Transcript

04:45 Doug Blackmon: Welcome back to American Forum. There is no more sacred or serious responsibility for any American president than to plunge the nation into war. Whether the interests of the nation justify the certain deaths of American citizens, the tremendous cost to society in a small conflict, the consequences for the larger world order and the political risks that attach to so grave a decision. Indeed, Americans have been engaged in an historically prolonged and polarized national examination of the fateful decision by President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003. We have been debating that decision ever since and felt its consequences in the course of four presidential elections, thousands of funerals for American soldiers and victims of terror. Hundreds of thousands of medical visits by injured military personnel and even in the hundreds of millions at times we’ve all paid our federal taxes. Yet we still don’t have a broad consensus on exactly how and why all of that happened. Our guest today is a professor of political science who has spent a career studying such questions around the origins and consequences of war. Allan Stam is dean of the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. He was a military officer before his academic career and is the author or co-author of four books, most recently a volume on the nature of leadership titled Why Leaders Fight? It’s based on a detailed study of 2,400 national leaders over the course of 130 years attempting to identify a set of characteristics and life experiences explaining why some leaders are more likely than others to make war. Allan, thanks for joining us.

Allan Stam: Doug, thanks so much for the invitation to be here. It’s much appreciated.

2:24 Blackmon: The premise of your book is one that pushes against an idea that has become dominant certainly in academia and social science among historians and many political scientists of this idea that an old theory from the 19^th century, often called “great man theory.” But there’s been this idea in the last 50 years that who the leaders were is not really the most important thing in terms of great historical terms for nations and for the world. And that instead it’s social forces and broad dynamics that dictate history. But the book that you’ve written and the methodology that you pursued here essentially says the opposite. But how do those things square up? How do they fit together?

Stam: Well it’s an interesting question about how we got to where we are in this place where most social scientists are skeptical of the claim that political leaders in particular play an outside role. Part of this is in international relations historically we studied the nature of power and how it was used. After World War II the nature of power, military power changed fundamentally. Nuclear weapons took all the nuance of power. Power became binary. Either you were powerful or you weren’t. So the nature of leadership changed also. The people that study leaders and leadership in international relations realized that well if power is binary well maybe leadership isn’t so nuanced and important as well. That’s a big part of the trend. The other is that economists, political scientists, who focus on markets and institutions have played an increasing large scale role in our understanding of politics.

4:04 Blackmon: Walk us through how you set out to use data to establish some sort of a meaningful pattern.

Stam: Sure. We started with a really simple premise, people matter. And we thought about ourselves. We thought about our colleagues, our friends. Then if you, or parents who have children. Parents who have children put a lot of effort into raising their kids because they think the things that they do early in their children’s lives will have a big effect on how those people will behave as adults. Well, so if we believe that political leaders are people too then the same kinds of things that affect our children, our friends in their early lives, the same should hold true for political leaders. So we talked to a large number of political psychologists, social psychologists, ah, developmental psychologists and said if we were going to look for some things in political leaders early lives that systematically should shape how they behave, the kinds of policies they would support as adults, what would we look for? And the psychologists said, well, you want to look for things that are highly salient or have a high impact. And it turns out that things like at one end being an orphan, serving in the military. Things that take place sort of in that transitory period from adolescence to early adulthood. So we wanted to do this analysis statistically rather than from a purely historical perspective and so we decided we would collect information about these kinds of things, service in the military, how old somebody is when they are in office, some early life experiences for every single political leader from the late 1800s to very close to present. Then what we did was we used a statistical set of tools to look at which group of people shared a particular set of experiences and to see how that correlated with their behavior 30, 40, 50, even 60 years later when they ended up in office as a dictator, as a prime minister, or even as a president.

6:02 Blackmon: And there were 45 characteristics that you came up with that associated, 45 pieces of data, that variables that you attached to each of the 24 hundred leaders?

Stam: Yeah, so that started off we had a list what we did was we surveyed psychologists, graduate students, our mothers about things that matter and we came up, we had a list of actually hundreds. And we settled on 45 that our research assistants would be able to make a judgement about. So, for example, how old somebody is. Almost all of these leaders, not everyone, but almost all of them we actually know when they were born. So we have a good judge of their age. If we’re interested in say their, ah, how wealthy they were, well wealth is kind of a relative social status thing. So we didn’t code wealth. We believe it actually matters but we couldn’t figure out a good way to make it, to measure it in the context of the date that we have. So the 45 that we settled on were ones that both social scientists Historically it was very common for most of our political leaders to serve in the military when they’re younger. Today it’s actually a great exception.

FACTOID: Percentage of leaders with prior military service has declined dramatically

Ah, none of the candidates that we have in the election today that remain in the running have had any military service. Our current president, President Obama, has not served in the military. So some of these experiences serving in the military tip us in one direction. Ah if someone has had some type of early traumatic experience or highly salient experience that may pull them back in another. So we really have to think about people I the totality ah typically. There are exceptions. So John F. Kennedy is an exception. His experiences in World War II as the leader of PT109 or Khrushchev, the head of the Soviet Union who was Kennedy’s chief adversary. Khrushchev had been the political army commissar at Stalingrad. Saw some of the most vicious brutal fighting in all of World War II. Those two gentlemen came out of World War II understanding and believing both in the power and sort of violence associated with military force, but they also came away believing it could work. That it could be a very powerful tool for good for both of their perspectives. And so their people where that one experience was particularly salient. For others the experience is a little bit attenuated and so we need think about sort of a more collectivity of a bunch of factors. How old they are, the kind of political system in which they operate, their life experiences, they style of parenting that they had.

8:37 Blackmon: And you also identify a kind of special subset of leaders who seem to have no particular regard for human life and are willing to just see an unimaginable scale of loss of life and Hitler being an example of that and I think Stalin too. This is outside your time frame but the it is interesting to ask ourselves who on the American scale where are figures that might fit into that and you go back to the Civil War of course in terms of loss of life and the willingness of two leaders to go along with something that had a scale of loss that we can’t imagine today. You know the equivalent of, of all of Atlanta and these large, large American cities being vaporized. The equivalent of that. Ah but have you thought back on that even though like in Lincoln and Jefferson Davis outside the book? So I assume that means that they were very high risk people or were they low value of life people?

Stam: What we know, so again the social scientists the credible social scientists will always beg off if they don’t have data on it. Lincoln is a . . .

Blackmon; But you’re not credible so you’re not going to forge ahead.

Stam: No I’m going to say Lincoln is clearly resolute but we don’t clearly have the data. But there’s a case from that period that actually is ones that motivated us as we started this project. And it’s the dictator in Paraguay a fellow named Lopez. Lopez is an absolute dictator in control of his country of Paraguay. He had served in the military. He had been sent over to Europe when he was 17 or 18 years old by his father who was the previous dictator in Paraguay.

FACTOID: Francisco S. Lopez was president of Paraguay from 1862-1870

Lopez gets really caught up in all the pomp and circumstance and he comes back from Europe believing that he is the South American military genius because he’s the only military leader and political dictator in South America and this is in the 1850s and ’60s, same time as the American Civil War. But he’s the one, he believed that because he’s had this unusual experience in Europe that he is the military genius in South America. Well this plays out. He decides that he’s going to take on Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay simultaneously. Now that’s not that unusual actually. In history there have been leaders and dictators that have taken on much larger neighbors. The difference in this case is that Lopez never backs down. After every large victory the Brazilian and Argentine government offer to the Paraguayans let’s settle. We’ve defeated you in battle, let’s strike a bargain. Lopez never gives in. In the end 90 percent of all the males, boys, adult men, older men are dead because of Lopez. Because Lopez refused to accept defeat. He would rather have everyone in his country die. Now Lincoln ends up on the victorious side but he was incredibly, incredibly resolute. Now we don’t have the data about Lopez. We don’t have the data on Lincoln. But it was folks of that period, just before our data began, that was a big part of the motivation of this study

11:42 Blackmon: But if we look at Hitler and the decisions that he’s making and the correspondence between him and the general staff and others to go into the bunker at the very end of the war, he’s making very similar decisions. A willingness to see a complete loss of German life at that point but also is counting on that the allies will have less tolerance for loss of life, less tolerance for this grueling end of the war and right to the very end, if the papers are to be believed, he’s expecting some sort of a compromise option to come from the U.S. So where he’s willing to lose all this life but he’s calculating what he thinks Churchill’s willingness is and what Roosevelt’s willingness is. And how does that, he’s counting on someone else’s humanity I guess even though he has none of his own.

Stam: Yes, so there’s two strands to this question.  One is about the nature of people like Hitler, Ayatollah Khomeini more recently. The second one is how do those types of people interact with people that might not share those same sets of values or be that disinhibited. So the first part of the question we came up with our index and we noticed that we had a set of about 20 or 30 people in the world and they’ve been associated with really horrific wars in the past century and a half. So we talked to our friends in psychology and said this group of people seems quite different qualitatively not statistically. They’re, the statistical information identifies them as different but the way they behave is just fundamentally profoundly different. And our psychologist friend said those people are very likely sociopaths. That they’re outside of what we’re even talking about here.

13:24 Blackmon: Defective humans. In a sense.

Stam: Well we could put it that way. That they don’t have the genetic innate constraints that most of us have that lead to moral constraints on our behavior, they don’t have. Their switches never turn on at the sight of blood, at the sight of suffering they’re different.

13:43 Blackmon: Serial killers.

Stam: Well it turns out our best guess in the psychology literature is about one to two percent of people are sociopathic and have sociopathic tendencies. So we would expect in our data set to have just by random draw about 20 to 40 of these people in our data set and we have them there. When they end up in powerful, military powerful countries they can do extraordinary damage. Now, some leaders have made concessions to those people. Chamberlain in Britain made numerous concessions to Hitler expecting that Hitler would be satisfied with those concessions.

FACTOID: Neville Chamberlain served as prime minister of UK, 1937-40

The policy of appeasement. The British government has a change in leadership from Chamberlain to Churchill. Churchill recognizes and believes that if they continue to make these types of concessions Hitler will never stop. If Hitler had been, had died of natural causes in the 1930s, he would not have gone down as one of history’s great leaders. (Blackmon: Churchill would not have gone down. . .) Churchill would not have gone down as one of the great leaders. By the time we get to World War II his judgment has evolved, he’s matured. And he recognizes certain attributes in Hitler but he’s willing to make an emotional claim to the British people, to the Americans that the western free community has to stand up to what is in effect a sociopath in Europe.

FACTOID: Winston Churchill was British leader from 1940-45, 1951-55

15:10 Blackmon: So let’s go back for a second to JFK a figure we think we all know reasonably well. So what are the other primary factors that end up influencing the decisions that he made.

Stam: Sure. JFK ends up, he grows up in a very wealthy household. He grows up in a household where children are raised to have a sense of responsibility and privilege. So he’s been raised in a sense where he’s comfortable making important decisions. He attends Harvard University where that same set of values matter just inculcated now but are now being reinforced.

FACTOID: Listen to JFK at millercenter.org/presidentialrecordings

15:44 Blackmon: And so those things you just said, how do they translate into the data set? So there’s like well educated, is that one? How did you literally know what box to check?

Stam: Elite education, upper class membership. The things that we would go on today we might think of as somewhat pejoratively as noblesse oblige.

16:02 Blackmon: So the like the variables you just laid out would also match up to a to, to a George Bush the first as president, elite education, coming from a wealthy background, service in World War II, having seen combat, that all kind of tracks to that and then I’m just thinking, as we talk, that the level of, that the willingness to use force but also a degree of caution along with it would seem to be consistent between the first Bush and JFK. But then we get to the second Bush who has all of the same social variables but then has military experience but no combat, work out the math for it? How that applies to the second Bush’s decision sequence.

FACTOID: For biographies of Bushes, JFK visit millercenter.org/president

Stam: Yeah, sure. Again so, great questions. We’re starting to get into a little about the tales about what we can talk about because part of the purpose of our book is to say look, we need to set aside those past 60 years of not studying leaders and come back to really understand them. So we see this as a rudimentary first cut. But I think your question about the distinction between George Herbert Walker Bush and George Bush is an important one. And both have the same sort of cultural upbringing. Both have a training in the military. George Bush the elder had the experience of being shot down, seeing his copilot killed in a plane and ending up on a life raft.

FACTOID: George H. W. Bush flew 58 combat missions in World War II

George Bush the younger does not. George Bush the elder has the willingness to make the difficult decisions but does so in a cautious manner. And ends up with the 1991 invasion in Iraq. We pause. We stop. There’s the famous line, you break it you bought it. And so we leave Saddam Hussein in power. The second George Bush administration doesn’t have that type of constraint attached because they haven’t seen, he and many of his other members of his administration, Cheney, Rumsfeld, also have the same set of proclivities and so they’re willing to take even greater risks. Not just the risks to begin a war but the risk to depose an authoritarian leader and create this instability without, it turns out, now, retrospectively we know, you know a great set of plans about how to manage that instability afterwards.

18:15 Blackmon: So in the end is an analysis like this, it certainly, it’s certainly a useful exercise in terms of understanding why things happen in the way they did. Is it predictive in some manner and would this predict something about, could we turn to it now to try to figure out some of the things that face us at the moment?

Stam: Sure. We could think about some of the leaders that prospectively we’re looking at the leaders in the American election. But we can also think about international leaders that are our current presidents and future presidents have to deal with. So if we think about Vladimir Putin in Russia, the reactions of the American presidents have been somewhat disparate. One of our presidents, President Bush said there’s a man I can work with. President Obama has said explicitly and implicitly, there’s somebody I don’t want to work with. Putin is somebody that shows up on our data that is somebody who is extraordinarily risk acceptant, extraordinarily disinhibited. Now, many people would say, well we already knew that why do we need to do this study. Well, there are always two sides to an argument. So the candidate in the American election today, Donald Trump, has said somebody like Putin, that’s the kind of guy I can make, I can strike bargains with I can deal with somebody like that. Well what we know about Putin from this analysis tells us that reveals something about a presidential candidate like Donald Trump. That the very high risk acceptant like somebody like Putin probably is reflective of the kind of bargain that would emerge from a bargaining relationship with somebody like Donald Trump.

FACTOID: Vladimir Putin, former KGB officer, has ruled Russia since 2000

19:45 Blackmon: So let’s go through some of these candidates, we’re almost out of time, the ah, so where do you put Ted Cruz on the risk analysis scale?

Stam: So, Ted Cruz, he’s a really interesting case. Again if you recall my remarks of just a moment ago about domain specific, so one of the things that’s quite unusual about the people that end up in high leadership positions is their risk propensity, their disinhibition is pretty compartmentalized. So Ted Cruz comes out as one of the lowest risk presidential candidates we have. And if we take someone of his profile he would be only in the 20 percentile. One of the lowest percentiles of all either actual or potential American leaders.

20:31 Blackmon: And what’s the variable that most, that most pushes his number down into that?

Stam: In his case it’s a mélange of all the little pieces adding up. There is no one single piece that determinative.

20:42 Blackmon: So out of all the current candidates, the one if we were just going by this analysis who’s least likely to make a decision to go to war that Ted Cruz would be the one to fall at the bottom of the list?

Stam: That’s correct.

20:53 Blackmon: Let’s flop over to Bernie Sanders. Where does he fall?

Stam: High. Very high. (Blackmon: So what makes him a big risk?) I didn’t say he was a big risk (Blackmon: I’m sorry. What makes him risk tolerant?) I think that if we talked to Mr. Sanders he would deny the claim that he would hope to be part of a revolutionary movement. In fact I think that if we listened to his speeches that he’s given during the candidacy he has said the United States needs a revolution. So we would code Mr. Sanders as part of the leader or potential leadership group that are part of a revolutionary movement. Those folks are very risk acceptant.

21:32 Blackmon: And Hillary Clinton?

Stam: Very risk acceptant also. She falls obviously into the category of either actual or potential women leaders, people have asked us a lot about this. When we were writing the book we didn’t have a chapter about women leaders and my mother said to me, she read the first drat and she said where are women? And I said well there haven’t been that many of women leaders so we don’t have data to feel really confident to make a distinction between male and female leaders. She was not satisfied. So we went back and we looked very very closely both at almost all of the individual cases of women in leadership. What we find is generally the women that end up in higher office don’t look that different than men. What it means is we can use essentially the same measures we use to predict male behavior as female behavior. So Hillary Clinton’s general profile ends up looking for, again it’s a concatenation of all these small effects. She ends up being quite high in the sort of global profile of risk leaders just above the middle of American political leaders. Women do differ in a very interesting and important way. Remember we talked a few minutes ago about this group of 20 or 30 male leaders that are the sociopathic leaders.

22:54 Blackmon: And there were no women in that group?

Stam: None. There has never been a female leader head of state that has used human life in a cavalier manner. There has never been a female leader head of state that we would retrospectively look back and say oh that person wasted human lives. Now there have been female leaders Golda Meir, Benazir Bhutto, ah Margaret Thatcher that have been willing to use force. That have been forceful leaders for their country’s national interest. But they have always gauged the cost of human lives very, very carefully.

FACTOID: Meir Led Israel 1969-1974, Bhutto was a prime minister of Pakistan

23:32 Blackmon: The blights of man on mankind. So for the sweepstakes prize where does Donald Trump fit into this equation?

Stam: Well again, Donald Trump fits into this issue of domain specificity. So in his profile of the use of military force in the American experience he would come in about the 30^th percentile. In the bottom third. We don’t have the data but our instincts tell us that if we look at other areas though, for instance in business merges and acquisitions he would be very risk acceptant. One of the mistakes we could make about judging the character of leaders is to draw inferences from one policy area and apply those to others.

24:18 Blackmon: The perception, the negative perception of those people who are concerned about Donald Trump versus those who support him so strongly, but the concern is that he’s a reckless figure and he’s willing to say things that are outside the boundaries and he seems, and it feels like, to people who are worried about him, I’m not taking any position on that, but it feels to those people that this is a dangerous and erratic person who we, who would be highly unpredictable and probably would be very open to risky endeavors that could put the nation in harm’s way. But it sounds that this methodology would suggest, would temper that to some degree.

Stam: It would. It would say that we want to be very careful about drawing conclusions linking rhetoric and policy. So the candidate Trump is fairly clearly reckless in his use of words whether that would translate to a similar recklessness in the deployment of actual forces, we don’t know.

Blackmon: That’s great. Thank you. Allan Stam.

Stam: Thanks very much Doug for having me. It was a pleasure.

Blackmon: The book is Why Leaders Fight. We hope you’ll join this conversation with American Forum on the Miller Center Facebook page, or by following us on Twitter @douglasblackmon or @americanforumTV. To send us a comment, watch other episodes, download podcasts or read a transcript visit us at millercenter.org/americanforum. I’m Doug Blackmon. See you next week.