Emma Padrick: Good evening
everyone and thank you for joining us virtually for the
Eisenhower Institute's panel: US foreign policy from Eisenhower
to Reagan: Who did it serve, and what were the Consequences. The
Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College is grounded
in President Dwight D. Eisenhower's legacy of
leadership and promotes nonpartisan discourse and
critical analysis of issues of long term importance. Each year
the Eisenhower Institute undergraduate fellow Fellows
Program, excuse me,
offers a select group of Gettysburg
College students the opportunity to develop their leadership
skills and grow in their knowledge and understanding of
public policy. During the 2020 to 2021, academic year, the
undergraduate fellows have explored US foreign policy under
President Eisenhower, with the guidance of professor Brendan
Cushing Daniels, the Harold G Evans professor of Eisenhower
Leadership Studies. Tonight, we bring you the first panel in a
two part series to discuss the actions and r
epercussions of US
foreign policy from the Eisenhower administration to the
Reagan administration. I am honored to introduce our three
panelists who will address the intersection of foreign policy,
human rights, capitalism, and domestic policy. Dr James Goldgeier is a Robert
Bosch senior visiting fellow at the Center on the United States
and Europe at the Brookings Institution and a professor of
international relations at the School of International Service
at American University, where he serve
d as dean from 2011 to
2017. Previously, he was a professor at George Washington
University, where he directed the Elliot School's Institute
for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and cofounded
the Summer Institute on conducting archival research. He
has served as a director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian
Affairs on the National Security Council staff, and he has held
appointments or fellowships at the Library of Congress, the
Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations,
t
he Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the
Transatlantic Academy at the German Marshall Fund, the Hoover
Institution, and the Stanford Center for International
Security and Cooperation. He has authored or co authored four
books, and he has received the Edgar Furness Book Award, and
the Georgetown University Lepgold Book Prize. He serves as
a member of the State Department Historical Advisory Committee. Mr. Stephen Kinzer is an award
winning foreign correspondent who has covered mor
e than 50
countries on five continents. His articles and books have led
the Washington Post to place him, quote, "among the best in
popular foreign policy storytelling." Kinser spent more
than 20 years working for The New York Times, most of it as a
foreign correspondent. His foreign postings placed him at
the center of historic events, and, at times, in the line of
fire. He spent several of those years in Nicaragua, where he
covered war and upheaval in Central America, and wrote two
books about
the region. He spent much of the 1990s in Germany,
covering the emergence of post-communist Europe, including
wars in former Yugoslavia. After leaving the times in 2005,
Kinzer taught journalism, political science and
international relations at Northwestern University and
Boston University. He is now a senior fellow at the Watson
Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown
University, and writes a world affairs column for the Boston
Globe. Dr Kori Schake leads the foreign
and defens
e policy team at the American Enterprise Institute.
She is the author of five books, including Safe Passage, the
Transition from British to American Hegemony. Dr Schake has
been widely published in policy journals in the popular press,
including in cnn.com, Foreign Affairs, Politico, The New York
Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. She is
a contributing writer at The Atlantic and War on the Rocks.
Before joining AI, Dr Schake served as the Deputy Director
General of the Inte
rnational Institute for Strategic Studies
in London. She has had a distinguished career in
government, working at the US State Department, the US
Department of Defense, and the National Security Council at the
White House. She has also taught at Stanford, Westpoint, Johns
Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies,
National Defense University, and the University of Maryland. Thank you all for being here and
sharing your expertise with us. Each panelist will share remarks
for a
pproximately 15 minutes, followed by a few minutes for
each panelist to respond to their fellow panelists remarks,
we will conclude with a question and answer session, moderated by
the Undergraduate Fellows. If you would like to submit a
question, please use the q&a feature at the bottom of your
screen. Dr Goldgeier will be the first to address the panel,
followed by Mr Kinzer and Dr Shockey. Thank you. James Goldgeier: Great, well
thank you so much. I really appreciate the introduction, and
tha
nks to Professor Cushing Daniels for inviting me to join
this panel. What a, what a great group and I'm very much looking
forward to the questions from the students and others in the
audience. On January 17, 1961, President Eisenhower spoke his
farewell, as president to the American people, and sent a
clear warning to his fellow citizens. "We have been
compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast
proportions," he said. "We must guard against the acquisition of
unwarranted influence
, whether sought or unsought, by the
military industrial complex. Our military organization," he went
on to say, "bears little resemblance to that known by any
of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of
World War Two, or Korea, he added. "The potential for the
disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
President Eisenhower feared the weight of this military
industrial complex could endanger democracy, and said
that an informed citizenry is necessary to en
sure that the
military industrial complex served, quote, "Our peaceful
methods and goals." This speech was very important to President
Eisenhower. He had considered giving it for two years, and
originally was going to be giving it to the Congress and
decided to speak directly to the American people, and a major
question for this panel is was he right to be concerned? Is
what we saw for the rest of the Cold War and after a product of
unwarranted influence by the military industrial complex? The
U
nited States has long been the global military superpower, with
a reach across the entire world and now has a defense budget of
well over $700 billion per year. Since that speech that President
Eisenhower gave in 1961, the United States went to war in
Vietnam in the 1960s and 70s, carried out not one but two
major wars against Iraq since 1991, has been at war in
Afghanistan for two decades. And throughout the Cold War and
after engaged in numerous smaller, smaller operations
around the world. NA
TO, which was formed in 1949 to combat the
USSR, has now lived on 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, and the US maintains a robust set of military alliances
in East Asia. Is all of this because an uninformed citizenry
has been asleep at the switch, allowing the military industrial
complex to run wild? I want to give you three reasons why I
think it's not them but us and our elected leaders who are
responsible for the United States and its engagement in the
world. Reason number one,
the lesson of the 20th century, was
that the United States has to be number one in order to keep the
peace. Second, we periodically fear that we are about to lose
that position, which sometimes leads to savvy diplomatic moves,
but occasionally leads to disastrous foreign policy
decisions. And three, it's not just top executives at defense
corporations who benefit from military activity. Communities
across the country have grown dependent on the defense
industry for jobs and their elected leader
s know this. So let me start with the lesson
of the 20th century, and it's really basically one big lesson
boiled down simply to post-1919 bad, post-1945 good. That's the
lesson that America certainly American elites have learned and
I think the broader public - public opinion polls show that
the public has largely taken this lesson on board as well.
The United States intervened in World War One, and when it was
over, returned to its traditional isolationism. The
result was another world war 20
years later. Post-1919 bad. The
United States stayed engaged after 1945, and the result was a
free and prosperous West. Post-1945 good. So when the Cold
War ended, the United States took those lessons to try to
expand the community of democracies and saw the United
States as central to the effort through the military
arrangements forged during the Cold War. Why, for example, did
NATO, formed during the Cold War, last after the Cold War was
over? It lasted because it was the way
the United States
could stay in charge of European security,
which was something important not just to the United States,
but to many Europeans, especially in Eastern Europe.
What would happen if the United States didn't stay in charge of
European security? Americans believed we'd have wars like the
one in Yugoslavia breaking out all over the continent. The
lesson of the 20th century for American elites - and I would
suggest for many in the broader public - is that without the US
in charge, as my Brookings colle
ague Bob Kagan puts it, the
jungle grows back. Could President Eisenhower have ever
imagined that the United States would still be militarily
involved in Europe to keep the peace in 2021? Doubtful. Would
he imagine if it was, that it was because of the military
industrial complex? Maybe. But I think it's more about what we
tell ourselves about the world needing America. When he said an
informed citizenry was necessary because it would ensure the
military industrial complex served peaceful goals,
well, we
tell ourselves that peace requires us to be in charge. To
take another example, look what happened when Iraq invaded
Kuwait in 1990. The United States took it upon itself to
forge an international coalition to reverse that invasion. Why?
The whole post World War Two international system, centered
around the United Nations, was designed to prevent big
countries from invading and taking territory from their
neighbors, and that's what was at stake in 1990. What did
George HW Bush draw upo
n when arguing the US needed to
galvanize the international community to stop Saddam
Hussein? The 1930s, arguing that we stood by as Hitler started
taking territory, and look what happened. We couldn't do that
again, so President Bush drew a line in the sand. Second, we periodically fear we
are about to lose our position. When the Soviet Union launched
Sputnik in 1957 it was a huge shock. If the Soviets were ahead
of us, technologically, we might lose the Cold War, the United
States responded wi
th a massive technological response, much of
which did a tremendous amount of good and many of us benefit from
these efforts, including more funding for basic research at
our universities, as well as the effort to be the first to land a
person on the moon. The fear that the Soviet Union might
overtake the United States was a key rationale for the
Nixon-Kissinger policy of detant to find accommodation with which
with what they viewed as the rising power. And during the
Cold War this fear led to t
he belief that a loss of any part
of the world to Soviet influence was unacceptable to the United
States, and led us in the proxy wars all over the globe. And, as
Mr Kinzer has written in his book Overthrow, to overthrow
regimes in many places. The most egregious decision resulting
from this fear of losing America's position was the
Vietnam War, and the belief that if South Vietnam sell to
communist forces, the rest of Asia would follow like falling
dominoes and communists would soon be in San F
rancisco. And
what a disastrous decision that was. But this fear also led to
clever diplomacy, most notably the opening to China during the
Nixon administration as a means of using our relationship with
both the Soviet Union and China against those two other nations.
That fear of losing our position to the Soviets was replaced in
the late 1980s by our fear that we would lose our position to
the Japanese who had risen to the number two economy in the
world and seem to be on a path to rise even fu
rther. The result
of that fear was the belief in the United States that America
needed to remain militarily dominant after the end of the
Cold War, not just to prevent a nuclear competitor like the
Soviet Union had been but to prevent the rise of a new
compare competitor like the Soviet Union had been, and not
just to prevent the rise of adversarial regional hedgemonds
like Iraq, but to prevent even our allies like Japan and
Germany from dominating their respective regions. And that
requires a l
ot of superpower. Today of course we're gearing up
to begin believing that China will overtake the United States,
and that the Chinese seek to impose a new international order
to replace the American led international order that we have
enjoyed for decades. And I would expect to see some mix of
foolish decisions and clever diplomacy to resolve. And finally, community
dependence on the defense sector. The Biden administration
has called for a foreign policy for the middle class. That idea
arose d
ue to the Trump phenomenon, and it goes
something like this. US elites have overwhelmingly favored us
Global Engagement since World War Two. Since the 1990s, US
middle class lost out economically because of that
engagement, and thus, the middle class came to believe that
engagement was bad for them. Donald Trump took advantage of
this sentiment, and won the presidency by promising America
first. That's what the Democrats working for Joe Biden believe,
and they are determined that to gain support
for American
engagement, the administration needs to demonstrate that it is
a foreign policy for the middle class. Well a foreign policy for
the middle class means that people need to feel like they
are gaining not losing jobs. With every state in the country
dependent on the defense sector for jobs, how could the
administration possibly cut the defense budget without harming
the middle class? We could argue, I suppose, that this is
part of what Eisenhower meant by a military industrial complex
,
but I think normally when we use that term we think about
executives at Lockheed Martin or Northridge, Northrop Grumman, or
elsewhere, throwing money at members of Congress and
candidates for president to win contracts for their next weapon
system. And of course that is a legitimate concern. But I would
suggest the problem is much deeper, much bigger and goes
much deeper. We believe we are indispensable to global peace.
Each generation finds a new country whose rise we fear will
knock us off o
ur perch as the leading global power, and
communities across the country depend on the defense sector for
jobs. I don't see any of those three factors are likely to
change anytime soon. Thank you. Stephen Kinzer: Well, rather
than wait for an introduction, I'm just going to pick it up
right there. You propose some fascinating ideas. That's enough
for the whole evening right there. Let me try responding to
a little of that. So I was interested in your observation
that you are quoting from one of
our friends, that when the
United States does not rule the world, then the jungle comes
back. I would argue the opposite, that we are the
jungle. The jungle is a world with no rules where there's
bombing and invasion and occupation and countries just
decide that they can unleash violence on their own and don't
feel the need to follow rules that they impose on other
countries, that's us. So I would say, taking back from what you
just heard from Professor Goldgeier. Pre-1998 good,
post-1998 bad. S
o, I completely agree with the
paradigm with what you've just been presented. The United
States believes itself to be the guarantor of peace and freedom
in the world. When we're not running the world there's chaos,
and when we are there's at least some order. Only we see
ourselves this way, the rest of the world doesn't see us that
way; they see us as the greatest threat to global security and
order. The idea that the United States has to be number one, is
the idea that causes more upheaval in t
he world than any
other. It's been particularly acute, since the end of the Cold
War. Then, around 1990, we really had the chance to
dismantle the institutions that were created to deal with a
particular situation that no longer existed. That was the
moment for us to disband NATO, for example, as a military
institution to begin looking at the world in a new way. Instead
we did the opposite. We, we look for new ways to dominate
everybody. I would also argue against the paradigm that you
heard abo
ut the two World Wars. What happened after World War
One was bad because we became isolationist; what happened
after World War Two was good because we decided to run the
world. If the United States had never entered World War One, the
European powers would have found ultimately some balance among
themselves. Instead we entered on one side, made sure that one
side got 100% of the victory, and the other side got zero,
that's what created World War Two. World War One is the
founding catastrophe of
our modern age without World War
One, there's no Nazi, no Holocaust, no communism in the
Soviet Union. Almost everything we've known about the last 100
years, wouldn't have happened, and American intervention is
sometimes thought of as something that was positive, to
help shape the world after World War One, there are many other
ways to look at. Now, let me just go back to the
Eisenhower administration, which is where we want to start our
story, at least for for tonight's discussion. There's
gre
at admiration, up to this day, for President Eisenhower's
wonderful speech about the military industrial complex. As
you may know, in the original version of that speech he called
it the military industrial congressional complex; he cut
off congressional at the end because he didn't want to
alienate members of Congress, but he was absolutely right, it
is a military industrial congressional complex. So,
Eisenhower is seen in that speech as warning against hubris
against excessive American militar
y involvement in the
world. But that's only partly true. So let's go back to
Eisenhower's security policy, as you all know it was called the
new look. Eisenhower was one of those old time Republicans who
believed in small budgets. One of the kinds of small budgets he
believed in was small military budgets, he didn't want there to
be a big military establishment. And that was the new look. So
the new look had two fundamental columns to foundations. One was
a smaller and cheaper, military, and the
other was nuclear
deterrent so you wouldn't need such a big military. In fact,
the new law had three, not two fundamental pillars. It was the
smaller military and the bigger nuclear deterrent as the public
saw, but there was a third column, and that was covert
action. President Eisenhower was a huge supporter of covert
action. And when he warned against the military industrial
complex, what he was really saying is don't fight wars
overthrow governments by covert means we don't often hear that
b
ecause he didn't say that as part of his speech, but that's
what he meant. Eisenhower was a very tough guy behind that
smile. He was a tremendous supporter of the kind of covert
action that has produced the greatest catastrophes for the
United States over the last 70 years. When he first came into office,
within a year, he had already overthrown the democratically
elected government of Iran. A few months later, he overthrew
the democratically elected government of Guatemala. He
thought this was
a great idea -when you don't like a
government, it doesn't matter if it's democratic, we send the
CIA, we destroy that democracy. The result of Eisenhower's
destruction of Guatemala as a democratic country was a civil
war that lasted for more than 30 years, killed hundreds of
thousands of people, more people that were killed in all of Latin
America combined during those 30 years. His overthrow of the
government of Iran was a catastrophe that has led us to
the Iran that we have now, Iran was on i
ts way to democracy
before Dwight Eisenhower got his hands on Iran, and everything
you've seen since then a quarter of a century of the Shahs
dictatorship, led by 40, followed by 40 years of
intensely anti-American rule by fanatical mullahs who spent
decades trying to undermine everything American stands for.
That all goes back to the Eisenhower administration. Why
did he do that? Why was Eisenhower such a fervent
believer in covert action? Well, we don't know for sure. Because
Eisenhower never
explained his rationale. In fact, he never
even admitted that he carried out, or was in favor of or know
anything about covert action. In his memoirs he lies explicitly
about these operations in Guatemala, Iran, and others that
he carried out everywhere from Indonesia to the Congo and other
places, he would have said, if we could talk to him now, "I
wasn't lying. I was guarding the secrets of the United States."
So we don't know why Eisenhower favorite covert action so
intensely, but based on hi
story of his biography, we can come up
with a couple of answers. First of all, covert action played an
important role in winning World War Two. We didn't know that -
nobody knew it. But there were all kinds of operations,
including, famously, the stealing of the Nazi code
machines, that were very valuable to the Allied World War
Two effort now Eisenhower, as Commander of the Allied Forces
in the Second World War, would certainly have been aware of
this, so he would have come into office with a g
reat belief in
the efficacy of covert action. Secondly, Eisenhower hated the
idea of war. He had had to send thousnads of kids off to die.
And this affected him. We have cases of him almost being
completely overcome by emotion. When thinking about the kids
that died at D-Day and all the bodies that he saw, he
understood it - the moral burden that he had to bear for sending
so many Americans off to die. When he got into the presidency,
and he began to hear these stories about covert action,
that
you could overthrow a government secretly without an
invasion, without a war, with only modest casualties, he was
fascinated. So he would have thought of things like the
overthrow of a democratic government in Iran or the
overthrow of a democratic government in Guatemala as peace
projects. These were ways to avoid a war with a threatening
country. Here you could do it secretly nobody would know, it
wouldn't cost anything, not many people would die and you'd get
the result you wanted, you got rid
of a government union, like. So, Eisenhower thought this was
a perfect solution. And after those two operations succeeded
in overthrowing leaders that Americans didn't like, he wanted
to continue further. Now, why did we not like those leaders?
Why did we not like President our bends in Guatemala? Why did
we not like Prime Minister Mossadegh in Iran? Well, of
course, you can't get yourself out of the Cold War context,
where we feared that every threat to American power was
promoted by the Kreml
in. Besides that, however, both of those
leaders committed a great sin in the eyes of the United States,
and that is they put the interest of their own country
ahead of the interests of the United States. President Arbenz
of Guatemala decided that it was more important for starving
Guatemalan families to have land than it was for the United Fruit
to have large amounts of land that it didn't use. Prime
Minister Mossadegh in Iran decided to since Iranians were
sitting on a giant ocean of oil, and
Iranians were living in some
of the most miserable conditions in the world because all that
oil money was going elsewhere, it wasn't fair, and there should
be a new arrangement whereby Iran would benefit from its own
resources. This, these two operations in the early 1950s,
the overthrow of the government of Iran and Guatemala, were part
of a global war that Eisenhower waged, among others, and he was
waging it on behalf of the economic interests that control
the world. If the producing countries
, countries like
Guatemala and Iran were able to start seizing control of their
own resources and fixing prices by which they would share those
resources with the consuming countries, the entire way the
world was governed would be destroyed. Eisenhower considered
that to be a fundamental interest of the United States.
Upon taking office Eisenhower appointed two brothers to run
his foreign policy. One was John Foster Dulles who became
Secretary of State, and Dulles his younger brother, Allen
Dull
es became the head of the CIA. Both of these men and
served for years in the principal law firm, defending
and representing the interests of American corporations in the
world. That law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, was not really a
law firm as we think of law firms, it had a different, a
different goal. It was the law firm that American corporations
would hire when they got into trouble in other countries. And
this law firm had ways to intervene around the world and
force countries to do what Am
erican corporations wanted.
When those two brothers came into power they were the ones
who brought Eisenhower this idea that covert action was the way
to defend American interests in the world, and that American
interests in the world were identical to the interests of
American corporations in the world. Now you just heard some
discussion about World War Two, I think the United States
learned two terrible lessons from World War Two, two lessons
we never should have learned, two wrong lessons and
we're
still well under the burden of those two lessons. They can be
symbolized with simple phrases. First lesson is Pearl Harbor.
What does it mean? It means America might think it's safe,
but there's always somebody out there waiting to attack us by
surprise at any moment. If there's even 1% of a chance that
any country should attack us, that was our enemy, we must
attack first. The world is full of enemies, United States is a
poor, attacked surrounded country with enemies everywhere.
That's t
he terrible lesson of Pearl Harbor, which leads us to
see the world exactly the opposite of the way that it is.
The second lesson we learned from World War Two is described
in a single word, Munich. Now Munich, as you all remember was
the place where Hitler met with the British Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain, and Chamberlain afterwards said, "We
can have peace in our time." Now the lesson of Munich should have
been that Neville Chamberlain was wrong to trust Adolf Hitler.
But that's not the
lesson we learned. The lesson we learned
is diplomacy is always bad. Diplomacy is stupid diplomacy is
a way for other people to take advantage of it, so don't
negotiate. Just fight. In the Cold War context these were very
appealing concepts. Eisenhower failed to consider
two important factors. And if he were here today and we were to
ask him, Why did you carry out those covert actions that wound
up throwing whole regions of the world into chaos and causing not
only men suffering to the target co
untry, but also great damage
to American security over the long run? I think he might say,
first of all this. "You people now in 2021 have a lot of
understanding of the long term effects of covert action. You
know that when you release a wheel at the top of a hill, you
can't control where it's going to bounce or how it's going to
end and these covert operations have terrible unpredictable
enemies; we didn't know that then. There hadn't been any
covert overthrows of governments before I came into
office, there
was no CIA in the days before me before Eisenhower, and we want
to overthrow a government we sent in the Marines, so we
didn't know that there would be so many unpredicted
consequences." And the second thing I think he might say, is
something that's even more important for us today and that
is this. "When you can understand what lies ahead. We
should be careful. Don't assume we're the United States, don't
worry, whatever it happens we'll be able to control it." This was
the George
W Bush idea invading Iraq. "I don't know much about
Sunni or Shia, but whatever it is, I know we had times back in
Texas where we had two guys that wanted to be the postmaster and
I worked it out and we'll work it out over there too. So it's
often said the American people are ignorant about the world."
And that's true. In fact, I would argue that it is exactly
American ignorance that allowed Eisenhower's policies to be
promoted and imposed. If it weren't for public ignorance
Eisenhower's policy
of covert action could not have succeeded.
Public knowledge of what the United States was doing would
have destroyed Eisenhower's foreign policy. He needed
secrecy, otherwise there can't be covert action. So I think the
longer term error that Eisenhower made, and it's one
we're still making today, is to think that if we don't know
what's coming in the future, it's okay to go ahead anyway,
because we're America, we can control everything. And whatever
problems come up in the end, we'll figure it
out. Eisenhower
might have been the last president to believe that he
certainly was the last president to believe you can carry out
covert operations, like the ones in Iran and Guatemala, and
nobody would ever find out about it. We're now living not only
with the consequences of Eisenhower's covert operations,
but with the consequences of so many other covert operations by
subsequent presidents who carried out those operations in
part because they were following the model of Eisenhower. These
a
re all factors we need to bear in mind as we assess the long
term impact of Eisenhower's foreign policy and what effect
it;s had on the world in which we know that I'm gonna leave it
there. Thanks. Kori Schake: So, I think I'm up
next, and, and my own views come a lot closer to Jim Goldgeier's
on the nature of the international order. And I want
to try and pull you all into what the world felt like in 1952
when Dwight Eisenhower became president, because one of my
very favorite historians, David
McCullough, always challenges
the rest of us, that history, the art of writing history is
the art of trying to understand the world as people saw it at
that time. So, not, they didn't know how things were going to
come out, and they were living in a crazy time. I mean, imagine
yourselves 40 years from now, trying to explain to people what
the COVID pandemic was like, that a half a million Americans
were going to die, and our lives would be disrupted. This way,
they will know what eventually hap
pened, right, whether the
United States was able to come up with a vaccine, whether we
had the broad mindedness to vaccinate countries of the
global south and people who were not Americans, they will know
how the contest of a rising China was handled, all of those
things that we are having to navigate without knowing an
endpoint. So I want to take you back to that period. The first
important thing I think about the frame of reference of
Eisenhower and his colleagues was that they had witness two
global conflagrations in their lifetime. And whatever we may
think of why the United States should or shouldn't have entered
World War One and Two, the lesson that President Eisenhower
and the people who were helping craft his policies took from
that experience was that the United States had tried a policy
of not caring about the rest of the world in the 1930s, and that
allowed threats to gather of such a magnitude that we had to
muster 10 million Americans into the military, and fight in two
c
ompletely unconnected theatres of warfare for our very
survival. The international order that they tried to create
with universal values and security guarantees to other
countries, and military alliances, and international
institutions, what they were trying to do was build a wider
margin of error for early identification of problems that
were coming up, and the ability of countries to cooperate to
manage those threats. That's how you get the NATO alliance,
that's how you get the United Nations.
The United States was a
major advocate of assisting countries that we believed could
be democratic because we thought those countries made the
international order, safer, that is that they were less likely to
provoke wars of aggression. Now the political science on that in
our modern age is a lot murkier. But, but that's what they
thought the world they were living in was. And the wartime
alliance with the Soviet Union turns out to have the shocking
end product of Soviet conquests and retention
of control of
Eastern Europe, in a way that didn't just surprise Eisenhower
and his colleagues, it worried them about the rest of the
international order. Namely, if you think the lesson of the
1930s is by ignoring threats and allowing them to pick up
momentum, the United States ends up in a much more dangerous
place than trying to defang those threats, while they are
still nascent. One of the very best - so,
Stephen said that we don't know what Eisenhower thinks about a
lot of these things, bu
t he did actually leave pretty good
records, and those records are the conversations of the
National Security Council when debating what US strategy should
be, and I commend all of you to go online to the foreign
relations of the United States record series, so Jim Goldgeier
is a consultant to the State Department's historians, and
they publish troves of documents, including the minutes
of conversations that President Eisenhower and his cabinet had
over these issues. The way to find them is to l
ook for a
document called NSC-5501 -That was the Eisenhower
administration's 1954 National Security Strategy, and it's the
best one our country has ever written, and they actually even
executed it. What they thought they were doing was trying to -
so I'm sorry, one other thing I should have also mentioned
that's really important in the shape of the international order
in the early 1950s, and that is that because of both World War
Two and our allegiance with other democratic countries, in
partic
ular Britain and France, that the end of empires, the
creation of independent countries throughout in
particular, Asia and Africa - the Eisenhower administration
worried desperately, that we were going to be associated with
countries that had committed depredations as imperial powers.
They weren't so much so that when Great Britain offered the
United States troops to fight in the Pacific theater of war in
World War Two, the United States turned them down because we were
afraid we were going to b
e associated with British imperial
control of India, of what is now Pakistan, and other countries.
So, they understood that it wasn't just American power that
mattered in shaping of the international order, it was the
importance of ideals that they really felt like a world where
communism dominated the emergent countries, the United States
wouldn't be safe, that it would be a replay of the 1930s. And
there are lots of reasons, we can, lots of ways and reasons we
can criticize those judgments, bu
t they were quite sincere in
trying to protect and advance the country's interests and
Eisenhower, as both Stephen and Jim have pointed out, really
believed that the threat of militarizing this challenge was
almost on par with the threat of the challenge itself. Eisenhower
at one point says that "The country deserves both security
and solvency." He set an arbitrary top line for the
defense budget of $54 billion. And at one point his close
friend, Admiral Ridgeway, who was Chief of Staff of the A
rmy
during the 1958 Berlin crisis tells President Eisenhower that
he's going to go to Capitol Hill and argue that the Eisenhower
administration undercut American security. We needed 100 more
divisions in the army to be able to protect our interests in
Europe. And Eisenhower tells his old friend that won't change the
number of divisions in the army, it will just change the Chief of
Staff, meaning he was going to fire General Ridgeway if he did
that because it would completely undercut a strategy
of security
and solvency. Now, in this discussion about what US
strategy should be, Eisenhower strongly believed that the
nuclear age, the emergence of US and Soviet nuclear arsenals
created what he called the stability of the stalemate, that
it made very unlikely an actual war between the Soviet Union and
the United States, and this comes through very clearly
during the 1958 Berlin crisis where Eisenhower sends a message
to Khrushchev saying, "If you want to war over Berlin, I'll
give it to you
," and refuses to do to undertake any preparations
or increases in military spending, because he it was the
start of a negotiation of what the Soviets were actually after
in doing this in Berlin. Unknown: And, and so he thought
the great powers had the stability of the stalemate. And
he also thought that the where their interests in other in
deep, abiding alliances, like the NATO alliance, or the US
Japan treaty, where those were clear there was also very little
risk of war. What he worried abou
t were what he called Small
wars; countries like Indonesia, like Guatemala, where the United
States didn't have a deep and abiding interest in the
direction of the country, but also couldn't afford not to care
at all. This is the trap of the Eisenhower strategy and I would
suggest to you, the United States still hasn't solved this
problem. It is the vexing strategic challenge, not what
you do at the high end, not what you do at the low end. What do
you do for those countries that you feel have t
he ability to
create an international order where our adversaries have
momentum of the kind that that is a gathering storm for
problems that could become big, and we have to deal with? That's
why Eisenhower finds covert action so attractive because he
campaigned against American involvement in the Korean War,
believed you shouldn't fight a conventional war unless you were
willing to actually, as he called it, "push all your chips
into the pot and cross the nuclear threshold," and he
didn't belie
ve that Indonesia Guatemala were countries that
merited risking a nuclear war, but he also didn't believe you
couldn't do anything. And I share Stephen's condemnation of
a lot of the choices the administration made, but I would
challenge you students to come up with a better answer. Because
there's a reason the Reagan administration goes back to
covert operations, even when, as Stephen points out, there's zero
probability of them remaining covert, because the actual
problem, the strategic trap i
s what do you do about those
countries you don't care enough to risk American soldiers to
defend, but you do care that they not be added into an
anti-American international order? The solution the best
solution is the one Jim Goldgeier has long been such an
ardent and effective advocate for, which is alliance
relationships, security guarantees from the United
States that make countries feel safe enough and deter
adversaries. That's the stabilizing solution. And while
I agree, as both James and S
tephen pointed out, that
Eisenhower would have been shocked to find American troops
still stationed in Europe 70 years after he put them there,
he would nonetheless be deeply grateful for 70 years of peace
in Europe, and think that the small price of forward
stationing of American troops and continued hand holding with
our closest friends in the world was the best of many possible
solutions for the strategic trap that he worried most about. And
I'll stop there. Maddie Casey: Okay, um, if
either
of the panelists would like to respond at this time to
Dr Schake's comment. James Goldgeier: Well, I mean,
I've really enjoyed both presentations. I'm eager to get
to the student questions so I hope we can go to that quickly,
I guess I just one thing I would just say in response to both is
just let's add in the sort of the demand side of this other
countries wanting the United States to be involved. That's
not always a good thing for the United States, but we should
also think about why it is th
at other countries want us to be
involved when it comes to our allies, for example, our
European allies, you know, most of those countries in Europe
they want us to be in Europe, the South Koreans want us to be
assisting them in East Asia, the Japanese want us to be there.
So, you know, the question is, in some of these cases where you
have regimes like the type that Stephen Kinzer described some
some of these regimes are when Kori Schake was talking about,
they, you know, countries that that ar
en't at the top level and
they're not at the bottom level this sort of mid level, which is
a great way to way to think about it, you know, what happens
when these regimes are corrupt? You know, we're sort of
intervening on the, you know, we don't know a lot about them,
we're intervening to try to prop up regimes that we think are on
our side but are in often cases just using us to deal with their
enemies in ways that they're not able to, and I think, great to
hear Cory charge the students with f
iguring out a solution to
dealing with countries that were, that we think are
important enough that we should be involved, not important
enough that we would send American troops to fight, but
where we think outcomes will matter to US interests, and.
,you know what's the best way to, to manage those problems. Stephen Kinzer: I would say that
looking at those countries kind of in that middle level -
countries that don't pose a imminent threat to the United
States but where we fear that they might
at some point be part
of an enemy alliance, our answer has always been, what do we do
with those countries? We crush them, we destroy them, we
devastate them. It's very sanitary for us to be looking at
Guatemala, or Iran, or countries that Eisenhower also devastated
like, Laos and Burma and the Congo and India and Vietnam and
so many other places and say, "Well, we had to make a choice
so we decided we should intervene to be sure that maybe
something bad wouldn't happen." But we never intervene
to
promote democracy. Whenever countries emerge that wanted to
promote democracy, they were our enemies. Iran's only sin was
that it wanted to become a democratic country, same thing
in Indonesia, same thing in the Congo, same thing in Guatemala,
so I don't think it's right to say, we were trying to encourage
democracies to emerge. Democracies always have a
problem for the United States and especially during the
Eisenhower administration. Democracies, challenge the
economic power of American co
rporations that are the
underpinning of the US economy and as we thought of it, the
world economy, Kori Schake: I just don't think
it's true, right, if you think about the two great democracies
that emerged in the 1950s - they're Germany and Japan, and
the Eisenhower administration was primarily focused on
allowing the emergence of democracies in Europe, in Japan,
and if, and pushing South Korea onto that path, so it's not true
that democracy, that they were ardently against democracy, and
I als
o think it's not true that Iran in 1958 was a uniquely
virtuous government that was headed on a path to respect of
its own people, I think that the story is more complicated than
that. Stephen Kinzer: Well, we'll just
let the students follow those courses fine. Maddie Casey: All right, thank
you to our panelists for giving us their perspectives. I'm
Maddie I'm one of the undergraduate fellows. Jenna Thoretz: And my name is
Jenna, I'm another one of the undergraduate fellows, and we
will be moder
ating the q&a session tonight, so please, any
audience members if you have any questions, feel free to drop
them in the q&a box at the bottom of your screen. Maddie Casey: So our first
question is for Mr Kinzer, and we were wondering if you could
provide the audience with some specific context of some of the
consequences in terms of human rights crises within countries
in which the United States made the decision to intervene.
Additionally, if you could potentially discuss whether or
not you thi
nk that there's a prevailing double standard
regarding the United States' involvement in other countries Stephen Kinzer: I don't know how
many more hours we have, but let me try to answer that very
briefly. So, first of all, what about the long term impact, so
let me just pick out a couple. The United States decided that
the government of Guatemala in 1954 was threatening to the
United States - for whatever reasons that are subject of a
whole other discussion - we intervene, we overthrew the onl
y
democratic government Guatemala has ever had. Soon after that
there was a rebellion against the government that we imposed.
That rebellion led to a civil war that civil war, tore
Guatemala apart, and I was a I witnessed to the savagery and
brutality that was set off for 30 years in that terribly
suffering country. That wouldn't have happened if Eisenhower had
said, "Hey, the Guatemalans made their own choice and I don't
care about United Fruit Company." So, Iran was another
case. In Iran, the
government decided it wanted to nationalize
an oil company that was owned by foreign interest the United
States and the British decided to intervene. Since then there's
been no democracy in Iran, Iran had 25 years of military
dictatorship and then 40 years of religious rule. And both of
these operations and wound up in ultimately undermining American
security, American intervention in Indonesia set off a trail of
events that exploded in the mid 1960s in a horrific pogrom that
resulted in the sla
ughter of something like a million people
by the Indonesian government. So, when you intervene in these
countries militarily, from the outside without understanding
the domestic dynamics, you set off processes that no one can
control, and we don't care to control them. We don't even try
to control them. As long as the right person is in control in
Iran or in Guatemala or in Indonesia or in the Congo, we're
happy. We don't care about what's happening to the people
there. And that brings us to our
next
question, which is the double standard. I used to be a great
supporter of the human rights movement, but now I see human
rights is being used as a weapon to attack certain countries and
then give other countries a pass. So yes, I do think the
United States has a double standard when it comes to
judging countries on human rights issues, I think we have
all these lists of countries that support terrorism,
countries that allow money laundering, countries that allow
trafficking of human beings
. We've got 20 lists of bad
countries, but we don't start, for example, in our terrorist
list by saying which countries are terrorist, we put them on
the terrorist list, which countries are not terrorists, we
don't put them on list. No, we don't do that, we start off by
saying "What countries don't we like? Okay, all those countries
don't like, you're suddenly on the list of countries that
support terrorism, that support child trafficking, that support
religious oppression, everything else. Coun
tries that we like,
get a free pass." So I'm, I wanted this to finish by saying,
making this one observation. So, when I teach classes about the
Cold War, I try to tell my students, you have to put
yourself back in the craziness of that era, where Americans
thought their whole country could be liquidated in a single
minute, and therefore any sacrifice was justified. But no
matter how much I tell my students, we have to try to put
yourself back in this mindset, sometimes I think even I cannot
suc
ceed in putting myself back in that mindset because it was
such a bizarre time, so different from what we know. All
I would say is this: Cold War stories have now looked back
with all the information we've had in the last 20 years and
many of them have concluded this, who was responsible for
the Cold War? It was probably both countries up through the
end of the Stalin period. When Stalin died in 1953 the United
States had a chance to review its foreign policy and see if we
needed to continue thi
s hostility, but largely because
of domestic American politics we were not able to do that, and
the Cold War continued for decades. We're in a similar
situation now, domestic American politics make it impossible for
us to reach out to China, reach out to Iran, reach out to
Russia, and that is something that we're suffering under the
previous presidents also had to deal with. Kori Schake: Can I just add that
it's not actually true that most historians believe American
domestic politics are the re
ason that the cold war continued
after 1953 Soviet behavior had a lot to do with it. Stephen Kinzer: Okay. Jenna Thoretz: Thank you. And to
that point actually and to follow up with that, um, to Dr
Schake, what what sort of evidence is there that countries
like Guatemala and Iran were genuinely in danger of being
overcome by anti-American sentiment, and if there was
genuine danger, to what extent does that justify US
interventions and actions within those countries? Kori Schake: Okay, so that's
a
fantastic question, and I can't speak to Guatemala. I don't know
the case well enough, and maybe Stephen would like to speak to
that, since he's written extensively on it. In the case
of Iran, it wasn't anti-American sentiment that was driving the
concern about Mossadegh, it was the direction of the government
and its relationship with the Soviet Union, the
nationalization of the oil company. And we worried that we
couldn't protect Turkey, for example, or Greece or the
approaches of the Medite
rranean to protect Spain if Iran became
a satellite of the Soviet Union. We were worried about what that
would do in the Middle East. We already had begun to have
relationships with Saudi Arabia and others. And so for the
Eisenhower administration, they, this, this business about
dominoes falling felt real to them, and Stephen's earlier
point, I think is a really good one about how hard it is to
transport yourself back into how scary that time period felt. You
know, Eisenhower writes in his diar
y in 1958 that if the Soviet
Union were if we knew the Soviet Union were readying its nuclear
weapons for a launch on the United States, he debated what
he would do, and determined that he would actually have to let
hundreds of thousands of Americans be killed because he
didn't have the constitutional authority to unilaterally start
a war with the Soviet Union. I mean, an American president
hasn't had to think those thoughts in a very long time.
And coming off the experience of two worldwide con
flagrations in
their lifetime, they were very worried about trends that about
gathering storms, which is what Churchill titles one of his
memoirs. And so the nationalization of the oil
industry was, I think, the trigger again I'd welcome James'
and Stephen's views on this, but in Iran, the nationalization of
the oil companies made the Eisenhower administration
believe that Iran was going to become a communist government
and be associated with the Soviet Union in a way that would
be damaging to A
merican interests. I personally think
overthrowing the government was a bad idea, but that's what
they, that's what I think they were thinking, but I'd welcome
other views. James Goldgeier: I mean, what I
would just like to add is just when we, when we talk about
intervention American intervention during the Cold
War, I mean, there's a range of intervention, a lot of things
that we don't - you know, we're talking about cases that clearly
went awry for the United States, I mean the United States,
you
know, in the post World War Two period has not had a successful
Iran policy, I mean there was, there was the relationship with
the Shah, but that didn't, you know, obviously that was not a
long term effective policy for the United States and we talked
about places like Guatemala, you know, or GLA, with the election
of Salvador Allende that the United States, then opposed and
led to the, the role of General Pinochet, I mean, you know,
these are, these are mistakes of American policy but we h
ave to
broaden what we think of as our definition of intervention. We
intervened in Western Europe with the Marshall Plan, because
we were worried that those countries were going to fall to
domestic communist forces, if the government's there failed to
provide for their citizens. We intervened in South Korea to
save South Korea after the invasion by the North supported
by the, by China and the Soviet Union. Intervention of Vietnam
was a disastrous mistake, I mean, we made some disastrous
mistake
s, we also had some enormous successes. And so I
think the real challenge is thinking about what are the
different tools that the United States has at its disposal and
really trying to understand, you know, what it's trying to
achieve and what mix of those tools is most likely to produce
good outcomes for US interests and also for the interest of the
people in the countries involved. But I think we really
have to broaden the discussion to the different types of
intervention and the successes as
well as the failures that
we're really going to be able to evaluate US foreign policy. Stephen Kinzer: Talking about
broadening the discussion, I would just say that it's
dangerous. Every time you see a data gathering storm you say,
"Okay we got to act." We feel that we understand what's
happening in the world, but in many cases we don't. There was
absolutely no danger of Mossadegh bringing Iran into the
Soviet orbit most of the deck was an elderly feudal landlord
who despised all socialist and
communist ideas. We didn't
really know that. Now, it's often said Americans are
ignorant about the world which is certainly true, but many
people in many other countries are also ignorant about the
world, that's not lamented because that's our business we
try to educate people, but it's not necessarily bad, it doesn't
hurt the world. Ignorance alone is not the problem. If people in
Bolivia, don't know anything about, say, the Middle East,
that's a shame because the Middle East is interesting, bu
t
it doesn't hurt anybody; the United States, on the other
hand, act on its ignorance, we don't know anything about the
Congo or Indonesia or Iran or Guatemala, but we act, we lash
out. We lash out against Iraq, we lash out against countries
that we see as enemies. And because we act on our ignorance,
our ignorance is more dangerous than the ignorance of people in
other countries. Maddie Casey: Okay, thank you to
our panelists for those responses. So our next question
is somewhat directed at Dr
Goldgeier, but any panelist is
welcome to respond. We were wondering if you could provide
us with some of the domestic context within the United States
in this period, specifically in terms of anti-communist
sentiment and how such sentiment was used both in the
interventions that we've discussed previously and in, as
a means to sabotage American civil rights movements, and also
if you could briefly discuss the political movement McCarthyism
and how that movement contributed to incentives for
Ame
rican politicians during this period to weaponize
anti-communist rhetoric in order to consolidate political power. James Goldgeier: Wow, okay- Stephen Kinzer: Do that in two
minutes, please! James Goldgeier: Those are all
those are all great issues, and I think, you know, the political
establishment, people like President Eisenhower deserve
criticism for the way in which Senator McCarthy was handled.
But, you know, and it's not just Republicans, I mean there are
Democrats, Robert Kennedy worked
for Senator McCarthy, and the
Kennedy's own responses were insufficient as well to that
effort to basically go after all sorts of individuals on, what in
the vast majority of these cases were trumped up charges that
they were, you know, in cahoots with the Soviet Union are
somehow a threat to the United States, and of course that had
huge implications and in the State Department and academia
and Hollywood, and elsewhere. I think it's interesting really to
think about the role that anti-communism
played within
each political party during the Cold War. It certainly became an
important glue to hold the republican party together, and a
party that, you know, both political parties have distinct
wings. And you know, lots of, you know, challenges for the
direction of the particular party and what anti-communism
gave the Republican Party was a way to come together and to, you
know, argue that the central task of the United States was to
combat the Soviet Union. On the Democratic side, it's
int
eresting because presidents like Harry Truman and John F
Kennedy, were viewed as tough on national security as tough
anti-communists and, you know, were seeing as important figures
in in the cold war against the Soviet Union, what happens
within the Democratic Party is really the huge splits that
erupt because of the Vietnam War and the peace movement within
the Democratic Party, the opposition to what the United
States was doing the belief that, you know, rather than
being a force for good in t
he world, that the United States
was the problem in the world, and that, and so you had the
wing that believed that the United States was too much at
fault and too strident in its Cold War activity against the
Soviet Union becomes ascendant in the Democratic Party in the
early 1970s and shapes the future of that party for 20
years with respect to the fact that it could only win the
presidency once and that was the presidency of Jimmy Carter,
which was largely a response to the Watergate affair b
ut
otherwise, in that latter part of the Cold War, the Republican
Party became seen as the party of national security because it
was seen domestically, as the party that took the Soviet
threat seriously and and was willing to combat it. And what
enables the Democratic Party to emerge then, as the party that,
in fact, you know, not only can win the presidency but now has
won the popular vote for presidents for President every
time since the 1992 election except once, is that the charge
that the D
emocrats were soft on Communism which emerges in the
1970s is no longer relevant. After the collapse of the Soviet
Union, and so Bill Clinton, you know, Governor from Arkansas,
with little experience in world affairs, runs for president in
1992 and wins in a way that he really could not have had those
elections had he been running in the 1980s. He was running
against decorated war hero George HW Bush with significant
international experience and had been vice president and then
president for a t
erm, and people didn't care. But they would have
cared if the Cold War had still been going on so the Cold War
definitely shaped, both the politics of of that period, with
the anti communist glue holding the Republicans together, the
Democrats being tough in the Truman and Kennedy years and
then splitting and being able to be successful again after 1992
because being soft on Communism didn't matter. And it was the
Republicans who then split after the end of the Cold War because
they lost the glu
e that held them together, and I have
struggled with that ever since. Jenna Thoretz: Great, thank you
so much for that response. And our next question is directed at
Mr Kinzer and is focused on the role of the American press in
all of these events so we'd like to ask, can you give us any
specific examples of how the American Foreign Press
represented or misrepresented the events in other countries
and our role in political instability and other countries?
And as a follow up to that, and to what
extent did this media
coverage influence American citizens perceptions of
communism abroad and perceptions of our own actions as a nation? Kori Schake: That's a great
question! Unknown: It's really, it's too
great, actually, because it's just that's too much to deal
with. Let me just make a couple of observations. First of all,
it's certainly true that the Cold War narrative was
tremendously powerful. It's probably the most powerful
national narrative in modern history. How was it held
together?
Largely because of the press. You had Henry Luce,
controlling access of more than half of Americans to what they
heard about the world. And beyond that, a feeling on the
part of many people in the press, that it was our job to
promote the American interest. I think American journalism got
into the habit during the Cold War thinking that America is
essentially like a team. Everybody on the team has a
different role, and the press has a particular role which is
to make sure that the American peop
le are united behind a
certain set of policies. I don't like this because I don't
believe the press should be on anybody's team, the American
people should be allowed to have free information and and not to
be pushed towards certain conclusions. So I do think that
the press, played a tremendous role in demonizing leaders in
the world that the United States wanted to overthrow. If you read
the American press you would think terrible things about
Lumumba and Sukarno and Arbenz and Mossadegh. And t
his was not
an accident. The director of the CIA was on the phone with the
publisher of the New York Times and the president of US News and
World Report in the heads of American networks all the time.
The New York Times had a reporter in Guatemala Sidney
Grusin who started writing about land reform and the desperate
need of Guatemalans for land so they wouldn't start. He was
pulled out of Guatemala, after the head of the CIA called a
senior executive of the New York Times and got him pulled out,
so
the press, promoted the anti-communist ideology and not
by accident, it actually worked on both ends. It was the CIA,
through what they called Operation Mockingbird,
controlling what Americans read about the world, but the press
was very eager to do this, the press did not have to be forced
into doing it. I found a comment by an American Associated Press
reporter in Indonesia, who was watching American covert dry air
drops of weapons to revolutionaries trying to
overthrow the government in I
ndonesia, and he later said,
"We didn't write about it. Maybe it was a kind of patriotism that
made us hold back." So we felt, essentially he was saying now
I'm paraphrasing that this was an American project, we
shouldn't be against it, so let's flash forward to the
modern age without stopping, all the places along the way, the
Iraq War was a great example of this. It was one of the most
shameful episodes in the history of the American press. So, a
survey was later taken of the several 100 leadi
ng American
dailies, there wasn't a single one that opposed the American
invasion of Iraq, there were some that were kind of half and
half, just a few, but everybody was on board with a very few
exceptions. So the press bought into this. We didn't pull back
the way for example the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
should have done but certainly the press should have done and
said, "Wait a minute, everybody thinks this invading Iraq is a
good idea, everybody thinks Iraq has weapons of mass destr
uction,
but we're the press, we're not supposed to be like everybody,
we're supposed to pick up the corner of the rug and see what's
really in there and tell the stories that power does not want
to be told." But the press didn't do that. The Press played
its role as the stenographer of power, and that's one of the
reasons why we find ourselves in the position we're in right now. May I add one quick point to
that? Which is a reading recommendation for students.
It's a novel written in 1958 called
The Ugly American. And
it's one of my, it's not a good novel, but it's one of the best
books about American foreign policy because it shows how
visible to two angry national security experts in 1958, the
mistakes that we were making in these wars of middle interest
were, and it lays out an incredibly powerful case for a
much more effective American foreign policy. And for students
interested in how do you make good foreign policy, avoid the
mistakes that they catalogue chapter by chapter in thi
s
novel, and the press has an enormously powerful role to play
in it. Maddie Casey: Okay, thank you
for those comments from the panelists, we're now going to
transition into some audience questions, briefly. So, one of
our first questions. This might be best directed towards Dr
Schake. Looking for it towards the next few decades, how would
you advise future leaders to confront surmounting
geopolitical issues that present unprecedented challenges, as
well as addressed older ones that have yet to
be resolved?
Additionally, with regards to a President's decision to
undertake covert actions a version of both Congress and the
consequences for his actions, or lack thereof seem to only serve
as a template for future presidents to the same. Is
presidential accountability necessary or has this trend
become too ingrained in American leadership? Kori Schake: So three
interesting very separate parts of the question. So first
presidential accountability. I do believe it's been badly
eroded by Congr
ess not exercising its constitutional
powers of oversight and funding that we still have
authorizations for the use of military force on the books from
the 1990s, and we are using that 2001 authorization for purposes
that was never intended to because Congress doesn't want to
take a record on the record vote about what we should or
shouldn't be doing, that's, that's terrible for democracy in
America, and it makes for bad foreign policy as well. And the
second piece of the question. I'm sorry I c
an't remember the
second piece of the question I'll go to the first piece of
the question, which was kind of, what do we do about gathering
threats? You know, one of the things that Eisenhower
understood, and, and that we don't give him enough credit
for, was he believed that military force could freeze a
situation, while the attractions of the American way of life
created converts. He very often wasn't in a hurry. And he very
often thought that when people saw the security and the
prosperity th
at Americans enjoyed, the liberties that
Americans enjoyed, that the magnetism of that was what was
actually going to win the Cold War. And that, I think, is
something we under invest in, and I agree with Stephen that we
over militarized, a lot of the threats that we are concerned
about, and I would suggest - I'd be interested whether Jim agrees
with me on this - that America's tools of attraction, are, are as
equally important, and we under invest in helping societies be
successful in ways that
we are successful, that we, we think
too little about how do we use the tools of free societies,
transparency, the rule of law, accountability, does disparate
dispersal of power that isn't centralized? How do we help
countries do those things in ways that will shape their
longer term prospects advantageously for them and
advantageously for us? Stephen Kinzer: And to add to
that, what about the de munition of our value as an example? I
mean, how many people around the world are looking at us now
as
the ideal society they want to become compared to how they were
looking at us even a few years ago? James Goldgeier: Yeah, well,
since Cory mentioned my, my name there, I wanted to come in on
her point about the attraction and transparency but also say
something about the role of Congress which is incredibly
important and, you know, want to make sure to say one particular
point about that. You don't need attraction and helping other
countries move in a certain direction. So, I mean, again,
y
ou know, I think it helps to really think about it, think
about how we've intervened and in very broad terms, and, and I
think looking at Central Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold
War is a really important example. And the question is,
why did it turn out the way it did? Are there lessons to be
learned, are there particular, are there things that are unique
to that particular time and place? Because what happened was
you had all these countries, you know, behind the Iron Curtain,
they wer
e dominated by the Soviet Union occupied by the
Soviet Union. And then, the communist regimes collapse, the
Soviet Union collapses and the question is, well now what?
These countries were desperate to be part of the West, and the
United States, I mean, some of the advice the United States
gave was good so of the United States wasn't a good, but, you
know, the United States was asked, and Western Europeans as
well, they were asked for political and economic advice to
produce societies that would
have democratic policies and
market economies and respect for rule of law, respect for human
rights, but hugely important with civilian control over the
military, and, and the West used its two major institutions, NATO
and the European Union, as well as foreign assistance to really
help countries evolve in ways that, you know, no one knew
whether it would work out or not but has largely been successful,
even with some what we call backsliding in several of those
countries. So I think really tryi
ng to understand what was
required from the standpoint of those countries themselves the
kind of leaders they produced their interactions with the
United States and its then allies existing allies, and how
that turned out I think is is really important still to study.
I wanted to mention on Congress. I think we have a really
interesting situation right now because presidents typically
have jealously guarded their prerogatives and really, you
know, they've accrued more and more power over time, a
nd they
don't like to give it up, typically, and that Congress has
been very weak on foreign policy in the post Cold War period
expertise declined dramatically in Congress with respect to
foreign policy and national security. And so, as Cory was
saying, oversight declined. Congress doesn't like to vote on
use of force questions so they'd be just as happy to stay out of
the whole discussion about a new authorization to use military
force. I think one interesting thing to watch is that in the
2018
election, there were a number of national security
professionals who were elected to the Congress who were
reelected in 2020. And one question is whether or not those
members will begin to play a more important role, given their
prior national security expertise -I did a webinar
recently at Brookings with one of those members of Congress
Congressman Andy Kim from New Jersey. And we talked about this
the congressional role in foreign policy, and what to
expect and one of the reasons I'm interest
ed in this, and why
I say things of, you know, there may be a moment of change here,
is that it's clear from the, the statements that have been made
by President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken and partly it
reflects, you know, President Biden was in the Senate for a
long long time. Secretary Blinken, worked for Senator
Biden before he became Senator Biden became vice president, and
then worked for him during the Obama years and then moved on to
become Deputy Secretary of State, so they hav
e a lot of
experience with Congress, and they've called for a stronger
congressional role in foreign policy, and I think the reason
is because of what we've seen from 2016 to 2020, and then
potentially 2024. Donald Trump was elected in 2016 He came in
in 2017 and he undid all sorts of things that Barack Obama had
done. You know, walked away from the Trans Pacific Partnership
the Paris Climate Accords, the Iran nuclear deal, and so on. Joe Biden's elected in 2020,
comes in 2021 and he comes back
into the Paris Climate Accords,
he's talking about coming back into the Iran nuclear deal,
he's, you know he extended the New START treaty that, that the
Trump administration was, was walking away from. Alright so
what happens, who's going to be elected in 2024? We don't know.
How will Joe Biden's policies last past January 20 of 2025?
Why, why wouldn't they just zig and zag again, you know,
depending on you know for Republicans elected in 2024 if
Trump's real elected again in 2024? There's only
one way
really to to help create more stability in US foreign policy
and that is to have a stronger congressional role in foreign
policy, and I think that's why you see the President and
Secretary of State calling for that stronger congressional role
and the question will be whether the Congress is up for it and
what that would look like if they engaged more and use their
constitutionally derived powers to play that role. Jenna Thoretz: Thank you very
much. So we have just a couple of more ques
tions for you all,
thank you once again for your time. This next question is
coming from our audience. And any of you can feel free to jump
in and give your thoughts on this, so this question asks How
does skin color or race seem to in fact seem to affect past
interventions? Is that a determinant in US foreign
policy? James Goldgeier: I am so glad
this question was asked because I forgot to answer that part of
the question earlier that was tying anti-communism, the Cold
War to the question that
was put earlier about harming civil
rights, I think that it's really important to think about the
ways in which the Cold War battle with the Soviet Union was
seen by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. And what seemed by
Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, all of whom
preceded the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When they looked at the
ways in which the United States was losing the propaganda war
with the Soviet Union because the United States is talking
about human rights as violating the righ
ts of Americans. And,
you know, there were just some absolutely outrageous cases of
course - I mean we've, we've seen some recently in our
American history - cases that existed during the Cold War and
were used by the Soviet Union to say look at this, look at the
United States. Look at the way they treat African American
community look at the way they treat others, and, and much of
the effort by Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy on civil
rights was because of the need to make improvements in that
battle with the, with the Soviet Union, and Emory University
Professor Mary Dudziak has a wonderful book called Cold War
Civil Rights showing this but also showing that policies were
not what they might have been because they weren't about
necessarily about making things better here in the United States
to make things better here in the United States they were
about making things better in order to for all Americans.
Because of the propaganda war with with the Soviet Union, and
I think this is a
, this is a real question for today as well.
You know, as countries like China and Russia are able to use
the kinds of events that we've seen here in the United States,
whether it was the murder of George Floyd or whether the
recent killings in Atlanta of Asian American women, whether or
not countries like China and Russia can use that as
propaganda to cast doubt on the United States in its claims to
be a free and inclusive society. What then is possible? Of
course, the United States government
should be addressing
these issues because they're important to address for all of
us in the United States. Systemic racism is something we
should be addressing in the United States because it's
important for us to do so. It's possible that there will be
additional impetus to do so because of the foreign policy
ramifications, as there was during the Cold War. Maddie Casey: Alright, and our
last question for all of our panelists, is how can we as
students and citizens become engaged in our politic
al
processes as a nation and hold the United States government
responsible for treating other country's political processes
with respect? Is this reasonable, and is it possible? Kori Schake: It's both
reasonable, and possible. ecome a journalist become a college
professor, join the Marine Corps become an American diplomat,
join the CIA to make sure they're ethical voices in the
conversation about, about all of the subjects we've been talking
about, become a participant because your integrity, an
d your
perspective, are needed by your country. Stephen Kinzer: I support all of
them I would just add this one piece of advice. Don't fall into
following the paradigm that you're being fed by the mass
media. Recently I've been watching Fox News and CNN, I
tell you one is worse than the other. It's all the same, rant
over and over again. Try to expand your sources of
information, look at blogs like informed comment or responsible
statecraft, look beyond the stenography of power that it
character
izes much of the mass media, don't just become a
subject for what's pouring out of Washington, try to educate
yourself about the world. You know, Condoleezza Rice had a
nice line even though it was grammatically kind of odd about
Iran, she said, "We really don't have a very good veracity, about
the place." What she meant was we don't know anything about it.
We've never had a diplomat that's ever would have no
diplomat that has ever been in Iran, you college students can
be the counterbalance for
that you are the source of knowledge,
so pull yourself outside of what you're supposed to believe, and
look at things with an independent mind, that would be
my number one piece of advice. James Goldgeier: When I, I teach
a first year undergraduate class called America in the World
Since 1989, and I start the class, showing video that I'm
sure many of, if not all of your students have seen YouTube
video, Jeff Daniels in the show Newsroom, where he's asked what
makes America great. And he goes o
n a diatribe, about how it used
to be great but it's not anymore and he particularly goes after,
in ways that are completely inappropriate and unacceptable,
the woman student, he's assuming, who, who is asking the
question. So it generates a great discussion, because my
students get very angry, and of course the central message that
they have for me is, well, why is he blaming our generation,
your generation is the one that messed everything up. And I
think the important thing for you all who ar
e going to have to
fix the things that we messed up, is to really, is to
challenge us, and as you go out from school - I gather that
those of you in the undergraduate Fellows Program
are graduating in a couple months, and I learned before the
session, that there's going to be an on campus ceremony which
is fantastic; I'm so happy for you - I mean you're going to go
out into the workforce, or in graduate, or go to graduate
school. And I would just encourage you that if you're
working at places w
here Kori Schake and Stephen Kinzer and
Jim Goldgeier and others are working, that you challenge
them, and that you don't just accept what they are saying as
reflecting some kind of truth, but you bring your insights to
bear as the individuals who are going to have to make the
difference. As we enter some extraordinarily difficult times
for the United States and the world and particularly of course
on climate change. Stephen Kinzer: Don't think that
you know best, that's, that's one way the Unit
ed States has
gotten into a lot of trouble than we think we know what's
good for the world better than the world itself knows, Ask
yourself whether we really know what we're doing before we do
things. Jenna Thoretz: Thank you, thank
you all for being here and thank you to everyone that has joined
us tonight for the Eisenhower Institute's panel, US Foreign
Policy from Eisenhower to Reagan: Who Did it Serve and
What Were the Consequences. And again, a very special thank you
to James Goldgeier, Kor
i Schake, and Stephen Kinzer for being
with us. We hope you'll join us Thursday for Space Commerce: the
Burgeoning Business of Satellites, hosted by the
Eisenhower Institute Fielding Fellows. Follow Eisenhower
Institute on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and sign up for the
Eisenhower Institute newsletter for additional programming. Have
a great rest of your night.
Comments
The military Industrial Complexes (MIC) is so well divided among many important states, that tied the hands of Congress. Now we must serve the MIC for life. They (MIC) had been employing the intellectual elites of our nation to master our congressional leaders and think tanks. It’s too late to do anything now. Thanks for the extremely inspiring, learning and thought provoking discussions