At the Right Time

I am honored to have Anne’s and my name attached to NBR’s new Center for Northeast Asian Studies. In the fall of 1953, as a senior in secondary school, I wrote an essay on the attempt of the railroad magnate E.H. Harriman (Averill Harriman’s father) to gain an interest in several railroad lines in Northeast Asia in the first years of the 20th century as part of his scheme to complete a round-the-world transportation system. The essay won the school’s history prize—I’m sure the judges were more impressed by the abstruse nature of the subject than by the writing—and began my interest in U.S.-Asian relations. So this honor culminates a half-century of interest in Northeast Asia.

The National Bureau of Asian Research was founded in 1989 as a result of the inspiration of Senator Henry M. Jackson who believed that there was a strong need for developing a better informed American foreign policy toward Asia. The Senator served in Congress for 43 years and, but for Watergate and the public reaction against politics in the nation’s capital, might well have been elected president in 1976. Jackson wanted to find a means to bring expertise on Asia to bear on the policy process.

At the outset, NBR’s first days seemed to foretell a bleak future. There was one part-time employee—me—and two full-timers: Rich and a secretary—but she quit at the end of the first week saying that NBR didn’t appear to be a bona fide organization! My contribution to the subsequent growth of NBR was minimal. I will only take credit for having turned loose the talent and energy of Rich Ellings on the task of institution building. Rich’s irrepressible optimism carried us through many down times in those first years.

In retrospect, whatever the initial prospects, as I look back from today’s vantage point, the timing of its founding seems to me to have been fortuitous. I want to discuss in this talk my feelings of why it was fortuitous—why all the stars were properly aligned—why it was just the right time—for the establishment of the kind of research institute we had in mind and what our challenge is for the future.

At that time, there were observers who thought it was not feasible to establish a foreign policy institute in Seattle, a continent away from the nation’s capital. (Which is not to say that there are not advantages in being 2500 miles outside the Beltway.) As it turned out, however, we were on the cusp of the information technology revolution that greatly facilitated the model we had chosen for NBR. Fax machines, computers, the Internet, all the advances in communications, made our model feasible. Moreover, Seattle itself was at the center of this revolution. Microsoft has helped us develop the tools to achieve the kind of think tank we envisioned. Our idea was to create an institution that did not rely on an in-house research staff as nearly all other think tanks do, but rather would reach out to the best, most qualified specialists to study foreign policy issues wherever they might be.

In addition to the inspiration of the Senator and the indispensable support of the Jackson Foundation, which enabled our startup and has continued to back us—Helen Jackson’s strong support was a constant encouragement—we were fortunate in these early years to find an extraordinary leader to chair our board of directors. It was fortuitous for us that he was at a stage in his life when he was prepared to take on a new challenge and saw the urgent need for a better informed American foreign policy. One of the great entrepreneurial figures in American history, George Russell had grown up on Puget Sound, built the Russell Investment firm, and pioneered in the study of emerging markets and international investment. We all know that vision, leadership, and drive are a rare combination, but in George Russell that’s what you have.

There are many reasons for the difficulty in establishing policy institutes on academic campuses including (but not limited to) the intrusion of politics, the limited accountability, and a tendency to lose relevance to the practical world of policymaking. George Russell has provided the kind of strong, hands-on leadership for NBR that has kept it accountable to its goals of nonpartisanship and real world relevance that we set for ourselves. He has built a board of directors of extraordinary talent and dedication to guide this institution.

Another fortuitous aspect in the timing of NBR’s founding in 1989 is that it coincided with one of the great turning points in modern history. NBR was established just as one international system came to an abrupt and surprising end and a new one was in the making. Rarely in history had the components of world order changed so abruptly. Almost no one foresaw the sudden end of the Cold War system. As a matter of fact, NBR’s original name was The National Bureau of Asian and Soviet Research.

The end of the bipolar era within months of the founding of NBR meant that the new organization was from the start given a still more powerful raison d’etre than it would otherwise have had. The region we set out to study was suddenly without a fixed structure and was subject to rapidly changing conditions. The end of the Cold War opened a new era for Asia. The center of gravity of the global economy was shifting from the North Atlantic to the Asia Pacific region. A region that had been a colonial backwater when the Cold War began was now the emerging new center of world power and influence. After being dominated by the Eurocentric world throughout the modern era, Asia began to come into its own—increasingly subject to its own internally generated dynamics. For the first time in modern history, Asian nations acquired the power to adopt active roles in the international system and shape their regional order.

Asia, however, in the post-Cold War era is in a kind of interregnum. It lacks a fixed regional structure, a recognized legitimate order to cope with its diverse cultural and political systems, and has vast differences of wealth and population, competition for energy resources, arms races, border disputes, conflicting historical legacies, rampant nationalisms, and limited experience with multilateral organizations. NBR was faced at its creation with the challenge of analyzing and explaining the dynamics of this newly emergent region.

In trying to help policymakers understand this highly complex new reality in Asia, NBR’s founding was fortuitous in still another way. It came at a time when the study of international relations was achieving a new level of sophistication and could therefore provide analytic tools to apply to this complex region. The attempt to establish a science of international relations, the systematic study of patterns of conflict and cooperation among nations, is of relatively recent origin. It was in the post-World War II United States that the discipline of international relations flowered. Drawing inspiration from immigre scholars like Morgenthau, Wolfers, Deutsch, and the young Kissinger and Brzezinski, it became, as Stanley Hoffman observed, a quintessentially American social science. Born and raised in the U.S., the discipline of international relations grew up in the shadow of the immense American role in world affairs. The new discipline focused its attention on the study of order in international society. “How states create and maintain order in a world of sovereign powers,” Hoffman wrote in 1977, “has been the fundamental and so far insoluble problem of international relations.” In the time since the early postwar period a rich and burgeoning body of theory on the problem of international order—how it is devised, why it breaks down, and how it is reestablished—has grown, replete with its own controversies and competing theories. The study of great power transitions is one of the most thoughtfully considered aspects of international relations theory; and in Asia, we confront the rise of the world’s two new great powers, China and India.

Theoretical sophistication, however, has brought anything but consensus. For example, Aaron Friedberg has recently described six different theoretical perspectives on what the rise of China may mean for U.S.-China relations and regional stability. The historian John Lewis Gaddis, for one, has been highly critical of the scientific claims of international relations theory. He observes that “the efforts theorists have made to create a ‘science’ of politics that would forecast the future course of world events have produced strikingly unimpressive results: none of the…approaches to theory…that have evolved since 1945 came anywhere close to anticipating how the Cold War would end….If their forecasts failed so completely to anticipate so large an event as that conflict’s termination, then one has to wonder about the theories upon which they were based.” Gaddis quoted approvingly the wry remark of the distinguished historian of the Soviet Union, Robert Conquest, who when he was asked what lesson people might learn from the surprise ending of the Cold War replied: “If you are a student, switch from political science to history.” Nevertheless, whatever its limitations in anticipating the future, the field at its best provides us with perspectives and conceptual tools to apply to our thinking about the complex reality of the new era in Asia. NBR can draw upon what international relations theorists tell us about patterns of state behavior extending across time and space. Theory can sharpen the kinds of questions we should be asking about the objective conditions we’re dealing with.

NBR’s founding also came at a fortuitous time in another way, which was my own motivation in lending a hand to the effort to establish a policy institute. NBR could draw on a very highly developed range of expertise on Asian societies that simply did not exist a generation ago. Over the last generation there has developed in the United States, thanks to a combination of foundation and government support a very substantial infrastructure of Asian studies. This is a remarkable chapter in American higher education. When the United States first became entangled in Vietnam in the 1960s no American had studied the history of that country through native sources. While there were at that time a respectable number of specialists studying Russia, China, and Japan, their work was still at an early stage. Serious study of Korea was only beginning in the 1970s.

By the 1990s the number of Asian specialists with language competence and first-hand knowledge of the countries of this region had greatly expanded. It was the existence of this area studies expertise, scattered around the country and beyond, that Senator Jackson discussed as a needed ingredient in the policy process. He was particularly influenced by his belief that the American failure to understand the Sino-Soviet split had resulted from the absence of expertise on China in government. Jackson, who had helped bring down Senator McCarthy, blamed him for driving expertise on China out of the State Department.

The growth of area studies provided the possibility of giving our policymakers an understanding of the sources of the international behavior of Asian countries—something about which our policymakers had often lacked at very critical times. One thinks about how we have often misperceived and underestimated Japan—except for the 1980s when we overestimated Japan.

If, for example, American policymakers had understood Japanese history and culture better in 1941 they might not have been so confident in the effectiveness of the oil embargo to change Japanese behavior. In the autumn of 1941 the U.S. Navy was anxious to avoid conflict with Japan in order to allow time for the Navy’s crash shipbuilding program to achieve its buildup sometime in 1942 and also time to fortify the Philippines. But the State Department was confident that it could bring pressure to bear on Japan and still avoid conflict during the time period the Navy said was essential for its buildup. Stanley Hornbeck, the State Department’s principal architect of policy toward Japan, was contemptuous of the Japanese capacity to challenge American strength. Who would think Japan would go to war against a country eight to ten times more wealthy and powerful? He dismissed the fears of a young foreign service officer by the name of John Emmerson (some of us here will remember John Emmerson, more will know his son Don) who had just returned from five years in Japan with a keen sense of Japanese psychology and a concern that Japan might initiate war out of desperation over the oil embargo imposed by the U.S. “Tell me,” Hornbeck said to him, “of one case in history when a nation went to war out of desperation.” Then, ten days before Pearl Harbor, after drafting with the Secretary of State Cordell Hull a hard-line message to Japan laying down conditions for relaxation of American sanctions that included Japanese withdrawal from Southeast Asia and from China (probably including Manchuria), Hornbeck wrote an internal memo to his colleagues in the State Department in which he confidently wagered five-to-one odds that Japan would relent and that war was not imminent. Hornbeck later rued what he called his “wishful thinking and gratuitous predicting.” But he was not alone in his narrow vision and failure to understand the Japanese frame of mind. Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson felt certain that the administration’s embargo would not lead to war because, as he said, “no rational Japanese could believe that an attack on us could result in anything but disaster for his country.” American policymakers did not see that they had presented Japan with “two equally repugnant alternatives,” as Scott Sagan has aptly described the situation. Japan was confronted not simply by the prospect of war with a country eight to ten times more powerful than it, but also with the prospect of accepting a settlement that would deny the very self-image that it had of itself as a great power, the prime goal it had pursued for a century. A reading of the records of the conferences of Japanese leaders in the autumn of 1941 makes it clear how they felt their sense of national identity endangered. It is probably true that “no nation will submit to a settlement …that totally denies its vision of itself.” In the long run Japanese-American conflict was probably inevitable, but failure to understand the mindset of the Japanese military leaders may have hastened conflict at a time when the U.S. needed more time to prepare. American leaders did not understand Japanese psychology—nor, of course, one must hasten to add, did the Japanese understand American psychology.

A generation later Henry Kissinger greatly underestimated the motivation and purpose of Japan during the eight years that he guided American foreign policy. Kissinger himself in a very rare admission of personal fallibility confessed in his memoirs a failure to understand Japan. “When I first came to office,” he wrote, “there was no major country I understood less than Japan….I did not grasp Japan’s unique character…Neither I nor my colleagues possessed a very subtle grasp of Japanese culture or psychology.” Before he entered government and while he was still an advisor to Nelson Rockefeller, he made his first visit to Japan at the invitation of the Foreign Ministry, which wanted to introduce him to Japanese culture. It did not come off well. Kissinger’s Germanic accent and gravelly voice contributed to the cultural mismatch. He later confided his disdain to the journalist Don Oberdorfer. “I don’t zink they understand me,” he said to Oberdorfer. “They took me down to a Japanese inn in Kyoto. Vatever I asked them, they sent a man to press my pants.” During his tenure as National Security Advisor and as Secretary of State he gave short shrift to Japan and its commercial pursuits. Japan seemed of limited importance in the great power calculus. He detested invitations to the Japanese embassy in Washington because, he said, they always served him Wiener schnitzel.

Even Mao Zedong, in a remarkable exchange, shortly after President Nixon and Kissinger opened relations with Beijing, lectured Kissinger on his slighting attitude toward the Japanese. Having spent many years as a guerrilla fighter against the Japanese invaders, Mao was not disposed to underrate the Japanese. Kissinger however, persisted in his underestimation. “The Japanese do not yet think in strategic terms,” Kissinger told Deng Xiao-ping in 1974, “They think [only] in commercial terms.” The implication was that pursuing economic advantage was not a means of strategic pursuit of power. Kissinger’s failure to understand Japanese motivation is particularly ironic for, as the unswerving proponent of founding foreign policy on the principles of realism, he failed to notice that these very principles were deeply embedded in postwar Japanese foreign policy. The reason for his obliviousness was that Japanese postwar foreign policy was characterized by economic realism and Kissinger had little interest in economics as a source of power. National Security Council staff members under Kissinger observed that he had a “profound lack of knowledge and interest in economics” and that discussing economic issues with him was akin to discussing military strategy with the pope.

After Kissinger’s term as secretary of state ended and Japan’s economic power and influence grew dramatically, he belatedly came to see that Japan had as clear a foreign policy strategy as any other power. Indeed, he recorded, “in my view Japanese decisions have been the most farsighted and intelligent of any major nation of the postwar era even while the Japanese have acted with the understated, anonymous style characteristic of their culture.”

Senator Jackson was passionate about the importance of understanding the history and culture of the countries we had to deal with. In decisionmaking about foreign policy and national defense, the Senator found the missing ingredient to be what he called “people with good judgment.” “Judgment,” he said, “is the most valuable of all qualities—the ability to make good decisions in the face of uncertainty….Study of history is the foundation of wisdom in decisionmaking. History is the great corrective for the distortions, exaggerations, bombast, and verbal abuses of the present.” I love those lines. “Poor decisions,” he emphasized, “were so often traceable to the failure of people to comprehend the full significance of information crossing their desks, their indecisiveness, or their lack of wisdom.” As his long-time foreign policy advisor Dorothy Fosdick later observed, “Throughout his official life, the Senator drew on a remarkable group of experienced, historically oriented advisers whom he informally consulted in person, by letter—often by phone—to get their judgments on issues with fateful international strategic implications.” In his critical role behind the scenes in changing U.S. China policy, Jackson consulted frequently with Dwight Perkins, Mike Oksenberg and other scholars. When he went to China on those long trips, lasting several weeks— in order to get a feel of the country he went on his own far out into the boondocks and backroads— he had Dwight or Mike along.

Although Jackson sometimes disagreed with George Kennan about implementation of containment policy, Kennan represented the kind of person with the ability to bring a keen historical sense to bear on the policy process. His famous 1946 "Long Telegram," written from the American embassy in Moscow, and his Foreign Affairs article the following year, anonymously signed “X” and entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” were a remarkable distillation of history, ideology and political structure to explain the fundamentals of Russian motivation. Not only did Kennan’s X article help reshape Washington’s world view, it also foresaw with uncanny accuracy how the Soviet system might implode suddenly and totally collapse. Since the system had never experienced a “legitimate” transfer of power, Kennan wrote in 1947, “if …anything were ever to occur to disrupt the unity and efficacy of the Party as political instrument, Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.”

Given the vast new sources of knowledge on Asia, the challenge for NBR is to make the detailed knowledge of the specialist in the history and culture of Asian nations relevant and accessible to policymaking. But how should NBR make use of history with its chaos of detail and data to make it relevant to policy and accessible to policymakers who scarcely have time for reading more than one page memos? The new infrastructure of expertise on Asia will certainly help NBR to address all kinds of specific issues that it may be called on to study. But in addressing the fundamental questions about the future direction and the underlying determination of relations among nations in this region, I hope that NBR will pursue their sources of conduct, to use Kennan’s phrase, or what might be called their national style, or their strategic culture.

“Foreign policy,” it has been said, “is the face a nation wears to the world. The minimal motive is the same for all states—the protection of national integrity and interest. But the manner in which a state practices foreign policy is greatly affected by national peculiarities.” The behavior of nations, like that of individuals, is shaped by elements of heredity and environment, which through history respond to problems and experiences and in time build up relatively stable patterns of response. These patterns, although persistent, are by no means immutable, but evolve as a people absorb new experiences and encounter changes in their environment. They may change gradually over time, but they are not erased. There is innovation in the patterns as new challenges are encountered, but there is great conservativeness too. These recurrent patterns of behavior constitute a distinctive set of national attitudes, habits, and principles with which a people approaches its problems. They show themselves in the nation’s foreign policy and in the interaction the nation has with its external environment.

As the eminent French authority on international politics, Raymond Aron, wrote, nations acquire different "styles of being and behaving" that persist through time. A nation's style springs in part from intrinsic factors of geography and the nation’s natural endowments. "A position on the map imposes upon the diplomacy or upon the strategy of a state," Aron said "certain orientations which are likely to be lasting, if not permanent." Within that geographical setting, the centuries of experience are transformed over time into second nature, producing cultural traits which Montesquieu called "the spirit of a nation." This esprit crucially influences a nation's international behavior and, as Aron said, gives a "relative consistency in the 'style' of foreign policy," but it must not be used as a sufficient explanation of any particular policy. As Aron wisely observed,

the "spirit of a nation"; which Montesquieu speaks of is a notion as equivocal as that of national character, but perhaps preferable because it emphasizes the share of culture and the historical heritage. …The French nation was not born as it is now, it has become what it is as a result of the events which it has lived through, of the customs which have been slowly established and of the mode of government. A result more than an origin, the spirit of a nation renders a destiny intelligible as a particular act, but it must not constrain investigation; it helps understanding, but it must be explained.

As an historian I prefer to believe that the discernment and explanation of a national style is more art than science. Nonetheless, there is a substantial body of theory emerging from the study of strategic culture. “There are consistent and persistent historical patterns in the way particular states (or state elites) think about the use of force for political ends,” as Alastair Iain Johnston defines the subject. Attention to the strategic culture or national style or, to use Kennan’s phrase, the sources of conduct, can provide a way of distilling and making concrete and relevant the distinctive historical experiences of different nations and elites. In a region as culturally diverse as Asia, grasping this essence is a critical perspective.

Attributing a nation’s international behavior to national character or culture sometimes makes scholars nervous. As David Landes wrote in a book entitled Culture Matters, “culture in the sense of the inner values and attitudes that guide a population, frightens scholars. It has a sulfuric odor of race and inheritance, an air of immutability.” Yet, Landes goes on, speaking in this case about economic development, “Max Weber was right….Culture makes almost all the difference.”

Culture is not static. If we think of culture as an “array of formal and informal rules that guides the members of a society in their selection of appropriate behavior” it must be clear that it is neither immutable nor is it determinative of behavior. Rather, “it establishes a range of choices for action.” Understanding the strategic culture of a nation will not ensure successful foresight, but it is basic.

Neither will a sense of history provide easy answers about the future. Policymakers may use history badly. They may see the future in terms of mistaken parallels with the past. They may see a trend in the past and assume that it will follow a straight line into the future. Framers of foreign policy may make mistakes because they expect patterns of the past to repeat themselves. It is probably true, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once wryly remarked, that Santayana’s aphorism that those who don’t study history are bound to repeat it, should probably be reversed. Too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.

We historians cannot be too hard on the politicians because professional historians stumble too when they try to foresee the future. One of the most gifted of our number, the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, in his bestselling book published in 1987 chronicling the rise and fall of the great powers over the last 500 years, hinted at American decline, missed the extent of Soviet vulnerability, and mistakenly suggested that Japan was about to emerge as the new world power.

Whether it is the use of international relations theory, or history, or cultural analysis, the future is too indeterminate to predict. But NBR, if it makes intelligent use of all the tools at its disposal, can develop an effective methodology. International relations theory can bring area expertise into focus, compelling it to think concretely and succinctly about its policy relevance. It is the challenge of joining the insights of international relations theory with the depth of knowledge of the area studies community and making its research relevant, concrete, and accessible to policymaking that should be at the foundation of NBR’s methodology and purpose. I am delighted that Aaron Friedberg with his keen historical sense, command of theory, and real world experience, is going to provide the intellectual leadership in meeting this challenge for NBR’s new center.

A final reason for regarding the founding of NBR as fortuitous, one that subsumes all the others, is that it came at a time when there is need for a new American strategic view of its role in Asia. In contrast to 1918 and 1945, when American leaders offered new formulations of how to recreate international order, there have been few credible visions of a new strategic role for the U.S. in post-cold war Asia. I have found some of the best thinking about this subject in Mike Armacost’s book in which he reflects on his ambassadorship and discusses a U.S. strategy as an engaged balancer, maintaining the U.S.-Japan alliance, staying on better terms with Asian countries than they are with each other, and using American power to nurture regional institutions. The American ability to pursue its traditional goals of maintaining a balance of power, keeping the region open to trade and investment, and pressing for the expansion of democracy is more constrained because this is now a region much more pro-active and resistant in some ways to U.S. influence. Nonetheless we do have a window of opportunity to use the power afforded by the considerable public goods of security and market access that we now provide to foster regional institutions. In this way we may embed our values of democracy, human rights, and free trade and extend our influence far beyond the time when our power relative to other countries is as great as it presently is.

For all of these reasons—and perhaps more that I have not thought of—NBR was established at a particularly opportune time. Anne and I are honored to have our names attached to an important part of the institution and look forward to the work that it will do to meet the challenges of interpreting developments in this critical region.