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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BW: And what have you found so far?

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

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

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

Michael O’Hanlon has spent his career asking a deceptively simple question: how should the United States design its military—its budgets, posture, and strategy—for the world it’s actually in, not the one it wishes existed. In our conversation, he traces that “through line” back to a winding start: a physics degree, a Peace Corps stint, a near washout in graduate school, and then a catalytic insight in 1987—when he began imagining what U.S. defense policy might look like after the Cold War.
We also talk about the research habits behind long-form work: how he chooses questions, how a “working hypothesis” evolves as the evidence piles up, and how he decides when a project is done. Along the way, he shares a core argument from his newest book—that “isolationism” is a poor descriptor of American history—and closes with practical advice for students trying to build the concentration and discipline that serious thinking requires.
​
-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?
​
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?
​
Mara Karlin: It’s a real treat to be here, Ben. Thanks for having me. I guess the through line has always been curiosity—figuring out why things are as they are.
I showed up at Tulane as a political science major, and political science majors are kind of told we should go to law school. So that was the plan, obviously. And then I studied abroad—I did two incredible programs. I was on Semester at Sea and then in Jerusalem. And while I was there in ’99–2000, there was this vision a lot of folks had building of what the Middle East was going to look like—prosperous, peaceful.
Then I came back to school for senior year, and that all melted. And I wanted to understand why, and what had occurred. Trying to understand those questions is what took me into a career focused more on security issues—because it seemed to me that a lack of security, by a variety of parties, is what propelled the region into further and further violence.
So: trying to understand why things are the way they are, and then how to reshape them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BW: How do you think that affects capabilities?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BW: And what’s been your favorite part?

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

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

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

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

MK: My pleasure. Best of luck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BW: And what is that path?

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

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

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

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

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

BW: No.

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

BW: Wow. Quite an introduction.

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

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

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

DS: I’m not sure that’s true.

BW: What is?

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

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

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

BW: I couldn’t say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protecting the morning and sharpening the message
Ben Wolf: When we spoke two years ago, you described that the best intellectual work you do happens early—before the day takes over. What have you changed about your personal operating system since then? What do you protect? What do you delegate—and what still surprises you about the job?

Mayor Quinton Lucas: I’ve changed almost nothing in terms of the early start. But I do think one thing that’s often forgotten is that you want to keep advancing your writing style as the years go by. I’ve tried to write with better clarity, and with more brevity, in how I convey points and messages. The strongest intellectual pursuit I’ve focused on is: how am I becoming a stronger communicator, particularly in the written word?
In terms of the rest of your question—changes, things I’ve adapted to—not really. What has changed drastically is political communications. That’s an area we continue to work on.

Politics after “no comment”: observation, video, rapid response
BW: How are you trying to improve your political communications?

QL: One way is through observation—looking at forms of success. I’ve tried to be more strategic with that.
When I first got into politics, about ten and a half years ago, you had a template. The template could be: urban Black politicians reach out to this demographic, you have this market, and you deal with it.
What’s been transformative over the last decade is that almost everyone needs to be in the video-messaging business. Almost everyone needs to be in the rapid-response business—something I think this mayor’s office still needs to get stronger at. And I recognize that’s part of my own communication style now.
And here’s another shift—this is a critique some people might have of Democratic Senate leadership and others: you actually have to respond in more situations than you used to. “No comment” was much more viable in a past generation— even five to ten years ago.
When you look at President Trump—my goodness—who takes a kind of word-vomit approach to almost any engagement, what you can’t do is say, “We’ll respond on Wednesday at the U.S. Senate.”

Accessibility vs. focus: the phone number experiment
BW: On that note of rapid response: you once gave out your phone number to the city, saying you wanted to be the most accessible mayor in the country. What have you learned about the trade-off between accessibility and focus? And how do you separate real signal from political noise?

QL: What I’ve learned most is: you still won’t make everybody happy.
You would hope that giving the phone number is, in some ways—and I really did give it, and I do respond to it—enough of a sign to people that you’re accessible. But what people will say is, “Well, I texted you and you didn’t respond fast enough,” or whatever.
It’s understanding human beings. You can respond with, “It’s a really busy day,” and they’re like, “Screw you, man. No, I really have an issue right now.”
What I would suggest to someone isn’t necessarily that they shouldn’t do the same thing. It’s that you have to make sure you still have an office apparatus built out—people who know how to respond quickly and effectively.

BW: Do you stand by that decision? Any regret at all?

QL: I stand by it. I don’t regret it. There are absolutely bonkers people who have reached out to me, but it’s amazing—those people usually find you anyway.

World Cup 2026: preparedness, planning, and pressure
BW: Transitioning to something I imagine is happier to talk about: we have the FIFA World Cup coming here this summer. How are you handling that pressure, especially with a figure like Lionel Messi coming to the city? How is that pressure affecting you?

QL: I feel almost no pressure. Maybe I should, but I think our preparation has been exceptional.
Obviously there are always issues—public safety, transportation challenges, and others—that can trip you up. But Kansas City will be very ready at the venue, Arrowhead Stadium. The expansion of the streetcar line helps—good public transit helps make it work.
And I’ve worked pretty well across the aisle trying to make sure we get things done. The head of the FIFA White House Task Force is Andrew Giuliani, the son of the former mayor of New York City. Our politics are very different. That said, our commitment to making sure the World Cup is pulled off well is not.
I’ll also say: I’ve had a blessing as mayor in Kansas City, Missouri—the Chiefs have played in, I think, five Super Bowls, which is kind of crazy. So I’ve seen how different cities prepare.
New Orleans is interesting, because New Orleans is just kind of like, “We’re having a Super Bowl y'all,” and they bring in more law enforcement, and otherwise they’re like, “We throw big parties like this.” Others have to see more change.
The cities that are truly prepared are the ones that properly integrate major events into good city planning.

Cornell Law and the unexpected inflection point
BW: You went to Cornell Law. When you went to law school, did you already know you wanted to enter politics?

QL: No, I did not.

BW: What was the inflection point where you decided, “Yes—I want to run for office”?

QL: It relates to a death penalty matter I worked on in Georgia.
My first year of law school was normal—everybody takes the same courses. It went fine. I did fairly well, actually. So I was on the glide path to big-firm practice. Summer one I was at a big firm in Kansas City; summer two I was at a big firm in Boston and Washington.
But halfway through my second year, a professor asked if I’d be interested in working on a death penalty case. Missouri used to execute a lot more people, so I actually wasn’t interested. It’s odd to think, but in the ’90s and early 2000s, executions happened with some regularity in certain places. I said no.
She pushed me to change my mind. I did.
It was a Black defendant. Four-day trial—wild. One day sentencing phase. In 1991, he was sentenced to death by electric chair. We were working on an appeal, and I saw a fundamental failure in society that led to so many tragedies downstream—including the murder of his victims connected to a drug transaction, including his own execution, and lots of other steps.
I met his daughter, who was one year old when he was sentenced. And you saw a lot of the same challenges he faced as a child in the ’60s in Georgia: an incredibly segregated community, incredible poverty.
A lot of things had been unfixed. And I realized, in my view, that government—particularly starting at the local level—is a truly transformative thing for America.

BW: Have you spoken with Congressman Suhas Subramanyam out of Virginia at all?

QL: I have not.

BW: I interviewed him last month, and he had a similar story—working on a death penalty case at Northwestern Law, and that pushed him toward office. I wonder if he shared the same motivations.

From fear to the mechanics: what people misunderstand about campaigns
BW: For me, I’ve long been fascinated by politics. But one reason I’m drawn to something like the State Department, rather than running for office, is fear—the risk, investing yourself, and it not paying off.
How did you prepare to run a campaign? And what do people most misunderstand about the process?

QL: A few things.
What’s misunderstood about running for office is how hard it is—and I mean it this way: it’s rigorous, but a lot of people treat that as a barrier to entry.
Before I ran, I thought there was a central place where you get money, where you get support—where all those things happen. That’s not the case. It’s your personality, your connections, your diligence that makes an incredible amount of difference in any American community.
The example everyone talks about right now is Zohran Mamdani in New York—where a year and a half ago, no one in broader America knew who he was, and probably most New Yorkers had no idea who he was.
The traditional view is: even if maybe Andrew Cuomo with baggage doesn’t get elected, then the former comptroller, Scott Stringer, or someone else ascends—maybe Brad Lander, a nice Jewish boy from Missouri, from St. Louis, in a citywide position, looking to ascend to mayor. But Zohran does it differently. And that speaks to how politics are done today.
Money still matters—don’t get me wrong. But messaging matters a ton. Passion matters a lot.
My bio says I’m the youngest mayor elected in Kansas City since 1855. I was elected at 34.
But the point is: the barriers to entering a campaign aren’t that high. It’s amazing what one can do in the modern era with a blog, social media, real engagement.
And frankly, where we blow most of our political money is still television. TV is, in some ways, the biggest waste of political money. In races that don’t need it, you realize you can actually win without TV ads.
In Kansas City’s next mayoral election in two years, you could win without TV ads—which would seem transformative to someone not just thirty years ago, but even four years ago, when that was all they did because reaching people was harder. You had more town halls. That has shifted a lot.

Advice to students: solve the problem, outwork everyone, own your gifts
BW: As we close, I want to turn directly to students. As mayor, you’ve met many young people—students, staffers, people entering public life. What are the most important skills and habits to build for a long, successful career in politics?

QL: I’ll be blunt: you’ve got to figure out how to solve the goddamn problem. You have to solve the problem.
Sometimes that means—if we’re talking politics—you’ve got to win. You win or you don’t. There aren’t medals for “Wow, you came really damn close.” “It was tight in all these states.” “Great strategy.” Sometimes that’s my frustration in government, actually, because people are like, “But I worked so hard.” That does not matter.
Whether it’s government, politics, law—my profession—or anything else: a person hires you to get the deal done, to win the case. Same thing in political discourse.
Win or lose with honor—don’t get me wrong—but that need to win speaks to diligence and ambition.
The thing that dooms young people in politics—staffers and candidates—is thinking somebody’s going to do all the stuff for you. Delusions of grandeur.
I love smart people. That’s why politics is interesting: you can be in a room with the best-educated minds, and I’m like—you guys don’t know what’s going on in lots of America.
You can tell me the greatest treatise of how the American voter thinks, but I’m campaigning in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and there’s a loud on-the-ground concern about pure connectivity.
On diligence: when I ran, my predecessor endorsed another candidate. She had about three times as much money as I did, at least at the primary level. And I was like: no one will outwork me.
I was 34—really 33 most of the time. I had a 28-year-old running my campaign. It was just us. So what could we do? We worked our asses off every day. We were everywhere. We adapted. We listened. We engaged with lots of people. That was diligence.
And yes—you have to be ambitious. Don’t sign up for public life just because you think it sounds cool. I mean this with love, but if your vibe is to hang out, go sit at a law firm and hang out.
If you want to be a key decision-maker—mayor, State Department, Congress—then you need to find ways to share that ambition. Be a little more prideful than you might otherwise think--not obnoxious, not arrogant. Everybody hates an arrogant person who thinks they’re the greatest.
But I believe—this is how you sound humble, by the way, if you ever run for office—I believe God blessed me with a gift of communication. And I think that allows me to be a good messenger in a party that sometimes has trouble finding its way.
It’s up to me, based on the gifts I was blessed with—by whomever, mom, schooling—to use that gift for the best interest of the American people. I’d encourage you all to find that passion. It makes the job easier.

What to read: Du Bois and the discipline of biography
BW: Finally—if you could recommend a single book, either for someone interested in your career path or a book that most influenced you, what would it be and why?

QL: Oh my gosh—something I should think of before.
I’m a big biographies person. I learn a great deal from people—their pitfalls, their passions. I’d go back into Black history. Black leaders of the early 20th century were some of the most dynamic folks in changing the world in ways you wouldn’t have expected.
So rather than one book, I’d read the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois. In his early work with the NAACP, and looking at the role of Black Americans in American society, I think he saw a pathway that has continued to be—frankly—the path that’s built progress over the last 100 years.
​
BW: Mr. Mayor, it’s been a real pleasure speaking with you. I appreciate you taking the time.

Three vocations: clergy, academic, diplomat
Ben Wolf: To begin: you’ve been a chaplain, an academic leader, and a diplomat. If you had to describe your career as three vocations rather than job titles, what are they—and what did each teach you about leading people?
​
Ambassador Michael Battle: As an academic, as a member of the clergy, and as a diplomat—those three descriptives fit best, even though I spent almost twenty years in the military, including a period as a military chaplain.
As an academic, I learned the benefit of working with—and challenging—young minds, as young minds challenged me. The reciprocal process was always there. I taught logic and scientific method for most of my academic career, even though I also taught religion. I was assigned many courses in the philosophy department, and logic and scientific method became what I was most known for when I was at Hampton University, while also serving as the university chaplain.
The challenge was teaching people how to think critically, and then getting up on Sunday morning and preaching to many of the same people. I really enjoyed it when a student would come back to class and say, “I listened to your sermon—now let’s critique some of the arguments you tried to make.” That kind of exchange was immensely rewarding.
Serving as an academic administrator was also a pleasure. I was president of a seminary that, at the time, consisted of six different seminaries from six distinctive denominations working together in a consortium—the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia. Diverse theological backgrounds, from Presbyterian to Pentecostal to Church of God in Christ. It was quite interesting.
As a diplomat, I discovered that the same skills of building relationships—in ministry and academia—were necessary in building relationships as a diplomat.
My first diplomatic assignment was as U.S. Ambassador to the African Union. I was responsible for multilateral policies of the United States government affecting the entire African continent, working with 54 states—Morocco had left the African Union at that time. Working on policy development and trying to get the African Union to see the necessity of the sustainability goals set forth by the United Nations was quite a challenge—but I enjoyed it.
In the last three years of that four-year assignment, I was also assigned as a U.S. representative to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, which is the largest UN body on the African continent. My next assignment was as the bilateral ambassador to Tanzania. After Tanzania, I was assigned as the U.S. representative to the East African Community—the EAC—which includes eight countries. So I worked bilaterally, but also multilaterally with EAC countries.
Now, since I taught philosophy, I can give an answer that could last an hour. I don’t want to do that—so I’ll keep it shorter.

BW: Please—go as long as you want. The less I say, the better! This is your interview, after all.

How the first ambassadorship happened: “help without looking for reward”
BW: Before we dive into the day-to-day work, I’m curious: what was the connection or step that led to your ambassadorship at the African Union? Was it someone you knew? How did that position come about?

MB: For a long period of time, I had been active on the African continent. I led academic missions in North Africa and West Africa while at Hampton University, and I directed a very large interdenominational conference of clergy nationwide. I also served as vice chairman of the American Committee on Africa, which at that time was one of the larger and more powerful think tanks on African policy.
Even when I was president of the seminary, because we had so many students from Sudan and other parts of Africa, we decided to internationalize—to develop a more global theological interpretation of texts and a theological interpretation of how to respond to social dynamics. We developed a white paper on how to globalize theology, particularly related to what is now South Sudan—this was before Sudan split.
But the role that actually led to my first ambassadorship came through two young men who were asked by then-candidate Barack Obama to work on his campaign early—before anyone really thought he would win: Paul Monteiro and Joshua DuBois. They were having challenges with older ministers who did not respect the fact that young people had been asked to take such serious roles. I worked with them and helped them bridge gaps with older clergy and open doors.
Joshua DuBois was very close to Barack Obama. He was asked whether there was someone he felt should get an appointment, and he said, “Michael Battle.”
Normally, the process takes a long time. But they looked at my background and called the next day and asked: would you go to the African Union?
I served for four years at the AU, which makes me the longest-serving U.S. Ambassador to the African Union.
The lesson is this: whenever you’re given an opportunity to help someone, do it without regard to whether they’ll ever be in a position to open a door for you. If you authentically respond to someone’s needs without looking for reward—and you find the reward in the helping itself—doors open that intentional networking often won’t open.
And, of course, I had known Barack Obama for some time. When I was vice president at Chicago State University, he was a minor junior state senator—someone nobody thought would be elevated the way he ultimately was. I supported his early efforts, and later his Senate run as well.

“No such thing as a normal day”: Tanzania, trade, and where the real work happens
BW: Let’s get concrete. With your ambassadorship in Tanzania, what did a normal day look like? What time did you start? Where did most of your attention go—bureaucratically, operationally, leadership-wise?

MB: With the African Union, it was peace and security almost 85% of the time.
With Tanzania, I focused on commercial development. One of the accomplishments I’m most proud of is that we developed a commercial dialogue—the first ever developed between the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Tanzanian counterpart. We brought together private and public sector leaders in Tanzania and in the United States to talk about removing trade barriers and making it easier for U.S. companies to invest significantly in Tanzania.
Every now and then I intentionally check on progress, because I still have great relationships with the Tanzanian ambassador to the U.S., and with staff in Tanzania. I’m proud to say that dialogue continues to this day.
Now: there is no such thing as a normal day for an ambassador. It depends on the issues. Sometimes a president will call the entire diplomatic corps to meet in the capital.
In Tanzania, while Dar es Salaam has historically been the capital, the capital moved to Dodoma, more than a hundred miles away. So you can wake up planning to be at the office at 10:00, and someone calls and says, “No—President has asked you to be in Dodoma by 8:00.” Then you’re trying to find transport immediately.
And there are days that go late into the evening because of diplomatic receptions and engagements. I found you often get more work done in those engagements outside your office than you get done in your office.
There were times in Tanzania we dealt with peace and security, but it wasn’t the predominant focus. The predominant focus was building trade relationships.

Translating reality back to Washington: when “the obstacle” isn’t who DC thinks it is
BW: People often imagine the hardest persuasion is convincing foreign counterparts. But sometimes the harder persuasion is internal—Washington, interagency dynamics, politics. Can you describe a time you had to translate reality back home—and what made it difficult?

MB: I’ll give you an example from the African Union and one from Tanzania.
At the African Union, there were times when the National Security Council pushed me to convince the AU to pressure the Libyan transitional government after Qaddafi fell. The U.S. was trying to get Libya’s transitional authorities to collaborate with the African Union, and to get the African Union to pressure them.
We weren’t making headway. So I met with the AU Commissioner for Peace and Security and the AU Chairperson. I asked: why is it that much of the West is pressuring the transitional government in Libya, but you are not?
They said: what the U.S. and the West are not understanding is that the Libyan transitional government had a long history of racist policies toward Black Africans—persecuting them, expelling them, abusing them.
I reported back to Washington. I was told: “Go get proof.”
Working collaboratively—with the AU, with others, and with a French TV station (France 24)—we validated it. Secretary Clinton did not hesitate; once she saw the evidence, she conveyed clearly to the transitional Libyan government: you need to stop abusive behavior if you expect the African Union to work with you—and we will not work with you until you do.
Within weeks, we had the transitional Libyan government meeting with the African Union in Ethiopia.
The difficulty wasn’t that the African Union was unwilling. The reality was that the transitional government’s behavior made cooperation impossible. My job was to convey that—and to push U.S. policy to address the real obstacle.
In Tanzania, there were instances where Washington wanted us to pressure Tanzania to sign on to policy statements—like explicitly affirming Russia as the aggressor and Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
I personally am convinced the world should support Ukraine against Russian aggression. But Tanzania has, since its founding, been non-interventionist when it comes to issues it does not see as directly affecting Tanzania in the moment.
So I had to help Washington understand: our relationship with Tanzania should not rise or fall on a single isolated instance that is philosophically complex for Tanzania. They had intervened in Uganda under Idi Amin—but Uganda is a direct neighbor and part of the EAC. Tanzania saw a direct responsibility there that it did not see in the same way regarding Russia and Ukraine.

Democratic norms and diplomatic leverage: “pressure without context is performative”
BW: I read your Senate confirmation statement where you discussed unconstitutional changes of government and the AU’s stance. When democratic norms are tested on the diplomatic battlefield, what tools are effective in practice versus performative? Where can diplomats shift incentives—and where can’t they?

MB: The performative thing is trying to apply pressure without understanding context. That’s not only performative—it’s a waste of time.
The most effective thing is to get a country to see that it is in its best interest to be democratic—because democratic countries tend to be more economically prosperous, more stable, more constitutionally reliable, and transitions in government tend to be smoother.
The challenge the U.S. has right now is that we are not shining the light on the hill the way we want to. The idea of a “city set on a hill” was part of what made U.S. diplomacy credible: stability, human rights, resistance to aggression, defense of territorial integrity.
Some American diplomats now face the reality that our example is not what it traditionally has been.
But you continue anyway, because U.S. policymaking is temporal—four to eight years, and then it changes. You try to persuade people that America’s deeper commitment to democratic norms, stability, human rights, and territorial integrity is not going to be extinguished in the long run.
And in the meantime, we continue the argument: democracy is better for every nation than governments dominated by dictatorial and totalitarian policymaking. In the long run, most governments recognize that.

Advice to students: global awareness, confidence, and how to disagree without becoming disagreeable
BW: As we wrap up, for students who want to work in diplomacy or global affairs: what should they do that’s not obvious—beyond internships—over the next 12 months to become genuinely useful?

MB: My first foreign policy speech was made in high school at Model United Nations. I was 16 or 17, arguing against the policies of what was then Rhodesia—now Zimbabwe.
The best thing a student can do is develop a passion for international policy—a passion for people around the world—and develop a global sense and a global awareness.
When you take the Foreign Service exam, it will test how you see issues globally and what common-sense approaches you take to solving global problems.
You should develop the sense that there is no global problem without local and national implications—and no local or national problem without global implications.
Also: develop confidence in talking to other people. And confidence in disagreeing without becoming disagreeable—without becoming argumentative. You don’t persuade people by being angry or mean. You persuade people by being consistently passionate about the argument in the sense of logic, not emotion.

What to read: biographies as training in judgment
BW: To close, as is customary with the blog: for those interested in pursuing a career like yours, what’s a piece of literature you’d recommend—and why?

MB: ​As a diplomat, I encourage people to read great biographies. Read the biography of George W. Bush. Read Tony Blair. Read Condoleezza Rice. Bill Clinton. Colin Powell.
Biographies show you how people work—and how people fail. You see small pieces of their lives you’d never think would shape them completely.
One of the best ways I came to understand Barack Obama was reading the biography of his mother—not just his own books.
And don’t only read biographies of people you like. Read biographies of people you don’t like—people who oppose your thinking—because then you get a window into what shaped their positions.
And the last piece of advice: be authentically you.

BW: Ambassador Battle, thank you so much for joining me. 

​Peace Corps and the Weight of “Being America”
Ben Wolf: Ambassador Hill—Looking back at your early career, what experiences most shaped how you think about diplomacy—not just what you believed, but how you learned to operate inside complex institutions and negotiations?

Christopher R. Hill: Let me start with something that was not terribly complex: the Peace Corps. Not complex in the sense that we weren’t dealing with a lot of different institutions—but complex in what it teaches you.
Many Americans don’t understand this: no one is indifferent about the United States. Everyone has expectations of the U.S. Of course there are detractors, but nobody is indifferent.
So any young American living abroad—as I was in the Peace Corps—realizes that when you say something, people listen. That gives us responsibility, and it’s something we all need to think harder about.
I was always struck by the fact that if there weren’t a United States in the world, someone would have to create one—because we’ve been (a term I hate) the “residual superpower,” but nonetheless, in many instances we’ve been the country that has kept the peace. And now it seems we have Americans who don’t understand that, and who think we’ve somehow been victimized by this role—without understanding that this role has not only secured peace, but has also secured our leadership. That’s a win-win.
But we have many Americans who think it’s been an onerous task—something we have to get out from under.

BW: The Peace Corps was right out of college and you entered the Foreign Service pretty soon after?

CH: Correct. I took the Foreign Service exam while I was in the Peace Corps. I rode my Suzuki 125 dirt bike down to Douala—which had a two-person consulate at the time—and I took the exam there.

BW: Before the Peace Corps, did you already know you wanted to enter the Foreign Service?

CH: My dad was in the Foreign Service, so I was aware of it. That wasn’t necessarily something I wanted to follow, but I knew enough about it to have my eyes open—about the lifestyle and the challenges.
But when I was in the Peace Corps, I decided that’s what I wanted to do.

What Stays Constant Across Regions: Institutions and Fragility
BW: When you look back across posts as different as East Asia, Iraq, and the Balkans, what’s the one thing that stayed constant about how diplomacy actually works—regardless of the region?

CH: Every country has problems. Every country is unique—but not all its problems are unique. So you start to recognize patterns.
And one pattern is that institutions are very fragile things. Countries that are not doing well are countries that don’t have faith in their institutions. And when people don’t have faith in institutions, they retreat to older loyalties designed to protect them—including tribalism.
So if you don’t have civil society in a place like Iraq, and people don’t trust the state, they retreat into tribal affiliations. They find security in origin—tribal origin. But those affiliations aren’t going to lead the country in a better way.
The lack of faith in institutions is a huge problem in every country, because institutions are something you have to work on every day. You have to believe in them as serving the common good.
And frankly, it’s astounding to me that when I used to talk about countries like Iraq having crises of institutions, it’s now the world’s oldest democracy—the United States—that seems to be having these crises and reverting to forms of tribalism: loyalties to religion, national origin, even the color of your skin. There’s much to be worried about.

How Foreign Service Careers Actually Move
BW: You’ve served in many different regions. When you shifted from post to post—was that something you initiated? And more broadly: how much say does someone have in which region they want to be an ambassador in?

CH: Your audience should understand: if you’re a career Foreign Service officer, it’s like the military—you don’t start out as a general. You don’t start out as an ambassador. You start out as a junior officer and work your way up.
Your earlier assignments may shape later preferences. My first assignment was in what was then called Yugoslavia. And it became especially interesting when it began to collapse and wars developed: wars of secession and succession as countries broke up.
That became a major interest of mine, but I didn’t want to do just one thing. I think it’s important not to tie yourself to one set of issues, but to be willing to go to things that are less intellectually comfortable—but no less challenging.
So I took on different assignments. For example: Korea early on, and then later I came back as ambassador. Poland as a relatively junior officer, then later I came back as ambassador. Think of it as two trips around the track.

BW: Practically speaking, how does that work? Are you going to the Secretary of State and saying, “This is what I want”? Or is it more informal?

CH: Ideally, you’re not going to anyone—people are coming to you. Ideally, you have skill sets the institution wants, and you get a call: “We have this assignment. We think you’d be good at it.”
And when I say “they,” I’m not talking about the Secretary of State—except maybe for very senior ambassadorships.
Now, you can register your interest. When I finished in Poland, I did get in touch with the Secretary of State at the time—Colin Powell—and told him I’d be very interested in going to Korea. He might not have thought of me for Korea, because he knew me from the Balkans and Poland and might not have realized my earlier Korea experience.
So yes—you do have to let people know. You can’t expect a system with thousands of officers to keep you top of mind.
But people who spend all their time marketing themselves are usually not doing enough of what they need to do. So I wouldn’t make self-promotion your full-time job. And if the system isn’t seeing it the way you see it, maybe you need to adjust your expectations.

Career Service vs Political Service—and the Role of Luck
BW: In an earlier interview, I spoke with Elliott Abrams. One thing he emphasized was the role of luck in government—timing, networks, administrations. You’ve served under presidents of both parties. How did that work, and what do you make of his point?

CH: I want to be clear: I didn’t “serve in parties.” I served in administrations led by different parties. I’m a career person. I took the exam. I took the oral exam. I schlepped my way up from the bottom. That’s what career people do.
If you enter as a party-affiliated person, you’re dependent on your party winning elections. Republicans bring in political appointees; Democrats do too. Not to displace career people, but to supplement them.
And you see it in recruiting pipelines. If you’re at a Republican-affiliated think tank, you’re more likely to be tapped by a Republican administration. If you’re at Brookings or the Center for American Progress, you’re more likely to be tapped by a Democratic administration. That’s a different track from joining the Foreign Service.
Foreign Service officers, like military officers, have generally tried to keep their political views to themselves.
Now, you hear accusations that the Foreign Service is “just Democrats.” That’s not true. If you did a census, maybe you’d find more Democrats than MAGA aficionados—but to say Foreign Service officers are ipso facto Democrats is not fair.
And yes—there’s luck in public life. In the sense of knowing people who take an interest in you and are willing to make calls—there’s no question that happens.

Persuasion vs Performance—and the Shadow of Force
BW: You’ve operated in some of the highest-stakes negotiations of the past few decades. How much of diplomacy is persuasion—and how much is performance meant to signal resolve or restraint to audiences who aren’t in the room?

CH: With social media and modern public diplomacy, you see more performative behavior than you used to.
Now, I’ll contradict myself: Henry Kissinger was famously media-savvy and sometimes used the press to gain leverage. So it’s not new—but it’s intensified.
At bottom, diplomacy is trying to convince the other side to do something they don’t want to do. Argument helps—trying to show them what’s in their interest—but it’s rare that someone suddenly says, “You’re right, I never thought of it that way, I’m changing course.”
So you look at incentives. “If you do this, we’ll do that.” Or you “sweeten the pot”—for example, arranging a leader-to-leader meeting. Leaders can market that back home.
And then there’s the extreme: the possibility of force. Americans in recent years have talked too casually about using force.
Clausewitz said war is a continuation of politics by other means—and also that war is a serious means to a serious end. Once you’re dropping bombs, it’s hard to un-drop them. It’s hard to stop without achieving your aims.
So you exhaust peaceful means, and you try to make the other side understand: we can travel this road together. But if we can’t find a solution, you may be on your own.

Management, the DCM Track, and Leadership
BW: Ambassadorship is often romanticized as negotiation and representation. In practice, how much of the job is organizational leadership—managing people, bureaucracy, interagency friction?

CH: Ideally, you’ve had serious management experience. Most career ambassadors have come through the Deputy Chief of Mission role.
A DCM is managing the internal aspects of an embassy. The DCM looks inward; the ambassador looks out. And in the Foreign Service, most management training is on-the-job: budgets, personnel issues, discipline, all of it.
But the ambassador role is a step above management. It’s leadership.
You have to get people to follow where you’re going—not literally up a mountain path, but in terms of mission. People have to believe in what you’re doing and believe that subscribing to your approach is the best way to get there.
Leadership is getting people to go where they might not have gone if you weren’t there—and instilling confidence that you’ll get them there. When people doubt you’ll get them there, they don’t want to be on that team.
One of the problems with appointing ambassadors whose only qualification is that they’re a friend of somebody’s is that people underneath them can’t say, “I’m following this person because they know what they’re doing.” Because maybe they don’t.
Putting people with real experience in the right positions—that’s a full-time job, and it has to be done well. Otherwise you get fragmentation and dysfunction.

Leaks, History, and the “Thin Fact Base”
BW: I recently interviewed David Sanger of The New York Times, and one of the things we talked about was how major diplomatic plans, like the since-revised 28-point Ukraine Peace Plan, can leak—he told me he wasn’t surprised at all that it did.
How has the erosion of confidentiality—from leaks to social media—changed diplomacy?

CH: Well, if I’m David Sanger--who’s a good friend of mine, I might add--I don’t mind leaks at all.
But if I’m doing my job, I sure mind them.
Leaks often signal a lack of confidence in the system. Sometimes it’s people pushing their own agenda rather than the agenda set by leadership—whether the Secretary of State or an Assistant Secretary. It’s a symptom of a system that’s not functioning well.
Often it’s a breakdown in communication. People don’t feel brought into a process. They don’t understand the purpose. They don’t have confidence in what they’re being asked to execute.
And on issues like Ukraine—among the most consequential questions the world faces—complexity matters. When leadership doesn’t embrace complexity or understand historical antecedents, you get mistakes and mistrust.
In other countries, when people say “that’s history,” they mean the background you must master to make progress. In America, “that’s history” often means “that’s irrelevant.” I’m not on that side. You’re not going to understand what’s going on now unless you know what went on before.
A big problem right now is Americans aren’t doing their homework. You’ve got to read until your eyes fall out. Then you have to listen—really listen—more than you talk.
And another problem—probably amplified by the internet—is that people’s opinions are way out of proportion to what they know. Too often, even senior leadership skates on a thin fact base. When you don’t have the facts, you make mistakes. When you make mistakes, people don’t trust you. And when they don’t trust you, they leak—to slow things down, or shut things down.

Advice to Students: Fit, Mission, and Deep Reading
BW: To close, I want to turn this directly to students. How should an ambitious student think about the tradeoff between deep expertise in one region versus being broadly useful? And if you were 19 again trying to build a career in foreign affairs today, what steps would you take?

CH: People need to look in the mirror and decide what they’re good at. If you’re good at solving complex jigsaw puzzles, you might think about the Foreign Service, because this work is complicated.
If you understand that American leadership has been broadly positive—look at the 20th century: two world wars, and none since Americans asserted leadership; the creation of the UN, IMF, World Bank; NATO and other regional structures—that’s an extraordinary record.
If you don’t see it that way—if you only see America as being mistreated by other countries—fine, but maybe you should do something else. If you don’t see why American leadership is important and why it should continue, this probably isn’t the role for you.
And finally: if you’re interested in something, read a book about it. Get deep reading under your belt before you get too attached to strong opinions.

BW: You mention reading. At The Pathway Blog, I usually like to end by asking: if someone wanted to follow your career path, what piece of literature would you recommend?

CH: I’m a big believer in history. People who do best understand patterns of history. So I would crack a number of books.
I don’t have a single “how-to” book for this. It’s a life’s work—not one book.

BW: Ambassador Hill, thank you for your time—this was terrific.
​
CH: Thank you—and good luck. And thanks for doing this. It’s important for your contemporaries to hear these views. We’ve got to do a better job of listening to each other.