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

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

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

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

BW: Where do you think that gap comes from?

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


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

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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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