(gentle upbeat music)
- Welcome to A Conversation With History,
I'm Harry Kreisler of the
Institute of International Studies.
Our guest today is Niall Ferguson,
who is a senior fellow
at the Hoover Institution
at Stanford University.
His new book is
Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist.
Professor Ferguson is at Berkeley
to deliver the R Kirk Underhill lecture
for the Anglo American Studies program
at the Institute of Governmental Studies.
Niall, welcome back to Berkeley.
- Nice to be back Harry.
- Why are,
Anglo American studies still important?
- I don't think you can
understand the history
of the United States if you
ignore its British origins
for one thing.
I don't think you can really understand
the history of the world
unless you understand
the extraordinary and
disproportionately role played
by what Churchill called the
English speaking peoples,
and I think perhaps lastly,
it would be very difficult
to make sense of contemporary developments
in the United States if one knew nothing
of the parallel developments in the UK.
Populism is a word that's on
everybody's lips these days
while we had a populist
moment in Britain this year
with the vote to leave the European Union,
and I don't think that's irrelevant
to the kind of debates
that have been going on
in the US around the
presidential election campaign.
- And what is it about populism
as it's appearing all over
Europe and in Great Britain
and in the United States
that invites a comparison?
- Well I think there's
a global phenomenon,
certainly a northern hemisphere
phenomenon at work here.
A backlash against globalization,
not only economically but one
might say also culturally,
and one of the arguments I
want to make in my lecture
is that if one looks closely at
the case of the United Kingdom,
one sees certain common features
of this populist backlash
that are also visible in the
United States and elsewhere.
There is certainly an argument about
the economic consequences
of global integration,
but in particular I think
there's an argument about immigration,
and not only its economic consequences
but also its cultural consequences.
So the Brexit vote back in June,
the vote for Britain to
leave the European Union
is a really interesting test
of the power of populism
and on of the striking
features of that vote
was the way in which there
were big differentials
both regionally and in terms of age groups
in the way that people voted.
I'm a Scotsman, this
may still be detectable
in my idiosyncratic accent,
Scotland voted to remain in the EU
by quite a substantial margin.
It was England and Wales
that voted strongly to leave.
Even more strikingly, and this seems to me
highly relevant to the United States,
there was a huge differential in turnout
and voting between age groups.
So relatively young voters, the under 25s,
turned out at a rate of around 60%,
but voted by a large majority
to remain in the European Union.
Voters age 65 and older
turned out at a rate of 90%
and they voted
disproportionately to leave.
I think it's very interesting
to see how far populism
is a partly regional phenomenon,
but above all it's a
kind of demographically
differentiated phenomenon
appealing to older voters,
and it's those older
voters reaction against
the cultural as well as economic
consequences of immigration
who seem really, that that seems really
to be driving this movement.
- And what is it about globalization
in addition to increased immigration
that leads to this dissatisfaction
among this cohort you're talking about?
- Well I think if one
beings with the economics
one gets a sort of rough
idea of what's going on.
What you've had in the last 25 years
has been a really significant increase
in international flows
of goods, commodities,
capital, people and ideas,
and all of these things
have really significantly
increased in volume.
The migrant flows have
made the United Kingdom
really for the first time
in its modern history
a major destination of immigrants
with nets in migration running
at around 300,000 a year.
That's a lot for--
- And are these mainly
from Eastern Europe?
- No, no.
- No.
- No this is the interesting thing,
when you actually look
at what's happening,
about half of these people are not
from the European Union at all,
they're from all over the world,
and the other half are indeed
from the European Union,
but of that European
contingent, the East Europeans,
the people from the relatively
new member states in the EU
are actually quite a small fraction,
but that's not how the world looks
if you're a reader of the Daily Mail.
If you're a reader of the Daily Mail,
there's an enormous number
of people from Poland
and other East European states
who are coming to the UK
and they're taking British
jobs or they're lowering
the wages of British workers,
and they're consuming public services,
all of which is quite
wrong in fact it turns out.
If one looks at the
role of the EU migrants
what they actually do is they they come
and they they take jobs that
would otherwise not get done.
There's no zero-sum game here.
Employment has increased
for UK citizens enormously
in the period of recovery that
we've seen since 2008, 2009,
and it's kind of hard to
understand how that recovery
would have gone if there hadn't also been
migrant workers from the rest of the EU
to take some of the jobs
that were being created,
and what's also very striking is that
there are so many of these
European citizens in work
that they are clearly net
contributors to the public purse.
So there's a tremendous distortion
when you get to the level
of the media and of politics
about what exactly is going on,
and that gets me to the second point.
This isn't really about economics
or at least it's only superficially
an economic phenomenon.
It's much more I think a reaction against
the cultural changes that are
associated with globalization
not just with immigration,
but more broadly with globalization,
and that's why it's significant
that it's older voters in
the UK who voted for Brexit,
not because they had a
tremendously sophisticated idea
of the nature of Britain's relationship
with the European Union,
but more because they
wanted to protest against
changes that they have
seen in their country
over the period of say 20 to 25 years,
that have been the course partly economic,
but much I think it's
a cultural phenomenon
that we're seeing here.
A kind of rejection not just of a more
multicultural society but a
rejection of a whole range
of things that come with that.
Some of the interesting polling
that I'll talk about in
my lecture relates to
how people thought
about a range of issues.
Including for example feminism,
and how they voted in
the Brexit referendum,
and the correlations
are extremely striking.
Socially and culturally
conservative attitudes
match up with voting for leaving the EU.
So voting to leave the EU
is really a kind of proxy
for a generalized protest
against things that people
just don't like about
modernity and not surprisingly
if you're 65, and older and there's a lot
you don't like about modernity
'cause you remember things
being different in your day,
and that was a big part of Brexit.
If you look at the US the
slogan Make America Great Again
clearly resonates with a
section of the population
which is less well-educated,
older, whiter, and
culturally conservative,
and that I think is a
really important parallel
between the Brexit phenomenon
and the Trump phenomenon.
- To what extent should
we look at the elites,
the global elite, both in the
United States and in Europe
and,
ask what, in what ways have they failed to
getting ahead of the game
with regard to this response
which has come upon us.
- I think hostility to elites
who are perceived to be out of touch
and perhaps even corrupt,
is a really important part of populism.
I mean I came up with
a recipe for populism
earlier this year that
had five ingredients.
The increase in immigration,
the financial shock of the crisis,
the increase of inequality,
and at the sense that
the public institutions,
the elites are corrupt.
Final ingredient is a demagogue,
put all those things together and boom,
you have something pretty
toxic in the kitchen.
So I think the issue of
the elites have failed,
played a really big part
in the populist movements,
that we see all across
the world right now,
and I think the some
justification for this.
It's very easy for someone like me
who's clearly a member
of the global elite,
you're one too, I mean here we are,
professors at elite institutions,
to condescend to voters
who are attracted to populist causes,
but we have to acknowledge that they have
some right to be aggrieved.
After all it was the elites
who brought you the Iraq War.
It was the elites who brought
you the financial crisis,
and I think from the vantage point
of the imaginary median voter
in both the UK and the US,
the last 16 years has not been
a particularly edifying spectacle,
and it hasn't given you too
much confidence in those elites
who run the political
and economic systems.
- Is there a,
particular responsibility that falls
on the United States and it's elite
because of its role as a hegemon
in the post World War world?
Especially after the
fall of the Soviet union?
- Obviously the United
States has played a key role,
not just since the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the end of the Cold War,
but since World War II
and American leaders
or American elites if you prefer,
are the most important and
influential in the world.
So when the elites blunder,
which I think it's quite
reasonable to argue that they did,
the rest of the world and not
only American voters suffers,
so I think part of what we see here is
an understandable popular reaction
against major failures of policy,
and the populist critique on
both sides of the Atlantic
is not in that sense
without some foundation.
I mean even if you take a specific example
like immigration to the UK,
you could argue that the
inflows of workers to the UK
and the decline of immigration from the UK
are both signs of success,
the UK's economy has been
creating a lot of jobs,
more than most of the
continental European economies,
but Britain's leaders did not do
a terribly good job of explaining that.
In fact what they'd led people to expect
was that they were going
to reduce net migration.
They were going to actually bring it down
to more like 30,000 a year.
When the numbers were persistently running
at an order of magnitude
larger at 300,000 a year,
people understandably were angry
and felt that they'd been lied to.
I think the financial crisis was
a particularly important
moment when the elites,
both financial and political,
were exposed for their incompetence.
Hardly any of these
people foresaw the crisis.
I was one of a tiny number
of people who argued
in 2006, 2007 that we were heading
for a major financial crisis,
and potentially a depression.
So I think people are understandably angry
that the entire financial
system which enriched bankers,
and not only bankers,
enriched a whole class
of financial asset managers,
and sometimes enriched the politicians,
happened and ordinary
people paid the penalty
whether it was in the form of bank panics,
lost houses, lost jobs.
So I'm highly sympathetic to
those people who are drawn to populists
out of frustration with the status quo,
because the status quo
has not served very well.
- And were the elites
in both Britain and here
clueless about the political response
that was coming from the
people who it were hurting?
- Actually I think they
were rather clueless.
It was quite hard to explain
in the immediate aftermath
of the financial crisis,
to politicians or to bankers,
that a major backlash was coming,
and I had conversations with people
in Wall Street, in
Washington in which I said
you do understand that
after something this big
there's going to be a period
when people are just focused on
economically coping and
then there's going to be
a major political backlash,
and I argued in an interview in 2009
that there would be a populist response,
and that in some parts of the
world this would actually go
from populism into violence.
My prediction was that
the post-crisis world
would be a great deal more volatile
simply because it was such
a large financial shock,
and it not only cost people money,
but it undermined the legitimacy
of the regime's they lived under.
It produced full-blown revolution remember
in Middle Eastern and
North African countries.
We haven't gone that far,
but if one looks at the
ways in which people
express their disapproval in elections,
it's very clear that we've got a major,
major political shift going on,
and it's interesting because populism
is a two flavor product.
You can have the left-wing
flavor or the right-wing favor,
and they're available from all
political ice cream stores,
and so right now what
you've seen in the US
has been the populism of the left
in the form of Bernie Sanders,
then the populism of the right
in the form of Donald Trump.
To a historian of the Atlantic world,
these are very familiar characters.
You would have found very similar people
in the late 19th century
making very similar arguments
against globalization,
and the case I like to
cite is Denis Kearney.
Nobody has ever heard of Denis Kearney,
but once upon a time Denis Kearney
was the Donald Trump of
California in the 1870s.
It was Denis Kearney and others
who argued the Chinese must go.
There should be an end
of Chinese immigration
into the United States
and they were successful,
because in 1882 the Exclusion
Act was passed by Congress
and Chinese immigration basically stopped.
They didn't build a
wall, but didn't need to.
Metaphorically they did right across
the San Francisco harbor.
- And you've criticized the
United States in the past
for various deficits, leadership deficit,
a physical deficit, but you've also talked
about a history deficit.
So people don't know these
stories from the past.
- It's astonishing that this
history of American populism
seems largely to have been forgotten
outside the academic world,
and I've asked rooms full of
people in the last few months
who has heard of Denis Kearney.
Now maybe this being the
United States of amnesia
and in a few decades time nobody
will have heard of Donald Trump,
but right now I think we do need to know
about the early populists,
we need to recognize
that we've seen a version
of this movie before,
and in the late 19th century,
which was an era of globalization,
there were very profound
anti global movements
on both the left and on the right.
They were against immigration.
They were against free trade.
They were directed at financial elites,
and they were actually pretty
politically successful.
The US policy on immigration
was radically altered by this backlash.
So much so that although we love to say
the United States is
a land of immigration,
and we're all immigrants,
I'm an immigrant for sure,
but in a long period of American history
beginning in the 1880s and
continuing right through
until the 1970s actually,
immigration was much
reduced, much restricted.
We've only really seen a return
to late 19th century levels
of immigration in the last 20 or 30 years,
and we aren't yet quite back at that peak
in terms of the percentage
of the population
that is foreign-born that
was achieved in the 1880s,
and guess what?
It was in the 1880s that you had populism,
and we're having it now.
So I do think there's a
very very important analogy
to be drawn here between
late 19th century populism
and what we now see.
Those people who say that it's fascism,
who draw analogies with
the 1930s and 1940s
I think are overstating the case,
because I don't think this is fascism,
I think that's a category error.
Fascism is different,
fascism is about uniforms,
parades, it's about war,
but populism isn't about those things,
and populists are not militaristic.
No matter how many ways
you try to present him,
I don't think Donald Trump is itching
to launch a major war anywhere.
I mean beyond the
destruction of Islamic State
he hasn't really offered us
much more than trade wars.
I think that's much more
in the populist tradition.
That you're not really
that attracted by empire,
if anything you're an isolationist
and you want to focus on domestic issues,
and you want to build walls,
you want to impose tariffs,
and you want to bash
those guys on Wall Street
who seem to be the
beneficiaries of globalization.
- You've just in the last year
published a book on Henry Kissinger,
what did that journey,
which is still continuing,
in what way does what you've learned
contribute to the discussion
we're having right now?
- A lot actually.
I spent a large part of the last 10 years
working my way through
Henry Kissinger's private papers,
and a whole bunch of
documents and other archives
that related to the
first half of his life,
so this first volume covers the period,
as you mentioned, up
until 1968 until the eve
of his becoming Richard Nixon's
National Security Adviser.
Part of his life that's
much less well known
and much less well covered
in other biographies.
One of the documents that really
caught my attention early
on was a diary that he kept
of the 1964 Republican National Convention
not very far from here in San Francisco.
At which Barry Goldwater was nominated
to run for president
against Lyndon Johnson,
and Kissinger's diary account
of that event is fascinating,
because it was one of those occasions
in modern American history
when the right of the Republican Party
got the upper hand over
the more cosmopolitan
centrist elements of the of the Northeast,
and seeing Goldwater supporters
in full cry denouncing
Kissinger's mentor in politics
Nelson Rockefeller
really shocked Kissinger
and reminded him as he
confided in his diary
of his youth in Germany in the 1930s.
Kissinger having been
born in Germany in 1923
had come of age under Hitler.
Had left Nazi Germany in 1938,
not long before the disastrous and hideous
program of November that year
the so-called Kristallnacht.
Kissinger had seen fascism up close
and his response to to seeing
the Goldwater supporters was
goodness me this is are all
too reminiscent of the fascism,
but I think then as now,
we've got to be very
careful not to confuse
populism and fascism because I don't think
the Goldwater riots were fascists
any more than the Trump
supporters mostly are.
They're authentic American populists,
and as an outsider who was
only really becoming familiar
with American politics in the 1960s,
Kissinger was making a mistake
that we see commonly made today,
confusing populism and its,
which is an important part of
American political tradition
with fascism which has never really been
an important part at all.
- How did you come to doing
this biography of Kissinger?
- Well it was his idea.
He and I met in London,
I think it was in 2000s,
and had a conversation about
a book that I had written
about the First World War,
and in the course of
subsequent correspondence
the idea came up that I
might consider writing
a scholarly biography of him.
I don't think I was the first
person he discussed this with,
in fact I know I wasn't.
Think I was number three on the list,
but I was the one who was
mad enough to agree to do it.
After an initial hesitation.
I at first said no,
because I felt this would
be enormously difficult
which it was, and that at the end of it
there would be a bunch of reviewers
like Christopher Hitchens who would be
extremely nasty about it whatever I did,
and although Chris Hitchens
didn't live to review the book,
there were a few reviewers
of that kind of variety.
So I hesitated but then
he cleverly invited me
to come and look at some of the material
in his private papers,
and I remember sitting in Connecticut
and looking through boxes of stuff
from that early period and
finding that diary from 1964
and realizing that it really was
a fascinating and untold story.
It was that same day
that I saw some of his
letters from the 1940s to his parents.
Saw an essay that he'd
written during World War II
at the time of his witnessing
the liberation of a concentration camp,
and I saw immediately
in this early material
a completely different figure
from the Henry Kissinger
of established accounts
and indeed popular legend.
So I was attracted to the project
because it seemed like an
opportunity to recast reputation,
and that's what I, I guess
I'm in the midst of doing.
I was right that it would be
an enormous amount of work.
- And what's extraordinary in your
extremely well-written book
which reads like a novel,
is as you quote from Kissinger's writings
when he's in the military and then when
he's in military
intelligence after the war,
the clarity and
incisive writing that he was capable of
at say the young age of 22
when some of this was written.
- Writing of course in the language
that he'd only begun
to learn really in 1938
when he arrived in New York City.
Yeah, these early
documents are fascinating,
and I realized that I
was going to be telling
the story of a really quite amazing life.
Even the first half is a series of lives.
Refugee in 1938,
member of the proletariat in 39, 40.
Working in a shaving brush factory--
- [Harry] In New York.
- In New York City working nights,
and then he's a soldier,
then he's an infantryman,
and then he's a Nazi hunter
because he gets pulled out of the ranks
around about the time of
the Battle of the Bulge
and becomes a counterintelligence agent.
Which meant in the final phase of the war
in the early stage of the US
occupation of southern Germany,
tracking down the most
egregious offenders.
So even that early part of his life
an extraordinary amount happened,
and luckily for me the
biographer it was quite
well-documented in
letters and other writings
that survived, and then
there's a whole other chapter
which is really a kind of chapter
in American intellectual history.
The chapter of his Harvard career
as an undergraduate, a graduate,
and then a junior faculty member
and ultimately a tenured faculty member.
That was a story that I also
found quite fascinating.
- And we'll talk about that in a minute
but I want to understand
the challenge that you face,
because you're living in our times.
you have a long list of
books on finance and power,
and you're dealing with a
man who's become a misunderstood
very controversial figure.
What are the challenges you face
as you go through all
of this documentation,
ordering it but then bringing
an interpretation to it?
- I suppose in terms of its scale,
this book is a little bit like the history
of the Rothschild banks and family
that I wrote in the 1990s,
and it's similar in a couple
of other respects too.
First this is a chapter in Jewish history
and history of the Jewish Diaspora,
and secondly it is a subject
that is highly controversial.
In the 19th century the
Rothschilds were seen
as wielding a malign and excessive power
because of the size of
their financial network.
Well in the late 20th century
and it continues to this day,
Henry Kissinger has come to be identified
as wielding a kind of
malign and excessive power,
and if you are a connoisseur
of conspiracy theory websites
you'll find often that the
Rothschilds and Kissinger
appear in the same
rather sinister diagrams
that the conspiracy theorists like to draw
with the Illuminati at the
top and the Bilderberg Group
somewhere in the middle,
so I think this is a
similar problem in that
we have a phenomenon
that has been represented
often in an extraordinarily
negative light,
that was historically
significant and can be approached
by the methods of historical scholarship.
Using in both cases
documents that nobody else
has ever really had access to.
- As I went through the book,
it's almost like there
are four themes in a way
implicit in what you're discussing.
Let me just throw these out at you.
One is Kissinger's ambition,
and how he climbs up
the ladder of success in
the national security field.
Another is the development
of his character.
Thirdly is the history of ideas,
because you call him an idealist
and you explain why that is.
So he is a man of ideas who
during this period really
struggles
with ideas,
but then there's a body
of his experiences.
You've listed some of them are,
so all this time you're really
tracking four lines of
development, is that fair?
- I think it is.
I mean part of the challenge
of writing a biography
if one wants to just focus on
that as a technical problem,
is that human beings are very complicated,
and often do and think
contradictory things,
but when we read about lives
we want them to make sense.
We want there to be
some literary coherence,
and so the biographers challenge,
which distinguishes us
from writers of fiction is
that we have to make sense
of the really complex
and sometimes contradictory characters
that we have to deal with
and we have to recognize
that people change over time.
That the Kissinger of say
age 22 at the final phase of World War II
is not the same Kissinger who
is running US foreign policy
in 1973-74, so I think that's
a kind of technical challenge.
The only way that I think
you can overcome that
and retain the readers engagement,
is very explicitly to show
where you think the turning points were.
I don't for example
think that Kissinger was
driven by worldly ambition
throughout his life.
If you read Walter
Isaacson's earlier biography
you definitely think that,
but it came to me as rather different
as I went through the documents.
I think there was an
intellectual ambition there
that was inspired by
Fritz Kramer, his mentor,
whom he got to know during the war,
and that certainly
propelled him to Harvard
and through some fairly intensive study
as an undergraduate and graduate,
but I don't think there was
much worldly ambition there
until much later, and
in fact his early forays
into the non-academic world of
power were quite disastrous.
So the notion of somebody
carefully planning
his ascent up the greasy
pole which I think you get
in other earlier books
doesn't really seem to me
to stand up to close scrutiny.
Just to give you one example,
why if you were ruthlessly ambitious,
would you stick with Nelson
Rockefeller through three
unsuccessful bids for the
Republican nomination?
I mean surely after two failures
you'd have jumped ship and signed up
with the more likely winner
in 1968 Richard Nixon,
but Kissinger you was
very reluctant to do that
and indeed effectively asked
Rockefeller's permission
to accept when Nixon offered him a job.
So I think that story is not
the story that you're used to.
It's a story of of a rather
academic and cerebral guy
who ends up in the policy sphere
because he kind of wants
to influence policy
because he thinks mistakes are being made.
It's not somebody I think
who's pursuing power
as an end in itself,
and that brings me to
one of your other themes,
and that's the theme of the idealist.
I think that subtitle is
not just a provocation,
though some people have read as such.
It's an attempt to show
that in strict terms,
Kissinger was an idealist.
He was not a realist in the
sense that we use the term
and debates about international relations.
He was an idealist in philosophical terms.
He was somebody who criticized realism
looking back on the 1930s.
He says of Chamberlain,
he thought of himself as a tough realist,
that's not intended as a compliment.
- And he's also critical of Bismarck.
- Absolutely.
- Also, yeah.
- So Bismarck is often
identified with Kissinger
because Kissinger wrote
an essay about Bismarck
and people who can't really
be bothered to read the essay
say oh well, he was obviously
the American Bismarck,
but when you read what
Kissinger wrote about Bismarck,
including an unpublished book
that I found in his papers,
you find that essentially
it's a critique of Bismarck
which culminates in an
extraordinary passage
in which Kissinger says
you can't base policy
on cynicism and realism
because the public won't be with you,
and ultimately you'll
end up pursuing power
as an end rather than as a means.
So I think the young
Kissinger defined himself in
contradistinction to realism.
This is also true in his
interactions with Hans Morgenthau,
it was true when it came to debating
a whole series of practical policy issues,
Vietnam in particular.
- [Harry] Nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons produced the,
I suppose the reputation making book
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,
but in that book,
which again there's been
much misrepresented,
Kissinger's making an
argument about strategy
which is essentially based on the notion
that you have to have
some option in between
surrender and blowing the
world to kingdom come.
It's not that Kissinger was itching
for a limited nuclear war,
it was that he saw you had
to have a credible threat
of an intermediate stage in
order to have any leverage
in negotiations with the Soviets,
and I actually think that
turned out to be right.
- It's interesting
because in a way what this
first volume indicates that was that,
is that Kissinger was a student
of the world that he would
inhabit in the second volume.
And from all this reading in this march
through his early years you're coming up
with certain themes,
certain conclusions that
he came up with about
international politics and strategy,
and I want to talk about those now,
but we have yet to test them,
and presumably that comes
in the second volume.
Whether he will stick to those themes
and whether he will, how he will deal
with the contradictions
between those themes.
- That's absolutely correct Harry.
I mean volume two will probably
be called The Realm of Power.
I give my wife credit for this.
I used the phrase in one
of the earliest talks
I gave about the book
and afterwards she said
that's your subtitle for volume two,
and I think it's right
because in volume two
he's no longer really the subject of,
as it were, every sentence he's an object
of this extraordinary
complex realm of power
in Washington DC in which at first
he's rather a small player.
And I am very fascinated in
volume two to tell the story
of his rise from real obscurity
as National Security Advisor
to position of almost total dominance
in the final phase of
the Nixon administration.
I think that the real trick
here is to try to show
how far the theories that he'd mapped out
in the Academy while at Harvard,
helped him in his time in government.
Kissinger says in his own memoirs that
you kind of live off your
existing intellectual capital
from the moment that you enter government.
You don't have time to add
to your intellectual capital,
you don't have time to read,
it's what you arrive
knowing that helps you,
and I'm fascinated to to
look at the ways in which
that intellectual capital helped him,
and the ways in which he had ultimately
to reject some of the more,
some of the more idealistic notions
that he'd acquired in the 1950s and 60s.
- So in a way he's heading through time,
through extraordinary
opportunities and experiences,
networking with a series of mentors
who contributed to his
intellectual development
and his understanding of policy and
ultimately reaching certain
very important conclusions
about what policymaking and
strategic thinking was about.
That's where we are basic.
And I--
- [Niall] Right.
- Yeah go ahead.
- Fritz Kraemer is this
extraordinary figure
he meets in the US Army,
another exile from Nazi Germany,
who's the one who spots
Kissinger's intellectual potential
and says you know forget
accountancy at City College,
you've got to go to Harvard
and study philosophy and history,
and I think that's very important
this moment of discovery
by the somewhat Mephistophelean
figure of Kraemer
who continues to play a part
in the second half of the story,
but then there's another
mentor at Harvard,
the rather larger than life
Professor William Yandell Elliott
who sends Kissinger off to read
the works of Immanuel Kant.
Kant's a big part of the early
Kissinger's intellectual development.
That's a sense in which he's really
an idealist in philosophical terms.
Then there's Nelson Rockefeller,
completely different figure
who's attractive to Kissinger
because he seems like a
kind of Renaissance prince
and Kissinger sees himself as advising
this politically powerful
and charismatic figure
who's not terribly intellectual, cerebral,
but quite likes to have
bright brains around him.
At each stage in the
story there's somebody
shaping and influencing
the young Kissinger,
but there's also a kind of product.
An idea takes wing and
produces some written work.
The extraordinary book that he writes
on the Congress of Vienna,
this is A World Restored,
in many ways the best book he ever wrote,
an astonishing the brilliant exposition
of what the balance of power really means.
A book that policymakers
should all be made to read
because they mostly have
a completely false idea
of the balance of power,
and then later on you have other really
quite influential books like
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.
I think the balance of
power is the central
Kissingerian concept.
If you look at his most
recent book World Order,
it's still pretty much as it was defined
in A World Restored,
and there are two things
about the balance of power
that Kissinger saw that very few
of his contemporaries appreciated,
and it's still not properly understood
by most policymakers today.
Number one it's not naturally occurring.
There needs to be a balancer.
There needs to be in
fact an active management
of the balance in order
to achieve anything
like an equilibrium in
the international system,
and two, it needs to have legitimacy.
The order, the balance,
needs to be legitimate
in the eyes of all the different elements
and if it's not, if there's
a revolutionary power
that comes along and
questions that legitimacy,
then it will be very hard
indeed to avoid conflict.
That's a very useful way
of thinking about say,
the modern Middle East.
At a time when the Obama administration
has placed a very big bet on
its nuclear deal with Iran,
predicated on a notion of balance
that the president made quite explicit
in some of the interviews
he gave him the subject,
the possibility exists
that in Kissinger's terms,
you're not going to get balance at all
because you're not
really achieving balance,
you're achieving an arms race.
You're destabilizing and
delegitimizing the order
because Iran's a
revolutionary power itself.
I think that's a very
helpful conceptual framework.
One that I hadn't fully appreciated
until I sat down and read my way
through Kissinger's academic work,
and I do think that even
if he'd never become
Secretary of State, if
he'd been hit by a bus
in January 1969 we would still have
an incredibly important life to consider
and a major contribution to the theory
of international relations
and and indeed modern history.
- Let me go over some of the themes
that you pull out of there.
As he's at the end of your book
he's about to go to the White House,
he's been picked as
National Security Advisor,
and you say he brought to the White House
his sense that most strategic choices
are between lesser and greater evils.
- This is a very important point.
It may seem obvious, but
sometimes you get the impression
in discussions of foreign
policy that people expect
there to be a mother
who's an apple pie option,
but there are very, very few
of those in foreign policy
and most decisions are
choices between evils.
Kissinger writes this in the 1950s
long before he's anywhere
near the corridors of power.
He says in the Cold War
we have to face the fact
that most of the choices
we'll have to make
will be between evils and
it will take a certain
morality to be able to make those choices
and recognize that they are,
when we choose the lesser evil
we are doing it in the
pursuit of a greater good.
I think that's a really really important
Kissingerian insight and I'm
constantly reminded of it,
because most people who
write from the academic world
about foreign policy, are
very good at criticizing
the decisions that presidents
and secretaries of state take,
but they very seldom
make explicit what this
preferable alternative
would have looked like.
They're far happier just pointing out
that the act that was chosen was evil,
but if the choice was between evils
what you really have to show
is that it was more evil
than some available realistic alternative,
and very very few people who write
about foreign policy do that.
They just let you think as a reader
that there was some much easier thing
that would have, say,
ended the war in Vietnam
sometime in February 1969.
- The other point that he emphasizes
is the importance of
historical self-understanding.
To not only understand how
to deal with adversaries
but how you can deal with them basically
'cause of the pressures they're under.
- I think at a time when
game theory was becoming
increasingly fashionable
amongst nuclear strategists,
Kissinger stood out as
somebody who studied history,
and let's face it, if you
were an ambitious young man
in the early 1950s you
probably wouldn't choose
as a topic for your doctoral
dissertation the time of
Castlereagh Metternich in
the Congress of Vienna,
so Kissinger chose history,
and focused on historical knowledge
at a time when it was
far from fashionable,
and I think this is
another argument against
the scheming ambitious
figure in other biographies.
The key insight that
Kissinger gleaned early on
was that history is to states
what character is to individuals.
If you don't know the history of Russia,
you will not be able to understand
the way in which the Russian leader,
in our time President Putin, thinks.
You won't understand what
it is that he prioritizes,
and therefore you won't
really understand your rival.
You're negotiating with
somebody whose character
has been shaped by
their country's history,
and this importance
that Kissinger attaches
to historical understanding
was one of the things
that really drew me to the subject.
There are very few people
with real historical knowledge
who have entered the realm of power.
Not many professors of history,
although he was a professor of government,
he was in effect a professor of history,
not many people who have
worked in that field
have ended up in the situation room,
and in that sense it's quite interesting
to ask how far historical knowledge
really did give Kissinger an advantage.
I think it did.
I'm strongly of the view
that decision-makers benefit
from historical knowledge if only because
they understand their interlocutor better
when they're negotiating
with someone from abroad.
- And in making choices
a third theme is that
you have to conjecture
basically about the situation.
There are many known unknowns so to speak
to quote Secretary Rumsfeld.
- So the problem of conjecture,
which is how Kissinger who describes it,
is the most profound idea that I found
in researching this book,
and I still remember being very struck
by the power of the idea
when I first encountered it
in an essay from the early 1960s.
This is how Kissinger explains
the problem of conjecture.
He says at any given moment
a decision-maker confronts
a line of least resistance which in effect
involves doing nothing,
or as we would say kicking
the can down the road,
and hoping like Mister
Micawber and Dickens
that something turns up.
So you do the easy thing
and you hope for the best.
The alternative is that you
take action in the here and now
in the hope of averting
some disaster in the future,
and that's hard to do because
if you act here and now
you have to persuade people
to sacrifice resources,
maybe even men to the course
of action that you've chosen.
The asymmetry, and here's
the beauty of the idea,
is as follows.
If you are right in acting,
in taking option two, the harder course
and you avert disaster,
nobody will thank you,
because nobody is grateful
for averted disasters,
i.e. things that didn't happen.
If you take the line of least
resistance and do nothing,
kick the can down the
road, you may get lucky,
and disaster may not happen,
but if it does happen
then you'll have found out the hard way
that you should have acted.
So this is the central problem
of conjecture for decision-makers.
They cannot make the decision
on the basis of data.
Kissinger's very clear about this.
You can't just sit waiting for the data,
for the information to
tell you what to do,
because you're conjecturing
about the future
at the point of decision.
You have to take a decision.
And he shows this I think
very elegantly with a case,
historical example that
had greatly affected
him and his family.
He says in 1938
nobody really knew if Hitler
was just another German nationalist,
or a genocidal maniac.
Well, they opted to play for time,
that was the essence of
the policy of appeasement,
and they ultimately found out
that he was a genocidal maniac
and tens of millions of people
lost their lives as a result,
including of course least a dozen members
of Kissinger's family who
died in the Holocaust.
So for Kissinger the problem of conjecture
was a very live, burning issue.
He saw that the greatest error
in 20th century international relations
was the policy of appeasement,
and he spent much of his career
in the 1950s and 60s and 70s
trying to make sure that no
such mistake was made again.
Acting rather than not acting.
Rarely kicking the can down the road.
Choosing between evils,
and paying the price
in terms of the current
and subsequent criticism,
but I think always understanding clearly
that there is a problem of conjecture
with every decision that you take.
You can never be sure you were right.
You can never be sure
you averted disaster,
you can never prove that detente
successfully prevented World
War III from happening,
to take just one example.
You can't really prove that,
and in that sense the statesman's fate
is essentially that of a tragic hero.
The statesman's trying to
conjecture about the future.
The statesman as Kissinger
depicts him in A World Restored
is essentially ahead of the electorate,
ahead of the population,
trying to see disasters that
nobody else is thinking about.
If he successfully acts
to avert catastrophe,
he will not be thanked for this.
On the country are likely be blamed
for whatever short-term action he took,
and that's the tragic fate the Kissinger
kind of foresaw for himself.
- And finally,
he came to recognize it
as his ideas develop,
the importance of understanding
that you need to bring
the public along with you as
you ventured into the world,
and some would say he failed.
We'll find out in the second volume,
when he came to Vietnam
and he was in power.
- This it seems to me is
another part of the tragedy.
Kissinger's writing on Bismarck
which we briefly talked about before
identified a central problem
that if one is purely cynical
and realistic in one's calculation,
if one pursues a Bismarckian policy,
you're unlikely to have public support
because you'll be doing
things that require
what Kissinger calls
the courage of cynicism,
something notably lacking
in the American public.
So you don't really have a choice.
You've got to persuade voters
that these lesser evils
really are lesser evils,
and that they're worth doing to avoid
future potential disasters.
I think it's pretty clear already
from the existing literature,
that Kissinger's attempt
to sell detente politically
in a series of speeches that he made
all over the United States failed,
and that the critique of detente
that Ronald Reagan in
particular spearheaded,
was very effective and ultimately detente
was a dirty word by the late 1970s.
So I think it's already obvious that part
of what's tragic about Kissinger's story
is that he can never
really persuade Americans
that the strategy that he
and Richard Nixon devised
in the early 1970s as a way
of dealing with America's
profound problems at that
stage in the Cold War
was legitimate, was the lesser evil.
- So we're now positioned
after reading
the near 1,000 pages of your book to
better judge
whether Kissinger in
power in the next volume,
lives up to the principles that
he came to in this
period when he laid the
foundation in history
and in philosophy and
in understanding that he came to himself.
So I guess it would be to
preview for the preview,
we need to go back to
Kraemer's warning to him.
His mentor said,
advises him that now that you
have assumed this position.
it's much harder than academic
intrigue and ambition.
You are tempt,
gonna be tempted.
You're beginning to behave in a,
warns Kissinger, you're
beginning to behave in a way
that there is no longer human,
and people who admire you are starting
to regard you as cool, perhaps even cold.
You are in danger of
allowing your heart and soul
to burnout in your incessant work,
and he goes on to warn him
about maintaining his integrity,
and respecting in the integrity of others,
and to really maintain his own character.
- It's not often the biographer gets
documentation this good,
because there's something
wonderfully literary
about the way Kraemer writes,
warning, admonishing, his protege.
Kraemer saw himself as
a Mephistophelean figure
and he clearly saw Kissinger as his Faust,
so there's a sense in which Kraemer
was somewhat dramatizing the relationship,
but the story continues in volume two
and ultimately produces a better breach
between Kissinger and Kraemer,
which for me is a really
critical moment in volume two.
Those letters are wonderful,
a wonderful source because
you see here personified
that dialogue between that the worldly
and the rather less worldly,
between the pupil and the master,
a dialogue that had begun in of all places
a basic training camp in the
American South in World War II.
I guess,
part of the difficulty of
writing historical biography
is often that you don't get the sources
to give your story a real literary kick.
Well thanks to Kraemer's letters
I get quite a lot of literary kick here.
It's really extraordinary to have
the dilemmas of power
so starkly illustrated
and to have somebody who
sets himself up in the role
of Kissinger's conscience
and writes it all down.
- One final question,
we're almost out of
time so a brief answer,
what have you learned
from this work,
over and above what you've
learned about Kissinger?
How has it informed your understanding?
- That's an easy question to answer.
When I wrote a book called
Colossus about American power
more than 10 years ago I thought
there were three deficits
that constrained the United States.
A man power deficit in the sense that
Americans don't really
want to go abroad and work
and fight in hot, poor,
dangerous countries.
A fiscal deficit in the sense that
the whole thing was getting
more and more unaffordable.
And an attention deficit,
because American voters lose interest
in foreign policy after four years,
but then I realized writing
the Kissinger biography
that there was this fourth
deficit, the history deficit.
That we actually live in the
United States of amnesia,
and the lessons of Vietnam
haven't been learned at all.
Somebody, I won't a name
him, who read this volume
wrote to me saying couldn't
believe how familiar
Kissinger's reflections on
Vietnam in the mid-1960s were,
because they reminded
him of all the things
that had been said about
Iraq in the mid-2000s.
So part of the important
message this book conveys
is that we need to make
the study of history
mandatory for American decision-makers.
It's not a sort of part of
the entertainment industry,
it's central to how we should educate
the people who run this country,
and I'd say also the people
who run its major corporations.
Ignorance of history turns out to be
one of the most dangerous features
of the American political system.
We almost select out the
people who know their history
and choose people who think that things
can be figured out on first principles,
and Kissinger saw this
problem in the 1960s.
He regularly wrote about it and warned
that you can't make
strategy with the techniques
of a Wall Street lawyer
on a case-by-case basis.
So I think that's really the big message
that this book conveys,
that history is central.
It's not peripheral,
it's central to strategy,
and Kissinger was very unusual
in his generation for seeing that.
He's still unusual here in
2016 when he's 93 years old,
he's still unusual for seeing that.
- Well on that note Niall
I want to thank you for
writing this book, which is a great read.
I must tell our audience that
it's like reading a novel, actually.
So thank you very much.
- Praise indeed.
Thank you.
- And thank you very much for joining us
for this Conversation With History.
(gentle downbeat music)
