GRAHAM ALLISON: I'm Graham Allison, a professor here at Harvard, and
founding dean of the modern John F. Kennedy School of Government.
DAVID SANGER: I'm David Sanger.
I'm the chief Washington correspondent of the New York Times.
And together, we welcome you to the newest iteration of a storied course
here at Harvard, now named Harvard 211x, Central Challenges in American
National Security, Strategy, and the Press.
Harvard 211x is the latest version of course whose graduates over the past
four decades have gone on to become ambassadors and presidential advisers,
foreign policy strategists and politicians in countries around the
world, even a few wayward journalists, myself included.
Alumni of the course have included Bob Zoellick, who was recently the
president of the World Bank, Doug Lute, who was President Obama's deputy
national security adviser, and Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary General of the
United Nations.
And when I took this course, the Cold War still defined the rules of
American foreign policy.
Back then, no one could imagine China's emergence as a great power,
let alone terror groups like Al Qaeda or drone strikes or conflict in
cyberspace.
Oh, and back when I took the course, Graham here still had a full
head of dark hair.
GRAHAM ALLISON: David actually passed the course way back then, but our
standards have risen since then.
Let's be serious.
What is this course about?
Mass slaughter in Syria, including a major gassing of citizens that killed
more than 1,000 people last month--
to attack the Assad regime, or not to attack?
That's the question.
And if to attack, by what means and against which targets, for what
declared purpose?
Recognizing Iran's steady progress towards its first nuclear bomb, will
Iran get a bomb in the next year, or will it be bombed?
How will President Obama think about that question?
How will prime minister Netanyahu answer the question?
Or how will actually Iran's supreme leader Khamenei and his new president
Rouhani answer the question for themselves?
Even harder, when the New York Times and the Guardian and others receive
national security secrets like the material on the National Security
Agency that Mr. Snowden has liberated--
that's David term-- or stolen--
that's mine--
on the capabilities of the American intelligence community, or when the
WikiLeaks make available conversations between cabinet officers and prime
ministers and presidents, when and why does the Times decide to publish what?
And when and why does it decide to withhold what?
DAVID SANGER: So in this course, one confronts a series of case studies.
You are asked to sit in the situation room and rigorously analyze the
options to present to the president of the United States, and sometimes to
his allies and his adversaries.
Each of these case studies will force us to focus on a central challenge for
the US today and over the decade ahead.
Each is a problem from hell.
The demands, the toughest decisions any president has to make about lives
and about death.
Should the US intervene in the ongoing war in Syria, as Graham discussed, and
if so, how?
What about Iran's steady march toward its own nuclear bomb?
How do you cope with the rise of China or the impact of the Asian economic
crisis or the global balance of power?
And that's not all.
Decision making in Washington isn't like it used to be.
Today, as the decisions happen, they get influenced by many other factors,
including a relentless 24 hour a day news cycle and secrets that the
government once could easily keep get leaked out.
And that happens every day.
It happened back in 2010, when WikiLeaks got a hold a huge trove of
State Department cables, and the Obama administration had to deal with the
largest leak of classified information in history, cables that revealed the
debates inside the US government over how to handle dictators like Muammar
Gaddafi or how to deal with dissonance in China.
And then in 2013 came a new set of revelations, those Snowden revelations
that came from an unhappy young contractor for the National Security
Agency, who revealed sensitive documents about how the United States
sweeps up massive amounts of data, everything from the telephone numbers
we call to how we access the internet.
The revelations raised questions of how the press and the government
interact on the most sensitive national security issues, a big
sub-theme of this course.
GRAHAM ALLISON: And though, as we'll see in the course, David and I are
good friends, and we even occasionally fish together--
he says he fishes, but I try to catch fish--
on many of these questions, it'll be clear that David and I have quite
different opinions.
But the purpose of this course is to analyze problems and provide concepts
and frameworks that'll be helpful for you in thinking about these
challenges, not to give you definitive answers.
This is not a course about debating political opinions, either David's or
mine or yours.
What's important is that you gain a set of skills to think more carefully
and clearly about the president's hardest decisions.
And we all have to remember that the x in this course stands for
experimental.
This is the first time this course has been offered in this way, that's
accessible not just to students in the classroom but on the web.
We've been learning, and we'll continue learning.
In this first year of the experiment, this course will be
offered in three tiers.
The first tier is the traditional way this course has been taught, here in
the Harvard classroom for many years.
We'll have 50 students at the Kennedy School and in the rest of the
university.
Secondly, there will be a tier of up to 500 online participants in what we
call Harvard Classroom Online, at edX, who will be able to take this course.
But they have to apply for it.
They have to be chosen.
They have to do the work each week.
They'll be also eligible for a Harvard Certificate of Mastery.
Finally, a third tier of the course will be open for auditors, whomever's
interested to sample the course or indeed take the whole course online
but on your own.
DAVID SANGER: In trying to apply the lessons learned in earlier online
courses, we plan to break down the normal 70-minute classes into 15 or
20-minute segments.
At the end of each of these, there will be in elementary multiple choice
test, just to make sure you're on the page with the instructors, and a
question or two for you to think about that you'll be addressing in one of
the subsequent assignments.
Then we'll welcome those of you who've been selected to be in the second tier
of 500 students.
You'll be able to achieve a certificate of achievement, and you
too will be required to view the videos, do the reading, and complete
and submit assignments.
GRAHAM ALLISON: The course will confront the central and most
significant challenges to American national security
over the decade ahead.
And in addressing each of these, our objective is not simply to
characterize the challenge.
Better, it's to engage in strategic thinking about interventions the US
government could undertake to produce a better outcome than is likely to
occur otherwise.
DAVID SANGER: This requires the development of a capacity for
strategic thinking--
analyzing the dynamics of issues, identifying the drivers and the trend
lines, and then inventing strategies for intervention.
Moreover, almost all this must be done in the context of a government like
the US government today, whose deliberations are discombobulated by
leaks, by reports about internal differences among policymakers, and of
course, sometimes by press analysis.
Graham, who's spent a lot of time in government, will tell you how
unhelpful all of these revelations are.
I'll argue that they are a vital part of the process.
And participants in the course will learn to devise strategies and to
write and examine strategic options.
These analyses are memos that will require a combination of analysis and
strategic imagination, on the one hand, and then, of course, attention
to communication with major constituencies on the other hand.
GRAHAM ALLISON: So our hope is that if you choose to take this course, you'll
find it engaging and enlightening, as you read a daily newspaper, like the
New York Times, where David works, or the Wall Street Journal, or the
Financial Times, and that you'll be able to consider why there seem to be
so many unresolved challenges in the world today, thinking about what the
US government can do to contribute to a safer and more prosperous America
and a safer and more prosperous world.
You can find the syllabus on the course page.
As it states, we have five specific learning objectives for those of you
stick with the course.
These are to enhance participants' ability to first analyze issues in
international affairs from a policy perspective; secondly, to think
strategically about feasible interventions; third, to communicate
analyses of issues; fourth, to operate within the current national security
policymaking process, surrounded by an intrusive, enquiring press; and
finally, to appreciate the complexities of communicating national
security policies to multiple audiences.
For international students, both here in the classroom and on the web, to
repeat, this course is about challenges to American national
security, seen from the perspective of the US government.
So when we ask about national interests, we'll think first about
American national interests.
When we are asking about how the issue should be analyzed and addressed,
we'll think first about how it should be analyzed in the US government, how
it should be addressed from the perspective of the US government.
Traditionally, about a third to half of the class have been
international students.
And we've had students from China, Israel, Germany, Brazil, dozens of
other countries.
And they found the course maybe even more valuable than the Americans.
Some have argued that it was valuable to them because the US is inevitably
the elephant in the bathroom.
For others, it gives them a better idea of how the US government works
and why it does things that, from their perspective, seem so puzzling.
Also, the skills that are caught in the course are very useful in other
governments.
So a general methodology for thinking about strategy is one that graduates
of the course who have gone on to play key roles and governments around the
world have found works as well as they try to think about things from the
perspective of Russian national interests or Chinese national
interests as from the US.
DAVID SANGER: And while particular features of the press and its role in
the American political system are specific to the United States, the way
the press interacts with policymaking and its communication in other
countries will provide insights into similar interactions in other
societies as well.
So let's head off on the journey.
And we hope you'll be with us for all of it.