基辛格在里根112周年诞辰上的讲话
作者：henry-kissinger
2023-02-15
【编者注】本周一（2月6日）是罗纳德·里根总统诞辰112周年。位于加州西米谷的罗纳德·里根总统图书馆举行了庆祝活动，以纪念这一属于美国第 40 任总统的重要时刻。前美国国务卿、99岁高龄的亨利·基辛格博士在活动中发表讲话。本文特转发演讲中英文全文以飧读者。
罗纳德·里根是一位凶猛而冷酷的战士，同时也是一位狂热而坚持不懈的和平缔造者。对他来说，美国的国际实力不是虚荣心，其本身也不是目的。
罗纳德·里根是非凡的，是一个成功的美国总统。众所周知，罗纳德·里根是一个讲真话的人。为此，他获得了“伟大的沟通者”的称号。但他拒绝了这个头衔，说“我不是一个伟大的沟通者，但我沟通了伟大的事情”。前半句太谦虚了，但后半句是对的。里根凝结了使这个国家变得伟大的大部分因素，同样重要的是，使这个国家变得美好的大部分因素。
罗纳德·里根（Ronald Reagan）是一位凶猛而冷酷的战士，同时也是一位狂热而坚持不懈的和平缔造者。对他来说，美国的国际实力不是虚荣心，其本身也不是目的。相反，它是保持国家活力和使对手妥协的必要工具。他的远见在道德和战略上很清晰，也并不认为领导人必须在两者之间做出选择。他坚信，没有什么比实力更让对手钦佩的了，今天没有什么比军事弱点更不值得尊敬的。
他讲过一个美国人和俄罗斯人辩论的故事，美国人说：“在我的国家，我可以走进总统办公室，挥起拳头然后说，里根总统，我不喜欢你管理这个国家的方式。”对方回答：“我可以做同样的事情。我可以走进克里姆林宫，去总统办公室说，我不喜欢里根总统管理国家的方式。”意思是，你总是可以区分共产主义者和反共者。共产主义者会读马克思和列宁，反共者会理解他们。
里根在反共信念的灌输下担任总统。在任期间，行动从未动摇，但他避免灾难性战争的巨大责任感，使这些行动有所缓和。我有幸与他进行了大约70次对话，并在许多其他场合看到他在担任主席期间分组行动，他有3个信念从未动摇：
第一，里根认为，如果美国成为塑造稳定世界的领导者，那么美国才是最安全和繁荣的。
第二，他认为这个稳定的世界不能以美国孤立主义为基础。美国需要在实质上强大，并在保护思想上强大，如有必要，将强行进行。但他从不赞美力量。他最喜欢的一句话是：通过力量，和平到最后。里根在总统任期初期，就下令扩大我们的核能力。他用一个在第一次提出时被嘲笑的计划来补充它，现在这是我们军械库的标准部分。我意识到，这就是导弹防御计划。它现在是关键要素之一。他总是为这些努力辩护，其最终目的是和平。他决心不发生核战争，他想消灭灾难性的武器。
但他知道，除非美国拥有足够的实力来克服任何军事挑战，否则这种情况永远不会发生。由于这些努力，1987 年，一整类核武器被移除了。但是，当然，我们面对的是一个并不总是信守承诺的对手。因此，里根的这一部分努力虽然是实质性的，但尚未实现。但他是我所见过的任何美国总统中最强大的。
第三，在对国防的承诺的同时，他也对和平进行承诺，他愿意面对挑战并且以人性化地进行谈判。在一次会议上，他给戈尔巴乔夫讲述了一个故事，一个700英镑的男人节食并让自己下降到400磅，现在可以从他的卧室走到他的客厅。一位戈尔巴乔夫的下属告诉我，他们疯狂地试图弄清楚他想告诉他们什么，以及让他以礼貌的方式说出什么线索。最后，他们一个聪明人发现这是里根在去开会的路上在《人物》杂志上读到的一个故事。以一种有趣的方式，他们发现这是一次令人放心的谈话，也是令人敬畏的总统。
当里根从暗杀未遂中恢复过来时，他给布莱奇尼夫写了一封信，布莱奇尼夫当时是苏联领导人。他在信中指出，美国在人类历史上是独一无二的，从未利用其权力将其偏好强加于他人。相反，我们利用我们的权力和财富重建了饱受战争蹂躏的世界经济，包括曾经是我们敌人的国家。他说，苏联也存在同样的选择。作为美国总统，他将致力于实现和平。
即使在他大力推动军备和军队时，也甚至提出让他们分享我们的战略防御能力。如果我们能与我们的敌人取得和平的结果，那么战争就不会发生。这种态度可以从他关于柏林墙的演讲中得到最好的体现。1987年，他就柏林墙发表了演讲，他说，戈尔巴乔夫先生，拆除这堵墙。5个月后，他又发表了一次演讲，他说他正在设想他和戈尔巴乔夫在柏林会面的那一天，把它一砖一瓦地卸下来，他们将共同努力为世界带来和平。
这甚至导致了他和戈尔巴乔夫的联合声明，他们在声明中表示，核战争不可能获胜，也绝不能打。当然，戈尔巴乔夫并没有留任以实现这些愿景。美国领导人，常被批评在建立防御时非常好战，但里根超越了这个鸿沟。在他卸任的10个月后，如他所愿，柏林墙倒塌了，虽然不是通过俄罗斯的合作，而是通过美国坚持其原则的积累。
里根总统在经历了一段时间的内部动荡和国际危机后就职，他用智慧和内心的宁静克服了重重挑战，集中体现了我在最近的一本书中写到的一句话，伟大的领导者通过他们的远见和想象力，将他们的社会从他们所在的地方带到他们从未去过的地方。
今天，我们再次遭受国内分裂和国际混乱，关于我们是谁，我们的立场是什么。我们感到很难凝聚必要的国内凝聚力，来应对我们面前的挑战。
在中东，一个神圣的神权政权在发展世界上最具毁灭性的武器；在亚洲，中国成为“中央王国”的“野心”不断“挑战”世界秩序；最近，俄罗斯对乌克兰的野蛮入侵没有减弱的迹象；同时，人工智能在进化，它正在改变人类意识本身。这些紧迫的事态发展中的每一件，都需要武力与和平相结合来化解。
在最近的一本书中，罗纳德·里根被描述为和平缔造者。作为总统，他比任何人都更了解如何整合武力与和平。正如他在挑战演讲中所说，未来不属于胆小的人，它属于勇敢者。我们需要他的公民信仰，我们是一个伟大的国家，他提醒我们把自己限制在小梦想上，我们需要他的远见。
在另一次讲话中，他描述，正如他总是说的关于我们的国家，作为一只小猎犬，作为一座灯塔，一块磁铁，吸引着所有必须拥有自由的人，吸引着所有来自迷失之地的朝圣者。
以下是演讲的英文原文：
Henry Kissinger: What We Need Most on President Reagan’s 112th Birthday
Ronald Reagan was an extraordinary human being and a hugely successful American president. As we all know Ronald Reagan was a truthteller and for this, he received the appellation of being a great communicator but he rejected that title saying, “I wasn’t a great communicator but I communicated great things. And [they] didn’t spring fully from my brow. They came from the heart of a great nation.”
He was too modest about the first part, but he was right about the second.
Reagan crystallized much of what makes this nation great. And just as importantly, much of what makes this nation good. His core decency was irrepressible. His personality was so compelling that a deep trait of his character — compassion — went sometimes unnoticed.
On the day of the attempted assassination on him, the grievously wounded Ronald Reagan recalled the parable of the lost sheep that he, and I quote, “began to pray for the mixed up young man who had shot me and to hope that he will find his way back to the fold.”
Ronald Reagan was a fierce cold warrior and an avid and insistent peacemaker at the same time. For him, America’s international strength was not a national vanity nor an end in itself; rather it was a necessary instrument to produce flexibility and compromise by America’s adversary.
His abiding vision had a moral and strategic clarity; he refused to accept the proposition that leaders had to choose between the two. He was convinced that there is nothing which adversaries admired so much as strength and there is nothing for which they have less respect than military weakness. But he also knew that a country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.
President Reagan was an inveterate jestor. It was his way of making it clear that he wasn’t taking himself too seriously and to keep his adversaries off balance. One story he loved involved an American debating with a Russian in which the American says, “In my country, I can walk into the Oval Office. I can hit the desk with my fist and say, ‘President Reagan, I don’t like the way you’re running this country.”‘ The Russian replied, “I can do the same thing. I can walk into the Kremlin. Go into [the] president’s office, pound the table, and say, ‘I don’t like the way President Reagan is running his country.’”
Another story he used to tell was [how] you can always tell the Communists from the anti-Communists. The Communists read Marx and Lenin. The anti-Communists understand it.”
During the Nixon presidency, I was the liaison of President Nixon to Governor Reagan. I had many occasions to exchange ideas. There was one occasion in which I told him in the 1973 war that we wanted to send planes to Israel and we were looking for a formula to do it without bringing on an even more united Arab attack. Reagan said maybe the way to do it is to say we will replace all the planes that the Egyptians and Syrians have said that they had shot down. This was an awe-inspiring number and met every requirement that we had for replacement — and it also wasn’t exactly accurate.
Reagan came to the presidency infused by his anti-Communist convictions. While in office, these never waivered but they were tempered by his enormous sense of responsibility for avoiding catastrophic war.
I had the privilege of some seventy conversations with him and many other occasions to see him in action in groups during his presidency. There were three convictions that never waivered: first, Reagan believed that America was most secure and prosperous if it was the leader in shaping a stable world; second, he believed that this stable world could not be based on American isolationism.
Reagan knew that America needed to be powerful in substance and in mind to protect world order — by force, if necessary. He never glorified strength in its own name. Rather, he sought it as a means to peace.
Thus, his favorite phrase was ‘peace through strength.’
To this end, Reagan ordered an expansion of our nuclear capacity in the very early days of his presidency. He supplemented it with a program that was ridiculed when it was first put forward and which is now a standard part of our armory and that of our allies which was the Missile Defense Program. It is now one of the key elements. He always justified these efforts on the ground that [they] would lead to peace.
He was determined not to have a nuclear war.
He wanted to remove catastrophic weapons from the armories but he knew that it could never happen unless the United States possessed enough strength that it could overcome any military challenge. As a result of these efforts, in 1987, an entire category of nuclear weapons [was] removed from the armories. We, of course, were dealing with an adversary who was not always maintaining its commitments and so, this part of Reagan’s efforts, while substantial, has yet to be fulfilled.
He was in the strongest position of any American president that I have seen in action in his combination of commitment to defense and…to peace.
His willingness to face down challenges and his readiness to conduct negotiations on a human basis. At his first meeting with Gorbachev, he told Gorbachev a story about a 700 lb man who went on a diet and dieted himself down to 400 lbs. He could now walk from his bedroom to his living room. One of Gorbachev’s associates told me that the Russians went crazy trying to figure out what he was trying to tell them — what threat he was uttering in a polite manner. Finally, one of their intelligence people found that this was a story that Reagan had read in People magazine on the way to the meeting.
In a funny way, they found it very reassuring that in this conversation with this formidable American president was also talking to them on a human level.
On a more substantial side, when Reagan was recovering from the assassination attempt on him, he wrote a letter to Brezhnev who was then [the] Russian-Soviet leader in which he pointed out that the United States uniquely in the history of mankind was ready, had never used its power to impose its preferences on others; to the contrary, we used our power and wealth to rebuild the war-ravaged economies of the world — including the nations which had been our enemies. He said the same option existed for the Soviet Union.
As the American president, he would dedicate himself to bringing peace even while he was pushing the major rearmament of our military forces. He felt so strongly about it that he even offered to share our strategic defense capabilities if we could achieve a peaceful outcome with our enemies so that this kind of war could never happen. This attitude can be best demonstrated by his speeches about the Berlin Wall. In 1987, he made a speech at the Berlin Wall — I must say over the violent opposition of the State Department — in which he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Five months later he made another speech in which he said he was envisioning the day when he and Gorbachev would meet in Berlin [to] start taking down the wall brick by brick and that they would chair an effort to bring peace to the world. This even led to a joint statement by him and Gorbachev in which they said nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
Of course, Gorbachev did not stay in office to be able to carry out these visions. We have to remember who brought us to the point where we could have them and where we could be strong enough to implement them.
American leaders are often criticized as belligerent when they build defenses and weak when they practice conciliation. Reagan transcended this divide. Within ten months after he left office, the wall in Berlin came down much the same way as he had hoped — not with Russian cooperation — but through an accumulation of American willingness to stand for its principles.
President Reagan assumed office after a period of internal turmoil and international withdrawal; after years of protest over the Vietnam War; after the period of hostages in Iran; and [after] a period of domestic assassinations. He overcame these challenges with wisdom and serenity. He epitomized something that I wrote in a recent book that great leaders take their societies from where they are to where they have never been by their vision and imagination.
Today we again suffer domestic division and international disorder about arguments about who we are and what we stand for. We find it difficult to muster the domestic cohesion necessary to face the challenges ahead of us.
In the Middle East, a hollowed theocracy is on the brink of developing the world’s most devastating weapons. In Asia, Chinese ambitions as the Middle Kingdom constitute a challenge to world order. Most recently, Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine shows no signs of abating. And at the same time, the evolution of artificial intelligence is transforming human consciousness itself.
Each of these pressing developments requires a combination of strength and conciliation.
In a recent book, Ronald Reagan was described as the peacemaker. As president, he understood better than anyone how to integrate the elements of power and the elements of conciliation. As he said in his Challenger speech, ‘the future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted. It belongs to the brave.’
We need his civic face. ‘We are too great a nation,’ he reminded us, ‘to limit ourselves to small dreams.’
We need his vision. In his farewell address, he described ‘the city on the hill’ as he always said of our country as ‘a beacon — a magnet — for all who must have freedom; for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness toward home.’
It is in this spirit that I feel so honored to say these words about a remarkable president. To say at this point, what we most need is another Ronald Reagan.
