Diplomacy and the Star Wars defence program - 10 May 1996

Perhaps, as long as a year ago, a book came out from Henry Kissinger, who will be remembered by anyone with a grey hair in his head or her head as President Nixon's advisor on national security affairs and subsequently was secretary of state at a time of domestic tumult, mainly over the Vietnamese adventure, or misadventure, and it was also the only time there's been, when you might say, there was a forced abdication of a president in American history.

Mr Kissinger's book was called simply Diplomacy and it was not what all such books tend to be, a memoir of his own heroic efforts in a stressful time, it was a history of American diplomacy. After all Mr Kissinger did not practise diplomacy, he didn't get his first job in government, till he was moving into his late 40s.

Before that, he'd been a teenage refugee from Hitler and his persecution of people with names like Kissinger. He became a scholar and a professor of government at Harvard. So Mr Kissinger brought to his book, not only a hair raising record of handling foreign relations with many troubled nations, from Israel to China, from Havana to Vietnam, but a long absorption with the theory and practice of diplomacy in Europe as well in the United States. A scholar diplomat if ever there was one. Whatever the other merits of this book and they are considerable, Mr Kissinger brings out more sharply than I think anyone before him two dominant strains in American diplomacy: the idealism of Woodrow Wilson and the pragmatism of Theodore Roosevelt. Some people might say the idealist dream of Wilson wishing the world to be the way it ought to be, and Teddy Roosevelt's wide awake view of the world as it was.

To simplify this different world view, we should remember that it was Teddy Roosevelt who arbitrated the war between Russia and Japan, and in the heyday of the British and other empires, he thought America could sensibly have one of its own: commanding the Pacific Ocean, as Britain commanded the Atlantic, Mediterranean and Indian Oceans. In foreign relations, Teddy Roosevelt's aim, was to keep at the pitch of the highest training a thoroughly efficient navy, and then his motto was: "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Woodrow Wilson on the other hand, said that the First World War was fought to make the world safe for democracy, and once it was won, the nations of the world would, through the newly hatched League of Nations, settle down to perpetual peace.

Teddy Roosevelt however, died in the cynical conviction that the lions would never voluntarily lie down with the lambs. The more you look over this contrast of views, the more I think you discover that American foreign policy is always wrestling with both impulses, and you could say roughly that the Republicans have been more inclined to side with Teddy Roosevelt: try for a balance of power between the big powers and keep your powder dry. The Democrats have tended to side with Wilson, and help any embattled country struggling against a dictator with the offer or hope of democracy. What it comes down to – from the cloud nine of theory and dogma – is that the Republicans, as a rule always, want the defence budget held or increased, and the Democrats, as a rule, want the defence budget cut, deep down they'd like to see it vanish.

This conflict has come out into the open all over again this last week when most of us thought that the theory of Star Wars was dead and buried. Do you remember, you might call it, "The passion of St. Ronald Reagan." So, long ago as 1983, his idea to build a strategic defence initiative to protect the United States, also her allies – imagine the scale of the protection – with a ring or shield of satellites that would pinpoint and shoot down with lasers, any and all incoming ballistic missiles. Money, billions were authorised and I believe the actual authorisation bill was never repealed.

By the way, the Russians who pretended to be shocked to the core, had been working on this idea for years. Scientists broke into two camps, one saying it could be done, the other saying that 100 per cent protection of two continents was impossible. To which some on the other side said, we're not promising 100 per cent, how about 98 per cent protection? To which the never answered question came: if two per cent got through, wouldn't two missiles be enough to atomise half the continent?

At the end of last year, a branch of the CIA, the National Intelligence Council, put out a reassuring report. In the next 15 years it said: "No country other than the major declared nuclear powers," – I think that's what, five so far, surely enough – "will develop a ballistic missile that could threaten the contiguous 48 American states".

A famous conservative critic, recalling how the CIA assured us all five years ago that Saddam Hussein was probably 10 years away from building a nuclear weapon – it turned out he was several months. Well with that gross error in mind, the critic calls this bit of incoming ballistic reassurance, egregious. The new worries, springs not from the major nuclear powers, but from the threat of rogue states, small dictators or terrorists who have bought or stolen nuclear weapons. This critic says that this fear is a pressing issue and one that should be drawn into the presidential campaign. I doubt very much whether it will be. For one thing, it would cost billions and billions that would unbalance the budget forever, but also, of all our troubles and griefs, if there's one that seems hopeless to worry about, it's the making and alerting of lasers, revolving or tilting, to catch and destroy some small nuclear weapon that might be fired one day, by anyone of a dozen tin pot dictators or any one of half a dozen looney terrorist groups.

Well now, I started with the two competing impulses that Kissinger sees going on in the practice of American diplomacy, I wasn't thinking of how Woodrow Wilson or Teddy Roosevelt would have stood on Star Wars. I was thinking of the persistence in American government thinking, whichever party is in power, of the belief that the ills of any and every embattled country, can best be cured by democracy, preferably on the American model. You may call this naive, but watching American policy down the years, you have to see the continuing force of idealism in a country founded on an ideal of liberty and equality. We've recently seen and heard this idealism in full expression in the news reporting and television discussion of the elections in India, the coming election in Russia and the grandiose blueprint for democracy in the new South African constitution.

Now as you can guess everything that's happening abroad these days immediately gets talked about by Mr Clinton and Mr Dole with one half of the brain thinking about November and the election. So for instance, mention the Russian election anywhere near the White House and you can feel the anxiety start up like an electric fan. Will Yeltsin get in or won't he? Mr Clinton has bet his all on Mr Yeltsin, practically. When he was over there, almost made a campaign speech for him. This is one of the few, very few issues of the presidential campaign on which Mr Dole can't lose, even if Mr Yeltsin does win and then has a tough time maintaining order, or physically collapses, the Republicans can point out the folly of an American president's backing any single party in a foreign election.

The Indian election I don't think affects either party one way or the other. The gist of the American comment is three cheers for such a vast and disturbed continent staying with a democratic system. But South Africa and the passage of the new constitution, that has received the compliment of a huge intake of breath and a resounding silence. Because of the promises in the South African Bill of Rights, it goes far beyond the ten original amendments that constitute the greatly admired American Bill of Rights. It reproduces for the first time, for all its peoples, the guarantees familiar to most people listening to me now: freedom of speech, of movement, of political activity, the usual rights to anyone accused of a crime, a right of silence, legal protection, a speedy trial – that means an early trial – the United States has that right, which can mean anything from two days to several years. It prohibits discrimination on account of race, religion, sex – now called gender – and homosexuality – now called sexual orientation. It abolishes the death penalty and implies at least, a woman's right to an abortion. None of this last group of rights was included by America's founding fathers or the generations that came later, they have to be justified or argued about by the language of the 1789 document – the Constitution. But the guarantees in South Africa that caused admiration and a wide amaze, are the right to food and water, to education, medical care and to adequate housing – these are breathtaking promises.

What I am at once reminded off is Lloyd George, the victorious prime minister once the First World War was over. Britain he said, would provide homes fit for heroes to live in. It didn't happen. 1919, was a violent and rebellious time in both countries, when the returned soldiers who needed adequate housing, let alone jobs, couldn't find them. I believe Mr Mandela promised on the day of uhuru, of freedom, a million new homes and several thousand I believe have been built – how could it in such a short time be otherwise. But considering the huge legacy of poverty and deprivation among nine tenths of the people in that great land, we can only hope and pray that the day when these promises can be barely kept, is not too many years away.

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