Skip to main content

tv   Jeff Bergner American Materialism  CSPAN  October 3, 2024 9:04am-10:30am EDT

9:04 am
you don't mind holding up your chair and putting it up against the shelf it would be very much appreciated. >> if you enjoy book tv sign up for newsletters using the qr's on the screen and to get a list and more. book tv every sunday on c-span and television for serious readers. >> this year they celebrate 45 years of governing congress like no other and since 1979 we have been your primary source providing balanced unfiltered coverage taking you to where the policies are debated and decided in support of america's cable companies. 45 years and counting powered
9:05 am
by cable. let me turn it over to you and i do have a few questions depending on what you say and i think i know what you will say but depending on that and then we open it up for questions and a microphone in the room and all i ask is if you can walk up, introduce yourself, ask a question or comment but ask the question also so we can record it and get the audio. without further ado, jeff, please. >> thank you and please to be here at the foreign policy council and i know very well your founder and president and we go back along way in more ways than either one of us would care to admit and i am familiar with your work and you are from washington standards
9:06 am
of fairly small institution and you punch well above your way to make good contributions to american foreign policy so i am pleased to be here. you asked if i could begin my remarks and i talk about this book by saying a few words about my career and as i do understand that many of you are interns and probably on the cusp of trying to figure out what your own careers will be like and i thought maybe by some odd chance it may be helpful to hear what somebody else's career has been like. an you belly once said and i can't remember for sure but he once said that everybody's career and indeed everybody's life is a combination of things which you aim for and plan and intend to do on the one hand and fortune, luck on the other
9:07 am
hand. and that is certainly the case in my instance and i think it is in the case of many other people in washington with whom i am familiar but also went on to say that estimated maybe all your planning and thinking and maybe constituted a little more of your outcomes. and maybe little -- a little less than half and i don't know if you believe that or not but i think he was trying to talk to people who believed in that that their whole lives was something controlled by the outside and they had no agency and all and that isn't our problem today but i think he was right and these few comments i make about my own career will illustrate that to a ti think. i began when i was more or less your age is a senior in college with a thought of i wanted to be a professor and teach political philosophy and read philosophy and write about it
9:08 am
and teach about it. when i graduated and i went to graduate school and had an ma and phd at princeton and continued on what i thought was my normal course. as it happened a job opened up unexpectedly at the university of pennsylvania and i ended up getting that job in the best job in the country at that point in my field. i was pretty well convinced i was the master of my own ship and things were moving along just as i had planned it. i found out that that wasn't entirely the case after a few years and at least in my department they were going through assistant professors after three-year contracts and flushing us out and then starting again at the bottom. it was clear i would have to do some thing else and my first a natural response was to see if there was another teaching job somewhere in there were very
9:09 am
few at that point in those where there were i had no interest in being. so i was stymied in terms of my career plan. it just seemed to me this was rather tall cotton in the words of my southern friends. and on top of that it was a very tense and edgy time in
9:10 am
washington in the spring of 1968 with robert kennedy assassinated, martin luther king assassinated, riots and all the rest were breaking out not 15 blocks from where we are sitting today and capitol hill was surrounded with sandbags and military police guarding the capital and it had a kind of intensity and i thought maybe someday we would like to come back here if we could. so in my academic ambitions we decided i would take a look and see what jobs there were here. cited apply to places and i thought it phd would be useful and congressional budget office in places like that and my wife's parents were from indiana and they were fond of richard lugar, their junior senator. so on a complete lark i submitted a letter of application to senator lugar's office and in those days you wrote a letter and put a stamp on it and you mailed it and hope to hear something back
9:11 am
with no email. so i did get a call back from his chief of staff, who at the time was a young guy named mitch daniels. and he turned out to be the director of officer and manager of budget and two-time governor of indiana and the president of purdue university. so i interviewed with mitch daniels and he was from princeton too, which was a nice coincidence. he said in his usual droll way, i thought i had to see you because i wanted to see if the teacher like you actually existed. i said what do you mean? and he said somebody with a phd from an ivy league school who is a conservative republican. i didn't know if there was such a thing. and at any rate i was offered the job and then after thinking about it again i took it and when you think about fortune in life if you had told me three years before that i was going to be a capitol hill staff guy,
9:12 am
i would not have even known what you meant by that or what they do, much less that i would be one. but it turned out i actually enjoyed it a great deal. senator lugar was an intelligent and thoughtful guy and mitch has and still has the best and sharpest instincts of anybody i met. it was really a wonderful place to be. the two years we were planning to stay here past and i was still there for five years later at which point mitch left and i became senator lugar's chief of staff. something happened unexpected and could never have been planned for. that is, in a very short six years, senator lugar went from becoming the minority member,
9:13 am
the least senior member, to be the chairman and that had never happened before and so far as i know, it has never happened since. nobody could have expected that. but i did go over and became staff director of the senate foreign relations committee and it turned out to be the best job i had either before or after and i was able to hire a brand-new staff and we put together the best foreign- policy team in town. >> otherwise i probably would have hired your staff out. so it was good and we worked with members of the senate in the house and we passed major pieces of legislation and put the committee back on the map again where it had fallen into disrepair over the previous year's and i worked closely with the state department and we tried the best we could to be supportive of their initiatives but not everybody but most and it was really a
9:14 am
wonderful learning experience. i did think about staying longer but i had been on the hill for seven or eight years and i didn't want to become what we used to call a professional hill rat and spend my entire life on the hill. so i decided to go out on my own and join up with two of my friends and we started a small public relations firm which again proving the adage of this and we got off to a quick start and higher do some major clients and we turned it into gradually one of the better known and more successful washington lobbying firms in town. and i hate to confess but i became a bit seduced and when i was a professor i never thought it would be that and i went into that business to make money. but i did stay on at any rate
9:15 am
for 18 years altogether. we made a very good run of it and in my own defense as an academic i taught for 20 years during that period of time at georgetown a class each year on national security policies. so i convinced myself i was still somehow in academia. i left in 2004 and sold my half of the company to my partner and susan and i planned to build a house in chesapeake bay and i wanted to write a book that had been on my mind for a long time. out of the blue i did get a phone call from bob zoellick at the state department who was the deputy terry -- secretary of state. and i said and he said you
9:16 am
would be a good secretary for legislative affairs and i thought that was a nice thing and thank you for the thought but that is not really my plan at this point and we are planning to move out of town and i am writing a book. and in bob's typical way, that is the wrong answer. please go meet with connie. and along and the short of it is i was charmed and i guess i didn't screw up too badly because she offered me the job to be the assistant secretary and after a somewhat complex confirmation process of my own, i began and served in this position throughout the second term of that administration from 2005 to 2008. and it was a very intense and complex job. we were in charge of trying to get the state department budget past each year and in charge of trying to get legislation that
9:17 am
the administration wanted to pass and in charge of trying to stop bad ideas that came from the hill that we didn't like. and by the way there were a lot more of the latter than the former and we were in charge of trying to get treaties consented to by the senate, although, as you probably know, treaties aren't a very big business anymore these days and presidents prefer to do things by executive agreement or other because it's too hard to get consent for anything. and then also nominations which took up an inordinate amount of our time and when you think about it the state department has more nominees they have to get confirmed than any other cabinet department by far and every department has to have their senior staff at that level and above confirmed but the state department in addition because the constitutional requirements that ambassadors have to be confirmed, we have a lot of confirmations to do every year
9:18 am
and roughly 190 some ambassadors and if the average tenure is three years or so we had to confirm 60 or so ambassadors every year. this was a difficult and often extremely unhappy and unpleasant job and there was no end of things that came up. but in all events it was a wonderful learning experience and now that it is over i am very glad i did it. but at that point we finally decided to make good on our plan to build our house on the chesapeake bay and escape from washington. which we did do. i began work on this long- standing book project. at that point i thought maybe i should teach a little bit again. and turned out the president of the university there was in the process of turning the
9:19 am
university from a pretty good liberal arts school. so i met with paul and he said you have to teach here and i taught full-time for a year and then after that taught for the next three or four years off and on various courses on american government, foreign policy and political philosophy in whatever i could talk them into. that was a very good place to be. at that point again somebody out of the blue called me from the assistant dean of the university of virginia school of public policy. he was an acquaintance of mine and i would always invite guest lecturers so students could not only hear from me but emerging people and as hard as that is about a college anymore.
9:20 am
this friend of mine whose political views were the opposite of mine, i asked to come. he was fairly well received by the students and i had him back year after year. when he called, he said he was at the university of virginia and could have returned the favor and do some guest lecturing in his classes. i said, sure, i would be happy to. one thing led to another and i began to teach full-time at uva every spring semester. that brings us almost up to the present time. as you can see there is a complete mix of things which i had planned to do and intended to do and things which were a matter of fortune and for all practical purposes good fortune and not bad fortune. i encourage you as you think about your career to think about what you want to do. think about why you want to do
9:21 am
it and think about what would make you feel fulfilled and as this pathologist said think about what you want to do and what your assets are and how you would like to see your life unfold. but at the same time be aware to things that could come along and aren't expected and even out of the blue because often, those things are at least as good as what you have in your own mind as far as what you should be doing. i will leave it at that as far as one piece of semi-wisdom, i guess, plan, think, aim, but also be open. >> the real thing i want to talk about is the second major piece of something which i did learn over 45 years in washington is a little bit different in the subject which i take up in this most recent
9:22 am
book i wrote which was published in april and he was kind enough to say american materialism and domestic policies and foreign policies and the intelligence assessments often fail and as i say in the preface of the book, it was 45 years in the making reflecting something which i have learned. it did begin when i was a newly minted foreign policy staffer for senator lugar and he was on the last senate delegation in iran to see the shaw and i followed things in iran very closely when they came back and i can't remember if it was november or december but it was at the end of 1978 and then in midnight of 1979 he abdicated and left the country and after
9:23 am
seven -- several months of uncertainty the ayatollah khomeini assumed power and iran has been a theocratic government ever since. shortly after he came in i ran into an acquaintance of mine who was a mid-level cia analyst. i said to him, how did you get iran so wrong? and how did you miss this after all they had gone from one of our closest allies in the middle east to this and it more or less remained that way ever since. how did you guys miss this and not just some country but they were closest ally and along with saudi arabia and they were called the twin pillars of oil producers and guardians of the gulf through which so much of the oil that fuels the western economies came. and his answer i found was fascinating. he said, well, you know, we in
9:24 am
the intelligence business are very good at counting things and seeing material things in tangible things and things we can count. so when we did look at iran we saw the shah and so many thousand troops and so many thousand tanks and agents are secret service and it appeared as there was absolutely nothing on the horizon that would jeopardize his power and he could face this as he had been but he was in good shape and they were predicting that he would be in good shape all the way through the mid 80s and as far out as the eye could see which of course wasn't what happened and after these predictions were made the shah abdicated. so i did think about this and it did stay with me throughout all of the different jobs which i have described to you that
9:25 am
far too often when policymakers are looking at making policy, they rely too heavily on what you could call economic or material causation but the reason things happen or for material reasons that is really what the purpose of this book is to explain how this came to be. it wasn't always thus and it certainly always wasn't the first 150 years of our country's history from 1789 up until the progressive era and this is the second and third decades of the 20th century. and how it came to be but more importantly how it plays itself out in domestic policy and foreign policy and intelligence assessments. i won't belabor my whole analysis of what came to be other than to say in short it came with the arrival of progressivism from europe and
9:26 am
progressivism being essentially kind of a pale version of marxism which over accentuates the importance of material things. if you're interested in that you can see a long and somewhat difficult analysis of all of this but what i would like to do today rather is to give you some examples about how it is i think an excess of belief in material causation makes the policies deficient and it's not that economics isn't important or doesn't have a role but simply not the beginning and end all. if i could let me spend a few minutes or five or six minutes on domestic policy and in foreign policy which is after all here and then talk a little bit about the intelligence agencies and assessments and try to demonstrate to you how this is the case and why it is
9:27 am
our policies even though all is very well-intentioned but often are not altogether successful. when it comes to domestic policy, if you were to sit in on these debates on the hill or executive branch about what we should do in education policy or agriculture policy or food stamps or whatever it is. and every one of these debates ends up on the question of how much money do we provide for these particular jobs and tasks. in the conventional wisdom held certainly by the democratic party and progressive especially but also by a lot of republicans is that they all depend on money and the keys to success is to provide more resources and more money and that is always the answer. if you look at this and mentioned the education policy
9:28 am
or you look at education policy this is the beginning and end all and how do you improve educational attainment in this country which is often criticized as often not being very good and there are indeed many short comings but you provide more resources and how do you measure how good you are doing or how well you are or sincere you are or how much you intend to improve educational attainment and how much money do you provide? did you provide more money than last year? and when you do sit in these debates, it becomes so striking that you could hardly not see this unless you are not looking for it. when you look at education policy, the interesting thing about it is is there is absolutely no empirical evidence that this is true. there is some material things
9:29 am
and you need to pay for teachers and you need schools but it isn't the beginning and end of all wisdom about how you improve educational attainment in this country. to the contrary, there are a number of things that if you really want to have a decent education policy that don't involve money at all or throwing resources at the problem. these may include, for example, taking a look at the family structure in the united states and when you look at the many families, the parents have no interest in education and provide very little preparation for their children when they go to school and i am no fan of teachers and not of teachers unions, but they get a little bit of an unfair rap about how bad teachers are because a lot of kids come to school and they have almost 0 vocabulary and they don't know anything or particularly care to know anything and they get a little bit of a bum rap i think but
9:30 am
the family structure, this is very important and likewise also what is the quality of the teachers you are hiring and likewise too what is it they are teaching exactly as opposed to some of the things that pass for education today? or how about competition which in every sphere of life produces better results than monopolies do. and all of these things are important. if you think you're going to solve educational attainment problems in this country, you can double the amount or triple the amount of money we spend or triplet and you still won't get the results you want and you have your head wrapped around a notion of the only way to improve education is to provide more money. more resources. so this is an example. but you can trace this same pattern over and over again in all the different cabinet departments and all the debates that go on about how we do good
9:31 am
and make good policy. and let me mention another thing about domestic politics that flow from this reliance on a notion of economic causation. if you listen sometimes to people in the press or members of the press particularly on the left, people ask why is it that poorer or working-class people in this country whatever vote republican or for trump? how can that be? don't these people know their own self-interest? it is the left who wants to provide to use mitt romney's famous words, more stuff. what is the matter with people? why can't they understand where their self-interest lies and it seems like a straight up question in a way. and a very interesting book
9:32 am
written in 2008 by a man called thomas frank and the book is called what is the matter with kansas and he raises this question why is it exactly that kansas, which he thinks because he knows about it but why is it that so many people there, particularly ones not in the elite but are more working- class, why is it that they would vote republican? why do they do this? how can they not know what their self interest is? it seems like a very fair and neutral question. but if you think about it and unpack it, it's not a fair and neutral question but one that depends entirely on the premise that people's true self interests are always monetary, financial and material in human beings can't have deep and true interests other than financial interests. and so what happens is what we call these days cultural issues
9:33 am
for want of a better word. these are dismissed as being red herrings. but the fact of the matter is people have all kinds of interests for sure and not that they aren't important. they are. they aren't the only thing. and people are more complex than economic beings and they are for more complex in the care about other things like faith, country, family and not weird to think that people may to some degree cast their votes on part of what they think is self-interest rather than on economic bases of whether or not they receive more money from the federal government. and this also has been like
9:34 am
this for the first hundred 50 years of our country's history where it was assumed somehow that people's self interests were material or financial but this came in largely with the progressivism movement of the earliest 20th century and has been with us for about 100 years. and by the way, and make an argument and i don't know if you believe it or not, but it seems to be progressivism is a background intellectual characterization of our country right now the most all of the elites or people who deal with symbols and numbers and words are somehow of a material mindset or progressive mindset. this is certainly true of the democratic party but true of
9:35 am
educational institutions, the media, the entertainment industry, and most non-for profits and of course not the american foreign policy council of course but also true of many republicans who somehow harbor this notion as well. again, it isn't that material things and money are unimportant but somehow the notion that they are all important is really a conceit that comes from nowhere other than what you made trace back is a european or marxist notion that economics are what shaped at the bottom post everything that occurs in shape why it occurs. but so much not said about domestic issues, there are a whole host of other issues which i explore including
9:36 am
questions like why this tends to over exaggerate or shouldn't say that but exaggerate what people think is the importance of money in politics, which i think is vastly exaggerated and most of all empirical evidence points to it as not being as nearly as important as most people think. also, i think it suggests that you have this phenomenon of our government that we pass a lot of bills and do a lot of things but they all concern inputs, money, resources and very little of what you may call results to the contrary. there is virtually no intelligent congressional oversight about anything and what passes for congressional oversight is a got you type of
9:37 am
thing where somebody has done something wrong. like take a secret service. but to take bills in which they passed, nobody in the executive branch or congress ever looked seriously at what is this actually accomplishing and what is it not accomplishing? to the contrary, it is the question of measuring inputs rather than measuring results. there are a number of other things that followed from thinking about it this way but in the interest of moving along and opening this up eventually, let me turn to foreign policy for a few minutes. and let me discuss two aspects of american foreign policy. first, take a look at the state department and its priorities. the state department budget, i don't know exactly what it is today, but something in the range of $60 billion.
9:38 am
what you do see is $40 billion of that, two thirds, goes to provide foreign assistance to other countries. and only one third of this goes to pay the salaries of all state department employees, both americans and foreign nationals and 50,000 people altogether. it goes to pay for building buildings and embassies and so forth going to pay for security in both the officials in our embassy and goes to pay for all the visa programs and stuff and goes to pay for travel and all the things that go into having diplomatic presence and conduct the policy and only one third. and with this other two thirds it is clearly a question of providing financial resources to countries. and i actually know a little bit about this and i don't say this with any particular pride
9:39 am
but i was from 2005 to 2008 on the hill but thinking about it all and the terms in which i do in this book it seems to me that what one could say is there are some very useful and good assistance programs but they tend to be the one that have a very specific objective and specific and goal clearly understood by an clearly measurable. you could take something like narcotics and the plan in columbia and did that change columbia from being a country that was a terrorist state to a normal country and most of the credit is due to the colombians themselves but american assistance to them was important. it was important because it was clear what the objective was in clear what we are trying to achieve and how we measured results are didn't and for this
9:40 am
program, i think it makes sense. and then also a proliferation strategy and there has been a number of times when a strategy like that has been successful and in libya for example. there are number of cases in which that is the case that the assistance we provide is useful in achieving concrete clear objectives and measurable results. or the ades programs in africa. we have a very substantial commitment to that and opposing aids in sub-saharan africa. this also is clear what the objective is and clear what we are trying to do and clear also that the results are measurable
9:41 am
and also to the person you can count how many lives have been saved by these programs. as well as providing military assistance to israel because you know what they need and you need to help to do it and i do mention this in part because capitol hill the sun. and programs like that make a certain amount of sense but the great majority of foreign assistance programs are maybe more amorphous than this and they are not measurable and clear-cut but more like we want to do good and encourage economic growth and encourage development. and now the word development is itself very interesting and a word borrowed from biology if you think about it. human beings and other
9:42 am
sentiment beings, live beings, have a pattern of development. human beings go from embryos to babies to small children to adults and if something doesn't interfere from the outside they have this natural progression of development and what they tend to do is assume there is such a thing like that in the sphere of nations and it is a natural thing for countries to develop in that way. and all of these have lots of money to stimulate this to happen. and the evidence for this as well seems to be small. and you can point to countries where there is no development and to the contrary and you look at venezuela and this was
9:43 am
once a semi-prosperous country and now after several regimes including two six-year terms of maduro and maybe a third term coming if they cheat enough, countries don't necessarily develop in a certain way and they can go backwards overnight as was has done in this government has virtually destroyed the country. there is no reason to think it's such a natural thing, this development. how this came to be is a lot of economic models that were produced or stages of growth were they seemed to be natural and if you simply provide money here here and here you can see economic growth. again, as i say, i think this is a rather vague and not necessarily well-founded notion but it does rely on the notion that it is economics and
9:44 am
economic assistance that is needed above all for countries to develop. and that isn't entirely true. you could see it with venezuela. and they have gone backwards and no amount of economic assistance that could correct them today that would make the slightest bit of difference in this is a problem of governance and not money. so as i have said in other instances, this wasn't always the case that we behave like this is a country and for the first years from 1789 until several years before world war ii when we did this lend lease program and we virtually provided assistance to anybody in this began to change with that program and then ultimately after world war ii more so with this plan and
9:45 am
assistance to greece and turkey and finally became fully institutionalized as a project around 1961 with the agency for economic development. since then we did proceed along on the basis of these unspoken models. and it will naturally develop and provides more resources and it will succeed. and some of these programs i think show there is no prospect for them being helpful to be perfectly blunt about it. this was a result of a very long experience watching how the foreign assistance programs are provided and how money is rolled out and around the table with the senior staff and state
9:46 am
department and you watch how decisions are made about how much money country a should be given in country b and it would curl your hair. and let me leave it at that. this is two thirds and by far the principal prospect of the state department currently and i will mention the second thing about foreign policy. and there was a professor who wrote an article a few years ago in foreign affairs journal and said economic sanctions have become the principal tool for american foreign policy and i think is absolutely right and if i made you guess how many economic sanctions we have in play currently i would estimate that every time and there are
9:47 am
11,000 economic sanctions we have now against other countries, other groups, individuals and certain weapons systems, ships, against any qualify military thing. and this also wasn't always the case. we didn't really do economic sanctions as a country from 1789 all the way up until the years after world war i. and this is when they became understood to be a useful tool of american foreign policy. we did embargoes during war times as far as economic sanctions being put against countries and individuals during peace time this wasn't a foreign policy tool. it didn't become one until the post-world war i period. again, why?
9:48 am
because the progressive movement in woodrow wilson in particular thought this was the way foreign policy could be successful and conducted. there is a wonderful wilson quotation which could be the front page of this book in which wilson says when he was busy helping create the league of nations he said the economic sanctions against the country is harsh and more severe penalty against that country than invading them militarily. and there seems to be something ridiculous but nevertheless there was and this was the principal tool of the league of nations and it got off to a rocky start but the league of nations decided they would sanction italy if they invaded ethiopia. and threaten italy with sanctions and and when italy
9:49 am
invaded it made no difference whatsoever and i think that is something one needs to think about in terms of all of our economic sanctions as well. and it depends a little but i suppose in what you're trying to achieve by economic sanctions and if you're just trying to express dissatisfaction or unhappiness with something again, that is one thing that if you think that sanctions would have such an effect is to change the policies of other governments, i think you will be sorely mistaken and there really is a very little evidence that this really works but if you're going to change the whole foreign regime with sanctions that almost never works. and i won't say where the has to be a few cases where it works but they were very much
9:50 am
involved in sanctions against south africa in the apartheid regime. and they were very specific and unusual why that succeeded in for the most part, it doesn't succeed if your goal is to change policies of foreign governments or change the regimes themselves. we have sanctioned north korea so many ways, upside down, forward, backward, left and right. it hasn't made a single bit of difference so far as i can tell in the policies of kim jong-un or the development program of theirs for nuclear and changing the nature of its machine. we have sanctioned venezuela. again forward, backward, upside down. and still maduro is there are cruising along very nicely. and as my kids may tell you, how is this working out for you? it's not particularly working out. the reason i think that people
9:51 am
have such hopes with sanctions and that they will work is that again there is an excessive reliance on the notion that they could change behavior with economic tools and economic means and vastly overestimated as a useful tool. and again as i say it's a fairly recent phenomenon and if you want a more current example look at russia and ukraine. we threatened them with sanctions if you invade ukraine and put sanctions and as my kids say how did that work out. and they you created -- invaded ukraine and then on russia of various kinds of various types. and they have had literally so far as i can judge no significant effect at all but
9:52 am
we see that putin continues to do what he does and he's not doing it for economic reasons but to the contrary and has an idea in his mind which isn't even an economic idea at all. and they are a very convenient tool if i were a real cynic. you could almost say that why did we put so many sanctions in place? because it looks like we are doing something without doing anything real and take a credit for being tough. i think this is founded on the great reliance on the notion of economic causation and material things and motivate people are nations and as a result these policies are nowhere near
9:53 am
successful as their proponents would like to say. sometimes, they are even counterproductive and i can give you a good example of a time when the sanctions were completely and utterly counterproductive and if you want an example of that if you are interested. so those are two ways in which i think the two fundamental normal regular everyday policies of the state department are founded on notions of an excessive economic foundation and let me turn to a few minutes and i will start here to intelligence assessments. and i should be clear in the beginning what i am talking about and not talking about and the committee has two different kinds of things it does and one is operations and the other one of which is analysis and let's
9:54 am
see how this reflects that and there is a direction -- director of operations which engages in all of this as you can imagine at great risk often and often with great difficulty and then a bigger part of this. and i am not talking at all about the operations side of the house. nor am i talking about the provision of facts which the intelligence committee provides to decision-makers. and if you have ever been privy to any of this information, you would be astonished what we actually do know and what the prime minister said at breakfast yesterday morning. here is what they said. or how many missiles does china have up against the taiwan straits or whatever the case may be. what i am talking about is how
9:55 am
you make something meaningful out of these facts and do an assessment in the intelligence community or make sense of it and this usually comes in the form of the lowest common denominator statement from the combined intelligence agency saying we assess that or we judge that or assess it with moderate confidence or whatever and this is the way the intelligence committee attempts to understand what is happening or predict or not predict what is happening. that is the part i am talking about. i do offer up a number examples in the book about how these intelligence assessments have gone wrong and the first one i mentioned to you the case of the shah in iran and who is
9:56 am
doing what to home and all of that but didn't conclude from any of this the right thing and why in this case is because they were really focused on the balance of material forces and that is a marxist phrase in the balance of that and protest groups. there are others and in the interest of time let me mention as well lest you think what happened in the iran case and the question of the collapse of the afghan government. and nobody particularly thought that the united states left afghanistan and it was going to defeat the taliban but the real question is how long could the afghan government stay in place and fend off the taliban? i suppose it's the case of
9:57 am
plausible the nine -- denying. but the intelligence community made in retrospect flat wrong conclusions about all of this arguing and that they could be held off at bay in the afghan government could take a hold and defend itself and exist for 18 months, two years or something like that or some indeterminate future based on what? based on the fact that the afghan government had, when we left far more troops than the taliban had and, by the way, had more in much better weapons than the taliban had and they had the weapons we left behind. so, you know, there was a phone call that president biden made
9:58 am
with the afghan president very soon before the government imploded. in which he said, you have all the reasons to be successful and far more troops under your command than the taliban has and all organized monetarily or militarily in the ways we have trained them and you have these state-of-the-art weapons that the taliban doesn't have. you should be in good shape, at least for a while based on your own reading of intelligence. how did that work out? when we left, the afghan government collapsed almost instantaneously because it turns out having more troops or more guns or weapons isn't the
9:59 am
beginning and end of all but things happen in the world. and admittedly they were doing a bit of a pep talk and the notion that somehow and it's not correct and other more complex things that go on to explain why things happen. and then i mentioned in the book, ernest hemingway's book, the sun also rises in one character asked the other. and g to see the director of the cia at that time and now talk about
10:00 am
war incredible success. they had in the handling afghanistan. their success, i suppose, consisted in this that they were the more pessimistic of the various intelligence. so the military agencies were more optimistic than the cia. none of this was a success. it was all not right or to come even more clear. look at russia and the invasion of ukraine here. there's some invasion of ukraine. the intelligence agency predicted, they knew that putin was going to go after ukraine. the european intelligence agencies, they were actually better than zelenskyy.
10:01 am
we have hope that the invasion wasn't going to take place but we tried to prevent russia from invading ukraine with the threat of sanctions which caused nothing to happen. putin invaded ukraine anyway. sanctions have not caused him to change his mind ever since. o at that point, once they were so correct about the issue of what putin was going to do, then the assessment was way off the rails and they subscribed as did a number of people in the european agencies that russia would defeat ukraine in three, four, five days depending on what you read. the intelligent service people were picking apart kyiv and so forth and threatening to create a
10:02 am
public government there. so, you know, this assessment that they made that ukraine would collapse in a short period of time was flat wrong. what does it matter? i suppose it matters and so far ofru whether ukraine would be able to hold off russia and change the whole balance of things and move the border back toward russia. we provide more useful weapons to ukraine but that is a policy question. all i am saying is that this intelligence assessment was way off. just to conclude about this, i can give you many more
10:03 am
examples if you want. one, he went through a litany and said there's no major -- the question is why? it's not for want to resources. that is for sure. it would be very hard if these predictions were in different ways. as yogi berra said, predictions are hard, especially about the future. the thing that they all failed in the exactly the same way. in taking economic things off the basis of reality. the reason things change or don't change and the form of
10:04 am
understanding of the various things that motivate human behavior. certainly in putin's case i don't think there was a strong economic motive to attack ukraine. economic things do matter in the long run. russia has more troops, more guns and so forth we are making a difference but the intelligence of how quickly ukraine would collapse was flat wrong and wrong for the same reason all of the other ones i mentioned in this chapter are wrong. they made it over estimation of the importance of material causation. let me stop there and say i do as i feel i was obliged to do, offer a few thoughts of how we might improve the situation. intelligence agencies are now reviewing the way they do business and that is all to the
10:05 am
good. what they need to understand is the probability underneath all of this is they make the same mistake every time and this is what needs to be taken a and thought through from the ground up. i make a few suggestions, but i have to admit the notion of material causation is deeply embedded in the american psyche at this point. ff the changes going to be very difficult. i think that is something we simply have to acknowledge going forward. we can certainly improve it. i make a number of suggestions but i may be more conscious than anybody about how limited these suggestions are in terms t of making a big difference, but
10:06 am
at any rate this is the case that i make here. i suppose one that i would argue is the other big thing that i learned over the 45 years i have been in washington . so just to summarize, if you are going to look at careers think about what you want to do seriously, but also be open to the possibility of it coming in ways you do not expect. i felt that that was important not to make enemies gratuitously but rather to treat people as decently as you can. you would be surprised how often things
10:07 am
come around later on in your life in interesting ways. if you want to advance your chances of success it is very helpful to be reasonable, saying, and fair-minded about things. our current republican nominee has gone a long way without this virtue, but for the most part i found it very help full. finally, think if you will about problems that are trying to address that are amenable to the solution. think a little bit about it and what actually could help improve academic performance of our children. take a look.
10:08 am
think about what congress should be doing, it is some real oversight. all of the economic sanctions we put in place there is not one that has done any study about the economic impact. not the treasury department, not the state department or the defense department. it is all about input. i think you could advantage yourself if you talked about things a little bit more and look at things on the basis of achieving the
10:09 am
results you want. n i guess i will stop there. thank you for hosting us. i look forward to questions or complaints, questions, comments. >> wonderful. tremendous food for thought. i'm sure there's tons of questions but the big take away particularly because you are speaking to a group of young researchers and intellectuals, the fact that the current political system in particular t d prioritizes the non-tangible. it leads to very dangerous strategic surprise. here at the american foreign policy council we spent a lot of times looking at culture and ideology. anybody who is well-versed in
10:10 am
russia imperial ideology would have been better placed to understand that for putin it was not just about the material. it was about the ideological, the imperial, the vision of greatness. by the way, in the middle east what we have seen over the last nine months as a consequence of the fact that a rejection is group refused to allow trickle down economics to change an economic actor into a political actor. these things, what you are highlighting is very important. for everybody in the careers i think it highlights the way where you can really contribute and make a mark. >> i would just say that you will have been the beneficiaries of that.
10:11 am
>> that is great. let's open it up for questions. i have some of my own but whoever wants to step up to the mic, introduce yourselves and have at it. >> thank you. thank you very much for coming here. i really enjoyed it. my name is nathan myers. i am from kansas, so thank you for mentioning kansas. i major in political science and economics. my question was, you talked about how we think too much in terms of material. this material view of the world which is progressive from this marxist explanation of the world that everything is motivated material factors. my question would be because that is not very common. they thought of themselves as
10:12 am
politicos not you can honest. i think that we think of ourselves more aseconomic us . so in the politics and policy positions and whatnot, how can we influence policy and stuff for the country in general to think more and thatpoliticos and how can we return to that. >> i guess i would say that is t a more normal way of looking at things for many centuries in the west and east and everywhere. people looked at other countries and understood them not merely in economic terms but also political terms. you see this today with russia.
10:13 am
there are people that still argue that putin somehow invaded ukraine for economic reasons. i just don't see a real economic reason. it seems to me it has been a very expensive project. people also say, we need to give him an offramp and show him how it is harming the economic interests of the russian people. if he wanted an offramp it would be easy enough for him to find a. that is not the problem. he needs to be defeated. the harder question you ask is how can we encourage a broader -- i think it is right to say that political is more broad than economic. it seems to me that is the discipline that asks the more deep and serious questions about how we organize and what is it that the justice consists
10:14 am
of and making money consists of. i cannot offer an easy way to do that. there are hopes of smaller suggestion i make. for example, i think it would be an excellent thing if members of congress would put in place a structure in which they require themselves to follow-on oversight act -- investigations of what is being done. the way to do that i suppose is to make every piece of legislation that passes subject to expiration of some kind. it sounds like a right wing project but it isn't. this idea of sun setting legislation was originally a left-wing idea to try to free up policy from the painful
10:15 am
effects of big business. there are a lot of places in which this makes sense besides just economic areas. we passed a resolution, but it has a seemingly endless life. maybe some kind of term limit on education, agriculture term limits i think would be helpful with congress and the executive branch to look at them and ha defend and consider how is it exactly that this has worked. i think the answer of any fair- minded person is that it works
10:16 am
in some ways but there are other ways it has not worked. so that is one suggestion. somehow institutionalizing in a certain way that i hope intelligence agencies are doing in terms of their review of procedures especially since afghanistan and ukraine, but i would say that this is perhaps small compared to all of the sudden trying to somehow look at things and understand the economics that motivate everything. the economic things sort of came into place with these notions that somehow if we could solve the economic problem we would solve human problems.
10:17 am
that was not just marks. it was all kinds of people just simply conceding if he saw the economic problem you solve all the problems as if somehow you solve economic problem and everybody has enough you are somehow going to solve every other human problem. problems of selfishness and pride and lust for vengeance and every other human motivation that there is? not likely. i see a few signs to be honest, that maybe people are beginning to understand that economics has its place but not everywhere . looking at the conover revival on the conservative side saying conservatism which seems to me to have a stronger
10:18 am
core than it had with barry goldwater in 1964. there was not much of a bench back there but now you have all kinds of places and institutions and publications and media and so forth that defend some of these broader, more natural rights oriented traditions. there is that but i think there are some on the left as well that have a question about whether economics is really the beginning or end of all wisdom. if you look, for example, this is not in any way, shape, or form anyway to do with economic development or providing more for people. in fact, it is usually providing less. because of this overarching noneconomic question of global warning -- warming. you see it in that way. i make him -- an argument that
10:19 am
the whole transition from the left of equity also seems to me that maybe it is a sign that the economic validation of things will take us only so far in the sense that equality is part of the liberal tradition of trying to provide more for more people . this has nothing to do with that. equity has to do with sameness. it could be at this level, this level, this level. it is more a question of justice. more of a political question. there are others that i point to, they suggest that maybe there are some courses that would suggest that economics is not the beginning and end of all problems.
10:20 am
but i will fully confess and plead guilty to the fact that i have not got the magic bullet to make people think more broadly in political terms rather than economic terms which they seem for the most part to do. thank you. they give for the indulgence. >> hello. first of all, thank you so much for your talk. my name is grace. i'm a student at rice university. i look a lot at iran. i thought the sanctions things you are saying were interesting and measuring tangible versus intangible. my question is, to what extent do you think things should be --
10:21 am
sanctions can have an intangible effect am supposed to a tangible effect other positively or negatively for undermining public support for a regime by making conditions worse or on the other side possibly strengthening a belligerent cause against our own interest and what are the intangible effects. >> i'm not sure i entirely understand your question. i think some of the programs we run, for example, would seem in a way to me to run somewhat parallel to american foreign policy council that we run democracy promotion programs or programs that encourage looking at broader political questions and ideological questions. these are all to the good. i have taken, i suppose a
10:22 am
compromise involved in a lot of the republican institute projects and some of the trips to talk about democracy and all of that. the current president happens to be a good friend of mine and something that i often invite for a guest lecture. i think that there is a role for what you call public diplomacy, which is not based at all on economics but based on trying to teach other ways about how you organize yourself or how you run a campaign or two elections. have i touched at all on what you were asking? >> yes. i think so. >> i think there is a very big role for places like the council to cause you to think
10:23 am
more deeply and to look at what might be the real factors involved and why things happen the way they do. sometimes they are economic but sometimes they are not. >> to that point when you talk about economic sanctions and outcome in iran is a perfect example of how they can be a tactical success but a he strategic failure. they can draw down resources but don't change the ark of the country. that is what we have seen. >> that is exactly right. simply giving them $6 billion -- some of it just boggles your mind that somehow you are going to change the regime by handinga out a chunk of money to them. it is ridiculous. i agree. you can certainly generate some
10:24 am
suffering in another country, but whether that results in changed policies of the regime, it seems like the kind of regime you want to punish are those least likely to suffer from the sanctions. kim jong un is doing pretty well. he eats, obviously too much but also the iranian regime and russian regime don't really care all that much with what their populations think. therefore it is on us as we think about them and what motivates them to try to understand. again, at the risk of being a broken record it's not always about economics. >> thank you. >> i think we have time for one more.
10:25 am
>> i am alec, i'm a hoosier so on behalf of the people of indiana thank you. my question i was going to ask, i'm just curious to your thoughts. you have talked a lot and spoken very well on how the focus on material and economic aspects is deficient in a lot of respects. what i am wondering is, as soon as we start moving to the immaterial, noneconomic factors, do we start to venture off into questions of values or subjective evaluations that might the reason we focus on economics is because we can agree on it, it is measurable. once we start getting into questions like iran, do we start to enter into what do we
10:26 am
want it to look like so maybe we kind of accept the devil that we know and stick to an economic approach? >> that is an excellent question. where are you from an indiana >> >> noblesville and hamilton county. >> we have all kinds of family there. i think you touch on a very subtle and interesting question. if you had an american government that was not trying to just solve problems by handing out money but was trying in some way to shape the ideological current of the country, you would not want to go very far in that direction either. so it is an excellent question. at the moment i don't think we are in any danger of that, but we have no particular problem with running to shape the ideological character of other countries. why not.
10:27 am
let's fix north korea and change the value system of russia and so forth. i think we need to be much more careful of not replacing an orderly economic understanding was some kind of ideological indoctrination. that is simply replacing it with a fair look about what it is that could produce a policy, make changes that are real and those would have to be ones that have democratic support and that we agree are important. i think everybody would agree that improving the educational system is a good idea. thinking about how to do that seems to be fair game. if you move too far in the direction of teaching everybody all this ridiculous stuff that becomes an issue. i think you raise a very subtle question.
10:28 am
i think we are in no danger of hearing on that side but rathere more on the side of iran. thank you for that. >> i am cognizant of the time so we will ended there. thank you so much. please join me in thanking dr. bergamen. [applause] thank you for coming to the american policy council. we are small but mighty on capitol hill. for those of you watching at home if you are interested in our work you can visit us online. thank you. >> thank you very much. >> nonfiction book lovers, c- span has a number of podcasts for you. listen to best-selling authors
10:29 am
and on q and a here wide ranging conversations with those that are making things happen. episodes her weekly hour-long conversations that regularly feature fascinating authors of nonfiction books on a variety of topics and takes you behind- the-scenes of the nonfiction publishing industry with insider interviews, find all of our podcasts by downloading the free c-span app and our website c-span.org /podcasts. >> the house will be in order. >> c-span celebrates 45 years of covering congress like the weather. since 1979 we've been your primary source on capitol hill taking to you work upon --

17 Views

info Stream Only

Uploaded by TV Archive on