The US is often described as the only superpower and, in a technical, military sense, this is correct. We are the only country that can project its power almost anywhere around the globe. At the same time, the issues to which military force is relevant are shrinking and the domestic support for military action is decreasing equally rapidly, so that for most issues that affect peace and war and progress, military power is an absolutely last resort.
With respect to almost all other issues, the US, while it is still the single strongest nation, is, in fact, one nation among others. Japan, Europe, in a little while China, in a little while Russia, India, will all have a capacity to affect international events. In a world of interdependent economics and instantaneous communications, earlier this year we had a financial crisis in Mexico. That is not a rare event; what is a rare event is that a financial crisis in Mexico could threaten financial markets all over the Western hemisphere and potentially the world.
“Only an unemployed rich egomaniac can stand for the US presidency today,” Kissinger said in Sydney in 1995. David Rowe
This complexity is made even harder to solve, at least for the US, and I suppose for almost all other democratic nations, by some other features. The political processes in most countries are creating a discontinuity between the qualities required to be elected and the qualities required to govern.
I have said, only flippantly, that only an unemployed rich egomaniac can stand for the US presidency today because you have to spend three years collecting $US15 million in thousand-dollar lots due to limits on campaign expenditures.
You then have to fight a campaign in 30 primary states before you even become the candidate. When I started advising political leaders, they asked me what to think. Today, they ask me what to say. Different problem. It does not apply to everyone, but it is a real inhibiting factor. Political leaders arrive in office exhausted and not having been able to concentrate on the substantive issues.
The hardest problem for a leader is to take his society from where it is to where it has never been – and that is a lonely task.
— Henry Kissinger
This is complicated by the change in human consciousness in which America is the leader, but in which we are only ahead of others. That is the change from knowledge by concepts and words, to knowledge by pictures and impressions. I think this is a fundamental change in human consciousness.
When you learn by words, you have to develop a concept and the role of a concept is to relate disparate events to each other and establish categories of thought. When you read a novel, you have to imagine what a scene looks like.
When you learn from computers and television you do not need concepts because they present the picture to you and so knowledge is more instantaneous, it can be stored more easily, but the relationship to events can get lost.
I reflect on the great statesmen of this century, the Churchills, De Gaulles, Roosevelts. They were not smarter than anyone else and there must have been thousands of professors who knew more than they did. But they had a vision of the future and an inward assurance to move towards that future.
The hardest problem for a leader is to take his society from where it is to where it has never been – and that is a lonely task. If he gets too far ahead of his people, he will be destroyed. If he is too cautious, problems will overwhelm him. How to find that middle ground is the overwhelming problem of politics. It is a problem I do not believe any society that I know has solved.
Global change is coming
Bob Hawke and former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger at Parliament House on August 11, 1983.
Let me now talk about the international situation as I see it. The problem is that not only the US but almost every country that I know faces a dramatic change in the international environment, so that all countries have to adjust to new conditions simultaneously.
The US has to adjust to a condition in which it is one of five or six countries of more or less equal strength to effective ends. So it has to think in terms of structure, not of ultimate solutions. Every US program in the post-war period has been presented with a kind of a terminal date and with the idea that, after it is carried out, the problems will disappear, or that particular problem will disappear.
Now we have to think like the Europeans in the 19th century and like Asian nations in their area: in terms of structure. Europeans are used to thinking in terms of structure but their scale has become too small to affect global events. An exorbitant amount of European time is absorbed in the internal deliberations on the organisation of Europe to make the nation state less significant. I will be brief on most of the nations I want to concentrate on.
Can Russia stay within its national boundaries?
Henry Kissinger with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2004. AP
Russia is within borders that it has not had since Peter the Great. Russia has never been a nation state, it has always been an empire with no natural frontiers, pushing in all directions simultaneously, or alternately into Asia, Europe, Central Asia, Middle East. The image of itself as a national state is something new to Russia. On the one hand, you could say that a country that extends from St Petersburg to Vladivostok, that such a country should not suffer from claustrophobia. Yet if you look at Russian foreign policy, you could argue that one of its dominant things is to make life unbearable for the former republics that constituted the Soviet Union, to create a situation in which these countries will decide that to return to the fold, at least in a strategic sense, is better than independence.
So long as this policy continues and so long as it is believed by various so-called democratic leaders that the way to become popular is to pursue such a policy, there will be an instability in Europe and Asia. Therefore I have been urging, in the US, that we should not exaggerate our ability to make Russia democratic. We have trouble enough conducting our own domestic politics without getting involved in the domestic politics of every other country. The problem with Russia is: can they convince themselves to stay within their national boundaries? If they can, most of the other issues between us can be solved very rapidly.
On the other hand, if this pressure continues, two difficulties will arise. The pressure towards the West will create a crisis with Europe sooner or later. The pressure towards Central Asia will create a challenge in the following sense. If China and India continue to develop economically at the present pace, the energy consumption of the world could double by the year 2010 or 2020. In that case, the attempt by one country to get control of most of the untapped energy reserves, many of which are in Central Asia, will represent a hegemonial aspiration whether or not that is the immediate intention. So Central Asia will become an area requiring careful thought.
What China and India’s rise will mean
In Asia, we deal with three major countries: India, China and Japan. The newest entry into the great power club, or soon to be, is India. It seems to me that India has many of the prerequisites of rapid economic progress. A good, if excessively socialistic civil service, a fairly large educated group, a lingua franca in English and a democratic system.
The interplay between India, China and Japan can already be seen in Burma, where the Chinese are building a railway towards Rangoon, the Japanese are offering economic aid and the Indians are claiming that, since Burma was governed from India, it really should be in their sphere. So in Asia, there may develop a kind of foreign policy that was characteristic of Europe in the 19th century. That is true, even more, of north-east Asia.
China has made extraordinary progress in the last 15 years. I have been visiting China every year since 1971. Not much changed domestically until 1979, but from then until now, whatever the validity of the statistics, it is visually clear that China is a different society from what it was under Mao. What will this mean for the future? Nobody should make a clear prediction, but a number of things are probable.
First, it is impossible to have such a rate of economic change without at the same time bringing about some political change. At a minimum, the system will have to become more transparent, more predictable and therefore more constitutional. I am not saying they will become more democratic; I am saying that the legal procedures by which decisions are made have to be made more predictable in order to run a complicated modern economy.
Taiwan is one that should be handled with extraordinary care.
— Henry Kissinger
That, in time, is bound to affect the political process. A second evolution will surely be that the balance between provinces and the central government will fluctuate and that the age-old nightmare of the Chinese, how to maintain central authority in the face of a widely individualistic and family-oriented people and regional autonomy, is probably forever unsettleable.
Will China be an aggressive country if it should continue to evolve, as it probably will? Again it depends how you define aggressive. I think it is extraordinarily unlikely that China will embark on a system of conquest like the Japanese or the Germans did prior to World War II. It has not historically been the Chinese style. On the other hand, the Chinese will certainly believe that they should be treated with the respect to which their performance entitles them.
They will be extraordinarily sensitive to slights and they will react very sharply to being treated as if they could be ignored. They will also react very sharply to anything they construe as threats to the sovereignty of historic Chinese territory.
“If the Chinese challenge any country, then we have an issue,” Henry Kissinger said in 1995. David Rowe
Therefore, the issue of Taiwan is one that should be handled with extraordinary care. The Chinese were quite willing to see a gradual accretion in Taiwanese autonomy that might be compatible with the one country, two systems concept. Until last year, very unwisely in my view, the issue of Taiwanese sovereignty was raised as a formal issue. That turned what was an evolution that was not challenged into a crisis. Therefore, I think outside countries should be very careful not to get enmeshed in that issue as a legal issue and to try to deal with it as a practical issue.
If the Chinese challenge any country, then we have an issue that we can discuss but until then, I believe the correct policy in Asia is for the United States to maintain good relations with all the countries of Asia and not to demonise any country before there is a provocation. This is all the more important because it seems to me inevitable that Japan will undergo an extraordinary transformation. The position in which Japan concentrated on economic development while subordinating its foreign policy entirely to the US is certain to end.
Indeed, I am of the view that when this present political manoeuvring in Japan and, after one or two more elections once it is shaken down, we will see something analogous to the Meiji restoration: the re-emergence of a national Japanese foreign policy pursuing Japanese national interests, not necessarily anti-US, not necessarily threatening any one country but also not necessarily following the American lead.
The key of the relation of nations in Asia to each other is different; the essence is different from Europe in one respect. It is inconceivable that the European nations west of Russia would ever settle their disputes with each other by military means except in the ethnic rivalries at the fringes of Europe. It is not inconceivable that the nations of Asia at least consider the use of military means. This gets me back to where I started. It very rarely happens in history, in fact it has never happened in history, that the entire global international system was up for restructuring simultaneously. Not many generations can say that they really have such an opportunity on a global scale.
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