Kissinger: What Next for the U.S.?

The urgent need, he says, is to restore credibility

Henry A. Kissinger is the only person ever to have served as both National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. For a 26-month period, in fact, he held both jobs simultaneously. Thus he is in a unique position to comment on Cyrus Vance's resignation as Secretary of State and on the part played by National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in that stunningly timed departure. In the following exclusive interview with TIME Washington Correspondent Gregory Wierzynski, Kissinger talks of the tensions that arise between the two powerful jobs, suggests some rules that should govern relations between the Security Adviser and the Secretary, and confesses how he realized belatedly that he had violated most of them. Finally, he discusses some directions that the new man at Foggy Bottom might pursue in formulating U.S. foreign policy at this critical time.

Q. If you were in Edmund Muskie's shoes, what would be your agenda of priorities?

A. His first necessity is to get control of the State Department, to establish his direction. My impression is that the morale of the department's members is poor, that they have not felt that they were the central part of the policymaking process. To restore a sense of participation, he has to give them a sense of responsibility. I don't mean this as a criticism of Secretary Vance, whom I admire enormously and whose departure in my view was hastened by this state of affairs.

Then, the next priority has to be the closest possible relationship with the President. You cannot conduct foreign policy as a contest between the President and the Secretary of State; they must be partners, with the Secretary, of course, as the junior member. The relationships that have worked best--say, Acheson and Truman, Dulles and Eisenhower and, I must say, mine and Ford's--developed when the President and the Secretary understood each other's thinking perfectly, and the question of principle between them never would arise.

Third, we need a restoration of American credibility. The President will not re-establish our foreign policy position until he admits this to himself. Foreign leaders, friends as well as adversaries, do not believe that our policy is steady or that it has a clear-cut sense of direction.

Q. Was the President right to make the hostages his No. 1 foreign policy priority?

A. I do not object to the priority but to the publicity. There were two mistakes. One was to proclaim the hostages the central issue of foreign policy; the price goes up by the very importance you attach publicly to the hostages. The other mistake was to create the impression that there was some price we would pay to get them released. This turned it from an issue of principle into an issue of haggling over terms.

Q. What is the way out of the deadlock now?

A. In November, if two or three weeks of diplomatic efforts had not achieved their release, I would have favored a blockade through the mining of the ports. If it had been done very suddenly, it would have been very hard for them to reorient their economy without enormous disruption. And maybe the threat of our doing that would have got the hostages released. Today we have to assess the situation in terms of what alternative sources the Iranian authorities have already developed, basically the Soviet Union. In short what would the real effect of a blockade be? Also, what would be its impact on other gulf states? What is the relationship of the Afghan to the Iranian crisis? Therefore, I think we have to pursue a more patient course than the one I would have advocated in November. We have to be sure we prevail if we move.

Q. You are for attempting to move the hostage issue into the background?

A. If somebody developed a plan with a good possibility of success, I would be urging a confrontational course to demonstrate that you cannot humiliate the U.S. with impunity. But I would oppose some spasm that doesn't succeed. I would not take a step just to placate public opinion.

Q. Are economic sanctions the right course?

A. Yes, but everything has been done in too much slow motion. When you threaten, you must act fast; if not, the other side will have time to build up, to get used to the idea and to develop alternatives. Gradual escalation is the most dangerous course because it allows the other side to match you little step by little step. And when you have finally reached the end of the process, though any one step might have sounded minor, the accumulation of them is massive.

Q. The dialogue with Moscow has been nonexistent since the Afghan invasion. Should the Administration reopen it?

A. In the nuclear age we cannot be without a dialogue with Moscow. It is imperative for the preservation of peace. On the other hand, it is essential that we know what it is we want to talk about. And here we face two problems. I am not sure that our Government has a clear idea of what it wants to achieve in a dialogue. And I am sure that the alliance as a whole is divided as to what its common position ought to be; indeed whether it needs a common position. So the danger is that talks will either become purely atmospheric and give the illusion that progress is being made and thereby ratify what the Soviets have done in Afghanistan, or they will deepen the confrontation. Either course is undesirable. And that is the risk we are running with France, the Federal Republic and the new Secretary of State all planning uncoordinated talks with the Soviets and a European security conference looming in the fall in Madrid.

I believe it is essential that the leaders of the industrial democracies meet urgently for a political summit to develop some strategy so that in the contacts with the Soviets that I favor, there are some coherent positions. Otherwise negotiations with Moscow become a way of self-neutralization.

The absolute imperative to get across to the Soviet Union is that their definition of detente is simply unacceptable. Their definition of detente is to be permitted to defeat us peacefully. They either have to accept that they cannot undertake a geopolitical offensive, or they have to give up detente. They have to make a choice. Look at what has happened since '75: Cuban troops in Angola, Cuban troops in Ethiopia, Soviet bases in South Yemen, Ethiopia and Libya; and in the past few years, there have been the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia under the cover of a friendship treaty, a Soviet brigade in Cuba (which I tell you happened after '76, no matter what nonsense is being put out; dangerous nonsense, because the Soviets know when the brigade was put there), encouragement of terrorist groups all over the world, including Central America. If that process continues, some sort of confrontation is inevitable. So they have to be prepared to speak about detailed rules of coexistence. In return, we must be prepared to talk about both economic relationships and arms control relationships. I would tell the Soviets that there will be no talks in economic and arms control areas until there is progress toward agreed restraint in international conduct.

Q. Has the failure of this Administration been to tackle the problems one at a time?

A. The Administration for several years has proclaimed its opposition to the concept of linkage. It has taken each issue on its merits and therefore has enabled the Soviets to pick those issues for negotiations that were most advantageous to them while being undeterred in other areas. One can say that the Administration has been both too tough and too soft at the same time: too tough in some of its human rights proclamations, which had no practical significance as far as the Soviet Union was concerned; too soft in the denials of linkage, in its hesitations in the face of Soviet expansion and the real reluctance to build a military force, without which we cannot possibly achieve what is necessary. Take the Carter Doctrine. The military budget has actually declined since the Afghan crisis in real terms. The capability to back up the new commitments is not being created. That is a great vulnerability.

Q. Would you favor the stationing of U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf area?

A. Yes. But above all I would favor a visible demonstration so that when we say we will defend something, a rational person would be able to explain to himself how we would go about doing it.

Q. Are you saying that the proclamation of the Carter Doctrine is confusing, or at worst dangerous?

A. It could be, if we do not create rapidly the forces to enforce it. There is a gap between our commitment and our capability. One of the signs that the threatened people so assess it is that nobody among those most threatened and most afraid has been willing to identify himself with it--Pakistan, Saudi Arabia.

Q. Do you have any advice for the Administration on the Middle East?

A. My only advice as the talks proceed is to define a framework that enables Jordan to participate. It is very difficult to have a West Bank settlement without the participation of Jordan. And I think there has been a breakdown of communications with Jordan.

Q. Do you agree, as Brzezinski has stated, that the Third World is where the action will be in the next decade?

A. The Third World is one of several arenas where the action has been in the past few years and much of it disadvantageous to us. It cannot, as Brzezinski sees it, be insulated from East-West relations. It is partly autonomous and partly overlapping. In an Administration that was intending to give top priority to the Third World, we have Iran in anti-American chaos, that whole arc of crisis more and more hostile to the U.S., India and Pakistan both vying for Soviet favor, a Soviet base in South Yemen, the Afghanistan occupation, a Soviet base in Ethiopia, Cubans and East Germans all over East Africa, Central America in anti-U.S. turmoil. And the last conference of the nonaligned passed the most virulently anti-American resolutions in the history of the movement.

Previous Administrations might not have paid adequate attention to the human rights issue, but the simplistic proclamation of human rights has too often undermined pro-Western governments. They are replaced not by democratic alternatives but by totalitarian, radical, anti-American, anti-Western ones. This seems to be happening in Nicaragua. Each of these changes brings a sort of rock slide. We now have crises in El Salvador, possibly in Honduras, and sooner or later this will have its effect in Mexico. So I agree with Brzezinski that we need a coherent policy for the Third World, but we have been too simplistic in thinking the radical elements of the Third World can be won over as partners.

Q. Has the Administration moved too fast toward rapprochement with China?

A. There has been a temptation to deal with China on a purely tactical level--to tighten our bonds when we are annoyed at the Soviets and slacken them again when things calm down. We should not use China to needle the Soviets. We need a long-term settled strategy that does not fluctuate with the ups and downs of our Moscow policy. We have a fundamental interest in the independence and territorial integrity of China. As China gets stronger, it may treat us with greater reserve; we should not delude ourselves about that. But in the next decade or so there will be a considerable parallelism of interest, which we should conduct soberly and really almost independently of our relations with the Soviet Union.

Q. What should the role of the National Security Adviser be?

A. The Security Adviser should not be perceived as one of the chief originators of policy. He should be the orderer of options. He should make sure that everybody gets a fair hearing. If he is a very wise man, he should be occasionally available to inject, on a very private basis, his own judgment to the President, much like the British Cabinet Secretary. He should not appear on television; he should not see foreign diplomats. If he does, he is conceived as the alternative to the Secretary of State. This gives foreign governments the opportunity to try two routes to the presidency. When I was Security Adviser I violated every one of these rules except the one that I never went on television. But I violated the spirit of what I'm saying. Further service convinced me that it was an unsound system. The best Security Adviser I know was General Brent Scowcroft. He had his own views, but you always knew that everybody would get a fair hearing. And he would not present anything to the President that he had not first discussed with the Secretary of State.

Q. When you were Secretary of State and General Scowcroft was the National Security Adviser, he obviously shared your views on foreign policy. Is this a requirement?

A. The top team in an Administration better share the same views after working together for some time. Government is not an academic seminar. If you seek to implement different philosophies simultaneously, the result is incoherence. General Scowcroft and I agreed, say 90% of the time, but we disagreed 10% of the time. If Scowcroft disagreed, he would say so to the President and I wanted him to do that. But I felt that if as Secretary of State I could not present an argument that would prevail over that of the National Security Adviser, I did not deserve to.

If serious people differ, it is an illusion to think that you can go through four years of an Administration like a college debating society. At some point the President has to choose which philosophy he wants to pursue if he wants to stake a claim to leadership. If there are philosophical disagreements, somebody has a problem of principle. The person who has a problem with principle ought to leave. On the other hand, if there is an agreement on principle, your disagreements are tactical and therefore soluble. This Administration has no coherent philosophy. If in the fourth year of an Administration, the Secretary of State resigns over principle, that is not a trivial matter. And it explains why it is that foreign peoples and foreign leaders have such a sense of uncertainty about where we are going.

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