Henry Kissinger was President Nixon's national security adviser from 1969 to 1973, when he became secretary of state. He helped engineer Nixon's policy of warmer relations with both China and the Soviet Union, leading to historic summits in both Beijing and Moscow. After Nixon's resignation, Kissinger served as secretary of state under President Ford, continuing to pursue the complex, cooperative relations with the Soviet Union known as détente. Henry Kissinger was interviewed for COLD WAR in March and April of 1997.

On the end of the Cold War:

The Soviet Union had undertaken something that was beyond its capacity: it had taken on the whole industrial world plus China, with a stagnant economic and a rigid political system, which had no capacity of rejuvenating itself. So the question really only was: at what point would the disparity between the Soviet Union and the outside world become intolerable? It ended at that particular point because of at least two major factors. One, an American President who made this disparity evident by SDI and a somewhat confrontational policy. And secondly, because of the series of succession problems that the Soviet Union had, so that they could not develop a coherent leadership for a three- to four-year period. And then partly because Gorbachev, who deserves huge credit, misunderstood the nature of the communist system: he thought he could modernize it, and he accelerated its demise.

I think the Cold War ended in considerable part because of American foreign policy. American foreign policy rallied the democracies, it created the alliances which contained the Soviet Union, it prevented Soviet expansion, it restored Europe and some countries of Asia; and with all its failings, it was American idealism and American dedication which provided the structure for the specific policies, the composite of which ended the Cold War.

On the future:

The object of United States foreign policy today is the big issue we are facing. In the Cold War period it was really an application of traditional American convictions; that is to say, it was the application of the New Deal and our experiences in two world wars to a global scene. The New Deal taught us that if you narrow the disparity between social classes, social stability will occur. And particularly the Second World War taught us -- "taught" in quotation marks -- that resisting aggression was the preeminent goal of American foreign policy. And that, more or less, was adequate to the conditions of that period.

At the present time we have this dilemma: American foreign policy without idealism is inconceivable, because this is what America has represented to itself in that society of people who turned their back on Europe and settled here on the basis of conviction. On the other hand, we do not have a clear-cut ideological enemy, and we are now no longer able to present foreign policy to ourselves as a series of solutions to specific problems. Whether we like it or not -- and many don't like it -- we are now part of the system, which means there's no exit: that every solution is an admissions ticket to another problem. And it's something that Europeans and Chinese have no difficulty at all [understanding] -- it doesn't even have to explained to them. But for Americans, it evokes great rebellion, and it therefore is obviously believed that there is something out there, and now they're sort of looking for an enemy in China or somewhere -- a rallying principle of policy that can be given a terminal date.

This is our big challenge right now: whether we can marry American idealism to some degree of structure. We keep talking about "world order." There is no "world order" as such now. Any international system represents some system of order in some abstract sense, but the world of the Eighties has been totally transformed in the Nineties, and at the end of it some order will emerge, in the sense of some principles by which disputes get settled -- or not settled. But we are not there yet, and we don't have a precise blueprint. And we CAN'T have a precise blueprint. ...

I believe ... that the world into which America has been projected -- where we are very powerful but not all-powerful -- requires us to have a more modest perception of what we can implement immediately.