395. Speak Softly and Carry Big Data

[0] Hey there, podcast listeners.

[1] This week, an episode we recently recorded live in Chicago on a topic that's a bit unusual for us, American foreign policy.

[2] A few important things have already changed since our recording.

[3] For one, President Trump's decision to withdraw some U .S. troops from Syria, which scrambled the calculus for the U .S. as well as for the Kurds, Syria, Turkey, Russia, and who knows how many other players eventually.

[4] And then, even more recently, U .S. special forces closed in.

[5] on ISIS leader Abu Bakr al -Baghdadi, who reportedly then killed himself.

[6] This too happened in Syria.

[7] The Democrats' impeachment proceedings have also accelerated thanks to Trump's interactions with Ukraine.

[8] So, this topic is a moving target, to say the least.

[9] In any case, we learned a lot and hope you do too.

[10] Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the host of Freakin' Onits Radio, Stephen Dubner.

[11] Thank you so much.

[12] We are recording live this week at the Harris Theater in Chicago and partners.

[13] with the great public radio station WBEZ.

[14] Now, Chicago is home to many great institutions, but perhaps our favorite is the University of Chicago, a true hotbed of intellectual curiosity and inquiry.

[15] Its economics department includes someone you should all be familiar with, my Freakonomics friend and co -author.

[16] He is rarely spotted in the wild, but he's here tonight.

[17] Please welcome Steve Levitt.

[18] So Levitt, nice to have you here.

[19] Tell us what you're working on these days?

[20] Yeah, so I've kind of gotten tired of academic research and decided I should try to do something useful for a while.

[21] So I started a center at the University of Chicago, and we're trying to do good things in the world.

[22] As I've gotten older, I've become more reflective and maybe less than an economist and more of a regular person, and it felt like the right thing to do, just to see if I could do something useful, finally.

[23] I applaud your turn toward reflection.

[24] Now, there's another reason we've come to Chicago, tonight.

[25] There is a set of problems in the world today, the sort of problems that are a constant feature in human history concerning international relations.

[26] So at the moment, the United States has a relatively charged relationship with, among others, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.

[27] The stakes are high.

[28] The issues are complex.

[29] The outcomes will reverberate for decades, if not longer.

[30] Now, Leavitt, do you have a lot of experience as an economist in the realm of statecraft or spy craft?

[31] I don't know if you'd want to call it experience, but I did once visit the CIA campus.

[32] I got invited there to work on a project, and when you get to the CIA, they basically take all your stuff, they take your cell phone and whatnot, and they hand you a badge, and they say, this badge is incredibly important, and it is your form of identification while on campus, and if you are traveling without it, you will be treated like an intruder, and potentially you will be shot.

[33] So I took my badge.

[34] and I got on the bus, which drove me across campus, and I got off the bus to go to my meeting, and I reached for my neck, and I realized I had left my badge on the bus, which was driving away, and I raced after it, and the bus driver didn't see me, and I thought, oh, my God, what is going to happen next?

[35] And there was a CIA guy off in the distance, and I thought to myself, like, what should I do?

[36] Should I approach him?

[37] Will he shoot me?

[38] And I thought briefly about maybe I should take my undershirt off and wave it as a form of surrender, but I thought probably I'm more likely to be shot if I'm walking around without a shirt on campus.

[39] So I approached the guy very timidly, and I said, I'm so sorry, excuse me, I left my badge on the bus.

[40] And he looked at me and he said, oh, that's no problem.

[41] Where are you trying to get to?

[42] I'll take you there, don't worry about it.

[43] And I got to say, that was the high point of my state craft so far.

[44] All right, so I think it's safe to say that neither Levitt nor I are experts in the field, but there are some experts, also, at the University of Chicago in a group called C -Post, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.

[45] They are a collection of scholars who conduct data -driven research on foreign policy and international security.

[46] So tonight, we will hear from some C -Posters, as well as a couple of high -ranking practitioners of foreign policy that we've flown in from Washington, including one former Secretary of Defense and one potentially future Secretary of Defense.

[47] So let's begin by welcoming the founder of the University of Chicago's Seapost, the political scientist Robert Pape.

[48] So, Bob, you and your fellow Seapost researchers try to use empirical means, right?

[49] Data analysis when available to understand foreign policy.

[50] How rare is that?

[51] Well, actually, a lot of people use data.

[52] The key question is, are you going to focus on really current and new problems?

[53] Or are you going to try to solve problems around for 50, 70 years?

[54] So a lot of the problems of the faculty at Seapost are relatively new problems or very new takes on those problems.

[55] So my work, suicide terrorism, that is a field that didn't exist 30 years ago, 20 years ago.

[56] It exists now, and there's a lot of good reason to want to throw a whole lot of data at that problem because it's too easy to have preconceptions and think, oh, yes, it's religion causing people to blow themselves up.

[57] And if you get it wrong, you could do really dumb things, like send an army to Iraq in 2003, which didn't turn out very well.

[58] Can you quickly summarize what you found there and how the data aided that discovery?

[59] Yeah, so after 9 -11, I compiled the first complete database of all suicide attacks, around the world.

[60] At that time, it showed that half of suicide attacks were not driven by Islamic fundamentalism.

[61] Many were done by purely secular groups, such as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, which is a Hindu group, not even an Islamic group, a Marxist group, an anti -religious group.

[62] What I found was that 95 % of suicide attacks around the world since the early 1980s were in response to a military intervention, often an army being sent on the territory that terrorist prized.

[63] So what I did is I knew Paul Wolfowitz, our deputy secretary of defense.

[64] Before the work was published, I sent this work to Wolfowitz.

[65] And basically, the word was, Bob, we're still doing Iraq, but we will move our troops out of Saudi Arabia, and we're going to start an airbase in Qatar.

[66] So that's where UD Air Base started in 2004.

[67] And basically, I said in my published work that that wasn't going to be good enough, that we were going to touch off the largest suicide terrorist campaign in modern times, which we did.

[68] So let me ask a question to both of you, University of Chicago professors, Bob Pape and Steve Levitt.

[69] There is this lovely idea that academic research that's done rigorously and challenged by peers and referees will be so robust that it can just be put right into play as policy.

[70] How often does that actually happen?

[71] So I would say, honestly, my research has had no direct impact on public policy.

[72] The only, I'm not joking, the only law change I know that occurred because of my work, there was a small town in Alaska which passed a law which made walking drunk a crime because we had written in one of our books about the dire risks of walking drunk.

[73] And I think that is the lone policy success I've ever had.

[74] in almost 30 years.

[75] It's not nothing.

[76] So Bob...

[77] So September 2005, I get a call from Deputy Secretary of Defense Eglon.

[78] Wolfowitz had been replaced, where I'm asked to come to Washington immediately, so I went the next day.

[79] Eglin began this meeting by saying, Professor Pape, we want to see your data because the NSC tomorrow is having a meeting where they're going to decide whether to send an army to an African country.

[80] And the NSC wants to know how good is your data.

[81] So for three hours, they tried to destroy the finding in my data.

[82] We never did send the army.

[83] They never told me what country it was, but I'm pretty sure it was Somalia.

[84] So when lives are on the line, man, are they going to try to really rip that data apart?

[85] So Bob, I understand you once found yourself advising a Republican and a Democratic candidate for president in the same race.

[86] Can you talk about how that worked out?

[87] Yeah.

[88] So Ron Paul was a Republican, and he picked my book up at Barnes and Noble.

[89] And Random House, who published my book, sent me a note saying, there is some congressman from Texas giving a whole speech on the House floor about your book.

[90] And well, then he ran for president and he asked me to be an advisor.

[91] And I kept saying, no, no, no, no. And the truth is, he wanted me because of Iraq.

[92] And that was really what I knew.

[93] I don't know about income tax and gold standards and so forth.

[94] You guys might, but I don't.

[95] But then I also really believed that the guy who was going to win was Barack Obama.

[96] And he was completely on the same page, I was.

[97] What does that page say when you say on the same page about Iraq at that point in time?

[98] Really understanding that by going in and invading Iraq in 2003, we broke the system in a way that was going to create the chaos and hornets nest of terrorism.

[99] And we really had to come to grips with that as a fundamental cause.

[100] And did you have any sense that Ron Paul was perhaps on the same wavelength as well?

[101] Oh, perfectly on the same wavelength.

[102] The real thing that happened here is you had a Republican and you had a Democrat who maybe didn't agree on anything else, but they agreed on the most important foreign policy issue of that time.

[103] And so you thought, hey, I'll double date.

[104] Well, I didn't do it intentionally.

[105] This is one of those cases where as a naive academic, I'm not really understanding what it means to be advising two campaigns at the same time.

[106] Once I realized this was not going to work.

[107] I just step back from both of them at exactly the same time.

[108] And is it important for you to maintain some kind of political middledom or independence?

[109] Do you consider yourself a political person?

[110] Are you a registered Democrat or Republican person?

[111] So I started life as a Republican, basically a Reagan Republican.

[112] And then in the mid -90s, I started voting for some Democrats.

[113] So in 96, I voted for Clinton straight on foreign policy.

[114] 2000, I supported George W. Bush.

[115] 2004, because of what happened with Iraq, Kerry, 2008, Obama.

[116] I really don't vote on domestic politics at all.

[117] I'm really trying to see which presidential candidate do I think has the best foreign policy or national security policy for our country.

[118] And when you say best, can you unpack that for a moment?

[119] What's that mean?

[120] I'd like to think it means that these are people who will listen to advisors, whether within government, civil service, academia, but that they also know how to make important decisions and they have a familiarity with history.

[121] That's what I would think of as best.

[122] Maybe you have a different definition.

[123] Yeah, so I think best means that it's going to enhance the strength and security of the United States over time.

[124] And I believe that's best done by working with allies.

[125] I believe that's best done by promoting regional stability.

[126] Some people may think we could get ahead in the short term by playing hardball with this actor or that actor.

[127] And they may be right within six months or a 12 -month period of time.

[128] But I believe in enlightened self -interest in academic terms.

[129] It's a little bit longer -term time horizon.

[130] I had a lot of respect for Ronald Reagan's foreign policy.

[131] After all, he ended the Cold War without us firing a shot.

[132] That's an incredible outcome that occurred after many, many years of working to that direction.

[133] Obama's foreign policy, I think, was really, wouldn't say perfect, but I would say it was really quite good.

[134] Second, right up there with Ronald Reagan, I'd put the two together.

[135] I believe we're strong.

[136] longer when we have friends working with us than when we push our friends away.

[137] And I think we see that today.

[138] So I'd like to talk about the research you've been doing looking at economic sanctions.

[139] So this is something we all read about all the time.

[140] I'll be honest, as a layperson, it's really hard to know what quote works and how it works if it does and what kind of time frame we're supposed to be looking at as a success.

[141] So, you know, some of the U .S.'s current economic sanction targets include Russia and Iran and Venezuela.

[142] So what can you tell us empirically about the efficacy of this kind of sanction?

[143] Yeah, it really matters whether you're pursuing sanctions for ambitious foreign policy goals like regime change, to pull back a military offensive like Russia going into Ukraine, or to stop a WMD program, or you're doing more modest things.

[144] Like you're trying to cut a trade deal.

[145] You're trying to free some hostages.

[146] It's really important to see the division between the tough goals and the easy goals.

[147] Sanctions work really well for easy goals.

[148] The tough goals, much poorer track record.

[149] Can you give us some numbers?

[150] And I'm also curious to know about your data set.

[151] How far back did you look?

[152] How good is the data on this topic, et cetera?

[153] It's really quite good going back to World War I. So since World War I, well over 115 cases of economic sanctions, and we could really divide up and cut up the data in this way.

[154] And this is not just the U .S., correct?

[155] Oh, no, this is global.

[156] So the problem isn't whether you have a data set at all.

[157] It's, are you dividing the data in the right way?

[158] Are you mixing apples and oranges, or are you comparing the tough cases to tough cases, so to speak?

[159] And when you do, you see that sanctions for tough cases work less than 5 % of the time.

[160] Oh, my goodness.

[161] And they not only work less than 5 % of the time, but about 5 % of the time, they have catastrophic failure.

[162] Give us this specific, please.

[163] July 1941, we want Japan to stop using all the military force on its adventures in Asia.

[164] So we slap maximum pressure oil sanctions on the Japanese.

[165] We think what we're doing is that we're going to tilt the balance.

[166] We're going to weaken hawks and empower the doves.

[167] We did exactly the opposite.

[168] What we did is we weakened the doves and we empowered the hawks.

[169] The guy who led the Pearl Harbor attack was Admiral Yamamoto.

[170] We know this because we got all the documents.

[171] And what Yamamoto did was he flipped his position on Pearl Harbor as a result of the sanctions.

[172] Before July 41, he was opposed to the Pearl Harbor attack.

[173] July 41 sanctions were what caused him to do the Pearl Harbor attack because it was a brush bat pitch.

[174] The more we threatened the survival of Japan, the more he wanted to take a risk to push us back.

[175] And that, I'm afraid, is what we're seeing with Iran today.

[176] So you said that the sanctions work on the tough problems about 5 % of the time.

[177] What percent of the time do whatever other approaches we use on tough problems work?

[178] I mean, they're tough problems.

[179] So maybe there aren't a lot of other good options.

[180] Yeah, so they're usually compared, Steve, to military force.

[181] So what you see is that when you apply economic sanctions on a target, especially for a tough goal.

[182] A lot of times, what's happening is they fail, and then you end up using military force.

[183] Pearl Harbor, again, is a perfect example of that.

[184] Another example is when we put economic sanctions on South Vietnam in 1963.

[185] We wanted to change the government of 1963.

[186] If we tried with economic sanctions, that wasn't good enough.

[187] It didn't do it.

[188] So we ended up pursuing a foreign -sponsored military coup.

[189] And that, of course, then led to our military intervention in Vietnam.

[190] I'm curious if you do economic sanctions, whether you actually can measure effects on prices and quantities.

[191] Let me give you a good case.

[192] Iraq after 1991.

[193] So we slapped economic sanctions on country of Iraq, an oil producing country, cutting off virtually all of its oil, starting in 1990, and we kept that off.

[194] We cut its economy in half, it dropped 50 % plus.

[195] We have really good data on that.

[196] And we thought that would ultimately bring about regime change.

[197] A Republican president thought that, Democratic president thought that, and another Republican president thought that.

[198] And the truth is politically, that didn't work.

[199] We had to invade Iraq.

[200] But if you look at the consequences of cutting that economy, We had tens of thousands of miscarriages and other harm due to malnutrition as a result of the sanctions, which are all blamed on us.

[201] The costs here weren't just on the regime, and we can measure it, and it's not because we didn't damage them enough.

[202] In 2014, Russia made a military move on Ukraine, and they annexed the Crimean Peninsula.

[203] So in response, the U .S., under President Obama, joined other countries in imposing economic sanctions on Russia.

[204] tell us about the consequences of those economic sanctions on Russia, as far ranging as you can.

[205] I believe that the sanctions have had no effect on Putin.

[206] They have weakened the economy, but they've also fed nationalism.

[207] So one of the reasons why sanctions don't work is because rather than in terms of just raw cost -benefit calculation, you produce nationalism, which shifts things in favor of the hawks, even though they're losing wealth.

[208] And what have been some of the consequences of Russian nationalism in the form of blowback to the United States?

[209] Well, one of the things we worry a lot about is that a lot of those sanctions are some of the reasons why Putin has so much in his gun sites.

[210] It's not simply personal animus against Hillary Clinton.

[211] Do you or others have evidence that one of the blowbacks was Russia attempting or actually meddling in the 2016 U .S. President?

[212] election.

[213] Nope, can't go that far.

[214] No, I can't personally go that far.

[215] So it's not because there's not a correlation there.

[216] It's because the kind of work I do.

[217] So when I'm looking at the cases of economic sanctions, I'm getting inside to the extent possible the decision making on the target country.

[218] You can't do that in every single case.

[219] So I'd have to pull back and say, there's a correlation there, but no, I can't say for sure that's the trigger.

[220] So here's the problem, as I see it.

[221] As Levitt said, the reason that solutions to difficult problems don't often work is because the problems are difficult.

[222] And you're describing now that sanctions are typically ineffectual.

[223] And the other choice is typically a military invasion, which is costly on many, many, many dimensions.

[224] And furthermore, as you've said, military invasions and or occupation have a downstream cost of suicide terrorism, among many other things, right?

[225] So can you give us anything remotely resembling good news or good ideas?

[226] Rather than have pushed for the sanctions, what we should have done is played up the politics of embarrassment.

[227] So we had just had a case in Syria when the Syrian government used gas, you'll remember that, and what the Obama administration did and Secretary Kerry, Secretary of State did, was embarrassed the heck out of Putin for supporting us and got the Russians to not veto in the UN, the most serious anti -chemical campaign that we really have ever had.

[228] And that politics of embarrassment was our best lever in Syria.

[229] And what I believe is that we could have been better off by trying that approach in Ukraine.

[230] What we underweight is how much the politics of embarrassment can separate a leader from his own nationalist base.

[231] Because it's one thing for the public to be nationalists, it's another thing to want to really embrace a war criminal that's committed murder and killed hundreds of civilians outright.

[232] That is a very different thing to own.

[233] And I think it has a possibility of separating the leader from the public, whereas sanctions, I believe, just bring them right together.

[234] One of the things Robert Pape has done at his Chicago project on security and threats is assemble a cadre of younger political scientists who, like him, are trying to look at international affairs through an empirical lens.

[235] We brought up one of these political scientists, Paul Post, for a brief conversation about his research, which has to do with the spreading of democracy or the lack thereof.

[236] So a good way to think about this is to go back a little bit.

[237] You know, everybody's excited about the 1990s because it's the end of the Cold War and it's viewed as this moment that now liberal democracy, that, right?

[238] represented the West is going to spread.

[239] And the reality is it didn't just happen.

[240] And that, Post says, is because the big countries that have historically prided themselves on being the big spreaders of democracy, the U .S. in particular, are, in fact, not very good at spreading democracy.

[241] Or maybe they're just too distracted with other pressing matters.

[242] In any case, imagine you are the leader of a smallish country that's heading toward a new democratic setup?

[243] And these leaders a lot of times, they're looking for resources.

[244] They're like, I need help, I need technical expertise.

[245] Everything here is geared towards giving out bribes.

[246] I need help building roads.

[247] How do I do this?

[248] The common perception, Post told us, is that the U .S. is always willing to step in and provide this help.

[249] What my research showed is that that wasn't fully what happened.

[250] Instead, what I have found is that countries that are what we call democratizing, meaning they're basically in their first five to ten years of being a new democracy, they are dramatically more likely, say in the order of 30 % more likely, to form new international organizations compared to, say, established democracy, autocracy, or any other kind of just regular country.

[251] In other words, these new democracies can't get what they need from big countries, like the U .S. or big organizations, like, NATO.

[252] Instead, they rely on what Post calls middle democracies.

[253] One of my favorite examples of this is something called Baltbat, the Baltic Battalion.

[254] The Baltic Battalion was an organization formed by the Baltic States after the end of the Cold War, and who steps in is the Nordic countries.

[255] In particular, Denmark, who's a NATO member, they come in and actually help them to form this new organization to where it was referred to as a preparatory school.

[256] for NATO.

[257] And that organization then started to allow them to get the resources that they needed to help to start to consolidate.

[258] So two of the most avid advocates of democracy spreading in the past, the U .S. and the U .K., they both seem much less interested in that function at the moment.

[259] So do you, and I don't mean this to sound as bad as it's about to sound, but do you feel in your research that you're chasing a piece of history that's already evaporating?

[260] Ah, yes.

[261] That is the common narrative you hear right now.

[262] I actually, despite being very cynical, I actually have a much more optimistic view of it.

[263] Even if you go back to the early 1990s, it wasn't the U .S. that was leading the way.

[264] It was the smaller middle democracies and lead the way.

[265] Or if you go back to the 1940s with the creation of NATO, it was Canada that came along and said, hey, U .S., there's this thing you might want to get involved with that would really help out Europe.

[266] You sound shocked that Canada could come up with a good idea.

[267] So when you talk about spreading democracy, you've focused on countries that already have a nascent democratic process in place.

[268] But when I think about the U .S. approach to spreading democracy, I think about us assassinating leaders, bombing places, doing very undemocratic things to trigger the process.

[269] Is there any data on the success rate of big democratic powers doing very undemocratic things to try to induce future democracies?

[270] We call this foreign imposed regime change.

[271] But the key to that is it's not necessarily democratic change because all those things that you mentioned the U .S. did.

[272] They also did it the reverse.

[273] They've also engaged in operations that undermined a democratic regime, largely because they felt, well, this particular regime is going to be more pro -capitalism, pro -U

[274].S.