HIRSH: How did you see Assad as a man and a leader? KISSINGER: No great knowledge of the West. I think I was the first Westerner with whom he negotiated consistently. A man of extraordinary brilliance and a good sense of humor, he was also ruthless and passionately nationalistic. He used some of the early negotiations with me to educate himself about the West. And he was very careful to conduct the negotiations in such a way that the result did not appear as his own personal decision but as the result of a confluence of forces which he registered, rather than created.
How would you characterize his style? I would say he was in the retail business. He had to prove that he gave nothing for nothing. He thought that his domestic situation did not permit him a generous move. He could not break the deadlock [because] of the fears of Arab nationalists. After I negotiated the 1975 disengagement agreement between Egypt and Israel–the fairly substantial pullback into the Sinai by the Israelis–I called on him and said, “Look, you have no choice. You have to do the same thing. The only choice is whether you do it gracefully or gracelessly.” He said, “You’re wrong. You’ve betrayed Vietnam. Someday you’re going to sell out Taiwan. And we’re going to be around when you get tired of Israel” [laughs]. I said, “That’ s not going to happen.”
Does this reflect his negotiating stance up until the end? Absolutely. Recent American negotiators used to give him great lectures on the desirability of peace and of his making a breakthrough to a different reality, but that wasn’t the way he thought.
But he was right at the doorstep this time. I thought he would have seen it through. It was just not in his character that he would have gone this far and just let it drop.
Do you think that the peace process will be back on track in the next several years, whoever takes over in Syria? In the next several years, for sure. The question is, can we be back in the next several months? And I rather believe that we will because the options for Syrian leaders have not improved with Assad’s death.
Was Assad a successful leader? His success was in managing to stay in office for 30 years, which was not a mean achievement. He was a man of survival and small increments. He was not a man of huge departures. In terms of Syrian great-power politics, he achieved traditional things. What he lacked was to transcend the environment in which he grew up. This is important to remember in assessing his approach to the peace process, which is quite different from the American approach. Our conception of peace is a transformation from a state of hostility to an atmosphere of reconciliation. His conception of peace was a ratification of a balance of power that he was in no position to alter, but would not be necessarily binding if circumstances were to change. It’s important not to think of his approach to the peace process as a conversion, but as a calculation.
