ISSN: 0738-3169

AMERICAN
FOREIGN POLICY
NEWSLETTER

NATIONAL COMMITTEE
ON AMERICAN
FOREIGN POLICY, INC.

Pan Am Building
(Suite 303 East)
200 Park Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10166
Telephone: (212) 687-9332

VOL. 8 — NO. 5

$2.00 A COPY

OCTOBER 1985

Professor Hans J. Morgenthau
Founder

Professor George Schwab
Editor

Foreign Policy Address by
**The Honorable George P. Shultz**
Secretary of State
to
**The National Committee on**
**American Foreign Policy**
**in Accepting**
**The Fifth Hans J. Morgenthau**
**Memorial Award**
**New York, New York**
**Wednesday, October 2, 1985**

Thank you very much. Ambassador Kellogg, Mr. Traub, Henry. I deeply appreciate this marvelous award because of the greatness of the man in whose honor it was established. My appreciation is doubly reinforced because of the greatness of the man who has just made this presentation.

Hans Morgenthau was a pioneer in the study of international relations. He, perhaps more than anyone else, gave it intellectual respectability as an academic discipline. His work transformed our thinking about international relations and about America's role in the postwar world. In fundamental ways, he set the terms

(continued on page 2)

Restoring U.S. Influence
in the
United Nations: Five Proposals
by
**The Honorable José S. Sorzano**

This month the United Nations will celebrate its fortieth anniversary with elaborate ceremonies. Heads of state, foreign ministers, and other high-ranking diplomats will congregate in New York, meet bilaterally to transact diplomatic business, attend dozens of luncheons, receptions, and banquets, and deliver formal addresses to the plenary session of the 40th General Assembly. Both the outline and the content of those speeches can be predicted.

(continued on page 4)

Remarks by
**The Honorable Henry A. Kissinger**
on the Occasion of the Presentation
of the Fifth Hans J. Morgenthau
**Memorial Award to Secretary of State**
**George P. Shultz**

Marvin (Mr. Traub), Mr. Secretary, ladies and gentlemen. When I'm introduced, it is sometimes said that few people need an introduction less, but it is also true that even fewer enjoy an introduction more, especially when it is characterized by what my mother would undoubtedly consider Anglo-Saxon understatement.

There are very few positions in the world that are subject to as many conflicting pressures and demands as that of secretary of state. American public opinion is characterized by two wings, one that believes that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry—another that believes that foreign policy is a subdivision of theology. The first wants to equate relations among nations with relations among people, and the second has

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The Road to Damascus
Is a Dead End:
**A Reply to**
Seymour Maxwell Finger's
and
Nitza Nachmias's
"Arab-Israeli Peace: Next Step Syria"
by
Howard L. Adelson

The recent proposal for a new Middle East policy based primarily on a novel attempt to achieve a peace agreement between Syria and Israel made by Seymour Maxwell Finger and Nitza Nachmias is extremely interesting but unconvincing. It will not stand the test of close analysis and careful scrutiny. It is an argument that is flawed in its basic premises and assumptions and, I am afraid, in its logic as well. This is quite obvious as early as the first paragraph in which it is,

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AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY Newsletter

OCTOBER 1985

periodically move from threats to actual withholding. For that reason, I suggest that Congress provide a limited amount of discretionary authority to the executive branch to withhold up to, say, 10 percent of the U.S. assessed contributions in any given year. This would give American delegates to multilateral fora the powerful instrument of withholding and the necessary flexibility to use this device sparingly but regularly as a bargaining chip.

We need not fear that the selective use of withholding would put us in a unique position in the United Nations or that we would rapidly accumulate sufficient arrearages to put us in violation of Article 19 of the UN Charter, which requires a nation to forfeit its voting rights after its arrearages are equivalent to two years of its assessed contribution. For decades the Soviet Union has used withholding and has unilaterally lowered its cumulative contribution to the United Nations by close to $300 million. Similarly, given very modest rates of UN budget growth, we could withhold a full 10 percent of our annual assessment each year and not even come close to violating Article 19 for more than fifty years.

## Conclusion

As it celebrates its fortieth anniversary, the United Nations is in trouble. Many wonder whether the organization will reach the half-century mark. At the same time, the United States is also in trouble within the UN system, and many wonder whether it would not be better for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations. One thing is clear. However presumptuous it may sound, the fate of the United Nations and the fate of the United States within the United Nations are inextricably related. Our current impotence within the organization is easier to explain than to justify. For the good of both the United States and the United Nations, our position must improve or the organization will prove that it is committed to terminal irrelevancy.

## Notes

1. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York), in a recent *New York Times* Op-Ed piece, also concluded that "the UN needs a victory, which will only come if the United States redeems some of its former influence." (September 17, 1985).

2. The two country-by-country voting reports submitted to Congress for 1983 and 1984 show a decline in the overall level of support for American positions when all the votes cast during the 38th and 39th General Assemblies were considered. Nevertheless, in the more significant category of "key votes," where the United States concentrated its lobbying efforts, there was a substantial increase in support for U.S. positions.

3. See the 1983 and 1984 reports submitted to Congress pursuant to Public Law 98-151 and Public Law 98-164, U.S. Department of State, February 24, 1984, and May 20, 1985, respectively.

4. For a thorough discussion of the voting blocs and their dominance of the UN voting process, see "The United Nations as a Political System: A Practicing Political Scientist's Insights into UN Politics" by Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, *American Foreign Policy Newsletter*, October 1983.

Copyright © by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.

José S. Sorzano served in the U.S. Mission to the U.N. in New York from January 1981 to August 1985, as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.'s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and, beginning in August 1983, as U.S. deputy permanent representative. Dr. Sorzano has returned to Georgetown University, where he is an associate professor of government. He is also serving as president of the Cuban-American National Foundation in Washington, D.C.

The views of Ambassador Sorzano do not necessarily reflect those of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy.

## Remarks by Kissinger (continued from page 1)

had almost every secretary of state in the position where he is forced to protest his anticommunism, and they then say, "We don't care what kind of a communist you are."

There are the pressures of having to explain before endless congressional committees the various aspects of foreign policy and of being supported by an able, dedicated bureaucracy, which, however, is convinced that no secretary of state in their memory could have passed the Foreign Service examination. And, therefore, at the end of every day, unless it has recently changed, the secretary of state finds on his desk a list, a sheaf of papers, containing three options: nuclear war, unconditional surrender, or what the Foreign Service recommends.

To navigate between these shoals is no easy task, especially when one deals with subjects so esoteric as arms control, which is beginning to acquire the

characteristic that Lord Palmerston ascribed to the Schleswig-Holstein question when he said that only three people had ever understood it. One was dead, the second was in a lunatic asylum, and he was the third and had forgotten it.

The complexities are evident when foreign policy is shaped by such abstractions as what is meant by direct negotiations and who could be a Palestinian representative who is not a PLO member and yet speaks for the PLO. Amid all of these pressures a secretary of state has to navigate. I know none who has conducted himself with more wisdom and greater courage and has inspired so much confidence as Secretary Shultz.

Several years ago, when George Shultz was still at Bechtel and I could have had no conceivable ulterior motive, I wrote that if I were asked to select one person for any position affecting the future of this country, I would without any doubt choose George Shultz.

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OCTOBER 1985

The qualities that are most important in a statesman are character and courage. It is his responsibility to take our people from the world that we know to a world where we have never been and to do so on the basis of an assessment that cannot be proved true when it was made.

We have had the extraordinary good fortune as a nation at a time when world peace and freedom so crucially depend on us to have had Secretary Shultz guiding our foreign policy. And I believe that in the years to come, it will be evident that in many areas of the world, especially in East-West relations, a new basis will have been laid that will mark a turning point.

It is a great privilege for me to be here to present the award that is named in the memory of my friend and teacher, Hans Morgenthau, who felt passionately for freedom and thought deeply about the realities of foreign policy and who, I know, would be extremely proud that this award is being given tonight to Secretary of State George Shultz. Thank you very much.

The Road to Damascus (continued from page 1)

perhaps correctly, noted that the Mubarak-Hussein initiatives as well as the abortive Reagan Plan seem to have come to naught and are not likely to achieve anything in the future. From that, however, it does not follow that "The only feasible plan to peace is through Damascus, not through Amman." Negotiations with Damascus should not be depicted as the sole alternative to negotiations with King Hussein. In fact, it seems not at all unlikely that if Israel were to offer all that Finger and Nachmias wish it to offer—cession of the entire Golan, the Allon Plan for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, "legitimate rights" for the Palestinians, and Moslem control of the Moslem sites in Jerusalem—that most Arab powers, including the various wings of the PLO and other Palestinian Arab groups, would be prepared to accept those gifts in return for beginning negotiations with Israel. Not only is it a fact that myth has replaced fact to an unusual degree in the Arab-Israeli conflict, but the stakes are apparently much greater than merely the arrangement for a very tiny part of the Middle East.¹ It is also clear that even direct negotiations might not lead to a firm peace and that some Arab states might well be prepared to open discussions under favorable auspices in the expectation that even the negotiations might weaken Israel.

Syrian Aspirations

Among the underlying assumptions of the Finger-Nachmias analysis is the belief that if the Syrians could regain possession of the Golan (presumably demilitarized), they would leave it demilitarized and reduce their military expenditures, which are such a burden to their economy, because they would be secure from an Israeli attack. This involves acceptance of the assertion that the Syrians fear an Israeli invasion. That, however, is dubious in the extreme. All occurrences of open warfare along the Syrian-Israeli frontier were initiated by Syria. It has always been in

the interest of Israel to keep the border with Syria as quiet as possible. Given Soviet backing for Syria, it is obvious that Israeli planners are doing their utmost to avoid such a test of strength along the Syrian-Israeli frontier. In 1967 the Six Day War began because the Soviets convinced the Egyptians under Nasser and the Syrians of the preparations for an invasion of Syria by Israel. The Soviet report was completely fictitious. Although the Syrians fear the possibility of a war with Israel, it is doubtful that they expect an Israeli invasion designed to win further territory from them. In the past the Israelis surrendered broad stretches of Syrian territory in order to achieve an armistice or a truce. That would not have happened if the Israelis had cast a covetous eye on further Syrian lands. The same cannot be said for Syria. The aspirations of the Syrian government for a Greater Syria, including the entire Levant and its immediate hinterland, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Jordan, necessitate that Syria attempt to achieve overwhelming military superiority especially in the region of the Golan. Those aspirations might be largely fulfilled by a temporary peace with Israel. If Syria could guarantee a temporary peace with Israel, it might feel free to act more decisively against Lebanon or Jordan without looking over its shoulder at Israel. Thus it might well be that the Syrians would increase their armaments budget to make it possible for them to fulfill their political goals. The Ba'ath party of Syria has never been reticent about its aims.

What has been said about Syrian aspirations for a Greater Syria is of course a matter of dispute. Finger and Nachmias specifically state that Assad would have to "... give up any dream of a Greater Syria, incorporating Jordan, Israel and Lebanon. Because such polemics are mere propaganda and Assad knows it, abandoning them would be a reasonable price for improving Syria's strategic and economic position." It is very hard to accept a statement that is based on eliminating a traditional stance in Arab history, which has been remarkably constant in the entire period since the First World War. Although some may think that it is not a realizable goal for Syria to strive for a Greater Syria, it is certainly the intention of the Syrians to establish a sphere of Syrian influence extending from Egypt to Iraq. It is simply unacceptable to base an analysis of a political situation on the belief that whatever one of the parties has consistently said is not to be believed.

It has long been noted that Assad, as a member of the Ba'ath party for three decades, is committed to Arab unification and the hegemony of Damascus at least in the so-called Northern Rectangle.² He believes, as did George Antonius and the vast majority of Arab nationalists, that the boundaries of Syria properly include modern Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan.³ That was the position taken by the Syrians in the UN on the numerous occasions when the Palestine Mandate was under discussion. Syria's foreign policy with respect to Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel has always reflected the belief that those countries are in the sphere of Syrian influence even if they have not yet been included within the Syrian state. Whether such aims can be fulfilled is quite a different matter, but they remain the declared

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