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Council on Foreign Relations
New York, N.Y.

NICHOLAS KRISTOF: Can we have your attention? Thank you. We'd like to welcome you to this luncheon conversation about moral choices and foreign policy and also a discussion, although nobody will be quizzed about its content, of The Power Game, which is Joe's excellent new book. I'm sure you know Joe's background. He is one of those philosopher kings at the nexus of academia and government in foreign affairs. He was also my professor many years ago in [inaudible] at Harvard, and I must say that when I encountered this book last fall I was— you know, I was heading off on some trip overseas and I thought, well, you know, maybe I'll learn something about nuclear proliferation or interagency cooperation and I took it along on some trip and then just found myself— I confess a little bit to my surprise— just riveted to the story itself, and it's very much of gray and green kind of a yarn about power and people, and the characters I think are incredibly well-drawn.

The best blurb on it actually comes from [Council on Foreign Relations President] Richard Haass, and I see some of you have read it. It's that everyone knows that Joe Nye is an expert on nuclear proliferation, but who knew that he is also an authority on fly fishing, bureaucratic infighting, and— I hope you are sitting down— sex. [Laughter]

So we thought we would ask Joe to read aloud some parts. [Laughter] Let me just start by asking a few questions that arise out of the book and about foreign policy in these subjects and then we'll switch it over to you and make a conversation. Maybe the first thing that struck me, and this arises directly out of the book, is that of the characters [who] were actually in government and it's principally— it's kind of the narrator, [who] is a senior State Department official who comes out of academia and loves fly fishing and [inaudible].

And, but all the officials— you are either career officials or elected officials— actually kind of come across as total jerks, and, I mean, I tend to think that, in fact, it's almost the reverse; that the public impression of officials is kind of exaggerated as them as being kind of devious and often malevolent people, and in fact they often tend to be better and more decent then we expect. But I must say reading your book I think, well, maybe they are all jerks. So is the jerk-to-good-guy proportion ratio greater in government than, say, in this room? [Laughter]

JOSEPH NYE: Oh, now that's a tough question. [Laughter] I think the type of people who wind up going into policy-making roles, particularly if they are going to be successful, have to have a taste for power and different people [inaudible] on where— how much they enjoy power and want to use it. And one of the characters in the book decides— he's asked to go and join the government he says, "No," and the person who asked him said, "You're one of the most intelligent people about the use of power in this whole academic department." He says, "Yes, but I know the difference between studying fire and playing with it."

And I think the— it's true that people who go into these roles are trying to keep a balance. I mean, most of them have good intentions. The problem is how easy it is to confuse your own agenda and your own ego and your own stakes with the public agenda that you're trying to promote. And what makes it difficult is that if you try to be perfectly straightforward and do no bureaucratic games-playing, you're going to lose. In other words, you can't take every issue to the president, which means you have to sort of fight the battle some things at levels below that, and if you say, "I'm not going to dirty my hands or demean myself by fighting at that level," guess what? You have clean hands and you're irrelevant. You know, like they said about Emmanuel Kant. You know, his hands were so clean and had no grasp on anything. [Laughter]

And so the— you have to be something of the utilitarian, a consequentialist, to say, "I want to get thing done," but as you then get into this game, you have to ask yourself, "Am I playing this game because it's really what I need to do for the public, or is it also because I like winning in my own right?" And I think there is a tendency very often for people to get those two things confused. Part of what I am trying to do in this book was to illustrate what it's like to be in that situation where you can't— you don't have the luxury of pure, clean hands, but it is extraordinarily important to keep your moral compass as you play these games so that you don't get the two things confused. And that really is what I was trying to get across; not that the people were jerks, but a lot of them did get seduced by power and became jerks.

KRISTOF: The narrator, though— I mean, he gets in trouble partly because he loses his moral compass and becomes a jerk, but also partly in a sense because he tries to do the right thing and his— it's precisely in a sense his effort to do the right thing, to save lives, that ends up creating a mess that ends up costing lives. And I wonder— I mean, to the extent that in recent years there has been much more of an emphasis on, you know, bringing values and moral goals into foreign policy. I mean, are you suggesting that's a mistake?

NYE: Well, some of the way people talk about moral values and moral clarity in foreign policy is just good intentions. If I'm for liberty, if I'm for democracy, if I'm for whatever great value, then everything that follows must be good because it's good intentions. I argue that, in fact, when you judge morality of actions not just in foreign policy generally, you usually look at it in three dimensions. We look at people's intention, we look at the means that they choose, and we look at the consequences. And those three dimensions are not just incidental. If you look at the classic tradition of just-war theory, you have to have right intent, you have to— proportional means, and you have to have a high probability of success or good consequences. And that's what we use to judge.

Now, if you look at some of the actions we've taking in foreign policy which are moral, people often say there is a clarion call about good intentions. Well, guess what? If you used inappropriate means and you have bad consequences, that's not moral. I mean, that's one-dimensional morality to judge just on intentions. And I think a lot of the discussion about morality in foreign policy that goes on in the press today or in the foreign— maybe even in the Council on Foreign Relations tends to be somewhat one-dimensional in the way it thinks about morality, and it has to be three-dimensional.

KRISTOF: If one looks at humanitarian intervention scenarios where there is no particular U.S. interest involved, then I'd say traditionally that tended to be more of interest on the left; that liberals tended to be— you know, to want to do good elsewhere and save lives and this kind of thing. And these days, the Republican Party is to some degree moving from, you know, a hard-eye, kind of realist view to an element of kind of [inaudible] sentimentality, as well as— and wanting to do good in places. I mean, is the— do you think that that reflects a broadening of foreign policy in general to try to have a more values-based foreign policy, or are the Republicans replacing Democrats in that respect?

NYE: Well, I think there have been changes in the Republican constituency and as the religious right has gotten more important inside the party, that first dimension of intentions or declaratory ideals has become more important. But there is— the Republican Party, like the country as a whole, is a coalition of political forces and if you look at, for example, going into Iraq, you really had three very different strands. You had one strand which was you might call the traditional Jacksonian-American nationalist strand, which would be [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld and [Vice President Dick] Cheney. You know, we have been attacked, we will respond with force to deter anybody in the future from ever doing it, whether this guy did it or not.

And then there was another strand, which was the strand that said— you might call it the traditional Republican-realist strand, which probably would be represented by [former Secretary of State] Colin Powell, which is the view that we— if there are weapons of mass destruction here and there's been violations of U.N. resolutions and this is a threat to balance in the region and balance of power in the world, we are fully justified in using force.

And then the third stand was the neoconservative strand, of which [former Deputy Secretary of Defense and World Bank President-designate] Paul Wolfowitz would be the clearest example, which is really in a long tradition in American foreign policy; the tradition that comes down through [former President] Woodrow Wilson, except they're Wilsonians of the right. They truncate Wilsonianism. Wilson, you remember, wanted to promote democracy, but he also want to build institutions and do it with others. The neoconservatives tended to drop the second half of the message, but the emphasis on morality and a moral purpose was clearly there in their mind.

What's interesting is, with the aftermath of the Iraq war, when it turns out that the argument about weapons of mass destruction, which was the— if you want, the Republican realist argument turned out not to have much substance and when the argument that Saddam had been involved in the attack on 9/11, therefore the retribution was a little bit— unlike Afghanistan— was a little bit indirect, that sort of undercut some of that strand and that has led the president, I think, to focus very heavily on the neoconservative strand and not only the president, but also [Secretary of State] Condi Rice.

If you compare Condi's statements, for example, in her very good speech in Paris which I happen to like, or the president's second inaugural, and you compare that to what the president said in the 2000 election about we don't want foreign policy as social work, no more nation-building, no more of these irrelevant interventions, and Condi's article in our famous magazine, Foreign Affairs, which is, "We are going to be realists," it's amazing. It's a 180-degree turn, so just within the Republican coalition, there has been a tremendous change and I think part of that change comes from the importance of the religious constituency in the party, but I think the large part of that is also come from the experience of Iraq and that two out of the three arguments were shot down. You know, if you have three horses and two of your horses are shot out from under you, you ride the last horse.

KRISTOF: Your character— the narrator's most heroic quality is probably his willingness to leak to journalists. [Laughter]

NYE: Big mistake.

KRISTOF: But it all revolves around a commando assault on a nuclear facility in Pakistan and, I mean that— you were very much involved in those kinds of decisions about counties like Pakistan; for example, in North Korea. Looking back, those counties— I mean, Pakistan is now a formal nuclear power. North Korea probably has, say, maybe eight nuclear weapons as opposed to maybe one or two when you entered the Defense Department as assistant secretary. Shouldn't we have used some kind of military force against either country when we had the chance to limit the damage?

NYE: It's an interesting question. In fact, the first one— the question of Pakistan is what also helped me write this book— that prompted me. As I was going out of the [former President Jimmy] Carter administration, I was asked to write an informal memo of what are the pros and cons of using force to stop the Pakistan nuclear program, because we knew at that time that they were building nuclear weapons. It wasn't— I mean, they may have said it was peaceful, but we had pretty good evidence.

And I looked pretty hard at it and said, you know, "It's— here are the pros and here are the cons. It may be difficult to make sure you are going to have the results you want. There are too many moving pieces. I am not sure you can get it all. It's not clear whether you can— when you really will be able to do this effectively." You also remember this is also Pakistan just at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, so as in many foreign-policy issues, we had more than one stake at risk and if you had really— if you'd tried for a surgical strike, if it wasn't surgical, you didn't get it all, and you wound up losing Pakistan in terms of ability to deal with Afghanistan. I think the memo that I [wrote] said it's too hard. As we now discover the role of [Pakistani nuclear scientist] A. Q. Khan and the spreading of the disease, I sometimes wondered about this. When I concocted the plot of the novel, which is that the CIA discovers that Pakistan is about to send nuclear weapons to Iran and it mounts an operation to stop it, that was over 10 years ago when I thought of that plot. Then I kept worrying that fact was overtaking my fiction. But I have wondered many times whether I came to the right conclusion in that memo.

On the North Korean case, we actually came, I think, fairly close to war in ‘94 and before Jimmy Carter went in— I guess it was done June or July— June of ‘94. And it— again, it's very hard to know exactly how you replay these things, but if we had had a strike then, we would have destroyed the Yongbyon nuclear reprocessing plant and the reactors that go with it. We probably would not have got the two bombs where the plutonium that the North Koreans had stolen under the [George H.W.] Bush I administration. I mean, they built and secreted away. We weren't that sure where that was. We could identify where the reprocessing was, which would have brought their number up from two [nuclear weapons] to eight or more. And now, you now, they've dispersed that and you don't— you can't be sure of what you are attacking and where.

The question is if we had used force to try to destroy that plant, the North Koreans said they would retaliate against South Korea. They had Seoul. And we found very quickly that our allies in Seoul and Tokyo, while they talked tough when it was an abstract question, the closer we got to actually doing something the more they became very antsy about it, and it's not clear we would have had full support. So one of the questions is, you might have bought yourself five years, a decade, by an attack. You might also have ruptured the alliance structure that you were trying to build in East Asia. Though there was a to and fro, in a sense we never quite had to face the final part of that because Jimmy Carter essentially thrust himself into it and we reached the framework agreement, which looked like a good solution until we discovered late in the game that the North Koreans were probably cheating on that. So it— on the North Korean one, I've sometimes wondered if that— you know, it was a hard call, but maybe some use of force might have been better. But, again, these are very hard choices that you have to make.

KRISTOF: And at that time— I mean, to what extent did you worry not only about losing allies in the sense of as a coalition, but losing them in terms of losing— having a new Korean War, for example?

NYE: Well, there was some danger that you'd have a new Korean War. There was a— the North Koreans obviously wanted to create that impression, but it's also truth that, since I think the main thing on their mind was survival of the regime, that they knew that a new Korean War was very, very clearly the end of the regime. So there were— a number of people have thought that there was a degree of bluffing in that; that that would not have been a new Korean War.

But there was another dimension, which was we were trying at that time to also look ahead 10 years on East Asia with the rise of Chinese power and to have a U.S.-Japan alliance and a strengthened U.S.-South Korean alliance not to contain China, but to create a framework in East Asia in which, when you brought China into the WTO [World Trade Organization], there was a larger framework which encouraged the Chinese to act responsibly and integrated into the regional balance and into the international community. That might also been have been blown out of the water because you remember the Chinese were very uneasy about any attack on North Korea. So it's— there are a lot of things that go into any foreign-policy decision other than the clear question of, "If I strike that plant, what will the bomb damage assessment be?"

KRISTOF: The Bush administration is going to have to make a similar decision about Iran, perhaps in the next few years. If President Bush calls you up and asks you to write a memo similar to your original one about, "Do we launch some kind of strike or military action against Iranian nuclear activities," what will you tell him?

NYE: Well, I think you never want to remove the threat of force entirely from the table. Right now, there is a bargaining game going on where we're trying to be more supportive of the EU-3— France and Britain and Germany— to get an agreement on getting the Iranians to stop enrichment. And if the— if there is a little hint that there could be a terrible outcome in terms of use of force, that certainly helps to encourage the Iranians to bargain with the Europeans. It's a bit of good cop/bad cop, and we don't want to remove the bad cop entirely. On the other hand, imagine that fails. Imagine that the Iranians do start enrichment. Then you would have [to] face— then you no longer have this sort of, "I can have the best of both worlds," and you'd have to face the question of what would be the effects of strike. You first of all have to ask, "How much am I buying on the benefit side," and if you don't know where all the facilities are or some of the facilities are deep underground, you might turn out to be buying, let's say, five years. I mean, the facilities that you destroy— the uranium hexafluoride plant or something like that might set them back for a few years. So you buy, let's say, a half-dozen years on the benefit side.

On the cost side, you have a couple of things. One is, we have another game we are playing right next door in Iraq where the Iranian— where it matters tremendously that we are able to get some sort of Shia-Sunni-Kurdish resolution and get enough stability there that you can have a government that is stable. If the Iranians decide that in retaliation they are going to make that impossible, they have a lot of levers for doing that. So there is one short-run or immediate cost that you have to face.

The other cost is a longer-term cost, which is you may buy five years on the nuclear program. You may lose a generation on regime change. Most people I have talked to who know Iran reasonably well say that there really is extraordinary disaffection along generational lines; that it might be as high 60 percent for the younger generation have just had it with the mullahs. Now, right now the mullahs are tightening up in terms of their political controls. The next election will probably go the wrong direction from our point of view, compared to the last election, but nonetheless, an underlying structure of opinion is one which is running in our favor. If we attack these facilities, do we stimulate enough Iranian nationalism even in that younger generation that we win five years on the one side and lose a decade or generations on the other? So I think— though I wouldn't take force off the table, I think it's probably not likely that we have a good military option on Iran.

KRISTOF: Let me ask just one more question before turning over to all of you. Proliferation experts tend to have interesting nightmares. When you— I mean, you've been involved in that issue throughout your career. When you look at where— at the direction we're going in today with Pakistan-India, with North Korea, do you worry that what kind of losing that larger battle against proliferation or not?

NYE: Well, I do have nightmares and one of the things that's nice about fiction is you can extrapolate your dreams and nightmares and play them out in this, but it's still— when you have to go back and live in the real world, there are times when I worry a great deal about it. I worry less about the question of whether you can create deterrence among some of the countries that might get the weapons than the leakage problem, and a lot of my realist friends like my [Harvard University] colleague, Steve Walt, who I greatly admire, has written that while sensible states will not get— will not lose control of their nuclear weapons. But then you read about the A. Q. Khan network and you say, "Wait a minute, it's not so simple."

And so the danger of more proliferation and of leakage factor— and that leakage eventually getting into hands of groups that want to do us grave harm, that does worry me, and I think the Bush administration has been correct to place the danger of a transnational terrorists getting hold of weapons of mass destruction— particularly nuclear— does worry me a lot, and that's why I think we have to have to have an extremely high priority on proliferation and the— I think the— again, it's a glass half-full and half-empty.

When [former President] John Kennedy wrote— spoke about this in the ‘60s, and Ted Sorensen may have written the speech, he said that he expected to see something like 25 countries with nuclear weapons a decade after, I guess the speech was ‘63. And there are, let's say, eight; I mean, depending on how you count North Korea. But if you say the five in the NPT [international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty] that are recognized: India, Israel, and Pakistan, that gives you eight— North Korea you should probably add to that, which gives you nine. Then there have been cases like South Korea— I mean, South Africa— which have subtracted themselves off the list, or Brazil and Argentina, which were very much involved in the nuclear weapons program which turned it off. So it's not a hopeless task. It's not something where, you know, it's just inevitable that we're going to have a huge number in a short time. But it does mean it takes constant work and constant policing.

Some of it means maintaining the nonproliferation regime— the nonproliferation treaty, but also reinforcing that with other measures. And I think the Proliferation Security Initiative, which the Bush administration has instituted [that] tried to halt shipments on the seas, is probably a useful thing. I wish they'd match that with a little bit more forthcoming attitude at the Non-proliferation Treaty Review Conference [in May] to make sure that the treaty stays in good stead, but it's across the board that we are going have to work on this, because it matters tremendously. The more there are, particularly among governments with the weaker controls, the more the danger of this leakage which is what really keeps me up at night.

KRISTOF: Let's broaden the conversation, you— this is on the record in contrast to usual protocol, and in your questions please also identify— stand up and identify yourself. It is being broadcast to other Council locations. You don't have to make knowing allusions to the book to ask a question, [laughter] but it should be a genuine question. Yeah.

QUESTIONER: I'm Donald Gregg from the Korea Society. I would like to take you back to the issue of regime change. The Bush administration seems to have a sort of an approach to regime change out of The Wizard of Oz, sort of ding-dong, the witch is dead. You remove the wicked leader and everybody lives happily ever after. Maybe that came from the Dulles brothers [former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and former CIA Director Allen Dulles], who brought us Iran, Guatemala, and Cuba. The current approach seems to be with regard to North Korea: North Korea's leader is immoral, so we refuse to deal with him, and we are going to push for regime change in one way or the other. So going back to the title of your talk, how do you shake out on that? Is it more moral to hope that somebody you bring into power through pressure is better than the devil you know?

NYE: Well, I mean, it'd be nice to have regime change, as I'm sure you would agree, Don. Get rid of [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Il, but if you are doing it on the basis of wishful thinking, then you go back to what I said about more issues in general. You've got to have a reasonable prospect to success. And in the case of North Korea, we've been expecting the Kim dynasty to fall for quite some time. In fact, I remember your cautioning me a decade ago when I was in the government, when we were doing estimates about Korea, and you said, "Don't count these guys out. They may be nasty and mean, but they're not dumb, and they may last longer than expected." Turns out you were right.

And I think one of the dangers is that, when the Bush administration came in, they were so internally torn between the people who say we can solve this thing by regime change and the people who said let's do some practical negotiating, that they lost two or three years. And during that two or three years, the fuel at Yongbyon was dispersed. Well, first they exited the safeguards and the inspections that we— that were in place under the previous agreement. The fuels and— the inspectors were kicked out; the fuels reprocessed, dispersed, and the North Koreans developed this capacity while we waited for regime change. That was a case of the ideological good being the enemy of the best, and so I think that— I mean, [Harvard University's Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs] Ash Carter had an interesting— my colleague had an interesting op-ed on— commenting on the Silberman-Robb report [of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the Untied States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction] in the Washington Post on Sunday in which he said, everybody is saying, you know, "All this was at— all this failure on weapons of mass destruction is a terrible failure of intelligence. And let's be honest, folks, this was also a very large failure of policy."

QUESTIONER: Jerry Cohen from the Council. How do you estimate, Joe, the risk from rogue use of nuclear weapons of former [inaudible] reforms that we've been told are very worrisome for al Qaeda [inaudible].

NYE: Right. Well, I've often believed, actually going all the way back to when I was in charge of nonproliferation in the Carter administration, that was the part that worried me most: states you can deter; there is a return address. You know, they do something, you know how to go back to where it came from. With some of these transnational networks, there is no return address; [they are] much harder to deter. And then the question is: What are the steps you can take? And probably the most important is to make sure they can't get their hands on fissile material. In other words— and where could they get fissile material? They could get it from the former Soviet Union; I mean, in the sense of the so-called loose-nukes problem. And there we see putting a lot more effort into the sort of the descendants of the Nunn-Lugar program to help the Soviets lock this up.

We also wanted to make sure we continue to press that there not be additional nuclear weapon states because some of them would be weak states where you can get leakage. And we will also have to push very hard on not only intelligence, but operations which prevent dispersal. And that's were I think the Bush administration has done well, that the efforts that went into wrapping up the A. Q. Khan network, or at least learning about it, and wrapping up the Libyan program and using the Proliferation Security Initiative was, I think, the right kind of step, not because it was the Libyans alone that were so worrisome, but because of this general leakage problem into rogue hands.

KRISTOF: Yes?

QUESTIONER: Don Shriver, Union Theological Seminary. As somebody who's tried to teach ethics most of my life, I can only congratulate you for your three-prong image of what ethics ought to be, especially in relation to policy. How would you take those three dimensions of ethical thinking and apply it to the question of what this country should do, if anything, about the threatened people in Darfur?

NYE: Well, I— Darfur is a— Nick is actually the person who should answer this since he's been there and I haven't, but a Darfur is a case where I think our intentions are to try to save people in Darfur. The means we have are quite imperfect, but the consequences of being limited by imperfect means are pretty awful.

So I think that there are— you know, people say, "What you are going to do?" Send in the 82nd Airborne when the army is already overstretched in Iraq? No, it doesn't have to be that; those aren't the alternatives. One can press a lot harder. I mean, there are other means in addition. One can press a lot harder on trying to support Africans and others through logistics, through helping them with communications— I mean, there are ways in which we can take more of a stand in helping to get a larger international force there.

I think we should also be sort of pushing this issue higher. You know, there's a lot of rhetoric at the intentions level but not a lot of attention to how it actually works out on the ground. And so, even if you say that the American military is not in a position right now to send in the 82nd Airborne, there are a lot other things that we can do short of that which could probably save lives. I think the same thing is true when you look back at Rwanda, which was a period when I was in the government. I mean, if you look back it Rwanda, sometimes people say, "Well, what could you do?" You know, you're— right after Somalia, there was no way the Congress or the American people were going to support sending large numbers of American troops into Rwanda. Well that's probably true, but on the other hand, we didn't have to pull the rug out from under the U.N. peacekeepers. We could have saved a lot of lives— maybe not prevented all of it, but we could have saved a lot of lives by being much more forward-leaning by offering things we could have done in logistics and transportation and communication and supporting the peacekeepers.

And so, sometimes these things are not either/or. Very often people will say, "Well, if you can't save everybody or you can't put in the 82nd Airborne, then we can make great statements, but there's not much else we can do about it." No, there is a middle ground and we're not doing nearly enough in that middle ground. But, Nick, you've been in Darfur. You should not just moderate, you should have a chance to observe. [Laughter]

KRISTOF: Well, I don't want to— yeah, I mean, I think there is indeed a lot of, I guess, I do want to say [inaudible]. I think there is, indeed, plenty more that we can do and it involves supporting the African Union force with some kind of a U.N. force— it's putting much more pressure on the Sudanese government. I mean, every time President Bush even raises the issue, then the killing rate in Darfur goes down. And in the best of situations, there's still going to be many, many, many more tens of thousands who are going to die, but what little Bush has done, has already saved, I think, several hundred thousand lives. So, I think, it's all calibrating the degree to which we want to do things.

But let me use that as a way to ask another question, and that is, when in answering Don's question about how kind of ethical questions apply to North Korea, you were critical because of the kind of impact of it. But one thing that President Bush has done has been to inject— and [former President Ronald] Reagan did it before him— is inject kind of a moral language in speeches and in foreign policy, and for example, the denunciations of Kim Jong Il as, you know, whatever, a pygmy, and is talking about them as evil, this kind of thing. Or Reagan talking about the Soviet Union as the evil empire. Does that— is that a useful— or Bush talking about genocide, for example. I mean, is that— I mean, I think that this kind of crowd tends to feel nervous when politicians use words like evil about foreign leaders, but is that necessarily a bad thing?

NYE: Well it's not a bad thing. I mean, if you go back to my three-dimensional approach, one is to state values, intentions, and stating those clearly is extremely important. And it's also— goes— it has much longer antecedents in American history than just Reagan and Bush. I mean, if you looked at— look at some of the speeches that were given at the beginning of the 20th century. I've been actually doing some work reading history in my year on leave at Oxford about the early 20th century of looking how the United States saw the world at a time when we were entering the world arena. If you look at some of the speeches of [former President] Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the language is surprisingly similar. Roosevelt— Teddy Roosevelt used the word evil. I mean, that was— there's nothing new about this. That's different from using the word pygmy, and [laughter] I mean, if you're trying to negotiate with somebody— we offended all the pygmies. [Laughter] No, but if you're trying to negotiate as well as stand for clear values, you've got to learn how to tailor this rhetoric.

The other danger is if the rhetoric is too grandiose, and the deeds don't match the rhetoric, you rapidly become accused of hypocrisy. So, moral language is a long tradition in American foreign policy, and unlike Europeans, or some Europeans, America is not a world— or is not a country where you can run a foreign policy on a purely, narrowly, realistic basis. You have to have your foot in both worlds, or it— it's the reason I keep talking about this three-dimensional view of ethics: you have to have all three. And I think that a lot of the rhetoric in President Bush's second inaugural address was actually quite good rhetoric, and not that different, as I said, as you could find in [former President] Harry Truman or Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson. It's the inability to relate the rhetoric to practical actions or thinking of the rhetoric as a substitute for practical actions where I would have more problems.

KRISTOF: In the back there.

QUESTIONER: David Speedie, Carnegie Corporation. Joe, I can't ask a question regarding an intelligent assessment of the book because I haven't read it yet, but [laughter] I will warn that somewhere an addition to fly fishing and the other thing, that the term soft power may come in either by direct reference or implication. A certain notable former president of this institution about two weeks ago, Les Gelb, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Democrats need a Dick Cheney. And essentially, what he was saying was that the Democrats needed someone to project hard power. This seems to be capturing the dialogue within the Democratic party itself, and I am not trying to put this along Democratic-Republican lines, but can you tell me— I guess I'm asking you how soft power fits into your narrative, or how do you feel soft power playing out in the context of much of what you've been discussing already today?

NYE: Well, I think it's important. Having written a book called Soft Power, it's important to make sure that I don't over-claim for it. Soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction, and it's extraordinarily important, but it's only part of the arsenal you need. You need both hard and soft power. So that if you go back to the Cold War— we won the Cold War essentially by a combination of our hard power deterring Soviet military aggression and our soft power, which was our ideas and values which pierced the iron curtain from within, if you like. So when the Berlin Wall fell, it fell not to an artillery barrage, but to hammers and bulldozers. So soft power is not a substitute for hard power, but it's part of the overall arsenal.

My concern is that, in recent years, we haven't done enough to use that part of the arsenal. In fact, in my book what I said was that you don't want to be a hard power or a soft power. You want to be a smart power, which means the knowledge of how to combine the two dimensions. And so it's— so I think the— I guess I didn't see Les's piece. The nice thing about being on sabbatical at Oxford is you don't read everything in the American press. Sorry. [Laughter] You know, the good stuff you get through the [International] Herald Tribune. [Laughter] But there is— and you're obviously [inaudible] all the time. [Laughter] I think— I mean, it's true that Democrats may have sometimes not had enough of an image of hard power; on the other hand— and so it would be a mistake for the Democrats just to argue soft power.

But there's a larger question rather than a partisan political question, which is the United States as a society to have an effective foreign policy has to remember that it wins its positions by soft power as well as hard power. And if you're fighting a war on terrorism, you can kill a certain number of people through bombs and bullets, but it's whether you win the hearts and minds of the vast majority so that those extremists can't recruit them, which is equally important to whether you're going to win in the long run. So the idea that it's either hard or soft power seems to me a big mistake. And I can't comment on the article you mentioned since I didn't read it, but it'd be a great mistake for the Democrats or the Republicans to become identified either with hard and soft power. The answer is to have both.

KRISTOF: Felix?

QUESTIONER: Joe, I wondered if you would comment on the need for allies today more than before because of our dependence on foreign energy and foreign capital in much larger dimensions than we ever have before.

NYE: Well, I have long believed that the maintenance of alliances is one of the things that we do best. In other words, remember when the Cold War was over there was a view that NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] was going to collapse? It was over; there was no hostile threat from the Soviet Union anymore. And people have been declaring the demise of NATO as an alliance, and what's remarkable about American alliances is because of the openness of our society and because of these interdependencies, we have maintained an alliance structure far longer and far more successfully than any time in history. And if you go back to— you know, to Thucydides and the Delian League [in the 5th century BC] and so forth, we managed to do something that others were not able to do.

What worries me about this latest trend where the issue determines the coalition, not the coalition determines the issue, is that it essentially is a very short run, ad hoc, our convenience way of approaching allies. It essentially devalues their voice. It breaks the constitutional bargain, which has led them to give us the benefit of the doubt in the past, and there are times when they're going to be issues where we're going to need them, such as the ones you just mentioned as well as others. And so I think the philosophy that was identified particularly with Donald Rumsfeld, I mean he's— that's his phrase that I quoted, is a very shortsighted philosophy. And I think in fact if you weaken these alliances, we will pay a significant price for it the future.

KRISTOF: Yes?

QUESTIONER: Thank you very much. Pat Rosenfield, Carnegie Corporation. I'd like to pick up on the shortsighted policies that you're— that brings you back full circle to moral choices because of this— of your tripartite framework. The one where I think we found most is on the reasonable— the assessment of the reasonable prospect of success. And when you look at the assessment that was made in arming the mujahedeen in Afghanistan or supporting Mobuto [Sese Seko] in the Congo, we had a shortsighted policy. And I'm wondering: Hhow do you get the longer-term view into the State Department in the White House? And really, beyond the utilitarian [inaudible], but in fact he did have a sense of the absolute right and wrong. How do you combine the utilitarian with the Kantian perspective in the State Department and get that into policy-making?

NYE: Well, there are very good people in the State Department who try to do this, I mean, and I'm not saying that it's not done, but— and that essentially is the central theme of the novel, which is that there are people in this novel who argue on the one hand for some Kantian perspective, on the other for a pure utilitarian perspective, and they often get their perspectives mixed up with their own personal interests and stakes, and that's a perversion of the process.

But it does strike me as extremely important to get people to step back from what's convenient for the next step, because if you don't think two or three moves ahead, you're going to lose the game. And very often we do things because they're convenient in the short run, and not thinking two or three steps ahead.

If one— I guess Don Gregg started us out with this question of we look back in the 1950s in our policy on Iran and opposing what was then a nationalist leader, if we hadn't done that, we might have a lot better Iran today than what we had. So there is the— I mean, the question of thinking through what's convenient in the short run as against what are some of the long run implications is— sometimes people think about it, but it's often the political pressures are to do what is more convenient. But with all that said, it's often a lot easier to use 20/20 hindsight, and when you're talking about several decades of history, none of us knows what's going to happen several decades from now. But it does lead you to questions like we had earlier, the Iran example, where you have to ask, not just, "What I do over the next five years," but, "What happens in my effects on a next generation?"

QUESTIONER: Moushumi Khan, Law Offices of Moushumi Khan. How do you reconcile the fact that there are those in the world who think of the U.S. as an immoral, imperial power and an evil empire, and this administration particularly using morality to— in foreign policy— I mean, is morality really a justification for ideology? Because they're both using the same language.

NYE: Well, humans are driven by both morality and interest. I mean, all of us, whether we're pro-American or anti-American— and one of the hard things, I think, is to make sure that while pursuing our interests we are able to pursue them in forms that express larger values. There's a wonderful phrase in the— in Thucydides, in which phrase is, "Those who really deserve credit are those who like power and use it, but also like justice or go beyond the immediate dictates of power."

I think the key for the United States is to realize that there will always be some resentment of the United States because we're large, because we're richer, and so forth. But there is also a simultaneous admiration, and if we can combine those two— admit that we're pursuing our interests, but our interest being in a longer-term perspective which can include often the interests of others and that this is in terms of larger values, then I think you can reduce to some extent— not for everybody, there will always be some who hate you— but you can reduce the intensity of the anti-Americanism and the hatred in the— sort of the middle ground, which is where the battle has to be.

So we're— you know, if somebody is a staunch jihadist who believes that we're the great Satan and is already absolutely convinced of that and nothing can change them, our rhetoric and our actions are [not] likely to make much difference. But if you're in the middle ground and you see that the Americans do care about the rhetoric, but also they care about actions which follow up on the rhetoric, which pursue larger and longer interests, then I think it's not out of the question that we can win those people over.

Interesting, if you look at the effect of the Iraq elections on this; in other words, if the elections hadn't occurred, the caricature of the United States as a new empire or a new imperialism I think would have been much stronger. I think the Iraq elections— we're a long way from a democracy in Iraq; there are many steps between where we are and success— but the Iraq elections, I think, did for a number of people in the region make them think a little bit again. It complicated their thinking that maybe we weren't quite as simple as the caricatures made it.

We're going to have [to] follow that with other actions like just making progress on the Middle East peace process, continuing to work toward a political solution in Iraq, continuing to be a little bit more consultative so that other countries feel their voices are heard. I think if we do those things, we can indeed regain some of our soft power or attractiveness for this group in the middle, even though there will be some at the extreme who I think who will never be— I mean there is no chance you are going to win over [al Qaeda leader Osama] bin Laden or al Qaeda, and I think that's only a case where you have to use hard power.

KRISTOF: As you say— I mean, usually, our foreign-policy decisions are justified on the basis that they're both in our interest and that they are morally the right thing to do. But in the sense, it becomes intellectually interesting when there— when it acknowledges a clash and one says, "Well, it's in the U.S. interest to do that," but the moral thing to do is why and when we've— when we have had to look at that trade-off and at times have had— have pursued things that we believed to be kind of right, but not necessarily in the national interest, then there— well, for example sanctions against Burma, I mean, the policy there. That's something that it's hard to see as particularly in our interest, but it's been justified as a moral thing to do, and it hasn't actually worked terribly well, I wouldn't say. What are some— I mean, if you look at places where our— where we've taken moral actions that are more on the moral front than on the national-interest front, what do you— what's a good example of one that has been pretty successful?

NYE: I'd say usually people take Somalia as the case of one where there was almost no national interest and where it was unsuccessful, and then they generalize from that. But I think you can actually define an American interest in a longer-term perspective in the promotion of values such as democracy and human rights. Then the question becomes: How do you go about it?

Again, I think if you look at the actions that we took in the Balkans, both in Bosnia and in Kosovo, there was an interest there. I mean, the interest was preserving NATO and stability in Europe, but also we went beyond just a narrow view of our interest, and I would argue that compared to the alternative, which is a chaotic Balkans where people are constantly killing each other, that that was actually something which we were right to do.

The Burma case, though, is interesting, which is sometimes you can get a— what I would call a cheap shot. In other words, if you say, "Do I have any trade with Burma? No. Do I have any strategic interest in Burma? No. Will I put sanctions on Burma for human rights? Absolutely." [Laughter] And the trouble with that is— and I might be in favor of that if I thought the sanctions were actually going to change the military in Burma or get [human rights activist] Aung San Suu Kyi out of jail or get her into power.

One of the things that strikes me, though, when I talk to people in India, which is also a democracy where I was recently, is they say, "Your policy in Burma is counterproductive. The best thing you can do in Burma is to open up and swamp them with outside influences." And there is an interesting paradox here, which is, if you have a repressive regime, what's the most— what's the biggest favor you can do for them? Build a wall around them so they can't get their people out, can't get other influences in. We've done [Cuban leader Fidel] Castro that favor for decades. And so, if you have a tin-pot dictator, what he really wants is to get American sanctions. We put on the sanctions feeling extremely moralistic about it. But the question of whether that has anything to do with good consequences for the people in the country is another issue.

KRISTOF: Yes, in the back.

QUESTIONER: [Inaudible] Recently [U.N.] Secretary [General Kofi] Annan released a report. In his report, he mentioned that exactly your criteria for the humanitarian intervention, so I would like to ask you how do you see the report? The reason of the question is I imagine if there are three million people dying because of hunger in North Korea, would this justify for us to use of force?

NYE: Well, on the high-level group report, it's one of the more interesting U.N. reports that I've seen in the last couple of decades. I mean, it was well done, it had a lot of good ideas in it, and one of the things that was most interesting— I mean, there are several things that are good about it. Most people focus on the change of the Security Council, which is important, but they also came up with a definition of terrorism, a way to improve the Human Rights Commission so that you don't have the travesties such as Iraq heading the Human Rights Commission. It also talked about, as you mentioned, using criteria which are really derived from just-war doctrine as aids for the Security Council to decide when it does use force. These are all things which I think this report did an extremely good job on. The problem is whether we're going to see governments able to come together and implement any of this, and that's— if you read today's paper where China indicated it was not willing to go ahead with changes in the Security Council, I hope that doesn't doom the whole report.

On the question of famine in North Korea, it's interesting: the North Koreans may have killed something along the lines of— that you mentioned, through their policies. One of the things that we could do when we had the [1994 Agreed] Framework [aid-for-disarmament] agreement was we could justify providing food aid despite our differences on the nuclear issue. So there— but there is a problem now: imagine that you had another famine in North Korea— another situation like that— and a situation where there was no nuclear agreement, and the question then is, Would you swamp the North Koreans with food aid again? I suspect that probably we tend to divorce food from other instruments. I suspect we probably would. Would we use force to remove the North Korean regime because of the famine? I suspect we probably would not.

KRISTOF: What if North Korea were not a nuclear state? What if we— what if— as you say there were famine and three million people dying or the famine like the one in the ‘90s, where maybe two million people died, no nuclear weapons. At some point, do we—

NYE: Well, that was Somalia, remember? George Bush 41 went into Somalia because of the— people were starving, and the idea was that it was important to get the food to them. When we got there, we found the reason they couldn't get the food was because you had all these thugs and gangs and [inaudible] that were preventing distribution or diverting it, so then we had to try to knock heads together. And then before you knew it, we were in over our heads. So, I mean, there is— I mean, the realists have a point, which is, if you don't have appropriate means, you can make consequences worse.

KRISTOF: Yes?

QUESTIONER: I'm Ted Sorensen at Paul Weiss. If I can just bend the rule for one minute and let me make one comment before I ask my question. It's on the earlier discussion between the two of you on presidential speeches. There is a difference between presidential foreign-policy speeches that are moral and those that are moralistic.

My question, Joe, and as always, it's a pleasure to hear [inaudible]. My question relates to your memos on the possible use of U.S. military force, presumably an air strike, against proliferation. Well, one memo you actually wrote and one you hypothetically discussed and you— in that you confined those memos as I listen to you, to the diplomatic and political downside and correctly so, but there is also, is there not, a military downside? We learned of two of them during the [1962] Cuban Missile Crisis. One is that the air strike might not get them all, and those that you don't get are sure going to be used against whoever is attacking them. And the second that we learned was that there is no such thing as a surgical air strike. You have to bomb the entire country into smithereens to make sure no other planes or any antiaircraft or whatever also come up, and the military answer to a rogue or new nuclear weapon is not much of an answer for military reasons as well as political and diplomatic is what I'm asking.

NYE: Well, there— it's often the case that the— what looks like an easy military option is not. For example, in the North Korean case, if you have to suppress air defense, that can lead to a much broader bombing campaign than just hitting the plants that you're talking about. The other thing is that North Koreans have about 11,000 artillery tubes in tunnels in the demilitarized zone, which they can wheel in and out and if you are going to— and those can attack Seoul with conventional weapons, and if you are going to take all those out before you attack the facilities, you're also talking about something that's quite large. But there have been some technological changes. Cruise missiles, for example, don't require the same suppression of air defense.

And so there are— your basic point, though, is correct, which is that— how much of it can you get, and what are the— and again, what is step two? In other words, if you think about a move, you have to think like a chess player. You have to think about what's the next move, what's the move after that, what's the next move after that. And often when you think your way further down the road, it turns out to be a little less acceptable and a little bit more complicated than it first appears.

KRISTOF: In any discussion of morality and foreign policy, clearly one consideration has to be that it would be immoral to keep you here discussing the foreign policy [laughter] after two o'clock, and so I'm afraid we are going to have to call it quits here. I should say that there is a pile of Joe's books— supposed to be right there in the back, and he has also agreed to— maybe right outside— and he has agreed to sign them as well. You don't have to buy a book to ask a question, though. [Laughter] And in any case, thanks very much for coming, and please join me in giving Joe a hand. [Applause]

NYE: Well, thank you, Nick.

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