HyperNormalisation Page #3

the capital of Syria.

One was Henry Kissinger,

the US Secretary of State.

The other was the President

of Syria, Hafez al-Assad.

The battle between the two men

was going to have profound

consequences for the world.

And like in New York, it

was going to be a struggle

between the old idea of using

politics to change the world

and a new idea that you could run

the world as a stable system.

President Assad dominated Syria.

The country was full of giant images

and statues that glorified him.

He was brutal and ruthless,

killing or imprisoning anyone

he suspected of being a threat.

But Assad believed that the

violence was for a purpose.

He wanted to find a way of

uniting the Arab countries

and using that power to stand up to the West.

Four,

three,

two,

one.

Kissinger was also tough and ruthless.

He had started in the 1950s

as an expert in the theory of nuclear strategy.

What was called "the delicate balance of terror."

It was the system that ran the Cold War.

Both sides believed that if they attacked,

the other side would immediately

launch their missiles

and everyone would be annihilated.

Kissinger had been one of the

models for the character

of Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick's film.

Mr. President, I would not rule out the chance

to preserve a nucleus of human specimens.

It would be quite easy.

At the bottom of some of our deeper mineshafts.

Henry was not a warm, friendly,

modest, jovial sort of person.

He was thought of as one of the more...

...anxious, temperamental, self-conscious,

ambitious, inconsiderate people at Harvard.

Kissinger saw himself as a hard realist.

He had no time for the emotional

turmoil of political ideologies.

He believed that history had always

really been a struggle for power

between groups and nations.

But what Kissinger took from the Cold War

was a way of seeing the world

as an interconnected system,

and his aim was to keep that system in balance

and prevent it from falling into chaos.

I believe that with all the

dislocations we now experience,

there also exists an extraordinary opportunity

to form, for the first time in

history, a truly global society

carried up by the principle of interdependence,

and if we act wisely, and with vision,

I think we can look back to all this turmoil

as the birth pangs of a more

creative and better system.

If we miss the opportunity, I

think there's going to be chaos.

The flight has been delayed, we understand now.

Kissinger will be arriving here

about an hour and a half from now,

so we'll just have the press informed

and then we'll stay in contact with you...

And it was this idea that

Kissinger set out to impose

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