THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

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# Kissinger's World View

He sees massive shifts, with Europe back on center stage

And much better for us to link in terms of structural changes that any sensible Soviet leader would want to follow. Even the has a less dynamic personality than Gorbachev's.

Now, I think that the dominance of the two superpowers willode in the '90s. You will have various powers. You will have the S, Soviet Union, China, India, Europe. All of which will be simultaneously economic, political, id military powers, and a little later I wouldn't exclude that Brazil and Mexico could be at least at the second rank of such a world.

This requires that we look at the world in a different way than did in the post-war period. The Soviet Union will still be a major country; it will still have a major influence in world affairs. But we are very close to the goal containment as it was defined the 1940s.

Economic reform for the So-

viet Union is not a favor they do to us. It's not something for which we should pay a huge price; it is something that they almost have to do. An aggressive Soviet policy would unite all of these powers on their borders against it and therefore they have reasons quite beyond Gorbachev to move into a period of conciliation.

So our task is to do something that Americans have not ever done before: namely, to think of a world of equilibrium. Not of a world in which we like to think of foreign policy as conversion – that Gorbachev comes along and he ends 70 years of communist history. He'd really have to end 400 years of Russian history.

How should he come to that view? What is it in his experience that would lead him there? There's no Jefferson in his past. There's no American tradition. But there is the compulsion of circumstance.

If we want to disengage ourselves from the front line of every confrontation, we have to learn to think of the structural balances that exist in the world and to decide whether we want to back whom we back.

It's sort of a balance of power concept, which in a modern global world is much more complicated. In that context, I think we can negotiate with the Soviets much more reliably than by being so obsessed about whether the President and the Soviet leader get along. And incidentally, I would also think that it also means that the emphasis on pure arms control gets us off the subject.

I'm not opposed to arms control as one of the many negotiations to conduct, but take Europe for example. In many ways Gorbachev is conducting a traditional Russian policy. He's trying to separate Europe from the US. And he has had major success in Germany in getting this German romantic feeling that they've got to have some sentimental attachment to somebody focused on the Soviets. That's a short-term victory if the world is bipolar.

In the process, however, Eastern Europe is becoming fluid and what we may see is a simultaneous disintegration of Western and Eastern Europe, with Eastern Europe disintegrating faster and in which even the seeming victories of Gorbachev are double-edged. Because to the extent that he gets the Germans more active in foreign policy, the place they have something to gain is in the East not in the West, and so he may be resurrecting the contest between the Teutons and the Slavs.

Now, that's what we've got to get beyond. And it's sensible that negotiation with the Soviets

would be unavoidable in the next administration, and, in my view, the big issue will be Eastern Europe. Because whatever *perestroika* does in the USSR, it is undermining the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. So long as the Soviets identify their security with the maintenance of unpopular regimes, therein is a trap of their own making. If they go into one of these countries they will undermine everything that they have achieved with their policy of apparent moderation. And if they don't go in they start a process which may spill over into the Soviet Union.

Therefore, I believe an important subject of negotiation with them on a quiet basis, is whether it is possible to create a political framework in Eastern Europe which separates the security issues from the political issues, in which we can be very far-sighted and generous. You know, something like Finland in which the peoples of Eastern Europe are free to choose their own government and there are clearly defined limitations on military capabilities.

In such a framework, then, one could approach conventional arms control, which in my view is totally insoluble in the Warsaw Pact-NATO context. Well, totally insoluble is exaggerated, but incredibly complicated. It will turn into a numbers game that will feed on itself.

I think the fundamental negotiation with the Soviets should be: what kind of a world do we visualize? How can we avoid sliding into a war which neither of us want and which we can't settle by just technical rearrangement of arms? For the first time now since the war there is a real danger that some explosion could occur in Eastern Europe like prior to World War I. We are so focused on Hitler, and we forget that Sarajavo produced a world war.

I don't think the Soviets will ever march into Western Europe to occupy it as Hitler marched into neighboring countries. But what could happen instead, as an act of desperation we could face a Berlin crisis. The one way they could demonstrate the fact that they're the one who runs Eastern Europe is to make us knuckle under on something in Berlin. And you notice that even as they are courting the Germans they will not agree to have West Berlin a German state, which would be the easiest way to settle it. They insist on treating it, as close as they can get away with it, as a free city.

I'm writing a book on how national cultural patterns and values affect the perception of foreign

policy. And you really find in many countries a very consistent pattern. But Germany didn't become a nation until 1871, then for 19 years they had a foreign minister - a genius who juggled all the competing forces in Europe in such a complicated way that it couldn't be continued.

We Americans got to know the Germans *after* the war. And so we thought that the pro-Western orientation of Germany was a natural thing. The fact is if you look at German history, Germany has never had alliances in the West - all its alliances have been in the East, when they had any alliances. So the Adenauer-tradition, pro-American group has been demoralized as a result of many factors - including some of the recent negotiations with the Soviets.

And so you now have a kind of restless activism, almost for its own sake. The West Germans give a billion marks to Hungary in order to ease the fate of the Hungarians, but what they are also doing is to increase the freedom of maneuver of the Hungarians vis-à-vis the Soviets, and there is a limit to this. So German romanticism and sentimentalism without any evil intention could be a very real problem. It sort of triggers everybody else.

The French are running to Moscow now because they don't want the Germans to be there alone. The French are quite cynical in their conduct of foreign policy. And in Gorbachev's *perestroika* and in all the Soviet public statements - nobody pays much attention to this in this country - they keep talking about the European house that goes from the Urals to the Atlantic.

On the face of it, it is already an absurdity, because what happens to the Soviet Union on the other side of the Urals? Will that be cut off?

Now, a Europe from Moscow to the Atlantic will lead to one of two things: either the Soviet Union will be the permanent drain on its resources if its economy doesn't improve or the Soviet Union will become so strong that all of Europe will become Finlandized and America will be gradually separated from Europe.

The logical dividing line is on the Soviet-Polish border, with Moscow and Washington having equal status legally in Europe. In such a context you could think of arms control agreements. But nobody is picking the Soviets up on this. And once this gets established in people's minds that Moscow is part of Europe but Washington is not, the '90s could get very uncomfortable.

POLITICS

Or else the Alliance will rupture

By Henry A. Kissinger

From recent remarks by a former US secretary of state at a conference of Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

There seem to me to be two major problems that must be solved [in major European-American relations].

First is the issue of military strategy. The facts are perfectly clear: The strategy developed in the early 1950s cannot possibly continue into the 1980s. Perpetuating the theory that American strategic nuclear power can protect Europe against all contingencies inevitably will lead to a combination of demoralization, pressures for unilateral disarmament, and a failure to build up conventional forces. The issue has been ducked for 15 years or hidden behind percentage figures of budgetary increase that never got to the heart of the problem of what strategy is really appropriate for the '80s and '90s.

The only possible strategy is one that builds up conventional forces to resist foreseeable challenges. There are no shortcuts, there are no gimmicks. Ideas like renouncing the first use of nuclear weapons will have the inevitable consequence of stigmatizing the weapons on which Alliance defense must still in part depend, or will create the dangerous impression that the West may accept a conventional defeat rather than in the end resort to nuclear retaliation. But the converse is not true. It is not true that we can continue to rely on essentially the strategy of the '50s and '60s, modified with a gimmick here and a new technology there. That is the fundamental problem in strategy, and it underlies the arms control policies that must be related to it.

The second problem has to do with East-West relations. We have now gone through a period of exuberant détente and then through a period in which détente was retrospectively made to carry the blame for all the difficulties that were caused by our domestic divi-

sions on other subjects. It is now time to address the fundamental question of how we should conduct East-West relations over an extended period of time.

We are at a moment when the Soviet Union is in enormous difficulty, when it is foreseeable that some time in the '80s some Soviet leaders must ask themselves how much longer they can run an economy as unbalanced as the one that they now maintain; they must ask themselves how long they can govern a system that cannot manage a legitimate succession, an economy that is assailed by shortages and surpluses at the same time - a problem that no communist country has yet solved.

At that point, a possibility for serious negotiations must arise - provided that we do not make the mere fact of negotiation an issue in our national debate, with one group considering any conference progress toward a settlement, and another group considering any meeting with Soviet negotiators as a pact with the devil. Our problem is to define what in a serious negotiation we would ask of the Soviets; what we are prepared to pay in return for what we consider restrained international conduct; and, indeed, how we define restrained international conduct on both sides.

Now that requires, however, that we husband our assets. And it implies that we have to avoid unilateral concessions, either the unilateral disarmament that so many so-called peacé movements attempt to impose on us or the unilateral concessions in economic relations that in so many countries in Europe are identified with détente.

Fundamentally what the Soviets want from us in economic relations is irreplaceable for them elsewhere: food, technology, general know-how. What they pay in return - if they pay anything in return - is raw materials that are relatively easily replaceable for us. In these circumstances, trade would have long since assumed minimal proportions were it not constantly fueled by concessional prices and concessional credits. It will seem

incomprehensible to future generations that the West was not able to develop a coherent East-West economic policy and that it was not able to exact a political quid pro quo for the economic benefits it was unilaterally bestowing on the Soviet Union.

I do not think that the timing and the tactics of the American decision on the pipeline will go down in history as classic examples of modern diplomacy. I do believe, however, that the questions raised by the President's pipeline decision were important. And I cannot endorse the self-righteous confrontational reaction of so many of our allies who hide behind allegations that they were simply carrying out obligations and make debating points that since we were selling grain they had a right to sell the pipeline. Everybody knows that if we stopped selling grain tomorrow the pipeline would still go forward. The question raised by the administration was fundamental. Incidentally, I am not a wild supporter of the grain sales, either.

I do not join those who believe that an economic boycott of the Soviet Union can bring about a collapse of the Soviet system - though I would not go into mourning if it happened. I do believe that the Soviet Union understands best a negotiation on the basis of strict reciprocity. And I think it is a failure of Western leadership that we have not been able to define for ourselves what it is we want from the Soviet Union in the political field or that we have not been able to agree with each other on credit policies and pricing policies that are in the common interest. Lenin is supposed to have said 60 years ago that the day would come when the capitalists would fight with each other for the privilege of selling the rope with which to hang them. What he didn't know is that they would also offer credits to buy the rope.

The lesson to be drawn from the pipeline affair is not by what face-saving formula we can end the immediate crisis - which clearly, if rationality prevails, will be ended before

matters get totally out of control - but rather whether we can use the pipeline crisis to fashion a fundamental agreement among the industrial democracies about how they visualize East-West economic relations and for what political price. The democracies should do so in the context that they are prepared to have these economic relations with the East in support of a fundamental negotiation - a fundamental negotiation that they are also prepared to define for themselves and that is not driven by the need to placate public pressures on a year-to-year basis.

Let me make a final point about European-American relations. It is not possible, nor is it desirable, that we pursue parallel policies all over the world, but it is also not possible or compatible with the Alliance that we agree on no major policy around the world. It seems to me that we are perilously close to drifting into such a state of affairs. In Central America one can only say that several European policies are deliberately designed, or have the practical consequence, of undercutting what we are attempting to do. I am not saying that we are inevitably right, but I do maintain that when a major country acts in an area it considers of vital importance, its allies owe it some respect for its views, as we attempted to show in the Falklands crisis vis-à-vis Great Britain.

And we see it again in recent weeks with respect to the Middle East. A fundamental objective of the President's speech of Sept. 1 seems to me to have been the introduction of Jordan into the negotiations. How can that process possibly be helped when PLO leaders are feted all over Europe and their status is enhanced before anybody has seen even the slightest indication of what conclusions they have drawn from their defeat in Lebanon? Why is it so impossible for us and the Europeans at least to discuss our assumptions? How can it fail to lead to a fundamental rupture, sooner or later, if totally different strategic conceptions are simultaneously pursued?