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Asia and the US:
Opportunities and
Obstacles of
Working Together

Remarks by
Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
56th U.S. Secretary of State
United States of America

FEB 2 5 1997

Now let me talk to you about America and Asia. And let me begin with America so that you understand the context in which these sorts of decisions are being made. Whenever I travel in Asia, or almost anywhere else, the prevailing assumption I encounter is that the United States has a carefully thought-out strategy and that every American move is part of some master design. Most often, I am asked about the policy behind it. The same is, of course, true of the CIA to which I hear ascribed qualities I never discerned when I was in office. I must say that at times I wish they had some of the attributes depicted in movies and elsewhere.

But the fact of the matter is that the United States does not at this moment have any overarching strategy. That may sound depressing and it is certainly depressing for an American. But the reason is really quite simple. For one thing, America never had a foreign policy to speak of until 1945. We are the only nation that went through the greatest part of its history without having any powerful neighbor, without ever having a real security problem, and that could therefore act on the basis of the illusion that its domestic institutions were so uniquely blessed that it was immune to the considerations by which other nations have had to conduct their affairs. In 1917, when America entered World War I, we suddenly came up with the theory that wars are the result of people not being democratic; and that the spread of democracy was the way to bring about peace. Nobody had ever come up with such a theory before, and there wasn't a shred of evidence that it was true. Yet it was never contested at the time, and in many ways it is still an operating principle of American foreign policy.

At the end of World War II America had the nuclear monopoly and 50% of the world's gross national product. Under those conditions, you don't conduct foreign policy, you allocate resources since you can overwhelm any problem you face by allocating sufficient resources to it. The real dilemmas of policy arise when you are forced to balance your risks against the opportunities on the basis of assessments you cannot prove at the time that you make them, or when you have limited resources in relation to all the things you might possibly do. Therefore you must establish priorities.

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger • 1

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Because these have all been reasoned experiences for America over the past few decades, there has been no established tradition of foreign policy thinking – as there has been in Britain, France, or China. We have had to learn it as we went along. In assessing American foreign policy, its special problem is compounded by the current situation.

Until 1989, we had a pretty clear operating policy, namely to contain the Soviet Union. And it coincided with the two great experiences of America in the twentieth century – overcoming the Great Depression and World War II. We overcame the Depression through our massive governmental programs, in effect war spending, and we won World War II by defeating the aggressor through the massive mobilization of our resources. While this was not exactly the same in every part of the world and that line of thinking got us into trouble to some extent in Vietnam, it was more or less accurate and it ended with our victory in the Cold War – in the sense that Soviet Communism and its empire collapsed and we emerged as the strongest military power in the world.

Now, however, we live in a whole new environment. Militarily we are a superpower but the issues that can be solved by military means are shrinking. Most of the issues today are not within the reach of American military power, at least conceptually. Secondly, in the economic and other fields, Japan, Europe – or Germany and Russia – China and India are all emerging, if not as superpowers then as nations which can significantly affect world events. And the United States must define its relationship vis-a-vis all of them. We have to do so, moreover, in a way we have never done before.

In the past, American presidents would say, here's the danger and to overcome it we have to mobilize resources. Then, at some point in time, the effort will no longer be necessary. We will have won and the problem will have gone away. This is no longer the case. Now we are part of an integrated system, and we have to look at international politics in a systemic way. There is no specific, isolated outcome; no end to the process. Every solution becomes the admission ticket to another problem, and we have to learn to balance the rewards and penalties. We also have to know in advance what it is we're trying to do.

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger • 2

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I've already told one or two of you of an experience I had on one of my earlier visits in China. During a meeting with Deng Xiaoping, I made this conventional American statement to him. I said, the good thing about our relationship is that we want nothing from each other. Deng let it pass. The next day, when I saw Mao, he said, I have read what you said to Deng. "If I wanted nothing from you, I would not have invited you. And if you want nothing from me, why did you come?"

Now that is the reality of international politics. What are we trying to do? What is our objective in the world? The answer to those questions is complicated further by the fact that, in America, we have generational and intellectual changes going on simultaneously. The generational problem is this: I come from the generation that overcame the Depression, won World War II, developed the Marshall Plan, went through the Korean War and constructed the architecture of the Cold War strategy. I was not personally involved in all of these things, but felt a part of the generation that witnessed first-hand so many big projects under America's auspices.

The generation that is now becoming more and more dominant is the generation that grew up during the Vietnam War. It doesn't like big American projects or the exercise of power. Now, for any of you who favor the withdrawal of American power from Asia, let me tell you: that's the easy part; the hard part is keeping it there.

The new generation wants to improve the environment, human rights and all kinds of worthwhile social issues which, however, do not define the traditional concept of foreign policy. But after the Vietnam generation there will come another generation – not as defensive but extremely ignorant, in part because it will have been brought up in an altogether different way from its predecessors. My generation, and even the Vietnam generation, was brought up on books. When you're brought up on books, you realize that every last shred of knowledge cannot exist in a book and that you must learn by concepts because only concepts enable you to understand comparable situations. Projecting into the future, the next generation, brought up as it will have been on computers, will not so much be able to write as to print. I'm not exaggerating. Because what the young are doing today is not learning through reading or writing but through pictures. As a result, a totally different mentality is developing. It is more sentimental, more emotional, but above all very short-term

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger • 3

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and very much geared to immediate impressions. And the limited attention span affects our whole style of life and politics. It comes at the precise moment when what is really needed is long range thinking. That is the real problem as I see it. How to design an American foreign policy in such an environment is an extraordinarily difficult task. But what I would like to do is to apply the problem to our relations with Asia.

In Asia we meet very old societies and established cultures. Whether they are Chinese or Japanese or Indian, they have all had a long history. American history, on the other hand, is relatively short. I'm always struck by this simple difference: when you ask an American or a Westerner when this or that event occurred, he gives you a specific date; when you ask a Chinese when something happened, he gives you a dynasty. There have been fourteen Chinese dynasties that I know of, ten of which have lasted longer-or as long as-the entire history of the United States. So when you cite a dynasty, you're essentially within 300 years of the problem. It's a different perspective. Whenever I visit Chinese provinces I rarely come to one whose population is not larger than that of the largest European country. All of this creates a different scale of thinking. And that's not easy to absorb.

One can make the same sorts of observations about India and Japan. Then the Americans come along and they have a solution to every problem. In fact we have more answers than they do questions. And we're asking all those nations to react to us. As I've said, we are part of an international system. Yet the political relations of the Asian nations to each other are more akin to those of nineteenth century Europe than they are, say, to the nations of the present-day European Union. I believe that China, Japan, India and Korea look at each other as potential opponents strategically. That is not to say that they're going to go to war with each other, only that they are looking at each other from the perspective of being potential threats. One could apply that to Thailand and Indonesia as well.

There is one South East Asian leader, I won't mention in which country, whom I've known for many years. I like to play a little game with him every time I see him, namely I ask him to cite the three greatest threats to his country. He's never yet mentioned anything other than another Asian country - and this has been going on for twenty years.

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger • 4

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When I first encountered China, it felt most threatened by Russia and potentially threatened by Japan and India, having had bad experiences with each of them. As for Nixon's opening to China, that was bound to happen. We did it perhaps more skillfully than others might have, but it would have happened eventually because the Chinese would have insisted on it. What I think we in the Nixon administration did well was to select our focus. For instance, the advice we got from our political advisors at the State Department was to discuss claims and assets, arms control and all kinds of conventional diplomatic issues. But we said no, let us instead talk to the Chinese about the international equilibrium to see whether we have common interests here. Mike, you've no doubt seen the record of our conversations when you were in government, so you know that they were conducted on as high a level of strategic analysis as one would find in the best academic seminars – except that the academicians wouldn't have had the feel for the reality.

But that was then. And China is growing ever stronger. I agree with those people who say that China has to be related to the international system. But I would go further and say that the whole international system has to be redesigned because, until 1945, it was a European-based system. Between 1945 and 1989 it was an American-led Cold War system and everything was more or less integrated into the pattern of East-West relations. But what do we do now? What is the present system about? What are we trying to do?

I am very heartened by the fact that our government and the Chinese government are now beginning high level talks. It took an awfully long time – four years – during which everything that was tried failed so that we are now having to base it on one shipwreck after another. Still, I am glad that the dialogue is starting. The next question is, what are we going to talk about? What is going to be the subject of conversation? What are we trying to achieve? America has had the tendency, because of the missionary bent developed by President Wilson and adopted by all of his successors, to perceive solutions as ultimate moral dispensations and to ask all other nations to ascribe to them as well. That is very difficult. Take the issue of non-proliferation. On the face of it, China has as great an interest in non-proliferation as we do. In fact I would argue that China, having more neighbors than we do, faces greater risk if nuclear weapons spread to those neighbors. But while a dialogue based on mutual interests

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger • 5

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is indeed possible, what we have been doing lately is, for instance, to say to China: we have passed a law which dictates that you may not distribute missiles of a range of more than 300 miles (I don't know how we arrived at 300 miles but, for all I know, that's a reasonable definition). What matters is that it was never discussed with the Chinese and that, on that basis, no agreement is possible. I think the non-proliferation issue will in fact be solved as soon as we pursue it on the basis of mutual interests. We may not agree on every technical point, but it has a good chance of being solved.

Beyond such issues as non-proliferation, what else do we want? Certainly, we have a mutual interest in good relations between China and the United States – a mutual selfish interest. China cannot continue to grow economically if political warfare develops between us, or at any rate it would grow only with great difficulty. Secondly, some of China's neighbors may, over a period of time, feel encouraged to apply pressures they might not otherwise engage in. The United States has an interest in this because, if we get into an open confrontation with China – or into any kind of confrontation with China – you in this room know exactly what the other Asian nations are going to do. They're going to seek a middle between us and China but they will not support us or support China. In the process of manoeuvring between us, they will all turn more nationalistic and that will demoralize everybody. For this reason alone, containment is not possible in the anti-Soviet sense of the Cold War days. It shouldn't even be discussed because it's not an option. If we do try it, it will be one of those policies in which both sides lose. So good relations are in our mutual interest.

On the other hand, this cannot be a purely American enterprise because the relationship between us and China is very, very tricky. As China's power grows economically and militarily, its weight upon the surrounding countries will likewise grow. You all know this from its markets and style of policy. China's armies need not go on the march for it to exercise greater influence and insist that it be treated with the respect its power, economic and in every other way, entitles it.

We Americans and our Asian friends will have to get used to all this. And, of course, there is a point beyond which, if it should shade over into hegemonical aspirations, some resistance must be assembled. At

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger • 6

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that point things will start getting more difficult. What should be the United States' attitude towards all of this? I don't think we should organize alliances against China. That would be self-defeating. Because the United States has no direct interest in any of the inter-Asian quarrels, it can afford to promote good relations with all of them simultaneously – including China. We should always be present but unobtrusively so. We should be available, but not insistent.

I've been talking only about China, but we need to take into account the other countries of Asia. First, there is Japan. We Americans have a tendency to think of every nation as being incipiently American and as a potential candidate for our specific style of government. Then there is Japan with two thousand years of history. Until 1945, it considered us its mortal enemy. Then we won the war. The Japanese adopted institutions modified from the previous period. Keep in mind that they were modified, which is to say not all that different. But in America we assume that Japan has become a Western-style democracy, that it will never again be politically active, remain an economic powerhouse and, in terms of its politics, will always follow the American lead and be an integral part of the American alliance system.

That cannot be. It is impossible. Japan made – and kept to – a very heroic decision for forty years to subordinate itself to the United States. But that was precisely because it was so conscious of its extraordinary national identity, to survive under foreign tutelage. They used it to build up a strong economy and now that it ranks as a world-class economy, it finds itself facing a new environment. The Russian threat has diminished. China is growing in strength. Korea will always be viewed differently in Japan than in the United States because, for us, Korea is an intellectual problem whereas the Japanese view it as a matter of life and death. They also see other nations developing and I predict that, in the next ten to fifteen years, Japan will pursue an increasingly national policy including an ever stronger military force. It already has the third largest military budget in the world and probably the second most effective military. I think that today its force is probably more effective than that of Russia -small as it is. And it can expand quite rapidly with a significant nuclear capability that can be activated at any time. For all these reasons, Japan will be a major player. The direction it goes in will depend very much on the environment in which it finds itself. The American alliance is

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definitely a stabilizing element, but I must be frank: that alliance must be seen as a means of enhancing Japanese security, not as a weapon that can be used to expand Japanese strategic influence into, say, South-East or Southern Asia. And that will be a tricky passage indeed. British foreign policy east of Suez is Indian foreign policy. It was made in Calcutta and afterwards in New Delhi by Indian civil servants under the Viceroy. And the traditional British policy east of Suez was that New Delhi - or Calcutta before New Delhi - was dominant from Singapore to Aiden. One of the ironies of the Indian-American dialogue in the next decades will be the following: for about thirty years, the Indians claimed and even believed themselves to be morally superior to the power politics of other nations. (Which is incidentally exactly what the Americans said before World War I and World War II.) It's the classic position of a country removed from immediate issues. The real problem will be that, as India becomes more active, it will turn more traditional. The Americans are more likely to come to the Indians with all kinds of sweeping ideas when what the Indians will really want to talk about is what happens east of Calcutta and west of Bombay. They don't want to be bothered with high-flown rhetoric that they can't apply to their own conditions. But the fact is that, west of Bombay, we really do have many common interests with respect to Islamic fundamentalism. As India becomes more active in South and South-East Asia, it will run up against Japan, China, and local circumstances. None of this is bad. It means, however, that American foreign policy has to be less intrusive and more behind-the-scenes. We have no reason not to have good relations with China, India and Japan simultaneously. We don't have to encircle anybody. On that basis, let's see what happens. If everybody co-operates, everybody will be happy. If any of these nations become excessively aggressive, the others will begin to oppose it and then the United States can choose to what extent its interests are involved.

The only trouble with the theory is who is going to implement it in America? Where are we going to find the people to do it? This is our real challenge. We no longer have to worry about being part of a Cold War system in Asia but there are still lots of problems - like the environment, which is really getting to be a serious problem, especially among the coal burning populations. On such issues, co-operative models can be built.

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You may notice that I have not talked about human rights. Yet that is one of the big debates that will be coming up in America. Nor can we any longer avoid that issue because it is making it impossible to define a good foreign policy. It has led to a coalition between the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and the neo-conservative wing of the Republican Party. And that leaves no anchor in foreign policy between the parties. On the one hand, the United States will always have to be in favour of democracy: it's our tradition, it's inevitable, and it can never be eliminated from the American lexicon. On the other hand, our perception of it is highly unique. Democracy evolved in the West over a period of 800 years in a very particular direction. There is no inherent reason why it should be implemented at the beginning of every political evolution in every country, even in ones with totally different cultural backgrounds from ours. On the face of it, it's an unrealistic expectation yet it is the essence of the debate we've got to have in America in the next year or two, otherwise a whole series of accidents will occur.

I have been talking only about political subjects but do want to mention the major economic issues ahead of us in the next ten years or so. One of these has to do with Europe. Most Americans have not focused on the fact that there will soon be a European currency. Only lately has it begun to penetrate Wall Street thinking that this is really going to happen. And when it does, there will suddenly be another reserve currency in the world and a whole other player. Adjusting the rates between those two is not going to be all that easy, and it will also affect third parties.

The second point has to do with what I was getting at in my question yesterday to Anwar. It's all very well to talk about free, multi-lateral GATT-like trade, but the reality of the next ten to fifteen years is that, while the United States should certainly recommend multi-lateral trade, a whole series of special arrangements are already arising: Mercosur in South America, some special arrangements in the ASEAN and other Asian situations, NAFTA, and the European Union. Therefore the relationship between the regional blocks and of the multi-lateral and bilateral groupings are going to become overwhelming issues. We shall soon have to begin to adjust our rhetoric to reality but even before that, will have to understand what it is we are trying to do. This has been a very broad sketch and I've talked much longer than I was asked to speak,

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but it reflects what I perceive to be the shape of the future. With respect to China, we don't yet even have a decent dialogue in place. But in the long run we must have both a political and an economic dialogue with China.

One of the economic problems is that this state of affairs will not be tolerated indefinitely. The imbalance of trade between America and the key Asian countries cannot simply continue to grow. Nobody may ask for my opinion on trade policy, but I promise you that the American political system will not stand for it indefinitely. Therefore it would be useful to see what can be done to keep it within limits where America's self-interest is somehow clearly involved. These are some of the challenges. None of them is insoluble, and we should begin by having good relations with China. Secondly, we have to adjust our relations with Japan. Finding ways to hold political dialogue with Japan is less prohibited by conflict than by culture.

The fact is, if you'll forgive me, the Japanese are not geared to the sort of dialogue we in the West like to engage in; while we're not geared to the consensus-type of discussions the Japanese prefer. That's a definite problem. With India, we haven't even begun serious discussions. Or with Indonesia, or with ASEAN as a political entity. On the other hand, I want to stress that everything I've described is salvageable. These are not incurable problems. Though I have cited quite a lot of problems, keep in mind that the problems are themselves a mechanism of change. And if you can say, as I am saying, that their solution is within your own control, then you are not in bad shape. That's my basic message to you.

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger • 10

Page 1

Side A

After hearing a friendly introduction such as Bill just made, I find myself in the same sort of position of trying to live up to the kind words he expressed. It is true that we met at the time of the Latin American Debt Crisis and that I was saying it was not an economic issue but a political issue; that the challenge was not just to collect the debt but to do so in a way that wouldn't overthrow the political institutions. Now this is not something bankers exactly love to hear, and it was to his enormous credit that Bill not only gave me a hearing in those days but that he came up with solutions which were both politically tolerable for the countries concerned and which laid the groundwork for some of the economic recovery of Latin America we have been speaking about today.

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2

3

Because these have all been reasoned experiences for America over the
past few decades, there has been no established tradition of foreign
policy thinking - as there has been in Britain, France, or China. We
have had to learn it as we went along. In assessing American foreign
policy, its special problem is compounded by the current situation.

Until 1989, we had a pretty clear operating policy, namely to contain
the Soviet Union. And it coincided with the two great experiences of
America in the twentieth century - overcoming the Great Depression
and World War II. We overcame the Depression through our massive
governmental programs, in effect war spending, and we won World War
II by defeating the aggressor through the massive mobilization of our
resources. While this was not exactly the same in every part of the
world and that line of thinking got us into trouble to some extent in
Vietnam, it was more or less accurate and it ended with our victory in
the Cold War - in the sense that Soviet Communism and its empire
collapsed and we emerged as the strongest military power in the world.

w

4

shrinking. Most of the issues today are not within the reach of American military power, at least conceptually. Secondly, in the economic and other fields, Japan, Europe - or Germany and Russia - China and India are all emerging, if not as superpowers then as nations which can significantly affect world events. And the United States must define its relationship vis-a-vis all of them. We have to do so, moreover, in a way we have never done before.

⊕

[e]

5

The new generation wants to improve the environment, human rights and all kinds of worthwhile social issues which, however, do not define the traditional concept of foreign policy. But after the Vietnam generation there will come another generation - not as defensive but extremely ignorant, in part because it will have been brought up in an

[c]

6

altogether different way from its predecessors. My generation, and even
the Vietnam generation, was brought up on books. When you're brought
up on books, you realize that every last shred of knowledge cannot
exist in a book and that you must learn by concepts because only
concepts enable you to understand comparable situations. Projecting
into the future, the next generation, brought up as it will have been on
computers, will not so much be able to write as to print. I'm not
exaggerating. Because what the young are doing today is not learning
through reading or writing but through pictures. As a result, a totally
different mentality is developing. It is more sentimental, more
emotional, but above all very short-term and very much geared to
immediate impressions. And the limited attention span affects our
whole style of life and politics. It comes at the precise moment when
what is really needed is long range thinking. That is the real problem as
I see it. How to design an American foreign policy in such an
environment is an extraordinarily difficult task. But what I would like
to do is to apply the problem to our relations with Asia.

In Asia we meet very old societies and established cultures. Whether
they are Chinese or Japanese or Indian, they have all had a long
history. American history, on the other hand, is relatively short. I'm
always struck by this simple difference: when you ask an American or a
Westerner *when* this or that event occurred, he gives you a specific
date; when you ask a Chinese when something happened, he gives you a

⊕

7

dynasty. There have been fourteen Chinese dynasties that I know of, ten of which have lasted longer - or as long as - the entire history of the United States. So when you cite a dynasty, you're essentially within 300 years of the problem. It's a different perspective. Whenever I visit Chinese provinces I rarely come to one whose population is not larger than that of the largest European country. All of this creates a different scale of thinking. And that's not easy to absorb.

8

When I first encountered China, it felt most threatened by Russia and potentially threatened by Japan and India, having had bad experiences with each of them. As for Nixon's opening to China, that was bound to happen. We did it perhaps more skillfully than others might have, but it would have happened eventually because the Chinese would have insisted on it. What I think we in the Nixon administration did well was to select our focus. For instance, the advice we got from our political advisors at the State Department was to discuss claims and assets, arms control and all kinds of conventional diplomatic issues. But we said no, let us instead talk to the Chinese about the international equilibrium to see whether we have common interests here. Mike, you've no doubt seen the record of our conversations when you were in government, so you know that they were conducted on as high a level of strategic analysis as one would find in the best academic seminars - except that the academicians wouldn't have had the feel for the reality.

9

9

I am very heartened by the fact that our government and the Chinese government are now beginning high level talks. It took an awfully long time - four years - during which everything that was tried failed so that we are now having to base it on one shipwreck after another. Still, I am glad that the dialogue is starting. The next question is, what are we going to talk about? What is going to be the subject of conversation? What are we trying to achieve? America has had the tendency, because of the missionary bent developed by President Wilson and adopted by all of his successors, to perceive solutions as ultimate moral dispensations and to ask all other nations to ascribe to them as well. That is very difficult. Take the issue of non-proliferation. On the face of it, China has as great an interest in non-proliferation as we do. In fact I would argue that China, having more neighbors than we do, faces greater risk if nuclear weapons spread to those neighbors. But while a dialogue based on mutual interests is indeed possible, what we have been doing lately is, for instance, to say to China: we have passed a law which dictates that you may not distribute missiles of a range of more than 300 miles (I don't know how we arrived at 300 miles but, for all I know, that's a reasonable definition). What matters is that it was never discussed with the Chinese and that, on that basis, no agreement is possible. I think the non-proliferation issue will in fact be solved as