After dinner, we had a fascinating, discussion 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. From stalin to gorbachev. I noted among his books zhivagos children. Having just watched the movie yet again, dr. Zhivago, i was drawn to that topic. Jerry 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 is called it could be called the impossible president , but it is the impossible presidency. It is about whether anyone can be a successful president. He is the distinguished are for leadership in Global 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 want. Vlad everyone always says i will try to be brief, so i will try to be brief. [laughter] people talk about brezhnev, we are struck by the fact that have noindividual ability to conceptualize , they came 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. Brezhnev proceeded proceeded khrushchev. The person who represents her bolshevik tradition, that is the existing capitalist system and the revolution. 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. 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 data 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 in episode, a heroic episode in this search for accommodations between the two great powers. Whatever khrushchev did, was quite awful, especially in Foreign Policy. [laughter] at times a visceral reaction to khrushchevs risktaking. Brezhnev something opposite to what khrushchev did 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 stabilize 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. Suddenly, he finds a partner. With whom he can 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 Europe with checks of our cap and he is a falling domino man. Had we not invaded czechoslovakia he put it differently, saved czechoslovakia the troops would soon end up immediately on our western borders. That resonates today with putins thinking. He is a more normal man to me than khrushchev and there are many more brezhnevs in the political establishment then you shove 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. This is many other things piling up. 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, you know, half drunk, in the watergate stays, its in crimea and it is their last meeting. He raises a toast to the doctrine of lasting a 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 communist country, but it was china, not the soviet union. They offered the alliance to china because it is strategically and directly against the soviet union. Now moving to putin is a very different person than khrushchev, but he is also different than breast that then brezhnev. Putin, like brezhnev, is deeply illiberal. The respect force he celebrates , great fatherland war, much like brezhnev did. To reduce putin to a kgb man is the height of primitivism. He had a state learning curve. He learned a lot 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 noneligible very knowledgeable russians, and even they dont understand why russia cannot find a proper mode 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. For economic and other reasons. It doesnt have enough umpf for that. And then russia refuses to act as a Regional Power because it is in itself diminishing or derogatory. 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. The past years prove how great the order was for russia, given the wealth of its roman terry. Raw materials. Its a wonderful raw materials. Its a wonderful system. That not enough. Because you come to the idea of constant forces coming from the east and from china as well, threatening to chip away what you consider to be our 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 opponents append and dependents say, ahha, you are weak. Putin cannot afford to be weak. When he has to showby 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 assisted he system 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 have 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, propaganda was a joke. The probably danko means that everything that everything the russia says come 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 weekend 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. Does not need more territory if anything because more territory comes with more people and they need more pensions and things. [laughter] 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] 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 avlds by vlads. Because he does not tell the story of detente. But he contextualizes it with a lot of framework, the role of soviet leaders, but also soviet citizens like himself, survivors children 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 74 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 water hit, 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 nixon and kissinger i think they came to this thinking independently they both believed that the global order 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 win when it 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 at 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] 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. Four nixon 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 sent power in the white house, the use of secrecy, the writing out of the state department, that is simply something domestic politics. That is the american image at home of the view of the international system. They are deeply connected. 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 estate 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 residents 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 ground when the president 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 demonized individuals and these are the men that will 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 interpersonal 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 negotiations. 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 thinking this through. It is a disdain for expertise, but also in a belief that its all politics, all about making tradeoffs. That is what 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. 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 romantics s ability 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 insight 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. Years ago Common Knowledge, understandings. Years ago, i did a word search and understandings came up more than anything else. 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 gorbachev generation, cant understand the new thinkers, without understanding this period and the way these personal relations wrote 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 Knowledge about nuclear ends Nuclear Weapons less . Wouldnt that make the world a safer 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. Worlds 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 a. 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 kissingers 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 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. Wins over people on the other side and manages to pay off 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. 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. 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 and had 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 rush and 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 that 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. We are during exactly the wrong things today without saying a word about donald trump, we are doing the wrong things today. We need more diplomats, not less. We need more diplomats, not less. We need more area experts, not less. And we need to be talking more, not less. And i 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. The 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 ics 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] did you want to respond . 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 all the 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 and his own set of believes but also how lucky he was and that brings us to structural factors. 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. Brezhnev ran out of luck even before he had a stroke or whatever he had. He met ford, who we never mentioned. [laughter] ford politely listens to brezhnev and they have no so brezhnevs own health but also, as i interviewed soviet participants who knew him, brose 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, in 1977, was a little bit misguided. To renegotiate salt, it was very unfortunate. 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 here the aim of soviet diplomats when the first ambassador to the United States 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. Thats very generous. The image of the u. S. The soviet are continually baffled by semithings about how americans do their warm policy. Barbara jeremy . Jeremy 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. 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 sink 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 ask at the time when there is already how strong, i dont know but there is already antiamerican consistence around moscow elites antiamerican consensus around moscow elites. And putin overrules that. That is the role of the individual. And he overrules it in that yeah, it is heroic. 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 are incapable of understanding. Even scholars sometimes are incapable of understanding. The then it becomes a whole path 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 foreignpolicy. 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. 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. 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. Jeremy made the point how we 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 era did a better job of 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 kanye co. You look at the skill. Take for example, we havent talked much about vietnam. They americans during this period are totally have shunned by their position on vietnam and their need in every negotiation to get the soviets to help them manage their vietnam problem. Dolbrinin handle that issue. 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 notice the russian form 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, 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 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 others with money and groups of capitalist monopolies and blah, blah, blah. It was very much present. The opposite viewpoint and quite linked to what jeremy and i have discussed about individuals was the point i discovered. His younger proteges told me right away. 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 succeed in a tactical way. They did not wait they did not succeed in a strategic way. Between these two opposites 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. 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 her foreignpolicy. Had a narrow said of rules set of rules. That provided slow and gradual advance in all chosen directions. Thats why gorge of brushed them aside. 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 the age of 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 [indiscernible] 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 ethiopia, afghanistan, which the best angola, ethiopia, afghanistan, which the best in the world could not have accomplished. Two translate all of those abilities, all but the longterm strategic set of action. Jeremy just a fun point of information 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. Its very interesting. I think it shows brezhnev to be intellectually extraordinarily weak. And i think you will also find that the men con 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 studying studying of political science. 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. 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 combination 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. Information. It is how you are processing so 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. Is he a partner . Do i need him for my policy and a certain policy framework . Or is he an adversary . If 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. Brezhnevnixon meeting. Brezhnev take some aside takes him aside. All of the sudden, they feel like they are both the intensely insecure individuals, both have enormous power, and they can trust each other. And it is a miracle. Jeremy i want to say one more thing. I think vlad nailed it. What is so important is for a leader to create our rhetoric at home has always been some plastic. 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 extraordinary to me about ronald reagan, that he could walk past that. 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] you were watching American History tv on cspan3. Join the conversation it, like us on facebook. Watching American History tv on cspan3. Museum ofe from the the bible in washington dc for a symposium on the founding of america. Explore theill bibles role and scripture passages referenced during the american revolution. Baylor University History professor thomas talked about Benjamin Franklins debated faith. This is live coverage on American History tv. We have about three more minutes for get started. Thank you
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