 We have a real treat now, and I did say briefly to Dr. Brzezinski that Winston Lord went out of his way to praise in unheralded terms. It was a great trip that he took in September 1978, and May of 1978. So I'm going to use that as the only bridge. Everyone knows Dr. Zabig Brzezinski. He was the national security advisor in the Carter administration instrumental informally establishing diplomatic relations between China and the United States. And of course everyone knows David Ignatius. I look forward to, I don't know which I'll enjoy reading more, his column or his novels. But each of them are stimulating and interesting and endlessly fruitful. So let me turn it to you to get started, David. Great. Thank you, John. I should just say you're allowed to read both. There's nothing that says you have to choose between fiction or non-fiction. It's great to be part of the greatest book party of all time, Dr. Kistner. And sitting here with Zabig Brzezinski honoring Dr. Kistner in his book, I am reminded of a phrase I heard as a student, as an undergraduate at Harvard. A professor named Samuel Beer, who some people may remember, used to give his lectures in what we called Soxi II. And he would talk about the great chain of being, which was this wonderful medieval concept of an ordered universe. And in my mind, I don't know about all that medieval stuff, but there is a great chain of being when it comes to national security. And that great chain of being flows through Henry Kissinger and through Brent Scowcroft and through Zabig near Brzezinski and then back again through Brent Scowcroft. And it's one of the really important and powerful things in our country and what keeps it going. So I think of this in part as a celebration of the great chain of being. And so with that as an introduction, let me turn to Dr. Brzezinski. And we're going to talk a little bit about the book on China. And we're going to talk a little bit about China and maybe some other issues too. But Zabig, I want to begin by asking you the core question at the center of Dr. Kistner's book and any contemporary discussion of China. Which is, are we fated to come in conflict with a rising China? There's a particularly interesting passage toward the end of Dr. Kistner's book in which he's citing a memo that was written by a British Foreign Service Officer. And I'm going to mispronounce his name, but it's Eier Krau. Do I have that right? We think of the Krau Memorandum in terms of Admiral Krau, but this was a much earlier Krau. And he was essentially saying, when you look at a rising Germany, the questions of good faith, of negotiation, of all of the attributes that statecraft might bring to this discussion matter less than the objective fact that this country is getting richer, more powerful, bigger weight in the world. And that if it, and he made naval armament the centerpiece of his analysis, if it goes forward with that armament, nothing else matters. That the objective correlates, if you will, mean that the confrontation is implicit. So let me ask you to take that as a starting point. Well, are we fated to become enemies? When you ask me that, I thought immediately of Henry and myself. So I hope that Henry, when he's up here, will associate himself with what it was reported Winston Lord was saying about me. That'll be the answer to that, but the answer is under suspension until we hear that affirmation. The same is true of the American-Chinese relationship. Both sides have to make an effort, and I think both sides are aware of the fact. I really do believe they're aware of the fact that their fates are somewhat interwoven, and therefore the better part of wisdom is to try to be friends. Maybe friends is too much, but quite seriously. I think we have clearly an awareness, at least on the sort of serious policy level in this country, that demonizing China is not a policy. It's a form of escapism, and it's a self-damaging escapism. I think the Chinese leadership has become somewhat more aware of that in recent months, in terms of its own attitude. If I may say so, I think I contributed a little bit to it in a number of private meetings with the leaders of the Chinese military and also with Chinese senior officials. And also in one meeting at which you, Henry, were there, where I sort of started doing the same act, namely reading to them what some of their serious journals are saying, reading back to them some of the things that their military are saying about us and how it impacts on our attitudes and how it interplays with those here who also spontaneously, or for some other motives, lean towards the demonization of China. My sense is that the Chinese in the last several months have seriously tried to tone down that anti-American analysis. I, for one, who follow this, you know, reasonably responsibly, have been struck by the fact that it's much less of it lately. But there was a kind of crescendo rising in the course of the last year and a half, getting close to a peak late last year. And then, because of a variety of inputs, and I don't want to claim mine was so decisive, but I certainly made a point of making it to the Chinese leaders, there was a change. And then we had the articles by Councillor Dai, kind of, you know, positive, constructive vision of China's role in the world. And what's his name, Zhang Bijun, Bijun, what's his first name? Zhang Bijun. Also, who is the chief ideologist, has written major pieces, reaffirming again the content of the proposition China, peacefully rising, harmonious world, and so forth. Now, I say this, and incidentally, these questions are not prearranged, so this wasn't a prepared speech, but this is an important question. These things are dynamic, and they're really dependent on the goodwill and determination and vision of the leaderships of both societies and in our society, of a more informed mass media. I am worried that in our mass media and in our political partisanship, we may be less able to control volatile public opinion. So that is a risk, but I think the relationship is altogether different from Imperial Germany in 1914 and Great Britain in 1914. So I'm on the whole cautiously optimistic. And in your mind, is there a red line in this Memorandum of Britain in 1907 about rising Germany that the red line was a significant naval armament by Germany that would challenge Britain's dominance of the oceans and its ability to maintain its empire? Is there a similar red line in your mind as you think about China that if they proceeded down a certain path, that would then lead you to say, as much as we like the nice things that people sometimes say, objectively speaking, we have a problem? Well, we may have more of an objective problem. What grounds can we say to the Chinese you're not entitled to an oceanic navy? What grounds? We're entitled to have a navy that can be deployed in the far eastern Pacific, but they're not entitled to an oceanic navy that can reach out, let's say towards Hawaii, or that can somehow or other and be present in the Indian Ocean. If I were Chinese, I would say my strategic security depends on the ability to operate freely on the oceans. And the ability to operate freely on the oceans for a major power cannot be a main gift from a more powerful other state. It has to be intrinsic to their own capabilities. So that is a question that we can resolve, but we have managed to deal even with a much more belligerent, short-sighted and, in its latter phases, incompetent Soviet leadership. We have established a situation of, in effect, a kind of nuclear interdependence. Even though we started off with a massive edge, then they decided to catch up. We decided not to go to war to prevent them from doing it, and I certainly don't think that we would be very productive in terms of our national interest. We went to some sort of conflict with China to prevent them from having something which, inherently, a great power like China is entitled to have. Inevitably, and my question certainly focused you in this direction, in speaking about red lines, you're speaking about ways of projecting power that we could call legacy systems. A deep water navy, the ability to transit the straits of Malacca. I mean, those are images that could arise any time over the last 150, 200 years. When I ask, in my rare visits to China, when I ask Chinese defense analysts this question, I get an interesting answer from one in particular who's a prominent professor at Fudan University in Shanghai named Dengli Shen. And he says, why would we want to contest you in the Straits of Malacca? We have no interest in building a legacy system to rival yours at enormous expense. These are the weapons of the past. What we want is to be able to go into the battle spaces of the future. We want to be very powerful in space systems. We want to have the cyber and other new weapons, beam weapons, other related weapons that will allow us to disable your command and control of your fleet at sea that you have put out at enormous expense and all of your systems. We want to be able to take out any tank, any ship by new means, new technologies, and that's where we're going. And I wonder if you'd speak to that. In other words, you know, when we think about drawing lines, there are sort of lines in the past where we've already been. And that's not where the issues will be five, ten, twenty years out. Well, I'm not sure if that's where the issues will be 20, 25 years from now. They may both be operative, so to speak. If I were a Chinese military person talking to you, I would certainly not go out of my way to arouse your anxieties or to get you to say things that will arouse more assertive American conduct. I would sort of play it low-key and try to do whatever is possible within the reach. For the Chinese, sure, competing with us in this sort of new dimensions of global power is obviously an important challenge. The one that they probably feel they have to meet in the longer run. But in the shorter run, they also do have a problem of secure access to something that they desperately need and which passes through the Indian Ocean and then through the Strait of Malacca. And they may well feel, and rightly so, that they don't want to be dependent on the goodwill of their neighbors or perhaps on us helping them even, which would be a long stretch and for which we would probably demand a price. So they will try to work around that. This doesn't mean some sort of a naval confrontation between the Chinese and the Indians, but it means a capability to project their power. It also means, and there are a lot of reports on this, the establishment of some sort of presence on the Indian Ocean in western, southwestern Pakistan, the port of Gardir or whatever it's called exactly. And they seem to be exploring that, building a road, building a pipeline, perhaps building a base. Those, I think, are kind of sensible elements of what obviously is a regional competition and some degree of regional reassurance for something that is vital. Beyond that, they are beginning to ask themselves, I've noticed that in their analyses, they're beginning to ask themselves, what are the implications for them, of what is becoming apparent to them, also to me, of America's decline in the Middle East? Because, you know, we have been the dominant power in the Middle East for the last 50, 60, 65 years or so. I think that power is rather rapidly declining these days for a variety of reasons connected with our policies and errors, misconceptions and even deceptions. But whatever the motive is for the Chinese, what is of course of importance is what happens if we decline. And then what should be their role in the Middle East? And they may need the Navy in that connection as well. Stay with that for a moment and let me ask you, how worried should we be about the reports that Bunderbin Sultan is making a secret mission to China to talk about Saudi Arabia's concern about declining American power and its desire for better relations with China? That comes at the same time that the Pakistanis are signaling quite dramatically their sense that whatever their problems with the United States, they have a good and improving relationship with China. Pakistani officials said to me recently, at last we're on the right side of history. Our relationship with America may be going to hell, but the new rising superpower, there are best friends. When we hear talk like that, when we read about Bunder going to China, should we be nervous or should we say welcome to the Middle East mess, Chinese brothers and sisters? Well, I think we should be concerned about what we are doing or have not been doing and what it means for our position because our decline in the Middle East is not ordained by history. It's a byproduct of our short-sightedness, absence of leadership, political opportunism and indifference to some basic geopolitical or even moral dimensions of some of the problems involved. It's a problem of our making, but that does not necessarily involve China. We have to address that anyway because we have such a stake, political, geopolitical and moral in the Middle East that it's in our interest to address it and the fact of the matter is that for decades now our leadership has been on the whole more skillful in policy. It's programmed to go off when you talk about the Middle East. While they're fixing, let me talk with you for a minute about the context in which you dealt with China, dealt with Deng Xiaoping and the context in which Dr. Kissinger dealt with Zhou Enlai and that context was our concern about a strong, you can argue about whether it was perceived at the time as rising. My recollection is that it was seen as a rising Soviet Union and here was a chance to get a natural ally, an unconventional one, against our common enemy. Well, one analogous situation is as we look at this rising China and try to figure out how much of a threat it is, we look a little closer in Asia and we see a rising India. When I travel to New Delhi, as I'm sure is true for many people in this audience, I hear discussion from Indian strategists about the inherent implicit unity of interest between the United States and India at this time and people don't like to use the C word, the containment word, but that's really what they're talking about and I'd be very interested in your thoughts about this. In a sense it's inherent in the situation no matter what anybody says, but what are the opportunities of it, what are the dangers, what do you think? Well, first of all, when we were competing with the Soviets, we were competing with someone that was openly proclaiming that our end is approaching, even setting a date for when they'll become global and supreme, pursuing programs that were highly hostile and were generally motivated ideologically by very, very articulated and explicit hostility towards us. And of course we reciprocated accordingly. I don't think the situation between us and the Chinese is of that kind, but I can see in that context how it would be in the interest of India to get us at loggerheads with the Chinese. But I think given my sense of what is involved, which is a very complicated long-term development in China in a rather complicated Asian context, we don't need to slide down that path unnecessarily. So I am a little skeptical about some of these efforts to enlist us into some sort of anti-Chinese relationship unless I become convinced that we are in fact facing some sort of a hostile challenge. The challenge that I see at this moment in our relationship with China is more rooted within the United States than it is in the relationship. It's whether we can pull ourselves together, whether we can get on top of the problems that we face. Can we reactivate the potential dynamism of our society? Can we begin to articulate effectively and compellingly a notion of a healthy society which doesn't define well-being purely in the acquisition of material goods? Can we begin to achieve a little more social justice in a society in which the extremes of social inequality are worse of all indexed countries in the world? The tiny percentage of the super-rich owning an enormous share of total wealth and a growing number of the poor were becoming poorer. And in that context we're also of course concerned about our global power and in some cases in a manner that leads us into adventurism in which we start wars under false pretenses. Totally false pretenses and then get bogged down and that of course then leads to a further escalation of the process and to the prolongation of the conflict. So a great deal of what besets us and handicaps us in the relationship with China is not because China is rising, but because to put it very crudely we've been screwing ourselves up for a fairly long period of time. That's powerfully said. I'm going to be pedantic and return to Asia for a minute not to diminish the force of what you just said. I'd ask you to talk a little bit about the map of the rest of Asia. When people talk at conferences, meet at the CSIS, they'll talk about a rising China. They'll talk about the implications of a rising India as a potentially competing power. But they'll sometimes talk about a relative decline in Japanese power. They'll also talk about South Korea as a wild card. They'll talk about an increasingly assertive Southeast Asia. Hard to know exactly where the fault lines lie there. And I'd just be interested in your thinking out loud as a long-time observer of these different pieces of the Asian story. What's your thoughts about Japan, about South Korea, about the ASEAN world and where it's going? Well, I'll just make two points about it. First of all, I think that is a challenge that the Chinese have to think through very seriously. Because in all of this talk about rising China, harmonious world and all of that, these pieces that you rightly bring up don't figure very much. So they better think about it hard. But secondly, and more specifically, I think any talk of writing of Japan as some sort of moribund state populated by elderly people is just a misjudgment of what Japan is about. I think the Japanese went through a terrible experience in the last few months. But what has struck me from following as to what and how the Japanese people are reacting, what has struck me was the courage, determination, self-discipline of the Japanese. And I think Japan is going to make a significant comeback. Maybe it's even a healthy jolt in a way because it's forcing all of the Japanese to ask themselves, how do we conduct ourselves in the world and how do we operate as a society? But they're asking it in a context of really impressive determination and self-discipline. I hate to think who have been like in the United States, if anything like that had happened on the West Coast, let's say. And we have a little preview of it in terms of what happened in New Orleans when the place got ripped apart by our equivalent of tsunami and the violence and this thievery and so forth, practically none of that in Japan. This is an impressive country with impressive people with a sense of its mission. I think Japan is now debating very actively what kind of a defense policy it ought to have, what kind of alliances it ought to have in Asia, whether it should go into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, whether it should go into other forms of association, perhaps, economic partnership agreement with the EU and so forth. I think this is going to give Japan much-needed kind of stimulus for a more active role in the world, commensurate with the size of a GNP. It is, after all, the number three economic power in the world, much larger than a European country. So I think Japan should not be ignored in this context. Let me ask you about South Korea. South Korea often flies under the radar in strategic discussions, but it shouldn't. What do you think, and I'd be as interested in your, how will you assess this if you were a Japanese policy advisor as a Chinese? Well, I think, I know what you're alluding to, and I think the continuing hostility between them is unfortunate, and I hope it begins to wane. And I think in this new emerging context, there may be some acceleration in that waning. But the South Koreans are a wonderful example of economic success. They're now in the top 20 economic powers in the world. They see themselves as a global player, which is an amazing change in South Korea. And they have moved from an authoritarian model of rapid development to a successful polity that is genuinely democratic in its procedures. And in that sense, there may be a hidden example here for the Chinese that the Chinese haven't thought about, because in the long run, one way or another, the issue of self-governance, which we define as human rights, is going to confront the Chinese unavoidably. And I think the South Koreans, in a sense, have demonstrated what might be some of the stages in that evolution. We talk in America often about American exceptionalism, and the parts of Dr. Kitzler's book that I found especially interesting was the discussion of what makes China China. And there's some interesting, simple analogies that are used. One of them that caught my eye was the contrast between our kind of intellectual framework as a chess-playing culture where it's about victory. You just crush your opponent in chess, or it's a draw, where the pieces are all out on the board, where there's something about chess that's highly rational in what we think of as our Western way. And the Chinese fondness for a game that we usually call Go, that I gather is called Wei Qi from reading Dr. Kitzler. Never having played it, I couldn't begin to understand it, you know, about strategic encirclement and kind of going where they ain't, and that sort of thing. There's also in this book a lot of discussion about the Confucian nature of Chinese society, the sort of thing you hear from Chinese, you know, we're different, we want harmony, we want everybody just to get along peacefully. And there is an evocation of this Chinese difference, much more subtly than I, that little shorthand. But it makes you ask the question, you know, does the Confucian part of China overwhelm the Machiavellian part of human nature? There's a blunt way to put it. That's a very good question. Let me first of all say quite honestly that I think Henry's book is really an erudite and elegant piece of work, and he has every reason to be proud of it. It's well written, he has some really wonderful terms of phrases, and it does enhance one's sort of intellectualized understanding of the Chinese, and I used the word understanding in the sense of acquired experience. I was never a student of China as such, and I bow in deference to those who were, but neither was Henry, and I think we acquired a certain understanding of the Chinese, and Henry grasps it and expresses it extremely well. The examples you have cited are the two ones in which I have some doubt however, and I therefore preface my comments by saying something that I've just said, and which I really mean sincerely. I'm not sure that one can push this conflict between chess and go too far. The Chinese are known for playing the game subtly and over the long haul, but if they have the opportunity to produce a decisive one-sided, sometimes extremely assertive, if not to use the word brutal outcome, they do so as well. So the notion that we play... Let me push you on that, what's an example? That's precisely the point that some people would... Well, I'll give you an example, Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongolians in Inner Mongolia right now. I mean, these are things which are resolved by the Chinese without playing go with an outcome like in chess. You know, somebody gets it, and the result stands there. And we have also learned to play the other way. We didn't win the war in Korea, but we were satisfied with the outcome. We didn't go all out for a victory like in chess. We settled for that in Vietnam. Do you want to make a bet about Afghanistan? I think we're all looking for the go outcome there. Yeah, so I have some uncertainty about that. And the other uncertainty, and here I am really on tenuous grounds, and it's not a criticism of Henry or disagreement with Henry. It's really more a question mark, the Confucian aspect. It certainly is there. But I was struck in reading Henry's book that he refers to the monument that they have put up near the Great Hall of the People to Confucius. And that was very, very suggestive and made me wonder repeatedly what it means. I erased it with Chinese leaders, and I noticed they were always a little embarrassed about it. Can anyone in this room tell me where that monument is today? Well, it just disappeared. It's no longer there. Now, these things don't happen by themselves. The embalmed body of somebody else is still in the Great Hall of the People. And there's an interesting debate surfacing right now in China about the relevance of Maoism. I think it's a strained argument, but the relevance of Maoism to the current economic success of China. There's been a book recently published on this sort of economic prospects for China by a Chinese scholar. A rather interesting book, actually, in which he predicts categorically that China will emerge on top. And he gives a great deal of credit to Mao Zedong. Not terribly much to anybody else, except current leaders. So... Really, this is a go player. Yeah, so... I just don't know whether Chinese are really that fundamentally different from us. They operate differently. They have a very different style of personal negotiating. I'm sure Henry experienced it as well, and when they want to put you ill at ease on some issue, they all of a sudden burst into this kind of strange, unpredictable laughter in which you have a sense they're laughing at you. So obviously you begin to think, what did I say that was so stupid? But I think it's all this kind of gamesmanship. They also become sometimes very vividly angry. And I don't think that's entirely emulation. I think sometimes they really do let themselves go. And you sense that in the public outburst of Chinese nationalism, how emotionally aroused they become. I experienced that not only in the negotiating process, but even in meeting with Chinese students, where we talked about various things, Beijing University students, and their desire for democracy, more open internet, freedom of travel, choice of leaders and so forth. And then Taiwan came up and bang, all of a sudden, all of a very angry and very really nastily ugly. It wasn't contrived. So there are certain cultural patterns that differentiate them. But ultimately, I think their salesmanship is wise. It's prudent. It's patient. Maybe those are the discerning differences. But I don't personally, since I do play chess, I think that it either negates the relevance of chess to their own strategy, nor our ability also sometimes to be cleverly duplicitous, deceitful, patient, willing to proclaim victory when we barely avoided defeat and so forth. Let me ask one last question. I've been looking for John Hamry. So I'm just going to go by my watch, which says it's 3.30 in time for this panel then. John. One more question. And this is a question that I'd love to hear Dr. Kissinger answer to at some point. Reading this book is to be startled again, even though you've read the story so many times, about what creative diplomacy can do as Dr. Kissinger says at the end of the first meeting in 1971 with Joe Enlai and recalls in the last page of the book, this will shake the world. What we're doing here as diplomats, the opening we're creating will shake the world and transform possibilities for both countries. And so my question to you is, is there any diplomatic opportunity you can see at this moment? Anything that genuinely creative, out-of-the-box American diplomacy or statecraft could do. You've already answered part of this, which is clean up our own mess. So I want to ask you to project it abroad. That would change the fundamentals in a way that we'd end up saying, we've shaken up the world here. Are you talking about the American-Chinese relationship? No. More generally. Well, that could be talking about that. I'm really asking you in whatever direction that I was thinking more broadly. Well, yeah, but I think that will divert us to a totally different subject, which I don't think we're here to discuss. I'm convinced that our policy in that part of the world, which now on the map has to be drawn from the Tunisian-Libyan frontier and to the Chinese frontier at Xinjiang, our policy in that entire sector of the world is self-defeating, counterproductive, damaging to our interests, and really posing on history's agenda the question mark regarding our role in the world in the future. This is where I think we are off in the wrong direction, but that takes us elsewhere. When it comes to American China, I think what Henry started and working with Nixon in a brilliantly creative way, which was then consummated some years later by, if I may say so, Carter, is of fundamental importance to our well-being, and this is why intelligent management of the American-Chinese relationship is not only in our interest, it's doable. Henry's book is a very significant contribution to making that possible, and I think we stay on that course, we'll avoid an unnecessary catastrophe and maybe we'll be in a better position to deal with a self-created catastrophe which is now in the process of mushrooming. And this is why I do think we have a serious foreign policy dilemmas on our hand, but it isn't the Chinese one. That's the perfect note on which to close this session, so join me in thanking Dr. Prudence Prudence.