A Conversation with Henry Kissinger | Intelligence Squared U.S.

[Music] hello and welcome to a very special live event brought to you by intelligent squared us in collaboration with the how to academy and bloomberg i'm john michaelthwaite i'm editor-in-chief at bloomberg today i'm joined by henry kissinger and our subject is his new book leadership six studies in world strategy henry welcome thank you for joining us this is an unusual interview to the extent that often you get pestered by me about matters of current affairs and this time as i said we are focusing on your book which is about basically six leaders um conrad adenauer and charles de gaulle who are arguably the architects of germany and france after the second world war we have richard nixon who perhaps doesn't need much introduction to the viewers here anwar sadat the egyptian president who launched both the yom kippur war against israel and then helped the peace process with israel lee kuan yew the creator of singapore perhaps a model for china and margaret thatcher um who came from the country where i came you knew all these people and by looking at them and looking at their leadership your argument is that we're able to learn from the past so in in accordance with that we will follow the narrative of this book but also try to say some things about the current at the end we will have a small quick fire quiz which i think is a novelty for you on the book i'll only say one thing to the broader audience is that we will discuss hopefully the bigger issues that you raise but as a reader the delight of it often is in the small details i didn't know that both anwar sadat and adenauer were both arrested during the second world war um adenauer for allegedly plotting it's hitler sadat for trying to help irwin rommel beat the british in the desert there's also a series of delightful vignettes at one time you pushed de gaulle um to try and persuade him that he should let the americans be a greater presence in europe and you point out that if he doesn't do this he might have to cope with the rising germany how could anyone contain a rising germany you ask and the aloof frenchman replies palaga by war anyway the book is full of these things let's begin with the two people who rebuilt their countries after the second world war charles de gaulle and conrad adenauer adenauer um is former mayor of cologne as i said he he certainly struggled against hitler and then he took over germany and rebuilt it and by extension did some degree of rebuilding europe and while all the time forcing germans to think about the sins of their past and i suppose the first question for you i have for you is if you were at an hour now and you looked at the current germany both suddenly spending more money on weapons than the soviet union bigger defense budget it's talking about soviet union was a was a freudian slip then russia um but at the same time resisting kind of nuclear fuel resist relying on russians for for a lot of its gas and with these odd tensions within germany how would adenauer look at germany today well on one level he could take pride in his achievements the germany reached a position of equality and now potential leadership within within europe to even dare to think that at the time when he was elected when germany had been smashed by the war by the wars society had collapsed uh so he'd be quite proud of that but on the other hand uh he might be a little uneasy maybe more than a little uneasy to find his country now potentially having the largest army in europe and fearing that one of the great positions of his life was that he came from the western part of germany that had been annexed by prussia at the end of the napoleonic wars and he was never at ease with the present attitude that relied on power and organization and he came from the part of germany that had softer values and i think he would ask himself now and he might warn his people to make sure not to lose their soul in their accomplishments do you think he would see germany as too prussian then is that no it's not present at all now but it is very focused on material achievements and it will soon have the largest army in europe which is good for a united europe but the evolution of europe is less than clear so i'm not saying these tendencies are dominant but uh for i know he would warn against him my favorite character in the book i have to admit despite being english is de gaulle um who's an incredible but insufferable man i think comes through and i often sympathize with americans who had to deal with them you depict very well the world where roosevelt i think desperately wanted to get rid of him and churchill somewhat against his own will protected him then when when france when when de gaulle goes into the liberated france um he basically gives the americans no kind of kudos for having done d-day it's all about the french and then he repeatedly resists attempts by people including by you to try and do things and i wonder whether you think that de gaulle defined france too much by being against america in some way or by being different to america the goal was the the overriding concern of the goal was what he considered the collapse of french of of the friends faith in itself and of its basic values and he believed even at the time that when he was in in britain at the very beginning and he had no military forces uh and all the other troops that were there to help britain were speaking of victory and he spoke of the regeneration of france and so his concern was that america was so powerful that if he followed american guidance he would not restore the friends self-confidence and faith in itself it was more and he was very trying at one point when the british reconquered madagascar uh roosevelt asked her to why he didn't pack off the call to medicare get rid of him but but do you think de gaulle was fundamental do you think that idea of france that defined itself a bit by being the country in europe that didn't accept american domination do you think that do you know he wouldn't accept american domination but he would cooperate for example in the cuban missile crisis yes and also in the various crisis over berlin uh he needed it needed to be an existential thing you you say in your book that when the cuban missile crisis came in he came in very hard behind america but the rest of the time he was a pain whenever the united states put forward a proposition and on the assumption that there was no question about accepting it one could be sure that he would not accept it yeah do you think france still has a gaulist foreign policy you you you say that at one point yes i think france has a college streak in its foreign policy so the most articulate advocate today of a european autonomous military force as macron the french the french president and that is an inherent aspect that france has to define its own strategy and its own policy but it is in my opinion it's prepared and it expects to cooperate with the united states but it is not taken by legal formula that obliges to do things uh that other than on the basis of a french analysis of the situation so to that extent it still follows the way that de gaulle looked at the world which was very much he was he was almost france first in the same way as trump was america first and uh and when the socialist media didn't follow him immediately but i made down that mitteron pursued a very similar policy you you use the example de gaulle blocked britain's entry into the european union or what is now the european union was he right well the sad things in policy are when both sides are right the girls thought that britain would never be a wholehearted member of the european community that it might make operational decisions together with the european community but the instincts of britain were across the seas and so he thought in that way it was weakening uh europe at the same time he thought of himself and of france as the country that could balance germany which has been a historic friends ever since the 30 years war french objective and so for both of these reasons uh he was never at ease with britain in the european community and plucked them twice when you look at modern europe you can there is mackerel has got trouble he has now got a socialist parliament you have a new chancellor in germany who has not made a particularly strident effort on the global on the european stage you are mario draghi in trouble do you think there is do you think european leadership is unusually weak at the moment well european leadership does not have the sense of direction and mission that brought europe to its impact in the world europe is now more focused on on its economy and less on the political role it could play or even less its strategic role and that is a sadness because the great achievements of the west came from the sense of mission that the europeans had and enabled them to achieve astounding results of course there were many weaknesses in that too colonialism was not necessarily was not at all the attractive aspect but the great qualities of which the west is now proud came out of a european sense of purpose beyond the immediate practical objectives and that kind of outward looking self-confidence is now gone it's not it's not so obvious now we talk a bit about richard nixon um you recount how when he initially asked you to be the national security adviser you asked for more time and you also say that on balance if you were him you would have just rejected you on that basis not least because eisenhower as he confessed to you had said that it was ridiculous to appoint an academic and you shouldn't shouldn't appoint an academic anyway um but if that if indeed nixon had said no on that basis and you you you fortunately i think ran into nelson rockefeller who told gave you a rocket and said um uh ring him immediately and say yes but imagine that and not happened you know how would nixon's foreign policy without you would there have been a big difference well first it's important to understand that i had never met nixon when he appointed me i and on the on the contrary i had been a friend and collaborator with nelson rockefeller who was nixon's principal yes opponent for two president in two presidential races uh primary races so when i was invited to to meet nixon uh i didn't know what to expect but amusingly he did not offer me the position when he invited me to come to see him because he had an element of insecurity that made him very reluctant to do faith possible rejection and so we went through the first meeting together without my knowing exactly what the purpose of the meeting had been and then after a few days john mitchell called me up and said well are you going to take the job or not and i said one job and i heard mitchell mumbled something about another screw-up and uh then i was called back to see nixon and this time he did offer me the job and i foolishly told him i needed time to think about it and until nelson rockefeller said to me has it occurred to you that he's taking a much bigger chance on you than you on him do you think but do you think that he would have done different things if you would not be you are always put together people talk about nixon and kissinger did this nixon and kissinger did that do you think he would have done something different without you i certainly made a significant contribution to what nixon achieved nixon made an overwhelming contribution to whatever i was permitted to do so i feel deep gratitude to him and we really acted as as colleagues he had an extraordinarily good sense for the political and psychological capacities of other leaders and he was extremely courageous in the sense he made a very difficult decisions and he had a basic principle two basic principles you paid the same price for doing something halfway as for doing it completely or whatever has to be done ultimately needs to be done immediately so there may be weakness in that occasionally but that that guided him i was more analytical and we supplemented we supplemented each other do you think he was better do you think nixon was a better foreign policy president i mean obviously everything is shrouded by watergate but do you think nixon was a better foreign policy president than a domestic one he was a very good foreign policy president and he destroyed himself domestically but in there he made important decisions but he did not have the same conceptual strengths in domestic policies in foreign policy one time you you talk about the us being in a very similar place now to what it was in the late 1960s when when nixon came in and you say it's it america has now gone from exuberance to over extension and then to self-doubt in the same way as it did in the sixties and also the us now faces interlocking challenges to its strategy and its values all the way around the world um and you then say you think we need a nixonian flexibility now how would you define that if you're if you're in the white house what would be the nixonian flexibility that we need now when needs an analytical understanding of the essence of the strategic and political problems and then try to find a solution uh based on what makes the biggest contribution to a uh creative outcome and nixon demonstrated that for example when in 1967 when it was not fashionable at all he favored he wrote an article advocating an opening to china i never knew that it was it was really interesting that was new to me and i'll go a step further it was sort of a liberal view that one might at a moment open to to china but he carried it a step further into building uh a chinese policy into its strategy vis-a-vis the soviet union the theory being that if you have two adversaries it is pointless to attack them both and so we defined our policy in that period in a 20-year period that we would always try to be closer to either china or russia then they were to each other so that we always had more options than they did and that worked for about 20 years we'll come back to that issue about the ends and the means in a second i just wonder one individual thing because you deal with it the yom kippur war i mentioned it earlier how close do you think israel was to losing that war i don't think it was close to losing the war in the traditional definition of losing a war but there were moments uh particularly on the third or fourth day of of the war when the egyptians had crossed the sewers canal and managed to establish a defensive line that the israelis couldn't breach and then later on that week again uh the israeli defense minister and chief of staff recommended to call the mayor that she seek a ceasefire that would have been a huge blow to the state standards of israel and also to its initial in internal position but they were not actually losing the war but the pattern of politics would have changed significantly did you do you deal with sadat in the book and what's interesting about him is out of these six leaders he in some ways seems the sort of greatest failure to the extent that there is much less of his legacy left um the old thing about sea you know if you if you want a monument look around you um egypt is he he did create this peace with egypt but many of his other achievements as you say have have gone away and i wonder do you think that was to do with him or was it to do with what was wrong in in egypt it's in a way a tribute to his extraordinary quality which he however was not able to implement when it said that began in life as an anti-british terrorist really and then in all his practical politics he was on the side so did some israeli leaders you could point out but yes yes yes but uh that's true and and then he maintained that position uh through starting the uh yom kippur war and the essence of that position was that there were inflexible demands that would have to be met before arab or arab leaders would engage themselves uh sadat came to the point that he was willing to adapt the demands but at the same time was raising the objectives but when he came to speak in when he went to jerusalem uh the first arab leader who had ever done that and said i have not come here to settle and he listed a lot of specific issues he said i came here to create a new philosophy of how arabs and israelis and how nations in general to deal with each other well that was of course heretical and in this manner he isolated and thereby doomed himself but he still brought about the egyptian peace settlement and some syrian aspects of it but it shows both the quality of overreaching and the inability to set limits to its reach but he didn't manage to set to achieve something more lasting other than that one bit of peace well i hate to quote myself but uh i'd say in the book you think it's the last sentence about that the egyptian history the ancient egyptian history was based on the eternity of of great art and so he was based in millennia whilst de gaulle was merely centuries which is it's a form of progress lee kuan yew um there's a wonderful bed in your book where you have lee kuan yew comes to harvard and there is a group of professors your erstwhile colleagues there and they have a long debate about how terrible vietnam is and um whether america is merely sort of psychopathic or or deeply wrong and eventually he stops they ask him what he thinks and he says you make me sick um and then goes on a long lecture to them about how it was important to places like singapore that america stayed how important it was for america to play a role in asia because china would be a major force and small countries like singapore needed some america needed some outside friend friends and so he objected to americans running themselves down at it and i wondered which i mean that was a particularly demonstrative example of it but i wonder if you put lee kuan yew beside joe biden now what would he tell joe biden to do about china from the same perspective i think because i've often heard him elected americans on that and me the importance of understanding the permanence of china that one could not eliminate the chinese problem so therefore one had to find a way of living with china that it was very important to prevent china from becoming the hegemon of the world but it was also important to recognize that this could not be achieved by permanent confrontation and that was one of his basic themes and would apply that to biden now he would that means dealing with china on a long-term way i presume i think that and previous administrations have been too much influenced by the domestic aspects of the view of china and that it is of course important to prevent chinese or any other countries at germany but that is a permanent assignment that is not something that can be achieved by uh endless confrontations but it rather will require some occasional periods of adjustment but also periods of confrontation but above all is strategic design do you think at this moment china is in a weaker state than it was before it's got all the problems with covered it seems to have made itself more unpopular in the region i think it's it's dangerous to to judge that that's on on on a short-term basis china certainly at the moment has an array of of problems and uh but whatever judgment one makes of that uh china has seen itself as the central kingdom and acted like that it's not an attitude we can accept it's an attitude we must resist but it is not the same as conflicts between european states in the medieval period and afterwards because the scale of the problems and also of the efforts are greater and they're not so many other balancing forces in asia as they are as they were in europe do you think lee kuan yew just on the domestic side of china do you think that singapore i know it's much smaller lee kuan yew used to say he was the ruler of 224 square miles at low tide but it's small but it has been a model a little bit for china deng xiaoping famously came and saw what he liked what he saw i remember being there once the xi jinping was about to come just before he was made head of china to go and visit lee kuen you to sort of learn from him do you think that singapore is a decent model for china to try it that's like the best that china can be going forward domestically well the great achievement of singapore is that here is a multi-ethnic state whose components had been fighting bitterly against each other it has no natural resources whatsoever and the and when lee kuan yew created the state he really didn't create it he was tossed out of malaysia and it looked hopeless and he decided that he would build on the only resource he could find which was the potential excellence of his society and so that is a confusion principle and led to spectacular results in but and but whether china can ever give up the notion that there is a special quality of its governance and that therefore its relation with its neighbors at least will always be at the edge of overbearing that is i that's the big difference between between being a small island that has to deal with other people the whole time and being the middle kingdom yes and i don't know how comfortable it would be if they were two billion singaporeans in the world quite a terrifying idea uh margaret thatcher um i'm tempted to say who do you think had the least sense of humor between her and she'll degaulle but who had the word because thatcher i think had no sense of humor and there doesn't seem to be much sense of humor with sheldogall no no she was no but she could have a very biting commentary yes you you have a very nice bit where you describe um you're giving a speech and you quote bismarck and thatcher is sitting there um and she doesn't know who you're quoting and she asks somebody um and they say they they say they say it's bismarck and she says bisma otto bismarck the german time to go home and march is off there is a i i put it to you there's a contradiction which i'm sure you want to answer between two different things in your book you you give a lot of praise to adenauer and de gaulle in terms of bringing constructing europe you also praise thatcher for the bruges speech and for i suppose what many people would see the beginning of brexit how do you square that do you think europe should be more integrated or do you think it should be more integrated and britain should not be part of that well i would not have been an advocate of brexit but i understood it do you think thatcher was a brexiteer i think sacha would have been comfortable with brexit and she she was willing to be cooperative with europe but she heard the essence of her strategic and political convictions was the anglo-saxon world and she would never be comfortable with decisions that were made by parliaments they did not have a national base one other thing on thatcher which struck me is that some people looking back at thatcher now thinks think she went too hard she changed britain dramatically but in the process she laid waste too much in northern england the industrial heartland scotland wales these all became areas which faced a long time of not being able to recover thousands of companies went bankrupt and some economists say she didn't need to go that hard do you think that about that in terms of i'm i'm not an economist i know from her own conversations that she thought she had no that she had no other choice and that it was her duty to bring principles of of capitalism into the british system and of market economies and that britain having gone through years of settling down after the war into more and more difficult circumstances that this was her overriding duty i don't know enough to judge whether she could have done this more kindly but usually great reformers have concepts of their goals and do not show the same compassion for their opponent you also quote lee kuan yew saying he had to knock a few heads and i suppose another question similar to that is that a criticism of the kind of great man school of history that the individuals matter which is a big part of your your your your thesis is that sometimes that does mean you end up saying well look the end they were achieving justified the the means they went through whether it's whichever way and i wonder if you look at all these characters or indeed what you know you were involved in if you if you look at any of things where you think actually the the means did not justify the ends it wasn't worth the cost of pursuing these things well if you take the goal he had decided that that france had to give up algeria yes which had been french possession for 150 years populated by a million frenchmen and he decided that there had to be a final cut that was a great decision because it ended in an internal civil war but it was also an extremely brutal decision and the manner in which it was executed one would like to think had a more compassionate component but then compassionate advocates of that view never appeared in the history of the algerian so i would say that the goal was very harsh on the french settlers who had parsley brought him to power but was anything else was the end probably justified the means here about that i'm just not prepared to go that far yeah because i'm not familiar enough with the damage that you're describing what about what about with nixon i mean given especially your role do you think there were bits where nixon in foreign policy the cost was too great we have things like getting out of vietnam and things like that these are traditional arguments for you but though nixon inherited a ten-year-old war with 550 000 americans in place and he wanted to end it honorably which the vast majority of the american people wanted which we defined as not imposing a government on the people who in reliance on our american promises had made sacrifices and run risks whether every strategic move was avoidable it's easy to judge in retrospect uh if you take for example the bombing of cambodia which happened in the first months of nixon's administration he came in determined to end the war but to determine to end it in the manner that that i described he had written to ho chi minh offering a thing he meant to achieve a negotiated outcome the vietnamese replied by launching an offensive that cost a thousand americans in less than a month and most of the casualties caused by vietnamese by vietnamese forces stationed in cambodia in total violation of any international agreement and so he then started bombing those uh those concentrations if one had time in an academic seminar to discuss the pros and cons one could come to very sophisticated conclusions but these decisions had to be made within a week or so within a month of having come into office and the arguments and that uh are endless yes i know they've been a constant in your life can i ask you about something direct and now which is this issue of ukraine very quickly is i know as part of the interviews for this there's this idea that you you think that ukraine as part of a settlement with russia should see what some of what it sees as its territory particularly crimea do is that still your is that a fair way of describing your position no my boots my position erodes in this following circumstance but before i i give that i'd like to point out that i've been explaining this now for months if you read what i actually said i never said what you mentioned but it's it's now generally accepted that i must have said it what i said was this the war will have to be ended by negotiation at some point and that point is coming closer so what would be a basis on which a seeds fire could be achieved and i said disease fire could best be achieved along the line where the war started thereby ending all the russian conquerors and defeating aggression however there is a slice of territory beyond that line especially crimea which the ukrainians say it's theirs i would leave that open to the negotiations after after deceitfire by the war over crimea which had been russian for many centuries it's a war with russia and i wanted to draw a dividing line do you think do you do you think putin just to reverse it a bit do you think putin would remotely accept a deal where he was taken back to his starting point in this war no my deal was not designed to be very attractive to putin in fact it was supposed to indicate that to be a rather hearty deal right now ukraine rather occupies 20 percent of ukraine uh and that would have to be given up under my proposal to achieve its ease fire thank you thank you for making that clear on can i can i ask you one last thing on the book and then i'll ask you is quick for our series of questions um one thing you point out is that all these leaders they all came from middle class lower middle class backgrounds they all rose through education and you have a bit at the end of the book where i think you you appear to be warning that you worry that education systems aren't able to do that any longer is that fair i think that this is true uh for a society to be great uh its key elements have to believe in the worthiness of the society and the great periods in history that one studies have this common feature now in at least some of the american institutions uh the worthiness of the country is in itself the issue within academic discussions and if a country is is driven by endless attacks on its history and on its previous views of the future it will have a very difficult time to look at the great things that have to be done it bothers me in america a great deal you so you think that i suppose putting it in simple terms sort of walkery generally or what seems to be happening in american universities is damaging to its future leadership class i'm afraid very interesting um well i promised you we would we would end by i would end by asking you a series of questions about your your heroes or your the people you've chosen um the rule is you're only allowed to choose one or possibly two to answer this um and i will ask you a variety of questions about what they which one you would choose the first one is which one out of those six people we've discussed would you most like to have dinner with probably said a brave man um assume they were all born american today which one would you want most to be in the white house probably league one you which one do you think would be best at negotiating with vladimir putin on the issues we just talked about well decal with his peculiar particular style i think that's better but i i would think that the nixon would be quite good would be good i'll just ask about a longer term problem um dealing with climate change which one of those six would be the person who'd be able to understand that and forge away dealing with what climate change i think league one you i think he seems to be doing well in this um finally at the very end we are we're our time is normally up but one which is deeply personal at least to you and me um i have known you for half my lifetime i think a quarter of yours and during that course the one thing that has united us especially which seems particularly ironic seeing we're talking about great men is that both of us follow not great football clubs i follow leicester and you follow first a camp cub which it should be said you supported even as a young boy when i think it was being run by nazis if um leicester has its own problems at the moment despite your occasional praise for them but firth has just been relegated so which out of these six people would you want to manage the erstwhile great football club or not that great football club of firth to manage which club yours you could give one for lester as well that would be great but i i don't think my club is which is now in the second yes it's been relevant division after having won i think only four or five games in the whole season it's responsive to greatness do you think leicester city is responsible to great greatness do i think leicester is respect responsive to greatness well let's uh at this moment and expansion had an unexpected league championship yeah that's true i think on that note i think on that note which is um one of great optimism to me at least um i will say thank you very much henrik is just thank you to intelligent squared and thank you to all of you who have been listening and hopefully enjoying today's event again i'm john michael bait thank you very much for joining us and the book again is called leadership by henry kissinger thank you

Channel: Open to Debate

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Keywords: Intelligence Squared, IQ2, IQ2US, Intelligence Squared U.S., debate, live debate, I2, nyc, politics, conservative, liberal

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Length: 56min 11sec (3371 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2022