I had the good fortune to meet James Blight when he was visiting a graduate school within the Univ. of California at Berkeley. And I want to recommend him to TPM readers for his remarkable insight and processes for dealing with international conflicts, especially the problem with Iran. And I suspect that Obama will rely heavily on Blight in preparations for negotiations with Iran.

Blight is a former Director of Harvard's Center for the Study of the Psychology of Nuclear War and now is lead professor at the Watson Institute for the study of international affairs at Brown U.  He had the distinction of being the only psychologist to have been allowed to have direct access to prominent world leaders, including Gromyko, Castro, MacNamara, Rusk, and others who were involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Imagine. Heads of state talking to a psychologist!

He gained access, because unlike all other professionals who were studying the psychology of nuclear war, he refrained completely from name-calling and other degrading practices and relied only on amazingly thorough preparation and insightful questioning. Almost every other student of this problem called world leaders "insane." Blight understood them empathically as human beings caught in desperate, bewildering, and catastrophic situations. That is just how some of the best leaders think of themselves.

In this connection, I always remember Bush responding to a reporter who asked him, "In light of the grave dangers you face, how difficult is it for you to sleep." Bush said, "I sleep like a baby," whereupon Secretary of State Powell said, "I sleep like a baby, too--I wake up every two hours screaming." Blight appreciates that you can't rule out the whole human being when dealing with foreign actors. But don't be misled. He's not into pop psychologizing. 

Here's an announcement of one of Blight's presentations/conferences that speaks to Billy Glad's impression that I'm proposing a "new age" method for dealing with international conflict that relies on Obama's ineffable qualities.

Missed Opportunities?: US-Iran Relations, 1997-2005” is being launched as a major new multi-center, multi-national initiative, using the method of critical oral history pioneered by Watson faculty members Jim Blight and janet M. Lang.

The project began with an April 2007 planning conference for US, Iranian, and European scholars, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and MIT’s Center for International Studies. This will be followed by research in Tehran. The culminating event of this phase of the project, a conference in spring 2008, is planned to feature major figures from the US administration of President Bill Clinton and from the Iranian administration of Mohammed Khatemi.

As a research method, critical oral history brings declassified documents and policymakers involved in a particular event into a conference setting with scholars to analyze what occurred. Participating with Blight and Lang in “Missed Opportunities?” is John Tirman, executive director of MIT’s Center for International Studies, and Malcolm Byrne, research director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

The point of this critical oral history is to enable participants to construct a reliable, valid understanding of Iran-US relations as a basis for improving them. The documents help keep them honest, and that honesty and the trust the develops in these thoughtful, agreeable conferences enables leaders to achieve their goal.

As I've argued in other posts, the underlying may Obama opponents people are having with the kind of international relations Obama represents is at the level of the most basic human relations paradigm, prevailing morality. Here's a little more depth to that argument.

In the Realist/Moralistic view, there's practically nothing to understand concerning Iran. People are misbehaving. We point that out and demand change. We ratchet up the threats of  and actual punishment until they give in. There may be, in the case of international relations, a little more subtlety involved such as geo-political checks and balances that excite the livers of posters, but those are just more pressures to behave. Regarding the need to have an inquiring empathic conversation, as Billy Glad has argued in his posts on Obama and Iran, everyone already knows what they need to know.

In the Realistic Empathy view represented by Obama, Blight and others, there much to understand and much mutual understanding to arrive at. That's the basis of negotiations.

I know this way of thinking by analogy to my psychotherapy practice. The process of developing a realistic, empathic view of a person is excruciatingly tedious at times and quixotic. Consider the following example. I once said to a very troubled man, "It must be hard to think that you're not perfect." He seemed completely unaffected and started talking more about the incident that upset him. At the right moment, I then said, "It must be hard to think that you're imperfect." His entire expression changed. He sort of moaned and said, "When you said that, all of the tension in my stomach went away." My point is that relationships are in fact excruciatingly subtle and complicated, whereas the standard view reduces them to simple matters of pressure and compliance with it. In the therapy I learned in grad school, I felt like I was always subtly pressuring people to be more reasonable and behave better. Then I learned to help them by relieving them of degrading views of themselves and others.

Blight for Secretary of State!