For years, Steve Clemons has occupied a vantage point that is unusual in Washington: close enough to the foreign policy establishment to understand its language, rhythms, and habits of mind, but independent enough to notice when that conversation becomes self-reinforcing. In this conversation, he reflects on what he sees as the central blind spot of the American strategic class: a lingering assumption that the world still orbits around the United States in the way it once did.
The discussion ranges widely. Clemons traces the origins of his own career from an Air Force upbringing and early exposure to Cold War strategy, to writing on Japan and challenging Henry Kissinger as a student. He also reflects on what separates real judgment from the mere performance of seriousness, how he thinks about AI as a tool rather than an authority, and why young journalists should build expertise, live broadly, and learn to take editing well.
At its core, this is a conversation about leverage, perspective, and intellectual independence: how power looks from inside institutions, how it looks from outside them, and what it takes to think clearly when the official language of a profession starts to harden into mythology.

​—Steve Clemons is a longtime journalist, editor, and foreign policy commentator whose work focuses on politics, strategy, political economy, and the way institutions shape decision-making

The Gap Between Washington’s Worldview and the World Itself
Ben Wolf: You’ve spent years watching Washington from a vantage point that is slightly unusual, in that you’ve been very close to the foreign policy establishment and understand how it talks to itself, but independent enough to notice when that conversation becomes self-reinforcing. When you look at the national security class now, where do you think the greatest gap is between the way it describes the world and the way the world actually is?

Steve Clemons: That’s a great question. I think the strategic class in Washington is largely unconscious of how narcissistic it is. It is deeply self-absorbed. Over the last eighty years, America’s leadership and its role in building much of the world’s postwar institutional infrastructure placed the United States at the center of most major global action, or inaction. We were the nation that mattered. That mindset got baked into the way people here think.
So it is very hard for them to walk in other countries’ shoes. It is also hard for them to recognize that, over time, America’s significance, not that it has become insignificant, but its significance in all things, has diminished. The biggest gap today is that many people in Washington feel we are far more powerful and influential than we actually are. Other nations are making their own decisions and their own calculations. Not everything is built around the United States. In fact, we are at a moment marked by serious doubt about whether we will even remain present in many of the world’s problems.
The world has moved on in many ways. That does not mean we are unimportant. After Suez, the United Kingdom remained important, but it was no longer definitively important. I think that is the biggest gap right now. And I’ll tell you, some of the most powerful forces in foreign policy are psychological. You see it in countries like Russia. A great deal of what Putin does is bound up with a sense of humiliation at the hands of the West. In the United States, our version of that is an ego problem around diminished significance that we do not want to accept.

BW: Where do you think that gap comes from?

SC: I think the biggest reason the gap began to emerge is that many of the world’s major institutions, the UN, the WTO, and others, came to represent less and less of how power was actually distributed. Where does India fit in? Where does Brazil fit in? Where does a country like Iran fit in? It has ninety-two million people and is certainly not on our list of favorite nations, but it still carries weight. How does China fit in? China is in the UN, of course, but in many institutions it had to muscle its way in, and that has often been an uncomfortable arrangement.
A lot of these institutions have not adapted well to how power is now distributed. In my view, and I do not blame him entirely, but President Obama had a unique chance after George W. Bush to rewire some of those institutions and make them more reflective of the world as it had become. He had the opportunity, as a transformational president, to help write a new global social contract for the United States and to help create institutions that better matched the real structure of global power. He failed to do that.
So the gap you are talking about comes from this growing distance between the world America wants to see and the world as it actually is, combined with our failure to modernize. We were still sitting atop institutions we built eighty years ago, and we have been inconsistent in figuring out how to keep evolving them. That is why, on the one hand, America can look more muscular than ever. We throw power around constantly. But in terms of alliances, trust, and solving global problems, we are simultaneously more forceful and yet weaker, less able to get the outcomes we want.


How His Career Began
BW: I want to go back to the beginning of your career. What first got you involved in foreign policy and domestic politics journalism? Was it a specific moment, or did it develop subtly over time?

SC: I was an Air Force brat. I grew up in the military. My dad was in the Air Force, and we lived all over the world. I graduated from high school in Japan. At the time, we were in the middle of the Cold War, and my dad, like everyone else in that world, was very focused on what they saw as Soviet competition with the United States. It was the Soviet Union then, not Russia.
So I grew up in that environment. I always thought of myself as someone who had a lot of international experience as a kid, and I was interested in political science and economics. It seemed natural to focus on those things. When I was at UCLA, I got involved with something called the Center for International and Strategic Affairs. It has a different name now. I also worked with the RAND-UCLA Center for the Study of Soviet International Behavior. It had a very long acronym.
I worked there for a man named Arnold Horelick, who had been the top Soviet intelligence officer on the National Intelligence Council during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. He had written a classified study of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He completely intrigued me. He was our top Soviet expert. Brilliant. Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision, which in political science was one of the books you always read, was based in part on Arnold’s work.
So I entered that world in the early 1980s, and you could already feel the Soviet Union slipping. You could feel the decline. We held a conference at UCLA in 1984 that brought together many of America’s best-known Soviet experts, and you could sense, in the discussion, the breakdown that would later become unmistakable in 1989. We all saw the foreshocks. For a young person, it was extraordinary to be in the middle of that. I was just a kid, but I was around people who mattered intellectually. They were driven by ideas. These were not just people with titles. They knew things. They cared deeply. They debated seriously. I got hooked.
At the same time that the Soviet Union seemed to be declining, the region I knew best, Japan, was rising. So I shifted from being a Soviet watcher to someone who thought, maybe I should return to my own roots and study Japanese politics, the Japanese economy, and Japan’s place in the world. It is hard for younger people to fully appreciate now, but Japan was once what China is today in the American imagination. It was an ally, but it was also seen as a serious threat to American economic dominance.
That whole period fascinated me. I thought Japan represented a genuine competitive challenge, but also a different way of organizing national strength. It took elite graduates, put them into powerful positions across industry and government, and there was a kind of coordination there that was deeply interesting. The American model was much more laissez-faire and chaotic. You can argue that the United States is ultimately more inventive and creative, but there are moments when another organizational model can be highly competitive.
So I got caught up in the world of ideas, frameworks, ways of thinking. That is really where it began.


Writing, Publishing, and Kissinger
SC: The journalistic side came from the fact that I just started writing. In college, I was involved in something called the UCLA Undergraduate Review. I was in the honors college. I wrote constantly, and then I started trying to get my work published.
The first thing I published outside college was a letter to the Los Angeles Times challenging Henry Kissinger. He had written an op-ed about Japan, and without getting too deep into it, he was wrong about some structural features of Japan’s political system and how they were shaping the trade disputes we were having at the time. So I was cocky. I wrote a response.
Because I worked for Arnold Horelick, I had access to Kissinger’s address in Arnold’s Rolodex. After my letter was published, I mailed it to Kissinger. I wrote, “Dear Dr. Kissinger, I thought I would share this with you. With all due respect, I saw things somewhat differently and thought you might find it interesting.” Very polite.
Then I got a note back from Henry Kissinger. It was extraordinary to me. He thanked me for the piece, and at the bottom, in his own handwriting, he had scrawled a question: “Well, how do you lobby Japan at the subcabinet level?” To anyone else it would have seemed minor, but to me it was electrifying. I had just had my first interaction with Henry Kissinger, and it was clearly his handwriting. So I ended up writing a paper on the question he had posed, and the whole experience was thrilling.
Then, many years later, when I was running the Japan America Society of Southern California, the Soviet Union had collapsed and Japan was still rising. I organized a conference on what would drive power in the post-Cold War world: the size of your military or the size of your economy. Kissinger was famously associated with the first view; I was interested in the second.
Kissinger was on the board of ARCO at the time, and I knew the company’s CEO. I was still a relatively young guy running the Japan America Society, and I said, “Kissinger’s fee is fifty thousand dollars. Is there any way you can tell him I’m the young man who once wrote to him?” I showed him the exchange. And not only did Kissinger agree to speak without his fee, but the CEO flew him out on an ARCO plane.
That conference became huge. It started with Kissinger, then included Larry Eagleburger, Brent Scowcroft, Pete Wilson, and eventually even Richard Nixon. I had Democrats there as well. It became this major event, and somehow it all traced back to a college-aged exchange of letters. That is when I really got addicted to this world.


AI, Journalism, and Staying Useful
BW: Today, with AI, the 24-hour news cycle, and everyone having much shorter attention spans, do you think aspiring journalists need to think differently about the field than you did when you were coming up?

SC: That is a good question. I do not know that I have thought deeply enough about all the displacement dimensions of AI and journalism, except to say that AI is going to write a lot more journalism. I worry that we are entering a world where we will constantly ask whether something nuanced, subtle, and context-rich was written by a human or generated by a machine. And increasingly, the answer may not be obvious.
A lot of people say the key is to use AI as a tool, and I think there is truth to that. Use it on top of your own inquiry. Use it in support of your own reporting, your own accountability, your own thinking. The truth is, some of the best journalists I know will be able to do that. They will use AI well and still stand above it. But not everyone is at that level. A lot of journalists are just trying to do solid work and get by.
I have long told people who want to become journalists: go live life first. Go do something interesting. Go learn a topic deeply. Then become a journalist. I never studied journalism, and I have nothing against people who do. They learn a useful craft. But I think the way to remain ahead is to know something so well, and so deeply, that you become indispensable to that subject. Then you learn to write and report on it well.
We still do not know exactly how AI will play out, but I do think it will displace a lot of people, not just in journalism, but in many white-collar professions. We are going to have to see where it goes.

BW: How have you been using AI in your own daily life?

SC: For me, AI is like a very fast version of the reference tools people used to keep on shelves. Your grandparents had Encyclopaedia Britannica, Webster’s Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus. Then all of that moved online. Now, with AI, you not only have access to information, you also have something helping organize it.
So I use it as an adjunct. I do a lot of public speaking, a lot of research, a lot of problem-solving. I use Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT for different things. I will ask for perspectives because it sometimes surfaces angles I had not considered. That does not mean it is always right, but it can make me think, “That’s interesting. I had not considered that frame.”
I never use it to generate my product, my writing, or my opinions. It helps me work. It also helps with quick primers. I know a lot about Japanese history, a little about Russian history, and almost nothing about Turkish history. AI can give you an opening orientation very quickly.
At the same time, I see a lot of bias in these systems. A friend of mine wrote a book about Thomas Willing, an important founding-era banker, the first president of the Bank of North America and the first president of the Bank of the United States. He was central in ways most people do not appreciate, and yet when you ask many platforms about him, he is described as a kind of second-tier figure. That tells you something important. These systems aggregate inherited judgments. If history overlooked you, the platforms often will too.
So when you look things up, you are often receiving accumulated bias, not settled truth. If that can happen to someone like Thomas Willing, imagine how much worse it is for people who were even more marginalized in the historical record. So yes, I use AI as an adjunct, but I am also constantly wrestling with how wrong it can be.


Judgment Versus the Language of Seriousness
BW: You spend a lot of time talking to people who know how to sound authoritative. What separates someone who actually has judgment from someone who just knows the language of seriousness?

SC: I think you can tell fairly quickly whether someone has a real command of historical context. You can usually tell whether they are genuinely well read and deeply informed, and whether they can draw on that grounding to explain their views or their decisions. To me, that is one marker of serious judgment.
By contrast, there are people who may perform the role well, but you get the sense they are basically reading talking points. They are not grounded in their own learning or their own critical thinking. The differences can be subtle, but they are real.
That does not mean you should become closed off. I always tell people to maintain a wide aperture. Look broadly. Listen. Do not become so self-confident that you stop taking in information. But there is a difference between someone who has thought deeply and someone who is just playing a part.
I saw this all the time on television. I was an MSNBC contributor for about eight years, and you could tell who had genuinely thought about an issue and who was essentially recycling a script. You would hear the same talking points repeated from show to show to show. They were clearly just circulating a line. I never wanted to do that, and the people I respected most did not do it either.


American Leverage and the View from Outside Washington
BW: You’ve also spent time talking to people outside the American establishment, people less invested in Washington’s own mythology. Has that changed the way you think about American leverage, and how much of it is real versus assumed?

SC: Yes, absolutely. And I have felt that gap for a long time. The distance between the confidence with which many Americans think they are exercising leverage and the reality of how much leverage they actually have has been growing for years.
I once wrote that you can measure the contraction of American power not only through enemies rising, but through allies hedging their bets. I looked at Japan and Germany, countries we defeated in World War II and then helped rebuild, and also at Israel and Saudi Arabia, both deeply tied to the American security framework. You could see all four doing things that, ten years earlier, they would never have done. They were hedging against the possibility that America might not be there for them in the way it once was.
That was long before Donald Trump. Long before the current moment, you could feel relationships becoming more conditional. There is always a lot of triumphal rhetoric in Washington about how close allies are and how durable those bonds are. But over time, the love became less unconditional.
I also worked closely with Chalmers Johnson, a fascinating intellectual. We founded the Japan Policy Research Institute together. He wrote Blowback, which became one of the most sought-after books after 9/11 because people were suddenly asking whether aspects of America’s posture in the world had contributed to the terrorism that struck us. Chalmers later became more radical than I was comfortable with. In books like Nemesis, he came to see America itself as a rogue power. I did not go that far, but I found parts of his argument deeply instructive.
The broader point is that as India rose, as China rose, as interdependence deepened, it became harder and harder to sustain the fiction that America controlled everything. We were living in a world of interdependence, and a world of interdependence is not a world of total American control. That has been clear to me for a long time.
And yes, engaging people outside the American establishment reinforced that view. H. R. McMaster has called this “strategic narcissism,” and I think he is right. We are so caught up in ourselves that we miss the extent to which much of the world is moving to a different drummer.


Advice to Students Entering the Field
BW: As we begin to close, I want to turn the conversation directly back to students. When you think about your own early career, what skills were most valuable in setting you apart, and what should young journalists today aspire to develop?

SC: I always want to be careful about generalizing, because everyone’s path is different. In my case, my dad died on my first day of college. I was American, but I had really come from Japan into UCLA, and suddenly I had to work immediately to stay in school.
One of the things I did was work with faculty members on their research projects. I supported work in sociology, econometrics, and other fields. I learned a tremendous amount as an undergraduate because I had to. Some students were more passive. I was not doing it out of some grand plan. I was trying to survive and make money. But it forced me into a much wider intellectual life than I otherwise might have had.
So one lesson is that breadth matters. Diverse experiences matter. They can differentiate you. Another is that relationships matter very early. I built strong relationships with professors, and those professors trusted me. That is how I became involved with the Center for International and Strategic Affairs and with RAND-UCLA. I remember reading Fred Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon, which is about the early strategic thinkers in American nuclear policy, and realizing that I actually knew many of the people in it. I was nineteen or twenty years old.
That taught me that people matter. The people you meet along the way matter. When you are young, you do not always understand that yet. For me, that meant saving business cards and building a Rolodex. Today, it would mean maintaining your contact database. In Japan, the exchange of business cards and the cultivation of relationships are taken very seriously. In the United States, we are often much worse at that. But for journalists, future sources matter, and relationships matter.
Second, live life. Go do different things. Do not just copy what everyone else is doing. The more varied and interesting your experiences are, the more you distinguish yourself in a crowded field.
Third, do not hate editing. Let people edit you. I have to be edited. Everyone has to be edited. One of the clearest indicators of who will grow as a writer is whether they can accept constructive criticism about how they communicate. Be open to that.


What to Read
BW: Finally, as is customary with the Pathway Blog, if there were a young student interested in following a career path similar to yours, what piece of literature would you recommend to them, and why?
​
SC: That is a tough question. I read ravenously. There is a book that probably is not easy to find now, but it really affected me when I was young: If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him. It is basically a reminder not to over-revere your idols. You can admire people, certainly, but do not surrender your own judgment. It is really about developing confidence in your own thinking.
I think a lot of young people should absolutely be inspired by great figures, but not intimidated by them. More generally, I am obsessed with the founding era of the United States. I find it fascinating how many times this country almost did not happen. That period is full of struggle, contingency, and improvisation, and I find that incredibly compelling.
There is also a wonderful book on Cicero that I love: Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt. It is such an interesting portrait because Cicero could be slippery, opportunistic, even exasperating, but underneath all that he developed ideas that proved durable for thousands of years. I find that very compelling too.

Returning to the Founding War
Ben Wolf: You’ve now written major works on both World War II and the American Revolution. At this stage in your career, what drew you back to the nation’s founding war—and where did you feel earlier accounts still left room for a new narrative or perspective?

Rick Atkinson: Well, I’ve always written about war, both as a journalist, as a foreign correspondent and war correspondent, and now as the author of eight books about five different American wars.
When I finished the Liberation Trilogy, which is about the liberation of Europe and the American role in that, even before that third and final volume was published, I was thinking about what to do next. The obvious thing would have been to pivot to the Pacific and do for that theater what I’d done for the Mediterranean and Western Europe. But after almost fifteen years, I just didn’t have the heart for it. I was up to here with World War II.
I’ve always been interested, since I was a kid, in the American Revolution. The characters fascinate me, always have. The fact that it tells us something about who we are, where we came from, what our forebears believed, and what they were willing to die for is profound, in my estimation.
So I decided, in 2013, that that was what I was going to do. I was going to take on the American Revolution. I think that, like World War II, like all great events, like all great personages in history, the Revolution is bottomless. There’s more there. There will always be more there.
It’s not that I believe the many scholars who’ve taken it on for 250 years have missed something, per se, but I think my voice, my modernist perspective, and the digging that I like to do as a scholar all lead us to a different take on the war and a different narrative account of the war.


Writing for the Reader
BW: There’s a growing sense today that audiences expect stories to move faster—whether in film or in books. As you look back across your career, have you found yourself adjusting your pacing or structure to meet those changing expectations, or do you deliberately resist writing to perceived attention spans?

RA: I don’t really worry about the reader that much. The reader is going to find his or her way. Some of them will find their way to my books. Many will not. So I don’t try to pander to what may or may not be shorter attention spans.
I do recognize, as a narrative writer, that I have an obligation to, as I have a sign right over here next to my writing desk that says, “Get on with it,” I have an obligation to get on with it. So I’m always cognizant of the story and the need to keep the story front and center in the telling of the tale. It needs to be a tale.
So to the extent I’m pandering to the reader’s wants or desires, I suppose it takes that direction.


Washington and Real Leadership
BW: When you study a figure like Washington up close, how do you distinguish genuine leadership from reputation that was shaped after the fact? In other words, what tells you that someone was truly exceptional in real time rather than simply remembered that way because of the outcome?

RA: Well, the proof is in the pudding. If Washington had failed completely in the war, and he failed in various moments of it, which is one of the reasons he’s as intriguing as he is, if he was a war-losing general, that would tell us something about his leadership chops.
If you spend as much time with him as I do, as others have, you see his failings, for sure, but you also see his extraordinary strengths: his commitment to the cause, his robust physical qualities. He never seems to even catch cold, which is really important at a time when typhus and typhoid and smallpox and all the other infectious diseases that torment the world in the eighteenth century are killing tens of thousands, including thousands of his own soldiers.
He’s got a big brain organized for executive action. He is willing to take responsibility. He is willing to make decisions. He has an excellent eye for subordinate talent, so he sees this twenty-five-year-old, overweight Boston bookseller named Henry Knox and somehow intuits that this guy is going to be the father of American artillery.
That is countered by the fact that during his lifetime at Mount Vernon, by the time he died in December 1799, he had had at least 577 slaves working on the plantation. It’s part of the source of his wealth, and it’s the reason he can go away for eight years knowing that business will be taken care of back at the plantation by all those slaves.
So it’s a very complex story, as human stories often are. If you study him as a military figure, as I do, you see that he is not a particularly gifted tactician. He makes mistakes. He reads the ground wrong in places like Long Island or Brandywine. And yet, again, he’s got assets that are important. He’s got good luck, which is the trait Napoleon most cherished in his generals. He’s got fortitude. He’s a commanding presence, which is important in a military leader. When he comes into a room, there’s no doubt who the commanding general is.
So all of this is to say that, yes, it’s a mixed bag, and it’s complicated. But at the time, he was recognized for his leadership skills. As early as the winter at Valley Forge, 1777 to 1778, he is declared the Father of His Country for the first time, and not the last time. His reputation, and he cared a lot about his reputation, has basically stuck with him now for 250 years.


On Heroes, Villains, and Human Nature
BW: Your books are filled with figures who are brave, flawed, capable, and often wrong all at once. Has writing history made you more skeptical of neat labels like hero or villain—or even genius or failure—and how has that changed the way you approach character?

RA: I don’t know if writing history has done it, but I’ve always been skeptical of facile characterizations. I think “hero” is badly overused. If everyone’s a hero, then no one’s a hero. These accolades should be held in reserve for those who are truly worthy of them. Otherwise, you devalue the concept.
So yes, back to the earlier point about Washington, the complexities of human nature, the complexities of human fates, are such that first of all you have to accommodate that as a writer. And it makes it more interesting. It makes them more human. They all have feet of clay. It makes it easier to relate to them. They’re not alabaster, ten feet tall, standing on a pedestal. They make mistakes, they sin, they misbehave. All of this is part and parcel of the human condition, and certainly it’s good grist for writers.


How Washington Became Washington
BW: A core question we ask on Pathway is how people become who they ultimately become. When you study the younger Washington, what do you see being formed? Was his later steadiness rooted more in temperament, discipline, ambition—or something else? And what, if anything, can aspiring leaders today learn from that transformation?

RA: He’s got a capacity for growth and adaptability, and those are important. They help him become who he becomes.
When he first arrives, even before the Revolution begins, back when he’s a young colonel in the Virginia militia during the French and Indian War, always under superior British command, at one point he writes, “I have heard the bullets sing, and there is something charming in the sound.” That’s banal. That’s fatuous. And he learns that it is fatuous, that in fact those singing bullets mean dead boys and sobbing mothers. He never says anything that stupid again once he’s responsible for the entire army. So that kind of personal development is something that we see.
His adaptability can be seen in a number of ways. When he first arrives to take command of the Continental Army in Cambridge in July 1775, he privately has nothing good to say about dirty New Englanders. He’s a Virginian commanding what is largely a New England militia army. They’re from different countries. And he doesn’t recognize the sacrifice that most of them are making to leave their farms, their shops, their tanneries, their families, to serve in the cause at his side. Again, he’s got hundreds of slaves working the property for him back at Mount Vernon.
And he’s got to learn that this mystical bond between leader and led is something that he doesn’t grasp immediately. He’s going to grow into it.
Then, as a general, we see his adaptability. He is instinctively very aggressive, and he wants one big brawl just to settle everything, a titanic battle that decides the war. And he comes to recognize that he can’t do that against the British Army, that they’re professional, they’ve got good officers for the most part, and they’ve got the greatest navy the world has ever seen. He has got no navy to speak of.
So he’s going to have to modify his native aggression and adopt what we would today call strategic defense, where he is looking for opportunities to nick and bleed the enemy, but for the most part he’s playing rope-a-dope with them. He’s staying out of reach. He’s avoiding battles that could cost him the army, and therefore the cause.
So it’s that kind of adaptability that is critical to his success as a general and to the success of the American cause. We see these kinds of mutations in his character and in his behavior that are really important to his success and to growing into the job. He has the capacity, as most great men and women do, to grow, to get bigger. And without that, you don’t have greatness.


The Solitary Work of History
BW: When a new project first begins to take shape—when the idea is still just a possibility—what does your next step look like? Do you move immediately into the archives, or is there a period of reflection before the formal research begins?

RA: Oh, the writing is way far in the future from the point that I have the germ of an idea. You roll it around in your brain for a while to see whether this is something you really want to commit to, because every author, regardless of who they are, at some point is going to hate what they’re doing. It’s just the tediousness of it. You’ve got to have enough momentum and enthusiasm for the subject to get past that inevitable point.
What I do, once I have decided that this is what I’m going to take on as the next book, and obviously I’m consulting with my agent, who I’ve had since 1986, and my editor, who I’ve had since 1987, the three of us have been a troika for a long time now, and I discuss these things with them. For a publisher to buy into the project, you write a proposal. I’ve taken great care with the proposals that I write, because it’s a pitch. It’s a pitch to the publisher to underwrite this project for, in the case of the current project and the previous project, long stretches, years at a time.
And that helps you think it through. First of all, is this really something I want to be doing? And second, how would I go about doing this? How does it really shape up when you sit down and lay out the arc of the story and the plan that you have to make it happen?
And then it’s a matter of diving into the topic. For the current book, for volume three of the American Revolution Trilogy, which I’m just now starting to research in earnest, my books-to-get list, secondary sources, just books, is 2,500 titles long. It’s a lot. I own about half of them.
That’s an enormous task to take on, and it includes the volumes of the papers of George Washington, which have been curated by the University of Virginia beginning in 1968, and they’re almost finished. For the Revolutionary War part of the Washington Papers, they’re on volume 38 now. And then there’s the papers of Nathanael Greene and the papers of Charles Cornwallis and the papers of Benjamin Franklin, and so on and so forth. It’s vast.
And that excludes periodicals. So the periodicals-to-get list, things that have been written in scholarly journals and elsewhere over the centuries now, is very long. I’m very diligent about getting those and reading them.
And then the primary stuff is held in a variety of archives, repositories, and libraries around the country and around the world. I am assiduous in working through those. So for the current book, I’ve been to the British Library. I’ve been to the Huntington Library in Southern California. I will make my way to Ann Arbor and the great Clements Library there. I’ll be at the New York Historical Society Library in another month, and the Society of the Cincinnati Library, which is very close to me here in Washington, where I live.
I end up spending days, weeks, in some cases months cumulatively, in these places, working through the primary sources. It’s all very solitary. It can be very tedious. But the mystery of the next unopened archival box is something that needs to get you up in the morning, or you’re probably in the wrong business.


Writing, Outlining, and AI
BW: For many students, the hardest part of writing is simply beginning—especially in an era where shortcuts like AI are increasingly available. In your experience, does that process ever become easier, and why is it still important to wrestle with the work rather than bypass it?​

RA: Well, it’s not for everybody. You can always go to law school, although you’re going to have to do a lot of writing in law school. Maybe you’re naturally a mathematician. You have a different kind of language. Or a scientist, and your writing skills are not as important. It’s not about lyrical writing.
For me, I always start by making an outline. And I think if you don’t make an outline, you’re at risk of finding yourself at sea without a map. I spend six to eight months on the outline, typically. It involves going through all of my notes, all the material that I have been gathering during the years of research. I have no stray documents. It’s all in Word files. And I go through page by page, line by line, deciding: this goes there, this goes there, no, no, it’s not going to fit, no, this goes there.
It’s the most tedious part of the whole process for me. But I always do it. I’ve always made an outline, even when I was a journalist writing a short day story for a newspaper. I would be scratching it on the back of an envelope: okay, this is part one, this is part two, this is where I’m going. Because that just makes it a whole lot easier when it comes to putting the thing in order and doing it efficiently and swiftly.
Once I’ve got the outline done, and the outline typically is two or three times longer than the final book will be, and it tells me where everything is in my notes, then it’s time to sit down to write. I use that outline as the map.
AI? I’m enough of a dinosaur that it’s not going to affect me. Maybe there will be an AI that can write lyrical books someday. I don’t think it’s going to be in my lifetime. AI can do things, clearly. But if you aspire to be a writer, I don’t know why you would want to use AI to sort out what’s happening in your heart and in your brain, because that’s what writers do.
I think AI will never have a human heart. It might have a human brain, but it will never have a human heart. I’m a Luddite, so I don’t really need to worry about AI. What I need to worry about is what I’m doing today and the next book.


What He Hopes Readers Carry Forward
BW: To close, when readers finish this trilogy, what do you most hope stays with them—not necessarily as a lesson, but as an idea or perspective that continues to resonate after they put the book down?​
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RA: I’m not a didactic writer. I’m not here to instruct. They will take away what they’re going to take away.
I would posit that knowing about the founders and the American Revolution and our early history is vitally important for twenty-first century Americans, because those founders left us a bequest. And it includes personal liberties, and it includes strictures on how to divide power and keep it from concentrating in the hands of authoritarians who think primarily of themselves.
We cannot allow that priceless heritage to slip away. We cannot allow it to be taken away. And we cannot be oblivious to this gift, or to the hundreds of thousands who have given their lives to affirm and sustain it over the past 250 years.
I would hope that readers take away that fundamental lesson, as well as the notion that not only were they struggling against what they defined as tyranny then, you can think they’re overstating it, that George III is not really a tyrant, the last King of America, but what they defined as tyranny. More important, they were struggling to prevent future tyrannies. That’s what the Constitutional Convention is about. That’s what the war itself was about. It’s what the fundamental earliest struggle of the young republic is about.
And that’s a pretty important lesson, I think, for Americans to hang on to.

Finding the Right Language
Ben Wolf: You’ve spent your career translating complex economic data into meaningful narratives for the public. What initially drew you to economic journalism as the best way to make sense of power and real-world impact, rather than just crunching numbers?

Neil Irwin: I have always been interested in the news and politics and money and how those things intersect. Going back to when I was a kid, I would read publications. Economics was my favorite class in high school. It all just kind of made sense to me.
I thought for a while in college that I might want to become an economist, get a Ph.D., be on that track. And then I saw my first B in an advanced math class and realized that was not going to work for me. My brain has good intuition for economic concepts, but not the advanced math skills you need to be a top-flight professional economist.
But I was pretty good with words and worked on my college paper, and I saw that there was an opportunity there to combine that love of these topics with an ability to understand two different languages, which is the language that economists speak and the language that ordinary people can understand, and to try to be a link between those worlds. That seemed really appealing to me.
So that’s what I pursued. I did my senior thesis on the IMF in Russia in the late 1990s, I did internships with different newspapers, ended up working at The Washington Post coming out of college, and eventually covering the Federal Reserve and the U.S. and global economies.


Writing for Shorter Attention Spans
BW: With attention spans shrinking in the digital age, how has the demand for "fast content" changed your approach to writing—specifically, balancing the need for quick takeaways with the depth required for complex explanatory pieces?


NI: It has. I mean, I work in a place where that’s the entire business model and theory of the case.
Axios was started back in late 2016 by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen. They believed that the path forward in journalism is toward things that are easily digestible. People consume media on their phone. The days of sitting down and having a leisurely read of your morning paper over a two-hour breakfast, if that ever existed, don’t exist for most people now.
Instead, we are barraged with information, and you get it often on your phone, you’re flipping through, and you need to know the key things you need to understand. You need to be concise, you need to be clear, you need to be honest and accurate. So that’s what it aspires to do. The premise is called smart brevity.
So we use a lot of bullet points, a lot of things to try to help make these very complicated issues and sophisticated topics accessible, even when you’re between meetings or just trying to understand what you need to know about the world to do your job well.


Entering Journalism Now
BW: Considering the rise of AI and the changing media landscape—particularly the decimation of local news—how does the current environment for students entering journalism compare to when you started? Are the barriers to entry different?
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NI: The media business has always been really hard. Getting into journalism has never been the safe bet in my entire lifetime.
When I started in the early 2000s, those were the heyday of print newspapers. They were extremely profitable. They had a lot of journalists, and not just in the big cities, not just Washington and New York, but across any decent-sized city you had a meaty, high-quality local paper. Local media is decimated now. Local papers just are not what they used to be. Even the national places, the New York Times is bigger than it used to be, but other national places are not of the scale they used to be.
I think the question is: if you really love doing the work, is there a window, and can you find opportunities? I think the answer is yes. I think this technological change that resulted in these old media business models falling apart has also created an interesting opportunity.
The entire idea of independent creators who have a podcast, have a Substack, have a YouTube channel, that’s not something that existed when I was starting. You couldn’t really hang out a shingle and become your own media organization when I was starting out. And now that’s a very well-trodden path that a lot of people do.
I think a key idea is that journalism and media-like things cannot just be done from inside massive traditional media organizations. There are all kinds of think tanks that do their own content trying to reach a broad audience. Different companies do that, nonprofits, all kinds of organizations outside the big newspapers and TV networks that were really dominant 25 years ago.


Fast-Twitch Writing vs. Long-Form Reporting
BW: Your work spans fast-twitch analysis and long-form reporting like your books. Can you walk me through the key difference in your workflow for each—from the moment an idea strikes, how do the research, outlining, and drafting processes diverge?

NI: I am a pretty fast-twitch writer, meaning for me, I don’t need a lot of time between conceptualizing an idea and typing some words and getting them out there.
In fact, one of the things that has been one of my relative skills is the ability to do that: to look around and say, okay, the bond market’s doing this, the Federal Reserve chairman just said that, the stock market’s doing this, the currency markets are doing this, here are four different analysts’ notes with their take on it, here’s how that all fits together into one coherent narrative, and here’s what a busy executive or busy student needs to know about this thing that just happened.
So I can do that pretty quickly, but that’s something that I’ve practiced and learned over a 25-year career. I wasn’t that good at it when I first started. I’ve gotten better at it with reps. It takes repetition.
Now, I’ve also done longer-form things. I have written two books. I’ve written multi-thousand-word articles for The New York Times and other places. And that is a different process. There, it’s weeks, months, years of reporting, interviewing dozens of people, piling through thousands of pages of documents, trying to come up with a coherent narrative out of that messy thing.
You have to outline more carefully. You have to plan ahead of what’s going to come where, and what are the beats in that feature story or that book. And the writing is much more labor-intensive.
Let’s put it this way: writing a 10,000-word book chapter or a 10,000-word reported feature is way more than ten times as much work as writing a 1,000-word spot analysis, even though it’s only ten times as many words. So I’ve done that. It’s hard. It’s rewarding when it works. But to me, they’re pretty different workflows.


How He Stays Informed
BW: To stay informed on the economy, how do you balance consuming data and reports with actively talking to people on the ground—economists, government officials, or market players? What does your daily routine look like for synthesizing information?

NI: I have to talk to a lot of people. I think a reporter in my line of work who just reads reports and looks at numbers is not getting the full picture.
Every week I’m talking to economists. I talk to people at the big banks and universities and think tanks who have expertise in these areas. We bounce ideas off each other. It’s not just a one-way street. The questions I’m asking them are helping me understand what’s important and what people care about.
And government officials too. I cover the Federal Reserve. I talk to people at the Federal Reserve frequently. Often those conversations are on background or off the record. I can’t always quote the people I’m talking to, but I’m understanding how they think about the world, and that helps inform, let’s say, when a new jobs number comes out and I have to write analysis of that in 15 or 20 minutes.
I can judge what that report is likely to cause the Federal Reserve to do, or how they’re likely to react to that, because I have years and years of talking to officials there about how they interpret data and how they view the world.
So I’m using my own judgment based on those conversations, those years of work, to assess: okay, the unemployment rate did this, the payrolls number did that, the wage number did this. That probably means we’re going to get a rate cut in the next few months.
That’s the kind of analytical judgment that’s maybe not traditional journalism. It is not Journalism 101 that you might learn at J-school, but it’s a useful thing for the world, I hope.


Journalism School and Subject-Matter Expertise
BW: Many people debate the value of journalism school today. In your experience, which is more critical for success in economic reporting: a strong J-school foundation or deep, subject-matter expertise in the topic?

NI: I’m an unusual case. I was an economics and political science major in undergrad. I then did a fellowship when I was about 27 or 28 at Columbia University called the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship for mid-career business journalists, which is technically part of the journalism school, but all the classes were in the business school at Columbia. So it was really more like getting an MBA. I did get an MBA.
So I was really more going to business school than going to journalism school, but I did get some visibility into what they do.
The path I have chosen, and the path that I think has a lot of value to it, is becoming an expert in some specific thing. If you’re the expert in science, or art, or politics, or economics, and can become one of the leading writers and voices and reporters on that subject area, the journalism skills you can kind of learn on the job.
If you don’t have something like that, then it can work the other way, where J-school comes in. Learn the reporting skills, learn how to go out on the street, get an interview, get somebody to tell you what’s going on, cover the police, cover city hall. That can be a valuable way into the business.
I think it is harder to come into the business that way now that we’re in this world where, as I mentioned, the local papers are decimated. There are just a lot fewer opportunities to start as a generalist who has a J-school master’s degree and starts somewhere small and kind of learns the ropes that way.


Writing Inside Big Institutions
BW: When writing for major institutions like The New York Times or Axios, how does the rigorous editorial and institutional structure—the multiple layers of editing and legal review—influence or constrain your analysis compared to when you were a younger, independent writer?


NI: Yeah, I think you feel a real obligation to realize that when my newsletter goes out every day, I write a newsletter called Axios Macro, it goes out at noon, it’s free, you can subscribe at axios.com, that goes out to many hundreds of thousands of people, and they’re counting on me to have both the factual information correct and the interpretation and analysis correct.
If I can’t deliver that, if I’m just wrong or have a bad take, I’m not fulfilling our inherent promise to them. And that’s true in any large professional organization.
We have editors who insist on that. Everything I publish that goes through that newsletter is edited by two people before it goes out to all those recipients. The New York Times has even more layers than that for a lot of pieces.
The more sensitive the story, the more layers of editing you’re going to get. If it’s more investigative, if it’s accusing a person or an institution of some misdeed, you can be sure that’s going to have multiple layers of editors, maybe lawyers involved, making sure you have that nailed down and factually correct and fair.
That’s a really important part of it. I don’t mean to criticize individual creators and people kind of on their own, but that process is something these traditional organizations have that, I think, you miss out on if you’re kind of a solo practitioner of journalism out in the world, like more people are these days.

What the Financial Crisis Changed
BW: After years of covering the Fed, markets, policy, and economic turning points, what do you believe now about economic expertise that your younger self perhaps would have been surprised to hear?

NI: When I was a young journalist in my twenties in Washington, D.C., I think I had a very naive view of the degree to which certain questions of how the economy works were settled issues.
If you went to the center-right think tanks and the center-left think tanks and talked to their economic experts, they would talk about tax policy and trade-offs and the moving pieces of the economy in pretty much the same way. And I took it for granted that they knew what they were talking about.
What really kind of undermined that view of the world was the global financial crisis, which I was covering intensely back in 2008, and seeing how much people’s model of the world kind of broke and didn’t work the way they said it would.
You had things like: okay, the Federal Reserve ended up doing quantitative easing and printing trillions of dollars, but there wasn’t inflation that came out the other side of that. The government ran these massive deficits, but interest rates didn’t rise like they were supposed to.
I think with hindsight we can understand some of the reasons those dynamics applied, but I think the idea that there’s this settled wisdom among economic elites that you can take to the bank is just not true. There are a lot of questions about the economy and how the economy truly works that we still don’t have decisive answers to, and that’s what makes it interesting. You get to try and feel your way around in real time and figure out how things are working and not working.


This Economic Moment
BW: You’ve noted the U.S. economy’s resilience, even amid global shocks like the Ukraine war and the Iran conflict. In this current moment—where the labor market appears strong but inflation and policy uncertainty complicate the picture—do you believe the headline numbers truly reflect a resilient economy, or are they masking a more fragile underlying reality?

NI: Both can be true. I don’t see a tension between those.
I think the U.S. economy has proven shockingly resilient over the last fifteen years. The only recession we’ve had in fifteen years was the pandemic, which was unprecedented. Everybody was suddenly losing their jobs and not working, and it was very short.
The hits we keep taking, the Ukraine war, the trade wars, the Iran conflict, are serious ones. But we have a very adaptable, large economy that manages to keep chugging along throughout it.
You mentioned AI earlier. The AI shock is going to play out in a lot of different ways in every industry, and we’re only in the early stages of seeing what that looks like.
I guess one thing I’ve learned is this, and it’s a kind of guideline I’ve said to younger reporters before: not every bad thing that happens causes a recession, and not every recession is an all-out catastrophe like 2008.
What I mean by the first part is: bad stuff happens in the economy all the time, but when you have a $30 trillion economy and 150 million workers, some pretty bad things can happen in one sector or one region without it turning into an overall contracting, recessionary environment.
And then on that second part, 2008 was a terrible recession. The pandemic was a very short recession, but extremely severe. But we also have recessions like 2001, which was barely a recession by some measures. GDP only barely fell. It was a jobless recovery. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. It happened in the early stages of my career. I don’t recommend it. But it’s not the same thing as ’08, which had this long-tail effect of reshaping world history.
So look, I think simultaneously the job market’s not that strong. I think if you look at hiring opportunities out there, they’re not that great. And I think AI has everybody a little nervous. But at the same time, the U.S. economy just keeps growing, and unemployment is still pretty low for now, and I hope that remains the case throughout this year and beyond.

Advice to a 20-Year-Old
BW: If a 20-year-old came to you wanting to achieve genuine excellence in economic analysis and writing, what specific curriculum of reading material would you recommend, and which two or three skills should they focus on developing immediately?

NI: Well, obviously, start with Axios Macro in your inbox every weekday at noon!
Look, there are a lot of other excellent economic writers working today at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and they are absolutely worth following and seeing how they do their work and how they craft a story.
That’s at the journalism level. I think with the internet there’s also a lot of information available for free, working papers, things that academics are working on that are involved but aimed at a mass audience, that you can read even if you’re not a specialist.
If you’re like me, as I said earlier, I was never going to be a Ph.D. economist. I don’t have delusions of being at that level of sophistication in my understanding. But if you’re a good thinker, pay attention to the reading, talk to smart people, and you can become a pretty sophisticated consumer and analyst of this world. That’s what I’ve tried to do, and I think it’s a lot of fun.

Setting Goals, Building Teams, and Making a Difference
Ben Wolf: You’ve had one of those rare careers where the same person has seen the American state from almost every angle: legislator, budget negotiator, White House operator, intelligence chief, defense secretary, and now mentor to future public servants. Across all of those roles, is there a consistent through line? A problem you were always challenged with trying to solve?

Leon Panetta: I always thought it was really important, whatever job I had, to set goals and not just sit at a desk and move stuff from the inbox to the outbox. I really think it is important, and I say that to young people like yourself, that whatever career you engage in, it’s very important to set goals that you want to achieve and, obviously, work on a strategy to achieve those goals. You have to build a team and establish teamwork.
And lastly, I think you need to be honest with yourself about who you are, not try to pretend you’re somebody you’re not, and also be very honest with others. Those are the basic principles I’ve tried to follow in whatever job I’ve had, so that I could look back on those jobs and say I was able to achieve things that I set out to do. In many ways, that gives you a sense that you’ve made a difference.
Public service is really important if you make a difference in people’s lives.


Turning Values Into Numbers
BW: As Chairman of the House Budget Committee, and then as OMB Director, you had to turn values into numbers. What did budget work teach you about leadership that national security debates still too often ignore? Namely, that every grand strategy is also a spending decision, and every spending decision reveals what a country believes in at that moment.

LP: What I learned from my experience as Chair of the Budget Committee, and then when I went into the Clinton administration as Director of OMB, is that numbers are not just numbers. Numbers reflect priorities. What is it that you want to invest in? What is it that you feel is important in terms of programs and how they affect people? And also, how do you achieve discipline so that you’re fiscally disciplined in what you do and don’t simply borrow and spend, or borrow and cut taxes, and add to the deficit?
Because there was pretty good leadership around at the time I was in Congress, on both sides, both Democrats and Republicans were interested in trying to make sure that we were able to reduce the deficit. We had a deficit in those days, not as much as it is now, of course, but we felt it was important to try to deal with that deficit and ultimately provide some real fiscal discipline.
Not easy to do, because it takes some very tough decisions on areas of spending and whether you tax or do not tax people. Fortunately, at the time, we made agreements that basically did both. Initially, we went to Andrews Air Force Base, and a bipartisan group negotiated an agreement that provided for $500 billion in deficit reduction, $250 billion in spending savings, and $250 billion in revenues.
Not easy. It was tough. But we were able to get it passed on a bipartisan basis, and that was important. Then when I became Director of OMB for Bill Clinton, we did the same thing, another $500 billion deficit reduction package.
As a result of both of those important steps, we were able to balance the federal budget. Not only that, but achieve a surplus. And when we achieved that balance and surplus, I thought politically no Congress would want to go back to borrow-and-spend and adding to the debt.
I was wrong.
It didn’t take very long before another administration decided to do a big tax cut that immediately added to the debt, and then other problems followed. Today, unfortunately, and I say this with a great deal of regret, I think both parties are not interested in making the tough decisions that you have to make if you’re going to discipline the budget. So we’ve got a $40 trillion national debt, and that is basically going to pass on to your generation and your children’s generation if we don’t deal with it.


What a Serious Budget Fix Would Require
BW: If I might ask, what do you think a good solution to that deficit problem would look like today? People talk about cutting social services or reducing defense budgets, but with every decision there’s a big opportunity cost. In your eyes, what would the best approach be?

LP: I think the best thing we did at the time was that we were willing to put everything on the table. You can’t exclude certain areas. You can’t say, “Oh no, we’re going to look at discretionary spending, but we’re not going to look at entitlements.” Entitlements make up two-thirds of the federal budget. You have to look at entitlements. You have to look at discretionary spending, both defense and domestic, and you have to look at revenues, and determine exactly what kind of balance you can achieve.
By doing that, very frankly, it provided cover for both parties. Democrats don’t like to cut spending. Republicans don’t like to raise taxes. But by being able to do all of that as a package, we held it together. And the result was that we looked at the American people and said: everybody’s got to sacrifice a little bit if we’re going to achieve some kind of fiscal discipline.
We were willing to do that. The presidents at the time were willing to support it, and the leadership in both parties was willing to support it. That kind of leadership is critical, because make no mistake about it, these are tough decisions. When you’re looking at entitlements, you’re looking at Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm price support programs. You’re looking at programs that are very popular, and it’s not easy to try to discipline those programs. The same thing is true for taxes, obviously.
But if you’re willing to take those on and do all of that, in other words, put everything on the table, then I think you can arrive at the kind of balanced agreement that can be supported politically by both parties.


Why He Left the Republican Party
BW: I want to go back in time to your election to the House of Representatives. Early in your career, you switched parties. You had worked in the Nixon administration as a Republican and had accumulated relationships within the Republican Party, so you might have been expected to stay. What was behind that decision? And were you nervous that in switching, you might not have support on the other side?
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LP: I actually began as a Republican here in California, but I was a Republican in what I would call the Hiram Johnson mold. Hiram Johnson, who was Governor of California, was also a Republican, but he was a moderate and a progressive, and really felt it was important not only to deal with civil rights, but with the rights of employees and other important issues.
I got a job working in the United States Senate with a Republican senator from California named Tom Kuchel, who came out of that Hiram Johnson group. We had Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight, and others. They were moderate Republicans, and Kuchel was Minority Whip under Everett Dirksen. There were other moderate Republicans like him: Jacob Javits, Clifford Case, Hugh Scott, Mark Hatfield. They worked with Democrats on a lot of legislation.
It was really a great experience for me because both sides were willing to work together. I often say I’ve seen Washington at its best and Washington at its worst. The good news is I saw Washington work, where both parties, Democrat and Republican, were willing to sit down and work together on major issues.
What happened, I think, was civil rights. Republicans in the Senate had worked on civil rights legislation with the Democrats, but then Republicans began to back away from strong civil rights enforcement. Nixon made a deal with Southern Republicans to back off strong enforcement on civil rights. At the time, I was appointed Director of the Office for Civil Rights, and my job was to enforce the law. I was getting a lot of political pressure to back off, and ultimately I lost my job as a result of that.
That was kind of the first step. Then, in the next administration, they started going after moderate Republicans. I think it was Spiro Agnew who actually ran against Charlie Goodell, the Republican senator from New York, because they thought he was too liberal. So the party began to cut its own throat.
I just thought the Democratic Party had a bigger tent. It accepted people from the left as well as the right, and that I would be more comfortable there in terms of what I believed in. So I made that change, and I’ve never regretted it.


What the White House Taught Him About Leadership
BW: Let’s look to the Clinton years. When you became White House Chief of Staff, what changed in your understanding of leadership? At what point, for you, did you understand the main challenge in making the presidency actually function?

LP: It’s a very fundamental approach that a president needs to take, which is: I’m President of the United States, and what do I need to do in order to improve the lives of my fellow Americans in this country?
I worked for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Both of them were very bright. Both of them were very capable. Bill Clinton is one of the brightest people I’ve ever known. You could sit down and brief him on complex issues. He would ask a lot of questions, which was good, and he would make decisions as to what he felt needed to be done. He was not afraid to make those decisions.
The good thing about that experience is I saw a president who really took the time to evaluate issues, get the pros and cons, look at different options, and then select an option that he was comfortable with. The purpose of a chief of staff, like myself, was to help present that information to the president, give him the information he needed, and give him the advice.
These were presidents who didn’t mind having smart people in the room. They wanted smart advisors. They wanted people who were experienced in their areas. That is very important for a president. No president knows everything about everything. No president.
Presidents who are successful are willing to listen to people who have experience and can provide guidance. If you do that, your chances are not only that you will get the right information, but that you will make a decision that really is in the interest of the country. And that ultimately is what a president has to do. If I’m going to make a decision, is it in the interest of the American people? That is the fundamental question every president should take seriously.


Credibility at the CIA
BW: You would later become Director of the CIA, where the cost of wishful thinking is obviously much higher. I want to ask: you served in the Army briefly, but beyond that, you did not have a long intelligence résumé. Going into that role, did you have hesitancy? How did you prepare yourself for it?

LP: As you said, I was an intelligence officer in the Army, which is a long way from being Director of the CIA. But I did deal with intelligence. Frankly, as the president’s chief of staff, the president every morning is presented with what’s called the President’s Daily Brief, which is a summary of intelligence from around the world that every president gets access to. So I had a pretty good sense of the role of intelligence and the importance of speaking truth to power.
However, I had spent my life on the budget. I had spent my life working on issues protecting the ocean and working on agriculture issues and that kind of thing. So I didn’t really have a lot of background in it. I asked the president why he was selecting me, and he basically said, “Because I think you can help restore the credibility of the CIA,” which was badly damaged in those days, and both parties were attacking the CIA. He also said, “I want you to go after Bin Laden.”
For almost ten years, nobody really knew where Bin Laden was. I like a challenge. The jobs I’ve always taken, I’ve taken because they were a challenge.
The way I approached it was that I had a very good aide and chief of staff, a guy named Jeremy Bash, who had worked on the intelligence committees in Congress. When I was nominated, I went back and got a full set of briefings from all of the key people at the CIA, so I had a good sense of what they were involved with and what they were doing.
When I went to the CIA, I did something Jeremy had recommended: I didn’t bring a big team of people with me. It was just myself and my chief of staff who walked into the CIA. That basically sent a signal that I was not trying to change the CIA. I was prepared to accept the professionalism of the people who worked there.
Because of that, I developed a very good bond with the people at the CIA and worked closely with them. If you appreciate the fundamental role of the CIA, which is to speak truth to power and present accurate intelligence about the threats that are out there, and if you believe in that, then you understand what the CIA is all about.
We were able to do that job, and obviously we were able to carry out the operation that got Bin Laden. That built a real team that worked together, not only intelligence officers but Special Forces as well. To see that kind of coordinated effort and see it work, that is probably one of the proudest things I’ve done in my life.


On War, Clarity, and Presidential Responsibility
BW: In your recent New York Times essay with Chuck Hagel, you warned, in effect, against drifting into a war with Iran without a clear objective or end state. Let me ask it to you bluntly: what is the first question a president must be able to answer before using force? And how can you tell when an administration is evading that question and acting without clear objectives?

LP: As Secretary of Defense, and in that op-ed with Chuck Hagel, who was also Secretary of Defense, we know that probably our most serious responsibility is to deploy our young men and women in uniform into harm’s way. If we’re sending them to war, it’s very important that we have a clear objective. What is the objective of sending them into combat? What is the strategy for achieving that objective? And what’s the endgame? How do we ultimately wrap it up and bring those forces back home?
I think it’s really important to think through all of those issues. The problem is, when a president becomes evasive as to what the objective really is, or comes up with different versions of why the country is going to war, it creates confusion, not only among the American people, but among our men and women in uniform, who deserve to know the truth about why they are going to war. They’re putting their lives on the line. They are entitled to know exactly why they are at war.
For that reason, I think it is really important for presidents of the United States to speak very truthfully about exactly what the objective is and how that objective is going to be achieved. That is something I think is a problem right now, because the president keeps coming up with different reasons why we would be at war with Iran.


What He Tries to Teach Young People
BW: As we begin to close, I want to turn the conversation back to students. Across your many different positions, you’ve seen interns and young staffers go on to pursue all kinds of careers. Over the years, what have been the most persistent traits you’ve seen in the students who later went on to succeed?

LP: My wife and I established, when I came back from working for Bill Clinton as chief of staff, an institute for public policy. The purpose of our institute is to try to inspire young people to lives of public service.
I’m often asked what attracted me to public life, and it was really several reasons. Number one, I was the son of Italian immigrants who felt very strongly about the importance of serving the country. I served in the military for two years, which taught me a lot about how you build a team that can take the hill. And there was a young president who said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” That inspired me to get involved in public service.
My wife and I felt, when we got back, that young people were not attracted to lives of public service. So we thought it was really important to see if we could inspire young people to be part of our democracy, because they are the next generation of leaders, and they have to be involved in our democracy.
We created a curriculum to try to inspire them. We have an internship program where we train students to go back to Washington and work with the California delegation, both Democrats and Republicans. What we do that is different is bring them to the institute for two weeks of training on issues and on understanding how Congress works, so that when they go back to Washington, they are well trained, or at least they understand what they are getting into.
The most important thing I stress to them is: maintain your objectivity. Don’t get dragged into the partisan warfare that is now a part of Washington. Whether you work for a Republican or a Democrat, always maintain your objectivity, step back, and look at the big picture. I think that is really important.
I also think it is important to focus on the substance of issues. We have another program at the Panetta Institute where I bring in law students from Santa Clara University, my old alma mater, as well as graduate students. I have them look at a major issue, whether it is immigration, health care, the budget, whatever it may be. And what I ask them to do is give me the Republican position, give me the Democratic position, and then tell me what a compromise would look like.
That is called governing. That is what our democracy is supposed to do.
What I am trying to do is restore the art of governing so that young people understand they have to look at both sides. They have to be willing to listen. They have to be willing to understand what all sides are talking about. But their responsibility is to come forward with compromise and consensus. You are not going to simply slam dunk whatever the hell you think needs to be done. It doesn’t work that way in a democracy.
For most of my career in Washington, Washington worked because Republicans and Democrats were willing to sit down, trust each other, work together, and come up with consensus. That is how we governed. I think that is a lost art right now.
What I try to stress with young people is: take the time to understand that you have to listen to other people’s views, and you ultimately have to try to find consensus.

​
The Book He Would Recommend
BW: Finally, Secretary Panetta, as is customary with The Pathway Blog, if there were a student bold enough to be interested in following a career path similar to yours, what book would you recommend to them, and why?

LP: I really think that young people ought to take the time to read the history of our Founders. A great book on John Adams, a great book on George Washington, some great books on Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. Take the time to read about the Founding Fathers. What motivated them? How did they look at life? How were they able, in their genius, to come up with what our democracy would look like?
They were all children of the Enlightenment. But the reality is, they had a sense that they wanted to create something special when it came to governing. And in the Constitution, they ultimately put together those elements. They did not want to centralize power in any one branch of government. They did not want a king. They did not want a king and Parliament. They did not want a Star Chamber court. So they created a system of checks and balances in our democracy.
I think it is really important for young people to understand why our country was created with those principles, because in the end, our democracy doesn’t work unless there is a willingness to sit down, have a dialogue, and ultimately arrive at consensus. That is the way democracy works.
They need to understand that right now, frankly, Washington is dysfunctional. The president doesn’t work with Congress. Neither party works together with the other party. They are in constant confrontation, and the problems this country needs to address are not being addressed because of partisan differences.
So what I want young people to know is that it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to be that way. If you are willing to provide leadership, then let me tell you what I often say to students: in a democracy, we govern either by leadership or by crisis. If leadership is there and willing to make tough decisions, then we can avoid crisis. If leadership is not there and leaders are unwilling to make tough decisions, then we will govern by crisis.
Right now, Washington is largely governed by crisis.

BW: Incredibly well put. Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for your time. 

Europe, the Cold War, and the Problem of Order
Ben Wolf: Ambassador Fried, thank you for joining me. Let's start with Europe. When did Europe stop being for you just a regional assignment and become the central strategic problem of your career? Was there a moment early on when you realized this region was not just about diplomacy, but about the future of the political order itself?

Ambassador Daniel Fried: The question doesn’t quite apply to me, because I entered the Foreign Service wanting to work on Soviet affairs, East European affairs, and the Cold War generally. So I didn’t join the Foreign Service and then discover Europe. I was interested in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as we called it then, and joined the Foreign Service so I could be active in those areas.
So I was always committed.

BW: On that same note, you worked on Europe in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, when the dominant mood in the West was often described as triumphal. What did you see earlier than others about how unfinished that moment really was?

DF: Well, I was working as the Polish desk officer, not a high-level position at all, sort of a lower-middle-level position, from 1987 to 1989. In other words, I was working on Polish affairs in 1989, through the elections and the Round Table negotiations, by which Solidarity out-negotiated the communists, and then the famous June 4 election, where they won.
So that was sort of the best thing ever, to watch the Solidarity movement, which was both a trade union and a national pro-democracy movement, succeed. It was just wonderful.
I then went to Poland for three years to work in the embassy, came back, and joined Bill Clinton’s NSC staff during his first term, where we started working on the shape of Europe after the Cold War.
I wouldn’t call it triumphalism. That is too dismissive. The Clinton people and the George H. W. Bush people before them were well aware of all of the difficulties. Yes, they were aware that democracy had succeeded and the Soviet Union had collapsed, but they were thinking about how to shape the future in a way that would be stable, leave a place for post-Soviet Russia, and not exclude the newly self-liberated Central and East Europeans.
So people working in government were not triumphalists walking around strutting. They were thinking about the problems and were well aware of them. In fact, in the early 1990s, even as late as 1993, it was not clear to most people that the transformations in Central and Eastern Europe would generally be successful. I was optimistic, but I had been in Poland.
Most people thought it was still an open question whether the Poles would succeed. We now know that they succeeded in spectacular fashion. I was confident that they would, but that was not the general view.
So your use of the label triumphalism, I think, is misplaced. I know where it comes from. It’s reasonable of you to start thinking in those terms, but that is a broad-brush attribution that doesn’t actually apply to the way things were on the ground.

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NATO Enlargement and the Post-Cold War Settlement
BW: I appreciate that clarification. I think your perspective really is valuable here in considering post-Soviet Europe. You mentioned that when you were with Bill Clinton’s team, you were helping to shape what post-Cold War Europe would look like. What does that mean practically? Was that talks with other nations? Meetings? Drafting memos? What was the concrete work that went into that shaping?

DF: Well, the biggest issue that I worked on was the question of NATO enlargement, which was really about whether or not we would extend the line of the Cold War into the post-Cold War era and leave the Poles, the Czechs, and the Romanians in a kind of gray zone, or whether we would enlarge, whether we would open the doors of the institutions of the West to the countries that wanted to be part of the West and had earned that by virtue of their own effort to overthrow communism and liberate themselves.
So that was the issue, and it was hotly debated within the Clinton administration. In fact, about 90 percent or more of the U.S. foreign policy establishment was against NATO enlargement as late as 1993.
So you ask what the work consisted of concretely. Yes, it was memos and meetings, but it was really making the argument that NATO enlargement was a better answer to post-Cold War Europe than leaving in place the line of the Cold War as a kind of mental line beyond which the institutions of the West could not cross.
This was a big debate, because most U.S. government experts didn’t think much about Central and Eastern Europe, and when they did, they considered it a kind of gray zone unto itself. “Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact” was the uncharitable term of art.
So even though it was the Poles mainly, but also the Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Romanians in the streets, who overthrew communism, there was little understanding that these countries had the capacity to enter the European mainstream. There was a great deal of dismissal of their capacity to build free-market democracies on the ruins of communism.
Now, to be fair, this was an enormously difficult task, one that had never been attempted, not even contemplated. No one in 1988 thought that communism would fall, so in 1989 there was no Western expertise on what would come next.
So the Poles and the others were making it up as they went along, with some U.S. advice. But basically, they were the ones doing it. U.S. advice was not critical. It was second-order.
And I was there on the ground in Poland when they were making these decisions. So the work in the early years after 1989 was understanding what was happening in these countries and helping them to the degree we could. There were things the Bush administration did that were solid. Then the Clinton administration had to open NATO’s doors or decide on the alternative. After much debate, furious debate inside government, a debate in which the Poles and Czechs themselves participated rather skillfully, the Clinton administration made the decision, and NATO’s doors were opened.
It made the decision to enlarge NATO, however, in parallel with the decision to work with Russia, to develop a NATO-Russia relationship which could be, as one of the authors of it said, “an alliance with the alliance.” Such were our hopes in the early days.
So this was a dual-track policy that we settled on by, oh, I don’t know, 1994 or 1995, and then we implemented it.


What People Get Wrong About the Foreign Service
BW: A lot of students hear “Foreign Service” and imagine the prestige, the travel, the policy influence. What is the part of diplomatic life that is most misunderstood by people looking at it from the outside?

DF: Well, you talked about the prestige. There’s not a lot of prestige in serving in a combat mission in wartime Iraq, and there were a lot of my colleagues who did that. There’s not a lot of prestige in being a junior officer at a large U.S. embassy. The work can be isolating. It is difficult on families. It is hierarchical, so when you’re a junior officer, you may think you’re not much and that you’re very low on the pecking order.
However, the Foreign Service gave me professional opportunities I could have obtained in no other fashion. How else would I have been able to live in Poland during the critical years of the early post-communist transformation? There were other people there, students, some volunteers working with Solidarity, so it wasn’t the only way. But it was a way in which I could be a witness to this transformation and, as an official of the U.S. government, help contribute to its success by letting Washington know what was going on and by making recommendations.
As the Polish desk officer, I had the opportunity to help make some of the early recommendations for the George H. W. Bush administration that helped the Poles in a critical fashion. I was able to do that because nobody expected anything would happen in Poland in 1989, and when it did, the young Condoleezza Rice sort of brought me into the policy picture because I made the call.


The “X Factor” and Knowing When to Break the Rules
BW: You mention Condoleezza Rice bringing you into that picture. I’m always curious about how one climbs the ranks in the federal government. Is it about who you know? Is it about working hard and getting lucky? Is there some skill to it that people should know when they are trying to reach the levels that you have?

DF: Working hard and getting lucky is part of it. Knowing the right people is part of it. And also, there's a kind of X factor.
The Foreign Service will teach you the rules, and if you’re good and follow the rules and are skillful and diligent, you will get to a good rank. The system will reward quality fairly, to that degree. But there’s an X factor, which is that you have to know when to break the rules.
I’ll give you an example. I’ve referred to my position in 1989 as somebody who saw the changes coming in Poland. I was practically the only one who did, outside of the U.S. embassy in Warsaw, that absolutely nailed it. Very few others could listen seriously to what was happening there.
Condoleezza Rice was willing to listen to me when I said, “You better watch this space. Communism could be coming apart at the seams. Solidarity could win these negotiations.” She had the intellectual self-confidence to actually take this seriously, and she knew something about Central and Eastern Europe because she had studied with Madeleine Albright’s father, Josef Korbel, at the University of Denver. He had taught her about Czechoslovakia. She knew something about it, so she had a feel for it.
So in March 1989, she called me up and said, “Look, Dan, it’s possible that Solidarity is going to succeed in these negotiations with the communists, and if they do, President Bush wants to welcome this. Can you draft a speech?”
Well, desk officers at the State Department are not supposed to draft presidential speeches. She either didn’t know or didn’t care. Anyway, she asked me to draft a speech. So I drafted a speech and sent it upstairs through the system. I explained the background and noted that Director Rice of the National Security Council staff had requested this draft for the State Department to convey to her.
It was rejected within about a half an hour of my sending it up, with a derisive note that read, “Dan, you’re giddy,” which was a patronizing putdown.
I got this and realized there was no way I would get it through the system, so I called up Condi Rice. This was before email. I said, “No way. The only way you can get this draft is if it appears by magic on your desk. In other words, I’ll walk it over to you in a plain brown envelope.”
She said, “Yeah, okay. Do it.”
So I hand her the speech. A couple of weeks later, Bush gives a speech in Hamtramck, Michigan, welcoming the Round Table talks, and it was the speech I drafted.
Now, I had engaged in an act of insubordination. The State Department had said no, and I did it anyway. The only excuse for the insubordination I showed is when you win. I had just drafted a presidential speech. What were they going to do, fire me? No.
And what I said to Condi Rice, handing her that speech, was, “Condi, from this moment forward, I work for you.” And she started giving me assignments. Like, “If you had $100 million for Poland, what would you do with it?” That became the Enterprise Fund, which was one of our more successful initiatives. Congress funded it at $240 million.
Another Foreign Service officer and I drafted the concept paper for the Enterprise Fund in an afternoon and sent it to Rice and her people. We didn’t ask permission.
So this is a long way of illustrating the answer to your question: sometimes you have to break the rules. And then, when you do it, you better win. Notice, I didn’t say when you’re right. Being right is not always enough. It helps. But you have to win.
The Foreign Service will not teach you that. They will teach you all the skills you need to succeed in your career, and these are valuable skills. Pay attention to the training. But there’s always something different.
My Foreign Service colleagues who succeeded often had various versions of the X factor. Think of Toria Nuland. She’s famous for her, let us say, acerbic wit. Look what she’s done. Look at her career. It’s brilliant. Or Nick Burns. All of these people had an X factor, a willingness to push.
They were also people who were not principally interested in their own careers. I mean, you’ve got to be ambitious. I’m not saying that they were saints or that I was. But it wasn’t about getting ahead. At some point, you cannot game the system to plot your advance like it’s some office-politics exercise. You can try, but I remember people who did that, and I don’t remember what happened to them.
All I know is that I didn’t think in terms of my own career advancement. I did very much think in terms of the work. That sounds naive, but it worked out pretty well for me.


Views, Strategy, and the Debate Over the Transatlantic Alliance
BW: Looking toward today, when you look at the modern debate over Russia and European security, what is the most important thing that younger analysts, who perhaps don’t have your historical expertise, still get wrong because they confuse having a view with having a strategy?

DF: Right now, there’s a larger debate within the Trump administration and within the United States about the value of the transatlantic alliance, or the free world strategy of the United States that we’ve had since Pearl Harbor. A lot of other ideas, with roots in pre-World War II America, have come back. It’s called isolationism, but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. It’s more like unilateral transactionalism and an emphasis on power and narrowly defined American interests rather than a free world strategy.
Well, don’t complain about the debate. Think about the arguments for where values and interests overlap and how best to advance them. Your generation will have to fight this all over again.
I am a believer in the free world grand strategy of the United States. I think it works. It’s got the right-wing variant, which is Ronald Reagan. It’s got the Franklin Roosevelt variant. But they’re basically consistent in that they hold that American values and American interests advance together, which is not, as some critics say, naïveté or charity or do-gooderism.
The free world strategy is based on the assumption that a values-based foreign policy is really good for the United States, that we will come out on top if it is an open world rather than a world divided into competing empires.
Now, Woodrow Wilson had many problems. He was a bigot, for one thing, a racist. But he also understood that American values were a pretty good way to construct American foreign policy, and he wasn’t doing it because he was a nice guy. He did it because he knew that American interests would advance faster if we had a values-based foreign policy.
It’s not naive. It plays to America’s strength, or what used to be America’s strength, which was what we used to call Yankee ingenuity. It meant that we had entrepreneurial excellence and exuberance, massive advantages from a continental country loaded with natural resources, as well as skilled people, as well as industry and power coming out of the Civil War. That launched us to world leadership by the turn of the twentieth century.
And we advanced values because it was better for us. It turned out pretty well after 1945. People who say it didn’t really work out well should compare Pax Americana to the alternatives, which are nineteenth-century European imperialism or, let’s say, Nazism and communism. We look pretty good, which is why the Europeans were so happy to work with us.
Never, as far as I can remember, did a leading world power attract the kind of voluntary support that we did. Voluntary, because our system worked best when it worked for everybody. Which sounds obvious, but that’s not the way previous systems worked. That’s not the way Putin would have the Russian empire work, not at all. Pax Americana worked for everybody, which is why a lot of people signed up for it and why people like the Poles after 1981 wanted to be part of it, because it was a good deal.
But don’t take my word for it. Deng Xiaoping said once, I think thirty years ago, “I don’t know much about foreign affairs, but I have noticed that America’s friends tend to be really rich countries.” A rather sly, clever statement.
Who are America’s friends in Asia? South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore. Winners, every one. And don’t you want to be part of that system? Deng Xiaoping did. Things have gotten sideways with China since. But my point is that the American grand strategy was not based on nothing.
My advice to entering Foreign Service officers is that they think about it. What is it that you’re trying to achieve? Now look, as a junior officer, you’re not going to be doing grand strategy. I promise you. No way. That won’t come for years and years. I get that. But it helps to start thinking about this stuff early.
When I was a junior officer in the Soviet Union, I started trying to put what I was seeing on the ground into a larger framework. It helped organize my thinking. It made my political reporting better. That’s my point. You don’t start thinking strategy because you think you’re going to be Henry Kissinger tomorrow, because you’re not, and you may never be. But thinking about strategy will help inform your work, and it will make it better, and you’re going to enjoy it too.


Trump, NATO, and the Risk of Squandering Alliances
BW: As we begin to wrap up here, I want to ask: when you see headlines about Trump considering pulling out of NATO because the allies don’t want to help in the Strait of Hormuz, or because they’re not adequately financing what’s going on in the Middle East or in Ukraine, where do you see that ending up? And where do you think it should end up?

DF: Well, it should end up with a renewed transatlantic alliance, with greater European capability, more European contributions, and frankly, a greater European voice. On the other side of whatever it is we’re going through can be a renewed transatlantic alliance with a more equal contribution between the U.S. and Europe. That’s the constructive side of Trump’s argument, and he’s right.
The problem is that, having been right and having won the argument, which he did last year at the NATO summit, where allies agreed to pony up the money, his trouble is taking yes for an answer.
The skepticism about NATO has its roots in pre-World War II American foreign policy thinking, but I’ve got little sympathy for it. If you want to build a coalition to help with Iran, then build a coalition. Don’t go off on your own and then tell everybody, whistle, and expect everybody to fall in line.
Look, you can think what you want about the Iraq War, and I’m not trying to defend it. But when the Bush administration wanted to build a coalition, it went out and did it. For all of the problems, we ended up in a better place because we had a coalition than we would have without one.
So it won’t do just to snarl at people. Moreover, if you look more closely at the Trump administration, the arguments tend to weaken. So Trump wants European countries to help out with Gulf security. Right, got it. What’s the one European country that is doing the most right now? Why, arguably, Ukraine, which has offered its drone technology that nobody else in the world can offer, nobody else in the free world anyway.
Have we thanked them? Has Trump claimed that this is his success because it proves that a U.S. investment in Ukraine was right? No. Instead, we’ve brushed it aside.
The French and British offered something rather vague to help with the Strait of Hormuz. But publicly, I know what I would have done with that: grabbed it, run with it, turned it into something. Don’t disparage it. If you dump on it, you won’t get anything at all. But if you try to pump it up, maybe you’ll have something you didn’t have before. That’s diplomacy: make something out of not much.
And it won’t do just to snarl.
Since we were talking a lot about Poland, as I was listening to Trump and Pete Hegseth complaining about allies, I thought of repurposing the opening lines of an epic Polish poem: “Alliances, you are like good health. We miss you only when you’re gone.”
Well, right. Try not to screw it up, is my advice.


Judgment, Compromise, and the Crooked Timber of Humanity
BW: One of the things Pathway is ultimately about is how people build judgment over time. After decades in public service, what do you believe now about diplomacy that your younger self, even a very smart younger self, would have resisted hearing?

DF: Don’t be too pure. This is a game of compromise, half measures, taking what you can get. And understand that diplomacy, like human beings, is made of the crooked timber of humanity, to borrow from Immanuel Kant. No straight thing can ever be built.
But that doesn’t mean nothing can be built.

Opening
Ben Wolf (BW): You’ve worked across academia, civil society, and the State Department. At what point did arms control become not just a policy interest, but a career commitment?

Bonnie Jenkins (BJ): It really started when I was an intern in what was then the Presidential Management Internship Program, which later became the Presidential Management Fellowship. I was at the Pentagon in the International Law section.
While I was there, I went to a meeting on arms control and weapons of mass destruction. At that point, I hadn’t figured out what type of law I wanted to pursue—I had just finished both a law degree and a master’s degree. After that meeting, I thought: this is really interesting. I hadn’t focused on these issues before. And I decided then that I wanted to work in public international law, focusing on weapons of mass destruction and treaties.
So it was completely by accident. I hadn’t planned it at all.


Fragility and resilience in the nonproliferation system
BW: Was there a specific moment—an event, negotiation, or some sort of internal failure—that clarified for you how fragile or resilient the global nonproliferation system really is?

BJ: In the 1990s—what I think of as the last real decade of arms control negotiations—we were negotiating the Chemical Weapons Convention, finishing the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. Treaties were still something we did. They were regularly ratified by the Senate.
So at the time, the system didn’t feel fragile. It felt like this was simply how the international community addressed weapons of mass destruction.
It also didn’t feel fragile because Russia—then the Soviet Union—and China were part of these processes. What’s changed over the past decade and a half geopolitically has altered that environment significantly. But at the time, this approach felt stable and routine.


Norms vs enforcement
BW: The nonproliferation regime is often described as a normative success but an enforcement challenge. Where do you think that tension is most visible today—and how did we get here compared to the 1990s environment you were describing?

BJ: I think that’s a fair way to describe it. The norm still exists: countries should not develop nuclear weapons.
During the Biden administration, one concept we emphasized was that of “responsible nuclear weapon states”—that if a country possesses nuclear weapons, it should not engage in saber-rattling or destabilizing behavior.
But there has always been a challenge tied to Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which calls for disarmament discussions. The United States and Russia—the Soviet Union before that—did engage in those discussions through the START treaties, reducing nuclear stockpiles by over 80% since the end of the Cold War.
The problem now is that we no longer have a START treaty. It ended recently, and it was the last remaining agreement with Russia that both limited and reduced nuclear arsenals. That mechanism is now gone.
At the same time, we have an upcoming Nuclear Nonproliferation Review Conference. These conferences are always difficult because of the range of issues involved. Iran will certainly be a major topic. There’s ongoing interest in a Middle East weapons-free zone, which will be even more salient now. And non-nuclear states consistently press nuclear states on disarmament timelines.
The last two Review Conferences failed to produce consensus documents—the most recent one in part because of Russia’s position on Ukraine, which wasn’t even directly about nuclear weapons. So the traditional challenges remain, but they’re compounded by new geopolitical tensions.


“A new Cold War?”
BW: I recently spoke with David Sanger of The New York Times, who argued that we may be entering a kind of new Cold War—given the end of the START treaty and China’s rapid nuclear buildup. Do you agree? Are we entering a new Cold War?

BJ: I would say we’re entering a period of new challenges. I’m hesitant to use the term “Cold War,” because that was a very specific historical period with its own leadership and dynamics.
That said, the possibility of an arms race is real—unless countries come together to negotiate constraints. China is expanding its nuclear arsenal, and without a START framework, there are no longer formal limitations in place. That creates space for increased nuclear and broader military competition among major powers.
So I wouldn’t call it a Cold War, but I understand why people draw that comparison. The absence of constraints is the key issue.


AI and escalation timelines
BW: As AI becomes more integrated into military systems, does it compress escalation timelines in ways current arms control frameworks aren’t prepared for?​

BJ: There are both positives and risks. New technologies can improve decision-making in certain contexts.
For example, if we had a new START treaty, advanced technologies could potentially enhance verification processes. We don’t currently have all the tools needed for more comprehensive inspections, so there’s interest in how emerging technologies can help.
But AI is also a new variable. We don’t yet fully understand how it will be used, particularly in military contexts. There is concern about how it could accelerate capabilities or decision-making.
There has been some movement toward norms—for instance, agreements among the U.S., U.K., France, and China to ensure a human remains in the loop for nuclear decision-making. There are also international discussions, such as the RE-AIM conferences hosted by the Netherlands and South Korea, focused on responsible AI use in the military.
Still, the pace of technological development is faster than arms control processes. Even if negotiations were underway, keeping up with that speed would be difficult. Not impossible—but definitely a challenge.


Inside government: adjusting to leadership, making policy within parameters
BW: Inside government, how often do personal views on arms control have to adjust to leadership priorities and institutional constraints?​

BJ: That’s always part of the job. I’ve been fortunate to serve during periods when there was strong interest in arms control and multilateral engagement.
Whether the focus is on reduction, elimination, or nonproliferation depends on the issue, the negotiations, and the positions of the countries involved. Every country operates within policy parameters set by leadership—not just one individual, but a broader set of decision-makers.
Within those parameters, there is room for discussion and influence. But the broader direction is shaped by leadership priorities. That’s why it’s much easier to work in environments where leadership supports arms control than in those where it doesn’t.


The biggest misconception about how arms control decisions get made
BW: What’s a major misconception people have about how arms control decisions get made?

BJ: One major misconception is how little people understand about how government works in general.
Many people don’t know the roles of different departments or agencies, or how government actions affect them directly. People naturally focus on what they encounter in daily life—healthcare, groceries—but that means a lot of government activity goes unnoticed.
In more specialized areas like international security and arms control, public awareness is even lower. These issues tend to surface only during moments of crisis, like Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
There’s also a tendency to treat “government” as a monolith, or to assume that anyone can step into these roles easily. But effective policymaking requires expertise, experience, and deep institutional knowledge.
I would like to see greater public understanding of the scope and importance of government work.


Skills that translate from scholarship into diplomacy
BW: You’ve bridged academic research and diplomacy. What skills translate best—and what should students focus on?

BJ: First, I would encourage anyone interested in government to pursue it. There’s some discouragement right now, but we still need people committed to public service.
It’s also important not to equate government with any particular set of individuals. Government is an institution; people come and go.
In terms of skills: respect for different viewpoints is essential. At the State Department especially, you’re constantly engaging with different cultures. No perspective is inherently superior to another.
Writing is also critical—there’s a great deal of it in government, and the ability to construct clear arguments matters.
Curiosity is equally important. You should be asking big questions: who are we as a country? What is the United States’ role in the world?
And finally, a commitment to public service. Whether in government, teaching, NGOs, or the military, the underlying goal is helping others. If that motivates you, there are many ways to pursue it.


Most rewarding part of her career
BW: Looking back, what has been the most rewarding part of your career?

BJ: My commitment to public service. That’s been the constant throughout my career.
When I graduated from law school, most of my peers went into private law firms. Only a small number of us chose government or other public service paths. But that decision opened up incredible opportunities—working across different levels of government, negotiating internationally, traveling, and contributing to major agreements.
I started in city government in New York, then moved to state government in Albany. That foundation eventually led to treaty negotiations, international travel with senior officials, and work on major commissions like the 9/11 Commission.
It’s all come from that initial commitment to public service. That’s what I value most about the path I chose.


Tradeoffs, regrets, and choosing seriously
BW: What’s a tradeoff you wish you had understood earlier in your career?​
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BJ: I don’t think of it in terms of major tradeoffs.
For me, it’s about making thoughtful choices. Life presents multiple paths, and each one leads to a different outcome. When I graduated from law school, I had several options—all in public service. Choosing among them was difficult because each would have led to a very different life.
The key is to do the research, take the decision seriously, and choose based on what matters most to you. If you do that, you’re less likely to feel regret later.
I’ve always tried to pursue what I’m passionate about—and when something no longer aligns, I move on. That approach has helped me avoid feeling like I made major sacrifices.
Ultimately, it’s about living in a way where, looking back, you can say you made deliberate, thoughtful decisions. I want to reach that point without significant regrets.
And I’ll add: it’s important for younger generations to stay engaged. You’ll be taking on these responsibilities in the future, so your involvement matters now.

Setting the frame: intentional direction, serendipitous outcomes
Ben Wolf (BW): You’ve worked across think tanks, government, and transatlantic institutions. Looking back, was your career path intentional, or did it evolve through opportunities and moments of uncertainty?

Tyson Barker (TB): I always wanted to work on U.S.–European relations. I prefer that phrasing because I think “transatlantic” can make it sound like we’re not independent actors. Europe and the U.S. have always been—at least in my lifetime—independent actors. So I like talking about a relationship that recognizes that.
If you mean “intentional” in the sense that I set out pursuing the idea that I would have this kind of career, then yes. But it’s also been very serendipitous in the way it developed.
I’ll give you examples. In grad school, I was trying to decide between Latin America and Europe. I got a position as a research assistant for a senior professor working on Europe, and that led me in that direction—doing research on the Cold War.
When I graduated, I had done some work on Europe–China relations in grad school, and I received a grant from the Starr Foundation. At the time I was trying to decide: do I focus on the private sector? Do I look at the World Bank or the international financial institutions?
I had a conversation with one of my mentors, and he said, “I think the Bertelsmann Foundation is going to open an office in Washington, D.C. You should contact them and see what their plans are.” I contacted them, and they said, “How did you know we were opening this office?” I told them I’d spoken with mentors and gotten that advice.
Long story short, I ended up being the first hire for the Bertelsmann Foundation’s Washington office—something I probably would not have gotten without doing informational interviews and building those relationships.
Opportunities kept presenting themselves, but they were also shaped by my own initiative. At Bertelsmann I focused on U.S.–European trade relations and digital issues—GDPR, information sharing, the Lisbon Treaty, the Eurozone crisis. At the same time, I did a lot of work on the political side. I co-founded Foreign Policy Professionals for Obama and helped raise money for the campaign.
Then, in the second Obama administration, a political position opened up, and I was fortunate enough to be selected by Victoria Nuland—one of the most accomplished diplomats in U.S. foreign policy in the past 25 years. She said, “I need somebody who knows TTIP”—the U.S.–EU trade negotiations—“I need somebody who understands this.” So she brought me on board because, for my generation, I had developed a reputation for working on U.S.–EU relations. Not Russia, not Turkey—U.S.–EU.
Then Crimea happened. Then Donbas happened. So I ended up spending my tenure in the Obama administration not focused as much on TTIP, but much more on Ukraine.
When I left government, I went to Berlin. I knew Germany quite well. I ended up working in a very academic environment on cyber risk—cyber insurance for critical infrastructure, particularly industrial control systems. Very technical work.
But through that—and through getting to know the technology space better—I ended up at Aspen Germany, where I started the digital program and later took over the transatlantic program. After that I went to the German Council on Foreign Relations and founded their digital program while continuing to work on transatlantic policy. Eventually I was brought back into the Biden administration to work on U.S.–Europe technology policy.
In that role, my boss ended up leaving—Karen Donfried, our top diplomat for Europe in the Biden administration. And my former boss, who was then the number two official at the State Department, said, “I’m putting you back on Ukraine.” So I ended up returning to Ukraine policy again.
I always joke that when I’m in government, I work on Ukraine, and when I’m out of government, I work on the EU. But it’s really a bit of both. You set your coordinates and create opportunities for yourself—but there’s always serendipity too.


Mentorship: how it’s formed, and how it actually works
BW: You mentioned mentors. A lot of people hear “mentor” and it can be confusing—is it a professor, a boss, a friend? When you’re looking for mentors, first: how do you create and foster those relationships? And second: how do you use mentorship effectively?

TB: Great question. Mentorship, like any relationship in life, is a two-way street. There’s agency on both sides. You select your mentors, and your mentors also select you.
They come from different parts of your life. I’ve been very fortunate to have bosses whom I consider great mentors. And I’ll be honest: many of those amazing bosses have been extremely ambitious, creative women.
My first boss at the Bertelsmann Foundation was Anetta Heuser—an incredible policy entrepreneur. She set up the office in Washington and Brussels and is now leading a major foundation in Germany. She invested in me because I invested in the mission.
Then I had Victoria Nuland—Dick Cheney’s national security adviser, Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson, married to Robert Kagan, and an architect of years of policy toward Russia. Again, she invested in me because I invested in the mission.
Before that—during undergrad or grad school—a lot of it comes down to demonstrated interest. If you have professors, researchers, fellows, or practitioners in the university ecosystem, demonstrated interest begins with what you did: reaching out. I did that constantly.
It’s one reason I try to pay it forward. I’m getting worse at it, frankly, but when people reach out to me, I want to say yes because people did it for me. When you’re established, you want to open doors and build ladders—pipelines of opportunity.
But many people simply don’t ask. It’s becoming more common now, but for a long time it wasn’t.
Especially in grad school—and maybe in undergrad too—use alumni networks. They can be incredibly helpful. I went to Columbia for undergrad and Johns Hopkins for graduate school, and Hopkins has a very supportive alumni network. People understand the value of helping others coming through the same program.
If you’re part of a specific program—even if it’s not the whole university—that network becomes a core resource. It never hurts to reach out. I remember being an undergrad and emailing professors—this was back in 2000—just cold emails, which felt strange at the time. But sometimes they responded. It starts with outreach.


The biggest strategic risk to the alliance: internal confidence and volatility
BW: Transitioning to current events: in your view, what is the greatest strategic risk facing the transatlantic alliance over the next decade, and how should it be addressed?

TB: The greatest risk is internal. You have to be confident in the core of the relationship in order to project outward.
There are external threats—Russia, China, climate change, competitiveness, technology—but at the end of the day there has to be a fundamental belief in the utility of the relationship in terms of both interests and values.
As articulated by figures like JD Vance and Marco Rubio, there are serious critiques of Europe within the United States—and very serious critiques of the United States within Europe. The message Europe is receiving from what many perceive as erratic U.S. behavior—tariffs, shifting positions on Ukraine, proposals like the so-called “28-point plan,” or even debates around Greenland—creates deep uncertainty.
The big question in Europe right now is: how do we build guardrails and shock absorbers to manage this volatility coming from the United States?
At the same time, there are anti-democratic forces within Europe—both far right and far left—and those pressures can deepen divisions.
So in my view, the greatest threat to the transatlantic alliance is internal.
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China and Europe: capacity, priorities, and who does what
BW: You mentioned China. How should the U.S. balance competition with China while maintaining focus on European security?

TB: The United States has immense capacity to walk and chew gum at the same time. There has been discussion since at least the Bush administration about a “pivot to Asia” or a “rebalance.”
Europe recognizes that the primary strategic theater may increasingly be the Indo-Pacific, because that’s where a lot of economic dynamism and security competition is happening.
But I would ask right now: is that even what the Trump administration believes? I don’t think the administration has articulated a clearly coherent position on its role as a security provider and economic actor in the Pacific with respect to China.
On one hand, there are impulses toward a more oligarchic or authoritarian-style entente with Chinese leadership. On the other hand, there is occasional rhetorical support for Taiwan and the South China Sea, though not necessarily to the degree seen in earlier periods.
So I’m not sure there is a coherent doctrine. It feels more focused on the Western Hemisphere, to be quite frank.
Europe recognizes that in the Indo-Pacific it will likely play a more junior role—supporting stability because global trade depends on a rules-based order. At the same time, Europe needs to take a more senior role in its own regional security. That’s an area where there is growing agreement.

Munich and the “wrecking ball” problem: predictability beyond four-year cycles
BW: You referenced the Munich Security Conference. Last year JD Vance gave a memorable, but polarizing speech. This year, it was Marco Rubio. What are your biggest takeaways from the past conferences, and what did you make of this year's speech?

TB: It comes back to the broader structural problem. The pendulum in the United States has increasingly become a wrecking ball. One administration sets a course, and the next knocks it down. That makes it extremely difficult for allies, businesses, or policymakers to plan because the long-term horizon disappears.
This administration has been particularly maximalist. You could describe it as a kind of demolition diplomacy. Many observers expect that some of these policies will not outlast the administration.
But even if the pendulum swings back—whether under Republicans or Democrats—it will be difficult to restore the level of predictability that once allowed allies to plan beyond four-year cycles. And that is a tragedy.
I assign a lot of responsibility to Trump for how he approached the world, but I also think these dynamics predate him. You can trace some of them to the Bush administration and even to aspects of the Obama administration.
Take the Iraq War. It was deeply divisive and sold domestically in ways that fractured international legitimacy. Then the Obama administration comes in and argues that the original legitimacy was never properly built. What does that say to allies who supported it?
You saw similar dynamics with Afghanistan. Allies indicated they might have stayed longer, but without the U.S. backbone the coalition could not hold.
So the lesson for Europe is that you have to plan around U.S. cycles. Increasingly, you cannot assume policies will outlast them—whether it’s incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act, tariffs imposed today, or diplomatic agreements reached in one administration. If I were advising Europe, I would assume many of those policies will not last beyond the current administration.


Career guidance: your 20s, travel, languages, and choosing inspiration
BW: For readers interested in your path, what has been the most rewarding part of your career? And what should they know if they want to enter this field?

TB: First, use your twenties to figure out what you want to do. Don’t feel pressure to have everything figured out by 25.
I learned that during my year abroad as an undergraduate. I was ambitious and thought, “By 24 I need to accomplish X.” But I was surrounded by people of different ages who were still figuring things out. You don’t need an extremely linear life.
Second, travel and learn languages. If you want to work in international relations or foreign policy, make a serious commitment to understanding countries, languages, cultures, and anthropology. It’s much more than tourism.
People sometimes say, “Everyone speaks English,” or “That language is too difficult.” But you should throw yourself into it—date in the language, make friends in the language, live with roommates who speak it.
I did that with several languages. I lived in Taiwan for a time. I lived in Germany. I actually left college for a year and went to Guatemala. I started graduate school in Italy.
In those places I learned languages—especially German and Spanish—well enough to work professionally. That opens entire worlds.
And sometimes the value isn’t about what seems “most useful.” People say, “Why learn German? Everyone in Germany speaks English.” But they don’t speak it professionally the way you need for policy work. German opened an enormous world for me in Europe.
The most important thing is to be inspired by the language and the culture. If you have that inspiration, the rest tends to follow.


The tradeoffs: pensions, stability, and being a “guest” abroad
BW: What’s been the biggest cost—or the most difficult aspect—that you wish you knew earlier?

TB: My career path has been fairly omnivorous. I’ve always earned a comfortable salary, so I’m not complaining there, although I have friends who have earned more.
But if you pursue certain government tracks—like the Foreign Service or congressional careers—you can receive retirement benefits like pensions. I’m 45 now, and some of my friends are getting close to eligibility. They may not retire immediately, but they can pivot while still drawing that pension, which is a significant advantage.
Because my path has been more serendipitous and less linear, I don’t have that same pension track.
Another tradeoff comes from living abroad. When you live in another country, you’re ultimately a guest. That shapes your access. German may be my working language, but I’m not German—I’m American. Access in political Berlin or Brussels is different from someone who has spent their entire career in that ecosystem.
And the dynamic works both ways. In Washington, there are advantages that Americans have which Europeans might not.


The book that mattered—even though he disagreed with it
BW: To conclude: what book or piece of literature has been most influential on your life, and why should others read it?
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TB: I should have thought about this beforehand—it’s such a good question.
This answer might get me in trouble, but I’ll say it anyway because it mattered at an important hinge point in my life. I had lived in Taiwan and studied abroad in Berlin in 2001, but I didn’t want to pursue foreign policy. I was planning on a domestic career.
What changed my mind—what changed my entire generation—was 9/11. I wanted to understand and impose some kind of order on a world that suddenly felt chaotic.
So I read Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. I bought it in a German bookstore in English and read it straight through.
It’s controversial. People criticize it for framing the world in terms of civilizational blocs. And it was in conversation with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, which argued that ideological conflict had essentially ended with the Cold War.
Even though I ultimately disagree with Huntington’s thesis, engaging with it—trying to make sense of the world through a framework—was very important for me. It shaped how I began thinking about international politics.

The first spark: Georgia, geopolitics, and the limits of what we notice
Ben Wolf (BW): To begin: knowing that you’ve "built your beat" around U.S. foreign policy and national security reporting, what was the first moment you realized this was the lane you wanted to commit to professionally, and why?

John Haltiwanger (JH): I’m not sure there was a singular moment, but a really formative experience for me came not long after undergrad. I’d pursued a certification to teach English as a foreign language, and for a brief period I actually taught U.S. history and AP World History. I’ve always been into geopolitics—the history of politics, the history of interactions between countries.
While I was teaching high school, I realized: I’m not sure I want to get locked into a career quite yet. So I accepted a job teaching English abroad in Georgia—the country—in 2012. It was a couple of years after Russia had invaded Georgia in a really short war that was also quite formative for the country, despite the fact that it only lasted a couple of days.
It was clear it was still having an impact on Georgians and on the country—particularly given Russian forces were still occupying two internationally recognized Georgian territories, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. I started talking to Georgians about it a lot. And I started blogging about it.
And I realized: I’m very into this geopolitics thing.
There was another moment where I was in Tbilisi, the capital. That wasn’t where the school I taught in was—I taught at a school about three hours from there in a pretty small village. But I remember going into this Irish pub and running into all these U.S. Marines who were there to help train Georgian troops involved in what at the time was called ISAF—the International Security Assistance Force—basically NATO and allied troops in Afghanistan.
I was 23. I grew up in D.C. I always thought of myself as fairly aware of what America is doing around the world and its global footprint, but it was a shock to me that these Marines were in Tbilisi—and I had no idea.
It was humbling and eye-opening about the limits of my own knowledge about what the U.S. does around the world. It reignited this desire within me to have a better understanding of America’s foreign policy role—its military footprint.
While I was in Georgia, I decided to apply for an international relations program. And because I’d had such a great experience internationally, I decided to pursue programs abroad—not in the United States. A lot of the best IR programs are in the U.S.—D.C., Denver, Boston, all over the country—but I thought it’d be interesting to get a non-U.S. perspective on IR. So I applied to a program at the University of Glasgow.
I was really attracted to it partly because they had a strong focus on Central and Eastern Europe, and I was very interested in that region. I got into the program, and while I was there I continued to blog, continued to have conversations with people from around the world about geopolitics—and I realized: this is what I want to do.
I didn’t necessarily know I wanted to be a journalist, but I knew I wanted to write about foreign policy. I loved sinking my teeth into convoluted topics. I loved the IR theory courses—using different theories as tools and lenses through which to analyze the world and current events.
Over the course of my master’s program, I realized: academia is great, but I’d rather be more engaged with things at a fast-paced, current level. And what better way to do that than journalism?
While I was in grad school, I kept blogging. I got some freelance opportunities, and it spiraled into a journalism career. In a lot of ways, I ended up here by accident.


The “zigzag line”: pathways, skills, and what (not) to redesign
BW: You mentioned you’d always been interested in international affairs, but it took time to figure out where you fit within that. Looking back, is there anything you’d redesign or something you’d double down on earlier?

JH: Not necessarily. A lot of fields have prescribed pathways. My pathway into journalism was definitely unconventional. A lot of people go to J-school—they might major in journalism in undergrad, then go to J-school. There are advantages to that if you want to get into journalism: internships or fellowships at media organizations, building the network that can help you get a step ahead. Connections are currency in any field.
That definitely set me back a little bit. I studied IR. I did not have connections to journalism. I really had to put myself out there to get my foot in the door.
But at the same time, I gained a level of expertise in a subject matter that you might not necessarily benefit from in the same way if you’re solely going through a traditional journalism pipeline. I don’t want to discourage people from going to J-school. I guess what I’m trying to say is: we should break away from the notion that there’s a single pathway into any given field.
You should pursue your interest and not worry too much about precisely where you’re going to end up—while still being practical. We all need to pay the bills. We all need gainful employment. That’s just the way the world works.
But I don’t have regrets about the pathway I took. It was a zigzag line—not exactly linear—but pretty much every experience I had along the way, from studying history to my time in Georgia to my master’s program, gave me skills I continue to benefit from.
As a history undergrad, I took a class called historiography—studying the ways the sourcing of an event impacts how it’s depicted: primary sources versus secondary sources; thinking about why a document portrays something in a particular light; what perspective it’s coming from. That is so important in journalism—understanding biases injected into portrayals of events, particularly by people in power who have a stake in portraying certain events in a certain light.
Going to Georgia—without even realizing it—I was unofficially interviewing people about the war and its impact. I was doing what journalists do: you go into the world and talk to people. I was getting soft skills that matter. It is difficult to go out and talk to people.
Even if you’re extroverted, it can be tough. I’ve had to report in difficult contexts. For example, about two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, I was reporting from the Poland–Ukraine border, speaking to Ukrainians as they crossed—people who were, in that moment, becoming refugees. You’re talking to them on the worst days of their lives. You can worry you’re invading their space, but you have to remember: this is an important story to tell. This is a major event in history, and you’re doing your part in writing the first draft of it. So you go up and talk to them—with sensitivity and empathy, of course.
Every experience I had helped prepare me for this. I’d encourage people interested in journalism to think about what beats they might want to cover and take courses that interest them. In undergrad, it wasn’t just history: I took Middle East politics, an American presidency course—electives I was interested in. Little did I know I’d end up covering U.S. national security, the presidency, the Middle East years later. I’m a strong advocate for pursuing what interests you.


Access vs accountability: being truthful, not “neutral”
BW: Now, you mentioned everyone has to pay the bills. I came across an article recently describing how incentives in journalism have changed over the past few decades. In today’s media environment, journalists can be incentivized to chase outrageous stories—things that get more clicks. How do you distinguish between access journalism and accountability journalism, and where do you personally draw the line?

JH: It’s a very important question. There are certainly people out there who engage in sensationalist journalism. I think it comes down to integrity and your personal set of ethics.
I got into journalism because I care about the world. I care about my country and the role it plays in the world. The United States is the most powerful country in the world—what we do has rippling consequences for millions, if not billions, of people. I think it’s really important, as a citizen in a democratic country, to keep my fellow Americans informed so they can make the best possible decisions at the ballot box—voting for people who align with their beliefs—and to be informed about what is actually happening around the world. And also: if you did vote for this person, this is what they’re up to on your behalf and in your name around the world.
Media has been under a lot of economic strain, especially as it shifted from newspaper- and magazine-based models to digital. I’ve been laid off multiple times. I’ve faced the economic ups and downs. It’s a tough industry.
There have been publications where I’ve faced pressure to report on things I don’t find particularly interesting or important for what the public needs to know. It’s important to push back on editors when they throw those ideas out.
It’s also important to be flexible and creative about how you report the news. A big part of my job is making the news interesting to people—framing it responsibly, but in a way people will engage with. America is inward-looking. A lot of people don’t leave their hometowns or states. They understand America is powerful, but it’s hard to wrap your head around why events in Syria, China, or Venezuela matter to me. People think: I have work, I’ve got bills, I’ve got a family—I don’t have time to keep up with all this.
One challenge is explaining why it matters—why it impacts you—why it affects oil prices, the value of the dollar, and so on. Or just putting things in context: the sheer amount of money the U.S. spends on defense every year—this is what your tax dollars are going to. If you’re worried about issues like healthcare, more money is going toward defense than healthcare, etc. Contextualizing it.
And making sure I’m fair. There’s a misconception that journalists are supposed to be neutral. We’re not supposed to be neutral—we’re supposed to be truthful. Sometimes the truth paints one side in a negative light. It’s not our responsibility to avoid that because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings—particularly if the facts are something the public should be aware of.
When reporters uncovered Watergate—back in the Nixon era—they reported facts about nefarious activity even though Nixon wasn’t happy about it. That’s our job: to speak truth to power, to let people know what’s happening in the shadows—but also to be human about it. Our first responsibility is to do no harm.
That means being selective and careful about information. If I’m speaking to someone in a war zone, and revealing their identity could put them in danger, I don’t do that. If I came across information that could put U.S. operatives or other people in danger, that’s a serious editorial decision: does the public need to know this? What’s the value of knowing it versus the potential fallout?
We have to weigh those things—while also being aware that media is a business. We have to write at a pace that keeps people reading. But you can do that responsibly and ethically.
I encourage anyone interested in this—who believes in democracy and keeping people informed—to pursue it. But be clear that fair and neutral are different. Watergate wasn’t “neutral,” but it was truthful and important.
And one other thing: when you work at a big organization—Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Washington Post—you’re not just representing yourself. You’re representing the organization, its legacy, and your colleagues. It’s different than some random guy on YouTube claiming he uncovered a scandal. The stakes are higher. If you don’t do your job responsibly, you can hurt a lot of people—including your colleagues. So I take that responsibility seriously: covering things fairly, in a balanced way, doing no harm, and protecting people who need protection.


Sources, anonymity, and vetting information at scale
BW: I’m glad you brought up working at a big institution. I remember a conversation I had with Binyamin Appelbaum at The New York Times a couple months ago. One thing he described was that at smaller organizations you’re really seeking out sources—but at bigger organizations, sources are often coming to you. Have you felt that change? And when sources do come to you, how do you evaluate whether they’re reliable?

JH: That’s a great question. I’ve worked at startups and more established outlets like Newsweek, Business Insider, and Foreign Policy—and yeah, there’s a huge difference.
At smaller places no one had heard of, I really had to seek out sources—chase them down publicly, be relentless with calls and emails. Sometimes you still have to do that even at the biggest outlets, but you do see differences.
And part of being responsible—especially if you’re writing something critical about an administration or someone in power—is giving them every chance to tell their side of the story. You go out of your way to contact them and give them ample time to respond. If you don’t, you’ve broken a fundamental value of journalism—Journalism 101: reach out and give people a chance to respond.
Our job is to put as many pieces of the puzzle together as possible for readers. If someone requests anonymity, you explain why—because the issue is sensitive or their life could be in danger.
When people reach out to me with information, I have to be cautious. If they’re reaching out, they might be looking for attention. Why me? Why this publication? What are they hoping to get out of going public?
At this point—I’ve been doing this for over a decade—you have to be good at sussing out who someone is and what they do. There’s no room for error. Sometimes I get pitches and I’m immediately like: nope. It’s not our job to regurgitate what people in power are saying. We’re not PR.
The type of news I do is high-altitude analytical coverage that helps people connect the dots on complicated national security and geopolitical developments. Vetting is an extremely important part of what it means to be a journalist—and it’s a skill you develop.
Early on, it’s important to ask for help from editors and colleagues: “I got this tip. I’m not sure how valid it is.” I’ve gotten tips before—on massive stories—that, if true, would have been huge, and they ended up being nothing. Someone may have been dishonest or misled.
It comes back to responsibility. When you’re working on big platforms with large audiences, you have a responsibility to do no harm—and that means really vetting information and sourcing to ensure you’re giving the public the most accurate possible information.


The rewards—and the tradeoffs you don’t see coming
BW: Looking back at your career, what has been the most rewarding part—and what’s the biggest tradeoff you wish you’d known earlier?

JH: The most rewarding part is that you get to be a student and a teacher constantly. I’m constantly learning new subjects—getting access to top experts on various issues.
For years, the main region I focused on through national security reporting was the Middle East, because that’s where the U.S. has been most active for a long time due to the war on terror. More recently, with the Trump administration’s increasing focus on Latin America, I had to shift attention there. I was hardly an expert—and I’m still hardly an expert—but I’ve had to build sourcing and learn by talking to really smart people. It’s been fascinating and a privilege.
Another rewarding part is this idea some journalists used to describe as being a “voice for the voiceless.” I disagree with that phrase. I think everyone has a voice, but not everyone has a platform. Not everyone has an audience. So for refugees, people in war zones, people who feel unheard—giving them an opportunity to tell their stories, or doing my best to be an avenue through which they can express themselves—that’s a privilege and a big responsibility.
Talking to people in challenging environments about harrowing experiences and making sure you do their stories justice—because some of the most impactful reporting has a strong human element. If you’re reporting on a war and just giving casualty stats, it can feel robotic. People relate differently to an individual story that reflects broader trends.
I try to lead with empathy. I’m not just using people for their story. Not to sound corny—I genuinely care. Part of why you get into this field is because you believe in human rights, you believe in democracy, and you want to shine a light on abuses. You can approach these issues with care and sensitivity, and make people feel seen and heard in a responsible manner.

​In term's of the biggest tradeoff, I think it would’ve been nice to have someone warn me how tumultuous the profession would be—how many ups and downs I’d have outside my control: layoffs, acquisitions, getting moved around a lot.
When I entered the industry in 2014, it felt like a golden age for new media—Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Vice News, all these outlets emerging; digital taking over; more video. It seemed limitless—like it would never stop. And then a couple years in, it burst. The older outlets caught up, figured out digital, and they had the money and experience to do it well.
No one could’ve predicted it—maybe some people did, but I didn’t. There have been long periods of unemployment for me. Maybe I would’ve saved more money or prepared better for the rockiness.
But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I love what I do. It’s been worth it—in spite of the challenges. That’s life. No matter what field you get into, there will be ups and downs.
I’d also say: if you’re considering journalism, don’t be deterred because it’s rocky. It’s very worth it. You talk to incredibly interesting people from around the world. You’re constantly learning. Sometimes you pinch yourself because you have a front-row seat to history. I feel privileged when I look back on what I’ve been able to report on and the people I’ve been able to speak to.


The next decade: skills, media literacy, and rebuilding trust
BW: As we close, I want to look ahead. If you had to guess how foreign policy journalism will change over the next decade, what do you think will change—and how will that affect people trying to enter the field?

JH: It’s a million-dollar question a lot of people are thinking about—especially at a time like this, when we’re hearing rumors of major impending layoffs, including on foreign desks at outlets like The Washington Post. People reporting from conflict zones could be on the brink of losing their jobs. I actually haven’t kept up with that over the last couple of days—some of this may have already happened—so I apologize if I’m behind. But it’s indicative of the challenges.
And it’s not just foreign policy journalism—it’s journalism in general. Local newspapers have closed. Local outlets have closed. News has become more nationalized, and there are negative repercussions. Local news fuels connection among people you live near. It helps you understand the good and bad things happening around you. When everything is viewed through a national lens, it can fuel divisions.
As it becomes more nationalized, I hope to see efforts to adapt at a local level. Some folks have responded by taking a nonprofit approach to journalism—one example in the D.C. area is The Baltimore Banner. So there are solutions. I hope they spread.
Anyone entering the industry needs to be nimble and flexible. You need a wide skill set. You can’t just be good at one thing. You need to write, do TV, do social media, do quick videos, explainers—because people digest news in so many different ways.
And you need to be a strong advocate for media literacy. A lot of people don’t have strong media literacy education. They don’t know how to discern trustworthy sources. They worry everything is incentivized by money and profit. Look—I’m a journalist; I’m cynical. I have to be. Gullible people will struggle in journalism because you have to recognize people in power have agendas. But there are a lot of good people in media who genuinely care about the country and their communities.
Frankly, a lot of us don’t make that much money. If you’re looking for big bucks, I wouldn’t necessarily pursue journalism. You can make a comfortable living, but it’s tough.
So be clear-eyed about the challenges—be an advocate for media literacy and restoring trust. And the First Amendment is there for a reason. Americans—not just journalists—should be strong advocates for freedom of the press.
If you do get into this field, it’s rewarding—but be prepared for ups and downs. Remember the responsibility. Keep an open mind. Have as many conversations as possible.
And another thing: you have to do a lot of self-promotion. You have to build your own brand as a reporter—even if you work within a brand. It can feel tasteless, but it’s part of surviving in the industry. Pay attention to trends, engage with them, and don’t give up, even though it’s challenging—because it’s incredibly rewarding.

A book that shaped the lens
BW: Finally, if you had to recommend a piece of literature to a reader interested in following your path—or a piece of literature that most influenced your own—what would it be, and why?

JH: Oh, wow—that’s a tough one.
A book I always think back to from college is Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. I took a class on the Mongols in undergrad. It was really interesting to learn about the ways Western historians denigrated Genghis Khan and elevated the prestige of Western empires compared to the Mongolian Empire.
None of this is to whitewash what the Mongols did—no empire hasn’t done terrible things, and the Mongols certainly did terrible things. But that book was indicative of the importance of balance in writing on complicated issues—context, perspective, pushing against prevailing narratives.
It had a big impact on me as a journalist: it’s important to analyze issues from different perspectives and offer those perspectives in your reporting, so people can come to their own determination about how they feel.
That’s the ultimate responsibility of a journalist, if I distill it: offering different perspectives on a complicated issue and giving people the most comprehensive information available so they can come to the best possible conclusion.
It was also just a great read—an example of taking what might seem like a boring topic to a lot of people and making it fascinating. That’s hopefully what I try to do, too: take something someone thinks they don’t want to read about, but they see the headline or read the lead and think, “Oh wow—I’m going to keep reading. I need to learn about this.”

Richard Haass doesn’t pretend his career was a master plan. He describes it as a sequence of exposures—first to Vietnam as the defining political issue of his teens, then to the Middle East through an undergraduate detour into comparative religion that turned into a summer, a junior year abroad, and eventually a first degree focused on the region. From there, graduate work in international relations followed “one thing led to another,” but the point—he’s explicit—is that he wasn’t optimizing for a pre-set path so much as chasing strong teachers, serious books, and jobs where he’d learn the most.
That openness shows up again when he talks about power. Haass’s core corrective is blunt: virtually nothing is inevitable. People make policy, and different people in the same circumstances produce different outcomes. He traces that lesson to early government work—especially 1979, when the Iran Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan collided with his recent field exposure and doctoral focus, giving him a real seat (and real memos) in high-level policymaking while he was still young.
The conversation then moves from individual agency to institutions: why consensus can be intellectually “bland,” why CFR avoided institutional positions during his tenure, and why “policy planning” is not “policy predicting”—especially in a top-heavy administration. From there, he defines what “rules-based order” actually means in practice: basic norms (like not acquiring territory by force) plus mechanisms that reward compliance and penalize violations.
We close with Haass on the strategic stakes: China’s nuclear buildup and why Cold War analogies distort more than they clarify; Europe’s deepening doubts after Munich; and why he rejects any endgame in Ukraine that “rewards aggression.” Finally, he offers unusually concrete advice for students—study history, rotate through multiple jobs early, and start with two books: Thinking in Time (Neustadt/May) and Bull’s The Anarchical Society.


—Richard Haass served as president of the Council on Foreign Relations for 20 years and previously held senior roles across Congress, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House.

Career origins: how it started
Ben Wolf (BW): For readers trying to understand your trajectory, what first pulled you toward foreign policy? And how did that turn into a real path?

Richard Haass (RH): A couple of things. I have some specifics about my case, and then one or two general thoughts.
When I was in my teens, one of the big issues was Vietnam—the war—so that immediately, or inevitably, got me interested in foreign policy subjects, but just as a political issue.
When I went to college, one of my early areas of focus was comparative religion. I took a course on the New Testament, became friends with the professor, ended up spending the summer—and then my junior year abroad—in the Middle East. I came back, focused then on Middle Eastern studies, got my first degree on that.
Went to graduate school and ended up doing my master’s and doctorate in international relations, and one thing led to another, led to another.
All of which is to say: I was not one of those people who had a long-term career focus. I’m not sure I even recommend that. I think it’s much better to be open—to things, to experiences, to good professors, to books. And it just happened.
I did not have a career, if you will, by design. It evolved because I always tried to study with the best professors. I took the jobs that I thought were the most interesting, where I’d learn the most. And yes, I’m interested in international things—but it just as easily could have been domestic politics or economics.
Indeed, when I originally thought about graduate school, I was looking at international relations. I was looking at international economics. I was looking at Middle Eastern studies. I didn’t know what I wanted to do—and in some ways, it’s impossible to until you do it.
My general advice is not to overthink it. When you’re young, try to expose yourself to the most interesting situations—the places where you learn the most. And if you’re lucky, you’ll stumble across what you want to do.


Power and policymaking: what he learned by doing
BW: When you first entered government, what did you not understand yet about how decisions actually get made—and what experience taught you the most?

RH: I didn’t have understandings about power and policymaking when I was young. So again: when I was young, those weren’t questions I thought about.
I worked in Congress in my early 20s. As a staffer, I worked in the Pentagon in my late 20s. I worked in the State Department in my early 30s, the White House in my late 30s, and so forth.
Usually the only thing I knew before I had experience was what I read in history books—what I studied.
The one thing I will say that I learned is that virtually nothing is inevitable—that at the end of the day, people make policy. Very different people put in the same circumstances will come up with very different policies.
That ought to motivate people to think about this, because you can make a difference.
When I was in the Pentagon in the late ’70s—in ’79—there were two enormous geopolitical events: the revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I happened to have just come back from Iran and Afghanistan. I did my doctorate on that part of the world. And suddenly, there I was, as a young person, with a chance to participate in policymaking at a pretty high level.
In many cases, if my voice didn’t make it into the meeting, my memos made it into the inboxes of the most senior people.
That’s what’s so interesting about government: you can have extraordinary opportunities at a young age, and nothing is set in stone. So I’m a great advocate for young people to get involved in government.


Think tanks: expertise without groupthink
BW: You led one of the most influential convening institutions in the country. In that environment, how do you keep “expert consensus” from turning into groupthink—and make sure dissenting views don’t get filtered out?

RH: It wasn’t a problem, because when I was lucky enough to be president of the Council on Foreign Relations for 20 years, the institution never took institutional positions. So each individual member was free to have his or her own opinions. Each fellow on the staff could reach his or her own conclusions or recommendations on policy. Same held for authors in Foreign Affairs.
There was no attempt to reach a consensus.
By and large, I also find two things. One is: consensus is often bland—you find the lowest common denominator.
And in my experience, the best intellectual work is not done by groups. The best intellectual work is done by individuals. Think about it: how many great books can you think of that were written by committees? Great intellectual work is written by individuals.
Now, in government, you’ve got to have people working together. And I think in government it could be an issue where you reach the consensus and the rest—that it may not be the best policy. To me, the goal in government was never necessarily to reach a consensus. The goal was to reach the best available policy. Where there were differences, hash it out, and the president—or whoever was the decision maker—would hopefully reach the best possible decision.
But I’ve never lived my life with the goal of coming up with consensus.


Planning vs. predicting
BW: Looking ahead 12 months, what feels most likely to shape global politics—and what risk do you think is still being underweighted?

RH: When I ran the Policy Planning Staff, I used to say I was in charge of policy planning, not policy predicting. So I’m not going to go there. The answer is: I don’t know.
There are too many variables. And in particular, you’ve got an administration in this country that does not have a heavy institutional bias. It’s very top-heavy. The president makes a lot of policy.
So anyone going out on a limb and making predictions about events—honestly, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next 12 hours with Iran or something like that. I’m not going to go there.


What “rules-based order” means in practice
BW: People use “rules-based international order” as shorthand. If you had to make it concrete: what are the core rules or norms that matter, and what enforces them when they’re violated?

RH: The slogan you hear is usually “rules-based international order,” whatever.
It’s the idea that international relations is conducted with respect for—or acceptance or toleration of—certain rules or norms.
The most basic one is that territory is not to be acquired by the use of military force. There are other norms: genocide isn’t to be allowed to happen, terrorism is unacceptable, and so forth.
Those are norms or principles on which order is based. And then you’ve got to have ways of encouraging people to respect those rules, and mechanisms or means for penalizing them if they don’t—whether it’s sanctions, the use of military force, or what have you.
That’s the basic stuff of foreign policy: you want to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others. And if you are not successful at discouraging them, you want to defeat challenges to order.


China: objectives, deterrence, and constraints
BW: On China, what should the U.S. be trying to achieve—what’s a realistic end state? And what does effective deterrence look like, especially around Taiwan?

RH: What the United States should be looking for with China is that China doesn’t use its growing power in ways that we think are inconsistent with order as we understand it.
In one narrow space, it’s obviously that they ought not use force to change the status of Taiwan. That’s been our biggest concern. But we also have other issues. They ought not be supporting Russia like they are in its war of aggression against Ukraine. We have all sorts of concerns about an export-led growth model, which we believe is inconsistent with a global economy that works to the benefit of most countries and people, and so forth.
With China, as with anybody else, you’ve got to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others. That’s the stuff of foreign policy. It’s not unique to China.
I always say the business of foreign policy is influencing the foreign policy choices of others. And China has gotten more complicated because their power has grown. Their ambitions are considerable.
And our ability, in some cases, to push back is limited. We may not have the military force, or we’re vulnerable to Chinese cutoffs of rare earth minerals, and so forth. We haven’t necessarily structured the relationship in ways that allow us to shape Chinese behavior as we’d like to.


China’s nuclear buildup and the “new Cold War” analogy
BW: China’s nuclear modernization is accelerating. How should we interpret that strategically? And when people call this a “new Cold War,” as David Sanger has in his recent book, what does that analogy get right, and what does it get wrong?

RH: I think you’re conflating two things. Let’s walk it back.
One is the growth of China’s nuclear weapons. The other is whether the Cold War model fits U.S.-China competition.
Look—China has the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. It’s the fastest growing. I think China has made the strategic decision: over the next decade, they want to reach rough equality with the United States and Russia. They see that as central for great power status.
They also look at the war in Ukraine, and they notice that the United States supported Ukraine much more under the Biden administration than under the Trump administration, but we supported it indirectly—with arms and intelligence. We didn’t send U.S. forces to the battle.
China would love to replicate that when it comes to Taiwan. They would love to limit U.S. support for Taiwan to arms or intelligence, but they would much prefer U.S. military forces not get directly involved. So my guess is they think their chances of succeeding increase significantly if they have a nuclear arsenal that’s roughly on par with that of the United States.
So I think for the next decade China will increase its nuclear arsenal significantly—say by 100 warheads a year—which would get them to 1,500 plus or minus a decade from now.
I think then there’s a possibility China would be open to participation in some type of arms control framework. I think until then there’s negligible chance China would participate. So I just take that as a fact of life.
Now: what’s the nature of the U.S.-China relationship? I don’t much like Cold War analogies, because there were unique qualities to the U.S.-Soviet Cold War.
The U.S. and China will have elements of significant competition. We could have elements of conflict. We could have elements of limited cooperation.
The Cold War had a large ideological dimension—I’m not sure that’s at play here. The Cold War had two large alliance systems arrayed against each other—I don’t see a parallel there with China. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is integrated into the world economy. So, all things being equal, I find the Cold War parallel more distorting than illuminating.


NATO, Munich, and Rubio
BW: After Munich, where do you think European confidence in U.S. commitments actually stands? Specifically, what did Rubio’s speech clarify, and what did it fail to resolve?

RH: I thought it was an impressive speech. It was well delivered.
On the other hand, it didn’t deal with Ukraine, didn’t deal with tariffs. It didn’t settle any of the doubts about Article 5 and America’s commitment to Europe. You also have Vice President Vance a year ago in Munich, and you’ve had any number of comments by the president of the United States.
It wasn’t clear exactly who Marco Rubio was speaking for. I thought there was a serious disconnect between elements of his speech and elements of U.S. foreign policy.
At the end of the day, the most important thing to say is: the Europeans didn’t come away reassured. Some liked the speech; some didn’t, depending on what they focused on. But the biggest—and I think correct—conclusion is it didn’t change any of the fundamentals.
The U.S.-European relationship has changed fundamentally for the worse. And a speech—even a good speech by the Secretary of State—couldn’t change that.
He didn’t help himself by not dealing with Ukraine in the speech. He certainly didn’t help by flying off to Hungary afterwards and all the sympathetic talk to Mr. Orbán.
Again, Munich didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened in the context of a year of Trump foreign policy: tariffs, a tilt towards Russia, often non-support of Ukraine, harsh criticism of allies over cultural issues as well as defense-related issues.
So the speech did not turn things around. Most Europeans increasingly think they’ve got to look to themselves for their security—not to the United States.


Ukraine: negotiations, concessions, and red lines
BW: With U.S.-brokered talks underway with Russia and Ukraine, what kind of settlement framework is even plausible? And from the U.S. perspective, what should be non-negotiable versus potentially negotiable for Ukraine?

RH: I don’t think Ukraine should be conceding. You do not reward aggression.
We should be supporting Ukraine. We are not, for the most part. We should be supplying them directly with military arms. We should be putting much more pressure on Russia.
So I do not support the thrust of the Witkoff–Kushner diplomacy towards Ukraine.
I’m sympathetic to a desire to end the war. I think peace is too ambitious; a ceasefire, in principle, would be good. But I think the way we’re going about it is dead wrong. And Ukraine is not interested in it.
Russia keeps upping its demands.
But we’re about to end the fourth year of this phase of the war—start the fifth. And I’m sad to say we’ve already had, what, on the order of two million casualties between Russia and Ukraine. It’s quite stunning—quite awful.
But I don’t want to see the war ended in ways that reward aggression, or simply tee Russia up for renewed aggression after some kind of pause. So I think the U.S. approach is deeply flawed, and from what I can tell, neither Ukraine nor the Europeans want any part of it.

BW: A lot of people would argue that conceding territory could be justified simply to stop the killing. Why do you reject that logic?

RH: It’s for Ukraine to decide, but I certainly wouldn’t pressure them to do so.
And it’s not just “some territory.” It would have strategic significance. Russia’s economy is on a wartime footing. And I don’t believe a pause in the war would be anything more than a pause.
So, no—I think the best thing we could do is support Ukraine far, far more than we are, and pressure Russia far, far more than we are. We’ve got to disabuse Vladimir Putin of his view that time is on his side.
If we want to end the war and we want to end it on terms that are supportive of our interests and our principles, that’s the way to do it. We do not want to be in a position of peace at any price. That, to me, would be a deeply flawed diplomatic path.


Advice to students: skills, rotation, and history
BW: For students who want a career that moves between government and institutions like yours, what should they do in their 20s to build real leverage, and what should they avoid?

RH: I’m not so arrogant to think my career path is meaningful for others.
One of the good things about being an American is you have options of going in and out of government. So I was never a career anything. I was not a career Foreign Service officer, what have you. I liked the opportunity to move back and forth between government and think tanks.
I got my doctorate. I thought I would be an academic, but there’s a lot of what goes on in modern academia that doesn’t excite me. Too much of it is theory-based and quantitative, has no real application to the real world. It’s not particularly relevant.
I’ve never heard, in all my decades in government, anybody talk about theoretical models or quantitative models of international relations or foreign policy. So much of what goes on in academia, sorry to say, is irrelevant.
If I were going to recommend for students what to study, I’d say history. For the most part, I find it the most valuable background and analytical tool to think about policy-relevant history—the kind of work that people like Alexander George, Ernest May, Richard Neustadt, and others championed. I found that really useful.
More conceptual works I like: Hedley Bull, Henry Kissinger, Hans Morgenthau.
But I would say the best thing is to read as much history as you can, get some experience in government, and don’t put pressure on yourself early on to discover or figure out what’s the right thing for you.
I always tell people in their 20s—maybe early 30s—the goal should be to have five different jobs. Imagine you had five jobs, two years each. It’s almost like a doctor having a rotating residency: you get exposed to five different specialties, you learn from each, and maybe come closer to figuring out what’s right for you.
If you’re interested in foreign policy or government, go work in different places. Be exposed to different things. Find out if it’s for you. Some things may interest you more than others—maybe a certain part of the world, maybe a certain discipline, what have you.
Don’t expect a 22-year-old—whatever the age is—to know what’s right for you. The best thing you can do is invest in yourself, build up skills, and expose yourself to different situations.
Those ought to be the two considerations when you’re young:

1. How do you add value? How do you tool up no matter what?
2. How do you begin to figure out what’s right for you—what really excites you, what you’re really good at, where you think you can make a difference?

If you can do those two things in your 20s or early 30s, then you’re way ahead of the game. Then you’ve got the next 40 years to go make a difference.


Two books to start with
BW: Last question: which books most shaped how you think about foreign policy decision-making, and why those?
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RH: I alluded to a couple.
One is Thinking in Time by Dick Neustadt and Ernest May, about the uses of history for decision makers.
Probably Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society—my single favorite book about how to think about international relations.
The former is the best book for would-be policymakers. The latter, I find, is the best work for how to think about international relations. So I would start with those two.

From engineering to political science
Ben Wolf: If you had to describe your career as a single problem that you’ve been trying to solve, what is it—and what originally pulled you toward it?
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Craig Volden: Thanks for asking, and thanks for having me here today. I’ve been—early on—on a bit of a winding path.
I grew up in North Dakota and went to college pretty far from there, up at Caltech, to study aeronautical engineering. From there, I decided I wasn’t that excited about that topic. But I also learned at Caltech that political science could be treated as a science.
In other words, the way they approached it there—political scientists were asking questions that led them to form a hypothesis, gather data, test those hypotheses, and so on. I found that tremendous because I’ve always had this science-y background, but I was drawn to political science and public policy questions.
From there, I transferred up to Stanford and stayed there for grad school, and then I had a winding path as a new professor—University of Chicago, Claremont Graduate University, Ohio State, University of Michigan, and finally here at the University of Virginia.
The questions I’m drawn to are: why do we have the public policies that we have? Those policies affect a lot of people’s lives, and I’m interested in the politics behind them.
That led me to big questions like: if one state or locality adopts a policy and it’s working really well, does it spread elsewhere—what we call policy diffusion?
And more recently: if somebody has a good idea in a legislature, what can they do to advance it? What does it take to be an effective lawmaker? That latter question led me to co-found the Center for Effective Lawmaking, which studies and promotes effective lawmaking in Congress and the state legislatures.
I enjoy the academic career and being a professor, but simultaneously, the ability to interact with members of Congress, their staff, state legislators, and the good-governance community—that’s really exciting. It feeds back into new hypotheses to test with new data.

Where the research goes next
BW: When you think about your work right now—the questions you’ve answered in the past and the questions you’re answering now—where do you see that leading you in the future? Do you imagine you’ll continue investigating these questions, or is there a broader goal you’re working toward?

CV: When we set up the Center for Effective Lawmaking, that was in 2017, and we were almost exclusively focused on Congress. We found a way to score every member of Congress—who are the effective lawmakers—and use those scores as a research design to ask: what could someone do to become more effective?
Over the past few years, we’ve been in a position to pivot to the states, too. So now we’re studying state legislators, scoring them for effectiveness, and using the variance across institutions to ask: why are folks in Louisiana different than folks in Virginia, and what are their patterns for how they come up with solutions to public policy problems?
It’s tremendously exciting. Is it the same questions? Sort of, because it’s still about effective lawmaking. But now we’re studying 50 states and 99 chambers instead of the two in Congress.

BW: I interviewed Congressman Suhas Subramanyam once before—he’s in Virginia’s 10th District, funny enough. Do you recall off the top of your head how his score was?

CV: Especially now that we have thousands and thousands of lawmakers at the state level, I don’t recall any particular one particularly well.
But what we do on our website, thelawmakers.org, is put all the data up there. For Congress, the scores go back 50 years, so you can see big trends—what’s been going on in your district. Did you have a really effective lawmaker, and is the current one living up to that standard? A lot of people enjoy poking around there.

How the scoring works
BW: Could you tell me a little bit more about how the scoring works—what goes into the equation? In high school, I remember creating a statistical metric to measure an NBA team's effectiveness in drafting players, which proved to be much more complex then I originally thought. I can't imagine what goes into yours.

CV: We care about lawmaking, so we set aside other important activities: oversight, constituency service, how much funding you bring back to your district. Those matter, but we’re focused on lawmaking.
We start with the bills that can become law. For a member of Congress, we look at how many bills they introduce—and then how far those bills move through the lawmaking process. Do they get action in committee—like a hearing, a markup, a subcommittee vote? Do they get to the floor of the House or Senate? Do they pass their home chamber? Do they become law?
Each of those is a rarer activity, and rarer activities we rate more highly. You get a tiny boost for introducing a bill, but a big boost for a law.
Then we know not all laws are the same. If it’s naming a post office—commemorative stuff—we downgrade those. But if you’re tackling immigration reform or other major issues of the day, you get upgraded for taking on major issues.
And one thing we found in Congress—and it’s starting to take place in the states as well—is that individual bills matter, but now they’re often putting together these giant packages, whether it’s a “one big, beautiful bill” or a major omnibus budget bill that includes a lot of provisions.
So we want to give people credit if they have ideas that are incorporated into those bigger laws. We’re at universities, so we use plagiarism-style software: we take the text of any bill and the text of every law and compare them. If there’s a lot of overlap, we want to give members credit for their ideas finding their way into law.
It has a little of everything going on there, but it captures what we’re interested in.

Limits, improvements, and staying in your lane
BW: When I built that metric I mentionned, we admitted there were things it couldn’t capture—like draft-day trades. Kobe Bryant was drafted by the Hornets but spent his career with the Lakers. Are there “trade”-type issues with your statistic—things you’re looking at now and saying, “We need to account for that”?

CV: Our major one was exactly what I just mentioned—so much language is embedded in other bills. That was an innovation we adopted just a few years ago, even though we released our first scores in 2014.
It’s helpful to have that mindset: I like what we’re doing, but if there are opportunities to do it better, let’s improve.
We use these scores for research on what it takes to become an effective lawmaker, and then we try to convey that to members of Congress, state legislators, their staff, and the good-governance community. We get feedback, which is wonderful.
Some feedback is: capture these bigger bills. Other feedback is: it would be great to have scorecards for oversight, or for how well they communicate with constituents.
I agree—those are important parts of what a legislator does. But since we’re focused on lawmaking, we try to stay in our lane.

Recruitment, parties, and what “winning” means
BW: Another part of what you’re doing seems organizational: parties want to put together a team—committee chairs, party leaders, and so on. How much does effective lawmaking factor into that?

CV: One research project we’re taking on right now is to try to figure out: who recruited these members of Congress to run?
If we can identify the ones getting a lot of support from political parties—through campaign contributions and so on—we might be able to say: that’s who the party was recruiting. And are they recruiting people likely to be highly effective lawmakers, or are they recruiting people who will vote with the party no matter what?
We don’t know the answer yet, but it seems valuable. It’s like putting together a team you want to succeed—what does “succeed” mean? What’s your strategy?

Trends over time: bipartisanship and specialization
BW: Looking back at the past 40 years of lawmakers, what interesting trends have you noticed? Are they more effective now than they were in the past—or vice versa?

CV: We’ve found patterns that are really consistent over time.
One is: you can look at who you attract as co-sponsors. Some members of Congress are really about partisan issues—they advance everything on behalf of Democrats or Republicans—while others are more bipartisan.
People talk about the loss of bipartisanship today, but there are very few members of Congress who don’t have at least some degree of bipartisanship in their co-sponsors.
The most effective lawmakers attract about 40% of their co-sponsors from the other party. That’s a strong signal that the idea has been worked on, refined, and supported across parties—and if you’re including things in a bigger package, or if you’re a committee chair deciding what to spend time on, these are bills where the homework has been done.
That was true 40 years ago; it’s true today. But co-sponsorship across parties has declined: it used to be about 30–40%, and now it’s more like 20–30%. Not as extreme as the public might think, but it is on the decline, which is unfortunate.
Another consistent pattern: the most effective members of Congress specialize. They might put forward half of their bills in one issue area—environment, health care, and so on—and become known as the person who knows that topic inside and out.
That specialization mattered 40 years ago, and it matters today. But members of Congress are becoming more generalists over time, scattering legislation across many issues.
In part, that’s based on committee structure and congressional capacity—party leaders are taking the lead on legislation instead of committee chairs. Without strong specialization incentives—“this is your committee; build expertise; move it forward”—members become more generalist, which, in many ways, doesn’t help the lawmaking process.

What the public misses about policy
BW: More broadly, what do you think people most misunderstand about how policy actually gets made in the U.S.?

CV: A lot of people think nothing gets done. That’s definitely not true.
It’s easier to tell a story about what’s contentious—partisan politics and people yelling at each other—than the story about the work that’s being done, often behind the scenes. People miss a lot of what Congress is doing.
Likewise for state legislatures: many people misunderstand their rules and how they work. If a policy isn’t being accomplished by Congress, there are ways states can step in, and they have on a variety of issues. A lot of that flies under the radar.
So yes: there are major public policy problems not yet being addressed—that’s fair. But there are also many areas where we’ve made substantial progress, and not many people notice it.

Turning “messy” politics into measurable research
BW: What’s your personal method for translating a big, messy political question into something measurable without losing the main point?

CV: It depends on the question. But our starting question was: are there some members of Congress—some state legislators—who are better at their lawmaking jobs than others?
That felt big, so we said: let’s define what lawmaking is, and define what “being good at it” is.
That led us to: laws come from bills, and bills progress through a process. We can capture that.
We didn’t want to go with just what’s easy to measure. But we did want to be objective and not put our thumbs on the scale.
The numbers themselves show patterns—like: it helps to be in the majority party, it helps to be a committee chair, it helps to be senior. But we didn’t want to give someone a higher score simply because they’re in the majority party. We wanted the objective measures to reveal those patterns.
So it’s about being objective, breaking the question into small parts, and bringing it all together.

The fork in the road
BW: I want to turn back to your career path and conclude with advice for students. When you look back, what was the pivotal fork-in-the-road moment—something that looked small at the time but changed your trajectory?

CV: One was the realization that political science could be a science. That was crucial for me because I loved science, and I loved public policy questions.

BW: When you say “realization,” what did that actually look like?

CV: If I look back at my high school government class, it was memorization—facts, dates, storytelling. It wasn’t something I was drawn to in terms of data and hypotheses.
Then in college, around your age, I ran across classes where it really was government as political science—as: there’s a bunch we don’t know; how can we figure it out?
For lawmaking: how can we measure who an effective lawmaker is? Is it better to be a generalist or a specialist? How important are congressional staff in getting things done? What issues are more gridlocked than others?
Those questions sound like: develop hypotheses, gather data, detect concepts like bipartisanship, issue specialization, gridlock—and test.

Generalist vs. specialist: advice for students
BW: You mentioned weighing generalist versus specialist in the context of lawmakers earlier. Students weigh that too—especially those interested in government, think tanks, research, writing. Should they build breadth across fields, or specialize? And if they specialize, how do they decide?

CV: Absolutely—a tough question. It’s something I struggled with early on.
I think the answer is: sample a lot until you’re sure.
If you only know one thing, you won’t build that many connections. But if you’re only an inch deep, that won’t work either.
In the early days, when you’re deciding between history, political science, public policy, engineering—don’t run far down one path until you’ve had experience with a bunch of them.
Universities force some of that through general education requirements. But I’d say the same for clubs: don’t make them all the same. If you can do an internship or a summer job, don’t repeat last year’s—try something else.
Eventually you’ll say: I loved that—and I know why I loved that. You notice patterns: “In all my papers and classes, I keep getting pulled toward environmental policy.” When you know it, you see it.
And there’s no failure here. There’s learning: “I didn’t like that work environment.” Great—why? How do you avoid it? “I didn’t care for domestic topics; I’m drawn to international ones.” Wonderful—because it helps you set a path.
Once you know your path, you’ll naturally build expertise and knowledge around it.

What successful students have in common
BW: As we conclude: you’ve been a professor for many years, and you’ve seen students go on to lead successful, meaningful careers. When you think about those students, what traits, skills, or habits do you think led them there?

CV: Traits and habits can be established over time. It’s not like you’re born “successful” or not.
Students face things that are tricky and difficult for them—and the more difficult it is, probably the more you should go down that road.
If you’re not comfortable as a public speaker, force yourself to get in front of groups and make speeches. If you’re not comfortable with math and data, take classes that make you comfortable.
So: get out of your comfort zone, have a growth mindset, and keep trying things.
The most successful students become lifelong learners. The question is: how do you set yourself up so that after college, you can still learn?
The world is full of opportunities—online and in person—to learn skills. The challenge is identifying what will be hard to learn on your own, and learning that while you have structure and support.
For many students, that’s methods: working with data, econ classes, that kind of infrastructure. Learn it in a group, in an institutional setting, while you’re here—even if it’s tough.
Some substantive knowledge—something you’d love to take a class on—if it doesn’t fit your schedule, there will be opportunities to learn it later. You’re not done learning when you leave.

A book recommendation
BW: Finally, Professor Volden, If you had to recommend a single book for a student interested in your work, what would it be—and why?

CV: Rudely and supportingly, we do have a book that came out early on called Legislative Effectiveness in the U.S. Congress: The Lawmakers—so, buy the book.
But if you’re interested in effective lawmaking, I’d also say: start on our website, thelawmakers.org. Click around. Look at the working papers, what we’re doing now, and the projects we have going on.
We have a lot of interviews with effective lawmakers. They might not be as compelling as what Ben’s putting together, but it’s our attempt to highlight some of the good work being done in the states and in Congress.
And of course: look up the scores for your lawmakers.

BW: I’ll be sure to check out those scores. Professor Volden, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been a real honor.
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CV: Great to talk to you.

Career as a single problem
Ben Wolf (BW): If you had to describe your career as a single problem you’ve been trying to solve, what is it—and what originally pulled you toward it?
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Ambassador Lisa J. Kubiske (LK): To make the world a more prosperous and peaceful place—that’s the problem to solve.
What drew me to the career was, actually, a degree of happenstance. I had a lot of international background traveling with my family growing up. And I spoke Spanish because I’d done a year abroad—I studied in Mexico, and then a year abroad in Peru.
I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I did know that when I had gone back to Peru for a year after my year abroad, people couldn’t pigeonhole me. Was I government? Was I a spy? Was I an academic? I wasn’t any of those things.
So my year in Peru had already made me more aware of what my own political and moral values were, because I had been there when they had been nationalizing all these industries. I didn’t like that. They didn’t nationalize the press.
And I figured I should belong to some kind of institution—have some kind of connection where people would understand. So I looked for jobs, and I definitely had a positive-negative reaction to working in the U.S. government, but not to representing the United States.
So I took the Foreign Service exam because it was free, and it was there, and I was in a master’s program in international affairs at Georgetown. And I thought, well, I’ll just try it.
I actually thought I wanted to do policy, and when they send you overseas, they tell you: you’re not making policy; you’re implementing policy. That’s not quite 100% true, because the way you send suggestions back through the State Department, you can be quite influential at times. But I thought originally I wanted to do policy.
Then I got overseas, and I thought: well, I’ll try it for a tour. I’ll try it for another tour. I kept doing well, so I stayed in, and I did eventually become an ambassador.

What diplomacy is in practice
BW: When you first entered the work, what did you think diplomacy was? And what did you learn it actually is once you were inside the State Department?

LK: I thought it was trying to bring everybody onto the same page through dialogue. That’s what I thought, and that is what it is. But you have a lot of tools at your disposal.
Particularly during most of my career, the U.S. was an admired place. That definitely helped. The fact that we were also interested in development, and that we represented—or tried to represent—moral values and human rights values: those were positives. And the fact that our economy, for a lot of the period, was doing well—it also was interesting to people.
People could partner with us, or sometimes emigrate to the U.S.—all of that. So there were definitely tools. It wasn’t just dialogue, but it was definitely trying to find common ground and showing how what we were interested in for ourselves and for the world had a lot in common with what they might like to do as well—or why they would like to have a relationship with us.

Why economics became central
BW: A lot of your work sits at the intersection of economic policy and on-the-ground diplomacy. When did you realize economics would become central to your toolkit?

LK: That’s another thing I kind of fell into.
The first job I got out of graduate school was not the Foreign Service. I had taken the Foreign Service exam, but they didn’t contact me for a long time. So I ended up with a job in the Economic Research Service at the Agriculture Department—USDA.
They taught me a lot of practical agricultural economics—sort of practical, focused economics. My interest had been more in development, but that’s okay. I had taken some economics courses before, but it became real when I was doing it with the Agriculture Department.
Then when I did get into the State Department, they said, “Oh, well, obviously you have all this economic experience—we’re putting you in the economic specialty.” And I thought, “Well, I’m actually interested in democracy,” but that’s okay—development, that’s okay. I can do this.
And the good thing about the State Department is that when you do economics, there are so many different types of economics—everything from trade and investment to sanctions, development, and work with international organizations—that every tour can be a little bit different. So I found a home there, basically.

Judgment: what it is and how you learn it
BW: People talk about “good judgment” as essential in foreign policy. What does good judgment look like in a role like being an ambassador—and how do you train it rather than just hoping you have it?

LK: I’d never thought about that question.
I guess it gets trained by the mistakes that you make. But good judgment is: you can read the other—whoever you’re working with, either a country or an individual—so that you truly understand where they’re coming from, and where you can find common ground.
And you understand your own government and your own country. So you understand what we’re trying to put out there. And you also understand the limits of what you can do.
Through that sort of informational filter, you can decide how to move forward. There’s room in that for creativity—that’s definitely what you want—and curiosity is also part of what gets you some of the information you need to make a good decision. But you’re also guided by your own moral values.
American moral values—it doesn’t really matter what religion you come from—pretty much Americans all kind of have a similar interest in freedom, however you want to define that, and prosperity, and some basic security for your family, some ability to aspire for better for the future, for your kids. That’s common to everybody. So you build on that.

Honduras: principles vs. pragmatism
BW: When you were Ambassador to Honduras, what was the hardest recurring trade-off you faced between principles and pragmatism?

LK: A realization that you have to deal with people that may have checkered backgrounds.

BW: And once you confront that reality, how do you operate without letting it corrode the mission?

LK: Well, you don’t have much choice. You can’t avoid all the people in the world that you would disagree with—or where the U.S. would have a different view of the person—because you keep in mind the goals you’re trying to achieve.
So in the case of Honduras, for example, their justice system didn’t work. There was a lot of impunity, and a lot of that impunity existed because people with power allowed it to happen—made worse by the flow of drugs through the country.
But if you wanted to have stability in the country, which is something the U.S. also wanted, part of getting there was economic futures for poor people in the country.
And so you talk to the people who were in power, and you try to figure out economic development projects—or election projects, that was another one—that would lead to that goal you were interested in, which was more opportunity for people who were more or less outside the system.

Brazil: working with a global-aspiring power
BW: You also served in senior roles in Brazil. What did that experience teach you about working with a major regional power—something you couldn’t learn in Washington?

LK: Well, you always learn things when you’re overseas. Washington is very Washington-focused. I suppose if I had interviewed 20 people—or even the right three people—I would have gotten it, but countries have very different characteristics.
In Brazil, the people that I dealt with—whether government or not government—didn’t want to be told what to do. Compared to a country like Honduras, where they definitely did want to be told what to do. And I didn’t know that ahead of time. But I learned that.
But the other thing was: Brazil actually aspired to be a global power, not just a regional power. And so there were a whole set of issues—basically all the global issues that we used to deal with the Europeans on—whether it was nonproliferation in Iran, or climate change, or energy production, particularly biofuels in those days.
And so what I learned was: the way to deal with Brazil was to talk about those issues and see where in the world we could work together. And we did that very successfully, actually, in the energy area. And we were starting to do it in a number of other areas too—space and agriculture, and that kind of thing.
You learn a lot from every country you’re in, and every country brings something positive to the table. Brazil brings a lot of positives to the table. And as long as you’re working with them in a constructive way, as opposed to an “I’m going to criticize you” kind of way, you can get very far.
So those were all things I learned being in Brazil.

The hardest parts you don’t anticipate
BW: Looking back across your career in the Foreign Service, what’s been the most challenging part—something you wish you had known earlier, before entering the work?

LK: The world doesn’t stand still. Governments change, including ours.
So you think—you know that line about the arc of justice bending toward the positive. That may be true, but it’s back and forth, right?
And in this Trump era, the policies have changed so dramatically that I never expected there would be an effort to undo as much of what had been U.S. policy for my entire career, basically. And that’s a tough thing.
The other tough thing was: the guy who became president of Honduras, when I was there, ended up being extradited to the U.S. on drug charges. And that’s a tough thing to discover, when you realize this is more than the usual situation.
A third is in the human rights area. The U.S. torture at Abu Ghraib happened when I was in the Dominican Republic. I was the number two in the embassy—the deputy chief of mission—and I basically told my ambassador: it’s going to be a little hard for us to say that we’re promoting human rights when this is what we’re doing.
So those were all challenges.

What makes it worth it
BW: On the flip side, what’s been the most rewarding part of the career? Is there a moment that stands out?

LK: Well, for a long time, the one thing I did in my very first tour was coordinate all the search teams after a major earthquake in Mexico. It was 1985, so at the very beginning of my career. There had been this huge, huge, huge earthquake, and Washington sent down three different types of search teams, and I coordinated all of them as a first-tour officer. And we saved lives.
So that was definitely the single most rewarding thing. But there were many, many rewarding moments—dealing with people, seeing where you could bring the U.S. and people together, making their lives and ours better.
There was a port in one country that wanted to build a very secure port, and helping them do that was another big positive thing. So many areas.

Advice for students: test fit, don’t romanticize
BW: As we close, I want to turn this directly to students. For a smart college student who’s drawn to this life, what should they do in the next six months to test fit—before they start romanticizing a career in the Foreign Service?

LK: First of all, don’t romanticize it. It has its ups and downs.
Certainly the State Department has some internships, but other organizations have internships too—try to apply for some of those. Possibly an international organization, or regional ones.
In my area, which is mostly Latin America, with some China, the Inter-American Development Bank is probably worth pursuing to see what you can do with them. It could be a Washington-based job, but possibly they have other things. Maybe they have something remote where you could get a feel for it.
But definitely going overseas is a good thing to do. So even just studying overseas, and then making contact with different kinds of organizations—I think that would be a way to go.

What to read and where to learn more
BW: For a student who wants to learn the work the way practitioners understand it, what’s a book you recommend—and why?

LK: There’s an author named Nick Kralev. He’s written a couple of books, one of which I’m in, which I don’t have here. I think it’s called Diplomatic Tradecraft.
In that book, he has different chapters on lots of aspects of diplomacy, and they’re written mostly by former U.S. ambassadors, so you can get a really good sense of the advice that all of these former ambassadors give. I wrote the economic chapter.
He has other books that he did beforehand too—one of which I don’t remember the name—but it interviewed a number of ambassadors, and they just talked about their careers.
And the third thing: there’s an organization called ADST—the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. They collect oral histories from ambassadors, mostly ambassadors. You can go on their website, ADST.org, and click around until you find how to get access to their oral histories.

Donald Green’s career, by his own telling, did not follow a straight line. It emerged through what he calls a series of “bumbling steps”: an undergraduate fascination with political philosophy that gave way to empirical research, collaborations that opened new questions, and an eventual realization—years into his career—that randomized field experimentation would become his intellectual home. Looking back, what appears coherent on paper was anything but in real time.
In this conversation, Green reflects on how academic paths actually form: through chance decisions, intellectual curiosity, and the influence of collaborators with sharply different perspectives. He explains what graduate school really demands beyond credentialing, why writing—not teaching—is the core labor of academia, and how randomized experiments transformed political science by testing assumptions that observational data had long treated as fact. Along the way, he discusses moments when his own research overturned his expectations, from voter turnout and education to the limits of persuasion.
The discussion also turns to early-career habits that matter more than raw intelligence—deep reading, intellectual breadth, and a willingness to have one’s ideas challenged—and to the risks of pursuing a collaborative, curiosity-driven research agenda without a fixed plan. Green’s advice is simple but demanding: surround yourself with people who argue forcefully, love the work enough to endure rejection, and remember that careers often make sense only in retrospect.
​
—Donald P. Green is the J.W. Burgess Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a pioneer of randomized field experimentation in political science, with research spanning voter mobilization, persuasion, discrimination, and experimental methodology.

“Bumbling steps,” collaboration, and the real through line
Ben Wolf: Thank you so much for joining me. To begin, if you had to describe your career path as a single problem you’ve been trying to solve, what is it—and what drew you to that problem?

Donald Green: I don’t think there really is a single substantive question. My career path is more like a series of bumbling steps with no particular direction that eventually reached a moment of epiphany—but it wasn’t part of an ex ante plan.
I went to Berkeley for graduate school for no really sensible reason—they didn’t have a foreign language requirement, and my brother was already going to Berkeley. I thought I was going to study political philosophy, and I did study political philosophy, but I ended up making an abrupt turn toward empirical work.
Now I look back and say: I never actually wrote anything in political philosophy. I only wrote—in the guise of being a running dog of empiricism. There have been lots of twists and turns. One constant is that I’ve really enjoyed the social aspects of my profession. It’s fun to learn from other people and collaborate.
The most exciting moments in my career have been learning lessons from scholars with very different backgrounds. To the extent I’d give advice: surround yourself with interesting people who can argue forcefully for a new point of view. Even if you don’t embrace it, you’ll come to grips with it in a way that enriches your intellectual experience.

Graduate school: worth it, and what you’re really signing up for
BW: You mentioned you went to Berkeley for what felt like fairly arbitrary reasons. How do you value graduate school today? It’s incredibly expensive, and it’s time out of the workforce. If someone wants a path similar to yours, what trade-offs should they be considering?

DG: The fact that I went to Berkeley was arbitrary, but the idea that I would go to graduate school hit me as an undergraduate. I was taking canonical pre-law classes and not enjoying the law part very much. But when I interned with the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 1981, I discovered legislative politics—and that was an eye-opener.
The political director said, “Okay, Green, you can do scut work and answer constituency mail, or you can shut up and follow me around all summer and be a fly on the wall.” Of course I chose the latter. When I came back, I realized: this is what I want to do. I love the idea of exploration.
From that point on, I watched professors differently: how do they do what they do? How do they talk?
I went to graduate school straight out of undergrad. I didn’t know anything about anything. I was 21 when I applied—the youngest in my class. Many people I was in graduate school with had worked, done research, or had real jobs outside academia.
In some sense, the fact that I never left academia gives me an odd perspective. But I learned a lot from them. When I studied for tests, I thought the objective was to get an A. It became apparent that was a juvenile undergraduate viewpoint. The real objective is to make an intellectual contribution to a field. When you set your sights on that, you put a different kind of effort into your work—you broaden yourself and deepen yourself. That was important.
When I talk to my own students, I ask them to think hard about whether they really love doing this. It’s one thing to want to do it—you need to love it to get over the parts that are really hard, if not painful.
It’s no fun to have your work rejected and criticized. It happened to me today, and I thought: even after forty-plus years, it still stings when your work is roundly criticized.
And the thing we’re actually doing in academia—though it looks like we’re instructors—is writing. Writing is incredibly difficult to do well. So two things: do you love it, and are you a good writer? Do you love writing? Because it’s hard work.

What experiments can reveal that observation can’t
BW: You helped normalize randomized field experiments in politics. What do experiments reveal that observational data can’t?

DG: The range of things that can be studied experimentally is narrower than what can be studied observationally—partly for practical reasons, partly for ethical reasons.
But if we use observational research designs to study cause and effect, there will always be a residuum of uncertainty. There might be unobserved variables that confound the apparent causal relationship between an intervention and an outcome.
For that reason, political science—and other fields—shifted dramatically toward experiments, or designs that resemble experiments. It’s very hard to build theory on a foundation of “facts” that may not be facts.
Looking back on decades of field experimentation, things that were taken as facts didn’t stand up to scrutiny when subjected to experiments. That applies to mobilization, persuasion, and other policy principles involving costs, frictions, and resources.
It’s not that the theories were stupid. They were smart theories. The question is: did they point people in a productive direction? Often the answer was: not really.
One thing we learned is that theorizing appropriately is much more difficult than it looks—especially given how context-dependent a lot of what we study is.

Early-career habits: what matters beyond raw talent
BW: You mentioned earlier the requirements for entering academia: loving the work, loving writing. If a young scholar has those, what habits matter early on beyond raw intelligence?

DG: Read deeply enough to understand the intellectual pedigree of your field, especially the area you’re studying.
When I think back on my very best students, one thing that distinguished them is they could have a conversation not only with their peers but with people across multiple academic generations. Their reading was wide enough to give them deep perspective.
You could see it in their writing. In the introductions to their papers, they could summon ideas that would be unknown or foreign to many counterparts. So: being a deep and perceptive reader can separate two otherwise equally intelligent people.

A paper that changed his mind
BW: What’s a paper you wrote that changed your thinking—where you went in with an assumption that didn’t survive the research?

DG: It’s a little embarrassing to talk about your own work as changing your mind, but one thing that’s happened is: I’ve gone into an experiment thinking it would come out one way, and it came out the opposite.
A good example is a paper with Rachel Milstein Sondheimer on the effects of education on voter turnout.
There’s a massive cross-sectional correlation in every observational study in the U.S. between educational attainment and voter participation. I thought: that’s got to be spurious. There are lots of reasons to think factors other than education per se might explain the correlation.
So we looked for opportunities to study randomized experiments—or very close to randomized experiments—where there was an exogenous, in some cases truly random intervention that raised educational attainment in the treatment group versus the control group. The question: when they became adults, did the treatment group vote at higher rates?
I thought: no way. But actually, three for three—all showed a turnout effect, which I did not expect. That’s a good example where intuitions go one way, but the facts go another, and it changes your mind.

Career paths that only cohere in retrospect
BW: A lot of people’s careers look linear on paper, but they’ll admit they were lost in real time. When you were trying to figure out your path, what did you look for to stay on track? Did you know, or did it only make sense in retrospect?

DG: In my case, I did not have a clear intellectual agenda at first. One manifestation is that I worked on all sorts of projects on unrelated topics—which I wouldn’t recommend to people on the hunt for tenure. It’s risky. It worked for me, but I wouldn’t generalize from it.
I arrived at Yale in 1989 without a clear set of things I would study—maybe campaigns and elections, maybe public opinion, maybe methods. I worked with a political theorist on a book about rational choice theory, which sent me down a different direction. I wrote a dissertation on self-interest and political and economic behavior.
Then I became increasingly interested in discrimination, prejudice, and hate crime—another direction.
My problem is that I can get interested in almost anything, and I enjoy the social aspects of collaborative work. If the right people come along and invite me into a collaboration, I’ll go in that direction. That’s a risky strategy.
But years later—before I got to New York—I started working on randomized field experimentation. That was in 1998. And once I did that, I realized: that is my calling. That’s what I want to do for the duration of my career. But it wasn’t according to a plan.

What’s interesting now: persuasion and durability
BW: What questions interest you right now?

DG: I’m increasingly interested in whether interventions designed to be persuasive actually work—and when they do, whether they endure.
Beyond that: to what extent is it possible to change people’s minds not only about a specific proposition, but a broader suite of opinions? Is it possible to have a transformative persuasive intervention, as opposed to an aerosol-like effect that wears off quickly?

BW: And what have you found so far?

DG: I’ve done a lot of experiments—in the West and in the Global South. I’ve seen many instances where dramatization—narrative dramas—can change views in a persistent way. But those effects are fairly limited to the specific things modeled in the dramas.
So one question is: is this because my experiments have had insufficient dosage? If I studied how people absorb messages over a longer period of time, with more and more episodes, would I find stronger effects?
And another question: to what extent are pedagogical shows influential in ways that go beyond what we ordinarily appreciate—because our studies aren’t capturing everything people take in? Or is it the case that they’re entertaining and people follow the characters, but at the end of the day they’re not transformed?

Closing book recommendation
BW: Professor Green, I’ve really appreciated your time. I want to close the way I typically close Pathway Blog interviews: for a student interested in following a path similar to yours, what book would you recommend, and why?

DG: That’s a good question. There are so many great books, and it’s hard to pick one. Having just taught a great books course, the problem with reading one is you want to read them in conversation with one another.
In some ways, you want to pick one that will get you fired up—with objections—so you have to reflect on why you disagree. For example, if you want to get riled up, you could read Achen and Bartels’ Democracy for Realists. Not because you’ll be nodding along the entire time, but because you’ll have to reflect on why, and to what extent, you disagree.

Michael O’Hanlon has spent his career asking a deceptively simple question: how should the United States design its military—its budgets, posture, and strategy—for the world it’s actually in, not the one it wishes existed. In our conversation, he traces that “through line” back to a winding start: a physics degree, a Peace Corps stint, a near washout in graduate school, and then a catalytic insight in 1987—when he began imagining what U.S. defense policy might look like after the Cold War.
We also talk about the research habits behind long-form work: how he chooses questions, how a “working hypothesis” evolves as the evidence piles up, and how he decides when a project is done. Along the way, he shares a core argument from his newest book—that “isolationism” is a poor descriptor of American history—and closes with practical advice for students trying to build the concentration and discipline that serious thinking requires.
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-Michael O’Hanlon is the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy and director of research in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, and author of To Dare Mighty Things: U.S. Defense Strategy Since the Revolution (released January 13, 2026).

Career through-line: from physics to strategy
Benjamin Wolf: Dr. O'Hanlon, thank you for joining me. For readers who may be unfamiliar with your career path—your through line—if you had to describe your work in a few sentences, or the main question you’ve been trying to solve throughout your career, what would it be?

Michael E. O’Hanlon: Thanks, Ben. Nice to be with you. I got into the field in the 1980s. I was born in ’61. I went to college; I studied physics. I graduated from Princeton with a physics degree in 1982, but I’d always had an interest in history as well. That was my favorite high school course—AP American History.
I also really enjoyed the January term at Hamilton College, where you had a 3.5-week compressed focus on one subject—one course—and I always did history in that. I’m telling you this because I figured out I really needed to get intense about physics. I transferred from Hamilton to Princeton—Hamilton was good, but small—and I sort of ran out of physics courses.
I still have mixed feelings about leaving Hamilton. I have fond memories, and I still teach once a semester at Colgate, which is really next door in central New York.

Leaving physics—but not science
​MO: At any event: I went off and did the Peace Corps. I needed a break from college. I always knew I wanted to do grad school—there wasn’t really any doubt—but I was a little burned out and a little unsure what to do next. I had this great interest in physics, but I almost mimicked the graduate school experience already in my last two years of undergrad, because the Princeton Physics Department was so good.
We had a lot of interaction with graduate students and fantastic professors, and I was way into it—taking two or three physics and math courses every semester. So I maybe overdid it a little bit.
And I was also unsure. At Princeton, I saw that while I was good at physics, I wasn’t the best. It didn’t cause a crisis of confidence overall, but it made me think: it’s not like I’m God’s gift to physics. It’s not like I have to go out and figure out what’s happening in some nebula someplace because I’ve been empowered with these physics neurons. In a way, I felt liberated not to be the best.
So I went off to the Peace Corps, taught physics, did some additional projects while there. And then I went to graduate school, still unsure what I wanted to do, but I applied to programs in science and public policy. That’s sort of all I knew: I wanted to combine those. I didn’t know how. I didn’t really know what that meant. I didn’t even know what courses that would entail.

Graduate school struggles and a turning point
I did those applications while sitting in my little house in the middle of Congo—way before the internet, when phone service was terrible. My only way of learning about different colleges in the U.S. was through the diplomatic pouch of the State Department and the mail. So I sent for brochures, and at that point—being far away from home—I had a proclivity to want to go back to something familiar. I was a little homesick.
So I went back to Princeton, knowing I was going to change department anyway. I wasn’t going to be in physics. Still not sure what it really meant to do science and policy together. I’m still pretty young at this point—only 23. I come back from the Peace Corps, launch into this program.
I found a group doing arms-control-related research that I really liked—and I liked the people—but the coursework was primarily within the engineering school. That’s where they directed me with this program in science and policy. I was doing just fine with the engineering, but I wasn’t really clear on how to combine that with my interests in policy. And frankly, I struggled.
To only slightly exaggerate—and not bore you with too much of the story—I basically almost failed out of grad school twice. I would have failed out with a master’s degree, so it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. It would have essentially been concluded between me and the faculty that there wasn’t a good Ph.D. path for me, and that I should take the master’s degree and run with it.
That would not have been so bad. But luckily, I kept at it. I had some professors who really helped—took a personal interest in me—and helped me get through these setbacks. By 1987—now I’m three-plus years into grad school—I finally got through the general exam process. By this point I had switched over: not in the engineering school anymore, but to the public policy school—what was then called the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

Imagining the post–Cold War world
MO: Anyway: by 1987, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were starting to get along better. The U.S.-Soviet relationship was improving, and it looked like we might actually see an end to the Cold War. Just to remind folks: the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989—November 9, 1989. So here I am in the summer/fall of 1987.
I see the improvement, and I think I see where it’s headed. But most of Washington and the policymaking elite could not yet conclude there would be any near-term end to the Cold War. There was no way to foresee when it would happen.
So people at places like RAND—and even Brookings—were not yet doing studies on how you might envision a post–Cold War foreign policy, or specifically, in my case, a post–Cold War U.S. defense policy.
So I decided to make that my dissertation. And it was the benefit of being in an academic setting at a policy school, where you were trying to do policy-relevant research—but you had a little more freedom to think long-term than people inside the Beltway.

From dissertation to lifelong research agenda
MO: That was the key insight—the key decision—when I decided to do my dissertation on how to imagine rebuilding a U.S. military and global force posture for a post–Cold War world.
I was off to the races. Ever since then—whatever people think of my work—I’ve been on a consistent path. I haven’t had big doubts about what I was doing or whether I was properly trained for it.
I spent five years on Capitol Hill at the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1994—that’s when the Berlin Wall fell, when the Soviet Union dissolved, and when Operation Desert Storm was conducted to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. A lot was going on. That was a fun time to be on Capitol Hill, but I’ve been at Brookings—on payroll—ever since 1994.
In that period I’ve had the opportunity to learn about a lot more things, to continue my education through research—sort of think of my job as both at the same time. More recently, I’ve done these books on military and defense history, which in many ways are the books I wanted to read when I was back in graduate school.
So the key turning point was 1987—the decision to pursue that dissertation—after struggling through the academic precursors and hurdles. But from roughly ’82 to ’87—ages 21 to 26—I was searching and unsure.

How he researches: choosing questions and testing ideas
BW: You conduct research for Brookings, but with writing your own book, that is, of course, too, a glacial amount of research. What’s your process? Where do you look first? How do you test that it’s going to be a good question to write about—and how do you know when the work is finished?

MO: It’s an excellent question—maybe the most important of all when you’re in this kind of field.
Generally speaking, I’m always kicking around a few ideas in the back of my head—when I’m driving somewhere, or on a long jog—things I might be interested in working on. They’re often topics in the policy debate today, or things I think I should know better than I do.
For example, the book I just published--To Dare Mighty Things—came out this week: a history of U.S. defense strategy ever since the American Revolution. That’s a book where I had curiosity about the subject for a long time. I broached it wanting to learn better—figuring that if I, at this point in my career, still didn’t feel like I had a good understanding of that topic, a lot of other people probably didn’t either, and maybe the book would be useful to them.
My hope was also that I might identify some patterns—some tendencies—in American decision-making, military policy, strategic culture—call it what you will—that we’d be well-advised to understand about ourselves. Because you don’t want to operate on the world stage naïve about who you are as a country and a people, and about how other countries see you. But I think we often are a bit naïve.
That was the motivation. I wanted to do these last two books—about military history and military strategy—for decades. What I really wanted was to read them more than to write them. But writing became almost a double pleasure: it meant I could immerse myself longer and get paid to do it, since that’s what my job allows—as long as the books are relevant and I stay engaged in the near-term policy debate while doing longer-term projects.
So curiosity has to be the number one answer—but curiosity not in some abstract intellectual sense, because I’m not a pure academic, and I’m not a plasma physics researcher studying the Big Bang. I’m doing think tank work a mile from the White House, a mile and a half from Foggy Bottom, four miles from the Pentagon, two miles from Capitol Hill. There’s a reason Brookings is where it is and why I live where I do.
So the curiosity is always in pursuit of a better understanding of American foreign policymaking—with a goal of contributing to future policymaking.
A couple more thoughts. I usually begin not just with an interest in a subject, but with a little bit of a working hypothesis about what I might want to argue. It’s a fine line: you want to stay open-minded about changing your argument as you learn more, and as you do analysis that improves your understanding.
A lot of times, you have to modify the argument as you go. Hopefully I don’t wind up completely turning it upside down—although it’s okay if that happens, because that’s the whole point of research: to understand things people didn’t previously understand. And you might conclude you were wrong—that the answer is 180 degrees from what you expected. That’s okay.
But usually I modify more like 30 or 45 degrees—not 180. I don’t completely change direction. I often come up with a more focused, specific, sometimes more nuanced thesis.
And I like working on subjects where I have some knowledge going in—pretty good knowledge—but also where I’m curious to understand better. If I didn’t know anything about the topic, it probably would not be a good thing to ask Brookings to pay me a couple hundred thousand bucks a year to work on—it would be like going to school, freshman year, and getting paid for it.
So I should work on things where I’m already reasonably conversant with the material. But if I already thought I had the whole thing figured out, I’d probably just write newspaper op-eds and journal articles and push out my message—and wouldn’t need the time and effort of a book research project.
So I’m usually looking for something in the middle: where I’m already knowledgeable, and where I want to learn a lot more.

What history shows: the “restless” United States, then and now
BW: Let me ask more about your new book. You look at U.S. defense strategy since the American Revolution. Were there any trends you found especially fascinating—and does it tell you anything about defense policy today, whether in Latin America, the Middle East, or the Arctic?

MO: Yeah, for sure. The overall argument that I make is that the United States has always been energetic, entrepreneurial, restless, and assertive in foreign policy and military policy.
You’re a lot younger than I am, so you’re closer to high school. I don’t know how American history was taught to you, but my memory is that a large fraction of the literature was people saying: we came to America to get away from all the silly wars in Europe and all the kings and monarchs. We wanted to build a democracy here. We wanted to be left alone. We fought off British oppression, and then we really just wanted to build our own country—and we only got involved in foreign policy when we had to, because in the early twentieth century Europe kept getting involved in big world wars, and Asian powers too, and they needed our help.
And I’ve come to believe that’s not true. That narrative is bunk.
We were never content to be a peaceful, isolationist country. It’s obvious when you think about it: a country that began as a swath of land along the eastern seaboard and then grew to be a continental power from the Atlantic to the Pacific did not do that by just being peaceful. We took land from other people.
Now, yes—we bought the Louisiana Purchase from France, and we bought Alaska from Russia—but even Louisiana Purchase territory needed to be, in our estimation and our ancestors’ estimation, conquered, because there were other people living there at the time. We didn’t develop some Machiavellian master strategy, but we did it incrementally. We pushed Native Americans west, eventually pushed them onto reservations. We always thought we were making a deal where we’d share the land—and then we got hungry for more land.
I don’t write a revisionist history in the sense of an anti-American tirade. If we hadn’t done these things—if we hadn’t taken the Southwest from Mexico in the U.S.-Mexico War of 1846 to 1848—we wouldn’t be this great continental world power that could have helped save the world in World War I and World War II and keep the peace in the Cold War.
So I have mixed views from an ethical perspective on the nineteenth century, but there’s no doubt we were super assertive. The last thing you’d call us, by any fair measure, is isolationist—or peaceful.
I think Americans are a very good people. I think we’ve done a lot of good in the world. But I don’t think we’re peaceful. I think we’re restless—verging on hyperactive—and sometimes looking for a fight. Sometimes not using military force as a last resort.
And in this sense—sort of obvious where I’m going—in this sense, while I’m not a supporter of Donald Trump, and I think he’s a different kind of president than everybody since 1945 (or since 1932 when Roosevelt was elected), I think his restlessness is not uncommon. It’s not unique.
Now: to see it apply to Greenland and ideas like that—that’s bonkers. I think it would be terrible for the world and for our long-term interests if President Trump were really to use military force to take Greenland. In fact, I think he’s already going way too far even to threaten military operations to do so.
But the energy associated with him is, in many ways, typical of our history.
The presidents whose policies, in some cases, foreshadowed what Trump would do—or where you hear echoes—my short list: President Madison with the War of 1812 (a war we probably shouldn’t have fought); President Monroe and the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, claiming more or less U.S. jurisdiction over the entire Western Hemisphere at a time we had basically no navy—so it was a bit of chutzpah, and therefore typically American; President Polk asking Congress for a declaration of war against Mexico and turning a border dispute into a huge military operation, taking Mexico City and holding it hostage in order to make Mexico sell us the land that’s now New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada; then probably McKinley and Roosevelt, building a big navy and beginning to act like a world power.
Those are the five presidents and that time period where you can look back and see precedents for some of what Trump’s doing today. But I don’t want to sound like I’m blessing or condoning what Trump’s up to now, because what might have “worked” back then is not necessarily appropriate for today’s world—and even what we did back then was sometimes ethically very questionable.

Foreign Policy Trends Across Presidencies
BW: You mentioned an expansionist impulse in U.S. foreign policy. Do you see that as something driven mainly by American ideals and institutions—like the Constitution and the structure of the presidency—or by something deeper, like incentives of power and security? And relatedly: if presidents come in with very different instincts—Trump campaigning on avoiding new wars, for example—why does U.S. policy often seem to revert back toward activism anyway?

MO: Expansionism is the word that captures the first half of our history, roughly through the 1890s. The Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890—where Sitting Bull was killed—and that was sort of the end of the wars against Native Americans. It completed the consolidation of the continental United States as we know it today. We had already acquired Alaska from Russia in 1867.
Then we had the Spanish-American War of 1898 where we got Puerto Rico and Guam, and also temporarily involvement in Cuba, and also sort of accidentally and temporarily the Philippines. Then we realized we didn’t really want the Philippines. We didn’t really want to be colonialists. We had reached the natural borders of the country. And everybody after McKinley basically accepted that.
There may have been people who talked about buying Greenland—as Trump would surely say if he were here—but nobody made it a centerpiece of their foreign policy.
So expansionism characterized the first half of our history, and now Trump’s trying to bring it back—and that is a complete break with more than a century of American presidents.

Advice to students: concentration, reading, and protecting the “core hours”
BW: To close, I want to bring this directly back to students. Are there certain habits or skills you developed in undergrad—or other educational pathways—that were particularly formative in your later career, and that you’d recommend students follow?

MO: I’ve never been content with my skill set or my research strategies. I’ve always felt I could be better—always felt I could improve.
Perseverance and putting in the hours is a big part of my strategy, if you will—my recipe.
I think also having some background in science and math, and history, has been good. I don’t call myself a political scientist. I have a lot of qualms about some aspects of American political science—how it’s taught, how it’s conceptualized. I like cleaner, simpler analysis, as you do in physics and math, and as you do in history. Political science is more about inventing concepts that try to explain things. There’s utility to that, but I find it secondary to my research bent and my identity as a scholar.
I try to read a moderate amount, and I try to protect hours in my life. This is not so much a concern for students—students are good at this. Students are often better at this than older adults into our careers, because we wind up getting pulled in a million directions: immediate debates, meetings. Even at think tanks, there are scholars who don’t protect two to four hours a day for research, reading, and writing. But I try to do that.
Sometimes I have to be ruthlessly protective of my time. I don’t do breakfast meetings unless I absolutely have to. I do a little bit of work on the weekend to maintain momentum—not so much that I want to devote the whole weekend to work, but if I’m in the middle of a project, I’ll often devote both weekend mornings to work.
I try to go into the office later in the morning if I can, and do two or three hours of research and writing at home first—especially if I’m in the chunky part of a book project.
So: willingness to be a little tunnel-visioned—stubborn about protecting time for those core skills.
I try to remember when I was a student—when I learned how to concentrate and apply myself—probably starting senior year of high school and all the way through grad school. Again, students are often better at this than older adults.
The ability to work through a lot of literature, read a lot of pages—develop some skimming skills, but also, for some material, read it thoroughly—sit down with it, think about it, let it imprint on the brain. Those skills are important. Finding good books, good authors that become your lodestars—how to think about certain subjects—that’s important. Keep coming back to big ideas and concepts that help you understand a field.
To simplify: science and math have been good; history has been good. They’re matter-of-fact fields that have been good for my brain—teaching me how to think and giving me substantive knowledge and methodology to fall back on. And protecting several hours a day for core research, reading, and writing—that would be my guideline.

Books that shaped him
BW: Finally, Dr. O’Hanlon: what’s a book that influenced your life and your work the most—and why?

MO: It’s a good question. I could give several answers, but you wanted one, so I’ll fall back on something specific.
If you ask me on a different day, I might not give this answer. But I love a history book about the Civil War era by James McPherson called Battle Cry of Freedom. It helped me understand the military parts of the Civil War pretty well—although I did more research on that after reading McPherson, because it’s really more of a societal and cultural and economic and political history leading up to that period.
That period—like a lot of people—I find it fascinating, and obviously excruciating for what it did to the country, but there’s an intrigue about it that’s alluring. McPherson did that—and he was a professor at Princeton when I was there. I’m still kicking myself, but I never took his course. I never even met him. Anyway, it’s a beautiful book. I really, really like it.
And a similar book—I’ll cheat a little bit—is William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, about Nazi Germany. Shirer started as a journalist living in Germany after World War I and saw a lot happen. Again, a complex history weaving together politics, people, culture, society, and military matters—and of course a terrible story in the end.
Those were big-idea books that took on crucial periods and wrestled with what was happening and what might have happened differently if people had made better choices.
So I guess those are a couple that you probably wouldn’t get from most political scientists, because these are pure history books. But that tends to be what I like. History has been on my mind a lot the last five or six years.

Where party ideas come from
Ben Wolf: Let's start with where your work begins. Where do party ideas come from in the first place? And in your framework, who matters most when deciding on an issue—what specific group?
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Hans Noel: I don’t think there’s one specific group, because the whole point of a party is that it’s a coalition of people who want different things. Where it comes from is really: somebody wants something, and they’re not enough people by themselves to form a majority.
So they pressure others—try to persuade them, whatever else—but ultimately they end up allied with others. Either the people who want something initiate that, or people who want to get elected say, “Okay, I need to build a coalition, so I’m going to appeal to these people and these people and these people.” A lot of what a party’s platform is, is about trying to craft that coalition.
Similarly, ideology can be understood in the same way. It’s a slightly different process—it’s not someone consciously trying to win an election—but people trying to think through issues, finding common ground with others. They build that coalition; the more support behind a movement, the more energy it gets.
So in both cases, it’s about: people want whatever they want—personal experience, instincts, gut feelings, whatever. And then as we try to organize that into a large enough group to make a difference, you start accepting some things, rejecting others, compromising, and the rest.

Polarization: what’s underrated, what’s overrated
BW: Polarization gets explained through a lot of buzzwords—social media, tribalism, incentives to be outrageous. From your perspective, what explanation is most true or underrated? And what’s overrated?

HN: Part of the problem is that there are a lot of different things we call polarization. Sometimes we mean people flying out into two extremes—and some of that is happening. But more common, the bigger factors today are:
One is the degree to which partisan alignments are lining up with so many individual identities and ideological differences. It used to be the Republican Party was more ideologically diverse, and the Democratic Party was more ideologically diverse.
So it’s not necessarily that people are more extreme. In fact, on some issues they’re even less extreme than they were in the 1950s or ’60s. But they’re properly sorted into the right parties—and that also is polarization.
And then another thing is the degree to which we hate the other side—this intense feeling that the other side is wrong. Those things are related, but they probably have slightly different causes.
I think one big cause of sorting is the degree to which political parties, as institutions, have been weakened—less able to manage their coalitions—and that role is taken over by more ideologically oriented folks. A political party might like to say, “Let’s bring the temperature down on this issue,” even if it alienates some people. But ideological money and ideological energy often want a more extreme candidate.
So our primaries—which are not fully controlled by the party—allow outside forces to drive that sorting. There’s more to it, but that’s a big factor, especially of late.
And that can feed the tendency to dislike the other side. It’s hard to manage a coalition of your own—you might take a position some people on your team don’t like—but if you can say, “Fine, get over it, because the other side is so much worse,” that helps keep your coalition together. There’s political value in amplifying that dislike.
One thing I don’t think is driving most polarization is simply social media or media polarization. It matters some, but most polarization in the U.S. took off in the early 1990s—way too early for social media to be the driving factor. Social media and silos don’t help, but they’re not the root cause.

Identity politics: not just one side
BW: One idea you hear a lot is “identity politics”—that party ideology now encapsulates more of who someone is, so attacks feel personal. How do you look at identity politics?

HN: First thing to remember is: “identity politics” is often used to describe a certain set of identities, but really a lot of stuff is identity politics.
In a lot of ways, the MAGA movement is identity politics for rural, white, disaffected Americans—who would be the first to say, “We don’t do identity politics”—but it’s about identity. It’s about crafting who they are.
The process by which identity matters for what team you choose is ubiquitous. And it’s not necessarily bad in and of itself. Of course you have identities, and they shape political preferences. It makes sense that you attach to a team in a particular way.
But there is a tendency where identities become so well-sorted into a conservative identity—connected to race, religion, and other aspects of culture—or a liberal identity connected to those aspects, that it becomes harder to understand what people are like on the other side.
There’s a political scientist, Lilliana Mason, whose book is really about how personal identities are becoming aligned in this way. Polarization is richer than just that, but it’s definitely happening and it’s part of what drives identity’s role in polarization.

What “moderate” actually means
BW: How should we think about moderates in modern American politics? Are moderates a coherent ideological group—or just people whose coalitions haven’t demanded hard alignment yet?

HN: “Moderate” is a lot of things. And frankly, so is conservative or liberal—but “moderate” can mean many things.
There’s evidence that people who think of themselves as moderate are very different from one another. I wouldn’t say there’s no such thing as moderate—there’s a “there” there.
Some moderates are genuinely interested in compromise between political positions. If you think of an ideological spectrum from liberal to conservative, some people are in the middle.
But not all moderates are like that. Other people are moderate because they don’t line up very well. They might be conservative on some things and liberal on others, or some weird mix. There’s no reason the liberal–conservative dimension has to be the only dimension that matters. Historically there have been other dimensions, and even today there are potentially cross-cutting dimensions.
And then there’s a degree to which “moderate” is an identity: “I’m a sensible, reasonable person. I’m not an extremist.” You press them on policy positions, and they might look quite liberal or quite conservative compared to everyone else—but they see themselves as reasonable, careful, willing to talk to the other side.
That can be performative; some of it may be self-delusional. But it’s also real for some people.

Studying messy politics without drowning in jargon
BW: How do you study something as messy as ideas and coalitions and polarization without turning it into jargon—especially when those words and many others like them have become common buzzwords?

HN: It is difficult. And to a certain degree, a little bit of jargon is necessary. If we want to talk about what a moderate is, or what a conservative is, we might have to talk about whether there’s an ideological dimension, or dimensional reduction.
Part of the goal is to find ways to talk about those concepts in plain English. But doing the research sometimes means stepping back into a more abstract world—thinking, “Okay, I’m going to think in terms of dimensional reduction.”
People have different opinions on every issue. In principle, you could have any combination of preferences. They’d be all over the place—that’s possible. And yet that’s not what we see. If you tell me your opinion on some issues, it will often predict your opinion on others. So what does that say about the organization of beliefs?
You might study that abstractly—statistically or otherwise—and then come back and translate it into plain English. All scholarship is like that: the more specific you get, the more esoteric language can get. If it’s something important that we want everyone to be able to talk about, you have to translate it into how we all talk.

A view he had to revise
BW: What’s a view you held earlier in your career that you’ve had to revise—and what forced the update?

HN: I hope there are a lot of them.
Early in my career, I had a view like the one I was describing: people have strange positions—why would you organize everything into a clean dimension? Why would you choose a party at all? Why are there only two options? You should be able to do your own thing.
You could look at that and say, “Then this is bad, so I’m going to reject it and study something else.” But social science tries to understand the things that puzzle us. Why would people join parties? Why would parties serve this purpose?
Once you spend time understanding them, you realize: they serve a really important purpose. My thinking about how politics should be done was wrong. It’s wrong to reduce everything to everyone’s position in a high-dimensional space and say that’s all that matters. What matters is that individuals have opinions, and then they form alliances and connect with other people—that’s what a party is. And it’s okay that you disagree with your party on some things.
A more modest change is that for a long time I thought: therefore a two-party system is fine; we’ll have to live with it. We do have to accept the system we have—but I’m increasingly concerned about the ability of a two-party system to properly reflect American opinions.
I think it would be important to find ways to develop a true multiparty democracy—or, short of that, better ways to understand intra-party factions. Slicing things more finely is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

The future of parties, coalitions, and ideologies
BW: Where do you see the future of parties, coalitions and ideologies in America?

HN: The need to form alliances and build coalitions is never going to go away. People who embrace it and do it will succeed; people who try to outrun it or be purist and refuse internal compromise will eventually not succeed.
We’re in a place where a lot of people are uncomfortable organizing with others or compromising with their own team. They want to prove they’re not polarized—so they want to show they disagree with Democrats and Republicans: “Look, I’m sensible.”
That impulse isn’t going away. So we’ll see push and pull around it. And the consequence is: there will be actors who can exploit those frictions.
In a lot of ways, Donald Trump has done exactly that—differing with the Republican Party in useful ways, while still saying, “The other side is worse,” so people stay with him. Parties have to think: what kind of umbrella do we want, and do we want to let it be controlled by someone exploiting things this way? That’s a tension.
But whatever happens, politics will still be different people finding alliances—maybe changing alliances—trying to find ways for their team to succeed.

Teaching at Georgetown and seeing politics up close
BW: Alongside your research and writing, you’re also a professor at Georgetown. How has teaching students—and being around that student culture—affected your work?

HN: Being here is exciting and interesting. We’re in the capital—people come give talks, we have access to so many folks. And as a consequence, we also have so many students and faculty who are interested in these things.
The classroom is full of people who, if not understanding politics better than I do, certainly have experiences I don’t have. They disagree with each other.
So it shapes how I see things. And what I’m heartened by is that while there’s real ideological disagreement—more students on the left than the right, but still a lot of disagreement—there’s also appreciation that disagreement exists, and that we want to talk across it.
I taught a class a few years ago with the president of the College Republicans in the room, and also very progressive students involved in College Democrats. There was disagreement, but people could talk, have a conversation, and work beyond it—partly because of the university environment.
You can’t port that environment everywhere. Once people go into the real world, there’s different conflict. But it’s heartening to know that given the opportunity, people can talk to people they disagree with.

Advice: staying engaged without becoming cynical
BW: For students who want to understand American politics without becoming cynical—what should they train themselves to notice?

HN: There’s probably some value in a little bit of cynicism, or at least realism. Nothing works perfectly. There is no ideal world where everyone is doing what you want and no one is corrupted in any way. That’s humans—that’s life.
You can still be enthusiastic and sincere, and really believe in what you believe, while recognizing that most people—including yourself—have limits. You’ll have bias; you’ll be tempted to win quickly rather than build long-term relationships. And that’s okay—because that’s part of how politics works.
So I’d embrace the need to build coalitions, and the need to be practical, but not let that get in the way of also trying to be idealistic—having high-end goals that aren’t just cynical directions.
Being realistic and accepting that you’re never going to live in a world where everything is perfect and pretty is actually liberating.

What the most successful students tend to have
BW: Over your years teaching, what’s the most common skill you see among the most successful students—and why that skill?

HN: I’ll mention two—one specific and one general.
The specific skill is quantitative and statistical methods—research methods. Having concrete statistical analysis skills can be really useful for getting your foot in the door. It’s not something everybody seeks out, but it’s valuable. And it changes the way you think—not just a job skill.
More broadly, the successful people tend to have a passion for what they want to do, and a willingness to try things—go places, take risks. And some patience: maybe you go to law school first; maybe you volunteer and then get additional training. Keep the goal in mind.
The people who seem happiest now are people who continue trying to do good in the world—whether it’s good for an abstract cause, or for themselves or their families—but they’re still motivated. That comes back again and again.

Book recommendation
BW: Finally, as is customary with The Pathway Blog: if someone wants to follow your work, what book would you recommend—and why? Or what’s a book that has most impacted your life?

HN: There are so many books that have been impactful.
If you want my work: my most recent book is a thin book on presidential coalitions. I also have a textbook with Seth Masket on political parties—nice and comprehensive. And then there are bits and pieces in various places.
But instead, I’ll recommend one influential book I return to. I just finished reading again, for an undergraduate seminar, John Aldrich’s Why Parties? It continues to be a really useful framework for why politics takes the shape it does. My students had a great discussion of it, so I’d recommend it to others as well.

The through line
Ben Wolf: Could you start us off with the through line of your career? Has there been a consistent question you’ve tried to answer—and what led you to it?
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Mara Karlin: It’s a real treat to be here, Ben. Thanks for having me. I guess the through line has always been curiosity—figuring out why things are as they are.
I showed up at Tulane as a political science major, and political science majors are kind of told we should go to law school. So that was the plan, obviously. And then I studied abroad—I did two incredible programs. I was on Semester at Sea and then in Jerusalem. And while I was there in ’99–2000, there was this vision a lot of folks had building of what the Middle East was going to look like—prosperous, peaceful.
Then I came back to school for senior year, and that all melted. And I wanted to understand why, and what had occurred. Trying to understand those questions is what took me into a career focused more on security issues—because it seemed to me that a lack of security, by a variety of parties, is what propelled the region into further and further violence.
So: trying to understand why things are the way they are, and then how to reshape them.

Washington, defense, and the Pentagon
BW: What was the first step after college—what took you from that question into a career?

MK: After convincing my parents I wasn’t going right to law school—and spoiler alert, never made it—it was trying to understand the different visions folks across the Middle East had of what the region could be, and the role of U.S. policy.
The United States is a really big actor—politically, economically, and above all on security issues—in shaping that region, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in less good ways. So I came to Washington, D.C., the hub of U.S. policymaking, to try to understand that.
Not long after getting here, I realized defense issues were where I wanted to focus. While I was in grad school at Johns Hopkins, I started interning in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. People picture a handful of folks outside the Secretary’s office—that’s not accurate. It’s thousands and thousands of people.
I was responsible for shaping policy ideas the United States would take toward the Levant—Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel—issues involving the Palestinians. And I just thought it was the neatest thing. The U.S. comes with a lot of resources and energy, and I was intrigued to figure out how to more positively influence all that.
So when I finished grad school, I went to the Pentagon full-time. I’ve since been in and out of there, working for six Secretaries of Defense across Republican and Democratic administrations. And I also learned there’s a world beyond the Middle East and ended up covering a wide variety of topics.

Working across administrations
BW: You’ve worked across different administrations and political parties. How did that affect your work?

MK: There are two ways civilians serve in the Pentagon. One is as a career civil servant—you’re there no matter who is in office. The other is as a political appointee—you’re appointed by the president and you’re there until the president is done with you or finishes the term.
I’ve served in both roles. I was a career civil servant in the Bush administration, and then a political appointee in the Obama and Biden administrations.
Frankly, the execution of the roles is more similar than not. It’s helping formulate a vision of the U.S. approach to the world and to defense and security issues—and trying to realize that vision in line with what leadership is trying to achieve: the Secretary of Defense, the Commander in Chief, the President.

What two decades of war left behind
BW: You’ve written about what America’s military inherits after two decades of war. What do civilians most consistently misunderstand about how Iraq and Afghanistan changed U.S. institutions—what habits stuck, and what capabilities quietly went away?

MK: My second book looks at what the military inherited from being at war for the longest time in American history—twenty years. That’s astonishingly long. It’s probably around the age of many of your listeners.
What I find so interesting talking to your generation is: for you, this is ambient noise. You’re used to an America always at war, which is not the case at all for folks like me who grew up in the ’90s, or the generation before me.
One thing that has come out of these wars is a real gap between the American public and the military. The military slogged through these conflicts for twenty years, and most of the public didn’t pay much attention. It didn’t need to—nothing was really asked of the public, and only one-half of one percent of the public serves in the military anyway.
It’s easy to grow up not thinking much about these issues, even though they profoundly affect those who serve and America’s role in the world.
I also talk about how the character of these conflicts was fundamentally inconclusive at best. That’s often how it works when you’re fighting insurgents or terrorists—especially absent an existential threat, which characterized most of this period. That was hard for a lot of the military: “What am I achieving? What am I doing?”
What was unique about the post–9/11 wars is you saw people deployed to the same places over and over, across the twenty-year stretch. They could see the effects they were having—and often the effects they were not having.
Operationally, the U.S. military is hands down the best military in the history of humanity. Period. Most capable. And yet at the strategic level, it hasn’t been successful at some major things it tried to accomplish. Wrestling with that is something the military needs to do—and the American public should as well.

The “secret sauce” behind U.S. military capability
BW: People often can agree that the U.S. military is among the most capable in the world. This may seem naïve to ask, but what exactly has allowed it to be that way? Is it merely spending and strategy, or is there something more to it?

MK: Superb question. The U.S. defense budget is around a trillion or so dollars. But I don’t think it’s the exact number that’s determinative of operational success. How you spend it matters a lot.
And who serves in your military—sometimes a less glamorous topic than the cool tech—is the secret sauce. The U.S. military brings together extraordinary Americans from across the entire country, and operates in a system where people are empowered to figure out the best way to solve a problem, and then do so.
This is worth watching because there’s a lot of attention on what the military buys, and less attention on who serves and who chooses to serve. It’s worth focusing now because we’re seeing notable changes—particularly with the Trump administration pushing out senior women, senior people of color, and senior military lawyers, who help ensure the military is professional and follows the law—which is one of the most important things you can ask of your military.

BW: How do you think that affects capabilities?

MK: It affects unit cohesion. If you can’t totally trust and feel comfortable with the folks next to you in conflict, and if you can’t pull from all demographics across the country, you’re going to be less effective.
There’s a great book by a friend of mine, Kori Schake, on civil-military relations. She has a section about efforts to integrate African American men into the U.S. military. Senior military leadership pushed hard against it, even when mandated by civilian leadership. It wasn’t until the Korean War heated up that they realized: we need more capable people—and there are a whole lot of capable Americans who want to serve, who weren’t given equal opportunity.
So we know there’s a relationship between who serves and the efficacy of the military. And right now that’s up in the air in a not-great way.

Deterrence: what it really requires
BW: My generation is very used to the U.S. being at war, but lately another word has been repeated constantly: deterrence. People use it almost like a mantra. In practice, what does deterrence require during peacetime? And what does it cost beyond money?

MK: Deterrence is saying to someone: don’t do this thing. Don’t do it because if you try, you won’t be successful—or if you try, we’ll respond so harshly you’ll feel a lot of pain.
What’s interesting is that for a lot of the post–9/11 wars, deterrence wasn’t the dominant concept. Trying to deter violent non-state actors like al-Qaeda or ISIS doesn’t really work. Deterrence is more about state actors. So the concept went into a bin, and it has resurged as Russia and China and Iran and North Korea have gotten sportier.
For effective deterrence, first, you have to tailor it to who you’re trying to deter. The things that convince you not to act are different from what convinces me. You’ve got to understand: who am I trying to shape, and how?
Second, you need a feedback loop. Have they picked up on the fact that I’m trying to deter them? Is it working?
A simple analogy: if a teacher is trying to deter cheating, they might use major punishments so you don’t want to fail the class. Or they try to make it impossible—blocking internet access on the exam. You tailor it to the person and context.
A real-world example: after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, there was a massive effort across Europe involving the U.S. to deter Putin from attacking NATO territory. That included surging U.S. troops, joint exercises, harsh language, and around fifty countries sending military aid to Ukraine.
The message was: don’t cross this line. If you do, we’ll respond—and we’ll also counter you aggressively in the place you invaded.

Credibility: capability and will
BW: A word that goes with deterrence is credibility. How do you think about credibility—what makes adversaries believe we’ll act, and what erodes that belief?

MK: To deter effectively, you need capabilities and you need will. You can have the most extraordinary military in the world, but if you never show willingness to use it under problematic circumstances, people won’t fear it.
There were long stretches where the U.S. would park carrier strike groups in the Middle East and not really do anything. Some would say they were there to deter—but they were just sitting there. Over time they became almost like a sunk cost.
Credibility means being clear about what you are willing to do and not willing to do—and then being willing to actually do those things. Not just make threats, but make them real. Sometimes it’s in your interest to be fuzzy for this reason.
This is particularly interesting right now as we examine the Trump administration. Over the last few weeks there were massive protests in Iran, and President Trump tweeted about “help” being on the way. The regime massacred a huge number of people—we don’t know the exact number, but rumors go as high as 20,000. And despite signaling he might use force, he hasn’t yet.
I’m not necessarily advocating that he should, but he put American credibility on the line by signaling and then not acting. That affects whether people go back into the streets, and what they believe will happen.
And what happens in one place is watched elsewhere. If you’re sitting in the Indo-Pacific, you’re watching how the U.S. responds in the Middle East and wondering what it would look like if China starts to bully others—what the U.S. might threaten and what it might actually do.
I’d add one more piece: President Trump did use the military to strike Iran over the summer, so his threats had a different level of credibility than previous presidents’ threats. That’s part of what has shaken people—there was an assumption there was real credibility, and now it’s unclear. The U.S. has sent at least one carrier strike group to the Middle East, arriving later this week. So it’s not impossible this issue isn’t over. If it is, it will hit U.S. credibility in a problematic way.

Analysts vs. deciders
BW: As we wrap up: what distinguishes people who move into real decision-making roles from those who remain permanent analysts? What do the deciders do differently day to day?

MK: Both groups ingest massive amounts of information, synthesize it, and pick out what’s significant.
The difference is: deciders have to accept they’re choosing among bad, awful, and catastrophic options. They have to pro-con those and make a call.
In international security and foreign policy, it’s rare you get butterflies and unicorns as options. You get a rumble in your belly, and you still have to choose. You accept there will be problems with whatever you recommend, and yet you believe—with the information you have at that moment—it’s the best among those options.

Depth vs. breadth in college
BW: Students hear “learn as much as possible” and equate that with breadth. Others worry committing to a region or issue too early will lock them in. How do you weigh studying something specific versus broad?

MK: Isaiah Berlin has this great piece about the fox and the hedgehog, and it argues both sides. There’s no right answer.
The best response is “yes, and.” Get smart on something—and build breadth.
Even if you never end up working on the topic you went deep on, learning a subject inside and out equips you to learn other topics. You know what questions to ask. You know what you don’t know. Find the thing you’re interested in, get really smart on it, and be comfortable looking around.
Also focus on skills: taking in a lot of information, synthesizing it, deciding what matters--not for large language models, but for you. Learn to communicate orally and in writing. You’re conveying complex topics to busy people. Taking something complicated and conveying it in three pages or three minutes is tremendously important.

The least-discussed cost—and the best part
BW: What’s the least-discussed cost of working in national security, personally or professionally? What do you wish more young people understood before jumping in?

MK: It is an all-consuming field. People ask about work-life balance, and I have no good answer—particularly in public service—because foreign affairs are unpredictable. Something is always happening somewhere, often things you didn’t predict or prepare for.
In the Pentagon, it can become all-consuming. You make plans and something pops up and becomes your sole focus. Figuring out how to operate in that space in a healthy way is really important.

BW: And what’s been your favorite part?

MK: Security issues are fundamental to every human being—whether you’re in New Orleans thinking about personal security, whether you’re a refugee returning to Syria after a decade and a half of civil war, whether you’re a foreign leader fighting an insurgency, or a state worried another state is trying to eat up your country. So much comes down to security.
What I’ve always found fascinating is how one can relate to it no matter where you’re sitting. And serving in government is an extraordinary honor. You’re responsible for protecting the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans, and hopefully putting the world on a safer, more prosperous path.

A book to follow the path
BW: If there’s one piece of literature you’d recommend to someone interested in a pathway similar to yours, what would it be?

MK: The title is clunky, but it’s totally worthwhile: Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It’s about paradigm shifts—when we’re in one, what to do, and how to picture the future.
That’s relevant because your generation is graduating into a very different world than five or ten years ago. Post–World War II there was a relatively stable political, security, and economic order for about eighty years. It wasn’t pristine and it wasn’t for everyone, but it was remarkably prosperous and secure. That’s not where we are now. Things are shifting, and it’ll be incumbent on you to help figure out what the new paradigm looks like—and to shape it.

BW: Dr. Karlin, thank you so much for joining me. It’s been a real honor.

MK: My pleasure. Best of luck.

A lot of political arguments aren’t really arguments—they’re translations. The same word can land as a warning to one audience and a promise to another. In this conversation, Professor Desh Girod of Georgetown helps explain why: how people come to hear authority, hierarchy, and “democracy” through different historical and emotional logics—and why that gap has become one of the defining problems of American politics.
We start with the experiences that shaped his career: an early fascination with cities and policy, a formative master’s program at Trinity College Dublin during the 2000–2001 political moment, and the realization that research and writing were a way to think honestly about power. From there, Girod traces a through-line from growing up in Puerto Rico and asking “who gets to decide?” to his work on foreign aid and post-conflict reconstruction, and finally to White Democracy, his project on why authoritarian language can register as democratic renewal.
Along the way, he offers unusually grounded advice for students: worry less about “the perfect plan,” read deeply instead of skimming, protect “quiet mind” time, and treat writing as a craft that carries across careers—even in a world increasingly built for distraction.

—Desh Girod is an Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Social Justice

Origins: The Problem That Pulled Him In
Ben Wolf: To start at the beginning: what problem were you trying to solve—be it intellectually or morally—when you first got into political science? And what early experiences made you interested in that problem?

Desh Girod: My interest in political science as a field really emerged when I was doing a master’s degree at Trinity College Dublin. I had long been interested in policy, and as an undergrad I interned at the mayor’s office in Philadelphia—that was formative. I got curious about how you make cities work: how diverse dynamics can translate into creativity and quality of life across the board.
I was fascinated by cities—how different places handle different challenges. I went to Trinity in part because I was interested in their coverage of conflict resolution and mediation, thinking it would be useful for city-level policy work. But while I was there, world politics was everywhere.
This was 2000–2001—during the Bush v. Gore election. In Ireland, there were questions being asked about the United States and its international role that weren’t being asked in the U.S., and that was striking. I was in Ireland just before 9/11; I came back to the United States after my master’s, and suddenly the U.S. was thrust into world politics in a way I hadn’t experienced in my lifetime.
Having been in Ireland, I had been thinking deeply about world politics. I knew I wanted to go into political science as a career. On one hand, I thought it would make me a better policymaker—knowing what scholars know, going in with that background. But I also got really interested in writing and research through the master’s program.
I remember hearing someone say: if you’re spending your Friday nights in the library and you find yourself excited—reading, writing—then you have the makings of a scholar. I paid attention to how much I loved putting thoughts on paper.
One of my advisors told me: if you don’t do a PhD now, you might not do it later—once you’re in your 30s with a mortgage and other obligations, it’s hard to return. She encouraged me to apply sooner rather than later, and I got into Stanford. I was very excited to be there, and my interests unfolded from that.
But really, it was those experiences—being an undergrad in the mayor’s office, then Ireland and Europe—real life experiences linked to what I was learning in the classroom. That combination of life experience and theory set me on this path.

Advice: Skills, Anxiety, and “Trusting the Present”
BW: I do want to ask more about the work you did then and are doing now. But I’m also curious—looking at your career and educational trajectory, was there something you would change? Or something you wish someone had told you earlier?

DG: If I could go back to past me, one thing I’m glad I did was stick with political science as a major. A lot of people told me: unless you want to be a lawyer, political science won’t translate into a job.
But one of my early advisors told me to pick a major based on substance and where I would have the best professors—people who would challenge me to write well, speak well, and think critically and analytically. So I didn’t worry too much about whether it translated directly into a job.
Over my lifetime I’ve seen stress increase among undergraduates—this pressure to choose majors with an obvious practical emphasis. But I still think it’s true: if you develop the skills to think, write, speak, and present, they carry you across many different jobs—especially as the world changes.
In terms of what I’d do differently: nothing jumps to mind. But generally, I wish I worried less about what the future would look like. I wish I had more confidence that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing in that moment—that there wasn’t some predefined path, and I wasn’t behind.
I say that because I didn’t have a master plan. I stumbled into the idea of a PhD. I can’t think of anyone in my family with a PhD—certainly no professors—so I didn’t grow up with that as an option. Being open to possibilities made it an option.
So I’d tell myself: trust your instincts in the present, and carry less anxiety about the future. Of course, everyone’s situation is different. I was privileged at every step—full scholarships as an undergrad, funded PhD programs—so there were structural factors that made it easier to be at peace. But I still wish I’d worried less.

Puerto Rico, Agency, and the Aid System
BW: That’s very insightful, thank you. You’ve described growing up in Puerto Rico as formative. How did that vantage point shape your instincts about power, legitimacy, and the question of who gets to decide?

DG: That’s a sharp—and perceptive—question. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Over a lifetime, you peel back layers and keep relearning what you thought you knew about yourself.
Growing up in Puerto Rico, I was always interested in the relationship with the United States and the inequality between states. Puerto Ricans are born into American citizenship, but you don’t have all the same rights of citizenship as someone born in Pennsylvania. Becoming aware of that at a young age got me interested in agency—who gets to decide.
I had questions about the decision-making power the United States has over policies that affect everyday life in Puerto Rico. Those questions stayed with me.
I got interested in foreign aid in part because I was curious why outcomes differ—why the U.S. invests more aid in some contexts than others. During my PhD, the U.S. had intervened in Iraq and Afghanistan, and massive state-building operations were unfolding. I would hear policymakers and think tanks talk about “looking for the local will to reform,” and it always sounded patronizing—and odd—like some people want reform and some don’t.
It struck me that we needed to understand incentives: the structures and pressures people are under. In other words, if it were me in that situation—if it were any of us—we might choose the same things under the same pressures. That intuition informed my book: trying to understand the structures that incentivize the use of aid in one way versus another.
I did fieldwork and talked to people about reconstruction processes in places like Uganda and Mozambique. But after working on aid for so long, I became frustrated—with the system and with the narrow question of “how do we make aid work better?”
I started asking: why this aid system at all? Where does it come from? Why do we invest so much thinking in aid when results are often weak—and when aid is a small proportion of overall financial flows?
That pushed me toward bigger-picture questions—looking at countries not only in terms of where they sit in an international structure, but how they arrived where they are historically. You can see imperial dynamics repeating: imperial powers justified their projects with discourses similar to those used for foreign aid and development today. Different nouns, same logic.
So I’ve become interested in how much of the present is a repetition of that history, even if it looks slightly different. And it’s all rooted in that early experience: seeing the United States through the prism of Puerto Rico.

White Democracy: When “Dictator” Sounds Like “Restoration”
BW: You touched on it just now, but in White Democracy you’re asking why authoritarian language can land as “democratic restoration.” What’s the simplest way to explain that paradox to a reader who hasn’t spent years inside the literature?

DG: You probably remember during the presidential campaign, when Donald Trump used the language of being a “dictator for a day”—or “dictator on day one.”
For a lot of people—on the left, in progressive circles, on the coasts—it sounded like he was saying the quiet part out loud, and that it would be bad for him politically. “Dictatorship” has a negative resonance for much of U.S. history.
But if you look at reporting that day—people interviewed at rallies—you heard responses like: “Maybe this is exactly what the country needs.” “We need it to restore democracy.” One person described it like a parent cleaning up a mess.
There’s a sense among many supporters that the system is unfair, that it’s a mess—that the deep state and corruption are real—and that something hierarchical might be required to restore democracy. So you hear the same words, and they mean completely different things. For one audience, it’s a threat to democracy; for the other, it’s a savior of democracy.
That’s fascinating to me. How do we hear the same words so differently? That’s what I’m writing about in the book.

Teaching: Fresh Questions and Global Classrooms
BW: Alongside that research and writing, you’re also a professor. How has being around younger students—who ask you questions about your work—shaped your process? What have you learned from your students?

DG: I learn from students all the time—especially as I’ve gotten older and seen multiple generations of students. Students ask good questions. As professors, we can lose track of the big picture; students coming fresh to the material often ask the most important questions.
It’s invigorating. And at Georgetown, we have students from all over the world, so I’m constantly learning about different politics through their experiences.
It’s a mix of seeing students encounter ideas for the first time and hearing how their life experiences shape their relationship to those ideas. And Georgetown students tend to be deeply engaged—they read, they come prepared, they want to engage. It’s been a privilege to spend my career here with such students.
Sometimes I also build courses around literature I’ve been wanting to read, so I’m reading it with the students. That’s a great process of continued learning and staying on top of the material—you want to deliver the best every time.

Student Success: Reading, “Deep Time,” and Distraction
BW: To close—since you’ve seen many students go on to work or further study—what skills and habits do the most successful students tend to have? And what downfalls do you see most often?

DG: I can’t say enough about the value of reading—books, essays, periodicals like The Atlantic and The New Yorker. It’s accessing incredible minds. In a way, it’s like what you’re doing with The Pathway Blog: talking with one amazing mind after another as you move through texts.
Developing the habit of reading—whatever ideas you’re interested in—keeps your mind rich and makes the world more interesting.
A lot of students move through material quickly now. AI can summarize things; historically, Cliff Notes were always a thing. But you miss so much. Making time to read is powerful.
And it’s also about focus. It’s almost cliché, but distractibility is a huge challenge—being so connected to phones, constant stimulation. I worry we lose track of the big picture and make less well-informed decisions because we know ourselves less. Time that could be spent thinking, reading, reflecting becomes time scrolling and absorbing everyone else’s life.
I can’t emphasize enough what I’ve derived from walking, thinking, reading—deep time of the mind, with a quiet mind. That sets you up to do many things with more self-understanding and confidence.

Reading Recommendations: Du Bois, Historians, and Getting Outside the Journals
BW: Professor, I’m really grateful for your time. I like to close Pathway conversations by asking: for someone interested in following your work—or a book that influenced you—what would you recommend?

DG: Hard to name a single one.
In a way, I stumbled too late in my career onto the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois. I learn something new every time I read him—his work, his life, the context of his writing. There are similarities to challenges we’re facing now. Everything I’ve read by Du Bois has been extraordinary for me—personally and intellectually.
I’ve also been reading a lot of historians, which has helped my work tremendously. Stepping away from constantly keeping up with mainstream political science journals and engaging other disciplines has been valuable.
That’s how I ended up reading Du Bois, but also historians like Quinn Slobodian--Globalists is a powerful book for understanding neoliberal ideas: where they came from, who held them, how they were contested, and how they became so resonant that we now hold them without thinking.
And of course Heather Cox Richardson—her books are revealing, not just intellectually but culturally, for understanding what it is to be an American. When I read her, I find myself asking questions I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
I also love Daniel Immerwahr’s work--Thinking Small, on community development programs and how they relate to modernization ideas in foreign aid, and How to Hide an Empire, which goes from Puerto Rico to the early expansion of the United States. There’s a lot of creative work that’s been inspiring and helpful.

The Problem: A Parliament That Can Govern
Benjamin Wolf: Daniel, I want to start off by asking: for readers meeting you for the first time, what’s the core problem you’ve spent your career trying to solve—and what made it feel worth committing to?

Daniel Schuman: For the last 20 years, I’ve been focused on: how do you build a strong and effective parliament in our political system? What put me down this path is that I’m interested in how systems work. And one of the most interesting and pivotal institutions in the world is the United States Congress—so that’s why I focus there.

BW: When you say you’re interested in how systems work, what do you mean? Like how they get things done?

DS: Congress is the place that—at least in theory—people can come together and solve their problems in a nonviolent way. And of course, the United States has been the pivotal nation of the world. Decisions we make here don’t just affect people inside the United States; they affect people around the world.
There are lots of different ways that power gets concentrated. You can have corporate power, political power, economic power, oligarchical power. But Congress is the institution we created that is a counterweight—or at least can be a counterweight—to these things.
And the rules it creates change the incentives for all the other actors, right? It gets to change the landscape. That’s very interesting.
But it doesn’t work all that well—or it doesn’t seem to be working all that well. And it’s gotten markedly worse in the last 10 or 15 years. So I’ve been very interested in that problem. That’s where I’ve been spending my time.

BW: Where do you see the future of governmental—maybe not efficiency, but efficacy—actually working, in your terms?

DS: Yeah, and it’s not necessarily efficiency. That is a useful value. It’s really sort of the legitimizing of the exercise of power, right?
Congress and politics is about power—how it works and who it benefits. And I’m having a really hard time these days seeing a positive outcome from all this work.
I see a pathway to make things better. The pathway is becoming narrower and narrower. But that is where I focus my life’s work—just to try to get us to go down the right path to fix things.

BW: And what is that path?

DS: At this point, it’s allowing multiple factions to be able to operate inside the legislative branch—so you don’t have two different teams fighting with one another—and it’s having the vast majority of the players committed to democracy and rule of law, to countering the power grabs we see in the executive branch, the courts, and elsewhere.

A Technical Fix That Became a Cultural Change
BW: Was there a specific experience—inside an institution or watching from the outside—when you realized your earlier assumptions about how change happens in Washington were incomplete?

DS: Oh, yeah.
I came to Washington in 2001. My first day on Capitol Hill was 9/11. And I’ve been on and around Congress for maybe—by that point—about 10 years.
Around 2010, I was working at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit focused on government transparency. We had been fighting to get the Library of Congress to publish data about legislation online.
Since the mid-’90s, there was a tool called THOMAS—a website where you could see bills being considered—but it didn’t work very well. Links would break after five minutes. It didn’t publish information in a way that other people could reuse. So if you wanted to analyze legislation, if you wanted to track what was going on, you were using this really bad information source.
And THOMAS at the time was essential for journalists, for civil society—it helped collapse the difference in power between those who are very wealthy and well connected, who could find out what was going on, and the vast majority of people who could not.
We had been pushing and pushing and pushing for the Library of Congress to publish this information online as structured data, and they just would not do it. We’d been fighting that fight for 15 years and they were not going to give in.
We found legislative allies, and we had a memo that was being offered—an appropriations bill—by Darrell Issa, who was (and still is) a congressman from California. He was chair of the House Oversight Committee.
Republican leadership said to him: don’t do this. If you do this, it’s going to create all sorts of problems for us. They really twisted his arm on behalf of the Library, which did not want this information to be available in a useful way.
They came up with a compromise: they would create a committee to study the issue—the Bulk Data Task Force. The idea was the issue would go there and quietly be killed. At least that was the idea on the part of Republican leadership.
They pulled together people from the House, the Senate, support offices, support agencies—to figure out whether this information should be made publicly available as structured data.
What they did inadvertently was bring together all the technologists from these different places—people who care about making things work right—people who didn’t know each other. They got to know each other through this task force: leadership, committees, personal offices, support offices and agencies.
I brought a group of folks and we testified before them. They agreed with us. And they ultimately directed the Library to publish the information.
But that wasn’t the thing that was interesting.
What was interesting is: they kept meeting. They have been having quarterly meetings with the public for the last 16 years now. They have become a driver of modernization in the legislative branch.
We aimed for a technical fix—publish this data in this format. And what we got was a cultural change: bringing together people created a different attitude, a different way of relating, and a different focus.
This is not to say we’ve solved all of our problems—because we haven’t. But what I was aiming for was not the right thing. We stumbled into it, and that thing continues to transform the way Congress works.

September 11 and the Anthrax Letters
BW: You mentioned your first day in Washington was on 9/11. Can you tell me a little bit about what that experience was like?

DS: Yeah—so 2001 was a really tough year for me. My grandfather passed. My father had open-heart surgery. So I came to D.C. in September of 2001 instead of earlier when I had intended.
It’s difficult to explain how different things were then. There was a job announcement bulletin that was published on paper once a week. And one of the ways you could look for jobs was—you’d go and knock on doors.
So I did that. I went and knocked on doors. I met with my two senatorial offices, my member of the House, and other people as well—committees—asking: are you looking for anyone? Do you need anybody right now?
One of the places I looked was with one of my two senators, Joe Lieberman, who was a Democrat at the time. I had gone to interview for an internship, and that interview was on 9/11.
So I came into the— I think it was the Hart Building, or the Dirksen Building. I don’t remember anymore.
I’m staying in an unfurnished apartment in Georgetown. The only furniture I have is a blow-up air mattress and my clothes. I take the D6 bus from Georgetown to Union Station. I get off at Union Station, and I’m walking to the Senate.
I’m getting close to the building, and I start seeing everybody running the other way. It’s 9:30 in the morning. My interview’s at 10. And the World Trade Center was hit at 8-something. The Pentagon was hit a little bit later than that—so it had been hit as well.
People were running out of the buildings. And I’m getting closer—and I can pick up on a hint—this is clearly not right.
I ask a police officer what’s happening. He says the World Trade Center was hit, the State Department was blown up—which of course was not true, but it’s the fog of war, so you don’t know. And everything’s locked down.
And I said: it looks like I should get the hell out of here. He’s like, yeah. And that’s what I did.
I first tried going to Union Station, which was closed. I ended up walking back to Georgetown.
I came back the next week, had my interview, got the internship. I was there for five weeks or four weeks—and then it was the anthrax attack.
I was an intern, so I was working in the mail room. Lieberman’s mail room is right next to Daschle’s mail room—and Daschle was one of the people who received the anthrax. That was the end of my time in the Senate.
I was on Cipro for 10 weeks. I switched to the House. It was really tough. It was really tough for a lot of people.
There’s a photograph in The Washington Post from that day. It’s a picture of a guy holding a giant vial with a Q-tip in it. That’s my friend Greg, who was interning with me in Lieberman’s office. The expression on his face is basically saying, “WTF”—he’s looking at me and showing me what we’re in for.
Nowadays, with COVID, everyone’s used to having giant Q-tips shoved up your nose. But that was a novel thing in 2001, and I hadn’t had that done before.
Afterward, I worked in Rosa DeLauro’s office as an intern, and I got a job later on as a staff assistant for a congressman from Florida.
Four months into that job, they start delivering the mail again—and it’s all irradiated. It’s crinkly, crackly stuff that you open and it just spurts out—like it’s from the movie Alien, like the spores of irradiated crap just flow into the air.
That’s what I remember of that time—and getting trained on how to put on a quick hood in case of a chemical attack. You ever see the Austin Powers movies?

BW: No.

DS: Well, there’s a scene where Dr. Evil has this giant clear mask over his head—like he’s in a bubble. That’s what it was. You got trained in putting those things on.
So that was my introduction to working on Capitol Hill.

BW: Wow. Quite an introduction.

Inside vs. Outside: Where Reform Happens
BW: You’ve navigated spaces that reward different instincts—policy, advocacy, institution-building, public-facing work. How do you decide when to be a builder inside the system versus a pressure source outside of it?

DS: I don’t think there is a distinction.
I think you look for where you have the greatest ability to do the greatest good. And that’s where--
Part of this conversation is: how did I get to do what I’m doing now? And the answer is: my job did not exist when I started my career.
My job at the Sunlight Foundation didn’t exist—they made the position for me. My job at Demand Progress didn’t exist—the executive director recruited me to go work there. The jobs were built around my strengths and weaknesses.
A lot of the people I know who are really good at what they do—they build the things around them. They find a way to make the space their own.
Whether you’re on the inside or the outside, you go back and forth between the two. For me, when I had a choice about what I did next, I would always angle toward the thing that was more interesting and a better fit.
So if someone asks: how do I get to be the executive director doing a focus on rules reform, appropriations, and all the other stuff that I do? It wasn’t a thing. It’s a thing now, but it was never a thing before.

Media, Incentives, and Recency Bias
BW: From your perspective, how has the modern media environment changed incentives for members and staff in ways that make serious governance harder—also for the people on the journalism side of things? And are there any counter-trends you find encouraging?

DS: I’m not sure that’s true.

BW: What is?

DS: In the 19th century, members of Congress would give speeches on the floor, and there were no transcripts. Journalists would write what was said, and then the members would go hang out with the journalists at Swampoodle near what’s now Union Station. They’d clean it up, and then send it out to be published in newspapers. That would create a tremendous political reaction around the country that would influence what members did.
So the media—major media—has always been closely related to the work Congress does.
I’m not sure the current media environment makes it harder for them to do their jobs. I think the way they’ve designed their institutions is making it harder for them to do their jobs: most members of Congress don’t have anything meaningful to do with their time. They’re not being valued. They haven’t created institutions that support their work.
The nature of Congress has changed in ways that are more radical than is easy to understand. And the nature of the press has changed.
In the 19th century, you had journalists who would sit in the House, who would be clerks for committees, and who would gamble on the stock market with insider information about what they were covering.
You had the press at the turn of the 20th century stampeding Congress into war with Spain—yellow journalism.
There was a series of articles in Century Magazine that exposed corruption of senators and led to direct election of the Senate.
So I think we suffer from recency bias when we evaluate the press.
Now, there is definitely a lot more crud—bad faith political stuff. It seems like there’s a lot of it right now. It was also really bad at other times in our history, where it was nasty. And it was harder to ascertain the facts.
I do think algorithm bias in social media has changed the way we access information around us, for good and for ill. But I wouldn’t necessarily say things are worse in terms of the relationship between the press and those they cover.
If anything, there are not enough journalists covering what’s going on, so a lot of things remain uncovered in ways that would be helpful if they were exposed.

BW: Just to play devil’s advocate: even when reporters aren’t lying, the incentive structure can still reward selection and framing—highlighting the most provocative lines because outrage travels farther online, and attention converts into revenue. How do you think that dynamic affects coverage of Congress today? And are there norms or counterweights that still keep serious reporting anchored to what’s actually true?

DS: I think it’s almost always been true.
We had a period of time where it was a little bit less so. But even then—who are you?
So, like, in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, television news might be a little bit more neutral—or the Associated Press might be.
But do you know why the Associated Press takes a neutral perspective in its reporting?

BW: I couldn’t say.

DS: It’s really interesting.
They realized that the papers they were trying to sell reporting to in the 19th century—they were all Democrats, or Republicans, or whatever. And if you put a perspective in your writing, you couldn’t sell to all of them. So they made it as clean as possible, so whoever took their reporting could put their own spin on it.
So the reason they did it wasn’t some noble calling or higher truth. It was because they could make more money.
And the idea that “if it bleeds, it leads” has certainly been true throughout my lifetime.
And think about all the stories newspapers didn’t cover: civil rights, employers mistreating workers—historically, there’s no women’s perspective, no Black perspective, depending on what paper you’re reading and when.
We look at it through rose-colored glasses as if having Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather was a pure good—and they were, to some extent. My parents talk about Walter Cronkite. But there’s a whole lot of stuff that never got coverage—ever.
And the elite consensus around what you can and can’t talk about: it’s fine if you’re part of the elite, if you benefit from it. Not so great otherwise.
Journalists have always been in business to make money. There have been changes—billionaires now own journalistic publications. “Freedom of the press” only counts if you own a press.
Of course, now more people can publish themselves. I do think there’s less filtering now. But in the past, if you go back 100 years, you would read a paper relevant to your political party, and that’s how you got your news.

Advice to Students
BW: As we close, I want to turn it directly to students. If you were advising a sharp undergrad—or if you could go back to your time as an undergrad—wanting to work in government, governance reform, and journalism: what concrete steps would you take—internships, experiences, habits—and why?

DS: The first thing that’s valuable: if you want to be a journalist, if you want to engage in the policymaking process, if you want to be a press person—I would intern for Congress, if there’s a way to do so.
I would aim at committees or leadership more than personal offices, if you can. Understanding the tempo and the incentives and the nature of the people that work there is incredibly valuable for the rest of your life.
Doing what you’re doing—being curious, talking to people, asking them questions, figuring out what they do and why—is incredibly valuable as well.
Be willing to try new things, different jobs. Experiment and see what fits you and what doesn’t.
There’s a lot of received wisdom about how to do stuff. Everyone has an opinion about the right way and the wrong way.
It’s worth finding out: just because it’s been done one way in the past doesn’t mean it has to be done that way in the future.
You hear a lot of people talk about Chesterton’s fence—the idea that if there’s a fence out in the woods, it’s there for a reason.
I can tell you: oftentimes, things are done a certain way for no good reason whatsoever—or the reason no longer exists. So there’s nothing wrong with being bold and trying to think things through for yourself. That’s how progress is made.

A Reading List: Start With CRS
BW: Finally, Daniel, I like to close Pathway Blog conversations by asking: for someone interested in your career path—or at least entering the same general field—what’s a piece of literature, a book, an essay, an article, that you’d recommend, and why? 

DS: It’s such a tough question.
I won’t recommend a book—although I have several that I can think of that would be really interesting—but I would recommend a website.
I run EveryCRSReport.com, which has 20,000-ish Congressional Research Service reports—more than is available from any other source.
Go to that website and type in a topic you care about. I used to write those reports. You can see what an expert on a topic says—it helps give you grounding for what the subject matter is.
Then go look at the footnotes. Find the footnotes that are interesting and use that as a jumping-off point to learn more about what you care about.

Zack Cooper came to Asia strategy from an unconventional angle: not as a country specialist, but as a defense analyst who realized the hardest problem in the Pentagon wasn’t abstract theory—it was how to maintain deterrence in Asia as China’s capabilities grew. That functional starting point pushed him toward alliances, basing, and the operational realities that sit beneath the rhetoric.
In this conversation, Cooper breaks down deterrence by denial in plain terms, explains why crisis instability is often a symptom of weak deterrence, and argues that “bases vs. places” matters more than territorial obsession. He also offers a rigorous (and refreshingly candid) take on credibility—why costly signals matter, why “audience costs” may be changing, and what that means for U.S. signaling today.
We close with student-focused advice: what actually compounded for him early on, what it means to be “useful” as an intern, how to think about graduate programs without wasting years, and the book that most shaped how he thinks about power transitions.
​
-Zack Cooper is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a lecturer at Princeton University.

​Getting Into the Work: From Defense to Asia
Benjamin Wolf (BW): I want to start by asking where you got into this work. What problem were you trying to solve when you first started focusing on Asia strategy—and what did you see that others were missing?
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Zack Cooper (ZC): I first got interested in Asia in a very different way than most people in the regional studies world. Usually when people start working on Asia, they start out as country specialists. Maybe they’ve been living in part of Asia, or they’ve got family heritage from a certain part of Asia. They end up studying that country and language and living there.
I came at this from the other end of the spectrum—as a functional specialist rather than a regional specialist. I started out as a defense specialist, and I really wasn’t exactly sure what part of defense I was most interested in. But over the course of a couple of years at the Pentagon, it became pretty clear that by far the hardest challenge from a defense perspective was how to maintain deterrence in Asia, especially with regard to China. So I decided that’s really what I wanted to be spending my time on—because it was such a hard problem.
It took me a little while to figure out exactly what that meant. I don’t have a China studies background, so I didn’t feel well equipped to do China-specific work. But I ended up doing a lot of work on U.S. alliances and partnerships. And I got a little bit lucky: when I started to work on alliances and partnerships, a lot of the people in that world came more from the area studies background, so they didn’t have much of a defense background to be doing analytical work on specific defense issues. That gave me an opportunity to do something useful in the field that hadn’t been done as much. There were people doing it, but it was a smaller group—and I ended up leaning into that.

Early Career: Getting Into the Pentagon and the White House
BW: You mentioned your work in the Pentagon, and I know you’ve worked with the Department of Defense and the White House. What led you to those roles? Was it things you did during your undergraduate studies? If so, what were the specific things you were involved in that made you want to pursue that career?

ZC: When I was in undergrad, I managed to get some informational interviews with people at the Pentagon, the State Department, the White House, and the intelligence community. I asked them about their jobs and what they enjoyed most. It became pretty clear to me that the most important thing in Washington is understanding how government works—and that the only way I could understand that was by being in government.
So when I was an undergrad, I was determined to find a position where I could learn how government operates—or, in many cases, doesn’t operate. One of the things I ended up doing was an internship at the Pentagon before my senior year. I got lucky: very atypically, that turned into a job straight out of undergrad.
These days that’s a lot harder to get, but you have to remember this was still just a couple of years after the September 11th attacks. There were specific hiring authorities to bring on very junior people because the national security community needed warm bodies. That was a great opportunity for me to come in through a path that probably otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.

Teaching at Princeton: What Students Expose
BW: We’ll focus on your work at AEI soon, but first: you’re also a lecturer at Princeton. How has that experience informed the way that you explain today’s events—China, the Indo-Pacific? Have your students taught you anything that changes how you explain these complex topics?

ZC: Yes. As time has gone on, I’ve found teaching more and more valuable—and more and more interesting.
I learn two things from teaching. First: the way I teach is very reliant on readings. So every week I go back and do all the readings that the students are doing. I find that incredibly helpful because some of these foundational pieces are so rich that even if I’ve read something twenty times, reminding myself of the fundamental logic—how we think alliances work, what the basic logic of deterrence is—is really useful.
Second: you might think you understand a topic, but when you try to teach it, you find the flaws in your logic—because the students will find the flaws very quickly. Teaching is valuable for sorting out how to conceptualize an issue: where your understanding is strong, and where it’s weak.
And a third aspect I’ve enjoyed more over time is that policy work can be very hard in a different way. It’s difficult to tell if you had a direct effect on an outcome. Even if you’re sure you suggested an idea to a policymaker, when they do what you suggested, maybe they had the idea on their own. You’re never sure.
But when you’re teaching, you’re having a direct effect on people. You get near-term feedback, and it’s exciting to watch people you’ve taught learn something and apply it professionally. Over time, I’ve found that more and more rewarding.

BW: I recently spoke with Sarah Kreps, who’s a professor at Cornell, and she emphasized similar points—so it’s interesting to hear that consensus.

Deterrence by Denial: What “Denial” Means Operationally
BW: I want to get more concrete. In your writing, you’ve emphasized deterrence by denial. What does “denial” mean operationally? What exactly must China be unable to do—or what should the United States do?

ZC: One of the basic concepts of deterrence is the difference between deterrence by punishment and deterrence by denial.
Deterrence by punishment would be saying: we’re not going to physically stop you from doing something, but if you do it, we’re going to make the cost so prohibitive that you’ll wish you hadn’t. The classic example would be threatening a nuclear attack against an opponent who crosses a red line.
The alternative is deterrence by denial: if your opponent tries to do something you don’t want them to do, you’re going to physically try to stop them. You’re trying to convince them they won’t succeed if they try—not that you’ll punish them after.
The basic argument I’ve tried to make is that in Asia today, the U.S. is no longer as strong as it used to be. But one advantage we have is that we’re a status quo power. We don’t want fundamental changes in the order in Asia. Deterrence by denial can be very effective when you’re a status quo power—when you’re trying to convince the other side they can’t overturn the order.
In a conflict over Taiwan, that would mean signaling to China before conflict that they won’t be successful at taking and holding Taiwan—because that’s a very hard operational problem.
I’ll add one last thing: we have to be careful not to assume denial is a silver bullet. Some of what I’ve been working on recently is sketching out the limits of a denial approach. There are real limits. Sometimes you’re going to have to threaten punishment against an adversary like China as well. Like most things in the defense arena, it’s not binary. It’s how much focus you put on denial, how much on punishment, and in what situations.

Deterrence vs. Crisis Instability: Where’s the Line?
BW: How do you think about the trade-off between strengthening deterrence versus increasing crisis instability? What’s the line for you—what do you look for?

ZC: My view—different than some others—is that crisis instability sometimes happens because there’s an incentive to do a first strike. That can happen because the balance of forces is so even that whichever side strikes first has an advantage for the rest of the conflict.
One way to deal with that is to be stronger, in which case strengthening deterrence also strengthens crisis stability—from an American standpoint. Fundamentally, I think that’s the most important dynamic.
We thought a lot about this in the Cold War in the nuclear realm. But the U.S. is at risk to a first strike by China in part because it’s reliant on a small number of bases in Asia. If the U.S. increased the number of bases it operates from, that would make the U.S. less vulnerable to a first strike and might increase crisis stability.
So there are small, specific choices—like operating from a larger number of bases more frequently—that can increase crisis stability while increasing deterrence. In general, I think crisis instability happens when you have a weak deterrent hand to play. There are edge cases with direct trade-offs, but in general, the better deterrent we have, the more stable behavior we’ll see in crises.

Bases, Places, and the Greenland Question
BW: You mentioned increasing military bases. It’s interesting because that’s been part of the argument President Trump has pushed—capturing Greenland, and broader American territorial ideas. Michael Froman, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, argued in a recent article, among others, that the U.S. doesn’t need to capture Greenland because it can establish bases without taking territory. He mentioned that at one point the U.S. had seventeen military bases in Greenland and now it’s down to one—and that was America’s choice.
What has been stopping the U.S. government from expanding those bases? What’s making them not want to expand?

ZC: My logic applies mostly in the Indo-Pacific theater. I’m not that concerned, in the near term, about Chinese activity in Greenland. There’s a lot the U.S. could do to manage that risk.
But part of the challenge for the United States is that we’ve had a transformation over the last eighty years—from a world in which the U.S. had its own sovereign facilities (bases on territory the U.S. controlled) to operating increasingly from facilities that other countries control on their own sovereign territory.
There are downsides: the U.S. has to enter into agreements with host nations, and those agreements are often more constraining than if the U.S. is operating from facilities it fully controls. But there’s also a long-term benefit: host countries are more likely to politically support U.S. operations from facilities if they aren’t U.S.-flagged bases, but rather local facilities that U.S. forces deploy from.
Over the last 30–40 years, we’ve seen a transition from what we’ve called “bases” to “places”—away from U.S. bases toward places the U.S. can operate. I think that’s a healthy trend. Some of what we hear from President Trump goes against that instinct, and we’re seeing the predictable reaction from allies and partners: they aren’t interested in the U.S. owning territory, but they are very happy to allow the U.S. to operate from their territory.
My view is we’d be better off focusing on the capabilities that flow from access to facilities rather than who owns the land—especially because in most cases, the land is owned by partners who are willing to let us do a lot from their territory as long as it’s in shared interests.

Credibility: Real Signals vs. Domestic Theater
BW: In my conversations with foreign service officers and ambassadors, and in the broader State Department sphere, there’s a lot of talk about credibility. From your perspective, where is credibility real versus performative? What actions actually move adversary beliefs, and what’s mostly domestic theater?

ZC: It’s a great question—and I don’t think we have great answers at the moment.
Academics have spent a lot of time thinking about credibility and signaling. One way they think about it is through the logic of costly signaling: for something to be credible, it should have to be costly. If it’s not costly, it doesn’t really send a signal your adversary takes seriously.
It can be costly in different ways. Two that we talk about most: sunk costs and audience costs.
Sunk costs are when you do something so expensive it wouldn’t make sense unless you were serious. For example, in the Persian Gulf War 35 years ago, the U.S. spent six months building up hundreds of thousands of troops at great expense opposite Iraq. It wouldn’t have made sense to do that unless the U.S. was serious about military action. That’s a sunk cost—an expensive signal you wouldn’t send if you weren’t serious.
Audience costs are tying your own hands as a leader. The classic example is a president making a major public statement—like President H.W. Bush saying of Iraq, “This will not stand.” He tied his hands. The logic is: there’s an election coming up, and if he backs down he pays a domestic political cost.
What’s hard right now is it’s not clear whether President Trump faces audience costs. Technically, he’s not up for another election, so maybe what he says doesn’t matter. But also, Trump supporters are pretty quick to shift their views when President Trump does it himself. That makes this unusual for academics. If he can’t generate audience costs, then his words don’t matter—and all that matters are actions you can observe and whether they’re costly. That makes it hard to signal convincingly.
This is a challenging moment for academics trying to think rigorously about credibility and signaling.

Student Advice: What Actually Compounds
BW: As we begin to wrap up, I want to turn to your early successes and advice for students. When you look back at your early twenties, what one skill—writing, methods, modeling, networking—ended up compounding the most, and why?

ZC: This is an easy one for me. The only thing in my early twenties that actually mattered was working really, really hard.
There may be other people who are incredibly skilled at that period of their lives—who can demonstrate how smart they are, and how well traveled. I think the only comparative advantage I had at 22 was that I was willing to work extremely long hours for very terrible pay.
A lot of my coworkers couldn’t do that. They had families. They couldn’t stay at work until midnight. They couldn’t work every weekend because their spouses wouldn’t allow it. I hate to say it, but for me, that was my only comparative advantage at the time.
It’s much harder, as somebody in mid-career, to work that hard now. So when you get an opportunity where you can demonstrate how hard you can work—and not every job cares, but in places like the White House and Pentagon it matters a lot—being able to show you’ll put in the time and effort was the most important signal I could send to coworkers and bosses about my willingness to get the job done to the best of my ability.

What “Being Useful” Means as an Intern
BW: You’ve worked across think tanks, academia, and government, and you’ve been around many young students through internships and fellowships. What does being useful actually mean for a student intern in this space? What deliverables do great interns produce that mediocre ones don’t?

ZC: I wish I could tell you that interns—and frankly, even young researchers—are given wonderful opportunities in think tanks or government or the private sector. Often that’s not the case, and that was certainly my experience when I was young.
For the most part, I was being asked to sit in meetings, get coffee, set up meetings, schedule, sometimes take notes. It didn’t require a lot of brain power. And yet doing those basic things well was a requirement to convince leadership they could give me a slightly harder task than making coffee for a senior official.
I often see anxiousness among young people—I absolutely felt this—to jump from basic requests to something more challenging. But if you can’t do the basic stuff well, or you can’t show you’re willing to put in the time to do the basic stuff well, you’ll never get the more challenging tasks.
So when you get an internship, the most important thing is to show not only that you’ll work hard, but that you’re a good teammate, you’ll do whatever needs to be done to make the organization successful. If you do that for a couple of months—or a couple of years—then you can get to step two: doing more substantive work. But step one is doing the basics, doing them well, and showing you can be trusted as part of a team.

The Graduate School Lesson He Wishes He’d Understood Earlier
BW: Is there anything you wish someone had told you as a student that would have saved you a lot of time in trial and error?

ZC: The one thing I wish I had fully understood is the difference between different types of graduate programs.
When I finished undergrad, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to go back and do a graduate degree. My undergraduate degree felt too disconnected from the policy world I wanted to be in. But once I was in the policy world, the policy world felt too disconnected from academia—and we weren’t paying enough attention to the theoretical, foundational aspects of our work.
I thought blending those could best be done in a master’s program. I don’t want to suggest master’s programs are never useful—I teach in a master’s program, and there are situations where they’re valuable. But I didn’t realize early on that what a master’s program tends to teach you is how to consume research, not so much how to do new research.
I ended up doing a master’s and then a PhD because what I really wanted was to conduct new research. For people thinking about career transitions or professional development, master’s programs can be wonderful and can be stepping stones to other degrees. My wife and I met in a master’s program—she was doing a joint law degree and a master’s, and I switched to the PhD.
But I think people should think twice before treating a master’s as a terminal degree—and I wish I had understood that earlier.

One Book That Shaped How He Thinks
BW: Finally, if you had to recommend a book for someone interested in following your career path—or just name a book that has influenced you most—what would it be, and why?

ZC: The book that’s been most important to how I think about the world is a political science book that doesn’t get a lot of readership because it doesn’t fall neatly into the theoretical paradigms commonly taught. It’s by Robert Gilpin, and it’s called War and Change in World Politics. It’s about how and why countries rise and fall.
At a moment like we’re in in the United States—asking fundamental questions about America’s role, watching China rise rapidly over the last 30 or 40 years—this isn’t the moment to read books about a static, unchanging world. This is the moment to think about how change happens and what it looks like. Gilpin’s work has been foundational for me in trying to think in a logical, theoretically informed way about how that happens.

Closing
BW: Dr. Cooper, thank you so much for joining me. I’ve learned so much in just a short period of time. It’s been a real honor.
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ZC: Of course. It’s been wonderful talking to you—thanks so much for having me on.

The through-line: technology disrupting national security
Benjamin Wolf: I’d love to begin by asking: when you look across your work at the intersection of technology and national security, what’s the core question you keep coming back to—and why does it feel urgent right now?

Sarah Kreps: A lot of people ask what the through-line is for my work. Broadly, it’s the way technology is changing—sometimes disrupting—national security.
The motivation comes from my background in the military. I was in the Air Force. I did my training at MIT. So these ideas—technology and national security—are very much embedded in how I think about things. I’ve worked on everything from drones to cyber to AI to nuclear weapons.
I have a book coming out on these questions about how technology has disrupted national security. In it, I try to pattern-match—to think about hype cycles, the tech optimists and the tech pessimists—and position myself in ways that are historically and empirically grounded.
The reason it feels important now is that what’s “relevant” keeps changing. In each moment, a different technology seems scary and disruptive. I’m trying not to offer simple solutions, but to frame questions: what can we, as a society—and as a national security establishment—do to temper the excesses of technology while harnessing the opportunities?

Audiences and institutions: not persuasion, but usable evidence
BW: You’ve moved between institutions and audiences—academia, law and policy communities, and public-facing writing. How do you decide who you’re speaking to on a given project, and what changes when the audience changes?

SK: I’ve never thought of myself as trying to persuade anyone. I would frame it instead as bringing insights to audiences that are in a position to protect society and take advantage of opportunities.
Sometimes that’s members of society—how can they guard against disingenuous AI? Sometimes it’s militaries—how can they take advantage of drones but guard against others’ use of drones? Sometimes it’s government—how do we develop institutions that protect, for example, in a nuclear security context?
Too often, both sides engage in hyperbole—either tech solutionism or tech pessimism, tech doomerism. Often the answer is somewhere in between. What I’m trying to do is make sense of an appropriate equilibrium—not persuasion so much as providing evidence that helps clarify the problem.

From environmental security to “bombs and bullets”
BW: If I’m not mistaken, you studied environmental studies and public policy as an undergrad. What led you into the military and eventually into the work you do now?

SK: I grew up in the D.C. area, so I was always marinating in public policy questions and national security. My dad worked for the Department of Energy in the nuclear space. So I was always interested in some version of security.
As an undergrad and master’s student, that took the form of environmental security. I did a lot of work on environmental engagement. But as I did ROTC training—and especially once I was in the military—I pivoted to what people might call “hard” national security, or what folks in the business refer to as the “bombs and bullets” side of security.
Part of that was the era: Kosovo, 9/11, and then Iraq. These were big military engagements. My work in the military was developing new intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems.
It seemed to me there were big questions within the military that didn’t always have the analysis. You had practitioners without the analytics, and analysts without the military experience. My background allowed me to bridge those audiences in ways most people can’t—either because they don’t have the credibility or they don’t have the experience.

Career arc and the value of the think tank ecosystem
BW: After the military, how did your career evolve? And with fellowships and affiliations—are those things you pursued, or did they come to you through the work?

SK: Some of both.
Think tanks let you stay engaged with real-world questions. It’s not that the “ivory tower” deserves all the derision it gets, but it’s certainly more insulated than the think tank community. Being involved in those conversations keeps ideas fresh.
If you look at the arc of my publications, I try to think hard about difficult national security problems. In 2009, before many people were paying attention to drones and U.S. counterterrorism, I started working on drones because I’d been in that space earlier. A friend from high school—he was a philosopher—came to me and said, “I’ve been watching what’s happening with drones. You were in the military; you’re a political scientist. Do you want to collaborate?” So I said yes.
That’s also true of my work more generally: it’s interdisciplinary. That drones work was with a philosopher. My work now on semiconductor supply chains is with mechanical engineers. My AI work is with computer scientists.
In a way, it comes full circle to being an undergrad working in labs. I took a lot of hard science classes—chemistry, physics, math—so I can be credible not just in national security, but also across disciplines.
The questions that are pressing today are inherently interdisciplinary. They need voices not just of engineers or computer scientists, but also philosophers, political scientists, and people who study national security. And especially in the last few years, these have become big societal questions—AI’s impact on employment, the battlefield, the classroom—so many of them require interdisciplinary answers.

A battlefield-proof guardrail (if one exists)
BW: Staying on AI: if you had to propose one realistic guardrail that could actually survive contact with modern conflict, what would it be?

SK: The important guardrail would be ensuring there is a human in the loop. But I’m not completely optimistic that it can survive contact with the battlefield.
Some of the work I’m doing right now is trying to figure out—data-driven—how individuals in battlefield settings interact with AI decision-support systems. People are developing these systems and putting them out in the field, but we don’t yet have great data about how people interact with them.
For example: do people respond to confidence thresholds in the same way? Are some more likely to override than others? We’re often assuming one size fits all in how these systems are used, but we don’t have good evidence for that.
So even saying “keep a human in the loop” is itself indeterminate, because we don’t really know—within a group of ten people—whether those ten will respond similarly to the same outputs.

Grants, rejections, and the “show up” principle
BW: You’ve certainly earned a lot of awards and grants for that kind of research. How do those processes start? How often do they work out? And how do you not get discouraged by the rejections?

SK: It’s definitely a numbers game. You have to apply to a lot of things, and some will work out. Like a lot of things in life, it’s about showing up over and over.

BW: When you win an award, do you already have a detailed plan for how you’ll implement it? Or does it adjust as you go?

SK: Part of the reason those processes are so long is that they require high-granularity thinking about what you’re actually going to do. Execution is often more straightforward than idea generation.

Regulation without delusion: the pragmatic middle path
BW: When governments try to govern emerging technology, they often default to either overconfidence in rules or fatalism that rules won’t matter. What’s your pragmatic middle path—how should institutions build adaptive governance without outsourcing responsibility to the technology?

SK: It’s a tricky question, and I grapple with it in the book. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach.
A lot depends on values. Europe is approaching this differently than the United States, which is approaching it differently than China. These regions have different values. Europe has long been more skeptical of new technologies, so the response tends to be more precautionary—even when technologies are still nascent.
We see that in the AI Act, which leans more aggressively into regulation than the U.S. The U.S. approach has been more: let evidence and data unfold so we can understand what the technology means before responding.
Policymakers face a conundrum. If you act too early, you may not understand the technology and could impede progress—for example, AI applications in medicine. But if you don’t act soon enough, you risk being caught flat-footed as new threats emerge.
In AI, we’ve seen a lot of existential language where the reality is more ambivalent. In the U.S., it’s also complicated because the U.S. has many of the tech firms. Aggressive regulation isn’t only about stifling technology and opportunity; it also has economic implications, because these firms are among the most thriving parts of the economy.
Certain states are taking regulation more seriously—California, New York—but what those steps can ignore is that capital and talent are mobile. They can move from state to state, country to country. In Europe, you don’t have the same thriving AI tech sector in part because people come here to do the work—because they can.

Why academia: the privilege of thinking (with students)
BW: Outside your research and writing, you’re also a professor at Cornell. Why did you decide to pursue academia alongside everything else, and what’s been most rewarding about teaching?

SK: I went into my PhD at a place known for cultivating practitioner types—Georgetown—so I thought I wanted to go back into the policy world.
But once I got into my studies, I realized what a privilege it is to wake up every day and think about questions that are important in the real world—or at least I hope they’re important. And also to educate the next generation on these issues. What better position than a university professor?
Someone from a think tank once said think tanks are great because they’re universities without students. And I thought: why would you want to be at a university without students? Students are one of the best parts of my job.
I teach law students, business school students, PhD students, undergrads—the whole range. Each group thinks about these topics differently, and my interactions with them enrich the way I think about the questions.

Two skills in 12 months: breadth and better questions
BW: As we wrap up, if a motivated undergrad wanted to contribute meaningfully to this field in the next 12 months, what are two concrete skills or habits—one analytical, one practical—that would make them more competent?

SK: I read this recently—and maybe it validates the approach I’ve taken—but the world today is a world suited for generalists.
Practically, I would recommend breadth. Some of the most interesting people can combine philosophy and computer science, or economics and political science. My recommendation is: don’t stovepipe yourself. Be well-versed across disciplines so you can look at problems not in silos, but as the real world presents them.
Analytically, it follows from that: learn how to ask the right questions. These aren’t falsifiable math questions. It’s about asking: how can societies, polities, and economies get the most out of new technologies without the negative externalities and risks? You try to get closer to the answer, even if there isn’t just one answer.

What she wishes she’d done earlier—and why reading still matters
BW: What’s a piece of career advice you wish you had taken earlier?

SK: Even though it contradicts what I said a little, I wish I had taken more math and more computer science earlier.
There’s a lot of debate about whether computer scientists will become obsolete because of AI, but I think that’s overblown. You need some understanding of coding to engage meaningfully with AI and to ask the right questions. I often feel like I’m outsourcing some of those parts to students.
On the other hand, that’s what teams are for. Not everyone can be good at everything. The best teams bring together people who are excellent at coding with people who are excellent at other things. But yes—I’d recommend that students load up on math and computer science while also engaging the bigger philosophical questions.

BW: One last one: if someone wants to follow a path like yours, is there any reading you’d recommend?

SK: I would just recommend more reading. I lament that people are engaging more and more online and on their phones. As someone who studies technology, I’m becoming more of a Luddite—wanting to put my phone aside and read something dense.
Read a classic. Sit down with a dense novel—Dostoyevsky—something that’s a slog, something that requires mental discipline. There’s a lot of awareness of physical discipline, but I think mental discipline is atrophying. Our ability to sustain focus is lower, and it takes a conscious decision to retrain that part of the mind.

BW: I’ve honestly never heard that response before, and it feels right. We live in a world built around short-form video—even platforms like Netflix and major news outlets are including clips on their platforms.

SK: The advice to read a dense book can sound out of step. But I do think that kind of mental discipline—something fewer people have—will set you apart.

BW: My computer is actually propped up on Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography right now--definitely different than Dostoyevsky but certainly dense!

SK: Biographies are great. I love reading biographies because there’s so much we can learn from people who’ve been successful.
And weaving insights together across different figures helps you map them onto your own personality. There isn’t one-size-fits-all. You read about one person, then another, and you can see, “I like this quality,” or “I hadn’t thought about that.” It becomes like a menu of skills and attributes. But how would you know that without reading deeply about people?
I read a biography of Martin Luther and found it fascinating—this figure from 500 years ago. He walked from Germany to Rome in the early 1500s. Putting yourself in a completely different time period—no trains, no modern travel—forces a mental exercise you don’t get online.
What struck me was that he disrupted the status quo. We think of technology as disrupting the status quo, but that’s what he did as an individual—enabled in part by technology like the printing press. Bringing those insights to the present is valuable. And I think if I’d read that book two years earlier, I would have gotten something different out of it. That’s why reading is so useful—it stimulates thoughts that short-form content just won’t.

Closing
BW: Professor Kreps, I can’t thank you enough for your time. It’s been an honor speaking with you today.
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SK: Thank you so much, Ben.