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DIMITRI SIMES, President, Nixon Center: Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure and privilege to introduce the chairman of this conference, chairman of the Nixon Center Advisory Council, and a man without whom this center, this conference, could never take place: Henry Kissinger.

I have an enormous personal debt to Secretary Kissinger, because first of all, without his and President Nixon's policy of détente, I would never be able to come here.

You know, we have a lot of moralists in Washington who constantly tell us how good is their heart but somehow are not terribly concerned with results of their efforts. The policy of détente enabled hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews to come to the United States. I was one of them. I think that was not the most important outcome of the policy of détente, but it is one illustration how what is in the national interest sometimes is also morally right.

I am also very grateful to Secretary Kissinger because, of course, without him, I could never get to know President Nixon, because without being exposed to your accent, he would never be able to deal with mine. (Laughter, applause.)

Let me get serious. As a historian, I was usually uncomfortable as a TV commentator when somebody would say, "This is a historic event" or "This is a historic figure." I always had the sense that perhaps we were trivializing history. Henry Kissinger is a historic figure. It is just as simple as that. He was widely praised. He was brutally criticized. But everybody knows that he was one of a few chosen people of this century, and not just of this century, who were fortunate enough to shape history.

I also know that he had to shape history during one of the most difficult periods of American history: when this country has discovered the enemy and the enemy were ourselves. To be national security advisor and secretary of state during that period and to perform with flying colors is next to unbelievable.

Let me also say that it is pointless and banal to give the least of Mr. Kissinger's numerous jobs, titles, books, accomplishments, because that is not what he is about. He is an institution. He carries his own weight on his shoulder, and he is much bigger than any job, any mission, any book he was associated with.

Let me finally say something about his relationship with President Nixon. As someone who was fortunate enough to know President Nixon well during his last years, I had many discussions with him about Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, George Shultz, Alexander Haig, Bill Simon. And Nixon was a very remarkable man. He was accused often of being insecure; yet he collected the most remarkable, most talented, most ambitious, most assertive group of Cabinet members. And he was proud of them all their life.

I will never forget the conference which we had three years ago, where President Nixon and Henry Kissinger had a serious disagreement about American policy toward Russia, and as President Nixon left the room -- and they had a serious debate; they were very respectful of each other, but intellectually they were not pulling their punches -- I thought that he would say to me: "What is Henry up to? Why is he doing that?" And he said: "What do you think of Kissinger's reasons? He had to have some very serious reasons. I have to think about them."

Ladies and gentlemen, Henry Kissinger. (Applause.)

HENRY KISSINGER, 56th Secretary of State: Dimitri, Tricia, ladies and gentlemen, some of you may have heard me tell this story before, but Dimitri leaves me in the position, the lady that came up to me once at a cocktail party and said -- "I understand you're a fascinating man," she said. (Laughter.) She said, "Fascinate me." (Laughter.) It turned into one of the less successful conversations that I have had. (Laughter.)

I would also like to congratulate the Center for Peace and Freedom for organizing a nonpartisan, bipartisan conference. I shudder to think what would happen if they organized a partisan conference. (Laughter.)

All of us who worked with President Nixon read all these pettifogging stories of minuscule incidents. But anyone who knew his foreign policy reflections was aware that the consuming interest of his life was to make America worthy of the huge changes that he understood were taking place in the international environment and to enable it to make the complicated passage from an American position of predominant nuclear monopoly, economic supremacy, to a world in which America would still be the strongest nation, but no longer in a position simply to impose its views by its own weight. He spoke a lot about balance of power.

But it is also true that the president he admired most was Woodrow Wilson. And when he moved into the Oval Office, he asked for the Wilson desk. It wasn't his fault that the curator of the White House produced the desk of Horace Wilson, who was Grant's vice president. (Laughter.)

What President Nixon understood was what Newt Gingrich said so eloquently yesterday, that America is composed of two strengths -- the romantic and idealistic, and the pragmatic -- and that one without the other is self-defeating. Excessive pragmatism leads to paralysis. Idealism, in the abstract, can lead to self-righteousness and the attempt to believe that adopting a posture can transform humanity. And this is especially the case when we live, in what Sam Huntington and others have described, in conflict that in many areas coincide with the fault lines of civilization.

And it is also the case, though President Nixon was very reluctant to make evident, that is some respects he had an almost naive faith in the fundamental American institutions. When there were student demonstrations at Harvard, early in his term, he said to me, he was so glad it happened at Harvard, because he thought, as the greatest university in the country, they would set an example that others could follow. As a recent member of the Harvard faculty, I suffered from no such illusions. (Laughter.) And I told him that within two days, my ex-colleagues would have the situation so confused that nobody would know who did what to whom. (Laughter.)

But this necessity for America -- to be idealistic and pragmatic at the same time -- is a particular challenge when we're moving into a world for which, as a nation, we have relatively little preparation. We are the only major country whose history begins on a specific date. We are the only major country populated almost entirely by immigrants. We are the only major country that has never had a powerful neighbor. We are the only major country which, except for the Civil War -- which, from that point of view, affected only one part of the country -- has never known national tragedy.

To live in a world that is moving from bipolarity to multipolarity, in a world in which communications are instantaneous, the economy is global, but the conflicts are ethnic, civilizational, is something for which few of our leaders have been systematically prepared. It took a loner from Yorba Linda who loved to read and who didn't really enjoy politics in the form of glad-handing to develop his own approach. But as a country, we have great difficulty facing some of the realities Newt Gingrich described so eloquently yesterday, compounded by the fact that we're moving as a civilization from a world in which concepts were formed through writing into a world where concepts are formed through pictures.

When one acquires information through books, one has to operate by concepts and one is taught, or at least some are taught, to understand the relationship of events to each other. When one learns from pictures, one reacts to essentially unrepeatable impressions, and analysis is often replaced by sentiment and reflection by instantaneous perception which cannot, as I said, be repeated. That is the world into which we began to move at the beginning of the Nixon period and which in many ways is culminating in its debates in our period and in which indeed some of the discussions that took place here are a good example.

Some of the controversies about what should motivate America in foreign policy, which were really underlying yesterday's discussions, have their origin in two contradictory propositions. The first proposition was that America should base its foreign policy on a clear perception of the national interest. To that, most American academics react with horror because they interpret interest as something selfish that is beyond America and that it therefore appeals to the least objective aspects.

Those of us who embrace this proposition -- and I believe I speak here also for President Nixon -- would believe that the national interest, properly understood, has to encompass the relationship of a society that always claimed its values had universal validity to other societies and that forming an international consensus was part of America's mission. But they would also say this: If American leaders are convinced that something is essential for American security or American values, they would have to pursue that objective alone, if necessary, and form the consensus as they go along. They would prefer not to do it that way. But in the extreme, they would be prepared to do this.

The opposing point of view, which now claims to be internationalist, really started out as an isolationist point of view. It considered the American role in the Cold War presumptuous, excessive, and some of them even thought of it as potentially evil. They wanted to discipline American power by reining it in through international institutions, and they therefore adopted the view that America could act internationally only as a result of multilateral consensus.

That is, in my view, what the debate is all about at this moment, and in my view, the congressional backlash -- whatever one's view about the specific measures that have been adopted to express it -- the congressional backlash is, in effect, saying in the end America cannot derive its motivation from an international consensus; it has to develop its specific purposes and then try to shape an international consensus.

Until fairly recently, this was not considered a philosophical problem. There is no dispute about the role of the U.N. in Korea or in the Gulf. In both of those cases, the United States made it quite clear that it would act unilaterally if necessary according to its perception of what the global security required. It invited the participation of others, which is the prudent thing to do, and it achieved the participation of others. But Brent, who guided the effort so skillfully in the Bush administration, will hopefully agree with me if I say that one reason support was achieved so quickly was that it was the only way to gain influence over American actions that in all likelihood would have been taken in any event. Once we sent 200,000 troops to Saudi Arabia, we had crossed our Rubicon, and everybody understood this.

The problem arises when one moves from peacekeeping to peacemaking, from the observation of an already accomplished agreement to the imposition of an agreement on reluctant parties and if one does that not on the basis of an American definition of the interest but on the basis of a vote in the Security Council. That then raises the question of how one explains the casualties and the other sacrifices to an American public, and this is what, in my view, has produced the reaction. Nation- building in Somalia has not yet achieved the level in the American mind of an American national interest.

The second difficulty arises when difficult decisions that we take for other reasons are justified by being required by the United Nations. Though I have sympathy for the administration's view on the embargo in Bosnia -- especially under current conditions; maybe not two years ago - - to justify it as if it were required by the votes of others and as if it did not reflect an American preference produces a conflict that has to be reconciled. If it is an American preference to end the embargo, we are, in effect, saying that we are changing our definition of the national interest for a majority vote or for a Security Council vote which everybody knows we have a major influence in shaping.

And Haiti was another problem of this kind. Haiti, whatever one feels, was an essentially American domestic issue in which people with strong convictions that may well be valid believed that the democratization of Haiti was essential. It served no purpose to pretend that we were mandated by the United Nations to carry out this active mission, especially as this ran counter to two centuries of the -- or a century and a half of the Monroe Doctrine, in which it had been believed that the problems of the Western Hemisphere would be settled within the Americas.

So the issue is not freedom of maneuver with respect to the U.N., the issue is whether the American interest and the general interest can be reconciled in the minds of the American public. And if that cannot be done, it just cannot be expected that the American public or the American countries will agree to sacrifices which are declared not to be in the national interest and only in that of the United Nations. This is the issue that seems to me to have been at the heart of the debate yesterday. And it cannot be ended by deferring to executive prerogatives, whatever one thinks of this or that specific proposal that has originated in the conference.

And it is therefore in almost every area that we face certain conceptual problems. One of the topics that was discussed this morning concerns NATO expansion. And I don't want to go into all the obtuse technical issues that are raised. I just want to raise a number of philosophical issues. First is what do we conceive to be the relationship between Europe and America in the coming decades? How does NATO have to be adapted as the only institution that organically links Europe and the United States to the new conditions?

I would argue that, with the collapse not just of Soviet control of Central Europe but of the division of Germany, many of the previous assumptions in which French political dominance was traded for German economic dominance no longer apply. There had to be a role of America in Europe if Europe is not to fragment itself into its traditional policies, the only policies they have ever carried out systematically, of national rivalries. But there also has to be space for a European unity. And that, of course, raises the fundamental question, where does Europe begin, a question we have systematically fudged. Part of the reason is that the same people who thought the Cold War unnecessary really do not believe in alliances in the traditional sense. They believe in collective security, they say they don't want dividing lines, and they think of structures that go from Vladivostok to Vancouver.

But an alliance must have a line of separation. It has organized units. It has command systems and specific obligations. Collective security is a legal concept which has to be negotiated from case to case. One cannot do both simultaneously, as we have attempted to do, and we have to choose. And I must say, as I've said this morning, when we say we are for a policy but the when, how, who and where remain to be decided, we are backing all the key issues that make up a policy. This is not an intellectual seminar; one has to define where Europe begins, and one has to recognize what Russia is. Russia is a great power that has expanded for 400 years.

I do not know whether nations can ever change, and I know in America I've seen many movies where some evil character has an automobile accident and emerges as a saint. (Laughter.) But one rarely sees it in real life. All I'm saying is 400 years of foreign policy indicate a certain proclivity. (Laughter.) So Russia, which borders Europe, the Middle East and Asia, is in its scale not a European country -- nor in its geography. It represents many European traditions, but it has always been torn.

In the Nixon administration we were accused of being too permissive to Russia in the policy of détente. But the objective was the same as I avow here: to treat it as a great power, respectfully, recognizing it's interests, but not deluding ourselves that this is a social welfare challenge.

I have respect for Yeltsin, but his survival is his problem, not our problem. Our problem is to encourage Russia to stay within its borders, which one would think, since St. Petersburg is closer to New York than to Vladivostok and Vladivostok is closer to Seattle than to Moscow, should not induce claustrophobia. (Laughter.) So our role, vis-a-vis Russia, is not psychiatric. Our role, vis-a-vis Russia, is to respect its interests and see whether we can balance theirs against ours, to encourage a humane evolution. And I support, as President Nixon did, economic assistance to Russia for that reason.

But we also have to keep in mind that the independence of Ukraine, for example, is a key to European stability. With respect to other former republics of the Soviet Union and central Asia, we may have many common objectives -- especially with respect to resurgent Islam, provided they are recognized as independent nations, and provided it does not become a normal feature of the international scene that Russian armies are on the territory of member states of the United Nations who did not invite them, simply because they were there as remnants of the Soviet Union. Those seem to me the preconditions for good relations with Russia, and those are the philosophical issues or conceptual issues that are at the heart of the current debate.

Now, with respect to Asia -- in many ways the most difficult problem for America, because it is a almost classic 19th Century European situation. There are major countries that consider themselves competitive with each other, that do not have a sense of a community as the Europeans do, that direct their policies in part against each other. Now, we -- I have heard here yesterday, and I agree with it, that America is in a strong position because it has better relations with each of them than they have with each other. So we should be able to achieve that equilibrium.

Of course, we try to play on an equal playing field, so we're trying to make it difficult for us to have better relations with each of them. And there were some great moments when we were assaulting China and Japan simultaneously, which is the hard way of conducting Asian foreign policy. But if one agrees with that proposition, as I basically do, one also has to admit that we have no great natural talent in conducting that sort of foreign policy, even though I believe that Asian relations and Korean relations cannot be understood except in such an analysis.

But let me go back to something that Newt Gingrich said yesterday and I thought was very important. When you look at the great transitions in international affairs, they occurred when there was a shift in economics and also a shift in the human consciousness of who was related to whom. In the late 18th Century, it would have occurred to nobody that a ruler was a foreigner because he spoke a foreign language. Fifty years later it was conventional wisdom that those who spoke the same language should be organized in the same state, and 100 years of political adjustments followed. They coincided, as Newt pointed out yesterday, with changes in technology and economic organization, which luckily coincided with a change in human consciousness.

In our period, there are huge changes in technology and economics, but they have not been accompanied by comparable changes in human consciousness. And I sort of tremble at the thought that the guy who brought down Baring is the wave of the future, that some technicians manipulating computers can shape our world in a way over which there's no political influence. So I would say one of our major tasks is to get hold of some of the instruments we have created.

There were many mistakes made in Mexico, for example, but I don't think anybody understood the volatility of investment funds that are moved into a country for purely speculative purposes by institutions that, unlike banks, have no permanent interest other than to maximizing their immediate profits, and they are therefore going to pull out at the slightest sign of difficulty. We have no institutions to monitor this adequately, much less to control it.

As far as the United States is concerned, the change in political consciousness that I believe is ahead of us, which I spoke about briefly yesterday and Professor Kirk spoke about this morning, is a reorientation of our thinking from East-West in part to North-South, at least in the Western Hemisphere. If that had been fully understood, we would have presented the Mexican loan not as a way to keep unwanted immigrants from coming to the United States or as a way of promoting American jobs, but in the way I conceive it, which is this:

Conventional wisdom holds that the world will be a global trading system. I think it is a proposition that requires examination. But I do believe that it is apt to develop into a series of regional trading systems. I also believe that the United States, powerful as it is, is, in the face of the global combinations that are foreseeable, not sufficient to act on a purely national basis. And it is therefore in our interest to create a grouping in the Western Hemisphere of nations with similar, more or less, histories committed to free market. And if we could be imaginative and relate Europe to this as well in some sort of economic relationship, then we would have a vision for the future that would respond to some of the challenges that have been described.

We have done the right thing with Mexico, but we have justified it in a way and tied it to conditions that are so onerous that our justification may undo the courageous actions we have taken, partly because we have not settled in our own mind what our view of the future should be.

There are areas of the world that I have not covered, such as Islam, because I don't fully understand all the movements going on there. But in a foreseeable future, Europe and America will have to react either to its possibilities or to its frustrations. When refugees start showing up, when terrorism becomes global, when vital interests are threatened, it will be necessary to develop common positions.

So we are back to where President Nixon started, trying to solve a war that he inherited and that he did not abandon because he believed it was the moral duty of America to stand by those who had entrusted their fate to us, even if it was a different political administration. Since then, there have been huge successes and transformations that nobody could foresee, but it only brought us back to the original question. And for raising these questions, I would like to congratulate Dimitri Simes and John Taylor, and I would like to think that President Nixon, had he been here, would think that his legacy has been carried out.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

JOHN TAYLOR, Executive Director, Nixon Library: Ladies and gentlemen, Chairman Kissinger has consented to take just a few questions. To make that easier for you, I'd like everyone to please sit so that four geopolitical geniuses-in-the-making can identify themselves by raising their hands. Marie-Rose, Joel, David and Jamie. You see these young people holding microphones? It's your responsible to make yourself known to them.

Begin with Marie-Rose. Please identify yourself so that Dr. Kissinger can run a security check. (Laughter.)

QUESTIONER: Thank you. Alan Gerson. Dr. Kissinger, should President Clinton go to Moscow to celebrate the Russian celebration of the 50th anniversary of the end of the war?

DR. KISSINGER: In a normal world, except for Chechnya, there would be overwhelming reasons to go to Moscow, and I actually have great sympathy for his wanting to go there. Still, I would find it painful, and I think most of our European allies would find it painful, if he went there while the war is still going on in Chechnya and the Russian Army has killed so many people, although I understand the need for the symbolism of showing that we knew how to cooperate once. And it's not an easy question for him.

MR. TAYLOR: Joe.

QUESTIONER: Harry Arad from Jerusalem. Dr. Kissinger, as someone who had many, many hours with President Assad in a grueling shuttle over 20 years ago, do you believe that Washington should become much more actively involved in the peace process between Israel and Syria?

DR. KISSINGER: Twenty years ago there were no communications between Arab nations and Israel, and the most trivial message had to be carried by us. It was at the end of a war, and it was important for the United States to be the shaping element in the negotiation. I believe at this point that it's fairly clearly understood what needs to be done by the various parties to come to an agreement, and whether an agreement is reached or not really depends at this moment more on domestic considerations by all the parties than on anything the United States could do.

So I don't really believe that it is wise for the United States to become -- to go beyond what it is doing in my view quite effectively.

MR. TAYLOR: David?

QUESTIONER: Elaine Sciolino from The New York Times. Dr. Kissinger, if President Nixon were alive today and in the White House and you were in the White House with him, what would you be doing differently? (Laughter.)

DR. KISSINGER: That's an impossible question to answer, because, you know, when you make a decision in the White House, it is not an academic exercise. It's the cumulative result of months and sometimes years of nuances that build up. Almost certainly there would have been less of a multilateral emphasis in justifying American policies, and perhaps less of a tendency as you -- if one takes the expansion of NATO, I tend to think a decision would have been made one way or the other and it would not -- one would not say we are for it, but we leave the timing to the future.

But I don't want to second-guess every move that the Clinton administration, and I have supported them on Mexico, on NAFTA, on several instances. And I think one's basic attitude would be, as was the case with President Nixon and the aid program to Russia, to try to support when one can.

MR. TAYLOR: Jamie, you have a victim.

QUESTIONER: Dr. Kissinger -- (unintelligible) -- Rheinsicher Merkur and -- (unintelligible) -- Weekly. I understood that you think the situation in Russia is basically stable with borders I think many Russians devise as historically unjust borders. Do you really think the situation in which Kiev is a foreign city to much of Russia is a stable situation which America could play on?

DR. KISSINGER: We did not break up the Soviet Union. Yeltsin broke up the Soviet Union. The borders of Ukraine are the borders that were recognized in the CIS when the Soviet Union broke up. So I have no fixed view on where the borders of Ukraine should be. I do have a fixed view that, when a nation of 58 million, a member of the United Nations, is in existence, its neighbors cannot challenge its borders without violating accepted rules of international conduct and behaving in an aggressive manner. And, therefore, I simply would hope that Russia, A, will have good relations with Ukraine, but, secondly, respect the borders it was the first to establish and that are now recognized by the United Nations.

MR. TAYLOR: Our final question --

QUESTIONER: Oh, this is a hard one. You've talked several times in the last few days about the fact that we had a concept, a framework, a theory, about what to do in the Cold War, and we are lacking to that. How do we proceed without this kind of a theory or a framework? Does it fall back on individual interest, incidents case by case in accepting the inconsistencies that arise from that?

DR. KISSINGER: Well, one can, of course, be too idealistic, as Brent pointed out, about the history of the Cold War. It took five years nearly for the containment concept to be accepted. And, if you read the debates between Henry Wallace and President Truman or the argument in Congress over NATO and the Marshall Plan, you will see that it was far from self-evident. But then over the next period there were debates about how to implement it. In the Korean War, there was no disagreement about our being there. Was there disagreement about whether we should pursue the war more strenuously than we did. This gradually broke down -- and probably would have broken down without the Vietnam War -- but this consensus certainly broke down in the '70s. And then the disintegration of the Soviet Union created a totally new situation.

Now, it is much harder to reconstruct such an agreement today, because it is probably not possible to have one overarching concern. And I don't have -- and the second difficulty is, when I was a young professor, none of us ever thought that we would be in high office. We thought that the only way to influence events was to write reflective books or articles. Sometime in the '60s the academic and intellectual community divided into two groups: revolutionaries and job applicants. (Laughter.) So that the leadership, the intellectual leadership, gradually eroded, because the job applicants wrote the same papers that were already being written within the government more or less. And it's very rare that you get a fundamental paper like Sam Huntington's, whatever one -- I happen to agree with much of it, but whether one agrees with it or not.

So I have no good solution. One would like to think that whatever administration is in office will help to shape this. I believe, for example, that this proposal for a national commission on strategy, on bipartisan, if it were redefined and broadened, might be a good beginning to do it. But I know the need better than the solution.

MR. TAYLOR: Thank you, Dr. Kissinger. (Applause.) One moment, please, sir. A brief presentation.

Dr. Kissinger, you spoke of all that has changed in the world since at an age not much older than young Christopher a future president lay awake at night in his bedroom in Yorba Linda and dreamed of going to far-away places when he heard the train whistle. On April 26th, we will mark the first anniversary of that young lad's final return to Yorba Linda, and on that occasion the United States Postal Service will release a postage stamp in his honor. We believe you need this for the wall of Kissinger Associates in Manhattan. We hope you'll take it with the compliments of the Nixon family. Thank you, Dr. Kissinger. (Applause.)