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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

JM: I’ve noticed that.

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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


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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

BW: Where do you think that gap comes from?

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


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

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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


What to Read
BW: Finally, as is customary with the Pathway Blog, if there were a young student interested in following a career path similar to yours, what piece of literature would you recommend to them, and why?
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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.