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By
Belinda Luscombe
Henry Kissinger, the
98-year-old, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning, Monty
Python-inspiring, former U.S. Secretary of State, believes that,
perhaps more than any time since the Age of Enlightenment, the world is
entering a period of disruption that needs thoughtful leaders. And the internet
is not helping to produce them.
In his new (and 19th)
book, Leadership,
Kissinger—widely admired and reviled for his management of world affairs under
President Richard Nixon—uses a historian’s approach to examine six
consequential world leaders who inherited difficult geopolitical situations,
and in his view, overcame and improved them. He looks at the work of Konrad
Adenauer, who helped Germans take stock of their actions after WWII, Charles de
Gaulle, who restored confidence to France during the same period, Richard
Nixon, who, in Kissinger's telling, understood how to balance the delicate
scales of world order, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian leader who signed the first
regional peace treaty with Israel, Lee Kuan Yew, who brought national cohesion
to Singapore and Margaret Thatcher, who navigated the U.K. out of its economic doldrums
of the 80s.
Kissinger, whose last book—a mere eight months ago—was co-authored with Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher, says that because the internet provides such ready answers to so many questions, and can provoke so overwhelming and speedy a response among wide swaths of people, it discourages long term thinking and problem-solving, or what he calls “deep literacy.”
Read
more: Henry Kissinger’s Last Crusade: Stopping Dangerous AI
It also makes leading
harder. “It is not that changes in communications technology have made inspired
leadership and deep thinking about world order impossible,” he writes, “but
that in an age dominated by television and the internet, thoughtful leaders
must struggle against the tide.”
Do you consider
yourself a leader?
Yes, but more in the
intellectual and conceptual field that in the actual political leadership
field. I tried to have some influence on the political thinking also, but not
by being actively involved in politics.
You include Richard
Nixon in a book of inspired leaders, and a lot of people will balk at this because
of the way he left office. Are you trying to re-tilt history in his favor?
I included him because
I believe in the field of foreign policy, in which I knew him best, he took
over in a very difficult and declining situation and tried to show a way out of
it, and some of his policies in the Middle East and on China, for example, set
a pattern that lasted for over a generation. In that sense, I think he had a
transformative impact. He was the American president, of those that I have
known, who best understood the impact of societies over a period of time in the
foreign policy field.
Who would you say was
the runner up?
George Bush, the elder.
How do you think
history will judge the leadership of Vlodomyr Zelensky?
Zelensky is doing a
heroic and extraordinary job in leading a country that normally would not elect
somebody of his background as leader. He has made Ukraine a moral cause in a
period of great transition. It remains to be seen whether he can
institutionalize what he has started or whether that is the impact of an
extraordinary personality on a very dramatic situation. He has not expressed
himself about what the world will look like after the war with the same clarity
and conviction with which he has led the pursuit of the war. But I consider him
a great figure.
At Davos, you suggested
that Ukraine might think about ceding some land in order to find peace and this
suggestion was highly criticized.
If you read what I actually said, I never said that. What
I said is that the best dividing line for a ceasefire is the status quo ante,
that is, one should not pursue the war from the territories that were Ukrainian
when the war started into territories that had been tolerated or accepted as
part of Russia at that time. And I warned against turning the war for the
freedom of Ukraine into a war about the future of Russia. One has to think
about this very carefully. Right now, Russia still occupies 15% of pre-war
Ukrainian territory. It must be restored to Ukraine before a meaningful
ceasefire can be established. The disputed territory is a slight corner of
Donbas, about 4.5%, and Crimea. Crimea, especially, has a significance to
Russia beyond the dispute of the current crisis. I'm very worried that this war
might spread into something that will become very unmanageable. I did not say
that territory should be given up. I just implied that it should have a
separate status in any negotiations. I am unreservedly for the freedom of
Ukraine, and its significant role in Europe.
In the book, you say
there are two types of leaders: statesmen and prophets. Could you explain the
difference?
Statesmen leaders
analyze the realities of the existing situation and want to achieve the maximum
possible within them, balancing vision against risk and keeping in mind that
history lasts longer than the passion of the moment. Prophets, as I conceive them,
do not accept this distinction. They believe that their values must be
implemented as quickly as is possible, and that the quality of the values
determines the significance of their political role. The prophetic view is
often the more elevated view and certainly the more passionate view and it may
achieve great historic transformations, but it does not make allowances for the
scale of human suffering and for the capability of any one generation to adapt
to fundamental change.
You also write that
“Forgetfulness is sometimes the glue for societies that would not otherwise
cohere.” I wondered if that has any relevance to an America that right now
feels quite unglued?
America now is much
more conscious of its divisions than of its coherence. [That coherence] still
exists in major parts of the country, but at the level of political debate, it
has become much weaker. When I was in government, I thought we were having a
bad time in terms of public disputes about Vietnam. But in retrospect, the
Vietnam issue was a debate about the best way to achieve basically agreed-upon
objectives. Today, the conflicts are about different objectives. At that time,
there was a fixed number of senators to whom you could go and say, the national
interest requires a certain action. They didn't always agree. But they
didn't a priori disagree. They considered it a valid issue. Today the
definitions of the national interest and of the national values are in intense
dispute.
One of the ways in
which that's playing out at the moment is in the Jan. 6 hearings. Do you think
they are good for America geopolitically?
Election outcomes that
are disputed by the loser have happened before. But the issue then is to what
extent that disagreement should be pushed and whether one should not keep in
mind the need of the country's ultimate unity. Whatever the debate about
Richard Nixon after his defeat by Kennedy—there were plausible arguments that
maybe the election in some states had not followed agreed procedures— he
refused to make that case and conceded the election, because he rightly knew
that such a debate would split the country in a way that would make the
conflict unbridgeable. And in all the disputes that I've read about of that
kind, the system itself did not come under assault. That's the special aspect
of the January 6 situation. The real issue is not whether there were some
transgressions but whether the constitutional system at the end, should
override the disagreements within it, when a legal judgment had been reached.
Do you think that it's
a useful exercise to conduct hearings on the way the President behaved?
It's not an abstract
historical inquiry about whether they were violations to begin with, and
whether the president should intervene and to what extent. Part of its purpose
is to affect the prospects of Trump as a presidential candidate.
If you just had to pick
one, which leader do you think America needs now? One with the integrity of
Konrad Adenauer, the forceful vision of de Gaulle, the tenacity of Thatcher, the
imagination of Lee Kuan Yew or the peaceful heart of Anwar Sadat?
(Long pause.)
I think it needs somebody like de Gaulle, who recalls it to its essence, even
if the definition of that essence is somewhat romanticized, as de Gaulle’s was.
That was his essential contribution—he took a country that had lost faith in
itself and declared as his objective not ultimate victory but a kind of
regeneration of a lost faith in itself.
You write that the task
of the leader is to ‘transcend circumstance by vision and dedication.’ Could
you find no leader who leaned left who did this?
No, of course, there
were leaders—the left-right division is relatively recent. But several leaders
of the British Labour Party were personal friends of mine, and for example in
France President Mitterrand, who was explicitly left, I rate just behind de
Gaulle as a leader with vision. It's probably true that I personally lean more
towards center but I don't consider the division between left and right the key
division.
What do you consider the
key division?
A willingness to
recognize the importance of history. Leaders who think that history must be
totally changed usually bring more suffering.
You write that foreign
policy in the U.S. right now needs a "Nixonian flexibility." What
might that look like, say, in the U.S.’s dealings with China?
The encounter between
China and the United States has its special ingredient in the fact that both
societies consider themselves exceptional and therefore unique and therefore
entitled to prevail. The difference is that the United States thinks that the
coherence of the world is natural and therefore the challenge is a series of
practical problems that have to be solved on an ad hoc basis. But China thinks
of history as an evolution without end in which the solution of one problem is
an entrance ticket to another set of problems. Where America prevails—in its
image—by its case to case performance, China's view of itself is that it
prevails through the majesty of its conduct and the scale of its performance, which
results, in my interpretation of the Chinese view, not in conquest but in
respect. So, they are aiming for different things on a day-to-day basis.
But they have one
problem that has never existed before. Technology has become a participant in
the sense that its evolution is rapid in a way that is unheard of. More than
that, the human-created objects can develop something close to consciousness,
so that one can have computers that can write articles and make weapons that
can define their own danger or their own objectives.
A war between these
countries would therefore have implications of catastrophe that were not
imaginable even 30 years ago. So I always wind up saying, as I wind up in the
book, that the United States and China have a special responsibility, one, to
be in contact with each other to define that danger for each other, and
secondly, to make this the basic principle of their foreign policy, even while
they disagree on a wide range of other things. No two countries have ever had
that challenge. And I would say the world, of course, has exactly the same
challenge. This is what makes thinking about history so different from even 25
years ago.
Business leaders are
becoming more willing to become geopolitically engaged, as we’ve seen in
the voluntary sanctions against Russia they undertook. What do you think is the
role of business leaders going forward?
Business leaders are on
dangerous territory when they think they can apply the requirements of success
in business to the requirements of political change. Because business is about
the implementation of a vision for profit of some form or another, but the
historical process covers a broader range. One aspect of our period is the
transformation of the image that business leaders have of themselves, because
at one time they thought they were contributing by what they were doing in a
separate field. And now they’re in some cases trying to use that separate field
to become an integral part of the political world. If you are not informed
about the historic processes, that is a potentially dangerous course.
You’re quite gloomy on
the effect of the internet on leadership. Why is that?
The internet is an
overriding reality of the period, and one should not discuss it as if it could
be done away with. It permits a degree of self-education that was inconceivable
relatively few years ago. But the manipulation of the internet requires such
special skills and can evoke such broad reactions, that the ability to affect
the immediate impact of stories or events can become the preoccupation of
leaders, rather than a view of a more distant future. And the impact is not
just of the internet but of technology. It is now relatively easy to construct
a computer assistant to yourself that produces rapid answers to issues that you
are addressing. In any one case that is a wonderful help, but over a lifetime
and over the educational cycles it may produce an inability to ask the deeper
questions. Some of the greatest ideas of history, of philosophy, or literature,
came out of the anguish of struggling for understanding, and might never have
been reached if there was a helpful assistant who gave an immediately relevant
solution.
At 98, do you feel
hopeful about the world or not?
The problems that
occupy me now could not possibly have preoccupied me when I was [younger]
because the world has changed so much. When you enter a country as a kind of
refugee, the ambition that you might become the Secretary of State of that
country is not one that forces itself on your imagination in any immediate way.
I've had the opportunity through the radical nature of history, as it engulfed
us, to participate in many things that, from where I sat, were attempts to
improve the world to some extent. And this possibility now exists in an even
wider sense. That is a positive aspect. But I'm also concerned that if my
children's generation doesn’t make progress in understanding what I've tried to
describe—things that I have never dealt with—that this could become a world of
great violence and division. So there is an opportunity and also a danger, and
both are relatively unique. Whether we are preparing ourselves adequately for
this kind of world, that’s the challenge. What I tried to do in this book is to
show how it was done by some people in different times. It's not a cookbook;
it’s supposed to inspire some reflection.
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