Tyler Jost has been awarded a series of Brown Undergraduate Research and Teaching Awards (UTRAs), which have funded research assistants who have been critical to Jost’s deep dive into transcripts of high-level diplomatic meetings between major powers.
Jost said he is seeking to “document the evolution of cooperation among major powers since the mid-twentieth century,” and intends to publish the results in a book.
One particular area of interest to Jost is the period of “détente,” when tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union eased, beginning in the late 1960s, before its subsequent demise during the Carter administration. During détente, “both sides opted into far more cooperative policies than those that characterized the late 1940s, all of the 1950s and the early 1960s,” said Jost.
“Why does détente come when it does? And why is it under Carter — arguably one of the more dovish presidents of the Cold War — that it collapses?” asked Jost. While both the U.S. and the Soviet Union wanted the policies of détente to continue, they “nevertheless ended up taking actions that led things to fall apart,” he said.
A more recent example, which Jost said was the primary motivation for the project, is the rise and fall of cooperation between the United States and China over the last three decades.
A thaw in U.S.-China relations began with President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, and cooperation between the two nations peaked in the 2000s, following the passage of the United States-China Relations Act of 2000, which established permanent normal trade relations between the two nations. However, this period of constructive engagement has given way to growing distrust, leading to a trade war starting in 2018 and an increasingly competitive relationship.
Jost plans to document and explain what went wrong.
The project involves collecting and organizing a staggering amount of data. “My student research assistants have been helping me vacuum up and catalog documents from the archives around the globe,” said Jost. The research team first helped identify thousands of high-level diplomatic meetings since 1945 among heads of state, as well as foreign and defense ministers, from China, France, the Soviet Union and the United States. Jost’s team then scoured each country's archives to locate the records of each meeting.
Jost then collected the bulk of these records, often by creating a digital copy of the transcript, with some important assistance from a few members of the research team.
Daphne Dluzniewski, a senior international and public affairs (IAPA) concentrator, worked with documents held in the Diplomatic Archives at La Courneuve in France.
Reflecting on the experience, Dluzniewski said that she enjoyed immersing herself “in diplomatic conversations addressing the most pressing issues of the 20th and 21st centuries.” She especially appreciated the opportunity to conduct research in another language.
“The opportunity to practice using my French in a professional research setting and to build my knowledge of multilateral diplomacy will be invaluable to me after I graduate from Brown and pursue a master’s degree in international security in Paris,” said Dluzniewski.
After document collection, the team reviewed each transcript to record what the two sides discussed and to evaluate whether they reached any kind of agreement.
Michael Ochoa, an IAPA concentrator who graduated in 2025 and served as a research assistant for Jost in 2023, said he developed his analytical and writing skills working with Jost. “I reviewed troves of diplomatic records in search of nuanced variables like the use of cooperative incentives or coercion,” said Ochoa.
