Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger predicted today that “a year or so down the road a basic strategy will begin to emerge” on a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. He made his statement in the course of defending his step-by-step diplomacy in the Middle East over the past three years. He appeared to indicate that the U.S. would put forward the “basic strategy” aimed at a “comprehensive solution.”
Kissinger, however, did not specify any elements of strategy or say in what form it might arise during his appearance before the American Society of Newspaper Editors at the Shoreham Hotel here. He made no mention of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, generally regarded as the framework of a Mideast peace settlement.
Kissinger made his remarks in response to a question and criticism of his step-by-step policies by a reporter who had suggested that the step-by-step approach was begun at the “wrong end,” maintaining that it should have put forward a long-term objective for a stable peace in the area and that the belligerents should have been told, “Here it is–let’s have your remarks on this solution of your problems.”
Kissinger said that the differences between his views and those of his critics were “very significantly” the question of timing. He said that “at some point the comprehensive approach was needed instead of the step-by-step approach Kissinger said that at the time of the Yom Kippur War if “we put forward a comprehensive scheme we thought the danger of failing would sharpen the (Arab oil) embargo, increase Soviet domination” in Arab countries, including Egypt, and “enhance radicalism” in the area.
The step-by-step approach, he said, has “given us time to think and a more comprehensive solution. I think it is now generally agreed–and Israel agrees too–that the time for individual steps with individual countries is probably over and we now have to work on a wider canvas,” Kissinger said.
Asked what priorities he set on such foreign policy matters as U.S. relations with the industrial democracies and with the Soviet Union, Kissinger said he could set no priorities because it was necessary to “deal simultaneously” with all matters. But he observed that the Middle East is “sufficiently explosive” to make “all other policies fall.”
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