00:00:00DEAN RUSK: But perhaps I might begin with two or three points of background
which might affect everything we talk about for the rest of the time we have
available. In the first place, foreign policy is that part of our public
business which we ourselves cannot fully control. Subject to certain self-
imposed constitutional limitations, we can pretty much decide what we do here at
home within our own national borders, but when we go beyond our national
borders, we find about a hundred and sixty nations out there, each with its own
geographical situation, its own cultural, religious, historical background,
living indifferent parts of the world, to whom the very globe itself looks
different if you put a pinpoint on Rangoon or on Montevideo or on Beirut. And no
00:01:00one of those nations simply snaps its heels and salutes when we speak. There's
no command out there. There's a world of discussion, hopefully common points of
view, but many disagreements, adjustment, compromise, confrontation, and, at
tragic moments, violence.
So there is a degree of disappointment and frustration that is built into the
very nature of our relations with the rest of the world. The State Department
and the secretary of state will never be popular with the American people or the
American presidents. Very often he's having to say, "Sorry, Mr. President, you
can't have it that way because these funny foreigners just won't do it that
way." And presidents don't like to hear that, and some of them don't like to
00:02:00hear it more than others. I'm thinking of LBJ [Lyndon Baines Johnson], for
example. So there are limits to what we can reasonably expect in shaping a world
that we would like to see.
Second point, every four years our constitution requires us to go through a
great inquest of the nation as we decide who shall be president and at the same
time we elect a third of the Senate [and] all of the House of Representatives.
It's the most solemn and most important political process in which we as
citizens participate, but it's also our quadrennial silly season, a period
during which we say a great many foolish things to each other, to the confusion
of our friends and our adversaries abroad. I have certain sympathy with the
00:03:00complaint once made by Mr. [Nikita] Khrushchev. He said, "It's very difficult to
deal with you people in the West because someone is always having one of those
damned elections." (laughter) Now, so every four years we're a body politic with
a fever. We're not normal, and we perhaps ought to be aware of that.
As a matter of fact, foreign policy, particularly in this postwar period, has
been nonpartisan or bipartisan. It has been my privilege over the years to sit
in on literally hundreds upon hundreds of meetings of committees and
subcommittees of the Congress. On no single occasion have I ever seen
differences of view turn on party lines, Democrats on one side, Republicans on
the other. Now, there were many differences of opinion because a lot of these
00:04:00questions are extraordinarily complicated, requiring on- balance judgments,
razor-edge conclusions, on which honest men and women can disagree. But I've
never seen those differences turn on party lines.
Now every four years each political party goes through a certain amount of agony
to write a party platform, and they always have a section in those platforms
about foreign policy. And in those sections they try to say something that a]
sounds good and b] sounds a little different from the other party. And once in a
while there's even a little fight on the convention floor about what goes into
the foreign affairs section of such a platform. I don't want to sound cynical,
but I've, again, sat in on hundreds of meetings involving the executive and
often the legislative branches of the Congress [sic], of the government, under
00:05:00mostly Democratic but sometimes Republican administrations, where decisions have
to be made, and on no single occasion have I ever heard anyone say, "Well, gee,
let's get out the party platform and see what it had to say about this matter."
(laughter) Because these generalities, these generalities are so general that
they cannot possibly encompass all of the elements of a problem on which a
decision has to be made.
Now, in that connection, [let me] remind you of another point which might be
helpful to the classroom teacher. When a pilot takes off a modern hot jet
airplane, he goes over a rather extensive list of questions. Sometimes they have
them on little roll cartridges, and they roll these things over in front of them
00:06:00in the cockpit. He must ask himself dozens upon dozens of questions before he
takes off on that policy, on that plane. Similarly, the policy officer has
dozens and dozens of questions on his checklist that he ought to ask himself
before he takes off on a policy. Every significant foreign policy question
breaks down into dozens upon dozens of secondary and tertiary questions. Now
because of limitations of space and time in the way we talk about these things
with each other, we almost never get a chance to run through that kind of
checklist with respect to a major question of foreign policy. We simply don't
have time for it, or we're not offered the material on which we can give it time
ordinarily. I would give a great deal if, just to substitute the mood of a
00:07:00question. When we hear that something has been done by a president or by the
Congress, instead of saying, "Why did the so-and so's do that?" if we could only
ask, "I wonder what they had in mind when they did that?" it might help us a
great deal toward understanding somewhat more why certain things were done.
Now, a third point before I turn to your particular questions is to remind us of
the sheer complexity of our constitution and political system, the most
complicated political system in the world, at least since the Dalai Lama was
chased out of Tibet by the Chinese--I think his was somewhat more
complicated--deliberately made complicated by our founding fathers for reasons
which all of you understand, an attempt to put some limitations on the exercise
00:08:00of raw power in the interest of freedom.
The late Chief Justice Earl Warren was here in our law school shortly before his
death, and on that occasion he said that if each branch of the federal
government were to pursue its own constitutional powers to the end of the trail,
our system simply could not function. It would freeze up like an engine without
oil. Those who hold positions of responsibility in that constitutional system
have to spend an enormous amount of time just to make the system work, and
sometimes we as citizens don't understand that necessity, and sometimes we
become a little disdainful about those who have to make some adjustments from
00:09:00time to time just to see that the United States government at the end of the day
can do or not do what is called for.
We think of a secretary of state as somebody usually who is flying off somewhere
in an airplane or flying home from somewhere in an airplane. All right, let's
use that metaphor. He flies on four engines: first, his relations with the
president; second, his relations with the Congress; third, his relations with
the Department of State and other departments of government; fourth, his
relations with the press and public opinion. Now, notice that all four of those
are domestic engines. This is before he talks to the foreigner at all. A
secretary of state will have to spend at least half of his time on the domestic
arrangements that are required to have a policy before he knows what to say to
00:10:00the foreigner. And I don't know of any other foreign minister in the world of
whom that is true.
We think of the president as a chief executive sitting there at that desk in the
Oval Office striking off decisions all day long. Well, if we do, we must also
think of him as a sheep dog, as G a man who's trying to round up enough people
to go in the same direction for a long enough period to have something called a
policy. If you make a list of the things that a president can do all by himself,
it's a very short list, even though we develop a good many illusions about it.
For example, evry few weeks, a question comes out, a poll comes out, asking the
question, "How do you rate the president in managing the economy?" He doesn't
manage the economy, doesn't have the constitutional power to manage the economy.
Asking the question is a fraud upon the American public, but it's one of those
00:11:00frauds happily protected by the First Amendment. In a very real sense, the
presidency is a license to persuade because he's got to persuade an awful lot of
people, not just in the Congress, but certainly in the Congress, if we're to
move forward or to move on an agreed national basis.
Now, I think we have to admit that the White House is a pretty good place from
which to begin to persuade people. Senator [William] Fulbright used to complain
about the habit of presidents who invite groups of senators down to the White
House in order to talk various policy questions over with them because Fulbright
said that the very awe in the atmosphere and the historical background of the
White House itself makes that an uneven conversation. The cards are stacked
00:12:00against the senators. Well, there's something to that. Prime Minister Gladstone,
once writing in the nineteenth century about his relations with Queen Victoria,
said it's very difficult to argue on your knees. (laughter) So there is
something about that. Teddy Roosevelt called the White House, you'll remember,
"a bully pulpit." But nevertheless that element of persuasion is a very
important part of any presidency, president's job.
Now, these are just three preliminary remarks. I might begin with one question
which I understand that your group is interested in. I was tipped off on it. It
begins with the current situation in Afghanistan. There have been two main
elements in our relations with the Soviet Union since World War II, both always
present. But in our public thinking and public discussion of our relations with
00:13:00the Soviet Union, we tend to swing like pendulum back and forth between
something called cold war and something called detente.
Let me take just a moment to put this somewhat into perspective. We and the
Soviet Union share a massive common interest--the prevention of all-out nuclear
war. They know it; we know it. If all those thousands of megatons were to go off
in the same half hour someday, there would be a real question as to whether this
earth could any longer sustain homo sapiens. Now, if we and the Soviet Union can
find points of agreement on large matters or small, which will help to broaden
that base of common interest and reduce the range of issues on which violence
00:14:00might occur, many of us think the effort has to be made.
Now, that effort didn't just begin when Mr. [Richard] Nixon became president and
started talking a lot about something called detente in the early 1970s. It
began immediately after, well, during or just after World War II. For example,
the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada went into the United Nations
in 1946 with something called the Baruch Plan under which all fissionable
materials would be turned over to the United Nations to be used solely for
peaceful purposes, a plan under which there would be no nuclear weapons in the
hands of any country, including the United States. The Soviet Union turned it
down. But no sanctimony on that point because if the Soviet Union had been the
first to develop the atom bomb and had made exactly the same proposals in the
00:15:00United Nations as we did before the United States obtained the so-called
know-how, we could not honestly say that the executive and legislative branches
of our government would have accepted those proposals of the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, the effort was made, and there was a fleeting opportunity that
escaped us. President Truman and Secretary Marshall in good faith invited the
Soviet Union to participate in the Marshall Plan. It was the Soviet Union that
walked out of the Paris meeting of European countries to work out their response
to this information, and when they walked out, they took Czechoslovakia and
Poland along with them. But, again, no sanctimony because I think we'd have to
say that if the Soviet Union had been a major participant in the Marshall Plan,
we would have had great difficulty in getting the necessary appropriations from
Congress. But nevertheless the effort was made. During the Eisenhower years,
00:16:00after hundreds of negotiating sessions, they achieved the Austrian State Treaty
which got all occupying forces out of Austria and allowed that fine little
country to proceed into the future on the basis of independence and neutrality.
And again in that period a brilliant piece of preventive diplomacy--the
Antarctic Treaty--which has excluded that vast part of the world from great
power military competition, reserving it for scientific research under
arrangements which give each signatory a chance to visit each other's activities
and installations down there to be sure that the treaty is being complied with.
Then in the sixties, despite the very grievous crisis over Berlin and the even
more dangerous crisis over the Cuban missiles, President Kennedy and Vice
President Johnson and their senior colleagues felt that it was just too late in
00:17:00history for two superpowers to pursue a policy of total hostility across the
board. Because we understood that at the end of the day we and the Soviet Union
must still find a way to inhabit this speck of dust in the universe at the same
time. So we had the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of '63. We had a consular agreement
with the Soviet Union, a Civil Air Agreement, providing flights between Moscow
and New York, a nonproliferation treaty with regard to nuclear weapons, two
important space treaties which have gone a long way toward keeping outer space
insulated from great power military competition. And in the'70s Mr. Nixon and
his colleagues extended those, that matter, that approach into more trade and
were able to conclude a pretty good new agreement over Berlin and so forth.
00:18:00
Now, as far as I'm concerned, this word "detente" means no more than a
continuing search for possible agreement. Now, agreements with the Soviet Union
don't require trust, if performance can be readily ascertained. It'll be a long
time before the Soviet Union trusts us or we trust the Soviet Union, but their
credit on Wall Street is good because they pay their commercial bills. If they
stop paying their commercial bills, their credit would disappear. You don't have
to worry about whether they're complying with that Test Ban Treaty of 1963
because your government can tell you accurately, honestly, that if they exploded
a nuclear weapon in outer space or in the atmosphere or underwater, that we
00:19:00would know about it immediately and could tell you so. So, there are those who
seem to think that there's no point in making any agreement with the Soviet
Union because you can't trust them. Well, when you go into a bank to make a
deposit, you don't ask yourself every time, "Can I trust this teller behind the
cage here?" because we've got Federal Deposit Insurance; we've got bank
examiners, so you don't even have to worry about that particular question. Now,
that's one line of policy.
Many people are familiar with the lugubrious story of the period between World
Wars I and II and the events of the 1930s that led us into the catastrophe of
World War II, but most people have forgotten what happened just after V-J Day.
We demobilized almost completely and almost overnight. By 1946 we did not have a
00:20:00single division in our army nor a single group in our air force that could be
considered ready for combat. The ships of our navy were being put into mothballs
as fast as we could find berths for them, and those that remained afloat were
being manned by skeleton crews. It's a matter of public record that for three
fiscal years, and you'll find this hard to believe, the defense budget of the
United States came down to just a little over $11 billion, groping for a target
of 10 billion.
Now, during one of the wartime conferences, Mr. Churchill made a remark to Mr.
Stalin about the views that the Pope had expressed on certain points. And Stalin
said, "The Pope! How many divisions does he have?" (laughter) And Mr. Stalin
looked there and looked out across the West and he saw all the divisions melting
away, so what did he do? He tried to keep the northwest province of Iran,
Azerbaijan, the first case before the UN Security Council. He demanded the two
00:21:00eastern provinces of Turkey, Aras and Khardahan[?]. He supported the guerrillas
going after Greece using bases and sanctuaries in places like Albania and
Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. He arranged a coup d'tat in Czechoslovakia with the
Red Army just across the border. He blockaded Berlin. He gave the green light to
the North Koreans to go after South Korea.
Now, we have profound differences with the Soviet Union, despite what I would
call the necessity for trying to find points of (unintelligible). We have
profound disagreements with them, not just over the shape of our own
societies--we've had those differences since 1917--we haven't started shooting
at each other because of that--but differences about the very shape of the world
community of nations. If you want to get a succinct statement of the kind of
community of nations that the United States supports and can live with, read
00:22:00over the first two articles of the United Nations Charter. It's no accident that
should be so because we played a major part in drafting those, that charter.
The Soviet Union talks about something called the World Revolution, which as a
matter of ideology they consider to be historically inevitable. If we use the
word "detente," they use the word [sic] "peaceful coexistence," which to them
means a continuation of the struggle by all means short of general war, which is
not exactly a synonym for what we think of when we use the word "detente." So
we've had periods, moments of confrontation with them. I mentioned several of
them just a moment ago, but we've had confrontations over Cuba. We've had
00:23:00problems over what they've been doing in Africa. It seems tragic to me that
after all this happened since World War II, that they still would send their
troops into Afghanistan.
Now, sometimes these moments of confrontation get in the way of the search for
agreement. For example, on a certain Wednesday morning in August 1968, we and
the Soviet Union were all set to make a joint identical announcement that
President Johnson would soon go to Leningrad to open what came to be known later
as the SALT talks, negotiations on limiting strategic nuclear weapons. Trouble
is, that the very night before, the Tuesday night before, Soviet troops marched
into Czechoslovakia. And I had to, personally to call the Soviet ambassador in
Washington and insist that he immediately call, telephone Moscow to tell them
00:24:00not to make that announcement the next morning about President Johnson's visit
to Leningrad. It's a little ironic to think that some years later the SALT II
Agreement had to be put into the refrigerator for a time because Soviet forces
marched into Afghanistan.
I mention this background because our news media tend to ignore the background,
partly because they haven't the space or time. They tend to leave the impression
that history started yesterday morning at nine o'clock. There are those of us
who are dealing with, I think, with young people, and I do as well as do you,
might want to remind them that a lot of these things are not new, that they all
have considerable background. At all times in our relations with the Soviet
Union there are both the elements of detente, the search for agreement, and
confrontations based upon these fundamental differences about the very shape of
00:25:00the world community and what kind of conduct is required if we're going to live
together in peace.
All right. Those are some--Now, what questions would you like to put? Yes, sir.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: How do you view the invasion, or the motives of the
Russian invasion of Afghanistan?
RUSK: Well, when you get into motivation, one has to be a little careful
because motivations usually are very complicated, and in the case of the Soviet
Union they do a much better job in keeping their mouths shut than our people do,
so that you have to speculate about motivation a good deal. But my guess is that
they saw in Afghanistan a self-proclaimed Marxist government that wasn't making
a go of it, and that worried them under the rubric of what they used to call the
Brezhnev doctrine, the right of the Soviet Union to intervene in any socialist,
00:26:00meaning Communist country, to insure that it remains Communist. I think they saw
a major election in process in India with high prospect that their old friend
Indira Gandhi would soon be coming back to power. They saw great political
fragility in Pakistan. They saw an Iran which was in a state of complete
disorder with separatist movements shooting at the authorities in places like
Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Baluchistan and high tension between Iran and the United
States. I think they found it predictable that Western Europe in general would
take a more-or-less indifferent and business as usual attitude if they were to
00:27:00move into Afghanistan. They saw us in the middle of a presidential election, and
it may well be that this question got caught up in the preliminary maneuverings
with regard to the succession to Brezhnev and Kosygin. I don't know whether it
was related to any long-term plan to move into the Persian Gulf and the Arabian
Peninsula. My guess is the Soviets don't make their decisions that far in
advance. They'll wait and see. But I think they put together a combination of
things and made the decision that they could move with impunity as far as the
rest of the world was concerned. They may have underestimated the Afghans. I
suggested to my friends in the State Department some months ago that they send
me to Moscow to give them some technical assistance on how to get bogged down in
a small country. (laughter) All right. There's another question. Yes, m[a'am].
00:28:00Right here.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Do you see any immediate, or within the next three to
four months, resolution of the Iranian crisis, or do you have any suggestions
that might be relevant to the situation?
RUSK: These hostage situations are unique situations, each one unique, and one
finds that ordinary ways of thinking and acting simply may not be relevant. When
something like that happens, the first thing you have to decide [is] where your
priorities are. I think the, our own government made the right decision in
giving top priority to the safety and the lives of the hostages themselves. Now
00:29:00that immediately puts a lot of limitations on what you can do. It requires a
great deal of calm and patience and restraint, and also involves a great deal of
suppressed anger and frustration and all the rest of it. We had the same kind of
problem when the North Koreans seized the Pueblo. We had eighty-five officers
and crew seized. And when we first heard about it in Washington, the ship and
its crew were already entering Wonsan Harbor in North Korea. Now, we could have
bombed North Korea and then maybe picked up eighty-three [sic] corpses someday,
but we decided that since we had sent those men on that type of ship, which is
unable to defend itself, into those waters, relying on international waters for
its protection, and that proved unreliable, then our first duty was to the
00:30:00officers and men. It took us eleven months to get them out of there, even though
at least in North Korea there was a government that was in charge. Now, I don't
know how this will evolve. My--if I were Jimmy the Greek, and we'll bear in mind
that Jimmy the Greek is a gambling man, I would bet that we would get our
hostages back, but it may take, it will take some more time, and at the very end
it may come through some kind of bizarre kind of involvement. We got our people
back from Korea under literally one of the most bizarre diplomatic moves one has
ever heard about. For weeks and weeks, the North Koreans had pounded the table
requiring us to make a statement--
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