CCP Bureaucracies in War

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 succ...