HAK:

Chet Crocker has renewed his plea that you allow the US Institute of Peace to print and distribute your remarks, along with those of Ted Koppel and Les Aspin, to 3000-5000.

You have said no.

Koppel's and Aspin's remarks are attached, along with your own.

Still do not want it published

Well, OK

HAK: Attached is your US Institute of Peace speech, including Gina's edits.

Suzanne mentioned that you wanted to see this before deciding if you want them to release it at all; USIP would like to know this week if they may use it.

OK to release as edited.

Don't want this released.

Prefer:

DF

The Honorable Henry A. Kissinger

Perspectives On Diplomacy in the Twenty-First Century

Address delivered during the United States Institute of Peace
Tenth Anniversary Celebratory Dinner

December 1, 1994

I am glad to have this opportunity to speak to an institution
dedicated to so important a subject and to one composed of so many
individuals with whom I have had the privilege to work and whose
work I have had the opportunity to observe, as well as to
representatives of so many foreign countries whose friendship,
association, and cooperation with the United States has meant so
much for the world in which we live.

This is a strange period in which we live. I consider it a tribute
that many foreigners ask me whether the change in the recent
elections means that there will be a great upheaval in American
foreign policy. I consider it a compliment because I have not been
known for unqualified admiration of the current foreign policy, and
I would not be heartbroken if there were a change in certain
respects. On the other hand, it represents this important truth:
United States foreign policy cannot be looked at from a partisan
point of view.

[Y]

I served in this city during a heart-rending period of America's involvement in the world. And I became deeply convinced of the importance of nonpartisan conduct of our international affairs.

It is especially difficult at this moment--not so much to achieve nonpartisanship--as to develop a coherent American approach to international affairs. For not only are we undergoing important domestic changes, but the international situation has altered so radically in the last five years that many of the traditional premises of American foreign policy are very difficult to apply, and many of them cannot be applied at all.

The United States has always been a nation different from any other--populated almost entirely by immigrants, without any powerful neighbors, and with a history that can be pin-pointed to a specific date. It has never had to make--until relatively recently--the careful calculations in the balancing of interests that have been taken for granted in other societies.

For the greatest part of our history, we have been able to enjoy the privilege of either isolation or domination. Almost every problem with which America has been faced has been presented to its public as being capable of a definitive solution. And even the great period of American foreign policy at the end of World War II--of which we are all so proud: the period of NATO, and of the

2

[Y]

Marshall Plan, and of the construction of the then international
order--was presented to the American public as a series of
decisions with clear cut terminal dates at the end of which the
people of the world would live with a consciousness of harmony.
Even containment was presented as bringing about a change in the
balance of forces. But what was to happen when the magic moment
of success was reached was never addressed by any of the fathers
of containment.

Now we live in an age without clear-cut strategic enemies; without
an overwhelming ideological challenge; and with a series of crises
that have no readily obvious terminal points. The question arises,
how do we define American decisions at this moment? And, moreover,
how do we do it so that foreign nations can rely on some
continuity and constancy without having to fear that every time
there is a change in the administration of this country, all the
trees will be uprooted in order to see whether the roots are still
there. This, I think, is the fundamental foreign policy challenge
of our time.

Abd it is complicated by the fact that there are important
philosophical issues which have not been resolved, some of them not
even addressed. Moreover, the American penchant for finding some
general formula universally applicable in every part of the world
is no longer valid. The philosophical issue, of which the current

3

[Y]

tragedy in Bosnia is an example, concerns the issue of when
American should use its power.

There has been an enormous reluctance in American history to
justify foreign policy on the grounds of the national interest, and
an overwhelming tendency to seek some universal approach in the
name of which we can act. Thus President Bush, at the end of the
extraordinarily successful Gulf War, nevertheless said that the
reason why we had such wide support was because everyone had
understood that we had no interests in the Gulf and that we were
defending international law, universal principles, and some other
general slogans. Now that was a very American attitude.

There has been, moreover, in the recent Administration--as a legacy
of the fact that the formative experience of so many of its members
was in the Vietnam period--a tendency to try to fold power into
general multilateral institutions, leading to the strange situation
that the action in Haiti was brought before the United Nations but
not before the American Congress. The belief that multilateral
solutions were the principle justification for international action
was (at least at the beginning of this Administration) one of its
central themes.

There will be many reflections on what went wrong in Bosnia, and
I think no nation that participated in the morass has much to be
proud of. But one of the fundamental issues--the question of

4

[Y]

whether Bosnia should have been constituted as a nation in the
first place--was never systematically addressed, though it was at
the heart of whether what one was facing was pure aggression.

But even more importantly, none of the nations that were conducting
policy in Bosnia stated objectives for which they were prepared to
make the efforts or pay the sacrifices needed to achieve them. If
punishing aggression meant returning the Serbs to beyond the
borders of the administrative entity in the Yugoslav federation
called Bosnia, then ground forces of a substantial size were
necessary. If one was not willing to supply ground forces, one was
obliged to state objectives related to what one was willing to do:
if nations cannot bring their goals and their efforts into harmony,
some sort of debacle is inevitable.

And at this point, whatever one's views were at earlier stages of
the conflict, the overriding concern has to be with what this does
to the cohesion of the Atlantic alliance, and to the foundations
of one of the key elements of the international order in the
post-war period.

Now, it seems to me that the tendency to state some general goal
and then to apply it globally must be related--as it was not in
Bosnia or for that matter in Somalia or elsewhere--to what our
capabilities are to achieve these objectives. Containment was an

5

[Y]

operational policy; enlargement of democracy is a much more
complicated policy that cannot be applied with equal precision in
every part of the world. In the Western Hemisphere, I believe it
can be a useful guide to American foreign policy. In Western
Europe and in Western and Central Europe, the fact that the
governments are, almost without exception, democratic should be a
major factor in the kind of foreign policy we conduct.

But there are other problems, even in Europe. There is the
historical experience, the change that has occurred with the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the retreat of the Soviet army to the
Russian borders, the emergence of a unified Germany, and the
resulting vacuum in Eastern Europe between the Russian border and
the German border, which goes beyond the Atlantic area. Yet the
Atlantic Alliance as such has been given very little concrete
content. I believe it will be a tragedy if it is permitted to
wither away.

We are living in a relatively calm period without any obvious
enemies of a strategic type. But the vacuums that now exist--if
history is any example--are bound to be filled. New forces are
emerging, for example fundamentalist Islam, toward which it seems
to me that the Western democracies and the North Atlantic
democracies should, if not take common positions, at least develop
some common philosophy. (Although I think, in most cases, it
should be possible to take common positions.) When we talk of

6

[Y]

European-American relationships, it seems to me essential that we
should be able to define where Europe begins and where Europe ends.
And the generalities in which this debate has so far been conducted
must be given greater meaning if the Atlantic Alliance is not
gradually to disintegrate.

I personally have been in favor of NATO expansion. But that is a
secondary issue, as far as I am concerned, to the fundamental
question of the relationship between Europe and the United States,
and of the inability to define any common purposes other than the
Partnership for Peace, which really is more a strategy toward
Russia and the Former Soviet Union than it is a strategy for the
relationship of Europe to the United States.

In the world which is likely to arise, the old partnership between
Europe and the United States obviously will have to be given a new
meaning. The previous arrangement assumed the division of Germany
and a permanent Soviet threat. Under such conditions, America had
the principal responsibility for the defense of Europe, West
Germany subordinated its political role to that of France in order
to gain legitimacy in its contest with Eastern Germany, and there
was a kind of balance, both within Europe and within the Atlantic
Alliance. Now that Germany is unified, the strategic threat is
diminished but the willingness of Germany to subordinate itself to
any other nation is also diminished.

7

[Y]

Therefore, the question of European equilibrium, in a political way, will reemerge and can be solved only either by going back to the traditional balance of power policy or by creating some idea of Europe that subsumes the traditional balance of power policy. The latter, I would think, is the better course. But the latter requires some kind of definition of where Europe begins and ends. I do not believe that Russia can be an integral part of Europe. Russia can be a friend of Europe, it can have close relations with the Atlantic nations, but Russia as part of the European Union or as part of the Atlantic Alliance will dissolve both of them into institutions with multilateral difficulties similar to what we have encountered in the United Nations. And both of them are inconsistent with a long-range American role in Europe.

Now this is a debate that should not be conducted over such issues as how long it will take for the military establishments in Eastern Europe to be up to the level of military establishments of Western Europe, or creating a set of criteria that make membership in the European Union or the Atlantic Alliance look as if it were some sort of a club in which the definition of security and unity depends entirely on the technical criteria. I think the fundamental decision should be, as it was when Europe was formed in the first place, where the process is supposed to begin and which countries it should include. The technical problem of what the levels of participation should be can be solved relatively

8

[Y]

easily, and is, in my view, secondary.

We should use, on both sides of the Atlantic, the Bosnian debacle to reexamine where we have gone wrong conceptually, not to blame each other for what has really been the same mistake on both sides-the attempt to deal with a major foreign policy problem as if it were a domestic issue, to do just enough to still the immediate situation but never enough to deal with its essence. I find it difficult to imagine that on the one hand the United States can proclaim its dedication to "enlargement of democracy", while on the other hand jettisoning, in one way or another, its relationship to the oldest democracies in existence without making at least a major effort to define what the fundamental issues are.

When we go to other parts of the world, for example in Asia, the United States faces a situation quite different from the one we confront in Europe. We have just concluded a very successful meeting of the countries of the rim of the Pacific in Indonesia, where some very worthwhile objectives were stated that nobody, however, has any intention of realizing in any brief period of time. But the fundamental reality of Asia is different from that of Europe in that the nations of that region do not consider themselves part of the same community. Most of them define

9

themselves in some form of strategic competition with each other.

Therefore, the American asset in Asia is precisely the fact that we are closer to almost all the nations of Asia--at least all the key nations of Asia--than they are to each other. If you ask any of the leaders of Asia to list the three principal threats to their security--as I have sometimes done--you would not find America among these but you would always find other Asian nations listed. And I have heard it said that, in Southeast Asia, for example, nations group themselves into two categories: those that are afraid of Vietnam and are friendly with China, and those that are afraid of China are friendly with Vietnam.

So in Asia we have to conduct a kind of foreign policy--which is uncongenial to us and with which we have next to no experience--that seeks good relations with everybody (in that we have experience) but within which we can adjust our relations in terms of some overall strategic interest. This is the reason, as many of you know, that I have always believed that friendly relations between the United States and China have to be a cardinal aspect of our foreign policy. I must say that in recent months, whatever my concerns have been in this respect have been greatly ameliorated. I think that, on the whole, we are on the right course in that relationship now.

10

The key point I want to make is this: there are endless debates
in this country about what should guide our foreign policy--
whether we should be motivated by idealism or by pragmatism,
whether democracy or power is the key issue. I do not think it is
possible to define American Foreign Policy with any one slogan.
Of course, America became great by the principles that Woodrow
Wilson expressed so eloquently, but it is also true that the
conduct of foreign policy without any emphasis on power is empty.

I would like to quote a great Greek philosopher called Damon Runyon
who once said, "It may be that the race does not always go to the
swift, or victory to the strong, but that is surely the way you
should bet."

So in the conduct of foreign policy, we simply no longer have the
luxury of pretending that our values are automatically the key to
every foreign policy problem, or even that we know how to implement
our values in every part of the world. Of course, we should give
preference where there is compatibility with us. But even then we
have to know what we mean by preference. And we have to be able
to balance preference against the foreseeable costs.

When the idea of the "new world order" was presented, it was
treated in the media--and maybe even by some of our spokesmen--as

11

A

if it were something that already existed; as if it were a
culmination of history. But in fact we are only at the beginning
of such a process. And that process is bound to be extremely
tumultuous. At every stage of it, the United States will have to
clarify its choices--and at a time when, on top of everything else,
we are at a changing of the generations--from the generation in
which I grew up and in which American efforts were identified with
great achievements, to another generation which identifies American
efforts with enormous ambiguity and which, therefore, does not have
the assurance of those of us who went through a world in which the
question of good and evil was very easy to define and in which the
post-war period, for all its efforts, could also be encompassed in
some relatively simple formula.

We are now heading into a period of infinite complexity in which
the American role is bound to be less direct in many parts of the
world but, nevertheless, conceptually extremely crucial. It is
true that our European allies did not distinguish themselves in
Bosnia. But it is also true that at no time have we put forward
a clear statement of what it was we thought could be achieved, or
what we thought it would cost us in common.

Too many of the debates in this country get bogged down on
technical issues. We have yet to have a thoughtful debate about
the nuclear agreement on Korea. Not on the technical issue of
whether, if it all gets implemented, it will help to eliminate the

12

[Y]

North Korean capability, but on the issue of how American acquiescence--even for an eight-year period if that's what it should turn out to be--is perceived in the surrounding countries. That in turn would have to be analyzed in relation to the real measures anyone was willing to take. Until we have that sort of debate on a whole range of issues, we are likely to have a divisive foreign policy no matter who conducts it. And yet our goal ought to be--and an institution like the U.S. Institute of Peace can contribute to it--not to settle every tactical issue, but to try to define what kind of world we can reasonably aspire to, what the American contribution can be, what it is that we alone must do, what we can do only with others, and what it is we should not attempt. That is now lacking, not because of individual mistakes or particular administrations, but because we are in a transitional period in which the need would exist no matter who governed (and whatever my reservations are about specific policies).

So let me thank you for inviting me here, with, I repeat again, so many colleagues, comrades of other battles, and occasional critics-whom I of course forget because they cannot be right a hundred percent of the time. Thank you.

13

An Interactive Forum on the Global Information Revolution

Ted Koppel

I belong, I suppose, to the mainstream media; in the sense, at least, that
words still bear an approximate relationship to their original definition.
They don't, of course. Suffice it to say that the field of media in general
has expanded to such a degree that most of us over the age of fifty are
barely able to keep track. Not only have the tools of communication
multiplied; but so too has their accessibility. It has become, in our life-
times, both easier to receive information and to disseminate it. This has
created the opportunities and the problems which all of us who are,
directly or peripherally, involved in the conduct of foreign affairs must
confront.

But let's return for a moment to the issue of definitions. The meaning of
words evolves. Whereas once "media" referred essentially to newspapers
and magazines; and then gradually expanded to include radio, film and
television, the term also had an implied reference. To speak of "the
media," suggests, to this day, forms of communication controlled by an
elite few. Hearst and Pulitzer gave way to Sarnoff and Paley; who, in turn,
were obliged to acknowledge the existence of Goldenson and then, Turner.
Apple and Microsoft, Sony and Panasonic, the King Brothers and Rupert
Murdoch are today as much a part of the media galaxy as the Sulzbergers
and the Grahams. To the degree that these people and corporations control
the superhighways -- the main arteries of the communications network --

1

[LC]

the blue highways, the backroads, are now in so many hands that it has changed the nature of communications altogether. That, after all, is what concerns -- or what should concern -- many of you.

But before we examine those changes a little more closely, one more observation on the governing principle of communication between and among us all. In *this* country at least, all of these 20th and 21st century media, are controlled by an 18th century concept: The first amendment to the Constitution. Anyone, in the United States, who wishes to be a journalist, need simply announce himself as such. There is no requirement for a license; there is no need for a preliminary course of study. No individual or body of individuals exercises even the limited control that the Commissioner of Baseball, for example, once had over what used to be known as our "national pastime." The all but universal freedom that was designed to encourage political oratory and pamphleteering, now encompasses a somewhat expanded universe. But even more significant, is the accessibility of the media themselves. There has been (how best to put it?) a democratization of media. They are no longer the exclusive tools of enlightenment or playthings of the powerful few. To the degree that any man, woman or (increasingly) child in America has access to a computer, tape recorder, or Hi-8 camera, he or she can transmit information across great distances to large numbers of people.

Although the United States has always been in the vanguard of the communications industry, there seems to have been less appreciation for the international implications of this new reality here than in many other parts of the world. The "Samizdat" of the 1980's, both in the former Soviet

2

[LC]

Union and throughout Eastern Europe, was no longer the typed or handwritten document; but rather the videotape. Just as the Ayatollah Khomeini's audiotapes were recorded during the mid and late '70's in France and then smuggled into the Shah's Iran; so too, video journals compiled from Western news reports and from tapes shot with 8mm home video cameras throughout Eastern Europe, were mass produced and then passed from hand to hand throughout Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia...East Germany and Romania. During the mid-80's, we found one church in Gdansk with tiers of video tape recorders -- more than 60 of them -- capable of mass producing many hundreds of tapes every day. Each of these tapes, in turn, would be distributed, re-copied and passed from family to family. A crude form of mass communication; but effective, nevertheless.

The tiny satellite dishes that are only now being marketed here in the United States, have been ubiquitous throughout Eastern Europe for nearly a decade. It was neither accident nor coincidence that the revolution in Romania was ignited in Timisoara, the city that is closest to the former Yugoslavia. Even without satellite dishes, the residents of Timisoara were able to pick up CNN broadcasts from their western neighbor. When I visited Timisoara shortly after the Ceaucescus were killed, I was repeatedly told how dissidents had taken encouragement from scenes of anti-government activities in Hungary, Poland and East Germany that they had watched on CNN.

Nor was this cross-pollenization of political activism limited to Eastern Europe. What happened in Europe was seen and fueled the activism of

3

[c]

dissidents in China and in the occupied territories of Israel and throughout
South Africa; and the same thing, I might add, happened in the other
direction. Satellite technology has done for television what short-wave
transmissions did for radio. It has made geographic borders irrelevant;
but even more to the point, technologies that were once so complex and
expensive that they were available only to the few, have been placed in
the hands of the many.

I ask you to keep all of this in mind as sort of a sub-text to the larger issue
which I know concerns most of you: the interrelationship between the
conduct of foreign policy and the media. The fact that media, capable of
conveying great quantities of information to large numbers of people in
distant locations, the fact that such media are now in the hands of the
general public, redefines - - if you think about it - - the nature of mass
media.

But permit me to focus for a few minutes on the more conventional, the
more traditional definition. Think of mass media as we have been
accustomed to thinking about them: powerful organs of communications
under the control of a few powerful men and women. Even under that
limited definition, times have changed; or perhaps it would be more
accurate to say . . . *time* has changed.

In January of 1992, my Nightline colleagues and I were the first American
journalists to be granted visas to Iraq. We arrived in Baghdad from
Amman late in the evening. We drove from the airport straight to the
foreign ministry, where I met with Nizar Hamdoun. Even though it was

4

[L]

after 11pm by the time we got there, the offices lining the corridor down to Hamdoun's were all occupied. This, remember, was only a few days before the beginning of Operation Desert Storm. All of the offices had television sets. Each television was tuned to CNN. I suspect that if a colleague had walked down the appropriate corridors at the State Department, the CIA or the Pentagon at the same moment, they too would have found televisions in corresponding offices tuned to CNN. To the degree that either the U.S. or Iraqi government sought insights into what was happening in the other's capital, it frequently obtained its first information from CNN. The information is dispatched and received literally at the speed of light; but the effect of that information is, in almost all of its aspects, disproportionate. Far more information was flowing from Washington to Baghdad than the other way around. The actual audience in Iraq, of course, is tiny. Indeed in most foreign countries where CNN is seen, it is available only in hotels, where it's accessible to foreign visitors but to very few locals, and in the government ministries of that country. A few thousand others may also have access to the network through satellite dishes; but there is no equivalency in the exchange of information. It is, in other words, far easier for Saddam Hussein, for example, to reach a wide audience in the United States with his own spin on events, than for the U.S. government to do the same in Iraq.

And that, in a sense, is the central point. The conduct of U.S. foreign policy is influenced far less by its failure to reach large audiences in other countries. It is affected by the constant requirement to shape perceptions here at home; and that imperative is continually influenced by the barrage of information that inundates the American viewer and listener every day.

5

[L]

Until now, we have been largely spared the worst consequences of this phenomenon by the ignorance and incompetence of our foreign adversaries. They are not yet as adept at the manipulation of U.S. public opinion as they believe themselves to be. You have only to recall the scene of Saddam Hussein benevolently patting a clearly petrified, young British hostage on the head. The intent of that scene and its impact could not have been more dissonant.

But simple pictures can, and do, have enormous consequences for American foreign policy. Scenes of starving children in Somalia clearly helped precipitate our involvement in that country; just as scenes of that dead Ranger being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu speeded up the timetable for our withdrawal. Scenes of incredible brutality in Rwanda and Haiti forced a degree of involvement in both countries that had little or nothing to do with what is normally defined as U.S. national interest. The same can be said of television pictures from Tien An Men Square in 1989, of scenes showing young Palestinians being beaten by Israeli troops during the height of the Intifada; and, more recently, of the incredible violence being perpetrated throughout the former Yugoslavia. The operative question is not whether such scenes have consequences -- they do; but whether those consequences are intended; if so, by whom; and if not, whether those consequences can be avoided.

Many years ago, a professor of communications, by the name of Wilbur Schramm, put forward what he described as "the gatekeeper" theory. It was predicated on the way information was processed back in the 1950's; at a time when opinion leaders both within and outside the media tended

6

[L.C.]

to set the national agenda. It was, if you will, sort of a trickle-down theory of information, under which a few men and women determined which issues were of importance to the nation. During recent years, that theory has been largely turned on its head. This is, in some measure, a function of focus groups and opinion polls, which have encouraged our political leaders to seek direction from the public; rather than the other way around. But it is also a function of the growing accessibility of the media themselves.

Increasingly, information is being gathered and disseminated by more people and in a more chaotic fashion than ever before; and, whether coincidentally or not, it is happening at a time when the conduct of U.S. foreign policy itself is being subjected to its own chaos theory. If nothing else, anti-Communism provided the United States with a sense of direction and stability that, for understandable reasons, is no longer present. While there is no discernible reason for growing nostalgic over the absence of the Cold War, there is every reason to be alarmed by the inability of our leaders to focus clearly on where our national interests now lie. It is insufficient and ambiguous to simply preach a gospel of human rights, democracy and free trade. For one thing, they are not always compatible; as has recently been illustrated again in our relationship with the People's Republic of China. For another, the gospel is too broad. How is it applied, for example, to Bosnia?

The absence of adequate focus produces the political equivalent of a vacuum; into which all opinions, however inconsistent they may be, are irresistibly drawn. Random scenes of cruelty and suffering, instantaneously communicated to the nation from around the world, are

7