| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Michael Nacht Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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I'm interested in the role of ideas in foreign policy and national security policy, and how new ideas develop, and what are the institutions and processes by which that happens. You were a founding editor of a very important journal, International Security, which came at a particular point in our history after the Vietnam War.
Right, just as Vietnam was ending.
Tell us a little about the founding of that journal, and how it came to be a factor in the foreign policy discussions, at least among the technocrats and intellectuals in the field.
Well, it's an interesting little story; I'll condense it. But I had the good fortune to be at a major place, Harvard University, after I received my Ph.D. I was part of a center there that dealt with security and arms control issues. This was at a time, in the mid-seventies, when even thinking about these issues was still almost verboten on many college campuses, because the anger over Vietnam was so intense and so long-lasting.
An important figure at Harvard who doesn't get the public attention he should, Paul Doty, a very distinguished biochemist, had a dual life. His other life was in these fields of security and arms control, and he persuaded McGeorge Bundy, who by then was the president of the Ford Foundation, to provide a major grant to start a center, and part of those funds we used to start this journal. The rationale behind it was that there wasn't any journal that we saw in the field that could publish serious, well-documented, databased, analytical, scholarly work in this field.
There were important journals -- Foreign Affairs, of course, was an eminent journal for decades, going back to the twenties -- but often one of commentary or of major national figures offering advocacy of their positions. It wasn't really a research journal. Foreign Policy had been started only a few years before we started ours, and they had some research articles, but also many articles of commentary. We wanted primarily to attract the serious analyst, the scholarly community, and the people who really wanted to look into the details, who wanted to read an article with 75 or 275 footnotes, and a lot of charts. We were not unwilling to publish any of them. Now, of course, that meant the market would be small, and I think even today, International Security has maybe 6,000 or 8,000 subscribers and Foreign Affairs may have 200,000 subscribers. But I think we did fill an important niche.
I was associated with it as long as I was at Harvard, until 1984, and I think it's a terrific journal twenty years later. It's a wonderful journal for the serious student of these subjects.
Do journals like that put ideas on the table before they have a currency, say, in Washington or in the public debate?
Absolutely. I haven't done a content analysis in recent years, but most of the authors in this journal are in the university community. There are some who are not, but most are. They are not necessarily involved in or wedded to the details of day-to-day Washington machinations or what's going on at the UN or elsewhere. They're standing back and looking at a lot of material from scholarly sources, and they're building models, they're making analytical judgments, and they could easily be ahead of their time. Sometimes their time never comes, but it's very valuable. They are constantly, as the scholar does, testing and retesting hypotheses, challenging conventional wisdoms, overthrowing paradigmatic ways of thinking. This is, of course, the very nature of the intellectual enterprise.
You mentioned McGeorge Bundy and the Ford Foundation, and I'm curious as to what sort of grade you would give the foundations? I know in earlier careers you've done a lot of consulting, and maybe even today, evaluating the work that has been funded and so on. Generally, would you give a good grade to the foundations, in terms of anticipating problems? It's obviously easy to put the money into a set of inquiries after something has happened, but not always easy to do it before.
I may be too close to this community. I've been associated with the American philanthropic community, and to some degree some others in Germany and Japan for, as you say, almost three decades now.
They're not perfect, but they are an essential element to the whole way the American system works, because, first of all, there are a lot of smart people who work in these foundations full time. They are not merely receiving ideas from prospective grantees and then providing funds, they're often generating the ideas and saying, "We would like some work done in this area." They often generate their ideas through conversations with scholars and people in government and elsewhere. So they're like a "fifth estate," they're another key nodal point in the network. They fund a lot of very interesting work, path-breaking work. Of course, as a percentage of all the things that they've funded, probably it's not that high, but you can't expect tremendous mega-hits every time.
There was work done on the role of nuclear energy in the 1970s that was funded by Ford; and the Rockefeller Foundation has done path-breaking work on public health in sub-Saharan Africa. There's been work funded by the Carnegie Corporation in New York on the sources of internal conflict. These are all very valuable studies. And not only that, they not only fund studies, they support people, fellowships, visiting appointments, the establishment of research centers in many fields. The major centers of study in the field of international security today in the United States (and not only in the United States, but elsewhere) -- at Harvard, at Stanford, at MIT and elsewhere, at IISS in London -- they're all based on Ford funding, almost every one. And if not Ford, then the other American foundations came through.
So I don't in any way underestimate the importance of the American philanthropic community, which, I should add, is unique. There are very few examples of a comparable degree of philanthropic spirit in most other -- even the richest countries of the world. I mean, Germany has a few major foundations now, many more than they used to have, which is a great sign. Japan has just a couple. France has hardly anything. Britain has very little. Most of the other European countries have very little. Outside of that, there's almost none, because they're the poorer countries. So I think the United States philanthropic community is very ... you know, we have a lot to be thankful for, for what they've done.
You're uniquely situated to give us a perspective on the dichotomy between theory and practice, especially in the national security field, but in public policy generally, between the way the books tell us the system works and the way it actually works. I would like to draw on your experience in the government to help us understand that dichotomy better. Of what you read and studied, did it prepare you for what you learned when you actually went to the Arms Control Disarmament Agency?
It prepared me, but incompletely. For example, I think in a lot of the literature and in the whole scholar community, there's a tendency not to dwell on or to weigh very heavily the importance of individuals. One looks at macro forces and ways of thinking. So it doesn't matter whether you're doing it or I'm doing it, it will come out the same way if it's in a certain context. What I found on the ground -- whether I was in Washington or Moscow or Beijing or in Petra, Jordan, which were some of the places I was in during my tour of duty in government -- is that people matter a tremendous amount. It does matter whether you're in charge or I'm in charge, and whether it's your set of ideas that's the driving force or not. So that's one thing. Now, you might say, "Boy, that's a kind of trite observation: 'people matter everywhere.'" But somehow I think I was not prepared to appreciate how much they mattered.
The second point is that bureaucratic politics are more important and more visible when you're in government than you appreciate if you're not in government. The most important thing that I observed, which I have not seen in any of the [political science] literature, is what I call ideological cohorts. Maybe it's in a piece that I haven't read; I would modify to some degree some of the paradigms that Graham Allison and others articulated, which largely discuss the role of agencies competing with each other within the Executive branch.
[Ideological cohorts] are people with a set of value systems in common. They have the same value system, but they don't work in the same place. Some could be in the press, some could be on Capitol Hill, some could be in the State Department, the Defense Department, the Arms Control Agency, when it existed (it's now part of the State Department), and elsewhere. And they all have a similar view of things. This becomes a powerful "congeniality" force, because they actually even collaborate with each other, even though it's sort of not part of the rules. Opposed to them is another cohort, with diametrically opposed, markedly different views, that is equally across agency lines. So sometimes the struggle is not Defense versus State or Executive versus Congressional, it's ideological group A versus ideological group B. And then the media and others, people in academia, are used in a way as pawns to justify these arguments. That's a very powerful force which I have not seen in the literature.
The third point, which is in human affairs: people make mistakes. I know, I'll just speak for myself, I've made many mistakes; partly inadvertently, partly maybe deliberately, partly for lack of information, partly because I rush things. Well, the same thing happens in government. I think scholars tend to sit back and look at a government policy and assume it's almost like a Tiffany diamond, it's perfectly created. It may be all screwed up, but every part was intentionally constructed in exactly the way it comes out. And then they try to develop all kinds of theories to justify this. They may not like it, but to explain how did this happen.
And oftentimes it's not the case: it was rushed, it just was scribbled on a napkin. I mean, it's hard to sometimes say this, but it's the truth. I remember one time -- I'll spare you the details and camouflage the people -- but I was in a situation where a doctoral student gave a very elaborate theory of why a very eminent Secretary of State once got off an airplane and made a statement about another country very far from where he had just landed. It all had to do with signaling, and this and that. He drew a lot of interesting evidence from the theoretical literature. He made a very powerful case. And then after he made the presentation, someone said, "Would you mind if I comment on what your dissertation was about? Because I happened to have been in the airplane with the Secretary when that was developed, and I'd like to tell you what happened." And, of course, what happened had nothing, nothing whatever to do with this beautiful, powerful, very persuasive theoretical insight.
So I think there's a lot of happenstance, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't work as well as one would like to think it does in the real world, that's not reflected in the literature, and you just have to realize that, and you have to sort of roll with the punches. You have to understand when you can take initiative and when you'd better stand back, when you understand what the rules of the game are and when you think the rules might be shifting. And it's tricky. It's subjective. It's often non-quantifiable. It's hard to stay abreast of this.
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