Dr. Henry Kissinger
Former Secretary of State
Author, Years of Renewal

"U.S. Foreign Policy Through the Decades"

John, and ladies and gentlemen, it is occasionally said that it is difficult to introduce me and that few people need an introduction less. But even few people enjoy an introduction more than I do.

If I may be so impolite as to correct our chairman for a moment, he said that I was first National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State for President Nixon, but the fact of the matter is that for a while I was both National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. The only reason that I take the liberty of correcting our eminent chairman is to point out that never before and never since have relations between the State Department and the White House been as good as they were in those years. And if I might make just one more introductory remark before coming to Kosovo, I look forward, of course, to responding to the questions which I know you are seriously writing down at this moment and I just want to warn you that I’m a believer in President de Gaulle’s handling of the press conferences. President de Gaulle was of the view that he would not let the French version of Sam Donaldson tell him what he should talk about, so he would come to press conferences or public meetings, mostly press conferences, with four prepared answers and no matter what the question was he’d work his way through the answers. If you’re not discouraged yet, please write your questions, and all the friendly ones will receive an immediate reply.

Now, I have gone through a traumatic period. I’m supposed to promote my book, Years of Renewal. All kinds of television programs have been arranged, and nobody is angrier at Milosevic than I am because every time I go on a television program I must talk about that famous book, Kosovo, and I never get around to discussing my own. I will take the liberty of making a few observations and then go on to the contemporary subject, largely because the events that we’re living through now, many of them, the problems have their origin quite a few years ago and the lessons to be learned are inherent in the foreign policy dilemmas of the United States.

I worked, as was pointed out, for President Nixon, and I must inject this anecdote, if I may. When you read books about me, especially by professors and especially by Harvard professors, I committed the terrible sin that I became Secretary of State, so they have to answer the question "Why me and not them?" And their answer is that I plotted carefully to maneuver myself into this position of eminence next to President Nixon and then to President Bush. I thought you should know how I did this, because maybe people can learn a lesson from it. I maneuvered myself close to President Nixon by supporting Nelson Rockefeller in three primary campaigns against President Nixon. That’s bound to get anybody’s attention. I had never even met President Nixon when he invited me to [take] the position of National Security Advisor. Now, President Nixon, regardless of what you see in movies about him, was basically a very shy person and he didn’t want to be rejected by a Harvard professor, which is something I can understand. But that had the result that, in my first interview with him, I didn’t know what he wanted after he left. I knew he wanted something, but I didn’t know what it was, so I left. Three days later John Mitchell, who was very close to him in those days, called me up and said "Well, are you going to take the job?" and I said "What job?" And Mitchell said "Oh, my God, he’s screwed it up again."

So then I got a call from Nixon, and he said come see him again. This time he offered me the job. Now I have to give you an example of Harvard arrogance. I said to President Nixon "You know, I’ve opposed you for twelve years and three campaigns and I don’t want to lose my friends by joining your administration so could I take a week to consult my friends?" It’s a great tribute to President Nixon that he didn’t tell me to get lost and he said "Take a week." Nelson Rockefeller was out of town and he came back two days, he was in Venezuela, and in those days telephones didn’t work so well, so he came back two days later and I told him what had happened, and he said "You’re out of your mind." He said "The President is taking a much bigger chance on you than you on him." Which, if I hadn’t been at Harvard, might have occurred to me. He said "Now, you pick up this telephone and accept, because when a President asks you something you accept and you don’t bargain with him." Which is an important lesson. So anyway, this is how I got to where I was and the rest is in these huge books which I can say I write in long hand because until three weeks ago I didn’t know how to use a computer and I still can’t type, so I’m doing my writing under severe technological handicaps.

Let me make a few observations about the period in which I served in government and then go to the contemporary situation. The period in which I served was the moment, really, when American began to realize that some of our historic approaches to foreign policy were no longer going to work. Our country has had an absolutely unique historical experience. We’re the only country, major country, populated entirely by immigrants. The only country that was explicitly dedicated from a fixed date to the idea of liberty; in all other democracies it developed gradually over centuries. Above all, [we are] the only country that has never had a powerful neighbor. We were protected by two great oceans, we never faced any immediate threat. That made us rather unique in the sense that we believed that, first of all, whether we engaged ourselves or not was entirely up to us. That we could commit or withdraw as we saw fit. Secondly, we believed that the way to bring peace to the world is to make everybody adopt out institutions and our principles on the theory that democracies don’t go to war with each other.

So, in America, there has been a tendency to divide foreign policy into two schools of thought. One that identifies foreign policy as a subdivision of psychiatry and another that treats foreign policy as a subdivision of theology. The psychiatrists think relations among nations are like relations among people and you bring peace through this strenuous exercise of good will. The theologians believe that all foreign policies are a struggle between good and evil and the thing to do is to destroy the wrongdoer once and for all, after which normalcy returns. But for most nations, in almost all of history, foreign policy doesn’t lend itself to such approaches. Most nations have had to make calculations of reward and punishments. For most of them there have been no final solutions but only gradual improvements.

I can tell you from personal experience [that] when a problem seems to be solved as far as the media are concerned at the moment that I would sometimes receive what I considered adequate approbation, at those moments I was usually somewhat depressed because I knew that what was celebrated as a success was really an admissions ticket to the next set of problems and that it never ends and this is the nature of foreign policy. When we came into office we found ourselves with 550,000 troops in Indochina that our predecessors had put there. As soon as they left office they joined the peace movement and told us to solve the mess over their opposition. And so America was divided for a long period over how to extricate ourselves, and President Nixon and I took the view that however we got in there by now millions of people had relied on us and we owed them that we not abandon them, while our critics acted as if all you needed to do is like changing a television channel. And that was the drama of that period, and what we tried to do was to convey to the American public the need to develop an idea of national interest to which you could refer over an extended period of time. So that when Americans risk their lives you could tell their mothers how it affected the lives of Americans, because if you could not do that, sooner or later support would evaporate. So that was one set of problems.

Then we came into another set of problems a little later on. The so-called ethnic conflicts. Now we in this country are used to the coexistence of ethnic groups. It’s one of the glories of America, but in many parts of the world, like the Balkans and certain parts of the Middle East, ethnic groups have been conquered and oppressed and have themselves conquered. In the centuries of this struggle, the weak and the conciliatory have been eliminated. Most of these ethnic conflicts are tied to religion. So that for the various groups their identity is intimately related to their religion, to their history. So you cannot simply talk as if we were in a nice Mid-Western environment and all it takes is some good will and all the tensions disappear. In my day, we dealt with Cyprus and Lebanon. President Reagan had to deal with Lebanon, and now we are dealing with the Balkans, but the structure is always more or less the same. The various groups believe that even some of the democratic principles cannot work because if there is an ethnic majority the minority will never be able to become a majority and it will fight.

I had the following experience once: there was a negotiation between Greeks and Turks of incredible complexity, fueled by the hatred of the two sides for each other. So at one point the Turks came up with an idea. So I said to the Turkish foreign minister, "The Greeks will never accept it coming from you. Why don’t you let me make the proposal and then everybody can accept it because it’s an American proposal?" He thought that was a pretty good idea. So I went to the Greeks and the Greeks actually accepted it. Then I went back to the Turks and they rejected their own proposal because they figured if the Greeks accepted it there had to be something wrong with it. So that is the problem in part in Kosovo.

For the Serbs, this is a centuries-old struggle with the Turks; they don’t care that these are now Albanians. They’re Muslims, all Muslims are [the same] in their minds. For the Albanians, it’s the same struggle and they’re the majority [in Kosovo]. So it’s very difficult to find a solution. How to deal with these problems is something that we have lived with now for a long time, but we Americans are not well-equipped intellectually to deal with how to solve them because we have absolutely no experience, thank God, in America of this kind of conflict. Now, I say this to explain my somewhat strange position on Kosovo. I did not agree with the diplomacy prior to the war. I thought we were aiming for a rapid overall solution. We handed a proposal to both sides which characteristically both sides rejected, and the only reason the Albanians accepted it is not because they meant to implement it, but because they were told that if the Serbs rejected it we would bomb them. And so this thing drove towards a confrontatio, and I did not think this was the right way to proceed and I wrote this at the time and I testified before Congress along those lines. However, once we decided to proceed I had a different position.

Now, those of you who know my writings may have got it that in the last election President Clinton was my second choice. But on the other hand, I have seen what it is like to try to conduct a war when a big part of the country yells at you from the sidelines and, therefore, once the war started I have supported the President, and not only for abstract patriotic reasons, but for a very concrete reason. If NATO, consisting of nineteen nations, 500 million population, cannot achieve its stated objectis--whatever I thought of them when they starte--against 10 million Serbs, it will create a level of uncertainty around the world in all the places which depend on American promises and American military power. It will encourage North Korea, Libya, Iran, all the rogue states in the world. Therefore, now the only way out is by success. And I must say, also, that what our objectives are now, first of all I think I didn’t disagree with the objectives of our diplomacy. I just thought our diplomacy went about it in a very clumsy and counterproductive way. But I do agree that ethnic cleansing is not acceptable and that refugees must be given an opportunity to return and I don’t think this is now any longer possible with the Serbs in control of Kosovo. Whatever mistakes were made should be addressed after this is over, and so I always urge, when I’m on television not promoting my book unfortunately, support for our present effort and not to repeat what the administrations in which I served went through.

Now let me make a few observations about another problem. I said we have great difficulty as a nation coming to grips with certain types of issues, such as ethnic conflicts in the Balkans or on Cyprus or in other parts of the world. But we also have difficulty sometimes dealing with countries of totally different cultures from our own, and here I would take China as a principal example. We have a tendency to believe that every foreigner is an aspiring American and that he really thinks like an American. I have an acquaintance who believes that there is no such thing as an English accent. He thinks the English put this on to intimidate Americans and if you could only catch an Englishman unaware, like waking him up at 4:00 a.m. when he’s not ready for you, he’ll talk with a nice Mid-Western accent. Now, we apply this to China. Here is a country with an uninterrupted history of 5,000 [years] and, rightly or wrongly, they suffer from the delusion that they have staggered through 4800 years of those without advice from the United States because we didn’t exist, so they think they have their own way of doing certain things and it’s a different culture. When you ask an American when something happened he’ll give you a date; when you ask a Chinese when something happened he gives you a dynasty. There have been fourteen dynasties in China’s history, ten of which have lasted longer than the entire history of the United States and the other four are about equally long. So when a Chinese tells you this happened in a dynasty you know it’s anywhere from 200 to 600 years of what you ask him about. It’s a huge population, as those of you who travel in China will know; almost every Chinese province has a larger population as a province than the largest Europe state, and this produces a different approach. When President Nixon met Mao he said to Mao "The Chairman’s teachings have changed civilization." Mao said ‘No. I’ve changed Beijing and a few of its suburbs." Which, given the complexity of the count, actually turned out to be true.

So the problem we face now is this: when I read the press I keep reading endless stories about the danger we face from China and how that’s taking us to the cleaners, and we lose sight of the fact that [with] every President since Nixon one of the most consistent aspects is the conclusion that good relations with China are in the mutual interest of the two countries and are essential in many respects for the peace of Asia. I’m sure that if I ask the various consuls who are representatives here from Asian countries how they would feel if suddenly a confrontation started between China and the United States that they would say their countries would be horrified because it would give them choices they really do not want to have to make. Of course, if we are challenged we will have to resist and we will resist but we should explore to the greatest extent possible what cooperation is possible and get some sense of perspective. The Chinese, even if they have stolen some of our technology we should remember we ought to be mad at our security system. I expect to have other countries try to steal our things, but you don’t expect to have your security system make it possible. Whatever else the Chinese have, at most twenty-five strategic weapons, we have 8,000--and on top of that we have 10,000 tactical weapons. We have four times as many missiles on our submarines in the Pacific than they have altogether, and that doesn’t count anything we have in the United States or on aircrafts. So it is not yet a military problem and will not be for decades. The Chinese gross domestic product is twenty-five percent of ours, so even if we continue growing at the rate of 2.5% a year and they grow at the rate of 10% they’ll still not catch us. So there’s no reason to panic and there is every reason for some cooperation.

Of course, if they challenge us, we will surely resist and we (a) have the means to do it and (b) most Asian nations would support us. So this seems to me to be a philosophical problem that we face as a nation. How do we react to problems in the world? On the one hand, we have Kosovo with a population of 1.8 million in a part of the world, as President Clinton said, most Americans have never heard of. President Nixon would say to me when I used Harvard words of more than two syllables, he used to say to me "now, remember, the American people will think you’re talking about a soft drink," and that’s probably what people thought when they heard Kosovo three months ago. Now we have this challenge. On the other part of the world, as we saw in the visit of the Chinese Premier two weeks ago, we have a colossus which is modernizing. Will they become democratic? That’s difficult to say. I think they’ll become constitutional for sure because you cannot run a modern system without having a legal system, and as you decentralize authority the conditions for democracy are created, but how long that will take is not easily determined.

For us, we are now the only superpower. We are being asked to act in every part of the world simultaneously. We have had little experience in this. We have been terrific in great projects but we have not had to micro-manage day-to-day events. We have to learn what only we can do, what we can do only with others, and what we cannot do at all. We have to know for what our moral influence is important for what we have to add economic assistance, and for what we have to use force--but to resort to force has to be something that we do not undertake except when we’re prepared to win. There is no exit from a war except victory, and you cannot explain to families that they’re running risks to their loved ones if it is simply about some abstract principle and not about something that affects Americans. This is the challenge before us.

We have done extraordinary things in the post-war period, but we have to make an adjustment to these new circumstances. I have seen this now over an extended period and I sometimes sum it up, which some of you may have heard me speak, it’s one of these stories, but I’m like President Reagan with some of his stories. There is a proverb, a Chinese proverb, that I like, or an alleged Chinese proverb--I say alleged because I don’t know whether there exists as many Chinese proverbs as they lay upon us--and it was told to me by Lee Kuan Yew who was Prime Minister of Singapore. It goes like this: "When there is turmoil under the heavens, little problems are dealt with as though they were big problems and big problems are not dealt with at all. When there’s order under the heavens, big problems are reduced to little problems and little problems do not tear us apart." We have to make sure we don’t deal with little problems as if they were big problems and we have to make more sure that we know how to reduce big problems to little problems, because that will be our contribution to peace and progress in the world.

Let me stop here and take some of your questions.