 One of the first things a good diplomat needs to be able to do is to understand the other side so that one's responses, one's interactions and exchanges and conclusions and communicates and so on and so forth, right? Reflect that and you can actually progress. Yes. Not only do we not have that capacity, I think just as sadly and just as worrisome, we Washington, doesn't seem to have any interest in developing it. This is Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. I'm here today with Patrick Lawrence, who is an extraordinary writer, journalist. He is the executive editor of The Scrum. It's a column that he and our former colleague Marshall Arbach and others are involved in. He's written many books related to foreign policy and he's written some very, very powerful things in recent weeks related to China, the Ukraine, the Biden administration and Vladimir Putin. Patrick, thank you for taking the time to join me today. It's a great pleasure, Rob, and I'm very honored to, you thought of me to have beyond and give me some time. Very grateful. Well, how I say you more than earn it, I'm the one who's fortunate here today in my view. So, well, any rate, let's talk about, you had a recent article and you cited a book from a man I once sat in on a course. When I was at MIT, I worked along with economics and engineering. I took a lot of courses in arms control and disarmament, George Rathgins, Jack Rowena, Bill Kaufman and others. And they sent me over some cross registration to Harvard and I did sit in on a course with Stanley Hoffman. So, in this context, your was a primacy in world order is the book you're citing. That's the launching pad. How did that inspire you? Where are we going? You know, it's very funny that that Hoffman book, Primacy in World Order, was published in 1978. I was a younger man. I was an editor at the New York Times at that moment when it came out. One sunny afternoon in June, I remember walking into a bookshop on my lunch hour and I bought it. It's been an important book for me ever since. Paranthetically, it's remarkable, the number of people who have made comments such as your own. Oh, yes, I sat in on a Hoffman course or Jamie Galbraith said, he reviewed my master's thesis, etc. Lots of people. Look, the title says a very great deal four words, primacy or world order. It's a rather stark binary. And I think Hoffman meant it that way. He wrote it in 78. A lot of us were thinking three years after the, some would say the fall of Saigon, I would say the rise. Three years after the defeat in Vietnam, the better among us were scratching their heads. What have we done wrong? How did we go wrong? Where do we go from here? We ought to do things differently. The world is another kind of place now, etc. These were the Carter years, basically. That's when the book came out. It's best understood as a post Vietnam introspection. And that is what he came up with. We Americans had a choice. We could continue to pursue the primacy. We elaborated rather swiftly after the 1945 victories. We could continue to insist upon that, right? Various ideologically driven crusades and so on. And, you know, Wilsonian make the world safer democracy, the whole thing. Or we could develop what Hoffman called a world order policy. That was our choice. What was a world order policy? Well, one of the more interesting things he said about it was, nobody can declare a world order. He didn't use the word multipolarity. I'm rather mystified. I can only conclude it wasn't in the lexicon at the time or something. But that's what he meant. In a multipolar world, by definition, nobody can stand up and say, okay, here's the world order. A world order policy reflects the reality that the global order is formed one question, one conflict, one interaction at a time. As my other half here said brilliantly when she was reviewing my Hoffman column, world order is not a policy. It's a process. That's what Hoffman meant, right? So that was our choice in brief. And we made the wrong one. As I said in the column in part brought us together. It's rather grim to reflect how pertinent Hoffman's book remains. Because we haven't got it done yet. I think for a variety of reasons, we can go into them if you wish. We simply can't, well, we, our foreign policy elites and so forth, do not seem capable of changing direction, of reexamining our circumstances. They're very wedded to the realities of the first 50 years after the 45 victories. They're not brilliant at imaginative thinking. And a new, a world order policy would require a lot of imagination, creativity, wisdom of a sort that seems to be in short supply in Washington. And courage. We have to do something new. That takes courage for a person to run a policy in Washington. And they don't seem to have it. So there we are. You know, I thought that's why it was pertinent to bring Hoffman's book off my bookshelf and put it in front of readers. I'm very interested from the perspective that you have raised through referring to Hoffman about where the obstacles are. Why can't well-educated, intelligent people in the national security apparatus of the United States see this, what you might call, we rather than me approach to the design and implementation. Why, what I'll call a co-authored world order as the state from an imposed world order. And I do sense from the echoes of Bismarck and others that there are times when, which you might call, the instability at home creates a yearning for a foreign adversary that we can all become aligned and united against. But there's another piece of this too. And I'll call it the Daniel Ellsberg piece. When I was taking courses at MIT and Harvard in the 70s, about the time that book came out, the notion of mutual assured destruction, Tom Schelling's game theory and everything was very prevalent. Daniel Ellsberg has written a book called The Doomsday Machine who says, if we degenerate into a nuclear conflict, particularly vis-a-vis Russia, we can destroy the upper atmosphere and all life on earth. So the stakes are not who's got a broken arm from an arm wrestle. The stakes are related to what you might call an escalation that could lead to destruction of life on earth. We don't even get to the climate change challenge if we induce the climate change with this hideous outcome. Some people are terrified of it right now, perhaps with some basis. Your question is why? Why can't Washington think new thoughts? It's a great question, multiple answers. I think number one, isn't it the nature of power? The possessors of power are just always bound to be reluctant to surrender power. They tend to think in a well-worn phrase, but perfectly good. They tend to think in zero-sum terms. So if we begin adapting to a world of multiple poles, we lose. That's part of it too. I think another part of it is nostalgia. One of my parents was horrifically nostalgic, right? Always remembering childhood. As a boy and an adolescent, I grew extremely impatient with that. I concluded years later that nostalgia is a form of depression. It reflects a refusal or an inability to embrace one's present. Let's get lost in the past. It's a reaction to fear. On a personal level, it can be an irritation or something. On a national level, it's problematic. It's troublesome to put the point mildly. It's plain. The Pentagon perhaps most of all, the Pentagon, certain factions in Congress, nostalgia for the unchallenged, uncomplicated decades after the war is very powerful. They don't want a sort of flippant phrase. Why do people want to continue pretending it's 1955? But that's the impression you sometimes get, so nostalgia. And again, multiple answers. I think another one might be a thought. Did Chalmers share this with me long ago? I can't remember. Maybe it was mine originally. For 70 years, the policy cliques in Washington did not have to think. It was just do more of the same. That's another thing power does to people. Right? We didn't need a foreign policy. And we didn't have one. We had a security policy, right? It's most pronounced across the Pacific. Butchers Gali, who I greatly admired after the United States arranged for his ouster as Secretary General at the U.N., published his memoirs, and he concluded with the most delightful insight. Diplomacy is for the weak. The strong have no need for it. Right? That was our problem for a long time. We had all the power we needed, and we didn't have to think. We did have no need for diplomacy. That's another reason. And now, the 21st century demands, in one case after another, diplomatic solutions to things. Often with multiple parties at the Mahogany table. And we're sclerotic in this way. We're unpracticed. I spent many, many years abroad as a foreign correspondent. You meet embassy people all the time. I was in Asia for most of this time. New Zealand produced some excellent diplomats. Sometimes Australia. Some of the Southeast Asians. Japanese foreign ministry. Very sophisticated organization. The way they trained people. They had institutional memory and so forth. The quality of foreign service officers at the United States embassies, wherever they were, KL or Tokyo or wherever, was just abysmal. We really had no, as they say, we didn't have a deep bench. These were nice enough people who had no sophistication, no very little worldliness, with some exceptions. I have to say, of course exceptions. But first secretary, political secretary, and so on, that sort of thing. I never went to the American embassies after a time. They never had anything to say. Boiler plate. And so that's part of it too. Sclerosis. No need of diplomacy and therefore no capability. And we're going to have to learn this. So far we've gotten to the point where it's mandatory to say diplomacy first. Well, that's progress. But those are just two words. And that appears to be as far as we've got so far. Well, you brought up Hoffman and you brought up in a phrase just a moment ago, we have to learn. How does journalism and how does teaching of international relations at universities contribute to us evolving now? Or and what resistances are there to those two institutional forms of what you might call dynamic upgrading? What a question. I lecture at Colorado College once a spring semester every year. This summer, this year, I'll do it in the summer. And of course, as mentioned, I was a correspondent abroad for 29 years. And I teach a course called Reinventing the Foreign Correspondent. It sort of goes to your question. Yes, it does. The argument and the entire argument of the course arose from my experience in those 29 years, almost all of them among non-western people. And many of them among East Asians. And I concluded we have to develop the capacity to see from the perspective of others. We have to dispense with we they. If you read the foreign pages in the New York Times, implicit in them is a we they. Self and other is the scholarly phrase for this sort of discourse. We don't have to agree with whatever we are learning from the Japanese. But we need to understand it, as I say in my course, from the inside out, so we can reflect it in what we write. And I mentioned this not because I assume I'm talking to rooms full of correspondence. Of course, I'm not. This is something we all need to learn. And it's certainly something our policymakers need to learn. We have this Ukraine crisis now. I see no shred, no sign, no evidence whatsoever that that the policy people in Washington are the slightest bit interested in understanding this question from the Russian point of view. It's apart from the fact that it's unproductive. It's profoundly unprofessional. I think Chas Freeman told me this. One of the first things a good diplomat needs to be able to do is to understand the other side so that one's responses, one's interactions and exchanges and conclusions and communicates and so on and so forth, reflect that and you can actually progress. Not only do we not have that capacity, I think just as sadly and just as worrisome, we, Washington, doesn't seem to have any interest in developing it. I'm very energized as I'm listening to you because I heard a podcast the other day from the celebrated life coach, Tony Robbins, and he said, for someone to improve a relationship, you don't try to change the other person. You change your awareness of the other person so that they feel seen and safe and I thought, wow, that sounds to me like a recipe for the foreign policy you would like to see as to stay from within the family, but it's human to human. I don't want to diminish the significance of politics and history. No, but there is a psychological dimension to so many of the questions that confront us. I drew this conclusion first in Southeast Asia watching nations such as Malaysia develop and why they were very uneven in their development incapable of absorbing a lot of international assistance and so forth. It's psychological. I concluded if people aren't ready, they're not going to get it done. You could pour all the money you want into Thailand or Malaysia or Indonesia. It's when people are psychologically prepared that they are able to move forward with all the assistance and advantages that may be at their disposal. I was sometimes accused of using psychology to blot out historical and political realities I'm chasing by that criticism. I mentioned now this psychological dimension is one dimension of numerous culture. I'm always resonating with the wisdom of the famous psychologist C. G. Jung, the 10th volume of his collected works is called Civilization and Transition. It's about seeing three things. The nature of the conscious individual, the unconscious dimension of that individual and the collective unconscious and how that differs from what you might call the mechanical man optimizing and improving and always going forward is very different. What we call the shadow plays a very big role and it's not just the shadow of the other. I've also energized often by conversations I've had with Orville Schell and he and John Delury wrote a book called Wealth and Power which said that the wounds of the opium wars and the Japanese invasion in the 30s in China are creating a desire or yearning for them to which you might call overcome those wounds and evolve to a place not of unilateral global leadership but at least being in the front row once again like what they call the middle kingdom. At the same time the United States as you've been alluding to is coming down the tracks thinking this is our system fall in line adapt to our leadership and Orville and John really explored how with different philosophical systems the Cartesian Enlightenment West and the what you call Taoist or Indian philosophies the Eastern philosophy which are very different how it could create the basis for misunderstanding and error and I know it's a big difference. Brzezinski gave a speech 2010-2011 in Montreal about exactly the same thing how are we going to make a G20 cohere when the whole world is watching after the great financial crisis doesn't believe in expertise doesn't believe in governance thinks things are degenerating how are we going to put what you don't do back together again. Yeah Hoffman's phrase to stay with Stanley Hoffman for a moment what a marvelous phrase harmony amid cacophony right that's what that's that's what a world order policy would have among its chorus assumptions and objectives and I often think if we could learn to consider our circumstances in new ways we would realize that our insistence on primacy hegemony if you like I'm not allergic to the word empire it has it has some very deleterious consequences number one we are a very lonely people if you're the hegemon by definition you're up there alone number two the burdens this pretense of primacy imposes upon us are very great right there are domestic consequences I anybody who can look out their window can see them social disorder infrastructure problems and so on right and also we don't get any help in in the way we make decisions because they have to be our decisions on our insistence I sort of think sometimes pick a question environment or whatever it may be a military question how rich we would be we all of us right if we had a multiplicity of voices weighing in here's part of the solution look at it this way too and what about that right we would all be we would all benefit greatly from that it would be another kind of world right it would be another kind of world order in the terms we're using today and the burdens on Americans would be much lighter this is why the zero some syndrome is so regrettable it keeps us from even imagining these questions of multi polarity harmony amid cacophony even imagining them we're so much in a posture of resistance we never see over the hill to to the benefits we again are policy people it's an interesting dimension here that I guess what I what feels like to me is there is a yearning to be emulated the American model freedom the high level principles we want everybody to be inspired to join that vision which comes from the struggle and development of this country but I'm I'm haunted a little bit right now I've just finished a book by the uh he's lives in Singapore but I believe was born in India Kishore Mahbubani oh yeah his new book is called 21st when I was a correspondent there well he's got a new book called 21st century Asia and he's talking about these different philosophical perspectives this need for difference diversity dignity mutual respect and things but he said what's really hard for him right now is he has a chapter and it's I think I don't remember the title but it's either the title and subtitle plutocracy or democracy and the question he's saying is if you have something that's four and by and over the one percent in the United States is that what the rest of the world is going to be inspired to Emily and he's he's actually saying if you will you got to practice what you preach and yeah I know he doesn't listen to Barry White very often but that song comes to my mind but but how do you take Mahbubani's how do I say challenge and how do I say collide that with the desire would almost call the vanity the narcissism of a nation wanting to be emulated irrespective of its performance yeah well um we need to step back rather far here right uh let me take a few minutes with it first of all there is the ever present presumption somewhere in our unconscious of of America as a chosen providentially favored nation it's been noted by some of the better historians after the after the American revolution Americans really had no taste whatsoever for revolution anymore because they had theirs and they have it right and we've got it right and that's all we need to know right now if we have it right then we better pass the word on you know torchbearer of the world lighting the way and so on and so forth right so that's that's deep within us as a people also uh I've been interested for some time thinking about how America was settled you know uh the settlers they didn't really have a lot of time to think things over if they needed to build a corduroy road to get a half a mile further into the wilderness that was the job uh and from that I think has come down to us a very strong preoccupation with method Americans are interested in how they're not really all that interested in why you know the why of it we know about all that the why of it is we are the new world and um and all and all those questions are resolved right commager pointed out in his wonderful book the American mind America has never produced a first rate philosopher with the possible exception of emerson right so we're all about method if you go to a dinner party or a cocktail party or something listen to the conversation it's always about how to do something right it's really very amusing and the first thing you ask is the first thing somebody asked you at a cocktail party how'd you get here did you take did you take the i-95 bridge right um it's how right method technique right um and it this computes down uh as um a givenness to technocratic solutions to all problems and once we begin to dedicate ourselves to technocratic solutions to all problems we begin to lose we want to impose them on on the rest of the world and at the same time lose all sight of culture history political traditions uh in some the the humanity what makes other people human their aspirations and so forth none of that matters here you know this is what shock therapy and all that was about unless I read it wrongly um uh and this is why we we're not a match with uh we're not a match with the world around us you know the world around us um as I mentioned in one of the commentaries that brought us together um I find its roots in the so-called independence era in the 50s and 60s but once again the cold war over the world is a great field of aspiration uh and um we can't we can't hear these aspirations they don't fit with us because nobody should aspire to anything more than what we have mastered and here is the how of it here's how you do it right we're a historical that way right you know yeah and I sense from what you're saying the unmindfulness about why is dangerous why what drama why you do something as opposed to how you do something no it's yeah if you're if you're I'm being facetious but if you're driving off the end of the dock as long as you manage your car well and you just go into the ocean and the car sinks that's okay because you you drove skillfully but you didn't choose where to drive to or why you want your car to go into the water I mean you know that book the promise of American life uh who wrote that quote Herbert Crowley right yeah yeah he makes a distinction in the early pages so he just a passing thing but it's only stayed with me right we're a nation of destiny if you're a nation of destiny you don't have to ask any why questions the higher powers are guiding you yeah it's all all resolved right we're a nation of destiny and we must become a nation of purpose the difference between a nation of destiny and a nation of purpose is vast when you have purpose you have things to do you're very cognizant of the why right in in greek terms technique and t loss the what are you working for what's your north star what's your intent right um and and this is a transition we need to make we need to re-recon ourselves as a not a not a people with a destiny but a people with a purpose then we can start saying and this is our purpose and this is why it is our purpose this is our t loss this is our uh end point this is what we strive for right um uh you know purpose and destiny limit let me uh shift focus i think our exploration of this side of the ocean whether it's pacific or atlantic is important but i'd like because it's not something i'm particularly familiar with and i know you are i'd like to take us across to how bladem your Putin is feeling and acting and why i say that is i start from uh my wife co-founded an organization called the perception institute which study the regions of the brain mind science and how to heal social and racial animosity interesting proposition and the punchline i'll i'll just use i think it's a fascinating body of work but the punchline i'll use is when you shame somebody or when you threaten somebody it makes it worse so i'm looking at Putin sitting on top of 6 000 nuclear weapons according to the newspapers we have five thousand six hundred yeah and i'm looking at the fear all around the earth and the pandemic and other contexts climate change on the horizon but this coming on to center stage i'm looking at how and curious to ask you what he must be feeling like about how which my call the world has and the american led world has and is imposing upon him if you were his right hand strategist how would how would you advise him to be behaving in how does that differ from how he is behaving uh the other day john pilger the australian british journalist sent me a map a map of nato accession by color right pre 1997 post 1997 there's nothing in that map we don't already know but if you look at it it is a very effectively graphic uh image of how russia feels right there are only two nations left uh on the whole of russia's western border that aren't nato belarus and ukraine last summer we tried a color revolution in belarus it didn't work out but that's what that business last summer was all about right i looked at this map and i said wow lukashenko i don't really know a great deal about lukashenko he may not be a very nice piece of work but vladimir putin is going to be his friend that's just based on the map uh and um and ukraine just below it that tells you what you need to know or it's a beginning it starts you on the story of what of how vladimir putin sees things um uh if i'm not mistaken the topography has something to do with this there's a very great deal of flat land between uh between the russian border and whatever river marks out the the rest the elv or something right um very easily invaded history history uh is the the campaigns eastward to russia we all know them uh that's part of it what what i would do differently than putin you know i i i know very i'm pretty confident this uh uh this move he made into ukraine was hugely he was very reluctant about it people who watched him speak people who who are familiar with him russia watchers uh noted he was almost grief stricken as he gave that speech announcing what he was going to do what russia was going to do this comes at the end of end of uh uh depending on how you want to count um 30 years of constant movement uh eastward and part of that are all sorts of covert operations we don't even know anything about right um i i'm not sure i would have done anything differently i i i think uh putin made it very clear he said certain things in that speech i think we are well to take notice of and one of them is um on a couple of occasions uh we i don't have a right not to do this it it is my obligation to do this it is my obligation to our country and our people to do this uh uh whether we object to that or not we we really need to get our we we really need to understand what he meant there right again go back to the map right uh if if ukraine or belarus went into nato those frontiers would be a constant mess of incursions and sabotage and who knows what all right uh they would be very frayed borders he can't have that he can't have that right uh the popular trope now is putin the madman we can't understand him he's lost his grip right this doesn't do it simply doesn't do whatever you think of putin he has proven many many times over that he is an accomplished statesman with uh a very sound grasp of history right uh that's not an advertisement for putin these are just facts right you can you can you can hate putin and still understand those two facts right yeah it's interesting to me because the portrait that's painted to me as a consumer of the baseline american media would never have acknowledged that dimension of him i mean you're seeing beyond which might call the propagandistic wall that is the mainstream legitimization in the united states yeah i can't cut my clothes to the fashion of the times as lily and helman once said i i am sorry that that these points are so unpopular that has nothing to do with whether or not i'm going to articulate them i think this is exactly what i mean meant earlier when i said it is imperative upon us as a people as a nation state as as properly professional diplomats and statesmen to develop the capacity to see how the world looks from behind the eyes of other people and what we are getting now is wall to wall resistance to this right if you read the social media and so on and so forth it is a major transgression now to express any understanding i'm leaving out the word sympathy to to express any even rudimentary understanding of why putin is acting the way uh he is i prefer to say russia i don't like this personalization of everything right putin the mad man i'm sorry it's too flimsy it's too silly right uh nato has this has nothing to do with nato expansion eastward that's another one you're hearing now first of all it's patently patently false but beyond that it is one of the ways we are totally resistant to seeing this question from the other side's point of view so in essence what we are fed is a vision of us resisting his aggression as in contrast with his resisting nato and western and us led aggression history deep and near chronology since the nineties and certainly since 2014 the coup causality and responsibility we can't leave these things out and pretend to understand this question this crisis and that's exactly what we're doing leaving it all out remember um um richard pearl um it intellectual ornament was a george w administration right after the attacks in 2001 he came up with this term decontextualization man that term i remember hearing it i don't remember it in the context his immortal observation was we must not try to understand the terrorists any attempt to understand them is amounts to support for them i think he he augmented the thought with the this is a crime and nothing more and it should be treated as a crime yesterday i saw some things on twitter that essentially we're saying uh we can't afford to tolerate this negotiation between the ukraine and russia right now they said that it was a twitter art and another uh a person who i follow replied and said what are you telling us that it was a journalist i believe with cnn or somebody that had made the statements and my friend's reply was what are you telling us me we have to go to nuclear war now like what what are you talking about and then there was a whole discussion following my friend's reaction about how don't don't you understand how aggressive these people are being and it's almost like you know the old adage of game theory there was thing called the chain store paradox let's say you're macy's in new york somebody opens a little shop you don't crush them because they don't matter but then 20 other shops open and all sudden macy's is on defense everybody undercutting their prices so you got to go crush every little thing so that as long as you look tough you've deterred everybody from exploring and and that kind of sense that we got to be super tough right now where what you might call the backstop is nuclear exchange in the context of what we call mutual assured destruction it's quite daunting how far do you want to provoke a nuclear reaction i don't i i don't know that much like i said that's part of why i invite you on because i don't quite understand but i feel like things are out of control they're spiraling out of control and where where is the healing going to be found what was Putin saying when he let it be known the other day a couple days ago that he had authorized the nuclear deterrence programs in russia airborne seaborn landborn to assume of of status of standby alert i gather it's a low it's a it's a low status it's not one minute to be there what was he trying to say there it was a shocking statement of course right i think what he was trying to say there was look i drew the line you saw the line there was nothing too complicated about my red line and you crossed it and i i think putin this goes to the context of the putin she statement on february fourth right i think putin sees this as a as a moment to really clean things up and begin constructing a world order of the type stanley hoffman was writing about 44 years ago right i think he sees this in very large terms and that's what i think he meant to convey when he mentioned the deterrence uh the standby alert right they use the term deterrence implicit in that is we're not doing this first but we're ready for you right so i think he sees this as a big moment capital b capital m right um of of historic geopolitical consequence and in the columns that brought us here uh that's my running theme we are living through uh we are living through a passage of very significant history as i mentioned in one of them it's very hard to understand one's present moment as as history because you're inside it looking out you can't really you know you just see what's going on around you the tick tock of events and so forth right uh i think this is a moment where we need to step quite far back and recognize that we are in a moment of a very great historical significance so that we can re participate in and respond to it uh adequately a couple of sentences from the joint statement uh the she put in statement which which i i i think is it's i i i urge that we consider this statement in the context of the ukraine crisis the ukraine crisis is in a certain way a subset of what they're talking about in this document on the on international relations entering a new era that's part of the mile long title of the document right today the world is going through momentous changes and humanity is entering a new era of rapid development and profound transformation a couple of sentences later a trend has emerged toward redistribution of power in the world some actors representing but the minority on the international scale continue to advocate unilateral approaches to addressing international issues they're talking big thoughts here right and uh as one might have predicted the the administration has had virtually nothing to say about this statement and the new york times predictably enough sort of purported to flick it off the table uh as as nothing i i think it would be hard to overstate the importance of it and i mention it here uh whether you want to go into it or not is up to you rob but uh i mention it here because it gives an idea of the let's say the the the scale of president putin's thinking the the the significance he reads into this moment right uh in all honesty i you know i'm not suggesting i hold a great candle for laudamere putin i'm not that critical i'm not as critical of him as others right um uh but uh it in all honesty in the interest of of a new kind of world order i want him to succeed i want him to get nato to back off the way george kennan uh kissinger uh and the current burns the william burns the current director of the cia advised cut it out uh this would be good for all of us right there are a couple of unpopular ideas for for you rob them yeah i'm really i'm stirred here because that portion that you read from the joint statement seems like wise empathetic insightful people appealing for mankind in a excuse my name robert johnson at the crossroads uh but uh but i'm seeing but i'm seeing a very uh an interesting element which is why i brought up the perception institute defining yourself with your military nuclear arsenal is igniting the fear on the other side and it may contribute to making a frightened america on the one level more complicit in this aggressive agenda and number two and this is what bothers me even more it may ignite within the biden white house a fear that if they're not tough the population is going to migrate to more protection meaning the republican side in the next election so i don't know what's being triggered i can feel that and this has been very valuable the depth of what you have brought from that joint statement and from your way of seeing this deep geopolitical history both in asia and in europe and and that there is a what you might call humane basis for the stand that putin is taking but i am concerned about how we de-escalate the boldness and the toughness on both sides to create the harmony that allows us to march down the road that you would like to see bringing nuclear considerations into this was you have to reckon that as a bad move right i i think the point i made earlier as to what the kremlin meant to say with that stands it could have been made uh more artfully no question of that you know the the nuclear the the nuclear danger is just too dreadful to put anywhere near the table right uh parenthetically apparently uh uh he was responding to comments uh the british foreign secretary louis truss was making she's kind of about as much qualification for standing as british britain's foreign secretary is my local librarian she's completely over her head right uh makes one idiotic statement after another which is quite dangerous right um you know i find i find the statement regrettable and you and i think you may be right it uh it may advance antagonisms rather than de-escalate them you know but you know it's remarkable rob in the context we were exploring earlier the quality of american states men and states women liz truss foreign secretary antony blinkin national security advisor jake sullivan the you know they're they're just not up to the job right lavrov is uh once again he's a very accomplished diplomat right uh while um while uh javad zarif was serving as iranian fm i thought lavrov and zarif were were uh among the most professional statesmen that acted you know and going back to what we were saying earlier we we've had no need for diplomacy expertise um and um this is what you get amateurs right i've always i've remarked from the beginning and blinkin and sullivan have served their entire careers in advisory roles they've been advisors on capitol hill and the state department and so on right biden put them in executive positions a radical over promotion and had they had in the field experience in other countries where their depth of awareness of say china or japan or russia uh in other words being advisors on capitol hill about something afar is different than living in the fabric of that place afar and bringing that insight back home look at jake sullivan's cv he doesn't know anything about china i don't think blinkin does either right blinkin surprised me it's a superb education right born in america is why his mother moved to paris spent his high school years in the french lisae totally bilingual a corporate lawyer in new york and then in paris you know a very worldly fellow he surprised me his his lack of sophistication his his habit of repeating entries in some american catechism about human rights and democracy it's interesting because people like urnist hemmingway used to write that when you're going to be most creative is when you go to a land that's not what you might call where you're unfamiliar where your customs and unconscious habits and so forth are not abided by in other words you no longer feel like you can dance and be part of the tribe now you become creative now you start to notice now you become yourself and so those people who have that international experience are often deep from the way they've been challenged to be themselves and that's right that's why blinkin surprised me yeah but you talked about hoffman earlier he had come from france as i remember yeah well he was austrian born his family moved to paris they moved to new yi they must have had money right uh and um his uh his mother took him to the south of france uh two days before the germans took paris uh after the war he resumed his education in paris uh one of the grand day coal i think i don't remember which one um and then he crossed the ocean and 50 odd years teaching at harvard it all showed i mean you know he was a very worldly fellow i love what he said i mentioned it in this column i love what he said toward the end of his career when he returned to european studies uh after many many years on american foreign policy he said you know after a time denouncing the same old repeated mistakes is no longer any fun that how would i say it feels a little bit like resignation but but i how would i say if you can redeploy yourself and make a difference somewhere else maybe that's just smart he made a great contribution to yes he did yes he did that was that was a modest statement probably underestimating the impact that he had on people like you and me and others oh yeah so you have a forthcoming book tell me just a little bit foreshadowing because i want to set us up for making the next chapter when that book is released okay thank you rob well the last one the last one was called time no longer yell put it out it's still in print um americans after the american century right uh kind of a study of um of where we were after 2001 and uh at at that time i i said i argued that america had 25 years counting from 2001 book came out 2013 i think america had 25 years counting from 2001 uh to decide whether it was going to move into a new position in the world relative to the to other nations with imagination and creativity and guts as we were saying earlier or messily and violently well we've chosen the latter past that's one way of looking at ukraine in fact um uh i i'm not sure i want to write any more books like that this new one um is called the journalist in his shadow um the title comes from a passage in um niches the the wanderer and his shadow right um and it's uh it's it's it's it's it's a kind of a genre bender it's about the crisis in our press um so it's in that way analytic it's also history my argument is that the american press had a very bad cold war and never recovered from it uh because it could never acknowledge its errors and that's why we're repeating every single one of them with shocking astonishing fidelity and its memoir it's uh my own years through most of the period i'm writing about uh as a professional an editor in new york uh and then a correspondent abroad right and ending with my my years as what we're now calling an independent journalist right um i clocked out of the mainstream uh in i don't know 2010 or so um and functioning as an independent journalist ever since and i make the argument that that's where the future lies the future lies with independent journalists who have a different the core question is what is the relationship between journalism and power at the moment it's it's just the way it was during the cold war a very corrupted relationship there's no independence any notion of a fourth estate is that's that's a dusty antique right um and we have to restore that uh and and i think the restoration is going to be driven by independent media so that's the book the memoir is kind of a gives some narrative flow and force to it well that's that's powerful you're at it a cutting edge when the institute for new economic thinking is contemplating how to make a difference the notion of what i'll call educating versus educating citizens versus credentializing as inputs to production and how that matters to education what people choose how strong the body politic can be it derives from i have read years ago jane jacob's final book called dark age ahead and chapter three is credentializing versus educating and i'll i'll uh i'll pass that on to you as a thanks away from she moved beyond urban studies and all that that's correct she was in toronto and wrote this just fantastic book and it was released in 2004 she had a great intellect she had a great yes she did yes she did and and and her her humanity the way her humanity informed her intellect i think is is part of the reason she was so effective as a writer you know yeah and you know people like her a friend of mine who's at wane state university in detroit where i grew up jerry heron who's written about universities in the myth of cultural decline he wrote a book called after culture about how media refracted and demonized the city of detroit and i used to say they divorced in detroit they didn't rescue it and they didn't make it a part of the nation yeah they told everybody the american dream is fine those people cause their own problems so uh but but i think this this realm that you're exploring vis-a-vis journalism like i've been exploring vis-a-vis education is about how healthy and how capable the body politic is of reacting in our own interest our own collective common good interest vis-a-vis some of the forces that we've been exploring today i'm very eager to make the point look this may be a book about journalism but it's a book that all of us need to be concerned with right uh uh because um you know uh i quote in the one of the chapters i quote jefferson this wonderful moe of his he was writing back to a friend in america while he was serving as the minister in paris right and he said uh if it came to a question of a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government i would without hesitation choose the latter condition that's pretty good and and we don't what we have now is government without newspapers because the relationship between the media um and and political and and corporate power and the difference between those two is very hard to discern sometimes right um uh is is is very diseased it's it's uh it's very it's direly bad um uh quite corrupt uh and so in consequence the the press serves political power to such a faithful extent that we effectively have government without newspapers these these papers uh i know it sounds a bit extreme i stand by the judgment they're basically bulletin boards well that's in part why i founded this podcast that sensibility and that's very much why i asked you to come and join me here today the light you shed on things it reminded me of my namesake and his song the first verse of crossroads i went down to the crossroads fell down on my knees i went down to the crossroads fell down on my knees asked the lord above have mercy now save poor bob if you please well i'm using this bandwidth and these things too not just about poor bob but poor poor america poor world because we are at a crossroads and you are shedding light on things and uh i'm tempted to bring up another song Todd rungrim i saw the light in your eyes from the time we first met through our friend marshal there's a light within you and i want to both celebrate it and encourage it and encourage my young people who are defining meaning in their life in their career to take your example one if you're broadcasting to students one little shard of advice look up the word discernment the jesuits have an excellent definition of this word it means autonomous thinking it means learning to think to discern means to think for yourself and make your own judgments uh free of the influences of others not to say you don't learn from others but um discernment there's not enough of it in my own courses i teach it right uh whatever you're teaching to a certain extent maybe you agree you're teaching students how to think all right uh and um maybe your students want to look up that term that's what they need