Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on July 18, 2001:

Dr. Henry Kissinger 
Former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor
 
“Does America Need a Foreign Policy?”

Thank you, John [Hotchkis], ladies and gentlemen.  I’m glad you pointed out to this group that I was born in Germany because you would never have known it if that hadn’t been emphasized.  I have a brother who came here at the same time as I did and he speaks without an accent.  Somebody asked him how that was possible, and he said, “I’m the Kissinger who listens.”  I also appreciate, John, that you pointed out that I have advised a lot of people in many parts of the world, and a few of them didn’t even ask for my advice.

I’m here to talk about a book which has a title my publisher chose.  I’ve been just waiting for a reviewer to say “no,” and we wouldn’t have had to read this book.  I must point out one other thing.  My old friend, Kirk Douglas, is here.  He shows up at these events to see whether I drop my voice at the end of a sentence.  He has come to hear me speak before and I thought I was doing pretty well and he said, “but you dropped your voice at the end of the sentence and that puts off your audience,” so now [even] if I slip on the substance, I’ll be getting my voice up at the end of each sentence.

The United States right now is in a curious position.  We are the most powerful country the world has ever seen and our economy represents over 20 percent of the global economy.  So in terms of influence around the world we have an enormous potential.  But there are two problems:  one problem is, if you achieve such a position of eminence, there is a tendency of other nations to try to get together to restore some kind of equilibrium and to try to cut you down to some extent. And the second challenge we have is that as a nation we have never had to conduct foreign policy the way other nations have had to conduct foreign policy.  We are the only major nation that has never had a powerful neighbor, the only major nation that has been protected by two great oceans, and the only major nation that could believe, and correctly, that whether we involved ourselves in international affairs or not was largely up to us.

So when we did get involved in international affairs, which up until 1914 was really very rare, we identified a problem, threw resources at it and then we thought we could withdraw.  That, too, worked for a while.  Even at the end of World War II, when we did get involved in international affairs, we had a nuclear monopoly. For a while we had close to 50 percent of the world’s GNP, and it wasn’t really until the period of the Vietnam War that we came up against some limits--physical limits, emotional limits and cultural limits. 

Now we are in a world where we don’t have a permanent enemy but there are problems in ethnic conflicts, in revolutionary upheavals, in globalization, which brings about tremendous economic change, which is often ahead of the political structure, and there is no end to it.  We are used to thinking of an end to problems. In 1998, when President Clinton sent troops to Bosnia, he announced that after one year we could withdraw because the problem of Bosnia would be solved.  Well, we’re still there, and the problem of Bosnia has been going on for hundreds of years, at least one hundred years.  I found the other day a quotation from Disraeli.  In 1878, when there was a Bosnian crisis, he explained to the House of Lords why he did not want to send troops there.  He described all the rivalries and all the hatreds and all the conflicts in words that would apply exactly, not just approximately, to the present situation.  He said, “It would take 50,000 of Europe’s best troops to calm this down and they would have to stay there forever.”  And that’s about what happened. 

Not only do we have trouble recognizing that some problems have a long time frame, but also that there are problems that are not discrete.  That for every problem you try to solve, you open up another series of issues.  In the 19th century there was a statesman who said: “Policy is like a play in many acts which unfolds inevitably when the curtain is raised.”  Some people argue about the quality of the play, but people who understand the theatre of politics know that the real question is whether you raise the curtain, because once the curtain is raised the play will be completed either by the actors or by the audience that mounts the stage.  If you want to see an illustration of this, you have it in Kosovo. 

To us, it was one problem of ethnic oppression.  But once that issue was raised, it raised the next issue of independence for Kosovo, and once that issue was raised, it raised the next issue of what about the Albanians in Macedonia, in Montenegro and other parts of the Balkans.  Those are not trivial issues, but the question for us is, do we have to be engaged in every problem, in every part of the world and if so do we have to use American forces to do it? 

So, therefore, as this century develops, in the many trouble spots around the world the fundamental thing we have to decide is: what are we trying to do?  What problems must we solve?  What problems would it be nice if we could solve?  And what problems are beyond our capacity?  We tend to think of this as if there’s one solution to every problem in the world, and it’s a solution drawn from our own experience and which we tend to think of every foreigner as an aspirant American and who with just a little education will follow our prescriptions.  I have a friend who claims there is no such thing as an English accent, that they put it on just to intimidate Americans.  

One of the great important lessons to learn of this period is that there are different structures in different parts of the world having their own necessities.  In relation to the Western Hemisphere and to most of Europe, the American maxims apply quite well.  The countries are democratic, they have market economics, war between them is unlikely, highly improbable, and therefore the emphasis on economics, global economic structures, free trade and democratic institutions tends to bring these societies together.  But when you go to Asia, the countries of Asia look at each other as strategic rivals.  Conflict between them is not likely but it’s not impossible.  They conduct foreign policy towards each other in a manner very similar, not to 21st century Europe or 21st century America, but to 19th century Europe.  That is as a balance between India and China and Russia. 

The role of the United States there is different, because we have to maintain or help preserve an equilibrium.  In Asia it is important for us, although there is no clear adversary, but it’s important for us to have a maximum degree of options as the situation develops and it’s also important for us to understand the cultural differences.  China, for example, has had an uninterrupted history for 5,000 years, and for all but the last 200 hundred years they managed it without significant advice from the United States—because we didn’t exist.  And so, the Chinese do not take it for granted that we know the answers to all their problems.  So the attempt for us to deal with China by exact analogy to our domestic situation leads to extraordinary tensions.

Then, there is the Middle East.  The Middle East is most comparable to 17th century Europe, to the period of religious and ideological wars that culminated in Europe in the Thirty Years’ War.  By that I mean that, when you have fundamental religious and ideological disagreements, the normal method of diplomatic negotiations does not really work in the same sense.  When President Clinton invited the Israeli Prime Minister and Arafat to Camp David to negotiate a final settlement of the conflict in seven days, he was acting not partly like God, but partly, above all, like an American.  When they were talking about the Temple Mount in Jerusalem there was one idea that it could be cut in half, with the top belonging to one and the bottom to somebody else—to the Israelis. Another idea was that maybe the top could be given to the Arabs if the Israelis were permitted to build a little synagogue at one corner of it.  [This] is the way you can logroll things in the Congress, where people are more or less of the same fundamental convictions and they’re trying to adjust practical differences.  The result of all of this was that the negotiations not only failed, but blew up because the people, the radicals on each side, would never accept the various compromises that were being put forward. 

I would say, paradoxically, that the key to a solution in the Middle East is not to attempt something called “a final peace,” but something that the leaders have to sell to their constituents as a definitive arrangement for all eternity.  The key to the solution, if there is one, is to recognize that, when you have people with vastly different interests sharing a territory fifty miles wide—that’s all the depth from the Jordan River to the sea--the real problem is co-existence. 

On the day the Oslo agreement was signed I was invited by Secretary Christopher to a lunch, and I sat next to one of the leaders of the PLO delegation and he said “I’m going back to Palestine for the first time in forty years and that’s a tremendous experience to me.”  I said, “When you get there, wherever you are, you’re going to see the light of some Israeli settlement, city or something, some Israeli presence.  What does that mean to you?”  He said, “That isn’t my problem when I go to Palestine, because if you ask me where my home is, even though I haven’t been there for forty years, I’ll tell you it’s in Jaffa.  And if you ask my children who’ve never been there where their home is, they’ll tell you it’s in Jaffa.”  Well, Jaffa happens to be on the coast—it’s a suburb of Tel Aviv.  And it means that it’s very hard for people with this mentality to accept the permanent solution.  Therefore, I believe at this moment, when the exhaustion sets in, which is almost there, the thing to talk about is co-existence.  How do they share a territory in which neither side can destroy the other?  And to hope that if that co-existence goes on, not for eternity, but for ten years or some extended period of time, that a newer generation will get used to living with each other. 

I’m not here to say that I have solutions to all these problems, because then you won’t buy the book. , to keep in mind simultaneously different methods and different structures, and to keep in mind how other countries calculate their national interests.  We’ve seen this week the signing of an agreement between Russia and China, which had, to me, some very startling provisions of very intense consultations.  There are many reasons why that happened, but one of the reasons is that over a period of nearly a decade now, we have become unpredictable to each of these countries and they’ve been trying to get some freedom of maneuver. 

In the period when America opened to China, we had one basic principle, which was: we would try to be closer to both China and, at that time, the Soviet Union than they were to each other.  Now that may not be a very elevated principle, but in the conduct of foreign policy you have to keep in mind how other nations assess the situation.  When you are in that position, then you have more options than the other parties and, therefore, greater freedom of movement, and therefore you can define your interest in a more creative manner.

  It’s a complicated issue that has many more aspects than I mentioned but I wanted to point out the need for the United States to understand the historical process.  I’ve just come back from Russia and startling transformations have taken place there –I haven’t been there for eight years. But still, when you talk to Russians they’re conscious of a history of invasions from the East, invasions from the West.  They don’t remember so well the invasions they conducted in both East and West.  That’s where their memory is somewhat more limited: a history of really oppressive government and sort of an idea that central authority is, at the end, a solution to all problems.  In other words, we both, Russia and the United States had empty territories to fill.  We did it under the banner of liberty; they did it under the banner of a Russian mission and of the succession.  I’m not passing any judgment on it.  I’m just pointing out how leaders have to get used to looking at the world that way. 

  That gets me to my final point.  I want to point out to you I was warned before I came in they said, “You’ve got a great audience here.  We’ll give you all kinds of time.”  I said, “Like what?”  They said “Oh, twenty, twenty-five minutes.”  I pointed out if anyone hears me for twenty to twenty-five minutes they’ve been present at a historic occasion.  If your native language is German, you can go for twenty-five minutes without placing a verb. 

  I want to make one final point.  When you try to conduct foreign policy you have to understand the historical process.  You have to understand where a society came from to get some grasp of what the limits are and what the opportunities are for its future.  We are facing now a great educational challenge, because when you learn from books you have to form concepts, because you can’t read the same book over and over again.  So you have to get some ideas that help you relate things to each other.  And you have to train your memory.  When you learn from computers, you don’t have that necessity.  You ask the same question you get the same answer, and therefore for anything that requires immediate action you have available more information than you could ever dream of in previous periods.

  But when you have to project into the future in a political sense, not in a mathematical sense, then knowledge of the present is not enough.  So the challenge we have culturally, in a way, is how you can get a sense of perspective for history when all the other incentives are focusing you on an immediate body of knowledge.  If you look at the great statesmen in history, they all had a sense of the past and were able to project into the future.  That distinguished them, not their IQ.  Obviously, we’re going to be living in a computer age.  My grandson will be far ahead of me—he’s already equal to me and he’s only eight years old--on his computer.  I’m not saying that this is something that we should alter, but I am saying that the challenge to our educational system is how to get a sense of perspective to deal with some of the problems I have described and to get a final sense, namely, to go back to what I said earlier: to know what we must do, what we would prefer to do and what we cannot do.  Because, whatever happens, the key to a peaceful and progressive world is the United States.  We cannot solve all problems, but none of the key problems can be solved without us.  That is the fundamental challenge that I’ve tried to put before you this evening.

Now, I’ll be glad to answer some questions.

  Thank you very much.