| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Michael Nacht Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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What are the skills required to do public policy, foreign policy analysis? What sort of training does a student need, or what sort of aptitude or temperament should they possess over and above their education?
Part of it should be a willingness to suspend one's beliefs and look at the data, and have the skills to analyze the data. Now, data in this field comes in many colors. So a part of it is through quantitative methods of analysis, part of it is just understanding how political systems work and how bureaucracies work -- when a president makes a speech, what might be behind that speech? -- having a sophisticated understanding of how that works. You can learn that, but there's almost nothing like seeing it in action to appreciate it. But you have to be somewhat inquisitive, and you have to be willing to suspend to some degree your belief systems until you see how it works in action.
What does a school of public policy teach, other than these quantitative skills and learning how to research a problem?
Well, there's a core curriculum. It's basically a public sector analog to an MBA in the private sector. So there are courses in microeconomics, because a lot of the issues in public policy are resource allocation issues -- how much money do we put into which area? Microeconomics is enormously powerful to answer those questions and to understand economic behavior. But we also teach courses in political analysis, in public management, how to manage in the public sector when there's no profit motive. We also look at the role of law in public policy, because law is such a powerful tool, especially in democratic societies. So it's a mixture of those tool courses, and then the rest are substantive courses in areas of interest. They may be of policy, they may be criminal justice, they may be social policy, housing, race relations, affirmative action, those kinds of things. Or they could be in foreign policy and national security.
What are the differences, if any, in doing public policy in what we might call domestic areas -- housing, health -- versus doing policy analysis and work in national security and foreign policy? Is there something that distinguishes that foreign policy/national security realm?
Yes. I think that the data is less well developed in the foreign area. It is, in some ways, more politicized. You have very prominent and intelligent people on completely opposite sides of the fence, who are not willing to compromise much at all. I also think that the degree of personal animosity that can develop in the foreign realm is much more intense than the domestic realm. Maybe that's because I've spent most of my time in the foreign policy area. I think the reason for that is the people who are engaged in these debates believe that it is literally a matter of life and death, it is literally a matter of the survival of the society that we're discussing. And, therefore, they're not very tolerant of views that don't conform to their own. Whereas, others will say, "Well, you know, if this approach to welfare reform doesn't work, it will fail, and we'll try again in a few years to adjust it." I don't think it quite has that intensity [of foreign policy work]; but, you know, it may well be that people who have worked on those issues over many years believe that they encounter as much intensity as I have in the international arena.
What is the greatest obstacle to making rational national security policy in a democracy? Is it what you just said, or is there an added dimension to it?
I think there's an added dimension with the way the policy process works. A new administration comes in with a set of ideas, and it's often very hard to implement a lot of them, because the whole governmental structure of the United States is designed to make it hard to get anything done. That was what, in many ways, the founding fathers had in mind. They were trying to protect against a tyranny, and they've succeeded. So you have tremendous competition, and competition within agencies, across agencies, and between the entire Executive branch and the Congress.
You also have now in the American democracy a plethora of other players that play a role. Whether it's the press, which, of course, has always been very powerful, or the think-tank community, which has mushroomed tremendously since the 1960s, or university scholars and other organized units within universities, they all play a role, as well as the military and the industrial sector. So it's a very complicated set of players that are involved, and they tend to produce an outcome which may not make much sense to anybody. It's a compromise, it's a resultant force (in the physics sense) of a compromise among many different competing interests.
What about public opinion in this equation? It would seem that the public is more susceptible to not understanding the issues, because many areas related to foreign policy don't have anything to do with things that they really know about, or what we might call "bread and butter" issues. Is that an element in all of this?
I think that administrations and people in politics, of course, pay attention to the public. They both seem to influence public opinion, but they are also influenced by public opinion. I don't think it is correct to accept the statements often made by people that, "Oh, we don't care what the public thinks." That's not true. But the public is slow, often, to decide these things. The American public warms up to these issues. If it becomes a hot-button issue, they become quite well informed about it. Of course, our whole system is geared to informing them. We have this tremendous media of all stripes -- with all of its problems and all of its weaknesses, it's a fantastic resource, in a sense, to support the state. It's an essential element of our democracy. So after a while the public does form an opinion, and if that opinion becomes very, very pronounced in one direction or another, it's very hard for an administration to go against it. But that may take years. The whole name of the game, especially in national policy, is "what's happening this afternoon."
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