Ladies and gentlemen, Ted Heath and I were friends.
I met him before he became Prime Minister, I worked with him when he was Prime Minister
and we stayed in contact through the rest of our lives.
When I was invited to give this speech, it became evident that the house in which Ted
Heath lived was close to where I was stationed when I was here with the 84th Infantry Division
of the United States where I was near Winchester.
All this occurred before I was Henry Kissinger, so it is not a known fact, but I visited
Salisbury several times while I was in Winchester and so I have a great feeling for where Ted
Heath lived.
I thought what I could do here is to describe our interaction with Ted Heath when he was
Prime Minister.
What the issues were were sometimes we agreed and occasionally we didn't agree, but we
always respected him as one of the important figures of our time and with a vision for
Europe that is historic.
So when the Tories unexpectedly won the 1970 election, Richard Nixon was so elated that
he called me on the telephone nearly every hour to update me on the status of the returns.
In terms of our hierarchy, it should of course have been the other way around.
Part of Nixon's enthusiasm for Heath was the comparability of their rights to office.
Heath was the first Tory Prime Minister to be selected by vote of the conservative members
of parliament rather than by a consensus of party eminences.
Both Heath and Nixon were admitted into the establishment, not defined by it.
And this awareness shaped an important way, their combination of remoteness and high
analytical skill.
In Heath's case, these qualities were combined with an extraordinary knowledge and love of
music which evoked in him unexpected episodes of personal warrants.
I intend this comparison with Nixon as a tribute of the 10 presidents who honored me by allowing
me to participate in the conduct of foreign policy, some tangentially, others more intensively.
Nixon was the best prepared and in his impact on the international system, perhaps the most
transformational.
To the Nixon administration, as to its predecessors, the wartime alliance was still personal.
We respected the vision by which Winston Churchill had transformed Britain's imperial preeminence
into partnership with America, held together by intangible ties of shared history and buttress
through informal arrangement between leaders.
In its operation, British diplomats occasionally augmented the traditional diplomatic practice
of balancing interests with an element of paternal guidance, if necessary, evoking a
sense of guilt if we deviate it from our lets at being the less sophisticated partner.
This intimacy between two governments had enabled a succession of British leaders of
both parties to transform the wartime alliance into an Atlantic partnership.
Ted Heath continued this tradition in the management of geo-strategic issues.
The relations with the Soviet Union were closely coordinated.
In the Middle East, both leaders inherited and undeclared Israeli-Egyptian air battle
along the Suez Canal.
A Syrian invasion of Jordan followed in 1970, while terrorism made its first systematic
appearance.
Finally, the outbreak of the 1973 Middle East War imposed a new emphasis on diplomacy.
In all of these crises, two of which included partial alerts of U.S. forces, close cooperation
with Britain, and between the president and the prime minister, was a key element of American
policy.
It was when Heath undertook the delicate passage of Britain into Europe that issues arose
in the operation of this special relationship, which were inherent in the nature of the problem
and not in the policies of the individual leaders.
The objective of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was the common security of individual
states based on a shared definition of both threats and strategies to deal with them.
The emerging European structure, however, strove to express a specifically European
identity by way of institutions which would over time merge into a supranational entity.
The simultaneous quest for both European and Atlantic integration were therefore not always
easy to reconcile.
International developments compounded structural issues.
The Nixon administration inherited a war in Vietnam from which it sought to extricate
itself at a pace that did not undermine the American position as the guarantor of alliances.
Some of our European allies urged more rapid withdrawals to provide relief from their own
domestic pressures.
The Nixon administration sought to overcome the domestic obsession with the Vietnam War
by putting forward a new concept of world order.
It opened to China and engaged in negotiations with the Soviet Union, especially on arms
control.
These openings, especially to China, needed to be conducted with a minimum of external
consultation to avoid a paralyzing domestic debate.
For he who was pursuing his own opening to China, the secrecy and suddenness of our policy
implied a sense of unnecessary preemption.
In the end, he achieved the same goals by a decisive move along the same paths.
And China policy will stand as a monument to his incumbency in office.
These differences might have strained some relationships, very not for the mutual respect
and admiration felt by those responsible for its conduct, including on the ministerial
level where Alec Hume and Peter Kerrigan provided extraordinary inspiration.
Having said all of this, the role of the statesman is to take his society from where it is to
where it has never been, that he will count among the important statesman of his period.
Because the Britain he inherited first as a key figure in the pro-European wing of the
conservative party, and later as prime minister, had been ambivalent about its options between
developing closer relations with the United States, reimagining the Commonwealth or entering
Europe unreservedly.
It had rejected the human plan and the European defence community.
Even Churchill argued that if the unified Europe he advocated for Britain to choose between
Europe or the open sea, it would choose the latter.
He's rejected the inevitability of such a choice.
He was ever mindful of the fate of Harold Macmillan, whose bid for entry into the common
market, Charles de Gaulle, had branded an Anglo-Saxon Trojan horse.
He managed Britain's entry into Europe in a way that combined a dramatic adaptation
of traditional British policies with determination to preserve Britain's co-national interests.
The successor, Harold Wilson, anchored the outcome among the public by a referendum that
indicated its approval in 1975.
He's welcomed this event with the following statement.
I have worked for this for 25 years.
I was the prime minister who led Britain into the community.
So I'm naturally delighted that the referendum is working out as it is.
Over the succeeding decades, a political European Union was built in the essence of both the
Atlantic relationship and its special relationships were preserved.
But now, four decades later, the global context has changed profoundly, raising the issues
of decades' time in a new and even more complex form.
Then the challenge was how to maintain Atlantic unity under the conditions of approaching nuclear
parity.
The threat was from the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc.
Today, the threat is far-reaching, ambiguous, amorphous, and posing new forms of danger.
New capabilities of technology have emerged in multiple aspects, like cyber and artificial
intelligence, for which a decreed strategy does not yet exist.
They are accompanied by forms of international conduct unimagined a generation ago.
Global upheavals rent the continents from multitudinous causes, and the remedies are not always in
alignment.
The most significant global questions then become, what concept of world order can restore
stability, or even establish criteria by which to fashion a common design, should the Atlantic
alliance conceive its reach as global?
What is the relationship of the European Union to the creation of world order?
Or will the world evolve into regional spheres of influence which combine their relations
unconstrained by the best-failing system?
And if so, how will it be possible to avoid an even more cataclysmic outcome than the
two world wars of European origin?
In these circumstances, Brexit, which was at first seen as a primarily British domestic
issue, has taken on a more general significance.
On wealth level, it will lead to new negotiations on a British relationship with Europe.
That relationship needs to be close and organic.
That's an outcome, is in the overwhelming interest of both countries, of both parties,
and of world order.
And America's interest is to encourage that process of linking Europe and Britain, and
to help the process if temporary dislocations occur.
In a deeper sense, the resolution of Brexit will resurrect the issues of 1973.
In the new structure, there will be three elements.
The European Union, Britain with a special negotiated relationship with Europe, and
the U.S. as the custodian of common security.
How can Europe forge a sense of unity and maintain the sense of diversity from which
it's genius derived?
How can the articulation of a European identity be combined with Atlantic partnership?
Can a monetary union be maintained without a common fiscal policy?
And how can a common strategy emerge from such a structure?
What is important to understand about the present world is that for 300 years the world
has been organized on principles first developed by Europe, the idea of the nation state, the
notion of sovereignty, the concept of a rules-based system.
In the operation of the system, Europe, Britain, and the United States have played a decisive
role.
And whatever emerges out of the present negotiations should keep in mind that in order to restore
world order and to act on the principles that led to its greatness, Europe and America must
not drift apart.
They need to resist the silent calls of their respective neutralisms.
The new centers of power all around the world should not be tempted to exploit the disputes
of the Atlantic community or the disputes in Europe.
When the structure emerging from Brexit, Britain could perform its historic and global role,
contributing to a world order that is stable and forward-looking through an Atlantic partnership.
The question of how to forge European unity while honoring diversity that inspires loyalty
and creativity is not a bureaucratic but essentially a moral and political task.
Give me a few personal words.
I first met Tedes before he became Prime Minister and I stayed in friendly contact with him
until his death.
He participated in a discussion group that I chaired under the auspices of the Aspen Institute
which met in the United States and Iran in 1978 and in Germany in 1980.
My last encounter with Tedes was at Catherine Graves' funeral in 2001, which he attended
on his own as he talked in a friendship because of their common service on the Brent Commission.
When he retired from parliament in 2004, I wrote to him to tell him how much I admired
his service to the cause of freedom and to the relationship of Britain with Europe.
He replied telling me that on the big issues he and I had always seen things in the same
way.
I was proud of this note.
I admired Ted's integrity, his courage, his devotion to service and strange as it may
seem to those who knew Ted only as a leader, his capacity for personal warps.
He performed great services for Europe and the cause of freedom as an essential bridge
between his country's past and its future.
His is a legacy worthy of recognition as Britain, Europe and America, hopefully together, face
the challenges that lie ahead.
There are many people here in this room tonight who knew Ted Heath extremely well.
He was, I think, by any yardstick estatesman, but I think as we all know, Ted could occasionally
be a little prickly.
I remember Douglass telling me on one occasion Ted was dining at Downing Street with a lady
on either side of him whom he totally ignored, and Douglass, being a good private secretary
at the time, wrote Ted a note which said, Prime Minister, please speak to the women
on either side of you, to which Ted replied in a little note that he sent back, I have,
and that was the end of their conversation that evening.
So what Ted did do was engage on the very big issues, and you have touched on a number
of them this evening.
Let me turn to something that was implicit in, I think, what you were saying.
When you were Secretary of State and Ted was in number 10, we spoke of the international
order and we knew exactly what the international order was.
I'm not at all sure to many of us that we're quite as clear these days exactly what the
international order is or what it stands for.
And I recall a quarter of a century ago now, George Bush Sr. referring to a new world order
emerging.
Again, I'm not sure entirely what that world order may be, and I'd welcome your thoughts
given what you had to say about the Atlantic relationship and the importance of utilising
the prestige both of the United States and of Europe.
The world order which I studied at university and in which I grew up was based on the nation
state and it developed in Europe at the end of the Thirty Years' War in which the doctrine
of sovereignty emerged as a companion and ideas of international law that laid down certain
rules of conduct.
At that time, at the end of a war that had been fought in part about the religious beliefs
within societies, it was tacitly agreed and in fact explicitly agreed that intervention
in the domestic affairs of other states was not a subject of international policy but
international aggression consisted of the crossing of borders or the violation of borders
of established states.
There were, of course, periods in which this was violated, such as during the French Revolution,
but the basic structure of the international order when I was in office and when he came
into office was essentially based on the nation state and the principal elements of security
were still the states of Europe plus Russia which had been at the fringe of that international
order through all of its existence.
India was only beginning to emerge in the seventies.
Countries like India were just beginning their international role.
The Middle East, for all of its crisis, was on the whole a conflict between various states,
some of them radical, some of them less so.
The current situation is radically different.
When the West speaks of a rule-based system, there are major countries that feel that they
did not participate in the creation of that system and they're not, therefore, obliged
to observe it.
In addition, states are now emerging that are based on principles of legitimacy that
are not based on the Westphalian concept but that are based on the nature of their domestic
structure so that in the Middle East at the time that Heath was in office, one heard relatively
little about the conflict between Sunni and Shia that was just a contributing element.
But now the nature of the structure of domestic systems in itself becomes an issue of international
insecurity.
And now we also are dealing with a technology of extraordinary scope going far beyond what
we experienced.
In our period, we were deeply concerned about the catastrophic impact of nuclear weapons.
But the use of them was essentially confined to two countries and the assumption was, it
turned out to be more or less correct, that the damage they would do to each other was
so huge that they would not resort to nuclear weapons.
But now nuclear technology has proliferated to many countries and new forms of technology
have emerged like cyber or artificial intelligence which create totally new visitors.
And in that world now, formerly peripheral countries can produce enormous dislocations
and formerly dominant countries have not necessarily defined what their role is in these new circumstances.
We have upheavals in many continents simultaneously, but the upheavals are not caused by the same
issues.
And therefore to develop a coherent view is a totally new challenge.
And this is why I pay such attention to what can be done within the Atlantic region at
least to get a coherent view.
And this is a sketch of the difference between the period in which Ted Heath was in office
and I was in office and the challenge we face today.
Let me pick up a part of that then and the bit of most relevance, I think, to everyone
present this evening, the Atlantic Alliance.
What do you think the Atlantic Alliance actually means in practice today?
Do you think it needs refreshing?
Do you think it's worth well?
Are you concerned of the way in which Europe on a number of occasions seems to have sharply
different views from the United States?
You once memorably ask a very famous question.
What is Europe's telephone number?
Do you know what it is today?
I know what it is today, but I may not like what it says.
But the fundamental challenge for the Atlantic Alliance is to define what it is trying to
do.
What is it we are trying to prevent?
And what is it we are trying to achieve?
And what is it that we will achieve only as allies?
And what may we feel we are obliged to do even without allies?
And our allies should understand these answers.
That is a dialogue that has yet to take place.
How do you think in present circumstances we can bring the collective will of the United
States and Europe closer together than it at present appears to be?
Well, of course, some depends on how the Brexit period is resolved.
I cannot imagine an Atlantic strategy in which Britain and Europe and the United States are
not attempting to find common answers.
And so from this point of view, while I took no position during the Brexit debate, thinking
that it was a matter for Britain to decide, I think that to the extent that Britain plays
an active role in trying to evoke an answer to this question, it will play an extremely
important role.
And in order to get an answer, it cannot be that the United States prescribes all the
answers and Europe passively then criticizes.
In a well understood alliance, we would know or we would come to some conclusion of how
to resolve issues like Syria and not continue to do things that make the situation more
acute rather than resolve it.
If you look right across the Middle East, you see the most extraordinary complex interrelationship
of problems.
But where would you begin, where you Secretary of State today, where would you begin to unravel
the chaos that is Syria in an event to bring an end to what we now see happening, the destruction
of a nation, and the death of huge numbers of people who just happened to be caught
in the wrong place at the wrong time in the midst of the wrong dispute?
Well, let me say first of all, in the present structure of the Middle East, emerged in this
Sykes-Picot agreement in 1919.
And it was based on the concept that there would be a British sphere, which was more
or less Iraq, and a French sphere, which was Syria.
These spheres would be constituted as states, but they were not states in the European
sense.
They were a collection of ethnic groups, religious groups, and so these morsels were
put together in a way that facilitated their management from the outside.
So Iraq, which has a Shia majority, was governed by a Sunni minority.
Syria, which has a Sunni majority, was governed by a Shia minority.
And that worked tolerably well as long as Britain and France were the major custodians
of the region, and the governments could orient themselves to a dominant country.
With the decline of British and French power, and in the absence of any other outside power,
these states became extremely fragile, and to apply to them the principles of the West
Union system made the situation more complicated.
So in Iraq, we removed the Sunni ruler, and we thought that this would lead to democracy,
but it couldn't lead to democracy.
It led to a civil war, and Syria really proposed that the Shia leader be removed, again believing
that this reflected the will of the people, but the people of these countries were above
all the Germans, not to be governed by any of the other principles that existed there,
so they too started a civil war, and Libya did the same, and Libya, the same thing, happened.
So the issue is, can we salvage that situation by finding a coalition government, and I think
it is essential, after our election, quiet down, that we go beyond the tactical management
of the situation, into hopefully some consensus with our allies as to a solution that is more
likely to bring stability and peace, and it takes into account some of the elements that
I mentioned here, because I think a pure tactical management of this crisis will guarantee that
it gets worse and worse.
Right, now we're going to come to questions, David, are you going to individually?
Who would like to ask Dr Kissinger the first question from the floor?
Dr Kissinger, you played a remarkable role in stabilizing the world.
You left it in a much safer place, not least because you made this great contribution by
developing détente, translating common interests into rules, and then developing détente on
many fronts, having left the world a safer place then, in the mid-70s, and comparing
it with the world now.
Would you say that it is a safer place now, still, or a less safe place?
The world in which I was influential in policy was more dangerous in the sense that if something
went wrong, it would be really catastrophic.
The world now is more complex, and therefore, in the long term, more dangerous because there
are means at the disposal of more people that do not have the same sense of limits that
existed then, and that could lead to complications.
For example, if you look at the nuclear problems in our day, you could assume that the damage
to both sides in a nuclear war would be so huge that it would operate as a greatly straight.
But now that so many third countries have nuclear weapons, and if they get involved
with a major country, they can affect the balance between major countries, and major
countries can be tempted to intervene, much as like World War I started, to prevent things
that haven't happened, and may not even be on anybody's mind, and then modern technology
creates opportunities for harassment and pressure that you can use to manage it, until someday
you don't manage it.
If you look at the history of World War I, the crisis that led to World War I was no
worse than 10 others that had been solved in the previous decade, so that the mere fact
that nothing crisis occurred in the summer of 1914 would not automatically evolve a picture
of a global crisis, and I would add, at least in the world that I know best, and the internet
world, the generations that are trained to react instantaneously to impressions, and
not do long range thinking, may be less good custodians of extreme possibilities.
So I think we live in a more dangerous world, even though the immediate consequences, and
this is why we need more long range thinking.
Is there one final question?
Yes, at the back.
My name's Quentin Peale, I'm formerly of the Financial Times, now at Chatham House.
Three years ago I had a long conversation with Hans Dietrich Genscher, the former German
Foreign Minister in Berlin, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Britain joining
the European community, and one question I asked him was why was Germany always so much
more enthusiastic about British membership of the European community than France?
And he didn't hesitate at all, he said, it was because we were convinced that if Britain
was in the European community, America would trust us, but if Britain was not, they would
think it was all a terrible plot.
Do you think that if Britain, if, when Britain leaves the European Union, America will trust
it less?
The basis of the British relationship with America was created before there was a European
community, and I did not like the argument during the Brexit debate that Britain would
go to the end of the line if it were not backed by Europe, because we have a historic relationship,
and also because I hope that Britain, in the discussions that are now going on, will play
a role in emphasizing the importance of the Atlantic relationship.
So in my thinking, I would hope that out of all of these discussions emerges a Britain
that has close linkages to Europe, but also represents the conscience of an Atlantic relationship,
and so I would not think it's necessary to make that choice.
But I do think that Britain's greatness was developed in a period before there was a European
community, so I think Britain can continue to play a major role within the parameters
that I have tried to explain.
Dr Kissinger, Sir John, on behalf of everyone, I would like to say how much we've enjoyed
tonight, which has truly been a memorable occasion, thanks to your participation.
Thank you.
Thank you.
