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2 MR. BUCKLEY: You may think that our international problems substantially ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Our guest would agree with you that this is so in a critical sense. After all, Gene Rostow was a firm and adamant Cold Warrior, and nobody had more reason for self-satisfaction than he when finally reality set in in Eastern Europe and the soviet Union. But the thesis of his book, Toward Managed Peace, is that the national security interests of the United states are an ongoing problem and that there are signs here, there and everywhere, not only that President Clinton is only dimly aware of this, but that Congress and the American people are progressively unaware of the character of our ongoing responsibilities as, to use his metaphor, the conductor of the world's orchestra. Eugene Rostow has been, roughly speaking, everything. As a young man he was dean of the Yale Law School, he has been undersecretary of state for political affairs under Lyndon Johnson, director of U.S. arms control and disarmament under Ronald Reagan. He is a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a visiting professor at OXford, Cambridge, the University of chicago and the National Defense University. This program is being filmed the day after Yeltsin dismissed the Russian parliament, and since an important chapter in his book deals with our responsibilities towards Russia, I begin by asking: Is the disruption in Russia in any significant sense the result of diplomatic delinquency by the United States? MR. ROSTOW: I don't think so. I don't think so. I think we could be criticized for not having pressed more strongly to try to persuade the Russian regime to adopt policies which would favor foreign investment more directly, policies which are indispensable to the rapid development of the Russian economy. But I thought that President Bush handled his Russian card very skillfully, the main objective being to persuade Gorbachev and then Yeltsin not to use force to put down the liberation of Eastern Europe and then the other republics of the Soviet Union. And that was an immense contribution, the fact that the Soviet leadership did not do what the Chinese leadership did and shoot down a crowd. MR. BUCKLEY: And in turn not to use force in MR. ROSTOW: Again, it followed. MR. BUCKLEY: --and threaten a civil war. MR. ROSTOW: It followed. Because if you look back at it, I would say the major diplomatic mistake of the 20th century--and that's a field that has a great many major diplomatic mistakes-- 1

3 MR. BUCKLEY: Using force too late. MR. ROSTOW: It was too late. That is the period in Russia, when we should have helped obviously, on a very large scale, the democratic--promising new democratic regime of Prince Lvov and Kerensky to succeed. And the Allies, exhausted by the first war, made a few feeble gestures and then retreated and allowed this cancerous development of the Soviet regime to take place. MR. BUCKLEY: But it seems to me in one of your other books, if memory serves, you point to this weakness in democracy, i.e., a democracy is prompted to move only after the case for moving is overwhelming, at which point it is often too late-- MR. ROSTOW: That's right. MR. BUCKLEY: --to move effectively. Castro would be an example of this, wouldn't he? MR. ROSTOW: Yes. Well, Castro would be a relatively minor one, but Castro surrounded, helped, backed by the Soviet Union, it was too late, yes. But-- MR. BUCKLEY: On the other hand, if we had moved preemptively against Castro, say in 1960, would American opinion--certainly not at Yale--have supported such as other than Western jingoism, imperialism? MR. ROSTOW: Well, that would have been true but you had the question mark of the Soviet Union in the background and the nuclear question, and the fascinating handling of the-- MR. BUCKLEY: But that was two years later. MR. ROSTOW: Too late. Nobody wanted to provoke that sort of a crisis. When Khrushchev did it in 1962 and then Kennedy faced up to it and demonstrated that you could make an effective threat to use conventional force, even against a nuclear threat, but you could do it only at a time when we had 10-toone or five-to-one nuclear superiority. MR. BUCKLEY: Well, this leads me to an important element in your book in which you say that we should very early on- meaning a year and a half ago--have moved in Yugoslavia under the auspices of NATO, and prevented not only the bloodletting that has happened up until now, but that which may be prospective given the leverage now achieved by the Serbs and to a certain extent, the Croats. My question is, isn't this one of the impediments of democratic government, that unless you have leaders as sure of themselves and as relatively aggressive as Teddy Roosevelt, it's hard to bring the American 2

4 people along in military maneuvers for which there has not been a consolidated public sentiment. MR. ROSTOW: Well, I never criticize democracies on that ground. De Tocqueville did in his famous book. He said it was very doubtful in his mind, strongly as he was in favor of democracy, doubtful whether democracies could conduct an effective foreign policy, because they would have a tendency to change. Well, I point out that we have followed the policy of containment from the time of Truman until the collapse of the soviet Union very consistently, very stubbornly, and at very great cost. And we did it on a bipartisan basis. Yes, there were outcries at the fringes, but fundamentally the majority of the American people supported that. MR. BUCKLEY: But we caved in vietnam. MR. ROSTOW: Well, we caved in Vietnam, but I think that was much more-- We didn't cave exactly, we were licked in Vietnam. It was much more a problem of the conduct of hostilities. I've published, I guess, and said that much as I respected and admired Johnson, his mistake in Vietnam was not winning. And it's very hard for me to understand how that happened, because General Ridgeway had performed his miracle in Korea just a few years before and everybody knew about it, and of course Johnson knew about it. And I think he tried when he put General Abrams in there to get Abrams to repeat that miraculous turnaround, which Ridgeway did by force of will. He came and his commanders briefed him and--maps and so on--and the first fellow got up and said, "Here's where we are now and here's my first fallback position, here's my second fallback position." Ridgeway listened to that and one or two more, and then he said, "Gentlemen, you don't seem to understand. Your orders will be to attack. I'm not interested in your fallback positions." And they were greatly relieved. But outside the military circles this wasn't really known and it wasn't understood by the politicians. MR. BUCKLEY: But even if you accept that our containment program, with here and there a military episode in Korea and in Vietnam, finally succeeded, I think you would have to say two things. Number one, an enormous amount of suffering took place that perhaps was not necessary. When the bomb fell on Hiroshima, I was 21 years old; when the Berlin Wall came down, I was a senior citizen. So that meant that during my entire adult life and during the adult life of all my counterparts in Europe, they were at the mercy of slavemasters. I'm not sure that you counsel the kind of historical patience that says 45 years is about how long we should be prepared to wait. And in the case of Bosnia, you want immediate action, which prompts me to ask the question yet again, Can you have immediate action in 3

5 a society that is becoming isolationist more or less in union with the country's intellectuals? MR. ROSTOW: I don't think the country is isolationist. If you look at the elections since 1940 really, the losing issue was when a candidate was tagged as being weak in defense--not weak against communism; it wasn't an ideological struggle, it was a power struggle. MR. BUCKLEY: No, I am talking about post-soviet union isolationist: Now that we have rid ourselves of the menace of that superpower, we can go back to tilling our own fields. MR. ROSTOW: Well, there is that feeling. MR. BUCKLEY: Yes. MR. ROSTOW: There's no doubt about it. But I think if you look at the history of it, you'll see the reason for the answer. In 1945, there was only one man that I know of who advocated our declaring preemptive war, giving an ultimatum to the Soviet union. MR. BUCKLEY: Lord Russell. MR. ROSTOW: Lord Russell. Lord Russell, the great logician, who looked at the situation and said, "Tell the Russians--you have the nuclear weapon; that monopoly won't last long--tell the Russians to join the human race or else." It was out of the question for the best reasons of American character to turn on an ally and break him up. But the prospect of a war with the Soviet Union, which had just--the Red Army had just beaten the Germans head-to-head in a way that no one else did, was unthinkable on ethical grounds too: the greatest good for the greatest number. It would cost more than it could possibly have accomplished. In any event that was the reasoning. And I think it is reasoning that is very hard to challenge, and so we adopted the policy of Kennan, of holding the line and preventing them from becoming overwhelming. MR. BUCKLEY: I understand. MR. ROSTOW: I know you do. MR. BUCKLEY: I was working in a separation center, having moved from the infantry, and I can't imagine under what circumstances these young men would have consented to go back to fight another war. MR. ROSTOW: And a big one. 4

6 MR. BUCKLEY: But we're talking now in another frame. We have to remember, given what you just said about the politics of the situation, that approval of President Bush's stand in Iraq only narrowly got through the Democrats in the Senate. MR. ROSTOW: Yes. MR. BUCKLEY: Doesn't that suggest that there are an awful lot of people instructing an awful lot of senators that even action against so patent an aggressor threatening so vital a supply, we can't confidently assume we would do the right thing? MR. ROSTOW: I think that's fair enough. It raises the question, but it doesn't answer it. I am a Democrat. I refuse to give up the privilege of calling myself a Democrat. MR. BUCKLEY: Is that a privilege? [laughter] MR. ROSTOW: Well, it's my privilege. I have been, and I see no reason to abandon Thomas Jefferson now, or Wilson or Johnson or Franklin D. Roosevelt. But the behavior of the Democratic Party on that vote, which they didn't want to happen--they wanted Bush to go and do it and then blame him for doing it without a congressional vote. But they had it fixed, both the House and the Senate, that Member A would talk to the leadership and if they didn't need his vote to prevail, to support the president, then they would vote no. But if the vote were needed in the judgment-- Well, I thought that was a shameful, disgusting-- MR. BUCKLEY: Pretty cynical, yes. MR. ROSTOW: Not only cynical, but irresponsible by any democratic standard. So that was a very bad moment, I quite agree. And it was the vietnam syndrome writ large, and it's part of the price we paid for not having won, I believe, in vietnam. MR. BUCKLEY: Now, in terms, Mr. Rostow, of meeting the obligations that you outline in your book that we have, you use several times the name of Woodrow Wilson, but it seems to me that you're a little bit undifferentiated in your use of it, by which I mean that Wilson, to quote you, "was in favor of collective security against aggression. Yes. But his name was also attached to the doctrine that it is America's responsibility to bring democracy to the entire world. And it seems to me that that sense of mission was thoroughly undermined by even post-jfk inaugural address time. MR. ROSTOW: Yes. MR. BUCKLEY: And you're not here reasserting it, are you? 5

7 MR. ROSTOW: Not at all. Quite the contrary. And I think I tried in this book, and I think I succeeded in another passage, to make it clear that democracy wasn't the issue, but the balance of power was. MR. BUCKLEY: And rule by law. MR. ROSTOW: And rule by law. The management of the balance of power in accordance with the rules of law. The phrase about "make the world safe for democracy II came, as a matter of fact, from David Lloyd George, and not from Wilson at all. And his handling of approaches to war and his correspondence with Gray, the British foreign minister, make it clear that he thoroughly understood the distinction. Yes, it's true that he was a rhetorician of the first order and his great speeches on getting into World War I rank with anybody's, with Churchill's. But he did not favor a universal crusade for democracy. He in fact--i said a few minutes ago--he was responsible for the great diplomatic mistake of not following through against the Bolshevik coup d'etat in But it was impossible at that stage of World War I to have done that very effectively, and we had half the enthusiasts in Western Europe and in America thinking that Lenin and the 10 days that shook the world were the opening to a new Elysium MR. BUCKLEY: When John F. Kennedy in his inaugural address used those alliterative sounds, like "We will make any sacrifice, stand any--" MR. ROSTOW: "Bear any burden. II MR. BUCKLEY: --"bear any burden," and so on and so forth, all the commentators thought that he was holding high the banner of Wilsonianism. You think this was a misunderstanding of Wilsonianism. MR. ROSTOW: I hope so. I think so. He was very discriminating, and tried very hard to--as all American presidents do--to avoid a commitment that would be purely for the sake of ideology. Within the Reagan administration I argued against making a corresponding--putting an ideological element so strongly into our foreign policy. Of course any country where we have influence, any situation in which we have influence, the influence is going to be used by peaceful methods in favor of democracy and capitalism and pluralism. MR. BUCKLEY: But our commitment should be more discreet. MR. ROSTOW: Much more discreet. 6

8 MR. BUCKLEY: Well now, apropos of that, you say we are right to make common cause with China today. But you do that in a section in which you are talking about the balance of power. MR. ROSTOW: That's right. MR. BUCKLEY: Now, to what extent are we properly squeamish about alliances with such as China and Stalin a generation earlier? MR. ROSTOW: Well, I think we are properly squeamish, but perhaps too squeamish in a way. I think from the point of view of educating American public opinion, it's vitally important to make the distinction clear. And it was clear enough in circumstances--i think I mention in the book that I have never met an American yet, student or adult, who didn't understand why in Nixon's first term we made common cause with China as a counterweight to the Soviet union. Any grown person would know that and did know that and said it, "Well, of course," you know, "that will help keep the balance." But-- MR. BUCKLEY: Now I'm interested that you use the words, "making common cause with China," because I was one of the journalists who were there, and we sought, some of us, to make a hard distinction between an avenue to Peking and any suggestion that we were involved in reorienting Peking against Moscow, which it already was. MR. ROSTOW: Well, the fact of the matter was, it was Peking that was getting our support in its policy of breaking with Moscow. MR. BUCKLEY: Yes. MR. ROSTOW: And they took the initiative in that exchange with the ping-pong matches. MR. BUCKLEY: Right. Right. MR. ROSTOW: Now-- MR. BUCKLEY: In '71. MR. ROSTOW: But that-- They-- MR. BUCKLEY: But what we had hoped was that they would in effect say, Go ahead and win the Vietnam War, which they didn't do. MR. ROSTOW: Oh no, they didn't see it that way at all. But they were threatening China with nuclear weapons, to take out 7

9 China's burgeoning nuclear industry, and I think the most important thing that Nixon did in his two administrations-- MR. BUCKLEY: Give them our intelligence. MR. ROSTOW: No, he gave the Russians a warning. He warned them not to do it. And the soviets take those warnings very seriously--but you know, secret and not advertised and not blown up in public or anything else, but it worked. MR. BUCKLEY: But Henry Kissinger in his memoirs mentioned also that a very important strategic endowment of the united states at that point was 100 Russian divisions on the frontier of China-- MR. ROSTOW: That's right. MR. BUCKLEY: --which meant 100 fewer divisions in Eastern Europe. MR. ROSTOW: That's right. When I was working in the Johnson administration, I asked the intelligence people to brief me every week on the number of Soviet divisions on the Siberian border. And they went up in my time, and that was in the late '60s, from four divisions, which had been a normal complement- and I've forgotten what it was when I left. It was 20-30, but it was clearly going up all the time. Yes, of course. MR. BUCKLEY: So what would you see as the proper objective of a Clinton administration in which China figures? MR. ROSTOW: Well, it's almost precisely the other side of our relationship with the Soviet union and with Europe. China is certainly going to be modernized. It is being modernized very rapidly. The question is, under what circumstances and with help from whom? If China is modernized, were to be modernized in an exclusive relationship, partnership, with Japan, I think every man, woman and child in the United states would know that was something we would find very disturbing and very threatening. Exactly as on the other side of the world in Europe, if Western Europe, which is now becoming more and more a unit--it's not a political unit yet, but something--if Russia, which is also going to be a great power again very soon, perhaps sooner than many of us realize because of its military endowment and because that military endowment from the Soviet Union has not been dissipated in a war or anything else, if Russia were to be modernized in an exclusive partnership with Germany or even with Europe as a whole, it would present very grave problems for us. And therefore, our mission should be to try to help cooperate in managing the evolution of this changing distribution of power in the world. 8

10 MR. BUCKLEY: And this is-- MR. ROSTOW: It's in our interest. MR. BUCKLEY: And this is best done by a kind of a collusive diplomacy? MR. ROSTOW: Collusive? Not collusive. I should think an open diplomacy. I should think the foundation for it would have to be NATO and corresponding arrangements in Asia as they are, and the evolution of that policy to be open to the Soviet union and to China on terms of cooperation. That's why I think we've got to do what the British did in the 19th century, lead a concert of great powers interested in influencing the peaceful evolution of the state system. In the 19th century European statesmen all had the vision of Napoleon in their minds. And anything to prevent-- MR. BUCKLEY: Prevent that, yes. MR. ROSTOW: --the emergence of a new Napoleon. MR. BUCKLEY: Well now, since you touch on NATO--you pointed to it as the obvious instrumentality of anything we might have done preemptively in Yugoslavia to prevent the current mess. At the same time, from time to time, you pay tribute--some of it sounds a little bit formalistic--to the united Nations. At one point you say you acknowledge that if in fact it were necessary to defy the united Nations, you would be willing to do so. MR. ROSTOW: Yes. MR. BUCKLEY: Do you anticipate that happening? MR. ROSTOW: It may. It depends. I think what's clear in the very recent experience--in the contrast between the conduct of the Gulf War and the conduct of the tragedy in Yugoslavia--that the United Nations is simply incapable of conducting a war or a large-scale peacekeeping operation--peacemaking operation. I think that it can do hopefully very well what the concert of Europe did and the League of Nations did too, namely serve as a forum for diplomacy and as a catalyst for diplomacy. But it can't substitute for a great power alignment. MR. BUCKLEY: And you think-- MR. ROSTOW: That's recognized in the charter in the veto power in the Security Council of the major powers. 9

11 MR. BUCKLEY: Well, just simply--we have only a second or two- but do you believe that it will be necessary to actually send troops to be commanded by the United Nations? MR. ROSTOW: No. No, no. MR. BUCKLEY: You think Mr. Clinton is departing from that commitment little by little. MR. ROSTOW: Well, there is a distinction in the united Nations' vocabulary between peacekeeping and peacemaking. peacekeeping is-- Now MR. BUCKLEY: Is different, yes. MR. ROSTOW: --is patrolling fundamentally-- MR. BUCKLEY: Right. MR. ROSTOW: --and serving as a barrier between two forces, between the Egyptians and the Israelis, for example. And that can be a very useful thing, but it's not to be confused with conducting the Korean War. MR. BUCKLEY: Thank you very much, Professor Rostow, author of Toward Managed Peace; thank you, ladies and gentlemen. 10