September 9, 2014
On Capital Download with Susan Page, Dr. Henry Kissinger advocates for an attack on Islamic State. Shannon Rae Green
KISSINGER
NEW YORK – As President Obama prepares to address the nation on the threat by the Islamic State, Henry Kissinger says the United States needs to strike the terror group in retaliation for the decapitation of two American journalists, then eliminate it “as an operating force in the region.”
In an interview with USA TODAY, the former secretary of State and adviser to a string of presidents describes that task as achievable in a reasonable amount of time — “if we do it with enough intensity” — and says the deployment of U.S. ground troops shouldn’t be “necessary or appropriate.”
He also cautions that the American objective should be carefully defined.
“We have to keep in mind that we’ve been in five wars since World War II, and in only one can we say we’ve reached the objective stated,” he said. “So we should state the objective that does not get us into an endless conflict.”
Kissinger was interviewed in his office, which features a spectacular view down Park Avenue and framed photos of him with world leaders from Mao to Mandela. At the table to one side of the couch is an autographed photo from Richard Nixon (“With deep appreciation”) next to one from Barack Obama (“Thanks for your continued leadership”).
At age 91, the nation’s senior foreign policy elder moves more slowly and with the help of a cane, but he continues to travel, to meet with foreign leaders and to write. His 21st book, World Order, published by Penguin Press, goes on sale Tuesday.
Henry Kissinger sits in his New York office Sept. 8. (Photo: Todd Plitt, USA TODAY)
The book, delineating the challenges for policymakers in an increasingly complicated world, comes as Obama struggles to respond to the collapse of the Iraqi army in the face of Islamic State forces and the beheading of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. The president will meet with congressional leaders Tuesday to preview his speech.
Kissinger says it’s a moment for members of Congress, even Republican critics, to support Obama. “I think when the president of the United States calls for military action, he should do it for a united people,” especially “when the methods have been so cruel, so explicitly directed at Americans.”
“It could happen that down the road others and I will make comments,” he adds, “but I think at this moment, it’s important to support the president.”
That said, he acknowledges questions about Obama’s recent statement to reporters that he didn’t “have a strategy yet” on the Islamic State.
“It’s not what I would have recommended at a moment of crisis,” Kissinger says dryly. “I can understand that he will be in a process of getting different opinions, but the president to the public should appear to have a sense of direction.”
COLLIDING WORLDS
The new book may be titled World Order, but Kissinger acknowledges that there doesn’t seem to be much of that these days.
“It’s never happened in history that every region in the world could affect every other region simultaneously,” he says. “The Roman empire and the Chinese empire didn’t know much about each other and had no means of interacting. Now we have every continent able to reach every other.”
The problem is that these competing worlds – from Islam, China, Russia and the West – have different perceptions of what a just world order would be. That has made negotiating among them “the challenge of our time” – and one in which the United States, as the strongest nation in the world, has a special obligation.
The sense that Americans want to withdraw from the world, the attitude that “most of the world must take care of itself,” is one that has recurred in U.S. history but is fraught with peril, Kissinger cautions.
“It’s an empirical fact that when we withdraw somewhere, somebody else will try to fill it,” he says. “It says that nature abhors a vacuum; the international system abhors a vacuum.”
The crisis in Iraq is the latest reflection of that – and could be echoed after the planned withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the end of this year.
USATODAY
Kissinger: 40 years ago, when Ford pardoned Nixon
“We will face the same problem in Afghanistan a year or so down the road, with the same consequences, if we don’t anticipate it,” he says. “The high probability is if American forces withdraw from Afghanistan and if no alternative international arrangement is made that then the historic contests between the regions and the sects will reappear, the Taliban will re-emerge and a very complicated and maybe chaotic situation will develop.”
He proposes an “understanding” reached with Afghanistan’s powerful neighbors and near-neighbors – China, India, Russia and Iran, plus the United States – about what “acts” from Afghan territory would not be permitted.
A model, he suggests, could be the Treaty of London of 1839, which guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium – which had become a repeated battleground because of its strategic location.
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Kissinger addresses the audience following the HBO documentary screening of “Terror In Mumbai” at a Time Warner Center screening room Nov. 4, 2009, in New York City.(Photo: Michael Loccisano, Getty Images for HBO)
PUTIN AND THE TSARS
Kissinger’s conversation and his book is threaded with references to history, modern and ancient.
He places Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent steps, including the annexation of Crimea, in the context of Russian history.
“I’m not justifying his actions,” he says, but “one has to remember that when Europe had the Renaissance, Russia was occupied by Mongolia.” Security means something different to Russians, and Russian rulers – “whether they were tsars or commissars or presidents” – have been the embodiment of those security concerns.
He suggests that the solution might be to see Ukraine as “neither an outpost of the West nor an outpost of Russia” but a buffer state between them, the sort of role Finland and Austria have played.
Washington should do more to talk with Moscow. “We have not had an adequate dialogue with Russia,” he says. “I’m not saying it would work, but I’m saying it should be attempted.”
Nearly 40 years since he left appointed office, Kissinger still can provoke controversy. Hillary Rodham Clinton, another former secretary of State, wrote a favorable review of his new book in Sunday’s Washington Post. “The World According to Henry Kissinger,” it was titled, and an enormous photo of Kissinger’s face filled most of the page.
“I’ve known her for many years now, and I respect her intellect,” he says of Clinton. “And she ran the State Department in the most effective way that I’ve ever seen.”
More effectively than he did?
“Yes,” he says with a smile. “I was more chaotic.”
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President Nixon confers with Kissinger on Nov. 25, 1972, in New York after Kissinger returned from a week of secret negotiations in Paris with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho.(Photo: AP)
The review prompted commentator David Corn to protest in Mother Jones: “Hillary Clinton praises a guy with lots of blood on his hands.” Corn cited among other things the secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
“That was a period where Americans learned for the first time the limitations of its capacity, and that was translated into the domestic debate as a moral argument” over foreign policy decisions, Kissinger says. In Cambodia, he argues, the U.S. bombing targeted border areas taken over by the North Vietnamese, who were in a position to strike U.S. troops in Saigon with deadly force.
Kissinger likens the bombing to today’s drone strikes against terror targets.
“Obama faced exactly the same problem in Pakistan, and the current administration is attacking in Somalia and Yemen,” he says. “But that was 50 years ago. I’m now 91. And from that perspective, what you mentioned is not of any concern to me.”
What does he want his epitaph to read?
There is a long pause. “You know, I haven’t thought about that, because things are changing so fast, if I compare what the world was like when I started.” He pauses again. “I’d like to have it thought, probably, that I made a difference, and leave it to others to decide what the difference was.”
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