Archive for the ‘Kissinger’ Category
August 11th, 2010
Classes on the go: Distance education becoming more popular
By TODD FINKELMEYER
The Capital Times tfinkelmeyer@madison.com
Posted: Tuesday, August 10, 2010 5:00 am
Unlike many who take courses during UW-Madison’s summer session, Peter Owen hasn’t spent any hot evenings catching up on his studies while sipping a cold beer on the Memorial Union Terrace.
Owen is a 24-year-old first lieutenant stationed in Iraq with the 724th Engineer Battalion of the Wisconsin Army National Guard. So instead of sitting near the shore of Lake Mendota while finishing coursework, he’s knocked off some required readings and listened to recorded lectures on an MP3 player while seated in the back of a military transport aircraft waiting to take off on another mission.
“I have really enjoyed the opportunity to keep working toward my degree while deployed,” Owen, who is taking a foreign policy history course from UW-Madison professor Jeremi Suri, says in an e-mail interview. Owen was a graduate student at Valparaiso University pursuing a masters in International Commerce and Policy prior to being deployed.
Welcome to the modern world of “distance education,” a field that incorporates various styles of teaching and a range of technologies to deliver education to students who aren’t sitting in a traditional classroom. While evolving technology continues to drastically change how people communicate, get their news and make purchases, it’s generally having a less dramatic impact on how higher education is delivered — at least at a place like UW-Madison, where just 2.5 percent of all credit hours are taken through distance education courses.
“One of the motivations for this course is my sense that teaching is often not as innovative as it can be,” says Suri, who is teaching this online course for the second straight summer. “We fall into patterns and ruts, and that’s probably true of any profession. I’m not saying we should throw out the traditional ways of teaching, but I’m interested in shaking things up and experimenting in different modes of delivery.”
It’s no secret, however, that many professors on campus still thumb their noses at online-based courses and view them as something only lowly regarded, for-profit institutions put out for public consumption.
“Many of these online universities are offering an inferior product,” says Suri. “I’ve looked at some of them, and they’re crap. So why are some of these places thriving? It’s because they’re delivering a product people want. So I think it’s time that real institutions with quality products get into delivering more distance education.”
Everything in Suri’s eight-week, three-credit summer course — “American Foreign Policy: A History of U.S. Grand Strategy From 1901 to the Present” — is online. The class website includes a syllabus, which spells out course details and links to the online journal and newspaper articles that are required reading. The site also hosts short video lead-ins to preview each of the three, hour-long, audio-recorded Suri lectures students listen to each week. Those in the class – which include 100 typical undergraduate and 30 graduate-level students, most of whom have ties to the military – can download the lectures onto an MP3 player or other recording device to listen to at any time, anywhere. Or they can sit at their computer and listen to the hour-long talk, which includes additional information via PowerPoint slides. There are online discussion sessions and online office hours, with one main written assignment, a midterm and a final exam.
“The combination of a rigorous military schedule and improvements in modern technology made the distance class ideal for me,” Kimberly Jones, a 25-year-old Army captain who took the course to learn more about U.S. foreign policy, says in an e-mail interview. “I was able to use my phone to download all the lectures, so when I found that I had time and opportunity I listened to the lectures and took notes. Due to my commitments to work, church and continuous house guests (we live in Hawaii), the distance learning allowed me to listen to lectures, conduct readings and post discussions with flexibility and thoroughness.”
Jon Pevehouse, a political science professor, is teaching a similar set of students this summer in an online-only course titled, “Problems in American Foreign Policy (Poli Sci 359).” He agrees that the flexibility distance education courses offer students is the biggest positive, but notes there are some drawbacks.
“It does cut off some flexibility on my end,” he says. “Last (month), with the WikiLeaks incident (where the website leaked tens of thousands of classified military documents), I would have loved to have spent the next day’s lecture digging into that. But a lot of these things have to be recorded two and three weeks in advance, so it does cut off some pedagogical flexibility.”
Jesse Pruett, a 39-year-old Army reservist living in Alexandria, Va., who is taking Suri’s course, also feels some loss: “Although there was some give and take in the online discussion forum, I did miss the exchanges, debates and interactions that seem to be a big part of traditional brick-and-mortar classroom settings.”
In the end, however, most agreed these were relatively minor drawbacks for the opportunity to take a course from a highly regarded professor at a name-brand university.
“A key benefit is the flexibility and the lack of an attendance requirement,” says Pruett, who has a newborn at home and is pursuing a master’s in international relations. “Obviously, living in the D.C. area, I would not have been able to take the course in a traditional format. I also traveled during the course, coincidentally to Fort McCoy, Wis., for a couple of weeks of military training and to California for civilian purposes. It was difficult, but the online format meant it was still possible to maintain the workload, something that would have been impossible with a conventional route.”
Basic idea is nothing new
Although the basic idea of distance education is nothing new — UW-Madison professors in the agriculture department were sending informational pamphlets to farmers across the state in the late 19th century — upgrades in computer and online technology in recent years have led to an explosion in this form of teaching and learning.
According to a report from the Sloan Consortium titled “Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States, 2009,” some 4.6 million students were taking at least one online course during the 2008 fall semester — a whopping 17 percent jump over the previous year. That hike far exceeds the 1.2 percent growth during that time in the overall higher education student population, with more than one-in-four college students now taking at least one online course.
And there is no indication this trend will slow anytime soon.
In June, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels established WGU Indiana, a partnership between the state and Western Governors University aimed at expanding access to higher education for those in the Hoosier state. Under the partnership, this online university will technically remain a private school, but Indiana residents will be able to use state scholarships to pay for tuition there. Just last week, a committee of education and business leaders in Texas recommended that students there complete at least 10 percent of their coursework toward a degree outside the classroom through options such as online courses.
At UW-Madison, 152 “distance education” courses — which the university classifies as those “taught primarily by means of interactive video, recorded electronic media or the internet” – were offered in 1999-00. By 2008-09, the most recent year for which figures are available, that number more than doubled to 365.
Despite that jump, just 2.5 percent of all student credit hours at UW-Madison in 2008-09 were through distance education courses according to the school’s Data Digest.
“We’re having ongoing discussions about how do we find this sweet spot, so to speak, between making sure students get the whole Wisconsin experience as a resident student on campus — that includes research opportunities and service learning and all the high-impact, traditional practices — with the latest technologies,” says Aaron Brower, UW-Madison’s vice provost for teaching and learning. “It’s a very deliberate discussion about how can we best use technology in our teaching.”
Conference in Madison
Madison was the center of the distance education universe last week as 1,000 people from across the country took part in the 26th annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, a three-day event at the Monona Terrace Convention Center.
Jane Terpstra, the conference’s director and an outreach specialist with UW-Madison’s division of continuing studies, says there are numerous valid reasons for a college to consider adding more distance education options. A sometimes overlooked advantage, notes Terpstra, is that it gives students an important leg up in experiencing different ways of learning and communicating.
“Computer learning and communication is so important these days,” says Terpstra, who also teaches courses in UW-Madison’s two distance education certificate programs. “It’s important to become comfortable with new technologies and to learn how to communicate even if you aren’t face-to-face with someone.”
Another reason for adding online offerings is if there is a backlog of students attempting to get into courses that are a prerequisite to numerous higher-level classes. Most online courses can be taken at any time of the day, so they don’t interfere with other classes that meet on specific days at specific times. Offering these high-demand courses online can then help alleviate bottlenecks that keep students from graduating in a timely fashion.
Adding distance education courses can also make sense for schools trying to reach students from a large geographic region. Perhaps these students don’t have time to drive all the way to campus, but are willing to log on at home to take a class.
“Accessibility, to me, is the biggest issue for looking at offering more online courses,” says Suri. “We can not assume anymore that all the people who need to learn in our society want, or can afford, to show up on campus. Especially in the summer. This way, if you have to leave campus and work in Milwaukee or help out on the family farm, you can still get some credits taken care of and graduate earlier.”
And the faster students get through school, the more slots that open up for new students. This could help alleviate some of the political pressure there always is to allow more students into UW-Madison.
“One problem we’re trying to crack is it would be nice to have more students, but we don’t have enough dorms and classrooms,” says Kathy Christoph, the director of academic technology in UW-Madison’s Division of Information Technology. “So I’d love for people to think hard about, ‘How can technology help with that problem?’ Then measure whether we’re successful by seeing if we are able to teach more students successfully without having to build more dorms and classrooms. But there is definitely an art to designing online courses where the students really have a good learning experience, so that won’t be easy.”
Wedemeyer led the way
Charles Wedemeyer, a former professor of education at UW-Madison, is considered one of the fathers of modern distance education, says Bill Tishler, a media specialist with the university’s Division of Continuing Studies.
In the late 1930s, Wedemeyer expanded his reach to those off campus by using the university’s radio station to broadcast English lectures. After serving in the Navy in World War II, he worked as director of UW-Madison’s correspondence study department from 1954-64, where he devoted his energy to nontraditional education research. These studies are recognized as the foundation for distance education practices, and Wedemeyer became an independent study and continuing education consultant to a dozen foreign countries — including Great Britain, where he was a chief consultant to the Open University, the world’s first successful distance teaching institution which opened in 1971.
Tishler says UW-Madison started offering statewide distance learning programs on television in 1959, and that continued through the early 1990s, before the Internet came along and started to quickly change the game.
“This university has really been a pioneer in distance education,” says Tishler, a proponent of expanding distance education options on campus, and who produces the classes taught by Suri and Pevehouse. “But I’m not sure we’ve ever really embraced our own pioneering work. As a research institution, I guess we’re doing well. But as a teaching university, we don’t always practice what we preach.”
Unlike UW-Madison, the University of Wisconsin System as a whole is making a concerted effort to expand its distance education offerings, and today features a website which serves as a gateway to the roughly 1,200 courses across the system that require no campus visits to complete.
UW-Madison, which became one of the first universities to offer a Certificate of Professional Development in Distance Education back in 1993, today features a range of graduate and professional development programs in engineering, business, education, pharmacy and nursing, to name only a few, that are distance education based.
For now, however, there is little pressure to significantly expand distance education offerings for undergraduates at a state flagship institution. UW-Madison, like its peers, already is at capacity and turns away thousands of applicants each year because most young students straight out of high school still want that on-campus “college experience.” They look forward to moving away from mom and dad, to the face-to-face interactions with professors and other young people, and to attending college football games.
Conversely, universities which don’t continually reassess their distance learning options could quickly find themselves behind the curve.
“I really think these online-only classes are going to mushroom,” says Suri. “Not only because more and more of us (at UW-Madison) are trying it, but because students are demanding it.”
Posted in Blog, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Grand Strategy, Kissinger, Teaching, history | 
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April 11th, 2010
UW History Professor Takes Students on a Cold War Ride
By Bill Glauber
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/90547059.html
April 11, 2010
Page B1
Madison — It’s 8 a.m. and historian Jeremi Suri is working the room.
He’s on a 75-minute tear, taking students just back from spring break on an intellectual journey, “Cold War Society and Culture.”
He might as well subtitle the lecture: Your Grandparents’ World.
The trip is riveting, from China to the Soviet Union to Wisconsin, from Mao to Stalin to Joseph McCarthy. It’s a stem-winder of a lecture delivered by a rising academic star, the E. Gordon Fox Professor of History who writes, teaches and focuses on America’s place in the world. He used pluck and scholarship to land a series of off-the-cuff discussions with the subject of his first big biography, Henry Kissinger.
Suri is into it now, and so are the students. You can hear the furious clicking of computer keyboards and see the students sit up straight in hard wooden chairs.
And then, Suri brings the journey full circle, right into the bare-bones lecture hall.
On a large white screen, he projects a 19th-century photo of the University of Wisconsin – three buildings surrounded by farmland.
And then, he puts up another photo of the university in the present day, a rich assortment of buildings that sprawl for as far as the eye can see, the growth fueled during a post-World War II boom of enrollment, scholarship and federal funding.
He calls it the “Cold War University.” From Harvard to Stanford to other major colleges, Suri says that the American university system was long ago placed on a Cold War footing to advance American causes through scholarship and leadership, especially during a perilous time when the U.S. faced off against the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union is gone, but the Cold War University remains.
“We are all part of a Cold War apparatus,” he says. “This is not an academic story. It is a personal story. It is all a part of our lives.”
Connecting with students
Suri is the historian who wants to make history. He’s not merely content to write books, he wants to serve up provocative ideas, challenge students and help create the leaders of tomorrow.
Most of all, he brings the past to the present, ties it together in a way that is understandable even to students not majoring in history.
“Students have a hunger for narrative,” Suri says. “They don’t want sound bites. They want someone to tell them an extended story. That is what history is. You’re telling meaningful stories.”
At 37, Suri has already told his share of great stories. And he also has lived a great American story.
Suri’s father is an émigré from India and his mother is Jewish. Suri identifies himself as a “Hin-Jew,” part Hindu, part Jewish.
His accent and his attitude are pure New York: energetic and a little brash.
Raised on Roosevelt Island in New York, Suri’s love of history was fired at Stanford University, where he studied under Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David M. Kennedy. History is often a springboard to law school, which was Suri’s original goal. But he was hooked on the possibility of following in Kennedy’s footsteps.
“I looked at his life. I said, ‘Wow, this is the kind of life I’d like to have,’” Suri says. “You get to be a professor around interesting people doing research on interesting stuff. You get to do some informal policy advising but you’re not a politician.”
Suri’s rise has been fast, earning a master’s degree at Ohio University, a doctorate at Yale and coming to Madison as a professor in 2001.
His wife, Alison Alter, is the associate director of the Center for World Affairs and Global Economy at UW-Madison. They have two children, Natalie, 7, and Zachary, 5.
Besides teaching, he directs two centers that aim to bring together scholars and policy-makers, the European Center of Excellence and the Grand Strategy Program.
“History is old, the individuals who teach it are not,” says Paul M. DeLuca Jr., UW-Madison provost. DeLuca says Suri is one of those individuals “who take a campuswide perspective. They look to do scholarship that cuts across areas.”
Suri is a big thinker about a lot of things. He uses a blog to spread his opinions on subjects as varied as creating an ROTC-type program for the U.S. State Department to cultivating the creative leaders for a new century.
By referring to UW-Madison and other major campuses as Cold War universities, Suri focuses on research money that comes from federal grants “designed to produce things that will make the country stronger internationally. The university is seen as an extension of that enterprise.”
In previous decades, that meant creating area studies focused on the world’s potential hot spots, such as Russia and South Asia, creating language programs, and cultivating student and faculty overseas exchanges.
Eye toward the future
Suri says a post-Cold War university “should rethink the way we organize knowledge and money.”
“Why is it we have scientists on one side of campus and social scientists on the other?” he says.
He says universities “need to train young people to be more independent, take more initiative, to be free and nimble thinkers, less professionalized, less on particular tracks.”
“We don’t need to measure how many engineers we create relative to the Soviets in the way we did during the Cold War,” he says. “We should be measuring how many innovative creative thinkers we’re creating and sending them off to do their own thing.”
Suri’s focus is America’s place in the world. The book “Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente,” put Suri on the map and marked him as a serious thinker about superpower diplomacy during the 1960s, a decade of tumult and change.
He followed that work with a provocative look at one of history’s most controversial diplomats in a book called, “Henry Kissinger and the American Century.”
Suri analyzed Kissinger’s career, trying to strike a middle ground between those who view Kissinger as a diplomatic hero, and those who view him as a villain. Born in 1972, Suri was able to achieve some distance from Kissinger’s diplomacy in places that ranged from Vietnam and Chile to the Soviet Union and China.
But he also had a pipeline straight to the source. Kissinger talked with Suri periodically during the project.
“It’s a strange story, a Woody Allen story,” Suri says about his initial contact with Kissinger. The former U.S. secretary of state reached out to Suri when he heard the historian was embarking on the project.
“He does this sometimes,” Suri says. “He is acutely sensitive about his reputation. We had this very uncomfortable meeting for an hour and a half in his office on Park Avenue in New York.”
A surprise meeting
After the meeting, Suri figured it would be one and done, that there would be no further contact with Kissinger.
But in the summer of 2004, the two met again. Suri was doing research in the Jewish archives in Kissinger’s hometown of Fürth in Germany. It turned out that Kissinger also was in town, visiting with the mayor. The two met again in front of Kissinger’s boyhood home.
“He never thought I understood him, but I think I won his respect,” Suri says. “I was there, speaking German. I was there, doing research. To him, this symbolized the serious work in the Germanic tradition. It didn’t symbolize what he calls journalism. He thinks journalists are out to find embarrassing things.”
Over several years, they had around six meetings, Suri says. After the book was published, the two men appeared on the same New York stage to discuss the work.
Next up for the scholar is a book called “A Nation Building People.” The book will detail America’s role in nation building, not just in places such as Germany, Japan, Iraq and Afghanistan, but at home, in the original founding of this country.
He says the manuscript is due to his publisher at the end of this year.
A lot of writing remains for this young historian on the rise.
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Grand Strategy, Kissinger, Meetings, Speaking events, Teaching, history | 
Tags: Cold War, Foreign Policy, Kissinger, Leaders, Leadership, Suri, Teaching, UW, Wisconsin |
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February 24th, 2010
New, more complex global problems call out for a new generation of synoptic thinkers – in GB-speak, ‘geocrats’ – who understand power and dare to act.
Henry Kissinger never attended a public policy school, he never took an economics course, and he never worked for a law firm, a large corporation or a traditional government bureaucracy. His career belies the assumptions about professionalization that dominate our 21st century discussions of leadership. Kissinger was never really certified as an ‘expert’ of anything. His famous doctoral dissertation on the Congress of Vienna, for example, was a work of History written in a Department of Government. The historians considered him a dilettante; the political scientists believed that he was too unscientific. Kissinger only found a permanent academic position at Harvard University when the dean of the college, McGeorge Bundy, created a controversial and experimental new home – the Center for International Affairs – to nurture interdisciplinary projects and acquire large grants from foundations, the federal government, and the intelligence agencies of the US government.
Kissinger was a cosmopolitan generalist with an eye for pragmatic policy, living in a time of hyper-specialization and growing separation between thinkers and doers. That is what made Kissinger so special. He lived between separated worlds, and he brought those worlds together for concerted action on behalf of clearly defined national purposes. This was not just a form of work for Kissinger; it was his life story. As an Orthodox Jew in Nazi Germany, an immigrant in the US Army, a non-traditional scholar at Harvard, and an unelected White House adviser, Kissinger always operated on the edge of respectability. He was always the eccentric, the pusher, and the climber. Among respectable and smug pin-striped specialists, these were the qualities that allowed Kissinger to be more creative and daring in his policy advice. These were the qualities that also made him attractive to powerful figures in search of new initiatives.
Leadership, at its core, is about connections and calculated risk-taking. Kissinger excelled at both. He was a big-picture thinker who drew actively on the work of people with diverse areas of expertise. Kissinger might not have done the original research, but he knew how to identify and exploit valuable new knowledge. He brilliantly synthesized the talent around him to address pressing problems in pragmatic ways. In the decades after WW2, Kissinger guided policy-makers in their responses to the challenges of post-war reconstruction, communist containment, the nuclear arms race, limited warfare, third world revolutions, and détente. He mastered these subjects, and he kept a clear focus on the strategic need to expand American foreign influence, while limiting direct commitments.
Kissinger understood that leadership in a complex international environment frequently offers a first-mover advantage. He had lived through a decade in the 1930s when the powerful democratic states were paralyzed by their hesitance to take action against emerging threats. Kissinger was driven to prevent a recurrence of those conditions. As he put it, the successful statesman must anticipate, as well as react; he or she must “rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.” Leaders, Kissinger recognized, must define their times, rather than let their times define them. He succeeded in those terms as almost no one else has in recent memory.
Kissinger made many mistakes, but he managed to transform major regions of the world in ways that served American interests. The enduring peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, and the uninterrupted Western access to Middle East oil were negotiated by Kissinger personally over the course of his famous ‘shuttle diplomacy.’ The US opening to China was also orchestrated by Kissinger through a series of personal overtures that challenged conventional wisdom. Nearly every major international politician of the last two generations – from Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong to George W. Bush and Hu Jintao – has recognized that if you want to initiate international change, Henry Kissinger is a key catalyst. That is why he remains so influential, more than 30 years since he ended his term as Secretary of State under President Gerald Ford.
Whether one approves of Kissinger’s policies or not, the challenges of the 21st century require new Henry Kissingers. The problems – from failed states and the proliferation of violence, to environmental degradation, fossil fuel depletion, and global disease – require leaders who can synthesize gigabytes of information without getting lost in the details. Leaders will have to connect apparently incompatible ideas and people, and they will have to take calculated risks. The early crises of the 21st century – terrorist attacks, North Korean nuclear sabre-rattling, the near collapse of the global economy, and the devastating earthquake in Haiti – have shown that creativity and vision are at a premium. The old language of ‘deterrence,’ ‘development,’ and ‘democracy’ does not offer much help. The leaders of the 21st century will have to invent new intellectual anchors for action.
So far, the required international leadership has been in short supply. The most decorated economists around the world have mobilized to address the global financial crisis, and yet the structure of the international financial system remains largely unchanged. Where are the inspiring reform ideas? The same can be said for global energy, health and the environment. Experts have held countless international meetings – the latest in Copenhagen – and they have had the ear of many powerful politicians. Despite these opportunities, where is an inspiring programme for new energy production, improved human health and environmental sustenance? The international community has lots of pet projects and powerful ideas floating around, but where are the figures who can bring all of them together and implement a coherent strategy?
Politics within and among societies is clearly a hindrance to collective action. Resources are also in short supply, and citizens – especially in North America and Western Europe – are comfortably ensconced in self-defeating modes of behaviour. All of these observations are valid, but they are only part of the story. They are more of an excuse, rather than an explanation for poor leadership. The political, resource and habitual hindrances to effective policy in the 21st century are neither new nor overwhelming. They are, in fact, sources of creative opportunity that await a visionary transformation. Almost everyone recognizes that change is necessary, but no one has yet painted a persuasive picture of it.
The most advanced societies are, quite frankly, visually challenged in their approach to policy precisely because they are so technically capable. Scientists and engineers have proven ingenious in developing machinery and medicine that allow societies to put off tough choices. Instead of addressing growing inequalities in access to basic resources, the impoverished get connected to the Internet. Instead of deliberating about the behaviour changes necessary to improve human health, some of the sick get expensive new treatments, while others languish in Dickensian squalor. This cannot continue, but science and engineering have put off the day of reckoning – at least for a while.
Despite these deep forebodings, there is cause for optimism. Human history is filled with remarkable examples of creative leadership in the face of imminent disaster. We might have reached a similar juncture in recent years. The new Kissingers of the 21st century do not look or sound like Kissinger. They do, however, share his talent for connection and calculated risk-taking. They are cosmopolitan generalists – not narrow specialists – and they congregate in the spaces between established professions, disciplines, and political institutions. Like Kissinger, the new leaders of the 21st century are thinkers and doers at the same time – eccentric and indispensable.
They are also young. Active leadership is, in fact, a youthful enterprise. The men and women who are devising and implementing a new vision for international change do not have fancy titles, large incomes or even big offices. They work long hours, communicating with colleagues around the world, and pushing for change within existing business and government institutions. They often disagree on details, but they see themselves as part of a larger, serious, world-historical enterprise.
Who are they? They are the restless academics and journalists who left universities and newspapers because they wanted to be more relevant. In some cases, they found their generalist interests made them unacceptable for professional gatekeepers. In other cases, they achieved professional success, but quickly found themselves frustrated with the narcissistic combination of moral outrage and behavioural indifference that characterizes much of intellectual life in the most advanced societies. Like Kissinger, these new leaders have used hard work, eccentricity and opportunism to build careers in-between institutions – often floating among think tanks, foundations, government appointments, non-governmental institutions and temporary academic positions. These are the creative thinkers and doers of the 21st century, and they are evident in every major national capital.
What have these new leaders done? Quite a lot, in fact. They are the staffers who converted the 9/11 Commission Report into a stunning re-evaluation of security and government organization in age of stateless threats. They are the writers who, working with General David Petreus, redesigned American counterinsurgency doctrine on the eve of the ‘Surge’ in Iraq. They are also the itinerant scholars around Europe who are working every day to make the EU into a new kind of transnational government. In China and India, these are the thinkers who are pushing for more openness to outside influences, and better adjustment to domestic needs. The youthful generalists in these and other settings are Kissingerian in their non-traditional efforts at connection, and in their unwillingness to divorce ideas from action, as most bureaucracies require.
The problem is not finding these men and women, or encouraging them to continue their activities. They are highly motivated by the challenges, and they are smart enough to find mechanisms for support in large and wealthy societies. What they lack is intellectual fertilization from the academy and the business community. Kissinger came of age in a more clubby, face-to-face world, where people met frequently for discussions about the big problems of the day. The conversations emphasized understanding and empathy more than labels and political positioning. Despite differences and specializations, these discussions brought people together to listen, and they allowed generalists like Kissinger to acquire new ideas and nurture new supporters.
More often than not, the humanities communities at the great universities in the US, Canada and Western Europe provided the inspiration and the infrastructure for these wide-ranging discussions. Major post-war figures in History, English, Language and Arts departments saw it as their role to seed civic community around the pressing issues of the day. Scholars like Lionel Trilling at Columbia University, Raymond Aron at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, A.J.P. Taylor at the University of Oxford, and George Mosse at the University of Wisconsin brought in artists, policy-makers, business people and, indeed, the young Kissingers to enrich one another. To be a humanist was to be part of a society-wide conversation about the values of our civilization and the aspirations for the future. To be a humanist was to be in dialogue with the creative arts, the technical sciences and the policy-makers of the day. Many of the latter group, including Kissinger, were the students of the humanists.
The cosmopolitan generalists of the 21st century need the humanities, and the humanities need them. The young men and women around each nation’s capital are poised to exert ever more influence – especially as global crises mount. They risk, however, becoming too much a part of the governing system. They must make policy, but they also must remain connected to the creative thinkers who do not make policy. In Kissinger’s later life, one could argue that he lost this connection, and that his policies suffered.
The humanities are an incubator for the creativity and imagination that policy needs more than ever before. The humanities are also a natural connector for the arts, business and policy. The new Kissingers will not be traditional scholars of literature and history, but they will draw on the discussions surrounding that vital work. They will pioneer new humanistic applications of the modern world’s incredible technical capabilities.
Jeremi Suri is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of History, Director of the European Union Center of Excellence, and Director of the Grand Strategy Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a featured GB Geo-Blogger at www.globalbrief.ca.
(Illustration: Philip Burke)
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February 10th, 2010
Check out my new blog on contemporary politics and foreign policy. This blog is part of a larger Canadian-sponsored effort to bring strategic thinkers together from across the globe. I will be blogging two or three times a week on the GLOBAL BRIEF website: http://globalbrief.ca/
Posted in Blog, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Grand Strategy, Kissinger, Teaching, history |
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January 15th, 2010
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Grand Strategy, Kissinger, Speaking events, Teaching, history |
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January 9th, 2010
This is a short review that I have written of a recent book for an online discussion about the lessons from the Vietnam War.
I will host a live online discussion on Sunday, January 10 from 4:PM to 6:PM Central Time at: http://firedoglake.com/
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Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster (Holt, 2008) is a remarkable and very relevant book. The author spent more than a year working with an icon from the second half of the twentieth century, McGeorge Bundy, as he struggled to compose his memoirs. Bundy was one of the most influential figures in a postwar generation of smart, energetic, confident, well-born men who transformed universities, politics, and foreign policy in Cold War America. As Goldstein explains, Bundy was the central character in David Halberstam’s rueful parable of The Best and the Brightest. He was one of the Masters of the Universe who brought the United States into a terribly self-defeating and enormously destructive war in Vietnam. Readers today might naturally wonder about the parallels with the architects of the twenty-first century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the investment strategies and corporate management philosophies that brought the world economy to its knees.
“Why do smart people make stupid decisions?” My undergraduates frequently ask this question in reference to both Vietnam and Iraq. Goldstein’s book is very helpful in beginning to formulate an answer. His focus on Bundy and the decisions surrounding the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1964-1965 escalation of the Vietnam War highlight the traps that Bundy and his colleagues repeatedly fell into. In the case of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Bundy and others (including President Kennedy), did not question the political and strategic feasibility of military plans rigorously. They over-estimated American power and accepted promises of quick success. As Bundy told Kennedy after the fiasco: “The President’s advisers must speak up in council…Forced choices are seldom as necessary as they seem” (41-42.)
Goldstein is convinced that Kennedy learned this lesson well. He began to question basic assumptions about American military power, the domino theory, and even the necessity of global communist containment. Goldstein recounts how the young president opted for neutralization, rather than intervention in Laos. He also restrained the hawks who wanted to use greater American force in the crises surrounding Berlin and Cuba. Most of all, Goldstein emphasizes that Kennedy refused to authorize U.S. combat forces in Vietnam, even as he increased American aid and indirect military support to the regime in Saigon. “If you had poked President Kennedy very hard,” Bundy later recalled, he would have answered that it was “essential to have made a determined effort…because we mustn’t be the ones who lost the war, someone else has to lose the war” (230.)
Observers will forever debate what the slain president might have done in Vietnam if he had only lived longer. Goldstein’s book does not offer anything new on this score. The author does, however, show how Bundy, Robert McNamara, and President Lyndon Johnson could not bring themselves to let someone else lose the war in Vietnam. All three had serious doubts about the prospects for success, but none of the three could bring themselves to advocate a shift away from escalation. In seeking to avoid a massive commitment or a complete withdrawal, Bundy, McNamara, and Johnson consistently chose the easy middle ground – limited expansion of American military efforts. In the crucial months between the late summer of 1964 and the spring of 1965 this meant American bombing of North Vietnamese positions, followed by more bombing, and then the deployment of 3,500 Marines to combat positions in South Vietnam. The first Marine deployments were followed quickly by many more as the security situation continued to deteriorate. Goldstein does an excellent job of showing how Bundy encouraged this outcome with his famous “fork in the road” memorandum of late January 1965, and his visit to Pleiku, under attack from National Liberation Force units, a week later.
Why did Bundy encourage this escalation? For all his articulate statements, Bundy could never explain himself to his own satisfaction. Goldstein recounts Bundy’s struggles. He also tells us that after Bundy’s death in 1996 his family decided to prohibit the publication of his last thoughts. Goldstein’s book represents his effort to capture Bundy’s “lessons” for contemporary readers. Above all, Goldstein blames President Lyndon Johnson for failing to ask the serious questions and push for better answers – as Kennedy did in Laos, Cuba, and perhaps Vietnam after the Bay of Pigs. Goldstein titles his final chapter with the powerful statement: “intervention is a presidential choice, not an inevitability.”
This makes sense, but it is much too incomplete. Presidents are politicians and they rarely make decisions that run against the best wisdom assembled around them. The most successful presidents – Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower – almost always pursued policies that they could justify with the support of their most respected advisors. That is why Lincoln waited so long to remove McClellan, why Roosevelt spoke of balancing the budget during the early days of the New Deal, and why Eisenhower never firmly rejected the false allegations of a “missile gap” in favor of the Soviet Union. Corporate leaders and university presidents act the same way – they seek consensus from boards of wise heads to justify their decisions and displace blame when things go wrong.
Goldstein follows a number of other excellent historians – Fredrik Logevall, Andrew Preston, and David Kaiser, among others – in recounting how George Ball, Maxwell Taylor, Walter Lippmann, and other figures close to the White House encouraged President Johnson to reject escalation in 1965. The problem is that Johnson knew very well that Bundy and McNamara were the real Best and the Brightest. When he expressed his serious doubts about Vietnam, as President Johnson did repeatedly, he needed Bundy and McNamara to reinforce these doubts. They did nothing of the sort until a few years later, when they sought to separate themselves from their mistakes. Instead, the Masters of the Universe refused to accept the limits on American power. They refused to accept that they did not have all the answers. In the mid-1960s they refused to take risks for diplomacy and compromise, rather than force and full achievement on their own terms. Goldstein captures this when he writes that Bundy believed “it was better to fight and lose in Vietnam than not fight at all” (183.)
David Halberstam was right. The problem was that the Best and the Brightest were too smart for their own good. They refused to accept their own limitations. The same was true for American society as a whole. Goldstein’s book reminds us that successful policy requires much more than brains and brawn. Every president, CEO, and college chancellor needs advisors who will actively probe assumptions about power, purpose, and possibility. More than courage, leaders need people around them with imagination. For all his intelligence, Bundy lacked the imagination to envision an alternative future for Vietnam, and the Cold War in general. Do today’s advisors around the White House, Wall Street, and College Avenue display better imagination?
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