Leadership in America as it relates to challenges of the moment, Iowa City, Iowa, June 21, 2007

- [Alan Nagel] Today's program has been made possible through the cooperation of international programs at the University of Iowa, from the Wilson Family Foundation, courtesy of Herb and Janice Wilson, and the University of Iowa Community Credit Union. James A. Leach served 30 years as our Representative to Congress, where he chaired the Banking and Financial Services Committee, the sub-committee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, and the Congressional Executive Commission on China. Leach attended Princeton, the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Economics. He holds eight honorary degrees, has received decorations from two foreign governments and is the recipient of the Wayne Morris Integrity in Politics Award, the Woodrow Wilson Award from Johns Hopkins, the Adlai Stevenson Award from the United Nations Association and the Edgar Wayburn Award from the Sierra Club. Leach serves on the board of the Century Foundation, The Kettering Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, and formally served as a trustee of Princeton University. His topic today is leadership in America as it relates to challenges of the moment. Please welcome Jim Leach. - [James Leach] Thank you very much Alan. Happy Sally Mason day. Let me just begin with a, as noted I've been teaching the last six months and I've developed what I call a series of two minute courses on American governance, and I'm going to give you half a dozen of the couple dozen I've developed as kind of a theme today. And the first I call Leadership 101 and it's very simple. The United States of America has perhaps never, ever been better led in the arts, in business, in virtually every field of academia and the singular leadership exception is the two-party system, which at the moment is letting the country down and I think, quite profoundly. And the question of the time is really whether this is an aberration or whether we're seeing a reconfiguration of American manners and the manner of which we do political business. The second course I'll give is Classics 101. About two years ago, in Europe, intellectuals were talking about American political leadership and they were making enormous analogies basically to Greek drama. And characters in American governance were equated with various figures in drama. Then about a year ago in China, virtually all of the academic arena and now pretty well seeded in the public at large, there are analogies being made to Roman history, and it's largely about the decline and fall of civilizations and the rise and fall of civilizations. And it is a Chinese presumption that they're in a rise and it's a Chinese presumption that America is on the twilight side of greatness. Which brings me to something that's just starting to occur in Washington and basically in the last month. And led, perhaps ironically, perhaps not, in the Pentagon. But there's been a lot of talk about Greek history, particularly Thucydides and the Peloponnesian Wars. And if you recall in these wars, this was the great battles between Athens and Spartans. The question that's come about are is America the Sparta of modern times or is it the Athens? Or is it a wondrous combination of the two? Or is it a combination that is so loaded with hubris that it is weaker than each? And these are great questions for American society to think through. My third course is Political Science 101 and this is a very simple one, but largely misunderstood around the world and surprisingly not thought through by the American body politic. But the country is about one third Democratic, about one third Republican, about one third no party, with shifts. Right now, the shifts are clearly more in the Democratic side than the Republican, although this can change. This is a transitory phenomenon. But if you think that through, this means that half of a third, if one is mathematical at all, one knows is a sixth, so one sixth of the American public control the Republican Party, one sixth the Democrat. That's somewhat conservative, somewhat liberal. But less than one in four participate in primaries. And what that means is, that if you go one fourth times one sixth, one 24th control the Republican Party, one 24th the Democratic, and that's quite Liberal and quite Conservative. Which brings me to Political Science 102, and this is a phenomenon that half of which is truly well understood by the American public and the other half is not thought about. And the half that's truly understood is that in primaries for President of the United States, because of this phenomenon of what a small percentage participate, you see the candidates scoot to the extremes. On the Democratic side, you scoot Liberal, Republican side you scoot Conservative and then in the general election you try to shift back to the center. And that shifting back to the center is one of the things the American public sees and understands. In fact, in this particular race, we've seen candidates who've carved out given positions in their life that have kind of reversed to attract primary votes at this particular time. The intriguing phenomenon that isn't thought about a lot is how this works in Congress. And if you take the House of Representatives, 380 of the 435 House Seats are basically quite safe within a political party, that is, and about half of these are Democratic, about half Republican, either because of gerrymandering or because the natural order of how districts are drawn. Seats in the House or Representatives are astonishingly safe for the vast majority. The meaning of this is that if one is running in a safe seat, and this is 85% of the seats, the chances are one really wants to be at the edges in the Primary, but once elected, one has an enormous incentive to stay at the edges. And this is the case because the only real challenge will be from someone from the edge of your party. For example, in a Democratic seat, if someone's kind of Liberal, turns out to be a moderate, there's going to be a Liberal challenge. In the Republican circumstance, the exact other way around. If someone's kind of a moderate, there's likely to be a Conservative challenge in one of these safe seats. And so philosophically it means a couple of things in the Congress of The United States. One is that if you're at the edges and you have no desire to move to the center, how do you reach compromise? The second is, if you take the body politic, what is the great underrepresented group in American society? And it's clearly the common sense center. Now the center isn't always loaded with common sense, but it's the center. And that is a very unique phenomenon in a democracy to have what one might define as the largest number of people relatively unrepresented in the legislative body. Which brings me to Political Science 103, which is something that you're seeing the first definitive hint in the news literally today. And that is that if you have a situation in which the edges dominate, it becomes pretty obvious that there may be a third party start to materialize. And we could well be seeing the beginning of this. Now the basis has been set in another kind of way and that is there has been a little attention, but not a great deal in the body politic, about six, eight months ago a active Republican and an active Democrat from prior administrations that are quote insider types, not elected types, decided we ought to have a third party approach for this election and so in late May of next year, you're going to have an internet convention. And it's going to be fairly interesting. And with one of the great questions being are people going to find this an attractive option? But the idea is that there'll be an internet convention in which anybody can run and anybody can vote. All they have to do is affirm that they're voting once and that they are an eligible voter of The United States. The presumption is that in the first go-round it's very unlikely anyone can get 50% of the vote and so they either have two or three, so for example, the top two might go to the second round, maybe the top three or four and then the next go-round can be a week later because these ballots can be tabulated instantaneously. The hope is of the group putting this on, that maybe 10 million Americans will participate. If they do, that will be larger number than have participated in nominating the two candidates of the two major parties. The only obligation of the candidates are that if an Democrat is nominated, that person must choose a Republican as a running-mate or vice versa. Now whether this is ideally set up and why I say the news of the day for the current mayor, not the former mayor of New York, that is Michael Bloomberg, who's also hinted that he may be putting down five per cent of his fortune in this campaign, a meager billion bucks, we don't know. But it's a very interesting phenomenon for the country to follow. It might be ideally situated for Al Gore, Bill Bradley, Colin Powell, Newt Gingrich. I mean nobody has any idea who might emerge in this kind of setting. I also suspect that it's not a trivial possibility that you could get candidates from the edges and you could have fourth and fifth party. This particular idea is designed for the center although it might not produce a centrist candidate. But for example, there is a huge movement on the right that is very concerned for a spectrum of issues, one of which is immigration and who's to say a Pat Buchanan might not emerge? There's also a lot of activism on the left, and who's to say that a Ralph Nader kind of candidate won't emerge? But, interestingly, in most of American history there have been third party movements, most of the time they've carried an idea and have had a little effect on that idea but virtually no other effect. But it can be that third and fourth and fifth party candidates can play a role, as they did in 2000, in making an impact in which the major party candidates prevailed. And so for example, most people assume that if Ralph Nader didn't run in 2000, Al Gore would have been elected President, which is a fairly stunning thought. There is a possibility in this election, the third party could have credibility on its own, although the larger possibility is that if this works to some degree, that it forms a basis for future elections, because internet is such an attractive alternative. And then coming back to the number of participants, the unique aspect of this election is that most of the insiders believe based upon the crowding up front of the primaries, that the Republicans will determine their candidate by the end of February and the Democrats will determine their candidate by the end of February. And this election has started unbelievably early, and so one of the questions the public will have to ask is are they going to be bored by the process? Are they going to be disappointed in the candidates? Or are they going to be thrilled by the process and thrilled by the candidates? And this is a great question mark. At the moment the bizarre, frustrated person in America has to be living in the White House, because the attention is shifting from Executive Government to Aspiring Executive Government and this, at an earlier date than has ever occurred in our history. Anyway, which brings me to what I call Psychology 101. And that is, relates to a new rule for moral issues in public life and I want to give two sets, because when you talk about moral issues, there's a tendency in people that advance moral issues, to believe that they are ethically superior to someone that disagrees. And there are a couple of kinds, one on the Liberal side, an individual who might think that to be for every social cause is moral, to be against is immoral. On the Conservative side, the idea that if one has a given moral base, then the, there's an obligation to try to bind through law other citizens to that type of morality. And these are very awkward things in a country that wants people to be moral in public life but does not want to have morality too much on a sleeve. And this is one of these great phenomenon in our country that's getting to be larger and larger. Which brings me to Sociology 101, which is that if you take legislative politics, the glue of legislation has something to do with personal chemistry. And if people are at odds at the philosophical edges, at odds on morality and then if you think through who the people are on the edges, they're not of a type that instinctively like each other. You have a very hard time bringing things together in a bipartisan way or a non-partisan way. And so you have less and less conceptualization of the common good or what the British Utilitarians in the last century talked about, the greatest good of the greatest number, you have instead what I call the politics of power and the power is grouping. In International Relations you think of power politics, block here and block here, in Domestic Politics, it's interest group here, interest group there, and everyone is balancing interest groups, balancing power instead of advancing what might be again, the greatest good of the greatest number. Sociology 102 is that not in all issues is there necessarily a direct opposition. Now if you take what could be the most important phenomenon that may be disadvantageous for society, that's rife at the moment and could explode, it's the issue of protectionism. And everybody remembers how in the 30s we had a Depression, which by the way, was not caused by protectionism, but there is no economist anywhere that doesn't think it wasn't deepened and lengthened except by protectionism, as all societies started to try to pass laws to protect themselves from other societies and it ended up narrowing the total GDP of the world. Now we have a phenomenon in which worldwide GDP growth is rather impressive, five per cent or so a year. But it's astonishing how virtually every society in the world, and increasingly our own, feels disadvantaged by globalism. And it's being felt in very different, very many different ways and there are feelings particularly rising in America about China. In fact I was there a week ago and I gave a series of speeches at various universities and public policy forums, largely on the subject of what I consider to be a growing American protectionism and the possibility that the country that's led the world for free trade may be poised to turn around and do the very reverse. And for example, I mean in just a minor way, and I want to tell you it is profound in China, we have several candidates running for President, in this case on the Democratic side, that have argued in the last three weeks that we ought to do a non-participatory effort in terms of the Olympic Games in China in 2008. All because of Darfur. And Darfur is one of the great moral challenges of our time. But to equate the two issues I think would be an absolute and utter catastrophe for The United States and for the world and to equate the Olympic Games, which among other things were designed to take place even when people were at war, with political issues I think would be a catastrophic mistake. But a desire to appeal to various constituency groups, this seems like a powerful thing to do and I will tell you, it's powerfully against the interest of our country. In any regard, if you take both political parties, if you take the Democratic Party, there are hundreds of ways you can define groupings, but one way is to say the Democratic Party is composed of kind of an academic element and then a more labor-intensive element. Labor is much more protectionist than academia. Academia is almost instinctively pro free trade, labor is almost instinctively the other way around. Labor has all the money, labor has all the organizing power, labor is a dominant influence in the Democratic Party. In the Republican Party, you used to have a division that was between moderates and conservatives and you think of the notion of the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party versus the Goldwater wing. Well today that division doesn't exist at all. And today the division is between two kinds of conservatism, one being an individual rights conservative, you might call it the Taft-Goldwater wing and the other, social conservatives. The social conservatives have as a basis a given set of views, but also a constituency group that is more of a income level that feels much more challenged by job security issues. And so in the Republican Party, the dominant group is now the social conservatives rather than the individual rights conservatives and the social conservatives are much more inclined to protectionism than the individual rights conservatives, and so both political parties in Congress are increasingly protectionist. And so in a way, it isn't one versus the other, you could end up, particularly if we have any kind of recession in The United States, or any kind of issue that seems to be of a emotive nature, the parties could compete with each other to be more protectionist rather than be one for and one against. Which brings me to Constitution 101. Everybody knows that The United States of America was uniquely established with a separation of powers doctrine, which we derived from a French philosopher names Montesquieu. Interestingly the French didn't buy Montesquieu, we did, and so the European systems are all parliamentary, ours is this division between the Executive Legislature and Judicial and then what the rest of the world doesn't understand is that we're also de-centralist, so that we did the same thing at the state level, the same thing at the county level, same thing at the city level, so we quadruplicated separation of powers and there's a separation of powers that is definitive and then there are overlaps, so there's a tension between at the Federal level, each of the power structure and then there's an overlap going downward to the state, city and county levels and lots of tugging and pulling between. In any regard, as we look at foreign policy, we all sense and we've had a great example of this discourse this spring, that the power of Congress is principally one of the purse string. And you can't run an expensive foreign policy without a cent of Congress, but very intriguingly, in the Constitution and widely un-noted, what's called an Article One Power, and Article One means the legislature is the principle of commerce. And so commerce has always been something that is disproportionately legislated and legislatures are where a disproportionate amount of protectionism is going to come. Here let me turn to science a little bit, to Physics 101. Everybody knows that Sir Isaac Newton had these Three Laws of Motion, the third of which was for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, that is action equals reaction. Well a decade ago, and Derek has heard me reference this more than a few times, I discovered the fourth Newtonian law, and I discovered this as a pun. We had a speaker of the House named Newt, and it dawned on me that social physics was a bit different than natural physics and that in social physics, not infrequently reaction can be greater than action. And I give this example, I describe Bob Hoover here as a bum, he's likely to describe me as something a little tougher. If we as a country describe another country as evil, what is the likely reaction? Is it going to be a hardening of attitudes, or is it going to be submission? And we have to be very cautious about words, and the whole schoolyard mantra of sticks and stones break bones but names don't hurt do not apply to politics and they don't apply to international relations. And this is something that may be one of the great lessons of this administration. Reality 101 is that educated Americans are very well aware of a couple of Harvard scholars, Samuel Huntington and Joe Nye who've argued that we may be getting away from clashes between countries and more towards clashes of civilizations and that's the Huntington mantra, and then Nye is that we have to put more emphasis on what he calls soft power instead of hard power and diplomacy. But I personally think there's an additional one, and I make this distinction between realism and pseudo-realism, and the neo-con grim reality projection is that multi-lateral diplomacy is soft. And that is really worth thinking about. Is that realism or is that pseudo-realism? Since whence, since when does The United States of America not want to expand the Rule of Law? Since when do we not like to work in alliances? Since when is it great to stand alone against the judgment of everybody else? And that doesn't mean that there aren't times that all individuals should stand alone, and countries can stand alone, but as a doctrine of realism, it is chicanery. And people have to think about this. Now, my personal view is if you take American history, that we really operate uniquely in the world, and that is that we have an abstract idealism and we have a kind of Yankee practicality. And when you tie the two together, American foreign policy works rather well. If you divorce one from the other, it's likely to go astray, and so it's something that I think people have to watch very carefully. Now the intriguing contrast of the world we've had is that we went through the 20th Century in with what can only be described as greatness, stood down two unbelievable ideologies, the ism of Fascism and then the ism of Communism, and one involved the greatest war in human history, one involved the greatest non-war in history. Today we're challenged in an intriguing way by China coming up with a doctrine that is very much different than ours in some ways, attractive in certain circumstances and disadvantageous in others. Let me explain this very carefully. China is articulating to the world an economics first doctrine and it's rooted in a notion that sounds credible, that is they call it equality of nations. And it's called also non-interference, and frankly this is a doctrine that's vastly preferable to interventionist doctrine. But it isn't exactly neutral, as the Chinese would like to explain it, because if you take an issue like Darfur, and you say the government is equal to your government and you give it a lot of foreign aid, what are the implications of it? And the implications of it are that that foreign aid is used by an oppressive government to oppress its people and that becomes not morally neutral but morally untenable, and in the case of Darfur, where you have a genocide taking place and also runs about International Law because we have something called the Genocide Convention which obligates all parties to do whatever they can to bring a genocide to an end. And China's been on the other side of this particular circumstance although frankly, in the last month or so, it looks like China is sensing some difficulties and is trying to be more helpful. But all I raise in this is this doctrine that has some roots that seem philosophically interesting is very attractive to many countries in the world and is juxtaposed against our doctrine which is a politics-first, it's a doctrine of intervention and it's rooted in a very thoughtful way in the notion of it's not equality of nations but equality of the individual. And so we have some good precepts with some awkward implementation and some implementation that I think all of us our going to have to think through in individual country circumstances, but it brings me to Moral Philosophy 101 which begins with a scientific observation which is what I consider to be the greatest political observation of the 20th Century which was Einstein when he said that splitting the atom had changed everything except our way of thinking. And in this kind of way of looking at the world, the assumption of Einstein is that everything is advancing except human nature, human nature is a constant. And that's a rather interesting way of looking at the world. The other aspect of it that is terribly interesting to me is that Americans don't think about human nature a lot. Our founders did a great deal, that is they were moral philosophers as well as political activists and the reason that we developed the separation of power doctrine was the assumption of our founders that man was flawed. And that if you give someone too much power, they're going to abuse that power. And so you wanted to separate these powers. We haven't fought a lot those terms, but I think it's a set of terminology we ought to think about more. Which brings me to Moral Philosophy 102. Everybody knows the mantra of Lord Acton who was a minor character in British politics 100 years ago but a major one for one sentence which is that power corrupts and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. My corollary is that military power tempts, and excessive military power tempts excessively. And that it's pretty clear at this time in history that a great power, and particularly The United States has to be very strong militarily but wisdom would dictate that it has to be very cautious in using that power. And so how you balance the possession of power with its lack of use, or its restraint in use is really going to be the challenge of our generation. Moral Philosophy 103 is that the only thing more corrupting than aspiring to power is fear of losing it and this applies to almost every country in the world, and in some ways to China very peculiarly, internally and in some ways to The United States as well. Which brings me to Literature 101 which I have talked about for decades and this is my favorite set of books in American history of American Literature. When I was in college, we had this author named Lawrence Durrell, who wrote these four books called The Alexandria Quartet and not to go in too deeply but just simply to say the thesis of Durrell's books which were set in the inner war Egypt, at the town of Alexandria was that he took as kind of a first person account of a set of events, one individual, and he wrote a book and the first one was called Justine. And so it was this series of events written about from the eyes of Justine. And then he repeated the same set of events a second time with another person's name on it, and a third time with another's and a fourth time with another's. And so you ask yourself why would you read about the same set of events four separate times? And it ends up they're four separate stories and that the events are totally different. And the moral was you can't have a sense of morality unless you look at something from more than one set of eyes and so you take international relations, if you look at things from an American perspective, virtually everything we do in the world makes a certain degree of logical sense, but if you look at the same set of events from Europe, it looks different, from the Middle East different yet, from Asia, again different. And so to have a real sense of reality, it might be helpful to look at things, listening to others and there is a view in Washington and I've heard it so many times I can't tell you, and this is particularly deep in the Republican Party but it's true everywhere, but particularly in the Republican Party and that is if the world would, if we could only explain it better, the world would go along. And frankly, it's good policy that the world goes along with, it's not a problem of explanation. A good policy explains itself. And we do have to do more explaining, and we do have to do a better job, but that's incidental. It's the advancement of good policy that matters the most. Which brings me to a course I call Process 101 and that is a borrowing of a phrase from a great American company, GE, and modifying it a bit, but I think process is our most important product. And America usually self corrects itself partly because of process, and one should never underestimate our capacity to self correct. I don't think democracy is a protection against initial good judgements, but it's a better protect than any other system to correct poor judgements once made. But we do have to assume that process works, and when you have weaknesses in process, correction becomes harder and so I would suggest that all of the talk that we're so tired of really does matter about things like campaign reform. We do have to change our system and we have to change it radically, not modestly. The American system is just awash with money in ways that not only cause people to take positions they shouldn't take, but cause a lot of people not to run for public office. And I suspect there are a lot of people in this room that have thought of running for public office and then have looked at the process and thought to themselves, do I want to go through that? And I think we truly have to change this process. Finally let me just conclude as I particularly look at Jim MacDonald here that all of life is a combination of serendipity and preparation. And I serve 15 terms as your Congressman, I had a little bit of preparation but there is a lot of serendipity that related to, among other things, the people that helped me for no particular reason. But beyond that, participation in Congress is one way of public service but it's hardly the only, and that's again why I look at Jim rather than Margaret. I had a father who spent 15 months walking from Omaha Beach to The Bulge to the Rhine and he wasn't prepared for that, but his service in 15 months was vastly greater than anything that could follow, and so we thank people like Jim who also was in World War Two in a very major way. And I think when people think about public service, they've got to think through, does it relate to receiving a cheque and, from the government? But who is serving the public better, your favorite Senator or a major entrepreneur, let's say Bill Gates? Who's doing more good for The United States? Is it your favorite Governor? Or is it a scientist here at Iowa working on stem cells? Is it a Congressman or is it an historian trying to provide some sort of perspective to events of the day? And America is all about everybody working in these enormously different ways, and here I just have to conclude with a couple of traumas that I think are not getting adequate attention. We all know that it's awfully difficult to figure out how to start or whether to start a war. We've never really thought as a society how difficult and more difficult it can be to end one. And it's something we've never thought a lot about. Other than Vietnam, we've never really had a problem with ending a war, but that is really something that is extraordinary, and part of it relates to what I call the great weakness of politics, which is pride. And I reference this because if you take the Seven Deadly Sins, and you take the notion that human nature is constant, I like to contrast pride with greed, and greed which you might say is the weakness of the business class is surprisingly practical. And I give this example of you take a book store owner that reads a book a likes it a lot and reads another one he doesn't like, so he inventories six of the one he likes and one of the one he doesn't. If the public comes in and buys the one he doesn't like, he doesn't restock the one he does, he restocks the one that sells, and that's a very pragmatic thing. Politics, on the other hand, people hesitate to acknowledge error. And it is, it is the hardest thing in the world. And somehow when people in governments make mistakes, there have to be better ways of coming forth. We are confronted with something that I think is a greater danger than anybody else and so when I say this, you're going to have to take it with a grain of salt because no one agrees with me. I think we're far closer to escalating in Iraq than we are winding down. Escalating in the sense of moving to another country, and I think the possibility of our attacking Iran is anything but trivial. And the model people use is a model called Osirak and you might recall a generation ago there was an Israeli preemptive strike in Iraq in a town called Osirak that undercut a capacity to develop nuclear technology of a given type at a given time. Many people, geo-strategists think this was somewhat successful. Others are not so sure but there, it's a call that one can make internally. On the other hand, the idea of doing a one, two or three week strike against Iran from our perspective, the thought is that's going to be like Osirak. The downside is that from the Iranian perspective, it will be looked at very differently, that is it won't be one, two or three week issue. They will respond not in three weeks, and not in years, but maybe decades, and they will view this as an attack on Iranian civilization and if people think that it's difficult to deal with Al Qaeda, Hezbollah is far more consequential. And the response will be long term and very awkward. And then there's what I call a three three one hundred dilemma. The first three is that there are three ways you can get nuclear weapons. You can develop them. You can also buy them and steal them. So you attack a society to deter its capacity to build and I'm convinced that there would be some success in deferring Iran's capacity to build, but that doesn't stop capacity to buy or steal. And it certainly emboldens the right to use from the other side's perspective, whether it be against us or against Israel. The other three is there are three weapons of mass destruction. There's nuclear, there's chemical and biological and you deter one, that doesn't stop the other two. And I, the hundred is that we do have such a thing in history as hundred year wars. And I think this is a time period where America has to be doing everything it can to undercut the momentum that's building for lengthening out this confrontation with parts of the world and doing everything we can. And here I'll just conclude by saying that implies the need to expand law, mechanisms of law and ways of resolving issues in a more Pacific way, and it also means that we have to be concerned with opportunities of others abroad. And the societies that feel left out are societies that are likely to be radical. And these are the kinds of issues that our country should be dealing with and that we have to understand that this temptation to use military power because we have so much does not necessarily fit every geo-strategic problem and can, in fact, exacerbate them at given points in time. At other points, there's no choice, but this is a circumstance of choice. Thank you all very much. - [Alan Nagel] Before proceeding to the question and answer period, I'd like to remind the radio audience that they've been listening to Jim Leach, speaking on the topic Leadership in America as it relates to challenges of the moment at a meeting of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council. I'll pause for another moment or two while we collect question cards. I think we've just had an example of how fortunate Princeton is to have a new member of the faculty. I'm a bit jealous. Well here's a simple, factual one. Who are the people behind the Internet Primary? - [James Leach] Well there are two principles, and they now have a large number of other people but you may recall there was once a political consulting firm called Bailey-Deardorff, they worked for Gerry Ford and George Bush the Senior. And John Deardorff has passed away, his partner Doug Bailey is alive and kicking, and this is partly Doug's idea. And then he is working with a man who you might know somewhat more, the name Hamilton Jordan, who is Jimmy Carter's political top advisor. And so it's Hamilton Jordan and Doug Bailey who've crafted the idea and then they have a large number of other people that have joined in, one being that I'm told, and this is a new phenomenon, America's most trusted individual. And you might say why would I say that? Because that's a very hard thing to suggest to someone, apparently this is tested. And the people who test this are people in the advertising world, that is who do you want to have advertise your used car, your tires and whatever, and they have done the statistic that find that America's most trusted individual is a man named Sam Waterston, and in any regard, Sam is an advocate of this cause now, too. So we're getting into the celebrity arena but these are the people who have, are bringing it to you, but they're now thousands. They're no longer just a handful. - [Alan Nagel] Thank you. This is one that's probably not so easy. Many people believe the present administration in Washington has caused significant damage to our international relations. Do you agree with this, and how extensive is this damage? How long will it take to repair the situation? A few assumptions there. - [James Leach] Well, without accepting any of the assumptions, let me just simply say I have no doubt that we've made the greatest foreign policy blunder in our history and I have no doubt we're in the gravest difficulty as a society abroad than we've ever been in other than the challenge of World War Two. And, and the communist challenge, but in terms of perceptions of America, it has never, we've never gone through a period of greater, greater new views of us and it is extremely awkward. And again, we're going to have to think through in the political process, whether this is going to be viewed as an aberration or, or not, and I personally believe both of the political parties have to think through whether or not they want to set a new course. And it is not a partisan circumstance, it's a American challenge, and it's got to be the greatest foreign policy challenge we've had in a long time because it's, there will be obvious division in this country about it. - [Alan Nagel] There are two questions here that overlap, I'll try to synthesize them. You spoke in your discussion of the potential twilight of the US as a great power and the need for caution in the use of military power. What use, what role does ending use of torture and other abusive treatment by our intelligence agencies play in reestablishing the moral authority of the US? How has the use of torture weakened our country's image as a leader and weakened the furthering of American values? Again, a few assumptions there. - [James Leach] Well first, my reference to twilight is a reference to a Chinese description of the US, not my description. In terms of a, the issues that this question raises, torture and the two great, or three incidents, the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and then some of the other off-country placings of prisoners, very few things have been more difficult for The United States because it looks like we've abandoned our principles. And when you've abandoned principles as a principled country it is very undercutting and if there, there are a number of things the world is crying out for. And one is the word justice. Another is the word respect. And these are very profound and simple concepts. But if we do not present ourselves as a just society, with just values, advancing respect for other people in the world, especially when we differ, we're going to see the kinds of reaction that currently are taking place. There's a brilliant essay by, in this week's New Yorker by the way, by Seymour Hersh, one of our great, long-time writers on war who basically traces some of these issues, particularly of Abu Ghraib, I recommend it to everybody. - [Alan Nagel] What do you think about United States efforts to establish anti-missile bases in Eastern Europe? Is such a policy or such a system desirable, even if the Russians oppose it, and is the potential threat a genuine one? - [James Leach] Well the issue with, it relates to a higher abstraction, and by higher abstraction, this concept of arms control. And if you take the history of war, and there have been all sorts of developments in this history of war, but we've reached a point where there's hardly a military scientist around that doesn't think that forces of offense are now dominant and there's virtually nothing you can do about that. And so for example, if you take the notion of anti-ballistic missile systems, it is true that you can design a missile, a bullet to shoot down a bullet. It isn't true that you can do it with total reliability. But then the question is, how much does it matter? And this is the issue that almost nobody is thinking about. At very sophisticated levels, if you develop this and you assume that a bullet can shoot down a bullet, what about obviating strategies for substantially less money can you develop merve systems, balloon systems that attract these bullets shooting down bullets? But more importantly, and many people think you can do that and so what the Russians are saying, if you do this, we will have to develop many, many, many more missiles. And so we have an arms control strategy in place, not to do this so that other sides wouldn't develop more missiles. And you try to put restraints and arms control instead of development of missile systems. But secondly, what is more important, is it the missile or the warhead? And a lot of people logically think well, it takes the two together, and I'm here to tell you it doesn't. That is, the meaning of the so-called suitcase bomb is that you can, you don't need a sophisticated missile to carry a bomb. I mean, if we can't stop people walking into The United States, what does that mean? One of the great stories of the Cold War, 25 years or so ago, a group of Soviet agents hopped a fence in Germany and stole one of our side-winder missiles, a little missile and we didn't catch 'em, but we put a lot of effort into finding out what happened. We found they took this missile, they broke it in parts and they mailed it to Moscow. And the point is, is your mail service a second strike or a first strike capacity? Is UPS, is FedEx? Is a, a Chinese junk, that is a sailboat? What about things going in holds of ships? All I'm saying is, that yes, there is a technology that missiles can shoot down missiles. But there is an obviating technology as well, and what the Russians are saying, go ahead and do that and we'll just build like mad. And so the question is do you want that? Do you want to spark a new arms race, or reduce a new arms race? Now I'm one that likes the trend of the last decade and a half, vis-a-vis, the coming down of the Iron Curtain and our willingness to try to bring into the Western orbit, the former states of the former Warsaw pact. And this makes a lot of sense, but to do it in this particular way, people are going to have to think through I think a little bit deeper than they have. And so, these other questions have to be dealt with. - [Alan Nagel] Well here's a nice little simple yes or no question. Do you believe that the members of Congress can correct the problem of earmarks? I think this may have to be the last one. - [James Leach] Well, in theory, absolutely, if you don't believe in human nature. - [Alan Nagel] We've reached the time to conclude today's program. On behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, I want to thank Jim Leach for sharing with us and with our radio and cable TV audiences his observations on Leadership in America as it relates to challenges of the moment. I also wish to thank our sponsors, International Programs at the University of Iowa, the Wilson Family Foundation, courtesy of Herbert and Janice Wilson, and the University of Iowa Credit Union. As a modest token of our appreciation, Jim, I wish to present you, unwrapped, with the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mug, suitable for coffee, tea, or whatever you may prefer in Iowa City or in Princeton. I'm not quite sure what the favorite drink in Princeton is these days. - [James Leach] Well thank you so much. - [Alan Nagel] You are most welcome. Audience members, if you have any questions about joining the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, please call the office at 335-0351. If you enjoyed listening to our program on the radio or via cable TV, please consider supporting the Council's work by sending a contribution to the ICFRC, 1111 University Capitol Center, Iowa City, Iowa, 52242. Please return your name tags. Thank you, we are adjourned.