International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Global Strategic Review 2010

THE 8TH IISS GLOBAL STRATEGIC REVIEW

‘GLOBAL SECURITY GOVERNANCE AND

THE EMERGING DISTRIBUTION OF POWER’

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

POWER SHIFTS AND SECURITY

FRIDAY 10 SEPTEMBER 2010

DR HENRY A KISSINGER

FORMER US SECRETARY OF STATE

AND NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR

10 September 2010
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Global Strategic Review 2010

Ladies and gentlemen; for me it is quite a moving occasion to be here to address this group. I spoke
34 years ago at another IISS occasion, when I gave the first Alastair Buchan lecture. Before this event I
ran into some people from that period in this room, including my old friend François de Rose, with
whom I have shared reflections on international security for many decades now. I want to talk to
you, because of the title of the changing structures in the international system, and then perhaps in
the question period and the discussion we can go on.

When I spoke 34 years ago as Secretary of State, the primary concern was the relationship with the
Soviet Union. The challenge I addressed was how to manage the United States – Soviet rivalry in a
way that preserved stability and preserved nations that relied on us. At that time, there was one
dividing line in the world, and one fault line around which all security concerns were concentrated.
Today it would be very difficult to find one common denominator for all the fault lines that exist in
the world, or one common definition of the challenges that face us.

Since that time, the centre of gravity of world affairs has left the Atlantic and moved to the Pacific and
Indian Oceans. European unity has progressed substantially. It has also accelerated a change in the
perception regarding the legitimate exercise of national power. In a way, the European Union has
diminished the importance of the sovereign state, but it has not yet replaced the sovereign state and
the commitments of its population. With a reduction in the centrality of the sovereign state it has
become more difficult to frame policies in terms of national security and the use of force for specific
strategic objectives.

Military objectives are being limited, on the one hand, to peacekeeping, or inflated into universal
enterprises such as human rights, fighting global terror, and similar efforts. Military missions and
foreign interventions are often defined as a form of social work. Wars in which Atlantic countries
have been engaged in the past two decades have become extremely controversial, tearing at the
domestic consensus. As a result, fundamental asymmetries in today’s strategic landscape have
opened up.

A different attitude towards strategy exists in Asia, where major countries are emerging into
confident nationhood, and the term ‘national interest’ has no pejorative implication. For example,
China has announced a number of ‘core interests’ which are, in essence, non-negotiable and for which
China is prepared to fight, if necessary. India has not been similarly explicit, but it has, by its conduct
in the region it considers vital, shown a propensity for strategic analysis more comparable to 19 th
century and early 20th century Europe than the dominant trends in Europe today. I have personal
experience of the ferocity [with] which countries like Vietnam vindicate their definition of the
national interest.

In these circumstances, the classic concept of collective security is difficult to apply. The proposition
that all nations have a common interest in the maintenance of peace, and that a well-conceived

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International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Global Strategic Review 2010

international system, through its institutions, can mobilise the international community on its behalf,
has not been borne out by experience. The current participants in the international system are too
diffuse to permit identical, or even symmetrical, convictions sufficient to organise an effective global
collective security system on many key issues, including nuclear proliferation. A good example has
been the impossibility of achieving a common definition of what took place in a very constricted area
of the shores of South Korea a few months ago.

Let me turn to nuclear proliferation. The United States and some of its allies treat these issues as a
technical problem. They propose means of preventing it and offer international sanctions and
international inspection as a remedy. If we take Korea and Iran as the major proliferating countries at
this moment, their neighbours have a different, more political or geostrategic perspective. They
almost certainly share the view of America and its allies of the importance of preventing nuclear
proliferation. China cannot possibly want a nuclear Korea - or Vietnam for that matter - on its
borders, or a nuclear Japan; nor can Russia welcome nuclear-armed Islamic border states, all of which
are likely consequences of the failure of non-proliferation policy. China also has a deep concern for
the political evolution of North Korea, and Russia for the international and political consequences of a
confrontation with Islam. For all these reasons they are not prepared to engage in pressures that
either threaten the regimes or even impose serious consequences on them. As a practical result, the
willingness to apply pressures is limited to measures stopping well short of effectiveness.

In this manner, collective security begins to undermine itself. A decade of United Nations-backed
negotiations on Korea and Iran has produced no significant results, or at least no results relevant to
the resolution of the problem. It becomes a method used by proliferators to gain time. Negotiations
on proliferation and sanctions come to be defined by their attainability, not by their consequences or
results. The passage of a resolution is treated as an achievement, not its impact on the problem it is
trying to resolve.

Time is not neutral. The drift will, within a measurable point, oblige the international system to
choose one of two courses: whether to take decisive measures, defined as measures that have an
impact in a finite time on the resolution of the problem; or how to live in a proliferated world. We
will then have to come to grips with what this world will look like: how it organises itself, what a
widely proliferated world means for alliances, and its impact on deterrence. In fact, at that point we
may be in the strange position that strategic weapons systems, for which no practical use has yet been
invented, will be significant for the purpose of preventing proliferated weapons from becoming
conventional, and preventing nuclear war from becoming an accepted pattern when the weapons
have spread.

This gets to the reality with which we all started decades ago; namely, that the most destructive
weapons systems that exist are incommensurable to the task assigned to them. The disproportion
between the consequences of a general nuclear war and any political objectives that could be achieved

10 September 2010
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Global Strategic Review 2010

by it has been where strategic thinking started when the IISS was created, when I wrote my first book;
the problem has not changed. Even while these weapons were elaborated and acquired a practical
and technical end in electro-sophistication unimaginable at the beginning, they have never been
brought, or could not be brought, on any of the issues that the world has faced since the creation of
this organisation and since the problem has been addressed. All the wars have been at the fringes
and conducted with other kinds of weapons. It has never happened before that the most significant,
in terms of destructive weapons systems, could not be used for the tasks that were defined for them.

These cracks in the global system that I have described have been obscured, to some extent, by the
dominant role of the United States, [by] its willingness, sometimes its eagerness, to step into the
breach unilaterally or with coalitions that depended primarily on its unilateral willingness to commit
itself. The scope for so dominant an America is shrinking as a result of a number of objective factors.
America has been involved in three successive wars with vast domestic consequences: Vietnam, Iraq,
and now Afghanistan. This pattern of a war being fought while domestic divisions dominate the
discussion, and where exit strategy becomes the defining objective, will, in my view, not be
sustainable. Any future military engagement on behalf of the United States will have to be based on
clarity of objectives, coupled with unambiguous definitions of attainability of these objectives; they
have to be distinguished from primarily social programmes; and they have to be related to
timeframes, which the political process can deal with.

In my view, and I am sure Jim Steinberg can correct me tomorrow, wars will be risked primarily for
specific outcomes, not for abstractions. We also have to consider [that] the economic conditions in the
United States and in the Atlantic Alliance will inevitably bring about pressures on military budgets,
constraining the scope for intervention and imposing a strict need for establishing priorities. I do not
consider that a tragedy, because to govern is to choose, and this may be the basis for a sustainable
commitment. The United States remains the strongest single power in the world; constrained in its
unilateral capacities, it is still the indispensable component of any collective security system, however
that system is defined. However, it is no longer in a position to be the sole dominant country. It must
henceforth practice the art of leadership, not as the sole leader, but as a part of a complex world. The
United States will have to share the responsibility for global order with emerging power centres.
Some observers have forecast a multipolar world, with regional heavyweights, like China, Russia,
India, Brazil, or even Turkey, grouping their smaller neighbours and building power blocs that can
potentially create a global equilibrium somewhat on the model of the European systems of the 18 th
and 19th century. I do not believe that it is possible to compartmentalise the international order into a
system of regional hegemons. The United States is a Pacific country; it cannot be excluded from East
Asia. China or India cannot be excluded from the Middle East and other resource-rich regions.
Issues like energy and environment cannot be regionalised at all.

Niall Ferguson has coined the term of an ‘apolar world’, in which the United States gradually recedes
from its hegemonic role and is replaced by…nobody. That cannot happen, because it is the nature of

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International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Global Strategic Review 2010

the political world that it abhors a vacuum. That is the international system. Chaos may occur, but
when it does it will sooner or later settle down to some new order. It is the task of statesmanship, and
of groups like this, to try to generate the possibility, so that what must happen ultimately will happen
soon, and save humanity from untold suffering.

On some issues what we need is a functional approach to the issue of world order, something
between a globalised approach and a regional approach. Let me give one example: I have supported
our administration’s policy in Afghanistan, but it will have to merge at some point into some kind of
political end game. The effort must merge at some point with the reality that there are many
countries in the world that have a more immediate national security interest in the future of
Afghanistan than the United States, not an abstract interest in prevailing against aggression, but a
specific national security interest. The presence of a terrorist-producing state in that geographic
location will affect every country. For Pakistan, it will undermine whatever order exists today. Even
Iran, as a Shiite country, if it can ever move to think of itself as a nation rather than a cause, can have
no interest in a fundamentalist regime in Kabul. In many respects India will be the most affected
country if a jihadist Islamism gains impetus in Afghanistan. Even China, with its problems in
Sinkiang, cannot be indifferent.

All these countries have more vital interests in a stable and coherent Afghan state than does the
United States. For the time being, the American role is explained to the American public on the
grounds that it serves a vital national interest, and it is acceptable in the region precisely because it is
understood that America seeks no permanent presence in Afghanistan. An essentially unilateral
American role cannot be the long-term solution; the long-term solution must involve a consortium of
countries in defining, and then protecting and guaranteeing, a definition of status for Afghanistan
compatible with the peace of the world – much of what was done to Belgium in 1830, when it was
established in order to create some space where armies used to march for a century. The key issue is
that while America is so engaged, there may be many countries that believe that they can wait with
this effort. I would argue that starting this effort soon is the best way, and maybe the only way, to
bring this to a conclusion.

America’s relations with many countries are, of course, vitally important. My initial experience was
the importance of the relationship with Europe, and I continue to believe that a strong Atlantic
relationship is essential for many of the objectives I have described. However, in this period, the
relationship that is in flux is produced by the emergence of China as a great power. It raises the
issues that the world confronted before the First World War, when Germany attempted to enter the
international system, and partly through its short-sightedness, and a little bit through the lack of
imagination of the countries it was confronting, did not manage this process. In our period the
problem is even more complex, because China is not a nation-state, but a continental expression of an
ancient and great culture.

10 September 2010
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Global Strategic Review 2010

How America and China manage their relationship is the key to many of the issues that I have
discussed here: whether it is confrontational or adversarial; whether it is based on mutual
containment, or some concept of cooperation that may not have been invented yet. Within the
American debate I have favoured a huge effort behind the cooperative effort, and in China there are
many signs that indicate that leading elements of the society have the same objective. I have an
impression that some of the discussions that have taken place this week in Beijing between the
American delegation and the Chinese leaders indicate that both sides realise that in this period, on a
global basis, we cannot afford a confrontational set of arrangements, and that we need, and will make
a big effort, to achieve a cooperative set of solutions. In fact, the word solution is misleading, because
it implies there is some terminal point. We are part of a process that reshapes the international
environment and that will not end at any one point. The problem of the future of a peaceful world is
not a partisan problem in the United States.

I have tried to sketch for you some of the issues that were generated by the topic in my mind, and to
realise that the questions can only be the beginning of the process, which this institution has been
largely designed to try to reflect about. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.

Dr John Chipman
Thank you, Henry, for your thoughts, for reminding us that there are so many countries around the
world now who do not think the term ‘national interest’ is a pejorative one, and for also reminding us
on the importance of engaging the many different countries of the regions surrounding Afghanistan
in an ultimate political solution there.

10 September 2010