12

Henry A. Kissinger

happened, none of the nations felt that their own survival was
threatened by the domestic institutions of other nations. So there was
a widely accepted concept of legitimacy. It was the high point of the
doctrine of sovereignty of the nation-state, a doctrine at which
people now look somewhat askance. But we should remember that
the notion of sovereignty began to flower in response to the Thirty
Years War when over 30 per cent of the population of Central
Europe was wiped out in ideological conflicts which recognized no
borders. And it set some limits on the exercise of state power.

Then came World War I. It broke the back of the self-confidence of
the 19th century. It happened in large part because the statesmen of
the period did not understand the technology that they had created.
They had also created methods of mobilization which, once
underway, could not be arrested and generated their own
momentum. None of the statesmen who went to war in August 1914
would have made that decision had they known what the world
would look like in 1918. All of them believed that the war would be
over by the winter. And as the war went on, they had to adjust their
abhorrence of the suffering they had inflicted on each other to keep
pace with the escalating anguish. As a consequence, by 1918, the
balance of power was destroyed. The legitimacy of the system was
destroyed as well because Russia, which had been a key element of
the pre-war international order, now had a regime ideologically
hostile to the existing system and hoping to profit from its conflicts.
Germany fell outside the system because of the Treaty of Versailles.

Ironically, the appearance of America introduced a totally new
element into international politics. All the European states had had
powerful neighbours. All of them knew through long historical
experience that there were no definitive solutions to foreign policy
problems. All of them had relied on equilibrium and the relative
benefits of stability. Then appeared America, populated by a people
who had turned its back on Europe. It was a country with an almost
entirely immigrant population that had never known a powerful
neighbour, never engaged in a prolonged foreign war; a nation that

The World in Perspective: Lessons of the 20th Century for the Next

13

believed, correctly, that the secret to its success were the democratic institutions it had brought to the new world. It was this Wilsonianism that identified then, and does to this day, the ideal peace to be achieved via the spread of American values.

Thus much of the American domestic debate on foreign policy has been between these schools of thought: one that believes that foreign policy is a sub-division of psychiatry; one that believes that relations between nations are like relations between people; and another that holds that foreign policy is a sub-division of theology in which foreign policy represents a contest between good and evil.

These three tendencies permeate the American foreign policy debate. This is why we turned World War I - and every war in which we have engaged since - into a personal conflict between ourselves and the leader of the enemy nation. That is why the United States came up with the doctrine of self-determination as the key to international settlement in Europe. As we learned then in Central Europe and now see in the Balkans, ethnic boundaries are extraordinarily difficult to draw in regions across which conquerors have marched for millennia and in which the people have been mixed up. It is that much harder to bring into these regions some concept of equilibrium. At the end of World War I the strange situation therefore developed whereby the victorious allies, trying to limit the power of Germany, actually left Germany geo-politically stronger than it had been before World War I: before World War I there had been five major powers in Europe; at the end of World War I, there were only two or three left and Germany was surrounded by weak nations emerging on the basis of the concept of self-determination. As soon as Germany broke the disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles - which sooner or later had to happen as it happened after every war (like France did after the Napoleonic wars) - it was bound to emerge as the dominant nation in Eastern Europe.

14

Henry A. Kissinger

After World War II, Europe lost its previous central position. The Cold War began in which two extra European powers were the chief contestants and in which the European notion of equilibrium, which depended on a plethora of medium-sized states, did not apply. Moreover, nuclear weapons had modified the traditional power equation and created risks out of all proportion to the conceivable objectives. Before the advent of nuclear weapons, nations could go to war because they might think that the consequences of defeat would be worse than the consequences of war. With nuclear weapons, the consequences of a war became worse than any other conceivable outcome. It meant that a kind of pacifism was built into the prevailing strategies. This pacifism emerged in the principle of deterrence, around which highly esoteric theories were developed that nobody had ever tested and that depended entirely on never having to be tested. For this, there was no previous experience. As a former professor, I found myself in my capacity as Secretary of State in the position of knowing what the probable casualties would be. But I still had to go through the conduct of crisis in which the threat of nuclear war was not negligible. In the long run, such situation was bound to prove to be unsustainable.

On the other hand, the Cold War coincided with some of the things Americans do extremely well. In America there is no experience with, and really no understanding of, the concept of the balance of power. But there is historical experience with resisting attempts to achieve world domination. There is also the experience of overcoming a domestic recession by the mobilization of resources. The Cold War, especially at its beginning, suited such American experience very well. We could apply to it the theories of the anti-Hitler coalition, of dealing with the Soviet Union as the incarnation of evil (in President Reagan's phrase, "the evil power") and we could deal with European recovery by analogy to the New Deal of the United States, through which President Roosevelt restored confidence and hope. Those were our two great efforts that stabilized Europe.

15

When I was a young professor, I met President Truman and asked him what he thought he had done of which he was most proud. He replied: "I am most proud of the fact that, after totally defeating our enemies, we brought them back to the community of nations as equals. And I would like to think only Americans would have done that." It was a noble thought. In that sense the Fifties and Sixties were the high point of America's involvement in world affairs. Then came Vietnam. The war started, in my view, with the best of motives. It was an attempt to apply in Asia the lessons that had been learned in Europe. It was based on the proposition that, if one could stop communism in Asia, the nations there would recover just as the European nations had; and that their democratic processes would create such a difference between communism and democracy that, sooner or later, as George Kennan had predicted, communism itself would be under siege.

But it did not turn out that way because the nations we were defending were not nations. In Europe existed a civil service and the nations had a historic reality. In Vietnam, however, had never been a South Vietnamese nation. The attempt to create one had to be made in the middle of a civil war. These democratic criteria had to be applied while guerrilla troops and terrorists were killing the best of the Vietnamese people.

Then came a break in American thinking because American idealism turned on itself. The late Sixties and Seventies were dominated by a debate in the course of which the argument emerged - not that we had overextended ourselves but that there was something rotten in American thinking itself and that our anguish in Vietnam was a kind of punishment for our moral inadequacy. It was therefore not desirable that we should make the best deal possible but that we should lose because that was the only way to purify ourselves.

16

Henry A. Kissinger

When I went to universities in those days and said that we wanted an honourable peace, I was hooted down by those whose notion of honour was exactly the opposite of the government I represented. The protesters thought that honour depended on never being tempted to get into such situation again. None of the disputes of the Sixties and Seventies can be understood without first understanding how American idealism turned on itself.

Then, after a period of humiliation, came other assertions of American idealism. That were the Reagan period and the neo-conservative incarnations. It took on again a Wilsonian form. The neo-conservatives in America insist that our real mission is not to defend either the balance of power or our allies, but to spread democracy. But how? In the Seventies, it was said that we needed to use moral pressure. In the Eighties, it was said we should use economic sanctions. And now it is being argued that we should use military force and that the traditional principles of the national interest are not the decisive ones. It is convictions like these that lead to many of the challenges that America faces today and that make our domestic debate so extraordinarily difficult.

I belong to a minority that believes that crusades have caused far more deaths than they have cabinet wars. I think in this period one has to be able to explain to the mothers why, if their children are placed at risk, it should matter. I therefore have more sympathy for policies that are geared to a broad conception of national interest.

That is really in many ways the fundamental debate presently going on in America. We see it over such issues as Kosovo, a tiny country or not even a country, in a tiny corner of the Balkans. We see it in the ongoing debates about China in the United States. There is one group of people that would like to put China into the category of the Soviet Union and pursue policies towards China analogous to the policies that helped to win the Cold War. However, with respect to both Kosovo and China we face big cultural problems. With respect to Kosovo, Americans think of multi-ethnicity as the natural form of

[L]

17

co-existence, because in America everybody was a refugee at one
point or another and the melting pot has become an expression of
the national genius. In Central Europe and in the Balkans, however,
the ethnic groups have been run over, time and again. The weak have
been killed and the conciliatory have emigrated. Their identity was
equated in almost every instance to a religion invariably synonymous
with their group. If one looks at the history of the Balkans, one finds
that these ethnic groups have often lived together provided there was
an outside conqueror or dictator on top of them. As soon as people,
in a more democratic environment, began to ask questions about
"who should govern whom?", a blood bath ensued. So the very
effort to find a definitive solution sometimes becomes the guarantee
of an extremely bitter conflict. This is a cultural problem in the
Balkans. I would be amazed if, once the smoke clears in Kosovo,
many Serbs are left there.

In China, we are dealing with a society with a 5,000-year history. They think they managed quite well without significant advice from the United States. They therefore do not take it as self-evident that we have a superior knowledge of what their internal organization should be. Moreover, the historical experience of the Chinese has always been the difficulty of reconciling the vast numbers of their population with central control. They are, therefore, much more conscious of the anticipated tendencies in their society than appear in these monolithic pictures that are sometimes drawn of them in the West.

American diplomats and leaders tend to personalize their
relationships with their opposite numbers. They insist that good
personal relations are a major contribution to diplomatic progress.
But the Chinese, having survived thousands of years of turmoil, seek
to ground their relations in objective conditions. They are not
amused - or even understand - arguments by which we claim to
convert them to our point of view. They think they are responsible

[L.C]

18

Henry A. Kissinger

for their own point of view and that we are responsible for our point of view. The art of diplomacy is to reconcile carefully thought-out interests. What has complicated our relationship with the Chinese is that it has often run afoul over questions of style as much as it has over questions of substance.

For the United States - and for all of us - this is now a very new kind of world. Communications are instantaneous. Economics are global. Politics are national and motivations are often ethnic. How to reconcile the technological and the economic world with the emotional and political world is one of the overwhelming tasks of our period. It is compounded by the fact that, if one looks around this world, one finds at least three, possibly four, kinds of world orders existing side by side. In the relations of the Atlantic world and probably even much, if not most, of the Latin American one, the Wilsonian principles of self-determination and democracy actually have great relevance. Wars between these nations are almost unthinkable and the qualities that have represented the genius of the post-World War II economic reconstruction have a great scope.

In Asia, however, there is a world that is most similar to the 19th century Europe. Four or five significant countries look at each other as potential rivals and think of their relationships as partly strategic. There, some idea of equilibrium is an absolute essential of any diplomacy. None of them want to hear that we are doing them great favours. They are much more reassured if we tell them that our self-interest drives us in this or that direction and that we hope we can reconcile it with theirs. I therefore belong to the school of thought that considers good relations between China and the United States important because, without them, we will find ourselves in the middle of every Asian conflict - the more exacerbated by tensions if they are perceived to be unnecessary.

Then there is the Middle East, or the Islamic world, and the Gulf. Here the deepest conflict is between fundamentalism and secularism. In that respect, it is more like Europe of the 17th century. My point is

that all of us have to conduct policies in all of these areas simultaneously. For this we need different modes of thought. However, this is happening at a period when the human consciousness is changing in a way that has not happened since the collapse of the mediaeval period. Up to the end of the mediaeval period, knowledge was acquired via memory. This meant that one needed texts that everybody could agree on and that emphasized religion and epic poetry. The advent of books secularized the world. It broadened knowledge. It was believed at the time that it was the widest available knowledge. But the fact is that books, especially with our present knowledge, are difficult to read and one has to imprint them on one's mind because one can't go back to every book one has ever read. So one has to form concepts that relate things to each other. This then becomes a device for looking at the future - which, for statesman, is the most complex assignment. We now live in a world in which knowledge is at one's fingertips and with a range that was inconceivable before. It is also so easy to acquire that there is no obligation really to learn it. One only has to grasp it for a moment since one can always go back to it. So we find ourselves faced by the strange phenomenon that our knowledge has broadened while our perspective has shrunk.

The great statesmen of history have been distinguished by having had a view of the future and having had the courage to walk there. Bismarck, who was considered an ultimate realist, once said that the best a statesman can do is to listen to the footsteps of God, get a hold of the hem of His cloak and walk with Him a few steps of the way. I don't know any modern statesman who could formulate such a thought. Incidentally, it shows that, without moral convictions, you cannot be a realist because the realistic world offers narrow alternatives while morality consists of having the strength to choose among them.

20

Henry A. Kissinger

Modern statesmen live in a condition of congenital insecurity. They can never know how good they are until they have seen it depicted on the evening news. They live for the sake of sound bites. When I started in politics as an advisor, people asked me what to think. These days they ask what to say. This represents the deepest challenge of foreign policy for us in America, and also in Europe. In every country now, foreign policy is becoming more and more an aspect of domestic politics. We hear talk these days of a new kind of war, the humanitarian war - never mind that we have already gone through all this in Europe in the sense that we have exhausted the ideological war. As I said before the wars of the righteous - ideological wars - are much more destructive. Moreover, they always leave us with the question of who defines righteousness.

I have no great conclusions, though I have talked about America's dilemmas. I must say that, of all the people I have encountered, I know none that are more genuinely idealistic or more genuinely eager to contribute than the American people. Still, this is not something that happens automatically. I have a Chinese friend from Singapore who claims that there exists a Chinese proverb: "When there is turmoil under the heavens, little problems are dealt with as if they were big problems, and big problems are not dealt with at all. When there is order under the heavens, big problems are reduced to smaller problems, and smaller problems should not obsess us."

That in my view, is the real challenge of our period, everywhere: whether we can distinguish the little from the big problems, and whether we can reduce big problems to little problems. That, much more than the headlines of the day, is what will determine what that proverb calls "order under the heavens".

FAX LETTER

PAGES (INCL. COVER PAGE): 1

<table><tr><td>TO:<br/>The office of Prof. Henry A. KISSINGER<br/>1800 K Street, N.W., Suite 1021<br/>Washington, D.C. 20006</td><td>FROM:<br/>A.P.E.S.I.<br/>Prof. Curt GASTEYGER<br/>Villa Moynier<br/>120b, rue de Lausanne<br/>CH-1202 Genève<br/>Tel. (+41) 22-901.08.48<br/>Fax. (+41) 22-901.08.50</td></tr><tr><td>Fax: Fax (212) 753-7248</td><td>DATE: 15 June 2000</td></tr></table>

Dear Mrs. Issadore,

We thank you for your facsimile dated June 12. It is with great regret that we hear that your copy of the Programme from Dr. Kissinger's lecture in Geneva seems to be incomplete.

We have now checked several copies out of the total of abt. 500 and they seem all to be correct.

From the table of contents you will note that Curt Gasteyger's foreword starts on page 7 and ends on page 9. It was considered impolite to start Dr. Kissinger's speech on the back of page 9 (namely page 10) and it was therefore left blank. The speech starts on page 11. No page number is shown here since it is the "cover page of the speech".

After verification we have to admit that **showing** a continuous numbering throughout the booklet would have made things much more clear. This point will of course be considered in future publications.

With separate mail we will address you another copy. Should you need further copies, please do not hesitate to contact us.

With our sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused we remain,

6/6/99 - Programme for Strategic & International Security Studies (PSIS) 20th anniversary speech, Geneva
Transcription of Dr. Henry A. Kissinger's lecture on "The World in Perspective: Lessons of the 20th Century for the Next"

Introduction by Prof. Curt Gasteyger, Director of the PSIS:

I don't want to name all the very distinguished guests, but just one who happens to be with us (and delighted about it), Dr. Carl Bild, a special envoi of the UN Secretary-General for the Balkans. We are delighted to have you with us, Carl.

Tomorrow afternoon from 3 to 5, the second part of our anniversary programme will take place at the Aula of the university. Three outstanding experts: Dr. Walther Stützle (Secretary of State for Defence) from Bonn, academician Andrey Kokoshin and Professor David Calleo will present their views on, and expectations for, security in the next century. Everybody is cordially invited to this, I am sure, very interesting event.

And now allow me, Ladies and Gentlemen, a brief public relations exercise for both our Programme and obviously for our speaker today. One reason for celebration has to do with the fact that, as you probably know from the invitation, the PSIS is 20 years old, or young. By a strange accident of history, these 20 years are divided into two equal parts. The first decade covered the last years of the Cold War with its fears of nuclear war, its reality of wars by proxy, and its hope for disarmament and arms control. The second decade, as the Cold War had ended, was marked by an almost exuberant hope for a new world of peace and cooperation only to be followed by the saddened recognition that neither of them could be easily achieved. Seventy-two days of

[LC]

bombing to end, we hope, a conflict in a small place in the
Balkans and the first armed conflict between two nuclear powers
(India and Pakistan) bear witness to this. These two contrasting
decades deeply marked the activities of our Programme. This is
true for its teaching as part of the Graduate Institute (the HEI)
as it is for the various training programmes, its numerous
international seminars, les Conférences de Genève, its research
and its several dozens of publications. An overview of all these
activities is in a limited number available on request. We hope
that in this way PSIS could contribute, and will do so in the
future, to first, the reputation of the Institute, and second, if
I may say so, to that of Geneva and Switzerland, as ideal
platforms for teaching, training and negotiations on the central
issues of peace and security. Hence, our fervent hope that both
the Swiss Confederation and the Canton de Genève will be
foresighted and generous enough to support these important
activities also in the future and, if I may say so, in their own
interest.

I cannot end this overview without expressing my, our,
sincere thanks to those who have lent their support and
encouragement in these 20 years. Above all, to the Graduate
Institute, to the Swiss Confederation, the Canton of Geneva and,
occasionally even, the City of Geneva, to various foundations,
the Ford Foundation in particular. Our sincere thanks also go to
the many sponsors, individuals and firms and, why not, to the
hoped-for sponsors, the majority of which are located in Geneva.

2

[LC]

I owe sincere thanks to the members of the staff and the dozen assistants whose support and help were crucial. The latter assistants have just come out with an excellent collection of essays, "Security in the Globalized World: Risks and Opportunities". It can be ordered on the forms outside, but please, those who have already been curious enough to take some of the copies (we have only five), would they be kind enough to let us have them again.

Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to two ladies. First, to my wife Doris, whose unflinching support and encouragement, discretion and charm has been the indispensable and often needed ingredient to keep me and the Programme going. Then, to my secretary Mme Marianne Bruder, who for almost 20 years has been the most loyal and indispensable pillar (the roue and the pole) (?) of all our activities. Both ladies have with infinite tolerance and grace accepted my occasional short temper in the interests of long-term objectives.

And now let me turn at long last to our guest of honour, Dr. Henry A. Kissinger. It is only a slight exaggeration when I say, Dr. Kissinger, that it took us the better part of the second PSIS decade to persuade you, to lure you, to Geneva and, happily enough, to persuade you to give now what has become the Anniversary Keynote Address.

I have long pondered the question of how to introduce somebody with the stature of Dr. Kissinger, incarnating such a unique combination of outstanding statesman and as, in such cases

[L]

almost inevitably, not uncontroversial, reputed scholar,
strategic thinker and wonderful writer. Much of all this is
reflected in his writings, beginning with "A World Restored:
Information of the Holy Lands", his doctoral thesis, and ending
with the three volumes of his memoirs, "The White House Years",
"Years of Upheaval" and, just out (a little propaganda of public
relations doesn't do any harm), "The Years of Renewal". Not to
forget, "Diplomacy." Instead of an inevitably longish discourse,
let me therefore, Ladies and Gentlemen, introduce him as a very
personal note. It is prompted by a moving post-script in Dr.
Kissinger's third and last volume of memoirs dealing in a very
fair and impressive way with the Ford administration and its many
(?) accompt (?). Then at the very end, and seemingly totally
unconnected with the preceding thousands of pages, comes a letter
which Dr. Kissinger's father wrote to his two sons before an
operation which he feared he would not survive. And yet this
letter is both a testament and a testimony of what life, our
life, is, or should be, all about. The letter ends with a
father's advice, and I quote: "Always keep in mind that we find
real satisfaction only in what we are doing for others." Dr.
Kissinger, you certainly have lived up to your father's advice.
All of us are deeply grateful for your having done so and you are
doing us today one more great service by giving us such needed
guidance on the basis of your unique experiences in this century
on what we should keep in mind when facing the next. Moving as we
are from years of upheaval to hopefully again years of renewal

4

[L.C.]

and, who knows, eventually again to a world restored. Dr. Kissinger, Henry, the floor is yours.

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger:

Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Curt and I have been working together in various conferences and panels for longer than either of us wants to admit, and I have always benefited from his views and admired his efforts. So, in spite of a long negotiation, it was always clear that I would come, and I am delighted to be able to be here.

Curt chose the title for my lecture. He thought that I should review some of the evolution of international relations in the 20th century and the lessons to be learned from it. That would take me the better part of the evening, however, so let me instead make a brief summary of some of the changes taking place in the 20th century and then concentrate briefly on the present, especially on the challenge that America faces in this period.

I noticed our Ambassador sitting in the front row, glowering at me, and I want to make clear that I am speaking for myself, and that he speaks for the US Government. I often agree with our government and believe that foreign policy must be non-partisan. But if I should deviate from established orthodoxy, please remember that he represents it and that I'm just an itinerant professor.

The 20th century has seen enormous conceptual changes in the

5

[LC]

conduct of foreign policy. It began with the conviction that war
was unlikely since civilized nations would not fight with each
other. There was at that time a global economy, in the sense that
it involved all independent nations. Most thoughtful people did
not believe the general prospects would be risked in a general
conflagration. At the same time, an armaments race was going on
because all the nations believed in the balance of power.

Strangely enough, in light of what happened, none of the nations
felt that their own survival was threatened by the domestic
institutions of other nations. So there was a widely accepted
concept of legitimacy. It was the high point of the doctrine of
sovereignty of the nation-state, a doctrine at which people now
look somewhat askance. But we should remember that the notion of
sovereignty began to flower in response to the Thirty Years War
when over 30 per cent of the population of Central Europe was
wiped out in ideological conflicts which recognized no borders.
And it set some limits on the exercise of state power.

Then came World War I which broke the back of the self-
confidence of the 19th century. It happened in large part because
the statesmen of the period did not understand the technology
that they had created and because they created methods of
mobilization which, once underway, could not be arrested and
generated their own momentum. None of the statesmen who went to
war in August 1914 would have made that decision had they known
what the world would look like in 1980. All of them believed that
the war would be over by the winter. And as the war went on, they

6

[LC]

had to adjust their abhorrence of the suffering they had
inflicted on each other to keep pace with the escalating anguish
so that, by 1918, the balance of power was destroyed. The
legitimacy of the system was destroyed as well because Russia,
which had been a key element of the pre-war international order,
now had a regime ideologically hostile to the existing system and
hoping to profit from its conflicts and Germany fell outside the
system because of the Treaty of Versailles.

Ironically, the appearance of America introduced a totally
new element into international politics. All the European states
had had powerful neighbours. All of them knew through long
historical experience that there were no final solutions to
foreign policy problems. All of them had relied on equilibrium
and the relative benefits of stability. And then appeared
America, populated by a people who had turned its back on Europe,
an almost entirely immigrant population that had never known a
powerful neighbour, never engaged in a prolonged foreign war; a
nation that believed, correctly, that the secret to its success
were the democratic institutions it had brought to the new world.
It was this Wilsonianism that identified then, and does to this
day, the ideal peace to be achieved via the spread of American
values.

7

[LC]

These tendencies permeate the American debate. This is why we turned World War I - and every war in which we have engaged - into a personal conflict between ourselves and the leader of the enemy nation. And that is why we came up with the doctrine of self-determination as the key to international settlement in Europe. Now, as we see today in the Balkans and as we learned then in Central Europe, ethnic boundaries are extraordinarily difficult to draw in regions across which conquerors have marched for millennia and in which the people have been mixed up. It is that much harder to bring into these regions some concept of equilibrium, so that at the end of World War I the strange situation developed whereby the victorious allies, trying to limit the power of Germany, actually left Germany geo-politically stronger than it had been before World War I: before World War I there had been five major powers in Europe; at the end of World War I, there were two or three and Germany was surrounded by weak nations emerging on the basis of the concept of self-determination. As soon as Germany broke the disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles - which sooner or later had to happen as it happened after every war (like France did after the Napoleonic wars) - it was bound to emerge as the dominant nation in Eastern Europe.

8

[L]

position and the Cold War began in which two extra European powers were the chief contestants and in which the European notion of equilibrium, which depended on a plethora of medium-sized states, did not apply. Moreover, nuclear weapons had modified the traditional power equation and created risks out of all proportion to the conceivable objectives. Before the advent of nuclear weapons, nations could go to war because they might think that the consequences of defeat would be worse than the consequences of war. With nuclear weapons, the consequences of a war became worse than any other conceivable outcome, meaning that a kind of pacifism was built into the prevailing strategies. It emerged in the principle of deterrence, around which highly esoteric theories were developed that nobody had ever tested and that depended entirely on never having to be tested. For this, there was no previous experience. As a former professor, I found myself personally in the position of knowing what the probable casualties would be, but of nevertheless going through the conduct of crisis in which the threat of nuclear war was not negligible. This was, in the long run, bound to prove to be an unsustainable situation.

On the other hand, the Cold War coincided with some of the things Americans do extremely well. In America there is no experience with, and really no understanding of, the concept of the balance of power. But there is historical experience with resisting attempts to achieve world domination. There is as well experience with overcoming domestic recession by the mobilization

9

[LC]

of resources. Now the Cold War, especially at its beginning, suited the American experience very well. We could apply to it the theories of the anti-Hitler coalition, of dealing with the Soviet Union as the incarnation of evil (in President Reagan's phrase, "the evil power") and we could deal with European recovery by analogy to the New Deal of the United States, through which President Roosevelt restored confidence and hope. And those were our two great efforts that stabilized Europe.

When I was a young professor, I met President Truman and asked him what he thought he had done of which he was most proud. He replied: "I am most proud of the fact that, after totally defeating our enemies, we brought them back to the community of nations as equals. And I would like to think only Americans would have done that." It was a noble thought, and in that sense the Fifties and Sixties were the high point of America's involvement in world affairs. Then came Viet Nam. Viet Nam started, in my view, with the best of motives. It was an attempt to apply in Asia the lessons that had been learned in Europe. It was based on the proposition that, if one could stop communism in Asia, the nations there would recover just as the European nations had; and that their democratic processes would create such a difference between communism and democracy that, sooner or later, as Kennan had predicted, communism itself would be under siege.

But it didn't turn out that way because the nations we were defending were not nations. Because in Europe there existed a civil service and the nations had a historic reality. In Viet

10

[LC]

Nam, there had never been a South Vietnamese nation, and the
attempt to create one had to be made in the middle of a civil
war. These democratic criteria had to be applied while guerrilla
troops and terrorists were killing the best of the people. (They
left the worst alone because the latter would help do their work
for them.)

And then came a break in American thinking because American
idealism turned on itself. The late Sixties and Seventies were
dominated by a debate in the course of which the argument emerged
- not that we had overextended ourselves but that there was
something rotten in American thinking itself and that our anguish
in Vietnam was a kind of punishment for our moral inadequacy. It
was therefore not desirable that we should make the best deal
possible but that we should lose, because that was the only way
to purify ourselves.

When I went to universities in those days and said that we
wanted an honourable peace, I was hooted down by those whose
notion of honour was exactly the opposite of ours. They thought
that honour depended on never being tempted to get into such
situations again. None of the disputes of the Sixties and
Seventies can be understood without first understanding how
American idealism turned on itself.

Then, after a period of humiliation, came other assertions
of American idealism, in the Reagan period and the neo-
conservative incarnations. And, again, it took on a Wilsonian
form. The neo-conservatives in America insist that our real

11

[LC]

mission is not to defend either the balance of power or our
allies, but to spread democracy. But "how?" In the Seventies, it
was said that we needed to use moral pressure. In the Eighties,
it was said we should use economic sanctions. And now it is being
argued that we should use military force and that the traditional
principles of the national interest are not the decisive ones. It
is convictions like these that lead to many of the challenges
that America faces today and that make our domestic debate so
extraordinarily difficult.

I belong to a minority that believes that crusades have
caused far more deaths than they have cabinet wars. And I think
in this period one has to be able to explain to the mothers why,
if their children are placed at risk, it should matter. I
therefore have more sympathy for policies that are geared to a
broad conception of the national interest.

That is really in many ways the fundamental debate that is
going on in America. We see it over such issues as Kosovo, which
is a tiny country, not even a country, in a tiny corner of the
Balkans. And we see it in the debates about China going on in the
United States. There is one group of people in America that would
like to put China into the category of the Soviet Union and carry
out with respect to China policies analogous to the policies that
helped win the Cold War. But with respect to both Kosovo and
China, we face big cultural problems. With respect to Kosovo,
Americans think of multi-ethnicity as the natural form of co-
existence, because in America everybody was a refugee at one

12

[L.C.]

point or another and the melting pot has become an expression of
the national genius. But in Central Europe and in the Balkans,
the ethnic groups have been over-run, time and again. The weak
have been killed and the conciliatory have emigrated, and their
identity has become equated in almost every instance to a
religion invariably synonymous with their group. If one looks at
the history of the Balkans, one finds that these ethnic groups
have often lived together provided there was an outside conqueror
or dictator on top of them. But as soon as the question became
democratic, namely, "who should govern whom?", a blood bath
developed. So the very effort to find a definitive solution
sometimes becomes the guarantee of an extremely bitter conflict.
This is a cultural problem in the Balkans and I would be amazed
if, once the smoke clears in Kosovo, many Serbs are left there.

In China, we are dealing with a society with a 5,000-year
history. They think they managed quite well without significant
advice from the United States, so they don't take it as self-
evident that we have a superior knowledge of what their internal
organization should be. Moreover, the historical experience of
the Chinese has always been the difficulty of reconciling the
vast numbers of their population with central control. They are,
therefore, much more conscious of the anticipated tendencies in
their society than appear in these monolithic pictures that are
sometimes drawn of them in the West.

American diplomats and leaders tend to personalize their
relationships with their opposite numbers and insist that good

13

[L.C.]

personal relations are a major contribution to diplomatic progress. But the Chinese, having survived thousands of years of turmoil, seek to ground their relations in objective conditions and are not amused - or even understand - arguments in which we claim we are converting them to our point of view. They think they are responsible for their point of view and that we are responsible for our point of view. The art of diplomacy is to reconcile carefully thought-out interests. What has complicated our relationship with the Chinese is that it has often run afoul over questions of style as much as it has over questions of substance.

For the United States - and for all of us - this is now a very new kind of world. Communications are instantaneous. Economics are global. Politics are national and motivations are often ethnic. How to reconcile the technological world and the economic world with the emotional and political world is one of the overwhelming tasks of our period. And it is compounded by the fact that, if one looks around this world, one finds at least three, possibly four, kinds of world orders existing side by side. In the relations of the Atlantic world and probably even much, if not most, of the Latin American, the Wilsonian principles of self-determination and democracy actually have great relevance. Wars between these nations are almost unthinkable and the qualities that have represented the genius of the post-World War II economic reconstruction have a great scope.

But in Asia, there is a world that is most similar to the

14

[LC]

19th century Europe. Four or five significant countries look at each other as potential rivals and think of their relationships as partly strategic. There, some idea of equilibrium is an absolute essential of any diplomacy. None of them want to hear that we are doing them great favours. They are much more reassured if we tell them our self-interest drives us in this or that direction and that we hope we can reconcile it with theirs. Therefore, I belong to the school of thought that considers good relations between China and the United States important because, without it, we will find ourselves in the middle of every Asian conflict - the more exacerbated by tensions if they are perceived to be unnecessary.

Then there is the Middle East, or the Islamic world, and the Gulf, where the deepest conflict is between fundamentalism and secularism and which, in that respect, is more like Europe of the 17th century. My point is that all of us have to conduct policies in all of these areas simultaneously, and for this we need different modes of thought. However, this is happening at a period when the human consciousness is changing in a way that has not happened since the collapse of the mediaeval period. Up to the end of the mediaeval period, knowledge was acquired via memory, which meant that one needed texts that everybody could agree on and that emphasized religion and epic poetry. The advent of books secularized the world. It broadened knowledge and it was believed at the time that it was the widest available knowledge. But the fact is that books, especially with our present

15

[L.C.]

knowledge, are difficult to read and one has to imprint them on
one's mind because one can't go back to every book one has ever
read. So one has to form concepts that relate things to each
other and this becomes a device for looking at the future -
which, for statesman, is the most complex assignment. We now live
in a world in which knowledge is at one's fingertips and with a
range that was inconceivable previously. But it is also so easy
to acquire that there is no obligation really to learn it. One
only has to grasp it for a moment since one can always go back to
it. So we find ourselves faced by the strange phenomenon that our
knowledge has broadened while our perspective has shrunk.

The great statesmen of history have been distinguished by
having had a view of the future and having had the courage to
walk there. Bismarck, who was considered an ultimate realist,
once said that the best a statesman can do is to listen to the
footsteps of God, get a hold of the hem of His cloak and walk
with Him a few steps of the way. I don't know any modern
statesman who could formulate such a thought, and it shows,
incidentally, that, without moral convictions, you cannot be a
realist because the realistic world offers narrow alternatives;
and morality consists of having the strength to choose among very
tight alternatives.

Modern statesmen live in a condition of congenital
insecurity. They can never know how good they are until they have
seen it depicted on the evening news, and they live for the sake
of sound bites. When I started in politics as an advisor, people

16

[LC]

asked me what to think. These days they ask what to say. This
represents the deepest challenge of foreign policy for us in
America, and also in Europe. In every country now, foreign policy
is becoming more and more an aspect of domestic politics. We hear
talk these days of a new kind of war, the humanitarian war -
never mind that we have already gone through all this in Europe
in the sense that we have exhausted the ideological war. And the
wars of the righteous are much more destructive. Besides which,
they always leave us with the question of who defines
righteousness.

I have no great conclusions, though I have talked about
America's dilemmas. And I must say that, of all the people I have
encountered, I know none that are more genuinely idealistic or
more genuinely eager to contribute than the American people.
Still, this is not something that happens automatically. I have a
Chinese friend from Singapore who claims that there exists the
following Chinese proverb (I say "claims" because I don't think
there are as many Chinese proverbs as they lay upon us, and that
they sometimes simply make them up): "When there is turmoil under
the heavens, little problems are dealt with as if they were big
problems, and big problems are not dealt with at all. When there
is order under the heavens, big problems are reduced to smaller
problems, and smaller problems should not obsess us."

I think that is the real challenge of our period,
everywhere: whether we can distinguish the little from the big
problems, and whether we can reduce big problems to little

17

["Dr. Henry A. Kissinger:", "Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,", "It is not easy to begin speaking after such an eloquent introduction. I understand that you are a fascinating man, she said, and I understand that you are a fascinating woman. I understand that you are a woman of great intelligence, and I understand that you are a woman who can make a difference. I understand that you are a woman who can make a difference in the lives of millions. I understand that you are a woman who can make a difference in the lives of all women. I understand that you are a woman who can make a difference in the lives of all

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger:

It is not easy to begin speaking after such an eloquent
introduction. I was once at a reception where a lady came up to
me and said: I understand you are a fascinating man, she said,
fascinate me. It turned into one of the less successful
conversations in which I have engaged.

Curt chose the title for my lecture. It being one of
staggering profundity, he thought that I should review some of
the evolution of international relations in the 20th century and
the lessons to be learned from it. That would take me the better
part of the evening, however, so let me instead make a brief

7

[y]

summary of some of the changes taking place in the 20th century
and then concentrate briefly on the present period, especially on
the challenge that America faces in this period.

I noticed our Ambassador sitting in the front row, glowering
at me, and I just want to make clear that I am speaking for
myself, and that he speaks for the US Government. I often agree
with our government and believe that foreign policy must be non-
partisan. But if I should deviate from established orthodoxy,
please remember that he represents it and that I am just an
itinerant professor.

The 20th century has seen enormous conceptual changes in the
conduct of foreign policy. It began with the conviction that war
was unlikely since civilized nations would not fight with each
other. There was at that time a global economy, which most
thoughtful people did not believe would be risked in a general
conflagration, and, at the same time, an armaments race was going
on because all the nations believed in the balance of power.

8

[Y]

Strangely enough, in light of what happened, none of the nations felt that their own survival was threatened by the domestic institutions of other nations. So there was a widely accepted concept of legitimacy. It was the high point of the doctrine of sovereignty of the nation-state, a doctrine at which people now look somewhat askance. But we should remember that the notion of sovereignty began to flower in response to the Thirty Years War when over 30 per cent of the population of Central Europe was wiped out in essentially ideological conflicts which recognized no borders. And it set some limits on the exercise of state power.

Then came World War I which broke the back of the self-confidence of the 19th century. It happened in large part because the statesmen of the period did not understand the technology that they had created and because they created methods of mobilization which, once underway, could not be arrested and generated their own momentum. None of the statesmen who went to war in August 1914 would have made that decision had they known

9

[Y]

what the world would look like in 1980. All of them believed that the war would be over by the winter. And as the war went on, they had to adjust their abhorrence of the suffering they had inflicted on each other to keep pace with the escalating anguish so that, by 1918, the balance of power was destroyed. The legitimacy of the system was destroyed as well because Russia, which had been a key element of the pre-war international order, now had a regime ideologically hostile to the existing system and hoping to profit from its conflicts... and Germany felt on top of the system because of the treaty of Versailles.

10

[Y]

11

[Y]

then in Central Europe, ethnic boundaries are extraordinarily
difficult to draw in regions across which conquerors have marched
for millennia and in which the people have been mixed up. It is
that much harder to bring into these regions some concept of
equilibrium, so that at the end of World War I the strange
situation developed whereby the victorious allies, trying to
limit the power of Germany, actually left Germany geo-politically
stronger than it had been before World War I: before World War I
there had been five major powers in Europe; at the end of World
War I, there were two or three and Germany was surrounded by weak
nations emerging on the basis of the concept of self-
determination. As soon as Germany broke the disarmament
provisions of the Treaty of Versailles - which sooner or later
had to happen as it happened after every war (like France did a
while after the Napoleonic wars) - it was bound to emerge as the
dominant nation in Eastern Europe. This was one of the causes of
World War II.

12

[Y]

the position and a Cold War began in which two extra European powers were the chief contestants and in which the European notion of equilibrium, which depended on a plethora of medium-sized states, did not apply. Moreover, nuclear weapons had modified the traditional equation and created risks out of all proportion to the conceivable objectives. Before the advent of nuclear weapons, nations could go to war because they might think that the consequences of defeat would be worse than the consequences of war. With nuclear weapons, the consequences of a war became worse than any other conceivable outcome, meaning that a kind of pacifism was built into the strategies. It emerged in the principle of deterrence, around which highly esoteric theories were developed that nobody had ever tested and that depended entirely on never having to be tested. For this, there was no previous experience. As a former professor, I found myself personally in the position of knowing what the probable casualties would be, but of nevertheless going through the unmitigated theories of crisis in which the threat of nuclear war was not

13

[Y]

On the other hand, the Cold War coincided with some of the
things Americans do extremely well. In America there is no
experience with, and really no understanding of, the concept of
the balance of power. But there is historical experience with
resisting attempts to achieve world domination. There is as well
experience with overcoming domestic recession by the mobilization
of resources. Now the Cold War, especially at its beginning,
suited the American experience very well. We could apply to it
the theories of the anti-Hitler coalition, of dealing with the
Soviet Union as the incarnation of evil (in President Reagan s
phrase, the evil power ) and we could deal with European
recovery by analogy to the New Deal of the United States, through
which President Roosevelt restored confidence and hope. And those
were our two great efforts that stabilized Europe.

14

[Y]

He replied: I am most proud of the fact that, after totally
defeating our enemies, we brought them back to the community of
nations as equals. And I would like to think only Americans would
have done that. It was a noble thought, and in that sense the
Fifties and Sixties were the high point of America's involvement
in world affairs. Then came Viet Nam. Viet Nam started, in my
view, with the best of motives. It was an attempt to apply in
Asia the lessons that had been learned in Europe. It was based on
the proposition that, if one could stop communism in Asia, the
nations there would recover just as the European nations had; and
that their democratic processes would create such a difference
between communism and democracy that, sooner or later, as Kennan
had predicted, communism itself would be under siege.

But it didn't turn out that way. It didn't turn out that way
because the nations we were defending were not nations. Because
in Europe there existed a civil service and the nations had a
historic reality. In Viet Nam, there had never been a South
Vietnamese nation, and the attempt to create a nation had to be

15

[Y]

There
then
democratic
criteria
had
made
in
the
middle
of
a
civil
war.
to
be
applied
while
guerrilla
troops
and
terrorists
were
killing
the
best
of
the
people.
(They
left
the
worst
alone
because
the
latter
would
help
do
their
work
for
them.)

And then came a break in American thinking because American
idealism turned on itself. The late Sixties and Seventies were
dominated by a debate in the course of which the argument emerged
- not that we had overextended ourselves but that there was
something rotten in American thinking itself and that this was a
kind of punishment for our moral inadequacy. It was therefore not
desirable that we should make the best deal possible but that we
should lose, because that was the only way to purify ourselves.
our ideal in Vietnam

When I went to universities in those days and said that we
wanted an honourable peace, I was hooted down by those whose
notion of honour was exactly the opposite of ours. They thought
that honour depended on never being tempted to get into such
situations again. None of the disputes of the Sixties and
Seventies can be understood without first understanding how this

16

[Y]

Then, after a period of humiliation, came other assertions of American idealism, in the Reagan period and the neo-conservative incarnations. And, again, it took on a Wilsonian form. The neo-conservatives in America insist that our real mission is not to defend either the balance of power or our allies, but to spread democracy. But how? *is one of the big issues.* In the Seventies, it was said that we needed to use moral pressure. In the Eighties, it was said we should use economic sanctions. And now it is being said we should use military force and that the traditional principles of the national interest are not the decisive ones. It is convictions like these that lead to many of the challenges that America faces today and that make our domestic debate so extraordinarily difficult.

I belong to a minority that believes *in the realist school*.
I look *at history* and *feel* that crusades have caused far more deaths than they have cabinet wars. And I think in this period one has to be able to explain to the mothers why, if their

17

[Y]

children are placed at risk, it should matter. I therefore have
more sympathy for policies that are geared to a broad conception
of the national interest.

That is really in many ways the fundamental debate that is
going on in America. We see it over such issues as Kosovo, which
is a tiny country, not even a country, in a tiny corner of the
Balkans. And we see it in the debates about China going on in the
United States. There is one group of people in America that would
like to put China into the category of the Soviet Union and carry
out with respect to China policies analogous to the policies that
helped win the Cold War. But with respect to both Kosovo and
China, we face big cultural problems. With respect to Kosovo,
Americans think of multi-ethnicity as the natural form of co-
existence, because in America everybody was a refugee at one
point or another and this has become an expression of the
national genius. But in Central Europe and in the Balkans, the
ethnic groups have been over-run, time and again. The weak have
been killed and the conciliatory have emigrated, and their

18

identity has become ~~related~~ in almost every instance to a
religion invariably synonymous with their group. If one looks at
the history of the Balkans, one finds that these ethnic groups
have often lived together provided there was an outside conqueror
or dictator on top of them. But as soon as the question became
democratic, namely, who should govern whom?, a blood bath
developed ~~at every period in history.~~ So the very effort to find
a definitive solution sometimes becomes the guarantee of an
extremely bitter conflict. This is a cultural problem in the
Balkans and I would be amazed if, once the smoke clears in
Kosovo, many Serbs are left there.

In China, we are dealing with a society with a 5,000-year
history. They think they managed quite well for all but 4,800 of
these 5,000 years without significant advice from the United
States, so they don't take it as self-evident that we have a
superior knowledge of what their internal organization should be.
Moreover, the historical experience of the Chinese has always
been the difficulty of reconciling the vast numbers of their

19

[Y]

population with central control. They are, therefore, much more
~~centipetal~~
conscious of the ~~disintegrating~~ tendencies in their society than
appear in these monolithic pictures that are sometimes drawn of
them in the West.

American diplomats and leaders tend to personalize their
relationships with their opposite numbers and insist that good ~~personal~~
diplomats/ relations are a major contribution to progress. But the Chinese,
having survived thousands of years of turmoil, seek to ground
their relations in objective conditions and are not amused - or
even understand - arguments in which we deal with them in a
~~certain way in order to bring them over to our point of view.~~
claim we are inverbal

As I said, for the United States - and for all of us - this

20

[Y]

is now a very new kind of world. Communications are
instantaneous. Economics are global. Politics are national and
motivations are often ethnic. How to reconcile the technological
world and the economic world with the emotional and political
world is one of the overwhelming tasks of our period. And it is
compounded by the fact that, if one looks around this world, one
finds at least three, possibly four, kinds of world orders
existing side by side. In the relations of the Atlantic world and
probably even much, if not most, of the Latin American, the
Wilsonian principles of self-determination and democracy actually
have great relevance. Wars between these nations are almost
unthinkable and the qualities that have represented the genius of
the post-World War II construction have a great scope.

But in Asia, you find a world that is most similar to the 19th century European world. You will find four or five significant countries that look at each other as potential rivals and think of their relationships as partly strategic. There, some idea of equilibrium is an absolute essential of any diplomacy.

21

[Y]

None of them want to hear that we are doing them great favours. They are much more reassured if we tell them our self-interest drives us in this or that direction and that we hope we can reconcile it with theirs. Therefore, I belong to the school of thought that considers good relations between China and the United States important because, without it, we will find ourselves in the middle of every Asian conflict - the more exacerbated by tensions if they are unnecessary.

Then we have the Middle East, or the Islamic world, and the Gulf, where the deepest conflict is between fundamentalism and secularism and which, in that respect, is more like Europe of the 17th century. My point is that all of us have to conduct policies in all of these areas simultaneously, and for this we need different modes of thought. All this is happening at a period when the human consciousness is changing in a way that has not happened since the collapse of the mediaeval period. Up to the end of the mediaeval period, knowledge was acquired via memory, which meant that one needed texts that everybody could agree on

22

[Y]

and that emphasized religion and epic poetry. The advent of books
inherently secularized the world. It broadened knowledge and it
was believed at the time that it was the widest available
knowledge. But the fact is that books, especially with our
present knowledge, are difficult to read and one has to imprint
them on one's mind because one can't go back to every book one
has ever read. So one has to form concepts that relate things to
each other and this becomes an aid for looking at the future -
which, for statesman, is the most heroic and complex assignment.
We now live in a world in which knowledge is at one's fingertips
and with a range that was inconceivable previously. But it is
also so easy to acquire that there is no obligation really to
learn it. One only has to grasp it for a moment since one can
always go back to it. So we find ourselves faced by the strange
phenomenon that our knowledge has broadened while our perspective
has shrunk.

23

[Y]

Modern statesmen, at least the ones I know, live in a condition of congenital insecurity. They can never know how good they are until they have seen it depicted on the evening news, and they live for the sake of sound bites. Now when I started in politics as an advisor, people asked me what to think. These days they ask me what to say. This represents the deepest challenge of foreign policy for us in America, and also in Europe. In every country now, foreign policy is becoming more and more an aspect of domestic politics, or being driven by domestic politics. We

24

[Y]

So, I have no great conclusions, though I have talked about
America's dilemmas. And I must say that, of all the people I have
encountered, I know none that are more genuinely idealistic or
more genuinely eager to contribute. Still, this is not something
that happens automatically. I have a Chinese friend from
Singapore who claims that there exists the following Chinese
proverb (I say "claims" because I don't think there are as many
Chinese proverbs as they lay upon us, and that they sometimes
simply make them up): When there is turmoil under the heavens,
little problems are dealt with as if they were big problems, and
big problems are not dealt with at all. When there is order under
the heavens, big problems are reduced to smaller problems, and

25

[Y]

I think that is the real challenge of our period,
everywhere: whether we can distinguish the little from the big
problems, and whether we can reduce big problems to little
problems. That, much more than the headlines of the day, is what
will determine what that proverb calls order under the heavens.

And now I will be glad to take some questions. Thank you
very much.

26

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger:

[Y]

8

[x]

9

[Y]

10

11

[Y]

12

[Y]

position and a Cold War began - a Cold War in which two extra
European powers were the chief contestants and in which the
European notion of equilibrium, which depended on a plethora of
medium-sized states, did not apply. Moreover, nuclear weapons had
ended the traditional equation and created risks out of all
proportion to the conceivable objectives. Before the advent of
nuclear weapons, nations could go to war because they might think
that the consequences of defeat would be worse than the
consequences of war. With nuclear weapons, the consequences of a
war became worse than any other conceivable outcome, meaning that
a kind of pacifism was built into the strategies. It emerged in
the principle of deterrence, around which highly esoteric
theories were developed that nobody had ever tested and that
depended entirely on never having to be tested. For this, there
was no previous experience. As a former professor, I found myself
personally in the position of knowing what the probable
casualties would be, but of nevertheless going through the
theories of crisis in which the threat of nuclear war was not

13

[Y]

14

[Y]

15

[Y]

made in the middle of a civil war. Then democratic criteria had
to be applied while guerrilla troops and terrorists were killing
the best of the people. (They left the worst alone because the
latter would help do their work for them.)

16

[Y]

Then, after a period of humiliation, came other assertions
of American idealism, in the Reagan period and the neo-
conservative incarnations. And, again, it took on a Wilsonian
form. The neo-conservatives in America insist that our real
mission is not to defend either the balance of power or our
allies, but to spread democracy. But how? is one of the big
issues. In the Seventies, it was said that we needed to use moral
pressure. In the Eighties, it was said we should use economic
sanctions. And now it is being said we should use military force
and that the traditional principles of the national interest are
not the decisive ones. It is convictions like these that lead to
many of the challenges that America faces today and that make our
domestic debate so extraordinarily difficult.

I belong to a minority that believes in the realist school.
I look at history and feel that crusades have caused far more
deaths than they have cabinet wars. And I think in this period
one has to be able to explain to the mothers why, if their

17

[47]

18

[Y]

identity has become related in almost every instance to a
religion invariably synonymous with their group. If one looks at
the history of the Balkans, one finds that these ethnic groups
have often lived together provided there was an outside conqueror
or dictator on top of them. But as soon as the question became
democratic, namely, who should govern whom?, a blood bath
developed at every period in history. So the very effort to find
a definitive solution sometimes becomes the guarantee of an
extremely bitter conflict. This is a cultural problem in the
Balkans and I would be amazed if, once the smoke clears in
Kosovo, many Serbs are left there.

19

[Y]

population with central control. They are, therefore, much more
conscious of the disintegrating tendencies in their society than
appear in these monolithic pictures that are sometimes drawn of
them in the West.

American diplomats and leaders tend to personalize their
relationships with their opposite numbers and insist that good
relations are a major contribution to progress. But the Chinese,
having survived thousands of years of turmoil, seek to ground
their relations in objective conditions and are not amused - or
even understand - arguments in which we deal with them in a
certain way in order to bring them over to our point of view.
They think they are responsible for their point of view and that
we are responsible for our point of view. The art of diplomacy is
to reconcile carefully thought-out interests. What has
complicated our relationship with the Chinese is that it has
often run afoul over questions of style as much as it has over
questions of substance.

20

[Y]

When you go to Asia, you find a world that is most similar
to the 19th century European world. You will find four or five
significant countries that look at each other as potential rivals
and think of their relationships as partly strategic. There, some
idea of equilibrium is an absolute essential of any diplomacy.

21

[Y]

22

[y]

23

[Y]

24

C]

So, I have no great conclusions, though I have talked about
America s dilemmas. And I must say that, of all the people I have
encountered, I know none that are more genuinely idealistic or
more genuinely eager to contribute. Still, this is not something
that happens automatically. I have a Chinese friend from
Singapore who claims that there exists the following Chinese
proverb (I say "claims" because I don t think there are as many
Chinese proverbs as they lay upon us, and that they sometimes
simply make them up): When there is turmoil under the heavens,
little problems are dealt with as if they were big problems, and
big problems are not dealt with at all. When there is order under
the heavens, big problems are reduced to smaller problems, and

25

[Y]

26

Transcription of Dr. Henry A. Kissinger's lecture on The World in Perspective: Lessons of the 20th Century for the Next

years old, or young. By a strange accident of history, these 20
years are divided into two equal parts. The first decade covered
the last years of the Cold War with its fears of nuclear war, its
reality of wars by proxy, and its hope for disarmament and arms
control. The second decade, as the Cold War had ended, was marked
by an almost exuberant hope for a new world of peace and
cooperation only to be followed by the saddened recognition that
neither of them could be easily achieved. Seventy-two days of
bombing to end, we hope, a conflict in a small place in the
Balkans and the first armed conflict between two nuclear powers
(India and Pakistan) bear witness to this. These two contrasting
decades deeply marked the activities of our Programme. This is
true for its teaching as part of the Graduate Institute (the HEI)
as it is for the various training programmes, its numerous
international seminars, les Conférences de Genève, its research
and its several dozens of publications. An overview of all these
activities is in a limited number available on request. We hope
that in this way PSIS could contribute, and will do so in the

2

I cannot end this overview without expressing my, our,
sincere thanks to those who have lent their support and
encouragement in these 20 years. Above all, to the Graduate
Institute, to the Swiss Confederation, the Canton of Geneva and,
occasionally even, the City of Geneva, to various foundations,
the Ford Foundation in particular. Our sincere thanks also go to
the many sponsors, individuals and firms and, why not, to the
hoped-for sponsors, the majority of which are located in Geneva.
I owe sincere thanks to the members of the staff and the dozen
assistants whose support and help were crucial. The latter

assistants have just come out with an excellent collection of
essays, Security in the Globalized World: Risks and
Opportunities. It can be ordered on the forms outside, but
please, those who have already been curious enough to take some
of the copies (we have only five), would they be kind enough to
let us have them again.

4

[L]

I have long pondered the question of how to introduce
somebody with the stature of Dr. Kissinger, incarnating such a
unique combination of outstanding statesman and as, in such cases
almost inevitably, not uncontroversial, reputed scholar,
strategic thinker and wonderful writer. Much of all this is
reflected in his writings, beginning with *A World Restored*:
Information of the Holy Lands, his doctoral thesis, and ending
with the three volumes of his memoirs, *The White House Years*,
*Years of Upheaval* and, just out (a little propaganda of public
relations doesn't do any harm), *The Years of Renewal*. Not to
forget, Diplomacy. Instead of an inevitably longish discourse,
let me therefore, Ladies and Gentlemen, introduce him as a very
personal note. It is prompted by a moving post-script in Dr.
Kissinger's third and last volume of memoirs dealing in a very
fair and impressive way with the Ford administration and its many

5

[lc]

(?) accompt (?). Then at the very end, and seemingly totally
unconnected with the preceding thousands of pages, comes a letter
which Dr. Kissinger s father wrote to his two sons before an
operation which he feared he would not survive. And yet this
letter is both a testament and a testimony of what life, our
life, is, or should be, all about. The letter ends with a
father s advice, and I quote: Always keep in mind that we find
real satisfaction only in what we are doing for others. Dr.
Kissinger, you certainly have lived up to your father s advice.
All of us are deeply grateful for your having done so and you are
doing us today one more great service by giving us such needed
guidance on the basis of your unique experiences in this century
on what we should keep in mind when facing the next. Moving as we
are from years of upheaval to hopefully again years of renewal
and, who knows, eventually again to a world restored. Dr.
Kissinger, Henry, the floor is yours.

6

[L]

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger:

It is not easy to begin speaking after such an eloquent
introduction. I was once at a reception where a lady came up to
me and said: I understand you are a fascinating man, she said,
fascinate me. It turned into one of the less successful
conversations in which I engaged. But Curt and I have been
working together in various conferences and panels for longer
than either of us wants to admit and I have always benefited from
his views and admired his efforts and so, in spite of a long
negotiation, it was always clear that I would come, and I am
delighted to be able to be here.

Now Curt shows the title for my lecture which is of
staggering profundity and he thought that I should review some of
the evolution of international relations in the 20th century, the
lessons to be learned. That would take me the better part of the
evening, but let me make a brief summary of some of the changes

7

[c]

in the 20th century and then concentrate briefly on the present
period and especially on the challenge that America faces in this
period. I noticed our Ambassador is sitting in the front row,
glowering at me, and I just want to make clear that I speak for
myself. He speaks for the US Government. I often agree with our
government and I do believe that foreign policy must be in the
end non-partist, but if I should deviate from established
orthodoxy, remember he represents it and I'm just an itinerant
professor.

Now, the 20th century has seen enormous conceptual changes
in the conduct of foreign policy. It began with the conviction
that war was very unlikely, that civilized nations would not
fight with each other. There was at that time a global economy
which most thoughtful people thought would not be risked in a
general conflagration. At the same time, there was an armaments
risk going on because all the nations believed in the balance of
power and, strangely enough, in the light of what happened, none

8

of the nations felt that its survival was threatened by the
domestic institutions of other nations, so there was a widely
accepted concept of legitimacy. It was the high point of the
doctrine of sovereignty in the nation state, doctrines which now
people look at somewhat askance, but we should remember that the
notion of sovereignty began to flower in response to the 30 years
war when over 30 per cent of the population of Central Europe was
wiped out in essentially ideological conflicts which recognized
no borders, and it set some limits to the exercise of state
power.

Then came World War I which broke the back of the self-
confidence of the 19th century optimacy. It evolved, it happened
in large part because the statesmen of the period did not
understand the technology that they had created and created
methods of mobilization which once underway could not be arrested
and which created their own momentum. None of the statesmen who
went to war in August 1914 would have made that decision had they
known what the world would look like in 1980. All of them

9

believed that the war would be over by winter. And as the war
went on, they had to adjust their abhorrence (?) through the
suffering that they had inflicted on each other so that the
abhorrence (?) kept escalating with the anguish that had been
caused, so that by 1918 the balance of power was destroyed. The
legitimacy of the system was destroyed because now in Russia,
which was a key element of the pre-war international order, there
was a regime that was ideologically hostile to the existing
system and hoped to profit from its conflicts.

And, ironically, the appearance of America introduced a
totally new element into international politics. All the European
states had had powerful neighbours. All of them knew, through
long historical experience, that there were no final solutions to
foreign policy problems. All of them had relied on equilibrium
and relative benefit for stability. But then there appeared
America, populated by a people who had turned its back on Europe,
almost entirely immigrant, never known a powerful neighbour,
never engaged in a prolonged foreign war, a nation that believed,

10

and correctly, that the secret to its success was the democratic
institutions that it brought to the new world. And so
Wilsonianism identified then, and to this day, the ideal peace
with the spread of American values. And therefore much of
American debate on foreign policy is between two schools of
thought: one that believes that foreign policy is a sub-division
of psychiatry and which believes that relations between people,
nations are like relations between people; and the other believes
that foreign policy is a sub-division of theology and that
foreign policy is a contest between good and evil.

And both of these tendencies permeate the American debate.
This is why we turned World War I, and every war in which we are
engaged, into a personal conflict between ourselves and the
leader of the enemy nation. And that is why we came up with the
doctrine of self-determination as the key to an international
settlement in Europe. Now, as we see today in the Balkans and as
we learned then in Central Europe, ethnic boundaries are
extraordinarily difficult to draw in regions across which

[d]

conquerors have marched for millennia, people have been mixed up. And it is even harder to bring into some concept of equilibrium so that at the end of World War I, the strange situation developed whereby the victorious allies, trying to limit the power of Germany, actually left Germany geo-politically stronger than it had been before World War I because before World War I there were five major powers in Europe. At the end of World War I, there were two or three, and Germany was surrounded by weak nations emerging from the concept of self-determination. And as soon as Germany broke the disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, which sooner or later had to happen, since it has happened after every war (as France did after the Napoleonic wars after a while), it would emerge as the dominant nation in Eastern Europe. This was one of the causes of World War II.

After World War II, Europe lost its previous central position and a Cold War began. A Cold War in which two extra European powers were the chief contestants and in which the European notion of equilibrium, which depended on a plethora of

12

[d]

medium-sized states, did not apply. And, moreover, nuclear weapons had ended the equation and created risks out of all proportion to conceivable objectives. Before the advent of nuclear weapons, nations could go to war because they could think that the consequences of defeat were worse than the consequences of war. With nuclear weapons, the consequences of war are worse than any other conceivable outcome and so a kind of pacifism was built into strategies and emerged in the principle of deterrence in which highly esoteric theories were developed that nobody had ever tested before and they depended entirely on never having to be tested. For this, there was no previous experience, and I was in the personal position as a former professor knowing what the probable casualties would be, of nevertheless going through the theories of crisis in which the threat of nuclear war was not negligible. This in the long run was bound to be an unsustainable situation.

So, on the other hand, the Cold War coincided with some of the things that Americans do extremely well. In America there is

13

[d]

no experience, and really no understanding, with the concept of
balance of power. But there is a historical experience with
resisting an attempt to achieve world domination. And there is an
experience in overcoming domestic recession by the mobilization
of resources. Now the Cold War, especially at its beginning,
suited the American experience very well. We could apply to it
the theories of the anti-Hitler coalition dealing with the Soviet
Union as the incarnation of evil (in President Regan's phrase,
the evil in power) and we could deal with European recovery by
analogy to the new deal in the United States in which President
Roosevelt restored confidence and hope. And those were our two
great efforts that stabilized Europe. When I was a young
professor, I met President Truman and I asked him what he thought
he had done of which he was most proud. And he said: I am most
proud of the fact that after totally defeating our enemies, we
brought them back to the community of nations as equals. And I
would like to think only Americans would have done that. It was
a noble thought, and so the fifties and sixties were the high

14

[L]

point of the American involvement in world affairs.

Then came Viet Nam. Viet Nam started, in my view, with the best of motives. It was an attempt to apply in Asia the lessons that had been learned in Europe. It was based on the proposition that, if one could stop communism in Asia, the nations would recover like the European nations had; that their democratic performance would create such a difference between communism and democracy that, sooner or later, as Canon (?) had predicted, communism would itself be under siege. But it didn't turn out that way. It didn't turn out that way because the nations we were defending were not nations. Because in Europe there existed a civil service and the nations had a historic reality. In Viet Nam, there had never been a South Vietnamese nation, and an attempt had to be made to create a nation in the middle of a civil war and to apply democratic criteria while guerrilla troops and terrorists were killing the best of the people. They left the worst alone because they would help do their work for them.

15

idealism turned on itself. The sixties and seventies were
dominated by the debate that an argument emerged not that we had
overextended ourselves but that there was something rotten in
American thinking and that this was a punishment for a moral
inadequacy, and not that we had to make the best deal possible
but that in fact it was desirable that we should lose because
that was the only way we could purify ourselves. When I went to
universities and said that we want an honourable peace, I would
be hooted down because their notion of honour was exactly the
opposite. They thought our honour depended on never being tempted
to get into such situations again. And none of the disputes of
the sixties and seventies can be understood without this American
idealism turning on itself.

Then, after a period of humiliation, came another assertion
of American idealism in the Regan period and in our neo-
conservative incarnations, but again it took the Wilsonian form.
The neo-conservatives in America insist that our real mission is
not to defend the balance of power or our allies, but to spread

16

[c]

democracy. But how? is one of the big issues. In the seventies,
it used to be said we need to use moral pressure. In the
eighties, it was said we should use economic sanctions, but now
it is said we should use military force and that the traditional
principles of national interest are not the decisive ones, and it
is convictions like this that lead to many of the challenges that
America faces today and that make our domestic debate so
extraordinarily difficult.

I belong to a minority that believes in a realist school. I
look at history and I feel that crusades have caused far more
debts than cabinet wars. And I think in this period one has to be
able to explain to mothers that if their children are at risk,
why it matters in their lives, and therefore I have more sympathy
for policies that are geared to a broad conception of the
national interest.

Did I break the microphone?

That is really in many ways the fundamental debate that is
going on in America. And we see it over such issues as Kosovo,

17

[L]

which is a tiny country, not even a country, a tiny corner of the
Balkans. And we see it in the debates about China in the United
States. There is one group of people in America that would like
to put China into the category of the Soviet Union and carry out
with respect to China policies analogies to the policies that
helped win the Cold War. But with respect to both Kosovo and
China, we face big cultural problems. With respect to Kosovo,
Americans think of multi-ethnicity as the natural form of co-
existence, because in America, where everybody was a refugee at
one point or another, this has been an expression of the national
genius. But in Central Europe and in the Balkans, these ethnic
groups have been over-run, time and again. The weak have been
killed. The conciliatory have emigrated and their identity has
become identified, has become related, almost always, to religion
and invariably to their group. If one looks at the history of the
Balkans, one finds that these ethnic groups have often lived
together provided there was a foreign conqueror or a dictator on
top of them. But as soon as the question became democratic,

18

[d]

namely: who should govern whom?, a blood bath developed at
every period in history. And so the very effort sometimes to find
a final solution is a guarantee of an extremely bitter conflict.
This is a cultural problem in the Balkans and I would be amazed
that, when the smoke clears in Kosovo, whether many Serbs will be
left there.

In China, we are dealing with a society with a 5,000-year
history. They think they managed for all but 4,800 of these 5,000
years without significant advice from the United States so they
don't take it as self-evident that we have a superior knowledge
of what their internal organization should be. Moreover, to the
Chinese, the historical experience has always been the difficulty
of reconciling the vast numbers of their population with central
control, and they are, therefore, much more conscious of
disintegrating tendencies in their society than in these
monolithic pictures that are sometimes drawn of them in the West.
American diplomats and leaders tend to personalize their
relationships and insist that their good relations with their

19

[C]

opposite numbers are a major contribution to progress. But the
Chinese, having survived thousands of years of turmoil, seek to
ground their relations in objective conditions and they are not
amused, or do not understand arguments that, if we deal with them
in a certain way, we will bring them to our point of view. They
think they are responsible for their point of view and we are
responsible for our point of view. The art of diplomacy is to
reconcile carefully thought-out interests and this has
complicated our relationship which often runs afoul questions of
style as much as questions of substance.

As I said, for the United States and for all of us, this is
now a very new world. Communications are instantaneous. Economics
are global. Politics are national and motivations are often
ethnic. How to reconcile the technological world and the economic
world with the emotional and political world is one of the
overwhelming tasks of our period. And it is compounded by the
fact that if one looks around the world, one finds at least
three, possibly four, kinds of world order existing side by side.

20

In the relations of the Atlantic world and probably even much, if not most, of Latin America, the Wilsonian principles of self-determination, democracy, actually have great relevance. Wars between these nations are almost unthinkable and the qualities that have represented the genius of the post-World War II construction have a great scope.

When you go to Asia, you find a world that is most similar to the 19th century European world. You will find four or five significant countries that look at each other as potential rivals and they think of their relationship as it leans (?) partly strategic. There, some idea of equilibrium is an absolute essential of any diplomacy. None of them want to hear that we are doing them great favours. They are much more reassured if we tell them our self-interest drives us in this direction and we hope that we can reconcile it with yours. And, therefore, I belong to the school of thought that considers good relations between China and the United States important because without it we will be in the middle of every conflict of Asia, which will be exacerbated

21

[L]

Then we have the Middle East or the Islamic world and the Gulf, where the deepest conflict is between fundamentalism and secularism and which is more like Europe of the 17th century in that respect. My point is all of us have to conduct policies in all of these areas simultaneously and we need different modes of thought, and all of this happens at a period when the human consciousness is changing in a way that has not happened since the collapse of the mediaeval period. Up to the end of the mediaeval period, knowledge was acquired by memory, which meant that one needed texts that everybody could agree on and that emphasized religion and epic poetry. The advent of books inherently secularized the world. It broadened knowledge and it was believed at the time that it was the widest available knowledge. But the fact is books, especially with our present knowledge, are difficult to read and one has to imprint them on one's mind because one can't go back to them, to every book one has ever read. So one has to form concepts that relate things to

22

[c]

each other and this is an aid to looking at the future which for
statesmen is the most heroic and complex assignment. Now, we live
in a world in which knowledge is at one's fingertips and with a
range that was inconceivable previously, but it is so easy to
acquire that there is no obligation really to learn it. One only
has to grasp it for a moment and then one can always go back to
it. So we find the strange phenomenon that our knowledge has
broadened while our perspective has shrunk.

The great statesmen in history have been distinguished by
having a view of the future and having the courage to walk there.
Bismarck, who was considered an ultimate realist, once said that
the best a statesman can do is to listen to the footsteps of God,
get a hold of the hem of his cloak and walk with him a few steps
of the way. I don't know any modern statesmen who could formulate
such a thought, and it shows incidentally that without moral
convictions you cannot be a realist because the realistic world
shows you narrow alternatives, and morality consists of the
strength of choosing very tight choices. Modern statesmen, at

23

[L]

least the ones I know, live in a condition of congenital
insecurity. They do not know how good they are until they have
seen the evening news and they live for sound (?) bites(?) and
when I started in politics as advisor, people asked me what to
think. Now they ask me what to say. So, this, it seems to me, is
the deepest challenge of foreign policy for us in America but
also in Europe, because strangely enough when you were most
needed. So, in every country now foreign policy is becoming more
and more an aspect of domestic politics and it is driven by
domestic politics. We talk of new wars, humanitarian wars, but we
have gone through this in Europe. We have gone through
ideological wars. And the wars of the righteous are much more
destructive and they always leave the question of who defines
righteousness.

So, I have no great conclusions. Having talked about
America's dilemmas, I must say that of all the people I have
encountered I know none that are more genuinely idealistic and
more genuinely eager to contribute, but this is not something

24

[c]

that happens automatically. I have a Chinese friend from Singapore who claims that there exists the following Chinese proverb (as he claims, because I don't think there are as many Chinese proverbs as they lay upon us. I think they sometimes make them up), but this proverb goes something like this: When there is turmoil under the heavens, little problems are dealt with as if they were big problems, and big problems are not dealt with at all. When there is order under the heavens, big problems are reduced to smaller problems, and smaller problems should not obsess us.

I think that is the real challenge of our period everywhere: whether we can distinguish little from big problems and whether we can reduce big problems to little problems. That, much more than the headlines of the day, is what will determine what that proverb calls order under the heavens.

25

FROM: De C. Hak, KAIDC
TO: Theresa, KAINY
DATE: 7/13/99 8:02 PM

Re: letter from Geneva - RE: Kissinger's Talk

Contents:

1 letter from Geneva - RE: Kissinger's Talk

2 <no topic> * Binary *

================ Begin Part 1 =================
Topic: letter from Geneva - RE: Kissinger's Talk
Name: letter from Geneva - RE: Kissinger's Talk

----------Forwarded Message----------

From: Olivier Brenninkmeijer, INTERNET:brennin3@hei.unige.ch
To: [unknown], kaidc
Date: 7/13/99 4:07 PM
RE: letter from Geneva - RE: Kissinger's Talk

> To: 104520,2270@compuserve.com
>
> TO:
> Ms. Gina Goldhammer

> FROM:
> Mr. Olivier Brenninkmeijer
> Research assistant for
> Dr. C. Gasteyger,
> Director of the
> Programme for Strategic and International Security Studies
> Graduate Institute of International Studies
> (Univ. of Geneva)

> Mail address:
> 132 Rue de Lausanne
> CH - 1211 Geneva 21
> Switzerland
> Fax +41 22 738-3582
> E-mail: brennin3@hei.unige.ch

Dear Ms. Goldhammer,

From Ms. Christina Neumann at the Office of Dr. Kissinger, we
received a
request to send to you by E-mail attachment the transcription of the
talk which Mr. Kissinger delivered in Geneva on June 6. (File name:
"Kiss6j99.wp")

Please find attached in WordPerfect 5 format the transcription
mentioned. Should you have difficulty opening it, please do not
hesitate to let me know and I will send it to you either in a MSWord