Jeremi Suri

Archive for April, 2010

As I look around the world, I see a series of challenges that require an extraordinary combination of political skill and scholarly insight. Take the debt woes in Greece, Portugal, and perhaps Spain. These are countries that are living beyond their means. How can we move them, and the European Union as a whole, to recalibrate their societies to maintain social-market humanism in affordable and sustainable ways? To even begin to answer this question, one needs access to deep research on economy, sociology, and history. One also needs the political instincts of a Bismarck, a Metternich, or a Talleyrand to sell a viable new solution across an anxious European landscape.

Similar things could be said about nuclear proliferation and environmental degradation. To get a handle on both issues and understand root problems, one requires deep knowledge of physics, biology, political science, and game theory. Political negotiations surrounding arms control and climate change are tortuous, complex, and unpredictable. Here again, the successful strategist will need intellectual insight and political prudence.

In theory, modern bureaucracies are designed to bring all of these specializations and skills together. In practice, they do nothing of the sort. Every large bureauracy that I have studied (from the EU and the United States to modern corporations and world-class universities) produces fragmentation, specialization, and cross-area rivalry. In particular, the knowledge producers are rarely connected to the policy actors. The people who research understand very little about how big policy decisions are made. The people who make policy decisions understand very little about the research behind their decisions. Think, for example, of the paltry interchange between those who set education policy and those who actually educate in our societies. Or, even more startling, look at the gap between those who make war and those who actually fight war.

The time has come to reinvent bureauracy and the organization of knowledge for policy purposes. Here are three hypotheses to ponder:

1. We need to create more cross-field literacy and less specialization in our best educated young people. The most effective leaders need to know how to ask the right questions, and whom to ask.

2. We need more small institutions, not fewer big institutions. Size is often a disadvantage. It creates more complex lines of communication, more fragmentation, more separation. Cooperation requires sustained conversation. That occurs best in small communities.

3. We need to stop our search for simple answers with quick solutions. Nothing worth doing is accomplished in a short time frame. We need more patience. We need more willingness to invest in the long-term. We need to make more short-term sacrifices in the present for the future.

Our contemporary challenges are great, but so are the collective capabilities of the most advanced societies. The problem is not brains or money or strength. The problem is organization. The problem is that we are not doing enough to bring knowledge into the service of policy. Producers of knowledge and makers of policy must devise new ways to work together.

This post originally appeared on http://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.

For all its awesome military capabilities, the United States is a terribly weak diplomatic actor. Washington simply does not give enough attention to the compromise, negotiation, and relationship-building that are necessary for success in forerign policy. Instead, American leaders emphasize “containing” enemies, destroying “evil” regimes, and forcing change through “situtations of strength.” If the last decade has taught anything, it is that overwhelming strength and force are woefully insufficient — often self-defeating. Even the most powerful nation must learn to compromise and negotiate with despised adversaries. Americans are, sadly, poorly prepared for this kind of basic diplomacy.

Part of the problem is the American worldview — the emphasis on overwhelming strength, on “wars to end all wars,” on morally clean solutions to tangled and enduring problems. More fundamental, over the last fifty years the United States has systematically undermined its diplomatic institutions, just as it has enhanced its military capabilities. Before the Second World War, the U.S. had a small, fractured, and largely disparaged military establishment. The State Department was also small, but it commanded respect and authority among powerful political figures. Since 1945 all of this has reversed. The National Security Act of 1947 created a unified military, through the Department of Defense, and it gave the military — for Cold War purposes — broad national political clout unmatched by any other American institution. At the same time, the State Department found itself orphaned as a part of the Cold War American foreign policy-making structure with little access to the key information, resources, or personnel who would govern decisions about war and peace.

Since 1945 the United States has built a military that is larger than all of its international peers combined. The State Department has simultaneaously shrunk in size and influence. There are, believe it or not, more people in American military bands than in the entire U.S. diplomatic corps. American music has soared, but the nation’s diplomacy has suffered in every region of the world.

American diplomacy needs more than money. It needs to attract the best talent from around the country and put it to work in ways that will have an immediate impact. This cannot happen with a large cumbersome bureaucracy, a Foreign Service examination system that discourages applicants to the State Department, and a job rotation that sends the best recruits to stamp passports rather than contribute to policy. Simply stated, the State Department must become more dynamic, flexible, and entrepreneurial. It must take more calculated risks for greater policy achievement. American diplomacy needs the same youthful energy that has transformed the military since its years of despair after the Vietnam War.

American diplomacy will only achieve the serious status it deserves (and the world needs) when it draws on the most promising people in American society. The State Department must start at the grass roots, opening a process of recruitment and training that reaches the most talented college students who are committed to global change, but uncertain how to plan their careers. Today, these talented students most often go to the military, the Peace Corps, or a non-governmental organization. The State Department should develop a track to recruit and retain them in large numbers.

The military has done exactly this through its Reserve Office Training Corps (ROTC) programs on most college campuses. These programs provide scholarships and organized community for talented students who, in return, promise to serve for a fixed period (often five years) in a specific military service. In my experience, these ROTC students are often the most motivated, mature, self-confident, and successful. They have a sense of direction, a purpose, and a job when they graduate. They are confident in their personal success and their contribution to public service.

The State Department needs its own ROTC program. The key institution for American diplomacy could select the most talented college students, provide them with scholarships, and prepare them for immediate contributions to American foreign policy after graduation. Think, for example, of how the nation and its allies would benefit from more talented, idealistic, and hard-working trained young experts on the Middle East traveling to that region for assistance with reconstruction and nation-building efforts. Think how the nation and its allies would benefit from more young people trained in Chinese and other Asian languages, working for the American embassies in that vitally important region. The State Department needs more talent and it could inexpensively recruit and nuture that talent though a program of college scholarships with limited service requirements. This has worked so well for the American military; it would work even better for the under-staffed and frequently disparaged American diplomtic corps.

The new diplomats of the 21st Century will determine the future of our world. We need to recruit, train, and inspire the best young people for these vital roles. The present State Department bureaucracy will not do this. We need a diplomatic ROTC program to reform the institution and revitalize the nation’s global diplomatic role. A State Department ROTC program will cost little and pay enormous dividends.

What are we waiting for? The students are ready. They are knocking on my office door every day, asking how they can make a difference. Isn’t it time to give them a chance? Every State Department and Defense Department official that I have met agrees with this argument. Do we have the political will to do what is obvious for future policy success?

This blog originally appeared at http://globalbrief.ca