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Rob Johnson:
Welcome to Economics and Beyond. I’m Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
I’m here today with Patrick Lawrence, who is an extraordinary writer, journalist. He is the Executive Editor of The Scrum. It’s a column that he and our former colleague Marshall Auerback and others are involved in. He’s written many books related to foreign policy, and he’s written some very, very powerful things in recent weeks related to China, the Ukraine, the Biden administration, and Vladimir Putin.
I find his work, going back to our mutual friend, Chalmers Johnson, and others, to have always been at the cutting edge. You probably would remember that Chalmers Johnson wrote a trilogy of books around the time of 9/11, Blowback and other things, predicting the transformation of the American leadership was going to run into some stumbling blocks.
Patrick in his own books has really, really emphasized that the 21st century is going to be different. Looking forward, looking back are going to need different things. But I thought at this moment in this acute angst that someone like him could illuminate things for our audience, for our young scholars and it would really be beneficial. Patrick, thank you for taking the time to join me today.
Patrick Lawrence:
A great pleasure, Rob, and very honored you thought of me to have me on and give me some time. Very, very grateful.
Rob Johnson:
Well, I would say you more than earned it. I’m the one who’s fortunate here today in my view. Well, any rate, let’s talk about … you had a recent article and you cited a book from a man I once sat in on a course. When I was at MIT, I worked … along with economics and engineering, I took a lot of courses in arms control and disarmament, George Rathjens, Jack Ruina, Bill Kaufmann, and others. And they sent me over some cross registration to Harvard. And I did sit in on a course with Stanley Hoffmann. So in this context, it was Primacy or World Order was the book you’re citing, that’s the launching pad. How did that inspire you and where are we going?
Patrick Lawrence:
It’s very funny, that Hoffmann book, Primacy or World Order was published in 1978. I was a younger man. I was an Editor at the New York Times at that moment when it came out. One sunny afternoon in June, I remember walking into a bookshop on my lunch hour and I bought it. It’s been an important book for me ever since. Parenthetically, it’s remarkable the number of people who have made comments such as your own. “Oh, yes. I sat in on a Hoffmann course.” Or Jamie Galbraith said, “Oh, he reviewed my Master’s thesis,” and et cetera, lots of people.
Look, the title says a very great deal. Four words, Primacy or World Order. It’s a rather stark binary, and I think Hoffmann meant it that way. He wrote it in ‘78. A lot of us were thinking three years after some would say the fall of Saigon. I would say the rise. Three years after the defeat in Vietnam, the better among us were scratching their heads. What have we done wrong? How did we go wrong? Where do we go from here? We ought to do things differently. The world is another place now, et cetera, et cetera. These were the Carter years basically, right? That’s when the book came out.
It’s best understood as a post-Vietnam introspection, and that is what he came up with. We Americans had a choice. We could continue to pursue the primacy we elaborated rather swiftly after the 1945 victories, we could continue to insist upon that, various ideologically driven crusades and so on, and Wilsonian make the world safer democracy. The whole thing, right.
Or we could develop what Hoffmann called a world order policy. That was our choice. What was a world order policy? Well, one of the more interesting things he said about it was nobody can declare a world order. He didn’t use the word multipolarity, I’m rather mystified. I can only conclude it wasn’t in the lexicon at the time or something, but that’s what he meant. And in a multipolar world, by definition, nobody can stand up and say, “Okay, here’s the world order,” right? A world order policy reflects the reality that the global order is formed one question, one conflict, one interaction at a time. As my other half here said brilliantly when she was re-reviewing my Hoffmann column, “World order is not a policy. It’s a process.” That’s what Hoffmann meant.
So that was our choice in brief, and we made the wrong one. As I said in the column that in part brought us together, it’s rather grim to reflect how pertinent Hoffmann’s book remains because we haven’t got it done yet. We, I think for a variety of reasons, we can go into them if you wish, we simply don’t … Well, we, our leader, our foreign policy elites and so forth, do not seem capable of changing direction, of reexamining our circumstances. They’re very wedded to the realities of the first 50 years after the ‘45 victories. They’re not brilliant at imaginative thinking, and a world order policy would require a lot of imagination, creativity, wisdom of a sort that seems to be in short supply in Washington, and courage. We have to do something new. That takes courage for a person running policy in Washington, and they don’t seem to have it. So there we are. I thought that’s why it was pertinent to bring Hoffmann’s book off my bookshelf and put it in front of readers.
Rob Johnson:
I’m very interested from the perspective that you have raised through referring to Hoffmann about where the obstacles are, why can’t well educated, intelligent people in the national security apparatus United States see this … you might call we-rather-than-me approach to the design and implementation. What I’ll call a coauthored world order.
Patrick Lawrence:
Nice phrase.
Rob Johnson:
That’s distinct from an imposed world order. And I do sense from the echoes of Bismarck and others, that there are times when what you might hall the instability at home creates a yearning for a foreign adversary that we can all become aligned and united against.
But there’s another piece of this too, and I’ll call it the Daniel Ellsberg piece. When I was taking courses at MIT and Harvard, in the ’70s about the time that book came out, the notion of mutual assured destruction, Tom Schelling’s game theory, and everything was very prevalent. Daniel Ellsberg has written a book called The Doomsday Machine who says, if we degenerate into a nuclear conflict, particularly vis-à-vis Russia, we can destroy the upper atmosphere and all life on Earth. So the stakes are not, who’s got a broken arm from an arm wrestle? The stakes are related to what you might call an escalation that could lead to destruction of life on Earth. We don’t even get to the climate change challenge if we induce the climate change with this hideous outcome that some people are terrified of right now, perhaps with some basis.
Patrick Lawrence:
Your question is, why? Why can’t Washington think new thoughts? It’s a great question. Multiple answers. I think number one, isn’t it the nature of power, the possessors of power are just always bound to be reluctant to surrender power. They tend to think in … well-worn phrase, but perfectly good. They tend to think in zero-sum terms. If we begin adapting to a world of multiple polls, we lose. That’s a part of it too.
I think another part of it is nostalgia. One of my parents was horrifically nostalgic, always remembering childhood. And as a boy and an adolescent, I grew extremely impatient with that. I concluded years later that nostalgia is a form of depression. It reflects a refusal or an inability to embrace one’s present. Let’s get lost in the past, right?
Rob Johnson:
It’s a reaction to fear or dread.
Patrick Lawrence:
On a personal level it can be an irritation or something. On a national level, it’s problematic. It’s troublesome to put the point mildly. It’s plain, the Pentagon, perhaps most of all the Pentagon, certain factions in Congress, nostalgia for the unchallenged, uncomplicated decades after the war is very powerful. They don’t want … sort of flippant phrase, why do people want to continue pretending it’s 1955? But that’s the impression you sometimes get, so nostalgia, right?
And again, multiple answers. I think another one might be a thought. Did Chalmers share this with me long ago? I can’t remember. Maybe it was mine originally. For 70 years, the policy cliques in Washington did not have to think. It was just do more of the same. That’s another thing power does to people. We didn’t need a foreign policy and we didn’t have one. We had a security policy. It was most pronounced across the Pacific.
Boutros-Ghali, who I greatly admired, after the United States arranged for his ouster as Secretary General at the UN published his memoirs. And he concluded with the most delightful insight, “Diplomacy is for the weak, the strong have no need for it.” That was our problem for a long time. We had all the power we needed and we didn’t have to think. We had no need for diplomacy. That’s another. And now the 21st century demands, in one case after another diplomatic solutions to things. Often with multiple parties at the mahogany table. And we are sclerotic in this way. We’re unpracticed.
I spent many, many years abroad as a foreign correspondent. You meet embassy people all the time. I was in Asia for most of this time, New Zealand produced excellent diplomats. Sometimes Australia, some of the Southeast Asians. Japanese Foreign Ministry, very sophisticated organization, the way they trained people, they had institutional memory and so forth. The quality of foreign service officers at the United States embassies, wherever they were, KL or Tokyo or wherever, was just abysmal. We really had no, as they say, we didn’t have a deep bench.
These were nice enough people who had no sophistication, very little worldliness. With some exceptions, I have to say. Of course, exceptions. But first secretary, political secretary, and so on. That’s our thing, I never went to the American embassies after a time. They had anything to say, boiler plate. And so that’s part of it too. Sclerosis, no need of diplomacy and therefore no capability. And we’re going to have to learn this. So far, we’ve gotten to the point where it’s mandatory to say diplomacy first. Well, that’s progress. But those are just two words, and that appears to be as far as we’ve got so far.
Rob Johnson:
Well, you brought up Hoffmann and you brought up in a phrase just a moment ago. We have to learn. How does journalism and how does teaching of international relations at universities contribute to us evolving now, and what resistances are there to those two institutional forms of what you might call dynamic upgrading?
Patrick Lawrence:
What a question. I lecture at Colorado College once at spring semester, every year. This year I’ll do it in the summer. And of course I was mentioned, I was of correspondent abroad for 29 years. And I teach a course called Reinventing the Foreign Correspondent. It goes to your question. The entire argument of the course arose from my experience in those 29 years, almost all of them among non-Western people. And many of them among east Asians. And I concluded, we have to develop the capacity to see from the perspective of others. We have to dispense with we, they. If you read the foreign pages in the New York Times, implicit in them is a we-they.
Self and other is the scholarly phrase for this discourse. We don’t have to agree with whatever we are learning from the Japanese, but we need to understand it, as I say in my course, from the inside out, so we can reflect it in what we write. And I mentioned this, not because I assume I’m talking to a room full of correspondents. Of course, I’m not, this is something we all need to learn, and it’s certainly something our policymakers need to learn. We have this Ukraine crisis now. I see no shred, no sign, no evidence what-so that the policy people in Washington are the slightest bit interested in understanding this quite from the Russian point of view.
Apart from the fact that it’s unproductive, it’s profoundly unprofessional. I think Chas Freeman told me this, one of the first things a good diplomat needs to be able to do is to understand the other side so that one’s responses, one’s interactions and exchanges and conclusions and communiqués and so on and so forth reflect that. And you can actually progress.
Not only do we not that capacity, I think just as sadly, and just as worrisome, we don’t … we Washington, doesn’t seem to have any interest in developing it.
Rob Johnson:
I’m very energized as I’m listening to you because I heard a podcast the other day from the celebrated life coach Tony Robbins, and he said, “For someone to improve a relationship, you don’t try to change the other person. You change your awareness of the other person so that they feel seen and safe.” And I thought, wow, that sounds to me like a recipe for the foreign policy you would like to see, as distinct from within the family. But it’s human to human.
Patrick Lawrence:
I don’t want to diminish the significance of politics and history, no, but there is a psychological dimension to so many of the questions that confront us. I drew this conclusion first in Southeast Asia watching nations, such as Malaysia develop and why they were very uneven in their development, incapable of absorbing a lot of international assistance and so forth. It’s psychological. I concluded if people aren’t ready, they’re not going to get it done. You could pour all the money you want into Thailand or Malaysia or Indonesia. It’s when people are psychologically prepared that they are able move forward with all the assistance and advantages that may be at their disposal.
I was sometimes accused of using psychology to blot out historical and political realities, chasing by that criticism. So I mention now, this psychological dimension is one dimension of numerous, right, culture.
Rob Johnson:
Well, I’m always resonating with the wisdom of the famous psychologist, CG Jung, who the 10th volume of his collective works is called civilization and Transition. And it’s about seeing three things, the nature of the conscious individual, the unconscious dimension of that individual and the collective unconscious and how that differs from what you might call the mechanical man optimizing and improving and always going forward and is very different. What we call the shadow plays a very big role, and it’s not just the shadow of the other.
I’ve also am energized often by conversations I’ve had with Orville Schell, and he and John Delury wrote a book called Wealth and Power, which said that the wounds of the opium wars and the Japanese invasion in the ’30s in China are creating a desire, a yearning for them to what you might call overcome those wounds. It evolved to a place not of unilateral global leadership, but at least being in the front row once again, like what they call the middle kingdom.
At the same time the United States, as you’ve been alluding to, is coming down the tracks, thinking, “This is our system. Fall in line, adapt to our leadership,” and Orville and John really explored how with different philosophical systems, the Cartesian enlightenment west, and the what you call Daoist or Indian philosophies, the Eastern philosophy, which are very different, how it could create the basis for misunderstanding and error. And I know Brzezinski gave a speech 2010, 2011 in Montreal about exactly the same thing. How are we going to make a G 20 cohere when the whole world is watching after the great financial crisis? Doesn’t believe in expertise, doesn’t believe in governance, thinks things are degenerating. How we going to put Humpty Dumpty back together again?
Patrick Lawrence:
Hoffmann’s phrase, to stay with Stanley Hoffmann for just a moment, what a marvelous phrase, harmony amid cacophony. That’s what a world order policy would have among its core assumptions and objectives. And I often think if could learn to consider our circumstances in new ways, we would realize that our insistence on primacy, hegemony, if you like, I’m not allergic to the word empire has some very deleterious consequences. Number one, we are a very lonely people. If you’re the hegemon, by definition, you’re up there alone.
Number two, the burdens this pretense of primacy imposes upon us are very great. There are domestic consequences. Anybody who can look out their window can see them, social disorder, infrastructure problems, and so on. And also we don’t get any help in the way we make decisions because they have to be our decisions on our insistence. I think sometimes, pick a question, environment or whatever it may be, a military question, how rich we would be … we, all of us, if we had a multiplicity of voices weighing in. “Here’s part of the solution. Look at it this way too. And what about that?”
We would all benefit greatly from that. It would be another kind of world. It would be another kind of world order in the terms we’re using today. And the burdens on Americans would be much lighter. This is why the zero sum syndrome is so regrettable. It keeps us from even imagining these questions of multipolarity, harmony amid cacophony. Even imagining them. We’re so much in a posture of resistance we never see over the hill to the benefits. We, again, our policy people.
Rob Johnson:
It’s an interesting dimension here that I guess what feels like to me is there is a yearning to be emulated. The American model, freedom, da da, da da, the high level principles. We want everybody to be inspired to join that vision, which comes from the struggle and development of this country. But I’m haunted a little bit right now. I’ve just finished a book by the … he lives in Singapore, but I believe was born in India, Kishore Mahbubani. He’s got a new book called 21st Century Asia. He’s talking about these different philosophical perspectives. This need for difference, diversity, dignity, mutual respect and things.
But he said what’s really hard for him right now is … he has a chapter. It’s I think, I don’t remember the title, but it’s either the title is subtitle, Plutocracy or Democracy. And the question he’s saying is if you have something that’s for, and by, and of the 1% in the United States is that what the rest of the world’s going to be inspired to emulate? And he’s actually saying, if you will, you got to practice what you preach.
And yeah, I know he doesn’t listen to Barry White very often, but that song comes to my mind. But how do you take Mahbubani’s, how do I say, challenge, and how would I say, collide that with the desire. Would almost call the vanity, the narcissism of a nation wanting to be emulated irrespective of its performance?
Patrick Lawrence:
Well, we need to step back rather far here. Let me take a few minutes with it. First of all, there is the ever present presumption somewhere in our unconscious of America as a chosen, providentially favored nation. It’s been noted by some of the better historians after the American revolution Americans really had no taste whatsoever for revolution anymore because they had theirs and they have it right. And we’ve got it right. And that’s all we need to know. Now, if we have it right, then we better pass the word on. Torch bearer of the world, lighting the way and so on and so forth. So that’s deep within us as a people.
Also, I’ve been interested for some time thinking about how America was settled. The settlers, they didn’t really have a lot of time to think things over. If they needed to build a corduroy road to get a half a mile further into the wilderness that was the job. And from that, I think has come down to us a very strong preoccupation with method. Americans are interested in how. They’re not really all that interested in why.
The why of it, we know about all that. The why of it is we are the new world and all those questions are resolved. Commager pointed out in his wonderful book The American Mind, America has never produced a first rate philosopher with the possible exception of Emerson, right? So we are all about method. If you go to a dinner party or a cocktail party or something, listen to the conversation. It’s always about how to do something. It’s really very amusing. The first thing somebody asked you at a cocktail party, how’d you get here? Did you take the I-95 bridge? It’s how. Method, Techne, right? And this computes down as a given-ness to technocratic solutions to all problems. And once we begin to dedicate ourselves to technocratic solutions to all problems, we begin to lose … we want to impose them on the rest of the world.
And at the same time, lose all sight of culture, history, political traditions. In some, the humanity, what makes other people human, their aspirations and so forth. None of that matters here. This is what shock therapy and all that was about, unless I read it wrongly. And this is why we’re not match with the world around us. The world around us, as I mentioned in one of the commentaries that brought us together, I find its roots in the so-called independence era in the 50s and 60s. But once again, the Cold War over, the world is a great field of aspiration. And we can’t hear these aspirations. They don’t fit with us because nobody should aspire to anything more than what we have mastered, and hear is the how of it. Here’s how you do it. We’re a-historical that way.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. And I sense, from what you’re saying, the un-mindfulness about why is dangerous.
Patrick Lawrence:
Why what, Rob?
Rob Johnson:
Why you do something as opposed to how you do something.
Patrick Lawrence:
Yeah.
Rob Johnson:
In other words, I’m being facetious, but if you’re driving off the end of the dock, as long as you manage your car well and you just go into the ocean and the car sinks, that’s okay because you drove skillfully, but you didn’t choose where to drive to or why you want your car to go into the water.
Patrick Lawrence:
You know, that book The Promise of American life? Who wrote that? Croly. Herbert Croly, right? He makes a distinction in the early pages. Just a passing thing, but it’s always stayed with me, right? We’re a nation of destiny. If you’re a nation of destiny, you don’t have to ask why questions, right?
Rob Johnson:
The higher powers are guiding you.
Patrick Lawrence:
It’s all resolved. We’re a nation of destiny. And we must become a nation of purpose. The difference between a nation of destiny and a nation of purpose is vast. When you have purpose, you have things to do. You’re very cognizant of the why, right? In Greek terms, Techne and Telos, what are you working for? What’s your north star, what’s your intent? And this is a transition we need to make. We need to re-reckon ourselves as not a people with a destiny, but a people with a purpose. Then we can start saying, “And this is our purpose. And this is why it is our purpose. This is our Telos. This is our end point. This is what we strive for. Purpose and destiny.
Rob Johnson:
Let me shift focus. I think our exploration of this side of the ocean, whether it’s Pacific or Atlantic, is important, but I’d like, because it’s not something I’m particularly familiar with and I know you are. I’d like to take us across to how Vladimir Putin is feeling and acting. And why I say that is I start from … my wife co-founded an organization called the Perception Institute, which study the regions of the brain, mind science and how to heal social and racial animosity.
Patrick Lawrence:
That’s an interesting proposition. Yeah.
Rob Johnson:
And the punchline I’ll just use, I think it’s a fascinating body of work, but the punchline I’ll use is when you shame somebody or when you threaten somebody, it makes it worse. So I’m looking at Putin sitting on top of 6,000 nuclear weapons, according to the newspapers.
Patrick Lawrence:
They have 6,000, we have 5,600. Yeah.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. And I’m looking at the fear all around the Earth and the pandemic and other contexts, climate change on the horizon. But this coming on to center stage, I’m looking at how … and curious to ask you, what he must be feeling like about how, what you might call the world has and the American led world has and is imposing upon him. If you were his right hand strategist, how would you advise him to be the behaving and how does that differ from how he is behaving?
Patrick Lawrence:
The other day, John Pilger, the Australian British journalist sent me a map.
Rob Johnson:
Excellent mind.
Patrick Lawrence:
Sent me a map, a map of NATO accession by color. Pre 1997, post 1997. There’s nothing in that map we don’t already know, but if you look at it is a very effectively graphic image of how Russia feels. There are only two nations left on the whole of Russia’s Western border that aren’t NATO, Belarus and Ukraine. Last summer, we tried a color revolution in Belarus. It didn’t work out, but that’s what that business last summer was all about.
I looked at this map and I said, “Wow, Lukashenko, I don’t really know a great deal about Lukashenko. He may not be a very nice piece of work, but Vladimir Putin is going to be his friend.” That’s just based on the map. And Ukraine just below it, that tells you what you need to know or it starts you on the story of how Vladimir Putin sees things.
If I’m not mistaken, the topography has something to do with this. There’s a very great deal of flat land between the Russian border and whatever river marks out the rest, the Elbe or something, right. Very easily invaded. History, the campaigns eastward to Russia, we all know them. That’s part of it. What I would do differently than Putin. I’m pretty confident this movie made into Ukraine was hugely … He was very reluctant about it. People who watched him speak, people who are familiar with him, Russia watchers noted. He was almost grief stricken as he gave that speech announcing what he was going to do, what Russia was going to do.
This comes at the end of, depending on how you want to count, 30 years of constant movement eastward. And part of that are all sorts of covert operations we don’t even know anything about. I’m not sure I would’ve done anything differently. I think Putin made it very clear. He said certain things in that speech, I think we are well to take notice of. And one of them is on a couple of occasions, I don’t have a right not to do this. We owe it-
Rob Johnson:
The foreign intrusion is imposing this reaction upon me.
Patrick Lawrence:
It is my obligation to do this. It is my obligation to our country and our people to do this. Whether we object to that or not, we really need to understand what he meant there. Again, go back to the map. If you Ukraine or Belarus went into NATO, those frontiers would be a constant mess of incursions and sabotage. And who knows what? They would be very frayed borders. He can’t have that. He can’t have that.
The popular trope now is Putin the madman. We can’t understand him. He’s lost his grip, right? This doesn’t do. It simply doesn’t do. Whatever you think of Putin, he has proven many, many times over that he is an accomplished statesman with a very sound grasp of history. That’s not an advertisement for Putin. These are just facts. You can-
Rob Johnson:
That’s interesting to me-
Patrick Lawrence:
Hate Putin and still understand those two facts.
Rob Johnson:
It’s interesting to me, because the portrait that’s painted to me as a consumer of a baseline American media would never have acknowledged that dimension of him. I mean, you’re seeing beyond which might call the propagandistic wall. That is the mainstream legitimization in the United States.
Patrick Lawrence:
“I can’t cut my clothes to the fashion of the times,” as Lillian Hellman once said. I am sorry that these points are so unpopular. That has nothing to do with whether or not I’m going to articulate them. I think this is exactly what I meant earlier when I said it is imperative upon us as a people, as a nation state, as properly professional diplomats and statesmen, to develop the capacity to see how the world looks from behind the eyes of other people.
Patrick Lawrence:
And what we are getting now is wall to wall resistance to this. If you read the social media and so on and so forth, it is a major transgression now to express any understanding. I’m leaving out the word sympathy. To express any, even rudimentary understanding of why Putin is acting the way he is. I prefer to say Russia, I don’t like this personalization of everything. Putin, the madman. I’m sorry. It’s too flimsy. It’s too silly. NATO, this has nothing to do with NATO expansion eastward. That’s another one you’re hearing now. First of all, it’s patently, patently false. But beyond that, it is one of the ways we are totally resistant to seeing this question from the other side’s point of view.
Rob Johnson:
So in essence, what we are fed is a vision of us resisting his aggression, as in contrast with his resisting NATO and Western and us led aggression
History deep and near, chronology since the ’90s. And certainly since 2014, the coup. Causality and responsibility, we can’t leave these things out and pretend to understand this question, this crisis. And that’s exactly what we’re doing, leaving it all out. Remember Richard Pearl? Intellectual ornament for the George W administration,. After the attacks in 2001, he came up with this term, decontextualization. Remember that term? Do you?
Rob Johnson:
I remember hearing that. I don’t remember in the context.
Patrick Lawrence:
His immortal observation was we must not try to understand the terrorists. Any attempt to understand them amounts to support for them.
Rob Johnson:
Weakness. Yeah.
Patrick Lawrence:
In other words, I think he augmented the thought with, this is a crime and nothing more, and it should be treated as a crime. That’s decontextualization.
Rob Johnson:
Yesterday I saw some things on Twitter that essentially were saying, we can’t afford to tolerate this negotiation between the Ukraine and Russia right now.
Patrick Lawrence:
They said that?
Rob Johnson:
It was a Twitter article, and a person who I follow replied and said, “What are you telling us?” That it was a journalist, I believe it was CNN or somebody that had made this statement. And my friend’s reply was, “What are you telling us? You mean, we have to go to nuclear war now? What are you talking about?” And then there was a whole discussion following my friend’s reaction about how, don’t you understand how aggressive these people are being?
And it’s almost like in the old adage of game theory, there was a thing called the chain store paradox. Let’s say your Macy’s in New York. Somebody opens a little shop. You don’t crush them because they don’t matter. But then 20 other shops open and all of a sudden Macy’s is on defense. Everybody undercutting their prices. So you got to go crush every little thing so that as long as you look tough, you’ve deterred everybody from exploring. And that sense that we got to be super tough right now where what you might called the backstop is nuclear exchange, in the context of what we call mutually assured destruction, is quite daunting.
How far do you want to provoke a nuclear reaction? I don’t know that much. Like I said, that’s part of why I invite you on, because I don’t quite understand, but I feel like things are out of control. They’re spiraling out of control. And where is the healing going to be found?
Patrick Lawrence:
What was Putin saying when he let it be known the other day, a couple days ago that he had authorized the nuclear deterrence programs in Russia, airborne, seaborne, landborne to assume of status of standby alert. I gather it’s a low status. It’s not one minute to midnight. What was he trying to say there? It was a shocking statement, of course.
I think what he was trying to say there was, look, I drew the line, you saw the line, there was nothing too complicated about my red line and you crossed it. And I think Putin … this goes to the context of the Putin/Xi statement on February 4th, right? I think Putin sees this as a moment to really clean things up and begin constructing a world order of the type Stanley Hoffmann was writing about 44 years ago.
I think he sees this in very large terms, and that’s what I think he meant to convey when he mentioned the deterrence, the standby alert. They use the term deterrence. Implicit in that is, we’re not doing this first, but we’re ready for you. So I think he sees this as a Big Moment, capital B, capital M, of historic geopolitical consequence. And in the columns that brought us here, that’s my running theme. We are living through a passage of very significant history. As I mentioned in one of them, it’s very hard to understand one’s present moment as history because you’re inside it looking out. You can’t really … you just see what’s going on around you, the tick tock of events and so forth. Right?
I think this is a moment where we need to step quite far back and recognize that we are in a moment of a very great historical significance so that we can participate in it and respond to it adequately. A couple of sentences from the joint statement, the Xi/Putin statement, which I think is … I urge that we consider this statement in the context of the Ukraine crisis.
The Ukraine crisis is in a certain way, a subset of what they’re talking about in this document. On international relations, entering a new era, that’s part of the mile long title of the document. “Today, the world is going through momentous changes and humanity is entering a new era of rapid development and profound transformation.” A couple of sentences later, “A trend has emerged toward redistribution of power in the world. Some actors representing, but the minority on the international scale continue to advocate unilateral approaches to addressing international issues.”
They’re talking big thoughts here, and as one might have predicted, the administration has had virtually nothing to say about this statement. The New York times, predictably enough purported to flick it off the table as nothing. I think it would be hard to overstate the importance of it. And I mention it here, whether you want to go into it or not is up to you, Rob. But I mentioned it here because it gives idea of, let’s say the scale of president Putin’s thinking. The significance he reads into this moment.
In all honesty, I’m not suggesting I hold a great candle for Vladimir Putin. I’m not as critical of him as others. But in all honesty, in the interest of a new kind of world order, I want him to succeed. I want him to get NATO to back off the way George Kennan, Kissinger and William Burns, the current director of the CIA, advised. Cut it out. This would be good for all of us. There are a couple of unpopular ideas for you, Rob.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. I’m really, I’m stirred here because that portion that you read from the joint statement seems like wise, empathetic, insightful people appealing for mankind at a, excuse my name, Robert Johnson at the crossroads.
Patrick Lawrence:
Very good.
Rob Johnson:
But I’m seeing a very, an interesting element, which is why I brought up the Perception Institute, defining yourself with your military nuclear arsenal is igniting the fear on the other side. And it may contribute to making a frightened America on one level, more complicit in this aggressive agenda. And number two, and this is what bothers me even more, it may ignite within the Biden White House a fear that if they’re not tough, the population’s going to migrate to more protection, meaning the Republican side in the next election.
So I don’t know what’s being triggered. I can feel that, and this has been very valuable, the depth of what you have brought from that joint statement. That from your way of seeing this deep geopolitical history, both in Asia and in Europe, and that there is a, what you might call humane basis for the stand that Putin is taking. But I am concerned how we deescalate the boldness and the toughness on both sides to create the harmony that allows us to march down the road that you would like to see.
Patrick Lawrence:
Bringing nuclear considerations into this, you have to reckon that is a bad move. I think the point I made earlier as to what the Kremlin meant to say with that stands. It could have been made more artfully, no question of that. The nuclear danger is just too dreadful to put anywhere near the table. Parenthetically, apparently he was responding to comments the British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss was making. Liz Truss is … I don’t know whether you know much about Liz Truss.
Rob Johnson:
I don’t.
Patrick Lawrence:
She’s got about as much qualification for standing as Britain’s Foreign Secretary as my local librarian. She’s completely over her head. Makes one idiotic statement after another, which is quite dangerous. I find the statement regrettable, and I think you may be right. It may advance antagonisms rather than deescalate them.
But it’s remarkable, Rob, in the context we were exploring earlier, the quality of American statesmen and stateswomen, Liz Truss Foreign Secretary, Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, they’re just not up to the job. Lavrov is once again, he’s a very accomplished diplomat. While Javad Zarif was serving as Iranian FM, I thought Lavrov and Zarif were among the most professional statesmen, then active.
And going back to what we were saying earlier, we’ve had no need for diplomacy or expertise, and this is what you get. Amateurs, right? I’ve remarked from the beginning. Blinken and Sullivan have served their entire careers in advisory roles. They’ve been advisors on Capital Hill or the State Department, and so on. Biden put them in executive positions, a radical over promotion.
Rob Johnson:
And had they had in the field experience in other countries where their depth of awareness of say China or Japan or Russia, in other words, being advisors on Capitol Hill about something afar is different than living in the fabric of that place. Afar and bringing that insight back.
Patrick Lawrence:
Look at Jake Sullivan’s CV. He doesn’t know anything about China. I don’t think Blinken does either.
Rob Johnson:
I’m not familiar with that CV.
Patrick Lawrence:
Blinken surprised me. He has a superb education. Born in America, his mother moved to Paris, spent his high school years in the French Lycée, totally bilingual, corporate lawyer in New York and then in Paris. Very worldly fellow. He surprised me, his lack of sophistication, his habit of repeating entries in some American catechism about human rights and democracy.
Rob Johnson:
It’s interesting, because people like Ernest Hemingway used to write that when you’re going to be most creative is when you go to a land that’s not what you might call, where you’re unfamiliar, where your customs and unconscious habits and so forth are not invited by. In other words, you no longer feel like you can dance and be part of the tribe. Now you become creative. Now you start to notice, now you become yourself. And so those people who have that international experience are often deep from the way they’ve been challenged to be themselves.
Patrick Lawrence:
That’s right. And that’s why Blinken surprised me a bit.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. But you talked about Hoffmann earlier. He had come from France as I remember.
Patrick Lawrence:
Yeah. Well, he was Austrian born. His family moved to Paris. They moved to [inaudible 01:03:58], they must have had money. And his mother took him to the south of France two days before the Germans took Paris. After the war, he resumed his education in Paris. One of the Grande Cole, I think. I don’t remember which one. And then he crossed the ocean, and 50 odd years teaching at Harvard. It all showed. I mean he was a very worldly fellow. I love what he said. I mentioned it in this column. I love what he said toward the end of his career. When he returned to European studies, after many, many years on American foreign policy, he said, “After a time, denouncing the same old repeated mistakes is no longer any fun.”
Rob Johnson:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I have to, how would I say it feels a little bit like resignation, but how would I say? If you could redeploy yourself and make a difference somewhere else, maybe that’s just smart.
Patrick Lawrence:
He made a great contribution to international relations.
Yes he did. Yes he did. That was a modest statement. Probably underestimating the impact that he had on people like you and me and others. So you have a forthcoming book. Tell me just a little bit foreshadowing, because I want to set us up for making the next chapter when that book is released. So what’s in your vision?
Patrick Lawrence:
The last one was called Time No Longer. Yale put it out. It’s still in print. Americans after the American century. A study of where we were after 2001. Right. At that time, I argued that America had 25 years counting from 2001, book came out 2013 I think. America had 25 years counting from 2001 to decide whether it was going to move into a new position in the world relative to other nations, with imagination and creativity and guts, as I was saying earlier, or messily and violently. Well, we’ve chosen the latter path. That’s one way of looking at Ukraine, in fact.
I’m not sure I want to write any more books like that. This new one is called The Journalist and His Shadow. The title comes from a passage in Nietzsche’s The Wanderer and His Shadow. It’s a genre bender. It’s about the crisis in our press. So it’s in that way analytic. It’s also history. My argument is that the American press had a very bad Cold War and never recovered from it because it could never acknowledge its errors. And that’s why we’re repeating every single one of them with shocking, astonishing fidelity.
And it’s memoir. It’s my own years through most of the period I’m writing about as a professional, an editor in New York and then a correspondent abroad. Ending with my years as what we’re now calling an independent journalist. I clocked out of the mainstream in, I don’t know, 2010 or so. Been functioning as an independent journalist ever since. And I make the argument that’s where the future lies. The future lies with independent journalists who have a different …
The core question is, what is the relationship between journalism and power? At the moment, it’s just the way it was during the Cold War, a very corrupted relationship. There’s no independence. Any notion of a fourth estate, that’s a dusty antique, right? And we have to restore that. And I think the restoration is going to be driven by independent media. So that’s the book. The memoir gives some narrative flow and force to it.
Rob Johnson:
Well, that’s powerful. You were right at a cutting edge when the Institute for New Economic Thinking is contemplating how to make a difference, the notion of what I’ll call educating citizens versus credentializing as inputs to production and how that matters to education, what people choose, how strong the body politic can be. It derives from, I have read years ago, Jane Jacob’s final book called Dark Age Ahead.
Patrick Lawrence:
I haven’t seen that.
Rob Johnson:
Chapter three is called Credentializing Versus Educating. And I’ll pass that on to you. [crosstalk 01:10:01]
Patrick Lawrence:
She moved beyond urban studies and all that?
Rob Johnson:
That’s correct. She was in Toronto and wrote this just fantastic book. It was released in 2000.
Patrick Lawrence:
She had a great intellect. She had a great-
Rob Johnson:
Yes, she did.
Patrick Lawrence:
And her humanity, the way her humanity informed her intellect I think is part of the reason she was so effective as a writer.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. And people like her, a friend of mine who’s at Wayne State University in Detroit, where I grew up, Jerry Herron, who’s written about universities and the myth of cultural decline. He wrote a book called AfterCulture about how media refracted and demonized the city of Detroit. And I used to say, they divorced Detroit. They didn’t rescue it. They didn’t make it a part of the nation. They told everybody the American dream is fine. Those people cause their own problems.
But I think this realm that you’re exploring vis-à-vis journalism, like I’ve been exploring vis-à-vis education, is about how healthy and how capable the body politic is of reacting in our own interest, our own collective common good interests, vis-à-vis some of the forces that we’ve been exploring today.
Patrick Lawrence:
I need to, I’m working on revising the introduction now. And I’m very eager to make the point, look, this may be a book about journalism, but it’s a book all of us need to be concerned with, right? Because in one of the chapters, I quote Jefferson, this wonderful Mo of his, he was writing back to a friend in America while he was serving as a minister in Paris. And he said, “If it came to a question of a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I would without hesitation choose the latter condition.”
And what we have now is government without newspapers, because of the relationship between the media and political and corporate power … and the difference between those two is very hard to discern sometimes, right? Is very diseased. It’s direly bad, quite corrupt. And so in a consequence, the press serves political power to such a faithful extent that we effectively have government without newspapers. These papers, I know it sounds a bit extreme. I stand by the judgment. They’re basically bulletin boards.
Rob Johnson:
Well, that’s in part why I founded this podcast, that sensibility. And that’s very much why I asked you to come and join me here today.
Patrick Lawrence:
Bless you, Rob.
Rob Johnson:
The light you shed on things, it reminded me of my namesake and his song. The first verse of Crossroads, “I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees. I went down to the crossroads, fell down on my knees, asked the Lord above, have mercy now. Save poor Bob, if you please.”
Well, I’m using this bandwidth and these things to, not just about poor Bob, but poor America, poor world. Because we are at a crossroads, and you are shedding light on things. And I’m tempted to bring up another song. Todd Rundgren, “I saw the light in your eyes, from the time we first met through our friend Marshall, there was a light within you.”
Patrick Lawrence:
Oh, bless you, Rob.
Rob Johnson:
“Both celebrate it and encourage it, and encourage my young people who are defining meaning in their life and their career to take your example.”
Patrick Lawrence:
If you’re broadcasting to students, one little shard of advice, look up the word discernment. The Jesuits have an excellent definition of this word. It means autonomous thinking. It means learning to think. To discern means to think for yourself and make your own judgements free of the influences of others. Not to say you don’t learn from others, but discernment. There’s not enough of it. In my own courses I teach it. Whatever you’re teaching, to a certain extent, maybe you agree, you’re teaching students how to think. And maybe your students want to look up that term. That’s what they need.
Rob Johnson:
Yeah. Well in modern psychology, there’s a lot of discussion of what they call the true self versus the pleaser.
Patrick Lawrence:
Interesting. Interesting.
Rob Johnson:
The pleaser is going out and getting credentials, getting rewards, making their parents proud, getting lots of money or whatever, but they’re not acting from the heart. And the true self is finding your pathway where you can look in the mirror and not feel ashamed.
Patrick Lawrence:
Is that another book I should read? Who wrote that?
Rob Johnson:
Well that, I’ve seen it in many different contexts. I’ll have to look. I think it’s a beautiful dilemma that we see people facing, and it comes primarily from the acknowledgement that you are a part of society and other people matter, but how you matter for them or whether you’re a coward and what you may call playing in the music they want to dance to unmindfully is a very big challenge.
So I’ll try to find some resources in that regard, but that notion of what is the true self and how would I say, finding your own pathway I think is very important to my young scholars and to our young people. That challenge. I think that’s one of the things we can contribute at this juncture. And obviously we’ll stay in touch perhaps for other episodes as Ukraine, US, China, world system unfold. But thank you. Thanks so much for today.
Patrick Lawrence:
You’re very welcome.
Rob Johnson:
This was really delightful and you’re an enormous force for good.
Patrick Lawrence:
Thank you, Rob.
Rob Johnson:
We’ll talk again soon. Check out more from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at ineteconomics.org.
