Re: Who are we?

Description: World politics and human nature are such that you can't assume that virtue will triumph. Human beings are flawed, they make mistakes; some of them are deeply flawed and do things that are actually evil sometimes intentionally; therefore security is precarious.

Question: What forces have shaped humanity most?

Transcript: Well again, if I had to push it to a single common feature, it’s when societies have been able to do sort of two things.  One is generate a sufficient level of tolerance for diversity – sort of not insisting on a “one size fits all” approach to individual behavior, individual conduct, individual beliefs.  And this, you know, comes out of, you know, the religious wars of the late Middle Ages where people began to realize that something had to be done to break the sort of cycle of recurring violence and develop a certain degree of tolerance.   The second thing I think has been critical is encouraging the flowering of open thought and expression.  I mean I’m a child of the enlightenment in that sense, that . . . that we don’t advance the human condition when we shut off inquiry; when we shut off discussion; when we shut off debate.  So you know our capacity to live now is based in part on mastery of nature and scientific achievements.  It’s based in part on understanding that for all of their flaws, markets turn out to work better than command economies.  And then it’s by the way learning that markets can’t be allowed to operate purely on their own – that there has to be some political regulation to markets.  It’s figuring out that democracy, for all of its flaws, turns out to work somewhat better than one person giving all the orders and expecting everyone else to carry it out.  These are all cases where we’ve learned these things over time, over centuries.  And getting the lesson right has often been quite a wrenching experience.  But I think all of those things have contributed to greater mastery of the environment in which we live; which allows us to feed more people; which allows us to deal with disease; which allows us to build homes to then be able to keep them heated, etc., etc., etc.  But . . . but at the same time, it’s also involved making some political developments and learning some political lessons as well.

Question: Who are we?

Transcript: Well in the international relations world I’m thought of us a realist.  Realists tend to view the world as a pretty bleak and difficult place.  I’m actually, I think by nature, an optimist.  But my reading of world politics and of human nature is such that you can’t sort of assume that virtue will triumph; that human beings are flawed, they make mistakes; and some of them are deeply flawed and do things that are actually evil sometimes intentionally.  And that therefore security is precarious.  And stable, well-ordered societies are hard to create.  Tolerance is a wonderful thing, but difficult to manufacture.  And grand schemes for social engineering often go awry.  So my basic worldview, which I think has a theoretical underpinning to it, is that one has to be very prudent.  One has to be very careful.  And you know there’s an old French line: “above all not too much zeal.”  And I think that probably reflects something of my worldview as well.  So I think that, you know, the United States should use the power it has at its disposal to first of all protect itself and its interests. But then to the extent that we can, try to create a more stable and more orderly world.  The problem is there’s not very much we can do on that front.  I think what separates me from, you know, many other people who work in the field of American foreign policy is I think there are real limits to our capacity to shape other societies; that it’s not our business or within our capacity to dictate how other societies are gonna run.  I think that’s their job.  And we’re . . .  If we try to do it, we’re gonna screw it up far more often than we’re gonna succeed.

Question: What is human nature?

Transcript: Well I think human beings are very diverse.  You know one way of thinking about it is, you know, we’re all members of a single common humanity; but then we are separated by all sorts of individual and group characteristics – whether it’s ethnicity, or religion, or our physical characteristics, our relative intelligence, the particular things we believe.  So we do have lots of common traits, but then we divide ourselves up into different tribes.  Sometimes voluntarily we decide what we want to choose to be or who we choose to associate with, sometimes involuntarily.  If you’re left-handed, that means you’re different than someone who is . . . who is right handed.  My view, I guess, on human beings within that diversity we have the capacity to do remarkable things.  And we have a great capacity for great generosity, and great wisdom, and patience.  At the same time, most human beings have a capacity to do lots of very bad things; whether they do it intentionally, or whether they do it because they’ve been misled into doing them.  And the problem is that the bad things we can do to one another can often, you know, be of extraordinary . . . extraordinary moment.  So part of the human task now is to devise ideas and institutions that minimize those qualities.  You know I . . . I actually believe we’ve made considerable progress over the last few centuries; but the question is whether or not the problems we are facing that we have to deal with as a species are going to exceed our capacity to develop solutions over time.  I thought that the last few hundred years have gone fairly well, but there’s some pretty large episodes within that process that, you know, all human beings should regard as big warning signs.  Something like World War I or World War II is a giant warning sign about just how badly human beings can screw things up when they’ve got the wrong set of institutions, or the wrong set of ideas, or the wrong people are in positions of leadership.

Question: Why did 9/11 happen?

Transcript: I would . . .  That’s a great question.  I would look at 9/11 in sort of a small lens and then a larger lens.  The smaller lens would be the Al Qaeda, and the actual people who attacked us, and sort of where did they come from.  And we now know a lot about it; that this was a group of religious fundamentalists who got animated by a number of things involving American policy in the Middle East and decided to strike the United States.  They were upset about our military presence in Saudi Arabia.  They were upset about what they saw as overwhelming American support for Israel against the Palestinians.  They were upset for our backing the governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which they saw as dictatorial.  So they had a set of grievances, and they got organized and eventually were able to strike the United States.  So that’s sort of the micro view of it.  But you can take a larger view which doesn’t all point to 9/11.  And that’s at the end of the Cold War, the United States was left in this remarkable position – an unprecedented position.  We hadn’t seen a great power with such a concentration of might since maybe the Roman Empire.  And in that period, Americans drew the lesson that we deserved to be there; that we had pretty much the answer for other societies around the world; and it was now time for us to mold the rest of the world not necessarily exactly in our image, at least in a way that was completely compatible of our view of what was good for the world.  And we began to do that.  Now we didn’t do that by conquering the world; but we did it by shoving our weight around in a variety of ways.  And I would look at the last 10 or 15 years as the period of American primacy where the United States was in this unusually unconstrained position, and we could do lots of things in lots of places.  Well not surprisingly, the rest of the world began pushing back, right?  And sometimes it was just allies who would resist us on going to war with Iraq.  Sometimes it’s China that’s starting to push back in various ways.  And sometimes it was terrorist groups that in their own smaller way would try to push back either by bombing the U.S.S. Cole or by flying planes into the World Trade Center.  And I view these all as symptoms of a reaction to concern for American power and what it means in the world; what it’s doing in the world.

Recorded on: 10/8/07