Henry Kissinger, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning former American secretary of state, worries about how America’s values and foreign-policy objectives are perceived in the global community.

So, how should America get across its objectives to the international audience?

“The most important thing is to get it right in our own head, to analyze what it is that we want,” Mr. Kissinger said over lunch. “Secondly, we need to get our policy right. Look at figures like the late Pope John Paul II who could symbolize the necessities of the age – if the next pope simply tried to emulate everything that the late pope did, you’d have a shipwreck. So I wouldn’t say that we should supply a cookbook for recipes. But it’s a unique challenge.”

That challenge comes at a time of peculiar global tensions and of globalization, which is intended to generate a freer flow of capital, goods, services, and ideas between nations.

“But then we have these religious and quasi-religious crusades, and nobody in the world has experience with this,” Mr. Kissinger said. “Coping with that by itself raises some questions. Simultaneously, there are a whole host of other problems – proliferating weapons could bring about an entirely new world order. There’s also the shift in the center of gravity of foreign policy from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And there’s, of course, the impact of globalization. The last three issues don’t surprise me. I more or less expected them. But the first problem has spread more rapidly than I would have predicted.”

He is worried about the proliferation issue. (The reporter recalled that as secretary of state Mr. Kissinger had made arms control one of his key concerns.)

“There seems to be a great reluctance to run the risk involved in stopping proliferation,” Mr. Kissinger said. “The price for that is a worse form of proliferation.”

He’s convinced that the impact of China and India on the world will grow significantly. Already, China’s trade balance with America is more than $150 billion; its economy is growing at 10% annually. India, after decades of stifling socialism, has undertaken extensive economic reforms and registered annual growth rates between 6% and 7% for several years. Wouldn’t these Asian giants pose a threat to American economic and political dominance in years to come?

“I think it’s a mistake to think of them in terms of the containment theory of the Cold War,” Mr. Kissinger said. “We must, of course, resist any hegemonic or imperialistic aspirations they may have. But in my view, they are best resisted by maintaining cooperative relations, by building coalitions, with as many of these emerging countries as we can.”

His allusion to the late George Kennan – the distinguished American diplomat who foresaw the Soviet Union’s postwar effort to spread its influence and who urged America to adopt a “containment” policy – prompted the reporter to ask Mr. Kissinger what it took to be a statesman.

He is writing a book on that very subject, Mr. Kissinger said. He wasn’t sure about its title, but it might be called “Statecraft,” or “Statesmanship”; he said that he hoped to have it ready for publication next year.

“I believe that it’s important for statesmen to study history – not because history repeats itself but because certain problems keep recurring,” Mr. Kissinger said. “Of course, each generation has to learn for itself what matters are applicable. Somebody can tell you that a hot stove burns. But what good is that if you can’t recognize a hot stove?”

As the lunch wound down, the reporter asked Mr. Kissinger, what kind of a world did he see taking shape?

“There’s certainly a greater reliance on technology – and that makes it easier to package ideas than to produce them,” he said. “I see it in my grandchildren’s generation. They are far ahead of me on the computer than I am. But they can’t spell. They can’t write essays. And that produces a certain cast of mind.”

Did that mean he yearned for an age gone by?

“No, I don’t harken for the past,” Mr. Kissinger said. “We live in a period which would have been inconceivable some years ago. But I looked up my name on Google the other day, and found some 500,000 references to me. Now how do you get through that? I was talking to a writer not long ago, and I asked him what books he’d read. He looked at me almost contemptuously and said that he did not read books, that he only used the Internet.

“But I have no clear idea of the world that’s emerging,” Mr. Kissinger said. “I think ideologically I support the quest for democracy. But the road to there will be extraordinarily complex, and in some places it will be extraordinarily tempestuous.

“I could conceive of the spread of nuclear weapons that might result in a coalition of three or four nuclear powers,” Mr. Kissinger said. “They might say we’d better do away with nuclear facilities in all but three or four places. How that will come about, I don’t know.”

And what about the so-called “soft issues” that have figured prominently in global affairs in recent years – issues such as environmental security and social justice?

“They have become an important element in the cohesion of societies,” Mr. Kissinger said. “But they are not a substitute for traditional foreign policy.”

And what about multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the scandal-plagued United Nations? What role in the emerging global order did he envision for them? Was the American right correct in asserting that multilateral institutions infringe on American sovereignty?

“Multilateral institutions are a tool of foreign policy and foreign policy involves a sovereign decision to adapt one’s freedom of action to circumstance, national purpose, and moral values,” Mr. Kissinger said. “Multilateral institutions should be judged by how to fit these criteria, not by abstract debates in sovereignty.”

Mr. Kissinger had already given the reporter far more time than he’d expected. There was one more question that he wanted to pose to a man whose temporal accomplishments couldn’t possibly have been imagined by him when he was growing up in the Bavarian city of Fuerth as the second son of Louis Kissinger, a schoolteacher, and his wife, Paula Stern.

Was there something that he felt he still needed to achieve?

“If at the age of 82 you’re driven by an unfulfilled goal, that’s bad – because you do know the actuarial reality. I cannot conceive doing that,” Mr. Kissinger said. “I will continue to write, and I do hope that my book on statecraft will be read. I do not feel that there’s one more specific thing that I need to do. But I am determined to keep working until I am physically incapable.”