This is about one hour. Barbara this is our second half of this panel. We will go to a little bit past 1 00 during i just met glad last ad last evening over dinner. After dinner, we had a fascinating, decision about khrushchev and kennedy. But it was different ones, mrs. Jacqueline kennedy and mrs. Khrushchev. We may leave that for later discussion, but i enjoyed that conversation. Vlad is a professor of International History at the London School of economics. He is an expert of the cold war and soviet russian history, particularly intellectual history. Among his books particularly related to this topic, the failed empire and the cold war. I noted among his books zhivagos children. Having just watched the movie yet again, dr. Zhivago, i was drawn to that topic. Jeremy surrey is a longtime friend of the Miller Center. We are always happy to welcome him back as we did recently for an american for him on his latest book, the impossible presidency, which in light of the incumbent it could be called the impossible president , but it is the impossible presidency. He is based in both the department of history and the Lyndon Johnson school of Public Affairs at the university of texas. I will turn to vlad first, who will speak to us about his essay on brezhnev and the lessons of detente. Vlad shall i go there . Barbara you may go wherever you comfortable. Vlad everyone always says i will try to be brief, so i will try to be brief. [laughter] people talk about brezhnev, such an individual. Education. Up with the idea of detente and it succeeded for a while, at least in that enterprise. It is useful to understand brezhnev through khrushchev. Represents heroic bolshevik tradition, that is the existing capitalist system and the revolution. Him wrote a biography of believer. Rue if you ask yourself why there is only one khrushchev, truly, in the history of the cold war . There were no imitators of khrushchev before, since, and there were no willing imitators of khrushchev after him, which is easy to understand. Then you come up with a more normative picture of soviet Foreign Policy were most people, even stalin at many points of his career, and certainly people after stalins death began to search for some kind of sovietamerican detente or some kind of a conceptual system structurally, structure that would accommodate both soviet and american interests. So it makes khrushchev a colorful, but only an episode, a heroic episode in this search for accommodations between the two great powers. So russian of, personally, whatever khrushchev did, was quite awful, especially in Foreign Policy. [laughter] at times a visceral reaction to khrushchevs risktaking. Brezhnevs ideak he kept repeating that guy brought us to the brink of war. So brezhnevs idea of detente, i will go through all these things, but it was very simple. It wasnt the perpetual peace idea, but the deeply held idea that, if you have two great powers, that are big, that have nuclear weapons, that can destroy each other, what prevents them from reaching some kind of an agreement to build a stable world order . For brezhnev, it was absolutely logical that, sooner or later, that should happen. The only problem is that some people in the United States and brezhnev does not really understand what happens there but something prevents it from the american side. Prevents this idea from being realized. Then suddenly, he finds a partner. He negotiates from a position of strength as he does believe in strength. Thats richard nixon. A very good year for brezhnev because he just managed to deal with a huge crisis in eastern czechoslovakia. Man. A falling domino had we not invaded czechoslovakia he put it savedtly, czechoslovakia, the troops would soon end up immediately on our western borders. That resonates today with putins thinking. It is a more normal man to me than khrushchev and there are many more brezhnevs in the political establishment then you then khrushchevs. However, when you look at the brezhnev detente, you begin to realize it is a detente that hit its limitations very soon, in a few years. By 1975, everyone understands something went wrong. My argument is very simple. Brezhnevs idea, not only brezhnevs idea, but a huge number of communist officials, mostly russian but also ukrainian, that there could be some inevitable conceptual framework where the two powers would form a stable world order based on delusion and fundamental misperception of what america is about and how america wanted to build the world with u. S. Leadership and only u. S. Leadership. So when brezhnev meets next in, already nixon, who is watergate and in the crimea and it is their last meeting. He raises a toast to the doctrine of lasting and universal peace, the nixon and brezhnev doctrine. Thats a joke. But theres something deeper behind this joke. Brezhnev could never fully realize that the u. S. Soviet world order is [indiscernible] american elites never wanted to create such a world order. They wanted to prevail in the cold war. The United States did offer Strategic Alliance to a big come in his country, but it was china, not the soviet union. They offered the alliance to china because it is explicitly and strategically and directly against the soviet union. Putin is a very different person than khrushchev, but he is also different than brezhnev. Putin, like brezhnev, is deeply illiberal. He respects force. Venerates great fatherland war, much like brezhnev did. To reduce putin to a kgb man is primitivism. That is deeply wrong. He had a steep learning curve. He learned a lot about what it means when the state is destroyed. Russia is flooded with highly unpleasant realities linked to political liberalization. So he accepted the fundamental failure of communism as ideological doctrine. He does not want to rebuild a territorial soviet empire. His project is to improve russias place in the existing world order, not to create a new one. And here comes the rub. If you talk to very knowledgeable russians, and even they dont understand why russia cannot find a proper model or place for itself in the world. Sometimes russia acts as if it is a superpower. But everyone understands that it is not a superpower. It doesnt have enough umpf for that. And then russia refuses to act as a Regional Power because it selfderogatory and diminutive. The relationship of russia to the existing liberal order is not an easy thing to establish. In terms of provoking a discussion, i would argue that it is highly dichotomous. On one hand, the entire stability of putins state, regime, depends on economic stability and import export relationships. Exists. Better the past years prove how great the order was for russia, given the wealth of its roman terry. Raw materials. Its a wonderful system. That not enough. Because you come to the idea of a bad neighborhood. Constant forces coming from the east and from china as well, threatening to chip away what you consider to be our backyard, backyard, what you consider to be your own buffer zone. And you are the leader in the patrimonial authoritarian system where putin is the king. Everything is absolutely interdependent. If you yield on the foreign front, all your rivals and dependents say, ahha, you are weak. Putin cannot afford to be weak. He must compensate for the apparent sign of weakness by stopping at crimea. He cannot just stay idle and not respond to western sanctions. He must produce counter sanctions. Thats part of the regime that he is a hostage of as a creator of. What does that leave us with . I do think that still, if we go beyond this complexity, dealing with the system itself and pscyche, this is a country that is fundamentally different from the soviet union. Putin has some weaknesses, but some strength compared to brezhnev. Brezhnev was responsible for the sprawling communist empire, ethiopia and angola and vietnam and all of that. He had to maintain. Putin can at least choose more or less where to intervene and how far to go. Also, in terms of economic flexibility, yes, the russian economy is smaller than the soviet economy. But putin at least did not inherit a completely failed economic model. He still employs neoliberal economists that provide quite efficiently macroeconomic stability when the pie is shrinking, even under the conditions of sanctions. This is a flexibility brezhnev could not have even dreamed of. He was very conservative, very cautious when it came to the budget and the control of the state bank. But the politburo had no idea how to deal when you have a major crisis, Falling Oil Prices and all of that. Putin knows how to react to volatility. And that is strength. In terms of propaganda, brezhnevs propaganda was a joke. The propaganda means that everything that everything the say, you have to turn upside down. Russia propaganda today something to Brezhnev Soviet Union could not even dream of. With all my respect, rt is a very successful enterprise. Russian operations in social networks, using american platforms, like facebook, it is a tremendous achievement. To overestimate putins strength, no, of course. We know russia is weak and getting weaker. But underestimate putin is also a wrong thing and say, well, let it go down and the United States can ignore it. We cannot. We cannot ignore it. Finally, let me conclude with an optimistic note. Crimea is an exception. Its a oneoff thing. Putin does not need more territory. If anything because more territory comes with more people and they need more pensions and things. He doesnt like it. [laughter] it is a bargain. He doesnt want it. Perhaps the problem is the american side doesnt want to provide that opportunity. Perhaps for putin, it was as much a grand illusion as detente was for brezhnev. Thank you. [laughter] well done. We will turn to jeremy, whose essay is on nixon and detente. Jeremy i want to start by thanking the organizers and how delighted i am to be here with barbara and vlad. I want to applaud the Miller Center and help the president ial studies project continues to prosper. I know my graduate students will benefit from it as many of us will. I want to tell everyone how influenced i have been by by vlads. Elsese he does what no one which is he contextualizes it with a lot of framework, the role of soviet leaders, but also soviet citizens like himself, zhivagos children. That is my point of diversion. There is a tendency we have to describe detente in hyper elitist terms, of focusing on a few individuals and not understanding the context in which this transformative moment takes shape on both sides and the reasons why it failed to be an enduring transformation. The closest i have been able to come in nixons words in describing what he thought about detente is the speech i quote in the paper from the u. S. Naval academy in june of 1974. I want to read it just to give us a framework so we all know what the subject is we are discussing. Nixon explained at the height of watergate, a blend of the ideal and the pragmatic in our Foreign Policy has been especially critical in our approach the soviet union. The differences between our two systems of life and government are sharp and fundamental. But even as we oppose totalitarianism its interesting he uses that phrase we must also keep site of the hard cold facts of life in the nuclear age. Ever since the soviet union achieved equality in strategic weapons systems, each confrontation has meant a brush with potential Nuclear Devastation to all civilized nations. Mark and tim give us a wonderful description of the moment when that becomes clear. Reduction of tensions therefore between us has become the foremost requirement of american policy. Nixon and kissinger i think they came to this thinking independently they both believed that the global order benefitted the United States was diminishing its benefits to the United States. I think it is overstated to say that they think it was completely crumbling. But the world system was moving against american predominance. They saw crisis of the old order. They acutely felt it at home. This was the story of nixons electoral career in the 1960s, and the story of what actually got him elected was in large part the crisis of american politics in 1968. Its not just the 2016 election where a candidate draws an inside straight to get elected. That happened in 1968 as well. If you ran the 1968 election five more times, nixon would not than one or two more times. That election to go so many different ways. A few words from humphrey about vietnam a little earlier, perhaps a little less interference in the negotiations over vietnam, and perhaps that election comes ultimately. Another week and it comes out differently. Nixon was acutely conscious, as i think our president is today, how precarious his power was at home he believed, i think and this comes through in all of his writings about detente that establishing stability overseas was crucial for his political longevity at home. These were deeply interconnected. I wrote a whole book arguing this. Of course, i keep finding more evidence to reinforce that. [laughter] jeremi what nixon placed the most emphasis on, and this comes up even before he becomes president , in his notes on Foreign Policy, is the role of the individual and the personal role that he and those around him, i. E. In a kissingers and a few others, must play in controlling this decline, in holding back. Kissinger gives it pedantic terms. It is more desperate. That they elites are taking us in the wrong direction and i must stand up against these elites and push things in the direction they should go. And perhaps that the leaders in the soviet union and china themselves are not respected by their own elites in their own societies and might follow along as well. There is a hyper personalization of the understanding of diplomacy in Foreign Policy by nixon and those around him. The centralization of power in the white house, the use of secrecy, the writing out of the state department, that is not something domestic politics. That is the american image at home of the view of the international system. They are deeply connected. Fors not one or the other them. Richard nixon is acutely conscious of the fact that the last president to manage stable relations with the soviet union was frank when roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt did in a very personal way. Nixon recognized himself, if eisenhower was to some extent his first model for thinking of diplomacy, roosevelt was his model. From the beginning, nixon places emphasis on what president s in the cold war had done before, speaking with the soviets when there was not an agreed agenda. The only president ial trip i know of where there isnt an agenda when you get on the president n the arrives. No one would staff the president that way today. He doesnt go to quite that extent with the soviets. But there is a similar desire in what he thinks and rooseveltian terms, to sit with the other side and speak mantoman. And that phrase turns up a lot. That the elites are the individuals and these are the men who are going to figure things out. Nixon meets with his soviet counterpart more times in his relatively short presidency than throughout the entire decade before. So kennedy and johnson each have one meeting with a soviet counterpart. Nixon has three. His meetings are more extensive. They are more focused on interrelations. They are more secretive. There is an emphasis on making these relationships nimble. And more important, a negotiation in what nixon sees in rooseveltian terms, that everything is negotiable and that you can make tradeoffs. Kissinger gives this the fancy terminology linkage. But anyone who knows negotiations commences the kind of horsetrading that goes on in any serious negotiation. They have figured out systematically how to talk about abms. For nixon, it doesnt matter. Its all politics. So they intentionally disregard gerard smith and all the others coming to them who spent years taking this through. It is a disdain for expertise, but also in a belief that its all politics, all about making tradeoffs. That is what salt is, what the the abm treaty is. That is what the prevention of nuclear war is a there is an effort to use these negotiations and personal relationships to then build a structure for stability, not the other way around. Not the other way around. There is a distrust in the structural factors and the trends and the desire to use the individuals to redefine those trends. Again, kissinger can give us a sort of german romantic sensability that you are standing out and redefining your zeitgeist. It is simply about trying to redefine the pressures around you by building personal relationships as a foundation for new structural agreements. Thats why the agreement of basic principles and 90s 1972, about discussions about what a new world order should look like. Nixons insides is that many of the problems of the cold war could be managed better if you have more Common Knowledge. They know what we know and we know what they know and we respect each other and recognize what we know on both sides. Common knowledge, understandings. Understandings. Years ago, i did a word search and understandings came up more than anything else. Understanding. D we have to understand each other. To understand intentions, understand the rules of the game, to create a stability based on a Common Knowledge set for operating as a society. I would argue that, to some extent, what nixon does actually is successful. Im with many scholars who think that the 1970s did have enduring changes. I dont think we can understand the gorbachev generation, cant understand the new thinkers, without understanding this period and the way these personal relations broke down some of the areas, some of the ideological barriers between contact and general society. The ways in which east and west, due to the personal relationships, not to fundamental agreement on ideology, but the personal relationships of the leaders open space, give legitimacy, give cover to those who have long wanted to communicate across societies. And we do have a more stable world. Wouldnt it be nice if our president today, if we had some sense of what his common nucleare about weapons was . Wouldnt that make the safera safte place . We take it for granted as scholars because we think what we know we think we know what we know. So there is a sense of strategic stability and a new communicative connection that i think is built that has an enormous enduring value. I think no detente, no gorbachev. Where else will he have the opportunity to travel the way he does . Those Connections Matter enormously for these societies. And i think they matter for American Society as well. And the quality of the studying of the soviet union and of reagan that be by getting as much improved in the 1980s because of the exchanges that arise in the 1970s. That said, the successes come with many failures. Many failures that actually have to do less with individuals. The strength of nixon and kissinger as policymakers is there overwhelming energy, deep thought, and ability to pursue risky but important initiatives. Their weaknesses are all the same things. They do not know how to operate effectively in institutions. They are not institution builders. I would call them at times institution disruptors. And they systematically undermine consensus for everything they do every step of the way. One way of thinking about it is kissinger is a brilliant bull in a china shop. Side butveryone on one to piss off everyone on his own side. The pentagon and the state department are pursuing entirely different sets of policies at the same time that the white house is pursuing a focus detente policy. That is by design and it is never reconciled. Henry jackson sees that and jackson takes advantage of it. The staffing is very poor. It is dependent of very few people. When those people leave the scene, as happens in 1974, it is very hard to continue, to keep it going. This is the roosevelt and truman problem as well. And most deeply of all and most important for us today, it is not detente policy is not connected to american values. It is actually marketed, discussed, pursued as an alternative to american values. In fact, there is a deep selfcriticism of the United States built into it. For all the discussion of the silent majority, nixon and kissinger believe americans dont understand the world, never will understand the world, and should let them do it. And that is unsellable as policy in the United States in the long run. What effective policy needs, and now i am speaking to the present world, i dont think i have much to offer in how to understand Vladimir Putin. We are all making this up, right . But understanding the process of american policymaking from this period can offer today is the importance of staffing, the importance of having institutional gravity behind what you do. Too much of our approaches to other major powers have batted back and forth from administration to administration, and within administrations has been divided, uncertain, inconsistent. Did we pivot asia or did we not . Did we reset with russia or did we not . I think building a insistence a consistent staffing structure and a set of institutional priorities that can backup the policies we are pursuing is absolutely essential. The point of my more recent book is that president s take on policymaking themselves and policy implement in themselves and it never works. It never works. So we are doing exactly the wrong things today. I want to be on record with that. Without saying a word about donald trump, we are doing the wrong things today. We need more diplomats, not less. We need more area experts, not less. And we need to be talking more, not less. And i dont mean at the president ial or white house level. Let me make this as clear as i can. White house policymaking is doomed to failure. Foreign policy must be made in an interagency framework, must involve the state department and the Defense Department as well as the nsc, and there is no substitute for that. Longterm effective policy. Detente failed because it lacked that. Anything we are doing with russia now a failed regardless of what Vladimir Putin does until we build that interagency structure. And everything i see us doing it is the exact opposite. So before we start and everything i see us doing is the exact opposite. So before we Start Talking about Vladimir Putin, lets clean our own house. [applause] barbara you are busily making notes. Do you have questions . Vlad no, go ahead and begin. Barbara we have one here in the middle. Thanks for a very interesting and stimulating discussion. The soviet russian leaders have longevity in the office that their american counterparts normally dont have. When you look at brezhnev, it is johnson and nixon and carter and our focus is on nixon. Carter and johnson somehow got lost in our story. My question is on the state in the favor of detente. To what degree does johnson and carter have an effect and brezhnevs stroke had an impact on it . Vlad when i wrote about brezhnev, i was struck about how much of it was his per nalley, his personality, his own set of beliefs, but also his brings us to structural factors. He had nixon, who was an ideal american president in the soviet imagination. Everything is run through kissinger. Everything is secretive. Everything is decided through back channel. The u. S. Secretary of state doesnt even know about the back channel. Perfect. Perfectly how you can run business in the soviet imagination. So that luck couldnt last. Obviously. And brezhnev ran out of luck even before he had a stroke or whatever he had. He met ford, who we never mention, almost. [laughter] ford politely listens to brezhnev and they have no imagination or power to do anything. So brezhnevs own health of course deteriorated very rapidly. But also, as i interviewed soviet participants who knew him, said brezhnev reacted very quickly to opportunities. He was a very astute politician in a domestic setting and foreign setting. If he saw that it was something to do with germany, he would go there as long as success is almost assured. In that way, he was absolutely opposite to khrushchev. He was not a risk taker. He was more close to stalin. Stalin like to do things when everything was prepared and assured. He wouldnt take risk. When he was sick, it also couldnt see any opportunities for himself. If he had one under carter, he would have grabbed them. Unfortunately, carters ideas, we know in 1977, was a little bit misguided. To renegotiate salt, it was very unfortunate. This was something even the misunderstood. Every u. S. Administration starts from scratch and it is a mess. They have to wait for a year and then probably, at the end of the second year, does the administers and have a good chance. They would understand something about arms control and other issues. Then he uses this very narrow opportunity to do something with americans. And then the next president ial Campaign Starts and it is hopeless. I very much year the pain of soviet diplomats when the first ambassador to the United States said that japan was like a chamber orchestra. You knew every violin and cello and you could do diplomacy with that. But the United States is a unruly symphonic orchestra. Images very generous actually of the United States, musicalg his education. He was always continually baffled by some things about how americans do their foreignpolicy. Barbara jeremi . Jeremi i think we can go to the next question. My question is closely related. I found it very interesting, thoughtprovoking, the comparisons made between when he said was brezhnevs illusion or delusion about a possibility of the u. S. Soviet cooperative world order. Then you compared it to putins illusion or delusion of the beginning of putins first administration. About it thist but i found that very interesting. Perhaps putin first believed that a cooperative world order was possible. Can i push you to the moment where that illusion or delusion starts to dissipate and why and try to make the same comparison between brezhnev and putin . This is not a question about personality. This is a question about their vision of how world order might work, that it would be corporative and why it does not work this way . Is there any similarity . Vlad we all know this history after 9 11, when putin calls bush and offers all kinds of things, a Strategic Partnership of sorts. He definitely acts at the time when there is already how strong, i dont know but there is already antiamerican consensus around moscow elites. And putin overrules that. That is the role of the individual. And he overrules it in that heroic factors, is important. As long as i reach out to the american leader, our friendship would be the basis of the partnership. If we are friends, that is the best basis for partnership, and it never happens. It never happens in sovietamerican relations. That is a grand illusion. Because there are other Structural Forces that the soviets and the russians civilly are not capable of understanding. Even scholars sometimes are in understandingf obstacles. Iments and even scholars sometimes are incapable of understanding. Then it becomes a whole pattern of failures and you still ask the question why this failure . Why that failure . Maybe the conclusion should be that it was not a failure. It was a pattern. It was almost a law. Of course, i think it was iraq. I think it was iraq where, instead of doing you know, instead of listening to the russian concerns, the Bush Administration walked out of the abm treaty and moved into iraq. That had a huge impact on moscow foreignpolicy elite, huge impact. Jeremy on the american side, there is an interesting pattern of also delusion and disillusionment of among president s. President s have the ability to overstate their ability president s tend to overstate their ability. W. Bushwhat made george he wasresting because so modest. Generally, from kennedy forward, president s have a tendency to believe they can persuade their foreign adversaries and that they can persuade them and still do what they want to do. This comes back to tims point about not being how what we are doing as perceived as threatening by others. So i can build a relationship with you, but go ahead and do what i am doing in other parts of the world that undermine russian interests is boris and i are friends. Friends. Boris are the problem is, of course, foreign leaders are not persuaded as easily as we think they are and they pay close attention to what we do outside of our Close Relationships with them. Takes a long time for a president to understand that. I think the very good discussion is not generous enough to soviet foreignpolicy. How wemade the point would do better if we built up our institutions and did highquality policy work. I know of no period in which almost any government in the postwar era did a better job than the soviet government in the 1970s. This is not so much about brezhnev. This is now the people like you look at the skill. Take for example, we havent talked much about vietnam. Americans during this period are totally hamstrung by their position on vietnam and their need in every negotiation to get the soviets to help them manage their vietnam problem. Dolbrinin handles that issue. If you look back at it, could they have handled it any better . If you ask what were their purposes and how they wanted to skillfully manage assent to get to what outcomes, could they have done any better than they did . And if you could go almost from region to region to region and again, going to the objectives they had in the 1970s on their logic, it is quite a remarkable performance from an institutional point of view. And sometimes you could even maybe beneath putin and putin, the russian policy over the last few years has actually developed and implemented rather skillfully composed plans that obtain a Strategic Initiative and outmaneuvered their rivals in ways we might not like, but might Say Something about somebody doing some staff work. Like the move in syria, there is months of sophisticated staff work with the iranians. Just as one illustration. Nor did the stuff with crimea and ukraine sort of happened on a 24hour impulse with no advance plan. I just invite you a little bit, vlad, to it is not so much an attack on nixon and kissinger, jeremisagree with comments, but to step back and observe in a way moscow foreignpolicy in a light more flattering than you get from the supreme leader. Vlad there were at least three as far as i can see, approaches to the United States from the end of the 1950s to the end of the 1970s. One was a bad sociology approach that was surprisingly present, even near the 1980s, considered to be obsolete. The approach was popularized by the former soviet ambassador, smiling mike. There is a pyramid of power consisting of wall street and fightnds of groups that and groups of capitalist monopolies and blah, blah, blah. It was very much present. The opposite the point, and quite linked to what jeremy and i have discussed about individuals, was the point that i discovered. His younger proteges told me right away. And i came then. My mind was quite clouded by that bad sociology. Just throw out all this rubbish. Everything is about individuals. Everything is about personal, diplomatic, and cultural relations. We need to have more exchanges. We need to have more exhibitions, americansoviet exhibitions, more schools dealing with stereotypes and how to overcome them, a whole panoply, by the way, of detente era measures on how to reduce tensions and how to provide understanding that we completely ignore today in our discussion, an anonymous gamut of practices that had been invented, tried, applied. They did not succeed in a strategic way. Mentioned. Ould be between these two opposite approaches was the need for a foreignpolicy approach of good professionals. I agree with you. We buy the criticism of this group of people that emanated actually from the kgb. They felt more free and more entrepreneurial. People , all those they they were slightly dumbed down. Its not true. And i agree that was a very, very structural school that maybe didnt allow and that was a good reason. They didnt allow room for heroic foreignpolicy. They had a narrow set of rules. Gorbachev and aside. Brushed them they wanted something heroic, something quick. They frowned at amateurism and warned of dire consequences. They were crowing into the void. This is a fascinating session. I am reminded why i decided to call my chapter of a new book age of era the brezhnev. My students hate that. On this issue of staffing and leadership, i think that is an interesting discussion. Soviet foreignpolicy during the 1970s is very much a game of two houses. If people do not change, they are very professional, very good, capable of very good thinking, what changes in terms is leadership. The leadership weakens dramatically. It has to do with aging. It has to do with health. It has to do with a lot of things that happened at the very top. And that is the period in the late 1970s when i see a definite example of soviet overstretch in terms of international affairs, and goal angola, ethiopia, afghanistan, which the best angola, ethiopia, afghanistan, which the best in the world could not have accomplished. Translate all of those abilities, all but the longterm strategic set of action. Created bynly be leadership. Ategic just a fun point of information. This is a fun panel. There is only one u. S. Soviet summit for which we have a recording and that is the 1973 summit. You both probably know this, that many of the others here probably dont. If you want to hear brezhnev talking and listen to brezhnev and nixon talking to each other, we have it on tape. Five years ago the Nixon Library released it. Its very interesting. I think it shows brezhnev to be intellectually extraordinarily weak. And i think you will also find that the memcons of these meetings are different from the tape. It is the only taped summit that we have. There is no tape that we know of of the anna and glassboro. That we have one. Its worth listening to if you want to get a sense of the superpower relationship and want to assess brezhnev. Thank you. Barbara are there questions . Yes, dale. Just a very quick question. I largely agree with the idea that the more understanding between leaders and between bureaucracies is good for international relations. I am a big believer in that. But theres always this tension, at least from where i come from in the studying political of political science. Deception. Of you can obviously want to communicate. You can communicate with that smile and a friendship, build those personal relationships, but if the person is try to deceive you, you have to be very wary of that. The ultimate example is when second bush said i looked into putins soul and i like what i saw and i understand the man. That was a pure deception. I remember the woody allen joke that he failed his first year philosophy because he looked into the soul of the person next to him on the final exam. You cant look into the other person and see their true intentions and you might be deceived. I wonder how u. S. Historians would grapple this ageold problem in my field, how to deal with the problem of deception. Jeremy that is a great question. I think that the policymakers who understand the other side, they come to it through a commendation of two routes. One, from the personal impressions. But also the rigorous process around them that is providing contextual knowledge and forcing them to think that through. That is what i would call a good process. You dont just read the cia psychological profile and go on that. You combine that with your experience with them. So is not just more information. It is how you are processing it is not just your impression. It is how you are processing it. It is who is bringing him information and he is using that information as he is planning moment to moment. The problem with roosevelts process is that it takes an enormous amount of energy by him, the president. That is one of the reasons why he does so much younger than churchill and stalin. One of the most important insights was that, if Franklin Roosevelt lived as long as george kennan, he would have been alive in 1983. That is hard to imagine, in part because of the way he managed his leadership. Vlad i dont know. I do think this is the limits for there is a limit for how much we can understand about our interlocutor. What kicks in is our perceptions of him or her. Is he a partner . Do i need him for my policy and a certain policy framework . Or is he an adversary . Is this the stalin of 1945 . Roosevelt needed him. He hoped to use stalin as a postwar partner for creating a postwar order. He knows that stalin is capable of incident deception, but that does not matter as much as it would when you are truman and start to see stalin as an adversary. Then your optic completely flips. Then deception becomes a justification for a complete mistrust. It is striking how, in particular foreignpolicy and the cold war, how much more tolerant are american diplomats and policymakers against people who they perceive to be their allies than their adversaries. So a compromise stops at the door, at the border of the soviet union. Understanding stops. And but they stops at the border, at the doorstep of the kremlin and so on and so forth. There are some remarkable exceptions. There is one in the brezhnevnixon meeting. Remarkable. Nobody could predicted. Brezhnev takes him aside. Of of hisror entourage or whatever. Takes him aside and all of a intenselyey are both secure individuals, both have enormous power and they can trust each other. It is a miracle. Jeremi i want to say one more thing. I think vlad nailed it. What is so important is for a leader to create portrait of his interlocutory is. Our is so important is, rhetoric at home has always been so simplistic. It has become even more simplistic. I think this happened to obama as much as it has happened to others. You get locked into your political rhetoric at home more so than ever before. That is one of the things that was so to me about ronald reagan, that he could walk past that. He could create an evil entire image and sell another image of gorbachev. That might be more important than his strategic thinking, his ability to sell that image. We understand the importance of that in policymaking. But i would include that in phillips staffing. When you are doing Foreign Policy asked for in staffing, you have to draw Foreign Policy at home. Barbara thank you so much. Lets give a big round of applause to our panelists. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2018] announcer youre watching American History tv, all weekend every weekend on cspan3. Tv,ext on American History we will