A President’s Historic Opportunity to Define a New World Destination

The Times: There is much talk about the Bush Administration getting off to a slow start. Do you agree ? Do slow starts matter?

Kissinger: We are living in a seminal period of history in which a lot of things can be shaped. What a national leader has to do at such a time is to take his society and the world, insofar as the issues are international, from where it is to where it has never been. That means he cannot prove the destination is desirable until the society or the world gets there. The great leaders--I think of Churchill, De Gaulle, Lincoln or Roosevelt--had that sort of vision. That was their elemental quality. They had a vision of the future not yet accessible to their society.

Many traditional elements of international affairs are in flux simultaneously, and nations that oppose us ideologically are absorbed with their own internal dilemmas. The situation is malleable to an unusual degree. And I think that is the historic opportunity of the Bush Administration.

But in order to reach the destination, leaders have to assume responsibility for the road they take. They will not have universal approval on every step of the road.

So I’m not bothered by the Administration reviewing all options. I don’t think that matters all that much, if at the end there emerges a clear-cut compass course that is not a compromise between various positions. But a compass setting is not something that can be chosen by consensus in the bureaucracy.

In East-West relations, for example, we have to decide how to deal with the Soviet Union as ideology declines and it becomes a national state. What is the relationship between that huge empire as a national state and its environment? And how do we get it there?

We have to take care that on the one hand we don’t just settle for whatever eases the immediate problems, and on the other that we don’t look as if we are on a crusade to disintegrate that country. We have to find a philosophical level that can be conveyed both to them and to our own people and that is not a mishmash between every point of view in this country, or excessively driven by what have to be tactical Soviet considerations.

We have to come to grips with the fact that our relations with Europe now depend on acceptance of the fact that Europe will become genuinely independent of us. We are not used to a Europe defining its own objectives and then reconciling our objectives with theirs, which will not be identical.

I keep reading about non-discriminatory European policies. A common market is by definition discriminatory. Its external barriers are higher than its internal barriers. So that we’re really talking about the nature of the discrimination--whether it will be bearable and what the trade-offs will be.

Politically, we have to encourage the concept of a united Europe, both in West Europe and in the relations of East and West Europe, and we have to encourage a European defense community. All of this will require major adjustments in our relations with Europe.

The problems in Asia are different. In Europe at least there’s the tradition of cooperation, and we can use the Atlantic Alliance and we’re used to dealing with the European community.

In Asia we are coming up against something that can best be compared to the British role vis-a-vis Europe in the 19th Century. In Northeast Asia, we have the Soviet Union, Japan and China, in a rough sort of equilibrium. In Southeast Asia, the same applies to India, China and Japan, with the United States and the Soviet Union in the second line.

And what all of this requires is something that American intellectuals have rejected and our policy-making apparatus isn’t well suited to: a definition of the national interest that is permanent. We need to think and talk, not about a final condition called peace, but about a process in which we ameliorate situations, move them to more stable conditions, but never pretend to ourselves that the process at any one point is finished.

The area in which we are most in need of creativity is the Western Hemisphere. If we don’t watch ourselves, we could wind up in a situation in which so much of our energy is absorbed that the argument over “Are we shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific?” is subsumed in the question of “Are we shifting all of our attention to the Rio Grande?”

It is fundamentally a question of whether the United States can identify itself with the aspiration for growth in Latin America, of whether America is conceived as an obstacle to growth or as an aid to growth. If we can get over that hurdle, the technical solutions will be easier to conceive. And therefore nit-picking debates about who pays what interest and what period miss the point entirely. I think that the (Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas F.) Brady Plan, however hesitantly arrived at, is the beginning of an important step.

In government, somebody finally must say, “I’ve now heard all the talk, and we are going here.” Nobody can lift that from the shoulders of the President. But he cannot avoid the curse of giving a sense of direction by hedging. That’s the most important thing I learned in government. The tendency is to try to do a little of everything. Once you’ve decided, you pay the same price for doing the thing properly as for doing it halfheartedly. In fact, you pay at the end less of a price.

By the time Bush goes to Europe for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in May and the economic summit in July, he has to put forward, not necessarily a concrete program, but a concept. He needs to present an outline, like the original presentation of the Marshall Plan, of what needs doing, of something toward which we should be working.

Q: You say this is a seminal period in history. Do you think Americans are ready to accept the great changes that are going on? Only 45 or 50 years ago it was clear we were not just one of the great powers of the world but, for a while, the leading power. Do you think we are intellectually and emotionally ready for the change?

A: The great American Presidents have been educators. They brought a vision to this country and they have expressed its idealism in a way that could mobilize support.

In the late 1960s, the early ‘70s, we discovered many problems that were not caused by the Soviets. The international contests became less and less two-power contests.

Now we are in the situation where we run big risks involving how Americans might react. One is that they will ask, if there’s no Soviet danger, what the hell are we doing in the world? Why don’t we just stick to our knitting?

That is the temptation. And this is why just trying to balance conflicting approaches as they exist in the bureaucracy will not get us there. Now, what would happen if an American President said, “We are heading for a new age. Here is the age. This is what we have to do. It’s our permanent role. It’s not only a Soviet problem, it’s a structural problem of the world. There will never be a point at which we can say we can quit. All we can say is we can improve the situation. Here is what we have to do to improve.”

Will it work? I don’t know. I think the American people are an idealistic people. But can you sell them this paradox, that our idealism now requires a willingness to stick to a concept of the national interest with finite intermediate goals but a long-term improvement? Can you sell that to them? We must try. I don’t think we have any real choice.

Q: When you’ve talked to President Bush, have you found him interested in your concepts?

A: I think he is interested in a realistic role for America, although I do not want to give an impression that the concepts are something I am trying to sell to him or that I play a significant role in his decisions. The problem he will face, as any President, is how to translate a concept into operation.

I have great confidence in Bush’s basic approach. The problem now is: Is he willing to stand alone long enough to get it implemented? You can never tell that about a President in the early stage. I have been very well impressed with him.

Q: How does the future look to you now? Compared with, say, four years ago or even 40 years ago; are you more optimistic or less?

A: The immediate postwar period was extremely exciting for the United States. We emerged into world affairs, we seemed to be able to do everything we wanted and we found a world very similar to what we expected. We never asked ourselves: How is this going to go on? What happens if we succeed?

It’s interesting, for example, that in George Kennan’s containment policy there is no statement of what we should do on the magic day that the Russians appeared and said that the United States now had a position of strength and they were ready to negotiate. Nor do you find it in the writings of Dean Acheson or John Foster Dulles.

Now, by God, here they are, saying we have such a situation of strength and they do want to negotiate. And the West does not know exactly what it wants.

But because we are at about the point that everybody wanted in 1948, I’m fundamentally more optimistic. It is a more normal world. There will be other centers of power, meaning other centers of responsibility. We don’t have to make all the decisions, which is another way of saying we should make only those decisions of greatest importance to us. We don’t have to mix into every pettifogging problem around the world.

I am optimistic about this. I think this could be the most creative period in our postwar period, comparable to the 1948 period that saved the world as we knew it. There is an opportunity to shape a world in which people can live comfortably, although not a world in which people can live effortlessly.

It comes at a time when we have not had to do any heavy lifting for a while. And after a presidency that made the American people feel good by not asking too much of them in the foreign field, a presidency that personalized everything in the foreign field.

I’ve been talking, publicly and in my columns, about philosophical conversation with the Soviets. We need one with the Japanese almost as urgently. It’s not a society that lends itself greatly to philosophical discussion, and we’d have to find a method of talking to them, something for which no Western country is well prepared. But we must try.

Japan is already the third-largest military power in the world. It is the premier financial power. It will, with its credit policy, fundamentally influence the distribution of technology, at least in the underdeveloped world, and to some extent even in our country, by the support given to particular enterprises or withheld.

So what we need is some dialogue with the Japanese and some concept of whether we are going to deal with them as allies, or whether the relationship is going to be more and more confrontational.

Sorting out the relationship between Japan and the United States is absolutely unavoidable. It’s a mistake, for example, to get them heavily involved in Latin America without having some understanding with them about what happens in the next phase. If they became the dominant economic power in Latin America, and if they then started exporting to the United States from there, and if we then started protectionism against the influx of Japanese goods from Latin America, we would in fact be wrecking our own relationship with the Western Hemisphere.

In many ways it’s harder to talk to the Japanese than to the Soviets, because the Soviets at least have a concept of negotiation. The Japanese culturally hate confrontations. But they’ve got to get into their collective mind a concept of either cooperation or mitigated confrontation with us.

Finally, on this whole matter of optimism, I have to hand it to the Reagan Administration. The White House may not have done it deliberately, but at the end of the Reagan Administration there is a pregnant period in world politics. How it came about we can argue forever. But Bush has an open field and a historic opportunity. I think he can meet it.