Henry Kissinger: Former U.S. Secretary of State and Nobel Prize Winner | Talks at Google

I want to thank everybody for coming this is one of our the first event that we're having here at Google which in addition to being here and sent the number of other offices is also viewable on your desktop computer using some new google software so if you're online and you're using it let us know how well that system works for a long time I've hoped that we would be graced I think with the presence of somebody who I believe may be the single most important if not the one or two most important people in global politics in the last century dr. Kissinger is is an interesting person in that he escaped from Nazi Germany in 1938 moved to New York and to the United States brilliant professor at Harvard tapped by President Nixon initially as national security advisor than the Secretary of State and for those of you who were not paying attention then or not even born I can tell you that the phenomena of dr. Kissinger during that period was a sight to behold his his work ethic his impact the media obsession and his German charm created a phenomena that's not unlike what you see today with our presidential candidates as he set out with an agenda that has shaped much of the world that we see today it's I think with great honor that we have dr. Kissinger joining us here on stage dr. Kissinger and mr. secretary welcome to google I wanted to start with some questions about things which happened when I was growing up and then maybe we could evolve to your view of the global political situation today and some of your insights and so forth I wanted to start by asking frankly about President Nixon here's a president who was enormously controversial ultimately left office you work with him very closely you were never part caught up in any way in any of the Watergate issues and you were able to change the world during his presidency what was your relationship with President Nixon like can I make it gender common of course but could let me thank you for inviting me here and in order to understand me you should treat me like an inventor of the Gutenberg Bible treated a medieval monk who came tottering out of his monastery and said you're having huge implications in the world I don't quite know what they are and that's how I fell into dialogue with Eric at various seminars compared to what you people are doing but I do with modern technology is it it's grace I mean I I don't use email I don't text message i read a huge go go to read newspapers around the world and occasionally get a bit of in information and so I'm telling you that's why I have no right to be here in some respects and I I have some views about the relationship between information and knowledge and then between knowledge and wisdom and their sort of general philosophical views and this is how we fell into into conversation so I'm very impressed by what you do I I'm asking myself always there will it go and not where will it go in terms of what you do but in terms of impact on society and how it will get used this is my personal reason for being here and to learn but arrogant I thought it might be helpful for you to to hear some of the answers to the sort of question you asked because sometimes the collection of information doesn't give you the context or the motive for the history so it's in that sense that an answer and I will try to give it in a context so that it isn't just what did you think of Richard Nixon in order to understand my relationship to Richard Nixon you have to understand that I never met him before he appointed me sort of a little bit like how we hire people at Google not only not only had I never met him I was the foreign policy advisor to Nelson Rockefeller and we said we'd spend three campaigns trying to defeat Nixon and we did so by and we failed each time because we were backward in our perception on how candidates are selected Nelson Rockefeller sod did you become a candidate by having the best program so he'd spent three evenings a week and every Sunday studying issues no serious candidate today would waste his time on such an effort and so we were terrific on issues at least we thought we were terrific on issues while Nixon was collecting delegates and we'd arrive at the convention with some pitiful number of Delegates and it puts up one reason or another we failed it's done so if you studied secondly from 1961 1962 I've worked in the Kennedy White House as a consultant to Kennedy and Bundy and it's group on the Berlin crisis of that time so if anyone had said to me in 1967 you'll be the national security advisor of Richard Nixon but it said that's insane and it can't happen then just to give you some you don't understand Richard Nixon unless you understand that one he was a very brilliant man secondly he was a very insecure man so the first time I met Nixon first time I met him I was invited to see him after he was elected president in the Pierre hotel in New York and we had a two-hour conversation at the end of which I didn't know what he wanted so I knew he wanted something and I'd be offered something but I didn't know what it was so I went back to have it the week later John Mitchell whom you who became later Attorney General called me up and said well even take the job or not I said what job he said he said oh my god he screwed it up again yeah so then I was called in this time he did offer me the job unambiguously and I did something the Harvard people here will understand it unbelievable arrogance I told him you know I've been opposing you for 12 years and i would like to consult my friends for a week before i give you an answer to which he should have said get lost I've just offered you Liz third most important job in the government and he said take take the job yeah he said take a week and it wasn't until I saw Nelson Rockefeller who was in Latin America when this event occurred two days later and I told him what had happened and he said has it occurred to you that he's taking a bigger chance on you than you and him then I decided that was right i took it so so when i'm interested nixon i knew nothing about him except his public image and i sort of shared at first to have an image of Richard Nixon the Division I was not involved in Watergate was because of the rigid separation in the Nixon White House between foreign policy and domestic policy I don't know what I would have done had I said in of those meetings white houses and I've seen many sense but before are not organized to tackle the president every time he said something that you don't agree with but I don't know what I would have done it's like to think that I wouldn't at any rate I didn't I wasn't involved but let's see the technical reason was that foreign policy was kept strictly separate and in foreign policy Dixon had thought about it a lot he had read about it a lot and he was a good conceptual thinker but he did not like to do what face-to-face confrontations with anybody who disagreed with him didn't mean that he would not insist on his views but it meant that he would not do it directly and therefore for face-to-face diplomacy it was not it's 40 but he also he didn't try it very well so so the historical record says that you worked unusually well with a president who had who was not perfect and in the 72 election there was actually a discussion about a secret plan to end the war and that was what the media reported and then you ultimately were able to achieve with personal negotiations that were secret an end to the Vietnam War for which I personally am eternally grateful have because otherwise I wouldn't be here what was and of course your recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for that extraordinary work which you led did you conceive of that did you call them guess telephones didn't work to North Vietnam time how did it play out how did you achieve that you know when I had am blown in two long explanations it's to give you a history in the context I can give short answers in if you want them shorter let me say so but on the Vietnam under the nomination I did not know what Nixon said during the campaign because I didn't know him during the campaign I only met him I after the campaign I can tell you what I thought and it and my thinking on Vietnam evolved in the following way my major interest in foreign policy in Europe I had not any particular interest in in Asian issues when the Vietnam War was started I sort of academically I remember once asking Walt Rostow over security advisor why do you think you can do with 50,000 people which was the level when Kennedy would say that what the French couldn't do with 150,000 but that was a was an academic non involve ish then in nineteen sixty-five after Kennedy's assassination when Johnson was president ambassador large invited me to to come to Vietnam he knew me from the Rockefeller campaign and he asked me to look at the political situation in Vietnam this is 1965 I came to the view that the way the war was being conducted could not succeed and the straw variety of reasons and therefore thought that some negotiation would have to take place in retrospect I was right in my analysis I was wrong in my solution even though I'd spent seven years on it because when I said negotiation I thought some compromise something which separated the political from the military issues and I did not understand until really afterwards that for the Vietnamese North Vietnamese who had spent their lives as revolutionaries a compromise was the same as a defeat date to them the basic theory we had to leave let the people decide ever election and we will even accept a communist victory at the polls that didn't mean anything communism was the wave of the future it was the truths they had fought for it forever and to say they should compromise it and shepardize it in an election and so this was the weakness i would say in in in my thinking but it dominated my thinking then in 1967 when I was a private citizen I ran at an international conference into a Frenchman who had been was then working for the World Health Organization but in whose house ho chi minh had lived when he was in in Paris for the 1946 negotiations with the friends so I had the brain wave of saying why don't why don't you go to annoy and talk to Ho Chi Minh which only could would never today I'd be too smart coming to wives and I'd said it can't work so so I called up McNamara I knew the State Department was never to go for this so I called McNamara who's so vilified by so many and said why don't we try this I was nobody i had no governmental Staters at that time and McNamara pushed it and that Frenchman went and he brought a letter and it started a sort of negotiation which the North Vietnamese used to calm us while they were preparing the Tet Offensive and and then they launched the defense this was my background when I went into government so I was committed to negotiation but and I left also with the attitude that I thought and I still think that what got us into Vietnam versa kennedy and johnson administration at the Nixon administration and I felt a certain sense of obligation to the people that I had worked with and the Kennedy administration and that I was associated with it of it to try to carry out the solution to that problem the rice then parted company with him was they evolved say in 1965 we were together in believing that what was being done wouldn't work and we should try to solve it then gradually the debate in America move good towards that America was morally wrong and that this reflected a deep flaw in American society and that really it was almost better for America not to succeed because if it succeeded it would keep doing it and moreover when I was at Harvard as a graduate student and a young professor because I never met a Republican in those days but an Eisenhower was president and Harvard was not thrilled with us now but the one talked about the government as it is spectabile organization that was making mistakes that you would try to correct or influence in the 60s and then seven days it developed into the proposition that government was immoral criminal lying pursuing some ulterior motives and that sort of paralyzed the debate so when I became security adviser we try to follow a strategy in which on the one hand we try to demonstrate militarily that Vietnam and North Vietnamese could not succeed but give them political absence and when you study it without some of the hysterical writing you will find it that's about how it evolved but in the process it used up a lot of public cohesion but by the end of 1972 we had pretty well achieved what we set out to do and we negotiated an agreement and when people ask me what was my greatest moment in government they expect me to say going to China negotiating three Pete's agreements in the Middle East but for me the greatest single thrill was when the North Vietnamese accepted the proposals we had made her than six months earlier and I turned to my close associate Winston Lord when he had said this and I wrote him a note and I said we've done it well it turned out we didn't because we couldn't maintain the cohesion of the country may be largely it's at its other vault again to do what was needed to maintain the agreement but if it's so so in the middle of all of this this enormous achievement for which again you've been honored globally and all of us thank you you also i have described what happened you call it achievement i I think it was a person thank you I appreciate it I think I think the country agrees with me we're in the middle of all of us you've got your negotiating with our enemy right secretly and effectively you have all of the turmoil of AB you have an idea and that idea is now known as Nixon to China and the the thesis here was that here is a staunch Republican staunch anti-communist who sees that there's an opportunity to change our interactions which at the time were with a country that was so reviled that my father had a little red book which he kept but he would hide because he didn't want anyone to know it because it was so interesting and the history in China in the 60s was of a country that looks nothing like China today how did you decide to go to China there's a famous picture we obviously have a large operation now in in in China there's a famous picture of you President Nixon and mousey tongue walking the wall on your first visit and when you fly into Beijing Airport people still say that's the terminal where dr. Kissinger flew his military jet for the secret meetings that opened up China what was that was it your idea did you strategize it did you think about it and did it play as you expected for people interested in how the ideas develop this is rather interesting Nixon and I did not know each other then before 60 really January 60 not Nixon developed the idea that we should open the China in 68 I developed the idea their papers i wrote for Rockefeller and speeches Rockefeller gave that I drafted but they went parallel to each other they were not we didn't learn that from each other Nixon did it a little more from tactical reasons I did it partly for the same tactical reasons but also partly because I thought that with the bitter debate that was going on in this country about the nature of peas in Vietnam it was important to demonstrate to the American public that we had a concept of peace that was global and that Vietnam was an aberration in the system from that and not the expression of everything that one wanted to do what actually triggered out and that's how we ended and he and I had a number of conversations on that subject Nixon and I in the early part of the administration but this was in the middle of the cultural revolution in China so they had no diplomats applauded they had pulled back there diplomat they were completely closed as I were completely alone to the country there was no communication a 1.3 billion people locked inside we had an endo communion not only no communication there was no economic relationship and so it was one thing to say we'd like to do this it was another how to do it and how to make the first move then in the spring of 69 they were a number of military clashes between the Chinese and Russians in the far reaches of Siberia at something called the usery river and we noted that and then the Soviets made the mistake of coming in to brief us on this and which stated because they were thinking of attacking China and they had moved and so as a result of their doing something that they normally didn't do we started following these events in detail and started plotting them and I had somebody from the RAND Corporation come to my office and we plotted where these incidents took place and we found that they were close to Soviet railheads and far from Chinese ray let's and we decided that the Chinese might would not be so stupid as to start military actions close to the supply lines of the enemy and far from their own so then the idea came in occurred to us were strength that maybe Russia was Soviets were planning to attack them so then we started studying their military dispositions and we found that about 40 Soviet divisions were being moved to the Siberian border so then we energetically began to move on the issue of communicating and etta turned out the Chinese that the same thing these are the earth and how did you find each other well we didn't find it we've made a lot of both sides made terrible mistakes we went to the romanians thinking they were communist but they were communists but dissident from Oscar turned out Mauer didn't trust any non Chinese Communist so that didn't do very well ma ma made the same mistake he invited Edgar's know who was a left-wing very Pro Chinese rider to see him do to give him an interview and he told him in that interview that then he hinted at a visit of Nixon to China and was a conciliatory end of you first thing that happens we didn't see the interview for two months because we paid no attention to snow and and then what you imagine now when we got the interview with zero this that the pro Chinese leftist if ma wanted something he'd be smarter than to go to that kids now so they're so so both sides misfired more or less for the same reason so then I won't go through where every we did a number of things one was we relieve minuscule restrictions of every existing restrictions on economic trade in a minuscule way such as that American tourists would be permitted to buy a hundred dollars worth of Chinese produced goods in Hong Kong no place else which is not part of China anyway at the time good and that was not part of China we've just wanted them to know and a few State Department people that were Soviet experts were smart enough to pick this up and warned us that if we continued on this road meant war with Russia so that we could in any way we finally asked the package Dallas who friendly to China no come is to deliver the message that we wanted to talk and they did and then you know for people like you it's unbelievable we we would get handwritten messages delivered in Pakistan by a Chinese emissary yes broad from Pakistan to washing by another emissary we answered on paper that had no water marks on it that went back the same way so every exchange took about 10 days would you like to visit well the gas exchange where would you like to visit the birth your place or mine first exchange was from China we note that the method from Pakistan or less and it is significant because it is a message from a head through a head to a head and so they said we would be willing to receive an emissary more or less to talk about the faith the future of Taiwan or so we wrote back they're willing to talk but only about the whole complex of relationships and then including heaven at its end cut refined through a few more experience and in the rest is history I wanted to ask one one more question of historical importance than maybe we could I could ask about today during the same time Vietnam is being settled by you and your team China is opened up with the enormous impact Assad you did one other thing set of things which is that you achieved Middle East peace and that beats but then progress and as part of that on your government jet you were the only person who could fly between the countries that were at war and you established I believe what is now known as modern shuttle diplomacy where you literally flew every few hours back and forth between the warring countries how did that play out I mention one one other thing because I think it's important to understand that period and maybe the current and future period we also while we were opening to China improved our relations with the Soviet Union and we made the first strategic arms control agreements and the missile defense agreement and the reason I mentioned it because our strategy was to position ourselves in such a way that we were closer to Russia and the Soviet Union and China then they were to each other so that in every crisis we had more options than they did but I know it sounds sort of heartless and but when you conduct long-range policy you have to so at the motivations and the incentives of the societies you're dealing and I mentioned this but before we get to the pressure of the Middle East because we could not have done in the Middle East what we did which had been at sort of a Soviet province and forever since the 67 war without having created the incentive in the Soviet Union that they did not want to drive us totally into the Chinese camp so they are responses were somewhat mitigated now in Middle East we had the great good fortune that in Egypt there was a great Arab leader yes Anwar Sadat yes and he had the courage to to do the difficult choices the dilemma of all the sides in the Middle East was that they would state absolute codes which the other side could not accept without entering its self respect and was especially a problem for the Arabs who considered the Israelis intruders and was also big problem for the Israelis because when you have a very narrow margin of survival in neighbors a vowel that is determination to destroy you you cannot risk very many brilliant moves that your friends may advise you to do because if you turn out to be wrong you don't get another chance but importantly because it said that it was possible to establish a dialogue and in the first two agreements that we made they would not talk to each other the way the process worked was that each side would stayed but in fact they negotiated through me and that is why I had a shadow literally you were negotiating between the two because they couldn't talk to each other they would give me their position there were two levels there was a political level so they couldn't like call each other on the phone no there was no communication with them debate work is we would set up the political contact and I would do that with a respective Arab leader Sadat or Assad or her saying I would meet with the Israelis then once the negotiation had reached a certain level in the Egyptian caves a technical group was assembled when the issue was disengagement from the Suez Canal for example a military group was assembled to discuss the technicalities of how to do this but they were always until we designed to be half a step behind the political level they were not authorized to go beyond what's ur dad koda and I had already settled so the shuttle was not really an invention if we had had en computers internet we wouldn't have had to do this but it it but the precondition for that working was not something you couldn't find on the internet it was that in that process confidence developed between the two sides I could give you one example one of the issues was when the Israelis agreed drove from the sewage canal and the and soda but both side to Peter withdraws 30 miles from the Suez Canal the question then was since now that strip technically was Egyptian how many times could they put into the many tanks in thanks you know so go to set 30 30 and my principal was I deliver any message once even if it's ridiculous so I I brought it he said coldest as 30 what's your offer no I said cooler said 30 whereupon the gypsum Minister of Defense burst into tears of rage and said we will never do this and no Egyptian off as it would ever sign this mr. president to set up set up that you go to the next room with me please and he said does she mean it I said no but you have to decide for how many weeks you want to hang in there to bleed increments of 30 out of this process until you get to the final point so 30 60 90 hundred dollar so he rented back into the other room and said I have accepted 30 kids and sugar gave me more and you'll sign it I mean that's why it was a great man so I went back to colder and I won't go through all the dialogue she finally agreed to 100 whereupon when I brought that back to Sadat he said not at me tell you something if I want to attack I'll put a thousand over the canal and one knife but this is a psychological problem so you go back to colder and tell her I won't put any tanks across the canal there'll be 0 but she should learn from this to respect the dignity of happy if that sort of dialogue were possible today yeah it'd be much easier to make to make progress so he did not in fact put the hundred tanks they put not no tanks across but it was one of these hat he wanted to attack that his tricking wouldn't have been any limitation so so one more question and then we'll go to the audience and let's imagine we're going to have a new president in January and any smart president is going to call you first and ask you your view of the world don't you think get some advice mitten that maybe not food but they may call me call you so so the president sits there and says well dr. Kissinger I've got a lot of problems 1 i'm now president okay i'm now president I've actually have to do this stuff and we have this enormous and unsettled set of issues in the Middle East of which you are an expert we have Iran as a potential nuclear foe President Bush for for whatever reason has managed to get Korea more or less under control Pakistan is a disaster we've got wars in Afghanistan and Iraq take us through the conversation that you would imagine what would you actually say if you got that call when you look at it today with all your your insight oh look you have to understand what happens when you come into the White House when you come into the White House there are no file sell the outgoing president takes every document with it huh so you have no record at all so you go to the bureaucracy and you ask them please give me the files that you consider most important to my problems it's fairly safe to predict that they will give you their best judgment plus everything that's been turned down in the last year Humphrey over there is also you get a second shot at it so you are overwhelmed with famous and recommendations you've got 150 countries around the world wanting to see the president to establish the personal relationship and you got congressional immediate pressure so you sit there in in the first few days trying to keep from drowning now in the Nixon period he had sought a lot about foreign policy for me my hobby was my work so we didn't start from nothing but what I would probably tell the president is what I would tell him now is your most important challenge will be not to let the urgent drive out the important the urgent and important separate the urgent things from the importance and I would also say to him now remember when you're dealing with the bureaucracy you're dealing with people who are in these jobs because they are dedicated they are giving up a lot of money because they want to serve their country so therefore over the years they've become experts in formulating propositions which may be perfectly reasonable but which will take you down roads that you may not want to follow a year from now so if you can possibly contrive it spend six weeks defining where you really want to go and where you where you want to come out and I think this is very important it's especially important if somebody like Obama becomes president who hasn't been in any of these discussions previously because i would say about the immediate situation if you discuss it in terms of ending the war in Iraq you're bound to fail because it involves Iran Lebanon sunni-shiite eventually India so you have to understand how these things fit together now you can all of course this is everywhere can disagree with it my judgment would be actually that the paradox is that we can probably ended in two years if we don't set it as a deadline and now on the other hand that's a tough problem for obama since it's promising but leaving aside this particular issue i would think the most important thing he can do for himself it's to get clear basically we are we going with Russia in so much of the contemporary discussion Russia is described as getting ready to go into another Neil star in its period I don't agree with that I think they're not democratic but I think that country has lost 300 years of its history and its trying to find a new definition of itself but i'm not saying i'm not arguing now that I'm right and others along I'm trying to say that if the president wants to come to a view of things he ought to listen to different conceptual perceptions of the future and some tactical means of getting there otherwise you jump into a decision and then in order to safeguard the decision you get into ever more complex situation and you decide about why you went in to begin with I think a new president will have an unusual opportunity to construct a new international system because there's so many upheavals going on in so many different parts of the world that the art would be to relate them into some framework it's a huge challenge but it doesn't often happen in history that things are so fluid why don't we have a couple questions from the audience and let me ask anybody has questions to please make them brief is we're sort of running out of time and I there's a mic here and there's a mic over there let's go ahead my question is related to the peace Nobel Prize that you were donated that's a first I want to congratulate you for receiving day peace Nobel Prize I also want to note that scientist and the authors usually get a Nobel Prize a decade or two after their achievements unlike many of the peace Nobel Prize laureates and for that I would like to ask you how does it feel to have the peace Nobel Prize for a deed that one of its collateral damages was a two million dead Cambodians especially the question was how does the one the premises of the Nobel Prize and all of that ultimately resulted in deaths in Cambodia the how did it feel to get the nobel prize is a separate question from the question you asked about the that i think em campo do now there is a Miss developing about Cambodia that is now common sort of commonly accepted I don't know what I don't believe it they were two million dead but that's not the issue whether it was a million or two million it's not the issue let's begin with what is usually invoked when that sort of question has asked which is the so-called secret bombing of Cambodia right at what people would but you probably have in mind now what was the secret bombing of Cambodia when the Nixon administration came into office there had been an agreement to stop American bombing of the north in return for his friends in the war in South Vietnam when Nixon was elected but not yet sworn we had sent a message based on my negotiations in 67 to the Vietnamese saying that we were ready to negotiate in good faith on the basis of justice to all sides itself doesn't mean anything but showed goodwill within three weeks of Nixon coming into office the Vietnamese started an offensive in South Vietnam from basis that they had established along the cambodian for the inside cambodian and had had established there for years what made these faces especially lethal it's because they were within 30 miles of Saigon and they would come across these borders and the kill Americans we suffered 500 that a week we suffered in one month nearly as many dead as we have in the six years in in Iraq after he had had 25 2025 hundred dead and while this was still going on Nixon ordered the bombing of the base areas in in Vietnam the base areas were about 10 miles wide and of different lengths the judgment of all the experts was that there was next to no population in there that judgment was supported by the ruler of Cambodia who when he was asked while the bombing of these face areas was going on whether the princi look whether this how he reacted to these rumors of bombings he said these areas are in the control of what he called the Viet Minh that meant the Communist Vietnamese I don't know what's going on there if even a pull-up gets killed I will protest but I have had no reports so the casualties in the in the base areas had to be very limited then the following year the Vietnamese broke out of these phase areas into Cambodia and we then followed them with ground troops in pursuit of that they were probably casualties of the same proportion as they were in Vietnam so it's I don't know I don't know of what the precise number of casualness was but you have to ask this from but what would you do have you been president of the United States in 69 we faced five hundred dead a week in 70 we faced the prospect that all of Cambodia would become a a page area we still had 500,000 troops there we will be drawing them at the rate of a hundred thousand a year and in the end we succeeded in getting all for 20,000 out 572 so it's possible to argue that mistakes were made but the way this issue is usually put that a bunch of immoral war mongering characters oblivious to human suffering with dragging Cambodia and killing Cambodians to pursue some nebulous objectives that just isn't how it was perceived and that is not the way most of the non-communist people in Southeast Asia are perceived it it what happened to Cambodia is a tragedy most of it was caused by the almost all of it but was caused by either the North Vietnamese communists or the Cambodian communists was the American War of it fought in the second phase not in the secret bombing face with its sufficient discrimination probably not because military are a blunt instrument and we see it we we see it again so another question it's implied for your question should we have charged swit and thereby theoretically saved lives well certainly more people were killed in Cambodia after the war ended then wherever killed during the war and and also a very large number were killed secondly you look at it from the point of view of a president we have responsibility for the credibility of America around the world at a moment when the cold war is still going on secondly we have 400,000 Americans still left when the Cambodian tried sit second Cambodian graduate started 400,000 Americans are still left we had already withdrawn hundred and twenty-five thousand they are surrounded by nine hundred thousand South Vietnamese troops and about 800,000 North Vietnamese and guerrilla troops and you start withdrawing them under those conditions which is an enterprise that we be asked we were told would take about 16 months to get that done so from that moment on it took us about 24 months 28 months to end the war under conditions in which our casualties were constantly falling and I think local casual dates were constantly falling as well because they were a function of the same our judgment was that we were saving preserving the honor of America and the security of the world by the strategy we pursued and you should also presume that it was a lot more painful to us than for people walking around with placards who didn't have to make the decision that was our perception and that's I I think the black hole in our understanding of what is going on in the world it's our interpretation of the Vietnam War we owe it to ourselves to come to an honest assessment of course mistakes were made but they were made by serious people trying to prakrit a better international system and we should learn from the mistakes but it wasn't a question of throwing away two million dollars so that somebody could win the Nobel Prize incidentally normally people get a Nobel Prize because they campaign for it I didn't even know I was being considered for it so it was a big surprise to me when I got it well thank you my next question in the innovative learning from mistakes and having serious people making decisions I'd like to get your opinion on US policy over the past I don't know decades that's been distorted by the importance of oil and we have people in power who don't know much more than oil and and it's so important that they were making all kinds of terrible decisions so that the premise here is oil is driving a lot of our foreign policy do you agree he has a know if the question implies are the oil companies running foreign policy i would say basically no pic companies know their commercial interests and on issues that affect their balance sheet in the short in the short term one really hear from them but most of them really don't know enough about the governmental process to affect it in on strategic issues oil is important in the thinking because when you know that the energy supply that the world runs on the industrial world runs on energy who controls the energy supply is a matter of great importance and now i actually have come to the view and he'll give you even then that you cannot deal with that simply as a national effort that you have to attempt to organize the consuming countries into a common approach to access to energy at one level and secondly i believe now which was not relevant in my period that there are a number of problems in the world energy environment proliferation climate that rise above the normal calculations of balancing state interest and that one of the chart that did the challenges of a new administration will be to find an international expression to that reality but i don't think the war in iraq was started by Halliburton and what companies have their short-term interests but not I have not seen it affect the fundamental strategic decisions they would affect commercial consult we're going to ask the question of this you know what would what would all not being important change how would that change policy if oil were not important how to change policy that's very hard to answer I think we should try to bring about a situation that reduces the importance of oil if all were not important Saudi Arabia and Iran would be different phenomena in in international affairs and so the impact on not on any one company but on the general access to energy of the oil-producing states it's big and ironically sometimes disproportionate to their power outside the old reach the area so if always we're not important you'd have a shift in one roll of various countries we run over I want to have one more questions to be yours and this unfortunately has to be our last question so go ahead as you may know the presidential candidates have mostly come to speak at Google one thing that they tended to agree on was that it will be challenging for the next president to deal with the politicization of the civil service and of the upper echelon scheme military that has taken place in this administration is using a number of administration's come so do you think that is an accurate characterization by comparison to other administrations no I don't think I I don't think that's an accurate description I've seen now every administration since eyes now look you have to look at it this way the Preferences of the president play a role in the thinking of the subordinates and it's it's simply naive to think that that isn't the case and so once it is known which direction it's going the system sort of works to help produce it so in that sense of certain polarization it's going on but then you have to look at various departments for example you take the State Department most foreign service officers believe that neither the president nor the Secretary of State could have passed the Foreign Service except so that's exaggerated but that sort of their thinking so their tendency is to keep pushing their preferences I mean every president you've ever was memorably of Everett will complain about that in the Pentagon the services our commander-in-chief oriented so yes they will try to get what he wants provided it also fits some of in other words management the bureaucracy is a huge task and if these candidates when the way have said not the polarization but to make the bureaucracy what we really need is a pure aakriti that develops a sense of the long-term national interest and it's less driven we spend so much of our time in a bureaucracy on the internal maneuvers of the bureaucracy that you forget what the purpose of the exercises I think and also sometimes politics play a mean you take last year that national intelligence estimate about nuclear weapons in Iran I don't know what they were thinking because the evidence they gave they began by saying it is our judgment that they have stopped their nuclear weapons program you had to read 20 pages to see that they were talking about warheads not about missiles not about the whole program and we're not even sure about the voids but it had a huge political impact so in short we need a let's politicize bureaucracy in a way but not because they are ordered to think but it is to harness their rivalries and to lift their thinking and that Deepika Simon for a new pressure mr. secretary I think you've lived up to everything i described about you the impact that you've had and the style and the insight that you brought to government has been phenomenal and to us as well so thank you very very much for coming to Google

Channel: Talks at Google

Views: 46,050

Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, henry kissinger, kissinger vietnam, henry kissinger china, henry kissinger cambodia, vietnam war

Id: _eM_z4vRxrA

Length: 70min 11sec (4211 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 19 2008