Nadia Schadlow has spent her career thinking about a question that many institutions prefer to avoid: not simply what a strategy says, but whether a government can actually carry it out. Across work in the Defense Department, the policy world, and the White House, she has focused on the space between ideas and implementation, where plans meet bureaucracy, politics, incentives, and time.
In this conversation, Schadlow reflects on the gap between strategy and execution, the gray zone between peace and war, the overlap between economic security and national security, and the challenges of competing with China. She also offers a candid account of helping shape the 2017 National Security Strategy, explaining why national security cannot be separated entirely from politics and why the hardest work often begins after the white paper is written.
For students interested in foreign policy and national security, Schadlow’s advice is practical: read history, clarify your assumptions, learn both regions and functions, build coalitions, and do not mistake fluent commentary for strategic judgment. Strategy, in her telling, is not just an intellectual exercise. It is a discipline of choosing, sequencing, persuading, and following through.

​-Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a national security visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. She previously served as U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy and led the drafting of the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States.

​Strategy as Direction and Implementation
Ben Wolf: You’ve moved between academia, the military policy world, and the White House. When you look back, was there a moment earlier in your career when you realized that strategy, rather than just diplomacy or operations, was the lever you most wanted to pull?

Nadia Schadlow: I don’t think you ever anticipate exactly where your education and experiences are going to lead you. A lot of it is serendipity and being prepared for the moments that are presented to you.
I always knew I was interested in strategy. I like thinking about the components of strategy, but what I really like is thinking about how you operationalize strategy. It is the combination of articulating a direction you want to go, or the direction you think a country should take, and then the operational ways to get there. I’ve always been interested in that combination.


The Gray Zone and the Operational Gap
BW: Many people study war, but far fewer study what happens in the ambiguous space before it. What drew you specifically to the gray zone between peace and war as the central problem of modern strategy?

NS: I began to see a pattern of overreliance on the Defense Department as the agency that could get things done quickly. When you work in government, even though I worked at the Defense Department, I could see that my counterparts in other agencies, especially the State Department, and even at the White House more generally, consistently relied on the Defense Department because it had operational capabilities that most other parts of our government do not have.
Not all, obviously. The Department of Homeland Security has components that do, and the intelligence agencies do. But the civilian agencies, such as the Commerce Department, for a long time the Treasury Department, and the State Department, do not think as much in operational terms.
That began to interest me because it was clear that if we were going to operate as a country in these areas short of war, whether we call them operations short of war, gray-zone areas, or non-kinetic competition, we needed a more competitive mindset more consistently. We also needed the capabilities to do things about problems in those domains.
Part of the reason I mentioned the Treasury Department as an agency that changed is because there was a really interesting shift after 9/11. After the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, there was a sense that we needed to improve our financial tools, both to cut off terrorist sources of funding and, later, to sanction countries like Iran that were developing nuclear programs. The need to develop this financial toolkit emerged, and I think it is a very good example for your readers of how the government, when it decides to refine a set of operational capabilities and equip itself to use them, can do that.
There are two specific books you could link to if your readers are interested. One is Juan Zarate’s Treasury’s War, which uses the phrase “guerrillas in gray suits.” The other is Edward Fishman’s more recent book, Chokepoints. The chapter on Iran really describes how Treasury developed those tools.


Strategy Versus Implementation
BW: When you look at Washington today, where is the gap biggest between the way we talk about strategy and the way we actually behave and implement that strategy?

NS: Unfortunately, it is everywhere.
Another little test case is that your readers could take a number of pronouncements. Just this morning, I was looking at some Defense Production Act awards that have been given over the years. These are grants that the Department of Defense gave to companies and entities to do things. They might be $2 million, $10 million, or $20 million, and it is very hard to find what happened afterward.
That does not mean there are nefarious things going on. But it does mean that follow-up on actual implementation is a serious problem, both in terms of transparency and in understanding how funds are being spent. Equally important, are we getting the outcomes we want?
When we say we are providing a big chunk of money for an infrastructure project, whether domestically or abroad, the follow-up and the ability to figure out whether that outcome has been achieved is, in my view, unnecessarily difficult. There just is not a reason for it.
I see it across the board, including in the State Department. This is absolutely not just this administration. It is a bipartisan problem that has existed for decades.


Competition with China
BW: If you strip away the speeches and white papers, do you think the United States has actually accepted what serious competition with China requires economically, industrially, and politically? Or are we still trying to preserve the comforts of the pre-competition era?

NS: I think we are still debating what it means. I think we are close, but I do not think we have definitively decided as a country the direction we want to take.
There is a push and pull. There is a growing recognition that the overlap between economic security and national security is growing and growing. I am not an economist, but it is harder and harder to argue that you can make decisions only on the basis of economic efficiency.
For your readers who are economists, I think there is interesting work to be done there. How do economists think about that link? That is the way I approach it as a national security person, but what are economists really thinking? How has economics shifted to accept that, or not? I think that is an interesting area.
Second, in terms of the competition with China, we have not really figured out whether we are going to take an approach that emphasizes what we need to do internally as a country, meaning improve, build, reindustrialize here, ensure we have enough workers here, and build up what we need here, or whether we need to do things almost offensively to weaken or slow China.
Those are two different ways of thinking about competition. You have a lot of people who argue that export controls are needed to make sure China does not have the chips it wants right now. That is part of the Nvidia debate. Those are examples of a “slow China down” approach, versus an approach that emphasizes that we need to do our own things no matter what and focus more on that.
It is not an either/or, but I think it is a useful way of framing the different tools. There is a lot of information out there, and what I try to do is think thematically about these different baskets of issues.


What Endures Across Administrations
BW: You helped shape the 2017 National Security Strategy. When different administrations change, there are different cabinet members and different people leading national security. How much of the work you did then is preserved today? How much does it change? Is that ever frustrating, that there is not a consistent presence of one’s strategy?

NS: I think a lot of people in the national security community, for many years, argued that national security was apart from politics. There was a view that there is something enduring about it, and somehow it is all apolitical.
I never really believed that entirely. I think there are enduring assumptions about the way the world works and about the way you think the world works. But in a democracy, a national security strategy needs to be linked to elected political leaders, to a body politic, and to explaining things to the American people. It is political.
It is up to people like me and others to make arguments about why these threats and opportunities should transcend politics, or why, if we keep going back and forth, we are not going to get to a better place as a country. But you always have to be able to make those arguments and convince the next generation of political leaders.
I do think a lot of features of the 2017 strategy are enduring. I can point to many of them, and many of them are not based only on President Trump, although the 2017 strategy was his first administration’s strategy. The Biden administration subsequently did many of the same things, or articulated competition with China and the importance of doing more manufacturing in the country.
It was not all the same. The Biden administration articulated climate as an existential threat. The 2017 strategy did not do that. The current Trump strategy in 2025 does not do that. So of course there are differences. But I think there are a lot of features of the 2017 strategy that remain relevant almost ten years later.


Inside the Making of the 2017 National Security Strategy
BW: Could you give us an inside look into how shaping that strategy actually worked? How long does it take? Where does it first begin? How does the research get involved? How does the nitpicking of writing it and proposing it to people work?

NS: There is no set template for writing a national security strategy. It is not something that is handed down from one president to another. Congress basically said, I think in 1986, although you should check when it first became part of law, that each administration should produce a national security strategy.
Since then, every administration has produced one, although they have not produced one every year, which I think is fine. I do not think you want a strategy produced every year. That would seem odd. What you would want is a sense of how things are going and implementation updates. But there is no formula for doing that.
In contrast, in the military, or in the Army, there is doctrine. There are set ways of writing things. That is not the same here. I like to say that it is an art, not a science.
I read all the previous national security strategies, in addition to documents that predated the requirement. President Nixon, in the 1970s, would give these very good messages to Congress on his foreign and national security policy. They were very well written and coherent, so I would suggest that the historians in your audience go back and read some of those.
I read all of that and began to get a sense of what the organization should look like. We decided, as a small team, to develop ours based on four core national interests of the United States: protect the American homeland, advance American prosperity, preserve peace through strength, and advance American influence.
I think those are four core national interests. It would be hard to find American presidents, or even political leaders today, who would say they are not. But what you will find differences in is how you do those things.
Obviously, President Biden felt pretty differently than President Trump about protecting the homeland. President Trump would argue that you have to lock down borders to do that. President Biden did not think that. President Trump is providing more emphasis on Golden Dome and missile defense. President Biden had a different view. But the overall interest is still protecting the homeland. The politics come in when you start arguing about how to do it and how to fund it.
After developing those four pillars, we started to gather the information needed to articulate the different approaches to what we would do. But again, this was a president’s document, so it was driven by President Trump’s view of the world, his previous speeches, his ongoing speeches, and his articulation of themes. I think the same is done for any administration.
It was not my document. It was a White House document.
We got it done in a year, but that is because I am pretty insistent on making sure that meetings do not go on forever and processes do not go on forever. That is the big death of outcomes: sclerosis. I hope all your readers keep that in mind.
You have to take decisions. You have to put a limit on time. You cannot spend your whole time in meetings. That is process, not outcome. Every meeting should have a purpose. Even at the university level, the purpose of the meeting should be stated at the beginning. That is the way you need to begin, whether in business, academia, or government, though it does not happen often enough in government.


Supply Chains, Critical Minerals, and the Crisis of Repetition
BW: You have written and spoken about very relevant issues like supply chains, industrial resilience, and the innovation base. What do you think national security officials now understand better than they did a decade ago? And what are they still reluctant to confront today?

NS: I think they understand better at a national level the seriousness of our vulnerabilities. Having said that, unfortunately, these problems are not new.
I wrote a piece called “The Crisis of Repetition,” which you can probably link to, that argued that our concern about critical minerals is about forty years old. Since 1980, you can document it. I started to ask: Why are we just repeating this and not doing anything about it?
I did not find a really satisfying answer, except that it is very hard. Political leaders also like to start from scratch themselves because it is easier to have the idea, as opposed to saying, “My predecessor actually also identified this as a problem. How can I help solve it?” I think that is partly human nature. You want to think you are starting fresh all the time. There is a little bit of human ego there, as opposed to recognizing that there are a lot of smart people out there and a lot of people have tried to tackle this problem.
That is another thing I would encourage younger people to do. Begin with that assumption going in, and then ask what obstacles still exist to solving the problem. That is harder. It is also less interesting. It is less exciting. You have to go into the obstacles. You have to go into the regulations. You have to figure out what you want to hack away at. That is harder than saying, “I want to build this shiny new thing,” or “I want to say that I am going to build this shiny thing.” That is just more fun.
The other stuff is hard, but I think technology and data today make it harder to avoid. We know the thousands of regulations that slow things down. We know the years of data that exist on how long projects take. So I think it is harder to ignore, and maybe it will get better.
But I think what we are still discovering is that we still have competing ways of doing things. For instance, in the industrial base, do you throw all your chips into three sectors of the economy? Or do you sprinkle things around?
I think we are seeing now an effort to throw chips into key sectors. I happen to think that is the right approach. Critical minerals, certain types of batteries, different components. That is different from sprinkling things around and letting a thousand flowers bloom. I am not sure that is the right approach.
Having said that, what are the competing approaches to these efforts at industrial policy? That is another idea for your readers, who are all still writing papers and being forced to write papers for classes. I do not think we have settled on these different approaches.


Regional Expertise, Functional Expertise, and the Need for Frameworks
BW: When you look back at your career, what do you think the biggest trade-off has been in terms of the work you have done, and what do you wish you had known before entering the field?

NS: I think it is the balance between functional areas and regional expertise. People in this field ideally need to achieve both.
For me, one thing was never becoming fluent enough in languages. Fluency with languages is great. I studied Russian, but I never got to the level where I was reading fully because I did not spend a lot of time there. Knowing a region well matters, and language tends to be important.
It is not a game. Some people are terrible at languages, and that does not mean you cannot do this work. But spending time in the countries you are studying is helpful. Having said that, it is harder to spend time in certain countries today, given the environment. But I think it really does help.
I also think you need to figure out what functional areas are important to you. If you are going to do trade, you need to know trade policy well. If you are going to do nuclear weapons, you need to know nuclear weapons well. If you are going to do missile defense, you do not have to be a scientist or engineer, but as a policy person you need to know the nitty-gritty. You have to try to maintain a balance between both.
Then there is the perpetual question of at what level you also have to be a generalist. There is no perfect answer to all of that. Everyone’s time is limited.
But I would encourage people to think thematically about what the debates really mean. You cannot just throw data at things. When you are supporting more senior people, whether as an intern or as a junior person starting out, do not just throw data at the person you report to. It does not mean anything without a framework. It is harder to get to that framework, but that is the work.


Moving a Bureaucracy
BW: What did you learn about the difference between writing strategy on paper and trying to move an actual bureaucracy? Was there ever an instance where you felt strongly about a certain policy, but someone above you did not?

NS: It is a combination of the big stick and persuasion. But you do not really have a big stick unless you are the president, the secretary of defense, or someone like that.
It is a mistake for more junior people to think they can go around yelling, screaming, and beating up people, saying, “Do this, do this.” It does not work because a bureaucracy can generally ride you out.
You have to think deliberately about the coalitions you need to build to get something done. I think this is relevant to things students are trying to do on campus: why coalitions matter, how to persuade, how to get the buy-in you need, and how to attach timelines.
For the hardest problems, you are going to need top cover. You are going to need the person who does carry the big stick to back you up if necessary. At the same time, I have found that coalition building is the better way because a lot of entities responsible for implementation can ride you out, especially in government.
In the private sector, it is different because you can fire people who are not moving more easily, and you can get rid of unnecessary organizations more easily. But even in a company, you still need the backing of leadership to drive change. Asking that of your leaders is the top cover you need. Second is coalition building. Third is the timeline, or the Gantt chart.
I wrote a piece a while ago that was critical of efforts to move toward electrification and electric vehicles because, no matter how you feel about them, you also have to create the infrastructure at the same time. You have to make Americans feel like they can charge up anywhere.
Henry Gantt was an important engineer in the early 1900s who had this chart for how you get there. You need to think that way if you care about implementation. Today, there are all these software programs that essentially took his Gantt chart idea, but the fundamental point is that you have to work backward. It forces you to work backward from what you need to do.
Often, there will be a lot of simultaneity. It is not all sequential. You are going to have to do things simultaneously. We do not have the luxury of time in a lot of these areas.


Building Strategic Judgment
BW: As we begin to close, I want to turn the conversation back to students. For younger people interested in foreign policy, the field can sometimes reward commentary more than judgment. What experiences or habits do you think actually develop strategic judgment, as opposed to just producing fluent analysis?

NS: What do you mean by judgment? Do you mean assumptions about how the world works and whether you are going to be right about something?

BW: Yes, building strong strategic judgment so that when you enter the field, you are prepared.

NS: I would say read history. Read about a particular region or functional area. History is important because it gives you a sense of how things have worked.
Also, clarify your assumptions going in. How do you think the world works? Do not mistake process for what drives actual progress or motivations. Culture, politics, motivations, and your sense of why you think something is going to move in a particular direction all matter. Avoid wishful thinking.
In that sense, I am probably more of a realist. I think power matters in the international system. Do not think everything stays in its lane. Just because you have negotiations and diplomacy does not mean that force is not relevant. It does not mean you do use force, but it also does not mean you do not. People tend to stay in their stovepipe lanes. You have to think across lanes.
Go in articulating and assessing your assumptions, and then reassess them. They are not static. They may change over time because you get new information.
Understand the coalitions that are required or that are likely to play into a particular policy. Think about politics, because politics influences and matters, even when we wish it did not. In most countries it does, even in authoritarian countries. Politics is about people and how they interact. It is harder to assess, but it would be wrong to judge that it does not matter.
Read on your subject. Think thematically about what has happened in the past, what forces are shaping something now, and whether those forces are likely to shape something differently in the future.


Reading for Strategy
BW: Finally, as is customary with The Pathway Blog, although you have already recommended many great books, if there were a student interested in following a career path similar to yours, what literature would you recommend?

NS: That is harder because there is so much out there. I break it up into categories.
There are classic books about world order, such as Henry Kissinger’s World Order, but there are other books too. So one category would be classic books about world order and power.
Another would be classic books about how militaries work. Williamson Murray and Allan Millett wrote wonderful books about how the American military worked, technology, and war. Michael Howard has an essay called “The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy” in Foreign Affairs from the 1970s. That is a very nice essay that always framed things for me.
You could think about categories of warfare, such as the period of counterinsurgency. If you are interested in Russia, there is Adam Ulam, Richard Pipes, and John Lewis Gaddis on the Cold War.
I am reading now the president of Finland Alexander Stubb’s book, The Triangle of Power. Right now, I am sorting through different books that look at world order in different ways. It is hard to identify one, which I know may be a cop-out, so I would break it into categories.
I am not an economist, and that is fine. I would have been a terrible economist. But I try to read books about globalization. Shannon K. O’Neil, at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote an interesting book in that category. I would look in categories.

The Two Parties and Where Power Actually Lives
Ben Wolf: You’ve covered politics long enough to see several versions of both the Republican and Democratic parties. When you look at Washington now, what do smart outsiders still misunderstand about where power actually sits inside the two parties?​

Jonathan Martin: The two parties are very different right now. The Republican Party has become a personality cult in which power flows entirely through the preferences of one man, Donald Trump. That’s a very different moment. All presidents are powerful and have enormous sway over their own parties, but this is something different entirely.
The Democratic Party is in a strange period because it’s out of power entirely in Washington. Generationally, its most prominent figures are part of yesterday rather than tomorrow. People like Chuck Schumer, the Senate leader, and former presidents like Biden, Clinton, and Obama are all figures, to borrow the Bill Clinton line, who have more yesterdays than they do tomorrows.
So we’re in a generational transition. The Democratic Party has always been a coalition party, but it’s sort of a patchwork of constituencies. It’s become much more of a high-and-low party now, which is to say it’s dominated by the most educated Americans: people with advanced degrees, lawyers, PhDs, high-income folks who live in big cities and close-in suburbs. And it’s also a party of people who are closer to the margins of society, who are dependent upon the federal government to survive. That includes a lot of first- and second-generation immigrants. It also includes, obviously, African Americans, who historically are the most loyal voting bloc for Democrats.
So the parties are different. But what’s unique about this era is just how Trump has become a singular force who dominates his party and controls what they do and say. But he also has enormous sway over the Democratic Party, too, because the Democrats, being patchwork in nature, are organized largely in opposition to Trump more than around any coherent ideological agenda right now.


Public Justifications and Private Motives
BW: One thing your reporting does especially well is separate the public justification from the private motive. When you talk to elected officials off the record, where do you see the widest gap between what politicians say is driving them and what is actually driving them?

JM: What’s driving their choices on the Republican side is survival. Republicans want to survive the next primary, and you don’t antagonize Donald Trump and survive many primaries. That overwhelmingly is what’s driving Republicans.
Privately, they’ll acknowledge that. And privately, they’ll mock and belittle Trump. They’ll talk about how little he knows, how uninformed he is, how absurd some of his behavior is. Obviously, they don’t want to say all that in public.
Democrats are more candid privately about issues around identity, whether it’s gender or race, that they don’t want to talk about publicly because of the sensitivities of their coalition. You certainly saw that with Biden. A lot of Democrats were uneasy about him running for reelection at 82. They were reluctant to say so out loud, in part because they feared the next question, which would have been, “Well, then, do you want Kamala Harris to be the nominee?” And the answer would have been, “Well, no, I don’t.” But they didn’t want to say that out loud.
Why? Because they thought she would have been a lackluster candidate. What she turned out to be. So here we are.


Ideology, Ambition, and Fear
BW: A lot of political coverage still treats ideology as the central explanation for why politicians act the way they do. But when you follow decisions from inside the room, how much is ideology, how much is ambition, and how much is fear of the coalition turning on you?

JM: I think it’s a combination of the three. Again, separate the parties. Republicans are driven by fear of Trump, especially if their prospects hang on a primary. If your survival every two years, every six years, every four years, is surviving a primary, then obviously Trump is the biggest force in your life. Staying right with him is everything.
On the Democratic side, the primary still matters a lot. Obviously, compromising with Trump or being seen as enabling Trump is detrimental to your survival in a primary. But most Democrats are still more focused on the general election, at least if they’re in more competitive districts or states.
Look, politics used to be a hodgepodge of partisan, regional, generational, and individual preferences. It was more confused. It’s much more coherent now, and polarized, in the sense that the parties have less give in the rope. If you look at the votes in Congress, if you look at the preferences of the voters themselves, it’s much more coherent along partisan lines.
That’s why Manchin and Sinema stood out so much, and why Fetterman stands out now, and why Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski stand out on the Republican side. There used to be 30 of them or more in the Senate, these wild cards, these more individual actors and free agents. Now it’s a much more party-line chamber. And the House, obviously, is the same way. People are much more inclined to vote the party line because that’s what’s expected of them.
There’s such a severe penalty, implicit and explicit, for stepping away from the party line. We’re in tribal times, and the expectation is that you will follow the expectations of your party. A lot of this is driven by political polarization and negative partisanship, which is voters voting against the other guys. Helping the other team is the biggest sin. It’s not even ideological principle or an agenda as much as it is being part of the home team.


Where Democrats Misread the Country
BW: You talked earlier about survival as a major force inside the Republican Party. Looking at Democrats, where do you think the party’s leadership class has most misread the country over the last few years? Not morally, necessarily, but analytically — where did they get the model wrong?

JM: Democrats didn’t fully appreciate how divisive the issue of Israel and Gaza was going to be with a lot of their voters. They thought it was more of a temporary issue, and it’s been stickier than they thought.
I think Democrats also misread their electorate and thought that their voters were more committed to Joe Biden. I was so struck by this in 2023. I actually wrote about it. I did a piece about Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, from Mackinac Island. What was so striking is that the higher on the political ladder, the more loyal Democrats were to Biden and renominating Biden. But further down the scale, toward the grassroots, Democratic activists and voters were okay with other folks running in 2024. There was not some overwhelming feeling of, “We can’t abandon our president.”
But actual Democratic voters were different. I think a lot of Democratic elites were so uneasy about sticking their head out, about being the ones who were going to speak up first and say Biden couldn’t run again, because the perceived penalty for stepping out of the pack in these tribal times is so severe.
Dean Phillips of Minnesota did it and got belittled. Also, nobody wanted to answer the second question about Kamala. So they said, “I don’t want to be the one who says it.” And so here we are. Biden runs for reelection while turning 82, and it turned out to be a debacle. These folks knew the risks. Not that it would be that bad, but they knew the risks and they were uneasy about it. Nobody said a word.

BW: Looking ahead to 2028, and even to the midterms before then, do you think Democrats have absorbed that lesson? Or do you think the party is still at risk of repeating the same mistake?

JM: I think there’s an appetite for a wide-open primary now. I’ll tell you what: if you look at the races where Democrats have won the presidency — 1976, 1992, 2008 — basically everything except Biden in modern times, and let’s take Biden out of the equation because Biden was really a vehicle against Trump and a vehicle against COVID, every one of those races was an open race.
There was not an incumbent president or vice president of their party running. Nobody tried to put much weight on the scale. The three folks who emerged all won the presidency: Carter, Clinton, and Obama.
In 2016, Hillary was basically anointed. Yes, Bernie challenged her, but that was an insurgency that had no support from the party leadership. So in 2016 and 2024, you’re basically talking about coronations more than competitive primaries. I think Democrats don’t want that again. They want a clean, open primary.


What Journalism Gets Wrong About Populism
BW: You’ve had a front-row seat to elite political journalism in a period when trust in institutions has clearly fallen sharply.

JM: I’ve noticed that.

BW: What do reporters still get wrong when they cover populism? And where does journalism confuse performance for conviction, or noise for actual leverage?

JM: There’s a saying, I think Gary Hart, the former senator and candidate for president, said this. David Axelrod sort of borrowed it, and I think it’s totally accurate: Washington is always the last to get the news.
What that means is that the conventional wisdom in D.C. about who can or can’t be a candidate, or who is or isn’t going to be a strong candidate, is often wrong. The voters surprise us. Arthur Schlesinger had this great saying that the future outwits all of our certitudes, and the voters tend to outwit all of our certitudes here in Washington.
They’re more open to Barack Obama, or Bernie Sanders, or Pete Buttigieg, or hell, Donald Trump, than we think they’re going to be in D.C. So let’s not prejudge who can or can’t be a nominee. That’s the biggest thing: understanding that the aperture is wider with voters than we assume it is. To me, that’s all the more reason to get out of D.C. and cover politics beyond D.C.


Reporting This Will Not Pass
BW: You co-authored This Will Not Pass, which gave readers a very close look at how political actors behaved when the stakes were unusually high. After doing that reporting and the research that went into the writing, what most surprised you about the way senior officials rationalized their decisions to themselves?

JM: Just the massive gap between what they say in public and what they say in private about people. There’s such a gap. They’re so petrified of talking publicly about some of the folks in their own party. But it’s so revealing when you have them on audiotape and can hear how they talk in private.
That was the big reveal. I’m really proud of that book that Alex Burns and I did. We got so much reporting about the conversations taking place at the highest levels of politics in Washington, but also in big cities and state capitals. It’s a really panoramic look at American politics in 2020 and 2021, and the aftermath of 2020.
So, folks, give it a look: This Will Not Pass. Available on Amazon.com right now.

BW: Certainly a must read. Mr. Martin, can you take us inside the reporting process for the book? How did the idea first come together, and what did the work actually look like as you tried to reconstruct that period?

JM: Sure. We had some friends in the publishing world who were eager to have a book about the 2020 campaign. What Alex and I wanted to do was less a campaign book and more a book about a period of time.
I think some of the best books in American history are about a single year: 1865, 1912, 1929, 1968. I think that period of 2020 and 2021 — Trump, COVID, Biden, January 6th — was a convulsive period in American history.
It turns out the title held up pretty damn well, because here we are in the spring of 2026, and we were pretty prescient with This Will Not Pass, because the fever hasn’t broken. We’re still living through these tumultuous times.
The idea was that we were going to capture this moment in American politics and American history and do a real, intensive first draft of American history that hopefully will be looked at by future historians.


Curiosity, History, and the Making of a Political Reporter
BW: You’ve covered politics at the highest level across several eras of the media business. Looking back, what choices or habits most shaped the kind of reporter you became?

JM: Two things: you’ve got to work hard, and you’ve got to be curious.
Work hard. Come in early. Stay late. Be curious. Give a damn. Take an interest in the world that came before you. Harry Truman once said, “The only new thing is the history you don’t know.” You’ve got to know where the world was. The world didn’t start in 2016 with Donald Trump. The more you know about what came before that, the better you’ll be.
Then just work hard and get after it. Luck helps, timing matters, connections matter, but if you put yourself in a place to succeed, you’re going to go a long way. I had good mentors. I had good timing, and that helped. But I also had a curiosity that I still have about the how and the why of American politics, American culture, and American identity.
Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we now? Where are we going?
I’m curious about all of that every day. The beauty of political journalism is telling a story about America and American history through the prism of our elections. So it’s a lot of fun.

BW: Where did that curiosity come from for you? Was there a moment when you realized that politics, history, and public life were the subjects you wanted to spend your career trying to understand?

JM: I was always interested in history and politics and public affairs. I was lousy in math and science, and I was always curious about the world around me.
I had parents who would take my brother and me to all kinds of historic sites, and who made sure that we constantly had books around us and were constantly at the library, learning and reading. You’re never bored if you have a book. That has been the maxim I’ve lived by now for almost half a century. That helped a lot.
At some point, you’re either interested in this stuff or you’re not. Some kids reject what their parents are into. I embraced it. For me, it was second nature. I just can’t imagine not being interested in history, politics, place, identity, and culture. It’s all fascinating to me.
I love the vast buffet that is American politics and American history. It’s all interesting to me, and I want to eat quite a lot of it.

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Advice for Young Political Reporters
BW: If you were advising a serious young reporter who wants to cover American politics well right now, where would you tell them to look that the rest of the press corps is still underestimating?
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JM: I would tell them to go cover a state capital or a state campaign. Get sources on the ground from across the ideological spectrum. Learn how to write. Learn how to report. Learn that the tougher you write, the more skeptical you are, people aren’t going to walk away. They’re going to respect you more, because you’re going to have more authority in your coverage.
And read, read, read. Again, the more you read, the better writer you’ll become. Writing is like osmosis. You just pick it up. You get better by seeing what other writing looks like on the page.
Read, read. Learn about the world that came before. Understand how we are, why we are, and you’ll have an advantage over the next guy. You can get it in your pocket. You have a computer in your pocket. Take advantage of it, man. Get off the social media stuff and read books and articles.

Beyond the Rational Actor Model
Ben Wolf: When you first studied how people form beliefs, what was the biggest misconception about how people actually process information?

Benjamin Converse: It took me a while to get here. This isn’t where I started. But now I’ve been teaching for basically seventeen years, teaching MPP students, and I think the biggest misconception I continue to work on with students goes back to the rational actor model.
What I’m trying to do is help them find a sweet spot for real humans in everyday life. In our case, at a policy school, that means real humans in everyday life who need to think about policy, economics, organizations, leaders, decision-makers, however you want to put it. What is a useful mental model for how this works?
I think it’s really unproductive to get into any kind of psychology-versus-economics debate. That can be fun intellectually, but it’s not all that useful for people who want to go do their work. So I try to help students see what economic models can help them do when they’re reasoning about causality and big systems, and what a psychological or behavioral science approach can help them do when they’re reasoning about essentially the same problems, but maybe at a smaller scale, in one-on-one interactions or small groups.
So in terms of misconceptions, some people adopt what Thaler and Sunstein call the “Econ” misconception, the idea that people are perfectly rational actors, like supercomputers who know everything. But then on the other end of that spectrum is a misunderstanding of psychology that casts everybody as dumb and irrational. The truth is somewhere in the middle, and there’s a lot of nuance to understanding how we make decisions in the real world.


An Unlikely Path Into Social Psychology
BW: You mentioned this wasn't where you started. What was your original field of study, and what led you to social psychology today?

BC: Sure. One of the funniest things about my journey, in hindsight, is that I took social psychology early on in my undergraduate career. Even though that is now my primary professional identity, I would say, I’m a social psychologist when asked what I do in most settings, it really didn’t make a huge impact on me at first.
It was a very standard introductory undergraduate class, and in hindsight I think what happened to me is what happens to a lot of students who take social psychology for the first time: as soon as you hear these ideas, they seem very obvious, if you don’t take enough time to pause and consider the opposite. I took that class, it was fine, and I moved on with my life. I didn’t expect to be a psychology major at that point, and I certainly didn’t expect to devote the rest of my professional career to those ideas.
What got me hooked was signing up on a whim for a class on experimental design. It was a small class that all the psychology majors had to take, but I signed up for it out of interest. It walked through the process of formulating a research question, crafting hypotheses based on prior literature, thinking about how to operationalize variables, and then testing them. I found that process fascinating, just encountering for the first time all of these clever ways behavioral scientists were trying to learn about behavior and the patterns going on in interactions, and the invisible things happening inside people’s heads. That’s where I got really excited about psychology.
From there, it was the luck of life. I got a little curious about a certain topic, and then I got passed from guardian angel to guardian angel, people who were doing really cool things and who happened to be amazing mentors. My undergraduate advisor invited me to do an honors thesis, so I got to work through that full process I had been so excited about.
Her name is Kimberly Quinn. She was a postdoctoral scholar when I worked with her in college at Dartmouth, and just as I was graduating she took her first faculty job. As part of her startup package she was able to hire a lab manager, so she invited me to come help set up her lab. That was at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
When I showed up, she asked, “What do you want to do while you’re here?” I had no idea. She said a lot of her colleagues there were developmental psychologists studying theory of mind, how we form ideas about what’s going on inside somebody else’s head even though we can’t see their thoughts or feel their emotions. She handed me some social psychology on the topic, including a paper by Nick Epley and his collaborators, and I started getting really excited about that work.
When it came time to think about graduate school, I reached out to Nick Epley to see if he might be taking graduate students. I thought he was still in a psychology department, but it turned out he had just moved and was getting set up in the business school at the University of Chicago. He was part of that early wave of social psychologists building labs in business schools and teaching management courses.
There was an opportunity to work with him, and I hesitated because I thought, I don’t want to go to business school. I don’t know anything about business. I want to be a social psychologist. He basically said, don’t worry. Come here. If you still want a job in a psychology department later, you’ll be able to get one. I’m pretty confident that by the time you’re done here, you won’t want to.
He was a very compelling person, and I trusted him. So I went to Chicago, worked with him at the Center for Decision Research, and there were just amazing people there doing incredible things.
Then, five or six years later, there was a job advertised at the University of Virginia at a policy school. That never would have caught my eye if I hadn’t already had the experience of being a social psychologist in a professional school. It was the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, and at the time they were building with affiliated faculty. Tim Wilson, an eminent social psychologist whom I had idolized, was leading the search. I thought, I have no idea what it would mean to work at a policy school, but if Tim Wilson is involved, I might be interested.
I think the experience I had gained in Chicago looked valuable to the people assembling the Batten faculty, and I ended up here. I’ve been here going on seventeen years now. It’s introduced me to questions I never would have asked before and people I never would have collaborated with before. It’s been amazing.


From Basic Research to Public Policy
BW: What would you say is the ultimate goal or intended use case for your research? Is it a prediction model, a tool for policymaker reflection, or something else?

BC: That’s a great question. It’s hard to answer because across my portfolio of work I probably have different answers.
I’m incredibly lucky to be a researcher at a place that allows all of us to roam pretty freely. Some of the projects I start are very basic social psychology. We’re trying to understand often undocumented or unrecognized systematic patterns in how people think, interact, or pursue their goals. That kind of work is often early-stage discovery work, documenting that this is a thing people do systematically. I hope that kind of work will be interesting, important, broad, and robust enough that in ten or fifteen years it becomes the kind of thing policymakers or decision-makers ought to know about. But research takes a long time, and that work needs to be replicated and extended, and we need to understand when it applies and when it doesn’t before, in my view, we go handing it off to decision-makers.
Then I have other work that’s much more applied in nature, where we think we have a pretty good idea of the psychology and how it works, but we don’t yet know how it applies to a particular problem. I’ve been able to do some work on decision-making related to climate change, often with respect to climate technology, and that work is much further along in the research process. In those cases, yes, I do hope decision-makers will be able to learn from the findings and incorporate them into how they have conversations or make choices.
So it’s really the full spectrum. I’m intellectually satisfied by being able to move between those kinds of projects, with different collaborators, over time. I’m lucky to be in a place that supports that kind of breadth.


Political Belief, Identity, and the Power of Situation
BW: One of the enduring questions in public life is whether people reason their way into political beliefs or inherit them first and rationalize them later. In your view, what shapes political judgment most, and how do identity, evidence, and prior commitment factor into that decision?

BC: I’d answer that as a card-carrying social psychologist. What that means to me is the power of the situation. I think situations are incredibly powerful in shaping people’s behavior.
I would never argue against the existence or importance of personality or stable beliefs. Both are real, both are relevant. But my own mind, because of my training and experience, is naturally biased toward thinking about the situations people are in. And like many social psychologists, I use “situation” in a very broad sense. I mean essentially anything outside the person.
That includes what we inherit from our closest caregivers, who shape us enormously. It includes the communities we grow up in and the early experiences we have. It includes the incentives we perceive in the world, ranging from financial incentives to social incentives. It includes the information ecosystems people live in, and their propensity to consume information, and their curiosity, or lack of curiosity, to go beyond those ecosystems in a sincere effort to learn.
In my psychology for leadership course for MPP students, I introduce what we might call nested models: individuals inside social interactions, inside groups, inside communities, inside broader institutional constraints, culture, and time. I think for all interesting behavioral problems, there are relevant factors at all of those levels of analysis.
Most people can’t work across all those levels all the time. There are just too many. So one piece of practical advice we try to give students is to identify the level they naturally care about most. Some people are drawn to individuals; others are drawn to institutions, culture, or history. But whatever level you’re naturally drawn to, it’s a good idea to understand the problem at that level, and also one level down and one level up. One step more concrete, and one step more abstract.
So to your original question about where political and sociocultural beliefs come from, I think it’s a super complicated and super rich set of problems. But it’s always worth asking yourself: what’s going on one level down, and what’s going on one level up?


Motivated Reasoning in the Information Age
BW: A lot of people assume that more information should make politics more rational. Instead, modern research shows that the information environment often seems to make people more certain and polarized. What is the explanation for this phenomena?

BC: The idea that explains the most variance for me is motivated reasoning.
What you expect to believe, what you want to believe, and maybe also what you’re primed to believe, even if you don’t fully recognize it as something you want or are seeking, all of those things serve as information filters. They affect how you perceive the information coming in.
Again, going back to my MPP class, because I think of it as the greatest-hits version of social psychology for people interested in public policy, we spend a couple of weeks on the mechanisms of motivated reasoning. There are lots of ways we end up believing what we expect to believe and what we hope to believe.
It starts with attention. Take a short news story. You could read it and attend to certain parts of it, and I could read the same story and attend to different parts. We might walk away with qualitatively different conclusions, or with the same conclusion but for different reasons, or with different levels of confidence. Why did we pay attention to different parts? That’s a complicated question, but it has to do with what we expect to find, what we hope to find, and what degree of skepticism we’re likely to bring to the information.
Then there’s memory, and there are the standards we apply to information once we encounter it. If somebody hands you a policy brief, and you start reading it with the background question “must I believe this?” that is very different from reading it with the question “can I believe this?” You are likely to consume the same argument and the same data in different ways.
So there’s a whole set of mechanisms that lead us to interpret information differently. Those mechanisms help explain how people can encounter more information and walk away more confident in what they believed in the first place.


Democracy, Complexity, and Cautious Optimism
BW: As we begin to close, I want to take a step back from the research itself. After studying judgment and belief revision for years, has it made you more optimistic or more cautious about how democracies handle uncertainty?


BC: I don’t know that it has made me more optimistic or more cautious. I am naturally curious whenever I encounter a behavioral question or behavioral problem.
Some people make progress in understanding the world by simplifying things. Other people make progress by adding complexity. Neither is necessarily better. I happen to be drawn to complexity and to thinking about nuance. And the answer, ultimately, is that a single human’s judgment is extremely complicated. A democracy is therefore infinitely more complicated.
I tend to assume, and I’m motivated in my work and teaching by the idea, that whatever people are doing, they are doing it for some set of reasons that make sense to them. If you approach any kind of decision-maker with that in mind, and you are curious and careful, I think you can make at least some progress in understanding what matters to them, why it came to matter, and how they are understanding the world.
So even though democracy seems extremely messy right now, and even though democracy in some sense always seems extremely messy, I still hold the belief that people are doing what they’re doing for reasons that make sense to them and their situations. If we approach those interactions with curiosity, with humility, and with care about how confident we are in the conclusions we jump to, I think we can understand why things are happening the way they are.
And from there, the optimism I do have comes from experience learning about and teaching negotiation. Successful negotiators do not have to agree on everything to make progress. They figure out how to make trades and find mutually satisfactory ways to solve problems. So if you approach these issues as a social psychologist, with curiosity and calibrated confidence, and then approach solutions with a negotiator’s mindset, then yes, from that point of view, I do remain somewhat optimistic.


A Reading Recommendation
BW: Finally, if there were a student interested in learning more about your work and the kinds of problems you confront on a day-to-day basis, what reading would you recommend, and why?
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BC: I would go with an oldie but a goodie: Thomas Gilovich’s How We Know What Isn’t So.
The examples are dated now, which often happens with books like that. I think the book is probably around thirty-five years old, at least in the edition I know best. But the questions in it are the questions that got me interested in this work.
It uses a judgment-and-decision-making lens to ask how reasonable, intelligent people can come to believe things that are, in some cases, completely false, demonstrably untrue. Not because they are stupid or foolish or selfish or ignorant, but because they are operating with a whole suite of psychological strategies, shortcuts, and tricks that work most of the time. They are highly functional and highly useful for navigating a complicated world, but they can also lead us astray in predictable and systematic ways.
So from a process standpoint, the book helps students understand what I think of as the behavioral scientist’s approach to the world: how can we set up processes that might prove us wrong about how human behavior works? And from a content standpoint, it helps us think carefully about many of the questions that animate your project, based on what you told me at the beginning, why you’re persistent about reaching out to a wide variety of people working on important problems, trying to understand their perspective, and trying to understand how, at a societal level, we continue to interact with people who have very different priorities and motivations, but still find a way to be productive and prosperous.

Strategic Strength and the Costs of Activism
Ben Wolf: A lot of your work pushes against the reflex to define US credibility by the number of commitments it takes on. At this point, what do you think Washington still gets most wrong about the relationship between military activism and actual strategic strength?

Jennifer Kavanagh: My view is that the United States is actually very safe, and that’s not the narrative you hear in DC most often. Every day I read the paper and hear about how the world is more dangerous and the US faces more complex threats, and I just disagree with that. The US has oceans on two sides and weak neighbors to the north and south. It has a powerful nuclear deterrent. It is very secure and very safe, and it does not need hundreds of thousands of US military forces or 700 bases abroad to protect itself.
So I see the US approach to security, which is to basically define anything that happens anywhere in the world that changes the status quo as a threat, as counterproductive. I don’t see having US military forces based forward as stabilizing to the world. I see US military power, actually, as quite destabilizing.
I came to that conclusion based on my work when I was at the RAND Corporation on US military interventions, where I studied every time the US has used force since 1898, the Spanish-American War. My big conclusion was that these interventions fail. They don’t make the US safer, and they don’t make the places we intervene any better off.
Starting from that assumption, what my work tries to do is look at which commitments we actually need and which we don’t. And when I started challenging a lot of the conventional thinking, I came to the realization that most of the commitments we have don’t actually make the US safer, and they create perverse incentives for our allies to behave in ways that are inconsistent with their geopolitical reality. If they believe they have an ironclad US security guarantee, they act in ways that are too aggressive or too provocative, or assume a level of military backing that they wouldn’t have if the US weren’t there. Japan is a good example. Israel is a good example. These are countries that take on significant risks because they believe the US will back them up.
I think the world would be better off if they didn’t do that, if they had to deal with their own geopolitical realities without the backing of US security guarantees.


Which Commitments Should Be Reconsidered?
BW: You hinted at it a little bit just then, but a theme that runs through your work is that prioritization is unavoidable. So if you were sitting with a president who accepted that premise, what would be the first two or three commitments that you would ask them to reconsider?

JK: Everything in the Middle East. The US does not have major strategic interests in the Middle East. It keeps getting sucked into wars in the Middle East, and the rationale for those wars is usually that our bases in the Middle East are at risk. But that doesn’t make sense. Those bases are supposed to be there to protect the United States. They are not, in and of themselves, something that needs to be protected. If the goal is to protect the bases, we’ve made a mistake. So that would be the first thing.
Then I would look very carefully at the commitment in Europe. I don’t know if the number of US forces in Europe should be zero, but it should be much less than 70,000 or 80,000, which is what we have now. I don’t think NATO is really necessary anymore for global security. It certainly isn’t really benefiting the United States. So I would relook at that commitment and see whether US involvement in NATO continues to make sense, at least to the extent that it is currently involved.
So those are the two places I would start.


Why NATO?
BW: Can you go a little bit deeper into the “why NATO?” question, or I guess, “why not NATO” in this sense?

JK: NATO was founded in 1949. It was basically a compromise with Europe to make them feel secure so they could focus on their economic rebuilding after World War II. The idea was that if the US was there to protect them militarily, they could continue to invest in their economic infrastructure, which had been devastated after the war.
It was also a move by those in the United States who believed that the only way the US could protect its interests was to basically take control of security everywhere. And it was built to inculcate dependence, to ensure that European allies couldn’t be a threat to the United States, and to make it so they couldn’t make their own decisions geopolitically, so that the US could, number one, be the number one global power, and number two, prevent things like World War II, which was in some sense a European mistake that the US had to clean up.
But the world is quite different now. I don’t see Russia as a conventional threat to the United States. It certainly is a nuclear threat, has extensive cyber capabilities, and acts in the hybrid domain a lot. But in terms of conventional military power, it’s not a threat to the United States. And it’s not really a threat to Europe.
I disagree with Europeans who are very concerned that in 2028 or 2029, when the Ukraine war is over, Russia’s next move is going to be to invade Europe. I talk to Russians all the time, and that’s just not how they see the world, and it’s not something they’re interested in.
And if the purpose of NATO is to defend against Russia, and Russia is not really a threat anymore, do we need NATO anymore? But even beyond that, Europe is rich and technologically advanced. The days of the 1940s and 1950s, when Europe was weak and couldn’t defend itself, are gone. Europe is perfectly capable of building a military capability that could defend against Russia, which has a smaller total population than all of Europe together and a smaller GDP than all of Europe together.
So I have a lot of confidence that Europe could defend itself without the United States. And even if it couldn’t, I don’t believe that Russia has the military power to take over Europe. So does it have enough military power to seize a corner of Estonia? Maybe. But does that really affect US interests? Not really. Do I want that to happen? No. But do I think it’s worth fighting a potentially nuclear war with Russia over? No.
And so that’s the final reason I would get out of NATO: I see it as more of a risk than a benefit. It entangles the US and risks nuclear war with Russia when that’s not in US interests. That doesn’t mean I hate Europe or think the US shouldn’t be partners with Europe. It’s just that the NATO alliance needs something specific to justify it, and I’m not sure that thing is in US interests anymore.


Ukraine and the Meaning of “Victory”
BW: If you strip away the rhetoric, what do you think US policymakers actually believe victory looks like in Ukraine? And do you think they believe it privately as much as they say it publicly?

JK: I don’t know that policymakers know what they mean when they say that. I think there was a time, when Ukraine was doing quite well on the battlefield, when there was some hope that maybe Ukraine could push Russia back, at least to pre-2022 borders. But now I don’t even think they believe that’s realistic. The battlefield has been stalled for a long time, and while it doesn’t seem likely that Russia is going to make big breakthroughs, it also definitely doesn’t seem likely that Ukraine is going to make big breakthroughs.
So now, when people talk about victory, I think what they really want is a peace settlement that doesn’t force major concessions on Ukraine, that doesn’t leave Russia feeling like it won the war. Giving up the rest of Donetsk, for example, would be something they would argue against because they would feel that would reward Russia, that it would suggest surrender or capitulation on the Ukrainian side.
They don’t want a postwar settlement that gives Russia major sanctions relief or places constraints on Ukraine’s military capabilities or sovereignty in any way. They don’t necessarily even want to close the door on Ukraine’s NATO membership. So they want a peace settlement that can be sold as a victory for Ukraine, and not a victory for Russia.
I understand, as a human being, why that’s appealing. Russia is obviously the aggressor that started the war, and no matter what its security concerns or grievances against NATO and the United States may be, war is a terrible way to solve that problem.
That said, ultimately I think the outcome of the war in Ukraine doesn’t have a lot of impact on US national security. It doesn’t even have a lot of impact on European national security, or I guess European regional security would be the better way to say it. So I would be in favor of pushing harder for something that does require some concessions from Ukraine, just acknowledging the reality that Russia can probably keep fighting longer.
And now, especially after the war in Iran, the US doesn’t have the excess material or resources to continue supplying Ukraine with the weapons it needs to protect its infrastructure. So continuing to fight is just a losing bet.


Defense Budgets and Avoiding Prioritization
BW: On the defense budget, do you think more money is sometimes politically attractive precisely because it postpones the need to make these choices?

JK: Yes. I think more money is appealing for a couple of reasons. The first is that there are a lot of constituencies that want more defense money. The defense contractors are a powerful lobby. Congressmen like more defense money because it creates jobs in their districts.
And then, yes, there’s the argument you just articulated, which is that it postpones the need to prioritize. If you look at the report from the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, not the current one that just came out in 2026 but the one that came out under Biden in 2023, they did a review of this issue, and their argument is that prioritization is impossible. The US is so essential that it cannot afford to prioritize across regions.
And then they acknowledge that in order to meet the requirements of this, the US must spend dramatically more every year. They also make the point, very honestly, that the only way to fund this really is through reform to entitlements, which would mean less Medicare, less Medicaid, less Social Security, or higher taxes. And that’s the tradeoff.
That’s the reason policymakers like this, because no one wants to prioritize. No one wants to give up US primacy. Well, except me. I want to give that up. But congressmen don’t want to. They want America to continue to be the global hegemon. But it’s just not sustainable, because you can’t outspend China.
The argument often made is that with the Soviet Union, we were able to outspend them. We could just keep spending on defense and their economy eventually couldn’t support it. But with China, you’re not going to outspend China. So you need a different strategy, not just more money.


Retrenchment Before Reality Forces It
BW: Ten years from now, what do you think will look more obvious in hindsight than it does today?

JK: That the US should have started retrenching earlier, because I fear that we’re entering a world now where, especially after the war in Iran, US resource constraints will really start to impinge on its strategy.
We’re entering a world where the question isn’t “Should the US do something?” but “Can the US do something?” If you think about the big debate a lot of us are having in DC, it’s whether the US should defend Taiwan. This is a long-term question that has become quite an active debate, which is interesting because it used to be very taboo to say that the answer to this question was no. But now I don’t think the question is “should” anymore. In my view, the question is “can?”
And at least right now, the answer would be no, because the United States doesn’t have the munitions to fight a war in Asia right now. It doesn’t have the air defenses. It doesn’t have the offensive munitions to do that. It doesn’t have the naval or air capacity as long as we have so many ships and aircraft committed in the Middle East.
So you’re entering a world where you’re not able to manage retrenchment. You’re not able to choose which commitments you want to give up and do it in a responsible way over a fixed time period. You’re not able to say, “We’d really like to keep these commitments in Asia because they’re valuable to us.” You’re forced to retrench, and you’re forced to retrench in ways that are maybe not strategically ideal. They leave allies vulnerable. They force you to give up things you’d rather keep or keep you tied down in places you don’t want to be anymore.
And that, to me, is a worse place to be than choosing how you pull back. So I think in ten years we will look back and wish that retrenchment had been something we started sooner, and that we had made more consistent and conscientious choices about the commitments we gave up, and that we gave them up sooner rather than waiting until we were forced to do so by reality.


Taiwan, Semiconductors, and Economic Strategy
BW: You spoke about the rationale behind US involvement in the Middle East, and I can see how it’s a little more blurry there. But as it relates to Taiwan, I think a lot of the concern is that a good portion of our semiconductor production comes from there. For those who want to defend Taiwan because of that, what would you say to them?

JK: I agree that semiconductor production is something to take into account. And I think it’s the only one of all the arguments made for maintaining the current commitments to Taiwan that actually requires serious consideration and thinking. Most of the other ones I can counter pretty quickly and easily.
A few things. First, China is also dependent on Taiwan’s semiconductor capabilities, and that means that at least for now, it also has a reason not to attack Taiwan. Even if it would like to seize those semiconductor fabs, a war over Taiwan would almost certainly destroy them. It’s unlikely they would survive that level of bombing, and the US might destroy them. If China were to seize them peacefully, most of the intellectual property and a lot of the input parts are not housed on the island. So the US could withhold them. The factories would be there, but they wouldn’t be all that useful to China.
So this gives us a window. The US has an advantage, in my view, in that it controls the technological know-how and intellectual property required to reconstitute TSMC-type production inside the United States. And we have time, because China is, at least for now, not imminently going to attack Taiwan and does have this dependence on TSMC that should keep it, at least for now, from taking military action.
So the answer, in my view, isn’t to keep the current commitment to Taiwan, but to reshore that capability and make sure it exists in more secure locations, in the United States and in other secure places, so you have resilient capacity. That will take time. It won’t be immediate. It will require resources. But what if we took part of the money that is supposed to be allocated toward this enormous defense budget and, instead of putting it toward weapons, actually made a serious effort to continue building this capability domestically?
The resources are always there for war. But somehow they’re not there for other types of serious near-term investments. In my view, that’s the answer to this problem: not to keep the current commitment to Taiwan, but to think economically about how to reduce the dependence we have on that specific capability, and others, so we avoid this problem in the future.


Entering the Field
BW: You’ve been writing about US military strategy for quite some time. What first got you interested in the subject, and when did it happen?

JK: I started working in this area right after college. I got a job working as a research assistant at the RAND Corporation after college, and I was always interested in international security. The first events I remember are the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was eight or nine, and it captured my attention as something that was quite fascinating that I didn’t really understand, but thought was worth learning more about.
But what really got me into this line of work was that I loved research. I think research is so much fun. After college, I thought maybe I wanted to get a PhD, because then I could do research as my job. But PhDs are hard and they take a long time, and I wanted to make really sure that I liked this enough to do it as a career.
So I decided I would be a research assistant at a think tank, and I was not super picky about the topic area. I would have researched anything. But I was lucky, and I got this job at RAND. After that, I was kind of sold on it as a line of work. I found it to be so much fun. I did eventually go back and get a PhD. I stayed at RAND for a few years and then went back. So RAND is really where I learned all about the military, and I guess I’ve been doing it ever since.


Tradeoffs, Criticism, and the Washington Ecosystem
BW: What do you think has been the biggest tradeoff of your work?

JK: I feel like there are so many things I wish I had known.
I think when I first came to DC, I didn’t really understand how DC worked, and there’s a big difference between, say, working at RAND and working in a downtown DC think tank. I’ve only gained appreciation for that over time. It took me a long time to understand how the DC ecosystem works and how to be effective, how to network, and how to have your work make an impact. So that’s one thing.
I think a second thing is that, at least right now, one thing that’s hard about my job is that I make a lot of unpopular arguments. And that means it attracts negative attention as well as positive attention. So being secure enough to know that this is what I believe, and people can criticize me if they want, but I can back up my arguments and that’s really all that’s important.
And then I guess the third thing is that getting a PhD is very hard. This isn’t something I regret, but it’s something I would advise people looking to get a PhD about: make sure you know why you’re doing it. I knew why I was doing it. I wanted to go back to RAND. I had a very clear vision of my life after the PhD. So when getting a PhD was hard and I wanted to quit, I at least had this vision of, “Okay, I know why I’m doing this. It will be worth it in the end.” That kept me going through the times when I really wanted to quit.
But if you don’t have that “why,” it can just feel like a slog, because it’s long and there’s not a lot of positive feedback along the way. Especially once you enter the dissertation phase, there’s no short-term gratification. It’s all long-term, and you don’t really know where you’re heading.
And then I think the last thing is that international security in the DC space, especially on the military side, is still very male-dominated. I often find that I’m still the only woman in the room. I’m used to it now, but sometimes it can feel isolating. I’ve been happy to see more and more young women involved in this space. Hopefully they’ll have a different experience.
I know my experience is different from the women who are older than me, who definitely had a very isolating experience. But I think that field is changing really rapidly, and that’s a good thing. Having more different voices and more different perspectives matters. There are also a lot of programs now in DC to get people not just from the East Coast, but from all across the country, including the Midwest and places that haven’t traditionally been feeders into the DC ecosystem. And I think that’s also good. Having a more diverse set of voices in the think tank space is important, because if you’re going to be informing policymakers, you want to hear from everyone, and that can help produce better US policy overall.


Making Unpopular Arguments
BW: You talked about having unpopular opinions and, because of that, facing criticism. Is there ever pressure to say the less inflammatory thing simply because it might make your views more agreeable, maybe bring more readership? How do you stay true to wanting to publish what you actually believe? Where is that line for you?

JK: For me, my goal is to advance a US foreign policy that I see as being in US interests. And if I can justify and back up my argument for why what we’re doing is wrong, I’m not afraid to make the unpopular argument. At this point, there’s no insult that I haven’t heard. There’s no new thing someone can say that will hurt my feelings.
And yes, sometimes my unpopular views mean I don’t get invited to certain things. But more often I’ve found that the more strongly and clearly I make my case, even if it’s controversial, the more things I get invited to, because as long as I’m not making a nihilistic argument, people are willing to engage with different ideas even if they don’t like them. Having different voices at events provides a depth and interest they wouldn’t get otherwise.
That’s a change over time. I think that’s happening more and more. But I guess it’s just that there’s negative feedback and positive feedback to pushing against the status quo. And if I don’t get invited to all the events or all the cocktail parties, that’s okay, because I still get invited to the things that, in my view, really matter and that really change policy.


Reading for Young Students
BW: Finally, Jennifer, if there were a young student who was interested in following a career path similar to yours, what book would you recommend to them, and why?

JK: One book I would definitely recommend, if you want to follow a career path similar to mine, is Barry Posen’s Restraint. It really lays out the strategic case for a restrained US foreign policy in a very clear way. Barry Posen is an MIT political scientist, so he brings in all the necessary political theory and evidence, but he also makes it very accessible. My goal is to advance his work and bring it more into the military domain. So I would say that’s one key thing I would recommend reading.
I think the other thing is maybe not a book, but to read the articles published in, especially, the print version of Foreign Affairs. The reason I say that is because it’s a really good window into the debates happening in DC. If you read the magazine over time, the key debates are really surfaced there, because they bring in perspectives from different sides of every issue. The big debates on European security, the big debates happening in Asia, the big debates happening over US foreign policy are all surfaced in that magazine.
And no matter what you believe, I think it’s important to be able to engage with all sides, and you can’t really figure out what you believe until you’ve seen the full picture. For me, that’s been really helpful: to understand the key debates, and then decide what I agree with and what I don’t agree with.

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.

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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?
​
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?
​
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.
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—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.