Director of International Affairs, Kettering Foundation

Former Assistant Secretary of State and Staff Member, National Security Council

Let me state at the outset my admiration for you who have pioneered in defining this important field of study. We who have spent most of our careers preventing, ameliorating and resolving deadly conflict certainly must regard ourselves as kindred spirits and co-workers in this field.

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I want to start by taking you back to May 26, 1967. Egyptian President Nasser had declared the Strait of Tiran closed. The Israelis regarded this declared blockade of a vital lifeline for oil supplies as an act of war. Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban was on his way to Washington to see President Johnson and other U.S. officials to determine whether the United States had a viable approach to reopening the Strait and preventing war. The Israeli military was arguing for an immediate attack on the grounds that waiting would increase Israeli causalities and the overall pain that would bring to the Israeli people.

To prepare for this encounter, President Johnson called a meeting of his National Security Council for late morning that Friday. He not only included the usual cast of participants, but this time also invited several senior figures whom he knew well -- Dean Acheson, Clark Clifford, Abe Fortas.

It was one of the best organized agendas I had seen. One Assistant Secretary of Sate was assigned to present the picture of the crisis from the Arab viewpoint. Another had been asked to present the Israeli position. Secretary of State Dean Rusk hurried in from last-minute soundings on Capitol Hill. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs gave a military assessment, and the Director of Central Intelligence gave his usual overview. The discussion proceeded for some time around the one non-military option on the table -- a U.S. effort to marshall the maritime nations of the world to challenge the blockade by sending their unarmed cargo ships into the Strait.

After prolonged discussion, President Johnson -- who by then was scheduled to see Eban early in the evening -- said: "Come sundown, I’m the one who has to bell this cat. I want to know what each of you would tell Eban if you were in my shoes." As Johnson went around the room, it flashed into my mind that he was no longer weighing elements in an analysis of the situation but was now collecting judgements. He was asking people whose minds he knew how they had processed the multiple variables in this complex situation.

This is not atypical of decision-making at that level. I seem to remember reading somewhere a comment by President Eisenhower about his relationship with his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. Most people at that time thought that Dulles was flying around the world making U.S. policy as went. But Eisenhower said, as I recall, in paraphrase: I spent many hours with Foster at the beginning of the Administration talking about the world and our role and purposes in it. When I knew how his minded worked, I was comfortable sending him out to speak for me.

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That kind of story could be replicated through the five administrations in which I served with obvious differences of emphasis for the different presidential personalities, world views and styles of relating to advisers. From my experience starting as a junior member on the National Security Council staff under President Kennedy to being at Camp David and in the middle of the Iran hostage crisis with President Carter, I draw four obvious but significant points for our purposes here this evening:

• First: Presidents make policy judgements in a highly complex domestic and international political environment. The variables are countless and the mix is continuously changing.

• Second: Presidents reach those policy judgements primarily through deliberation, not calculation. With one exception, I have never seen a quantified presentation of the human condition play a part in presidential decision-making. Military balances were the exception.

• Third: Presidents as human beings bring to each judgement their own conceptual frameworks.

• Fourth: The policy-influencing public that plays a significant role in shaping the political environment in which the president decides also works from its own conceptual framework.

Let me elaborate on what I mean by deliberation when I say that presidents reach policy judgements primarily through deliberation, not calculation. In the Cabinet room scene I described, there were plenty of analytical data to work with; they were presented with precision. I am in no way denigrating careful use of data.

But I am saying that there is an additional way of knowing. In the give and take of dialogue, people learn–not just facts but ways of thinking about facts. President Johnson was weighing policy choices not only in the light of data but in the light of how his colleagues felt about them. Presidents as leaders of people value and find most usable the knowledge that is generated in deliberative dialogue. Every administration has its formal meetings, but every president has his space for informal dialogue. Dialogue provides a way of knowing that is often more authentic for human beings than "scientific" data.

As we also know, it makes a big difference how issues are named and framed for deliberation. There was a period of time when the whole National Security Council system was built as a three-stage process which first laid out all technically reasonable options for dealing with a problem, then reshaped those options in light of political feasibility and finally provided space for deliberation on those options which itself might further reshape the options for final choice. It was a very careful process of deliberation in which knowledge was generated, accumulated and processed through dialogue and in which choices were shaped through interaction and made in the personal decision of the president.

I have also stated that presidents -- as well as the policy-influencing public -- bring their own conceptual framework to this policy dialogue. I have concluded in my own field of interest that the way to change how presidents decide to act in our rapidly changing world is to try to change the conceptual framework they use to give meaning to developments. The concepts that make up that framework are the lenses a president or a public uses to bring the world into focus. Those concepts are the lenses people use to give meaning to the chaotic world around them.

The conceptual lenses a president or a public uses to bring the world into focus determine how he or they act. That is why I as a reflective practitioner have decided that it is essential to deal head-on with concepts that no longer fully explain the rapidly changing world in which we live. Changing the conceptual framework–however slowly and laboriously–can change both the personal basis from which a president acts and the basis from which the public shapes the political environment within which a president acts.

A concern for the conceptual framework is particularly compelling at this moment in history. We are living through a paradigm shift–not because the Cold War ended but in the perspective of three centuries of thinking about the state system. That shift is generated by fundamental changes in how the world works. Our challenge is to articulate a framework that permits us to work effectively in this changing world. Let me identify six elements of this paradigm shift.

First: We are recognizing that the state is no longer as exclusively sovereign as we once thought it was. We begin to see the need to add a human dimension to our thinking about relationships among groups in this world.

The old state-centered power politics paradigm does not provide an adequate basis for acting in this world. That paradigm could be captured in a sentence like this: "Leaders of states pursue objectively defined interests against other states."

That does not begin to capture a world in which many of the conflicts and initiatives that seize our attention are generated outside the reach of states–even to the point of being part of their collapse. It does not capture the complexities and range of actors in the globalizing, electronically facilitated economy.

The formulation that I find more nearly captures what is happening in our current world is this: Relationships among countries and groups are a political process of continuous interaction among whole bodies politics across permeable borders. This dynamic political process operates at many levels simultaneously.

Whereas the metaphor for the realist paradigm is the strategic chess game, the metaphor that lodged in my mind during the Iran hostage crisis is a game of squash or racquetball with four players on a five-sided court with six balls in motion at the same time.

One conclusion that emerges from this new paradigm is that we must put human beings back into the equation of governance within states and relationships among states because they are a significant part of the political process of continuous interaction. Conflict has a human as well as an institutional dimension. Politics is a matter of citizens working as political actors alongside duly constituted governments.

Another phenomenon we must underscore in this political process of continuous interaction is the interaction. What happens to one party in the process can lead to consequences that circle back to affect another party and spread out in ripples to affect the larger political environment.

Second: From the political process of continuous interaction among needs and interests grows interdependence -- the essence of close relationships.

This is not action and reaction. The focus is on the political process of continuous interaction -- on the process itself. I call that dynamic process of interaction relationship. In dealing with deep-rooted human conflict, I focus on changing conflictual relationships –not on negotiating agreements. There are some things that only governments can do, such as negotiate binding agreements, but there are some things that only citizens outside government can do, such as changing human relationships. The unit of analysis becomes the human processes through which a complex interdependence plays itself out.

With the revolutions in communication and transportation, including the revolution in telephonic, satellite, electronic communication, the complexity of the global economy–as well as of political relationships–is underscored. The increased consciousness of multiple identities that cut across national boundaries further calls our attention to this complex interdependence.

Third: In the midst of all this, we are increasingly recognizing that our understanding of how we know and think is also changing.

For more than a century the idea of "scientific objectivity" has dominated our research–the notion that we can only know what can be materially defined and measured and that other kinds of knowledge are "subjective" and therefore to be discounted. Now as we put human beings back onto the stage of our thinking about politics and international relationships, we recognize that there are ways of knowing that grow out of human experience. In fact, many people today recognize that there is a degree of authenticity that comes from personal experience that no scientific experiment or measurement can capture.

In some ways, President Eisenhower also captured early in the post war era the wisdom that lies in the experience of citizens. Toward the end of his term, he said one night on British television (in paraphrase): "I like to think that one day the people of the world will want peace so badly that governments had better get out of their way and let them have it."

This was a significant statement by a man who had led one of the greatest military enterprises of states that the world had ever seen and had been the leader of the Free World at the moment when the Free World was being formed. For all of that, he turned to the wisdom of citizens outside government on the issue of peace and war which was once thought to be the exclusive domain of states.

In a sense, the story about Lyndon Johnson with which I began is another demonstration of a statesman turning to the minds of individual human beings as his resources in reaching judgements on matters of peace and war.

Fourth: Although the twentieth century has justifiably been called the most destructive in history, the last half of this century has documented a significant shift in the attention of leaders toward human beings outside government.

We have gone beyond defining peace simply as the absence of violence. We have proclaimed that peace to be genuine must be linked first with justice and even with respect for the fundamental rights of human beings. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights followed a few Geneva Conventions of the inter-war period. Then the Helsinki Final Act in 1975 gave to governments license to show actively their concern about the well-being of human beings within other sovereign states.

We have quietly laid the groundwork for changing international law and practice to make it the responsibility of governments to protect human rights, even when that requires intruding on the sovereignty of other states. This was the beginning of a move toward international acceptance that the traditional principle of nonintervention in the affairs of other states should be eroded for the sake of human well-being–for the sake of reducing pain. Not only is intervention increasingly allowable; alleviating human suffering is increasingly included on the list of national interests in a few nations.

The battle over this approach to human rights is still being contested around the world, but more and more intrusiveness seems permissible on behalf of increasingly accepted principles of political behavior.

Fifth: We might think of ourselves in the early days of another wave in the democratic revolution which began in earnest four centuries ago with significant milestones along the way for the United States in the town meetings, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The end of authoritarian and totalitarian rule at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s in Latin America and the Soviet Empire produced a new insight: the installation of democratically elected governments does not by itself solve a society’s problems. The people of Chile, for instance, mobilized to remove a dictator, elected a government and returned to their own pursuits. Today they are recognizing that democratic government alone cannot build the country’s future; citizens must also play their roles as political actors.

Citizens learn and make up their minds by interacting and deliberating with one another.

Finally, while this century has no monopoly on mass murder or the inhumanity of conquerors inflicting pain on the conquered, our growing sensitivity to the rights of human beings and the paradigm shift of which it is a part may open the door to new ways of dealing with the infliction of pain by one group of human beings on another.

As we focus more on the full range of political actors in the political process of continuous interaction, the door opens to new approaches that might be available to us in spotting early steps toward genocide and other sources of pain and stopping them. This work is just beginning, but the makings of a strategy are coming into focus. The recent Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict is but one example alongside numerous individually produced books and initiatives for this purpose.

Perhaps we should also learn something from the movement of the world Jewish community to hold up the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust before the world as a way of reinforcing this element in the paradigm shift. That effort has not prevented the killing fields in Cambodia, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia or genocide in Rwanda. But perhaps there are lessons to be learned about approaches to be used to further change the conceptual framework.

In short, the makings of a paradigm shift -- a change in our conceptual framework --are all around us. No shift in of this kind is neat and clean. Evidence of the old paradigm is still plentiful. But so is evidence that the old paradigm does not fully explain the world that is becoming. More and more we are recognizing the elements of the new paradigm and the consequences for action that would flow from it. The existence of this Society is but one of those pieces of evidence.

What I draw from the thoughts expressed to this point is this statement:

The challenge is not to quantify the amount of pain in a destructive situation. The challenge is to create a political environment–a conceptual framework–in which the reduction of human suffering is seen by a significant majority to be in the national interest.

The challenge is to cause people to understand that suffering in far-off as well as nearby places hurts them–to cause people to understand that it is in their interest to see the level of suffering in the world reduced. At the heart of that challenge for research is to learn what the connection is between citizens and distant suffering.

This is the immediate challenge. People have begun to understand that globalization of the economy affects them. They need to understand that suffering in the world also affects them. That is a much more difficult point to make real.

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Against that background let me then come back to the question of how presidents decide–how they weigh their choices when those choices may involve the possibility of causing varying degrees of pain.

A prior question to be asked is how evidence of impending problems that may inflict extensive pain can come to a president in a way that compels her or his early attention and eventual action. Two responses:

• To begin, a body of people increasingly adept at spotting the warning signals of developments that will inflict pain must grow. In the field of conflict prevention, the phrase is "early warning." In the field of panetics, that capacity is to recognize in what may seem ordinary situations–such as corruption in a society –the presently unnoticed pain they produce as well as recognizing the early signals of greater pain in the making.

• Next, a body politic must evolve that sees reducing pain as in its interest. This would create a political premium for a president on paying attention to such situations.

Once a problem reaches the president, I have said for my own analytical purposes over the past thirty plus years that a president goes through a decision-making process that responds to six questions. At each point through this process it makes a great deal of difference how the ingredients of answers to these questions are shaped. At these points I believe it is possible that ways of dealing with the infliction of pain can be inserted. These are the six questions:

First: What is the problem? We all know that how a problem is defined begins to shape what action will be taken for dealing with it. At the end of the twentieth century, I believe it is less likely than it was fifty years ago that any problem could be defined for a president of the United States that totally ignores the mass violation of human rights or the infliction of extensive pain on human beings. But if a Society like this is concerned about how a president will act, it is critical to make vivid to those who define problems the pain generated by them. I believe this will be done with most forceful impact on the whole body politic by dramatizing those problems in word and picture.

Second: How does this problem affect our interests? A president will always have before her or him an analytical or objective definition of interests.

During the Cold War, the definition of interests had an obvious starting point –deterring nuclear war to preserve the nation. Now we are groping for a fresh starting point. For me, that starting point follows from answering the question: what are the rules we want to govern the world we live in? Such rules would not be a "constitution," but could be a collection of principles agreed by a growing number of governments. A start in the West has already been made in the principles of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the Helsinki Final Act, and the Paris Charter of 1991. These would have to be reconciled with Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and involve countries of the East and of the Third World.

Experience also demonstrates that we need to think of interests more broadly. Of course, there will always be an analytical, material statement of interests. But there is also a political definition of interests which captures what citizens outside government value and how intensely.

For instance, a technician will say, "The United States has no security interests in Rwanda." However, I have learned from working with five presidents that a leader will not be satisfied with an analytical definition of interests alone. He will reach out for a political definition of interests. What are the American people interested in? What do they value? How intensively do they value it?

Research shows that Americans remain a deeply compassionate people and that when they feel that they or their government can do something to help people in trouble they will be most generous. They are also loath to see American lives put in jeopardy when they do not understand why a situation might be important to them. They tend to understand the interdependence of global economic life today, but they are still struggling to understand the relationship between a violation of human rights in another country and our interest in living in a world where people value life as we do.

Third: Do I really have to pay attention to this problem? When a president does get his mind around a problem and relates it to his own conceptual framework, he must first reach a conclusion about whether he or she can live with herself or himself if she or he ignores a certain problem. President Carter went to Camp David against the advice of his political advisers because he felt he had no other moral choice than to do everything possible to build on the courageous initiative President Sadat had taken in going to Jerusalem.

Next, he or she will have to understand how the people of the country connect with the problem. How do they feel their interests will be affected by acting or not acting? For instance, while governments were dithering over the genocide in Rwanda, several hundred non-governmental organizations were there providing what help they could to suffering human beings.

Fourth: What can I do? What are the practical choices? What are their consequences? If we think about relationships between countries and groups as political processes of continuous interaction rather than simply as a state using its own material power to get what it wants, the door is opened to a range of peaceful solutions to problems–peaceful interventions to prevent pain. So the paradigm shift enlarges the range of approaches that do not necessarily increase pain in themselves.

Because of my own intense involvement in the official Arab-Israeli peace process in the 1970s and in what I call the public–or nonofficial–peace process since I left government in 1981, I work within the conceptual framework of a multi-level peace process. I think of a range of possible actors from government through influential citizens down into the interactions of citizens’ groups.

That framework opens the door to drawing on resources from the entire body politic–most of them peaceful and therefore less likely to produce pain. I have often said to my friends in the State Department: "Your job is not just to design policy for the United States government. Your job is to conceive policy for the United States of America. When you think of policy implementation drawing on the non-governmental resources, energies, creativity, talents and compassion of this whole body politic, you will turn loose capacities governments cannot dream of."

The paradigm shift–the new conceptual framework–of which I have spoken opens the door to a much larger range of instruments for reducing suffering than the state-centered paradigm of the past.

Fifth: What will the body politic permit me to do? Here the answer will depend heavily on whether the American people have themselves changed their own conceptual framework to fit their picture of the current world.

Efforts to engage people in this kind of paradigm shift will have to engage them in their own deliberations on such fundamental questions as: "What kind of world do we want to live in?" Recent research into American attitudes toward foreign assistance seems to suggest that Americans do not fully understand how the actions of the United States can make a difference. But when they understand how a lot of our foreign assistance programs work, their supportiveness increases.

Sixth: Can we make a difference? It is extremely difficult to know what any outside actor can do when a country decides to take itself apart from the inside as Lebanon did during its prolonged civil war. But the answer may be influenced by recognizing that many tools are available in the early stages of a conflict that may disappear as a conflict progresses and leaves potential outside interveners with only a military option to consider.

Again, if we think of the relationships that produce pain as dynamic political processes of continuous interaction, it may be that the capacity to change those relationships comes from the capacity to get inside those processes and to change them. This will not always work because some of these interactions are beyond our understanding. But we are learning more and more how to influence the dynamics of destructive relationships. The limits on our learning stem primarily from the paucity of resources -- human and financial -- we are able to devote to this work. Those of us involved know it can make a difference.

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To conclude, what kind of research agenda would flow from these remarks? As I hope will be apparent by now, I believe the challenge is not to measure the amount of pain in a given situation, but to enhance the likelihood that policy-makers and the policy-influencing public will respond effectively to it.

First and foremost, I believe it is essential to learn what connections Americans see between their larger interests and suffering far from where they live. People act to deal with problems when they feel the connection between what they value and the problem.

The study I mentioned a moment ago carried out through an extensive series of focus groups not only revealed great ignorance about the foreign assistance program, but it also revealed that people became more supportive when assured that the aid made a difference not only in alleviating present suffering but in building local capacity to reduce it over time. They supported the kind of aid they would value in their own communities.

Given the complexity of potential connections and the fact that we may not imagine some of them, I believe the focus group offers the most fruitful place to explore this subject.

Second, I would give attention to defining the paradigm shift in a way that captures your concerns and then I would give attention to gaining the broadest possible academic and public attention possible to that emerging conceptual framework. I would consider all possible media for calling attention to the damage done by continuing to ignore that the old lenses will not help us see our way into the world that is becoming.

Third, I would give attention to strengthening narrative and dramatic ways of making vivid the many dimensions of pain in the world, ranging from the obvious costs of violence to the subtle costs of corruption in a society.

Fourth, I would commission a few studies on why our government has been slow to respond to complex emergencies, such as the genocide in Rwanda.

This is a formidable agenda. I apologize for being so bold. But the subject is daunting and I could not do other than respond to your flattering invitation to share my thoughts fully with you.