¶ Interview with Henry Kissinger, New York, May 20, 1999.

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¶ Chris: It seems like the UN is losing its leadership role in conflicts.

¶ Kissinger: It's certainly true in the Balkans. I think its more due to domestic American politics.

¶ Chris: Due to the Republican backlash against the UN?

¶ Kissinger: I think there is strong opposition in the Republican party. And this affects America's relations with the UN.

¶ Chris: But doesn't the deadlock between those countries with veto power on the Security Council also make it very difficult for the UN to act?

¶ Kissinger: It depends on what you mean by act. In a conflict involving a Superpower, the UN cannot supersede that power. On the other hand there is a certain utility in not basing foreign policy entirely on arbitrary individual decisions.

¶ In the past, American presidents have found it useful to get UN endorsement for probably what they were going to do anyway. Like in the Gulf, President, Bush would have almost certainly acted even without UN approval. And he would have been right.

¶ Chris: This leads us to ethnic conflicts like what we have seen in Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia ...

¶ Kissinger: Ethnic conflicts are not a category for which the UN was particularly well prepared. The UN was built in the days when military conflicts were, on a whole, conflicts between nations. Ethnic conflicts are sometimes conflicts between nations, but on the whole are conflicts within nations and so it is more difficult for the UN to engage itself. How does it define the legality of various actions?

¶ Chris: In the book there is a conversation that you quote between yourself and (former British Foreign) Minister (James) Calaghan predicting a brutal future. What was it at the time that led you to ...

¶ Kissinger: At that time, you have to remember that this was the time of the collapse of the administration in July '74, secondly we had just gone through a Middle East War and it was in the middle of an ethnic conflict in Cyprus between Greeks and Turks and Calaghan and I were trying to contain it. And the parties, as often happens in ethnic conflicts, weren't interested in global politics but were interested in their problems. And in that sense we sort of candidly exchanged ideas about the fact that the desirability of peace is not entirely convincing to parties in an ethnic conflict.

¶ Chris: You also talk about the only two outcomes to an ethnic conflict are partition or the victory of one group over the other. Is there a middle ground, is there a role for a Superpower?

¶ Kissinger: People say in the United States people of different ethnic groups live together, but these are ethnic groups that have turned their backs on their

homeland and they have started a new existence. Protracted ethnic problems
are those in which the parties live in more or less the same territory and will not
permit to be governed by another party.

¶ You take Rwanda where you served, as long as the Belgians were there, both Hutus and Tutsis could coexist. But when the Belgian removed, then one party was going to dominate.

¶ Now can there be power sharing? In academic textbooks it says they should.
In the real world it doesn't work very easily because somebody is going to
dominate. And checks and balances are not an idea that has evolved in places
where if they have any kind of democratic ideas they have a parliamentary
government.

¶ There were checks and balances built into the Cyprus constitution, there were
things that could not be passed without the Turkish minority and there were all
kinds of clever constitutional protections built into it.

¶ The only thing is the checks and balances only work only with great restraint.
Or if you are willing to be checked by a minority. In the Cyprus case the Greeks
found this condition so onerous that they in effect abrogated the checks and
balances and then *when you factor in a parliamentary system* then the majority is
permanent and the minority won't accept it.

¶ Craig: In one of your TV appearances you said that the US should have intervened in Rwanda and I guess my question is that Central Africa at the time wasn't obviously of huge national interest to the United State. Given the promiscuous nature of genocide, where do you intervene to stop a genocide, where do you not intervene to stop a genocide, what does the US do?

¶ Kissinger: I think that at the end of the day the United States should be able to
explain to the mothers involved why Americans were killed. I can imagine an
event so egregious that you say that you cannot reasonably permit it and I would
think that Rwanda came *overly* close to that. And in Rwanda I think we could
have stopped it without any significant casualties. I think if we had appeared it
would have stopped them, don't you think?

¶ Chris: Oh, absolutely.

¶ Kissinger: So I would have been in favor of intervening in Rwanda. Then
when you put on the scale the outright risks. But if we had intervened in Rwanda,
how would we have ever got out of it, because there is no way of governing
Rwanda by the Tutsis and Hutus together, one of them would have to dominate,
and the other one will get mad and fight.

¶ This has been the history of many African states and in a way it is the history
of the Balkans. So I was not in favor of our policy prior to going into Kosovo. I
thought was an exaggeration of an American role. But that's also because I
really didn't think full scale ethnic cleansing was going on. If I had known full
scale ethnic cleansing was going on and once I saw that full scale ethnic

cleansing was going on, I supported the administration. But I don't think it would
have begun if we had not bombed, but then you get into a circular argument.

¶ Chris: It seems to me that Clinton's Kosovo policy in many ways has the same problems that the Indochina policy had in that you are trying to fight halfheartedly, there is not a total commitment.

¶ Kissinger: The similarity is in the sense that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations went into Vietnam thinking that they could win with technological superiority. Not assessing the element of endurance and this is clearly true in Kosovo and the Balkans. But the risks in Indochina were much greater.

¶ Craig: In Cambodia, when you were presumably receiving reports of large scale killings what were your policy options then to stop those killings? Did you understand ...

¶ Kissinger: We had just ... The trouble is that a lot of these questions are being asked by people who were not born or very young when it happened. We, in the administration in which I served, we tried to prevent the Khmer Rouge from taking over and we warned that horrible things might happen, but we did not imagine murders on this scale.

¶ We had cut off military and economic aid to Cambodia. There was no conceivable way in 75 that we could have used military force six weeks after we had been voted out.

¶ At first the scale of the atrocities were so huge that we could not get anyone to believe it. We intercepted radio reports giving instructions to kill the families and children of any government official no matter what the level was. And we gave that out to the press and the press said here are these old warmongers again trying to get us back involved.

¶ Craig: I didn't ask you to revive ancient history, it was more in the rhetoric of Bill Clinton that there is a line between Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda and now U.S. policy in the Balkans, there is a clear case of historical lessons in those cases that can be drawn and that they are relevant to deciding what to do today.

¶ Kissinger: My feelings present a big problem to us. I don't accept the proposition that we either do everything or that we should do nothing. We have a lot of diplomatic pressures available, we have a lot of economic pressures available, and they are relatively free to use. Military force is something we have to be very careful about.

¶ Chris: Something I noticed in your book is that you do feel a need to remind the reader what the Cold War was like in the early 1970s, do you think the American people's memory is fading?

¶ Kissinger: Absolutely. There is a whole new generation. How are old are you, may I ask?

¶ Chris: 34

¶ Kissinger: Well, you don't remember it.

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¶ Chris: Very vaguely I remember 74-75, but not much before that.

¶ Craig: I'm older than that and it seems pretty vivid to me.

¶ Kissinger: But on the whole there is no adult experience with what the Cold War was like. I keep hearing about how tough foreign policy is now, but we had a thermonuclear adversary with 15,000 nuclear weapons. When we came into office, the administration under which I served, there were 400 dead a week. Now when we have one dead or there is one prisoner taken we have a national emotional breakdown. We had 400 dead a week from the first day we came into office. And we had to reduce that and we did. There is no recollection of what the Cold War was like.

¶ Craig: So who is wimpish, the military, the administration ...

¶ Kissinger: No, I think we come from a different background. I come from the experience of post World War II, when great things were done and you believed in America. You come from the experience of the Vietnam War and we don't believe that America can play a beneficent role in the world. Now they have changed back so that we can intervene everywhere.

¶ When we started, they believed that we should intervene no where. I am not uneasy about economic pressure, or political pressure, I am very uneasy about military pressure. Having said this however, I will say that when something happens like Rwanda, where you have really organized mass murder and when you have the means of stopping it without the great risk of escalation militarily, you should probably do it. If you have the information.

¶ Chris: In other parts of the book you talk about the transition from President Nixon to President Ford, and you are very insightful about President Nixon's personality and him being a great leader but also having this self-destructive element. It sounded to me very familiar to President Clinton.

¶ Kissinger: No, there is no similarity to President Clinton.

¶ Chris: Not this self-destructive ...

¶ Kissinger: That side of it maybe. But Nixon was much more systematic, he was much more oriented to the national interest. Clinton is more likely to pass to the universalist cause, than the American national interest cause.

¶ Chris: I wanted to ask you about China, because it seems we are going in two directions at once, with increasing tension over the espionage and the bombing ...

¶ Kissinger: We have to get this thing into perspective. The espionage is very critical to us, but you cannot make it affect your diplomatic relations. When the Russians stole the atomic bomb, we executed a few people. But our relations with Russia weren't brilliant, but were not particularly affected by the espionage.

¶ When you are the world's most advanced technologically, you are expected to be spied on, especially when you help it along. And I am assuming that we are spying on other nations, including China as well. So there is growing a

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considerable amount of tension, developing for a number of reasons, partly because of Chinese human rights policy, and partly because we in America haven't decided how to view China.

¶ There are some that would like to prevent China's emergence as a big power, they are convinced it guarantees conflict with us. Then in addition there are people who complain about specific acts of Chinese policy. I believe that the specific issues are susceptible to negotiation and diplomacy. The fundamental issues, whether we want to stop China from becoming a strong power, we don't admit to ourselves, on which we need to debate, because if we go down that road, you are in an endless confrontation.

¶ Chris: You talk about lobbying Gen. Pinochet about human rights, what do you think about attempts to prosecute him now?

¶ Kissinger: Here is what I want to correct. We were well disposed to Pinochet, because we thought that Allende was incompatible with American national interests because Allende was creating a Communist dictatorship in the middle of the Cold War, which was beginning to radiate outward to Argentina and Uruguay. We did think Pinochet's human rights practices were an obstacle to our relations, and with Congress it made it impossible to operate. So I tried to do both.

¶ In the present situation, because much of this happened while I was Secretary of State, I have not made any comments about the merits. But I do think the procedure, where a magistrate in one country where the alleged crimes did not occur, can issue an arrest warrant for a former leader of a country elsewhere and that they then become criminalized through the extradition procedure is extremely dangerous.

¶ No senior American official would be safe if this became an accepted practice, because anybody can be accused of something and then the whole extradition process starts.

¶ Chris: On Angola, that was a major development during your term. Twenty-four years later the civil war and fighting with Savimbi is still going on, what are your observations?

¶ Kissinger: Look, this was a period when there existed a strong Soviet Union and they challenged us in Berlin and Cuba and many other parts of the world. They had begun a massive supply of arms to Angola and we were of the view that if they could do such a thing that far from their territory and that far from their traditional expression of foreign policy, all the other African countries in precarious situations would get demoralized. This was how we intended to stop it and would have stopped it accept for our domestic difficulties when the Congress cut off aid.

¶ Chris: No, I fully understand that part of it, but since you have left office it seems to have evolved into something else.

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¶ Kissinger: Since I left office, the Soviet Union has disintegrated. Savimbi, who was actually not the man we were principally supporting, the man we were supporting has substantially disappeared, Savimbi is getting substantial support from elsewhere and has some diamond mines, is financing himself, has never been defeated by the countries government and it was no longer the same priority to us as it was before.

¶ Craig: To go back to the Chile example, did it make any difference that a plurality if Chilean voters put Allende in office? It was a popular election.

¶ Kissinger: It was a plurality to begin with, he actually had fewer votes in 1970 when he was put in than he had when he was defeated before in 69. And he won because the democratic opposition was divided. Under the conditions of the period, we considered the emergence of another Communist government, no matter how it came about, inimical to American interests.

¶ Chris: I interviewed Moammed Sacirbey, the Bosnian ambassador to the UN and he made the point to me that he thinks the Cold War is in a lull and that what is emerging now is a red-black coalition with nationalists joining with former communists ...

¶ Kissinger: In Russia, it could happen.

¶ Chris: Do you think this is a threat?

¶ Kissinger: Yes, and I think the war in Kosovo contributes to this, because it has created a public reaction that everyone agrees goes far beyond the Moscow elite. So I think there is a danger of something similar to National Socialism in Germany, which is what the Nazis were.

¶ Craig: One more real quick one. Back to Rwanda for a second. Protocol aside, as Secretary of State, could you have written a letter to the parents of a soldier who died in Rwanda?

¶ Kissinger: That's a very good question. One soldier, if it is a very small number of casualties. You have asked the right question. We should not go to war if you cannot write a letter to the parents and explain why their son died.

¶ Craig: The reason why I ask is that I spoke to the former Rwanda ambassador six days after and he had gone to the White House two months before. I spoke to him right after the genocide broke out and he went back to Somalia and he said that the reason President Clinton couldn't do anything about this was because Clinton did not get up in the case of Somalia and say that these 18 soldiers died for a good cause. Having failed to do that, he set the stage for the lack of or no response to the genocide and I thought that was a good ... (when)

¶ Kissinger: If you use military force, and you are not willing to suffer casualties, then you get into the dilemma we are now in in Kosovo. And then the only way to win is to make the population of the adversary suffer for it, that is a strange definition of morality and of humanity. I don't believe in, I do not accept this concept of humanitarian foreign policy. In specific, horrible cases like Rwanda, I

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¶ The only thing is the checks and balances only work only with great restraint.
Or if you are willing to be checked by a minority. In the Cyprus case the Greeks
found this condition so onerous that they in effect abrogated the checks and
balances and then when you factor in a parliamentary system then the majority is
permanent and the minority won't accept it.

¶ Kissinger: I think that at the end of the day the United States should be able to
explain to the mothers involved why Americans were killed. I can imagine an
event so egregious that you say that you cannot reasonably permit it and I would
think that Rwanda came overly close to that. And in Rwanda I think we could
have stopped it without any significant casualties. I think if we had appeared it
would have stopped them, don't you think?

¶ Chris: Oh, absolutely.

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¶ Kissinger: No, I think we come from a different background. I come from the experience of post World War II, when great things were done and you believed in America. You come from the experience of the Vietnam War, and we don't believe that America can play a beneficent role in the world. Now they have changed back so that we can intervene everywhere.

¶ Kissinger: We have to get this thing into perspective. The espionage is very critical to us, but you cannot make it effect your diplomatic relations. When the Russians stole the atomic bomb, we executed a few people. But our relations with Russia weren't brilliant, but were not particularly affected by the espionage.

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¶ Kissinger: Since I left office, the Soviet Union has disintegrated. Savimbi, who was actually not the man we were principally supporting, the man we were supporting, has substantially disappeared, Savimbi is getting substantial support from elsewhere and has some diamond mines, is financing himself, has never been defeated by the countries government and it was no longer the same priority to us as it was before.

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¶ Chris: Oh, absolutely.

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¶ Chris: 34

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¶ Kissinger: We have to get this thing into perspective. The espionage is very critical to us, but you cannot make it effect your diplomatic relations. When the Russians stole the atomic bomb, we executed a few people. But our relations with Russia weren't brilliant, but were not particularly effected by the espionage.

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