NOV 12 1997

Text of the address by Doctor Henry KISSINGER
delivered at MONACO 2nd July 1997

Your Serene Highnesses, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a great honour for me to speak here on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the Grimaldi family. What an extraordinary period! 700 years is three times longer than the history of the United States. It saw the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, when the family first came to Monaco. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, two world wars. An international system, it became truly global. And in all these upheavals, one family maintained itself, adapted to the conditions, ensured the survival of their charter and created a country which, in this week, when Hong Kong is achieving something like a comparable status, one can only say one can wish Hong Kong to wind up like Monaco. And it will be a very happy place and a very great fulfilment for it.

Prince Rainier has been here the longest of any of the Grimaldi family and introduced the new constitution and many extraordinary improvements. But he will have forgotten this. But as a great football fan, I sat next to him at a football game twenty years ago here in Monaco. And he told me that he was going to make Monaco one of the principal teams in France and in Europe. And he has certainly brought that about. And so many other things.

Now I want to talk to you about two things. Because of the events of this week, I would like to make some observations. About China and Hong Kong.

And then I would like to make some comments about the relationship, the future of Europe and its relationship with the United States.

The subjects are somewhat related because there is an enormous concern about the pace of the developments in Asia, the future that Asia will mean for all of us. And let me begin by stressing the cultural differences between certainly America and Asia and China and, to some extent, Europe.

Things in China are on a different scale. One rarely visits a province whose population is not larger than that of a European country. When a westerner is asked when something happened he gives a date, when a Chinese is asked when something happened, he gives a dynasty. Of the fourteen Chinese dynasties, ten have lasted longer or as long as the entire history of the United States. So that in itself introduces a different perspective. The size of the country, the nature of the population makes, for Chinese governments, the overwhelming problem of how they can establish control over these 1.2 billion individualists whose family structure has provided a cushion against all kinds of upheavals throughout history. When President Nixon met Mao, President Nixon said to him early on in the conversation: « The Chairman's teachings have changed a civilisation. » Mao said: « No, I have changed Beijing and a few of its suburbs. » That seemed preposterous. But

with all the changes that have since occurred, one can see that his overwhelming concern was, with some justice, what would happen after his death. And so today, I believe, the principal concern of the Chinese leadership is not, as is so often alleged, to overrun Asia, but how to develop their own country and indeed how to keep control of their own country. Now it's in this context that I would like to say a few words about Hong Kong.

The events of this week were extremely moving. And the decline of the Western reach is painful to observe. And it is also very likely that over a period of a decade or more, significant changes will occur in Hong Kong as they will in China. In the immediate period I do not believe that China will try to interfere significantly with the autonomy of Hong Kong. The reason is that they have too much to lose if Hong Kong collapses. Hong Kong is their largest foreign exchange earner. It is the Chinese bridge to many other economies. And, it is also their best hope of a peaceful solution to their relations with Taiwan.

If Hong Kong collapses then the hope or the possibility of a possible unification of China will disappear. And if Hong Kong collapses, confidence in China as such will disintegrate. And what will determine the future of Hong Kong are not statements by journalists or politicians, but the future of Hong Kong will be determined by the market. If the market loses confidence in Hong Kong, if the stock market or real-estate market collapses, or both, in Hong Kong, then we will see a totally different situation which will affect all other relationships. So, I believe for the immediate and mid-term future, Hong Kong is not the key issue though we in the west should let China know that we are paying attention and that we are far from indifferent to what will happen there.

The real problem is how we manage to integrate an economy that is growing at a rate of over ten per cent a year into the international system. What sort of relations can be established with this giant that is emerging? And it is a complicated problem. The Chinese approach to statecraft goes back thousands of years and it is usually based on a very simple principle. They like to balance off the distant barbarians against the close-in barbarians. And the conduct of the Chinese on the whole has always been geared to an attempt to make sure that no coalition of countries can penetrate this huge continental territory that they represent. And particularly after the age of colonialism, this is true. When President Nixon opened relations with China, it was based not on sentimentality on either side. The United States needed to disentangle itself from South-East Asia. The Chinese were concerned with the threat represented by Russia. There were never any ideological discussions in all the conversations that I have had with the Chinese over a period of nearly thirty years now. Their concern has always been precise, national-interest oriented and expressed in something that was said to me early on by Mao. I had said to Deng Xiao-Ping a sort of platitude that diplomats often express in which I had said: « The good thing about our relationship is that we want nothing from each other». Next day I saw Mao and he said « I've read this transcript, that is not my view ». And he said: « If I wanted nothing from you I wouldn't have invited you. And if you want nothing from me, you shouldn't have come ». That rather unsentimental precise approach is the essence of their statecraft. It makes current Chinese-American relations somewhat difficult because there is always a

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missionary streak in American foreign policy. And the Chinese believe that, having managed to govern themselves for five thousand years, without significant contributions from the United States since we didn't exist, it is not self-evident to them why their domestic arrangements should be subjects of international discussions. And it is also true that their domestic situation is much more complicated than it appears. On the one hand, they are growing at an unbelievable rate: over ten per cent a year. But that rate is very unevenly distributed. It may be twenty per cent in the coastal provinces, and four per cent in the interior. In any one year, between thirty to fifty million Chinese are moving around, looking for jobs, the size of a substantial European country. Every single year. The difference between the coastal provinces and the interior is a permanent challenge and they are attempting to develop it over a period of decades. Secondly, the one-child family is bound to bring about a substantial change in Chinese society. Anyone who knows China is struck by the extended family system which has cushioned the impact of government and which has made it impossible to organise the entire society for an extended period of time on a completely totalitarian model. Now there's only one child. There are no nephews, no cousins. No brothers and sisters. One spoiled child with four grandparents, or two spoiled children having to take care of eight grandparents. It is a fundamental change in Chinese life previously based upon the extended family with unpredictable social and political consequences. And if you add to that the change that the modernisation of the economy must bring, not necessarily in the direction of democracy, but certainly in the direction of constitutionalism, you understand some of the strains that China undergoes and why in the relationships of the outside world with China one has to be conscious that one is dealing with a complex organism and that these projections of a linear evolution on which so much is based, especially in the domestic debate in America right now, are almost certainly wrong.

The one thing that is impressive in China today is the tremendous confidence in the future. I was in Shanghai two weeks ago and they told me that they had built 2100 structures in the last eight years of more than ten storeys high. In one city! Now they don't worry about a real estate bubble. One keeps reading about the inevitable inflationary pressures which on paper certainly exist but which haven't quite happened yet. So, the impressive thing about China is not the military threat it may represent - that I think is largely overstated. One has to remember that the Chinese gross national product is ten per cent of that of the United States. So that ten per cent for them represents about one per cent of ours. And so the gap economically is not necessarily closing very fast but it's this tremendous confidence, this attempt to take a whole society and to move it from the coastline deep into the interior over a period of decades which will, over a generation, make China a tremendously powerful country but how it will act then will depend upon how we deal with them now and how we conduct ourselves now.

And I want to use this as a bridge to a discussion of Europe and the United States. Biographies of me refer to the fact that of course I was educated in Europe. And they leave the impression that I was reading Maeterlinck by candlelight as a child. I did live in Europe, but in Nazi Germany. Which did not particularly inspire excessive affection for the method in which government was conducted. My real experience in Europe came in

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1945 when, as a young soldier, twenty one years old, I came back to Europe. In France, Belgium, Holland and, finally, Germany.

And, of course, there are not all that many people now who remember. At least it's a declining number. What did Europe look like in those days? The ravaged cities, the destroyed industry, the absence of any normal economy. The breakdown of communication, so that it was an adventure to make a phone call from one European city to another and to call across national borders was an enterprise that, for many years, was not easily undertaken. I mention this only because, if one saw Europe in 1946, who would have believed what would emerge, how it would be reconstructed, how it would be unified. How the relations with the United States would develop. I mention this now, this is the Europe whose citizens I got to know. Whose faith that in innumerable enterprises and academic and other efforts got linked with mine. That is the Europe that I appreciated. And that is the Europe to which one now comes and listens to debates about European integration. And I hope you will forgive me if I tell you, that for somebody who has seen this evolution, it's a disconcerting debate. It is that, if Europe were being constructed by a group of accountants, the various criteria of Maastrich, the various percentages that are supposed to be determining of whether a common currency can operate are undoubtedly important from an economic point of view.

But the really fundamental question we have to ask is: What are we trying to do? What in the West are we trying to build? Why are we doing it? And I suspect that, if we could give both answers, we could solve the purely economic question. Germany, which is supposed to be the key to this stability has met the criteria of Maastrich in the last forty years only eleven times. So they have managed to have a stable currency without exactly meeting the criteria in twenty-nine of these years. And I would like to suggest to you this. I would like to put the case for what is needed and than see whether we can work back from that to the purely economic question.

I keep raising in America this question: Is there such a thing as Western civilisation? Are there values for which we uniquely stand, which make it worthwhile for these societies to develop, to thrive and to cooperate. That is not at least in America a trivial question because, according to some versions of our political correctness, Western civilisation is something that brought a lot of suffering to the world and should not be emphasised. And it led to a situation where one of our major universities in effect turned down a grant of twenty-five million dollars to study Western civilisation because the faculty did not want to appoint a professor or a series of professors for that subject.

It is true that Western Civilisation has brought much misfortune, but it has also made very unique contributions. A belief in the dignity of the individual. A conviction that justice was an objective value that did not depend entirely on the will of the ruler. Principles of constitutionalists and balance of power. A growth of market economics which produced enormous well-being. And a system of sovereign states which arranged their relations to each other for a long period, reducing the dangers of war.

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Those values in fact spread around the world, very largely because of the European and American performance. I belong to the generation that was young at the time that the Marshall Plan was created. That Europe and America linked their destinies.

When I was a graduate student, I wrote a paper on foreign policy, and I called on President Truman. And I asked President Truman what he had done that he would like to be remembered by. And he said: What I would like to be remembered is that we totally defeated our enemy and we imposed unconditional surrender. But afterwards we brought them back to the community of nations as equals. And we worked together for the developing of mankind. Now that was a noble and a very American reaction. And I believe that it is something like that spirit that is needed now. First in building Europe, then in building an Atlantic community. And it is the absence of that spirit that is producing the difficulties, the slowness in Europe and the absence of any real Atlantic construction.

The importance of a European construction is fundamental not only for the peoples of Europe. The European nation state was ideally designed to the problems of the nineteenth century. It represented an ideal balance between the technology of that period, the feasible economy of that period and the possibility of governing a particular territory.

The European Nation State is too small in terms of economics, of military strength, of political relevance for the challenges of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. So therefore the co-operation of the European states is a prerequisite of their economic and political well-being and, I would argue also, for their cultural well-being. I find it fascinating that, when one looks at the history of states, how often their culture thrived in proportion to their political importance. And when they lost confidence in themselves and society, they also lost very often the incentive in other fields.

This seems to me the dominant problem for Europe today. I am no expert on high finance. I have no precise idea of how these particular issues can be solved, but I do have the impression that the various criteria were put forward for domestic reasons and they are now being maintained in many countries for domestic reasons. I am not saying that there are no limits. It may even have been a mistake to have begun with the unification of currencies. It might have been better to have made the Euro a reserve currency and leave the existing currencies in being. But all of this is, in my view, now, not so relevant. But I believe that the process really now must be brought to a conclusion, because there is no alternative project that can meet that need.

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......in the end one has to explain this strange phenomenon that never have political leaders been more obsessed with polls and rarely have political leaders, according to the polls, been more distrusted. This must be due to the fact that what the publics want from their

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leaders is to take them from where they are to where they have not ever been, and this
requires a willingness to project into a future, just as the people did who at the end of the
war took a Europe in much worse condition than the Europe today and created the
opportunities of today.

Now it's in this context that I want to say a word about the United States. I would
like to see a strong Europe, and I would like to see a united Europe. I would like to see a
Europe that is a cohesive economic entity, and I would even like to see a Europe that
forms itself militarily, and is not totally dependent on the United States for its defence.
And I'm not afraid of such a Europe. I believe it would be helpful for us to have a
counterweight in the world that we have to take seriously - with one proviso. If I look at
European history, for all its great achievements in culture and politics and economics,
Europe has had an extraordinary propensity to launch itself into civil wars. There is almost
no other culture that has achieved so much and that consumed so much in a series of
conflicts which, in historical perspective, were often fought for marginal issues. Now I
would think it would be a disaster, if Europe forms itself, and then saw its purpose in
confrontation with the United States. And I see some symptoms. I find it strange when a
European statesman travels through Latin America and tells Latin America that its future
is with Europe, not with North America. I'm all for close relations beween Europe and
Latin America. But I believe that the countries of similar traditions - America, Europe, and
the Western hemisphere, and South America - should try to create a cooperative structure,
and not seek their fulfillment in reducing each other on the models of the European civil
wars that ended at the end of World War 2.

For the United States this is a particular challenge. At the end of World War 2,
there was a group of Americans who identified internationalism with Europe, who
travelled easily in Europe, and who had many friendships in Europe. Today, the centre of
power in America has moved to the south and the south-west, in which the personal ties
with Europe are very remote, and which look more to Asia. And the ethnic composition of
our population is changing, with increasing focus on Latin America and powerful focus
also for Asia. On top of this, the generation that emerged from World War 2 had
participated in great achievements, in overcoming the depression, in defeating fascism and
Japanese imperialism, and in working together with Europe. Many of those who are now
in leadership positions had their formative experience in the Vietnam period, which raised
questions about American purposes. And then there is a cultural problem. Mine is
probably the last generation brought up on books, and the new generation is brought up on
computers. And when you are brought up on computers you have available a range of
information unimaginable before, but it may be so easily accessible that you lose the
capacity to interpret its significance and to project it into the future. So there is emerging
an imbalance between technical competence and political projection, in which a world is
emerging of global interdependence in economics, of instantaneous communications, and
shrinking political loyalties.

So, for all of these reasons, I believe that America and Europe have now a task that
has some comparisons to the end of World War 2. They must find some common purpose

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in the Atlantic relationships. And really very little common enterprises are taking place. NATO is being expanded, but it is being modified in a manner that extends it to beyond Russia. And what I have said before makes it clear that Russia is geographically part of Europe, but it has never shared in the traditions of the Enlightenment, of the European universities of the medieval period, of the Age of Discovery, and that it has been of Europe but not within Europe. How to define a role for Russia is surely a great challenge for our period, but it is not the same as European integration, and even less the same as Atlantic cooperation. I have favoured an Atlantic free-trade area, simply because, or largely because, I think there has to be some concrete expression of a common destiny. And we in America - this is not something Europe can do by itself - need to devise a concept of Atlantic relationships that can tie the Atlantic region together. If this does not happen, America will become more and more focused on day-to-day politics, and anybody studying our domestic politics will see what I think is probably also happening in Europe - but what is surely happening in America - that the effort to get elected takes so much energy and calls forth such special skills that they tend to submerge the qualities that are needed for government. When I started out dealing with political figures, they asked me what to think; when I deal with current political figures, they ask me what to say. That is a big difference.

So when I contrast Asia with Europe, it is really in a psychological dimension. Emerging countries of Asia are not obsessed with what they cannot do. They have no doubt that they can master their future. Economic and technical analysts can easily demonstrate how many of their efforts are misconceived or are doomed to failure. We in the West are oppressed by technicians, by poll-takers, by short-term perspectives, by the fear, by the tendency to leave to another decade the tough decisions one doesn't want to make today. But if one looks at the road we have come, and if one looks at the possibilities of what we have created, there is no reason why we cannot master what I have described, and why we need to be terrified by forces that are developing elsewhere.

I have a Chinese acquaintance who claims there exists the following proverb. I say «claims» because I don't believe there are as many Chinese proverbs as they inflict on westerners. That proverb goes 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 little problems should not obsess us. So our challenge is not to be obsessed with little problems; to tackle the big problems, and thereby to contribute to what the proverb calls «order under the heavens».

Thank you very much

Lou Dobbs: Professor, thank you very much. After all these years, still a privilege to listen.

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Q.1: Dr. Kissinger, thank you very much for this very interesting speech. I want to ask you two questions. Hitler was brought about in Germany mainly because of the unemployment problem. Europe has, at the moment, some 18 million unemployed and it's getting worse. The last figure yesterday, the French, was an increase of 1.1%. Don't you think that unemployment will be a major attraction to some other Hitler to come about? That's number one. Number two, I wanted you to say a few things about the Balkan situation. Do you think we're sitting on a powder keg, and do you think that when our boys leave in June we'll start all over again? Thank you.

A.1: I agree that the question of unemployment is one of the fundamental threats to democracy at this moment. And it is complicated for a number of reasons, one of them being technological: that, in the past, increases in productivity could be achieved only by increases in employment. Today, that relationship is no longer so automatic, and in fact it may be the inverse, that increases in productivity in some respects reduce employment. In the United States, the problem has to some extent been solved by increases in the service sector. In Europe, the willingness to perform some of these services is less, and therefore that has not been so available. I believe also - and this is not necessarily a majority view - that the emphasis over the past decade on market economics as the solution to every problem and as the automatic solution to every social crisis will probably be replaced in many countries by an increasing emphasis on some need for a social consciousness. One sees it in Mexico, in Argentina, it's beginning in Europe, one begins seeing it in theoretical journals in America. Now how that translates into politics, I don't know so well, because it is also true that the excessive emphasis on social consciousness in the previous decades led to a slow-down of economic production, and that in England for example the success of Lady Thatcher in breaking through some of these encrusted social services is one of the reasons for their current economic dynamism. But I would certainly agree that this is one of the big challenges, and if it is not met .... I do not believe that export figures, if they cannot be translated into employment, can provide political stability - we have too many examples.

Now, the Balkan situation. I suppose you mean Bosnia. Well, you know, one of the troubles in Bosnia is that there are almost no innocent people around. Let me tell you my view. I don't think the Bosnian state should ever have been created. There was an irresponsible decision to recognise every administrative sub-division of Yugoslavia as a state. Now in Croatia and Slovenia this made a certain amount of sense, made a large amount of sense, because these were culturally and ethnically more or less cohesive units, Croatia with a large majority of Croatians. Bosnia was the residue of a series of European civil wars, of the dividing line between the East and the Western Roman Empire, so that these people have been fighting each other, and not just fighting each other in the European ethnic sense, in the European national sense. It's a religious war and why any thought that a coherent state could be created there, in retrospect is not clear to me.

Now terrible crimes were committed. But, on the other hand, one has to count. It depends on when you start counting. Who did what to whom because everyone of these nationalities can recite horrible crimes that were committed against it. There is no

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[L.C.]

question that the Serbian ethnic cleansing was appalling and probably should have been resisted at the very beginning. Probably the best would have been to make a NATO or European or UN trusteeship out of Bosnia. Now that ethnic cleansing has been completed, largely completed, I believe that the attempt to force them back into a single unit guarantees that another civil war will start. And I think we should now leave the three ethnic units more or less as they are and try to prevent them attacking each other, which is easier to do than to try to force them together.

I believe the American forces cannot be withdrawn. But the first thing we have to do is to understand that there are two aspects to the Dayton agreement - a political aspect and a military aspect. And that they are incompatible with each other. The military aspect separates the ethnic groups. The political aspect insists that they can work together and the refugees can return. I don't think that is possible without another horrendous bloodshed. So this is an issue that we ought to deal with now. And it's an example of modern politics that it is not dealt with because everybody is afraid of the political consequences and everybody hopes that something will happen. And if nothing happens it won't be any worse next year than this year. But it is mathematically certain that the dilemma I have described will be upon us at this time next year if we haven't tried to deal with it before.

Q.2: Lady Thatcher, who spoke here last year, who respects you greatly, who is a great admirer of yours, Doctor Kissinger, is concerned and expressed her concern about Germany's pivotal and leading role in a European Union. Do you have any shared concerns along those lines?

A.2: First of all, let me just say that Lady Thatcher is a personal friend and I admire her enormously. There is a distinction in her approach to Germany and mine. She is profoundly suspicious of Chancellor Kohl. And, if I know her, she had made no secret of this view when she was here. I believe that the day will come when even she will look to Chancellor Kohl with nostalgia. I think the problem of Germany is that it has had a different history from Western Europe and a disproportionate rate because of its larger population. Germany was the last state to be unified in western Europe. It does not have the history that England and France have in dealing with other countries. And between Bismarck and Eisenhower, German statesmanship really has a lot to answer for in the crises of Europe.

And Germany will undoubtedly have a major weight in any European construction. Chancellor Kohl, who is also a friend of mine, believes, and I believe him, that the best way to reduce German temptation is to integrate it into a larger European structure.

Lady Thatcher is afraid that Germany is bound to dominate a larger structure. But if there is no larger structure, Germany will not go away. And in Germany, in the absence of the tradition of foreign policy that exists in other parts, the temptation to play between East and West and the temptation to pursue its largely national policy would worry me more than what Germany would do within an intergrated Europe.

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So I understand her concern. I differ on the solution.

Q.3: Doctor Kissinger, you touched briefly on Russia, and I think you told us that you were not aware where perhaps it fitted in in relation to the past, or that was somewhat a hazy area, could we ask for your view on where it may fit into the future, if perhaps not as a political power, perhaps an economic power à la the scenario you have given us in relation to China?

A.3: I was warned that if I went beyond seven o'clock, something terrible would happen to me. So I couldn't cover every subject. And now you'll never know whether I could have. But, let me make a few observations about Russia.

Of course Russia has had a great history. And the survival of Europe has been brought about twice by Russian heroism. At the time of Napoleon and at the time of Hitler. But it's also true that, in the intervening periods, Russia has been one of the principal factors of European instability. For a number of reasons. Russia has never had any definable borders. It has also been an empire that, contrary to European empires, occupied contiguous territories, and so subjecting those populations became a special effort of the state, meaning also that the Russian army was always disproportionately large in relation to any security problems.

Then Russia has had temptations in Asia, in the Middle East and in Europe. And it was interesting that in the Russian Foreign Office in the nineteenth century, relations with western Europe, except the Balkans, were in the Foreign Office, but relations with the Balkans and with Turkey were in the department that dealt, in effect, with expansion. And so Russia was always torn between the necessities of Europe and the temptations of Asia. There are many people who argue in America that you can solve the Russian problem by establishing a democratic system in Moscow.

First of all, I do not rate the American or the European capacity to play domestic politics in Russia all that high, considering the problems we have playing domestic politics in our own countries.

Secondly, I think the Russia process now is very complicated. They have been pushed back or reduced to the borders of Peter the Great. This still leaves them with a huge territory of eleven time zones. In which Vladivostok is closer to Seattle than it is to Moscow. And Leningrad is closer to New York than it is to Vladivostok (or St Petersburg is). So therefore they should not feel claustrophobic. But they do. I don't know any Russian. I have never met a Russian. Maybe there is one in this audience. But I have never met a Russian who accepts the independence of the Ukraine. And the tendency to bring pressure on all surrounding countries is enormous. So one has to do two things with Russia.

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One, to discourage the old imperialist tendencies. Secondly, to give Russia a sense that it
can participate in the construction of a new international system, as an equal. I think a
pattern that was followed at the end of the Napoleonic wars, when France was considered
the problem, there was a quadruple alliance to protect against France. And a European
system in which France could participate. And as it happened, the quadruple alliance was
never used.

I think this should have been done and should still be done with Russia. I do not approve
of the attempt to relate Russia to NATO because NATO is a defensive alliance and to
bring Russia into it, even in an indirect way, confuses the Russians and confuses us. But I
would say that the Russian evolution will go on for quite some time and it will not be
parallel to that of the European one. As time goes on, as Asia develops, I believe that
Russia will be brought more and more into cooperation with the West. But we cannot
force-feed it.

Q.4: In the world that begins with the reformation of Russia and the emergence of China, what special issues arise as a result of the two countries and the directions they are now headed in?

A.4: The irony is that China has a communist political system and a wide free-market economy. Russia has a hybrid, semi-democratic political system and a much more controlled economy because a great part of the Russian economy is run by those who ran the communist economy and who, in the guise of privatisation, have taken over the industries that they ran before. So the Russian economy is sort of a mixture between mafia and a group of semi-monopolies dealing with each other.

So the economic reform that is needed in Russia is more severe than the economic reform
that is needed in China. The political reform in China, those in the audience who travel in
China know that the Communist party as such is not all that visible. And that you very
rarely are handed a visiting card of somebody who identifies himself by his party position,
which used to be standard ten years ago. So the Chinese system will, in my view, evolve
into something more constitutional and more technocratic. But where it will go from
there, I am not sure.

The Russian system, at this moment, has more similarities to a Tzarist system than to a
western democratic system, where they have sort of frozen economic structures.

Q.5: You talked about your desire for the Atlantic community, and of course the organisation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation exists, is that not adequate? If not, what would you like to see evolve there?

A.5: The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is the only institutional link of America to Europe. And it is the only thing that we are obliged to practice in relation to Europe every year and every month. And therefore I believe that NATO ought to be preserved and in some ways strengthened. I have favoured the expansion of NATO to include new

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members. In fact, I would also favour including Romania and Slovakia and not keep it to the three members that America favours. But that is not the key issue.

The key issue is, how does one relate Russia to this? I would like to keep the NATO structure more or less as it is, simply expanding it and to create a separate structure outside of NATO for Russian participation in the emerging post-war world. The attempt to bring Russia into NATO will create, over a period of time, a great confusion and it will also make it very difficult to bring about what I believe is very much needed.

Which is, first, a more defined European political identity. Secondly, a more defined American concern with North Atlantic relations. I have been reading in European papers and in American papers, about the European concern with American high-handedness. That tendency is absolutely inevitable as there is no structural relationship between Europe and America, because then everything will be handled from the point of the immediate impact on domestic politics. There is no possibility to create an alternative constituency unless there is something to do. And unless something is created to bring it about, and it will not be easy to do it on the American side.

Q.6: On the American side, Dr Kissinger, give us, if you will, your valuation of current US foreign policy and the effectiveness of the Clinton administration.

A.6: There things always go too long. Well, I have made no secret of the fact that President Clinton was my second choice in the last election. So I am not an unqualified admirer. The problems are the formative experience of too many people has been in the Vietnam protest movement and also that there is such a concern with domestic politics that it is too much driven by the polls.

On the other hand, in fairness to the administration, I must say this. I support them on their current China policy. I support them also on half of NATO expansion. What one has to worry about in America today is this. When I was in office, one talked about bipartisanship. That is, there was a governing party and you tried to attract as many people from the other party as you could to perform a foreign policy. And, for a long time, this was very well, quite well.

Now we have a very divided situation in America. The most consistent opponent of President Clinton in foreign policy is the minority leader of the democratic party in the House of Representatives, who happens to be in the same party as President Clinton. The reason is that he wants to run against Vice-President Gore for the next presidential candidacy. And because he appeals to the popular section of the Democratic party. Within the Republican party, to which I belong, there is now also a very sharp division, especially on the issue of China, in which the Christian Right, the Right-to-Life movement are combining with traditional conservatives to use China as a rallying point to create a new structure for the Republican party.

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