the agreement for
repeated bouts of blackmail on the pattern it followed after the
bilateral agreement of 1994.

The most urgent task for the United States is to clarify together
with other interested parties an answer to the following questions:

(a) How much time is left before the process of proliferation in
North Korea and India becomes irreversible? In other words, how
much time do we have to execute whatever policy is [reached]?

(b) If negotiations make progress, what precisely do we insist
on, and what concessions or assurances are we prepared to offer in
return?

If we cannot answer these questions, nonproliferation policy will
turn into a means to legitimize proliferation.

20

If the process continues to drift, we will sooner or later need to
address the issue of how we would react in the face of a nuclear
explosion of undetermined origin either in this country or on friendly
territory. At what point will the risk become so great [that it elicits]
consideration of how to impose nonproliferation regimes together with
like-minded countries?

16

longer be uniform – that is to say, the possibilities of miscalculation
multiply exponentially; nuclear materials may spread into the
possession of non-state actors, removing a direct target for
deterrence.

Dealing with nuclear proliferation requires a diplomacy that is
inherently preemptive; it is meaningful only before the process of
proliferation has become irreversible. But this also means that it is
difficult to demonstrate the extent of the danger and, above all, how
imminent it is. The diplomacy therefore concentrates on technical
issues while the underlying challenge is political. For the country
undertaking the journey toward proliferation, the motive is never
purely technical. For countries such as Iran and North Korea, the two
most imminent proliferators, the purpose is to become major
international players and to discourage attempts to influence their

17

domestic policy - in other words, the exact opposite of the general incentives put before them, which increases their dependence on foreign help and obliges them to rely on the promises of countries against which the process of proliferation is directed in the first place.

Inevitably there emerge disputes about the process of negotiation obscuring the purpose of the anti-proliferation diplomacy. The pressures and incentives that need to be assembled are of a magnitude to command a multilateral approach involving the key countries bordering Iran and North Korea. If the pressures involve the threat or use of military force, the attitude of neighboring countries - China with respect to North Korea, Russia with respect to India - becomes especially crucial.

To achieve a successful nonproliferation policy, the next administration will need to clarify these issues. The controversies

WORLD VIEW

AMERICA'S NEW
BALANCING ACT

Is the world ganging up on us? Henry Kissinger says yes—and Bush should begin to take heed.

By FAREED ZAKARIA

Be generous: Bush and Kissinger confer

FOR THE LAST DOZEN YEARS scholars of international politics have pondered a puzzle—why is no one ganging up against the United States? Throughout modern history countries have regularly resisted a rising global power. The world mobilized against Napoleon's France, imperial and Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union. But for more than a decade the United States has been the world's sole superpower and, far from countering it, most countries have courted Washington. Yet if events of the last two weeks are any guide, the ultimate honeymoon may be drawing to a close.

On July 15 Russia and China signed a “friendship treaty,” their first accord since 1949, and declared their joint opposition to America’s plans for a missile defense. A few days later 178 countries voted for a global-warming treaty with the United States alone in dissent. Next, 148 countries pushed to move forward with enforcement measures to ban germ warfare despite American objections. Now, these actions hardly constitute an anti-American alliance. But they are signals. Countries are behaving not like balancers (they don’t have the power to do so yet) but rather like spoilers, sticking a thumb in America’s eye.

It is a big shift from the past decade when American hegemony was almost welcomed by the world. The Soviet Union had been defeated, socialism was discredited and the American economy was performing at warp speed. The rest of the globe was adjusting to a new globalized age and looked to the United States as a guide. But over the last year, we have been returning to a more normal experience, where great power is viewed with suspicion and envy.

I asked Henry Kissinger, who has studied the balance of power for decades, whether he thought that the Bush administration's actions had contributed to the change in atmosphere. Kissinger has just written an elegant new book, "Does America Need a Foreign Policy?" (No points for guessing the answer.)

"The matter-of-fact acceptance of our hegemony is wearing off," Kissinger said. He blames the shift in mood partly on "center-left governments in Europe that find it difficult to deal with a conservative administration," but also acknowledges that there has been "tactical clumsiness" on Washington's part.

On global warming, China policy and missile defense, Kissinger argues that while often right on substance, the administration was being unnecessarily bellicose and unilateral. Even though he

supports missile defense, he argues that the administration will have to sign a new treaty with Russia. "They cannot [get stability] with a series of unilateral statements. The only reason that the Russians are negotiating is to build a binding, legal framework."

What did he make of the fact that the administration had criticized or withdrawn from five treaties in its first seven months? Kissinger has sympathy for the administration's skepticism. "The multilateral approach often paralyzes American foreign policy," he said. "But I am also deeply uneasy with a hegemonic approach to diplomacy. The U.S. should not be afraid of the process of translating its convictions into consensus. We have to find a balance between abdicating our convictions to multilateral institutions and imposing them on the world by fiat." I would put it less delicately. If with our power we cannot preserve our interests in an international negotiation, we should probably get out of the negotiating business.

There are some in the administration who would argue that the United States is so powerful that it need not worry about opposition abroad. We can do what we want and the world will have to lump it. This is often true. But such an attitude will sow the seeds for an inevitable and powerful backlash against America.

"We will be the dominant power in the 21st century," says Kissinger. "No groups of states will be able to prevent this. But our challenge is to see if we can translate our power into an acceptance of some kind so that every foreign-policy issue does not become a test of our strength, which will drain us domestically and breed resentment abroad. We must move from imposition to consensus."

Forging such a consensus in the past was the key to America's success abroad. In an essay in the current National Interest, the German columnist Josef Joffe argues that "the genius of American diplomacy was building institutions, from the U.N. to the IMF, from NATO [to] the WTO ... They advanced American interests by serving those of others." These policies created a more peaceful and prosperous world but they also demonstrated that Washington was a different kind of superpower.

Kissinger argues for "a [similar] generosity of spirit and concept. We will benefit from it. It will legitimize our power and perpetuate its impact. When we built the Atlantic alliance in the late 1940s, Europe was very weak. And yet we gave it a status and a degree of participation [in the alliance] that went beyond what it could have demanded for itself. This should be one of our objectives with Russia, to give it a greater role than it could extract but less than it might seek ... And I would say the same about China." (These are strange times, when Henry Kissinger sounds more humble than George W. Bush.)

Joffe, a conservative (like Kissinger), advises the administration to translate its instincts on economics into foreign policy—engage in supply-side diplomacy. Supply common goods and services for the rest of the world and it will have produced a demand for American leadership. And it won't even need to send out tax-rebate checks.

You can write to the author at zakaria@newsweek.com.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLES OMMANNEY—CORBIS SABA FOR NEWSWEEK

AUGUST 6, 2001 NEWSWEEK 37

Newsweek

Monday, April 1, 2002

For now, America should avoid pressure for a final settlement and help both sides agree on attainable goals. BY HENRY A. KISSINGER

# What We Can Do

THE REAPPEARANCE OF ACTIVE AMERICAN DIPLOMACY IN the Middle East has been greeted with a mixture of hope and trepidation. Hope, because the rage of both parties is giving way to exhaustion. Trepidation, because both sides know their objectives to be essentially incompatible. The secret dream of Israelis is legitimization of the status quo. For Palestinians, the goal is the imposition of terms reducing Israel to its 1967 borders, which could facilitate the destruction of the Jewish state.

Many who generally criticize America's foreign policy (and count among our sins obliviousness to their advice) are joining the widespread call for Washington to play a dominant role. These pleas have been

given fresh impetus by the initiative of Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, which proposes normalization of relations between the Arab world and Israel if Israel returns to the 1967 frontiers. Thus Vice President Dick Cheney's journey to the Middle East, intended to elicit Arab support for a possible showdown with Iraq, was reshaped by his Arab hosts into an occasion for a new initiative to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. This deflection of attention from terrorism to the Palestinian issue is in itself a considerable achievement for Saudi diplomacy. At the same time, the near unanimity in Europe and the Arab world urging American intervention stems from the hope that, in the end, we will impose on Israel a settlement essentially identical to the Abdullah plan.

In the past 30 years, American diplomacy has been the catalyst for practically all the progress the peace process made. But given the explosive politics of the region, it is all too easy to overestimate what is possible. In 2000, the impetuous attempt to settle all issues in one negotiation of limited duration at Camp David contributed to the outbreak of the current warfare.

In present conditions, a comparison of both sides' positions demonstrates that another attempt at a negotiated final solution would not fare better. The only formal plan by an Israeli government was put forward by Prime Minister Ehud Barak at

Camp David. In it, he offered more than 90 percent of the disputed territories (the formula was complex) but retained about 70 percent of the settlements. In exchange, the Palestinians were asked to renounce any future claims, including the right to return into Israel proper (though they would be free to return to a Palestinian state). Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has disavowed this proposal. Yasir Arafat preferred the *intifada* to the implications of finality.

The most forthcoming Arab proposal has come from Crown Prince Abdullah. According to its imprecise outline, Israel would return to the dividing lines of 1967 in exchange for the normalization of relations with the Arab states. Literally, this would imply Israeli abandonment of all settlements and Arab control of the Old City of Jerusalem, including the holy places. The Abdullah plan does not define what is meant by normalization, and is silent about such issues as the right of refugees to return (though it would surely be insisted on in an actual negotiation).

Welcome as this engagement in the peace process is—the first by an Arab state not having a direct national conflict with Israel—its specific terms represent a restatement of a position that has produced the existing deadlock. The pre-1967 “border” in Palestine—unlike the Egyptian, Syrian or Jordanian frontiers

with Israel—was never an international frontier but a ceasefire line established at the end of the 1948 war. It was never recognized by any Arab state until after the 1967 war and has been grudgingly accepted recently by states that do not yet recognize the legitimacy of Israel. I have never encountered an Israeli prime minister or chief of staff who considered the '67 borders defensible, and especially if coupled with an abandonment of a security position along the Jordan River. This is because the '67 borders leave a corridor as narrow as eight miles between Haifa and Tel Aviv and put the border of Israel at the edge of its international airport. Moreover, Israel would have to give up settlements containing approximately 200,000 inhabitants (about 4 percent of its Jewish population).

In return, Israel would achieve diplomatic relations with its neighbors. But in almost all other negotiations, mutual recognition of the parties is taken for granted, not treated as a concession. In fact, nonrecognition implies the legal nonexistence of the other state, which, in the context of the Middle East, is tantamount to an option to destroy it. Once granted, recognition can always be withdrawn; breaking diplomatic relations is a recognized diplomatic tool. Nor does formal normalization involve much else: Israel's peace agreement with Egypt of 23 years ago has brought little in the way of enhanced economic or cultural relations other than an exchange of ambassadors who are rarely brought into play.

While the terms of the crown prince's proposal represent no breakthrough, Saudi engagement could be important if it is used to produce a ceasefire and to start ne-

(over)

-2-

gotiations without preconditions from either side. But if its ultimate purpose is to induce the United States to impose its specific provisions, it would undermine the security of Israel and ultimately the stability of the region.

The precariousness of Israel's position is paradoxical. Israel has never been more powerful, and at the same time never more vulnerable. Israel is militarily stronger than any conceivable Arab adversary; it is clearly able to inflict heavy losses on Palestinian terrorist groups. But it has evolved into a middle-class advanced society and, as such, the strain of guerrilla warfare is psychologically draining. The intifada has generated an ambivalent rigidity in Israeli society. Prior to the Oslo agreement, the Israeli peace movement viewed reconciliation with the Arab world primarily in terms of psychological reassurance; land would be traded for peace even though the Arab quid pro quo would be revocable. But since the intifada, the vast majority of Israelis no longer believe in reconciliation; they want victory and the crushing of their Arab adversaries.

At the same time, there is growing despair over the seeming futility of the enterprise. With the proportion of Israeli casualties to that of the guerrillas going up, and the fact that Israel's retaliation beyond a certain point will not be tolerated by the United States, a sense of resignation is spreading. The desire to turn on the tormentors is beginning to be offset by signs of a hunger for peace at any price.

Israel finds itself facing the classic dynamic of guerrilla warfare as it has played out for two generations now. The guerrillas not only do not recoil from terrorism but practice an egregious form of it because a violent, emotional (and to bystanders), excessive retaliation serves their purpose: to trigger intervention by the international community, especially the United States. In the process, sanctuaries are established—however dubious their basis in international law—that, to all practical purposes, eliminate the capacity of the defending forces to get to the root of the guerrilla challenge. That process gradually erodes Israel's margin of survival even while the world's media and diplomats bewail its excesses. Torn between a recognition of strategic necessities and the pull of emotional imperatives, Israel runs the risk of sliding into paralysis.

-3-

Yet the imposition of the indefensible '67 frontiers is not the solution. For after the experiences of Oslo, Israelis know (as should the rest of the world) that the real division among Palestinians is not between those who want peace in the Western sense—as a point after which the world lives free of tensions with a consciousness of reconciliation. In reality, the number of Palestinian leaders holding this view is minuscule. The fundamental schism is between those who want to bring about the destruction of Israel by continuing the present struggle, and those who believe that an agreement now would be a better strategy to rally forces for the ultimate showdown later on.

Even if those Palestinians who sign a "final" agreement have no afterthoughts, no one can guarantee that they will not be replaced by radical successors. A peace agreement will not quell but may stimulate the intertransience of Hamas and other radical groups or states. If, as is asserted, Arafat cannot be asked to accept a permanent ceasefire as an entrance price into negotiations because his radical opponents would have a veto, why would not the same condition apply after a peace settlement? Thus the differences between a permanent and an interim settlement are more a matter of adjectives than substance.

NATO, American or other third-party guarantees are of marginal utility in overcoming this problem. Nobody can seriously believe that the European countries would go to war for Israel, especially against challenges that are likely to be ambiguous. The only possible solution would be an American guarantee against invasion from neighboring states. Aside from raising profound domestic questions in the United States, this would bring with it an American veto of Israeli retaliation against less than all-out attack and be almost impossible to apply against the resumption of guerrilla warfare.

Therefore, the beginning of wisdom is to recognize the impossibility of a final settlement under current conditions. Some crises can only be managed, not solved. The constant invocation of unattainable goals will foster a general climate of irre-

sponsibility. Yet a less ambitious mediation may have some prospects, if for no other reason than that the status quo is becoming increasingly intolerable for Palestinians as well. They have fought ferociously on behalf of the classic paradigm of asymmetrical warfare: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. Still, a point may be approaching where the costs of the war exhaust, or perhaps even destroy, the civil society the guerrillas are seeking to establish. For the other Arab states, their impotence on the Palestinian issue threatens in time to radicalize their domestic politics. They have a stake in a truce even if they are not able for domes-

tic reasons to support an overall settlement on meaningful terms.

But before the United States launches itself into a major diplomatic effort, it must be clear about what is at stake. Will the mediation be interpreted in the region as being produced by terrorism, or as an attempt to shape an outcome based on familiar American principles? Will the perceived lesson be that September 11 in the end obliged America to adopt positions it had rejected previously? Or will terrorism be viewed as obstructing rather than inspiring a positive American role? If negotiations start, will the military prowess displayed by the Palestinians in the intifada provide an

excuse for Arafat to play the constructive role Anwar Sadat did after the temporary Arab successes of the 1973 war? Or will he view America in retreat and Israel on the verge of an abyss—toward which he will push it step by step with the help of outside mediation? The answers to these questions will determine the prospects for a peaceful evolution of the region, and also to a large extent the prospects for America's war against terrorism.

The Palestinians will not accept a ceasefire because they believe they have momentum; the Israelis will not yield because they fear for their existence.

America can bridge this gap only by making clear to both sides that the only feasible goal is a limited settlement in which each will achieve less than its maximum aim but more than it can accomplish by a continuation of the conflict. It must urge Israel toward a peace program; it must impress upon its Arab interlocutors the limits of achievable concessions.

The strength of the Bush administration has been to cut through slogans to underlying realities. Under present circumstances, this means insisting that a ceasefire must accompany negotiations and that negotiations must aim for less than a final settlement. The goal of such an agreement would be secure borders for Palestinian state with contiguous territory. As part of the necessary withdrawals Israel should be prepared to abandon outlying settlements. Issues other than the border between the two states would be left for later negotiations. There should be an interval of suffi-

cient length for normal life to resume on both sides, encouraged by outside economic assistance. The United States should play a major role in facilitating such an outcome, provided the parties agree to the principles embodied in it. In its absence the United States has no option except to stand aside. If the United States appears to be gradually veering toward imposing the '67 borders, it risks continuation of the conflict.

To contribute to genuine progress, America must back a program that combines respect for Arab dignity with Israel's necessities for survival. There is no middle way.

CURS: BETTANIAN

SEEKING PEACE: The Kissinger-Mir Golda Meir in 1974

> The 1967 'borders' were a ceasefire line established at the end of the 1948 war... I have never encountered an Israeli prime minister who considered [them] defensible.

[LC]

KATHARINE GRAHAM 1917 - 2001

# The Kay We Loved

Katharine Graham left behind a remarkably diverse network of colleagues and friends around the world. They include historians and heads of state, diplomats and dress designers, a powerful software magnate and an old-school book editor—and many, many fellow journalists, both rivals and comrades in arms. They have in common only their admiration for her. Here's how some of them are saying goodbye.

HENRY A. KISSINGER
FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE

‘A symbol of the permanent Washington’

THE FRIENDSHIP Nancy and I shared with Kay Graham is one of the legacies of my government service that we cherish most. Unlike so many Washington relationships that end with the exercise of power, it grew in intensity in the decades after I left office. Yet The Washington Post had been a relentless critic of many aspects of the administrations in which I served. Nor were we on the same side of several issues afterward.

This seeming paradox dissolved in the face of the admiration and affection I came to feel for Kay as a person. Strong and, at the same time, somewhat shy, appreciative of humor, unobtrusively purposeful, never bitter

and always brave, matter-of-factily loyal to her friends and deeply devoted to her family, Kay ennobled all her human relationships. Who can forget the somewhat mischievous way she and Meg Greenfield would comment on the foibles of Washington, or, even more so, the exquisite tenderness with which Kay looked after Meg in the difficult last years of Meg's life.

After a great personal tragedy, Kay took over The Washington Post with no previous experience and not a little diffidence and built it into one of the world's most respected newspapers. She fiercely defended its freedom of expression and was a seminal figure in the battle to submit even the highest officials to ethical and judicial norms.

Kay was also a symbol of the permanent Washington that transmutes the partisanship of the moment into national purpose and lasting values. In that role, she tended to look with a certain wonder at the prominence fate had brought her and

to treat it as an obligation, not so much to impose her will as to build the basis for eventual healing. The Kay of the permanent establishment never lost sight of the fact that societies thrive not by the victories of their factions but by their ultimate reconciliations.

Kay and I met in 1969 at the home of Joe Alsop, another member of Washington's permanent establishment. Technically a Washington Post columnist, Joe saw his calling in protecting the nation from the depredations of the ignorant. Though his views rarely intersected those of his publisher, Kay treated Joe with affection and respect, occasionally tinged with exasperation. For his 70th birthday, Kay gave him a big party to celebrate his contributions to our nation, however at odds they were with the Post's editorial policy. A few weeks after I arrived in Washington, Joe invited me to meet Kay at his house for dinner for the three of us "because you cannot be in Washington, dear boy, without knowing Kay Graham."

Unfortunately, the evening did not turn out as Joe had planned. The president had called me into his office just as I was preparing to leave, and I had instructed my secretary to call Joe periodically to explain the delay. Joe considered a telephone call from a secretary a social offense, a subject on which he held forth at great length and with considerable passion when I arrived an hour late. So it happened that Kay was obliged to spend much of the evening calming the irate Joe. This she achieved with customary grace and some humor, gradually reducing Joe's successive eruptions to

manageable proportions.

As the months went by, Kay remedied the initial lack of dialogue between us. She would invite me to small dinners with one or two people—Bob McNamara, Nelson Rockefeller and Meg Greenfield come to mind—to evoke, with persistent questioning, a discussion about the nation's future beyond the issues of the day.

In the midst of a divisive Vietnam debate in which The Washington Post had been quite unsympathetic to the administration in which I served, Kay telephoned and said: "You need some rest. Let's go to the movies." Ever thorough, she

54 NEWSWEEK JULY 30, 2001

967 WORDS

7/20/01-A.M.

The friendship Nancy and I shared with Kay Graham is one of the legacies of my government service that we cherish most. Unlike so many Washington relationships which end with the exercise of power, it grew in intensity in the decades after I left office. Yet the *Washington Post* had been a relentless critic of many aspects of the administrations in which I served. Nor were we on the same side of several issues afterward.

2

bitter and always brave, matter-of-factly loyal to her
friends and deeply devoted to her family, Kay ennobled all
her human relationships. Who can forget the somewhat
mischievous way she and Meg Greenfield would comment on the
foibles of Washington or, even more so, the exquisite
tenderness with which Kay looked after Meg in the difficult
last years of Meg's life.

After a great personal tragedy, Kay took over the
*Washington Post* with no previous experience and not a
little diffidence and built it into one of the world's most
respected newspapers. She fiercely defended its freedom of
expression and was a seminal figure in the battle to submit
even the highest officials to ethical and judicial norms.

3

Kay was also a symbol of the permanent Washington that transmutes the partisanship of the moment into national purpose and lasting values. In that role, she tended to look with a certain wonder at the prominence fate had brought her and to treat it as an obligation, not so much to impose her will as to build the basis for eventual healing. The Kay of the permanent Establishment never lost sight of the fact that societies thrive not by the victories of their factions but by their ultimate reconciliations.

Kay and I met in 1969 at the home of Joe Alsop, another member of Washington's permanent Establishment. Technically a Washington Post columnist, Joe saw his calling in protecting the nation from the depredations of

4

5

As the months went by, Kay remedied the initial lack
of dialogue between us. She would invite me to small
dinners with one or two people - Bob McNamara, Nelson
Rockefeller, and Meg Greenfield come to mind - to evoke,
with persistent questioning, a discussion about the
nation's future beyond the issues of the day.

In the midst of a divisive Vietnam debate in which the
*Washington Post* had been quite unsympathetic to the

6

"You need some rest. Let's go to the movies." Ever
thorough, she sent over *Post* reviews of the choices
available. And the movie audience was surely startled when
they saw us together as the lights went up.

During yet another crisis, Kay telephoned with a
comparable message: "Things are tough right now. Why
don't you use my house in Virginia for a weekend?"

It was her way of asserting the permanent Washington
to which human relations mattered more than the
controversies of the day and in which the political battles
were a prelude to a new elaboration of national purpose.

As the decades went by, the bonds between Kay and
Nancy and me became ever stronger. We exchanged annual,

7

what diplomats would call reciprocal, weekend visits in the
summer, for the timing and guest lists of which
negotiations usually started in February.

I saw Kay the last time about three weeks ago when she
spent a weekend at our house in Connecticut. She was in
good form, relaxed, interested, humorous. Thunderstorms
prevented her from leaving as she had planned so we watched
a movie together, and then she mused aloud about her
family. She wanted to buy a present for Lally's birthday,
and she was not sure whether to surprise her or whether, in
order to be sure of Lally's approval, to let her help pick
it out. Kay spoke with pride and warmth of Lally's success
as a writer, of Steve's sense of humor and work in the
theater, of Bill's efforts in the financial world, and of

8

Don's surefootedness at the helm of the Washington Post.

She was clearly at peace with herself.

It is hard to believe that Kay is no longer among us.

But, in a way, she will never leave us. Her place in this country will not be filled nor the void her death leaves in the lives of her friends and family. Yet, in the pain of the moment, none of us would trade places with those whose lives were never touched by Kay Graham.

Henry A. Kissinger

JUL-20-2001 10:14

KISSINGER ASSOCIATES

212 759 0042

P.04/10

212 753 7248

P.04

3

her genuine concern, evoke the best of which they were capable. Above all, they never lost sight of the fact that societies thrive not by the victories of their factions but by their ultimate reconciliations.

Strong and, at the same time, somewhat shy, is appreciative of humor, unobtrusively purposeful, never bitter and always brave, matter-of-factly loyal to her friends and deeply devoted to her family. Kay ennobled all her human relationships. Who can forget the somewhat mischievous way she and Meg Greenfield would comment on the foibles of Washington but, even more so, the exquisite tenderness with which Kay looked after Meg in the difficult last years of Meg's life.

JUL-20-2001 10:14

KISSINGER ASSOCIATES

212 759 0042 P.05/10

4

Kay and I met in 1969 at the home of Joe Alsop, another member of Washington's permanent Establishment. Technically a Washington Post columnist, Joe saw his calling in protecting the nation from the depredations of the ignorant. Though his views rarely intersected those of his publisher, Kay treated Joe with affection and respect, occasionally tinged with exasperation. For his 70th birthday, Kay gave him a big party to celebrate his contributions to our nation, however at odds they were with the Post's editorial policy. A few weeks after I arrived in Washington, Joe invited me to meet Kay at his house for dinner for the three of us "because you cannot be in Washington, dear boy, without knowing Kay Graham."

JUL-20-2001 10:14

KISSINGER ASSOCIATES

212 759 0042
212 753 7498

P.06/10
P.06

5

Joe considered a telephone call from a secretary at our office, a subject on which he held forth at great length and with considerable passion when I arrived an hour late.

So it happened that Kay was obliged to spend much of the evening calming the irate Joe. This she achieved with customary grace and some humor, gradually reducing the irate successive eruptions to manageable proportions.

As the months went by, Kay remedied the initial lack of dialogue (between us). She would invite me to small dinners with one or two people - Bob McNamara, Nelson

JUL-20-2001 10:14

KISSINGER ASSOCIATES

212 759 0042

P.07/10

JUL-19-2001 20:49

6

Rockefeller, and Meg Greenfield come to mind - to discuss

punitives and questioning a Presidium where the country was headed beyond the issues of the day.

In the midst of a little Vietnam debate in which the民主

Washington Post had been quite unsympathetic to the administration in which I served, Kay telephoned and said: "You need some rest. Let's go to the movies," Ever thorough, she sent over Post reviews of the choices available. And the movie audience was surely startled when they saw us together as the lights went up.

Another example of many similar occasions, Kay telephoned with a comparable message: "Things are tough right now. Why don't you use my house in Virginia for a weekend?"

JUL-20-2001 10:14

KISSINGER ASSOCIATES

212 759 0042

P.09/10

8

so we watched a movie together, and then she mused aloud
about her family. She wanted to buy a present for Lally's
birthday, and she was not sure whether to surprise her or
whether, in order to be sure of Lally's approval, to let
her help pick it out. Kay spoke with pride and warmth of
Lally's success as a writer, of Steve's sense of humor and
work in the theater, of Bill's ~in the financial
world, and of Don's surefootedness at the helm of the
Washington Post. She was clearly at peace with herself.

JUL-20-2001 10:14

KISSINGER ASSOCIATES

212 759 0042
212 759 0042

P.10/10
P.10

9

TOTAL P.10

381 WORDS

7/18/01-#3

Kay Graham was a revolutionary. She built the *Washington Post* into one of the world's most respected newspapers and fiercely defended its integrity and freedom of expression. She was a seminal figure in the fight to submit even the most powerful to ethical and judicial norms.

But Kay was not just fighting for great causes; she was also, and perhaps above all, an expression and a symbol of a permanent Washington that transmutes the partisanship of the hour into national purpose and a permanent expression of America as the hope of freedom. Those of us who were present when she introduced Ronald Reagan and,

2

more recently, George W. Bush (and no doubt many others
that I missed) to that permanent Washington took it for
granted that it should be Kay who performed that honor even
though - or perhaps because - neither had been her first
choices in the elections. On those evenings - and others
less exalted - there was a sense of national unity, belying
the passions that form the headlines of the day.

The private Kay, who honored Nancy and me with her
friendship for three decades, was gentle, occasionally
diffident, appreciative of humor, relentlessly probing,
hostile to the second-rate, unobtrusively conscious of her
duties, devoted to her friends and to her family. I will
always remember how, in the midst of a bitter Vietnam
protest in which the *Post* was quite unsympathetic to the

3

administration in which I served, she telephoned and said:

"You need some rest. Let's go to the movies." Ever
thorough, Kay sent over *Post* reviews of the choices
available. And a movie audience was startled when the
lights went up to see the national security adviser walking
out with one of the administration's most relentless
critics.

It was Kay's way of showing that friendship
transcended the political battles of the moment and that
her friends mattered more to her than the controversies of
the day.

Among the events that have given meaning to my life,
Kay's friendship played a key role. Her place in this
country can never be quite filled nor the void her death

4

leaves in my life and Nancy's. Yet, in the pain of the moment, I would not trade places with those whose lives were never touched by Kay Graham.

07/18/01 WED 08:52 FAX 1 714 528 0544

001

393 WORDS

7/18/01-#2

She built Kay Graham was a revolutionary, and a pillar of the Washington Post into one of the world's most respected newspapers and fiercely defended its integrity and freedom of expression. She was a seminal figure in the fight to submit even the most powerful to ethical and judicial norms.

But Kay was not just fighting for great causes; she was also, and perhaps above all, an expression and a symbol of a permanent Washington that stands for gentleness, compassion, and the partisanship of the hour is transmitted into a national purpose and a permanent expression of a recognition that America is the hope of freedom. Those of

07/18/01 WED 08:53 FAX 1 714 528 0544

003

3

protest in which the *Post* was quite unsympathetic to the administration in which I served, she telephoned and said: "You need some rest. Let's go to the movies." Ever thorough, Kay sent over *Post* reviews of the choices available. And a movie audience was startled when the lights went up to see the national security adviser walking out with one of the administration's most relentless critics.

Among the events that have given meaning to my life, *some* would give Kay's friendship a decisive role. Her place in

004

4

this country can never be quite filled nor the void her
death leaves in my life and Nancy's. Yet, in the pain of
the moment, I would not trade places with those whose lives
were never touched by Kay Graham.

INTERNATIONAL

New World Disorder

The ill-considered war in Kosovo has undermined relations with China and Russia and put NATO at risk. BY HENRY A. KISSINGER

A WAR AT THE FAR EDGE OF THE BALKANS HAS POLITICAL consequences extending far beyond Kosovo. In Russia, an outraged sense of humiliation over NATO's actions has spread from the elites to the population at large and threatens to blight U.S.-Russian relations for years to come. In Beijing, the virulent reaction to the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade has vented frustrations with the roller-coaster nature of Sino-American relations that have accumulated for many months. And in Europe, the seeming unity of the Atlantic Alliance has grown brittle: key allies are eying the exits; domestic opposition is mounting; the newly admitted members in Central Europe are uncomfortable that their first allied activity is as part of a NATO-initiated war.

The causes in Russia and China are plain enough. Their leaders are products of societies that interpret decisions about war and peace according to whether they enhance a nation's security or other vital interests. If they can discern no such traditional rationale to U.S. behavior, they ascribe our motives not to altruism but to a hidden agenda for domination.

In Europe, the situation is more complex. The allies share our motives but are beginning to question our judgment. And they find themselves under increasing domestic pressure as the damage from the bombing of Serbia compounds the devastation of Kosovo.

A generation gap has exacerbated the crisis. The formative experiences of the Clinton administration's key personnel were either in the trenches of the Vietnam pro-test movement, or in presidential campaigns—or both. Suspicious of the role of power in foreign policy, they use it ineffectively and without conviction. They emphasize the so-called “soft” issues, like the environment, and have little concern with notions of the international equilibrium or of traditional U.S. interests, which they scorn as outdated. Obsessively driven by public-opinion polls, they are ever tempted to treat foreign policy as an extension of domestic politics. Their diplomacy is quite skillful in dealing with short-term tactical issues but obtuse with respect to strategy; adept at “spinning” public opinion but oblivious to a generation's worth of lessons about the limitations of air power and the futility of notions of “graduated escalation.”

The rejection of long-range strategy explains how it was possible to slide into the Kosovo conflict without adequate consideration of all its implications—especially the visceral reaction of almost all nations of the world against the new NATO doctrine of humanitarian intervention. Before the start of the bombing, it was conventional wisdom in Washington that Serbia's historic attachment to Kosovo was exaggerated and that Slobodan Milosevic was looking for a pretext to get rid of the incubus it represented—which a few days of bombing was supposed to supply. But what if Serbia, the country that fought the Turkish and Austrian empires and defied Hitler and Stalin at the height of their powers, did not yield? How far were we willing to go? Not to ground war, it was announced at the very beginning, tempting Milosevic to test his endurance to sustained bombing. No provision was made for a war of attrition or the flood of refugees it was bound to create—not to speak of the ethnic cleansing that the war has accelerated and intensified.

From the start, there has been a vast gap between the rhetoric and the means with which to back it up. Allied pronouncements have ritually compared Milosevic to Hitler. But the transparent reluctance to accept casualties signaled that the Alliance would not make the commitment necessary to overthrow the accused tyrant. Now, if the outcome is to be some kind of compromise, Milosevic will inevitably be legitimized and emerge as a valid interlocutor. By justifying the war in terms requiring total victory while conducting a strategy impelling compromise,

NATO has maneuvered itself into a trap.

Several fateful decisions were taken in those now seemingly far-off days in February, when other options were still open. The first was the demand that 30,000 NATO troops enter Yugoslavia, a country with which NATO was not at war, and administer a province that had emotional significance as the origin of Serbia's independence. The second was to use the foreseeable Serb refusal as justification for starting the bombing.

Rambouillet was not a negotiation—as is often claimed—but an ultimatum. This marked an astounding departure for an administration that had entered office proclaiming its devotion to the U.N. Charter and multilateral procedures. The transformation of the

SLAP AT BEIJING: Clinton backed away from a favorable trade deal with China's Zhu Rongji in April

> We must not repeat in Asia the emotional and unthought-out policies that brought us such grief in the Balkans

MAY 31, 1999 NEWSWEEK 41

INTERNATIONAL

Alliance from a defensive military grouping into an institution prepared to impose its values by force occurred in the same months that three former Soviet satellites joined NATO. It undercut repeated American and allied assurances that Russia had nothing to fear from NATO expansion, since the Alliance's own treaty claimed it to be a purely defensive institution.

Kosovo has thereby become a symbol of Russia's post-cold-war frustrations. The tribulations of Yugoslavia, Moscow's traditional friend (leaving aside the interruption of the Tito years), emphasized Russia's decline and have generated a hostility toward America and the West that may produce a nationalist and socialist Russia—akin to the European Fascism of the 1930s. This would be a sorry end for the administration's policy of supporting Russian reform and coaxing Russia closer to the West.

This is why the expectations attached to the Russian mediation in Kosovo seem excessive. Russian leaders would hardly be brokenhearted if the outcome in Kosovo weakens NATO. A Russian intermediary faces a double dilemma: if he is seen as supporting the NATO program, he will lose standing at home; if he induces us to reduce our demands, he will become a scapegoat in the American domestic debate over compromising our war aims. Russia's most constructive role in my view would be as full participant at a conference for political arrangements in the Balkans *following* a ceasefire.

To its credit, the administration from the beginning has recognized the importance of bringing Russia into the international community. But it has identified this effort primarily with democratic reform and market economics inside Russia and nonproliferation abroad. All this accentuates the Russian sense of having come under a kind of colonial tutelage. Russia, in turn, has clung to many aspects of its traditional diplomacy: seeking to reduce our influence, especially in the Middle East. Russia's image of itself as an historic player on the world stage must be taken seriously. This requires less lecturing and more dialogue; less sentimentality

and more recognition that Russia's national interests are not always congruent with ours; less sociology and more foreign policy.

Before the attack on its Belgrade embassy, China's reaction to the air war was more muted than Russia's—but equally negative. Every nation views international events through the prism of its history. And to China, the new NATO doctrine of humanitarian intervention evokes Europe's unilaterally proclaimed civilizing mission in the 19th century, which led to the fragmentation of China and a series of Western interventions. These humilations were followed in the 20th century by the so-called Brezhnev doctrine that proclaimed the Kremlin's right to punish by force of arms communist regimes that strayed from its ideological line. Indeed, it was to resist the Brezhnev doctrine that China moved to restore its relations with the United States in 1971.

That policy of close ties between the United States and China is now questioned in both capitals. President Clinton's policy has built on the conviction of all his predecessors since Richard

Nixon that both China and the United States have much to gain from cooperation and risk exhausting themselves by confrontation. For China, a breakdown in relations would deal a severe blow to its economic program and modernization. For America, it would ensure turmoil throughout Asia, leaving China's neighbors torn by the need to choose between the world's most populous country, whose 5,000 years of history give it a special place in Asia, and America, the world's only superpower.

That cooperative policy is losing momentum on our side largely because of a stalemate between the administration and opponents who see China as our principal strategic threat. The stalemate arises from the administration's tendency to present its policy of engagement with China less in terms of common objectives than as a better method of achieving its critics' objectives. A "strategic partnership" has been proclaimed, but real strategic discussions on the highest level have been rare amid

diseases over issues ranging from Taiwan to human rights to non-proliferation. And the administration has felt obliged to balance its China policy with periodic bows to its critics.

**A** GOOD EXAMPLE WAS the visit to Washington in early April of Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji—generally considered among the most reformist and market-oriented of the Chinese leaders. That visit was bracketed by the announcement—just before Zhu's arrival—that the United States would support a U.N. resolution condemning China's human-rights practices, and immediately afterward by the sale of long-range radars to Taiwan. And during the visit, the administration declined to sign an agreement on China's entry into the World Trade Organization, for which the Chinese had made major concessions and which they had reason to believe would be the centerpiece of Zhu's visit. (To compound Zhu's embarrassment, the administration published all the concessions he had made.)

Whatever one's view of the sub-

stance of these decisions, their timing conveyed an impression of a government driven by its critics into subordinating to domestic politics a policy that should be based on mutual national interests.

The bombing of the Belgrade embassy was the match that set off the explosion. Mutual suspicions fed on each other. The Chinese viewed the president's original apology—made as a response to a question at a press conference during a visit to Oklahoma and linked to a justification of NATO bombing—as inadequate. Americans considered the Chinese violence against the American Embassy in Beijing unacceptable. But if the Sin-American relationship is not to spiral toward a confrontation, it is essential to call a halt to mutual recrimination and seek to restore a dialogue.

The leaders of both countries seem aware that a confrontation would be catastrophic for both sides as well as for the peace of the world. But both are under pressure from ideological opponents at home. However, there is no way to dodge this debate.

WADE GODDARD—STOMA

WE MUST PERSIST: Ground troops may be required to clear Kosovo and allow refugees to return home

Suspicious of the role of power in foreign policy, administration officials use it ineffectively and without conviction

42 NEWSWEEK MAY 31, 1999

[L.C.]

In the United States, the critics are serious and so must be the administration.

The critics of a cooperative China policy fall into two camps. The first group holds that the emergence of China as a major power automatically threatens American vital interests, especially under communist leadership. A second group is concerned about specific Chinese policies from human rights to proliferation. To be sure, China's actions on many fronts reflect the unsentimental policy of an emerging power. Nevertheless, Sin American disagreements can be kept short of confrontation by patient and firm diplomacy. And there are many areas of congruent interests. If, in the absence of a direct challenge, the emergence of China as a major power and its political system are turned into the occasion for American hostility, we will be embarked on a lonely course without support from any major nation in either Europe or Asia. I would warn against such an ad-

venture that will distort our Asian policy for decades. There is no more important task for American foreign policy than to design a strategy recognizing and managing adversarial elements in our relations with China, yet drawing Beijing further into the international system. We must not repeat in Asia the emotional and unthought-out policies that brought us such grief in the Balkans. The law of unintended consequences still operates.

D ESPITE THE SEEMING unity of the NATO summit, Kosovo has made a debate about the Alliance's future inevitable. It is being delayed by horror at Milosevic's barbarities and by the paradox that Europe's new left-wing governments—especially in Germany and Italy—are afraid of being accused of undermining their conservative predecessors' legacy of pro-American and pro-NATO foreign policy. But these new governments are likely to consider that they have now paid enough homage to the traditions of allied solidarity. They can be expected to be influenced by the

mounting indignation of their rank and file, who would be protesting in the streets of Germany in the tens of thousands had former chancellor Helmut Kohl won the election and carried out a similar policy. Once the Kosovo crisis is over—or if the war drags on—these constituencies will become more dominant. And their influence has already been shown in the unprecedentedly abrupt refusal of the German chancellor to consider ground troops for Kosovo.

The issues ducked at the NATO summit brook no further delay. Specifically, what is the proper mission of NATO in so-called "out of area" conflicts? What are the relative roles of Europe and America? Does the Alliance have a serious political or military strategy for stabilizing parts of Europe or adjacent strategic regions?

Europe (the U.K. included) has already begun to draw the conclusion from Kosovo that it needs to accelerate the elaboration of its own institutions in order to enhance its autonomy from the United States—hardly a vote of confidence in the middle of a

war. But if Europe will not supply the resources for this task—as is likely—the Alliance will be left with the worst of all scenarios: a Europe asserting greater freedom of action from the United States but with little actual ability to act alone; and an America estranged from Europe.

No issue is more in need of rethinking than the concept of humanitarian intervention put forward as the administration's contribution to a new approach to foreign policy. The air war in Kosovo is justified as establishing the principle that the international community—or at least NATO—will henceforth punish the transgressions of governments against their own people. But we did not do so in Algeria, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Croatia, Rwanda, the Caucasus, the Kurdish areas and many other regions. And what will be our attitude to emerging ethnic conflicts in Asia, for example in Indonesia and the Philippines? The answer often given is that we act where we are able to without undue risk, not

elsewhere. But what are the criteria for this distinction? And what kind of humanism expresses its reluctance to suffer military casualties by devastating the civilian economy of its adversary for decades to come?

Moral principles are expressed in absolutes. But foreign policy must forever be concerned with reconciling ends and means. The fact that ethnic cleansing is repugnant does not obviate the need to devise the most appropriate response. At every stage of the Kosovo tragedy, other mixes of diplomacy and force were available, though it is not clear they were ever seriously considered. A strategy that vindicates its moral convictions only from altitudes above 15,000 feet—and in the process devastates Serbia and makes Kosovo unlivable—has already produced more refugees and casualties than any conceivable alternative mix of force and diplomacy would have. It deserves to be questioned on both political and moral grounds.

The United States can take pride in elevating human rights to an integral part of foreign policy. But when one observes the progression from the call for moral pressure of the 1970s, to economic sanctions in the 1980s, to military intervention in the 1990s, the time has come to call for a definition of purposes and a dialogue on the relationship between objectives and methods. But this is for the future. Now that the credibility of the Atlantic Alliance has been staked, we must persist—with ground troops if necessary—until Serb military forces leave Kosovo and the refugees are allowed to return.

The paradox is that a country that thinks of itself as acting in the name of universal values is seen by too many others as acting arbitrarily, or inexplicably, or arrogantly. A re-examination of the prevailing premises of our foreign policy is overdue. This is a tall order for the last 18 months of an administration heretofore more given to tactics than strategy, more to Band-Aids than to healing. The agenda will not be completed in the time left. But if the president encourages a debate on a new agenda before the end of his term, he will have left an important legacy. ■

RIFT WITH MOSCOW: Both public and elite, like new P.M. Sergei Stepashin (above), are shocked by NATO's war

> Russia's self-image as a player on the world stage must be taken seriously. This requires less lecturing and more dialogue.

MAY 31, 1999 NEWSWEEK

43

vailed, and Ford's staunch support enabled 130,000 Vietnamese to flee the catastrophe. Now that debate was overwhelmed by events. We had become spectators of a drama we were no longer able to influence, suspended between a pain we could not still and a future we were not yet in a position to shape.

For those who lived through the final day, any account must appear as fragmentary, dominated by the perspective from each protagonist's vantage point as chaos consumed two decades of sacrifice. For those who were spared the anguish, the passions will seem incomprehensible. And historians are no help, since their accounts generally replicate bitter schisms of the period. Radical critics conjure up bloodthirsty American leaders pursuing a war to satisfy their twisted psychologies. The right either ignores the war as a liberal aberration or blames the defeat on lack of ideological zeal (the mantra of "neoconservative" converts who, in reality, were on the antiwar side while the war was going on and have their own reasons for avoiding its memory).

Reluctant to come to grips with the most traumatic experience of the past half century, Americans find it difficult to draw the real lessons from what was done to this country—and what we did to ourselves—during that sad period.

That will be my subject here. For one of the most important casualties of the Vietnam tragedy was the tradition of American "exceptionalism." The once near-universal faith in the uniqueness of our values—and their relevance around the world—gave way to intense divisions over the very validity of those values and the lengths we

should go to promote and defend them. And those schisms have had a profound impact on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy ever since.

## ENTERING INDOCHINA & LEAVING IT

IT WAS THE SO-CALLED GREATEST GENERATION THAT ENTERED Indochina in the heyday of American exceptionalism. It did so in pursuit of the strategy that had already stabilized the post-World War II world, rebuilt Europe, restored Germany and Japan to the community of nations and arrested the Soviet advance into Europe and in Korea. A mixture of the experiences of World War II and a philosophy drawn from the New Deal, this strategy concentrated on stopping Soviet aggression and removing communist opportunities for internal upheavals by promoting economic and social progress in regions under U.S. protection.

Though the American conduct of the cold war is often presented as reflecting a nearly unanimous consensus, there was always significant dissent during this period, especially in the intellectual and academic communities. They argued either that the communist threat was exaggerated or that the United States was associating with too many questionable regimes to sustain its claim as a defender of liberty. But their critique was confined to the wisdom of specific policies, not to the validity of the values on which it was based.

With the advent of the Kennedy administration, this policy

was given its most sweeping formulation in the new president's Inaugural Address—his promise that the United States would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to ensure the survival and success of liberty." At the time there was virtually no opposition to this open-ended commitment, or to the conventional wisdom that Indochina was an essential outpost in the defense of liberty.

As Kennedy was preparing to take office, President Eisenhower recommended that America give military support to Laos if North Vietnamese intervention there continued. Within two months of his Inauguration, Kennedy sent Marines to Thailand, adjoining Laos. He recoiled from intervening directly (though the CIA undertook covert measures). But by December 1961, when Hanoi opened a supply line to South Vietnam through Laotian territory and intensified the guerrilla war, Kennedy sent U.S. military "advisers" to South Vietnam, whose number rose to 16,000 by the end of 1963. President Lyndon Johnson esca-

lated this commitment until it reached more than 500,000 combat troops by the time he left office. Once again, there was no significant opposition, either within or outside the administration, to that massive deployment. Though the decision was blamed on Johnson later on, it was in fact Kennedy's closest advisers—McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk—who urged the escalation.

By the end of the Johnson administration, frustration had set in. The strategy that had worked in every previous American war—of wearing down the

adversary by attrition—could not succeed against guerrillas defending no specific territory and who were therefore in a position to choose when and where to fight. Nor did the non-communist countries of Indochina live up to the standards of democracy of our European allies, throwing into question the moral purpose of the war. For those who had made the decision to send American troops, growing self-doubt compounded despair triggered by Kennedy's assassination.

While America's leaders were seized by emotional turmoil, their critics challenged the very essence of American foreign involvement. The argument that the war was unwinnable and that its cost exceeded its benefits escalated as rapidly as the U.S. deployment. At first the doubters dwelled on how to find an honorable way out. But within months, American exceptionalism itself was called into question. The protesters increasingly argued that the ultimate cause of the crisis was not errors in judgment but moral rot at the core of American life. The victory of the communists in Indochina, which administrations of both parties had sought to prevent for nearly two decades, became for the radical protesters a desirable national catharsis. Critics moved from questioning the worthiness of America's allies to challenging the worthiness of America itself, and of its conduct not only in Vietnam but around the world. Vietnam became the first war in which prominent Americans paid highly publicized visits to the enemy capital to oppose their own country.

By the time Richard Nixon became president, the battle lines

## THE LONELINESS OF COMMAND

After ordering the evacuation of the last Americans, Ford reflects on his decision in the White House family quarters with his wife, Betty

48

NEWSWEEK MAY 1, 2000

DAVID HUME KENNERLY—FORD PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY

[10]

VIETNAM'S LEGACY

VIETNAM BROKE THE FUSION OF IDEOLOGY AND strategy that underlay American exceptionalism. Though its principles continue to be affirmed by all sides, its application is now subject to profound dispute. Since the Vietnam War, there have been three main schools among American foreign-policy makers:

■ Advocates of adapting the cold-war strategy of the 1950s and 1960s to new circumstances.

■ Members of the Vietnam protest movement, who came to high office in the Clinton administration.

■ And a new generation that does not remember the Vietnam schism and now faces a world radically different from the one that formed either the cold warriors or the Vietnam protesters.

Shaken by the Vietnam experience, many liberals and intellectuals retreated from the field of strategy and redefined expe-

tionalism in terms of "soft issues" which could be achieved without the use of military power. As a result, traditional American strategy became largely the provenance of conservatives and neoconservatives. Always uncomfortable with commitments on distant battlefields, the American right concentrated on rigorous anti-communism and vigilance in maintaining the strategic balance, especially with respect to arms-control negotiations. And during the Reagan administration, against a Soviet adversary weakened by decades of over-

extension, this group achieved great successes.

Yet with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the need for a national strategy adapted to the post-cold-war world has baffled many conservatives. In the aftermath of Reagan, some of his disciples continue to emphasize his rhetoric while neglecting the hardheaded strategy with which he pursued the 1980s equivalent of containment. They seem torn (especially in the neoconservative group) between searching for a new danger to replace the Soviet Union, in opposition to which all foreign policy can be organized, and the redefinition of American exceptionalism as a global crusade for democracy. China is the target for much of this effort. But it is as yet too weak, its ideology too national and its potential danger too distant to allow foreign policy to be organized around it, especially if we wish to bring allies along with us. To be true to itself, America must always stand for democracy; but to shape the world, it also needs to understand both its interests and their limits, and not recoil from defining either.

The conclusions that many in the Clinton administration—and in the liberal community—have drawn from the Vietnam War present a profound challenge to traditional American foreign policy. They treat the cold war as a misunderstanding, if not an American creation. They recoil before the concept of national interest and distrust the use of power unless it can be presented as in the service of some “unselfish” cause—that is to say, as reflecting no specific American national interest. On many occa-

had been drawn. The demoralized establishment, which had launched us into the quagmire, abdicated from the task of extrication. They left the field to the protesters or joined them in attacks on the alleged shortsightedness and warped mentality of the Nixon administration. The radical protesters, certain of their moral superiority, saw no need for restraint in the methods they used to pursue their ends. Through street demonstrations and deliberate subversion of all authority, from universities to the U.S. government, they sought to wreck any policy designed to vindicate the values on which America's post-World War II policy had been based.

Nixon, who inherited this impasse, lacked the human qualities to transcend it, if indeed it was possible to do so. Still, for all his railing against the establishment, he, too, was a product of the "greatest generation." And he sought to implement what he understood to be the demand of moderate critics for an honorable withdrawal. Starting with the first negotiations with Vietn-

ese Politburo member Le Duc Tho, Nixon offered a timetable for American withdrawal and a variety of formulas to permit the people of South Vietnam a genuine choice. What Nixon would not accept—and what, until the end, Hanoi never ceased demanding—was the forcible imposition of a communist regime on the millions who, relying on the words of our predecessors, had thrown in their lot with the United States.

When a negotiated solution proved unattainable, Nixon proceeded unilaterally to implement his campaign promise to extricate

America from Vietnam. In the process, he reduced U.S. casualties from 1,200 a month at the end of the Johnson administration to 30 a month at the end of Nixon's first term. And he unilaterally reduced American troops from 550,000 to 30,000.

Many of the stages in this process were highly controversial, and they deserve fuller treatment than this article permits. But it is symptomatic of the schism Vietnam created that so much of the literature focuses on the charge that Nixon needlessly prolonged the war and sacrificed American lives, implying that there was some honorable way out that he refused to take.

The political divide was sharpened by a similar split in the intellectual community. When I was in graduate school, intellectuals rarely achieved high positions in government. If they wanted to affect policy, they had to write lengthy papers on longer-range issues. The Kennedy administration awakened their taste for political power, and they sought to shape immediate policy discussions first within the government and after Kennedy's assassination from the sidelines. In the process they divided into two groups—job applicants and revolutionaries. The job applicants replicated the debates of policymakers; the revolutionaries, the arguments of the protest movement. In either case, they accentuated America's schisms rather than help overcome them. A balanced judgment on Vietnam remains our challenge—not as a question of historical justice toward individual presidents, but of historical truth about a national tragedy.

THE EXITS CLOSE DOWN

The day before Saigon's fall, Kissinger tells Ford that Ton Son Nhut Airport has become unusable. Now helicopters are the only way out.

MAY 1, 2000 NEWSWEEK 49

sions and many continents, President Clinton has apologized for actions of his predecessors that stemmed from what he derogatorily describes as cold-war attitudes. But the cold war was not imaginary; profound issues of survival and national purpose were involved. And this denigration—generally quite inaccurate—of the actions of U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Bush must raise doubts about American constancy, even on the part of the administration offering the apology.

Apologies for 50 years of U.S. history are matched by uneasiness with the use of American power. In Kosovo, for example, the idea that NATO's actions elevated traditional national interest into universal humanitarian principles was invoked by all leaders as the distinguishing feature of the enterprise. But six months later the same leaders recoiled from applying the Kosovo principles to Chechnya—where civilian casualties were far greater—for fear of Russian power. The foreign policy of the self-proclaimed moralists had returned full circle (and with a touch

of hypocrisy) to the famous maxim that foreign policy is the art of the possible and the science of the relative.

Or consider the difference between the Clinton administration's attitude toward Iraq and toward Kosovo. In December 1998, Iraq inflicted a strategic defeat on us by expelling U.N. inspectors placed there as a condition for ending the gulf war. The administration responded by bombing for four nights. But three months later it bombed Yugoslavia nonstop for 78 days in pursuit of what was perceived as a humanitarian interest. In each case,

the conduct of operations was undertaken with a reluctance to accept casualties that ultimately conveyed to the American public, and to our adversaries, the absence of any vital interest. Yet paradoxically, the fear of domestic convulsions and ambivalence about the decisive use of American power end up making crises more frequent and more difficult to resolve. That is perhaps why the Clinton administration has been drawn into more inconclusive military operations than any previous administration.

IN THE GLOBALIZED ECONOMIC WORLD, THE POST-cold-war generation looks to Wall Street as mine did to Washington. This reflects not only a difference in financial remuneration but, in part, a reluctance to enter a calling more and more marked by vicious personal attacks and the prospect of political disputes that all too often end in criminal investigations.

Vietnam bequeathed a new generation divided into two camps: one in search of riskless applications of our values, another in an erratic quest for a focal point for our national strategy. It is not that this generation is obsessed by the debates over the war in In-dochina, with which it is largely unfamiliar. Nor does it have feelings of guilt about a doctrine of self-interest, which it pursues strenuously in its economic activities. But it has little knowledge of history or of national policy and hence lacks a sense of direction in the international political arena. It is tempted by the Clin-

tonian concept of riskless global gratification and the belief that the hardheaded pursuit of economic self-interest will ultimately produce global reconciliation.

Such an approach is possible only because our world has been freed to a large extent from the dangers of general war. In such a world, the post-cold-war generation of American leaders (whether graduated from the protest movements or business schools) finds it possible to imagine that foreign policy consists merely of instructing the rest of the world. This turns our diplomacy into nothing more than demands for compliance with an American agenda. When vast economic and military power is coupled with condescension and righteousness, dominance grows grating and leadership comes to be perceived as hegemony. But hegemonic empires almost automatically elicit universal resistance, which is why all such claimants have sooner or later exhausted themselves.

Economics will not provide a substitute for a national strategy.

The globalized world will emerge only through dislocations and tensions, both within and among societies. The nation-state, which remains the unit of political accountability for solving these crises, is itself in a process of transition. In many regions of the world, it is breaking down, either into hitherto ethnic entities or by joining larger regional groupings. And the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction represents a political challenge faced by no previous society.

If our new generation of national leaders is embarrassed to elaborate a

concept of national interest in dealing with these problems, or to invoke the unapologetic use of power as a last resort, it will achieve not moral elevation but progressive paralysis. Certainly any concept of national interest would not be American if it did not flow from our democratic tradition or concern with collective security. But we must also be prepared to face up to some hard questions imposed by reality. What, for our survival, must we seek to prevent no matter how painful the means? What, to be true to ourselves, must we try to accomplish no matter how small the attainable consensus, or, if necessary, on our own? What wrongs is it essential that we right? Which are beyond our capacity or not consistent with the national interest?

We will not have overcome the shadow of Vietnam—or be able to meet our new challenges—until we can achieve a national consensus on these issues. And this requires mutual respect among the disputants and a conviction, nearly lost in the Vietnam period, that we are engaged in a common enterprise rather than a fight to the finish. Our political leaders may skirt these issues during the presidential campaign that is about to begin. But the winner will not be able to escape them once he enters the Oval Office.

FOR A GALLERY OF PHOTOS BY DAVID HUME KENNERLY OF THE FORD WHITE HOUSE DURING THE EVACUATION OF SAIGON, LOG ON TO NEWSWEEK.COM

A FEW GOOD MEN

At the White House, Kissinger checks on the status of U.S. Marines who are serving as a rear guard during the evacuation of Saigon

50

NEWSWEEK MAY 1, 2000

Newsweek

June 21, 1999

# As the Cheers Fade

The Kosovo deal could lead to U.S. involvement in an endless series of conflicts—and even guerrilla war
BY HENRY A. KISSINGER

T
HOSE OF US WHO QUESTIONED THE
wisdom of the diplomacy preceding the
war over Kosovo owe it to the Clinton
administration to express our respect
for the fortitude with which it perse-
vered, and the skill with which it but-
tressed Allied unity and achieved Rus-
sian acquiescence. But victory leaves us with just
as severe a challenge: to avoid being permanently
mired in a corner of the Balkans as the modern
equivalent of the Ottoman and Austrian empires.
The so-called Petersberg plan risks turning into an
open-ended commitment toward ever deeper in-
volvement, casting us in the role of gendarme of a
region of passionate hatreds and where we have
few strategic interests.

Many commentators emphasize the differences
between the plan put forward by the Finnish presi-
dent and ratified by the Yugoslav Parliament, and
the Rambouillet proposals in the name of which the
bombing was initiated. And there are nuances of
some consequence. The NATO forces are entering
Kosovo on the basis of a U.N. mandate rather than
an agreement between Belgrade and the Atlantic
Alliance. Kosovo is explicitly described as a part of
Yugoslavia, albeit an autonomous one (Point 5);
the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Yu-
goslavia are affirmed (Point 8). The provision for a
referendum at the end of three years has been aban-
doned, and the initial insistence on complete
NATO control has been watered down to some ex-
tent by a series of U.N. mandates and the presence
of Russian forces.

But even where the peace plan still parallels
the Rambouillet accords it threatens near-perma-
nent American involvement in an endless set of
predictable conflicts and possible guerrilla war.
The turgid language of the accord was designed
to be impenetrable, so that each party could inter-
pret the inevitable ambiguities as favorable to it-
self. This diplomatic device is not without prece-
dent, but it is a special problem when it involves
parties that have refined their volatile passions
for centuries in the crucible of mutual slaughter.
The Petersberg plan provides for four stages of po-
litical evolution: (1) an interim reign over Kosovo
by a designated administrator; (2) an internation-

al civil presence; (3) substantial autonomy for the people of Kosovo *within* Yugoslavia, under the aegis of the U.N. Security Council; (4) the development of provisional democratic self-governing institutions.

Every aspect of this scheme is a potential land mine. According to Point 8, the political framework is supposed to take full account of the Rambouillet accords and the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. How can those objectives possibly be reconciled? Rambouillet provided for the occupation of Kosovo by NATO and a referendum on the future of Kosovo at the end of three years. The peace plan stops at autonomy and repeatedly affirms Yugoslav sovereignty. But the KLA fought and suffered for independence, not autonomy. After what its members and the population of Kosovo endured during the ethnic-cleansing campaign, remaining within Serbia will be inconceivable to them. The additional provision of Point 8, for the "demilitarization of the KLA" by NATO, is even more difficult to imagine happening.

If any of these provisions are to be realized, they must be im-
posed by American and other Allied military forces. We will be in
the ironic position that, having fought on the side of the Albani-ns for their autonomy, we may find ourselves resisting them (or
perhaps even fighting against them) over the issue of their inde-
pendence. And having gone to war to defend the Albanian popu-
lation against Serbian ethnic cleansing, we may
now be obliged to protect the Serbian population
against the rage of their Albanian neighbors. Un-
less we are willing to sustain a near-permanent
military occupation, ethnic cleansing of the Ser-
bian population could well be the outcome.

(continued)

The confusion is magnified by another provision of Point 8 that envisions "negotiations between the parties." But who are these parties? Presumably they are the Serbs and the Albanians. It adds that deadlock "should not delay or disrupt the establishment of self-governing institutions"—a provision that could paradoxically guarantee deadlock. The agreement is silent as to who should shoulder the task of imposing such self-governing institutions—implicitly leaving that responsibility with the United States. Not only are we imperceptibly on the road to replacing the Ottoman and Austrian empires in the Balkans; in time, we may face the same hostility from the native populations that they did.

The projected command arrangements compound the ambiguity. The military forces, in the words of the U.N. resolution, will be substantially NATO's. Additional troops from Russia will be assigned under uncertain command arrangements. To prevent the partition of Kosovo, Russian troops will not be given a separate area—unless they pre-empt the decision by occupying a part of Kosovo unilaterally, as they seemed to be doing last week. Moreover, the role of all these forces is vague and their rules of engagement are defined by the Security Council.

Analogies to Bosnia are misleading. The Dayton agreement ending the Bosnian conflict was negotiated and approved by all the parties. In Kosovo, NATO has imposed an agreement on both sides. In Bosnia, the three armies ended up on homogeneous territories specifically assigned to them by the Dayton accords. In Kosovo, there is no such equivalent solution. Nor are there armies to separate, since Serb forces will presumably have left. NATO's task—to confirm the departure of Serb forces, to disarm the KLA and to protect Kosovo's borders—is likely to bring them into conflict with Albanians seeking to influence events in Kosovo or Macedonia. All this may place our troops squarely in the middle of a civil guerrilla war, posing the same dilemma we encountered in Somalia.

Arrangements for civil administration contain comparable potential conflicts. The enormous tasks of reconstruction will fall to the civil administrator appointed by the U.N. Secretary-General "in consultation with the Security Council" and operating under a mandate established by a U.N. resolution. The administrator will need to organize a police force and oversee the restoration of essential services in a totally devastated country. As indigenous Kosovar institutions come to life, they are likely to challenge the civil administrator's authority in the name of independence. What if the KLA emerges as the police force of the autonomous authority? And, as Serbia recovers, it may challenge—possibly with Russia's backing—the civil administrator in the name of Yugoslav sovereignty.

(continued)

INTERNATIONAL

The situation in Kosovo differs from Bosnia in yet another important respect. Bosnia was, in a way, sui generis. The evolution of Kosovo is bound to have a profound impact on its neighbors. The immediate impact is likely to be on the Albanians in Macedonia, who comprise about a quarter of the population. They are likely to demand, at a minimum, the same status for themselves that the Kosovars are given. And the disintegration of Macedonia could ignite another Balkan explosion. Comparable pressures can be expected from the smaller Albanian minority in Montenegro. As well, there exists a drive toward a greater Albania, encouraged both from Tirana and by émigré Albanians supplying much of the financial muscle.

Aware of these tendencies—and as a sop to Russian and Yugooslav self-respect—the West has conceded Belgrade's sovereignty over Kosovo in order to keep it from emerging as an independent international presence. But the plan cannot possibly work smoothly. Russia and Yugoslavia will have every incentive to affirm Yugoslav sovereignty, while America and NATO cannot indefinitely stand in the way of Albanian self-determination.

In short, if we try to implement the U.N. resolution for any length of time, we will emerge as the permanent party to arcane and bitter Balkan quarrels. It would be far wiser to cut the Gordian knot and concede Kosovar independence as part of an overall Balkan settlement—perhaps including self-determination for each of the three ethnic groups of Bosnia. In such an arrangement, the borders of Kosovo and its neighbors should be guaranteed by NATO or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. As in Bosnia, the international forces would then patrol both sides of these borders for at least a substantial interim period.

Moving the issue to a definite resolution as quickly as possible is all the more important because of the hostility of the international environment. Most nations either supported or tolerated the Dayton accords. This is not the case in Kosovo. Russia may have thrown in the towel on seeking to shape the immediate outcome significantly. But it feels deeply humiliated; Kosovo has become a public symbol of Russia's loss of influence and public degradation by the West. It has no incentive to facilitate the arrangement once it is in place. Rather, Moscow is likely to seek occasions to obstruct it or to oppose elsewhere what it perceives as America's hegemonic tendencies. From the U.S. point of view, the quicker the Kosovo issue is removed from the Russo-American agenda, the better for our long-term relations. And Russia should have no interest in perpetuating a state of affairs in which it can embarrass us but cannot prevail.

The same is true, to a lesser extent, of China, which rejects the unilateral manner in which NATO intervened in what Beijing perceives as the internal matters of Yugoslavia. Indeed, most of the nations of the world will have an incentive to create obstacles to the application of the Rambouillet principles enshrined in the Kosovo agreement. Countries concerned that they may be the subject of unilateral NATO action may distance themselves from us after the dust settles. They may have an incentive to acquire weapons of mass destruction as the surest deterrent to America's conventional superiority. How ironically history repeats its patterns. During the cold war the democracies relied on nuclear weapons to balance an assumed Soviet conventional superiority. In the post-Kosovo period it is the smaller countries which may turn to weapons of mass destruction in response to America's overwhelming technological edge in conventional weaponry. For all these reasons, it is imperative to undertake a major assessment of how to relate the new foreign policy to an international consensus.

Even the Atlantic Alliance will never be the same after Kosovo. The Clinton administration skillfully held the Alliance together through more than 10 weeks of bombing. But the decision of the European Union's heads of state at Cologne to accelerate a unified European defense and foreign policy reflects deep uneasiness about Europe's relative impotence in face of the imperious American tactics. A serious European effort to build autonomous centers of decision would be far from undesirable provided Europe backs up its new organizations with appropriate resources. But it also requires a new thoughtfulness on both sides of the Atlantic if the vital American interest in close transatlantic cooperation is to survive.

For the foreseeable future, America will have a division and a half of our soldiers on near-permanent sentry duty at the fringes of the Balkans. We should therefore temper triumphalism with some reflection on the need to establish geopolitical priorities. Before we treat Kosovo as the model for a new era of humanitarian diplomacy, we should examine where else either the diplomacy or the strategy might apply. There are some 22 million refugees around the world and scores of ethnic conflicts. To which of them would a comparable mix of force and diplomacy be relevant? Where else could we bomb for 10 weeks without U.S. military casualties, a prohibitive risk of escalation or creating untenable precedents? The demonstration of what democracies can accomplish when aroused will stand us in good stead in the years ahead. But the ultimate legacy of Kosovo will depend on whether our diplomatic endgame matches the display of our power. ■

The Bosnia peacekeeping operation set the precedent for American and Russian troops working cooperatively

The initial insistence on complete NATO control [in Kosovo] has been watered down to some extent by a series of U.N. mandates and by the presence of Russian forces

EMRC-AP

NEWSWEEK APRIL 5, 1999

# Doing Injury to History

## Finding a solution to the Kosovo crisis must begin by rejecting false analogies to the traumas of the past
BY HENRY A. KISSINGER

THE WAR IN KOSOVO IS THE PRODUCT OF A CONFLICT going back over centuries. It takes place at the dividing line between the Ottoman and Austrian empires, between Islam and Christianity, and between Serbian and Albanian nationalism. The ethnic groups have lived together peacefully only when that coexistence was imposed—as under foreign empires or the Tito dictatorship. President Clinton has asserted that, after a brief period of NATO occupation, the ethnic groups will reconcile. There is no realistic basis for that assumption. Ethnic groups in Bosnia have not reconciled after three years of NATO peacekeeping.

When American forces are engaged in combat, victory is the only exit strategy. And that requires a definition of issues that can survive scrutiny. The Administration, in pursuit of symbols that resonate with the public, has put forward three categories of argument. The most convincing is that suffering in Kosovo is so offensive to our moral sensibilities that we will use force to end it even absent traditional considerations of national interest. But since this leaves open the question of why we do not intervene in East Africa, Sri Lanka, Kurdistan, Kashmir and Afghanistan—to name just a few of the places where infinitely more casualties have been incurred than in Kosovo—the President has invoked historical analogies or current threats that are extremely dubious. Where he does injury to history:

* Slobodan Milosevic is not Hitler but a Balkan thug, and the crisis in Kosovo has no analogy to the events preceding World War I. Neither Milosevic nor any other Balkan leader is in a position to threaten the global equilibrium, as the president constantly asserts. Milosevic bears a major responsibility for the brutalities in Bosnia, and I strongly supported the American deployment there. But unlike Bosnia, Kosovo is a war for territory considered by the Serbs as a national shrine. This is why there have been few, if any, signs of opposition in Belgrade to Milosevic's Kosovo policy.

* World War I started in the Balkans not as a result of ethnic conflicts but for precisely the opposite reason: because outside powers intervened in a local conflict. The assassination of the Crown Prince of Austria—an imperial power—by a Serbian nationalist led to a world war because Russia backed Serbia and France backed Russia while Germany supported Austria.

* The Second World War did not start in the Balkans, much less as a result of its ethnic conflicts.

* It is absurd to allege that the economic well-being of the European Union, with a GNP exceeding America's, depends on the outcome in impoverished Kosovo. This is even more true of Atlantic prosperity.

* The cohesion of NATO is threatened primarily because it was staked on the unsustainable Rambouillet agreement. It remains to be seen how long it can be maintained when public reaction to the scale and duration of the bombardment sets in, and when it becomes apparent that the long-term consequences of the present campaign have to be policed by NATO ground forces.

I respect the humanitarian motive for intervention. But this does not absolve the democracies from the necessity of coming up with a sustainable solution. The Rambouillet agreement does not meet that test. Conducting a negotiation based on an agreement drafted entirely in foreign chancelleries and seeking to impose it by the threat of air bombardment has only exacerbated the crisis in Kosovo. The Rambouillet text was sold to the Kosovo Liberation Army—which initially rejected it—as a device to bring the full force of NATO to bear on Serbia, and it may have tempted Milosevic into accelerating the repression of the KLA before the bombs fell. Now it risks involving NATO and U.S. ground forces in policing an agreement neither side really wants. It was a grave error to abandon any effort to strengthen the observers already in Kosovo in favor of NATO peacekeepers who will find no peace to keep.

President Clinton, in a speech to the Serbian people, has declared: "The NATO allies support the Serbian people to maintain Kosovo as part of your country." He added that the agreement would "guarantee the rights of all people in Kosovo—ethnic Serbs and Albanians alike within Serbia." This is why the Rambouillet agreement provides for the KLA to surrender its arms to a NATO force. Some ten thousand Serbian policemen are to maintain security; some fifteen hundred Serbian soldiers are to safeguard the frontiers.

None of this is achievable by agreement, only by imposition. The Serbs have rejected the Rambouillet agreement because they see in it a prelude to independence for Kosovo. They also see the

(OVER)

presence of NATO troops as the sort of foreign occupation Serbia has historically resisted against the Ottoman and Austrian empires, Hitler and Stalin. Even if they are bombed into capitulation, they can hardly be expected to be willing supporters of the outcome.

As for the KLA, its goal is independence, not autonomy; it acceded to Rambouillet as a tactical device to unleash NATO air power against the hated Serbs. The KLA is even less likely to agree to autonomy under Serbian rule now that Serbia has been so weakened by the NATO air campaign. The KLA will not turn in its weapons to NATO forces. And NATO forces will have no domestic support if they fight the KLA to impose disarmament. Nor will the KLA acquiesce to Serbian forces policing its frontiers. The role of Serbian police and military forces in the proposed agreement is both unclear and incapable of being implemented.

The ironic outcome of the Rambouillet agreement, in the name of which the NATO air campaign is being conducted, is that the NATO peacekeepers will replace the Serbs as obstacles to the national aspirations of the Albanians—especially if Serbia is too weak to provide a counterweight. Moreover, as Kosovo moves toward independence, the pressures on Macedonia, a third of whose population is Albanian, will increase. Why should they not be granted the same self-determination as their brethren inside Serbia? And that will risk expansion of the conflict as Bulgaria claims its own ethnic nationals in Macedonia, comprising at least a third of the population, and Greece perceives an opportunity to curtail—or to eliminate—a state whose very name it has rejected.

As the war continues, the Administration must redefine its objectives. NATO cannot survive if it now abandons the campaign without achieving its objective of ending the massacres. The Rambouillet agreement should therefore be stripped of its more esoteric components. The terms for ending the air war should be: an immediate ceasefire; the withdrawal of Serbian forces introduced after the beginning of the negotiations at Rambouillet, and the immediate opening of negotiations over autonomy for Kosovo. These negotiations are likely to be prolonged and bitter. But, at their end, Kosovar independence in some form is inevitable unless NATO insists by force on the kind of Serbian suzerainty which the President has promised—a course neither the alliance nor the American public will support.

If a ceasefire on such terms is rejected by Milosevic, there will be no alternative to continuing and intensifying the war, if necessary introducing NATO combat ground forces—a solution which I have heretofore passionately rejected but which will have to be considered to maintain NATO credibility. Whatever the outcome, stationing of some NATO ground forces in either Macedonia or Kosovo will be necessary, to serve not so much as peacekeepers as to prevent the Balkan conflict from widening. I have consistently warned against such an outcome. But, as a result of hesitations and confusions, NATO now has little choice if it wants to avoid a larger war.

For someone who has supported every military action of the Clinton Administration—or who has criticized it for acting too inconclusively, as in Iraq—the war on Yugoslavia inspires profound ambivalence. Serbia fought at our side in two world wars, and stood up to Stalin at the height of his powers. We cannot ignore Milosevic's brutality, yet the disappearance of Serbia from the Balkans equilibrium may tempt eruptions in other neighboring countries containing ethnic minorities. Even more importantly, the problem of Macedonia's integrity will be upon us, threatening a wider Balkan war. Let us hope that it will be handled with greater foresight than the prelude to the current crisis. ■

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

# WITH BACK TO THE ABYSS

Looking back, the former secretary of State charts the challenges of conducting foreign policy in an impeachment crisis. BY HENRY A. KISSINGER

AS THE OFFICIAL with primary responsibility for conducting foreign policy under Richard Nixon, I find the looming Clinton impeachment proceedings to have the character of a nightmare revisited. As during Watergate, there are questions of whether the impeachment process will affect the president's ability to act decisively in a crisis; whether it will tempt rogue nations to provoke crises, and whether the president might not undertake dramatic foreign initiatives as a means of easing his domestic travails.

In such an atmosphere, normality and hysteria exist side by side. The president carries out his day-to-day activities as if nothing unusual were occurring while he is, in fact, standing with his back to an abyss into which he can be hurled at any moment. His ultimate fate is now substantially out of his control—a devastating experience for someone who has paid the dehumanizing price required to reach the highest office in the land.

The circumstances that produced the two impeachment processes are hardly identical. And the surrounding conditions differ as well. In the Watergate period, the United States faced a global adversary. My greatest fear was that the Soviet Union might be tempted to test the

seeming decline in presidential authority. That never happened, partly because of Nixon's established reputation for savvy handling of foreign policy and ruthless decisiveness in reacting to foreign pressure. But North Vietnam, a regional enemy, did exploit our domestic divisions to complete its conquest of Indochina.

The Clinton administration does not confront a global challenge; its adversaries are local rogues—although, if anything, even more ruthless than Hanoi in the 1970s. At the same time, any decision by

Clinton to resist the degradations of Saddam Hussein would find wider domestic support than Nixon did vis-à-vis Hanoi in the '70s. Uncertainties about the international impact of the impeachment process exist because the Clinton administration has established neither the record nor the coherence of Nixon's foreign policy. It is the difference between a president whose overwhelming preoccupation was foreign affairs and one who ran his campaign on the slogan "It's the economy, stupid" and who has shown little indication of broadening his interest since. During Watergate, I was often able to act on behalf of the president because there was never any question in my mind as to Nixon's foreign-policy priorities or strategic design. I doubt that any of President Clinton's associates in the field of national security could make this claim or has available the machinery for implementing a strategic design even if it were suddenly to emerge.

Allowing for these differences, I believe that certain patterns are likely to recur.

The first is the growing preoccupation of the president with the crisis and the consequent decline in the attention span he can devote to other issues. This was not necessarily apparent at the beginning of either crisis, because both

Nixon and Clinton seem to have lacked any grasp of the gravity of what they were facing. Thus, at some point, both presidents became passengers rather than pilots of a runaway train.

That point marks a decisive psychological threshold. The agony, exhaustion and occasional exaltation of the quest for the presidency is made bearable only by the candidate's near obsession with control and his dedication to service. When the prospects for both control and service begin to evaporate—

©1971 FRED J. MAROON

Kissinger, who served under Nixon during the Watergate years, worries that
Clinton will also suffer from a 'growing preoccupation' with scandal

42 NEWSWEEK OCTOBER 19, 1998

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1349 WORDS

10/8/98

KISSINGER NEWSWEEK ARTICLE

As the official with the primary responsibility under President Nixon for conducting foreign policy, to me, the looming impeachment procedures have the character of a nightmare revisited. There are the same old questions as during Watergate of whether the impeachment process affects the president's ability to act decisively in a crisis; whether, in fact, it will tempt rogue nations to provoke crises; whether the president might not develop incentives to undertake dramatic foreign initiatives as a means of easing his travails.

2

to-day activities as if nothing unusual were occurring
while he is, in fact, standing with his back to an
abyss into which he can be hurled at any moment. His
ultimate fate is now substantially out of his control-
-a devastating experience for someone who has paid the
dehumanizing price needed for reaching the highest
office in the land.

The circumstances producing the two impeachment
processes are hardly identical. And the surrounding
conditions differ as well. In the Watergate period,
the United States faced a global adversary. My
greatest fear was that the Soviet Union might be
tempted to test the seeming decline in presidential
authority. That never happened, partly because of
Nixon's established reputation for savvy handling of
foreign policy and ruthless decisiveness in reaction