Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 3, Episode 1: John Mearsheimer, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy

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Season 3, Episode 1: John Mearsheimer, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm absolutely thrilled to have one of the world's leading experts on international relations and one of the most important voices in public affairs in the world today.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: With me, Professor John Miersheimer, also a good friend and somebody that I admire tremendously.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Professor Miersheimer has a very important new book, co-authored with Sebastian Rosado, who is a professor at University of Notre Dame, and Professor Miersheimer is the R.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Wendell Harrison distinguished professor at the University of Chicago.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure that most or all of you have been listening to John Miersheimer discuss the events around the war in Ukraine and now wars in the Middle East and so many other issues because he's been the go-to person for so much of the world in trying to make sense of the multiple crises that were in and the spread of violence.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: One of John's truly justifiably famous books is The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, which was written at the start of the new century.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: And in that book he said that it seems a little quiet now, but don't worry, or worry, maybe I should say, Great Power Politics will return.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the book's title that I'm going to discuss with you, John, also is about the tragedy of great power politics.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: And we seem to have a lot of tragedy to go around right now.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: But the new book that you've written is uh, of course, completely relevant for our current struggles and trials and tribulations globally.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: It it's about how states think.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the gist of the book is about whether state decision making is rational or irrational and what difference it makes.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: You started writing this during COVID, during the lockdown.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: So this is a book that you and uh Sebastian Rosado wrote, as I understand it, largely uh on Zoom together during the first couple of years of the pandemic, but it became absolutely pressingly relevant in trying to understand the Ukraine war.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe uh if we could start, you could explain the motivation for this book.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: You're known as our nation's leading realist thinker in international relations, so it would be good to help listeners understand how you fit into the story and your views about this, but what's the motivation of writing a book called How States Think?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there is a widespread perception in the academic world and in the policy world that states, in terms of their foreign policy behavior, are irrational or non-rational.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And our view was that if that is the case, most of our theories in international relations about how the world works are largely irrelevant because all of those theories are based on the rational actor assumption.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then we also said to ourselves that if you're a policymaker and you think that states are irrational, how can you possibly formulate some sort of coherent policy?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because you have no idea what other states are going to do, because they're basically irrational.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're wild and crazy.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And our intuition, in fact, our theories about how the world works, say that states are rational.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: So what we decided to do was try to figure out whether states are routinely rational or routinely non-rational.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And to do that, you have to have a definition of what rationality is, because that has to be the baseline that you then employ to look at past state behavior and determine whether or not states have been rational or not.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So what we do in the book is we explore what rationality is, and then we look at the historical record and we conclude, one might say unsurprisingly, that states are rational most of the time.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: This is not to say that they don't do irrational things.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And a good example of that would be the George W.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: That was clearly, in our opinion, a case of non-rationality.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll come to that to understand that.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: But in our current discourse, for example, it it has been said almost nonstop.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Putin, he's irrational.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: He thinks he's Peter the Great.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: He's aiming in an illusion to rebuild the Russian Empire.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: And your argument is no, this is not a serious way to think about Russia's decision making or President Putin's role in Russia's decision making.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: And if we think that way, we're ourselves going to be led down a very dangerous and inaccurate path in how we deal with global challenges.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, let me say a few words about Putin because there's no question that that's the case, that almost everybody rivets on these days.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Our basic argument is that whether a state is rational or not is largely a function of the theories that underpin the policy that a leader is pursuing.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And in other words, if a statesman or leader has a Kakamami theory that informs the state's policy, then that's not rational.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at the case of Vladimir Putin, this is a pretty straightforward case of Putin and virtually every Russian leader being deeply fearful of NATO expansion.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And when it was first announced in April 2008 that Ukraine was going to become part of NATO, the Russians made it unequivocally clear that this was unacceptable.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And Putin was in the lead in making that argument.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, NATO continued to move eastward and to attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the end result is a major crisis broke out in February 2014, and then you had the war where Putin or the Russians invaded Ukraine in February of 2022.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And our argument is that this is a straightforward case of balance of power politics.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's Realpolitik 101.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: What Putin was doing was balancing against the West.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: He was balancing against NATO.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's hardly surprising that this conflict has broken out.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: But many people who are in the war party, and of course, this includes huge numbers of people in the foreign policy establishment, believe that he is a mindless imperialist.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: And anybody who would dare to invade Ukraine for purposes of conquering it and incorporating it into a greater Russia has to be irrational.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not what he was doing, right?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: What he was doing was balancing against NATO.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a perfectly rational strategy.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we should have understood that from the get-go.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that we didn't is quite remarkable.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the pieces of evidence strongly in favor of your view is the memo that William Burns wrote in 2008 from his position as then U.S.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Ambassador to Russia.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: He's now the CIA director, but he wrote a memo back to the Secretary of State explaining it's it's not just Putin against the NATO expansion to Ukraine, it's the entire Russian political class.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's a complete opposite to the kind of claim that's made that there's some delusional leader.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: Burns spelled it out very clearly in a, I think the memo's entitled Nyet means Nyet.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: No means no.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now, interestingly, John, just to ask you about that, that memo would never have seen the light of day, most likely, but for WikiLeaks.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was leaked part of a treasure trove of foreign policy documents.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: So much of what states do, especially the U.S., I would say, and other big powers, is secret.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: So how does one assess the real decision making, what people really believe and how states are acting?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the truth is that it's very tricky to do in real time.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: And when you talk about Putin and exactly what his thinking was, it is not easy to put your finger on exactly what is going on.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's much easier to look at historical cases where you have a rich record and you can see what the documents and the memoirs and so forth and so on say about a particular set of leaders and what they were thinking.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I would argue in the Russian case, it's a pretty straightforward instance of a leader and his lieutenants, apropos of the Bill Burns memo, saying over and over how they thought about NATO expansion and what they were going to do.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's no mystery.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, it's it's actually quite remarkable.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: What's remarkable is that the West paid hardly any attention.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we could say no attention to what Putin and his lieutenants were saying.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: They completely ignored the Bill Burns memo.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I would imagine that once we get our hands on the historical documents, all the historical documents, we'll see that Burns was not the only one who was telling people at the top of the Bush administration that this was what was going to happen.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: So it does seem to me that Russia's response to this relentless push of the U.S.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: to have NATO, a U.S.-led military alliance, expand, was rational.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe to get to that, if you could explain what you and uh Sebastian Rosado mean by the term rational, because it is a loaded or a debated and unclear term.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: How do you operationalize that?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: And since we're talking also not about an individual decision or an individual person who could be rational or delusional and so forth, but rather a state.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: What is a state in this context specifically?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: And how would you assess whether the state is acting in a rational way?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Let me just quickly lay out Maya and Sebastian's definition of rationality and then answer your question head on.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Our argument is that rationality has two dimensions to it.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: First is the individual, and then there's the collectivity or the state.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because as you point out, you can't just focus on one individual because decisions are made by a handful of people.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: There's surely a leader like Putin, but Putin is surrounded by other people who have input.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a collective decision or a state decision.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And our argument is that at the individual level, what's imperative for rationality is for individuals to have a credible theory about how the world works that underpins their view of policy.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: We believe that human beings are fundamentally theoretical animals.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: We call this homo theoreticus.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: I like that, by the way.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that when you, Jeff Sachs, think about what economic policy should be in Washington.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: You think about the world as an individual in terms of theories about how the world works.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: You have these economic theories.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And when you look at international relations, you have political theories that inform your thinking.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: But that's just the individual level.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Then there's the collective level, right?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And our argument is you're often going to run into situations where you have different individuals who have different theories and therefore favor different policies.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: And to get a collective decision, to get a state policy, what you have to do in our story is have a deliberative decision-making process.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can't have a process that looks like the one before the Iraq War, where Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld suppressed all sorts of conflicting views or views that they didn't like.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: You have to have a robust and coherent decision-making process.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we argue in the Russian case that that's what happened.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: As you know, the conventional wisdom in the West is that Putin was isolated and that he made this decision to invade Ukraine all by himself.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And there were all these people who disagreed with him, but he exiled them or he didn't listen to them.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the fact that he was a lone ranger that makes this irrational.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: This is wrong, we believe.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, to go back to the Bill Burns memo, the Bill Burns memo makes it clear that Putin was not a loner here, that virtually everybody at the top of the foreign policy establishment in Russia agreed with Putin about NATO expansion.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: So our argument is at the individual level, what you had is a set of Russian leaders, including Putin, of course, who were operating on the basis of balance of power theory, right?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore had a credible policy, right?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: And at the collective level, they agreed on what had to be done to deal with the problem.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: They believed to a person, I think, that, and the Bill Burns memo confirms this, that NATO expansion into Ukraine had to be stopped.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the end result is that on February 24th, 2022, we got a war.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I think one of the telling documents, again, that really supports uh your view is the readout or even the it's almost uh verbatim minutes of the Russian Security Council meeting.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's February 21st, 2022, that basically it's a very organized meeting.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: And President Putin lays out the issue.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: What shall we do, colleagues?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and then he calls on Lavrov, the foreign minister, and then he calls on uh other experts, then he calls on uh people from the regions.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: And you get a full readout.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: We very rarely get that from the United States uh documents because these things are kept secret.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think the Russians uh wanted this uh to be understood, but it's actually a very orderly deliberation, and it obviously reflects a lot of orderly processes that repeated it.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's not one person, it's not President Putin pounding the table and saying, we must do this.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Quite the contrary.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Lavrov explains we made this uh approach to the U.S., but they sent back a document on such and such date saying they would not negotiate over NATO, and then the next one gives another answer, the next one gives another answer, and then the meeting is summed up by the president.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a very deliberative, orderly process that no doubt you get the feel reflects a lot of orderly attention to high-stakes issues, but actually through a deliberative process.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Jeff, can I just jump in here and reflect on one of the insights from our book?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people believe that when it comes to collective decision making, when you're at the state level, there's a difference between how authoritarian states and democracies operate.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: And almost everybody we talk to in the West believes that democracies believe in deliberation.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: But authoritarian states are the opposite.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: And what you have is one leader who runs roughshod over everybody else.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this, of course, fits with the conventional wisdom on Putin.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't listen to anybody, he decides what to do, and then anybody who disagrees gets sent to the gulag, and anybody who agrees gets promoted.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: So you have all these yes men and yes women who are operating under him.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: This is the way many people in the West think.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Our view in looking at all these cases, and we looked at 14 cases in great detail, is that there's no difference between authoritarian states and democracies.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: In both cases, both sets of cases, you get a small number of people at the very top who make collective decisions.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: And what you discover in almost every case is when people are trying to formulate policies about grand strategy or how to deal with a particular crisis, what you see is that nobody, including the leader, is really sure what to do.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: And they're kind of searching around in the dark, trying to figure out what the best policy is.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, leaders are prone to listen to their lieutenants about what might be a really good idea.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you take Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel today, whatever you think of Benjamin Netanyahu, he is in real trouble.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: The Israelis are in real trouble, and they're trying to figure out how to deal with Hamas.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: I am absolutely certain that Netanyahu is listening to anybody who he thinks might have a good idea about how to proceed.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: And someone like Naftali Bennett, who he might have terrible relations with otherwise, is a very smart man, and I'm sure that someone like Netanyahu will listen to Bennett just because Netanyahu is not sure what to do, and if Bennett has a good idea, he'll take that good idea and run with it.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: So my bottom line here is I don't think that Putin's behavior is any different in this authoritarian state, which Russia is, than would be the case if Russia were a democracy.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: You in each case have a small number of people at the top who make decisions and have a vested interest across the board in listening to others' ideas.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think that really comports with my perception also of China, which is very institutionalized, very bureaucratic.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's been an administrative state for 2,000 years, with a lot of discussion, a lot of deliberation, not one person calling any shots at all, but actually really collective decision-making in exactly that way.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder, in a way, there is an irony that sometimes happens in our democracy.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: I have a feeling, uh, let me ask you about this.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, many of the decisions that are taken are taken absolutely against or with no interest in American public opinion, though, in our, you know, self-assessment, democracy also means reflecting the will of the people.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: But on many of these issues, the people are not asked, they're told, or they're ignored.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: But often it happens that to get some decision made in foreign policy in our ostensibly public-driven process, the public is lied to.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: Lied to about the real situation on the battlefield or lied to about the real reason for going to war and so forth.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so maybe there's even more secrecy and less deliberation in the democratic setting in some cases, because you don't speak the truth.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: The lead up to the Iraq war was a desire of a small group to have a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein on pretextual reasons that turned out to be completely false, maybe even more false than they believed.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: But certainly they were not very much interested in the evidence that they were purporting to uh give to the American people.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a deception.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: And because of the deception, I'm just wondering whether maybe the deliberation is even cut short in such contexts because too much talk, too much deliberation lets too much of the public in, and they didn't want to let the public in.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, let me directly address this issue, which I've spent a lot of time thinking about.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, in the book that Sebastian and I have written on how states think, what we discovered is that public opinion, what the public thinks, domestic politics, and so forth and so on, matters hardly at all in the decision-making process.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: A small number of elites get together and they make the decision.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: We were actually surprised by this finding.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't go in thinking that this was a question we should address, how much domestic politics matters.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: But we discovered in looking at 14 cases and looking in a cursory way at a lot of other cases, that domestic politics doesn't matter.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's point one.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's a stunning finding and a very important one.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: And again, it wasn't one that we went into the book asking about.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Second point is that if you are in a democracy and you make a particular decision, you have to sell it to the public.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's no question about that.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's not as necessary in an autocracy.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's not to say it's completely unnecessary, because public opinion does matter somewhat, but it's definitely necessary in a democracy.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I wrote an earlier Book called Why Leaders Lie.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the principal finding in that book is that leaders do not lie very much to other leaders, and they lie mainly to their publics.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: And you get more lying in democracies than in autocracies.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: There you go.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: There you go.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: I believe that.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: I really believe that.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think sometimes you just feel it's a nonstop narrative and deception.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: One of the uh senior people in the Biden administration on another issue, and I don't want to say who and what and what the context was, but I said, well, you know, have you weighed in on this?
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: And they said, no, only the spin guys in the White House have any role in that right now.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's all about narrative, how you pitch it, not what the substance is.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: This was, you know, is there really that deliberation over that particular issue?
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: And there was very little, actually.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, when I wrote Why Leaders Lie, and I would go around the country and I would tell people that leaders do not lie much to each other.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: People found that hard to believe, right?
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then when I said that leaders in democracies are especially prone to lying to their publics, people found that hard to believe.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: But I would just say to you, the reason that people in democracies or the people inside a country are easy to lie to is because those people tend to trust their government.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because after all, it is your government.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: You expect them to protect you.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: They're your leaders.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: So they're primed to be deceived.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: When you're dealing with foreign leaders, they don't trust each other to begin with.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: We don't trust Putin.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: Putin doesn't trust us.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this goes back to 2000 when he took power, right?
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just now in 2023.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: So given that there's not much trust to begin with, you really can't get away with lying at the international level like you can at the domestic level.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's really something.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you led the discussion of this, and I think the world is really uh in your debt about the rationality of Russia's reaction to NATO enlargement.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: But let me ask you about the flip side, and you cover it in the book in part, the rationality of the U.S.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: decision to expand NATO.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it fits your description that, especially when Clinton made the original key decisions after a lot of internal debate in the Clinton administration about whether there should be an enlargement of NATO after all the Soviet Union, which was the original reason for NATO, no longer existed.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: Russia was supposedly a friend, and uh many people felt, and most famously the great scholar, diplomat, historian George Kennan, why stir up things with NATO enlargement when we're just in a fragile way trying to establish normalcy of relations?
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: But Clinton went ahead and decided that NATO would enlarge.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: And during his administration, it was originally to three countries of Central Europe: Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: How do you assess that?
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then was it rational in 2008 and was it done rationally by George Bush Jr.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: at that point to continue the push of NATO to Ukraine and to Georgia, given what Bill Burns and others were saying that this is going to be extraordinarily dangerous?
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: Does that fit the rationality criteria?
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let me start by going back to the 1990s, then we can talk about the 2008 decision in light of the Burns memo.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: In the 1990s, and most people have forgotten this, there was a huge battle inside the country, and certainly inside the Clinton administration, on whether to expand NATO.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it was basically a battle between realists on one side and liberals on the other side.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the realists, and there were many of them, including the Secretary of Defense, Bill Perry, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, George Kennan, as you said, and others, who had what I would call a realist set of theories that informed their view of the policy of NATO expansion.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: And they argued that if you expand NATO eastward and you have an open door policy, which means you're going to continue expanding NATO, this is going to blow up in your face.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: But no other third party, in this case Russia, has any say.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: So if NATO and Ukraine are discussing NATO, the open door policy says none of Russia's business.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Which is in effect saying that Russia's security concerns don't matter at all.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: It just doesn't matter.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: The argument is Ukraine has a right to pursue any foreign policy it wants, regardless of what the effect is on Russia.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is not a smart way of thinking about how to do foreign policy.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: Nevertheless, in the 1990s, there were lots of people who wanted to expand NATO.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: And these were the liberals, right?
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: And they believed that balance of power politics was basically dead.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: They also believed the Russians were so weak that it was not necessary to contain Russia.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's very important to understand that NATO expansion was initially not designed to contain Russia because Russia was a basket case, as you know much better than I do in the 1990s.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: You didn't have to contain it.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: What they wanted to do, the liberals, who carried the day, was they wanted to take the various institutions in Western Europe, like the EU and NATO, and spread them eastward.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they wanted to make Eastern Europe look like Western Europe.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted to create a giant zone of peace, a giant zone of peace, prosperity, and happiness.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the liberal thinking.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: But again, the realists, people like Kenan and Bill Perry, said that, you know, this is going to bite you in the hiney in the long term because the Russians are not going to be happy with NATO expansion.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, the liberals carried the day, and once the train left the station, it was impossible to stop it.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: So not only did you have the 1990 tranche of expansion that you described under the Clinton administration, in 2004 you had an even bigger tranche.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: Then in 2008.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: That was seven countries, just to remind people, the three Baltic states, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's getting pretty close to Russia.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you got the Baltic states, you have the Black Sea states of Romania and Bulgaria getting close.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: But Ukraine, it was in 2008 when they said, NATO said, that Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: And this, of course, is where the Russians drew a red line.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: They said, this is not happening.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: We couldn't do enough to stop the previous ones.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: The previous ones mattered, but not that much.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: This one really matters because Ukraine is a piece of real estate that is of prime strategic importance to the Russians.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the Russians were just not going to let that happen.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: So your question, Jeff, is was it rational for the Bush administration to push for NATO expansion?
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: I would argue it was.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's no question that the Burns memo said the Russians were going to resist.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: But the Russians had said they were adamantly opposed to the 1999 expansion, they were adamantly opposed to the 2004 expansion, and we just shoved it down their throat.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I believed that the Bush administration and subsequent administrations thought that, yeah, the Russians are not happy, Burns is correct, but it doesn't matter because we're the United States, we're super powerful, and we're going to shove it down their throat.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's one dimension of the argument.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: The other dimension is that you had a number of people, and I would put Mike McFall, who was the ambassador to Moscow in 2014, when the crisis broke out.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: You had people like Mike McFall who believed that the Russians would ultimately understand that the United States was a benign hegemon.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: Mike believes that the United States is a benign hegemon.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: He believed that we're not a threat to Russia and that Russia should understand that.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time he believed that they would understand it.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: So you had these two logic at place that led us to pursue this foolish policy.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, I just was with a very senior diplomat, again, I don't I don't want to mention names, who was discussing with a senior American diplomat, one of the most important.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the American official said, How do we convince to this day, after this war has been raging, how do we convince Russia that NATO is not a threat?
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: And you just feel, are you kidding?
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: But this comes to a question for me because I think it's a very strong point of the book that I like, but also a question, Mark, that I also have.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: You and Sebastian Rosado define rationality in a very good way that I like, which is that there's a deliberative process and that decisions are based on a credible or reasonable theory of the world.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: And this means that their rationality is not defined by some particular standard of exactly how the world works.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: The world's uh uncertain, there are different theories and so on.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: And your standard of rationality is rather loose and I think rather appropriate, frankly.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a very clever way to define this, which is that it's the process and that you're in touch with reason.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: Now, having said that, there are better theories of the world and worse theories of the world.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: And if you were looking back in the 1990s during the Clinton decision about NATO enlargement, I would have gone with uh George Kennan as a much wiser person than uh Madeline Albright or uh Dick Holbrook, who were pushing the NATO enlargement.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: And similarly with Bill Perry, who was uh Clinton's defense secretary, was aghast at NATO enlargement.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: He thought about resigning in protest.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: He just thought it was a terrible, terrible idea.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: So you define the decision in in the 1990s as rational because it was deliberative, there was a debate, there was a plausible theory, it was this uh liberal hegemonic theory.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: It fits, and I would subscribe to that.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: In 2008, now you've explained to me how you could consider this rational, because the rational theory at this point is: well, the Russians don't like it, but they haven't done anything the first two rounds, so that's a plausible theory of the world.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: But I would say it's a kind of reckless approach in 2008.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember being called by a very senior European uh at the time saying, What is your president doing?
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, are you kidding?
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: To Ukraine no less?
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: So there was an added step at that point that made it really willfully provocative.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: Then in February 2014, you have pointed out, I completely concur with you, that the U.S.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: participated actively in a coup against a Ukrainian pro-Russian president who wanted neutrality for Ukraine.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: At what point does the decision making become irrational in your view, if at all?
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: Or is this this move to war rationality all the way, but just a bad approach?
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, how would you characterize in this spectrum of rational and irrational the progression of U.S.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: policy making?
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: Let me reinforce your argument and then try to counter it.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: To reinforce it, you want to remember that in April 2008 at the Bucharest Summit, when we said Ukraine would become part of NATO, we also said Georgia would become part of NATO.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: So April 2008, we say Georgia and Ukraine become part of NATO.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: In August of 2008, a few months later, a war breaks out between Georgia and Russia.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that war is precipitated by, in large part, by the announcement that Georgia will become part of NATO.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: The Russians reinforces your argument.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: You would sort of say to yourself, they've now seen that the Russians are serious.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_00: Shouldn't they back off?
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now let me cut in the other direction.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think that if you go back to when the war broke out on February 24th, 2022, the vast majority of people were shocked that we had a war in Europe.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: The vast majority of people did not believe that this could happen.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's just unthinkable.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe that we did not think that there would be a war.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: We wouldn't have over Ukraine what happened over Georgia.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we just thought we could shove NATO expansion down their throat.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: And we were wrong, of course, but it's easy in retrospect to say we were wrong.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: Beforehand, there were lots of people who thought we would get away with it, right?
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not you.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: No, not me.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: I agree with that.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: I agree with that, right?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because you knew already in 2014 this was extraordinarily reckless and dangerous.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm just saying that the argument that we end up making in the book, which in a tricky argument, is we believe, the two of us, that we have a set of theories, realist theories about how the world works that we think are the best theories.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why we were opposed to NATO expansion, certainly into Ukraine.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: But the fact is, as you know, as an economist, there are always a number of competing theories out there, and separating them and saying which one is the best and convincing other people of that is very difficult to do.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't want to end up in a situation where you say, my theory is the only correct theory, and if you act according to my theory, you develop a policy that's based on my theory, it's rational.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: And if you develop a policy that's based on other people's theories, which are in the marketplace and have a lot of cachet, they're irrational.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: You kind of don't want to go down that road.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: But it it is interesting.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: There are two different axes we could think about the rational versus irrational and the smart versus dumb, uh, or or the reckless versus prudent.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, by 2021, it wasn't so hard to figure out that NATO enlargement was an aggravant that could be a disaster.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: And yet to that point, the U.S.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: wouldn't pull back and couldn't pull back.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: And just to say uh personally, John, when Putin put on the table on December 17th, 2021, a draft US-Russia security agreement that was really based on two ideas.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: One, it had a lot in it that we would never accept, you know, rolling back of NATO, but it was basically no more NATO enlargement, and you don't get to put the missiles where you want to put them near our borders.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: And we should agree on those two premises.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: I called the White House and I begged, you know, there's a lot in there.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: Negotiate.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: Negotiate over NATO.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I was told, no, no, we're not gonna have a war over that.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's not about to happen.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: I said, if it's not about to happen, say it.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: Don't don't allow this to explode into a war.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: And they went right ahead and formally delivered to Russia the view that NATO enlargement is none of your business.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I would call that at that point irrational, but if you want to call it rational, I'd call it exceedingly dumb and imprudent.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it is a different axis of evaluation.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: But by December 2021, the United States could have avoided this war but chose not to.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but just again, to reinforce your point, the war breaks out in February 2022, and then shortly thereafter, negotiations are taking place between the Ukrainians and the Russians, and Putin and Zelensky are deeply involved.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it looks in March and early April of 2022 like they're gonna reach a deal that Zelensky and Putin will be able to put an end to the war.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the Americans mainly, but also the British, move in, scotch the negotiations, tell Zelensky to walk away, and the end result is the war is continuing to this day, and it's gonna be a total disaster for Ukraine.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: It is already a total disaster for Ukraine.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's just horrible what's happened to Ukraine, and it's gonna be a disaster for the United States as well, because it's gonna be a major foreign policy defeat.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: So one could, just to reinforce your point, argue that we were remarkably foolish in the run-up to the war and in the immediate aftermath of the start of the war, right?
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: And one might even argue that that's not rational.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: I I've not thought long and hard about this, and it's just not clear enough what exactly happened before the war started, you know, in December, January before the war started, for me to make a firm decision on whether this was rational or not.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: I just take it a step further, Jeff.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think one could make the argument.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we don't have enough data now to know for sure that we provoked the Russians, that we thought we could beat them.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you talked about the December 17th letter that the Russians sent to NATO and to President Biden.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's really quite remarkable the extent to which we just dismiss this letter.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely the Russians were trying to avoid a war, and we just dismissed it.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: Then, as I said, you had negotiations after the war started.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: You would have thought that we would have moved in and done everything we could to work with the Ukrainians and the Russians to shut this one down.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, we do exactly the opposite.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: Were we thinking that a war wouldn't be such a bad thing because we could actually beat the Russians?
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just an argument that they're so weak that they can't resist NATO expansion.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: This is an argument that they're so weak.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: And with economic sanctions is the magic weapon, right, we can bring them to their knees.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: So there's no reason to negotiate.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: That is, you know, another theory that one could say plausible or not.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: I found it dubious in general because of my long experience watching sanctions not work.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: But the view was that cutting Russia off from the international or the dollar banking system, the so-called SWIFT clearance system, was the nuclear sanction, not nuclear in the literal sense, but that it was so devastating it would bring the Russian economy to its knees.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think they had theories, and maybe in fact they, yes, we'll beat them now.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: They'll they're in our trap.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it was one miscalculation after another in that way, or a game of chicken that they'll never dare to do it, given the threats that they face.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: And just again, to reinforce your argument, the war starts, negotiations in Istanbul fail.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: And over the course of 2022, the Ukrainians score a number of important tactical victories against the Russians in Kharkiv and in Hirsan.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: And General Milley, in the fall of that year, 2022, says this is the high water mark for the Ukrainians.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's time to try to cut a deal, because this is the best the Ukrainians are going to get now.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: And again, the administration scotches any talk of negotiations, and they encourage the Ukrainians to continue the war.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_00: So you really do have a sense looking at this, and again, these are preliminary judgments because we don't have a whole heck of a lot of data.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: But you really do have the sense that we thought a war wouldn't be the end of the world, the Russians, because we could beat them.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then once the war happens, uh we don't want to shut it down because we think we can beat them again.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, that all turns around this year, 2023.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: Let me uh in our closing minutes, I'd love, of course, to talk hours with you, and people would love to listen uh as they do to hours of your thoughts on this, but to turn to a point that's not really so much part of this book, and it's a a major question that.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: That you and I have discussed and debated to some extent, and that's where is diplomacy in all of this?
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, most of the decisions you analyze are one-sided decisions.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: A government takes an action anticipating rightly or wrongly the actions of others, but there's very little diplomacy in your treatment in the sense of engagement with the other side to shape the outcomes or to shape the decisions.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: And this comes back to your justly famous book that I have a problem with called The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, because it just doesn't sit right with me that we accept that a system is tragic, because it could be ultimately tragic, and we need to, in my opinion, find the solution to the tragedy, not accept the tragic outcome.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: And to explain to the readers, your underlying theory is that in our world in which there is no higher political authority than nation states, nation states are inherently feeling extremely vulnerable about their survival, about the threats from others, and that great powers are therefore inevitably jostling with each other.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: And because of this intense struggle for survival that they feel and that they're rationally acting on, there's very little trust, very little scope for diplomacy, and real chance for, quote, rational war breaking out on both sides, because that's the rational thing to do with a foe which is uh also thinking rationally.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, it brings to mind the famous prisoner's dilemma where the two sides end up being ultimately utterly non-cooperative, because that's the strategy that is rational.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, if you can't bind the other side, and you can't bind the other side in international affairs.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so, just to put it uh in perhaps too long-winded a way, your vision in that earlier book, and it's not so much explicit in how states think, but it is in the cases, the decision-making is very much within the state, not on the basis of either international institutions like the UN or the Security Council of the United Nations, or even in bilateral or multilateral diplomacy of other kinds to shape the environment, but rather it is a struggle, high risk, high stakes, and ultimately prone to tragedy.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I wanted to ask you about that.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a place for diplomacy?
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: Is there such a thing as peacemaking for two potentially belligerent foes, and is there ultimately a solution to this tragic risk, especially in a nuclear age?
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, my argument, Jeff, is you described it, is that great powers operate in a fundamentally competitive world.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: They compete with each other for power, and they have no choice because, as you said, there is no higher authority that can rescue them if they get into trouble.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you dial 911 in the international system, there's nobody at the other end.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: And in a world like that, you want to be really powerful, because if you're really powerful, then your chances of surviving are great.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you're weak in that kind of world, to go to the Chinese case, you suffer the century of national humiliation.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: So there are really powerful incentives for each state to be super powerful, but of course, it's a zero-sum game and therefore very competitive.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the question that you ask is where's the room for cooperation?
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: Where's the room for diplomacy in there?
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I actually believe there is a lot of room for diplomacy, and there is even room for cooperation in this fundamentally competitive world.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: The fact is that you can have two great powers that compete with each other that also have mutual interests.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_00: To give you an example, during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union obviously competed with each other fiercely for security, but they oftentimes cooperated.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the best example is nuclear proliferation.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: They got together mainly starting in the late 60s and put together a set of institutions, we used to call it the proliferation regime, that was designed to shut down proliferation, because both the United States and the Soviet Union had a vested interest in preventing proliferation.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: So they cooperated, and that meant they had to do a lot of diplomacy.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: So there is room for diplomacy.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: To take the present situation with regard to China and the United States, look, there's going to be a lot of economic cooperation between China and its neighbors and China and the United States moving forward.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: Furthermore, they're going to have a vested interest in dealing with things like climate problems, uh, dealing with proliferation, and so forth and so on.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: So there will be ample room for cooperation and diplomacy.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: But nevertheless, it's very important to understand that this cooperation takes place underneath the shadow of competition.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that is a very dangerous competition.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_00: And my argument, which you don't like, and I fully understand, is that there's no escaping this tragedy.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_00: We're stuck in an iron cage.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: And again, it's because there's no higher authority that can save states if they get into trouble.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: John, we're at the end of the hour.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to let you have the last word on that, but I'm going to look forward to continuing the discussion.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: Your analysis is scintillating and fascinating and crucial.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_01: I can also add that back when the tragedy of uh great power politics appeared, which is 2001, am I correct?
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: Or 2002?
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: 2001.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: 2001.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: At that point, there was very little tension between the U.S.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: and China.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you write in the book, wait a minute, as China rises, the tension will rise.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: So you also predicted that very, very clearly.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: And this is something to note, you know, as a description.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: I would look at it and say, no, why do we need tension?
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: We're friends, you know, we're going to cooperate.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: But you rightly called it, although I find it tragic and extremely worrisome.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: But we're going to leave it at that at the moment.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_01: Your new book with Sebastian Rosado, How States Think, is really a must-read for everybody that is interested in global affairs.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's everybody now, because uh we are in the midst of very tumultuous and very important times.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: And we're looking to you, John, for your wisdom and your ideas and your thoughts.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to thank you so much for being with us today on Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: My pleasure, Jeff, and thank you very much for having me on.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: I enjoyed it.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: Congratulations on the new book.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll be talking soon.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: You're welcome.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.