オバマはリアリストか? |
前半は得意のヴェルサイユ条約あたりの歴史について語っておりますが、私として以下の中盤の部分がとても面白かったです。
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'Obama Is Like a Chess Player'
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 86, discusses the painful lessons of the Treaty of Versailles, idealism in politics and Obama's opportunity to forge a peaceful American foreign policy.
(中略)
Kissinger: The belief in democracy as a universal remedy regularly reappears in American foreign policy. Its most recent appearance came with the so-called neocons in the Bush administration. Actually, Obama is much closer to a realistic policy on this issue than Bush was.
SPIEGEL: You see Obama as realpolitician?
Kissinger: Let me say a word about realpolitik, just for clarification. I regularly get accused of conducting realpolitik. I don't think I have ever used that term. It is a way by which critics want to label me and say, "Watch him. He's a German really. He doesn't have the American view of things."
SPIEGEL: Then it's a way to cast you as a cynic, isn't it?
Kissinger: Cynics treat values as equivalent and instrumental. Statesmen base practical decisions on moral convictions. It is always easy to divide the world into idealists and power-oriented people. The idealists are presumed to be the noble people, and the power-oriented people are the ones that cause all the world's trouble. But I believe more suffering has been caused by prophets than by statesmen. For me, a sensible definition of realpolitik is to say there are objective circumstances without which foreign policy cannot be conducted. To try to deal with the fate of nations without looking at the circumstances with which they have to deal is escapism. The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.
SPIEGEL: What if values cannot be taken into consideration because they are inhuman or too expansive?
Kissinger: In that case, resistance is needed. In Iran, for example, you need to ask the question of whether you have to have a regime change before you can conceive a set of circumstances where each side maintaining its values comes to some understanding.
SPIEGEL: And your answer?
Kissinger: It is too early to say. Right now I have more questions than answers. Will the Iranian people accept the verdict of the religious leaders? Will the religious leaders be united? I don't know the answers, nor does anyone else.
SPIEGEL: You sound very skeptical.
Kissinger: I see two possibilities. We will either come to an understanding with Iran, or we will clash. As a democratic society we cannot justify the clash to our own people unless we can show that we have made a serious effort to avoid it. By that, I don't mean that we have to make every concession they demand, but we are obligated to put forward ideas the American people can support.The upheaval in Teheran must run its course before these possibilities can be explored.
SPIEGEL: So you are calling for a kind of realistic idealism?
Kissinger: Exactly. There is no realism without an element of idealism. The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.
SPIEGEL: Do you think it was helpful for Obama to deliver a speech to the Islamic world in Cairo? Or has he created a lot of illusions about what politics can deliver?
Kissinger: Obama is like a chess player who is playing simultaneous chess and has opened his game with an unusual opening. Now he's got to play his hand as he plays his various counterparts. We haven't gotten beyond the opening game move yet. I have no quarrel with the opening move.
SPIEGEL: But is what we have seen so far from him truly realpolitik?
Kissinger: It is also too early to say that. If what he wants to do is convey to the Islamic world that America has an open attitude to dialogue and is not determined on physical confrontation as its only strategy, then it can play a very useful role. If it were to be continued on the belief that every crisis can be managed by a philosophical speech, then he will run into Wilsonian problems.
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キッシンジャーはまだオバマに対して評価は控えているみたいですが、とりあえずいままでの動きはいいねぇ、と言っております。
このインタビューで重要なのは、キッシンジャーがリアリストとは何かを論じていることですね。
結局のところはフクヤマやクラウトハマーみたいな「現実的理想主義」なんて言ってますが(苦笑