Question:  Does Israel receive a disproportionate amount of attention?

Transcript:  Well any country that the United States is aligned with, it seems to me one should be able to examine that relationship and ask is it . . . is it going in the right way.  But the key there is not that we wanna focus disproportionate attention on Israel and single it out in any particular way.  It’s rather that American policy has already singled out Israel in some fundamental ways.  It’s the largest recipient of American economic and military aid.  It’s about three to four billion dollars a year, which works out to about $500 for each Israeli citizen from the American taxpayer.  And this is a country that’s not a poor country any longer.  It has the 29th per capita income in the world, which is a wonderful thing.  It’s a remarkable testimony to the industry and achievement of Israel’s own citizens.  But the fact is we have a special relationship with it.  It’s not that we’re singling it out for attention.  It’s already been singled out.  And our question in writing the book was trying to explain why that was the case, and ask whether that was in the American interest at this point.

Question: Does Israel face an existential threat?

Transcript: Not really, no.  It’s the strongest military power in the region.  It has a strong ally in our case.  It’s won every war it’s fought.  You could argue about the most recent war with Lebanon, but that was not an existential war.  It has peace treaties with Egypt and with Jordan.  I believe it could have a peace treaty with Syria; and I believe the Arab countries actually would like to make peace with Israel now if the solution could be found to the Palestinian problem.  And finally the question is Iran and Iran’s nuclear ambition.  And I think that’s a problem for the Israelis, no question about it, as it is for us.  And we all ought to be thinking of ways that we could try and discourage Iran from developing a full nuclear capability.  But even if Iran got a few nuclear weapons, I don’t believe that it’s a threat to Israel’s existence.  I don’t think Iran could use those weapons without causing its own destruction.  Remember that Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons of its own, and I don’t think believe would be at all bashful about threatening to use those if it were ever attacked; much the same way that the United States threatened to use its weapons during the Cold War if it was ever attacked.  I don’t want to paint a picture that, you know, everything is just completely rosy or anything like that.  All countries face security problems, and Israel faces more serious security problems than most.  But Israel’s existence – and this is good news – is not in doubt at this point.  And I think that’s a good thing, and I don’t think any of the external threats it now faces pose a threat to Israel’s existence either now or in the long term.

Question: What should Israel do in the face of Iranian threats?

Transcript: Well a couple of things.  One is to understand exactly what Ahmadinejad said.  He’s frequently misquoted as having said that Israel should be wiped off the map.  What he was really saying was that Israel should “vanish from the page of time.”  Now that still sounds pretty awful, and I think the remarks are reprehensible.  But what he was suggesting – and it’s an allusion to an old quotation by Khomeini – that the Jewish state in Palestine could be a temporary political condition.  And it could eventually evolve into some kind of democracy so the Palestinians would have control.  So he’s opposing the Zionist regime there, but he’s not calling for the physical destruction of Israel or the massacre of all of its inhabitants or things like that.  He’s suggesting it could be like the Soviet Union.  It goes out of business at some point down the road, but not because it’s been physically destroyed.  I think if I were an Israeli, and indeed as an American I find those remarks deeply objectionable because I think the existence of a Jewish state is a good thing.  But how you deal with that is not necessarily by, say, advocating preventive war or exaggerating a particular danger it calls for.  It seems to me what we wanna do is isolate people like Ahmadinejad; do our best to strengthen more moderate forces in Iran; look for a deal with the Iranians that prevent them or discourage them from going ahead and getting nuclear weapons; and finally doing everything we can to get a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians which would take away the main political cause that extremists like Ahmadinejad like to invoke.  I think once you get that one settled, the extremists start looking like obstructionists and criminals and we don’t have  problem anymore.  And we don’t have anywhere near the problem that we’re facing today.

Question: Can Zionism survive?

Transcript: I don’t see any reason why a Jewish state can’t exist in perpetuity in Palestine where it is now.  I mean I can imagine ways in which the Zionist project over many decades and many centuries might eventually erode.  But I also see lots of reasons why it might continue.  That’s really beyond the scope of what we were working on as well and will, if anything, reflect political and social developments inside Israel that are very hard to foresee.

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Academia Today

Transcript: I do occasionally worry about the academic world, or at least parts of the academic world being really mired in what some friends of mine and I tend to call the “cult of irrelevance” – this idea of wanting to work on topics that are of great interest to you, and three of your friends, and two people at another university.  And I think this is an abdication of our responsibility as intellectuals.  We should be grappling with really big questions as much as we can, and questions that are of great importance.  That’s why society allows us to have these very privileged positions as intellectuals, or college professors or whatever.  And the way we should be paying society back is by using that to try and make the human condition better.  Now we’re not all going to agree, but that’s okay because we’re more likely to collectively reach a wise position if we all think hard and then argue about it, and do so in public whenever possible.

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Question: Where is America headed?

Transcript: Well I think that’s a very American question.  I mean I think that many societies wouldn’t even pose it that way.  And it reflects the fact that American history, although it’s had its unfortunate periods, has been basically an incredibly happy story.  Again not for all Americans, but if you think of sort of where the United States began in 1776 and where it ended up in 2007, it’s a remarkable run of success.  And it’s partly because we did some things right.  And it’s also partly because we got very lucky in where the country was located; the fact that the native population turned out to be very susceptible to disease that was brought over from Europe; the fact that the European countries kept beating each other up while we sat here and became more productive.  So we’ve been very fortunate, so we have this view of the world that everything tends to go well.  And therefore your question is how can we solve all these problems so this happy story continues?  Well of course it hasn’t been as happy a story for, you know, Russia throughout the 20th century; for much of Europe, which destroyed itself twice in the 20th century.  Other parts of the world don’t tell quite the same happy story.  So I think the first thing I would say is we shouldn’t be expecting perfection.  We’re not gonna be solving all these problems, and it’s not like bad things won’t happen to Americans or to other people.  We wanna try to do the best we can within the . . . facing the set of problems that we now face, and with the set of resources at our disposal.  So step one is be realistic about what we think we can accomplish, and then start, you know, taking off the various problems and start working on them.  I think Americans, again, tend to think of it as, “I want a perfect answer because I’m an American citizen, and I’m entitled to live for 85 years in relatively good health and in a pretty comfortable house with a pretty nice family.”  That’s not the way it really works – even in America. A couple of them.  You know just to beat a dead horse now, I do think open discussion is really critical; and encouraging lots of different voices to be out there.  I find now in the United States, for example, the debate on foreign policy is quite a narrow debate.  Lots of agreement among the most visible members of the sort of foreign policy establishment; and people who are outside of that consensus very much marginalized in public discussion.  But that’s just in foreign policy.  So I like open discussion. The second thing that we have to remind ourselves is a country, that knowledge turns out to be a good thing; that we ought to be basing our policy decisions to the extent that we can on robust analysis; on the best available expertise; on . . . on facts.  You know people call “reality-based analysis”.  It’s troublesome when you read about a president who says, you know, he likes to go on his gut instincts.  Nobody’s gut instincts are that good, and one of the things that has allowed us to get to where we are today as a country, but I think also more broadly in the world, has been to prize knowledge; to prize research; to place a lot of social resources in that place and encourage people to pursue ideas as much as they can.  And it’s, I think, very short-sighted for any society when they start short changing its intellectual community.  Or when it starts ruling certain ideas out of court and saying, “No, you can’t work on that.  You shouldn’t write that.  You shouldn’t say that.”  That’s what strangles human creativity, and we’re gonna need some creative solutions to address the various problems we already talked about.  Again we get that by valuing intellectuals of all kinds – natural scientists, philosophers, artists, etc. – but also giving them lots of freedom to explore ideas.

Recorded on: 10/8/07

The Digital Revolution

Transcript: I think we’re also seeing a revolution for how information itself is handled.  This interview is a little bit part of that to the extent that this gets web cast and pod cast.  And until relatively recently, if you were wealthy and powerful, you also could have a lot of impact on information.  You could buy a newspaper.  You could buy a broadcasting network.  You could hire a publicist to make sure your ideas got on whoever did have a newspaper . . . things like that.  And if you didn’t have those things, your capacity to get heard was much less.  I think one of the consequences of the Internet and . . . and the gradual spreading out of sources of information is that people who don’t have a whole lot of resources can, by sort of sheer wit, or brilliance, or energy become a voice . . . become heard.  Not all of them, right?  The blogosphere, for example, tends to be a few people everybody reads or many people read, and millions of people that nobody reads.  But still those other people aren’t necessarily in a wealthy, powerful . . . connected to wealthy or powerful institutions.  And I think over time we may see this world in which information has become a . . . much more democratized as well.  But where that’s going to take us I’m not sure.

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Question: Are global institutions up to the challenges of globalization?

Transcript: Well the set of global institutions that we have now are all sort of leftover from World War II.  And they were created for particular contexts.  I’m thinking here of the World Bank, the United Nations, particularly the structure of the Security Council.  And everybody understands that these are kind of outmoded in terms of either their membership or their powers.  What no one has done yet is been able to devise sort of, “Here’s the blueprint for how we should fix all of them.”  I think the biggest issue there, of course, is you have to devise a set of institutions that are sufficiently inclusive of the new power centers, right?  A Security Council in which India is excluded in 2030 doesn’t make a whole lots of sense to me.  A Security Council in which Brazil is not a player, again, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  So one part of it is just reforming the overall global architecture.

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Question: Is development at odds with environmentalism?

Transcript: I think there’s an obvious tradeoff.  We can’t have, you know, seven to eight billion people on the planet all of them living like Americans.  So one of the problems we’re going to have to address as a society is how do you convince people in the most advanced societies who are consuming most of the resources to . . . to essentially a diminution I regard as not necessarily a diminution of their lifestyles, but a diminution of their ostentation.  Or to put it in really crude terms, how do you get more Americans and Europeans to have a much, much smaller carbon footprint, right?  Without thinking that that requires us all to live in tiny homes; that requires us all to ride bicycles to work or things like that; but rather can we be happy about a different lifestyle where maybe the 12,000 foot McMansion is not the American dream, and that we all accept that many more people are going to have to live in some parts of their lives in a much more constrained fashion.  I actually regard that as a social and cultural problem that we are, again, just beginning to have to think about.  And it’s not one that’s gonna sit well with many Americans.  We tend to think, “We’re Americans.  We’re entitled to whatever we can afford.”

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Question: What is the world’s biggest challenge in the coming decade?

Transcript:  I think there is a sense . . . a growing sense that there are going to be limits to how many people you can keep on the planet, and how many people you can have living at a certain standard of living.  And I think the major constraint there is environmental.  The most obvious symptom of that is growing concern with global warming and climate change of various kinds; and the sense that we may not be able to stop that particular train before it goes off the cliff, you know if you imagine some of the more catastrophic scenarios.  Does that end all life on the planet?  No.   But does it have very severe consequences for different parts of the world?  I think that’s . . . that’s there.  I think we are going to see over the next 40 or 50 years a fundamental shift in the balance of power between what has been the sort of transatlantic access – Europe and America – for the last several hundred years shifting more towards Asia.  The United States will be a critical part of that too; but again India and China much more so.  I think third there is a . . . an issue of equality . . . an inequality on a global scale now which is compounded by the fact that increasingly, people who are further down the inequality scales are more and more aware of what their relative positions are.  And again, the advent of global communications and things like that is starting to make it much more obvious to people.  So we have at least, I think, a potential train wreck of different trends happening where India and China are developing.  Their development is gonna put greater environmental strains on the world.  They’re not gonna want to remain in an undeveloped condition, right?  The advanced countries like the United States are going to be concerned about what this all means.  And everyone is going to be more aware of all of this simultaneously.  So I think the potential for real trouble down the road is . . . is considerable. 

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Question: What is the world’s biggest challenge in the coming decade?

Transcript: I think there is a sense . . . a growing sense that there are going to be limits to how many people you can keep on the planet, and how many people you can have living at a certain standard of living. And I think the major constraint there is environmental. The most obvious symptom of that is growing concern with global warming and climate change of various kinds; and the sense that we may not be able to stop that particular train before it goes off the cliff, you know if you imagine some of the more catastrophic scenarios. Does that end all life on the planet? No. But does it have very severe consequences for different parts of the world? I think that’s . . . that’s there. I think we are going to see over the next 40 or 50 years a fundamental shift in the balance of power between what has been the sort of transatlantic access – Europe and America – for the last several hundred years shifting more towards Asia. The United States will be a critical part of that too; but again India and China much more so. I think third there is a . . . an issue of equality . . . an inequality on a global scale now which is compounded by the fact that increasingly, people who are further down the inequality scales are more and more aware of what their relative positions are. And again, the advent of global communications and things like that is starting to make it much more obvious to people. So we have at least, I think, a potential train wreck of different trends happening where India and China are developing. Their development is gonna put greater environmental strains on the world. They’re not gonna want to remain in an undeveloped condition, right? The advanced countries like the United States are going to be concerned about what this all means. And everyone is going to be more aware of all of this simultaneously. So I think the potential for real trouble down the road is . . . is considerable.

Question: Is development at odds with environmentalism?

Transcript: I think there’s an obvious tradeoff.  We can’t have, you know, seven to eight billion people on the planet all of them living like Americans.  So one of the problems we’re going to have to address as a society is how do you convince people in the most advanced societies who are consuming most of the resources to . . . to essentially diminution I regard as not necessarily a diminution of their lifestyles, but a diminution of their ostentation.  Or to put it in really crude terms, how do you get more Americans and Europeans to have a much, much smaller carbon footprint, right?  Without thinking that that requires us all to live in tiny homes; that requires us all to ride bicycles to work or things like that; but rather can we be happy about a different lifestyle where maybe the 12,000 foot McMansion is not the American dream, and that we all accept that many more people are going to have to live in some parts of their lives in a much more constrained fashion.  I actually regard that as a social and cultural problem that we are, again, just beginning to have to think about.  And it’s not one that’s gonna sit well with many Americans.  We tend to think, “We’re Americans.  We’re entitled to whatever we can afford.”

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Question:  Why did 9/11 happen?

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

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Question: What is human nature?

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

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Question: How should America use its power?

Transcript: I think that, you know, the United States should use the power it has at its disposal to first of all protect itself and its interests. But then to the extent that we can, try to create a more stable and more orderly world.  The problem is there’s not very much we can do on that front.  I think what separates me from, you know, many other people who work in the field of American foreign policy is I think there are real limits to our capacity to shape other societies; that it’s not our business or within our capacity to dictate how other societies are gonna run.  I think that’s their job.  And we’re . . .  If we try to do it, we’re gonna screw it up far more often than we’re gonna succeed.

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Question: What is the greatest challenge facing the U.S.?

Transcript: I think that, you know, as someone who has spent most of my career thinking about American foreign policy, I think the United States is going to have to do an enormous amount of adjusting over the next 30 to 40 years – adjusting both to sort of environmental limits that we’re now starting to become aware of; adjusting to China’s emergence as a major power, followed by India’s emergence as a much more consequential state.  I think the globalization will affect us the same way it affects everybody else, and that’s gonna require some adjustments.  Just to put it in one . . . one frame of reference, the United States has had the world’s largest economy since about 1900.  We’re sort of accustomed to being the biggest economic actor on the block.  Well at some point – maybe in my lifetime, but not too long after that – that’s probably not gonna be the case.  And that’s going to involve some adjustments on . . . on America’s part.  And it’s not clear to me that these adjustments were ready to make.  Most countries, as they start to become relatively less influential, find it a painful process.  I would like to accelerate the learning process.  I would like us to learn to adjust to living in a world where we are not just the 800 pound gorilla out there.  And I’d like us to learn that as quickly as possible. 

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Question: What distinguishes the Israel lobby from other special interest groups? 

Transcript: They’re not doing anything substantially different.  It’s a lot of the same techniques.  You go up on Capitol Hill.  You try and get journalists to write things that are favorable to your cause.  When they don’t write things favorable, you protest.  You do the same things at the National Riflemen’s Association.  You make sure that congressmen understand that if they take positions contrary to what you want, you’re going to steer campaign contributions to the other side if at all possible.  So the nature of the activities is pretty similar to what other powerful groups do as well.  Why is Social Security a sacrosanct, third rail issue?  It’s because the AARP has a position of that, and they can organize their members.  And so a politician who suddenly steps up and says, “You know I think Social Security ought to be cut,” is gonna be in real trouble for doing that.  So what they’re doing is not all that different.  They are particularly good at it, but they’re not doing anything that’s illegitimate.  With one exception, which is the tendency to smear anybody who is critical of this relationship of being anti-Semitic or being bigoted in some way.  Though what happened to Jimmy Carter, for example, after he published his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” is sort of a classic example of this where he was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer; accused of being a Jew-hater, etc., etc.  And this is a president who had done as much for Israeli security as any American president ever has.  And that, I think, is not legitimate because it gets in the way of free and open discourse, which is really essential in a democracy.

Question: How do we reign in special interest groups?

Transcript: You could certainly diminish the impact of all special interest groups if you could have a really radical campaign finance reform in the United States.  It wouldn’t end interest group politics; but it would take some of the fuel out of it.  And that, I don’t think, is gonna happen in my lifetime; because of course that would get resisted by all special interest groups, not any particular one.  I think because there’s nothing wrong with any group of Americans organizing to shape American foreign policy in ways that they think are good for the country; I don’t favor putting any of the restrictions or limits saying that, “You guys can’t organize.  You can’t come up on Capitol Hill anymore and talk to congressmen.”  I think anything like that would be very anti-American, very anti-democratic.  What I hope happens, and what I hope our book helps encourage, is that some of the organizations in the sort of broad coalition, which doesn’t agree on everything, by the way . . . that some of the more moderate groups, some of the more progressive groups become more influential, gain more supporters.  And similarly, some of the more powerful groups now that tend to be more hard-lined begin to rethink their positions.  I would have no objection to their being a very powerful, pro-Israel community in the United States if I thought the policies they were pushing for were better for us and better for Israel as well.  So I have no problem with their being a lobby.  I just wish it were pushing for policies that were smarter.

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Transcript: Well I had done work on Middle East politics previously.  My first book and dissertation was about the Middle East from the perspective of alliances.  And I’d actually written about the Israel lobby in that book, although not in as much detail and not with as much of a critical eye, I think is one way to put it. We decided to write on this for two reasons.  First, after September 11th, like many other Americans, and indeed like lots of other people around the world, we realized that something had gone badly off the rails in American Middle East policy – just understanding why the United States was so unpopular there; why a group like Al Qaeda could organize and decide to attack the United States.  So we started . . .  John and I both started thinking a lot more about this, and I actually wrote an article or two about the specific problem of what American foreign policy should be.  Second, the more we thought about it, the more we realized there was an aspect of American Middle East policy that was very important and very influential.  It was the role of different pro-Israel groups in the United States, but it was a topic that not very many people wanted to talk about.  It was a real third rail question, because anybody who did try to bring it up usually got attacked and often got smeared in various ways.  And we decided that we were in sufficiently secure and prominent positions that we could try to bring this up.  And one of our purposes was to simply break the taboo and make this a subject that one could actually talk about the same way you would talk about the farm lobby, or the oil lobby, or the, you know . . . National Rifle Association, or the American Association of Retired Persons.  These are all important public . . . important interest groups, and they get talked about all the time; but the Israel lobby is one that nobody wanted to debate, and we decided that wasn’t a good idea.  So we wrote a book.

Question: What is the central conclusion of your book?

Transcript: The basic argument is that there is a loose coalition of groups that don’t agree on every issue; that are not all predominantly Jewish American, but are all committed to trying to maintain a special relationship between the United States and Israel.  And that over time these groups have become more influential; that what they were doing was entirely legitimate – just good old-fashioned interest group politics.  But like some other interest groups, they’d gotten to be quite . . . quite powerful and had a pretty dramatic effect on what the United States was doing in the Middle East both in terms of providing unconditional support for just about anything that Israel was doing; but also influencing our foreign policy more broadly throughout the entire region.  And we decided that not only was this not good for the United States; that it was producing policies that were harmful to the country; but we also argued that it was not good for Israel.  In fact that many of these policies, which tended to be on a more hard line end, were unwittingly causing harm to Israel as well.  And we thought that what . . . the United States should have as a much more normal relationship with Israel.  We should treat it the same way we treat other democracies like Britain, or France, or Japan, or India where we support them when they’re doing things that are in our interest, and where we don’t support them when they’re doing things that aren’t in our interest.  Needless to say even saying that, which sounds, I think, pretty banal, got us both a fair degree of attention, but also a non-trivial amount of abuse.

Question: When has the Israel lobby influenced the U.S. to act against its national interests?

Transcript: One is Israel’s Settlements Policy.  The official position of the American government since 1967 has been that settlements in the West Bank are not a good idea.  They’re not good for Israel.  They’re not consistent with the international law.  So we formally oppose them, but no American president has ever put any substantial pressure on Israel to stop that.  It’s continued to be the largest recipient of U.S. economic and military aid, even though it’s doing something that we clearly don’t want them to do; and even though many Israelis now understand that this was a huge strategic blunder on their part to try and colonize the West Bank.  We would have been a better ally if we had stopped that many years ago.  So that would be one example. The second we argue in our book is that some of these groups in __________ lobby – and particularly the neo-conservatives – were a key element.  By no means the only element, but a key element in getting the United States into war with Iraq.  They sort of conceived the idea, worked hard to sell it; didn’t succeed in selling it until after September 11th when suddenly the political stars lined up, and Bush and Cheney bought onto a particular program.  So an important component; and again not good for us.  And also not good for Israel when you think about how the Iraq war has gone.

            (13:51) And then last but not least, I would argue that the response to the war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 where Israel’s response to Hezbollah . . . which they had every right to respond, but it wasn’t a smart response.  And we would have been a better ally, again, if we had either pushed the Israelis to come up with a better way of dealing with Hezbollah, or gotten the war ended very quickly before it lasted a month; before lots of civilian areas in Lebanon were attacked; before Hezbollah had been able to fire hundreds of rockets into Israel as well.  The United States didn’t do that.  We didn’t actually shut it down.  We backed the Israelis even though their policy was quite ill-conceived.  But in all three of those cases, I would argue the lobby was a key player in shaping U.S. policy.  And in each case it wasn’t good for us and it wasn’t good for Israel either.

Question: What distinguishes the Israel lobby from other special interest groups?

Transcript: They’re not doing anything substantially different.  It’s a lot of the same techniques.  You go up on Capitol Hill.  You try and get journalists to write things that are favorable to your cause.  When they don’t write things favorable, you protest.  You do the same things at the National Riflemen’s Association.  You make sure that congressmen understand that if they take positions contrary to what you want, you’re going to steer campaign contributions to the other side if at all possible.  So the nature of the activities is pretty similar to what other powerful groups do as well.  Why is Social Security a sacrosanct, third rail issue?  It’s because the AARP has a position of that, and they can organize their members.  And so a politician who suddenly steps up and says, “You know I think Social Security ought to be cut,” is gonna be in real trouble for doing that.  So what they’re doing is not all that different.  They are particularly good at it, but they’re not doing anything that’s      (15:49) illegitimate.  With one exception, which is the tendency to smear anybody who is critical of this relationship of being anti-Semitic or being bigoted in some way.  Though what happened to Jimmy Carter, for example, after he published his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” is sort of a classic example of this where he was accused of being a Nazi sympathizer; accused of being a Jew-hater, etc., etc.  And this is a president who had done as much for Israeli security as any American president ever has.  And that, I think, is not legitimate because it gets in the way of free and open discourse, which is really essential in a democracy.

Question: Did the outcry surprise you?

Transcript: We knew it was gonna be a controversial body of work, and it was undoubtedly gonna get some criticism.  I was a little surprised early on at just how venomous some of the criticism was; that there was a real sort of willingness to use almost any stick to try and beat us with.  So you know people immediately began linking us to David Duke and people like that which, you know again, is just a smear tactic designed to sort of marginalize anyone who is critical.  But apart from that it hasn’t been all that surprising.  I mean we’ve seen what had happened to some other people.  The basic point I guess I’d emphasize here – and this gets to sort of broader questions about where the world is going – is my co-author and I basically think that all countries do stupid things periodically.  No government, no people is immune to folly.  And the only way you can minimize the possibility of folly is to have as open a discussion as possible about different options, and what’s really going on. So anything that gets in the way of open discussion is a real problem.  It’s the kind of thing that will lead a country off the deep end and be unable to correct itself once it starts.  It’s why I think dictatorships actually commit some of the greatest human rights violations and greatest travesties because they don’t have an open dialogue.  When they are doing something that’s unwise, or cruel, or stupid, it’s hard for people in that society to correct course.  So here in a democracy, we do have the opportunity for doing that.  And one of the things we ought to be doing is encouraging open discussion as much as possible so that stupid policies are either not adopted; or when they are adopted, as will happen from time to time, we can figure it out quickly and change course.

Question: What is the difference between fair criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism?

Transcript: My own view is that anti-Semitism conceives of the Jewish people as sort of separate and not equal members of society.  It wants to treat them as a separate tribe and accuse them of various things – suggesting that they have to be treated harshly or in some way discriminated against because they don’t fully belong as members of society.  This is the complete opposite of what I believe.  I think that Jewish Americans are like everybody else.  I think Jews are like everybody else and they ought to be treated like every other member of society; every other ethnic group; every other religious group.  One of the great things about this country is we don’t believe that discrimination is appropriate.  And even though it happens from time to time, the good news is that it’s been increasingly discredited in our society as it has throughout many other realms.  Now once you conceive of Jewish people or anybody else as just like everybody else, then they should be as open to criticism when their actions are not correct, or you think they’re not correct.  And we make it clear, for example, in our book that we don’t question Israel’s right to exist or its legitimacy as a state.  But no country should be immune from criticism.  And no interest group in the United States should be immune from criticism.  Somebody wants to criticize college professors, that’s fine.  If somebody wants to criticize Republicans, or Democrats, or people who are in favor of disarmament, that’s good too.  But I think there’s a pretty clear distinction between the way most anti-Semites think of this and the way my co-author and I do, and I think many other Americans.

Question: Does Israel receive a disproportionate amount of attention?

Transcript: Well any country that the United States is aligned with, it seems to me one should be able to examine that relationship and ask is it . . . is it going in the right way.  But the key there is not that we wanna focus disproportionate attention on Israel and single it out in any particular way.  It’s rather that American policy has already singled out Israel in some fundamental ways.  It’s the largest recipient of American economic and military aid.  It’s about three to four billion dollars a year, which works out to about $500 for each Israeli citizen from the American taxpayer.  And this is a country that’s not a poor country any longer.  It has the 29th per capita income in the world, which is a wonderful thing.  It’s a remarkable testimony to the industry and achievement of Israel’s own citizens.  But the fact is we have a special relationship with it.  It’s not that we’re singling it out for attention.  It’s already been singled out.  And our question in writing the book was trying to explain why that was the case, and ask whether that was in the American interest at this point.

Question: Does Israel face an existential threat?

Transcript: Not really, no.  It’s the strongest military power in the region.  It has a strong ally in our case.  It’s won every war it’s fought.  You could argue about the most recent war with Lebanon, but that was not an existential war.  It has peace treaties with Egypt and with Jordan.  I believe it could have a peace treaty with Syria; and I believe the Arab countries actually would like to make peace with Israel now if the solution could be found to the Palestinian problem.  And finally the question is Iran and Iran’s nuclear ambition.  And I think that’s a problem for the Israelis, no question about it, as it is for us.  And we all ought to be thinking of ways that we could try and discourage Iran from developing a full nuclear capability.  But even if Iran got a few nuclear weapons, I don’t believe that it’s a threat to Israel’s existence.  I don’t think Iran could use those weapons without causing its own destruction.  Remember that Israel has several hundred nuclear weapons of its own, and I don’t think believe would be at all bashful about threatening to use those if it were ever attacked; much the same way that the United States threatened to use its weapons during the Cold War if it was ever attacked.  I don’t want to paint a picture that, you know, everything is just completely rosy or anything like that.  All countries face security problems, and Israel faces more serious security problems than most.  But Israel’s existence – and this is good news – is not in doubt at this point.  And I think that’s a good thing, and I don’t think any of the external threats it now faces pose a threat to Israel’s existence either now or in the long term.

Question: What should Israel do in the face of Iranian threats?

Transcript: Well a couple of things.  One is to understand exactly what Ahmadinejad said.  He’s frequently misquoted as having said that Israel should be wiped off the map.  What he was really saying was that Israel should “vanish from the page of time.”  Now that still sounds pretty awful, and I think the remarks are reprehensible.  But what he was suggesting – and it’s an allusion to an old quotation by Khomeini – that the Jewish state in Palestine could be a temporary political condition.  And it could eventually evolve into some kind of democracy so the Palestinians would have control.  So he’s opposing the Zionist regime there, but he’s not calling for the physical destruction of Israel or the massacre of all of its inhabitants or things like that.  He’s suggesting it could be like the Soviet Union.  It goes out of business at some point down the road, but not because it’s been physically destroyed.  I think if I were an Israeli, and indeed as an American I find those remarks deeply objectionable because I think the existence of a Jewish state is a good thing.  But how you deal with that is not necessarily by, say, advocating preventive war or exaggerating a particular danger it calls for.  It seems to me what we wanna do is isolate people like Ahmadinejad; do our best to strengthen more moderate forces in Iran; look for a deal with the Iranians that prevent them or discourage them from going ahead and getting nuclear weapons; and finally doing everything we can to get a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians which would take away the main political cause that extremists like Ahmadinejad like to invoke.  I think once you get that one settled, the extremists start looking like obstructionists and criminals and we don’t have  problem anymore.  And we don’t have anywhere near the problem that we’re facing today.

Question: Can Zionism survive?

Transcript: I don’t see any reason why a Jewish state can’t exist in perpetuity in Palestine where it is now.  I mean I can imagine ways in which the Zionist project over many decades and many centuries might eventually erode.  But I also see lots of reasons why it might continue.  That’s really beyond the scope of what we were working on as well and will, if anything, reflect political and social developments inside Israel that are very hard to foresee.

Question: Has any criticism has given you pause for thought?

Transcript: That’s a great question.  Most of the criticisms, to be honest, I don’t think did much damage to our basic argument.  There were a lot of people who, you know, called us names that I think was largely irrelevant – predictable but irrelevant.  There were a number of people who pointed out what they thought were major factual errors.  And we’ve written a long response to our critics where we showed that most of those complaints are wrong. I did take seriously the concern that a number of people voiced that you know, “Alright fine.  These criticisms are well intentioned.  You may even be right, but your work is gonna be misused.  It’s going to be taken by bigots.  It’s going to be seized upon by anti-Semites who will use it for their own nefarious purposes.”  And I thought, you know, a lot about that, and I would not want to have written something that could be used in those terms.  If I thought that the kind of anti-Semitism that existed, you know, centuries ago, or more recently in the 20th century was coming back in any significant way, you know I would have had real doubts about writing the book.  The good news is I don’t think that’s the case, particularly in the western world.  I think the good news is that anti-Semitism has been completely discredited among respectable members of society and that’s wonderful.  So I don’t think the danger that people are pointing to is actually likely to materialize.  Moreover, I think the fear of bringing about a resurgence of anti-Semitism can’t be allowed to stifle discussion.  It can’t be allowed to stifle debate.  Those who say, you know, “You might be bringing back anti-Semitism.  Therefore you can’t criticize Israel, and therefore you can’t criticize, say, the activities of APEC or other groups” are basically saying this fear means we can’t have a conversation.  And as I said a while back, I think the ability to talk openly about political and social issues is essential to getting policies right.  And we can’t allow anything to silence us.

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Lessons of the Past

Transcript: I had some wonderful professors as an undergraduate who were quite inspirational.  But the one moment I remember was in my junior year.  I was studying overseas.  I was actually at the Stanford program in Berlin.  And Gordon Craig, who was a historian at Stanford – a quite distinguished historian of German history – was doing a lecture to our class about Weimar, Germany.  And it was about what intellectuals had done in Weimar, Germany, which was basically to behave in a completely irresponsible way.  They disengaged from politics.  They started worrying more about art and other things as opposed to caring about real affairs.  And he basically said, you know, part of the reason we got the Nazis; and part of the reason we got Hitler; and part of the reason we got World War II was that the intellectuals in Weimar, Germany abdicated their social responsibility.  And I was, at that point, trying to decide whether or not to go to law school or go do graduate work in political science.  And I remember thinking, you know, that there was a role to . . . to play as an intellectual, but remaining engaged in politics.  And that . . .  I remember that being sort of the moment which I decided I was going to graduate school and not to law school.

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Question: What question should we be asking ourselves?

Transcript: You actually sort of touched on it, but one question is at a very personal level, many people find it hard to change.  And we are living in a world now which forces us to change more rapidly than we used to.  You know technology is changing dramatically.  The work environment changes dramatically.  The idea of someone getting a job at 21 and being in the same career at the same firm for the next 50 years is increasingly outmoded.  Just not the way things work.  And so I would ask most individuals, you know, “What have you done or what are you doing to prepare yourself for change?  For the fact that the world is gonna look different 10 years from now?  Your children are gonna grow up in an entirely different environment.”  That wasn’t the case 200 or 300 years ago. The pace of social change was much slower.  And I think as a species, we have to become more adept at the personal adjustments, right?  If it means that, you know, Americans do have to start bicycling more because we can’t all drive SUVs, how are we gonna make those adjustments, right?  And so part of it I would ask individuals, you know, “What are you doing to be able to prepare yourself for change?  And what can we learn from those people who turn out to be very good at it, right?  Who are very quick to sort of sense where they want to go next.”

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Question: Collectively, what should we be doing?

Transcript: You know just to beat a dead horse now, I do think open discussion is really critical; and encouraging lots of different voices to be out there.  I find now in the United States, for example, the debate on foreign policy is quite a narrow debate.  Lots of agreement among the most visible members of the sort of foreign policy establishment; and people who are outside of that consensus very much marginalized in public discussion.  But that’s just in foreign policy.  So I like open discussion. The second thing that we have to remind ourselves is a country, that knowledge turns out to be a good thing; that we ought to be basing our policy decisions to the extent that we can on robust analysis; on the best available expertise; on . . . on facts.  You know people call “reality-based analysis”.  It’s troublesome when you read about a president who says, you know, he likes to go on his gut instincts.  Nobody’s gut instincts are that good, and one of the things that has allowed us to get to where we are today as a country, but I think also more broadly in the world, has been to prize knowledge; to prize research; to place a lot of social resources in that place and encourage people to pursue ideas as much as they can.  And it’s, I think, very short-sighted for any society when they start short changing its intellectual community.  Or when it starts ruling certain ideas out of court and saying, “No, you can’t work on that.  You shouldn’t write that.  You shouldn’t say that.”  That’s what strangles human creativity, and we’re gonna need some creative solutions to address the various problems we already talked about.  Again we get that by valuing intellectuals of all kinds – natural scientists, philosophers, artists, etc. – but also giving them lots of freedom to explore ideas.  Let me just add one other caveat to that.  I do occasionally worry about the academic world, or at least parts of the academic world being really mired in what some friends of mine and I tend to call the “cult of irrelevance” – this idea of wanting to work on topics that are of great interest to you, and three of your friends, and two people at another university.  And I think this is an abdication of our responsibility as intellectuals.  We should be grappling with really big questions as much as we can, and questions that are of great importance.  That’s why society allows us to have these very privileged positions as intellectuals, or college professors or whatever.  And the way we should be paying society back is by using that to try and make the human condition better.  Now we’re not all going to agree, but that’s okay because we’re more likely to collectively reach a wise position if we all think hard and then argue about it, and do so in public whenever possible. 

Question: How do we reign in special interest groups?

Transcript: You could certainly diminish the impact of all special interest groups if you could have a really radical campaign finance reform in the United States.  It wouldn’t end interest group politics; but it would take some of the fuel out of it.  And that, I don’t think, is gonna happen in my lifetime; because of course that would get resisted by all special interest groups, not any particular one.  I think because there’s nothing wrong with any group of Americans organizing to shape American foreign policy in ways that they think are good for the country; I don’t favor putting any of the restrictions or limits saying that, “You guys can’t organize.  You can’t come up on Capitol Hill anymore and talk to congressmen.”  I think anything like that would be very anti-American, very anti-democratic.  What I hope happens, and what I hope our book helps encourage, is that some of the organizations in the sort of broad coalition, which doesn’t agree on everything, by the way . . . that some of the more moderate groups, some of the more progressive groups become more influential, gain more supporters.  And similarly, some of the more powerful groups now that tend to be more hard-lined begin to rethink their positions.  I would have no objection to their being a very powerful, pro-Israel community in the United States if I thought the policies they were pushing for were better for us and better for Israel as well.  So I have no problem with their being a lobby.  I just wish it were pushing for policies that were smarter.

Recorded on: 10/8/07

Question: Will we be able to make the necessary adjustments?

Transcript: Well I think that’s a very American question.  I mean I think that many societies wouldn’t even pose it that way.  And it reflects the fact that American history, although it’s had its unfortunate periods, has been basically an incredibly happy story.  Again not for all Americans, but if you think of sort of where the United States began in 1776 and where it ended up in 2007, it’s a remarkable run of success.  And it’s partly because we did some things right.  And it’s also partly because we got very lucky in where the country was located; the fact that the native population turned out to be very susceptible to disease that was brought over from Europe; the fact that the European countries kept beating each other up while we sat here and became more productive.  So we’ve been very fortunate, so we have this view of the world that everything tends to go well.  And therefore your question is how can we solve all these problems so this happy story continues?  Well of course it hasn’t been as happy a story for, you know, Russia throughout the 20th century; for much of Europe, which destroyed itself twice in the 20th century.  Other parts of the world don’t tell quite the same happy story.  So I think the first thing I would say is we shouldn’t be expecting perfection.  We’re not gonna be solving all these problems, and it’s not like bad things won’t happen to Americans or to other people.  We wanna try to do the best we can within the . . . facing the set of problems that we now face, and with the set of resources at our disposal.  So step one is be realistic about what we think we can accomplish, and then start, you know, taking off the various problems and start working on them.  I think Americans, again, tend to think of it as, “I want a perfect answer because I’m an American citizen, and I’m entitled to live for 85 years in relatively good health and in a pretty comfortable house with a pretty nice family.”  That’s not the way it really works – even in America.

Recorded on: 10/8/07

When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out for you?

WALT:             I think there are several.  I think . . .  I’ve already alluded to a couple.  I think there is a sense . . . a growing sense that there are going to be limits to how many people you can keep on the planet, and how many people you can have living at a certain standard of living.  And I think the major constraint there is environmental.  The most obvious symptom of that is growing concern with global warming and climate change of various kinds; and the sense that we may not be able to stop that particular train before it goes off the cliff, you know if you imagine some of the more catastrophic scenarios.  Does that end all life on the planet?  No.   But does it have very severe consequences for different parts of the world?  I think that’s . . . that’s there.  I think we are going to see over the next 40 or 50 years a fundamental shift in the balance of power between what has been the sort of transatlantic access – Europe and America – for the last several hundred years shifting more towards Asia.  The United States will be a critical part of that too; but again India and China much more so.  I think third there is a . . . an issue of equality . . . an inequality on a global scale now which is compounded by the fact that increasingly, people who are further down the inequality (44:51) scales are more and more aware of what their relative positions are.  And again, the advent of global communications and things like that is starting to make it much more obvious to people.  So we have at least, I think, a potential train wreck of different trends happening where India and China are developing.  Their development is gonna put greater environmental strains on the world.  They’re not gonna want to remain in an undeveloped condition, right?  The advanced countries like the United States are going to be concerned about what this all means.  And everyone is going to be more aware of all of this simultaneously.  So I think the potential for real trouble down the road is . . . is considerable.  And I’d add one final little problem in there is the capacity for small groups of people to cause large amounts of destruction has gone up for a hundred years or so.  You think about what you needed to kill 3,000 people in an afternoon.  Well if you wanted to do that in 1900, you pretty much had to be a government with an army.  But now of course 18 people or 19 people can fly planes in and kill 3,000 people in an afternoon or a morning.  And if you marry that up with either biological weapons or some kind of crude nuclear device, again you could imagine terrorist groups or other non-state actors having much more destructive impact.  And that’s, I think, gonna be something we tend to worry about a lot over the next few decades.

HOPKINS:       (46:18) Now you raise an interesting point that I want to touch on quickly.  And there is this sort of a humanistic interest both in development as well as in environmentalism.  But do you think that these two issues are going to become oppositional?  And how might that play out?

Card: Is development at odds with environmentalism?

WALT:             I think there’s an obvious tradeoff.  We can’t have, you know, seven to eight billion people on the planet all of them living like Americans.  So one of the problems we’re going to have to address as a society is how do you convince people in the most advanced societies who are consuming most of the resources to . . . to essentially _________I regard as not necessarily a diminution of their lifestyles, but a diminution of their ostentation.  Or to put it in really crude terms, how do you get more Americans and Europeans to have a much, much smaller carbon footprint, right?  Without thinking that that requires us all to live in tiny homes; that requires us all to ride bicycles to work or things like that; but rather can we be happy about a different lifestyle where maybe the 12,000 foot McMansion is not the American dream, and that we all accept that many more people are going to have to live in some parts of their lives in a much more constrained fashion.  I actually regard that as a social and cultural problem that we are, again, just beginning to have to think about.  And it’s not one that’s gonna sit well with many Americans.  We tend to think, “We’re Americans.  We’re entitled to whatever we can afford.”

HOPKINS:       (47:52) Right.  And do you think . . .  Where do you see that cultural change beginning?  Who do you think will drive it?

Card: What will change the way we think?

WALT:             I don’t know.  It’s . . .  I don’t know I . . .  But this gets sort of at some other questions about . . . about where revolutionary figures come from.  Revolutionary figures don’t always just come from either the ranks of, you know, sort of political activists.  They come from the arts.  They come from the scientific community.  They come from novelists.  You know I regard the Beatles as revolutionary figures in some respects, and they were musicians who came from Liverpool.  So I can’t really foresee who’s going to be . . . or who’s going to be the set of people that begin to sell this.  But I think it’s gonna be an . . . again, an issue that has to be confronted simply because there are some real limits.

HOPKINS:       (48:39) Now you spoke to this earlier and I wanna readdress it.  But you said that . . . that global . . . that American institutions in particular – and also that hinted a sense that global institutions as well in your viewpoint – aren’t ready to deal with these cultural, political shifts that are before us.  What needs to be done in your mind to ready ourselves for the challenges of globalization?

Card: Are global institutions up to the challenges of globalization?

WALT:             Well the set of global institutions that we have now are all sort of leftover from World War II.  And they were created for particular contexts.  _________ the World Bank, the United Nations,     (49:15) particularly the structure of the Security Council.  And everybody understands that these are kind of outmoded in terms of either their membership or their powers.  What no one has done yet is been able to devise sort of, “Here’s the blueprint for how we should fix all of them.”  I think the biggest issue there, of course, is you have to devise a set of institutions that are sufficiently inclusive of the new power centers, right?  A Security Council in which India is excluded in 2030 doesn’t make a whole lots of sense to me.  A Security Council in which Brazil is not a player, again, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  So one part of it is just reforming the overall global architecture.

                            (49:58) The second part of it, which I can only sort of point to – I can’t give you the answer – is that I think we’re also seeing a revolution for how information itself is handled.  This interview is a little bit part of that to the extent that this gets web cast and pod cast.  And until relatively recently, if you were wealthy and powerful, you also could have a lot of impact on information.  You could buy a newspaper.  You could buy a broadcasting network.  You could hire a publicist to make sure your ideas got on whoever did have a newspaper . . . things like that.  And if you didn’t have those things, your capacity to get heard was much less.  I think one of the consequences of the Internet and . . . and the gradual spreading out of sources of information is that people who don’t have a whole lot of resources can, by sort of sheer wit, or brilliance, or energy become a voice . . . become heard.  Not all of them, right?  The blo

How many people can the planet fit?

Question: When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out for you?

Transcript: I think there are several.  I think . . .  I’ve already alluded to a couple.  I think there is a sense . . . a growing sense that there are going to be limits to how many people you can keep on the planet, and how many people you can have living at a certain standard of living.  And I think the major constraint there is environmental.  The most obvious symptom of that is growing concern with global warming and climate change of various kinds; and the sense that we may not be able to stop that particular train before it goes off the cliff, you know if you imagine some of the more catastrophic scenarios.  Does that end all life on the planet?  No.   But does it have very severe consequences for different parts of the world?  I think that’s . . . that’s there.  I think we are going to see over the next 40 or 50 years a fundamental shift in the balance of power between what has been the sort of transatlantic access – Europe and America – for the last several hundred years shifting more towards Asia.  The United States will be a critical part of that too; but again India and China much more so.  I think third there is a . . . an issue of equality . . . an inequality on a global scale now which is compounded by the fact that increasingly, people who are further down the inequality scales are more and more aware of what their relative positions are.  And again, the advent of global communications and things like that is starting to make it much more obvious to people.  So we have at least, I think, a potential train wreck of different trends happening where India and China are developing.  Their development is gonna put greater environmental strains on the world.  They’re not gonna want to remain in an undeveloped condition, right?  The advanced countries like the United States are going to be concerned about what this all means.  And everyone is going to be more aware of all of this simultaneously.  So I think the potential for real trouble down the road is . . . is considerable.  And I’d add one final little problem in there is the capacity for small groups of people to cause large amounts of destruction has gone up for a hundred years or so.  You think about what you needed to kill 3,000 people in an afternoon.  Well if you wanted to do that in 1900, you pretty much had to be a government with an army.  But now of course 18 people or 19 people can fly planes in and kill 3,000 people in an afternoon or a morning.  And if you marry that up with either biological weapons or some kind of crude nuclear device, again you could imagine terrorist groups or other non-state actors having much more destructive impact.  And that’s, I think, gonna be something we tend to worry about a lot over the next few decades. 

Question: Is development at odds with environmentalism?

Transcript: I think there’s an obvious tradeoff.  We can’t have, you know, seven to eight billion people on the planet all of them living like Americans.  So one of the problems we’re going to have to address as a society is how do you convince people in the most advanced societies who are consuming most of the resources to . . . to essentially diminution I regard as not necessarily a diminution of their lifestyles, but a diminution of their ostentation.  Or to put it in really crude terms, how do you get more Americans and Europeans to have a much, much smaller carbon footprint, right?  Without thinking that that requires us all to live in tiny homes; that requires us all to ride bicycles to work or things like that; but rather can we be happy about a different lifestyle where maybe the 12,000 foot McMansion is not the American dream, and that we all accept that many more people are going to have to live in some parts of their lives in a much more constrained fashion.  I actually regard that as a social and cultural problem that we are, again, just beginning to have to think about.  And it’s not one that’s gonna sit well with many Americans.  We tend to think, “We’re Americans.  We’re entitled to whatever we can afford.”

Question: What will change the way we think?

Transcript: I don’t know.  It’s . . .  I don’t know I . . .  But this gets sort of at some other questions about . . . about where revolutionary figures come from.  Revolutionary figures don’t always just come from either the ranks of, you know, sort of political activists.  They come from the arts.  They come from the scientific community.  They come from novelists.  You know I regard the Beatles as revolutionary figures in some respects, and they were musicians who came from Liverpool.  So I can’t really foresee who’s going to be . . . or who’s going to be the set of people that begin to sell this.  But I think it’s gonna be an . . . again, an issue that has to be confronted simply because there are some real limits. 

Question: Are global institutions up to the challenges of globalization?

Transcript: Well the set of global institutions that we have now are all sort of leftover from World War II.  And they were created for particular contexts.  I’m thinking of the World Bank, the United Nations, particularly the structure of the Security Council.  And everybody understands that these are kind of outmoded in terms of either their membership or their powers.  What no one has done yet is been able to devise sort of, “Here’s the blueprint for how we should fix all of them.”  I think the biggest issue there, of course, is you have to devise a set of institutions that are sufficiently inclusive of the new power centers, right?  A Security Council in which India is excluded in 2030 doesn’t make a whole lots of sense to me.  A Security Council in which Brazil is not a player, again, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  So one part of it is just reforming the overall global architecture. The second part of it, which I can only sort of point to – I can’t give you the answer – is that I think we’re also seeing a revolution for how information itself is handled.  This interview is a little bit part of that to the extent that this gets web cast and pod cast.  And until relatively recently, if you were wealthy and powerful, you also could have a lot of impact on information.  You could buy a newspaper.  You could buy a broadcasting network.  You could hire a publicist to make sure your ideas got on whoever did have a newspaper . . . things like that.  And if you didn’t have those things, your capacity to get heard was much less.  I think one of the consequences of the Internet and . . . and the gradual spreading out of sources of information is that people who don’t have a whole lot of resources can, by sort of sheer wit, or brilliance, or energy become a voice . . . become heard.  Not all of them, right?  The blogosphere, for example, tends to be a few people everybody reads or many people read, and millions of people that nobody reads.  But still those other people aren’t necessarily in a wealthy, powerful . . . connected to wealthy or powerful institutions.  And I think over time we may see this world in which information has become a . . . much more democratized as well.  But where that’s going to take us I’m not sure.

Recorded on: 10/8/07

gosphere, for example, tends to be a few people everybody reads or many people read, and millions of people that nobody reads.  But still those other people aren’t necessarily in a wealthy, powerful . . . connected to wealthy or powerful institutions.  And I think over time we may see this world in which information has become a . . . much more democratized as well.  But where that’s going to take us I’m not sure.

Question: What forces have shaped humanity most?

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

Question: Who are we?

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

Question: What is human nature?

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

Question: Why did 9/11 happen?

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

Recorded on: 10/8/07