The Grand Strategy of Detente

evening everyone and welcome to tonight's lecture by Professor Neil Ferguson my name is Alan West Dodd I'm one of the directors of LSD ideas with my dear friend and colleague professor Mecox 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 there Rob today the topic for the lecture is the grand strategy of the taunt and as you will know the taunt was one of the big dividing lines in Cold War history it was one of those that many ways shaped the direction that the late 20th century took and coming as it did after the Cuban Missile Crisis of a period of very intense world will be between the superpowers I think a lot of people felt that they had warmed from very dangerous territory over to a territory that may be absent known as the height of the Cold War was but in many ways more secure that you will also know among historians there is never just one interpretation of events there are always at least two if not several and the only need now to 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 the taunt 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 taunt was part of the end game of the Cold War it gave stability of a sort and true stability it also gave the Eastern Bloc and China they tried to chat the chance to change from the inside the tenor is also another view of the talk the Reagan view of the taunt if you like that the tone compromised the values of the West and game or Italian rule and all the leaves of life that it otherwise would not have the taunting of the words was a side fact 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 did a taunt that Henry Kissinger I'm sure will figure prominently in today's lecture and 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 devant so there is a great discussion and the discussion that has a very direct impact on how we see international affairs today I think everyone who makes decisions about war and peace today that don't look the past 10 years will have to look back at the date on period for good of that 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 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 on the other person who is professor of history at Harvard also teaches at the Harvard Business School and this year Neil is the phillipcoleman professor of history and international affairs here at LSE you already had a pleasure or listen to 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 talk please welcome me this helped me in welcoming professor well thank you very much indeed honor it's a great pleasure to be back here but once again to continue this series of lectures don't worry if you missed the previous two this will still make some sense but I want to take this opportunity but tonight to really make the first lecture deliver the first lecture that I have delivered on the subject of my mixed big research book for about five years now I've been gathering material on the life of this man Henry Kissinger he has 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 like this they would call the ledge of 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 would really know whether the hypothesis has been falsified for another two or three or four seventy 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 and later the Secretary of State Henry Kissinger this particular bleeding chunk of a telephone conversation hit the headlines for fairly obvious reasons and I want you just to reflect at a moment 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 a storm of indignation from Kissinger's habitual critics when this transcript was published I am 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 slices into snippets and quoted out of context what 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 all 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 lept back into battle from his sickbed it it should be said it 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 boots two more and several other places I 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 head wind to deal with the head wind 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 that written in anything but scholarly language does not does the public view of Kissinger so a vitriolic so vehement have something to do with well something other than what he 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 Jeremi 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 Surrey who needs enemies he describes Kissinger in this book as a I quote a hybrid of the court coup and the state G what we might tentatively call the policy Jew for for sri 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 now let's say I found myself as I've read my way through the the antique 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 our conscious anti-semitism though anti-semitic critics are certainly out there and were very visibly out there on the rights of the Republican Party when Kissinger first entered public life as 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 the 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 is accounted 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 ante Kissinger literature has been written by by Jewish Journal seymour hersh most notably but there are plenty of from others rather the anti Kissinger tradition seems more rooted on the left than on the right and 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 of methods that either Kissinger is some kind of American Machiavelli engaged in a an unpleasant cynical realpolitik in which mere human life is not something to be weighed in the scale of policy or he's a cringing sycophantic called Jews 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 has been 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 end is the purpose of policy is if we look 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 two it doesn't really seem as if anything very different was happening in the Nixon Kissinger years or for that matter in the four Kissinger years people often need reminding that he's of two presidents the proportion of the literature that's about four years is tiny and yet really a great many important things happened in that period not least in American policy towards towards Africa if you look at what happened in the post-war period what you see is a succession of American intervention some successful some distinctly unsuccessful some very avert some distinctly covered some proactive and something simply reactive to solve it 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 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 or 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 two hundred thousand people losing their lives in 2000 or so losing their lives is a big one and that is the kind of order of magnitude we're talking about here exact figures 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 I walked the United States intervened in often support of the people committing their 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 and 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 on why that the things these men did a Secretary of State somehow count for less did the people whose lives were lost as a result of policy decisions they took that these people can for less why isn't 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 glass drafty overarching objective or the 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 administration's did until we know what Eisenhower and Dulles cooped up until we know what LBJ cooked 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 I hope to really be called the clarity of peace but I hesitated to be quite so 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 Friedel if my look is great essay on causality and values in history one of the greatest methodological s is ever written by storing 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 path 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 they're 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 a Harvard professor unusually for Harvard professor he traveled quite a lot but we don't do that anymore and this diary contains the following entry from the 20th of October after a meeting with Clark Clifford who was later to succeed McNamara as defense secretary I felt that the issue 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 but 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 his 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 let's 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 enter the Congress more than 30,000 u.s. survey service personnel had been killed in action more than 180,000 had been wounded in action around 306 we're missing in action most of them is many of them prisoners of war 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 we were being lost each week in that war just remember the number of lives that had been lost at that point before they came into office it was ten times the number of American service lives that have been lost so far in the entire war on terror and with Afghanistan in Iraq 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 four 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 Colossus the rise and fall of the American Empire but I don't think I published this one it's worth looking at at what this chart shows you is the extraordinarily rapid decrease of American casualties in the Vietnam War after Richard Nixon became president so 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 on tuned or was of course the Soviet threat here is another Kissinger quotation or rather three which I think give you a sense of how Kishin just saw this problem even before he came into office but forgive me this is quite a text II 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 just tried to extract some of the gold from the great morass of words the Soviet Union has taught 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 are in trouble it is not true as some people argue this is a very revealing quotation for an unpublished paper from 1963 that history is an inevitable advance towards progress certainly Kissinger never believed that I will not be particularly reassured by the fact that three hundred 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 in stories is to forget what we know happen 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 government government country which had at least some restraints on the military's appetite for hardware as you can see from the simplified chart of nuclear capabilities in 1974 the Soviet Union was if you did a simple warhead candidates quite a long way ahead of the United States in the unrestrained arms race that had been going on since the Cold War really kicks 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 build 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 terrorists outrages of the sort that even can happen in this city we forget 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 that the long peace was bound to be both long and 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 when we managed to find surviving footage of it it's very interesting um to see him make his first television debut the voices there's 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 at 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 next administration and the Ford administration you'll find a completely different story these things could not be separated and Kissinger regularly weighed in 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 in the necessity of choice that bestseller 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 for ordained 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 no 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 1960's and 1970's when it was far from clear that the Soviets were going to fall apart economically Paul Samuelson the great dying 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 believe this stuff even and especially apparently small people why do 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 smoothes it out into a 5-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 and the Bell Prize in Economics you point out to them that's not a proper Nobel Prize that's just from the Swedish central bank 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 talks 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 u.s. GDP accounted for by four rival entities the top line is the 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 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 a by the late nineteen seventies a combined GDP seven percent of that of the United States and then you have Japan zooming up from 10 percent to nearly 40 percent 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 in the early 1970s we think of Jane Fonda paying a visit to North Vietnamese air raid or rather anti-aircraft installations and smiley gleefully as they show her how to shoot down American planes that moon 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 Kissinger both were haunted by Bengal Aryan fears of American decline not surprisingly for a boy who had had to flee Nazi Germany just on the eve of the dreaded Astana pogrom who had lost his grandmother in the death camps who had returned at the end of World War two in an American uniform to see the reality of the concentration camps at firsthand not surprisingly for Henry Kissinger born Heinz kissing her in foot in southern Germany one of these strongholds incidentally of the National Socialist Party in Bavaria not surprisingly the fear of a second via our republic was alive in his mind and 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 is always being described as polar 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 only since it was much more violent think of the string of assassinations the 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 it's 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 forty three point four percent of the popular vote in 1968 and a smashing 60 Plus percent when he was reelected 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 why would 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 DC few presidents in all American history have been weaker with respect to Congress than Richard Nixon and that of course explains a crucial point but when it came to willing the mean 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 an excellent kissinger wearing office at a time of great instability in what we then called the third world nextly kissinger rather like to think of the world in what we would now consider an old-fashioned way the axis of history starts in moscow goes to bond crosses over to washington and then goes to tokyo that 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 there never never land in which tiny poor and weak nations can hold up for ransom some of the industrialized world he grumbled 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 sergeant at berkeley and Charlie Muir and eras Mennella 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 multi polar 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 to the post 1945 world wars very violent not as violent as world war ii but nevertheless pretty violent we call it a cold war 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 two million and the 1970s were there 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 okay those are the problems five problems I'll be testing you on them later um what was the strategy the strategy I think was this one to Vietnam eyes 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 path 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 consequences part for four reasons I hope you know C 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 within 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 implied 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 the somme 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 IND 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 and an early stage in the project I've confined no evidence that the United States contrived the events of 1973 merely that they welcomed those events they certainly tried to prevent the indeed 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 part 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 Percy perceived 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 ground design and it clearly it had to be under student 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 will see that there's a tension between that concept and the notion of ground 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 posh words Kissinger's point to Nixon in that notorious portation was nevertheless a statement of truth about American foreign policy the faith of the Jews that 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 imagining what it means to say something like that when you personally as a Jew have seen a Nazi concentration liberated the miss reading of this quotation not least by Hitchens but many other people seems to me to go to the very heart of their miss reading 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 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 canceled 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 and Vietnam will depend on how our relationship to the Chinese and Soviet 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 the exchange they're really extraordinary we have them recorded in our film but they're bear reading too we've played a game and we've gotten a little break here we were hoping we get one and I think we have one no this is the closest Richard Nixon ever to being happy I think I truly think that it's the only moment of near happiness that man experienced i kissinger applies but we set up this whole intricate web from we're tops about linkage everyone was steering 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 that they lost big time and indeed in it 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 have spread from Angola to Ethiopia in tandem with thousands in Soviet combat advisors in Cambodia Vietnamese troops backed and supplied by the Soviet Union was subjected subjugating that tormented country Afghanistan was occupied by over a hundred thousand 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 appear 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 have been how things could have turned out better let's consider what the implicit counterfactuals are in the critiques of tissue that I've mentioned so far the liberal critique implies that Nixon Kissinger should have walked away from Vietnam practically their day they took office just pulled everybody out and let the Soviets do whatever they felt like and South America Africa you name it that's the liberal implicit liberal QWERTY just walk away from her walk away from it and then there's the Reaganite critique which aren't I mentioned in his introduction a far more hardball stance no more mr. nice guy go in hard against Malta 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 the lower body carrot 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 hardline in 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 power that's the world of universities and by the way if you're a connoisseur of kissing genetics and 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 I'll leave the enthusiasts to seek it out on the web it's a truly wonderful exchange one of the funniest things to commercial the latest releases let me try and reinforce this argument with the 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 was 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 elements into policy makes self-limitation an almost unattainable ideal each side tends to play for absolute security which means absolute insecurity and neutralization for its opponent maybe Europe will recover its morale and provide an independent force possibly the emergent East will furnish another centre 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 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 reflection reflections one about our contemporary predicament and the other about what I regards the philosophical core of kissinger's strategy so 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 its improvisation its speeches there's no strategy trust me I've been there and I know general Jones the national security adviser recently departed was no Henry Kissinger of just kindly leave it and yet the problem is seem comparable the set of problems in fact seem analogous to 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 fermenters 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 come at the third model anymore do we thought emerging markets the instability in may change in izia 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 that I showed you up to 1980 well you know the United States had to worry a little bit about the Europeans well just look 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 China's GDP is already 90 that of the United States a bigger challenge the 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 and foreign policy each political leader has the choice between making the assessment which requires the least effort or making the assessment requires 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 a second and final point it's what Kissinger called the tragedy of choice this is a letter which has never been quoted in doublet before and it's an appropriate place that wish to conclude this lecture so mean 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 Agony's which you in your world of black and white can't even begin to comprehend would be appropriate if this letter had been written last week so Henry Kissinger's numerous critics those critics who've 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 you unless it was written to his parents in 1948 and I think he gives you a clue a little dude that's the kind of book I really write about it thank you very much Williamson and I enjoyed it very much we thought the same thing no no no I was getting to that as I usually do it was getting in that direction now in terms of interpretation and particular in terms of motives and you touched upon this in the in the lecture the respond thing that I always wanted the bottom wanted even more after I saw Jeremy series okay I need some of the most recent releases and that's about how much of this became not out of brand 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 the mistrust of the American people I mean when I read Kissinger I'm particularly the pre presidential Kissinger are you absolutely right in boiling up as you did in the in the lecture the significance of what he wrote and what we discussed in the previous election period coming out of the nineteen fifties there is one thread that goes through all of it it 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 them and of course coming into the voters in 1969 this is very much what he tells Nixon as Nixon has just been elected president proposed lost thing he wants three years that you can trust the people that we are selected 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 achieve decision maker the less it seems to me he employs the less ordinary people know about foreign policy making the better be off and I won't bring in terms of how you define the grand strategy I mean quite correctly I think in terms of what Kissinger wanted to achieve and what probably more importantly Nixon wanted to achieve how important Easter we know you know how important is this is trusted there are very great issues at stake 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 is 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 Americas I think it's very important on it but it takes completely different forms in the minds of the two men Kissinger's a view of the of the American Dream is as a starry-eyed as you could 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 in a brush Factory in Washington Heights and he ends up being Secretary of State second highest office the only office at an immigrant at the highest office an immigrant 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 as Kissinger point certain 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 in 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 what brings them together is the Kissinger plays on Nixon's hostility towards obviously the Democrats the press the academics and the multiple ethnic groups the Nixon hated because they were Democrats I mean people frequently misunderstand this points about his view of the American Jews that 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 very different views I think of the people I think if anything Kissinger was more romantic about the people remember he doesn't miss great heartland lecture to him in the four 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 in Harvard Yard and Kissinger really believes the middle America is okay 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 other questions yes we won't over there we hang a couple of them join together but take that further than the one right next to it yeah on the use of counterfactuals you go to your presentation who do also somebody asked and said that the argument could be worse but could also be a better outcome if another policy was chosen that was very interesting thank you very much did you highlight possibly significance or relevance of Lincoln's predicament in the Civil War 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 sir did I fall asleep is it next week and are we doing the Civil War it is the grand comparison seminal well I explained that I was thinking about about Lincoln today and unamusing about how Lincoln would have fared in a Nixonian world I mean would this man who after all had his his second term cut off even more brutally than Nixon's wars happened Howard Lincoln who was certainly not one to mince his words and 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 issues 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 that the shadow of Lincoln does indeed extend all the way across our tunics and the tragedy is that whatever they had in common the Lincoln ends up the giant that tighten the most in fact if anything the most revered of presidents and Nixon the most reviled but you're right they're certain there are certain commonalities in their republicanism I think that's that's an important and interesting point um the counterfactual of a better outcome is is that 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 the alert level to DEFCON three and beyond I want to stress again it was not a foregone conclusion that the Cold War would end with us 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 won 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 limitation that 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 IND stays in in power in Chile just to take the almost favorite counterfactual implied by kickback Kissinger's liberal critics one has to remember a couple of things about the a under an IND regime no matter how much one one wants to revile Pinner a Yun Jie'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 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 for less interventions 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 one in theory we could imagine a happier 1970s it's a lower probability less credible counterfactual than the worst one that I'm suggesting could have happened thanks for the question it's the right question to ask I agree with you on the laughter but I still think I prefer the continuation of Chilean democracy to its non continuation but we can discuss that later Neil upstairs yes please can we discuss it with heavy security we can discuss it over a glass of wine mystic lecture quick question how would you summarize what is the end game of the game you describe the problems and very much the the tactics all these problems but is there any such thing as the end goal of the game is it peace is it well is it power that's very good thank you it's actually a question but I have to take inaudible anyone else upstairs so go at the front over here the problem yeah thank you very much for the election actually we are looking at how the Chinese are reacting about the currency issue the house 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 that Iraq and Afghan loss how you think that these all issues are going to end we all avoid ranging today on three we go from Lincoln to your walk and I'm sure we will go back Neal well these two questions are 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 it has to be a third game and you keep playing until he falls asleep that actually happened to me last night I mean reason the only one was that he won the first game but the game the game of power and it is about power is is um 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 not have had to fly everybody out of Saigon in 1975 and clearly into China as a whole would not have plunged into the the chaos of which Cambodia's tragedy was the worst manifestation that clearly was taught the plan if everything had gone according to plan there would have been no Watergate and Nixon would have served out his his second term reaping the rewards 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 from the Soviets but then as these games do it slipped away domestically I think it slipped away most totally that 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 IRA read from 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 defeating the domestic political arena partly self-inflicted but partly inflicted by the Democrats that that condemned them to failure in 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 by pushing to the success I think he'd bring the Soviets out of the arms race into arms limitation talks was real and enduring and adored of course ironically into Reagan's president really when he turned out to be as big a believer in date old as any of the people he'd slagged off in the 1970s and and the opening to China 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 on a gang form 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 profound than any other single things that have happened since 1945 but the game never ends because that works fine for decades it made the United States more prosperous for decades as China grew chai America grew the Americans benefited for reasons I've discussed at length elsewhere but we now in a new game a new game which is unfolding before our very eyes in which China goes from being the junior partner into America to being a major rival in many ways East arrival in the Soviets we don't know what the Chinese will do but I guarantee they will have a brand strategy one laughing will certainly do with agree yes that's the question here in the middle in this road trip yep well I was going to say you stole my thunder slightly and answering one of the questions but I mean might seem like I'm excited for you 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 were 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 you know 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 no from 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 would it simply procrastinate the difficult position to the point where it's simply too late to teach it's a good question you can come back a lot of the it seems to be a lot of ire of American intellectuals against Henry Kissinger's 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 liked him because he was so very much like them and yet unlike them yep what a feast good questions we're having tonight um well you raised two issues I think one about Europe and one about the United States the the notion that that you'll remember from the the presentation that Kissinger really believed in a resurgent Western Europe as an independent player was not mere lip service to European pride genuinely didn't want them just to be satellite states and the Kissinger did not want a bipolar world he wanted a multipolar world he wanted the Europeans to step up as did as did Nixon step up militarily as as as well as as diplomatic Lee and I think Europe has 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 parts we need there to be other powers we need a strong China we need a strong and we need a strong Europe and we also need other other part besides Japan so Europe as 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 a bad about well but 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 preparing please tell them that crap you know please let's let's lay that absurd claim to rest the one thing the European process of integration is not done has been to affect the military policies of European Partha 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 Henry Kissinger famously asked the question who do I call when I want to call Europe see I can't do it and of course in those days there wasn't 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 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 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 they're also for reasons I I've touched on elsewhere 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 at its website and that is a scenario which reduces American overseas troop deployments to 30,000 men 3-0 that 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 Henry Kissinger's opprobrium the probiem 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 world word at all and indeed he might just as easily have ended up being a democratic in a democratic administration edie surf the Kennedy administration that's when he had his first job in in Washington he really went both ways politically and I know as somebody who's across the Atlantic but that's not so hard to do because we don't fit readily into either of the big American ideological camps the Liberals that can achieve and the conservative and so you which I described you know his experience with the Goldwater eye sees these people are scary but what's really important than what you kind of left out of your question is that there are a whole bunch of American Jews who had neoconservatives in fact not only a conservative movement is propelled by a Jewish intellectuals who think he's too soft on the Soviets who think he's too soft and 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 of Kissinger's Jewishness shouldn't be central to the the argument it is in series 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 lesser 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 upper end decisively as a result of his experiences in World War two he is a secular figure who needs to be understood in the tradition of Western philosophy Spinoza Kant Spangler the people about whom he wrote his monumental senior thesis which every undergraduate should look at just to realize how inadequate we are today um are we stopping yes in that case thank you all very much

Channel: LSE

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Keywords: LSE, London, School, of, Economics, London_School_of_Economics, University, College, Public, Lecture, Event, Seminar, Talk, Speech, socialscience, Professor, Niall, Ferguson, Niall_Ferguson, Politics, Government, cold, war, history, The, Grand, Strategy, Detente, communist, Soviet, Union, Russia, USSR, USA, United, States, America, unity, Richard, Nixon, China, Henry, Kissinger, compromised, international, relations, foreign, policy, diplomacy, diplomatic, affairs, 1960s, 60s, 60's, 1960's, IDEAS, ideas

Id: gtXqZQn_adE

Length: 89min 41sec (5381 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 20 2011