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.
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-Zack Cooper is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a lecturer at Princeton University.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.
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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.

Entering the Diplomatic Service
Ben Wolf: I’ve long been fascinated by French politics and diplomacy, but without growing up in France the path into diplomatic service can feel opaque. To start us off, could you walk us through your background and what led you to become a consul general? What did that journey actually look like in practice?

Rodolphe Sambou: I’ll try to summarize, although it’s been a long and interesting path. I’m around fifty, and from the beginning I loved travel. I studied languages, science, politics, philosophy, and history, and I spent a great deal of time studying abroad—in Spain, Ireland, Egypt, Israel, and the United States, where I did an internship in New York.
While preparing for the competitive exams required to enter the French foreign service, I worked as a teacher. I taught philosophy at a French immersion school in Egypt. After passing the exam, I joined the foreign service and have now been part of it for about twenty years.
My first assignment was as a desk officer for New Zealand in the Asia–Oceania Department. I then worked on United Nations issues, particularly human rights, and spent several months in New York. After that, I was posted to Haiti for three years, working on political affairs, human rights, and post-earthquake reconstruction. I later served in Thailand as a political officer, during a period of political crisis.
I then became Deputy Head of Mission in New Zealand for four years, returned to Paris as an adviser in the Asia–Pacific Division, and for the past two years I’ve served as Consul General here.

Formative Postings
BW: Looking back, was there an early posting that shaped how you practice diplomacy today, even if it didn’t seem especially formative at the time?

RS: Every posting leaves its mark, but my early work on multilateral issues and human rights was especially formative. Human rights intersect with almost every international issue—women’s rights, the death penalty, labor rights, economic and social rights. That work broadened my perspective and brought me into contact with people from very different backgrounds.
My posting in Haiti was also deeply influential. It was my first assignment in a truly challenging context, following the earthquake. It was practical, concrete, and showed me how diplomacy can directly help people in moments of crisis.

What a Consul General Actually Does
BW: Many Americans imagine diplomacy primarily through ambassadors or foreign ministers. How does the role of a consul general differ from those more familiar positions?

RS: That’s an excellent question. Ambassadors are usually based in capitals and deal primarily with federal authorities. A consul general is typically posted in a region.
We have two broad responsibilities. One is political, economic, and cultural: encouraging investment in France, promoting study in France, explaining French positions to local authorities, and reporting back to Paris on developments in our region.
The other—and perhaps the most visible—is responsibility for the French community. We are responsible for their safety and security. A consulate is almost like a city hall abroad: organizing elections, providing administrative services, assisting citizens in distress, responding to emergencies such as hurricanes, and ensuring consular protection when needed.

The Rise of Subnational Diplomacy
BW: Cities and regions now play a much larger role in international affairs. How has this rise of subnational diplomacy changed your day-to-day work?

RS: We see this very clearly here. Regardless of national-level tensions, regions want international partnerships—economic, educational, cultural. We work with local governments, universities, businesses, NGOs, and artists.
Education is a major pillar of our work. In Louisiana alone, there are more than forty French immersion schools, thousands of students, and teachers sent from France. This kind of cooperation continues regardless of broader geopolitical turbulence. Diplomacy today involves many actors beyond states alone.

Diplomacy in the Age of Instant Information
BW: Is there a diplomatic challenge today that would have been difficult to imagine when you first entered the service?

RS: The speed of information. Events unfold instantly. If something happens overnight—an attack, a natural disaster—we learn about it immediately, often before dawn, and must respond at once. The volume of information and the pace of international engagement are far greater than before, and that is a constant challenge.

Misconceptions About France
BW: Working with American audiences, what misconceptions do you most often encounter about France’s role in the world?

RS: France and the United States have been allies since the very beginning. We know what we owe to each other, and we continue to celebrate that history—from independence to D-Day.
One misconception concerns France’s economic role. France is the most attractive country in Europe for foreign investment, yet this is sometimes overlooked. There are also differences in how we frame issues like freedom of expression or the relationship between state and religion. Our role as diplomats is to explain these differences respectfully, recognizing that our democracies were shaped by distinct histories.

What Diplomats Do Between the Headlines
BW: Diplomacy often appears only at headline moments. How would you explain what diplomacy actually does on an ordinary day?

RS: There’s a stereotype that diplomats spend their time at receptions, but the reality is quite different. We assist citizens in distress, ensure security, and respond to emergencies. We also spend a great deal of time meeting people—cultural leaders, elected officials, business figures, NGOs—to understand local dynamics and create connections.
My day-to-day work involves facilitating dialogue, building partnerships between France and Louisiana, supporting economic and cultural projects, and helping institutions work together. It’s very practical, very human work.

Autonomy and Instructions
BW: How much autonomy do you have versus following instructions from Paris?

RS: We always operate within a framework of guidance from Paris. We receive briefings and instructions regularly—sometimes daily—on issues such as Ukraine, the Middle East, climate, or human rights. Within that framework, we have room to adapt our approach to local realities. A consulate works closely with regional stakeholders, while embassies focus more on federal authorities, but the underlying principles are the same.

Advice for Aspiring Diplomats
BW: For students interested in diplomatic service, what common mistakes do you see—and what advice would you offer?

RS: Curiosity and flexibility are essential. Many students focus narrowly on one region or issue, but diplomacy requires constant learning and adaptability. You are rarely a technical expert; your role is to understand what is at stake, explain it clearly—often in just a few minutes—and help decision-makers act.
Being able to grasp complex issues quickly, communicate clearly, and remain open-minded is far more important than narrow specialization.

Cautious Optimism
BW: In a moment of global uncertainty, what gives you cautious optimism about the future of international cooperation?

RS: There are many reasons to feel pessimistic, but we often say in France that we must combine the pessimism of reason with the optimism of will. Giving up is a form of laziness.
Even when progress is slow—especially in areas like human rights—it is essential to continue fighting for incremental change. Diplomacy is built on persistence. That effort, however difficult, is what ultimately sustains international cooperation.

BW: Mr. Consul General, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a real privilege speaking with you.