DALLAS WOMEN'S CLUB - SUNDAY, JUNE 4, 1977

REMARKS AND Q&AS

Before you get too impressed about the number of books I've written, I should tell you what a British reviewer wrote about one of them. He said, "I don't know whether Mr. Kissinger is a great writer, but anyone finishing this book is a great reader."

After the unfortunate events of last January, with the change of the Administration, I took a vow of uncharacteristic silence and said that I would not make any public comments for six months. I'm keeping to this in the sense that I've not spoken for public record, but during my term in office I had the opportunity to associate with some outstanding Texans: John Connally, Bill Clements, Ann Armstrong, and the immigrant Texan, George Bush.

You will appreciate that given the natural reticence that characterizes Texans, it took me sometimes a little while to pick out exactly what Bill Clements wanted, but after he hit me over the head a few times with a baseball bat, I got the point. I've never worked with a group of stronger men and women, more patriotic, more dedicated. I had the opportunity twice while I was Secretary of State to come to Texas and you cannot appreciate what it means when one is in a town which at that time had a one-party press more or less and when one was constantly assailed by doubt and cynicism come to a part of the country that felt strong and patriotic and supportive and meant an enormous amount to me and so when I was asked to come down here, I took this as my first trip outside of Washington to make some observations about our foreign policy.

In order to spare you the convoluted sentences which both my German and Harvard background has produced, I propose to speak for about 20 minutes assuming I can place a verb in that period and

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then I'll answer your questions about whatever aspect of foreign policy interests you most.

I'd like to begin with a comment that Mrs. Hill said in her introduction about my own personal history. There is no country in the world where an immigrant could become Secretary of State 20 years after having been sworn in as a citizen. The thought that I could ever rise to such a position never occurred to me at the time, but that it is possible at a time of crisis in this country for a foreign born to reach this position is an enormous tribute to the open-mindedness and to the democratic spirit of the American people, and in my whole time of office I never received one letter which said who are you to tell us what we should think about foreign policy.

Maybe in the southern part of this country they thought that my accent was a Harvard accent, but I make this observation because perhaps as a foreign born I have had a deeper understanding than people who tend to take it for granted of what America means to the world. When you travel around the world you must realize that without America's commitment there can be no security and without American dedication there can be no progress. Our involvement in the world is not a favor we do to other countries it is a necessity for the United States.

Our economy and the lives of our people have now become decisively dependent on what happens in far away countries and the decisiveness, determination, and mastery that the United States can show with respect to evolving events will determine whether there are jobs in America and a prosperous economy, or whether

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there is a recession as occurred in 1973 when as a result of events thousands of miles away our economy was thrown into turmoil. And again whether we will live in a secure world or one under constant pressure again depends very importantly on American actions. But there is one important difference now compared to previous periods.

The most difficult problem of policy making is that when your capacity for action is greatest the knowledge on which to base such action is at a minimum. When your knowledge is greatest the capacity for action has often disappeared. I can give you two examples: one from the 30's and one from the contemporary period.

In 1936 when the Germans remilitarized the Rhineland one French division could have stopped what was going on and spared mankind all the rest that followed afterwards, but the world would still be debating whether Hitler was a misunderstood nationalist or whether he was bent on world domination. Five years later everybody knew he was bent on world domination, but it was a knowledge acquired at the cost of 20 million lives.

Last year in 1975 and 1976 there were many of us in Washington who felt that the sending of a Cuban expeditionary force to Africa was a change in the international environment which would have profound consequences for many years and maybe decades. We felt that if the Soviet Union was permitted to operate 8 thousand miles away from its base of supply in an area of potential massive race conflict given the situation in Rhodesia and South Africa that we could easily lose control over the events at a moment when our efforts were succeeding and when only another month or two stood

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between us and the achievement of our objectives and when all
it cost us was a little money, a few ten of millions of dollars,
we were not talking about American forces. At that moment we were
prevented from pursuing it by Congressional action. Nobody could
prove then how significant Angola would turn out to be and it was
easy to say this is a far away country about which we know nothing,
which is what was said about Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Today we are seeing the beginning of the consequences of our
inability to do what was right then. We are seeing it in Rhodesia
and may soon see it in South Africa. What one has to learn in
foreign policy is if you make a relatively small effort early you may
not know that it was necessary but you may save yourself great grief
further down the road. On the other hand, if you wait until events
get out of control one will have to pay a horrendous price. The longer
one waits, the higher the price will be.

This places on American foreign policy an extraordinary responsibility because except in the rarest circumstances only the U.S. has a public opinion that is patriotic and strong enough and the resources and hopefully the leadership to take action when there is still time.

We now have a new Administration and candidly it puts those of
us who have served on previous Administrations into a complicated
position. On the one hand we know what it is like to conduct foreign
policy under constant harassment and we are aware of the fact that
every American Administration since 1960 has ended badly through
assassination or turmoil or domestic upheaval or other matters. So
as Americans we have an interest in their success, but also as time

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goes on we have an obligation to point out our concerns.

Now on this occasion I'll just run through a few problem areas that I see now before us and then we can go into details on any one of them as your questions develop.

We turned over at the end of January the most peaceful world that any new Administration has inherited in the entire post-war period, but there are trends that are now developing in many parts of the world which keep the prospects for progress poised between possible success and possible danger. Let us start with Europe. For the entire post-war period the relations between the U.S. and its European allies have been at the port of our security and central to our economic relations. We have become used to a very close association with like mine at state and our relationship with our European allies has been very close and yet those of you who have interests in Europe or have opportunities to visit Europe will know that in France and Italy and maybe Spain, but certainly in France and Italy, the prospect of communist participation in government is very real.

Now there are many clever writers and professors at institutions with which I used to be associated that believe that the communists have become dissimulated in the Democratic process. I want to say that communist participation in the governments of Europe will mark a fundamental change in the Atlantic relationship. I do not believe that the leadership of these parties has changed except in tactics. I believe that the electoral appeals they make are incompatible with close association with the U.S. and I think that over a period of

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time communist participation in major governments in Europe is bound
to undermine the entire post-war structure as we have known it.
It is not something that the U.S. can take lightly. It is not
something we must treat as a foregone conclusion and which way it
tips will importantly determine whether we will have a period of
peace and progress or a period of increasing complexity.

If you go to the other part of the world, you go to East Asia
where we have had extraordinarily close ties with Japan. We again
have the tendency to believe that the close friendship that
developed between us and Japan is a natural phenomenon that is
bound to endure for all eternity. Yet if you look at Japanese
history you will see that Japan shifted from feudalism to emperor
worship in a few months because of the visit of some American
warships. And it shifted from emperor worship to democracy in a
few days, again I must say because of the visit of some American
warship.

This suggests that the Japanese are very conscious of the
relationship of power in part of the world and if they should ever
get the idea that the U.S. is withdrawing its protection or failing
to understand its interests, that the Western Pacific is no longer
a source of primary American concern, you will see changes in Japan
equally as dramatic as the changes that have already occurred twice
in one century.

From this point of view troop deployments of the U.S. and East
Asia should be looked at not only from the point of view of their
immediate technical significance but from the point of view of their

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political impact on the other countries and its for this reason that I must tell you in all candor that I have the greatest doubt about the withdrawal of the American forces from Korea.

From another point of view the same problem with the Peoples' Republic of China. Mrs. Hill was kind enough to refer to my nine visits in China and it is customary to say that they reflected the deep-seated desire of the American and Chinese people whose separation from each other for twenty years was unnatural. In all candor I must tell you that having been there for nine times I got the impression that the Chinese existed quite contently for 2,000 years without contact with the U.S. and they would suffer no enormous sense of deprivation if they had no contact with the U.S. for another 2,000 years, except for one thing.

They are scared to death of the Soviet Union. What led us to China was not their desire to get Taiwan nor can we ease our relationship with them by yielding on the Taiwan issue. What they want from us is an understanding of the world balance of power. If we conduct ourselves in a manner that they believe we can prevent the Soviet Union from taking over what they call hegemony in Eurasia, we can have a constructive relationship. If they believe that we have become vapid and flabby and superficial, then their only salvation will be either to accommodate with the Soviet Union or to organize the so-called third world into a block which would then again be contrary to our interests.

In Africa, in which the events in Angola imposed on us in our last year of office the necessity for a very active policy, our concern

was always to keep in mind that there were two problems. One, the problem of how to prevent radical movements from taking over the evolution of a continent whose economic resources could have a profound impact on the economic future of Europe and also of the Western Hemisphere.

At the same time to encourage a moderate evolution towards change; the U.S. has to be very careful not to encourage a radicalism that can only benefit outside powers that may be able to use our own rhetoric to support their objectives and so there, too, the next few years will face us with important choices.

Bill Clements and I have talked more about the Middle East, for example, than I think about any other part of the world and it isn't often that one can isolate one conversation that then shapes a whole policy. On the way back from Dallas last year, things blew up in Lebanon and he and I discussed how this should evolve in our interest and I must say that to a considerable extent due to his advice we managed to have an evolution ... that was in the interest of moderation in the Middle East and that was counted to the radical forces. But there, too, we have to make up our minds just exactly what it is we want.

Do we want the Russians in on the settlement or do we want them out of the settlement. Do we want to go to Geneva or do we want to settle things as much as possible with the moderate states in the area on our own. I always favored the second course, to shape as much as we could by American influence, but whatever decision we make will have a decisive influence on our future, not only in terms

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of our energy supplies but also in terms of the tremendous financial power that these countries now command and that they haven't even begun to use yet in any systematic way.

And so much of this gets back to our relationship with the Soviet Union. There are a number of things to keep in mind about the Soviet Union. First, it is a regime that is ideologically hostile to us and no amount of evolution has changed that fact. It is a regime that has been accumulating military power throughout its history and as its industrial and technological base grows, its military power has also mounted. And we can debate forever what their intentions are, but I think it is safe to assume that they are not acquiring this military power in order to be nice to us. So this presents a security problem and whatever our intentions we must have a strong military defense.

Third, in the area of defense whether we like it or not in the nuclear categories the forces of the two sides increasingly tend to cancel each other out. This is fact of life which we can ignore only at our peril and, therefore, the capacity for intervention regionally becomes more and more important and there we are at a disadvantage for many reasons including the fact that nearly 60 percent of our defense budget goes for pay and allowances and only 30 percent of their defense budget goes for similar categories. So everything being equal we are likely to wind with smaller forces.

But whatever we decide something must be done in the next 4-5 years to strengthen our capacity for regional defense because sooner or later something is going to happen, even if it isn't intended

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by the Soviets. In 1973 as Bill knows very well there was a night when we thought the Soviet Union was intervening in the Middle East and I hate to think what the balance of forces would have looked like if we both had had to go simultaneously. People don't understand that we had to go on alert rapidly and scare them off before through a gradual escalation we got ourselves into a situation which we would have had great difficulty supporting either military or even more so politically given the fact that we were in the middle of the Watergate crisis at that particular moment.

On the other hand we have to realize that the Soviets have massive problems of their own. They're an inefficient system. They're a tired leadership. Where they prevail it is because of persistence not through brilliance. They have a massive problem in having China on one side and Western Europe on the other and if we can hold those two together over a period of time the Soviet Union will be more and more absorbed in its own problems.

I feel identified with the policy of detente. To me detente means the management of conflict between hostile systems. It means that we must not permit a situation to arise as existed in the late 60's and early 70's where the U.S. all over the world was not identified with a desire for peace. It does not mean friendship; it does not mean trust; it does not mean that our problems have disappeared; it means a tactical positioning of the U.S. so that we can maintain public support and international support and so that if there are opportunities to settle conflicts we are prepared to do it, but that we also when we resist can do so having proved to our public that we have made every effort to look at the other alternative.

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Never can it mean that we must let down our guard. So I come back to the original problem. Everything depends on the U.S. around the world today. Everything depends on what we think of ourselves. Everything depends on our willingness to make tough decisions. Everything depends on what other people looking at us believe we are likely to do. So the signal we get, the attitude we exhibit, is going to determine peace and progress of the world and, therefore, peace and progress of the U.S.

This is what we face in the years ahead. Rarely has such a responsibility fallen on one people and never has there been a people that has gone through so much as we have in the last decade and yet kept its faith and real strength. So I think that our challenges are great but our prospects are good and everything now depends on how our leadership will deal with it. Thank you very much and I'll be glad to answer any of your questions.

**Question:** What is your reaction to the U.S. surrendering the Panama Canal?

**Answer:** It depends what you mean by surrendering the Panama Canal. Candidly when I was in office I supported the negotiations about the Panama Canal and let me give you my reason. There are two issues connected with the Panama Canal. One is the administrative control over the Canal. Second is the defense of the Canal. The problem we face with respect to the Canal is that if we insist on maintaining the relationship that was established in 1903, we may face an endless gorilla war supported by all the Latin American countries. I believe that we can be flexible with respect to administrative control. We cannot be flexible about the defense. The defense of the Canal and

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the unimpeded access through the Canal must remain under American control. The administrative operation of the Canal is something on which I think we can be flexible and, therefore, I would judge the result of a negotiation by the criterion of whether it gives the U.S. two rights. One, to defend the Canal against outside aggression and secondly to insure that there is free and unimpeded passage through the Canal. If we can maintain those two rights, then I would not worry too much about changes in the administrative control and technical operation of the Canal. If we do not maintain those two rights, then I would not support any new arrangement that is made.

**Answer:** Let me put it in more general terms because I don't believe that you can isolate any one problem and say any one problem is more or less likely to lead to war. I would say that as a general proposition, and also I would not have started myself with the West Bank quite candidly, if there is not visible progress towards peace within the next year then the position of moderate leaders like Sadat and even Assad, too, who has become more moderate and even the Saudi leadership, will become very difficult. I would say above all the position of Sadat in Egypt could become precarious. How you measure progress is a very complicated problem and there is a strategic decision we have to make, whether we put the Palestinians first in line or deal with them a little further down the road. I would have thought that it's more important to make sure that some progress is made on the frontier issue than on the legal arrangements on who governs what part of West Bank territory.

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Certainly some adjustments have to be made on the West Bank. There is no settlement conceivable in which there is no territorial change on the West Bank. The big problem now is that there have been a lot of conversations, but there has been no clear-cut strategy to get us from here to there. If that doesn't develop soon so that the leaders in the Middle East can talk to themselves in these endless conversations in which they specify: where they're going to be six months to a year from now, I think there will be an increasing radicalization of the area. To answer your specific question, of course, there has to be an adjustment on the West Bank.

**Answer:** If there are contacts between those two regimes and occasionally we hear rumors about it, we have never had them confirmed. As a general proposition about this relationship, let me say a number of things. First, there are few people to whom it was more painful to do what we had to do in 1971 than the government on Taiwan. They have been honorable; they have been helpful to their own people; they've been good friends of the U.S. Our problem was that we had to create a counterweight to Soviet pressures in that area. We had to try to isolate the North Vietnamese and we could not give the Soviets the impression that they would have a clear shot at mainland China. On the other hand, I have never believed that our relationship with the People's Republic depended primarily on what we did with Taiwan. There are some problems you simply cannot solve. Whatever legal formula we come up with, we cannot turn over the people of Taiwan to the People's Republic of China. Therefore, we have to insist that

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whatever else happens must be done peacefully. Peking, on the other hand, for even understandable reasons cannot accept the proposition that something that they consider their territory should be negotiated with the U.S. Therefore, it is inherently insoluble problem and, therefore, it's better to leave it alone. There is no good solution to it. What the Chinese get from us if we design a correct policy is some sort of protection against the Soviet Union. What we get from the Chinese is attraction of Soviet attention to the East and making it impossible for the Soviets to put all their pressures on the West. This is a perfectly cold-blooded arrangement benefiting both sides; they're not doing a favor for us and we're not doing a favor for them. And I frankly have always believed that we can make cosmetic adjustments. We can withdraw troops from Taiwan because Taiwan isn't defended by American troops. All our forces there are communications for our own purposes, not really for theirs. We can do that sort of thing, we can do symbolic things which ease whatever pain this relationship causes. But beyond that I see no need to go at this time or in any foreseeable future.

**Answer:** I would say first of all that any new Administration has to learn the difference between a proclamation and a policy. I would argue that when we were in office...tape difficulty...were permitted to leave the Soviet Union. In many other parts of the world we brought about the release of political prisons. Indeed Bukovsky was available to be received in the White House because we brought about his release in December. However, we felt that the strategy was a one of quiet diplomacy not making it a confrontation

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with the various countries. The danger is that if we become too
vocal ... it may turn out that we are used by our opponents as
a demonstration of impetence and they may use it deliberately
as it seems to be happening in the Soviet Union now, harass the very
people we think we are helping and then telling them see what
your American friends are capable of doing for you. Then when
we get discouraged and drop it with respect to the Soviet Union
which is also happening, you haven't read too many comments
about the relations, then the whole human rights campaign turns
against its allies and you see that in Brazil and all over the world.
In many other key countries to the U.S. you may find that human
rights could become a cop-out for isolationism and in a way
turning our allies against us. So I support the objectives of
the human rights campaign. I question some of the laws and I hope
to God ...

**Answer:** About the aviation industry, let me say this. It is
an impossible position for the U.S. to say that as a result of
Vietnam we will no longer defend our friends. At the same time
we will not sell arms to our friends so that they can defend
themselves. Not only will it create danger for these friends ...
We should not forget that in 1972, Iran was the only country
joining the Soviet Union ...