William R. Polk on “America Confronts the Post-Imperial World,” Lecture 3

well ladies and gentlemen welcome to the third of the series systems and lecture series congratulations for getting through the snow and ice and dripping conditions we might have one or two people slipping in late of course because of this but they were thank you for coming and being on time and thank you especially if you've been to all three of these lectures by William Parker distinguished servant in the country of foreign service commentator foreign service practitioner also of many words before but by oh and the announcement of the lectures themselves we're going to have the same format as with previous two lectures ladies and gentlemen a talk about an hour and then time for for Q&A if I see it a lot of times I find that we may keep it we make a five or ten minutes longer than we generally plan but what do you just join me in welcoming what in for two [Applause] thank you very much this is very complimentary given the weather today he showed up I'm so delighted to be back again in my previous two talks some of you will remember I discussed the impact of colonialism and militarism on American society and what the Founding Fathers did to try to make American Liberty more secure and the changes the successors made now in this final discussion I turn to what has been tried to enhance the chances of our achieving what I call affordable world security and what has diminished our chances of achieving it you don't need me to recount the flow of violence in the world that pours over us every day from the media bombings assassinations renditions torture or war have become the saga we live with instead what I'm going to do today is to discuss and probe into how the world of which we live evolved at the end of the Second World War how our government and its advisors tried to understand and cope with what they perceive to be the threats to our security this is both a large and diffuse topic and I will be able to deal with only a few aspects of it and even with those I'll have to skip much so I'll try to be brief but I warn you I probably will fail I begin with two views why they separated in time on where we are today speaking at the University of Chicago in 1950 the grand strategist of the Cold War George Kennan said that the central puzzle that confronts Americans was the decline of American security a half century ago he said people in this country had a sense of security visibly the world environment such as I suppose no people have ever had since the days of the Roman Empire today that pattern is almost reversed we have before us a situation which I'm Frank to admit seems to me dangerous and problematical in the extreme how did the country so secure become a country so insecure that was 68 years ago what has happened since have our policies our efforts our vast expenditure of talent and money resulted in the security we tried to achieve one answer was given last September by the official who's essentially responsible for our major European of Foreign Affairs area the chief of NATO the world he said is at its most dangerous point in a generation you will have also seen that The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had just moved us half a minute closer to midnight in fact our country has been secure at least in the sense that we were not engaged in hostilities somewhere for only about twenty years since the 1787 Constitutional Convention that I discussed the other day and since the Vietnam War we've been engaged in almost non-stop conflicts throughout most of the world what the editors of the New York Times called America's Forever Wars now have us engaged in military operations in at least a hundred and seventy two countries and territories more than a quarter of a million American servicemen and women backed up by nearly that many mercenaries and special agents have been carrying out the whole gambled of overt military and covert espionage activities in my book crusade in Jihad I dealt with some of the reasons behind the dangers we face I focused there on overseas events and particularly on the blowback of people's throughout the world against imperialism colonialism and foreign intervention today I want to deal primarily with what America has done and its attempt to create security for itself I will avoid as much as possible assessing blame or giving credit but rather will try to analyze actions in terms of their success or failure to put our actions in perspective I'm sorry I begin with what other nations have done that set the content the context in which we've operated and what we've learned or particularly from Great Britain that have so influenced our own strategies and tactics is there really anything we can think of as security that is within the general aims of our society is security possible Dwight Eisenhower doubted it he said if you want total security go to prison there you were fed clothed given medical care and so on the only thing lacking is freedom I believe you'll agree with me that that degree of security is not affordable indeed trying to achieve it has costs that sometimes make the medicine worse than the sickness but security has been the prime objective of societies from the earliest times everywhere people built defensive barriers already in the little town of Jericho about 7,000 BC as we all learned in the beautiful afro-american spiritual the walls come tumbling down but just the task of building them virtually destroyed the town it has been calculated that about every adult male must have spent a quarter of his adult life laboring by hand to carry quarry and places much rock on earth as we fill a large trailer truck today workers hardly had time to hurt animals or raise crops even that huge expenditure of human muscle Wollaston save Jerico we know the inhabitants were killed carried off or ran away and were replaced by invaders time after time so their successors had to build or rebuild Jericho's walls at least 20 times but almost everywhere into all times walls continued to be built the Egyptian hieroglyph for town was wall and the Chinese ideograph for city charing rises from the characterful wall the Great Wall of China the eye and its smaller cousin Hadrian's Wall for work of generations medieval Europe was made up of wall towns the costs of building and Manning its defenses literally blood the beautiful little city of Siena to death we're all at it again in our time the Maginot Line the Italian barrier along the Libyan Egyptian frontier the French barrier they built during the Algerian war along the Algerian Tunisian frontier the Berlin wall the Israeli wall against the Palestinians and today mr. Trump is trying to copy them with a Mexican border common to all these efforts is that they were you ruinously expensive and that they never worked so the stronger larger and better organized societies often said about to destroy their enemies in their own homelands from the time of the ancient Assyrians the powerful carried ward of weaker nations much as the Americans did the Red Indians as I described in my first talk the boys did to the bun to the Chinese did to the Central Asian Hungarians and and no amount of military action brought more than a temporary security more of the creation and the use of armies like wall building came at a ruinous cost whole societies were transformed corrupted or ruined by militarization in medieval Italy for warfare was endemic a single campaign might cost the city-state ten times its annual revenue so it was that we owe to Florence two of the actions of government that control so much of our lives today Florence created the first European tax the Qatar so and when they that did not suffice they carried out the first system of public debt the Monti communy or mountain of debt today we have enormous Li amplified both of these our wars cannot be paid for by taxation and we will leave the bill for to our grandchildren and perhaps even to their grandchildren even more detrimental than the monetary cost is the militarization of society as I pointed out my previous talk our founder and fathers new the that the pursuit of security through militarization transforms subverts or curtails essential liberties and so weakens the civic institutions and practices it was proposed to suggest to protect indeed as Henry L Stimson in whose name we meet today presently wrote back in 1932 unless some move is made to prevent war modern civilization might be doomed his answer was a peace convention the Briand kellogg packed for the renunciation of war it was signed by most independent nations but it too did not work it was not long before Germany and Italy bombed and destroyed Republican Spain Italy conquered Ethiopia and Japan pillage and rape much of China and they bought the evils of war traverser II the whole world including of course America but Hope Springs the turul treaties are still being tried biological weapons were legally banned about a half a century ago and chemical weapons were banned a few years later but these horrible weapons continue to be manufactured stored and occasionally used and July last year 122 nations signed a tree calling for the prohibition of nuclear weapons but of course the ones that signed were the ones that didn't have weapons the decision did not make war but it accentuated what I call the apprehension of danger that shapes our lives today of course apprehension danger of itself leads to war but even when it does not it weakens the most precious and most fragile of our cultural attributes our sense of civilized life this is perhaps most evident and the use of torture and other inhuman activities that not only impact on the victims but also pervert those that employ them I would say as an aside one of the things that frightens me very much is to think that many of the people we've trained for example to carry out midnight raids in which people are killed in their beds without any immediate concern for them bringing those people back to our society may turn out to be one of the most dangerous things we've ever done so a few men a few men have tried to dig deeper into the question of why we all not just Americans are a warring people and his open letter of nineteen of July 30 1932 which is often referred to as the SA y war Albert Einstein asked is there any way of delivering mankind from the Menace of war which has come to mean a matter of life and death for civilization as we knew it despite all the zeal displayed he said every attempt at solution has ended in the mandible breakdown this must be he concluded because man has within himself such hatred and destruction what can be done about this Einstein decided the best person to address this question to was Sigmund Freud but Freud offered Einstein neither solution nor solace he believed that human nature was incorrigible he thought that the only hope was to wrap monic mankind and what he called a Supreme Court of Judicature with adequate executive force because any effort to replace brute force by the force of an ideal he said under present conditions is doomed to fail there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity's aggressive tendencies so what is the record of humanity's aggressive tendencies in our time forgive me for indulging in some detail it does no good to break out the current litany of events where deadly regaled with them I'm also reacting I have to say against the attitude I encountered during my brief time in government service never ask what caused a given problem just deal with it and see what it can be done at that time in Texas and my youth that people used to use the expression ready you'd aim I think it is important in trying to see what prevents us from feeling secure to know how Americans got involved in with with the issue of security and what we're trying to do to achieve it there is no a great place to begin discussion of the till most of the last century but it seems to me that the character and dimensions of the challenge we face right now are marked by strategic doctrines and tactical actions we can trace down and perhaps rather crudely summarized under the totem animals that we have in the world the law and the bear and the eagle the British lion had grabbed large chunks of the Vogel Empire and was feeding itself and financing what we call the Industrial Revolution from the rich Indian subcontinent without the Indian empire King George the 3rd 3rd that England would be as he called it a toothless little beast living off the scraps but with India it became a lord of the world so the lion roared and flailed a way to acquire not only India but also its neighborhood and to keep everyone else out the most important everyone else was the Russian bear starting with Ivan the Terrible Russian Czars plunge down the long dominant vodka and they too wanted a piece of India Peter the Great God as far as the Caspian Sea and his successors who their armies into the Ottoman Empire and attempts to break out of the Black Sea into the warm Mediterranean the epic and romanticized battles of the line of the bear the great game in the towering mountains of Afghanistan and the charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea were the nursery rhymes and effective woods in Churchill all his life Churchill was obsessed with blocking the russian route to british india to him that meant keeping the Ottoman Empire alive and enabling it to hold to the choke point as I was try to just call it of the Turkish straight with a cork in the bottle opening at Istanbul the right would be contained to the Black Sea British strategy work but the Turks eventually overplayed their part and the First World War they close the Straits to both the Russians and the British and starve Russia into the 1917 revolution war and revolution swept away the 19th century in just a few years both the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire collapsed and British India began the political evolution that would lead a quarter of a century later to its independence the world changed but churchill ever the imperialists kept to his strategy if india would no longer be but the British Empire the Churchill's certainly tried his best to prevent the coming of independence the neighborhood became a vital British interest the India's contribution of the Empire was taken up by the oil fields of the Middle East particularly in Iran without Middle Eastern oil got cheap on concessionary terms of imperialism Churchill feared that England would starve so the overriding goal was to find a neat checkpoint to keep out the Russians since Turkey was no longer available he decided the best barrier was Greece he determined that Greece would be Britain's notional wall Churchill's strategy was a hold over the 19th century then the powerful countries treated the weaker countries like lifeless pieces to be moved around on the playing board other great powers Churchill and many others followed the South African leader General Yan Smuts in thinking of little countries as dominoes neither in Greece nor elsewhere to Churchill see that in the struggling for freedom societies had become nations with their own aspirations to Churchill Greece was still just a domino he had little interest in virtually no knowledge of what was happening in Greece what was happening was that the German invasion had driven out the Greek King his immediate entourage and his they all ended up in british-controlled Egypt under British control but the king left behind the bureaucracy and the security forces of the former dictator Yanis MEK taxes who under the king had been the effective ruler of greece Metaxas had tried to turn greece into a nazi state complete with the greek versions of the gestapo of the SS and even Hitler Youth metaxas had died but the regime he established lived on and collaborated with the Germans indeed if the Germans and the Italians had been wise enough not to invade Greece but taxes probably would have led his state into the axis itself but like most invaders the Germans were not was they made the vast majority the Greeks their enemies seizing Greek industry and draining the country of food they starved the population finally desperate and angry the Greeks developed a vigorous political anti-nazi resistance movement perhaps even more than Tito's partisans movement the Greek National Liberation Front the EAM grew into a national movement the British Secret Intelligence Service thought enroll virtually the entire adult population and estimated its military forces about 50,000 guerrilla fighters by comparison the underground in France about which all of us have heard much more the population of six times as large probably never loved numbered more than a tenth as many and unlike the French underground the EAM controlled virtually the entire country like most the Asian liberation movements it was inspired by and partly led by the Communists the a.m. was determined to come out of the war heading for a new way of life that movement terrified Churchill he agreed with South Africa's general Smuts that Greece was the first domino to fall in what he called a wave of disorder and wholesale communism it was sweeping over Europe Greek nationalists he decided were just communists different name not only would they not block us so we had move south but they would help the Soviets to sterilize both the oil States to the Middle East and the Western European states to block the expected Russian move in the South was he believed the imperative of just of strategy so Churchill would as I fixed firmly on Imperial strategy took an initiative that shaped much of the world of which we've lived during my lifetime but it still is not fully appreciated so let me recount just a bit of it the surest way to regime change the iaea em Churchill believed was military force and the major military force was the one General Eisenhower was readying for an attack on German dominated Europe Churchill tried very hard to get the allied war prisoners to direct it from Italy to Greece but eisenhower refused rebuff he decided on another strategy since he thought that the Greek EAM was simply a communist organization he concluded it must be under the control of Stalin so if Eisenhower wouldn't play ball the game had to be played with Stalin in May 1944 Churchill sent Foreign Minister Anthony Eden to Moscow to propose a deal when the Russians seemed receptive Churchill himself flew to Moscow in October and sitting across the table from Stalin in the Kremlin he scribbled a short note which he passed over that noticed today that in the public record office in England in the note he proposed the swap Britain would recognize Soviet control over virtually all of Eastern Europe if the Soviet Union would recognize British control over Greece Churchill snapped up the offer so this from Churchill's deal that the Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe may be dated and it happened almost a year before the alter conference in which our for which Roosevelt was excoriated having been self-taught on communism and having been outsmarted by Stalin it was the great chokehold war Churchill himself who planted the cornerstone of the Iron Curtain the Iron Curtain was then hammered into place by the Soviet Army's destruction of the German army profiting from the collapse of the German occupation of Greece the British were then able to invade Greece divided and weaken the underground ever imposed the monarchy keeping his part of the bargain Stalin told the e/m leaders that they better make a deal with the British the Russians would not help them the a.m tried to fight on and defeating them proved to be expensive as Britain was nearly broke it was no longer able to afford Churchill's strategy so with a remarkable sense of resilience in rudeness Churchill turned to the American Eagle knowing these events helped us to understand both the European Cold War and the American intervention in Africa and Asia of course America had no Indian empire to protect and felt secure and holding on to his share of Middle Eastern oil which was mostly in what was essentially than American dominated Saudi Arabia to win its cooperation Britain had to sound a different message that message was at hand it was a combination of fear of communism and the idea that nations were like dominoes in essence that was the message the Churchill took - is still very unsophisticated Harry Truman American leaders had feared communism for decades and so convincing them of the danger was easy and the Domino image was visually dramatic it seemed both to explain the war shattered European states and the former colonial areas had to point toward ways to secure them above all it had the great virtue of simplicity suddenly dominoes became everyone's favorite game it was eagerly played illegally attended by all of Truman's closest advisors and would become the image of American policy in order for decades to come even later when he became President Ronald Reagan proclaimed and I quote him that if the Russians weren't engaged in this game of dominoes there wouldn't be any hot spots in the world so how to apply the Domino image fear that the Warwick weakened Italy in France would fall under communist control was the challenge in Europe while the Assumption the British rule and Greece set the pattern for the Truman Doctrine and the extension of the American role in the Middle East and South Asia meanwhile in the in the Far East Japan had surrendered the American government believed that more or less single-handedly - won the Pacific War and therefore was entitled to dictate the peace it's so it sound a peace treaty with Japan on its terms including to the anger of the Russians the preservation of the role of the Emperor on an American battleship that under the American flag without any Soviet participation and established its own administration both in Japan and that part of Korea it controlled further it massively but ultimately and effectively supported the anti-communist Chinese Ally Chiang kai-shek and aided France also massively but equally and effectively and its attempt to recapture its indo-european colony taking a page out of the British playbook for briefs it said about suppressing the left-wing America said about suppressing the left-wing nationalist movement its wartime Ally the Philippine underground that seemed to American a sort of oriental version of the am most powerfully it also carried out the coup d'etat that overthrew the democratic elected government of Iran lurking behind all these diverse and little-understood movements was assumed to be local Communists and Soviet imperialism Truman and his advisors with much encouragement thought that they had to move massively into the chaos and confusion of the post-war and post-colonial world if they did not they believed country after country would tumble like dominoes and America would find itself alone to cope with this new world President Truman concluded America would have to reorganize itself part of the model for the revamped government already existed the task of mobilizing deploying and sustaining a huge military force as it had to do during World War two gathering the necessary raw materials organizing the industry to fabricate weapons had forced the creation of a vast new bureaucracy recondite skills had to be improved or acquired the American code breaking effort for example in intelligence was already well advanced and the extra parts that had to be acquired could be acquired from the British spying as was polite because no call is called human intelligence was avidly studied at the feet of the British Secret Intelligence Service by the OSS enough remained of the pre-war Army and Navy to command a command structure that it was able to carry the weight of this vast new expansion but Truman his advisers thought that the early activities had to be regularized and expanded thus in July 1947 at his urging Congress passed the National Security Act the National Security Act created both the National Security Council the NSC and the successor to the wartime intelligence organization the CIA the innocent NSC would preempt some of the traditional functions of the cabinet under the chairmanship of the President it was shaped to favor a military view of American overseas challenges as originally organized it included the civilian secretaries of defense Army and Navy and Air Force but two years later the civilian secretaries were grown were dropped and were replaced by the general who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as it evolved under President Eisenhower or the NSC became a sort of executive government within the traditional civil government these were the first steps in what came to be called the national security state parallel to the NSC in some ways to the CIA was another organization the policy planning staff when General George Marshall became Secretary of State in 1947 he was appalled to find that the civilian side of the government had no general staff so he created the policy planning staff to lay out a master plan on how to deal with the world at large and particularly with the Soviet Union it was this task that brought to the fore two particularly remarkable mine George Kennan and Paul netsy Kenan and it's his views of the world and the task before the American government were different but they were different only in degree both were hawks in the grand phrase and both focused on the Soviet Union but can believe that time was on the side of America and that the Soviet Union would evolve peacefully whereas miss he thought the West had no time and he advocated Swit action swift action against an implacable an evil enemy as Kenan summed up his position and I quote the Soviet leadership had no preconceived design for world conquest his psychology was primarily defensive but he also believed the Soviet Union must face an impenetrable barrier that barrier had to be a reconstructed Europe anchored in Germany and this he under wrote in the great program he initiated the Marshall Plan that embodied the concept of containment Kenan was no dove indeed at that time there were practically no doves roosting in the White House or the State Department and certainly not another defense department Kenan not only favored the use of power but he advocated using it in all of its forms including espionage however he saw to rule out large-scale armed force which would return the world he thought to general war and so destroy its hopes for well-being security and peace a wise strategy he argued was together the USSR time to evolve toward peace and prosperity while at the same time showing his leaders that aggressive action did not work behind his analysis there were some hard facts Russia had been severely weakened by the German invasion and had not recovered in 1947 the u.s. produced four times the amount of steel five times the amount of aluminum six times the amount of kilowatt hours of power and eight times the amount of oil as the Soviet Union and the gap was widening in America's favor carefully played out kenan thought containment would forced the soviet leaders to recognize that since the cost of war was so horrible and the advantages of america over the soviet union were so great they would mellow the time he argued was on the american side that was not the conclusion of poll let's see netsy was kind of successor as director of the policy planning staff and he set out his argument and what was perhaps the single most influential government policy paper ever confirmed we know it is NSC 68 NSC 68 which was commissioned by President Truman on January 1 1950 called for a massive buildup of both conventional and nuclear arms in the deprecated cannons idea of containment as he wrote without superior aggregate military force and being and readily mobilize able a policy of containment which is an effective policy of calculated the gradual coercion is no more than a policy of bluff as McGeorge Bundy commented when he delivered the Henry Simpson lectures here fifteen years ago NSC sixty-eight two the gloomiest possible view of containment indeed Nets his plan called for America to prepare for war security would be achieved by overwhelming military force mrs. Atkins contrasting physicians were never seriously debated because on June 25 1950 North Korean military forces crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea and in a Secretary of State Dean Acheson commented Korea preempted discussions on American strategy the north korean action was taken as confirmation of midsi's argument it would become American policy more immediately the hard-fought nearly lost and nearly nuclear Korean War contributed to a climate of fear and mutual distrust so evident Farm Affairs and in the decline of mutual respect and civility within American political circles these are forces with which we continue to struggle today then isn't it seized position began to be known many of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb were horrified as they saw unless these nuclear weapons policy implemented of what came to be called the military-industrial complex Einstein spoke for many of them when he said if I'd known they were going to do this I would have become a shoemaker he and a number of other leading scientists formed an organization to try to slow down or even to give up nuclear weapons but Nitz he had set out a worldview and a plan that both Democrats and Republicans found not only attractive but necessary ironically NSC however provoked a massive Soviet nuclear weapons build-up itself and so it was in effect self-defeating as well as self confirming the Soviet Union was and had to be building up a potential for war thirty years of difficult and dangerous negotiations or relations followed and during them Europe recover but had become what came to be called a what came to be called the Cold War nearly exploded into nuclear war on various occasions then the objective that both Kenan and Nitz he had sought came to fruition but not because of the action either one of them had advocated what happened were two developments that neither cannon Arnott's he could have predicted the first was that the Soviet Union wrecked itself on the decade-long campaign in the 1980s in the Afghan mountains just as America had bogged itself down in the 1960s and the Vietnamese jungles the second transformation was that when he became the Soviet leader in the 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev undertook a program of divestiture of central control and granting a virtual autonomy to the Soviet republics in this process the structure of the Soviet Union gave way in the current phrase the Soviet Union imploded both Canada and netsy focused their attention on the Soviet challenges in Europe we can follow further closely how they shaped the Cold War but there was no comparable strategist on with the French scholar Alfred so V as Sony dubbed the tier Monde the third world their countries of Africa and Asia what came to be called the term indoctrination of the British 19th century policy aimed at protecting India but the British called the forward policy sought to block Russian moves southward by creating a notional wall of colonies or subservient regimes from the Mediterranean to the Pacific starting in in Egypt who Suez Canal formed another sort of choke point like the Turkish straits the British dominated the Persian Gulf occupied Iran invaded Afghanistan instead of outposts in Central Asia organized a covert military assistance program for China neutralized Tibet and conquered Burma before reaching the Anchorage of Singapore the essence of that policy the notional wall was picked up a century later by john foster dulles when he became Secretary of State he elaborate elaborated by extensions of the European wall of NATO into the Asian walls of sento or the Baghdad pact for the Middle East and Seto for the Southeast Asian countries this was the essence of American third-world strategy in the 1950s the question posed by Kenan etsion Dulles was how to implement these strategic notions the essential questions were who would authorize them who would pay for them and who would implement them the inescapable Kanaan durham is who makes the decisions the president has staff Congress or the American people as I've shown in my second talk it was this essential question that was argued by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and ruled upon by the Supreme Court in 1936 it was approached by different angles by American thinkers during the Second World War kenan and that's he agreed with each other and with Alexander Hamilton that the people were not qualified to make decisions on vital issues of war and peace but Madison and the delegates the Constitutional Convention insisted and that ignorant or not the people had to be involved American thinkers statesman's and educators had been struggling with to bridge this dilemma ever since the dilemma was succinctly put by my favorite American humorist Will Rogers he Lampoon us when he said the problem ain't what the people know it's what the people know that just ain't so the public lack of knowledge was staggering the bitter commentator on america ambrose bierce adapted the English poet John Keats is line they stood aloof and giant ignorance to describe the American public one in four Americans did not know the earth was circles the Sun and despite the Mark Twain's joke that God created war so that Americans would learn geography we're told that 88% of young Americans couldn't find Afghanistan on the map seventy-five percent couldn't locate Iran or Israel sixty-three percent couldn't find Iraq more than seven and ten didn't know what the US government said was the reason for the Cold War it didn't get any better among the elite among the financially most successful private citizens wealthy donors two successful presidential candidates who were being nominated to represent the United States abroad if you had even a vague notion of the country to to which they were being assigned sometimes they didn't even know where the country was I didn't intended to speak of the attempts to upgrade the knowledge of the public through education but because of the time constraints I had to drop that part of my analysis I've written about it elsewhere I also as a teacher have to admit that the effort has been while the effort has been impressive it is not resulted in a sophisticated America as governor Wallace governor Morris of New York a delegate to the ID 1787 congressional conference remarked one objective of the Constitution was to save the people from their most dangerous enemy themselves the founding fathers were deeply concerned about the manipulation of the fickle and ignorant public by tyrants and they sought to guard the Republic structurally and defensively they were not willing to adopt Hamilton's reshaping of America into an aristocracy but thought they could accomplish the same name by dividing the decision-making process and by centering the decision to go to war and the branch of government most immediately responsive to the public the Congress but in the early days that Congress was just the public with all this faults and shortcomings the faults and shortcomings were glaringly at our glaringly evident today Congress makes little attempt to embody the national interest but is itself essentially up for sale or rent as the members assemble the money they think they need to be reelected few of them served in government who of us who served in government have much respect or for either its wisdom or its integrity what the Founding Fathers sought was overturned in the centralization of war-making powers in the hands of the president as we've seen as a consequence of the Cold War and is shaped by other parts of the world by the extension of the Truman Doctrine has spilled out an NSC 68 and subsequent acts the president gun on his own authority launched Wars and even a worldwide general war with or without provocation in turn or in some our lives are completely and utterly in his hands this is true even if he happens to be suffering from a headache has slept badly as exhausted has a temper tantrum or is even drunk as I have learned personally during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the heat of such crisis when one is exhausted one's judgment is always fragile and if one is also suffering from numerous other problems the fragility becomes a mortal threat to all of us as the Defense Secretary Robert McNamara has written I quote him the whole situation seemed so bizarre as to be beyond belief on any given day as we go about our business the president is prepared to make a decision within 20 minutes it could launch the most devastating weapons of the world that is what we've lived with for 40 years and with few changes this system remains in tact we have so far been lucky but lucky is not a stable base for policy we can always count on having leaders of good sense and good will nor of course can we count on others also having them as our wise old philosopher Ben Franklin commented at the Constitutional Convention he trusted the first president George Washington but he was not sure he would be able to trust any of his successors as yet it is come into focus in our times Washington's successors have the sole control of the life of death of all of us I turn now to what could provoke the operation of presidential power and the flow of ambiguous often provocative and dangerous events long before the phrase was spoken the Soviet Union was considered the evil empire what we saw in our magic mirror as I've spelled out in my first talk was that we were decent honorable and peace-loving as John Winthrop had told us we were doing what we did standing on the top of ära Hill for the benefit of the world virtually everyone in the US government assumed the worst of the Soviet Union so finding out what the Russians were doing was it was already in 1946 so urgent as to create what was called in government circles I need to know already in 1946 the Air Force had begun monitoring the borders of the Soviet Union and it's satellites as implicit American and Soviet gentlemen's agreement came into force the both sides were fairly restricted in the way they approached this task so we had planes flew along the Atlantic coast of America and American planes flew along the frontiers of the Soviet Union and at first another side tried to shoot down the other or to invade its territory then in 1949 the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear device and November 1950 Chinese forces entered Korea and on December 16 1960 1950 President Truman declared a state of national emergency suddenly gathering intelligence on the Soviet Union its capabilities particularly on the assumed - presumed ability the Soviet Air Force to attack America across Alaska and Canada became insistent Truman immediately approved aerial penetrations of Siberia the US had just acquired a new relatively fast high-flying bomber the b-47 it could be modified for the task the pilots of the b-47 took the first step in what became a lengthy game in which American and Russian fighter planes intercepted followed photographed etc but did not normally try to shoot down the other Saudi aircraft however surveillance soon turned into provocation and the spring of 1956 President Eisenhower authorized a major aerial invasion of the Soviet Union armed b-47 bombers took off on american air base and through greenland and overthrew verse read the whole stretch of the Soviet Arctic as James Benford has written I quote him over seven weeks almost daily between eight and ten bombers launched refueled over the North Pole and continued south over the Russian border in one incursion six armed aircraft flying abreast flaunted American power and broad daylight as though on a nuclear bombing run had they not been caught unprepared the Russians might well have launched a counter-attack with devastating results the Soviet military came to regard penetrations of its airspace is intolerable it was after all on the front to their professionalism the first armed clash came apparently in 1949 and in the following eleven years a dozen or more US aircraft were shot down or Christ enter near the Soviet Union another site admitted their existence finally the CIA ordered a new aircraft the Lockheed jet powered glider the u2 and had it flown by CIA pilots it was the CIA contract pilot Gary Powers who flew the u2 that brought down was brought down over the USSR in May 1960 the shooting down of the u2 was perhaps the most publicized event of the Cold War I have to interject here a small personal anecdote some years later I was invited to lecture at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and I was being met at the airport bump my old friend you get any promote calls who later became the Soviet prime minister and was then the fellow of the Institute of which I was president and when he met me at the airport he said congratulations I had no visa to go to Russia congratulations you are the first American to come to Russia without a visa since garriepowers fortunately the advances in rocket technology have now largely rendered obsolete which could have been a trigger for war but of course many others resulted from the very advance of technology there now many more pieces of highly dangerous Hardware placed in exposed regions are being used as props and signaling what strategists say is intent or warning thus almost as dangerous as provocations were accidents and mistakes as we all know from our daily lives when almost anything even paper clips run into the thousands some are almost certain to get lost dropped or broken so it's been with nuclear weapons despite great and expensive efforts that command and control there have been a number of near catastrophes and presumably the Russians have had similar experiences it's believed that about 50 bombs have been lost at sea along with 26 nuclear reactors from 1950 to 1980 what happened after that date is so far on recorded but it probably as many as a thousand significant nuclear bomb accidents any one of which could have just wiped out a large city have occurred former Secretary of Defense William Perry reported one that shows how monitor could be the start of the nuclear war the watch officer at the Strategic Air Command called him up in the middle of the night one time when he was Deputy Secretary of Defense to report the 200 ICBMs had been picked up on radar heading for America from Russia fortunately the general quickly found out that the wrong tape had been inserted in the computer it was a near miss a response by American aircraft could have been a real-life enactment of the movie dr. Strangelove sometimes even more dangerous than deliberate provocation was accident or or accident was routine during the week of the Cuban Missile Crisis the American Air Force went ahead with the previously scheduled test of an ICBM it was programmed after all and all the arrangements had been made so despite the fact that we were hovering on the brink of a war those in charge simply went ahead what I well I had access to all the actions during that week I did not find out about the missile test until later remarkably the Soviet intelligences her favorite services didn't seem to find it either had they done so they presumably would have regarded as directed against their forces in Cuba with also possibly the beginning of a World War one does not have to be a paranoid or believer in conspiracy theories to question whether such near misses or accidental or deliberate I had some reason to know that a number of our senior military and some senior civilian officials were pushing the president very hard toward war during the Missile Crisis the Russians detected the firing of that particular missile and reacted the president almost certainly would have been forced to adopt what the generals were trying to force him to do mr. Perry who was closer to the military than I reached the same conclusion as he wrote many wanted to rush us into war one plan to rush us into war was called Operation Northwoods it was a complex violent and indeed treasonous plan to provoke a war with Cuba both real and simulated attacks on Americans in which some would be murdered and the public would be told they had been killed by order of Castro almost certainly the president would have been pushed into war had had plan been carried out the plan was prepared by a secret military unit under the auspices of the then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Lyman Lemon sir lemon sir also attempted to enlist his fellow generals so the plan could have been in the opening gun of a coup d'etat in effect the coup had really already begun as the military commander was making plans and creating situations which it would not reveal to the civilian superiors including the Secretary of Defense the Joint Chiefs of Staff prevented even the Secretary of Defense finding out about their activities but rather foolishly they revealed at least part of their plans to the think tank they'd set up the RAND Corporation and they're one of the political military technicians their additions Daniel Ellsberg recalled and horror from their plan and then just booked last year the doomsday machine he pointed out that if it had been implemented the planned nuclear strikes would have wiped out every city and most towns of the Soviet Union and China killing about half the world's population devastating most of the rest of the world and almost certainly would have caused a Soviet counter-attack that even with the small remnant of the Soviet forces that had survived would have killed about half the American population as Ellsberg learned the air force chief general Curtis LeMay tried to keep the authority and ability to order on his own I had reason to believe that ellisburg assessment of Lemay's desire to strike the Soviet Union was correct during my time on the policy planning council I was sent to ask for me about the message he'd been leaking to his friends in the Congress that the Chinese development nuclear weapons must be stopped and that the Air Force could do the job the parallel to North Korea today I'm sure will strike all of you an answer to my questions for detailed on what he proposed to Kennedy's critics but may said laid out a plan for an attack that certainly would have precipitated world war 3 he was planning to apply 70 bombers across China toward the Soviet Union to devastate the area out and sink yon province where the Chinese were making and testing their nuclear weapon development program as you will have observed I had to leave out many topics in the time we've spent together I've concentrated on the larger sense of strategy than the flow of events I've touched on here but I've written about most of them elsewhere the challenges in our society that were brought about by the growth of the military-industrial complex and the lamentable and dangerous decline in the standards of civil discussion of national affairs perhaps I can do no better than to leave you with the plea as each of us view reviews the doleful events the daily impaired impinge on our thoughts we go to the bottom line do we feel safer as a result of the policies we've implemented or not if not then what could we have learned I'm impressed with two sequences of events time proved to work in the Cold War we are further from war with the Soviet Union today than we once were and once we got off of Vietnam it was fascinating how dramatic and how rapid the process of healing was in that country and our relations with it but we've not applied these successes to other cases and we've gone back indeed now to the failed policy to the 1950s in pushing NATO for example into the Russian security zone in the Ukraine and in seeking to overwhelm with the regime change local societies by force or by threat of force in the third world and sometimes by the assassination of leaders of other nations as the Senate committee under Senator Frank church was able to document one in one instance of President Nasser was under attack and he told senator George McGovern that there had been 25 serious attempts to assassinate him McGovern came back and demanded that the CIA telling what the facts from their point of view were and they came back and said of the 25 he mentioned we were only responsible for 12 but we've applied we've not applied our successes and have not gone back to find out what caused our failures indeed we are going back to the failed policies in the 1950s we have reacted horribly horror at the action of those we call terrorists and who call themselves defenders there is much savage savagery on both sides and the terrible events that arises from this clash I'm not qualified to pass a moral judgement but I'm trying to evaluate results our attempt to achieve security military power military version murder and other means have not worked nor are they likely to do so worse as the effects spread the virtual certainty of blowback on our society even in the very attempt to achieve Graduate Society will also grow it is long past time for us to reconsider I think what we're doing now how the world is changing and what we need to change to go with it the for security must not bind us as a great teacher as I quoted earlier Benjamin Franklin warned those who would give up The Essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety thank you very much [Applause] we have time ladies and gentlemen professor Pope well you kind of yes sir yes sir yes sir to assures stress I didn't catch the first part what what I specifically was concerned with is we have seen when we trained for example in the Navy SEAL organization people who as a matter of routine are trained to kill people and we ran into the same thing in Vietnam one of my colleagues in Washington was a very civilized sophisticated and able man by the name of Bob comer he and I were two of the three members of the crisis management committee during the Cuban Missile Crisis and I had an enormous respect for his decency his intelligence and everything else suddenly I found that when he went out to Vietnam he helped to create and was in charge of a program called Phoenix and the Phoenix program murdered something like 20,000 Vietnamese many of whom were in effect in quotes sold by their local enemies or people to whom they owed money and or who did not pay them protection money so that this program was involved a fairly large number of Americans in the act that's not very dissimilar to the the Mafia activities and in effect we were creating a category of people with an experience of violating our code of decency and law and order and those people then coming back into American society or it seems to me a very serious danger yes ma'am can you speak up just for short basically empowering women giving women worldwide more equity more money even as a means of achieving international security is that something that's compelling for your do you think it's just sort of a product of our times and what do you think about the State Department sort of moving away from that I would say in the past couple of years where as several years prior so we saw more money going towards let me see if I fully understand whether women would play a more beneficial role in peace seeking than men I have been fortunate in my life to know a large number of women some of them were very nice some of them are not nice that's also true of men I think the division of men versus women is is a false one I think we're talking about good people versus bad people whether the men are women and for example at mrs. Mayer's request I negotiated the peace treaty between or the ceasefire between Egypt and Israel mrs. Mayer was a very very tough woman I don't think she was any lover of peace at all the the thing that she was involved with was a certain number of the Israeli citizens were being shot and bombed on the Suez Canal and she wanted to stop that on the other hand mrs. mrs. miracle is I think a major force for peace in the world today so I think there I think it's it isn't if you pardon my saying so I think it's a sort of an American jump into conclusion to say women versus men I think it's like saying white people versus black people of known wonderful black people and I've known a lot of awfully bad white people and but to make that distinction I think is a false one I think empowerment of everybody men or women is a very significant goal that we all ought to move for we need to have a world in which we first of all respect other people and secondly we listen to them and we don't really do either one of those today and I think we paid a terrible price for that how you had a second point I think there is an issue about essential qualities in peace loving for both men and women we all have stomachs and as long as we have a large part of the world population that goes hungry to bed every night people don't have as much need or our desire for peace as people who are relatively better off that is an important thing but I have found in my study of history that people are very often willing to give up even their jobs and even their homes provided you don't attack their sense of dignity and that is in a sense the the persona issue is it seems to me so enormous importance we've we've recognized that in our approach to dealing with the Jewish population the survivors of the Holocaust where we've apologized but we have we collectively in the West have killed an awful lot of people in the world and have destroyed a great deal of other cultures and other societies and it seems to me that one of the things that a radical solution or not solution but a radical contribution to toward a solution about the world would be to wage the the sense of outrage that people have the the Army for example conducted a study in Afghanistan not very long ago in which they found that the level of violence was inversely proportion to the activities the American military command the the stronger the actions of the Americans against in quote terrorists were the more violent activity that particular area experienced to the degree that we can find ways that that where we don't affront people in the world even if we don't feed them it seems to me it would be a major step forward but of course we need to also think about the disparity of income the disparity of Hope that people have I when I was young I spent a fair amount of time in both Africa and Asia and I found that one of the remarkable things was that when you came across people who had that sense of cohesion and integrity or cohesion and self-respect they were perfectly willing to give up particularly to entertain a foreign guest but it was an enormous ly expensive to them you think of a poor better one in the in the desert who is willing to slaughter virtually his last sheep in order to entertain a guest would be comparable in comparable terms like my being willing to give a guest my house and you know that was virtually his life but the integrity the sense of decency the sense of honor was more strong even than the material issue and to the degree that we can change our attitude toward the sense of seriousness and decency and honesty of other people that's a real move toward peace whether it's men or women is to me irrelevant yes sir one of the hallmarks of credible if their strategy dating back of course so many decades is the ability of the executive to essentially kind of quickly launch based on flexible set of options like the ones that Thomas set out for the US president I'm wondering kind of based on your comments what you think in the post-cold war era about strengthening checks on presidential launch authority of nuclear weapons and what that might mean for the credibility of us extended deterrence UN's deterrence in general well the United States faces potential adversaries I think your question is a very important one did all of you hear that - yeah I'm partially deaf so I'm sensitive to whether people hear anything and I think that a part of the problem lies beyond your question part of the problem is that events leading up to that question are have to be stopped at an earlier stage an analogy that I've came to in my government service was if you think of policies or actions of any one of us but particularly a government like an alphabet you take step a and you take accept B you take step C it's almost inevitable that you have you take step D because it's the logical consequence when you've taken steps a B and C to then try to the change and go over to a different alphabet it's very hard to do and it doesn't usually work but the problem that you raise is a very difficult one in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis where I happened to have sort of cut my teeth on this this this question the president was certainly prepared to react but in the Constitution the president is not supposed to react proactively he's not supposed to carry out a first strike and what really fighting the Russians in the Cuban Missile Crisis and almost led to the war and certainly led to the crisis itself was the fact that we were stationing nuclear weapons in Izmir that were first strike weapons they were liquid fired weapons the Russians weren't worried about the Bombers we had in central Anatolia they were very worried about the missiles and they countered that with their missiles in Cuba and the swap was to get rid of both of them the swap was a very intelligent thing but it was extremely hard for President Kennedy to do because he was he was a quote a liberal who was elected on a very thin margin of votes and he was he felt very delicate about that and the military was pushing him very hard to engage in war and war is is a curious thing too in terms of judging from what you you commented but the Thursday of the missile crisis all of us were so exhausted but I don't think anybody he's certainly not I had any sense that we were really thoroughly in control of our emotions and at a certain point the feeling was let's just get it all over with and I think that's a very dangerous situation so to the degree possible one needs to a avoid the issue and so far as you could possibly do it before that question before the question you raised comes up and B when you if you've not been able to do it then it seems to me that you still the the best hope you have is to not have the immediate reaction if you have a virtually automatic reaction as we all saw in dr. Strangelove for example then all hope is gone and in fact much of the technology that we've developed about the control of nuclear weapons depends on virtual automatic reaction so with this is a very delicate and complicated question but within a general perspective I would be in favor of preventing the president from having that kind of control and as we've seen in this Benjamin Franklin warned us about what we were likely to face in American politics we have to recommend we won't always have a president who is extremely stable and is extremely able to control the forces of his own mind much less the society sir yeah could I just follow up on that a little I'm sorry my voice is not what it should be by coming back to something I mentioned yeah an evening but not in front of the group this is is following on my understanding is that in the last year of the Nixon administration when he had become quite paranoid and was getting drunk a lot and giving bizarre orders at night this is Nixon Nixon yeah yeah a set of protocols was give up whereby he was he was told yes this will be done mr. president we go back to bed and so forth and that it was actually even formalized into or semi in formalized into an agreement among the Joint Chiefs that if ordered to launch any and the first strike against the Soviet Union they wouldn't do it unless all five of them agreed even though this was in violation of the chain of command and I sort of so I think that maybe it's to pollyannaish of me I suspect that there's some sort of informal agreements around Trump as well and so to my mind but this isn't my question isn't it isn't the real danger not that he would that we would inadvertently or through some executive overreach started World War three with the Russians or with the Chinese isn't the danger much more the kind of war that the military wouldn't mind having much less like Iran let's say I'm getting a you know ramping up the conflict with Iran and so it's it's not these reading these Armageddon type scenarios we really have to fear because after all these generals they themselves have families and children and grandchildren and they don't want to blow up the world necessarily but it does seem to me that the real the real threat is much more these kind of medium-size powers or I mean Iran is the most obvious one right now I'm scared to death of both of them but I think that the I think you're right there would be more likelihood of the military going along with the idea of attacking Iran for example and that's what they did in Iraq but Nixon was a very strange man in many many ways I was asked to by Henry Kissinger to join his his government and I said to Kissinger who was then working for Rockefeller that if Rockefeller were elected I would be willing to talk about the job they offered me but with Nixon I certainly wouldn't and I think probably the military felt a little bit that way too but the whole theory of deterrence rests on the idea that it would be absolutely automatic that regardless of anything else the military had to go along with this and that the the Soviet Union had to know that the military would not be able to stop it so I think the the issue is to some extent academic that whether indeed it would happen one way or the yes sir are there any easy questions I think we know all of us are terribly failed and all of our capacity terribly flawed in our capacity to deal with any of these questions there was never an intent that I know of that anybody thought that the UN would be really an executive organization and we in the American government treated it was utter contempt unless we wanted to use it for some reason and the idea that a group of people sitting in the Security Council could really perform the task that we would like to perform is very slight and they had no capacity of course to allocate military force or to do other things and in fact from the Russian point of view the Security Council has been essentially an American operation and the whole UN has been an American operation but my hunch is that you have a better chance with an ecumenical group of people of a group of people from various different countries that was as a point of Dobbin and one of my earlier talk that was the intent behind the American emphasis on using the Congress rather than the President to make these basic decisions because the Congress was presumed to be close to the people and a Security Council could be presumed to be closer to world than the opinion of anyone government but I think the actual implementation of that is to be desired their arguments despite 20 years forever war most people I wonder if if maybe there are domains in which negative has been successful at well I think that's a very very important point a very important issue to determine my own personal experience has been that as I think I mentioned earlier on that when I was a young man I traveled around quite supposedly disturbed areas I felt perfectly safe today I don't I couldn't go into most of those areas I was in Afghanistan again for the umpteenth time two years ago and I stayed with the American ambassador and I was checked in five times through various groups of mercenaries that were hired to protect the ambassador and the embassy and could not move outside the embassy at all whereas in 1962 I took a 2,000 mile trip around Afghanistan and went to every village and talked to everyone I could possibly talk to I was in Libya with similar experiences in Somalia on and on and on I feel relatively safe I must say here but two things worry me about the future that that make make it difficult to produce your report card right now we haven't had the final exam one of these is as I mentioned people coming back into American society from extremely violent experience and long term violent experience not just one time but a lot of times and if you look at the statistics of the Veterans Administration hospitals you find the post traumatic experience impact has been enormous ly powerful on a very large number of people indeed so many that I would doubt that many of them even had very much combat experience but the ones with severe combat experience of the statistics on spousal abuse on robbery on violence on murder on on nervous breakdown on suicide the whole range of things have been enormously powerful and those are people who are now coming back into our society there are uncles cousins husbands and so forth with large numbers of people what kind of an impact do they have on our sense of of civility I don't know the number of handguns in America as we all know the number of people who feel under the threat of violence not violence but under the threat of violence as enormous Lee increased and I think the weather however one feels about the right or wrong or most of the issues we were talking about if you've talked to people who've lost a brother or lost a cousin or lost a child in a bombing raid you find a great deal of understandable anger and the more we use drones and other things and carry out a midnight raids and kill people it seems to me that we would have to be very naive to think that at some point these people are not going to react and blow back as the expression is into our way of life our society the horrible thing that we all have focused on for the last decade or so has been of course the the attack on the World Trade Center but there are a lot of things before the World Trade Center that make it not don't justify it but make it understandable and the difference between justification and understanding is I think often blurred that we need to understand a lot of things that we don't understand about what causes people to do things so my I feel quite pessimistic about the future in those terms I think that the number of likely attacks on civilian targets is is is very much enhanced and if I were policy planner for a violent group I would say you're doing it just right the trick is to make you feel unable to do certain things that you like to do that was that spelled out I think I mentioned this in another context and another lecture the real architect of the theory of counterinsurgency was a British officer by the name of Caldwell he wrote a book called small wars and his idea was that the way you have to beat down colonial people is to hit them where it really hurts them the things that things they really count about and this is I don't know whether any of these leaders of the various insurgencies have read them but this it seems to me use is the essence of the smart policy for them but they need to do is to cause us to do things like jiu-jitsu where we use our own strengths against ourselves and look at what the result was of the 9/11 attack in New York for cost of maybe a hundred thousand dollars and the lives of perhaps 15 or so they're willing agents Osama bin Laden cause America to spend two or three billion dollars or maybe more in in all kinds of new measures causes it to put surveillance units around the country cause us to mobilize the militia forces cost us tremendous amounts of money in various other ways and Kiedis into a position where we lost a lot of our freedom and that was a pretty smart move it was one of it was I think you have to admit perhaps the most successful military campaign ever carried out but practically nothing they won a very considerable victory and I think that they're not stupid whatever else you may think about them and the the smart thing to do is to do similar things so I expected no matter how much survived wants to use how much control we have over surveillance of our bodies of our cities and everything else there will probably be other attacks and the military campaign in Syria resulted in a loss of territory by the Islamic state but the people who were not killed went home and the Russians tell me that they're very much more worried about the people who went home than there are about the people who stayed and are trying to do things in Middle East and I think that what you will have to to anticipate is the next generation will look back at those people as the heroes of the older generation that fought the good fight and they will they will be the people who will set the tone just as we believe the people who fought the Russians fought the British and the American Revolution for our heroes and we have trotted empty follow them as much as we can that's not a very good analogy I admit but but I think the the essence is that we're at the beginning of a process not at the end not just one but there are three steps [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Yale University

Views: 2,008

Keywords: William R. Polk; America Confronts the Post-Imperial World, Stimson Lectures, Yale University, The MacMillan Center, William R. Polk, William Polk, Yale

Id: TsAZTO_ti_s

Length: 91min 31sec (5491 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 08 2018