Jeremi Suri

Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category

The tensions around the Korean peninsula have escalated yet again, following the release of evidence that Pyongyang ordered the March torpedo attack on a South Korean ship. In recent days, the two Koreas have cut off most relations with one another, and the North has unleashed a new series of threats. The United States has voiced strong support for its South Korean ally, and the United Nations Security Council will discuss a new resolution on sanctions against Pyongyang.

This is serious stuff. It appears that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is using his recent belligerence to build internal support for a transition in power to his youngest, and largely unknown, son. For the conservative South Korean government and the United States, a direct and unprovoked attack on a sovereign state´s naval forces, operating in international waters, demands retaliation. The North Koreans and other observers must not think they can attack the ships of other states at their whim. They also must not believe that a small nuclear capability offers protection against reprisals. Otherwise, the incentives for more attacks and more nuclear proliferation, in East Asia and other parts of the world, will only increase.

The U.S. strategy toward North Korea, from the second term of the Bush presidency through the first two Obama years, has focused on containing Pyongyang through close cooperation with regional allies, awaiting the regime´s internal collapse. This still appears wise, but also insufficient. Recent aggression reinforces the long-standing fear that Kim Jong-il is willing to immolate the entire region for the sake of prolonging his regime, or at least making its self-destruction globally devastating. Kim will not follow the path of Erich Honecker and the other East German leaders who peacefully accepted the post-communist transformation of their government in 1989.

So what else should the United States and its allies do? There are no good options, but that observation does not justify strategic inertia. Here are 3 ideas the United States should consider for a new strategy against North Korea, short of war:

1. Increase forced information penetration of North Korean society. The South Koreans recently set up new loudspeakers near the border. We could also initiate aerial leaflet drops, new radio broadcasts, and other efforts to undermine Kim Jong-il´s totalitarian control of information in his society. Even if these actions show limited results, they will raise the costs of the regime´s recent aggression for its leader. If Kim wants to remain unchallenged at home, he must limit his belligerence abroad. Otherwise, we will use our technology and other means to bring our message into his society.

2. Cut off energy supplies. North Korea is dependent on energy imports, mostly from China, to fuel its military machine. Its citizens live energy-starved lives so that the military can threaten its neighbors. Its nuclear technology supports destructive weapons rather than basic societal needs. If we want to halt the continued functioning of the North Korean military, embargoeing energy imports is a fast and easy path to that outcome. The North Koreans will surely threaten a military reprisal, but we can respond with the offer for renewed energy imports after evidence of North Korean non-belligerence. This approach does risk a North Korean decision for war, but that might be an unavoidable risk under present circumstances. An energy embargo can have real effects on North Korea and force a possible change in its policies, if the U.S. is firm and builds support for this approach in China, South Korea, and Japan. If all of these states do not immediately agree, even the threat of an energy embargo might inspire a rethinking in North Korea.

3. As much as we might not like it, the time may have come for strategic military strikes against North Korea´s nuclear facilities. We cannot allow a regime that has attacked its neighbor´s navy to follow with threats of similar unprovoked nuclear attacks. We cannot allow a regime with this record of aggression to continue loose talk of launching nuclear missiles. If this continues, Japan and South Korea will surely feel more internal pressure to develop their own nuclear capabilities, setting off a greater arms race in the region and around the world. Nothing could have worse implications for U.S. non-proliferation efforts. The North Koreans and other observers (especially in Iran) must know that their nuclear efforts will become military targets if they are coupled with aggressive moves against their neighbors. This approach might induce a North Korean act of war, but that again might be a risk worth taking. Otherwise, we have set a precedent for accepting aggression and nuclear proliferation in East Asia and other regions. The future war that is likely in this scenario is worse than anything that would come from military strikes on nascent nuclear belligerents today.

As I said earlier, none of these are good options. The present course of containment, however, appears worse as it allows North Korea to attack its enemies at whim, pay few costs, and procure concessions that prolong the regime and its threatening behavior. To break out of this vicious cycle, the U.S. and its allies should consider some difficult alternatives. Effective strategy requires exactly this kind of thinking, staring into the abyss and contemplating necessary sacrifices and lesser evils.

This blog post originally appeared at www.globalbrief.ca

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.

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/

History 102: America since 1865

History 858/753: Afghanistan and the World

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/

If you cannot join the live online discussion, please add your comments below.

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?  

President Barack Obama’s plan to increase American activities in Afghanistan will transform the political and strategic landscape. His decision to send 30,000 more U.S. soldiers to the region, increase counterinsurgency activities, and work more closely with Pakistan will commit American power, treasure, and credibility to the creation of a stable state in Afghanistan. This is a worthwhile, but very difficult endeavor. For more of my thoughts on Afghanistan, and the role of scholars and educators, see my 7 minute news interview from 4 December 2009:  

http://wpt2.org/npa/han823_suri.cfm