Why do leaders with vast expert bureaucracies at their fingertips make devastating foreign policy decisions? Tyler Jost, professor at Brown, joins ChinaTalk to discuss his first book, Bureaucracies at War, a fascinating analysis of miscalculation in international conflicts.
As we travel from Mao’s role in border conflicts, to Deng’s blunder in Vietnam, to LBJ’s own Vietnam error, a tragic pattern emerges — leaders gradually isolating themselves from their own information gathering systems with catastrophic consequences.
Today our conversation covers…
-
How Mao’s early success undermined his long-term decision-making,
-
The role of succession pressures in both Deng’s and LBJ’s actions in Vietnam,
-
The bureaucratic mechanisms that lead to echo chambers, and how China’s siloed institutions affect Xi’s governance,
-
The lingering question of succession in China,
-
What we can learn from the institutional failures behind Vietnam and Iraq.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
