what his campaign strategy is going to be. >> thank you so much for the talk. make sure to get a copy of the book for yourself, your friends, your family, the holidays sneak up on you. from a wonderful booksellers at the counter, there will be a signing line here, if you would not mind holding up your chair and putting it up against a shelf, it would be much appreciated. thank you. if you're enjoying book tv, sign up for newsletter using the qr code on the screen to receive the schedule of upcoming programs, author discussions, book festivals and more book tv every sunday on c- span2 or any time online on book tv.org. television for serious readers.

the house will be in order . >> this year's these men celebrates 45 years of covering congress like no other. since 1979, we have been your primary source for capitol hill, providing balanced, unfiltered coverage of government taking you to where the policy is debated and decided with the support of america's cable companies. c-span, 45 years and counting, powered by cable. without further ado, jeff bergner, i will turn it over to you, i have a couple questions depending on what you will say, -- >> you might be surprised . >> maybe. we will open it up for questions , there is a microphone in the room. all i ask, since this is being televised, if you could walk up, introduce yourself, ask a question, make a comment, ask a question also, just so we can record it and get the audio.

without further ado, jeff. >> thank you very much, i'm pleased to be at the american foreign policy council. you and i go back a long ways, more years than either one of us would care to admit. i'm very familiar with your work , you are from washington -- fairly small institution, you punch well, making many good contributions to american foreign policy so i'm pleased to hear. you asked if i would begin my remarks, i will talk about this book, to begin by saying a few words about mike career because as i understand it, many of you are interns and probably on the cusp of trying to figure out what your own careers are going to be like. i thought maybe by some action, it might be helpful to hear what someone else's career has been like.

machiavelli once said, i can't remember if it was in print, machiavelli once said that everyone's career, everyone's life, is a combination of things which you aim for and plan and intend to do on the one hand. fortune, luck on the other hand. that is certainly the case in my instance. i think it is in the case of many other people. machiavelli went on to say, he estimated your planning and thinking, intending, maybe constitute a little more than half of your outcomes. fortune may be a little less than half, i don't know if you actually believe that or not, i believe he was trying to talk to people that believed in that era that their whole lives were controlled by the outside and

they had no agency at all. that is not our problem today, obviously. in all events, i think he was completely right and the few comments i make about my own career will illustrate that to a tee, i think. i began when i was more or less your age as a senior in college. it was the thought that i wanted to be a professor and teach political philosophy. i wanted to read philosophy, write about it, teacher about it . when i graduated, i went to graduate school, m.a. and phd at princeton and continued on with 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, it was maybe the best job in the country at that point in my field. i was really pretty well convinced i was the master of my own ship, things were moving along just as i had planned them. i found out having been at penn

a few years, that was not the case, my department was running through professors two or three years of contacts and flushing us out, starting to get on the bottom. it was clear i was going to have to do something else. first and natural response was to look and see if there is another teaching job somewhere there were very few at that point and those that were workplaces i had no interest in being. i was really sort of stymied in terms of my career plan. susan and i, my wife, who is back here somewhere, had been in washington, d.c. for our junior year of college. it turned out it was a wonderful experience, maybe someone a cane to the

experience you guys are having, we met with seniors of congress, senior executive officials, justices of the supreme court, mini argument with justice douglas one day, it seemed to me, in the words of mike southern friends, this was rather tall cotton. on top of that, it was very tense and ag -- edgy time in washington, 1968, robert kennedy was assassinated, martin luther king was assassinated, riots, all of the rest were breaking out not 15 blocks from where we are sitting today. capitol hill was surrounded with sandbags, military police guarding the capitol. the experience, susan and i thought maybe someday we would like to come back here, if we could. suddenly blocked altogether with my academic ambitions, decided to take a look and see what jobs were here so i applied at places i thought a

phd would be useful, congressional budget office, places like that. parents were from indiana, very fond of junior senator richard -- on a complete lark, i submitted a letter of application to senator leonard's office, that is how you did it in those days, you read a letter, put a stamp on it and you mailed it and hoped to hear something back. no email so i got a call back from his chief of staff, who at the time was a young guy named rich daniels, went on to be director of the office of management and budget, two-time governor of indiana, president of perdue university so i interviewed with mitch, turned out he was from princeton too, which was a very nice coincidence. he said in his usual droll way,

i thought i had to see you because i wanted to see if a creature like you actually existed. i said, what do you mean? he said, someone with the phd from ivy league school who is a conservative republican, i did not know if there was such a thing. i said, well -- at any rate, i was offered the job and after thinking about it a bit, i took it. when you speak about fortune in life, if you had told me three years before i was going to be eight capitol hill staff guy, i would not have known what you meant or what capitol hill staffers do, much less that i would be one. it turned out, i enjoyed it a great deal. senator lugar is a very intelligence and thoughtful guy, mitch has the best and sharpest clinical instincts of anybody i ever bet -- met. it was a wonderful place to be, the two years we were planning to stay, i was still there four

or five years later, mitch left and i became the chief of staff. then something happened that was totally unexpected and could never have been plan for, that is a very short six years, senator lugar went from being the minority member, the least senior member on the foreign relations committee to be chairman, that never happened before, as far as i know, it has never happened since. no one could've expected that. the short of it was, i went over and became staff director of the senate foreign relations committee which turned out to be the best job i ever had, before or after. i was able to hire brand-new staff entirely and i think we put together the best foreign- policy team in town. fpc did not exist at that point.

it was very good and we worked with members of the senate and the house, we passed major pieces of legislation and put the committee back on the map where it had fallen into disrepair over the previous years and i worked very closely with the state department, the reagan administration, tried as best we could to be supportive of their initiatives, not everyone but most and it was a wonderful learning experience. i thought about staying longer but by then, i had been on the hill seven or eight years and did not what to become what we used to call a capitol hill rat and spend the rest of my life on the hill. i decided to go out on my own and join up with two of my friends, started a small government relations firm, which proving the adage, it is better to be lucky than smart, we got off to a quick start,

hired some major clients and gradually turned it into one of the better known and more successful washington lobbying firms in town. i hate to confess but i became seduced by the -- when i was a professor, never thought it would be, don't go to the professor business to make money. at any rate, i stayed on 18 years altogether and we made a very good run of it. in my own defense as an academic, i did teach 20 years during that period of time at georgetown, one class each year on congress graduate class on congress and national security policy. i kept in the academia and convinced myself i was still somehow academic. i finally left in 2004 and sold my half of the company to my partner, susan and i planned to

build a house on the chesapeake bay and i was intending to write a book i had on my mind for a long time. out of the blue, i got a phone call from bob zoellick at the state department, he was the deputy secretary of state for condoleezza rice. he said, look, i told her i thought you would be a good candidate for secretary of legislative affairs, that is a very nice thing, thank you for that thought but that is not really my plan at this point, planning to move out of town and write a book. in bob's typical way, that is the wrong answer. please go meet with condoleezza rice. the long and the short of it is i was charmed, i guess i did not screw up too badly because she ended up offering me the job to be assistant secretary. after somewhat complex confirmation process of my own,

i began and served in this position throughout the second term of the george w. bush administration from 2005 to 2008 . it was very intense and complex job, we were in charge of the state department budget, getting it passed each year, in charge of trying to get legislation the department or legislation wanted to pass, in charge of trying to stop bad ideas that came from the hill that we did not like. by the way, a lot more of the latter than the former. we were in charge of trying to get treaties consented to by the senate, although, as you probably know, treaties aren't very big business anymore these days, presidents prefer to do things by executive agreement or another because it is too hard to get the senate to consent to anything. also nominations, which took up

an inordinate amount of our time. when you think about it, the state department has far more nominees they have to get confirmed than any other cabinet department by far every cabinet in the department has to have their senior staff at the assistant level, assistant secretary level and above confirmed. the state department, in addition because of the constitutional requirement ambassadors have to be confirmed, we have lots and lots of confirmations to do every year. there are roughly 100 something ambassadors, the average tenure is three years or so, we were having to confirm 60 or so ambassadors every year. this was a difficult and often extremely unhappy and unpleasant job. there was no end to things that came up. in all events, wonderful learning experience and now that it's over, i'm very glad that i did it. at that point, finally decided to make it on our plan to build a house on

the chesapeake bay and to escape from washington, which we did. so i began work on this long- standing book project and at that point, i thought that maybe i should teach a little bit again. it turned out the president of newport university, which is right there, in the process of turning it into a pretty good liberal arts school. i met with paul, he said, yeah, got a teacher. i taught there full-time for year, then i taught often on for a few years, various government, foreign policy, whatever i could talk them into, that was a very good place to be. at that point again, somewhere out of the blue, the way that bob zoellick call came, i got a

phone call from the assistant dean of the new button school public policy at the university of virginia. he was acquaintance of mine and when i taught at georgetown those 20 years, i was always invite a couple of guest lecturers so students didn't just hear from me, sometimes different viewpoints, as hard as that is to believe about college anymore. this friend of mine, political views were flat out opposite of mine, i asked to come, he was fairly well received by the students, i had him back year after year so when he called, he was at the university of virginia and that i returned the favor and do some guest lectures 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 to the present time to as you can see,

there is a complete mix of things i had planned to do and intended to do and things that were a matter of fortune. usually, for all practical pursuits -- purposes, good fortune, not bad fortune. i would encourage you, as you think about your career, do think about what you want to do, think about why you want to do it, think about what will make you feel fulfilled as mythologists just as campbell said, follow your bliss. think about what you do, what your assets are, how would like to see your life unfold. at the same time, be wide open to things that might come along that are not expected, even out of the blue because often those things are at least as good as you have in your own mind about what you should be doing to i will leave it at that as one

piece of semi-wisdom, i guess. plan, think, aim, also be open. the real thing i want to talk about today, the second major piece of something which i learned over 45 years in washington is a little bit different. it is a subject that i take up in the most recent book i have written, was just published in april called, -- kind enough to say, "american materialism" why our domestic policies, foreign policies, intelligence assessments often fail. this is, as i say in the preface of the book, 45 years in the making, reflecting something i have learned throughout my whole career in washington. it began when i was a newly minted foreign policy staffer for senator lugar. he went on the last senate doug legation to iran to see the shaw

. i cannot remember, the end of 1978, midnight, mid january of 1979, abdicated and left the country after several months of uncertainty about what was going to happen, ayatollah khamenei assumed power and iran has been a government ever since. shortly after ayatollah khamenei came in, i ran into acquaintance of mine that was mid-level cia analyst, i said to him, how did you guys get iran so wrong? how could you miss this? after all, iran had gone from one of our closest allies in the middle east to implacable enemy and has more

or less remained that way ever since. how did you miss this? iran was not just some country in the middle east, after israel, was our closest ally, iran and saudi arabia were called the twin pillars of oil producers and guardians of the gulf so much of the oil, the fuel for western economies came. his answer, i found was absolutely fascinating and stuck with me. he said, you know, we in the intelligence business are very good at counting things. we are very good at seeing material things, tangible things, things that we can count. when we looked at iran, we saw the shah had so many hundred thousand troops, so many thousand tanks, so many thousand agents, their secret service. it appeared to us there was absolutely nothing on the horizon that would jeopardize his power. in light of protest as

continually, he was in good shape, intelligence agency jcdc would be in good shape through the 1980s as far as the eye could see, what happened very shortly after these fearless predictions were made, the shah abdicated. i thought about this and it stayed with me throughout all the different jobs which i have described to you, far too often, when policymakers are looking at making policy, they rely far too heavily on what you might call economic causation or material causation, the reason things happen or for material reasons. that is really what the purpose of the book is, to explain how this came to be, it wasn't always thus, it was not always the first 150 years of our country's history from 1789 up until the progressive era, second and third decades of the

20th century, how it came to be, more importantly, how it plays itself out in domestic policy and foreign policy and intelligence assessments. i won't belabor my whole analysis of how it came to be, other than to just say in shorthand, it came with the arrival of progressivism from europe, progressivism being essentially a pale version of marxism, which tends to always over accentuate the importance of material things. if you're interested in that, you can see the long and difficult analysis about all of this in the book. what i would like to do today rather, to talk, give you examples of of how it is how i think excessive belief in material causation makes our policies deficient.

it is not that economics isn't important or it does not have a role, it is simply not the beginning of -- if i could, let me spend a few minutes, five, six, eight minutes on domestic policy and then foreign policy, which is your brief here, and then talk about the intelligence agencies and intelligence assessments and try to demonstrate to you how i think this is the case and why it is our policies, even though very well-intentioned, 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 and education policy or crime policy, agricultural policy, food stamps or whatever it is, every one of these debates ends up being premised on the question of how much money are we providing for these particular jobs, for

these particular tasks? the conventional wisdom held certainly by the democratic party and progressives especially, also by a lot of republicans is, they all depend on money. the key to success is to provide more resources, more money. more money is always the answer. if you look at, let me mention education policy as an example. if you look at education policy, this is the beginning and end of all, how do you improve education in the country, often criticized as not very good. indeed, many shortcomings. you provide more resources. how do you measure how good you're doing, how well you are, how sincere you are, how much you are intending to improve educational attainment in this country is how much money are you providing? are you providing more money than last year?

when you sit in these debates, it becomes so striking, you can hardly not see this, unless you are not looking for it. when you look at education policy, the interesting thing about it is, there's really absolutely no empirical evidence that this is true. there is some role for material inputs, without a doubt, you need to pay teachers, you need schools and so forth but it is not the beginning and end of all with him about how you prove -- improve educational attainment in this country. to the contrary, there are number of things if you really want to have decent education policy that don't involve money at all and simply throwing resources at the problem. these might include, for example, taking a look at the family structure in the united states. when you look at the many families, the parents have

absolutely no interest in education and provide very little preparation for their children to go to school. i'm no particular fan of teachers or teachers unions, it is a little bit of unfair rap to lay everything on how bad teachers are because a lot of kids come to school, they have almost zero vocabulary, they don't know anything, they don't particularly care to learn anything, to put it on teachers is a little bit of a bum rap, i think. look at the family structure, this is very important. likewise too, what is the quality of the teachers you're hiring? likewise too, what exactly is that they are teaching? as opposed to some of the things that pass for education today. how about encouraging more competition? always every phase of life produces better results -- 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 of money we spent or triple it and you will still not get the kind of results that you want. too much with your head wrapped around the notion the only way to improve education is to provide more money, more resources to this as an example, you can trace the same pattern over and over again in all of the different cabinet departments and the different debates that go on about, how do we do good, how do we make good policy? let me mention one other thing, a number of other things about our domestic politics that flow from the success of reliance on notion of economic causation. if you listen sometimes the people in the press or members of congress, particularly on the left, people will ask, why is it poorer people or working- class people in this country, would ever vote republican or

for trump these days? how can that be? don't these people know their own self-interest? it is the left that wants to provide, to use mitt romney's famous work, more stuff. what is the matter with people, why can't they understand where their self-interest lies? this seems like a straight up question, in a way. there is a very interesting book written i think it was 2008, by a man called thomas frank, the book was called, "what is the matter with kansas?" he raises this question, why is it, he thinks because he knows about it, why are so many kansans, particularly ones not in the elite, more working-class, why is it they would ever vote republican, why do they do this? how could they not know what their self-interest is? this seems like a fair and

neutral question. when you thing about it and unpack it a little bit, it is not a fair and neutral question, it is a question that depends entirely on the premise that people's true self-interest are always monetary, always financial or always material and that human beings can't have deep and true interests other than financial interests. so what happens is, what we call these days, cultural issues , for want of a better word, these are kind of dismissed as being red herrings. the fact of the matter is, people have all kinds of interests, economic interests for sure, very important, not that they are important, they are important but they are not the only thing that is important. people are more complex than economic beings, home economics, far more complex and care about other things. faith, country, family and it

is not weird to think that people might, to some degree, cast their votes on this part of what they take as their self- interest rather than simply economic basis, on whether or not they receive more money from the federal government. will this too was never like this the first 150 years of our country's history where it was assumed some help people's self- interest was always financial, always material. this came in largely with the progressive movement in the early 20th century and has been with us 100 years now. either way, i make the argument, i don't know if you believe it or not, it seems to me that progressivism is the dominant intellectual background characterization of our country, right now even,

most all of the elites, the people that deal with symbols and numbers and words, are somehow of a material kind of mind-set of a progressive kind of mind-set. this is certainly true of the democratic party. it is also true of educational institutions, it is true of academia, the media, it is true of the entertainment industry, it is true of most not for profits, not the council of course. >> clearly not. >> it is also true of many republicans, who are somehow harboring this notion in the back of their minds. i think that, again, it is not the material things and the money are not important, it is somehow the notion they are all important is really a conceit

that comes from nowhere other than what you might trace back to a european, even marxist notion are that economics are what shape at the bottom, most everything that occurs and shape why it occurs. maybe enough said about domestic issues. there are a whole host of other sides to this which i explore including questions like, why this tends to over exaggerate, i should not say over exaggerate, just exaggerate what people think is the importance of money in politics, which i think is vastly exaggerated. and almost all empirical evidence points to it not being is nearly important as most people seem to think. it also, i think, suggests why 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. there is very little of what you might call concern about -- or results. to the contrary, there is virtually no intelligent congressional oversight about anything. what passes for congressional oversight is some gotcha kind of thing where someone has obviously done something wrong, think the secret service. but to take bills that passed, nobody in the executive branch or the congress ever looks seriously at, what is this actually accomplishing and what is it not accomplishing? to the contrary, it is measuring inputs rather than measuring results. there are a number of other things that follow from thinking about it this way. in the interest of moving along and opening this up eventually,

let me turn to foreign-policy for a few minutes 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, something in the range of $60 billion. what you see is 40 billion of it, fully two-thirds, goes to provide foreign assistance to other countries. only one-third, roughly 20 billion, goes to pay the salaries of all state department employees, americans and foreign nationals, 59,000 people altogether, goes to pay for our buildings, indices and so forth, security and officials and embassies, goes to pay for the visa programs

and stuff, goes to pay for travel and all the things that go into having a diplomatic presence and being able to conduct diplomacy in some way. only one-third. about the other two-thirds, it is clearly all a question of providing financial resources to countries. i actually know a little bit about this since i suppose, i don't say this with particular pride, i guess i was the chief salesman for foreign assistance on the hill from 2005 to 2008. thinking about it all in the terms of which i do in this book , it seems to me what one could say is, there are some very useful and good foreign assistance programs but they tend to be the ones that have a very specific objective, very specific end goal, clearly understood and clearly measurable. you could take something like counter narcotics with colombia

a while back and change colombia from a country that was a narco terrorist state to becoming a normal state. most of the credit for this is due to the colombians themselves but american assistance to colombia was an important part of it and it was important because it was clear with the objective was, it was clear what we were trying to achieve, clear how we measured results or didn't. this kind of program, i think, makes some sense. so too, for example, counter proliferation strategy. there are number of times counter proliferation strategies were very successful. the convention libya, cannot be still lurking around, there are number of cases which is the case, the assistance we provide is very useful achieving concrete, objective and

measurable results or very good example, the counter aids -- a.i.d.s. program in africa. substantial program to preventing and opposing a.i.d.s. in sub-saharan africa. this too is clear what the objective is, clear what we are trying to do, it is clear to it is measurable, the results are measurable, almost to the person you can count how many lives were saved by these programs. these kinds of programs, as well as providing military assistance to israel because you know what they need and you want to help them to do it, i mentioned this in part, the reason i'm late is capitol hill screwed up fairly well because bibi is here, presumably asking for more aid.

the great majority of foreign assistance programs are far more than this, more measurable in clear-cut, we want to do good, encourage economic growth, encourage development. the word , development, itself is very interesting. it is a word borrowed from biology, if you think about it. human beings and other sentient beings, live beings, have a pattern of development, human beings go from embryos to babies, small children, adults, something from the outside does not come in and interfere, they have this almost natural progression of development. what the development programs of the state department and a i.d. tend to do, is to assume, there is such a thing like that also

in the sphere of nations, it is a natural thing for countries to develop in that way and all that needs to be done is to provide some money for this to happen. the evidence for this as well seems to be vanishingly small. you can point to countries where there is no development at all, to the contrary, you look at venezuela, this was once a semi-prosperous country, now, after several regimes including two, six year terms of madero, maybe a third term coming, if they cheat enough, countries don't necessarily develop in a certain way, they can go backwards overnight, as venezuela has done. this government has virtually destroyed the country. there is no reason to think development is such a natural

thing. how this came into being, a lot of economic models that were produced, stages of growth, where the stages of growth seemed to be natural, you simply provide money here and here and here, you will get economic growth. again, as i say, i think this is a rather vague and not necessarily always very well- founded notion but it relies on the notion that it is economics and economic assistance that is needed, above all, for countries to develop. that is not entirely true. you can see it with venezuela. it simply has gone backwards and there is no amount of economic assistance we could provide for venezuela today that would make the slightest bit of difference in terms of its future. this is a problem of governance, not of money. as i have said in a couple other instances, this was not always the case that we behave

like this as a country, for the first years from 1789 up until the several years before world war ii, when we did the lead lease program, we virtually provided no foreign assistance to anybody, at all. this began to change with the lead lease program, ultimately after world war ii, more so with the marshall plan and assistance degrees to turkiye, then we became fully institutionalized as a project around 1961, when the agency for economic development, a i.d., was created. since then, we proceeded along on the basis of these often unspoken models, the way for country to develop and it will naturally, if it can provide more resources, provide it with more resources, it will succeed. and some of these programs, i

think our run in such a way there is no prospect of them being very helpful, to be perfectly blunt about it. again, this is the result of a rather long experience of watching how foreign assistant programs are provided and watching how money is doled out, sit around the table with the senior staff at the state department and you watch how decisions are made about how much money country a should be given and country b, it would curl up your hair. let me leave it at that, this is two-thirds, and by far and away, the principal project of the state department currently. let me mention a second thing about foreign policy. there is a professor at tufts university main -- read a article a couple

years back, foreign affairs journal, he said, economic sanctions have become the principal tool of american foreign policy. i think he is right. i think he is absolutely right. if i made you guess how many economic sanctions we have in place currently, i bet you would underestimate it every time. there are roughly 11,000 economic sanctions we have in place now against other countries, against other groups, against other individuals, against certain weapons systems, against ships, any quasi, dual use military, everything. this too was not always the case. we did not really do economic sanctions as a country from 1789 all the way up until the years just after world war i, when they became understood to

be a tool, useful tool of american foreign policy. we did embargoes once in a while during war times. as to economic sanctions put against countries and people during peace time, this was not a foreign policy tool. it did not become one until post-world war i period. again, why? because the progressive movement, woodrow wilson in particular, he thought that this was really the way foreign policy could be successful and could be conducted. there is a wonderful wilson quotation which could have been the furnace piece of this book in which wilson says, he was busy helping create the league of nations, if you can believe putting economic sanctions against a country is a harsher and more severe penalty against the country than invading them militarily. this seems to be

absolutely ridiculous, nevertheless, there it was and this was the principal tool of the league of nations. it got off to predictably rocky start, the league of nations decided they would sanction only if they united ethiopia and threatened legal sanctions, ignore the threat entirely and when italy invaded, the sanctions were put on italy and they made no difference whatsoever in a talent -- italian policy toward ethiopia. i think it is something one needs to think about in terms of all of our economic sanctions these days as well. it depends a little bit on, i suppose, what you try to achieve by economic sanctions. if you try to express your dissatisfaction, unhappiness with some country, okay, that is one thing if you think sanctions are going to have such an effect as to change the

policies of other governments, i think you will be sorely mistaken. there really is a very little evidence that this ever works. or better yet, if you try to change the whole foreign regime with sanctions, that almost never works. not to say there have not been a few cases where it worked, senator lugar very much involved in sanctions against south africa, the apartheid regime, as a result of course involved -- specific and unusual reasons why that succeeded. for the most part, it does not succeed if your goal is to change policies of foreign governments or to change the regimes themselves. we have sanctioned north korea so many ways, upside down, forward, backward, left, right, it has not made a single bit of difference, as far as i can tell with kim jong-un's policies or his nuclear development program. or

certainly in changing the nature of his regime. we have sanctioned venezuela, again, forward, backward, upside down and downward, still madero is there cruising along very nicely. as my kids might say, how is this working out for you? it is not particularly working out, actually. the reason i think that people have such hopes that sanctions will work is that it again, excessive reliance on the notion that i could change your behavior with economic tools, with economic means. it is vastly overestimated as a useful tool, i think. again, as i say, this is a fairly recent phenomenon. you want a more current

example, look at russia and ukraine. we threaten russia with sanctions if you dare to invade ukraine, we will put sanctions on you. again, as my kids would say, how did that work out? putin ignored it, he invaded ukraine. then we put sanctions on russia, various kinds, various types, and putin is still at war with ukraine. these sanctions have had literally, so far as i can judge, no significant effect at all. putin continues to do what he does because he is not necessarily doing it for economic reasons but to the contrary, he has an idea in his mind about a greater rush or -- russia, not economic idea at all. very convenient tool, if i was a real cynic, which i might be, you could almost say, why do we put so many sanctions in place? because we can make it look like we're doing something without doing anything real. we can take credit for being

tough without actually being tough. i think this is all founded on the too great reliance on economic causation and ability of economics and material things to motivate people or nations. as a result, these policies are nowhere near so successful as their proponents would like to say. sometimes, they are even counterproductive. i can give you a very funny, although not really funny example of a time when sanctions were completely and utterly counterproductive, if you want a real example of that if you're interested. those are two ways in which i think the two fundamental, normal, regular, everyday policies of the state department are founded on notions of excessive faith in

economic causation. let me turn for a few minutes, then i will stop, i promised, let me turn for a few minutes to intelligence assessments. i should be clear in the beginning, about what i'm talking about and what i'm not talking about, the intelligence community has two different kinds of things it does, one of which is operations and the other one of which is analysis. the cia reflects that, for example, director of operations, which engages in all of the skulduggery that you can imagine, often at great risk and great difficulty. and then the director of analysis, which is by far the bigger part of the cia. i'm not talking at all about the operation side of the house, nor am i talking about the provision of facts, which the intelligence community provides to decision-makers.

if you had ever been pretty to this information, you would be astonished what we actually know . what the prime minister of country x said to the foreign minister during breakfast that morning, here is what he or she said, or how many missiles does china have lined up against the taiwan straits? whatever the case might be. what i'm talking about though, is how you make something out of the facts, how you do an assessment in the intelligence community, how you make sense of it. here, this usually comes in the form of the lowest common denominator, statement from intelligence agencies saying in the form, we assess that or, we judge that, we assess with moderate confidence, whatever. this is the way the intelligence community attempts to understand what is happening or even to help predict or not

to predict what is happening. that is the part that i'm talking about. i offer up a number of examples in the book about how these intelligence assessments have gone wrong the first one i have already mentioned to you, the case of the shah of around where the intelligence community had all kinds of facts, who is doing what to whom and all that but did not conclude from any of this the right thing. and why, in this case, because i mentioned they were focused on the balance of material, forces, marxist phrase, balance of material forces between the shah and his folks and different protest groups. there are others, in the interest of time, let me mention, lest you think would happen in the run is old news, totally changed our ways, we haven't.

the question of the collapse of the afghan government. no one particularly thought if the united states left afghanistan, afghanistan was going to defeat the taliban. the real question was, how long could the afghan government state in place and fend off the taliban? i suppose it is a case of plausible denial of our involvement the way it was in vietnam. the intelligence community made these, in retrospect, flat wrong conclusions about all of this, are doing what? arguing that the taliban could be held off at bay and that afghan government could take hold and defend itself and exist for 18 months, two years or some length of time out to

indeterminate future. based on what? taste on that afghan government when we left, had four more troops in the taliban and had. and by the way, far more and much better weapons than the taliban had, all of the weapons that we left behind. you know, there was a phone call president biden made with the afghan president very soon before the government imploded. in which he said, you've got all the reasons to be successful here, far more troops under your command then the taliban has, no doubt about it. they are all organized militarily, the ways that we trained them and you have, by the way, stated with our weapons that the taliban does not have.

you should be in good shape, at least for a while, based on his own reading of our own intelligence projections. again, how did that work out? when we left, the afghan government collapsed almost instantaneously. because it turns out, having more troops and more guns and more weapons is at the beginning and end of why things happen in the world. admittedly, biden was doing a bit of pep talk to ghani , there was that the notion that you can counter predict success based on the material balance of forces is really not correct and there are other, more complex things that go on to explain why things happen. i mentioned in the book, ernest hemingway's book, "the sun also

rises," another character asked, how did you go bankrupt? the character says, two ways, first, gradually, then all at once. that is exactly what happened in afghanistan, all at once. these projections of the intelligence agency were flat wrong. and it is a little discouraging to see the director of the cia, at that time and now, talk about what incredible success they had the handling of afghanistan. their success consists of this, there

in fact, they were actually better than zelenskyy , who hoped or thought this invasion was not going to take place. but just like we try to prevent russia from invading ukraine with the threat of sanctions, which caused no thing to happen. putin invaded ukraine anyway, and sanctions have caused him to change his mind. but at that point, they were can -- correct about the issue of what putin was going to do. they got the sense that he was off the rails.

they subscribed, as did a number of people to the notion that russia would defeat ukraine. depending on what you read. they were picking out apartments and planning to create a government there, if not a formal part of russia. so, you know, this assessment that they made that ukraine would collapse in a short period of time, it was wrong. what does it matter? well, it matters insofar as it was clear that ukraine was going to be able to hold off russia and for a while, it

began to change the balance of things and moved the border back toward russia. we might have provided more quickly more weapons to ukraine , but that is a policy question beyond the scope here. all i'm saying is that, well, you know, this is way off the mark. i can give you more examples. one acquaintance of mine who knows everything about intelligence, he went through the litany and said, there is no major transformative event in world affairs that the agencies have correctly predicted. the question is why. it's not for want of resources for sure. that's for sure. it would be very hard if these predictions were wrong in different ways. ronk this way in another case.

as yogi berra said, predictions are hard, especially about the future. and, you know, the thing, though, is, they all feel the exact same way. they take economic things as the basis of reality and as the reasons why things change or don't change, and without a full understanding of the various things that motivate human behavior. in putin's case, i don't think there was strong economic motive to attack ukraine. no. economic things do matter in the long run. the fact that russia has more troops -- is gradually, over time, making a difference. but that is the assessment about how quickly ukraine would collapse. it is wrong for the same reason

all the other ones in this chapter are wrong. the overestimation of the importance of material causation. so let me stop there and say i do, like i feel i was obliged to do, might offer a few thoughts on how we might improve the situation. it is a good thing to know that intelligence agencies are reviewing how they do business and looking at if they need more complex ways of thinking of things. instead of guns and tanks and troops and so forth. that's all to the good, but what they need to understand is what the problem really is underneath all of this is they make the same mistake every time when there is a mistake. this is what needs to be taken a look at and thought through from the ground up. i make a few policy suggestions, but i have to admit.

the notion of material causation is so deeply embedded in the american psyche at this point that changing this is going to be very, very difficult. and i think that's something we simply have to acknowledge going forward. we can certainly improve it at the margins. as i say, i make a number of suggestions, but i may be more conscious than anybody about how limiting these suggestions are in terms of making a big difference. at any rate, this is the case i make here, and it is, i suppose, what i would argue is the other big thing that i learned over the 45 years i have been in washington, and so, just to summarize, if you are going to look at careers, do think about what you want to do. take it seriously. consider it. but also, be open to the possibility of fortune coming

in in ways you don't expect. and, by the way, which i haven't touched on. it is important not to make enemies gratuitously. but rather, to treat people as decently as you can bring yourself to do. you'd be surprised how often things come around later on in your life in interesting ways. it was true with my very liberal friend. if you want to advance your chances of success, i think it is often helpful to be reasonable or sane, and fair- minded about things. our current republican nominee has gone a long way without

this particular virtue, but at any rate, i found it very helpful, and then, finally, think, if you will, about the problems you are trying to address. not all of them are amenable to an economic throwing money at them solution point think about it. think outside the box. think about what could improve academic performance for children. think about things like that. take a look, too. this is a notion i have -- think about, too, what you should be doing. what congress should be doing, what the executive branch should be doing. some real oversight. look at the results. not just the inputs. you know, all the economic sanctions we put in place against other countries, there is not one single agency in the government or in congress that has ever done any study about

the real impact of economic sanctions on a particular case. they manage most of these sessions. not the defense department. not the white house. not some congressional committee. nobody. it's all about inputs and nothing about whether they are successful or not. i think you can advantage yourself a bit if you thought about things a little bit more fullsomely. so i guess i'll stop there. thank you again for posting this. i look forward to your questions, your complaints, your objections. your comments. whatever. i always find this to be the better, interesting part of these conversations. >> that is wonderful. tremendous food for thought. i'm sure there are tons of questions, but for me, the big

take away, especially because you are speaking to a group of young researchers and pricing intellectuals, is the fact that the current political system, in particular, sort of deep prioritizes the non-tangible. and it leads to very dangerous strategic surprise. here at the american foreign policy council, we look at things like culture and ideology and anybody who is well-versed in russia's imperial and now neo-imperial ideology would be in a good place to understand that for putin, it was not just about the material. it was about the ideological, the imperial, the vision of greatness. that rubs another way, as well. in the middle east, what we have seen over the last nine months is a consequence of the fact that a palestinian group refused to allow trickle down economics to change it from an ideological actor. these things

are very important. for everybody that is beginning in their careers, i think it highlights the way where you can contribute and make your mark. >> bless you for doing what you do. it is a more thoughtful approach then you'll sometimes encounter when you get away here. >> that's great. let's open it up for questions. i have some of my own, but why don't we -- whoever wants, step up to the mic. introduce yourself, and have at it. >> thank you. is it on? thank you very much for coming here and i really enjoyed it. my name is nathan myers. i'm from kansas, so thank you for talking and mentioning kansas. i go to benedictine college,

majoring in political science and economics. my question was, he talked to us about how we think too much in terms of material, like this material view of the world that comes from progressives from this marxist explanation of the world that everything is motivated by material factors. my question would be -- that's not very common when you look at history and life -- and we think of ourselves more as homo economicus and not homo politicus. how can people think more in the homo politicus, and how can we return to that? >> i think you are exactly right.

homo politicus was a more normal, commonsense way to look at things for many centuries in the west, in the east, and everywhere. people looked at other countries or other tribes and understood them not merely in economic terms but often in political terms, and in fact, you know, you see this today with russia. i mean, there are people that still argue that putin somehow invaded ukraine for economic reasons. i just don't see it -- a real economic reason. it seems to me to be a very expensive project. people also say that, well, we need to give putin and offramp to show how it is harming the economic interests of russian people. well, if he wanted and offramp,

it would be easy enough for him to find it. that's not really the problem. he needs to be defeated if you are going to get him out of ukraine. the harder question you ask is how can we encourage a broader -- and i think it is right -- a more broad category than economic. it seems to me that that is the discipline that asks the more deep and serious questions about how we organize ourselves. what does it -- is it that justice consists of? as i confess, i can't offer to you an easy way to do that. there are hosts of smaller suggestions that 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 required themselves to follow on oversight investigations of what it is they've done.

and the way to do that, i suppose, is to make every piece of legislation that passes also subject to expiration of some kind. this sounds like a right-wing project, but it isn't. this idea of sunsetting legislation was actually originally a left-wing idea to try to free up policy from the painful effects of big business and government working together. there are a lot of places in which this makes sense besides just, for example, economic areas. we passed the more powers resolution. which is all fine. but it has seemingly an endless life, and a very wide applicability, if i can say that. maybe some kind of term limit

on education, agriculture. term limits, i think, would require congress and the executive branch to look at and defend what it is they've done .2 consider how this worked. i think the answer is any fair- minded person -- the answer of any fair-minded person is it has worked in some ways but there are other ways that it hasn't worked. that is one suggestion. somehow institutionalizing in a certain way, the way i hope the intelligence agency is doing in terms of the review of their procedures, especially since afghanistan and ukraine, is another, but again, i would say that this is perhaps small beer compared to, all of a sudden,

the scales are falling off of our eyes and we are somehow going to look at things in a more broad way, and to understand that economics doesn't vote -- motivate everything. the economic thing sort of came into place with these notions that somehow, if we can solve the economic problem, we would solve all human problems. this is not just parks. it was all kinds of people. it is definitely a conceit that if you solve the economic problem, you solve both problems. it's as if you somehow solve the economic problem, everybody has enough. you somehow are going to solve every other human problems? problems of selfishness and pride and lust for vengeance and every other human motivation that there is? not likely. and so, i see a few signs, to

be honest, but not altogether, that maybe people are beginning to understand that economics has its place, not everywhere, looking at a revival on the conservative side saying conservatism, which now has a much stronger core than it had with barry goldwater in 1964. it was one off. there wasn't much of a bench back there. but now, you have all kinds of places and institutions and publications and media and so forth, to defend some of these broader, more natural rights oriented kind of traditions. there's that, but i think there are some on the left, as well, who are coming to a? about whether economics are -- is the

beginning and end all of all wisdom. if you look at climate change, this is not in any way, shape, economic development or providing more for people. in fact, it is usually providing less. why? because of this overarching noneconomic question of global warming. you see it that way. i'll make an argument. i don't know if you believe it or not. this transition of the left from the quality to equity also seems to me to be a sign that maybe the economic evaluation of things will only take us so far and not further in the sense that equality is part of the liberal tradition of trying to provide more for everybody, more people, whereas equity has nothing to do with that. it has to do with sameness.

it could be at this level or it could be at this level, or at this level. and so, it is more a question of , again, of justice. it is more of a political question. what do we want to do in a broadway? there are others i .2. i think they suggest that maybe there are forces that would suggest economics is not the beginning and end of all wisdom. it is not the answer to every problem, but i will fully confess and plead guilty to the fact that i haven't got, you know, the magic bullet to make people think more broadly in political terms rather than economic terms, which they seem to do in the policymaking business. thanks. thanks for the indulgence. >> any other questions? >> hello. first of all, thank you for your talk. my name is gracie.

i am an intern here at afpc. i found a lot of what you were saying about the sanctions very interesting. i found what you were saying about measuring tangible versus intangible effects was fascinating. my question is, to what extent do you think that sanctions have an intangible -- sorry. to what extent do you think sanctions could have an intangible effect as opposed to tangible effects, positively or negatively, for example, by undermining public support for a regime, making on the ground conditions a lot worse, or on the other side, possibly strengthening the belligerent cause against our own interests, and, yes. what are the intangible effects? >> i'm not sure i entirely understand the question. i think some of the program we are running, which seems to run

somewhat parallel with the american foreign policy council -- the democracy promotion programs or programs that encourage looking at broader political questions and ideological questions, these are all to the good. i suppose i'm a bit compromised in this. i've been involved in quite a long of -- lot of republican institute programs. they talk about democracy and elections and all that. the current president happens to be a good friend of mine and one of the characters i often invite as a guest, by the way. and so, i think there is a role certainly for what you call public diplomacy. which is not based at all on

economics, but based on trying to teach other ways to think about how to organize yourself or how you run a campaign, how you do elections. i'm not sure. have i touched at all on what you are asking? >> yes. i think so. >> i think there is a very big role. you know, for places like the councils, which cause you to think 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. >> and to that point, right, and you talk about economic sanctions, there is an outcome, and iran is a perfect example, where sanctions could be a technical success, but a

strategic failure. they can draw down resources but they don't necessarily change the long arc of a country, and that is what we have seen, as you pointed out. >> that is exactly right. giving iran $6 million the i mean, some of this boggles your mind that somehow you are going to change the uranian regime by handing out this chunk of money to them. it is ridiculous. so i agree. you can certainly generate some suffering in another country, but whether that results in changed policies as a regime, it seems like the kind of regimes we want to punish are the ones least likely to suffer from her sanctions in the sense that, you know, kim jong-un this pretty well. he eats what he wants. and so, the iranian regime, the russian regime. all these regimes, the elites,

don't really care what their populations think. therefore, it is obligatory on us to try to understand them better. and again, at the risk of being a broken record, it's not always all about economics. no. thank you. >> so i think we have time for one more. we have one more question. >> so i'm alec. i'm a hoosier, so on behalf of the great people of indiana, thank you for getting governor daniels is good start off in life. i'm curious for your thoughts. you have talked a lot and spoken very well about how the focus on the material and the economic aspects is obviously deficient in a lot of respects. so my question, what i'm

wondering is, as soon as we start moving to the immaterial, the noneconomic factors, do we start to venture off into questions of values or subjective evaluations that may be the reason that we focus on economics is because we can agree on it? it is measurable. once we start to get questions like iran and changing iran, do we start to enter into, what do we want iran to even look like? do we stick to the devil we know and stick to that economic approach? >> that's an excellent question. i have a question. where are you from indiana? >> noblesville. >> we have family and noblesville. >> at a boy. >> i think you touch on a subtle and interesting question. if you had an american

government that wasn't just trying to solve problems by handing out money, but was trying in some way to shape the ideological character of the country, you wouldn't want to go very far in that direction, either. and so, it's an excellent question. at the moment, i don't think we are in any danger of that, but i would have no problem with us trying to shape the ideological character of other countries. you know, why not? i mean, let's let there on the air and. let's change the value system of russia and so forth. i think we need to be much more careful of not replacing an early economic understanding of things with some kind of ideological indoctrination. simply replacing it with a fair look at what is it that could produce policy that makes changes that are real, and those changes would have to be ones that have democratic

support, and then we agree are important. i think everyone would agree that improving the educational system is a good idea. thinking about how to do that, seems to be fair game. if you go too far in saying, we will teach everybody else all this ridiculous stuff, that becomes kind of an issue. i think you raise a very subtle question. my only defense would be to say, i think we are in no danger of airing on that side of it. more on the side that we are on. so thank you for that. >> thank you. >> i'm cognizant of the time, so, let's ended there. jeff, thank you so much. please join me in thanking dr. bergner. thank you for coming to the american foreign policy council.

we are small but mighty on capitol hill. for those of you watching at home, if you are interested in our work, visit us online at www.afpc.org. thank you. >> perfect. thank you very much. appreciate it. >> nonfiction book lovers, c- span has the podcasts for you. listen to influential interviewers on the afterwards podcast and on q&a, hear conversations with others that are making things happen. we have a weekly hour-long conversation that regularly feature authors of books on a wide variety of topics, and the about books podcast takes you behind the scenes of the nonfiction book publishing industry with industry updates and bestsellers lists. find all of our podcasts by downloading the free c-span now app, or wherever you get your podcast,