the discussions included assessments of roosevelt, jfk, george h.w. bush and bill clinton as well as their russian count counterparts. this is about an hour. >> this is our second half of this panel. we'll go to a little bit past 1:00. i have just met vlad subok last evening over dinner and after dinner and which we had a fascinating conversation about khrushchev and kennedy but two slightly different khrushchevs and kennedys about whom we've been speaking and it was mrs. jacklyn kennedy and mrs. khrushchev. and we might save that for a later discussion but i really enjoyed that conversation. vlad is a professor of international history at the london school of economics, an expert on the cold war and russian soviet history and particularly intellectual history.

among the books is particularly related to our topic of this conference, a failed empire, the soviet union and the cold war from stalin to gorbachev and i also noted among his books zhavago's children and having just watched the movie yet again, i was drawn, of course, to that topic. jeremy suri is a long-time friend of the miller center. as we did recently welcome him back for an american forum on the latest book "the impossible presidency" which in light of the incumbent might be called the impossible president but it's "the impossible presidency" about whether anyone now can be a successful president. jeremy is the mac brown distinguished chair for leadership and global affairs at university of texas an he's based in both the department of history and the lynn din johnson school of public affairs. so i'm going to turn to vlad

first who will speak to us about his essay on brezhnev and the lessons of detente. all right. >> should i go there? >> you may go wherever you are comfortable. >> maybe i'll say. everybody says i'll be brief so i'll try to be brief. [ laughter ] in reality. which doesn't mean -- when we think about brezhnev, of course, we're struck by the fact that such an individual, a threadbarer of education, no ability came up with an idea of detente and, you know, succeeded for at least for a while in that enterprise. it's useful of course to compare khrushchev to brezhnev. the person that represents heroic tradition.

that is -- that's take by the existing capitalist system and believes in revolution and all that. bill wrote a beautiful biography of him. he was a true believer. but if you ask yourself why there was only one khrushchev truly in the history of the cold war, there were no imitators of khrushchevs before him and certainly no willing imitators of khrushchev after him which is easier to understand. you come up with a more sort of normative picture of soviet policy where most people even stalin at many points of his career and certainly people after stalin's death begin to search for some kind of soviet/american detente or some

kind of a conceptual system structurally -- structure to accommodate both american and soviet systems and makes khrushchev a colorful but only an episode a heroic episode in this search for accommodation between the two great powers. and for brezhnev personally, whatever khrushchev did was quite awful, especially in foreign policy and just in -- as a reaction sometimes purely visceral reaction to the rice taking that brezhnev supported something opposite and repeated that guide that brought us to the brink of the war. so brezhnev's idea of detente was very, very simple. it was not a peace idea but it

was deeply held idea that if you have two great powers they're big, they have nuclear weapons, they can destroy each other, what prevents them actually from reaching some kind of an agreement to stable ides, to build a stable world order? for brezhnev it's absolutely logical that sooner or later that should happen. the only problem is that some people in the united states, some, you know, militant complex here brezhnev does not understand much what is out there, something prevents on the american side this idea from being realized and then all of a sudden he finds a partner with whom he can negotiate which results in also very important to negotiate from a position of strength and he does believe in strength. that's richard nixon. he comes to power in 1969. very good year for brezhnev because he managed to deal with

a huge crisis in the eastern europe with czechoslovakia and he said had we not invaded czechoslovakia or rather he put it differently, of course, not invaded, saved, you know, czechoslovakia then of course now the troops would end up immediately on our western borders. that resonates with today putin's thinking. so he's a more normal soviet man to methane khrushchev and there are many more brezhnevs in the soviet political establishment than there were khrushchevs. khrushchev's pretty unique if you think about it. so, however, when you look at brezhnev's detente and its fate and you begin to realize that it is detente hit its limitations very soon, in a few years.

definitely by 1975, everyone understands something went wrong. this is not only jackson amendment this is many other things. piling up. my argument is very, very simple. brezhnev's idea, not only brezhnev's idea, the idea of huge number of soviet communists, officials, mostly russians but also ukrainians and others that there could be a conceptual framework where the two powers would form a stable world order based on delusion and misperception of what america is about and how america wanted to build the world with u.s. leadership and only u.s. leadership. so when brezhnev meets nixon who's already, you know, half drunk in watergate stage, that's crimea and that's the last

meeting he raises a toast to the doctrine of lasting and universal peace, the brezhnev/nixon doctrine. that's a joke but there's something deeper behind the joke and i would argue that brezhnev could not realize it's an oxymoron. american elites never, ever wanted to create such a world order. they wanted to prevail in the cold war and the united states did offer strategic alliance to a big communist country but it was china. not the soviet union. and they offered the alliance to china because it expoli explici directed to the soviet union. now moving to putin. putin is a very different person than khrushchev but it's also

very different person in comparison to brezhnev. there's some similarities. there's not differences. let's go through them. for those that didn't have a chance to read the paper. putin like brezhnev is deeply e-liberal. he respects force, supporting military, venerates fatherland war like bresch nevada and promotes state. to reduce him to a kgb man is a height of -- it's deeply wrong. he had a deep learning curve. he learned a lot, what does it mean when the is state is destroyed? and russia was flooded by highly unpleasant realities. so he accepted fundamental failure of communist as economic dock dri doctrine.

he does not want to rebuild a soviet empire. his project is to improve russia's place in the existing world order, not to create a new one and here comes the rub. if you think about it, if you talk to, you know, very knowledgeable russians, i had an exchange with one of them over e-mail recently, they don't understand why russia cannot find a proper model, a place for itself in the world. sometimes russia acts as if it's a superpower and understands that russia cannot be a super power for economic and other reasons. doesn't have enough oomph for that, right? russia refuses to act as a regional power because it's allegedly something, you know, self diminishing and so, you know, russia is somewhere -- the relationship of russia to the existing liberal order is not an easy thing to establish. and just in terms of provoking a discussion, i would argue that it's highly dicotomist.

putin's state, regime, depends on microeconomic stability and export/import relationship with the global liberal order. nothing better exists. the past years proved how good this order was for russia. considering limitations of its economy and wealth of its raw materials. it's a wonderful system. but not enough. because you come to the idea of bad neighborhood, you come to the idea of constant -- the forces coming from the east and of course from china, as well, threatening to chip away what you consider to be your backyard, what you consider to be your own buffer zone. so on and so forth. you're the leader. in the authoritarian system where putin is the king it's -- everything is absolutely interdependent.

if you yield on the foreign front all your rivals and opponents domestically say, uh-huh, you're weak. putin cannot afford to be weak. when he has to show flexibility, for instance, he couldn't take -- just took crimea. he had to stop for obvious reasons but he must compensate for that apparent sign of weakness by doing something else. he goes to syria. he cannot just stay idle and not respond to western sanctions. he must produce. that's part of the regime that he is as hostage of as the creator of. so what does it leave us with? i do think that still if we go beyond this complexity dealing with the system itself,

structural limitations and putin's own psyche, this is the country again that is fundally different from the soviet union. putin has some weaknesses but some strengths in comparison to brezhnev. he was responsible for sprawling empire, allies in ethiopia and vietnam and all that, that he had to maintain. putin at least can choose more or less where to intervene and how far to go. also, in terms of economic flexibility, yes, russian economy is smaller than the soviet economy but putin at least did not inherit a completely failed economic model. he still employs that provide efficiently stability when the pie is shrinking.

even understood the conditions of sanctions. this is a flexibility brezhnev could not dream of. he was conservative, very cautious when it came to the budget and the control of the state bank. but they had no idea to do what to do with falling oil prices. putin knows -- not him personally, others know how to react to volatility. and that's strength. in terms of propaganda, brezhnev's propaganda was a joke. it was a joke for us for soviet citizens inside basically. it mean that everything that the soviet propaganda says you have to turn upside down. this is the truth. russian propaganda today is something that brezhnev's soviet union could not possibly dream of with all my respect. rt is a very successful enterprise and russian operations in social networks using american platforms like

facebook and twitter and others, you know, is phenomenal. i don't know if it's stayed this way but it's a phenomenal achievement. so to overestimate putin's strength, no. of course. we know that russia is weak and getting weaker. but underestimate putin is also a wrong thing. saying, well, let it go down and the united states can ignore it. it's -- you know, we cannot. we cannot ignore it. finally, let me conclude with an optimistic note. crimea is an exception. it's one -- it's one-off thing. putin does not need more territory if only because you have to feed them and pensions. he doesn't like it. putin's strategy was and is not a confrontation with the west but a bargain. we all know it. the problem is that the american side does not want to provide

him that opportunity. perhaps for putin it was as much of a grand delusion or a grand delusion as detente was for brezhnev. thank you, vlad. >> well done. well done. >> and now, jeremy, we'll turn to jeremy whose essay is on nixon and detente. >> i just want to start by, again, thanking the organizers and also say how delighted to be up here with barbara and vlad. i've used so much of the work here of mittller center. i want to applaud the miller and hope the project prospers in coming years. my graduate students will benefit of it as many of us will and i want to tell everyone how influenced i've been by vlad's work and does what no other

historian of the period of detente does which is to not simply tell the story of detente was to con textualize it talking about both the role of soviet leaders but also soviet citizens like himself. zhavago's children as barbara referred to the book before. i think one of the problems of studying detente and one of the big problems of teaching detente is i don't know what it is. it's very hard to define and there's a tendency we have to describe detente in hyper elitist terms focusing on a few individuals and not understanding the context in which this transformative moment takes shape on both sides and the reason why it fails to be an enduring transformation, of course. the closer i've been able to come in nixon's words of describing detente is the speech i quote in june of '74. i'll read it to get us started. i won't read anything but that quote to give us a framework of

what we're talking about so we know the subject here we're discussing. nixon explained, the height of watergate, a blend of the ideal and the pragmatic is critical in the approach to the soviet union. the differences between our two systems of life and government are sharp and fundamental. but even as oppose totalitarian we must also keep sight of the hard, cold facts of life in the nuclear age. ever since the soviet union achieved a quality and stroo teenlgic weapons systems each confrontation has meant a brush with potential nuclear devastation to all civilized nations and mark and tim gave us a wonderful description of the that moment when that becomes clear. reduction of tensions therefore between us has become the foremost requirement of american foreign policy. nixon and kissinger and i think

they came to this thinking independently, they both believed that the global order that had benefited the united states so much since world war ii wasdy m diminishing in its benefits to the united states but they thought that the trends in the noble world system, economic, political, military more moving against american predominance. and they acutely felt it at home. this was the sorry of nixon's electoral career in the 1960s and the story of what actually got him e leblgted was in large part the crisis of american politics in 1968. and it's not just the 2016 election where a candidate draws an inside straight to get elected. that happened in 1968, as well. i think if you ran the 1968 election five more times nixon would not win it more than one or two other times and that election could go so many different ways. a few words of humphrey of

vietnam earlier and thanks to the research done at the miller center, perhaps less interference in the negotiations over vietnam and perhaps that election comes out differently. another week and it comes out differently. nixon was acutely conscious as i think our president is today of how precarious his power was at home. and he believed i think and this comes through in all of his writings about detente that establishing stability overseas was crucial for his political longevity at home. they were deeply interconnected and i wrote a whole book arguing this and i keep finding more evidence to reinforce that. what nixon placed the most emphasis on and shows up even before he's president is the role of the individual. and the personal role which he and those around him, ie henry kissinger and a few hoothers, mt

control in holding back. kissing kissinger gives pedantic terms. the silent majority has been silenced. the elites are taking us in the wrong direction. and i must stand up against these elites and push things in the direction that they should go. and perhaps that the leaders of the soviet union and china themselves not respected by erp ps their own elites in their own societies might follow along, as well. there's a hyper personalization of the understanding of the diplomacy and foreign policy by nixon and those around him. the centralization of power in the white house, the use of secrecy, the writing out of the state department, that is not simply domestic politics but the view of the international system and deeply interconnected. not one or the other for them. richard nixon is acutely conscious of the fact that the last president to manage stable

relations with the soviet union was franklin roosevelt. and that franklin roosevelt did it in a personalistic way and i think many things written about nixon recognized himself. roosevelt was his model. from the beginning nixon places emphasis upon doing what presidents in the cold war had not done before. seeking to meet with the soviets even when there is not an agreed to agenda. only presidential trip of an agenda getting on the ground when the president arrives. he doesn't know when he meets or if he meets with mao. no one would staff the president that way today. he doesn't go to that extent with the societies but there's a similar desire in what he thinks a rooseveltian terms to meet with the other side, to sit down and talk things through man to man and that phrase turns up time and again. the perception that the elites

are the feet individuals and these are the men to sit down and figure things out. nixon meets, of course, with the soviet counterpart more times in his relatively short presidency than throughout the entire decade before. right? kennedy and johnson each have one meeting with the soviet counterpart. nixon has three. the meetings are more extensive, much more focused on personalization and making the rapes nimble and an emphasis and very important upon negotiation. again, in what nixon sees as rooseveltian terms, that everything is negotiable. and that you can make trade-offs. constanze stelzenmullering kissinger says this is linkage but a horse trading that goes on in any serious negotiation. it drives the arms control

experts batty because they have figured out how to talk about abms and for nixon and kissinger it doesn't matter. it's all politics. they intentionally disregard gerard smith thinking this through. it's a belief in terms of it's all politics. all politics. all about making trade-offs. that's what salt is. that's what abm is. there's an effort to use the negotiations and personal relationships to then build a structure for stability. not the other way around. not the other way around. there's a distrust in the structural factors and the trends and the desire to use the individuals to redefine those trends. kissinger can give it a german, romantic sensibility. it's about trying to redefine the pressures around you building personal relationships as a foundation for new

structural agreements. that's why you have the agreement on basic principles in 1972, the extensive discussions that occupy much of the time of a stable world order system to look like. and i think at the base of it nixon's insight is that many of the problems of the cold war managed better if you have more than here i yeez the phrase more common knowledge. that they know what we know and we know what they know. and we respect each other and recognize what we know on both sides. common knowledge. understandings. understandings. i did a word search in the documents and understanding comes up more than anything else. we have to build understandings. we must understand each other and by not talking to area experts but face to face. to understand the rules of the game for operating as a society.

i would argue that to some extent what nixon does actually is successful. i'm with many scholars like matt evangelista and others and vlad thinking that the 1970s had enduring changes. i don't think you can understand the gorbachev generation, you can't understand the new thinkers, robert english writes about this, as well, without understanding this period and the ways in which the personal relations broke down some of the barriers, the ideological barriers to contact of societies. the exchanges that arise. scientific exchanges. the ways in which east and west due to the personal relationships, not to fundamental agreements on ideology, but to the personal relationships of the leaders open space, give legitimacy, give cover to those who have long wanted to communicate across societies and we do have a more stable world. i mean, wouldn't it be nice if our president today, if we had

some sense of what his common knowledge about nuclear weapons was and make the world a more stable place. there is something about building common knowledge for strategic stability. we take it for granted as scholars. we think we know what we know and policymakers should know what we know. there's a sense of a new connection that i think is built during this period that has enormous enduring value. i read bill's biography of gorbachev saying this. he might disagree. no detente, no gorbachev. i think no detente, no gorbachev. where else will he have the opportunity to travel the way he does and a chance to spend time in canada and then spend time in the united states. hate the united states and seek canadian social democracy? those connections matter enormously for the societies and american society, as well. i think the quality of our study of the soviet union and the

quality of advice of reagan and others are getting is much improved in the 1980s because of the exchanges in the 1970s. those successes come with many failures, many failures that actually have to do less with individuals. the strength of the nixon and kissinger is their overwhelming energy, deep thought and ability to pursue risky but important initiatives. their weaknesses are all the same things. they do not know how to operate effectively in institutions. they're not institution builders. i would call them at times institution disrupters and they undermine consensus for everything they do every step of the way. one way of thinking about it is kissinger is a brilliant bull in a china shop. wins over people on the other side but manages to piss off people on his own side. the problem for detente on the u.s. side is it is not a process

in the american policy system. it is not brought into the american policy system. the pentagon and the state department are pursuing entirely different sets of policies at the same time that the white house is pursuing a detente policy. henry jackson was takes advantage of that. he's not the policy entrepreneur. the staffing is very poor. it's dependent upon very few people and when those people leave the scene as happens in 1974, it's very hard to continue, very hard to keep it going. this is roosevelt to truman problem. most deeply of all, perhaps most important for us today, it is not detente policy is not connected to american values. it's actually marked, discussed, pursued as an alternative to american values. there's a deep self criticism of the united states built into it. for all the discussion of the

silent majority, nixon and kissinger believe americans don't understand the world, will never understand the world and should just let them do it. that's unsalable as policy in the united states in the long run. what effective policy needs and now i'm speaking to the present world, i don't think -- i don't think i have much to offer in how to understand vladimir putin. we're all making this up, right? but i think what understanding the process of american policymaking from this period can offer today is actually a point that phil made recently to build on. the importance of staffing. the importance of actually having institutional gravity behind what you do. too much of our approach is to russia and other major powers have batted back and forth from administration to administration and have actually within administrations and derrick makes this point. they're undivided, uncertain, inconsistent.

did we pivot to asia? did we not pivot to asia? i think building a consistent staffing structure and a set of institutional priorities that can back up the policies you're pursuing is absolutely essential. the point of the more recent book on the presidency is presidents take on policymaking themselves and policy implementing themselves and it never works. it never works. so we are doing exactly the wrong things today. i want to be on record about that. without a word of donald trump. we are doing the wrong things today. we need more dip pllomats, not less. we need more area experts, not less. and we need to be talking more, not less. and i don't mean at the presidential or white house level. let me make this as clear as i can. white house policymaking is doomed to failure. foreign policy must be made in an interagency framework and must involve the state

department and the defense department and the nse and no substitute for that long-term effective policy. detente failed at least on the american side because it lacked that and anything we're doing with russia now will fail regardless of what vladimir putin does until we build that interagency structure and everything i see us doing is opposite. let's get our own house in order and we have a lot to offer for how to think about that. thank you. >> vlad, did you want to respond or -- you were busily making notes? anything to open before opening to questions? >> no, no, no. let's open. >> let's do. alfred, we have one here in the middle and then svletlana after that. >> thank you. thanks for very interesting and

stimulating discussion. the soviet/russian leaders have longevity in the office that the american counterparts normally don't have. and when you look at brezhnev it is of course johnson and nixon and carter and our focus is on nixon. carter and johnson somehow got lost in our story. and my question is about the fate and the failure of detente and to what arrival of carter and american policy. and brezhnev's stroke really contributed to that so again the question is about the importance of personalities in that story. how much -- how much emphasis you would put on personalities at end of detente. >> well, i would say when i wrote about brezhnev i was

struck how much it was his personality and his own set of beliefs but also how lucky he was and that brings us to structural factors and functional factors. i mean, he had brant, he had nixon who was an ideal american president in soviet imagination. everything is run through constanze stelzenmull kissinger, everything is decided through back channel. u.s. secretary of state doesn't know about the back channel. perfect. perfect way how you can run business in soviet imagination. so that luck couldn't last, obviously. and, you know, brezhnev ran out of luck before he had a stroke or whatever he had. illness. right after vladistok and meets with, you know, ford. whom we never mentioned almost.

>> right. >> right. but ford is the first president who sort of says politely, listens to brezhnev and has no imagination, power or energy to do anything with detente and goes back and says, no, i'm no longer using the word detente by the way. >> that's right. >> so brezhnev's own health, of course, deteriorated very rapidly. but also, as i interviewed soviet participants who knew him, they said brezhnev reacted very, very quickly to opportunities. he was a very astute politician in domestic setting and foreign setting who if he saw that something to do with west germany he would go there as long as success is almost assured. in that way he was absolute opposite to khrushchev. he was not a risk taker. he was closer to stalin in a strange way.

stalin liked to do things when everything was prepared and assured and would not take risk. so, when he was sick, he also couldn't see any opportunities for himself. if he had one under carter he would have grabbed them. unfortunately, carter's ideas we know in 1977 was a little bit misguided of renegotiating salt and numerous discussions of it. very, very unfortunate that americans changed the position. every u.s. administration starts from scratch and it's a mess. you have to wait for a year and then probably at the end of the second year the first administration have a good chance. they would understand something about arms control and other issues and then you use this very, very narrow window of opportunity to do something with americans and then the next presidential campaign starts and it's hopeless.

so i very much hear the pain of soviet diplomats when the first ambassador to the united states, you know, said that famous comparison. jay pan was like a chamber orchestra knew every violin and cello and united states is unruly similar phonic okrchestr. that's a generous image about the united states betraying the classical education. continuous continuously baffled of so many americans of american foreign policy and canada denied the ability of american foreign policy whatsoever. >> jeremi? >> i think we can go to the next question. >> right here in the front. >> my question is actually closely related. i found that very interesting,

thought provoking of the comparison vlad made between when he said was brezhnev's illusion or a delusion about a possibility about a possibility of the u.s.-soviet cooperative world order, and then you compare that to putin's illusion or delusion in the beginning of first putin's administration. well, i never thought about it this way, but can i -- this is really interesting, because maybe putin also sincerely believed that a truly cooperative order was responsible. world order. now, can i push you just a little more to the reason where that illusion or delusion starts to dissipate and why, and try to make the same comparison between brezhnev and putin and this is not a question about personalities. this is a question about their vision of how world order might

work, that it would be cooperative, and why it does not work this way. is there any similarity? >> well, we all know this history after 9/11 when, you know, putin calls bush and offers all kinds of things, strategic partnership of sorts and he, you know, definitely acts at the time when there's already how strong i don't know, but when there's already anti-american consensus in moscow political elites and even among diplomats. you know, approach to foreign policy. right. and putin overrules that, so that's the role of individual. and he overrules it, apparently, in his belief that, yeah, heroic, heroic factor is important, as long as i reach out to american leader, our

friendship would become the basis for the future partnership. and i'm quoting from your paper, svetlana. clinton and yeltson, you know, if we're friends, that's the best basis for partnership, and it never happens. and it never happens in soviet-american relations. it's a grand illusion, because there are forces that the soviets and the russians simply aren't capable of understanding. moreover, even scholars sometimes are incapable of understanding those impediments and those obstacles. it could have happened, it didn't, but for some reason didn't. but then it becomes the whole path of failures, and you still ask a question, why this failure, why that failure? maybe the conclusion should be like in a good science, it was not a failure. it was, you know, it was a pattern. it was almost a law. so, of course, i think it was

iraq. i think it was iraq, when instead of doing what, you know, instead of listening to the russian concerns by the bush administration, walks out and invades iraq. and those two things had huge impact on moscow foreign policy elite. huge impact. >> sorry. i was just going to say on the american side i think there's an interesting pattern of also illusion and disillusionment among presidents. i think presidents have a tendency to overstate their ability to persuade a foreign leader. they've gotten to power by persuading people within the country, and they overstate their ability to do that. it's what makes george w. bush so interesting, because he was so modest about his ability to do that, but generally presidents from kennedy, forward, perhaps eisenhower, presidents have a tendency, certainly roosevelt, as well, to

think they can persuade their foreign add sir sversaries. so, i can build a relationship with you, right, as boris, but yet i can go ahead and do what i'm doing in other parts of the world that undermine russian interests and because boris and i are friends, bill and boris can manage all these things, right? the problem is, of course, foreign leaders are not persuaded as easily as we think they are, and they pay close attention to what we do outside of our personal relationships with them. it takes a long time for presidents to learn that. >> yeah, i think the very good discussion is actually not generous enough to soviet foreign policy. in this period, germany made the point how we would do better if we built up our institutions and did high quality policy work. i know of no period in which -- in which almost every government

in the post-war era did a better job of institutional high quality staff work than the soviet government in the 1970s. this is not so much about brezhnev, this is now the people like cornienko and look at the skill, for example, the americans -- we haven't talked much about vietnam. the americans during this period are totally ham strung by their position on vietnam and their need in every negotiation to try to get the soviets to try to help them manage their vietnam problem. and dobrinen and his team managed that issue about, frankly if you look back on it, could they have managed it any better? you know, if you ask yourself what were their purposes and how did they want to kind of skillfully manage this and get to what outcomes, could they have done any better than they did? and then if you could go almost from region to region to region,

and again, according to the objectives that they have in the '70s on their logic, it's really quite a remarkable performance from an institutional point of view. and sometimes you could even notice that beneath putin and maybe including putin russian foreign policy over the last few years has actually developed and implemented rather skillfully composed plans that obtain the strategic initiative and outmaneuvered their rivals in ways we might not like, but that say something about somebody doing some staff work. like the move into syria. there's months of sophisticated staff work involved with both the syrians and the iranians that's a prelude to what the americans begin seeing in 2015. just as one illustration, nor did the stuff with crimea and ukraine sort of happen on a 24-hour impulse with no advanced planning. so i just invite you a little

bit, vlad, it's not so much an attack on kissinger, as to step back and actually observe in a way moscow foreign policy in a light more flattering than you get in focusing on the supreme leader. >> well, there were at least as far as i can see three approaches for the united states from the end of the '50s to the end of the '70s. one was a, i would say, bad sociology approach that was surprisingly present, even let's say in the early '80s, considered to be completely obsolete, but, of course, present. the approach that was popularized by the former soviet ambassador, smiling mike, that there's a pyramid of power consisting of the wall street and all kinds of groupings that fight for influence and money

around it, and, you know, there are groups of monopolistics, capitalists, blah, blah, blah, sociology mills for you in a soviet kind of incarnation of it. and it was very much present. so, from -- i guess the opposite, the opposite viewpoint, and quite linked to what jeremi and i have discussed about individuals, was the point i discovered in the institute, is all his younger proteges told me right away, and my mind was quite clouded by that sociology when i came. i said throw out all this rubbish, you know, everything is about individuals. everything is about personal, diplomatic, and cultural relations. we need to have more exchanges. we need to have more exhibitions, american-soviet

exhibitions, more schools dealing with stereotypes and how to overcome them. a whole detente era measures, how to reduce tensions and how to provide understanding that jeremi mentioned, that we completely ignore today at our discussions. enormous gamut of practices that had been invented, tried, applied, they succeeded in a tactical way, they didn't succeed in a strategic way, but that's another story. but they should be mentioned. it's all about the school. and i think between these two opposite approaches was the meat of foreign policy approach of good professionals. and sometimes we, indeed, i agree with you, phil, we're too harsh on them, calling them a school, buy the criticism of these group of people that emanated actually from the kgb

and gru, who felt more free, more entrepreneurial, and called all those people. they were slightly dumb, dumbed down, by gormiko. it's not true, and i agree that was a very, very structural school that maybe didn't allow -- and that was a good reason. they didn't allow a room for heroic foreign policy, of gorbachev style, but they were sort of fail-proof set of rules that they followed that provided slow and gradual advance in all chosen directions. so, that's why gorbachev when they came, they brushed them aside to a certain extent, because they wanted something heroic, they wanted something quick. but those professionals, predictably, frowned at

amateurism and warned of possible dire consequences. well, they were crying, of course, into the void. >> arne and then tim. >> fascinating session on -- and i'm reminded why i decided to call my chapter in this book on the age of brezhnev. my students really hate that when they see it, but this session has helped confirm to me a lot that is right in it. now, on this issue of staffing and leadership, i did have a really interesting discussion, and soviet foreign policy during the 1970s there stands out to me very much as a game of two halves, so the people do not change, certainly in terms of the staffing aspects. they are very professional, they are very good, they are capable of a lot of very good thinking. what changes is in terms of the leadership.

so the leadership weakens very dramatically, and this goes back to sergei's point, as well. it has to do with aging, it has to do with health, it has to do with a lot of things that happen at the very top. and that's the period in the late 1970s when at least i see some very definite examples of soviet overstretch in terms of international affairs, angola, ethiopia, afghanistan, which the best staffing in the world could not have dealt with, because there is a vacuum at the top. there is an inability to translate all of those abilities in diplomatic terms and intelligence terms, or for that matter in military terms, over to a strategic long-term set of actions, which can only be created by good and strategic leadership. >> just a fun point of

information -- this is a great panel. we do have one taped summit. there's only one u.s.-soviet summit for which we have a recording, and that's the 1973 summit, and i would -- you both, vlad and jeremi know about this, but many others probably don't. if you want to hear brezhnev talking and listen to brezhnev and nixon talking to each other, we have that on tape. five years ago the nixon library released it. it's very interesting, and i think it shows brezhnev to be intellectually extraordinarily weak. and i think you'll also find the nem-coms are different from the tapes. it's the only taped summit we have. there are no tapes of vienna, no tapes of glassboro, so we have one taped summit and it's worth

listening to if you want to get a sense of the super power relationship and you want to assess brezhnev. >> other questions? yes, dale. alfred dale is right here next to mel in the second row middle. >> just a very quick question, because i largely agree with the idea that the more understanding between leaders and between bureaucracies is good for international relations. i'm a big believer in that, but there's always this tension at least from where i come from, the study of political science and international relations, the problem of deception. and that is that you can, obviously, want to communicate, you can communicate with that smile and that friendship, build those personal relationships, but if the person is trying to deceive you, you have to be very wary of that. and, of course, the ultimate

example is when bush, second bush, said i looked into putin's soul, paraphrase, i looked into putin's soul, liked what i saw, i understand the man. that's a pure deception. reminds me of the woody allen joke he failed first year philosophy because he looked into the soul of the person next to him on the final exam. you can't do that. that's the problem of other minds in philosophy circles. you can't look into the minds of the person and see their true intentions, you might be deceived. i wonder as you as historians would grapple with this problem of how do you deal with that tension of trying to understand another and also deal with the problem of deception. >> this is a great question and it connects to arna and tim's points, as well. i think that the policy makers who get their adversary and their allies, who understand the other side, they come to it through a combination of two routes, right, one is they come

to it from their personal impressions, but they also come to it from having a rigorous process around them that is providing contextual knowledge and forcing them to think that through. and that's what i would call a good process, right? you don't just read the cia psychological profile of someone and go on that. you combine that with your experience of them. so it's not just more information, it's how you're processing it, and i really do think franklin roosevelt is a master at this. he's spending a lot of time with stalin and churchill, and then he has multiple people working for him, who are not working with each other, by the way, who are bringing him information and he's actually using that information as he's planning moment to moment. the problem with roosevelt's process is that it takes an enormous amount of energy by him, by the president, and that's why he dies so much younger, one of the reasons he dies so much younger, than churchill and stalin. by the way, frank didn't say this, but one of the most important insights in any paper for this conference was the insight that if franklin

roosevelt lived as long as george cannon, he would have been alive during abel archer in '83. that's hard to imagine, isn't it? that is really hard to imagine, in part because of the way he managed his leadership. >> i don't know. well, i do think that this is the limit for -- there's a limit for how much we can understand about our interlocuter and what kicks in about him or her. is he a partner? do i need him for my policy and certain policy framework? or is he an adversary? so, if this is stalin of 1945, as sergei wrote in his book, you know, roosevelt needed him, he hoped to use stalin as a

post-war partner for creating a post-war order. he knows that stalin is capable of infinite deception, but that does not matter as much as it would when you begin to see stalin as an adversary, then your optic completely flips. then deception becomes a justification for a complete mistrust. and this is really striking how particularly in u.s. foreign policy and particularly during the cold war, how much more tolerant are american diplomats and policy makers towards people whom they perceive to be their allies or useful category. and then their adversary. so compromise stops at the door of -- at the border of the soviet union. understanding stops, empathy

stops at the border of -- at the doorstep of the kremlin. there's some remarkable exceptions, and one remarkable exception is the brezhnev/nixon meeting. remarkable. brezhnev takes him aside, basically abducts him to the entourage, takes him over, a translator, and all of a sudden they begin to feel like they are both intensely insecure individuals, both have enormous power, and yet they can trust each other. >> right, right. >> it's a miracle. >> i think that -- i want to, if i could, say one more thing to build on what i think vlad's nailed. what is so important is for a leader to develop a complex portrait of his or her interl

interlocuters. our rhetoric at home has always been simplistic, but as we become even more simplistic, and i think this happened to obama as much as it's happened to others, is you get locked into your political rhetoric at home more so than ever before. that is one of the things that's still extraordinary to me about ronald reagan, that he could walk past that, that he could create an evil empire image, but then actually sell another image of gorbachev. that might be more important than his strategic thinking, his ability to sell that image. we understate the importance of that when we think about policy making, but i'd include that in philip's staffing, when you're talking about foreign policy, it's also how you're selling that at home. >> we must draw this wonderful panel to an end. thank you so much. let's give a big round of applause to our panelists. [ applause ]

here's what's ahead today on c-span 3's american history tv. coming up next, it's a look at the relationship between presidents reagan and bush and mikhail gorbachev and more about soviet relationships between the george w. bush and bill clinton eras and how they interacted with boris yeltsin. and then be with us tonight for american history tv in primetime. we'll continue our look at the relationship between u.s.-soviet union leaders at the height of the cold war from the university of virginia's miller center on america. you can see american history primetime beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern here on c-span3. elsewhere on the c-span networks, join us later today when new america in washington, d.c., hosts a panel discussion on the influence of politics on race relations. live coverage begins this afternoon at 4:30 p.m. eastern on c-span. and later, the white house

correspondents association hosts a discussion with white house press secretary sarah sanders and mike mccurry, followed by a panel discussion with white house correspondents. live coverage begins at 7:00 p.m. eastern also on c-span. a look at the significance of mccullochv. maryland in 1919. exploring with us, farrah peterson and mark kilnbeck, author of "mccullough v. maryland." watch on c-span, c-span.org, or listen with the free c-span radio app. for background on each case, order a copy of the companion book available for $8.95 plus

shipping and handling at c-span.org/landmark cases. for additional resources, there's a link on our website to the national constitution center's interactive constitution. c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies, and today we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court, and public policy events in washington, d.c., and around the country. c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. and now former national security adviser to president george h.w. bush, philip zelikow, robert zoellick, william ta