Posted on 03/14/2003 11:52:02 PM PST by Askel5
| Henry Kissinger Acceptance Speech | 1973 The Nobel Peace Prize is as much an award to a purpose as to a person. More than the achievement of peace, it symbolises the quest for peace. Though I deeply cherish this honour in a personal sense, I accept it on behalf of that quest and in the light of that grand purpose. Our experience has taught us to regard peace as a delicate, ever-fleeting condition, its roots too shallow to bear the strain of social and political discontent. We tend to accept the lessons of that experience and work toward those solutions that at best relieve specific sources of strain, lest our neglect allows war to overtake peace. To the realist, peace represents a stable arrangement of power; to the idealist, a goal so pre-eminent that it conceals the difficulty of finding the means to its achievement. But in this age of thermonuclear technology, neither view can assure man's preservation. Instead, peace, the ideal, must be practised. A sense of responsibility and accommodation must guide the behavior of all nations. Some common notion of justice can and must be found, for failure to do so will only bring more "just" wars. In his Nobel acceptance speech, William Faulkner expressed his hope that "man will not merely endure, he will prevail".
We live today in a world so complex that even only to endure, man must prevail - over an accelerating technology that threatens to escape his control and over the habits of conflict that have obscured his peaceful nature. Certain war has yielded to an uncertain peace in Vietnam. Where there was once only despair and dislocation, today there is hope, however frail. In the Middle East the resumption of full scale war haunts a fragile ceasefire. In Indo-china, the Middle East and elsewhere, lasting peace will not have been won until contending nations realise the futility of replacing political competition with armed conflict. America's goal is the building of a structure of peace, a peace in which all nations have a stake and therefore to which all nations have a commitment. We are seeking a stable world, not as an end in itself but as a bridge to the realisation of man's noble aspirations of tranquility and community. If peace, the ideal, is to be our common destiny, then peace, the experience, must be our common practice. For this to be so, the leaders of all nations must remember that their political decisions of war or peace are realised in the human suffering or well-being of their people. As Alfred Nobel recognised, peace cannot be achieved by one man or one nation. It results from the efforts of men of broad vision and goodwill throughout the world. The accomplishments of individuals need not be remembered, for if lasting peace is to come it will be the accomplishment of all mankind. With these thoughts, I extend to you my most sincere appreciation for this award. |
An initial post to the "Kissinger, Prince of Peace" cache
Van Susteren Interviews Kissinger on France and Germany (3/14/03)
Henry Kissinger’s politics beclouded his fine intellectual achievements. One consistent theme in the writings of this arch realist is that of the legitimacy of the international order.
“It implies the acceptance of the framework of the international order by all the major powers… the desire of one power for absolute security means absolute insecurity for all the others,” he wrote in 1957.In an essay on Bismarck, Kissinger amplified:
“Security presupposes a balance of power which makes it difficult for any State or group of States to impose its will on the remainder. Too great a disproportion of strength undermines self-restraint in the powerful… Also essential is a ‘moral consensus’ on what is ‘just or reasonable’.”In Does America Need A Foreign Policy?, he noted that
“for much of the 90s, America’s Atlantic policies oscillated between imperiousness and indifference, between treating Europe as an auxiliary and as a photo opportunity”.A serious strategic dialogue didn’t materialise. Russia and China hate these trends.
The post-Iraq war international order will lack all legitimacy. So will the regime imposed on Iraq. The Vietnamese hated Diem. But his forcible ouster “affected every tier of civil administration down to the village level”. History teaches us — and Kissinger warns — that the more extensive the eradication of existing authority, the more its successor must rely on naked power to establish themselves. For, in the end, legitimacy involves an acceptance of authority without compulsions.
A. G. Noorani, Hindustan Times
Two reactions flashed out at us from two men of extraordinary experience, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Kissinger surveys the scene in the United Nations and pronounces what is being done as "shocking." We see putative allies in the U.N. lobbying African and other nations to vote against the United States: "This has never happened in 50 years of previous controversies, which have been conducted as family controversies," said the most famous and experienced diplomat in U.S. history.The other guest on Wolf Blitzer's program, Mr. Brzezinski, has also served in the highest national security office, in behalf of President Carter. Zbig is a tough, brilliant analyst, and while not exactly disagreeing with Kissinger, assigns the blame not to defective allies, but to defective U.S. diplomacy. He thinks the U.S. bid for support has been at best clumsy, at worst, blockheaded. We have treated other nations as though they had the duty to "line up." We have dealt with them as if they were part of some "Warsaw Pact."
Would that be a statement with unentendred consequences?
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