August 5, 1964

HAK SPEECH FOR ASPEN INSTITUTE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM

Saltsjöbaden, Sweden -- June 22, 1982 -

I will discuss Latin American issues then Middle East, then some very general comments about East-West relations and I'll leave issues such as arms control and strategy to Paul.

...... difficulties with approaches to foreign policy sort of flow together precisely because no administration has ever paid systematic attention to it, or if they have paid attention to it, have done so in a somewhat condescending fashion. I would say that my own view about American foreign policy in general is that we have an enormous conceptual problem with dealing with foreign policy the way other nations have been forced to deal with it throughout their history. Except for the first generation of American leaders, we have been either/isolated from the rest of the world physically and therefore have dealt only with monumental crises to the international system, after which we withdrew from it again, or we have such a preponderance of resources that our foreign policy was really an aspect of domestic policy. We like to think of the Marshall Plan and the Greek-Turkish aid program and the Monnet period as the great creative periods of American foreign policy -- and they were -- but, as was said yesterday, at that time we had 52% of the world's gross national product. We made available huge resources to Europe. It is not so

-2-

difficult to achieve cooperation if you supply the means and
the other side has to organize itself primarily how to
allocate an essentially free gift and when you are asking in re-
turn that which they should be doing anyway.

The period of the fifties and the sixties was really more
comparable to the New Deal period than to foreign policy as
it has been conducted by the European state system from the
17th century to after World War II. It was based on the
premise that economic development would bring about political
stability, which indeed it did. And it was based on analogy
to the Nazi aggression by building up military forces to
deter an assumed attack which in turn was expected to move
massively across sovereign borders. Every decade since then
we have lost 10% of our relative position as was indeed in-
herent in the success of the Marshall Plan and the recovery
of Japan, plus the development of other areas of the world.
Today we have something like 20-22% of the world's GNP. This
still makes us a tremendous military power but it means that
in relation to the rest of the world we are something like
Britain was to the European continent. If the rest of the
world combined against us, we would be outmatched. Therefore,
there is imposed on us something that Americans do not like --
namely, a balance of power policy, an equilibrium, a geo-
political sense -- whatever the phrase is that one wants to
use. But an analysis of forces in the world that we have to
deal with and that we have to balance, regardless of what we

-3-

may think of the merits of every individual dispute. Also we have to understand dynamics that development that have their own momentum and that cannot be altered necessarily by goodwill, by persuasion and that have to be understood as forces. There are people who pay lip service to such an approach but it is not in the American soul and it's to the credit to the Americans that it isn't.

In America, as some of you may have heard me say elsewhere, there are basically two schools with which people feel comfortable: the school of thought that thinks of foreign policy as a subdivision of psychiatry and thinks that good relations among nations are like good relations among people and that with the strenuous exercise of goodwill, unilateral concessions, negotiating gimicks or even negotiating proposals, there is a need to a dispute. Or, the school of thought that thinks of foreign policy as a subdivision of theology and that is of the view that if the walls of Jericho have not crumbled it is because the right trumpet hasn't been blown yet and which is in the frantic search for the formula, the phrase, the slogan that will make our enemies wither and that is therefore interested in purity of approach and often these merge so that you can have arch-conservatives who will make blood-curdling anti-communist speeches, be totally unprepared to get themselves involved in specific situations in Latin America or Africa that may have long-term geopolitical significance because they are waiting for

-4-

the great show-down with the Soviet Union that will never come,
in my view, in that form. Because of this I would like to
talk about Latin America because I believe that the Falkland
crisis has generated forces there, that our Latin friends here
will undoubtedly correct me, which require analysis. Nor do
I want to go into the issue of whether American policy could
have done something else than it did do. I don't think Britain
could have done anything other than it did do and I think
Britain acted courageously and indeed helpfully to the West in
taking the position it did. The question is whether what
Britain had to do could have been with a more careful American
policy brought into a framework in which one could have
established the principle of resistance to force without the
other consequences.

Let me not spend time on the Falkland crisis as such but rather
discuss what I take to be some of the tendencies that both
antedate and follow that crisis. One of the problems is the
intellectual difficulty we have had and still have and to
which I don't have an answer is what do we do with governments
in areas that have no democratic tradition as we understand
it and in which then our domestic discussion polarizes be-
tween those who are for a democracy -- democratic forms that
have no roots -- and those who praise an authoritarian
structure that we find difficult to make relevant. It is all
very well to say that we were wrong to associate with the
authoritarian government in Argentina. It is also true that

-5-

forty years of Argentine history show that the legitimate
structure of Argentine politics, if it ever existed, collapsed
under Peron and that there is no democratic force on which
you can quickly build and so therefore the government in
Argentina oscillates between populist radical third world groups
that are objectively pro-Cuban even if they don't even consider
themselves so and the military who represent the conservative
moderate forces and who derive their claim to legitimacy on
the fact that they purport to be and had been generally
accepted to be the conscience of the nation and the ultimate
regulator of domestic conflict. You had endless oscillations
between these two groups with the military always in a position
to keep things from going too far in the radical direction.

Therefore, from the beginning of this Falkland crisis, there
were really two issues: one is the outcome of the crisis, the
other one was what happens to Argentina when the prestige of
the military is destroyed. That is a tendency that is totally
independent of the merits of the issue. Therefore, the
destruction of the prestige of the military is bound to have
two major consequences: one, it shifts the spectrum of
Argentine politics inherently in a radical direction and in
all this fan dancing that is now going on as to how will now
be President, one thing is certain that the Peronistas will
play a growing role, that they will be pro the state-run
economies, pro-radical third world, now what their relative
role is that will still emerge. This is something that
analysis of organic tendencies in societies could have been
told by anyone who has studied political evolution in those

-6-

terms from the first day of the crisis on. Indeed, it should
have been known last year when we involved the Argentinians
in Salvador, a place for which they have no more knowledge
than Nigeria does, except that they speak Spanish, and which
created all kinds of wrong ideas in the Argentine military
about what could be done. At any rate, there will be two
results: one is strengthening of the radicals and, secondly,
a belief by people who in the past were extremely pro-US
that the United States has betrayed them and therefore they
will lean more towards radical forces. This will have sig-
nificant consequences throughout Latin America not because
anybody likes the Argentinians -- they're arrogant, racist,
you can mention many unattractive qualities to Latins --
but because it will impose a number of objective conditions
on them. First, almost certainly we will now see a sig-
nificant increase in the military forces of all of the
countries. First because Argentina will build up its military
forces. Secondly, because Brazil and other states will have
learned that/military power is not so irrelevant because it
will appear that they did fairly well in the air force against
a modern European state. Brazil has already increased its
military budget by 10-15% and that will bring with it Peru and
Chile. Therefore in the one area in the world which was
relatively free from an arms race, I think we will see the
beginning of it and it is highly unlikely that the United
States will be a major contributor for many reasons, in-
cluding our reformist tendencies which will then accentuate

-7-

the movement of these military forces which, on the whole,
having been trained in the United States, were pro-American,
towards whomever the arms supplier turns out to be, on top
of the other tendencies I have already described. Secondly,
I think we will see a temptation to have recourse to military
force to solve the many order problems that have existed in
Latin America and that have never been settled or attempted to
be settled by significant use of force. Third, I think that
countries that are basically friendly to us and very antagonistic
to Argentina like Brazil will believe that the only way they
can bring about a degree of moderation within Latin American
context is to pursue a policy of greater independence which
therefore will mean objectively anti-US. We might well see
them pursue policies similar to Mexico which will drive Mexico
further in a radical direction. Fourth, I think the inter-
American system as we have known it has suffered a very severe
shock, in fact probably an irreparable shock. When I was in
office, I didn't understand that for many years the inter-
American system, and I hope some of our Latin friends are not
too offended, but it had the great advantage for the United
States that it relieved us of having to spend all our energies
on Western hemisphere problems. Wild speeches were often
made at OAS meetings and while there was a liturgy of assaults
on the United States, at the end of the day there was a
tradition of cooperation which dispensed us from having to
deal with each Latin American country as a separate sovereign
entity on the basis of pressures and counter-pressures and
therefore freed our energies for creative policies elsewhere.

-8-

[Y]

/:

I am not saying this is a hopeless situation but it is a
situation, this is not trivial in addition because Latin
America is that part of the underdeveloped world which is
closest to OECD status. It is the part of the world which
is the middle class if you look at the international society
the one that could act as mediator between the radical third
world and the West and has often done so, and which I suspect
will now for a period move much more in a direction which
is different from what we have seen in these forums (?).
It will be an area in which a great mistake now would be to
do what we usually do which is to start throwing money around
and offer economic aid programs and all sorts of nostrums.
The first thing we have to do, and I do not have the answer,
is to try to get clear a number of things. One is what do
we understand by economic development. What is it that we
can contribute in these area? That debt rescheduling problem,
which was mentioned yesterday, we talked a lot about it in
relation to Poland. Poland/is easy if we look at Argentina
and Brazil in terms of their debt. What a shock to the
international banking system would be if some of those happened
simultaneously. Or, what would happen if one of them used
its debt as a weapon rather than wait for a crisis and acted
on the realization that in the modern world the debtor is
stronger than the creditor and started exploiting that position.
We would have a serious problem.

-9-

The first issue is what do we understand by economic de-
velopment. Secondly, what do we understand by political
development. We have been debating in the United States
between those who praise authoritarianism and others who
give the impression that it is so easy to bring about
democratic reform. I don't have the solution so I'm not
saying this because nobody is accepting my ideas. But, how
do you go from feudalism to the modern state, how do you
go from a military government to democracy -- of all the issues,
that is an issue that has been addressed here. Howard Simon
said Salvador will be back on the front page of the Washington
Post and so it will be because there we have the problem of
the relationship between domestic reform and guerrilla warfare
and the time scale that is involved. It is easy to see how
ten years ago the right policies, if we had known what they
were, could have prevented the guerrilla war from arising.

It is not so easy to see how once the guerrilla war has
arisen the things that should have been done ten years ago
relevant to the solution of the guerrilla war. The American
nostalgia will be that we should say we'll punish these
people by showing them and then all of these ideas of coalition
government and negotiations that we went through in the
Vietnam war and that we've gone through in all of these types
of situations will I think find again an intellectual ferment
in the United States. It is hard for me to see how we are
going to win that war. But I don't see how we're going to

-10-

solve it by the methods that are proposed either. So all I
have are dilemmas. I don't see how a coalition government
between the guerrillas and the central(?) government can
solve the crisis. I know no civil war in history, certainly
none in Spanish speaking countries, which was settled by a
negotiation between the two sides. I don't see how people who
have been murdering each other are going to be able to agree
on sharing power. The practice consequence of it must be
the collapse of the existing government because if we will
not protect them when they are a government, we're not going
to protect them when they are a faction of a government.

Whatever my prejudices on that subject, the reason I mentioned
Latin America is because if we do not answer some of the issues
that I raised to ourselves, I believe that the Western hemisphere
will wind up absorbing more and more of our energies in the
next five years. I'm not talking about the next twenty years.
I think the Falklands have speeded up things that would have
happened over fifteen years so that they are likely to happen
now over maybe two years. If we don't watch ourselves we
may find ourselves so absorbed in the Western hemisphere that
it will take away from any ability to be creative in other
parts of the world which also require a great deal of attention.
Therefore, I have picked a subject in which I am a known non-
expert to express my concerns and to emphasize the fact that
I had the impression that these tendencies were not understood
at all when the crisis started and that it was discussed

-11-

[Y]

entirely in terms of was Britain right or was Argentina
right. Argentina was totally wrong. But that doesn't change
the fact that it could have produced consequences out of all
proportion to what these generals of limited imagination
imagined and whose biggest problem after the first week was
that they knew they had made a mistake but were too proud
to admit it and too unimaginative to get off it and so that
was one of the few cases where the problem was really much
more psychological than diplomatic. How to get them off these
islands in a manner that they could say they had done it and
how to get the other Latin American countries involved in this
process so that it didn't look as if the United States had
simply disregarded the inter-American preferences. This is
an area where political development, economic development,
the relationship of military assistance or arms sales,
East-West issues, North-South issues all tend to merge.
It is an area in which there is no huge body of long-range
thinking and therefore I have violated Joe's strict instructions
to talk about the crisis in German domestic politics and
in Alliance failures and concentrated on this.

Now the Middle East. The Middle East is actually a different
problem because there I think the fundamental issues are much
better understood. We may not know what to do about them but
the issues seem to me somewhat better understood. There I
want to make only this point. It seems to me in the last
few years we have had great difficulty in the Middle East
because we have not been able to tie together the various

-12-

issues into a coherent strategy. The issue of the East-West
conflict, the issue of the moderate-radical conflict among
the Moslem countries and the Arab-Israeli issue. We have not
been able to tie them together for two reasons. One because
our priorities were either different from the local priorities
because the Middle East countries felt that there was so little
they could do about our priorities that they did not see that
they could get themselves involved in it. Secondly, because
the necessities for a while of each of these conflicts were
not necessarily commensurate at least in terms of our own
domestic situation.

With respect to the first one, it is often alleged that the
Saudis are not interested in the East-West conflict and that
therefore Secy. Haig made a mistake when he tried to establish
a strategic consensus against the Soviet Union. He may have
made a mistake in trying to establish a strategic consensus
against the Soviet Union but not because the Saudis don't
worry about the Soviet threat. The problem is that the
Saudis figured and the Gulf states figured that the contri-
bution they can make to the conflict against the Soviet
Union is so marginal that if we have to ask their aid we
are already in such trouble that it isn't worth for them to
contribute. It is one of those situations where what we
conceive to be a system of collective security to them looks
like a form of American abdication and weakness. We will
never get them involved directly in an East-West confrontation
until they get attacked themselves. And in fact there is

-13-

very little they can do to add to our strengths. On East-West issues the only thing that will impress the Gulf states certainly is our overall performance and not our attempt to establish/collective security system.

On the other hand, on the moderate-radical conflict expressed in the Iran-Iraq conflict, the fact that Iran could defeat Iraq that is a shocking event in the Gulf. But it is also a terrible problem for us because I don't know how we can help Iraq technically. It raises all of the problems of how we are going to handle it. It has a layer over it the fact that the radical states or groups in the area, namely the PLO and the Syrians were beginning to play significant roles in the domestic politics of all of these moderate countries, further constricting their freedom of movement, also towards the Arab-Israeli issues. For all of these reasons, I believe that while it is safe to say that Begin is certainly not a winner as a personality and has taken many actions that are not always ideal from the point of view of calming the area, I think the Israeli incursion into Lebanon is a strategic advantage for the West if we handle it properly. I think the weakening of the PLO and the demonstration that there are limits to risks Syria is able to run give us a window of about two years in which we can do two things. One, try to bring about a rapid interim solution of the West Bank problem. Secondly, establish some system of guarantees for the Gulf without playing around too much on its domestic structures