 I'm Joseph Jaffe and I'm editor of The Zeit in Germany and also teacher of American Foreign Policy at Stanford University. Your guest is, the sooner I put my picture away though you'll see his name, he wants to be known as H.W. Brand. And he has written more books on history than I have written newspaper pieces. That's an exaggeration. We are told, all of us have been told by the organizers to ask certain questions. And I will certainly stick to the rules and ask the first question which has been posed by the organizer. And so I'd like to ask you, what keeps you up at night? Before your answer, I want to give you the answer that your predecessor this morning Michael Spence gave. Okay. What keeps you up at night? He said, my wife, laughter. Not what you think. He says, she's a journalist and works late. What keeps me awake at night, and sometimes keeps me from going to bed, is my younger son, who is a teenager. And this because he's a teenager. But also in a broader sense, because I wonder what his future is going to hold for him. I think it's difficult to sketch out a scenario in which the future of the generation that succeeds me is going to be as full of opportunities as my generation enjoyed. And so I really wonder about this. He's in college now. Jobs are hard to find for college graduates. He has two older siblings who've done, who are out of college and are doing well. But the economy changed in 2008. And so I don't know. And I do spend some time worrying about that. We all do have children of a certain age. But in terms of your profession, you're a historian, historian of the United States, historian of American foreign policy. When you think about the U.S. in the 21st century, is there anything, yes in the world, is there anything that keeps you up at night? I won't say that this exactly keeps me up at night. But I've come to the conclusion that American foreign policy in the 21st century is going to look more like American foreign policy in the 19th century than in the 20th century. For the following two reasons, one is that, well, in my study of history I've concluded that there's a basic law of foreign policy and it goes like this. For all countries? Yeah. All the ones that I've observed. I'm a historian, so I only look backwards, but I think it'll probably apply going forward. And that is that sooner or later every country gets the foreign policy that it can afford. Or that it deserves. No. I wouldn't say that it deserves. That it can afford. Okay. And it works like this. First of all, to have an ambitious foreign policy. You have to have an economy that can sustain it. But the sooner or later part of that formulation is absolutely critical. And if you look at American history, American foreign policy was quite modest through the late 18th century, through the 19th century, even with the partial exception of World War I until 1940. Now, this, despite the fact that by 1900 the United States had the most powerful economy in the world. So it could have embarked on a very ambitious foreign policy. But the mindset of leaders in the first part of the 20th century had been formed in the 19th century. And it was a time when Americans considered themselves comparatively poor and therefore more likely to have to adapt to the world than to force the world to adapt to the United States. Hey, this young republic, it was merely 13, 25 years old, starts a war against the mightiest nation on earth in 1812 with the mightiest navy on earth. How does that fit your pattern? In American history, in American history and politics, it was considered an extension of the Revolutionary War. It was a second war for American independence because the British had not followed through on all of their agreements of the Treaty of Paris. But anyway, through the 19th century, it never occurred to Americans to engage in the affairs of Europe, to engage in the affairs of Asia. This is true and not quite true. I mean, first of all, one of the reasons at least as an accepted theory of US diplomatic history is that the reason that the US could maintain its distance toward Europe was there was somebody to patrol the Atlantic and keep the US protected. That was the British Navy after that little incident between 1812 and 1814. None of my kids, when I teach them that kind of stuff, knows that the Brits did burn down Washington during the war. So there was no need to engage in the war. And by the way, this isolationist tradition, I thought, at least by the middle of the 19th century, the US was really quite active in Asia. By comparison perhaps to the 18th century, but it doesn't stand in comparison at all to the situation in the 20th century. And the big turning point, of course, comes with the beginning of the Second World War with Pearl Harbor, when all of a sudden the isolationist mindset is discredited. Americans discover two things. One, that they can afford to fight a war on two sides of the world. And secondly, that war and the preparations for war are a wonderful solution to the problem of the Depression. Now, and this is something that is important going forward, because- Let's have a little war right now. Well, the thing is that in order to make it work, you have to have disposable income. And the money that government would spend on war can't otherwise be claimed by something else. But it's often claimed that World War II was what cured the Depression for the United States and some other countries, which is true but not complete. Not true for Nazi Germany. And what is important for the United States is, and looking forward from 1941 ahead and from here on out, is that it wasn't the war per se. It wasn't the fighting, the destruction, the bloodshed. It was the government spending. And if some way had been developed to spend as much money as the United States spent on armaments and fighting the war for other purposes, it probably would have had the equivalent economic effect. Now, in fact, that's what happened during the Cold War. And one of the things, one very interesting corollary to this is that the U.S. economy, since the beginning of industrialization, has never demonstrated the ability to sustain growth over long periods of time without large injections of government funds. If you look at the period from industrialization mid-19th century to the end of the 1930s, it was one financial crisis, one panic, one depression after another. Things smoothed out only after 1941. And it was from that point on that the government was a major player in the economy. I think since then we've heard about the dozen recessions since 1941. But nothing like the Depression of the 1930s, the Depression of the 1890s, the Depression of the 1870s. The long so-called long depression of the 1870s plus is a kind of tricky thing. Of course, we had panic busts and booms, but at the same time, the size of the U.S. economy doubled. We've only got 30 minutes, Joe. We can't go into all the details here. Double. Okay. Now, here's the point where I would want to challenge you. Number one is that after World War II, there was nobody else to take care of business. It wasn't. European powers were out of the game. You weren't going to let the Russians take care of business. So some United States had to take over and keep house. That still hasn't changed, at least not in a fundamental way. There's still nobody to take over the task of World Order. That's one thing. The second thing is this hegemon has a rather cheap life. It spends on the average 4% of GDP on defense. If you compare that to previous empires, that's patty cakes. 4%. It's nothing. Compared to Rome, Habsburg, even the British Empire? Americans have never had an acceptable ethos of empire. Americans have acted imperialistically at times, but they've never subscribed to the idea that the United States ought to run a large part of the world. Americans have been very reluctant imperialists. They've been active imperialists at times, but reluctant. I think what you describe that there's nobody else to mind the store, nobody else to keep the peace, that is an obvious thing for someone looking at the United States from outside to say. It's not at all obvious for someone who lives in Iowa that, okay, there's nobody else to keep the peace of Europe, so we have to do it. In the 1930s, one could have made the same argument, and Americans took just the opposite conclusion. But what's forcing America to get the foreign policy, how do you put it in the beginning? It can afford. It can afford. Until, during the 20th century, I call this the era of free security for the United States, free in the sense that not once, between 1898, the war with Spain, and 2008, with one very minor exception I'll get to, did anybody prospectively weigh cost against benefits when the possibility of America going to war came up? So when Woodrow Wilson took the United States into the First World War, nobody said, Mr. President, that's going to be too expensive. When Franklin Roosevelt with the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, you name it. This came up very briefly in the run up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the general who brought it up was quickly fired. But 2008 changed the game. Since 2008, American politics has been obsessed with the American federal debt and the deficit, and the time is coming very shortly when all the promises made to the baby boomers are going to have to be either paid or modified. Now in the United States, everybody who is part of the social security system, that is everybody who works and gets wages or salary for a living, every year gets a statement from the social security system. So what you're going to get? Yes. It says, this is what you've contributed. This is what you're going to get. It's got your name on it, it's got your social security number, and it says, if you retire at 65, you'll get this, if you wait until 62, since 67, and so on. I don't get a statement like that from the Pentagon. I don't feel I have a moral claim on the Pentagon in a way I and most American taxpayers feel they have a moral claim on social security. The consequence of this is when it really comes down to a contest between keeping American troops in Afghanistan or some future country, or cutting back on social security, I think American voters are going to say, I'm going to keep my social security and let Afghanistan figure its own way out of its problems. It's not quite what the public opinion figures say, but I think let's take- Look at the rise of Ron Paul. American conservatives are starting to come back to the old conservative idea that the U.S. government was supposed to govern the United States and not govern the world. Okay. Ron Paul hasn't been doing very well lately, has he? He's not going to win the nomination, but he sticks around as a voice for those people on the Republican side. The last time around, he was hardly a Republican. He was really with the libertarians. But this idea of bringing American troops home and spending that money in America or giving it back to taxpayers is catching on. Okay. So have you been priming Obama recently? I mean, is that what he's about to do? I mean, you could say he's taken troops out of Iraq. He is about to take them out of Afghanistan. He's shifting- And look at his grave reluctance to get involved in Libya. Yeah. And another war. Well, there's lots of American ordinance being spent there. But there was this reluctance, correct? So no more war. He's also shifting troops out of Europe, the last ones are going. But even with this kind of column left-ish president, there's no inkling that he will leave the two strategic arenas which are going to make a difference. Because Europe didn't the 20th and the 21st, and you know what they are. We all know what they are. This is the greater Middle East, and of course, what we call the West and Pacific, and the Chinese call the Chinese Sea. There's no inkling of that, no indication of that. So let me put it this way to push you a little bit. The US is just shifting, shifting strategic focus. Or is it actually doing something else which I might exaggerate a little bit by calling it self-containment? Is this a real shifting in the nature of grand strategy or just in the focus of grand strategy? This kind of change doesn't take place overnight. This isn't Pearl Harbor, this isn't Suez for Britain. But the change is going to take place over time. The United States will not immediately pull troops out of Europe, to leave forces in the Middle East, to leave forces in the Western Pacific. But if some president should have in mind, you know, as George W. Bush did in 2003, let's affect regime change in Iraq. He's not going to be able to do it. First of all, he wouldn't even get the idea passed, members of his own administration. He probably wouldn't get it passed Congress. He probably wouldn't get it passed his own mind because we experienced certain problems with bringing democracies to certain countries. Yeah, and then we could get into the question of what that was, the point of going into Iraq at all. Nothing feels like failure, right? That's right. Now, having explained the financial constraints on what I'll call America's decline from sole preeminence in foreign policy, I'm going to point out there is an emotional counter-influence. And that is. And this is not something that has been part of American history from the very beginning. But since the end of World War II, the idea for well, American exceptionalism has been part of America's mindset from the 1770s. But not until the mid-1990s, until the mid-20th century, did American exceptionalism automatically mean the United States will impose its will on other countries. Through most, the mid-20th century, basically from World War II afterwards. But do you remember how Woodrow Wilson donated the nation? That's right. You've got to change them to elect good men. That's right. Wilson bought it and it expanded regionally so that by 1940 it included parts of Latin America, not clear South America, but the region. But anyway, the point is that Americans during that time, the earlier period, defined American exceptionalism as we will perfect the institutions of democracy and let the world benefit from our example. We're not going to impose those views on other people. John Quincy Adams made a famous statement. Oh, yes. Right, OK. John Quincy. And so from 1945, let's say, until roughly now, the mode of American exceptionalism has been, we will show the rest of the world how to do it. And if the rest of the world doesn't follow our example, we will force the rest of the world to follow. So the American troops in Iraq. We'll encourage you. Right, OK. Well, you invade a country that's strong and encourage you. That's very strong. But and so Americans of my generation and say 20 years older have gotten used to the idea of America as number one. And this really resonates with people. So I pose this question to my students. If there were two candidates who were equal in all of the respects and one said, I'm going to make sure the America remains number one. The other one says, number one, number two, number three, doesn't make any difference. People are going to vote for the America number one. So there is this emotional attachment to the idea of American preeminence. Look, it's more fun to be at the helm than hunkering down in the bottom, right, in the hole. But there's a generational aspect to this, because my students, my students, they're growing up. They're coming of age politically at a time when it's not so easy to be number one. It's not so automatic to be number one. And so by the time my students, who are 20 years old now, take positions of, say, national authority, by the time they're in their 50s, they will be quite used to the idea that the United States can be number one in the way it was during the 19th century. The United States... Which means? Which means that the United States will not respond to every incident, every uprising that takes place in the Middle East. Every time North Korea does something strange. Every time China tries to create a regional sphere of influence for itself. So it's gonna be a retraction. It is. And so American policy, I'm not gonna say this is gonna happen in five years. I will say that it'll happen in 10 or 20 years. So the United States will, this is related, the United States will stop sending in generals every time and send in diplomats. And one of the aspects of diplomacy as opposed to military force is that at a certain point a nation discovers what the United States knew during the 19th century, that you can't always force the world to accommodate yourself. But let me just throw a little fly to this argument. What the United States did in the 19th century was acquiring an empire at home. I mean, suddenly they had acquired almost the entire continent from beginning with the Louisiana Purchase, it was only a three million bucks of those days, and then we left a little war with Mexico and all that kind of stuff. So it was not that the United States was kind of pussycat sitting there harvesting the corn. It was expanding at an enormous clip, and it was lucky it was only up against pretty weak enemies, like Mexicans or Indians and what have you. That's right. And because... They didn't have to be afraid of Canadians. That's right. And because it was up against these weak enemies, this expansion came very cheaply. And if it had been expensive, Americans would have thought twice or three times about this. And this is why I get back to the fact that I think conservatives, and you'll know this, that in the late 1940s, American conservatives didn't sign on readily to the idea of the Cold War. Robert Taft took the view, who's leader of the conservatives, took the view that small government means small government. We live in this anomalous period where conservatives who on most points like to think they like their government small have endorsed the largest role for government and foreign policy. And those old conservatives said you can't have it both ways. And the best wars ever fought were started by Democrats, right? This is Wilson, Roosevelt, John Snow... And despite this, Democrats have always labored under this impression that they have to act tough, otherwise they'll be perceived as weak. And Republicans don't have their problems. They can be pussycat-like. Right. We have a couple, five more minutes, and I want to, if you want to, I'd like to shift a little bit toward, into your profession, which has to do with the study of history or more accurately, the disappearance of the study of history. And I would like you, since you are the pro here, I would like you to maybe correct my impressions. One of the games I always play with my students, and these are Stanford students, they're not exactly adults. So kids, do you know when the American Constitution entered into force? And nobody could answer the question. They couldn't even place it anywhere near the date. And then I kind of mock exasperation, I said, kids, what's wrong with you? This is not your peen history, this is not world history, this is your history. I got stares. What's the problem? Are we losing history? In the elementary and high schools we are, to a large extent. We are or are not. We are. In the United States. And this, because of I think a misplaced emphasis on other subjects that are subject to mandatory testing. And so, in the No Child Left Behind Act, there are very high stakes attached to successive students in reading, writing, and arithmetic, basically. History doesn't fall under that rubric. The result of this is that school principals get hired in fire, teachers get rewarded and punished based on how the students do on these mandatory tests, which do not include history. The result of this is that you teach what you're gonna get tested on. And so, there are a lot of very good students. I teach at the University of Texas. I have some very good students who have only a casual familiarity with American history. They can, students can get through high school in the United States. Without having a full year of American history. It gets tied into social studies. Your students at some point were told. Mine at Stanford. At Stanford. Your students were told at Stanford that the Constitutional Convention of Place in 1787 and all this stuff. They might have heard it once, and they were led to know that this isn't crucial. You really need to know this other stuff for the test. So, I would say this, that there is a countervailing trend. By the way, in Europe, it may not be as drastic, but there's the same phenomenon here. Well, it disappears. And I don't know if you have the same reaction in your classes that I get from my students. History is not made for the young. History is for us older folks. When you're 19, you're supposed to be looking ahead, not looking back. When people develop more personal history, then they become more interested in broader history. I don't know how many times I lecture to audience where the average age is 65 or over, and they say, boy, if I had had you as a teacher in college, I would have loved history. And you say, well, you probably did. But when you were 19, you weren't paying attention. You gave me two very good answers. One, of course, has to do with a market. If you get fired as a teacher as a principal by failing on the standard test, you're not gonna put a lot of emphasis on history. It makes a lot of sense, right? People respond to incentives. The incentives are wrong. The biological explanation is new to me, but it makes sense. I think you're right. If I think back, maybe you too, maybe all of us in the audience, will be that much interested in history when we were 12, 14, 16? Probably not. Most didn't sound. You gotta bring them back to school when they're 60, right? I do. In fact, I tell these people, I say, that I have an open door policy. You can drop in on my classes anytime you want. And some of them actually avail themselves of the opportunity. I have heard, I've heard an interesting incentive when you talk to CEOs, or what we call today, human resource people, they actually say it makes a lot of sense to teach them history. Because what is history all about? It's about gathering facts, putting them together, stringing them into a package called paragraphs, or story that makes sense, that makes a point, and brings a message across. I said, that's exactly what we need and what we are missing. These young people that we get, they may be good mathematicians. I've done it, gotten a great degree at the Wharton Business School, but they don't know how to use language and history as a wonderful training for the use of language and for the gathering of information and for the putting it together. Well, in fact, one of the things I tell my students is, become a historian, you will learn to take a really tall stack of papers and boil it down to a stack, maybe this small. You will be able to sift through all this information and make sense out of it. And that's a very useful skill in almost any walk of life. Do these kids still think in terms of stacks of paper? Well, I probably have to change my metaphor. Disc space. Right. We're almost done. So you don't believe that we're gonna lose history as a discipline? It's losing ground in the schools. We will never lose it among the general population because- That's the point, you look at the bookstores and they're just bounding with biographies and history and you name it. Humans apparently are fascinated with where we've been because that tells us who we are. And as long as that is the case, there will be that big history book section in bookstores. That is if there's still bookstores. Yeah, whatever that we call them, but they'll be there, right? Yeah. Okay, you've made me kind of a bit happier going out of this and coming in because I was really desperate about history and its disappearance. A, I understand why it's happening at a young age and B, I understand that it's coming back at an older age, which I think is a perfect way on this happy note to end our discussion and to thank all of you for listening, with great interest as I can see in the dark. Thank you for a very lively discussion. Yes.