WAMC Radio's Alan Chartock Interviews Carnegie Council President Joel Rosenthal
January 20, 2011
| Joel H. Rosenthal |
This interview was posted with kind permission of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. It was first broadcast on February 24, 2011.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Hi. This is Alan Chartock. Joining us today is Joel
Rosenthal, president of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs,
founded in 1914 as one of Andrew
Carnegie's original peace endowments.
Rosenthal, who earned a Ph.D. at Yale, serves as editor-in-chief of Ethics &
International Affairs and is the author of Righteous
Realists.
Joel Rosenthal, it's a great pleasure to have you here. We're flattered that
you've come. Thanks so much.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: I'm delighted to be with you. Thanks for the opportunity.
ALAN CHARTOCK: The first thing I want to know is a little bit more about you.
How did you get to where you are?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Interesting question. I'm an academic by training and
profession. I earned a Ph.D. in American studies with a history focus.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Where?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Yale University. My field of inquiry was U.S. foreign
policy, international relations, and some political and diplomatic history
as well.
ALAN CHARTOCK: What did you write your thesis on?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: That's what really brought me into the field of ethics.
My thesis was on a group of thinkers who were important to the formation of
American foreign policy after World War II, self-identified as realists, and
at the beginning of the Cold War, how were we going to deal with the world after
World War II.
As I looked at these so-called realists, I came to a realization of my own,
which was that for a group of people who said it's
all about power politics and we have to find our way in the world after this
great war, they were the most moralistic people I could find. They were deeply
concerned with moral and ethical questions.
The protagonists in this story were people like Hans
Morgenthau, a political theorist; Reinhold
Niebuhr, who was a theologian; George
Kennan, who was actually the person who coined the term "Cold War"
and containment. As I looked at these people, I began to think and write about
them, which brought me to this whole area of ethics.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Were you raised in the kind of family that taught you about
all of this?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Yes and no. I had a very conventional suburban background
in Massachusetts and always had an interest in the broader world and in history
and in travel, but nothing extraordinary in terms of my own personal experience
that way.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Let me then go from your background to Andrew Carnegie's, which
I find fascinating. Here's a guy who left a lot of his wealth to public libraries, endowments, and the Carnegie Council, which led to the establishment of what
we know and has saved my life as TIAA-CREF,
so that we professors could go from one place to another. Tell us about Carnegie.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: He was an extraordinary man. Maybe the first thing to
know is that he was a self-made man. He came to the United States as an economic
refugee, literally with just the shirt on his back. Through his own force of
will and his own experience, he became the richest man in the world, and he
was known as the richest man in the world in his own time.
He had a public profile
probably much like Bill
Gates has today, widely recognized, a celebrity figure. And, like Bill Gates
in many ways, he realized that with great wealth he had great opportunity. He
spent the last full third of his life giving away his
money in philanthropy.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Remind everybody how he made that money.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: He was the founder of the U.S.
Steel Corporation. It was really through a series of his work in coal, steel,
and in the building of the railroads, which led to the founding and eventual
sale of the U.S. Steel Corporation.
ALAN CHARTOCK: So many of us have spent a good deal of our lives in public
libraries. He did a lot for them.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: When he got to this point in his life where he was
trying to figure out, "I've amassed this great wealth, how can I use it to better
the plight of people everywhere?" he really had two big ideas of what he might
do.
The first, as you're suggesting, was the public library system. He himself had
been the beneficiary of a subscription library in Pittsburgh and became self-educated
in that library. He thought, "We really should be able to create a new system
where people everywhere would have access to knowledge, to information, to books."
It was a very simple idea, but it was a profound idea, that we could come up
with a new way of doing this. So he started to fund the building of public libraries
all throughout the United States and the United Kingdom, and by the time he
was finished he had funded 2,500 public libraries.
ALAN CHARTOCK: What led him to peace?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: He had this view that society was constantly
improving. It was a social Darwinist kind of view, that we're always improving,
we're always evolving, we're becoming more civilized as time goes by. He thought
that war was something that human society would eventually outgrow, that we
would come to a point of maturity where war would seem irrational and immoral.
And, much like we see something like slavery now, or dueling, where gentlemen had to duel to maintain their honor, that war
would be seen in a similar way, that it was an outmoded way of thinking and
that we would evolve away from that.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Was he right?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: No. I think that was a problem. His fundamental view
of human nature was a little bit overly optimistic, a little bit naïve,
if you will. He kind of misunderstood in some way the role that conflict plays
in human society.
He was not totally wrong, though, in the sense that we can find ways, build
institutions, come up with norms or rules that could lead to a more peaceful
world. That's where he started to make his mark, and this is the relevance that
he still has today.
In his day, the idea as it relates to war—how would you mitigate war?—was
a simple idea: When two parties have a dispute, they bring it to court, a mediation, or an arbitration. He thought, "We do this in civil society,
in domestic society; why can't we do that in international society?"
He helped to build the Peace Palace at The Hague—"We can build an institution
to help us to do better in this area of human conflict." He also was supportive
of the idea of a League of Nations—again, "We can build an institution,
we can change the way people think about how nations behave." This obviously
led to the whole field of international law and organization, which is still
very important in international relations today.
ALAN CHARTOCK: While we're talking about Carnegie, to think in terms of peace
in the world, was there any personal motivation that you know of? Was somebody
close to him killed in a war, or was there something that made him want to devote
himself as part of his legacy to the concept of peace?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: He had lived through the Civil War. He was not a soldier
in the war, although he did play a small role in some of the buildings and the
railroads around the time of the war. But that experience, of seeing the beginnings
of industrial war and the tremendous human cost and casualties
was certainly a factor.
Curiously, it was very much against his business interests to be such a pacifist. There was a lot of money to be made in the building of ships and artillery.
It was something in his own personal experience that led him in this direction.
But it goes back to something I said before, which is this idea that society
was improving and that we were becoming better as a species and that war was
just an irrational act, and this was something that he felt he could address
through his philanthropy.
ALAN CHARTOCK: You run the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
What do you do?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Our offices are here in midtown Manhattan, on East 64th Street. We run a series
of educational programs, public affairs programs, also programs for college
and university professors; we run a publications program and a website—all
devoted to creating educational resources on the intersection between ethics
and international affairs.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Give us an example of that intersection in terms of what you
study.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: This afternoon we will be having a discussion with Gideon
Rose, who is the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, and he's employed
by the Council on Foreign Relations. He will be talking about his book, called
How Wars End. That's a very profound question about how wars end,
in the sense of why is it that some wars end with a just and sustainable peace,
and why do some wars devolve into a series or a cycle of conflict.
ALAN CHARTOCK: So what would he say about World War I?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: That was a war that ended badly. It was a war that helped
to create, or at least sustain, a cycle of violence which had begun in the previous
century.
What's interesting about that would be to look at the differences between the
way World War I ended and the way World War II ended. It was a question of taking
into account the interests of the defeated parties. The whole founding of the
European project, the beginning of the Coal and Steel Community, the beginning
of the European Community, which ended up with the European Union, there was
a whole change in approach. It was interest-based. There was an understanding
that there was a common interest in creating this new community, and leadership
got behind this idea. It's really a very profound thing.
When people say, "We're destined to live with conflict and we're destined
to live with war"—well, yes that's true, perhaps up to a certain point,
but we can learn lessons. If you think about Europe, 100 years ago if you'd
said, "We're going to come to a place where war in Europe would be unthinkable,"
that would be hard to imagine. But you can see how it is in fact possible.
ALAN CHARTOCK: World War II we thought about those who lost the war. World
War I we punished them. Is that the thesis?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Correct. It was really an unsustainable, and to some
extent vengeful, peace. When we think about it today, we can see that in trying
to get to a sustainable, peaceful resolution of conflict we do have to take
into account the interests of all the parties and to try to find a way to move
forward.
ALAN CHARTOCK: If we were to take a look now at a contemporary "war"
that has ended relatively well by comparative standards, would we look at the
Irish experience?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: That's ongoing, but it's a good example, in the sense
of creative thinking, going back to the simple point I made before, taking into
account the legitimate interests and views of all the parties; thinking about
the distribution of power, and necessary evolution and change in that; thinking
about demographics and how these change and how these can be used in a positive
and not necessarily in a negative way. So there is a lot to be learned there.
I would caution, though, that all conflict is different. There are different
dynamics. There are so many different variables at play, so many different personalities,
that we can draw some general lessons, but I don't think there's a simple formula
that can be learned and then applied.
ALAN CHARTOCK: What about the demonization of the enemy? We look at something
like Iran. While the people of Iran seem to me to be generally good people,
we have demonized their leadership, and basically there is a sense, either with
the North Koreans or some of the leadership in Iran, that they have the bomb,
that they'll use the bomb, and that because they're nuts—this
is not my thinking, by the way, but this is what you hear—because they're
nuts, they will drop a bomb and go down with it like Dr.
Strangelove.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: This is a profound theme, the idea of demonization of
the enemy. That is a lesson that we should learn from the past. This is the
path toward destruction and destructive behavior, and it is something that we
can and should address.
If you look at any catastrophic genocidal kind of activity, war at that ultimate
level, it always begins with the demonization and, perhaps even a better word,
the de-humanization of the other. That is really the beginning of the end, when
you see the other as somehow either less than human or somehow evil, an evil
that has to be eradicated in some way. That's right there at the beginning of
the slippery slope.
ALAN CHARTOCK: You mentioned Hans Morgenthau earlier. But I'm thinking
about Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau
in the Roosevelt
Administration and the idea that the Germans could never, ever be trusted; let's
put them back and make them an agrarian society and never let them become either
urbanized or a society that can deal with complex subjects. Roosevelt said,
"No."
Do you ever think about that one?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: The Morgenthau
Plan is a good example of a bad idea. Wiser heads prevailed. Why? Because by trying to make Germany into
something that it is not, to try to tie its hands, and to try to subjugate it
in that way is a counterproductive notion.
So instead what happened? The European project was to give Germany a stake,
to make it in its interests to become not only part of, but the engine of this
new dynamic, a bigger economic and then political and cultural community.
When we think about society, we have to take into account these interests and
to work with them, not against them.
ALAN CHARTOCK: When I went to college a long time ago, the historians that
taught me would delve into the question as to whether there is such a thing
as a national character for a country. Then it sort of got discredited. I've
always been fascinated with the concept.
Do you think countries
have a national character? Do you think the Germans will always be the Germans,
for example? Do you think the Austrians will always be the Austrians, or will
the children of the children be different?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: That's a great question. There's a certain danger to
this national character, which then equals national destiny.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Stereotyping.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Yes. I prefer to think about core founding
principles. A lot of our work here is to see and to explore what's common. You
can see certain kinds of peculiarities or characteristics that come
out of historical experience, geography and so on. But the longer I look at
this, the more I see that the real story is about how there is so much universal
in the human experience rather than difference. There's a real danger in moving
almost in the direction of stereotyping certain kind of national characteristics.
ALAN CHARTOCK: I hope you're right.
One of the Carnegie Council's goals is to end war. Is that ever going to happen?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Not to be too cute about the answer, but it depends on
what you mean by war. The whole concept of war has really changed and evolved.
I do not think—and this is where I disagree with Andrew Carnegie—I
do not think that there is this peaceful end-state that's there for
us waiting to be discovered. Conflict and violence is part of the human experience.
But he was correct in a way to think that war, in the way that we think of it
in its most conventional way, is possible to change. We're moving into a
new area now. The way we think about war has changed. The whole idea of industrial
war and large-scale armies and invasions, seems quite outmoded.
The real question is: What do we mean by war? What will violent conflict look
like? What will interstate conflict look like? Can we move into a world where,
when we think about conflict, it's more like the way we would think about creating
a peaceful and ordered society rather than a war society?
ALAN CHARTOCK: You've given me a lot of places to go. I don't know where
to go first.
President Hu
was recently in the United States. Is competing systems part of a war, based on what you've
just told us?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: I don't think so. We're certainly not in a shooting war.
That's the first threshold question. The idea of competition between countries
is part of it. That could be seen as a healthy thing in some ways; it's not
necessarily something to be avoided.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Yet I recently talked to a congressman on our Congressional Corner
program who came from a district in Connecticut, and he was for building more
nuclear submarines. I asked him why we had to do that. He said, "Because
the Chinese just built one." So there's a certain kind of competition that's
going on.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Right.
ALAN CHARTOCK: But on the other hand, armed nuclear submarines?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: There is a real question about what's required
to provide basic defense for our country. Also, an even more interesting question
too, about what sort of responsibility do we, the United States, want to take
for global security, beyond just what's in our narrow national defense interests?
There is an argument to be said that we want to remain the preeminent provider
of global security so that we can take care of not only ourselves but our friends
and our interests that extend globally. Whether that requires the building
of more nuclear-powered submarines is an interesting question. I tend to think
we're going to go in the opposite direction. Less is going to be needed than
people say.
ALAN CHARTOCK: What do you make of the confrontation that lasted for all
those years when everybody thought we had to hide under our desks because either
we or the Russians would be sending A-bombs and H-bombs at each other? It didn't
happen because there was an awareness of the potential for destruction. What
do you make of all that?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Deterrence has worked. We need to figure out where we
go from there. Most people feel that that's a very uncomfortable compromise,
to say that we're going to threaten to obliterate any enemy that we might have
and this is what's going to create stability.
The idea of moving to lower and lower levels of capability is certainly within
our grasp.
ALAN CHARTOCK: I'm sorry. I don't know what that means.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Well, meaning do we really need as much the ability,
what was called overkill. How many submarines, bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, do you really need to get to the level
of stability that we're talking about—deterrence?
Some of the initiatives that are going on now to reduce levels of nuclear weapons
just make logical sense. Why do we need this overkill capacity in today's world?
ALAN CHARTOCK: The genie is out of the bottle. Clearly, the argument we're
making to North Korea and Iran is, "You can't have them; but we've got them."
And they're going to have them. Israel has them, and so many others.
What if, in the name of an entity, a god, somebody says, "It's our duty to lob a weapon at the Japanese from North Korea"? How would society
react to basically a mad act? You're assuming that that mad act won't happen
because it's self-defeating. But what if somebody really believed that you go
to heaven because you do that, and, "We don't care if we die," just
like suicide bombers don't? Does this add a level of complexity to your work?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Absolutely. Again, this is going back to Carnegie's original
vision. We're talking about the rational actor, the rational person, the rational
man. It's very hard to deal with those who are working under a different belief
system. That's exactly the anxiety that we see now with a theocracy like Iran,
or perhaps an irrational actor like North Korea. Do they see the world the way
we see it, and does deterrence work? That's an open question.
ALAN CHARTOCK: You mentioned just a little while before that we may be seeking
our own safety and also to assure the safety of the rest of the world. What's
the difference between that kind of thinking and that of Alexander
the Great?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: It's a question of intent. Is it an imperial enterprise?
Do we seek a certain kind of conquest or privileges that come
along with the extension of our power? I don't think so.
I'd like to think that we see the benefits of a stable, predictable global system
which facilitates trade, the movement of people, the movement of money, and
the improvement of people's lives.
ALAN CHARTOCK: But somebody's yelling at the radio now, "Alan, ask him.
Say to him, 'Yeah, but Eisenhower
talked about the military-industrial
complex, we've got to feed the beast, that that's what this is really all
about.'"
JOEL ROSENTHAL: That's legitimate. We're coming up to 50 years since
that speech and, sadly, it seems prophetic. We have had one war, one
conflict, after another, and if we keep looking for them we will certainly find
them. The open question for the United States right now is to think about the
goal, which is to have the most peaceful, stable, predictable world that we
can have.
It's a question now of what is our role. Do we need to still outspend everybody
by whatever the numbers are and have so much more capacity than any other, or
can we move to a world where there is burden sharing, where there are others
who have a stake and where there are others who will do some meaningful work?
ALAN CHARTOCK: What makes that happen? The "coalition of the
willing," according to George
W. Bush, and "We're going to put this together and we're not going
to be alone in this"—but in the end we certainly were. We had a little
help, but we certainly were. What makes others take a stake? Do we have to step
out?
I keep worrying about the poor women in Iran who get whipped because they show
ankle or a face, and the United States says, "Okay, we can't do that anymore.
They don't want us over there in Afghanistan, they don't want us in Iraq. We're
not going to be there anymore." And then we watch these horrible things
happen.
Joel, what is our responsibility?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: As the preeminent power, we certainly have some responsibility,
but we don't have it all, and it is our responsibility to lead. One of the weaknesses
in our leadership has been our inability to get others to do their part.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Why should they if they don't have to?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: We're going to move into a new world, and that
new world is going to be dictated by the resources that are going to be available
to the United States.
Secretary Gates
has already made it clear that we're not going to be able to sustain at the
level that we are now, and the numbers and the resources are going to come down.
There will be some movement in that direction. Whether we can get others to
step up or not is an open question.
ALAN CHARTOCK: You personally, Joel, are an expert on brokering peace,
terrorism and insurgency, and military ethics.
Let's go first to the concept of brokering peace. Who's doing it and who's doing
it well right now?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: I'm a realist in the sense that peace has to be made
between the parties. If there's a broker, a broker can only help to shape
the environment perhaps, provide a few marginal carrots and sticks. But it's
a dangerous game to think that third parties can come in and make it happen.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Didn't Theodore Roosevelt get a Nobel Prize for doing exactly
this?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Yes, in 1904, in the Russian-Japanese War. As a rising
power, the United States saw it to be in its interests to try to assert itself
in the changing balance of power in the Pacific Ocean.
There are times where you see changing power dynamics where parties can come
in and help to shape the environment, help to provide some kinds of assurances
to the parties, and finish off the deal. But we have to be careful about the
limitations.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Who's on the scene right now who's doing it? Kissinger
got a lot of credit for it—whether or not he really deserved it by the
time it was done, I don't know. But who's on the scene doing exactly that right
now? You got a name and a face?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Not one right off the top of my head, to be honest with
you.
ALAN CHARTOCK: What about Hillary
Clinton?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: I was going to go in that direction. Sometimes maybe
we hold the bar a little bit too high. Sometimes it's the dog that didn't bark,
right? There are a lot of flashpoints, hot spots, some pretty scary places out
there. We may not be satisfied with the result, and yet sometimes status quo
might be the best you can do.
The United States has not gotten enough credit and gotten way too much blame
for its efforts in the Middle East. You could even say the same in the Korean
Peninsula. Those are two flashpoints that are frightening to many. All sorts of bad things
can happen. There are a lot of good people who are doing a lot of good work
to avoid the worst.
ALAN CHARTOCK: And yet, in the Middle-Eastern situation, is it not so that about
a billion Arabs perceive the United States as being anything but an honest broker?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Again, that's what you were saying, this idea of brokering
peace. I don't think the United States is necessarily an "honest broker."
The United States has made it very clear that its ally is Israel, and it proceeds
on that basis unapologetically. That said, the United States has great interest
and has devoted great resources—time, effort, energy, prestige, money—in
trying to do its part to find a solution.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Let's go to the next war, the next other kind of war which we
mentioned before, which is terrorism. That's the new war.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Right.
ALAN CHARTOCK: A group of people who have issues start killing people, they
start bombing the World Trade Center, they do this kind of thing. But it's not
Pakistan. They may come from Pakistan, they may come from Saudi Arabia, but
what does a country do in terms of protecting its national interest? Does it
bomb Pakistan and say, "Okay, you came from Pakistan; therefore, we're
going to bomb it and take whatever collateral damage we can"? Or what are
the strategies?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: This gets back to the whole question of what do we
mean by war. We've made a big mistake in terms of if you want to go back to
the so-called war on terrorism. The whole war framework might be the wrong way
to go.
My position on the al Qaeda problem post-9/11 was to see al Qaeda for what it
is, which is a criminal syndicate, a network. I can't for the life of me figure
out why the strategy wasn't to take it out, much like we took out organized
crime.
That's not to say we have to do this with hands tied behind the back, not use
violent force. There are ways to do that.
But to try to put this into the framework of conventional war—the way you
think about war, there's usually a defined theater. In the global war on terror,
the theater is everywhere from Yemen to Somalia to Pakistan
to Afghanistan to wherever we find a terrorist. And then the idea of war also
has a timeframe—it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
We've set this thing up the wrong way. We've got a global theater that
has no limits and we have a timeframe with no end. That's the wrong way to look
at it, whereas if you look at it more like a criminal enterprise, that gives
you a much better framework for dealing with it.
ALAN CHARTOCK: I'm so glad we have you here, Joel, because you're the expert—I'm
certainly not—and I know you'll answer this very simple question from me.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Sure.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Why did George W. Bush bring our troops, if what you've just
said is so, into Iraq? What was the motivation for that?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: I take George W. Bush at his word. His word was he felt
that, in the wake of 9/11 and when it came to this notion of who had access
to weapons of mass destruction and who had intent, he said very clearly—and
this is in relation to Iraq—he said, "The risk of inaction is greater
than the risk of action." He made a very simple calculation that we're
not really sure, but close enough. That was number one.
Number two, I am convinced that Iraq was chosen as a demonstration effect. I
say this sadly. I think it was a terrible decision. But the idea being that
after 9/11—and we see that there are groups out there with this kind of
intent and this kind of growing capacity—that the United States wanted
to show the world what it was willing to do. What it was willing to do was to
take down regimes that would show this kind of intent and not retreat from it.
If you read what Bush says and what other people have said, I don't think there's
any great mystery to it. That's why they're not all that concerned with what
the report said about weapons of mass destruction. Their view was: "Close
enough. These guys had it, they had it in the past, they said they wanted it,
they said they were working on it, and they said they're use it. Close enough."
ALAN CHARTOCK: They weren't the guys who did it. The guys who did it came from
other places. We could have shown that will by bombing or going to war with
Pakistan.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Right. That was a much harder job.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Yeah?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: As was anything having to do with Iran, those were harder
jobs. This was something that they could do, and they took the decision to do
it. The damage was self-evident in a way, but also the greater damage, which
was the loss of cooperation and goodwill of anybody who was really on board
with us in September of 2011. We lost the opportunity to lead
a genuinely global effort of cooperation to take out this network.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Let me ask you this, Joel: When you wake up in the morning, do
you ever say, "Oh, boy"?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: I have a friend who says, "You must take optimism pills
every day."
Again, I do have a somewhat realistic set of expectations. There
are means within our grasp, particularly as Americans, and it's our responsibility
to be thoughtful about what we can do to make the world a more peaceful, stable,
and prosperous place.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Want to give us a list?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: One—we're already doing it a little bit here—we do have
to rethink the use of force and the future of war. We're living through a profound
time right now, all the way from at one end of the spectrum the whole question
of living with nuclear weapons. In fact, it's a great time right now. We have
the luxury in some way to take a breath, sit back, think about it, talk to our
friends, our allies, about what the real needs are. There is room to maneuver
that we didn't feel that we had in the past, and how can we move ahead with
this whole question about nuclear weapons.
Related to that, what are we teaching our kids about nuclear weapons? You're
talking about your age and mine, and we've had
a certain cultural experience about living with nuclear weapons, and we've drawn
certain conclusions from that. If you think about kids who are born in this
century—Hiroshima
is literally the distant past. It's a profound question: What are we going to
teach our kids about nuclear weapons and their capacity and what we're going
to do with them?
The whole question about war, its future, the use of violent force, is an open
question.
The other issue is thinking seriously about globalization, again something we
take for granted now. We live in a set of global systems. We can't just retreat
from the world. Whether it's the economy, the environment, flows of people,
flows of information, we live in a series of global systems and we're going
to be playing a role in that. We need to think about how we're going to deal
with that from an ethical perspective.
ALAN CHARTOCK: You're an ethics expert. I was going to ask you about this, because
certain words come to mind—Guantanamo,
Abu
Ghraib. You have to watch from your perch the way in which other people
think about us.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Right.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Some of these were really terrible experiences for Americans—dogs
jumping on naked people, pulling people away from their homelands and sticking
them on a plane and bringing them somewhere else, and all of the rest. What's
the risk for the United States in doing all of that?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: There's a great risk. This is why the decision for war was
so traumatic in a way, because this is all 100 percent predictable. We know
what's going to happen when we cross that threshold.
But the opportunity for us now is the capacity that the United States has for
self-reflection and self-correction. This is the openness of our society, the
fact that we're having a conversation like this and that we can have conversations
like this with our political and military leaders. People around the world do at some level
understand that. At the Carnegie Council that's a small role that we can play.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Maybe you are taking optimism pills, Joel. I see the glass
as half-empty, certainly, that we're not doing that, that we're going in the
other direction, that we are rewarding people who take a warmongering
position.
It's wonderful, your perch and what you're doing, and the Carnegie
Council. But in the end I take a look at the whole thing and
I just am scared to death.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: I draw a little bit of inspiration—actually, President
Obama has made
some very important speeches directed at the world in what I would consider
an American voice, one of understanding our responsibilities as the preeminent
power, but also with a sense of humility and a sense of trying to reckon with
any past injustices and move forward. We don't have any choice but to do that
as well.
ALAN CHARTOCK: How do you deal with that? There are those African-Americans
who believe that—you spoke of the Civil War before and Carnegie living
during the Civil War—that we should pay back for the indignity of putting
people on boats and then treating them like garbage for years and years. There's
always somebody who will say that we have good cause for doing this—and
they might.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: There are different ways of reckoning with the past or
with past injustice. The first thing is to face it and to
understand that, yes, we were a country that was born flawed, but, to channel
Mr. Carnegie for a second, we're evolving. Yes, when we were born women didn't
have the right to vote, there were slaves, there were all kinds of problems.
But we also had within the DNA certain principles and ideals, and we're
working on them.
To take any other view is to be unduly pessimistic. If you look at the history—even
within your own lifetime, think about where we've come in terms of rights for
women, civil rights, and rights for the disabled. Within one generation
our whole concept of what a fair and just society is domestically has changed
in ways that were unimaginable. That is, again, within part of your lifetime.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Corporations have now been made citizens by virtue of the
Supreme Court, or some would say even the Constitution, and many of those corporations
are now international entities.
Governance is not the governance of the
United States so much anymore, as these corporate folks who own so much of the
world and who don't have to listen to either the Congress or the president. What's your thinking about that?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: That's a great question.
First of all, they have to listen to themselves. If I'm a leader of a corporation,
or even part of a stakeholder in a corporation—a corporation is an entity,
it has a collective identity, and it's a reasonable question to ask what are
its responsibilities.
ALAN CHARTOCK: But that sounds so goody-goody. Ever since early films about
this, one of the stockholders stands up at the stockholders' meeting and yells
at them, "Stop this behavior," and they're treated like a nut, and
then in the end of the film she's treated as a heroine for having done that.
But that isn't the way it works.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: That's right. It's the government's requirement and job
to say, "Listen, this is the floor, this is what you've got to do." The government bears tremendous responsibility to say, "If
you want to have the rights of a corporation and the kinds of protections that
you get, we're going to protect you with our army, our police force, and our force
of law. Well then, you have these following responsibilities."
That's basically the legal aspect of it.
But thoughtful people will understand there's a difference between law and ethics,
that there are things that—"Okay, we can do these things legally,
but is this something we want to do as a group? Is this ethical? Is this desirable?"
ALAN CHARTOCK: The Carnegie Council interviews famous political scientists and historians and asks them
what their thoughts are. But how do you multiply the
important work you're doing so that there's any kind of real consciousness of
it?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: We try to create educational resources in a very traditional
way, which is to invite people to reflect on their experience, share their knowledge,
share their understanding, and they do it in a very conventional way, which
is to give a talk, participate in a workshop, write an article, or appear in an
interview.
We download that information and then we try to distribute it as broadly
as possible.
We have a large web of people in the New York area who are able to come here
and to participate in the programs.
But increasingly, through the wonders of digital technology, we are able to
distribute this information, whether it's in video, audio, or written
form, through the Internet. We have viewers, listeners, and readers all around
the world.
ALAN CHARTOCK: How do we know, those of us who are listening to you right
now, Joel, that you won't get co-opted, that the system won't do what it has
done with so many other people—basically eat you up, say, "We're going
to put Lady Van Snoot on your board, we're going to do this, we're going to
do that," and then, sooner or later, you have to behave.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: It's getting back to this idea of openness
and competition of ideas, the fact that we're out there. We are here as an open
forum. People can come, they can participate, they can have their say, they
can be part of it. That's really our answer. We are really a convening place,
a forum. It's not for us to bring peace or to create or manage policy. We're
here as an educational institution.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Would old man Carnegie have liked to hear you say that?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: I think so. He had an interesting view of his philanthropic
efforts. He believed that the efforts themselves needed to change, grow, and
evolve in an organic fashion over time.
The main point of this organization was to educate people so that they understood,
especially in the United States as a rising power, that the United States had
international responsibilities and that we wanted to foster a more peaceful
world.
If old man Carnegie walked in today, what would he say? I think he would say,
"We want to educate, we want to bring in as many people, voices, as we
can, and we want to distribute this information as broadly as possible. If we
can have some small influence on the way people think in this direction, that
would be a good thing."
ALAN CHARTOCK: Joel, I take it as the head of the Council that you travel
the world. When you go to other countries, what is your sense of their reception
to the idea of making peace?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: It's interesting. The Carnegie name actually does travel
very well. It's well recognized. Not everybody knows the story or the history,
but it is a respected brand. We're certainly seen as American, but not official
in the sense of official government. And it's a bit of a magnet—people
do respond to it and they see it as intellectually sound, they see it as sort
of as close to an honest broker as you can imagine.
My sense is that people around the world want to be heard, they want to be part
of something like this, a global forum for the discussion of these kinds of
issues.
In some ways they're delighted, and sometimes disarmed, by the fact that we
genuinely want to have open conversation and dialogue and want to hear different
voices. In that way the response has been very positive.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Tunisia—we're going through it right now. All of a sudden,
there is a Jasmine
Revolution and people rise up. What's to be learned from this?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: What's to be learned is that the whole idea of legitimacy
is essential. This is an ethical proposition. Governments fall when they are
perceived as illegitimate, when they lose their authority. How do you gain authority?
You gain authority by serving the people, by looking out for their interests,
by providing for them security and certain kinds of freedoms and
liberties.
In that sense, the battle for legitimacy—what is considered right, correct,
better—those are ethical and value questions.
What I take away from Tunisia is you see a society that has real problems and
its leadership has suffered because it hasn't performed.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Russia right now, journalists are being killed, political
parties are being discouraged. There was a major democratic revolution, an ex-KGB
man takes over, and the country more and more reverts to what it used to look
like. That's pretty discouraging, isn't it?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: It is. But on the other hand, the performance isn't
what we would want it to be, but are we better off now than we were in the days
of the Iron Curtain? We are. We're moving generally in the right direction.
Very dissatisfied with the performance and so on. But there has been some progress,
at least at the rhetorical and theoretical level, that there are certain kinds
of rights that are expected and that the government has to recognize.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Does our government ever come to you and
ask the Carnegie Council to help them?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Not directly. We have no direct influence at all. From time
to time we will participate in government-sponsored activity. We have done a
lot of work with institutions that are government-sponsored, like military academies,
service academies, war colleges, and State Department kind of initiatives. But we participate just as participants in any of those programs.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Would you take money from them?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: We've taken grant money from the United States Institute
for Peace, which is an educational institution. We've taken funds from the National
Endowment for the Humanities for educational programs for the public. We have
worked with the United States military in professional military education, ethics
education primarily for military officers and officers-in-training. We've had
that kind of relationship with the government.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Has there ever been what you would consider to be an untoward
suggestion that you come up with the programs or conclusions that they would
like as opposed to what you would think would be more honest?
JOEL ROSENTHAL: No. That's easy for us, because we operate by the principles
of academic freedom. Again, we are conveners. So when we work with a government
agency, we bring in people who have various expertise, whether it's academic
or practical and they do their thing under the auspices of academic freedom.
They're free to speak their minds and they're expected to.
ALAN CHARTOCK: Our guest today has been Joel Rosenthal, President of the
Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
Under Rosenthal's direction, the Council sponsors educational programs for worldwide
audiences. The Council's lectures, publications, and educational programs focus
on issues relating to ethics and war, the global economy, and cultural difference.
He has co-edited several collections of articles and written numerous articles
of his own, including "Ethics", in Bruce
W. Jentleson's, et al., Encyclopedia
of US Foreign Relations. His work in progress includes, How Moral
Can We Get? Essays on the Moral Nation.
Among his professional activities, he serves as senior fellow, Stockdale Center,
U.S. Naval Academy; adjunct professor, New York University; chairman of the
Bard College Globalization and International Affairs Program in New York City;
committee member for the journal Review of Ethics & International Affairs,
Shanghai International Studies University; and honorary professor in history,
University of Copenhagen.
I want to thank you, Joel Rosenthal, for joining us today. We are very flattered
that you have taken the time to come and be with us. It's just terrific to have
you here.
JOEL ROSENTHAL: Thank you, Alan. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Read More: Armed Conflict, Ethics, International Relations, Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Foreign Policy, War on Terror
Transcripts have been edited for grammar and clarity, and are posted with permission from the speakers.
