c-span.org, or listen with the free c-span radio app. for background on each case, order a copy of the landmark cases companion book, available for $8.95 plus shipping and handling at c-span according/landmarkcases. for an additional resource, there's a link on our website to the national constitution centers interactive constitution. next on the presidency, a look at what motivated president richard nixon and soviet premier leonid brezhnev during the period known as dtente. the discussions included assessments of franklin d. roosevelt, jfk, george h.w. bush and bill clinton, as well as their russian counterparts. this is about an hour. this is our second half of this panel. we will go to a little bit past

1:00. i have just met vlad zubok last evening over dinner and after dinner in 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. jacqueline kennedy and mrs. khrushchev. we might save that for a later discussion. but i really enjoyed that conversation. vlad is a professor of international historio london school of economics. he's an expert on the cold war, and soviet russian history, and particularly intellectual history. among his books is particularly related to our topic of this conference, a failed empire, the soviet union and the korld war from stalin to gorbachev. and i also noted among his books

zhivago's children. i was drawn, of course, to that topic. jeremi suri is a long-time friend of the miller center, we're always happy to welcome him back. as we did recently, for an american forum on his latest book, "the impossible presidency" which in light of the incumbent might be called "the impossible president," and it's about whether anyone can be a successful president, he is in leadership in the global affairs in texas, and lyndon johnson school of public affairs. i'm going to turn to vlad first who will speak to us about his essay on brezhnev and the lessons of dtante. >> maybe i'll stay.

i will try to be brief, in reality, which doesn't mean. when we think about brezhnev, we're struck by the fact that such an individual of threadbare education, no ability to conceptualize national allegations all of a sudden came up with the idea of dtante and succeeded, at least for a while in that enterprise. it's used to compare brezhnev and khrushchev. khrushchev is the last person as we heard so much from tim, the person who represents heroic tradition. that is -- staked by the capital system and believes in revolution and all that. bill wrote a beautiful biography of him. he was a true believer. if you ask yourself why there was only one khrushchev, truly,

in the history of the cold war, there were no imitateors before or after him. you come up with a more sort of normative picture of soviet foreign policy where most of 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 dtante or some kind of a conceptual system structurally, structural structure that would accommodate both soviet and american interests. so that, you know, 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 was quite awful, especially in foreign policy. it was just as a reaction, sometimes a visceral reaction to khrushchev's risk taking, brezhnev supported something opposite to what khrushchev did. he kept repeating that guy brought us to the brink of the war. so brezhnev's idea of dtante, i won't go through all these things, was very, very simplistic. it was not a perpetual peace idea, but a 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 stabilize, to build a stable world order. were 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, brezhnev does not understand, something prevents on the american side this idea from being realized. and then all the sudden he finds a partner with whom he can negotiate which results, and also importantly negotiate from a position of strength because he does believe in strength. that's richard nixon. richard nixon comes to power in 1969, very good year for brezhnev. he just managed to deal with a huge crisis in eastern europe with check slovakia. he put it differently, of course. then, of course, troops would

soon end up immediately on our western borders. that resonates with today, putin's thinking. so he's a more normal sieoviet man to me than khrushchev. there are many more brezhnevs than khrushchevs. khrushchev is pretty unique when you think about it. so, however, when you look at brezhnev's dtante and its fate, and you begin to realize that it is dtente hit its limitations very soon, in a few years, it's definitely by 1975, everyone understands something went wrong. this is not only jackson commandment, this is many other things piling up. my argument is very, very simple. brezhnev's idea, and not only brezhnev's idea, the idea of

huge number of soviet nomenclature communist officials, mostly russians, but also ukrainians and other, that there could be some inevitable famework that the two powers dould form a stable world order was under delusion and a 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, you know, in the watergate stage, that's in crimea, their last meeting, he raises a toast to the doctrine of lasting and universal peace, the nixon version of doctrine. that's a joke. but there's something deeper behind this joke. so i would -- brezhnev could never fully realize this a u.s.

world order is -- never wanted to create such a world order. they wanted the prevail in the cold war. the united states did offer strategic alliance to a big communist country, but it was china, not the soviet union. and they offered that alliance to china because it's explicitly and strategically directed against the soviet union. now i'm moving to putin. putin is a very different person that khrushchev. but is also a very different person in comparison to brezhnev. there's some similarities, some differences. let's go through them. for those who didn't have a chance to read the paper. putin, like brezhnev, is deeply liberal, respects force, supports militarism, venerates great fatherland war, and he

promotes state -- to reduce putin to a cagey man is the height of -- it's deeply wrong. he had a steep learning curve. he learned a lot what does it mean when the state is destroyed? and russia was flooded by highly unpleasant realities linked to political and economic liberalization. so he accepted fundamental failure of communism as economic and ideological doctrine. he does not, does not want to rebuild a territorial soviet empire. his project is to improve russia's place in the existing world order, not to create a new one. here comes the rub. if you think about it, and if you talk to very knowledgeable russians, i just had an exchange with one of them over e-mail recently, even 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. but everyone understands that russia cannot be a superpower for economic and other reasons. it doesn't have enough oomph for that, right? and then russia refuses to act as a regional power because it's allegedly diminishing and derogatory. so russia is somewhere -- the relationship of russia to the existing liberal world order is not an easy thing to establish. and just in terms of provoking a discussion, i would argue that it's highly -- on one hand the entire stability of putin's -- let's call it putin's state, putin's regime depends on macroeconomic stability and -- nothing better exists and nothing better that russia can certainly build or aspire to. 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 and so on and so forth. you're the leader. in the patrimonial of the system where putin is a king, everything is absolutely interdependent. if you yield on the foreign front, all your rivals and opponents domestically say, aha, you're weak. putin cannot afford to be weak. when he has to show flexibility, for instance he couldn't take

another russia, just to 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 counteractions. 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, which is the country, again, this is fundamentally different from the soviet union, putin has some weaknesses, but some strengths in comparison to brezhnev. brezhnev was responsible for a

sprawling communist empire, and ethiopian and vietnam and all 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 the completely failed economic model. he still employs neoliberal economists that provide quite efficiently macroeconomic stability when the pie is shrinking, even under the condition of sanctions. this is a flexibility brezhnev could not even dream of. he was very conservative, very cautious when it came to the budget and the control of the state bank. but the bureau had no idea how to do when you have a major crisis, falling oil prices and all that. putin knows, not he personally,

but other people he employs, knows how to react to volatility. that's strength. in terms of problem propaganda, it was a joke, a joke for us as citizens inside, it means the soy propaganda says you have to turn upside down. this is the truth. russian propaganda today is against something the brezhnev soviet union could not even possibly dream of. with all respect, rt is a very successful enterprise, and russian operations in social networks, using american platforms like facebook and twitter and others is phenomenal. i don't know if it stays this way. 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 and say, 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 a one of thing. putin does not need more territory, if only because more people come with the territory, you have to feed them and give pensions and so forth. he doesn't like it. putin's strategy was and is not a confrantation with the west, but a bargain. we all know it. the problem is that the american side does not want to provide that opportunity. perhaps for putin it was as much of a grand illusion, or a grand delusion as dtente was for brezhnev. >> thank you, vlad. >> well done, well done. [ applause ]

>> now we'll turn to jeremi whose essay is on nixon and dtente. >> i want to start and say thank you to the organizers. i'm delighted to be up here with barbara and vlad. it's one of the most important things the miller center does, but the historical profession has done in the last decade or so. i want to applaud the miller center. i know my graduate students will benefit from it as many of us will. i want to just tell everyone how influenced i've been by vlad's work. in many ways because vlad does what almost no other historian does, is not to tell the story of d ten dtente, but to confect yulize. barbara referred to the book before.

that's my point of dpe departure. one of the problems in studying dtente, and one of the big problems, first of all, i don't know what it is. it's very hard to define. there's a tendency we have to describe dtente in hyperelitist terms, focusing on individuals, and not understanding context, the reasons why it fails to be an enduring transformation, of course. the closest i've been able to come in nixon's words in describing what he thought about dtente is the speech i quote in the paper from the u.s. naval academy in june of '74. i'm just going to read it to get us started. i'm not going to read anything else. i want to read that quote to give us a framework of what we're talking about. we all know what the subject is here that we're discussing" nixon explained a blend of the ideal a ideal in the pragmatic in your foreign policy -- the differences between our two systems of life and government are sharp and fundamental.

but even as we oppose totalitarianism, and it's interesting he uses that phrase, we must also keep sight of the hard, cold facts of life in the nuclear age. ever since the soviet union achieved equality in strategic 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 that moment when it becomes clear. "reduction of -- american foreign policy." nixon and kiss inger came to this thinking independently, but they both believed the global order that benefitted the united states so much since world war ii was diminishing in its benefits to the united states. i think it overstates it to believe to say that they thought it was completely crumbling. but they thought the trends in the global world system,

economic, political, military were moving against american predominance, saw a crisis of the old order, and acutely, nixon in particular, acutely felt it at home. this is the story of nixon's electoral career in the 1960s, and the story of what got him elects was the crisis of american politics in '68. not just an inside straight to get elected, that happened in 1968 as well. if you ran the 1968 election five more times, nixon would not win it more than one or two other times. that election could go so many different ways, a few words from humphrey about vietnam earlier, perhaps a little 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 writes about dtente that establishing stability overseas was crucial for his political longevity at home. these were deeply interconnected. i wrote a whole book arguing this. i keep finding evidence to reenforce that. what nixon placed the most emphasis on, this shows up even before he's president, in his notes thinking about foreign policy, is the role of the individual and the personal role which he and those around him, i.e. henry kissinger and a few others must play in controlling this decline, in holding back. kissinger gives it po dant tick terms. for knicks son tis pedestrian. the silence of majority has been silenced. the elites are taking us in the wrong direction, and i must stand up against the elites and

push things in the direction they should go and perhaps the leaders of the soviet union and china themselves not respected by perhaps their own elites in their own societies might follow along as well. there's a hyperpersonalization of the understanding of diplomacy and foreign policy by nixon and the others 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, that is the mirror image of the international system. not one or the other for them. and 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 very personalistic way. many things, nixon recognized himself, if eisenhower was his first model, 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 when there isn't an agreed upon agenda. the most extreme example is china. the only presidential trip i know of when there isn't an agenda when you get on the ground. he doesn't know if or when he's going to meet with mau. doesn't know what's going to happen. he doesn't go quite to that extent with the soviets. but there is a similar desire in what he thinks of rooseveltian terms to meet with the other side, to sit down, as he said, and talk things through man to man and that phrase turns up time and again, the perception that the elites are the effete, femme recognized individuals and these are the -- nixon meets with the soviet counterpart more times in his relatively short presidency than throughout the interdecade before. kennedy and johnson, each have

one meeting with the soviet counterpart. nixon has three. his meetings are more extensive, much more focused upon personal interrelations, much more secretive also, emphasis on making these relationships nimble, and an emphasis, and this is very important, upon negotiation. and, again, in what nixon sees as rooseveltian terms, that everything is negotiable. and that you can make tradeoffs, kissinger gives this the fancy terminology linkage. everybody studying negotiating recognizes this is the horse trading that goes on in any serious negotiation. this drives the experts batty. they have figured out systematically the way to talk about abms, and for nixon and kissinger it doesn't matter, it's all politics, all politics. they intentionally disregard gerard smith and all the others who have come to them who have

spent years thinking this through. it's a belief that it's all politics, all politics, all about making tradeoffs. that's what salt is, that's what the abm treaty is. that's what the prevention of nuclear war treaty is. an effort to build a structure for stability, not the other way around, not the other way around. there's the distrust in the structural factors in the trends, and a desire to use the individuals to redefine those trends. again, kissinger can give this a german romantic sensibility that you're standing out and redefining your zeitgeist, trying to redefine the pressures around you by building personal relationships as a foundation for new structural agreements. that's why you have the agreement on basic principles in 1972, and extensive discussions that occupy much of their time about what a stable world order system should look like. and, i think, at the base of it, nixon's insight is that many of

the problems of the cold war can be managed better if you have more, and here i'm going to shoes thomas shelling's 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. years ago i did a word search in some of the documents, and the word understanding comes up more often than anything else. we have to build understandings, must understand each other, and by not talking to area experts, talking direct face to face. to understand intentions, understand the rules of the game, to create a stability based upon a common knowledge set 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 eadvantage li eadvantage -- you can't understand the gorbachev

generation, can't understand the new thinkers, robert english writes about this as well. the ways in which these personal relationships broke down barriers, 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 the personal relationships of the leaders open says give legitimacy give cover to those who have long wanted to communicate across societies. and we do have a more stable world. wouldn't it be nice if our president today, if we had some sense of what his common knowledge about nuclear weapons was? wouldn't that 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 can we know what we know and policimakers should know what we no. that's often not the case.

there is a sense of strategic sensibility and communicative connection that's built during this period that has enormous enduring valuable. i put out there, i read no dtente, no gorbachev. where else is he going to have the opportunity to travel the way he does? where else is he going to have the chance to spend time in canada, and then spend time in the united states. hate the united states, but see scandinavian social democracy as an alternative. those connections matter enormously. and matter for the american society as well. the quality of our study of the soviet union, and the quality of advice that people like reagan and others are getting is much improved in the 1980s because of the exchanges that arise in the 1970s. that said, those successes, i think, come with many failures. many failures that actually have to do less with individuals. the strength of nixon and kissinger as policimakers 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, are not institution builders, i would all them at times institution disruptor, and they undermine every step of the way. kissinger is a brilliant bull in a china shop, wins over people on one side, but manages to piss off everyone on his own side, every step of the way. the problem with dtente on the u.s. side is not is process in the policy system, not brought into the american policy system. the pentagon and the state department are pursuing different sets of policies at the same time the white house is following something else. that is by design and never

reconciled. jackson takes advantage of it. he sees that and takes advantage of it. 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 actually the roosevelt to truman problem as well. and most deeply after owl, perhaps most important for us today, it is -- dtente policy is not connected to american values, it's actually marketed, discussed, pursued as an alternative to american values. in fact, 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 that americans don't understand the world, never will understand the world and should just let them do it. that is unsellable 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 zelico made recently i want to build on, the importance of staffing, the importance of having institutional gravity behind what you do. our approach to russia and other major powers have batted back and forth from administration to administration and have actually within administrations, and derek makes this point, within administrations have been divided, uncertain, inconsistent. did we pivot to asia or not, did we reset with russia or not? 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 my more recent book on the impossible presidency is that 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 on that without saying a word about donald trump, we're doing the wrong things today. we need more diplomats, not less. we need more diplomats, 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. it must involve the state department and the defense department as well as the nsc. there is no substitute for that for long-term effective policy. d tdtente failed because it lacked that, and anything we do with putin until we build the interagency structure.

everything i see us doing is just the opposite. before we talk about putin, let's get our own house in order. as historians, we have a lot to offer for how we should think about that. thank you. [ applause ] >> vlad, did you want to respond? you were busily making notes. anything to say before we open up to questions? >> no, no, no, let's open to questions. >> let's do. alfred, we have one here in the middle and then svetlana after that in the front. >> thank you. thanks for a very interesting and stimulating discussion. the soviet/russian leaders have longevity in the office that the american counterparts normally don't have. when you look at brezhnev,

johnson nixon and carter. 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 dtente. and to what degree the arrival of carter and very new 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 in the end of dtente. >> weld, i would say when i wrote about brezhnev, i was struck about how much it was his personality, 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 kissing ger, everything is secretive, decided through back channel, u.s. secretary of state rogers 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. brezhnev ran out of luck even before he had the stroke, or whatever he had, the illness right after -- he meets with the fort, whom we never mention. but ford is the first president who listens to brezhnev, and has no imagination, power or energy to do anything with dtente and goes back and says, no, i'll no longer use the word dtente, by

the way. so brezhnev's own health, of course, deteriorated very rapidly. but also as i interviewed voef yet participants who knew him, brezhnev reacted very, very quickly to opportunities. he was a very astute politician in domestic setting and foreign setting. if he saw that it's something to do with west germany, he would go there as long as success is almost assured. in that way he was absolutely opposite to khrushchev. he was not a risk taker. you know, he was not close to stalin in a strange way. stalin liked to do things when everything was prepared and assured hechlt wouldn assured. he wouldn't take risks. 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 idea, as we know in 1977, was a little bit misguided, renegotiate salt, numerous discussions about it, very unfortunate that americans changed their position. this is something the soviets also couldn't -- 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, of the first administration, they have a good chance, would understand something about arms control and other issues and then you use this very, very window of opportunity 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 said that famous comparison, japan was like a chamber orchestra, you knew every violin

or you could do diplomacy with that but the united states is unruly symphonic orchestra. there's very generous, actually, image about the united states betraying his classical education. but the say are baffled by how americans do their foreign policy. and not only americans. canada denied american policy whatsoever. >> i think we can go to the next questio question. >> my question is closely related. i found it very interesting, thought provoking of the comparison vlad made between what he said was brezhnev's illusion or delusion about a possibility of the u.s./soviet cooperative world order and then

you compare it to putin's illusion or delusion in the beginning of first putin's administration. well i never be thought about it this way but this is really interesting because maybe putin also sincerely believed that a truly cooperate i oive order wa possible, world order. now, can i push you just a little bit more to where that illusion or delusion starts to dissipate and why and try to make the same comparison between brezhnev and putin? 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 putin calls bush and offers all kinds

of things, strategic partnership of sorts and he definitely acts at the time when there's already how strong i don't know but when there's already an anti-american consensus in moscow political elites and even among diplomats. more primakovian kind of approach to foreign policy. and putin overrules that. so that's the role of individual and he overrules it apparently in his belief that, yeah, heroic factor is important as long as i reach out to american leader our friendship would become the basis for the future partnership. i'm quoting from your papers. between clinton and yeltsin. if we're friends, that's the best basis for partnership and it never happens. and it never happens in sow yet american relations. that's a grand illusion because

there are structural forces that the soviets and the russians simply are incapable of understanding. moreover, even scholars are incapable of understanding those impediments and obstacle bus they think it could have happened, it didn't. then it becomes like the whole path of failures and you still ask a question, why this failure? why that failure? maybe the conclusion should be like in good science it was not a failure, it was a pattern. it was almost a law. so then 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, the baiush administration walks out of the treaty and invades iraq. those two things had huge impact

on moscow foreign policy. huge impact. >> i was going to say on the american side i think it's an interesting pattern of also delusion 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 h.w. bush so interesting because he was so modest about his ability to do that but generally presidents from kennedy forward, i would think, i would even think perhaps eisenhower but will might disagree, presidents have a tendency to believe they can persuade their foreign adversaries and still do what they want to do. this comes back to tim's point about not seeing how what we're doing is perceived as threatening by others. i can build a relationship with you as boris but i can do what i'm doing that undermine russian interests and because boris and i are friends, bill and boris

can manage all these things. the problem is that 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 talk like that. >> i think that the -- the very good discussion is not generous enough to soviet foreign policy. in this period jeremy made the point how we would do better if we built up our institutions and did high quality policy work. i know of no peached you in which almost any government in the post-war era did a better john of institutional high quality policy staff work than the soviet government in the 1970s. this is not so much about brezhnev, this is now the people like cornyenko.

like we vice presidehaven't tal vietnam. the americans are totally hamstrung by their position on vietnam and their need and every negotiation to get the soviets to try to help them manage their vietnam problem and dobrinin and his team, could they have managed that issue better? like how did they want to skillfully manage this, could they have done better. and according to their logic it's a remarkable performance from an institutional point of view. and you could notice that beneath putin and maybe even including putin russian foreign

policy has developed rather skillfully composed plans. they have outmaneuvered their rivals in way we might not like but say something about somebody doing staff work. like the move into syria. there's months of sophisticated staff work involved with both the syrians and the iranians that is a prelude to what the americans see in 2015, just as one illustration. nor did the stuff with crimea and ukraine happen on a 24-hour impulse with no advanced planning. so invite you a little bit to -- it's not so much an attack on nixon and kissinger per se, though i agree with jeremy's comments, is to step back and observe in a way moscow foreign policy in a light more flattering than you get from focusing on the supreme leader.

>> well there were at least as far as i can see three approaches to the united states from the end 20650s to the end of t of the '70s. one was a bad sociology approach that was surprisingly present in the early '80s considered to be completely obsolete. the approach that was popularized by the former soviet ambassador smiling mike. there's a pyramid of power consisting of wall street and groupings that fight for influence and money around it and there are groups of monopolistic capitalists and blah blah blah. and it was very much present so from i guess -- the opposite

view point and quite linked to what jeremy and i have completely discussed about individuals was the point i discovered at the institute. arbotov and his younger prodigies told me right away, my mind was quite clouded by that bad sociology just throw out this rubbish, everything is about cultural relations, we need to have more exchanges, more exhibitions, american soviet exhibitions, more schools dealing with stereotypes and how to overcome them. a whole panoply of detente era measures. how to provide understanding.

th that, by the way, we completely ignore today, 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 arbatov school. and i think between these two opposite approaching was the ne need, foreign policy approach of good professionals and sometimes we -- i agree with you, you're too harsh on them calling them gromiko school these are people who emigrated from the kgb. they were called slightly dumbed down by gromyko. it's not true.

i agree it was a school that didn't allow -- and that was a good reason, they didn't allow a room for heroic foreign policy of kruschevian style and later gorbachev style. but there were a fail proof set of rules that they followed that provided slow and gradual advance in all chosen directions. so that's why gorbachev gorbac f shevardnadze, they were crowing into the void. >> ari and then tim. >> fascinating session. i'm reminded why they called my

chapter in this new book on this area -- on this era for the age of brezhnev. my students really hate that when they see it but this session is a concerns to me and a lot is right in it. on this issue of staffing and leadership, i think that's an interesting discussion and soviet foreign policy during the 1970s, they stand out to me very much as a game of two havelves. they are very professional and good and capable of 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 i see definite

examples of soviet over stretch in terms of international affairs. an go angola, ethiopia, afghanistan. there's an ability 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 action which can only be created by good and strategic leader sh ship. >> i just have 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 -- both vlad and jeremy probably know this but many of you 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 extraordinary weak and i think you'll also find the mem cons of these meetings are different from the tapes. so it's the only taped summit we have. there's no tape that we know of of vienna and there's no other tapes but we have one taped summit so it's worth listening to if you want to get a sense of the superpower relationship and want to assess brezhnev. >> are there questions? yes, dale? alfred dale is 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 also 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 friendship. build those personal relationships but if the person is trying to deceive you, you have to be wary of that. the ultimate example is when bush -- the second bush said i looked into putin's soul -- paraphrase -- looked into putin's soul and i liked what i saw and i understand the man. that was pure deception. it reminds me of the woody allen joke that he failed first year philosophy because he looked into the soul of the person next to him on the final exam. well, you know, you can't do

that. that's the problem of other minds in philosophy circles. you can't look into the other person and see their true intentions and you might be deceived so i'm wondering how you as historians would grabble with this age-old problem in my field of how do you deal with that tension between trying to understand another and also deal with the problem of deception? >> so this is a great question in connection to the earlier points. i think that the policymakers who get their adversary and their allies, who understand the other side, they come to it through a combination of two routes. one is they come to it from their personal i beliempression. but they come to it from having a rigorous process around them providing contextual knowledge and forcing them to think that through and that's when i come to a good process. you don't just read the cia psychological profile and go on that. so it's not more information.

it's how you're processing it. and i think franklin roosevelt was a master at this. he was spend aing a lot of time with stalin and churchill and he has multiple people working for him who are not working with each other who are bringing in information and he's 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 he, the president, and that's one of the reasons he dies so much younger than churchill and stalin. frank didn't say this but one of the most important insights in any paper for this conference was frank's insight that if franklin roosevelt lived as long as george, franklin roosevelt would have been alive during ahbel archer in '83. that's hard to imagine, isn't it? that's hard to imagine because of the way he managed his leadershi leadership.

>> i think this is the limit -- there's a limit for how much we can understand about our interlocutor and what kicks in is perceptions of him or her. is he a partner? do i need him for my policy in a certain policy framework? or he is an adversary. so if this is stalin of 1945, you know, roosevelt needed him, he hoped to use stalin as a post-war partner for creating a post-war order. he knows stalin is capable of infinite deception but that does not matter as much as it would when you're truman and begin to see stalin as an adversary and then your optic completely

flips. then deception becomes a justification for a complete mistrust and this is really striking how in particular in u.s. foreign policy, particularly during the cold war how much more tolerant are american diplomats and policymakers towards people whom they perceive to be their allies or useful son of the bitch category. so compromise stops at the door of -- at the border of the soviet union. understanding stops. empathy stops at the border -- at the doorstep of the kremlin and so on so forth. there's some remarkable exceptions and there's one remarkable exception is the brezhnev nixon meeting. >> absolutely. >> no one could believe it.

brezhnev takes him aside, basically abducts him, entourage, takes him over with a translator and all of a sudden they begin to feel like they're both intensely insecure individuals, both have enormous power and yet they can trust each other and it's a miracle. >> i if i could i want to say one more thing. i think vlad has nailed it. what's so important is for a leader to develop a complex portrait of his or her interlocutors and then to educate the american public about that. one of the things that makes this so difficult is our rhetoric at home has always been simplistic but it's 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's 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 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 would include that in philip's staffing. when you're staffing foreign policy, it's how you're selling it at home, right? 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 ] >> sunday on c-span's q&a, kit bo bowler talks about her memoir "everything happens for a reason" talking about her being

diagnosed with stage four colon cancer at the age of 35. >> i felt the presence of god. people pouring in. the intense prayers. the second i got sick my whole little community got together in a chapel and just prayed like marathon runners for me, like handing off throughout my whole surgery. part of it was them reflecting back to me love and also was just the sense that, like, my hope is that as you're preparing to die i was having to make preparations that someone or something meets you there and i certainly felt that way. >> q&a sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span. 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