Moral Choices and Foreign Policy: A Discussion Between Nicholas D. Kristof and Joseph S. Nye

Speaker: Joseph S. Nye, Jr., distinguished service professor, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; author, “The Power Game: a Washington Novel”

 

Author: Nicholas D. Kristof, columnist, The New York Times

 

April 7, 2005, Council on Foreign Relations

 

NICHOLAS KRISTOF: Can we have your attention? Thank you. We’d like to welcome you to this luncheon conversation about moral choices and foreign policy and also a discussion, although nobody will be quizzed about its content, of The Power Game, which is Joe’s excellent new book. I’m sure you know Joe’s background. He is one of those philosopher kings at the nexus of academia and government in foreign affairs. He was also my professor many years ago in [inaudible] at Harvard, and I must say that when I encountered this book last fall I was— you know, I was heading off on some trip overseas and I thought, well, you know, maybe I’ll learn something about nuclear proliferation or interagency cooperation and I took it along on some trip and then just found myself— I confess a little bit to my surprise— just riveted to the story itself, and it’s very much of gray and green kind of a yarn about power and people, and the characters I think are incredibly well-drawn.

The best blurb on it actually comes from [Council on Foreign Relations President] Richard Haass, and I see some of you have read it. It’s that everyone knows that Joe Nye is an expert on nuclear proliferation, but who knew that he is also an authority on fly fishing, bureaucratic infighting, and— I hope you are sitting down— sex.

So we thought we would ask Joe to read aloud some parts. Let me just start by asking a few questions that arise out of the book and about foreign policy in these subjects and then we’ll switch it over to you and make a conversation. Maybe the first thing that struck me, and this arises directly out of the book, is that of the characters [who] were actually in government and it’s principally— it’s kind of the narrator, [who] is a senior State Department official who comes out of academia and loves fly fishing and.

And, but all the officials— you are either career officials or elected officials— actually kind of come across as total jerks, and, I mean, I tend to think that, in fact, it’s almost the reverse; that the public impression of officials is kind of exaggerated as them as being kind of devious and often malevolent people, and in fact they often tend to be better and more decent then we expect. But I must say reading your book I think, well, maybe they are all jerks. So is the jerk-to-good-guy proportion ratio greater in government than, say, in this room?

 

JOSEPH NYE: Oh, now that’s a tough question. [Laughter] I think the type of people who wind up going into policy-making roles, particularly if they are going to be successful, have to have a taste for power and different people [inaudible] on where— how much they enjoy power and want to use it. And one of the characters in the book decides— he’s asked to go and join the government he says, “No,” and the person who asked him said, “You’re one of the most intelligent people about the use of power in this whole academic department.” He says, “Yes, but I know the difference between studying fire and playing with it.”

And I think the— it’s true that people who go into these roles are trying to keep a balance. I mean, most of them have good intentions. The problem is how easy it is to confuse your own agenda and your own ego and your own stakes with the public agenda that you’re trying to promote. And what makes it difficult is that if you try to be perfectly straightforward and do no bureaucratic games-playing, you’re going to lose. In other words, you can’t take every issue to the president, which means you have to sort of fight the battle some things at levels below that, and if you say, “I’m not going to dirty my hands or demean myself by fighting at that level,” guess what? You have clean hands and you’re irrelevant. You know, like they said about Emmanuel Kant. You know, his hands were so clean and had no grasp on anything.

And so the— you have to be something of the utilitarian, a consequentialist, to say, “I want to get thing done,” but as you then get into this game, you have to ask yourself, “Am I playing this game because it’s really what I need to do for the public, or is it also because I like winning in my own right?” And I think there is a tendency very often for people to get those two things confused. Part of what I am trying to do in this book was to illustrate what it’s like to be in that situation where you can’t— you don’t have the luxury of pure, clean hands, but it is extraordinarily important to keep your moral compass as you play these games so that you don’t get the two things confused. And that really is what I was trying to get across; not that the people were jerks, but a lot of them did get seduced by power and became jerks.

“Virtuous War?”: Interview with James Der Derian

By Thivai Abhor

 

You talk about the military’s use of information as a force multiplier. How is that?
It’s a term that originally signified a sort of propaganda – psychological or psy-op – that you would have as an adjunct to the soldier in the field, officers who would provide leafleting, or even bullhorn. Consider the example we saw in Apocalypse Now, preceding battle by playing Wagner on your loudspeakers when the air cav is coming in. These are all forms of intimidation. Contemporary tactics have moved beyond that. It’s no longer about simply increasing the effect of command and control of the battlefield. It’s also about bringing to bear computers, new communication technologies, new intelligence, and multiple media, in a battle for reality in which you’re shaping – in addition to the outcome on the battlefield – the opinion, beliefs, and decisions that are part of any temporary struggle that lasts longer than the usual one or two-week international conflict. The military use of force multiplying effects is about the ever-increasing coupling of science systems and weapons systems.

Is Sun Tzu’s notion of military force based upon deception now more true than ever before?

I’m sure he could only be envious of the tools we have at hand now, compared to the gongs and drums that he would use to multiply the force of conventional arms back in 500 B.C. But if you go to military doctrine now, they call for something called “full spectrum dominance,” which means using every single available technological information tool to deceive. That’s deception on a tactical level. We need to also consider the levels beyond tactics and strategics, and the extent to which we have new levels of dissimulation taking place, on the levels of decision-making, how we read the images, and how the public is informed about foreign policy.

Interview with Paul Virilio

By James Derderian

 

Accidents

Accidents fascinate Paul Virilio. From the first train derailment to the crash of the stock market, accidents have served as a kind of diagnostic by which Virilio assesses the value and danger of new technologies. Television has become a “museum of accidents”; cyberspace ëan accident of the real”. Globalization is a hoax, virtualization is the reality, and we are fast approaching the day of the ëbig accident”, when virtual reality finally overpowers the real thing. Comprendez?

It is no accident – as French intellectuals before Virilio liked to say – that when Virilio’s dromology (the study of speed) crashes head-long into semiology (the study of signs) the order of things starts to look precarious. Over a diverse career as professor of architecture, film critic, urbanist, military historian, peace strategist, and in the course of over a dozen books, Virilio has interrogated the integral relationships of security and territory, war and cinema, speed and politics, technology and culture, and left no prisoners: what stale thought he does not liquidate with corrosive intellect, he liberates with rhetorical excess. This makes for a difficult, sometimes frustrating, but almost always an inspiring read.

Accidents surrounded our interview. In 1976, I discovered Virilio when I wandered by chance into an Paris museum exhibition on “Bunker Archeology,” Virilio’s remarkable compilation of photographs, documents, and text on Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. At the end of our interview, I discovered that twenty years ago we both had been attacked by street-fighters from the same neo-fascist party. We swapped war stories and compared scars at La Coupole Restaurant in Paris.

 

- Der Derian: Is the author dead?

 

- Virilio: There is a great threat to writing. The written work is threatened by the screen, not by the image. There have always been images in books. There have always been images in architecture, like frescoes or stain glass windows. No, it is the evocative power of the screen, and in particular the live screen. It is real time that threatens writing. Writing is always, always, in a deferred time, always delayed. Once the image is live, there is a conflict between deferred time and real time, and in this there is a serious threat to writing and the author.

Fostering Ethical Globalization: An interview with Michael Doyle

By Sacha Tessier-Stall

In Policy Innovations, March 19, 2008

 

Tackling issues of international ethics is Michael Doyle’s day job. A former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, he is currently the Harold Brown Professor of U.S. Foreign and Security Policy at Columbia University, where he teaches global governance. Policy Innovations recently sat down with Doyle to discuss globalization. Globalization means many things. Some define it as increasing international trade and migration. Others see globalization as the creation of a “global village” based on ever-expanding technological innovation. Many have suggested that globalization could replace anarchy and antagonism as a template for understanding international politics. Some say it explains political and economic developments, as international actors adopt pro- and antiglobalization positions.

For Doyle, this approach, “though a descriptively accurate representation of increasing interdependence, remains uninformative.” Globalization is not of much use as a doctrine, he argues, since it does not contain implicit prescriptions flowing from a political context. Neither does it constitute a relevant moral or political template for addressing the needs and responsibilities of various participants.

“For some, globalization is good; for others, it’s bad; and for still others, it’s trivial,” he points out. Doyle is one of the leading proponents of democratic peace theory, which, in some circles, has become known as Doyle’s Law. In general terms, democratic peace theory holds that liberal democracies rarely go to war with each other due to their internal cultures of tolerance and respect for the rule of law.

In a famous 1992 article, Benjamin Barber argued that the post-Cold War era would increasingly see the forces of tribalism and globalization clashing as the trend toward cultural standardization provoked a violent backlash. He called this struggle “Jihad vs. McWorld.” While conceding that globalization is not a smooth and linear process, Doyle argues that making it a scapegoat for the world’s problems is unfair. Radicalism in the Muslim world does not stem from globalization, he says, but rather is “a product of their failed modernization, over which we [North Americans and Europeans] superimpose our own chauvinism.”