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Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger today said his country
had no role to play in Kashmir and it was for India and Pakistan to
sort out the dispute between themselves.
"It is my personal view," he hastened to clarify while speaking at
the Annual Corporate conference organised by Dow Jones, Asia
Society and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). He added
that "it may not necessarily be the official stance .... Yet".
Mr Kissinger said India and the United States shared a strange
love-hate relationship. During the cold war era, "India played the
role that we would have liked to play". On the non-aligned policy
the ageing statesman said that it was not very realistic since no
country could afford to be non-aligned.
India, Mr Kissinger said, would soon become a world leader and play
a key role in the global decision making process. "It would be
wise to include India in the Security Council... But this will rake
up many issues in the United States itself," he said.
India and the United States do not have any clashing objectives.
But there is no serious dialogue too. In the Indian Ocean we have
certain parallel interests and we should work towards the much
neglected area of central Asia.
"We have common interest in which way the oil pipelines are going
as consumption of energy in the world is growing," he said.
The United States, Mr Kissinger said, is not the only yardstick for
measuring or making the world order any more. "we are not a
newspaper agency but a government agency. We need not he concerned
about everything happening in the world".
On the nuclear issue, he said the United States was not interested
in what happened internally within a country or a sub-region. But
we are worried over proliferation. "We have to prevent that," Mr
Kissinger stressed.
Today a world order should emerge not out of military strength but
through discussions and serious dialogue between nations.
Mr Kissinger said, "today in the US we are in a process of soul
searching. There are certain attitudes in the US that dictate the
policies especially the foreign policy".
We measure everything by American standards. There are roughly two
strands of foreign policy in the US, one says that it is a crusade
while the Republicans say that the whole Third World has to be
restructured.
The big issue we face is to organise the world. The world today
faces fundamental changes. Each day transactions worth trillion of
dollars are taking place. Nothing is determined by national
boundaries. "There is more flow of economy than politics," he said.
He asked whether today's generation of computers could meet the
challenges of statesmanship.
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