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Tyler Jost, "Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
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A
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B
Hello. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci. I'm an associate professor of political science at Amherst College. Today I'm here with Professor Tyler Jost, author of the book Bureaucracies at the Institutional Origins of Miscalculation. The book was published in 2024 by Cambridge University Press in their Cambridge Studies in International Relations series. Welcome.
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C
Hi, Eleonora. It's great to see you. Thanks so much for having me.
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B
Tell us a bit about yourself.
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C
Sure. So I'm an assistant professor at Brown University. My research kind of looks at two big issues. The first is Chinese foreign policy. Specifically, I look a lot at the way the decisions are made within the Chinese governments, with a particular emphasis on various foreign policy bureaucracies, diplomatic, military, and intelligence. And then I have a broader set of interests that look at just international security questions generally. Again, kind of focused on the way that bureaucracies and the information and intelligence that often reside in those bureaucratic organizations shape the decisions that states make on the international stage.
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B
Before we dive into the specifics of your book, could you share the origin story of this book? What kind of sort of intellectual puzzle or observation first sparked your interest in the topic?
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C
Yeah, that's a great question. And I guess there are probably.
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B
Three.
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C
Currents that we're all channeling in the same direction. The first is that this books started as what was my dissertation project. And I came into graduate school to get my PhD, very much interested in this puzzle of why states seem to make mistakes so frequently in international politics. If you open up any history of the Cold War, or frankly diplomatic history before or after the Cold War, but I, I have a personal intellectual curiosity about that second half of the 20th century. You just find decision makers routinely getting it wrong, routinely confronting situations that they hadn't anticipated, and oftentimes the strategies that they had chosen, yielding results that look quite different from what they anticipated. And so that dynamic really framed a lot of what I was interested in in graduate school and subsequently, more specifically, I had also come to graduate school very interested in the Chinese political system. And I had served in the US military before graduate school. So I was very interested in the Chinese military and its role in foreign policy decision making in China. I had, you know, personal interactions, sort of dealing with the People's Liberation army, which is the Chinese military, in a kind of outside of their decision making system, of course. But it really fascinated me if and how bureaucratic organizations in China, like the military were able to shape leader choices. Because we often think in, in the Chinese system that leaders are so dominant. If we think about forces like Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping or today Xi Jinping, we think about these as sort of like very domineering figures such that like most of the individuals that reside within the bureaucratic hierarchy below them don't exert much of the fact. And so I was kind of interested in, about whether that was truly the case. And then the third current, I would say, is a kind of broader question or it's an articulation of that, questions about Chinese leaders, but framed more broadly. And so when I was starting graduate school, this was in the kind of mid 2010s and it was a really important time in the discipline because we were going through, there have been several, what we call behavioral revolutions in the study of international relations, all of which are kind of interested in problematizing some of the rational choice frameworks that have dominated the fields at various moments in time, and incorporating insights from psychology, sociology and organizational theory to try to say the reasons why this might look a little bit different. And we were right in the midst, I think, of the most recent behavioral revolution in which if there was a single thing that was dominating our attention, it was world leaders, right? So presidents, prime ministers and dictators. And so ironically, we were kind of As a discipline saying it's not just China that the leader looms large. It was basically all countries, the United States and the Kingdom of France. And my personal intuition, I think, coming into the project was that minimally. That was minimally. That was an incomplete answer because we have all of these stories, oftentimes from historians about really influential advisors that shape the course of history. And then tales of some of the most important foreign policy disasters, like the one that will be familiar to a lot of viewers, would either be the US escalation in Vietnam or the intervention in Iraq in 2003, in which the story is often told as one in which the advisors were dominant. And so I wanted to try to reconcile the fact that our discipline seemed to be putting so much emphasis on one individual, whereas all these decisions were really inside of a broader organizational milieu. So those were the three currents that I think led me to the project.
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B
So three currents that led you to the process, starting from earlier on, from the dissertation, and, in fact, even before you started graduate work, all culminating into this book. What is the argument of the book? Could you walk us through it in broad strokes? Sure.
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C
The argument is actually pretty simple and really distills down to two basic intuitions. And the first is that many of the miscalculations that we observe states making on the road to war are rooted in these kind of pathological institutions governing the relationship between political leaders, on the one hand, and their foreign policy bureaucracies on the other. And then the second intuition, which is very closely related to that first one. And I'll go through the details of both of these contentions in just a second. But the second one being that these pathological institutions stem in large part from calculations that national leaders are making to try to survive politically. In other words, politics dominates the reason why we see these pathological institutions, and by extension, miscalculation on the world stage. So, yeah, let's kind of go through. I can kind of walk through each one of these steps if it's helpful to you and to listeners.
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B
It is.
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C
Okay, great. So on the institutional side, which is. This is the subtitle of the book, the Institutional Origins of Miscalculation. Um, there's. There's essentially three contentions that. That make up the overall intuition. Um, the first one is. Is a kind of hopefully straightforward one, which is the starting point of the book, which is that, as a general rule, like political leaders, world leaders, they want to avoid. They want to avoid international confrontations that don't yield very much beyond the status quo. In other words, like, you don't want to get into a war, you don't want to get into a confrontation with other states unless it's delivering some kind of benefit for you. Because these confrontations are costly, right? The cost of conflict itself can be catastrophic for states. But there is also risks to even threatening war, so on and so forth. And so to try to avoid these outcomes in which you start conflicts that are costly but don't really yield very much, Leaders want to gather as much as they can about the situation that they face and what that situation portends for the outcome. If they choose to initiate some sort of confrontation with another country. You could think about this as a kind of forecasting problem in a way. But of course, forecasting has, like all forecasting, is rooted in the present, right? If I don't understand the balance of capabilities between myself and another state, that might influence my ability to forecast, forecast accurately what would happen on the battlefield. Similarly, if I don't understand what the other state their political incentives, I might be unable to understand whether they're going to stand firm within a crisis or stick it out over decades on the battlefield despite extremely high costs and so on. And so, of course, leaders could rely solely upon their judgment. Or as a couple of people told me during graduate school, why can't they just open up the New York. Literally one person told me this at one point. So that's of course, one possibility. And maybe we can, and we'll talk about this in a second, it might be the case that leaders would actually benefit from strictly relying upon their own judgment or just from reading the New York Times. That's a possibility, perhaps ex ante, not one that's very satisfying. But that's actually really not what we observe in most countries, right? So leaders have oftentimes sprawling bureaucratic organizations that collect information, sometimes through covert means like intelligence, and sometimes through overt means, just diplomatic engagements and military assessments, so on and so forth. And so like the way that we say this in political science jargon is that there's divided labor across the government, right? So the leader delegates some information collection and search to this bureaucratic organization. But then you have this essentially giant, like, imagine a puzzle that has, you know, a thousand different pieces, all of have sort of been taken apart from one another, right? So information is distributed across the state. All of these little agents inside of bureaucratic organizations have their own piece of the puzzle. And the question is, leaders now face a choice in how to stitch everything back together, how to put the puzzle back together and so the third contention is that how the puzzle is stitched back together is essentially a function of. Of the institutional design choices that leaders make to try to aggregate this information back up, such that they have it at their disposal to make those foreign policy choices about whether or not to start international conflicts. And it's perhaps worth pausing here and sort of reflecting, like these institutions, and sometimes colloquially we refer to institutions as like organizations. Here I mean them slightly differently, like the way that we talk about democratic institutions or authoritarian institutions. Essentially, these are rules and informal patterns of behavior that shape the way that political leaders and bureaucratic organizations interact, particularly in this informational dimension that I'm interested in. And so what the book offers is a kind of way of thinking about how those institutions differ systematically over time and space in ways that could be related to the standard way in which we categorize states, which is that between democracy and autocracy, focused on how political leaders are selected for office. But really what the book is proposing is that there's this entire other dimension regarding this informational problem of how leaders and bureaucrats either do or do not come together to aggregate information back up. That it's just fundamentally different. Right? And so one way of visualizing in our heads, because we don't have the benefits of slides on a podcast, one way of visualizing in our heads. The distinction that the book is positing is essentially like, imagine a horizontal information flow. So like information going between bureaucratic agents and a vertical information, vertical information flow dimension in which information can either pass up from bureaucratic organizations to the leader. And so we can imagine some various combinations for, in fact, of different institutional designs that would either kind of facilitate information both vertically and horizontally, right? That would be one type of institution. The book labels that an integrated institution. We can imagine one type in which information flows up, but not across. So the book calls that a siloed institution. Just think about corn silos in the Midwest, where I'm from. Or you can imagine one in which there is essentially only horizontal information. That's actually a rather uncommon institutional type. The book makes the case both theoretically and empirically that that's the case. And then lastly, consider one in which essentially the leader doesn't stitch the information back together. There's no or very limited horizontal or vertical information flow, and that's called a fragmented institution. And so that typology of different institutional types, in the same way that studies of the democratic peace use that as our explanation for why states behave the way that they do, this typology provides the starting point for thinking about why states might be more likely, some states might be more likely to miscalculate than others. And essentially this boils down to there are real benefits from that integrated approach, which we can sort of summarize as 2. The first is that, and this is sort of getting back to the starting point here, integrated institutions having that vertical information flow allows leaders to have access to more information than they would be able to collect on their own. And it proposes that as a general rule, more information tends to be better, right? We could talk about some of the ways that, like, you might have too much information and that could induce overload and so on and so forth. But as a general principle, the book argues and finds empirically is the case, it's better to have access to the information that the bureaucracy has. Of course, one of the natural questions that follows, and this is the second part of the argument, is, well, wouldn't that information be bad for the leader if it were inaccurate? Right? Because you have more information doesn't mean that you're getting a more accurate picture. And so the book essentially argues that that whole horizontal information flow ends up being quite critical for the quality of information that makes its way up to the leader. Essentially proposing, and this is where the title of the book comes from, is that healthy competition between bureaucratic organizations fosters a kind of competitive dialogue wherein, if states know that, or, pardon me, if bureaucracies know that other bureaucrats have access to their information and can sort of make counterarguments against that, it pushes them to not only search for better information to ensure that they're not questioned, but to pull back against some of the natural tendencies to perhaps overstate their position or to present information in a way that's present information in a way that accords with their bureaucratic biases. It also is helpful to the leader just to have multiple perspectives at hand, because while some of that information falsification could be. Could be intended, some of it could be implicit, right? And so if a defense bureaucracy sort of views the situation from a certain lens, but a diplomatic bureaucracy views it from another, they might not be able to sort of understand the way that they're biased, but from the leader's perspective over them, having a dialogue between them can help them sort of leverage the. The ways in which they're so different from one another. Okay, so the last bit. Remember I said at the onset, there. There is this other puzzle that is essentially okay, if the first part of the book is right, that some institutions perform better than others, these integrated Institutions tend to avoid miscalculation more than siloed and fragmented alternatives. Why would a leader ever choose siloed or fragmented over integrated ones? And here the argument comes back to politics and a kind of unfortunate trade off that leaders face between the two categories. Right. And so the problem is that while integrated institutions are kind of optimal from the perspective of good foreign policy decision making, it is the case that they empower bureaucracies to be kind of like these powerful political agents, which can be threatening to political leaders. Right. If the bureaucracy is powerful, if they're filled with people who have lots of expertise, they have lots of access to information, that information theoretically could be leveraged to undermine the credibility of the political leader. So as political leaders, knowing this, if they see the bureaucracy as a political threat, in other words, some agents within the bureaucracy are willing to challenge them either in. Through sort of public debates, through leaking information, or directly through some sort of challenge by which bureaucratic organizations would organize. This happens mostly in authoritarian states. In order to topple the leader from power, there might be incentives to restricting information flow such that siloed or fragmented institutions become politically efficient, even if they're not efficient for the perspective of foreign policy decision making. So that's the argument in a nutshell. Although I guess the nutshell was perhaps it takes a couple minutes to go through everything.
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B
This is great. And it is a very complex book that takes its argument very seriously. So I'm glad you were able to sort of all flesh it out for listeners. And staying with the argument, were there any surprising turns in your thinking as you develop? I mean, aside from the New York Times bit. Bit, which I bet was quite surprising. But were there any surprising turns in your thinking as you developed the argument?
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C
Oh, I mean, very much so. I think this, perhaps the most striking one is the fact that this book started off as being primarily about the more traditional divide between civilian and military actors in government. Right. The kind of study of bureaucracy in international relations has a long history going back to Graham Allison's work in the 1960s and 1970s. Mac Destler and others were kind of part of this first wave, but it had sort of died out as a subfield within the discipline. But it had been taken up by individuals who were interested in how the preferences and influence of civilian bureaucrats, usually civilian political leaders, were either successful. Well, sorry, from a preference perspective, civilian preferences were different from military preferences, and kind of the balance of power between them moderated some of these things that we cared about. And the really interesting thing for me was that, and I didn't really realize this until I got to my field work in China, was that the military was an important part of the story for why you got miscalculation at various points in time. But actually the most fascinating cases for me, in particular this period of 10 years in the 1960s and 70s in China known as the Cultural Revolution, in which there's this widespread purge of the Party, including its bureaucratic arm, in preparation for the succession from Mao Zedong to whoever's going to take over afterwards. The military just wasn't. It was part of this story, but so much of it was actually about civilian bureaucracies and the way that they were affected. And so it was only once you started thinking about this from the perspective of. Of not a civil military relationship, but rather one in which you had a leader and different types of bureaucratic organizations, all of which were kind of critical to the choices that leaders were making, that the picture became clearer.
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B
You kept a very open mind through the process. I commend you for that. Let's talk about the methodology. Could you share with our listeners how you approached gathering and analyzing your evidence?
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C
Sure, yeah. So there's kind of two points here that are probably worth emphasizing. The first is sort of like, because institutions play such a prominent role, how would we know a integrated institution from a siloed institution when we look out in the world? Right. So that's a kind of descriptive component. And then there's evaluating the book's argument about the relationship between certain institutions and performance, in particular on the road to war and these international crises. So I can kind of divide my answer in that way on the descriptive component. There is both a kind of cross national. When we look out across the world. And the book takes its starting point, 1946, after World War II. What do we see when we look out? And then it has a number of cases, China, India, Pakistan, and the United States, which goes really, really deep within each of these to try to measure what institutions look like in some ways. For listeners here, it's helpful to start with the case studies. And so essentially what I was looking for in the cases was the set of formal and informal rules structuring information flow. And so what I started by looking at is sort of like things like the organization of bodies by which decisions were either made or information was supposed to be shared. I call those like decision making bodies or coordination bodies in the book. And it's really interesting, like a lot of states have these decision making coordination bodies, but others do not. And they also vary based upon who's included and who's excluded. Right. Often the case, particularly for coordinating bodies, that diplomatic ministries or even intelligence ministries are kind of pushed out or are siloed in ways that like, you will deal with the diplomats in one form and you deal with military or defense bureaucracies in another. So that was one kind of step of things. But as part of the case studies, one of the really fun things to think about was how you could try to validate these measures by actually not just looking at institutions intended to shape the flow of information, but the actual flow of information itself. And so, for example, in the US Case chapter, one of the things that I did was I went through these daily records of presidential activities. They're called the Presidential Daily Diaries, and they exist for each administration. And basically they catalog who the President met with from what time to what time. And so as a social scientist, you can sort of think about this as a kind of opportunity for information provision. And like, okay, so who has access, what bureaucratic organizations, and just how much does the bureaucracy from the or foreign policy bureaucracy have access to the leader? And the interesting result that obtains in the US Chapter, because that chapter argues that there was this big institutional break that occurred when Lyndon Johnson came into office at the end of 1963 after Kennedy's assassination, is that face to face time between Lyndon Johnson and lower level bureaucratic agents just massively drops, particularly in the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of Central Intelligence. He also sort of shifts systematically the forum by which, by which bureaucratic, by which he would make decisions on foreign policy matters. And so that was the approach for the United States. And then actually, surprisingly, you might think, okay, you could do this in the United States, but it would basically be impossible to do this in a country like China in which there's huge restrictions on information. It actually turns out that one of the big boons to the project was that the party released these compendiums of data which are actually quite similar in structure to the Presidential Daily Diaries for political leaders in China. So they're called chronicles or in Chinese, nanpool, but they're structured very similarly. On what date did, did Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping meet with what leader? Unfortunately, for those, we only go into the 1990s. So it wasn't possible to replicate the exercise across the full experience from 1949 all the way to the present. But it does provide some interesting insight there. And one of the interesting things about the Niempu as well is that it doesn't just tell you who the leader met with, but also talks about whether or not reports were submitted, what was discussed, so on and so forth. Really, really kind of interesting thing there. Of course, as I mentioned at the beginning, there is a cross national component which like what we mean by that in political science is essentially we want to have some proxy measures that would allow us to get a general picture of what these institutions look like across the nearly 200 countries that have existed across this time period. And of course there's going to be more measurement error when you try to do this. But what the book introduces is this data set that catalogs for each country in each year. Like a set of measures that will allow us to say, well, it was a little bit more integrated than siloed as opposed to fragmented. I can talk a little bit more about the methodology for that if you're interested. But also, it might be a tad technical for readers. I'm not sure.
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B
It feels like he gave it a lot of thought. Like this was the key part where the concepts.
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C
Yeah, it took, I think that portion of data collection took around three years to do the cross national bit. But yeah, in any case, so that's the measuring institutions part for estimating the kind of performance element of things. This is perhaps even trickier, right? Because like saying something if you were just sort of like to take A list of 10 foreign policy decisions that President Trump or President Biden has made and said like, was this in his calculation without giving any definition. Right. You would probably get like a wide range of answers from political scientists or the past public. And so what I would try to do is be a little bit more systematic in thinking about what constitutes miscalculation in the first place. And so in each of the case chapters, there are kind of two things that I look at. The first is within international crises. So these potential or actual confrontations and conflicts that the four case countries encountered since the mid 20th century. For each one of those, was there, you know, some, was there some sense that the assessments that leaders had were just were quite off? And we can do this kind of across the full span of countries, but even that can be difficult to do. And so a second measure that we can employ here is to say, okay, well, the theory proposes that leaders want to avoid international confrontations in which they don't achieve objectives. So let's try to catalog all of the objectives that leaders had within each of these crises and then score their performance. Like did they achieve this objective or not? And so one of the things that's introduced in each of these key chapters is that across the full universe of crises that they had, how was their crisis performance? And we can't necessarily conclude just from an individual observation that let's say you fail to achieve your performance or your crisis goals in one or your goals in one crisis doesn't necessarily mean that was a miscalculation. But we can look at patterns over time relative. So we have the scoring of institutions and look across all the crises that happen when a state had more integrated institutions, if they're achieving their goals at a higher rate. That's some evidence suggestive of the book's proposition about the relationship between institutions and its calculation. The sort of second way of thinking about this in the case chapters is just to process trace very carefully the way in which institutions were affecting judgment and accuracy of information within particular episodes. So for example, there are two chapters, empirical chapters on China. In the first of Those, it compares two crises, the 1962 KMT mainland invasions care and the 1969 Sino Soviet border conflict, and traces through the way in which institutions were affecting the information provision choices that bureaucrats made, as well as the way in which either that restrictions on access to information the leader was subject to based upon the institutional design shaped it. The way that they thought about it and oftentimes led them to sort of think about the international situation they were facing in just ways that were very incongruent with not only the facts of the case at the time, but the way things ultimately turned out. So that's that's kind of the second big component of it's okay not to.
- [33:26]
A
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C
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- [34:58]
B
The book is very rich empirically, and I'm glad you got it. You gave us a little bit of a glimpse of that. I wanted to talk a little bit about the reception of the book. What is one misconception about your topic that you most hope this book will correct? I have an idea, but tell us.
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C
Yeah, so oftentimes in political science we talk about foils of a book or like, you know, if you are right, who is wrong? I don't always like foils, but I think in this case what the book is pushing back against is the notion that it's very prominent in that first wave of literature on bureaucratic organizations in foreign policy. But it's also just a kind of if you were to walk down the street and ask people, well, does bureaucracy make things better or worse for decision making? Like this is perhaps, you know, my, my Tyler's reading it as opposed to actually pull actual polling evidence. But we do have this sort of notion that like, yeah, bureaucracy sort of mucks things up.
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B
I agree. I would think like we would find that too. Yeah.
- [36:14]
C
But if you think about the logic of the argument and its argument about integrated institutions in particular, this contention in the book that integrating bureaucratic organization into or organizations plural, that's actually key into a leader's decision making process is actually quite helpful, pushes back against that idea that if you had to simplify things down, of course this is not an incomplete characterization of that first wave of scholarship. But if the main contention of that first wave was like bureaucracy bad, this book is saying no. The answer is a little bit more complicated. Bureaucracy can be bad under a certain set of institutional conditions. But in many situations, if you design institutions right, they can actually be a force for good.
- [37:04]
B
So this is the misconception that we may find among like the public and sort of scholars, let's talk about practitioners or policymakers. How can they use your research to inform their work?
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C
Yeah, I think you could think about it in one of two ways. One could take that first part of the argument about the design of institutions as prescriptive in nature essentially saying, well, here's a roadmap to what the best bureaucratic design looks like. The interesting thing there, of course, if there was uncertainty about the fact that horizontal and vertical information flow is a good thing for foreign policy decision making, that part of the book would obviously help reduce uncertainty about that. But the interesting thing is that the second component of the argument, it's logic for why political leaders, knowing the consequences this will have for the efficacy of decision making, nevertheless choose these suboptimal institutions, in some ways suggest that that prescriptive element of the book is it's nice to think about, but if anything, I think the book is sort of drawing attention to the realities of politics and the ways that politics gets in the way under certain conditions of good institutional design or effective institutional design along this dimension. It is possible, of course, while the book doesn't directly theorize this or test this, but it takes as its starting point this idea of threats that the bureaucracy can pose to political leaders as kind of that's the starting point of the argument. But one could think about either in future research or from the perspective of policy like are there meta institutions or are there meta policy choices that could create a more stable set of conditions such that the bureaucracy doesn't pose a consistent threat to political leaders. Typically, the literature talks about the apolitical nature of bureaucracy, keeping bureaucracy out of politics as much as possible, both by law and by norm. That does seem while the book does not directly test it, that does seem like good practice for setting conditions that would allow those integrated institutions the book does study to emerge. But even if we put all of that aside, I think the most straightforward way in which this is perhaps relevant to policymakers is as a framework to think about the way that other countries and I guess all of my answer thus far has sort of centered on from the United States perspective. But one could imagine that this would apply either to the United States or countries elsewhere be the United Kingdom, France. But a framework for thinking about the way that other countries and their bureaucratic institutions might shape their propensity for choosing policies that end up quite different from the way that they are foreseen, choosing policies that have outcomes that are quite different from what foreign leaders predict that they will be or think that they will be.
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B
Which brings us back to the reason why you asked this question to begin with and you started graduate school. It was beautiful. Touching even. Tell us a little bit about the research and writing process one more time. What was one intellectually rewarding aspect of creating this work? I mean, you just shared with us it took three years to put together the data set. So you spent some quality time with your book. Was there a rewarding moment you want to share with our listeners?
- [40:59]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think for me the most rewarding part of scholarship comes when theory and application of that affords us a much different understanding about why specific historical events occurred. And so I think this happened for me at a couple of different moments. I think the case studies in large part conform to what historians have thought about them, albeit with a slightly different twist regarding the role of institutions usually. But one of the most interesting things is that or one examples of this, sort of like rethinking a historical event, comes from the cases or the book's treatment of the 1999 Kargil War, which, if you recall, was this very short but intense conflict between India and Pakistan in the early months of 1999 in which the Pakistani Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, greenlights this military gambit to seize key terrain in Kashmir that might allow them to improve their position with the kind of anticipation that India would probably accept it. And if they didn't want to accept it like they would, the Pakistani military position, by the time they discovered, the Indians discovered it would be. Would be so strong that the Indian side wouldn't be able to push back and that the international community would not sort of pose much of a problem in terms of getting what Pakistan wanted. All three of those things turned out to be wildly inaccurate. And this dovetails with what we were talking about earlier regarding, like, civil military relations. The traditional way of understanding this conflict was that the military in Pakistan, which is very politically powerful, was essentially to blame for getting Pakistan into the conflict. And the logic here follows a kind of very traditional civil military framework in which, and this is the traditional logic. So. And the traditional logic is essentially, I had to boil it down. The Pakistani military had a lot of autonomy as the result of being politically powerful, and as a result made choices that the prime minister wasn't fully aware of that got that sort of pulled, pulled Pakistan into this conflict against civilian wishes. And one of the really rewarding things was once you sort of thought about this from the perspective not of civil military relations, but of these bureaucratic institutions, a number of things that were really puzzling about the case start to make sense. So I'll just give two examples here. The first is that there is evidence that as early as around January and February, Nawaz Sharif did seem to be briefed by the military about what was going on. Like we could talk at length actually about the quality of those briefings and whether brief understood so on and so forth. But it doesn't seem to be the case that Sharif didn't. Didn't greenlight the operation. Right. So that kind of notion that the military was getting out ahead of the political leader didn't seem quite right. But if we think about it from the perspective of, and I argue that Pakistan at the time had rather siloed institutions, if you think about it from the perspective of a siloed institution, it actually makes perfect sense because those briefings were dominated by the military. Sharif doesn't have other bureaucratic representatives to kind of push back against or point out the flaws in reasoning that the military for the options that the military is presenting and as such, green lights in operation, underestimating the cost that it will have to bear in order to. To carry it out and perhaps overinflating the probability that it will succeed. But again, like the key there is not necessarily the military per se. It's the absence of civilian intelligence and, and diplomats in the room to provide countervailing advice.
- [45:51]
B
Cool. We've taken enough of your time. I'll ask you one more question. What are you working on right now?
- [45:58]
C
Sure. Probably too many projects, as is often the case with academics, I suppose. But the one I'm probably most excited about is my second book project.
- [46:07]
B
Neil has thought about it and you must come back when it's done.
- [46:10]
C
I would be happy to. I'd be happy to. So the book is tentatively titled the Rise and Fall of Major Power Cooperation. And it's essentially about why big countries like the United States, Soviet Union and China sometimes cooperate with one another on a wide range of issues. Like it's. It's partly about like, things like arms control, but also things like climate change and trade or, or kind of banal things like commercial flight patterns. But it's interested in big sweeping patterns of cooperative activity between these big countries. So essential think the two kind of motivating cases for it are like the rise and fall of detente between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 60s and 70s. And then perhaps the most important motivation for the book, because at some level this book is really just. It's trying to understand what happened to US China relations over the last two decades. So think about the rise of what is commonly called the policy of engagement between the United States and China and the collapse of it in the second half of the 2000 and tens. So yeah, the book is about why those things rise and fall over time.
- [47:23]
B
I think that's a great topic. Many of us think about what happened in the last two decades between these two countries and I'm very excited about hearing all about it when it's done. Thank you so much for talking to us today. My guest has been Professor Tyler Jost, author of the book Bureaucracies at the Institutional Origins of Miscalculation. The book was published in 2024 by Cambridge University Press in their Cambridge Studies in International Relations series. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci. Until next.
- [48:06]
C
Foreign.
- [48:15]
A
Doug Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [48:30]
C
Limu is that guy with the banana spectaculars watching us.
- [48:33]
A
Cut the camera. They see us.
- [48:34]
C
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty, Liberty Savings. Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.