Booknotes

RICHARD J. BARNET, AUTHOR, "THE ROCKETS' RED GLARE: WHEN GOES TO WAR, THE PRESIDENTS AND THE PEOPLE": Well, I wanted to write a book about American democracy and foreign policy because that's the big test of democracy, that's what de Tocqueville said in the beginning of the country and people have worried about it ever since. And war is the great test of foreign policy. The issues of war and peace are really the great issues that really determine the survival of the country and call into question whether democracies can function as democracies in foreign policy.

BARNET: I think it's seen its last big war. I think that's quite possible. It will either have been the last or there'll be one more, in terms of a big war, I believe. I don't think we've seen the last of small wars. I think the small wars are getting smaller, although the Panama invasion was the largest military operation that the United States has had since the Vietnam War. But even so, in terms of the wars that I talk about in this book, going back to the Revolution and to Washington's time and the War of 1812, it was a small operation.

BARNET: Right. Yes. Actually, Roosevelt, of course, appeared before Congress the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, and then three days later Hitler declared war on us, and the Congress did declare war on Hitler in response. But we have not had a Congress meet to declare war ever since, even though American forces have been in battle, engaged in combat somewhere in the world, almost every year since the end of World War II.

BARNET: Well, they've developed the argument, the rationale, that the change in military technology -- basically, the atomic bomb -- has rendered that constitutional machinery obsolete. It said that the war could come in a split second; an attack -- a nuclear attack -- could come from the Soviets and the president would have to respond immediately. And in order for deterrents to work, the Soviets would have to believe that the president could push that button without having to go to the people, without risking the possibility that crowds of people might panic in the streets and stay his hand.

I think that that argument has been terribly extended to all kinds of other wars in which that kind of situation doesn't arise. And, in fact, if you look at most of the Pentagon war plans -- not that I've looked at them -- but in many years since I have been in the government, my impression is that inside the government people have the same view that most experts outside the government have, that war is not likely to develop overnight, that there's an escalation of combat and that there would be a lot more time for congressional consultation, certainly, if not a formal vote of declaration of war, and yet, that we don't have. And that divide was really crossed in the Korean War.

In the Korean War, Dean Acheson, the secretary of state, counseled the president that the country might be divided, that the best course was to make a move to reinforce General MacArthur's troops and to go in under the aegis of the United Nations and not ask for congressional permission. And indeed, these decisions were taken without even informing Congress -- that is, the initial decisions.

BARNET: Well, I don't think that many. I think about 12.

BARNET: Yes.

BARNET: Well, I started really in the mid '80s, thinking about it. And I started -- it was going to be a book about Ronald Reagan, particularly Ronald Reagan's foreign policy and his style in foreign policy, because it seemed to me that Ronald Reagan was a president, unlike most of the presidents we have had since the second World War, who was not primarily interested in foreign policy. He had another agenda, a domestic agenda. And yet he used foreign policy extremely effectively as theater, as a backdrop to so much of the rhetoric about the evil empire. And so much of his campaign in 1980 was attacking the Democrats, President Carter, for having let down our defenses.

And I thought that he particularly had been very careless with facts on many occasions and yet was extremely persuasive. And we had the odd situation, for much of his administration, of the public giving him the vote of popularity, that he was the highest in the polls and he was an extremely popular man; that personally -- even at the end of his administration, even after the Iran-Contra affair. And yet he never managed to persuade the American people of some of his basic policies, either on South Africa or on Central America.

And then I began to wonder, is this something new, this selling foreign policy? Why do presidents have to work so hard to sell foreign policy? Is it different in Washington today? And then I was concerned with something that a number of people had been concerned about -- people like Kennan and the great political scientist Hans Morgenthau -- that one of the arguments that's made against the democracy is that you have to oversell the public, that you have to simplify; that you have to, as Dean Acheson once put it, make things clearer than true. And when you do that, you find that you have created a political climate which then limits your action in the future.

Anyway, I wanted to look at that. I wanted to look at a lot of these assertions about what democracy really has meant in American foreign policy, and go back and try to lay out what actually happened. What was the role of the people? What was the role of the president? What is this tension that has developed over the years, between presidents trying to assess and articulate and defend the national interests as they understand it, and the people, who in a democracy want to have and are assumed to have some basic decision making over the general course of direction. And it's precisely in foreign policy where the big choices have to be made. And if they're not made democratically, then it's very hard to say that we have a well-functioning democracy.

BARNET: Let me see. I guess I corrected the proof in the early fall.

BARNET: The publication date was the first of this month, February 1st.

BARNET: Well, it seems to be going very well. It seems to be going very well. People ..

BARNET: Well, you see it in a lot of places and it's gotten some very good reviews in important places. And I have had the opportunity to talk about it some on a number of programs. And I think that although it is primarily a history and goes through the Reagan years, it raises questions now that are going to be extremely important for the period that we're now entering, because we're now at a point where, for the first time in almost 50 years, almost everything in foreign policy is up for re-examination and re-thinking.

The Cold War world, whatever happens in the Soviet Union, is collapsing and we can't go back to either the ideas or the assumptions or the institutions in which so much of our foreign policy has been based. And we're at a time that, really, there's no parallel since the end of the second World War, where the need is very great for postwar planning. We're planning for the new decade and a new century. And I'm very concerned about what is going to be the role of the public in this. These are too important decisions to be made privately, in secret, or to be made by a few, quote, "experts," because nobody's an expert now. The experts have been terribly confounded, you know, myself included. I mean, nobody could have or did anticipate all these things that have happened. It ...

BARNET: Oh, "Global Reach" was an international best-seller.

BARNET: That was 1974. And it was a book about multinational corporations. It's actually a subject that I'm going to be revisiting in my next book, but really about what's happened to the global economy. But that was a book about the connections, intersection between politics and economics. What are the political implications of these major changes in the world economy?

BARNET: Well, I think the book that probably stands up the best is "Roots of War," which I wrote in 1972, which is about the domestic side of foreign policy. What drives -- what are the domestic forces, both within our bureaucracy, the way we organize our government, and the economy. What drives our foreign policy? That one is still very much around. It deals with a number of issues that I deal with in this book, too, but I deal with them here more in somewhat greater detail and more historically. But I guess the one that least -- well, I mean, the most dated one, certainly, is a book I wrote about US-Soviet relations, called, "The Giants," which came out in 1976. And actually, it was a badly timed book because it was a short book about detente, about how detente happened and where it was going. And by the time it got out -- maybe it was '77--detente was fast fading. And while I suggested that that probably was going to happen at the end of the book, nobody really wanted to read much about it at that point.

BARNET: Walter Lippmann.

BARNET: Yes. Right.

BARNET: De Tocqueville.

BARNET: Right.

BARNET: Yes. Right.

BARNET: Well, he...

BARNET: Well, because Walter Lippmann is probably the most famous and influential writer on the role of public opinion in American democracy. He wrote -- that was his first book -- the book was called "Public Opinion," and it was published in 1920. And he revisited that theme in at least two other books, a book called "The Phantom Public," in which he took his ideas even further and then, in the '50s, a book called "The Public Philosophy."

Well, I found him very interesting, in a way, as a complicated foil because he is you know, an extremely astute man, but who came out with a very elitist view of American foreign policy -- what it is, how it actually works and how it should work. And as I got deeper into the subject, I felt he was wrong about both points -- that is, that I don't think it worked the way he said it worked, and I don't think it should work the way he suggested it should work. And the fascinating thing is at the very end of his life, when he became a major and effective critic of Lyndon Johnson's policy on Vietnam, he himself changed his mind, although he never quite wrote about that in a theoretical way, as he had earlier.

His point was that, one thing he says is that public opinion is like a tyranny. That is, that public opinion absolutely constrains democratic leaders and keeps them from doing what their own better judgment tells them they ought to do. And he was basing that primarily -- writing that very much influenced by the experience of the 1930s, isolationism and the fact that public opinion had resisted the early moves towards going to war with Hitler.

And I'd like to get back to that because my own reading of that history is different and I think the record shows that when Roosevelt made up his own mind -- because I found that leaders were much less clear, much less certain -- and quite understandably so, on issues of war and peace, about what should be done, when it should be done, than his model, his theory, suggests. And his other point was, of course, that leaders -- intelligent leaders, gifted men, he didn't think much about women in those days -- who rise to the top of a society and have the knowledge, understanding and they have access to secret information, they ought to be given, essentially, a free hand, because why should the emotionalism and the ignorance of the public in any way inhibit people who really ought to understand the national interest? Well, I have trouble with that.

BARNET: Well, he lived a long time, and there's a wonderful biography of him by Ronald Steel, "Walter Lippmann and the American Century." It's -- yes, he lived into his 80s and he started as a very, very young man. I mean, one of the interesting stories about him is he was a very young staffer at the Versailles peace conference, and Wilson relied on him for his famous 14-point speech -- the speech that he gave to Congress, which signaled the American peace terms and which Germany grabbed, and eventually became the basis for the Armistice.

Well, in Versailles, Colonel House, Wilson's closest confidant, got ahold of young Walter Lippmann and said, "Now you wrote that speech. These 14 points, what are they? We need them by tomorrow morning, 8:00." But Wilson, who was extremely dogmatic about what he wanted, was -- I think the evidence is clear -- was rather confused, that he went to Europe without understanding the enormous complexities of trying to rewrite the map of Europe -- all of the nations of Europe -- and did not count on meeting the tough politicians like Clemenceau and Lloyd George.

And when he was there he simply was overwhelmed and became ill. And it was almost an endurance contest between this American president, the first one to sally forth into Europe, and these old war horses of the European powers -- Clemenceau, Orlando, Lloyd George. And I think it simply shows that these leaders are human beings. And what I tried to show in the book is something about their own thought processes, what they were saying, thinking, themselves -- to the extent one can find that in letters and a diary -- what they were saying and then what they were saying to the public, and very often they were different.

BARNET: It wasn't a president, it was Senator Vandenberg.

BARNET: Right.

BARNET: Yes. Well ...

BARNET: Well, that's an interesting one because Vandenberg had been one of the leading isolationist powers in the Senate, and ...

BARNET: In the '30s. He had opposed every move that Roosevelt was moving towards war, away from neutrality -- Lend-Lease, destroyer base deal -- all of that, a draft. He was a strong figure, believing in what was the prevailing idea at the time, that Europe's quarrels were not America's affair. And I talk about it in the book -- by the great disillusionment with our experience in the first World War and the overselling of that war to the American people.

Anyway, Vandenberg began to rethink his views under the very careful cultivation of Dean Acheson and important people in the press corps, like James Reston, the bureau chief for The New York Times and later a columnist, and, of course, Walter Lippmann, who was the columnist. I mean, no columnist in the United States in the last 20 or 30 years has had anything like the influence that Walter Lippmann had. He was not just a newspaper man; he was a sage, or so regarded. Anyway, he and Reston offered to help Vandenberg write his speech, in which he announced his basic conversion from an isolationist to an internationalist. And the speech was given and got great attention, of course, and then both of them roundly praised it in their columns as one of the great acts of statesmanship, without, of course, revealing that they had played a part in writing it.

BARNET: Yes, I think it did, and with others. And it has all through history. Of course, the use of the press and the way presidents use the press is a theme that I talk about throughout. Andrew Johnson was the first president, I guess probably the only president, actually to operate a newspaper out of the White House. And his "Kitchen Cabinet," these intimates who advised him, were more important than the Cabinet members, who were mostly newspaper men. And he built his political power -- the new Democratic Party -- on a chain of newspapers that supported his position and attacked the opposition party.

BARNET: Well, different people owned them, but basically they were all stalwarts of the new Democratic Party. And the president worked very closely, but Thomas Jefferson had a paper, too. I mean, it wasn't in the White House, but actually, when he was secretary of state he had a paper and he employed a man by the name of Freneau, who was a poet and, if anything, even more ardent a revolutionary -- a democrat than Jefferson. He put him on the State Department payroll to finance him, and gave him access to his correspondence and papers, and people didn't think anything of this separation from the press and the government. I would say that while the Lippmann sort of episode still goes on, there's probably more separation and more of an adversarial relationship today than there was then.

BARNET: I don't think so. A number of people describe themselves that way, but I don't think there is anybody quite like him.

BARNET: Well, of course, you have a different kind of person now. I mean, Kissinger -- you know, Kissinger was secretary of state and he was involved in policy, and I believe, until very recently, had an important advisory position, I mean, I think he was on the intelligence board. At the same time, he was advising foreign governments and corporations about matters of policy, and certainly selling not only his expertise, but also his access. And under some criticism he resigned. But he also writes columns from time to time and they are given a good deal of play because of his official connections in the past.

The other example, I guess, that is more disturbing than that, comes from fairly recent history, around the Iran-Contra affair, where the Office of Public Diplomacy, which was a unit set up by the White House to influence, I would say, propagandize the American people about Central America to get the administration's view accepted, they did not identify various -- they would feature supposedly independent academic voices -- talking about Central America and supporting the government's position without disclosing the fact that they were actually working for the government. They were consultants, I mean, they were paid to provide information to do that.

BARNET: Sure.

BARNET: Well, George Creel is an interesting character. He was one of the muckrakers of the early years of the century. He was a newspaper man and he had campaigned vigorously for Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson put him in charge of the first organized official propaganda office that the United States had. It was called the Committee on Public Information. And it was a huge operation, which enlisted the most prominent writers in the country -- Booth Tarkington and other very famous writers. And it was pure propaganda. It was designed to whip up feelings in the country against Germans, because at that time a substantial part of the population was of German origin and even a larger percentage of the public had great qualms about the war. Why were we getting into this war?

BARNET: World War I.

BARNET: No. No, it started up after the war, just about when it started. And it was to propagandize on a number of things -- on war bonds, on enlistment, on getting out, working hard, war production and a number of themes. But one idea that Wilson himself was worried about, but didn't really stop, was the promotion of, really, hatred of all things German, such that hamburgers were renamed liberty steaks, and they came up with other ways to exorcise anything German from American culture. German was bad and it was culturally bad. You couldn't have Wagner operas.

And then they came up with a rather ingenious system of using the new movie theaters to give four-minute patriotic speeches --they were called the "minutemen." And they would get local businessmen or lawyers, or some well-known local citizen would stand up in front of the audience before the silent films went on and give a four-minute pep talk on the war. And the directives from Washington said, "Don't get famous people. Don't get well-known authors or certainly not politicians because they talk too much and they will never keep to the four-minute limit." And that was effective.

But the general view of the Creel operation, after the war, was that it was very negative, that it had aroused a lot of false expectations about the war for democracy, and people felt had. And it was that idea of domestic propaganda that fed a resistance to government manipulation of opinion and really fed the isolationist feelings during the '30s. So you had this great shift of opinion during the '30s.

BARNET: Public Information--Committee on Public Information.

BARNET: No, well, I think the Office of Public Diplomacy is much worse because...

BARNET: No. Well, yes, the office is but the activities, I think, are certainly not what they were then. But the Office of Public Information did not engage in covert propaganda. It was overdone and I think it wasn't a good idea in many cases. But the notion of government sending messages to the public which they know are false, and not just exaggerated, but false, and misidentifying people as independent experts to commend credibility when, in fact, they're working for the government is dangerous. And it challenges the basic notion of democracy -- that is, democracy works. The assumption -- you get this very clearly in the writings of Jefferson -- it works if you assume that people are educable, that people will learn, that people can learn and that they're not being deliberately misled, not being deliberately miseducated.

BARNET: Yes, this is the sixth book.

BARNET: She is a vice president of Simon & Schuster and their editorial director of their trade division, and she's a superb editor.

BARNET: No, it generally is book-by-book.

BARNET: I'm from Boston, Massachusetts.

BARNET: I was born there.

BARNET: I went to Roxbury Latin School and to Harvard Law School.

BARNET: Then I went into the Army and I went to Germany. And I was a legal officer and defended and, on occasion, prosecuted courts-martial in Germany and worked on international law. And it was there that I got first interested in the question of Germany because those were very exciting days in Germany. I arrived, literally, on the day that Germany got its sovereignty back under the postwar treaties. And I spent all of the time I was there and then other people spent about four or five more years negotiating a very complicated treaty with the new German government about the status of American forces there -- what criminal jurisdiction, taxes and so forth. And it was difficult, in a personal sense, because we had two young children and my wife had just finished her medical education. And we moved 14 times in the first three years of our marriage. But I found it a very interesting and exciting time.

BARNET: Then I came back to Boston and went back to Harvard, worked at the Russian Research Center, and went and worked in a large law firm in Boston. But I moonlighted at the Russian Research Center, working on what became my first book, which was called, "Who Wants Disarmament?" And it was really about the disarmament negotiations from 1945 to 1960, and it was a look at whether anybody really was taking it seriously or not, and whether they should. I came to the conclusion that they weren't, but that they should, and that influenced a lot of what I have written about since.

BARNET: Yes. Then, as a result of that, I was invited to join the new Kennedy administration, and I worked with the group that was organizing what has become the ACDA, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and I worked there for a couple of years in charge of political research and was involved, also, in the Berlin crisis of 1961, which people don't remember much now, but in many ways -- at least I thought at the time -- was as potentially dangerous as the Cuban missile crisis, which came the next year. That was when the tanks came up, faced off each other a few yards away in the middle of Berlin. And it was a very, very tense time. And so I was there for a couple of years.

And then I also, after that, worked briefly as a consultant in the Defense Department, in the office that Paul Nitze headed. And it was then that we got the idea that we ought to start an institute that could look at some of these questions about foreign policy from an independent standpoint. One of my jobs in the government was to give out a very small amount of contract money to contract researchers. And I was concerned that the relationship between the contractors and the government was such that a lot of the basic questions, the basic assumptions didn't get asked. The contractors were very interested in servicing the bureaucracies that they were trying to get the money from, and I thought they should be something independent. And so a group of us thought it was a good idea and we assumed -- it was a very optimistic time -- that any good idea could be developed, could be funded. And we were lucky, you know. We managed to get it started and attract what, I think, were some very, very good people.

BARNET: Well, principally Marc Raskin, but the initial group was Christopher Jenks, who now is a professor -- was at Harvard, now at Northwestern; Donald Michael, Arthur Waskow, there were a number of them. And in the first board of trustees included David Riesman and Hans Morganthau, who were close to us at the time.

BARNET: 1963.

BARNET: Yes.

BARNET: Well, I say that in the American spectrum that may be true, I mean, I don't think those terms ever meant very much in the American context, and certainly the connotation "far left," which means Communists or means collectivist or means violent revolutionary in any way describes anybody who has ever been associated with the institute. I mean, that's just plain wrong, untrue.

I think they also missed, very much, the thrust of the argument that we have been making for almost 27 years about US-Soviet relations, which is that -- not that any of us had illusions about what the Soviet Union was from Stalin on, in terms of its domestic system, but that we did have questions about the conduct of the Cold War. And the question which I think will have to wait for future historians in opening up of a lot more records than are yet available, that we paid heavy and probably excessive costs in fighting the Cold War.

You certainly can say that the Cold War ended in, quote, "victory," for the United States, and certainly the Soviet Union is in very serious trouble. But I think the cost to the United States, principally in the neglect of our economy and our industrial base and our education system, are very serious and I think will come to be seen as even more serious if they don't become the major concern of our political leaders.

My worry is that we aren't doing that and that one of the problems -- it's really the point that I develop in the "Roots of War" -- the book we talked about before, that bureaucracies have an investment in a certain view of the world and they tend to pursue their own interests, sometimes to the neglect of the national interest.

And that was the argument that we were taking. I mean, it's strange that the far right was so concerned about these arguments because a lot of them, if you go back into our history, are much more conservative arguments -- that is, before the second World War it was American business that was concerned about the effects of a military industrial complex, that you would have -- that if you put too much money into the military you were not producing things that were themselves productive. It was inflationary and you would necessarily be creating a mammoth government.

But you can't be against big government and be for a big military. And those are basically the views that -- I mean, I think that the Cold War, one of the costs has been to obscure and, in a way, cheapen debate about real choices that the United States faces, so that so many people in Congress -- politicians had to defend themselves against the charge of being soft on communism, soft on Russia, when they were talking about things like health insurance or Social Security.

Those things should be debated in their merits. And the issue of what markets are and how they work, those should be debated on their merits, not whether it's more or less like the Soviet Union. And finally, I thought, the Soviet Union always was an underdeveloped country. And for purposes of whipping up the public feeling to support monumentally high military expenditures, we tended to make them 10 feet tall when they weren't. And I guess those were the points of difference that we have. It's an old tradition and it goes back to Jefferson. The opposition called Jefferson a French agent and they talked about Hamilton as a British agent. I mean, this kind of debate in our history -- Dwight Eisenhower was called by the Birch Society a Communist. But I think it doesn't help the debate.

BARNET: I think it's abysmal. I think that it's shocking -- that at the moment, when the future is more open than it has been in 50 years and the United States faces incredible choices -- I think great opportunities. This could be the best years in our history. But it requires understanding the enormous changes that have taken place and moving fast to adapt to those changes. Leaders can't do that by themselves. No leader in a Democratic country -- or really, in any country to a certain extent, can make these major changes without having the support of the public.

And you don't get the support unless there is understanding, unless there is debate, unless there's something approximating what fascinated me about the early years of history, in Washington's time. Talk about in the book how citizens, ordinary citizens would meet, members of political clubs -- they were called democratic clubs, republican clubs -- and would actually discuss pending legislation and would go meet together and figure out what they thought, and then go see the representatives or write letters to their representatives or go see various political figures. And they felt that they had a role, that they were part of the process and that was what was so exciting about the early years.

Now, we have a big country now, 250 million people, but we also have technology that would make it possible to have much more participation. If that were a major goal of either political party -- it doesn't seem to be -- and it's ironic to me that at a time when we see this wonderful flowering of democracy in Eastern Europe and even in the Soviet Union and the arrival, finally, of multi-parties, of a multi-party system, the differences between our two parties become narrower and narrower, and it becomes harder and harder to figure out what are the alternative visions? What are they asking -- why are they asking for a mandate for leadership, on what basis? What are they trying to achieve? We don't have that, and I think that is one of the reasons why the United States is acting in a very dangerously passive way on the world stage.

BARNET: Yes, but they participated at a much more active level than we do. I think the whole process of political change, where parties become much more institutionalized and media becomes much more important, that really starts with Andrew Jackson's time, where the parties become much more professional and campaigns become much more of a show.

It's also a time where suffrage -- the vote is open much more than it was, say, in Washington's, Adams' time. But still the United States, at the end of the 19th century, had one of the highest participation rates. People went to the polls, and there were sharp issues. Of course, there was the Civil War issues and the Reconstruction issues, and then the very intense debates about rising out of industrialization, what was going--what--workers' rights and what was happening to the farmers in the South. Those issues brought lots of people to the polls.

BARNET: Because...

BARNET: De Tocqueville was a French philosopher and historian and observer, social critic, who came to the United States in the 1830s and wrote "Democracy in America," still, I think, one of the great analytical works and descriptive works of American democracy, raising a lot of the questions that are still relevant today. In that book he said that democracy, that foreign policy is the area in which democracies are decidedly inferior, and he worried about the fate of the United States because of foreign policy. But his view of foreign policy was the 18th century view, that foreign policy was something that a few leaders did by getting together in secret rooms, that nations could get together at the Congress of Vienna and divide up the world, divide up Europe.

That has changed and we now have mass societies. And the danger -- the tension that he talked about is very much with us, but the solution has got to be different. The solution has to be democratic, because now foreign policy and domestic policy are so intertwined you cannot say, "We're going to have domestic policy run this democracy; we'll have foreign policy run out of the president's office," without destroying democracy. Because what is the question of our economic relations with Japan and Europe -- is that foreign policy or is that domestic policy? It's obviously both.

And I think one of the exciting things that's happening is that foreign policy -- the conduct of foreign policy in the United States is becoming somewhat more decentralized -- that is, cities and states are beginning to play much more of a role themselves in foreign policy; that connections are being made between cities and sister cities. They're cooperating on environmental projects and they even make their views known in ways that undermine national policy. I don't think that's so bad.

For example, when the Reagan administration was following the policy of constructive engagement on South Africa, cities were withdrawing billions of dollars in funds from businesses that were doing business in South Africa. I happen to think that was the right decision and probably contributed far more than constructive engagements, certainly, to the very welcome changes that are taking place in South Africa.

BARNET: I don't know. I can't remember what I quoted Humphrey about. Stallone -- I was interested because one of the themes throughout, of course, is how the popular culture deals with foreign policy, because so much of our feelings about other countries and other peoples in the outside world come from images of images, not even so much what we read in books and for relatively small numbers not direct experience of other people, because not a great percentage of the population travels to distant places.

But our view of the Russians so much out of the movies of the '50s and then the movies of the '80s. And they change, of course, overnight. The book traces our rocky relations with the Soviet Union from our cherished and respected ally in the second World War, a view of the Soviet Union which was outrageously exaggerated, welcoming them to the democratic alliance, because -- to the Cold War and then to detente and then to the second Cold War in the early '80s and now, hopefully, to a new stage and, I think, a more stable one of better relations.

BARNET: For me?

BARNET: Oh, the next book is going to be about the extraordinary changes in the global economy, which I believe are really at the heart of the political changes. Communism is going down, I think, not because of the accumulation of missiles -- although the extra expenditures had something to do with it -- but because you can't run a Communist totalitarian country unless it is isolated from the world economy, and you can't run a productive society unless it's integrated into the world economy. And these changes are bringing about political changes; and that's what I want to talk about.

BARNET: Oh, a long time -- four or five years -- three or four, anyway.

BARNET: Thank you so much. I enjoyed it.