Crafting a Better Future

Moving beyond the situation that might help us with the vision, looking back at this historical record that we've been talking about, what sort of characteristics do we need in a president for him to be able to do this "vision thing" in a way that works?

Well, good advisors, for one thing. Presidents themselves rarely come up with visions. Key advisors tend to do that for them, and you have to have somebody who has a sense of modesty, as Truman genuinely did -- he was willing to listen to advisors. It's the rarest thing that you have a president himself who can articulate that vision. Eisenhower, to an extent, was capable of it, but few others have been.

Also, you have to have a president who is (this may sound funny, but -- ) a little bit laid back, in terms of the duties of the office. The president who insists on having his hands on everything is going to be an incrementalist. He's going to be bogged down in day-to-day decision making, he's not going to be able to step back and take the larger view. The Carter administration was an excellent example of that. President Carter just could not stand back and look at the larger picture and, as a result, undertook a bunch of things that contradicted each other. I think that has to be there.

There clearly has to be an ability to move the public and to sustain public support. You have to be able to convince the public that this vision, whatever it is, is the right thing to do and that it's going to advance the national interest. If you can't sell it, then you're not going to get very far with it.

I would add, finally, a sense of proportion. You have to have a sense of what the relationship is between ends and means, you can't just project a vision that's totally detached from reality, totally detached from your own capabilities. That was the problem with SDI. It was a vision, but it went well beyond capabilities, it went well beyond the laws of physics and mathematics, as far as that's concerned and, at least as a scientific and military instrument, has proven to be a failure in that regard. It may well have been very successful as a political instrument however, as a bargaining device with the Russians.

What about the resource question? You said that again and again in this record, the resource constraints are a very important determining factor in what we can do, and right now, as our debate on decline proves, there is a sense that we don't have the resources that we have had. How do you think that's going to impinge on this process of evolving a new strategy?

It's an important constraint. I would put it in slightly different terms. It's not so much a matter of us not having the resources as that we don't have the will to pay for the resources. We could double defense spending without great harm to the economy tomorrow if people were willing to pay the taxes. We could double what we spend on roads and highways, or on social welfare programs, or on education tomorrow if people were willing to pay the taxes. This is still an extraordinarily low taxed country compared to many others. But none of that is going to happen unless the political will to do that is there.

What was different about the Cold War situation, the so-called "high Cold War" from 1950 through about 1970, is that the political consensus existed in that period to have half of the government's spending going for defense. Today, it's about a quarter. Until you get a change in the political will, you won't see the resources being developed. But physically, the resources are very likely there. Intellectually, certainly, the resources are there. It simply is a matter of how the public wants to allocate its priorities, what they want to spend money on.

What is the historian's contribution to this ongoing process? Is it important that we look at this record of what we've done, vis-à-vis our policy toward the Soviet Union and the rest of the world in order to formulate a new policy?

One hopes that it's a good thing to look at it. It makes sense from a commonsense point of view, that it's a good thing to look at it, because the advantage of doing history is that it broadens out your own range of experience, you don't have to depend just on what you, as a policymaker, have experienced, but you can draw on the accumulated experience of other policymakers in other times and places. So, at least in theory, some historical consciousness is a good thing.

It can also be a very dangerous thing though, that's a part of the problem. Some of our greatest mistakes in foreign policy have come precisely out of a historical consciousness that was misguided -- Lyndon Johnson's conviction, for example, that Munich, 1938, would replicate itself if we didn't get involved in Vietnam in 1965. A totally disconnected and inappropriate analogy in retrospect, but one that he believed very strongly in. So did other people.

The trick to doing this is to get a proper sense of how to do analogy, to make sure that more than just one analogy is looked at. That becomes a lengthy and complicated process, which then comes up against the fact that policymakers don't have that much time to do this kind of thing. So there are some difficulties.

What about a contribution toward the general education of citizenry? I understand that most historians are not as lucky as Paul Kennedy to have a best-seller, in the sense that their work is broadly distributed, but what about that input?

And even with Paul Kennedy, you have the feeling that people only read the last two chapters of his book, and have tended to see in it what they wanted to see.

Sure, if you're going to have an impact, that's where any academic is most likely to have the impact, short of being called in and asked to be NFC Advisor, where even then, your impact may not be all that great. It's on educating the next generation. It's on educating the people who will percolate up at some point to the condition of leadership. The difficulty we get into there, of course, is it's a long-term process, and if you think about this generation of college students, and how long it may be before they come in to a position of responsibility, their education may be totally inappropriate, as one might say of the current breed of policymakers.

So, it's too bad. There ought to be some way of updating statesmen in what the currents of scholarship are revealing about policy issues at some point beyond the time that they graduate at age twenty-one or twenty-two. There are not very many mechanisms for doing that within the government. Occasionally it happens, but only occasionally.

As a historian, and looking over this particular record, does one develop a real sense of tragedy, of men doing things they don't understand the implications of?

You wouldn't be a very good historian if you didn't have some sense of tragedy, and certainly, a sense of the frequency of incompetence along the way, of course. It ought not to produce Spenglerian gloom, because there are also examples of learning that are encouraging. The very fact that we're still here after forty-five years of Cold War, that we haven't had World War III, ought to give a considerable cause for optimism. Certainly it does to me, as a historian. It suggests something about the ability of societies, nations, and leaders to learn from the past, to learn from the experiences of World War I and World War II. So, I don't think it's a totally gloomy situation. But if you go into history with the view that policymakers at the top level are going to be panting for every article that you grind out or that their ideas are going to hinge on every word that you write, you can expect disillusionment.

One final question. Is there one kernel of truth that this record of U.S. - Soviet relations reveals that is worth repeating now, in the context of our current discussions of a future strategy?

The complete historian's answer to that is that, of course there's no such thing as "truth" in history to begin with. But I think that I would come back to what I just said: things could be worse. That would be the kernel of truth that I would hold out. Given the history of the way that other great nations have encountered each other, and given the frequency with which war, and even the destruction of the nation, has been the result, I think there is some grounds for saying that the Russians and the Americans have not managed their rivalry all that badly. Other rivalries have been more poorly managed over the years, and we ought to take a certain amount of satisfaction, perhaps, in that.

Professor Gaddis, thank you very much for this very interesting walk through the Cold War. We very much appreciate it, and thank you for being with us.

Thank you.

And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation on International Affairs.

To the Conversations page