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- [00:00]
Arne Westard
Good evening, everyone, and welcome to tonight's lecture by Professor Neil Ferguson. My name is Arne Westard. I'm one of the directors of LSE Ideas with my dear friend and colleague, Professor Mick Cox, who is in the audience tonight. It's a great pleasure for us to welcome Neil for his third lecture in this series on the Cold War and the meanings thereof today. The topic for the lecture is the grand strategy of detente. And as you all know, detente was one of the big dividing lines in Cold War history. It was one of those that in many ways shaped the direction that the late 20th century took. And coming as it did after the Cuban Missile Crisis, after a period of very intense rivalry between the superpowers, I think a lot of people felt that they had gone from very dangerous territory over to a territory that may be as unknown as the height of the Cold War was, but in many ways more secure. But as you will also know among historians, there is never just one interpretation of events. There are always at least two, if not several. And there are indeed now two schools, generally speaking, among historians, with regard to the significance of the taunt in a broad framework, I think still probably the dominant view is that detente helped preserve the peace and therefore in a longer historical framework, gave peaceful change a possibility, a chance within China and within the Soviet bloc. In other words, the taunte was part of the end game of the Cold War. It gave stability of a sort of and true stability. It also gave the Eastern bloc and China the chance to change from the inside. But then there is also another view of the tante, the Reagan view of the Tante, if you like, that the Tante compromised the values of the west and gave authoritarian rule another lease of life that it otherwise would not have had. Detente, in other words, was a sidetrack with regard to international history. It was when people came into power in Britain and in the United states in the 1980s, undid the approach to detente that Henry Kissinger, who I'm sure will figure prominently in today's lecture, and President Nixon had developed that the push was given to massive pressure to the Eastern bloc to change. That was what created the end of the Cold War. This school would have it, not the period of detente. So there is a great discussion there and a discussion that has a very direct impact on how we see international affairs today. Everyone who makes decisions about war and peace today, they've done over the past 10 years, will have to look back at the detente period, for good or bad, in terms of how they frame their responses to current crisis. In many ways, the significance of the taunt was much greater than any of the decisions that we've seen more recently because this was not just about war and peace in one region. This was about the future of the world in a very direct sense. Now, to discuss this tonight we have Professor Neil Ferguson, who is professor of History at Harvard, also teaches at the Harvard Business School, and this year Neil is the Philippe Roman professor of History and International affairs here at lse. We already had the pleasure of listening to two of his excellent lectures on the history of the Cold War and the implications of the Cold War for today. Today we are going to listen to him give his version of the grand strategy of the Tante. Please welcome me. Please help me in welcoming Professor Neil Ferguson.
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Professor Neil Ferguson
Well, thank you very much indeed, Arne. It's a great pleasure to be back here once again to continue this series of lectures. Don't worry if you missed the previous two, this will still make some sense. I want to take this opportunity tonight to really make the first lecture, deliver the first lecture that I have delivered on the subject of my next big research book. For about five years now, I've been gathering material on the life of this man, Henry Kissinger here seen in just a few of his myriad roles during the Cold War. And so what I'm going to do is rather unorthodox. I'm going to deliver a lecture about a book I haven't yet written. In the old days when historians did things like this, they would call the lecture something like Towards An Approach to Some Fragments of the Life of Henry Kissinger. That was what a medieval Oxford historian would have done. But those days are past now. That's nevertheless what it is. It's not even a sketch of a first draft. It's not even work in progress because I've scarcely written a word. And so the conclusions I offer you here aren't conclusions at all. They're more in the nature of hypotheses. And I wouldn't really know whether the hypothesis has been falsified for another two or three or possibly four years. You probably saw in your newspapers just a week or two ago a very unfortunate quotation that came from some just released transcripts of conversations between President Richard Nixon and various people, including his National Security Advisor, later Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. This particular bleeding chunk of telephone conversation hit the headlines for fairly obvious reasons. And I want you just to reflect for a moment on these words. I'm not going to do his voice. I can do it, but I'm not going to. The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern, maybe a humanitarian concern. NIXON I know we can't blow up the world because of it. This was in March 1973, and you can imagine the storm of indignation from Kissinger's habitual critics when this transcript was published. I. I'm not going to pass judgment on it now. Suffice to say that it is a very dangerous thing to take anybody's telephone conversation and slice it into snippets and quote it out of context. When was the last time it happened to you? When was the last time it happened to almost any major historical figure? Because one of the things you have to understand right away about Henry Kissinger as a historical figure and also about Richard Nixon is that they are almost unique in the extent to which their every utterance is documented, the extent to which every conversation, telephone and in the room ended up on tape. And because of the extraordinary interest of journalists of that time in the Nixon administration, not only on tape, but then transcribed onto paper, this has been the fate of very few statesmen in history. And one has to ask oneself what the telephone transcripts would have looked like of other major figures had they been recorded and written down. Christopher Hitchens has been Henry Kissinger's most ardent, certainly most rhetorically creative critic for many years now. His book Trial of Henry Kissinger, which started life as a series of articles in that renowned scholarly publication Vanity Fair, isn't, in fact, a particularly distinguished work of scholarship. I actually counted 12 primary source documents referred to in the footnotes for the entire book, which for most historians would be considered a relatively small number of documents. And in fact, it would almost be mathematically impossible to express that as a percentage of all the documents that one could quote in writing a book about Henry Kissinger. Nevertheless, Christopher Hitchens leapt back into battle from his sick bed. It should be said Hitch is very ill as soon as this quote hit the press, and with a characteristic flourish, he managed to describe Kissinger as, quote, the only unindicted conspirator in the Nixon Watergate gang and the perpetrator of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor, and several other places. I'm trying to think which these other places might be, but perhaps that will be revealed in a subsequent volume. So you must understand that anybody who starts to research the life of someone like Henry Kissinger, in a scholarly way has a major headwind to deal with the headwind of journalistic judgment that has been passed and continues to be passed on this individual. Was it something he said? Was it things that he did one way or another? It is very hard to think of any figure in modern public life in the United States who has been the object of quite so much violent criticism. If you Google Henry Kissinger, you'll. You'll see what I mean. Really? Millions and millions of hits, nearly all of them written in anything but scholarly language. Does the public view of Kissinger so vitriolic, so vehement, have something to do with, well, something other than what he said and what he did could perhaps have something to do with the fact that he was by birth, if not by observance, Jewish? This is a question raised by the young and talented American historian Jeremy Suri in his recent book Henry Kissinger and the American Century. I think this book is more friendly towards Kissinger than many others. Still, with friends like Suri, who needs enemies? He describes Kissinger in this book as I quote, a hybrid of the court Jew and the state Jew. What we might tentatively call the policy Jewish. For Suri, the most important thing to grasp about Kissinger is the way in which he uses his relationship to power, not just with Nixon, before that with Nelson Rockefeller, to achieve social and political upward mobility. It is an old story and I must say I found myself, as I've read my way through the. The anti Kissinger polemics varying from the scurrilous to the more respectable, being reminded over and over again of things that I read before when I was researching the history of the Rothschild family. There's no question that some kind of nerve is touched by this man and that it's a nerve very like the one the Rothschilds touched. This is not to accuse anybody of a conscious anti Semitism, though anti Semitic critics are certainly out there and were very visibly out there on the right of the Republican Party when Kissinger first entered public life. There's a very striking vignette that I came across in his papers when he attends his first Republican Party convention. I think it was in 1964. And as he's walking into a meeting room, a rather alarming young man with a crew cart is ticking off the names on the list. Kissinger's name isn't on the list, but he says, oh, Kissinger, we know you. Kissinger's account of that first encounter with the Goldwater right is anything but an enthusiastic one. He certainly felt ill at ease in those early Encounters with the 1960s Republican Party. That kind of thing still exists in American public life. But it's not really the key to understanding the well established anti Kissinger literature. On the contrary, quite a lot of that anti Kissinger literature has been written by, by Jewish journalists. Seymour Hersh most notably, but there are plenty of others. Rather, the anti Kissinger tradition seems more rooted on the left than on the right to have emerged from the politics of the 1968 generation for whom he became after Nixon the symbol of all that they resented most bitterly about the foreign policy of the United States and more besides. The problem that I have with much of this literature, not only the work of Hitchens but also of Hirsch and others, is that it is essentially a critique of methods. Either Kissinger is some kind of American Machiavelli engaged in an unpleasant cynical realpolitik in which mere human life is but something to be weighed in the scale of policy or he's a cringing sycophantic court Jew sucking up to Tricky Dicky no matter how offensive the President's remarks. But this is about, this is about methods. This is about modes of operation in power. It's not about what the power is being used for itself. And what I want to try and do this evening is to shift the emphasis away from techniques, away from means and back to the thing that historians should be most concerned with, what the ends, the purpose of policy is. If we look at, at the so called crimes that Henry Kissinger should be tried for in the eyes of someone like Christopher Hitchens, if we set those in the context of American foreign policy after World War II, it doesn't really seem as if anything very different was happening in the Nixon Kissinger years or for that matter in the Ford Kissinger years. People often need reminding that he served two presidents. The proportion of the literature that's about the Ford years is tiny and yet really a great many important things happened in that period, not least in American policy towards Africa. If you look at what happened in the post war period, what you see is a succession of American interventions, some successful, some, some distinctly unsuccessful, some very overt, some distinctly covert, some proactive and some simply reactive to Soviet efforts in a whole variety of countries. And in every case you can point to the country, to the scene and say some crime was committed there, people lost their lives, hands are bloody. But you can't really claim with any degree of credibility that, that there was something worse about American foreign policy towards chile, say in 1973 than there was In American foreign policy towards Guatemala in the 1950s and 1960s, I would argue that a great many more people died as a result of what happened in Guatemala than what happened in Chile. You might say to yourself, who's counting? But it is important to count. The difference between 200,000 people losing their lives and 2,000 or so losing their lives is a big one. And that is the kind of order of magnitude we are talking about here. Exact figures for the political victims of the Pinochet regime can be argued about, but it was certainly in terms of political murders somewhere in the region of two to two and a half thousand. The number of people who lost their lives as a result of the protracted civil war in Guatemala, a war which the United States intervened in, often in support of the people committing the worst violence. The number of people who died in that case were closer to 200,000. So these differences matter, even if they are the grim differences between piles of human bodies. My question for you, ladies and gentlemen. This is one for the sleepier people to wake up for. It's where are these books? Because I can't seem to find them in the LSE library. I've looked. Maybe they're back at Harvard, where we have such a vast budget for buying books, but I somehow doubt it. The Trial of John Foster Dulles, conspicuous by its absence from all libraries in the world. Dean Rusk and the American Century. I can't seem to find it. Can you, Arne? Why did the things these men did as Secretary of State somehow count for less? Did the people whose lives were lost as a result of policy decisions they took, did these people count for less? Why is it that one Secretary of State alone is singled out for this special historiographical treatment? That seems to me to be a valid and important question to ask, ladies and gentlemen. In my view, we need to assess grand strategy, overarching objective of a foreign policy as far as possible in context. In other words, we don't just endlessly write about the misdeeds of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger until we know something about what preceding administrations did, until we know what Eisenhower and Dulles cooked up, until we know what LBJ cooped up with Dean Rusk, not to mention Robert McNamara. Some of you, incidentally, will have seen the film that was made about McNamara, the fog of War. I've been working on a comparable film about Kissinger, which ought to really be called the Clarity of Peace. But I hesitated to be quite so ironic. You can't make judgments, particularly moral judgments, about a foreign Policy strategy if you do not take account of the circumstances of the context. Friedrich Meinecke's great essay on causality and values in history, one of the greatest methodological essays ever written by a historian, still bears reading today. Any value judgment you may be inclined to make needs to be based on an extremely rigorous reading in the archives, an extremely careful thought process about causation. Then and only then when you've established both context and causation, dare you presume as a mere academic in the comfort of your study to pass judgment on what those in power who bear the responsibility of power have done. I want to suggest to you this evening that Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, they worked closely together on what I'm going to describe, confronted five problems, real and large problems, when they came into office after Nixon's 1968 election victory. And I'm going to try and explain to you how those problems were linked and how they sought to solve them. I'm going to begin in Vietnam and I'm going to begin with the first of a number of quotations from Kissinger's private papers which I've been privileged to see. This is from a diary that he kept of a trip to Vietnam in October 1965 when he was Harvard professor. Unusually for a Harvard professor, he traveled quite a lot. We don't do that anymore. And this diary contains the following entry from 20 October after a meeting with Clark Clifford who was later to succeed McNamara as defence secretary. I felt that the issue of Vietnam was vital for the future of the United States, writes Kissinger. Clifford then asked me what I thought of the position of the President, meaning Lyndon Johnson. I said I had great sympathy for the difficulties of the President but what was at stake here was the future world position of the United States. Clifford asked me whether I thought the Vietnamese were worth saving. I said that that was no longer the issue. The date bears repeating 1965. Kissinger was already well aware as early as 1965 that it wasn't going to work. The policy that the Kennedy administration and then the Johnson administration had slipped into of trying to preserve South Vietnam as an independent state was fundamentally doomed to fail. That's very clear from the diary. But that was no longer the issue. What was at issue was the connection between the United States involvement in South Vietnam and its wider strategic position. That kind of connection, sometimes he called linkage, is central to understanding the Nixon Kissinger strategy. Lets reflect for a moment for those of the younger generation who may not have the numbers inscribed on their memories on the scale of the Vietnam problem. By the end of 1968, in other words, before Nixon and Kissinger entered the White house, more than 30,000 U.S. service personnel had been killed in action. More than 180,000 had been wounded in action. Around 368 were missing in action, most of them at least, many of them prisoners of war of the North Vietnamese. Popular support for the war fell below half of the American public in July of 1967. The first objective of the Nixon administration was to reduce the number of American lives that were being lost in each week in that war. Just remember the number of lives that had been lost at that point before they came into office was 10 times the number of American service lives that have been lost so far in the entire war on terror in both Afghanistan and Iraq. A far larger war, in other words, than anything going on right now than anything the United States has done since. This chart shows you how close the connection was between casualties and the popularity or rather unpopularity of the war. The red line is a cumulative total for killed in action and the blue line is the opinion poll approval rating of the war. This is a chart I've published before in my book the Rise and Fall of the American, but I don't think I published this one. It's worth looking at. What this chart shows you is the extraordinarily rapid decrease of American casualties in the Vietnam War after Richard Nixon became President to the point that by the time he was re elected American casualties in Vietnam had essentially ended. This is a very important point to notice and sometimes it seems to be forgotten by those polemicists like I'm afraid, Christopher Hitchens, who have a tendency to conflate Democratic and Republican administrations and lead unwary readers to believe that it was in fact the Republican administration that started the war in Vietnam rather than the Democrats who started it and the Republicans who ended it. I'll say more about problem number one later on. All I want to do now is just sketch what the problems were. Problem number two was of course the Soviet threat. Here is another Kissinger quotation, or rather three, which I think give you a sense of how Kissinger saw this problem even before he came into office. Forgive me, this is quite a texty, wordy lecture but this is a man of words. One cannot understand a figure like Kissinger without reading a great many pages of stuff like this. And I've just tried to extract some of the gold from the great morass of words. The Soviet Union has caught up with and surpassed us in more categories than are comforting. That was one of Kissinger's pitches for public attention in 1960, when he really made the shift from being an academic to being a public intellectual. We're in trouble. It is not true, as some people argue. This is a very revealing quotation from an unpublished paper from 1963, that history is an inevitable advance towards progress. Certainly Kissinger believed that. I will not be particularly reassured by the fact that 300 years from now the erosion of human events is going to take care of communism if in the meantime we as a society have been destroyed. In May 1969, he observed that the US was going down the tube, quote, as a great power. You can't understand the situation of the United States in 1969 without realizing that that was a plausible reading. The biggest challenge that we face as historians is to forget what we know happened next and to put ourselves in the moment that contemporaries inhabited. It didn't look good. The situation did not look good. And I'll show you more evidence to that effect right now. The Soviets could do many things badly. They could not make clothes at all well, but they could make nuclear missiles and they could make a lot of them. Indeed, they could make more of them than the United States, a democratically governed government country which had at least some restraint on the military's appetite for hardware. As you can see from this simplified chart of nuclear capabilities in 1974, the Soviet Union was, if you did a simple warhead count, quite a long way ahead of the United States in the unrestrained arms race that had been going on since the Cold War really kicked off. Since, in fact, the Soviets had managed to steal the technology and work out how to make first an A bomb and then, crucially, a hydrogen bomb. Remember what a dangerous world this was? The world of an unrestrained nuclear arms race. The world in which the Soviets could outbuild the Americans in terms of destructive capability. And think for a minute, remind yourself of what the destructive capability was. Because we forget too readily in these days of terrifying terrorist outrages of the sort that even can happen in this city. We forget what the potentially vast consequences would have been of even a single nuclear missile being fired in anger during the Cold war. By the 1970s, the superpowers had enough explosive capability to unleash 400,000 explosions of the size of Hiroshima. In fact, by some estimates, they had the capacity to destroy the human race 15 times over if they used all the weapons at their disposal. We forget this because it had a happy ending. We assume, as I said in a previous Lecture the that the long peace was bound to be both long and peaceful. No it wasn't. As I argue in the final lecture. It was by, in many ways by luck as much as by design or rational calculation that no hot war broke out. Kissinger in one of the very first television interviews he ever did and we've managed to find surviving footage of it is very interesting to see him make his first television debut. The voice is at a much higher pitch, the hair is much shorter and like many a novice broadcaster he makes the mistake of looking not at the interviewer but straight at the camera when he answers the question. Never do that. Probably, he said the Russians are considerably ahead of us in the missile field because they have rocket engines which have a thrust far greater than any we possess of the moment. This kind of belief in a missile gap had been fictional but important in the politics of the 1950s. It was real in the politics of the 1970s. By then the Soviets really had achieved the missile gap that had been imaginary before. Problem number three. You knew I was going to bring this up because you knew that I have an interest in economics but it is actually very important indeed. Now it's interesting that in his multi page three volume memoir Kissinger does his best not to talk about economic problems and indeed his line on this is always that he doesn't do economics, he does geopolitics. Go back to the documents of the Nixon administration and the Ford administration you'll find a completely different story. These things could not be separated and Kissinger regularly weighed in on on all the complex issues of the day. Trade protection, currency manipulation. Remember that the future of the Bretton woods system of exchange rate pegs. This was as much a part of American foreign policy as anything I've talked about up until now. And indeed it was inseparable from the problem of an American retreat from Vietnam and an American problem with the arms race, namely that the Soviets were winning it. In the Necessity of Choice, that best seller he wrote in 1960, Kissinger writes a Russian seeing the growth of the communist empire over the past 15 years would not naturally come to the conclusion that its system of political organization was basically wrong. If the issue is simply the relative capacity to promote economic development the outcome is foreordained. In other words, from the vantage point of Kissinger writing then, a straightforward economic contest might be one that the Soviets could win. Now we laugh at this sort of thing now knowing what we know about the Soviets economic problems we are cursed by this hindsight. It makes it so hard for us to remember what it was like to be alive in the 1960s and 1970s when it was far from clear that the Soviets were going to fall apart economically. Paul Samuelson, the great doyen of Keynesian economics, whose textbook every economist had to read until quite recently, had an edition of his textbook, an early edition in which he projected that Soviet GDP would exceed that of the United States before the end of the 20th century. People believed this stuff, even and especially apparently smart people. Why did they believe it? Well, look at the numbers. Here is a chart that shows you the annualized growth rate on a quarterly basis for the US economy adjusted for inflation. The black line smooths it out into a five year moving average. The blue line is the one that you probably would expect to see in the Financial Times. And you don't need a Nobel Prize in Economics. They're not worth having anyway. But you don't need one. It's not a proper Nobel Prize. It's very important to bear that in mind. Should you ever meet somebody with a Nobel Prize in Economics, you point out to them that's not a proper Nobel Prize, that's just from the Swedish Central.
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Arne Westard
Bank.
- [36:17]
Professor Neil Ferguson
Or is it the Norwegian? You can see that in fact the Nixon years were years of economic disaster for the United States economy. Recession upon recession, negative growth rates, quarter after quarter after quarter after quarter, and a clear downward shift in the trend growth rate of the US economy. No wonder they were worried. And that isn't even telling you the story of stagflation. The combination of low growth and high prices which I talked about in my first lecture on the political economy of the Cold War. You see, it all adds up. This chart here shows you the percentage of US GDP accounted for by four rival entities. The top line is the six who had founded the European Economic Community. The red line is the Soviet Union. The blue line down below the dark blue line is Japan. And the sort of unpleasant green line is China. The communist countries were not achieving rapid growth, but other countries in the developed or Western world were. They were clearly catching up. I mean, look at this. Just six European countries had by the late 1970s a combined GDP, 70% of that of the United States. And then you had Japan zooming up from 10% to nearly 40% share. The United States felt its economic dominance, its primacy slipping away in the 1970s. It felt it because it was just because it came back in the 1980s. Because we know that doesn't mean, of course, that they saw it coming. The fourth problem is an extremely important one to understand and that is the problem of domestic political crisis or domestic political weakness. This of course is what we all think of when we think of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. We think of Jane Fonda paying a visit to North Vietnamese air raid or rather anti aircraft installations and smiling gleefully as they show her how to shoot down American planes. That mood which exploded into violence not only on university campuses but in African American ghettos. That mood was a very big part of the problem in the eyes of both Nixon and Kissinger. Both were haunted by Spenglerian fears of American decline. Not surprisingly for a boy who had had to flee Nazi Germany just on the eve of the dreaded Kristallnacht pogrom, who had lost his grandmother in the death camps, who had returned at the end of World War II in an American uniform to see the reality of the concentration camps at first hand. Not surprisingly for Henry Kissinger, born Heinz Kissinger in Furthest in southern Germany, one of the strongholds incidentally of the National Socialist Party in Bavaria. Not surprisingly, the fear of a second Weimar Republic was alive in his mind. I think when one looks at the situation in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is not a fanciful fear. It was a well grounded fear compared with the America we know today, which has always been described as polarized, which because of recent tragic events seems suddenly once again to be more violent than this country. Actually the United States of the late 1960s and early 1970s was much more violent. Think of the string of assassinations that characterized that period. Think of the level of political violence that led to students dying at Kent State. It wasn't just fighting in the streets though. One of the most important things you have to understand about Nixon and Kissinger is not said often enough is how weak their position was in Washington itself. Now everybody knows that Nixon did very well as a presidential candidate. When he finally did win, he won big. 43.4% of the popular vote in 1968 and a smashing 60 plus percent when he was re elected in 72. That's the second highest ever in American history. He won 49 out of 50 states. Only Ronald Reagan matched that. But in other respects this was a weak administration. The Republican share of votes cast for the House reached its post depression nadir in 74. The same was true in the Senate in 1970 and 74. In other words, midterms went badly for Nixon's party, very badly indeed. The Democrats, people forget this, had majorities in both the House and the senate. Uninterruptedly from 1955 to 1979. What's more, those majorities grew in the Nixon years. The key you have to bear in mind when asking yourself what why were they so paranoid about the press? Why were they so concerned with secrecy? Why did they want to use back channels when they dealt with the Soviets? The key is to understand the weakness of their position in Washington D.C. few presidents in all American history have been weaker with respect to Congress than Richard Nixon. And that of course explains a crucial point that when it came to to willing the means for, for example, the policy of propping up South Vietnam, Congress could essentially starve Nixonian foreign policy to death. And that is ultimately what happened after Nixon's departure. The final problem is the one that I talked about in my last lecture before Christmas. What I called the Third World's war. The fact that Nixon and Kissinger were in office at a time of great instability in what we then called the Third World. Nixon, Kissinger rather liked to think of the world in what we would now consider an old fashioned way. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington and then goes to Tokyo. But he knew, and we know this from his extensive papers, he knew that that was not the world any longer that he and Nixon lived in. We're now living in a never never land in which tiny, poor and weak nations can hold up for ransom some of the industrialized world. He grumbled to his staff in 1974 at the time of the Arab oil price hike. In a recent collection of essays that I co edited with Daniel Sargent at Berkeley and Charlie Meir and Eres Manela at Harvard called the shock of the global. We argued that this was really the defining characteristic of the early 1970s. This was a time when globalization as we know it today was born. When the world moved from a simple bipolar order into far more complexity, into a multipolar world, into a globally integrated and interdependent world. The birth pains of interdependence, the birth of a truly global society. These are phrases from Kissinger's papers. As early as 1968 he said the age of the superpowers is drawing to an end. Reminder if you missed lecture two, the post 1945 world was very violent. Not as violent as World War II, but but nevertheless pretty violent. We call it a cold war, but it wasn't that cold. If you just look at the sheer number of people who died as a result of wars in each decade, one more than 2 million. And the 1970s were though not by a huge margin, but in relative terms the most violent of these decades. The slightly larger proportion of the world's population dying in violence, in war. Okay, those were the problems, the five problems. I'll be testing you on them later. What was the strategy? The strategy I think was this one. To Vietnamize the war, basically to take American troops out of Vietnam as fast as possible and then to use other issues to try to achieve linkage to the Vietnam peace talks in such a way that the North Vietnamese would give ground even though they knew they were winning. That's really the essence of part one of the strategy. Part two of the strategy was a sincere effort to reduce the risk of a hot war, to put some kind of lid on the crazy nuclear arms race that had been raging for two decades. Notice also the importance of West European integration in Kissinger's model. He saw the building up of Western Europe as an independent power with its own more or less independent nuclear deterrent as an important part of American strategy. Part three of the strategy was to play hardball on money, on currency issues and on trade. And the Nixon administration did not, always with good consequence. Part four, for reasons I hope you now see, was to limit the influence of Congress, of the media and indeed of the hated bureaucracy over the policy making process itself because they couldn't be trusted and I think that was a legitimate concern. And finally to seize all available anti Soviet opportunities. Anything that came up that might in some way weaken the Soviet position, particularly in the so called Third World, they were willing to give a go. The most important of these, which is almost more important than that implies, was of course the opening to China. And I'm sure in the discussion. We'll talk some more about that. In my view that was the single most important thing that Nixon and Kissinger did and it fundamentally altered the geometry of geopolitics to the advantage of the United States and to the disadvantage of, of the Soviet Union. Moreover, the benefits to China took a considerable number of years to flow through. So this was a deal in which the United States did most of the winning. Even although the Chinese thought that they were being terribly clever, it was advantageous to them. But I think on balance, and indeed for at least two decades it was more advantageous to the United States. Then there was the other great Kissinger victory. Kicking the Soviets right out of Egypt, taking Egypt within the embrace of American aid and diplomacy and making the United States the arbiter of power in the Middle East. That was a truly important strategic move that was not bound to happen of itself. And then, of course, there are the notorious episodes, the opportunism which characterized the American response to the overthrow of the Allende regime in Santiago, in Chile. I stress opportunism because at this point, and I want to make it very clear once again that this is a preliminary report at an early stage in the project, I can find no evidence that the United States contrived the events of 1973, merely that they welcomed those events. They certainly tried to prevent Allende becoming president in 1970, but they failed in 1973, as far as I can see from the documents, came as a welcome, but nevertheless a surprise, a welcome surprise to Nixon and Kissinger. We now come to the intellectual heart of the matter. If you are pursuing a strategy like this, aiming to tackle five interrelated problems of great complexity and aiming to tackle them from what you perceive to be a weak position, there has to be an ordering of priorities. You cannot attach equal importance to every country, to every crisis. You need to rank them. What happens in Chile, this is Kissinger in 1970, will have an effect on what happens in the rest of Latin America and the developing world and on the larger world picture, including relations with the ussr. You can believe it or disbelieve it as you choose, but this was the same man who wittily described Chile as a dagger pointing at the heart of Antarctica. Chile in itself didn't matter. Chile mattered within the grand design. And it clearly, it had to be understood and dealt with in that context. For that reason, the United States should not judge other countries on the basis of their domestic ideology. And that, after all, is the main objection that the liberals make to what Nixon and Kissinger did. That they were not squeamish about doing deals, doing business with dictators, as if by implication they should have made policy decisions purely on the basis of the squeaky clean or otherwise credentials of these regimes in terms of political and civil rights. You'll see that there's a tension between that concept and the notion of grand strategy that I'm presenting to you. And that should make you remember that first quotation about the fate of the Jews of the Soviet Union, made with characteristic harsh words. Kissinger's point to Nixon in that notorious quotation was nevertheless a statement of truth about American foreign policy. The fate of the Jews of the Soviet Union was not as important as the grand strategy of the Nixon administration. And that was a fact. That was a reality that he, more than anybody else, had to grapple with. Imagine, imagine what it means to say something like that, when you personally as a Jew have seen a Nazi concentration camp liberated. The misreading of this quotation not least by Hitchens but many other people seems to me to go to the very heart of their misreading of the man. Far from being immoral, Kissinger seems to me to be somebody who grapples endlessly with the fundamental moral problem of choice of priorities which is at the heart of any meaningful foreign policy. The second point I want to make to you is that this was a game, a great and dangerous game. And that was exactly how Nixon and Kissinger discussed it. There's a great exchange in 1971 when, not long before the planned visit of Nixon to Beijing after Kissinger had gone there to set the visit up, there's a terrible piece of news that scares them mightily. The Chinese cancel the traditional October the first parade and they're wondering what this means. And some people in the intelligence community say that maybe Mao has died. This is Kissinger's reading. Well, he says if they, the Chinese were jittery about the Russians and if that is all this is, then it actually means our game is succeeding and that will help the later evolution quite a lot. Policy in Vietnam will depend on how our relationship to the Chinese and Soviets has developed at that point. This was the linkage on which so much hinged. This was the game. The game was to outmaneuver the Soviets using not just the Chinese but particularly the Chinese to that end after it came off, after Nixon's triumphant visit to China which really was one of the astonishing events of the post war world. Well worthy of an opera. These are the words they exchange. They're really extraordinary. We have them recorded in our film but they bear reading too. We've played a game and we've gotten a little break here. We were hoping we'd get one and I think we have one now. This is the closest Richard Nixon ever came to being happy in his whole life. I truly think that the only moment of near happiness that that man experienced. And Kissinger replies, but we set up this whole intricate web. When we talked about linkage, everyone was sneering. Yeah, I know, but we've done it now everything is beginning to fit together. That was what they were trying to do. Who won? Who won the game? Well, many historians would say they lost big time. And indeed Kissinger himself in his book Diplomacy, considering many years later the situation at the end of the 1970s almost seems to agree. Cuban military forces had spread from Angola to Ethiopia in tandem with thousands of Soviet Combat advantages in Cambodia. Vietnamese troops backed and supplied by the Soviet Union was subjugating that tormented country. Afghanistan was occupied by over 100,000 Soviet troops. The government of the pro Western Shah of Iran collapsed and was replaced by a radically anti American fundamentalist regime. Whatever the causes, the dominoes indeed appeared to be falling. So is the key to this man that he played a game, a great game, a complicated game, and ultimately lost. Is that how we should understand his life? Is that how I should write it? As a study in heroic failure? Well, I'm not so sure. You see, before you can criticize any policy and condemn it as a failure, you have to be absolutely explicit about what the alternative outcomes might, might have been. How things could have turned out better. Let's consider what the implicit counterfactuals are in the critiques of Kissinger that I've mentioned so far. The liberal critique implies that Nixon, Kissinger should have walked away from Vietnam practically the day they took office. Just pulled everybody out and let the Soviets do whatever they felt like anywhere. South America, Africa, you name it. That's the implicit liberal critique. Just walk away from it. Walk away from it. And then there's the Reaganite critique which Arne mentioned in his introduction. A far more hardball stance. No more Mr. Nice Guy going hard against Moscow. Before you can say that Kissinger and Nixon truly failed, you have to be sure that these alternative policies would have produced a better outcome. A lower body count, a stronger United States. And I don't think that that is by any means self evident. On the contrary, I think it's perfectly plausible to say that if the United States had adopted an ultra liberal foreign policy in 1969 or an ultra hard line foreign policy in 1969, the 1970s could have been a whole lot bloodier than they were. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of counterfactual you have to ask. It's no use just imagining that the alternative is John Lennon's Imagine and they sit around and sing. That's not the world of Para. That's the world of universities. And by the way, if you're a connoisseur of Kissinger Nixon conversation, their Conversation on Academic Life is one of the great classics. I very, very nearly played it to you tonight, but I'll leave the enthusiast to seek it out on the web. It's a truly wonderful exchange. One of the funniest things to come out of the latest releases. Let me try and reinforce this argument with a quote from very early on 1951, long before he enters the realm of power. It's a long quote, but it's worth it. So you're feeling sleepy? Just pinch your thigh. I will find that works. It would be straight enough on US wisdom to be suddenly projected into Britain's traditional role. But a more awful responsibility awaits us. The injection of an ideological element into policy makes self limitation an almost unattainable ideal. Each side tends to play for absolute security, which means absolute insecurity, a neutralization for its opponent. Maybe Europe will recover its morale and provide an independent force. Possibly the emergent east will furnish another center of power. If so, the United States should play in relation to Eurasia the traditional role of an island power toward a landmass to prevent the consolidation of that continent under a single rule. I know that there's a tendency to point to the religious toleration following the wars of the Region Reformation as a possible substitute for ideological conflict. But surely the significant point is that this balance was achieved only after a 30 years war. Spoken like a historian spoken or written like a man born and raised in Germany. I'm going to conclude with two brief reflections. One about our contemporary predicament and the other about what I regard as the philosophical core of Kissinger's strategy. Do we need a grand strategy today? We do. We don't have one. One of the striking things about United States foreign policy under the Obama presidency is the complete absence of a grand strategy. It's improvisation, it's speeches. There's no strategy. Trust me, I've been there. And I know General Jones, the National Security advisor, recently departed, was no Henry Kissinger. I'll just kindly leave it at that. And yet the problems seem comparable. The set of problems in fact seem analogous. The problems of 1969, wars not going tremendously well, smaller admittedly than Vietnam, but nevertheless expensive wars. The rise of a communist rival, this time a real economic contender. For the first time since 1872, another power seems poised to overtake the United States in terms of gdp. The aftermath of a financial crisis. Not stagflation, but just stagnation. Maybe stagflation to come. The polarization of domestic politics that leads schizophrenic young man to murder a congresswoman in Arizona. And then even more bizarrely, a populist Republican to claim that it's a blood libel to accuse her of having fomented the violence. No, this all begins to seem quite familiar, at least to me. And then uncertainty in what we now call emerging markets because we don't call it the third World anymore. Do we? We call it emerging markets. The instability in, let's say, Tunisia, which could spread for all we know. We're on the very edge of a new wave of revolution this time in North Africa and the Arab world. These seem like reasons to have a grand strategy. Isn't it strange that the United States has nothing like one? Oh, and by the way, remember that chart I showed you? The one I showed you up to 1980 where, you know, the United States had to worry a little bit about the Europeans? Well, just look at where that little green line went. That's not a projection. According to the purchasing power parity adjusted GDP figures that the Conference Board publishes, G China's GDP is already 90% that of the United States. A bigger challenge than Nixon and Kissinger had to worry about. Let me conclude my conclusion has two parts. The first thing you have to understand when you come to write about power is this. It's what Kissinger brilliantly called the problem of conjecture in what I consider one of his most brilliantly written passages. Perhaps the deepest problem is the problem of conjecture. In foreign policy, each political leader has the choice between making the assessment which requires the least effort or making an assessment which requires more effort. If he makes the assessment that requires least effort, then as time goes on, it may turn out that he was wrong and then he will have to pay a heavy price. If he acts on the basis of a guess, he will never be able to prove that his effort was necessary. But he may save himself a great deal of grief later on. If he acts early, he cannot know whether it was necessary. If he waits, he may be lucky or he may be unlucky. It is a terrible dilemma and it is, remember the fate of preemption. My second and final point is what Kissinger called the tragedy of choice. This is a letter which has never been quoted in public before and it's an appropriate place at which to conclude this lecture. To me, he wrote, there's not only right or wrong, but many shades in between. The real tragedies in life are not in choices between right and wrong. Only the most callous of persons choose what they know to be wrong. Real tragedy comes in a dilemma of evaluating what is right. Real dilemmas are difficulties of the soul provoking agonies which you in your world of black and white can't even begin to comprehend. It would be appropriate if this letter had been written last week to Henry Kissinger's numerous critics. Those critics who have never done anything braver than write an article for a magazine or give a Lecture at a university. But no, that is not who the letter was written to. The letter was written to his parents in 1948 and I think it gives you a clue, a little clue. That's the kind of book I'm going to write about him. Thank you very much.
- [63:53]
Arne Westard
Thank you very much, Neil. It's a brilliant lecture, absolutely stunning in terms of presentation and I enjoyed it very much. It's not the same thing.
- [64:01]
Professor Neil Ferguson
It's not in terms of content.
- [64:02]
Arne Westard
No, no, no. I was getting to that as I usually do. I was getting in that direction now in terms of interpretation and particularly in terms of motives and you touched upon this in the, in the lecture. There's one thing that I always wondered about and wondered even more after I saw Jeremy Suris book and indeed some of the most recent releases from the tapes and from some of the documents that he used and that's about how much of this came not out of grand strategy as such but came out of rather deep mistrust not just of his or their political opponents in the United States but came out of mistrust of the American people. When I read Kissinger and particularly the pre presidential Kissinger and you absolutely write in lining up as you did in the, in the lecture, the significance of what he wrote and what he discussed in the pre presidential period coming out of the 1950s, there is one thread that goes through all of seems to me that the American people can't really be trusted to fight the Cold War. So therefore there has to be political leaders with the vision and the courage to do it for. And of course coming into the White House in 1969, this is very much what he tells Nixon as well. Nixon has just been elected President and of course last thing he wants to hear is that you can't trust the people, they've just elected him. But this is basically what Kissinger tells him. You can't leave key decisions to anyone except a very small circle with the President as the head and the chief decision maker. The less it seems to me he employs, the less ordinary people know about foreign policy making, the better. We are off. Now I'm wondering in terms of how you define the grand strategy. I mean quite correctly I think in terms of what Kirsinger wanted to achieve and what probably more importantly Nixon wanted to achieve. How important is that? I mean how important is this distrust? That there are very great issues at stake And I think you're right in saying that some of that comes out of his experience in coming back to Germany after the war ended. I Mean, these are serious matters. It's not a decision that he makes just, you know, because he wants to keep ordinary people away from decision making. How important is this distrust of the Americans?
- [66:22]
Professor Neil Ferguson
I think it's very important, Arnie, but it takes completely different forms in the minds of the two men. Kissinger's view of the American dream is as starry eyed as you could wish to find because he is in many ways the supreme beneficiary. Here is a man who is a political refugee who arrives as a teenager in the United States in 1968 and has to work in a brush factory in Washington Heights. And he ends up being Secretary of State, second highest office, the only office an immigrant, the highest office an immigrant can, can hold. It's an extraordinary story. And my sense from interviewing him and also reading his, his papers is that he retains in some ways a rather romantic view of the American people. It's multiple subgroups of the American people that he regards with suspicion. And this was where he and Nixon converged. Nixon as well had an uneasy relationship as Kissinger points out in one of the interviews I did with him to people he had, as Kissinger says, to force himself to be a politician. It came completely unnaturally to him. He was deeply misanthropic, an insecure person who hated meeting people. And once he got to be president he tried to avoid them as much as possible. They're very odd couple in that respect. And what brings them together is that Kissinger plays on Nixon's hostility towards obviously the Democrats, the press, the academics and the multiple ethnic groups that Nixon hated because they were Democrats. I mean, people frequently misunderstand this point about his view of the American Jews. You have to remember that it's not just some kind of bilious anti Semitism. It's born of Nixon's brutal political career. And he had been through every pounding that the American political system could administer to a man. So when Nixon said to him, not so much you can't trust the people, but you can't trust the press, you can't trust the academics, you definitely. And so on, you definitely can't trust the bureaucracy because they've all been to Harvard, all Nixon's insecurities, I think, responded to that. So while they had very different views, I think of the people, I think if anything Kissinger was more romantic about the people. Remember he goes on this great Heartland lecture tour in the Ford years when he decides that actually this policy can be sold and that ordinary Americans, if only you can get to them, will get It. It's the people in Harvard Yard and in San Francisco who don't get it. But Kissinger really believes that Middle America is okay. I don't think Nixon is so sure about that. But what they agree on is that there are these different groups conspiring against them. And like so many paranoid fantasies that one encounters in life, just because they're paranoid doesn't mean it wasn't true.
- [69:34]
Arne Westard
Other questions? Yes, we won over there. We'll take a couple of them joined together, but take that one and then the one right next to it. Yep, please.
- [69:42]
Professor Neil Ferguson
Yes, hi, I would like to ask on the use of counterfactuals you employed in your presentation, could also somebody ask. You said that the outcome could be worse but could also be a better outcome if another policy was chosen.
- [69:57]
Arne Westard
And then the one right next to. On that side. Yeah, please. That was very interesting.
- [70:02]
Professor Neil Ferguson
Thank you very much.
- [70:02]
Arne Westard
Could you highlight possibly significance or relevance of Lincoln's predicament in the Civil War.
- [70:09]
Professor Neil Ferguson
Regarding the use of the Emancipation Proclamation to effectively change the course from a position of weakness? Does that relate at all to that first slide you showed? Gosh, I seem to have wandered into a different lecture seminar. Did I fall asleep? Is it next week? And are we doing the Civil War?
- [70:34]
Arne Westard
This is the grand comparison seminar.
- [70:37]
Professor Neil Ferguson
Well, funnily enough, I was thinking about Lincoln today and musing about how Lincoln would have fared in a Nixonian world. I mean, how would this man, who after all, had his second term cut off even more brutally than Nixon's wars, Howard Lincoln, who was certainly not one to mince his words, have fared in the world of telephone transcripts? But it's hard to. I think it's hard to make a real analogy between the time of the Civil War and the time of, say, civil rights. There is, of course, a huge relevance there. In one respect, Nixon would not have become president had it not been for the civil rights rights issue splitting the Democrats. They controlled Congress on paper, but they were deeply, deeply divided on this issue. And that's how he came to be in the White House. Really. So the shadow of Lincoln does indeed extend all the way across to Nixon. The tragedy is that whatever they had in common, Lincoln ends up the giant, the titan, the most, in fact, if anything, the most revered of presidents and Nixon the most reviled. But you're right, there are certain commonalities in their Republicanism. I think that's. That's an important and interesting point. The counterfactual of a better outcome is. Is, of course, as important as the Counterfactual of a worse one. I think at the moment, the way I see it, the counterfactual of a worse one is easier to visualize. You just have to imagine a hot war. You just have to imagine the situation in 1973 just slipping a little bit further out of control than it did as they raised the alert level to DEFCON 3 and beyond. I want to stress again, it was not a foregone conclusion that the Cold War would end without a hot war being fought. And because it had that outcome, we should not conclude that it was bound to end peacefully. I do think that salt. SALT one. That the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty contributed to a real change in the dynamic of superpower relations. And I think it's not too much to say that Nixon and Kissinger began the process of taming the Soviets, who had gone through a phase of extreme overconfidence. I think by the time they'd opened to China, the Soviets were ready to talk and talk much more seriously about arms limitations than had been the case before. In that sense, I think linkage works. What would a really happy 1970s have been like? That's the question. Let's imagine Allende stays in power in Chile. Just to take the almost favorite counterfactual implied by Kissinger's liberal critics, one has to remember a couple of things about the Allende regime. No matter how much one one wants to revile Pinochet, Allende's regime was chaos. It was chaos in the sense that the economy was in chaos and not just because of American sanctions. And it was politically in chaos because the Supreme Court and the Chilean parliament had said that he'd acted unconstitutionally and had invited the military to remove him. So the counterfactual of America stays out of Chile and they all live happily ever after. Doesn't work for me. One of the points I tried to make in the last lecture was that the 1970s would have been pretty violent. The decolonization era would have been pretty violent even without the superpowers getting involved. They probably made it slightly worse, maybe a lot worse in some cases. But it's hard to imagine that in the absence of superpower intervention, everything would have been fine. And remember, in a counterfactual in which the United States is less aggressive or less interventionist, are we imagining the Soviet Union follows suit? Because that's quite a stretch. A Soviet Union which doesn't intervene in Third World politics, well, that's the Soviet Union in a parallel universe, very far from this one. So my sense is that While in theory we could imagine a happier 1970s, it's a lower probability, less credible counterfactual than. Than the worst one that I'm suggesting could have happened. But thanks for the question. It's the right question to ask.
- [74:49]
Arne Westard
I agree with you on the latter. But I still think I prefer the continuation of Chilean democracy to its own continuation. But we can discuss that later. Neil, upstairs. Yes, please.
- [74:57]
Professor Neil Ferguson
Can we discuss it with heavy security?
- [75:00]
Arne Westard
We can discuss it over a glass of wine which is much more costly. Yes, please.
- [75:04]
Professor Neil Ferguson
Yes. Well, thank you for this fantastic lecture. Quick question. How, how would you summarize what is the end game of the game? You describe the problems and very much the tactics to resolve these problems. But is there any such thing as the end goal of the game? Is it peace? Is it wealth? Is it power?
- [75:28]
Arne Westard
That's very good, thank you. It's an excellent question, but I have to take another one. Anyone else upstairs? So quiet up there. You're just at the front over here. The front? Yep. In the middle please. Thank you very much for the great lecture. Actually we are looking at how the Chinese are reacting about the currency issue, the whole issues and the emergence of Chinese market and the way they are reacting towards their neighbors, towards Japanese and all those kind of things. And how the American people are facing the problems in Iraq and Afghan wars. How you think that these all issues are going to end. Thank you very much. We are wide ranging today, aren't we? We go from Lincoln to Iraq and I'm sure we will go back, Neil.
- [76:14]
Professor Neil Ferguson
Well, these two questions are actually interrelated in an interesting way because it's in the nature of the game that it never ends. The game of power doesn't just stop like a chess game or rather it's like one of those chess games you play with your 11 year old son, which whoever wins the first game there's got to be a second game and whoever wins has to be a third game. And you keep playing until he falls asleep. That actually happened to me last night and the reason was that he won the first game. But the game of power, and it is about power is unstopping, unceasing and it's those people who believe it can be stopped in some utopian resolution that usually do the most harm. If everything had gone according to plan for Kissinger and Nixon, then clearly South Vietnam would have survived and they would have would not have had to fly everybody out of Saigon in 1975 and clearly Indochina as a whole would not have plunged into the chaos of which Cambodia's tragedy was the worst manifestation. That clearly was not the plan. If everything had gone according to plan, there would have been no Watergate and Nixon would have served out his second term reaping the rewards of, of his considerable intellectual effort. I think it bears saying that this was a highly intelligent administration. You can call their morality into question though I would challenge that. But you certainly can't call their intelligence into question. So they had setbacks, they lost, they won with China and they won I think considerable, considerable amounts of ground from the Soviets. But then as these games do, it slipped away. Domestically, I think it slipped away most totally. That was really where the plan failed. And that of course was not part of the strategy. Kissinger was in no way connected with the Watergate events, despite that quotation that I read from Hitchens. That's a complete slur. He was absolutely otherwise engaged when those events went on. And there's just a complete compartmentalization of Nixon's life between the stuff you do for reasons of re election and the stuff you do to try and stick it to the Soviets. So the game could have had a better outcome, particularly for Vietnam. But if you think of the five things, I'd say it was really defeat in the domestic political arena. Partly self inflicted, but partly inflicted by the Democrats that condemned them to failure in Indochina. The success in the Middle east was real and enduring. I mean Carter actually got the ultimate fruit of that success, but the foundations or the seed was planted by Kissinger. The success I think in bringing the Soviets out of the arms race into Arms Limitation Talks was real and enduring. And endured of course, ironically into Reagan's presidency when he turned out to be as big a believer in detente as any of the people he'd slagged off in the 1970s and the opening to China. And this brings me to the second question. Was the most enduring success of all? What bigger game changer in the post war world was there than to sweep the China of Mao and Madame Mao and the Gang of Four into history and bring into the world or act as midwife to the China of Deng Xiaoping that really transformed the world and it's transforming our world more profoundly than any other single thing to have happened since 1945. But the game never ends because that worked fine for decades. It made the United States more prosperous for decades. As China grew, Chimerica grew, the Americans benefited for reasons I've discussed at length elsewhere. But we're now in a new game, a new game which is unfolding before our very eyes in which China goes from being the junior partner in Chimerica to being a major rival. In many ways a scarier rival than the Soviets ever were. We don't know what the Chinese will do, but I guarantee they will have a grand strategy.
- [80:46]
Arne Westard
On that. We most certainly do agree. Yes, that's the question here in the middle, in the striped shirt. Yeah.
- [80:55]
Audience Member
Well, I was going to say you stole my thunder slightly in answering one of the questions, but, I mean, might seem like I'm slightly jumping above my station, but nonetheless, touching on what you said, it's clear that Kissinger was acutely aware you can't opt out of the game, but nonetheless, largely, that's what Europe today has done and we're yet to see whether America will opt in or opt out of the game. And we talked about how America was constrained by public opinion, but in many ways Kissinger's grand strategy was enabled by it because there was the specter of nuclear annihilation that made people aware something had to be done. But now, without those quite so clear superpower blocks, there is that sort of sense in which we can opt out, maybe, you know, fund the NHS a bit more, sort of roll out some more educational maintenance allowance, you know, let China creep around the world and, well, we've opted out. Is there anything that can make a Democratic west opt in, or will it simply procrastinate the difficult decision to the point where it's simply too late to take it?
- [82:01]
Arne Westard
Okay, there was a question at the back.
- [82:03]
Professor Neil Ferguson
What's a good question? You can come back.
- [82:05]
Arne Westard
Yes, please. Can we use the microphone? Yes. A lot of the.
- [82:11]
Professor Neil Ferguson
It seems to me a lot of ire of American intellectuals against Henry Kissinger is because the Jewish American experience is overwhelmingly politically liberal. And he was a conservative in that he was a brilliant intellectual and power broker. That is very much a Jewish experience. But the fact he was a conservative isn't. How much was the criticism of Henry Kissinger from people who like him because he was so very much like them and yet unlike them. What a feast of good questions we're having tonight. Well, you raised two issues, I think, one about Europe and one about the United States. The notion that Europe, you'll remember from the presentation that Kissinger really believed in a resurgent Western Europe as an independent player was not mere lip service to European pride. He genuinely didn't want them just to be satellite states. Kissinger did not want a bipolar world, he wanted a multipolar world. And he wanted the Europeans to step up, as did Nixon, step up militarily, as did as well as diplomatically. And I think Europe has been as disappointing in that regard as China has exceeded his expectations because that, remember, was what he anticipated. He has a great way of conceptualizing it. He says we can't be the balancing power and the balance of power if there are no other powers, if it's only the Soviet Union, but we can be, once there are some other powers. We need there to be other powers. We need a strong China, we need a strong. A strong. And we need a strong Europe, and we also need other powers besides Japan. So Europe has disappointed and I think will continue to disappoint because ultimately the project of European integration has never really been about military power. To go back to your question, what's the game about? The European game is really about wealth, about economic integration, and it's not, contrary to generations of politicians, boring speeches, it's not about peace in Europe. I mean, if anybody says to you in the course of the next year, oh, the great achievement of the European Union is to prevent war in Europe from happening, please tell them that's crap. You know, please, let's lay that absurd claim to rest. The one thing the European process of integration has not done has been to effect the military policies of European powers. That's the one thing it doesn't do. The reason there's not been a war in Europe is much more to do with NATO, much more to do with American foreign policy than it has to do with, you know, Jacques Delors, Henry Kissinger famously asked the question.
- [84:59]
Arne Westard
Who do I call when I want to call Europe?
- [85:04]
Professor Neil Ferguson
It had to call, see, I can do it. And of course, in those days there was no answer, but now there is an answer. What's her name again? Lady something. It begins with a. It begins with a. Henry. So, yeah, I mean that, that, that says it all, doesn't it? The US could, I think, enter a new. A new era of isolationism. I think that's not beyond the bounds of imagining, partly for the reason you give, that the stakes don't seem high enough. Unless there's a regular terrorist outrage in a major American city, the stakes don't seem high enough to sustain wars that last this long in places that far away. And I think that also for reasons I've touched on elsewhere, that there is a major fiscal problem building in the United States that will simply make an aggressive overseas foreign policy impossible. Right now there is a scenario that the Congressional Budget Office has costed. You can go and look on its website, and that is a scenario which reduces American overseas troop deployments to 30,000 men. 30000 if they are making that kind of serious forecast about how they can save money. We are actually moving rapidly towards an era of serious American withdrawal beginning in the greater Middle east but potentially worldwide. So you raise a really extremely important question. Finally, how far was Henry Kissinger's opprobrium the opprobrium which was heaped upon him a function of his conservatism? It's a complicated story because in many ways Kissinger was, although a conservative by the standards of the time and certainly an intellectual conservative, he was not a conservative in the American political sense of the word at all. And indeed he might just as easily have ended up being Democratic in a Democratic administration. In fact, he did serve the Kennedy administration. That's when he had his first job in Washington. He really went both ways politically. And I know as somebody who's crossed the Atlantic that that's not so hard to do because we don't fit readily into either of the big American ideological camps. The liberals are kind of too, and the conservatives are too. And so you, which I described, you know, his experience with the Goldwater rights. These people are scary. But what's really important and what you kind of left out of your question is that there are a whole bunch of American Jews who are neoconservatives. In fact, the whole neoconservative movement is propelled by Jewish intellectuals who think he's too soft on the Soviets who think he's too soft on the issue of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. He is in the middle of a lot of crossfire. He's got the left, all those people who now have kind of shifted their geopolitical orientation but can't quite say goodbye to their 1960s positions. And then he's in the crossfire from the right, from the neocons who consistently argue that he was too soft. Right to this day, even despite what Reagan did to them in the mid-1980s. So this story of Kissinger's Jewishness shouldn't be central to the argument. It is in Suri's book. And I think that's wrong because it's not central to his life. One of the most significant things about that letter I quoted at the end is that it is a letter repudiating his parents orthodoxy. And so one of the things we have to understand about Kissinger is he was raised as an Orthodox Jew and he broke with that. He broke with that upbringing decisively as a result of his experiences in World War II. He is a secular figure who needs to be understood in the tradition of Western philosophy. Spinoza, Kant, Spengler. The people about whom he wrote his monumental senior thesis, which every undergraduate should look at just to realize how inadequate we are today. Are we stopping?
- [89:26]
Arne Westard
Yes, I think I might do.
- [89:27]
Professor Neil Ferguson
In that case, thank you all very much indeed.
- [89:41]
Arne Westard
Thank you very much, Neil. This was a feast in terms of questions. And most of all, it was a feast in terms of intellectual and presentation ability. The feast is not entirely over. Neil will do his fourth lecture later on this term. And you're welcome back for that one, Neil. Thank you again very much.