Chinworth: We would like to talk about economic security, as it developed as a philosophy going into the Reagan administration, as it was practiced during those years--what it was really meant to be, and how it turned out, if at all; and for that matter, if there ever really was an economic security concept. I've got my biases; I worked on the campaign as a youngster who was primarily a gopher and a junior researcher. I had my notions of what was developing in the 79-80 period and didn't ever get involved in the administration, but had indirect exposure of some things at a lower level. So I've got my biases, and I will try to make them clear up front without trying to sway your answers one way or another.
But lets start at the beginning, and address that first question of how did it all get started, and what was the notion of economic security. I really think there was an effort to articulate a concept of national security in terms of economics, but it was really focused on the notion that a 600 ship navy is no good if it means a diversion of economic growth. The real important thing was with 25% unemployment in Detroit, that without a vibrant, self-sustaining domestic economy focused on what we would consider civil production, civil innovation, that there was no hope of trying to force on top of that a military defense structure, and that was the key driver of the Reagan foreign policy as I saw it regarding the Soviet Union. When we saw that pattern as a forced military structure, we knew it was going to bring the country down sooner of later, and didn't want to do the same thing to the United States. First things had to come first--automobile workers had to get back their jobs, and the rest.
So, I would like to get your thoughts first on that period in '79 up through the convention in '80. Where did you see that philosophy articulated and in what form? To me, the keynote was the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations speech, I think in March of '80. I thought that was the pivotal address, and I was sort of appalled the next day at how many press reporters missed the point entirely. "The man's talking about unemployment in Detroit, not foreign relations!" Precisely--that's the whole point. That's the way I took it. To me that is where it was really articulated, and then we'll get into how it was actually practiced.
Brock: Let me go back a little bit before that, because the conversation never goes away with the Republicans. It is sort of a truism that we believe that a healthy economy makes all things possible, and an unhealthy economy makes things almost impossible. Whether it is defense or welfare or education or anything else, you begin with a fundamental premise that this country has got to be strong in economic terms. We started developing that into something moving towards the foreign policy side in 1978, 79, and 80, well before Reagan, well before any nominee was in prospect at the Republican National Committee. We put together a group of a thousand different individuals who assumed roles of advisors to look at the different components of domestic and foreign policy. We started publishing something called Common Sense, which was an effort to get people to comment on these subjects. Mike Barrudi was its editor--Mike was quite articulate on the subject.
We began to weave this fabric together of economic national security from the defense side, together with our leadership, the components of that leadership being both military and economic. We tried to seize easy things to portray that focus--we did the tax blitz in 1978, where we got a lot of our people in the economic area--Solomon, Kemp, people like that--to fly all over the country to every major media center to talk about economic growth and the need to restore the country's grounding there.
Reagan's people clearly were following this similar track, more so than the other candidates, but virtually all of them were touching it in one way or another. Reagan seemed to have a clearer view. And I think you are right--I would tie it to the Chicago speech, where he was pretty clear in melding these things together. The election was almost entirely on economic issues--the inflation, the interest rate problem, the unemployment. There was some concern about using the international component of our unemployment, although it was done; it was done in Detroit, if I remember correctly--a candidate made a speech about Japanese automobiles and imports. But most of it was focused on simply putting our economic house in order; getting taxes down, regulations reduced, removing the friction that is caused by governmental intervention, and restoring our ability to be competitive. And on the basis of that, rebuilding our military and regaining our position as leader of not only the free world, but of the entire world.
All of that was sort of building to a crescendo by election day, but it was not a new issue--it was something that had been going back to the Nixon days, and we began to get away from it. We had difficulties over Watergate and a few others things in the early Carter years, with pardons and so forth. But we began to recapture that ground--it started probably in '77, but really effectively in '78, and the moved pretty strongly into the successful election.
Chinworth: The phrase 'Reagan's people' always implies that the Reagan campaign was Reagan's 'faction' for lack of a better word. It never struck me as being the traditional Republican Party; it was always on the outside of the Republican party. So you're saying their was never any factionalism at all--fortunately, fortuitously, the Reagan folks had a similar outlook, so their was a melding of what you would call traditional Republican philosophy with the Reagan campaign?
Brock: Yes. I think fortuitous is probably the right word. I'm not sure it was by design. We were being handed the issue by Carter. It was almost a no-brainer--we knew what we had to do. We knew the frustration--20+% interest rates, 12% inflation, rising unemployment, serious, really serious economic losses in major industries like the automobile industry, being the most dramatic, but there were others. The warning sounds were all over the lot, and the public disenchantment was very strong, so almost regardless of what anybody wanted to do, the issues were going to drive us to this area, which was an instinctive area for us, it was natural for us, and that made it easy.
There was a difference between the Reagan people and the traditional party people. Reagan took the party by storm. It was not the view of the so-called mainstream, Buick-driving Northeast Republicans that he ought to be the nominee. They were very much concerned that he was too conservative, that he was too ideological, that he was not broad-minded enough to be an effective President. They came around, but that was pretty strongly felt in those days. And what Reagan did was to put together the Midwest, the South, and the West, and he just overwhelmed everybody.
The Reagan people--and here I'm talking about the Kitchen cabinet, which was variously composed--nobody quite knew for sure who was in it--but the ones that came out of it in Washington terms were basically Cap Weinberger; but the Kitchen Cabinet, and the professional staff, Dave ? 180 being sort of the core, Bill Casick. They were not people who had had a lot of contact with the mainstream Republicans, either the political leaders or the professionals. And as a matter of fact, we had some pretty severe bumps in the road to the nomination. They wanted me to fund a bipartisan effort to attack the Panama Canal when I was national chairman, and I said no. I said I don't want bipartisan initiatives; if you want to make it Republican, I'll fund it, but I won't fund it bipartisan. They wanted me to take the convention away from Detroit and give it to Dallas; I said no, and that one they fought me on. They fought hard, and I won by one vote in my own committee. And then they tried to name someone else as national chairman, and I said you'll have to crawl over me. As it turned out, we had the votes, and they acknowledged that before they actually got into a count to see. So there were some real differences.
And it was as if California had a new kind of franchise on "conservatism." A lot of us didn't think they owned anything there. There wasn't anything unique about that. But there was tension in those days. Frankly, one of the nice things that happened was the fact that the issues were so compelling in classic Republican terms that we could unify the party and overcome all of that. And then shortly after the election, of course, it was all moot, nobody cared. But there were some moments of tightness before the election.
Chinworth: Within the kitchen cabinet, was there anybody that . . . either Meese, Nelson, Casey--maybe Casey a little bit, maybe Weinberger--but that crew never struck me as being a group of folks that cared much about economic security, and they were really operators. Who within the Reagan crew articulated that philosophy, if at all? Or was it just some nebulous . . .
Brock: It was Ronald Reagan. Reagan was above that. He never was quite comfortable with this more mundane aspect of the thing. He had a vision of what he wanted to do, and how he wanted to get there. He was very clear-minded and very articulate. People would talk about how beautiful some of his speeches were, when they were written by some of the wordsmiths. But he was articulate in person, in the Cabinet meetings or in campaign meetings, talking about this is what we are going to do, this is how we are going to say it, what our purpose is. No one ever had any doubt about who the boss was in that campaign, or subsequent to that. You knew exactly what the vision was, and while we would have some latitude in achieving it in later years, in terms of implementation, there was never any doubt about the fundamental purpose.
He understood we had to have the economic competence to restore the military capacity in order to make sure that we won the war. And I'm not talking about a fighting war, but the real war--the Cold War. It was all of a purpose, one focus.
Chinworth: Also representing my Japanese colleague today, Professor Murayama--I don't know if you remember him from San Diego--his perspective is a little different, and it will be interesting to see how we reconcile these perspectives, if at all. I think he represents a viewpoint that is not uncommon in Japan; that while this economic security philosophy may have been outlined in the early days of the Reagan administration, it was not really put in to practice. What really happened was that eventually there was a recovery, but it was a cyclical recovery, and it really came in low end industries--it came through service jobs at McDonalds, or wherever it might be. So there was sort of a superficial level of economic growth, but in the high-tech industries, there wasn't sufficient competitiveness to allow the U.S. to take on Japan head on. If anything, there was a bit of fear about the rise of Japanese technological dominance in specific industries, and that was demonstrated in specific actions by the Reagan administration that really communicated the true notion of economic security. That came in the form of trade restraint agreements in automobiles, machine tools, semiconductors--leading-edge industries where the U.S. had fallen to number two at best, and couldn't compete with number one, which was now Japan.
My own view is that in each of those areas and more, there is any number of factors going into it; in automobiles, we talked about that in San Diego. Bob reminded me of the Houdaille machine tool industry case, semiconductor negotiations in '87. From my cynical, inside-the-beltway perspective, I really view that as somebody else had better lobbyists, more than anything else, to be honest. But I would like you to comment on, and we can put automobiles aside, but specifically at Houdaille and semiconductors, in the context of that Japanese notion of economic security as it was practiced.
Brock: Probably the only industry--and I won't elaborate unless you want me to, because we did so thoroughly in San Diego--the only industry which was of such immediate consequence and in such immediate peril that there was a felt need to act was the automobile industry. Even there, there was some dissent, but it was more muted. When you got to the machine tool area and to the semiconductor area, the dissent was very vigorous. There were a lot of us who felt that, and argued very forcefully, that we did not need to take any restrictive action. That these were cyclical situations--never, ever, ever was there a year while I was in the Reagan administration in either capacity, as USTR or as Secretary of Labor, never was there a year in which our industry profits in semiconductors, for example, weren't substantially larger than the Japanese. We had a lot more capacity to plant ourselves back into R&D and do the things that we needed to do. And those people who were talking about Japan, they had to fall back on the unfair competitive practices of Japan and the Third World, primarily in Southeast Asia. That was their compelling argument. It was not the demise of the U.S. domestic industry; they simply we not making that case very effectively. They were saying that some action had to be taken in the semiconductor accord in what was it, '87?
Wampler: I think there was one in '83, which didn't work out, and they came back to it in '87.
Brock: That was non-relative, that didn't mean anything. Whenever it was, '87 was the right year, the only argument that had any validity was the predatory pricing practices of Japan, and we had some pretty good documentation of that. Maruyama's thesis that we were spending a lot of time arguing about the demise of American competitive industry, down in Washington from what was going on inside, I'll tell you, we were booming. About '85, the roof was coming off. We were doing terrific. The tax cut was beginning to bite, the country was humming. Things were getting so much better that I was urging to specifically ask the Japanese not to keep extending unilaterally all of their automobile things.
If you take his theme, then you have to ask how in the world did we get it right? The fact is that we got it right starting in '81, and we began to put in place those forces that really did change things. It is really easy to start picking one or two things and say they changed the course of events. It doesn't happen very often. If I had to cite one thing that changed the course of events in the Reagan administration, it would be the strike of the air-traffic controllers. That changed attitudes here and internationally in a really dramatic way. But, it didn't have the economic consequence in the normal sense of economics--what it had was a policy consequence. It really affected the way people thought about Reagan, and that was important. Like I said in San Diego, it enormously strengthened my position when I had further conversations.
But putting that aside, there are economic events that you can cite. The tax cut had huge impact in changing the dynamic of our GNP, but what was happening of even greater consequence was the restoration of a sense of spirit. That is an important thing, and people underestimate attitudes. There was a restoration of the sense of American enterprise, we began to feel like we could get it together, and this country started saying, we've been fat and sloppy too long. And the consequence of that was our businesses really aggressively began to reorganize themselves. We began to look at the competition of our workplaces, work forces, and we changed those things. And that, more than the next tax cut, more than any policy action that Reagan or anybody else took, put America back in the position of being dominant. It was an attitudinal change that said we just can't live like we are doing. But workers got scared, their jobs were being lost, and they became much more resistant to the union radicals. Talk to George Schultz, talk to some other who were there. George should have been probably in that kitchen cabinet group. But people like George were very clear-minded about the ability of the U.S. to compete. Not in any way terrified of the competition. As a matter of fact, very aggressively opposed to any restraints, any unilateral action. It was the case of the majority of the Cabinet, probably all but maybe two or three out of the 17.
Chinworth: Who were the two or three?
Brock: Mac Baldridge when he was there. Agriculture sort of has a tradition of being a problem. And Weinberger, mostly from a security point of view, export controls, that sort of thing.
Chinworth: In those meetings that Weinberger attended, did he take the export control type issue or the dependency theme . . .
Brock: He didn't argue the dependency theme, he would argue the security in the sense of technology and the export of technology. Concern that we would have--and you would get into horrendous fights over things like the Russian pipeline--those external affairs were on the table quite a bit.
Chinworth: Of course, in Japan's case--well, let's ask a real sweeping question covering 8 years of the administration--in what context do you recall Japan being mentioned in this export controls aspect, as Weinberger was concerned?
[Inaudible 367]
Brock: Japan was not an issue.
Wampler: How do you feel about the aspect of the semiconductor accords? The two things that get criticized are A) they engineered a price jump inadvertently in chips in the U.S., and then this whole idea of managed trade in trying to mandate a certain percentage of U.S. sales for the Japanese market. Was USTR involved in that negotiation, and trying to set those targets?
Brock: I was out of there when they did that, and opposed to it when they did it. That was more Baldridge; that was probably his last thing before he was killed. Who else was involved in that? It may have been Kemp. Kemp and Bill Clark would operate in tandem. I guess was it Clayton that was there at the time that they negotiated that?
Wampler: Clayton Nider? It might have been, after you had gone over to Labor. The latter was the one that had teeth to it. The '83 just didn't work out.
Brock: '83 was a subterfuge.
Wampler: Were you involved in '83?
Brock: We didn't want to do anything. And we effectively achieved that purpose. The '87, Mac was working on that, and it must have happened--I don't remember when he was killed--all I remember is that they moved that through the process without a lot of debate. I don't remember how they did that. I try not to get to creative when I'm foggy.
Chinworth: I'm jumping around here, but in '87, Bob reminds me, the Defense Science Board had a report on semiconductor dependency. That was, from my standpoint, a watershed in terms of this articulation of direct concern on being dependent on another countries capabilities, and all that it might imply. So now you are moving from an economic security buzzword on to this era of dependency. It seemed like economic security wasn't the buzzword so much as dependency. The DSB report specifically said that U.S. weapons systems were just filled with Japanese semiconductors, it wasn't just the low-end, it was high-end processors as well. At the very best, when the crunch came, we could expect price gouging, and at the very worst, we could expect to have planes fall out of the air because we wouldn't have enough supplies to keep them up there. Again, I've got my biases . . .
Brock: That was the Chicken Little report.
Chinworth: Right, it was, definitely. I've heard there was a classified version of that report. Bob is working on tracking that down. There is several things I would like to explore there with you, to the extent that any of this comes together. I saw that as being as much a personality-driven exercise than anything else. I've met Norm Augustine at different contexts, and admire the guy, he's driven, but I have feeling that was the Norm Augustine report on semiconductor dependence, not the DSB report. And again, I'll make my bias up front there, and I'd like your comment on it. The second thing is the extent, if at all, DSB solicited and was influenced by economic organizations or appointees or officials within the administration that had exposure to the economic aspects of it.
Brock: Certainly not me, not anybody I was associated with or anybody I had talked to. It was out of the blue. And it was sort of typical of what came out of there. They tend to make draconian statements about almost all things. The export control arguments were equally dramatic. I don't remember enough about the aftermath of that; what impact it had, I don't know.
Chinworth: I'm not sure; again, timing is foggy for me, but it seems like the release of the report was early '87.
Brock: It could have had an impact, then. Maybe that was the genesis of the semiconductor action.
Wampler: There was a subsequent DIA report around the eve of the Gulf War that was feeding that concern., because so many of the weapons we relied upon were seen as having this high-tech component that could be dependent upon non-U.S. suppliers, particularly Japan.
Brock: Even then they were saying that.
Wampler: Yes. One of the things that Mike has down here is to what degree when you were at USTR, would you get pulled in to any sort of assessments of U.S.-Japanese military codevelopment operation--weapons and things of that nature, this whole charge that would come down that on the security side, we were providing technological information that would fuel a potential economic competitor that would then fall into your ballywhip to try and deal with these issues. Was that anywhere on the agenda that you can remember talking about, trying to weigh the out-year consequences on the economic side of security cooperation?
Brock: We did; it was not a dominant theme that often, but we certainly had conversations about coproduction, and what that implied in terms of competitive circumstance. And there were those who felt that we ought to make them all here. And that's a tempting argument; that way you don't have to worry about the export of technology. That basically was what some were saying. That for me was not a priority; it was an area of interest, just because it was a fascinating intellectual debate. But, I'm not sure I recall actually being engaging in any particular policy as a consequence of it. It didn't affect the way we were running our shop, to be honest with you. It didn't affect our negotiations or the conduct of our policy.
Wampler: Was there ever any sense, and this was touched on in San Diego, that you were having to weigh your approach on trade issues, or at least time your trade issues to a certain extent that you don't create pressures on the Japanese government that could be used domestically there to attack a Prime Minister who is trying to help you on the security side? I have seen documents that say we have to formulate this or orchestrate in such a way that you don't lose what you are trying to get in one avenue by pushing in the wrong way or too hard in another avenue.
Brock: We did have those conversations, but they never affected the content of the policy; they might affect your timing. You always kept in mind that you are dealing with a political system, and you ask the Japanese to remember that they were dealing with one too. That was the context of the conversation. One of my arguments repeated probably ad nauseum in the Cabinet conversations was that Gentleman, they are an elected government, also; if we get what we want and cause the government to fall as a consequence, we will end up with less than when we started, and that's pretty stupid. So we would have those conversations. I don't recall anybody saying the Security Treaty is at risk right now, and if you push the Japanese on citrus, whatever it is we were messing with, you will make it more difficult for them to do that. I don't recall somebody saying that to me.
Wampler: There would be documents that aren't saying the Security Treaty will go down the tubes if you press on this, but you try to get specific goals, one of which is burden-sharing, and trying to get their defense spending up. There is one document which says Nakasone is really pushing hard on this in the Diet, and he is facing obvious different coalitions of opposition for different reasons. If we push hard on trade now, it gives his opponents another hammer to hit him on, and makes it more difficult to get this one precise goal we are trying to get within the security relationship. So you have to sort of time, or at least deal your pressures in such a way that, Let him get the increase in defense spending, then you get through the trade issue . . .
Brock: I don't remember dodging it like that. I'm going to tell you for a fact that I knew George Schultz well enough, I knew Al Haig well enough, and that's where it would have come from, probably.
Wampler: This was a State Department document.
Brock: They would say, I have a memo like this, what do you think? And I would say, I think if you need me to push it off for two weeks I could do that; if you need me to can the policy, I can't. I don't think I ever recall having a direct push to take a specific action because of the political circumstance of the Prime Minister. I knew that as well as anybody else; I was sensitive to it, and maybe because they knew I was sensitive to it, that they didn't have to push me, I don't know. I never got any pressure--something like that would be something I would remember. And if George Schultz had said Bill, we have got a serious problem here--Al Haig pushed me to go to Argentina in the middle of the damn Malvenus war, and I didn't want to do that at all. I remember that like it was yesterday, so I would remember those sorts of things.
Chinworth: Rather than focus on the past, I would like to discuss the current and the future. It is easy to say now that things were right or wrong, but put your best objective lenses on it and look at the notion of economic security. I think mainstream Republicans would say the original concept was right all along, and everything that has happened since has validated that, but let's try and get one step beyond that. Though that period in the areas that we've discussed, specific industries are in trouble: automobiles, machine tools, semiconductors. The idea of a strong productive capability on our human base is essential to any kind of security consideration. In retrospect, how valid was the argument, and how would you point to other danger points between the U.S. and Japan right now that you would cite as evidence that the economic security notion as we originally discussed is not being maintained, is not being supported sufficiently in the U.S. and/or in Japan by Japan and the U.S. to be able to allow continuation of the economic and security aspects of the relationship?
Again, one of our assignments here is to draw lessons learned and put some perspective on this. To make my bias known up front again, especially when you look at some of these coproduction programs, I'm not so sure if its over. That may have been a unique period that ended with FSX, for a lot of reasons. One of the things I am struggling with in putting on my historian's cap is carving into stone a perspective that is too narrowly focused; that we look at a small period in the 60s and 70s and say that was true of the entire 50 year relationship, and will be for 50 years beyond that. That is the kind of thing I am grappling with.
Brock: That would be an almost guaranteed prescription for suicide.
Chinworth: Absolutely. So, you've got a few years on both of us here; a wealth of experience is backing that up--
Brock: I've thought a lot about this. I think that the issue as we have defined it almost doesn't exist. It clearly existed in the 60s, in a different iteration in the 70s, and a third iterations perhaps in the 80s. Now, it almost doesn't exist at all because the networking, interweaving of these economies. The transfer of production, technology, capital, R&D around the world makes the question sort of a strange one. No one can define a U.S. product anymore; no one can define a bank anymore. You might as well call all of these companies financial institutions, including a lot of manufacturing firms. You just can't think like we used to think; you can't think in nation-state terms as much as we used to. Now, I'm not suggesting the end of the nation-state--I don't believe that we are at the end of history, but we are redefining what that means, and we have got to redefine the role of governments, and we've got to redefine the role of relationships. It is going to be a pretty tumultuous and very difficult time. If you look at the economic summit that just took place in Denver, that is just sort of a characature. We are being as stupid in our arrogance now as Japan was at the end of the previous decade. The world doesn't work quite like that, in straight lines. There will come a time where we will pay for this conceit in evidence at the moment. Our children are paying now, because we are not dealing with the problems of this country.
But in security terms, it is not the export of technology of Japan, it is not the absence of coproduction agreements, it is not even the success or failure of Japanese firms that is troubling; it is the fact that you can access that technology on the internet if you live in Nigeria. That's the threat, that's the danger. We don't have the foggiest idea of how to deal with that, we really don't. So we place in the hands of some people who have very different ideas about values, the technology to destroy an awful lot of lives. With all the resources of the CIA and the KGB and the several, from the Mossad on up, we still don't know what is happening in a lot of these places. We have no way of how to react if something happens; and it will be an ad hoc reaction, and could be in the process a very dangerous reaction. Sam Nunn had a piece in the Post about the need to take the warheads off these missiles. Not a bad idea. I haven't heard anything from the Republicans or the Clinton administration responding, but . . .
Wampler: They are trying to cut the money for assisting the Soviets in doing that.
Brock: I'm afraid we tend to argue the wrong issues. I think we're, again, fighting ?
Chinworth: Technology diffusion is actually involved in it a little bit. The more I actually do real things, the more flustered I am by it. Its very much like lifting a can on a dirty old shelf and having plain old cockroaches there you didn't know about just scattered in the woodworks and you just slap at them . . . it just goes.
Brock: And what do you do? Is that bad long-term? No! Near term--10, 15, 20 years--very dangerous, very dangerous. Maybe in the longer term, too, but certainly in the next generation.
Chinworth: Let me be real selfish here, and put on my current project hat. I have a contract with the National Programs Office at DoD to identify future programs that the United States and Japan can enter into. Specific cooperative technology development programs that the U.S. and Japan can enter into in order to further these various economic and security aspirations of both countries.
What you said a second ago, about the same concern that we are looking at the wrong questions, that that is a reflection of an institutional amendum whose assumptions may not be valid anymore. But, a comment on that will be very helpful to the current project, which will get up to reasonably good levels in both governments by the fall.
The other side is that if you were to look at your trade experience, labor experience, Republican Party National Chairman experience, all that you saw during that period, and if you were to recommend a specific set of technology and development projects between the U.S. and Japan, what would you recommend from that perspective as things that are mutually beneficial, that make companies in both countries wealthier, that do lend some semblance of enhanced security to the United States and Japan; the implication today is that you're not talking about just those two countries anymore, but a regional security outlook in Asia. If you would comment first on that--let's look at that institutional amendum type argument; are we really focusing on the wrong things? And international programs, just give me a list of ten things we can do together, and if so, how would you change it? And then on the other side, since I've got to give them a list of ten things, what ten things, or at least one or two, would you put on that list?
Brock: There clearly are some areas; but even someone that knows as well about defense as I do, there is some additional development that could probably be mutually beneficial, and where the costs are sufficient to warrant cooperation. I'm not sure I can be more precise than that. It seems to me that the dilemma that free societies are going to have to face is the absolute desperate need for more intelligence while maintaining personal privacy. We have got to more, and we have got to know it without finding out anything that we as individuals don't want to know. That is a conundrum of substance.
In security terms, knowing the threat, being able to identify it, being able to preempt, is more important than dealing with it after the fact, and it is a whole lot cheaper. I don't know how to elaborate on that.
In terms of some of the things that good minds ought to be thinking about, one has to do with the human development of these and all other societies, and that's the acceleration of the neurological sciences. We know a lot about how the mind works--we don't very effectively translate that into programs that enhance the ability of someone to learn and to use one's mind. That is important just in civil society terms. From that you can do a better job of education, but without it, you can't educate someone that can't receive what you are trying to give him.
The other area where we continue to do battle, as we did in Denver, is in the science of the environment. We need a fact-based policy, not emotion-based policy. We need to think about systems and structures that do that in a fashion that is somewhat de-politicized. We don't have those today. I think a large part of the conversation in the next 15 or 20 years is going to be on international systems. As simple as common sense, and as complicated as the science of the environment or neurological medicine, medical, things like that.
But one of these days we are going to have to ask the more important question that once we get all this figured out, how are we going to live with each other?
Chinworth: I was going to ask you that. I mean, in Japan's case, there would be those who say that Japan is not mature enough to think that way.
Brock: It is hard for the Japanese to think like this.
Chinworth: Tactically, what would you, from your experience, what you warn people who are in the trenches now and the future trench workers to avoid, to focus on when it comes specifically with Japan trying to implement these kinds of concepts? What's not going to work?
Brock: What's not going to work is imperatives, is mandates. What won't work is the pushing of a society, Japan or Bangladesh beyond its capacity to live, and a willingness to accept that, and to modify your policy so that you provide the maximum incentive with the minimum disruption. You don't want to create any monsters. I had a conversation in Brussels in 1985 I think it was. We went over for our quadrangular conference. George Schultz was hosting it, and [Schultz] was venting as he always did about Japan. I just slammed down on the table. George Schultz was talking to somebody, and I said, Dammit, just quit it. You are on the verge of creating a whole new monster. And George whipped around and said what are you talking about? And I said, I'm talking about Japan, George. We don't need to recreate 1931, '32, '33 with Japan. We have got to be very careful as to where we push them. I think that is at least as true now. That country has come along way, given that--that society's pace of change has been remarkable. I don't think that's something to be critical of. I think they have made remarkable progress. They are more mature than us in some ways, but less in terms of their levels of sophistication. I think accepting that, and having some way of evaluating that level of capability of change in virtually any significant country is an important art in political science that I'm not sure we are paying a lot of attention to--at least I haven't seen much of it. Does that make sense?
Chinworth: It makes sense. It actually answers what was going to be my last question: given the economic inter-planning of the economies in the globe, do you really think there is a need for the U.S.-Japan security treaty?
Brock: Yes. Yes, because it provides the fabric of the relationship. It gives the Japanese politicians an excuse to do things that they got to do.
Chinworth: It's always good to have excuses.
Brock: We have to think about those things. We have to give each other political cover. That's what a multi-lateral trading system does--it gives you cover to get things that you really know you ought to be doing, but they are politically tougher than hell. Same thing is true of the security treaty. It is, with its warts, still an effective process. If we didn't have it, we would have to invent something like it. Otherwise you would throw into the hands of the demagogues all kinds of new tools. Basically the Japanese people still feel a need for a security relationship with the U.S. It is pretty deeply ingrained; it will fade over time, but it is deeply ingrained right now. The younger people don't have it, but they're not there yet. This is an intermediary, mediating device that gets us to wherever we are going to be 10 years, 20 years from now.
Wampler: Thank you very much.