In our democracy there are officials who use up, by definition, their intellectual capital, and there must be others who venture forward against not only the frontiers of knowledge but to the limits of our imagination. This function has turned out to be a crucial one for the health of our society.

All of modern policy making in the democracies is affected by four major problems:

• First is the relation of men to events; the disjointed nature of the experience that forms individuals in relation to the problems they have to deal with when they reach higher office.
• Second is the problem that often expertise consists of management of the familiar, while the society needs a vision of a future that no one has yet experienced. That requires above all the moral fortitude to risk oneself on an assessment that one cannot prove true.
• Third is the complexity of the domestic structure, in which management of the bureaucracies often takes as much, if not more, energy than dealing with the problems they are supposed to solve. The process of getting elected bears little relation to the purpose of the election.
• Finally, there is in too many democracies a breakdown of the domestic consensus, without which no major policy can be sustained and especially no foreign policy can be sustained.

It may be possible to segment domestic decisions into a series of individual actions, but it is not possible to conduct a foreign policy without a vision of the world that one wants to bring about, some definition of what one means by peace and by justice and by order and by stability and by progress. If one does not have that vision, one runs the risk of a series of unrelated tactical decisions.

I have made these general observations because the main thrust of my remarks here concerns relations within the Atlantic alliance.

I do not want to create the impression that I am speaking of particular difficulties of individual policies. I am, first of all, in substantial support of the direction that this administration is taking. And secondly, I believe that the problems we face have been a long time in developing and cannot be solved in a few months, maybe not even in one or two years, and that it will require precisely the fortitude and the determination that President Ford spoke about with respect to our domestic policy.

The difficulty in the Atlantic alliance is perhaps best expressed in the current debate. It is an amazing phenomenon, less than two years after Afghanistan, less than four years after Cuban troops under a Soviet general appeared in Ethiopia, six years after the same thing happened in Angola and while thirty-plus Soviet divisions are constantly bringing pressure on Poland, that at this moment there should be mass demonstrations all over Europe––affirming what?--the desirability of peace and implying that it is the United States which is the obstacle.

And I must say that too many governments, while not condoning these demonstrations, seek to pull their teeth by adopting at least part of their programs and at least part of their efforts.

I was born in Europe. It is the area to which I am emotionally most attached. And close Atlantic relations have been the aspect of foreign policy that has always attracted most of my attention.

But it is a painful phenomenon when we hear the argument that the danger of war is growing because of the rhetoric of this administration; that it is our fault because of certain weapons decisions or a certain slowness in responding to Soviet overtures; that, even in the brief period since the Soviet actions I have described, one cannot separate the essential from the tactical.

For over a decade, it has been clear that there has been a reluctance to deal with the realities of security. The inevitable corollary is disagreement about the nature of East-West relations, expressing itself particularly about the nature of arms control negotiations. There is wide disagreement about what the obligation of alliance cooperation is outside the treaty area and occasionally within it.

These disputes have rent every administration since the 1960s, so that we are not talking about an individual phenomenon. We are talking about a fundamental problem.

In 1973, in a speech delivered to the Pilgrims Society in London, I said:

The next generation of leaders in Europe, Canada, and America will have neither the personal memory nor the emotional commitment to the Atlantic alliance of its founders. Even today, a majority on both sides of the Atlantic did not experience the threat that produced the alliance's creation or the sense of achievement associated with its growth. Even today, in the United States over forty senators consistently vote to make massive unilateral reductions of American forces in Europe. Even today, some Europeans have come to believe that their identity should be measured by its distance from the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, we are faced with the anomalous--and dangerous--situation in which the public mind identifies foreign policy success increasingly with relations with adversaries while relations with allies seem to be characterized by bickering and drift.

I think now, almost a decade later, it is possible to say that very little has changed in this situation. I would add that another decade of not facing the fundamental issues will threaten to turn the Atlantic alliance into a hollow shell.

We have heard all the arguments that counsel that one should not press the issues:

• that the governments of Europe have to concentrate on building their own identity;
• that we should strengthen weak governments and wait for a better day to face the problems;
• that Europe cannot afford the extra burden of adding to its own defense budgets;
• that détente in Europe has to be preserved no matter what happens anywhere else;
• that Angola was an aberration, Ethiopia was unique, Yemen and Afghanistan temporary setbacks.

But we have seen in this period that disassociation, dissent, and public protest have increased, not diminished; that the alliance as a whole, even though it agrees periodically on common statements, does not have a common philosophy or a common platform from which to resist Soviet blandishments or the pressures from its own constituents; and that to pretend otherwise only guarantees the perpetuation of current conditions.

Yes, the problems are objectively difficult, and the domestic situation in many countries for dealing with them is very complicated. But the problems will not get easier and the domestic situation will not improve unless one makes a deliberate, determined effort to establish a new basis for cooperation.

With respect to security, there are two harsh facts that Americans as well as our allies must face.

First, the strategic superiority that we enjoyed after World War II has ended. When it ended, why it ended, whether it was avoidable, or deferrable--that can be debated indefinitely by historians and politicians. The fact is, however, that this strategy of relying on American strategic superiority to offset Soviet conventional superiority cannot be the strategy of the 1980s. The issue we face is how to conduct American and alliance foreign policy in this new environment in which the Soviet Union is at least equal to the United States in its strategic forces. The credibility of the threat of general war must, therefore, diminish, and the invocation of the threat must, therefore, be demoralizing on both sides of the Atlantic.

The second fact is that the ability of the United States to protect its interests simply by extending the deterrence of our strategic forces to other parts of the world is also ending. We have vital interests in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf and in the Far East. We have solemn treaty commitments and moral obligations; we have a national interest to defend. But the gap between our commitments and our ability to fulfill them will inevitably grow, on any foreseeable projections of strategic power. And it will be accelerated by the commitment to strategic arms reduction talks--which I favor, but which will make it obvious, as the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks already did, that there exists a balance of strategic power. This will make it psychologically and practically very difficult to invoke the traditional guarantees.

I called attention to this fact two years ago and was accused of undermining alliance credibility. But the credibility of the alliance is not assured by repeating interminably things that common sense demonstrates are implausible. The credibility of the alliance consists in our willingness to face reality and to take the steps that are necessary.

Here the domestic debate in every country is an inhibiting factor. It is a strange phenomenon that on both sides of the Atlantic the groups that consider themselves humane and progressive and pacific are also the groups that advocate the most bloodthirsty strategies. It is taken as an example of warmongering tendencies to imply or to assert that it is the duty of governments to try to avoid a nuclear holocaust and to resist aggression, if it should take place, by means other than the most cataclysmic measures. On our side, it leads to opposition to any weapon that might extend, if only for a brief period, our counterforce capabilities, as if forcing our government into attacking civilian targets were the only means by which we can pursue peaceful policies.

And the corollary in Europe is that any attempt to define a use of nuclear weapons other than blind mass destruction of civilians is greeted with hoots of derision and howls of outrage. It evokes the argument that America is ready to dissociate its defense from that of Europe, or that America wants Europe to be devastated while it stands on the sidelines. When has it ever happened in history that threatened countries would make their own defense conditional on the guaranteed destruction of their strongest and distant allies?

There is a weird debate when the president affirms that "no NATO weapons, nuclear or conventional, will ever be used in Europe except in response to attack," and is ignored or derided. When he affirms the accepted NATO doctrine that we should seek to pause before plunging into a nuclear holocaust by not escalating automatically after the first exchange, he is accused of being a warmonger, even though this view has been expressed by every president since Eisenhower. But then Brezhnev gives an interview, greeted with wide approval or acceptance as a conclusive statement, to the effect that if one nuclear weapon is used, then "unavoidably" the conflict will assume a "global character."

Who is the more dangerous participant in this debate? What is the real menace? Can we really want to be in the position where we can protect our friends or our vital interests only by the indiscriminate destruction of hundreds of millions? Whenever has a political leader had to face such a responsibility?

Nobody needs instruction in the desirability of peace. The problem of any president is how to combine peace with justice and how to use strength for conciliation. If peace becomes the only objective of our country or of the Atlantic alliance, the world will be taken over by those who are prepared to threaten war. And if we say that there is something, whatever it is, that we will defend, we have an obligation to elaborate a theory of defense that a responsible leader can execute and that serious people can support--not a nihilistic orgy of mass destruction imposed on us by a sterile domestic debate.

If we look at the present debate, there is the great danger that the Atlantic nations will disarm themselves in both strategy and diplomacy. Arthur Burns, in what I consider a very profound speech about American-German relations, made the following observations:

The debate is becoming a battle for the soul of Europe with clear alternatives. On the one hand, the West can reaffirm unequivocally its determination to achieve sufficient collective security to deter Soviet aggression even as the United States seeks through negotiations with the Soviet Union to achieve major reductions of nuclear weapons. On the other hand, if such reaffirmation is long postponed or becomes uncertain, there may well be a growing sentiment in America to turn back upon itself and let Europe depend for its security and freedom upon its own resources or upon Soviet good will.

I would like strongly to endorse these observations.

If the American strategic arsenal is designed to avoid any counterforce capability; if the Europeans resist the concept of limited nuclear war for regional defense; and if both sides of the Atlantic refuse to build up the conventional defense that could be a substitute, how then are we going to avoid blackmail or demoralization? If one is serious about reducing the danger of nuclear war, then one should be committed to building up conventional forces on both sides of the Atlantic. We cannot have everything. We cannot have a volunteer army here, reduced terms of service in Europe, and no strategy for the use of the thousands of nuclear weapons that exist, and yet make ourselves believe that we are secure for the indefinite future.

The second question is the one raised by Arthur Burns. In these circumstances when there is no clear-cut theory for the common defense, how long will our Congress permit us to maintain 350,000 troops in Europe? For what purpose? Are they a tripwire, or are they a fighting force? Are they there to defend our allies, or are they there to trigger our retaliatory force?

If we cannot answer these questions, sooner or later somebody in this country is going to ask why we must have our largest force in an area that does not believe in local defense, and why we cannot have local forces in regions that do believe in local defense, or at least where local defense is essential, such as the Persian Gulf and other threatened areas.

That is our fundamental problem. I do not think anyone doubts the answers that I would give to this question, and it is why the debate about theater nuclear forces has taken such odd turns.

It has been forgotten in the demonstrations and in the maneuvers and in the proposals for various negotiating options that it was European leaders who, starting in 1977, called the attention of American statesmen to the gap that existed as a result of the Soviet deployment of the SS-20. It was Chancellor Schmidt in a major speech at the International Institute of Strategic Studies who pointed out that American arms control policy was being directed only at strategic weapons. We were producing a balance in the strategic field and an imbalance in regional defense. The great danger, we were told then, was that this would decouple the defense of Europe from the defense of the United States.

No sooner had the United States responded to this proposal by offering the deployment of theater nuclear forces into Europe, when the debate developed as if this were done for the defense of the United States. It became totally confused that, in fact, whatever one can say about these deployments, the one thing they inevitably do is to link the defense of Europe to the defense of the United States. They inevitably bring about a situation where the Soviet Union cannot blackmail Europe selectively, because it can only blackmail Europe with nuclear weapons by attacking American strategic forces; no Soviet leader would attack American forces in Europe without also attacking American forces in the United States. Therefore, what the Europeans seemed most to want is certainly assured by this deployment.

The irony is that if there should be any demonstrations, they should be in the United States, not in Europe. If we want intermediate-range weapons for an American conflict with the Soviet Union, we can deploy them at sea. We do not have to deploy them in Europe for American purposes. And therefore, I think it is time that we abandon the position of supplicant on this issue and ask the Europeans to tell us what they want and redesign our strategy accordingly. The most disastrous course is one in which Europeans accept weapons in which they no longer believe and we are pushed into negotiations whose primary purpose is to please allies.

And we have seen with respect to these theater nuclear forces the same ambiguities as with respect to the design of our own strategy. There is an agreement now to engage in negotiations on theater nuclear forces. But if one were to group the arguments that have led to it within the alliance, I think it is safe to say that there are some who want these negotiations as a pretext to avoid deploying these weapons; there are others who want these negotiations in order to deploy these weapons. There are some who want it as a bridge to strategic arms limitations or arms reductions, and there are others who want it to forestall such talks.

I do not believe that consensus yet exists. What is really wanted is an alliance-wide consensus; I would not dare to imply that our government lacks consensus on any issue.

All these tendencies, therefore, have merged in a general agreement to negotiate, but not yet in a direction toward which to steer these negotiations. And part of the problem is that there is no real agreement within the alliance, and maybe among ourselves, as to what exactly the purpose of negotiations is. There are some who look at negotiations almost as a psychiatric problem, to establish an atmosphere of good will. There are others who see in them a theological issue, in order to show up our adversaries.

My own view has been that it would be a sign of weakness for us to be afraid of the fact of negotiations. We always wind up in the wrong position. If we permit a long debate to arise about whether we are willing to negotiate, the end result inevitably is that the opening of negotiations will be taken as a victory for our adversaries, or for self-appointed mediators, and that we are then driven to extreme substantive positions we might not have taken otherwise in order to prove our good intentions in the first place.

We cannot avoid certain facts: The United States and the Soviet Union are ideological and geopolitical adversaries. No negotiations can change that fact. But the nuclear age compels us to strive for some rules of coexistence, and no rhetorical crusade can change that fact either. And the obligation of our statesmanship is to navigate between these positions, not to believe that a negotiation is the end of a process, or to want to substitute negotiation for strength.

There is no way around a defense budget along the lines that have been proposed by this administration. And it cannot be compared to domestic programs, if what I have described here is even roughly accurate.

Now let me make one other point. There is within the alliance also a serious problem about what is implied by the obligations of the alliance. What degree of coordination, what aspect of unity is essential? Very often the issue is debated in strictly legal terms: Do the treaty obligations of NATO apply to the Middle East, for example?

But I have always believed that if allies, faced with a common problem, have to call in their legal advisers to find out what their juridical obligations are, the alliance is already in desperate straits. An alliance is held together by a perception of the common interest, and it, therefore, requires some definition of what is a common interest. It is almost inconceivable that something that threatens the vital interest of a major partner cannot affect the fundamental interest of other partners, no matter what the documents say.

It is not plausible to believe that what happens in the Middle East, for example, can be dealt with totally separately as between Europe and the United States. And yet we have had for quite a while now two totally different philosophical approaches: one that attempts to rely on negotiation through existing states by an already agreed procedure, and another that attempts to bring in a radical group as the key element of the negotiating process--a group that has heretofore rejected even the existence of a potential negotiating partner and in the process has threatened even the existing Arab states at various times. This is a fundamental philosophical difference, and to pursue both policies simultaneously is to run the risk of thwarting both in an area that each of them, each party, considers vital.

And how is one to deal with the notion so widespread in Europe that Europeans can be "interpreters" between the United States and the Soviet Union? That they can be mediators, as if they were not themselves involved, as if somehow or other they had a more profound insight. Why is it not possible that we, who are presumably on the same side, if we differ, settle these differences in negotiations with each other rather than in a three-cornered negotiation that makes our adversary the referee?

Of course, an alliance cannot always have a total unity of views, nor do I say that our view is inevitably the correct one, nor have we always practiced what I am preaching here. In many administrations--it does not change--the fundamental problem is that the alliance cannot be a liturgical formalism that is invoked every six months at meetings. Some of the questions that I have raised here must be answered, even if they are given a different content than what I have implied.

It cannot be healthy that allies attempt to renegotiate their membership in an organization for the common security. Why should we pay a price for their defense beyond what already exists? It cannot go on that weapons technology develops, and arms control negotiations imply parity, while the rhetoric presents a defense doctrine hard to distinguish from that of the early years of the alliance. Somehow or other we need to tell the truth to each other and to develop an agreed strategic doctrine.

Our own obligation in negotiations is to be precise and to explain the direction of what we have in mind and its implications. The European obligation is to identify foreign policy as something other than pushing us from concession to concession and giving the impression that Europe is inherently more conciliatory than is our side. We need some definition of the necessities of common policies and of the range of permissible deviation. Whether this can be done inside the government or whether one should create an outside group, the experience has not been, in the past, brilliant either way. Whatever is done, the assignment should be to define the alternatives and not to struggle for some mealy-mouthed consensus, which permits everyone to continue doing what got us to this state of affairs to begin with.

I do not think I need to repeat that I would prefer a positive, decisive, constructive answer to all of these questions. But we also have to be honest with ourselves. If that is not possible, then we have to look for other measures and other arrangements.

Again, there is no reason why the first course should not succeed. We mesmerize ourselves with Soviet military capabilities, but they are in the hands of a country with a stagnant political structure, of an economy stretched to the utmost, of a system that cannot avoid structural changes.

What I have presented are all issues of policy, not issues of structure. In other words, we know what we have to do. So let us just see whether we can do it.

Henry A. Kissinger is the recipient of the AEI Francis Boyer Award for 1981.