Judgment, Experience, and Caution
Ben Wolf: When you look back at your early career, what’s a judgment you were confident in then but would approach much more cautiously now—not because you were wrong, but because experience complicated it?

Richard Fontaine: I think, big picture, many of us who lived through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, Libya, Syria, and other interventions have become more cautious about American engagement—especially military engagement aimed at changing the politics of another country.
Earlier in my career, I had greater faith in the efficacy of American power and probably underappreciated the complexity of domestic politics in other societies. That experience has made me dispositionally more cautious than I was twenty years ago.

Careers, Chance, and Serendipity
BW: Early on, did you overestimate or underestimate anything important when trying to break into this field?

RF: I underestimated the role of serendipity. In foreign policy and national security—as in many fields—you simply don’t know what jobs will exist, what issues will matter, or even what will capture your interest in the future.
If you had told me twenty years ago that I’d spend time thinking about artificial intelligence and geopolitics, my first question would have been: what is artificial intelligence? The lesson is to remain open to chance and not believe you need to follow a rigid path that inevitably leads to a specific job.

Mentors and Tulane
BW: Were there influential experiences at in college that shaped your interests?

RF: Absolutely. My academic and thesis adviser, Dr. David Clinton, was disproportionately influential in teaching me the substance of international relations and American foreign policy. I graduated in 1997, and I still keep in touch with him—I literally received his Christmas card today.
I also spent my junior year abroad at Oxford, which was life-changing academically and personally. Through that program, I met my wife—another Tulane student who was studying at the London School of Economics. We’ll soon celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, along with our four kids. Tulane shaped both my professional and personal life in profound ways.

From Analysis to Decision-Making
BW: What distinguishes those who move into real decision-making roles from those who remain permanent analysts?

RF: The ability to get things done within whatever system you’re operating. It’s usually clear who is effective and who isn’t, and those who are effective tend to get promoted into decision-making roles.
Hard work still matters. The ability to write—clearly and persuasively—matters enormously, even in an era of AI. Those basic skills meaningfully increase your chances of advancement.

Where Power Actually Resides
BW: You’ve worked inside and outside government. Where does real leverage over U.S. foreign policy reside?

RF: Foreign policy is made by the government. Outside actors—think tanks, analysts, journalists—can influence debates, but the deciders are in government.
That said, who the actual decision-makers are varies by administration. Power can reside at the White House, State Department, Pentagon, or elsewhere depending on process and personalities. For young people, the most important thing is to get into the field—whether in government, on Capitol Hill, or at a think tank. Over time, most careers move across several of these arenas.

Avoiding the Fear of Being Pigeonholed
BW: Many students worry that committing too early will lock them into a path. How should they think about flexibility versus focus?

RF: I used to worry about being pigeonholed, but that worry changed as my jobs changed. If you love a specific issue deeply, you probably don’t mind specializing. For everyone else—especially generalists—do work that feels meaningful and intrinsically fulfilling.
You can’t plan a career with precision. Particularly in foreign policy, people move between journalism, government, think tanks, and the private sector all the time. Cut yourself a break—it’s going to be okay.

Peace Deals, Credit, and Reality
BW: How do you assess President Trump’s claims about brokering peace deals?

RF: It’s a mixed bag. There are cases where Trump deserves real credit—for example, I don’t think there would have been a Gaza ceasefire and hostage returns without his involvement. There are other cases where he’s taken credit for outcomes he didn’t produce, or for conflicts that weren’t actually resolved.
When you enter a war and then take credit for ending it, that’s a curious formulation. Presidents don’t need to advertise their achievements—if they’re real, others will do that for them.

Alliances as Assets
BW: Alliances are increasingly criticized. Are they still America’s greatest strength?

RF: Absolutely. The United States has treaty allies across Europe and the Indo-Pacific and close partners worldwide. We’ve relied on allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
Compare that to China or Russia, whose alliances are limited. That doesn’t mean allies can’t do more—they should—but seeing alliances as a liability rather than an asset is a mistake.

China and the Uses of Power
BW: What does China understand about power that the U.S. sometimes underestimates?

RF: China understands that power has many forms—economic influence, trade, investment, military power, foreign aid, broadcasting, cyber operations. It uses a broad toolkit.
The United States has weakened many of its soft-power instruments. When you strip those away, you’re left with military power on one side and rhetoric on the other. China’s more comprehensive approach should be instructive.

The Personal Costs of National Security Work
BW: What is the least discussed cost of working in national security?

RF: Domestic politics matter enormously. The policies and job opportunities available to you change with administrations, often in ways outside your control. Working in foreign policy during different administrations can feel like entirely different professions.
Your partisan identity can shape opportunities, particularly for political appointments. That volatility is something young people should be honest with themselves about.

Reading for Perspective
BW: Is there a book you’d recommend to students entering the field?

RF: A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin. Even if you think you’re not interested in the Middle East, the Middle East will be interested in you. History—more than theory—often provides the most useful context for understanding today’s foreign policy challenges.

BW: Mr. Fontaine, thank you so much for your time. It’s been an honor.
​
RF: Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Finding an Intellectual Voice
Ben Wolf: So to begin: your career sits at the intersection of writing, editing, and foreign-policy thinking. Early on, how did you learn to develop an intellectual voice rather than simply echo existing arguments?

Jacob Heilbrunn: I was interested in foreign policy and American politics at a pretty early age. I have a somewhat combative intellectual temperament. Early on, I was more conservative-leaning in foreign policy—I was essentially an anti-communist, since the Soviet Union existed at that time. The prevailing ethos was more on the liberal side: that it was necessary to accommodate the Soviet Union, curb the nuclear arms race, and avoid open confrontation with the Kremlin. I was headed more in the neoconservative direction.

Kissinger, History, and Power
BW: I know you’ve written a lot about Henry Kissinger. What interests you about him? For me personally, the book that got me first interested in foreign affairs was Walter Isaacson’s biography of Kissinger. I found his story so incredible—so whenever I see anyone else write about him, I’m curious what draws them in as well.

JH: Kissinger was on our board at The National Interest. I found him quite compelling personally in talking with him. He had a grounding and knowledge of history that is lacking in many of his successors. There were intellectual fireworks with Kissinger, and he had this amazing career—going from being an immigrant to the United States, then serving in the U.S. military, becoming a Harvard professor, joining the Council on Foreign Relations, advising Nelson Rockefeller, and then this meteoric rise with Richard Nixon.

BW: Truly an interesting and inspiring figure. You mentioned your early trend toward neoconservatism—and in writing about neoconservatism, you’ve traced how a set of ideas migrated from the margins into the center of power. When you look at today’s foreign-policy debates, which ideas do you think are currently being underestimated but may shape policy a decade from now?

JH: That’s a tough question. I think what has happened is that the set of ideas around Trump are the obverse of the neoconservatives—that the foes of the neocons have now risen to power under Trump with a diametrically opposed set of ideas. The ideas we’re probably underestimating—or not paying enough attention to—are most likely on the left, or in the Democratic Party, if people develop a new set of ideas. I haven’t seen them yet, but it would be interesting, for example, if there were a comeback of Wilsonian idealism, because these things do seem to go in waves in the United States. You have Wilsonianism during World War I, a backlash in the 1920s, and then FDR comes to power, who really is a successor to Woodrow Wilson. America is probably a uniquely protean society—we’re more susceptible to swings than many other democratic countries.

Moral Language and Strategic Judgment
BW: American foreign policy is often framed in moral terms—democracy versus autocracy, good versus evil. That’s driven arguments for interventionism versus isolationism. From a historian’s perspective, when does moral clarity strengthen strategy, and when does it distort judgment?

JH: It definitely strengthened strategy during World War II, where we were battling the locus of evil in the form of Nazism. However, it can also lead you astray, as it did in Vietnam, where we tried to apply the lesson of Munich 1938 to Vietnam. It can turn into hubris. The same thing happened in the Second Iraq War: it was presented as a moral crusade, and practitioners of realist foreign policy tend to shy away from that kind of moralism, because they would argue that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Our objectives in Iraq were not inherently bad, but the idea of performing regime change in Iraq ended up producing an even worse outcome. It was not in America’s interest—the costs far exceeded the benefits for the United States.
So we need to be careful about moralistic language. You saw President Trump indulge in it in Venezuela again—presenting us as the children of light and our foe as darkness incarnate. That can lead your judgment astray when it should be based on a realistic assessment of the geopolitical forces at work. If you demonize your adversary, it means you can never come to an accommodation—and then the result would be war. We obviously don’t want to go to war with Putin’s Russia, for example. Even the Venezuela venture is highly dubious; it appears to be a concocted war, or a looming concocted war.

BW: On that same theme—learning from historic lessons—there’s a common claim that the U.S. never learns from past interventions. From your reading of history, do you think the problem is a failure to learn, or a failure to apply lessons when political incentives point in the opposite direction?

JH: It’s a mixture. I’m convinced that we replicate disasters—every 30 or 40 years, it seems like there will be another Vietnam. And we have a history of imperial interventions at the turn of the 20th century as well. Now, if Trump were actually to go in—it's hard for me to believe he would go in on the ground in Venezuela, but that could turn into another catastrophe. We do have a penchant for ill-advised adventures abroad.
However, it’s also a function of the fact that the United States is extremely wealthy and powerful, and can, in a sense, afford these mishaps—even if they are quite costly. Another country that wasn’t as wealthy, or didn’t possess this military power, would not indulge in these foreign adventures.

Media Incentives and the Overton Window
BW: You’ve worked both as a writer and as an editor. How do today’s media ecosystems shape strategic thinking—for better or worse—in terms of polarization, algorithms, and the broader trends of media?

JH: It’s changed radically. The good part is that the gatekeepers are gone, which means it’s much easier to publish a variety of views—there are far more outlets. The bad news is that the gatekeepers are gone too. It means there’s a lot of rubbish and drivel, and what we’re seeing, for example, is a rise in antisemitism because the filters are gone.
The extent to which it shapes foreign policy—I’m not sure, because the Trump administration right now is almost an autonomous project. I don’t think the officials or President Trump really care what anyone else thinks.

BW: It’s been interesting for me, as someone younger, to watch the rise of the far-right extremist Nick Fuentes and so-called "Groyperism." I heard about him three or four years ago and it was a very small movement—but now I see articles about him constantly. Do you think the trend toward showcasing more radical ideas has changed the news field—monetarily or otherwise? Has it benefited people in media?

JH: It depends what kind of media you’re talking about—but yes, for some. What has happened is that the mainstream media has become more attuned to the right wing. It used to either dismiss it or not cover it at all. Now I think editors have realized the significance of actors—whether it’s Steve Bannon or someone like Nick Fuentes.
It’s interesting: you call Fuentes a far-right extremist. He’s only “far right” as long as he’s seen as illegitimate. His aspiration is to become the right—and that antisemitism becomes a legitimate credential, that it becomes popular, or at least not unrespectable. That gets again to the nature of gatekeepers: is he going to be successful in expanding the Overton window or not? Is what we’re calling “far right” going to be the mainstream right? That’s why you have this battle.
You have Vivek Ramaswamy today writing an op-ed in The New York Times denouncing the Fuentes wing. Okay, great. So there is a struggle going on. The question is, as Lenin said: who wins?

BW: Where do you see the future of the Republican Party?

JH: Not good. I think, as with his other ventures, President Trump is likely to lead us into some kind of catastrophe—whether that is financial, a plague, or a military debacle, or all of the above remains to be seen. But his first presidency didn’t end well. He had COVID, and then he had the January 6th incident. I don’t think this one—his presidency—will end well either; to some degree it appears to be unraveling already.

After the Cold War: Hubris, Retrenchment, and Ukraine
BW: You’ve written about how the end of the Cold War reshaped American expectations of power. Do you think U.S. foreign policy is still reacting to a world that no longer exists? If so, what illusion has been the hardest to let go of?

JH: The biggest flaw after the end of the Cold War was the rise of American triumphalism—the belief that the United States had single-handedly defeated the Soviet Union. The truth, in retrospect, is that we contributed to that struggle, but Europe played a role; dissidents inside the Eastern Bloc and inside the Soviet Union itself were pivotal; and the command economy of the Soviet Union faltered. The system collapsed from within. We added enough pressure from outside to help accelerate the dissolution, but it was not America alone that accomplished this.
That feeling of hubris and triumphalism then led directly to the second Iraq War. I think America has shed much of that triumphalism, but we’ve almost gone too far in the other direction. One of the interesting things about the Reagan era was that he focused on supporting local movements, but not intervening directly—which is sort of how I see the Ukraine war today. I do believe we should support Ukraine in its battle against Russia. I think this is actually the last battle of the Cold War, if you will—but we don’t need to inject our troops directly. So maybe we’ve overlearned the lesson of what took place after the Cold War.

Advice for Young Writers: Expertise, Habits, and Curiosity
BW: For young writers interested in foreign policy, what matters more: deep specialization in a certain subject, or broader historical reading? And how should that balance evolve over time?

JH: Both are valuable. But having specific expertise is extremely useful, because it gives you something other than hot air—to put it bluntly.
On journalism school: I have mixed feelings. In the past it could serve as a way to get into a newsroom. I’m not sure it’s as valuable today as it was then. I actually prefer someone who has an actual education or interest in something—even if it’s exotic. You want to see that the person has a mind working, which gets back to area expertise: if you know something about Kazakhstan that no one else does, or Central Asia, or China, or Africa—whatever it is—that’s a very useful skill.

BW: When you began your career in journalism, what were some early habits or disciplines that led to your success?

JH: Wide reading. Travel, if possible. I focused on Germany and studied German—not just the politics, but also the culture and literature. Intellectual engagement and focusing on improving your writing skills. And if possible, doing some reporting—which gets back to area studies: if you write about something no one else is writing about, you have unique insight into it.
It’s hard, as a young writer, to just write a piece about Russian foreign policy, because there are a lot of people doing that already—and have been for decades. But if you’re an expert on the Russian military, or some aspect of it, or how the Russian economy is functioning—some specific area—and what the broader implications are, those give you unique slices. As far as preparing for a career, there’s no substitute for reading and writing.
I should add one thing: curiosity. Curiosity is what leads you to discover. You have to have this internal drive to learn things. It’s not just that Vladimir Putin, for example, today called the European leaders “swine” and “little pigs”—why is he doing that? What’s going on in the mental makeup? What is this feeling of Russian revanchism? Whence the hostility to the West? What does that exemplify? Those are broad questions, but intellectual curiosity is the key to success in almost any endeavor—Wall Street, Hollywood, whatever it is.

What Heilbrunn Reads Every Day
BW: In addition to historical knowledge, you seem incredibly well read on today's events. You mentioned the Vivek Ramaswamy piece that came out this morning and what words Putin said today. What are your habits in terms of what you read every day? What does an average day look like for you?

JH: As far as reading, I go through The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post. Sometimes the Financial Times has interesting material—I did an interview with them a couple weeks ago. I look once a day at the German press, because I read German. I’m intellectually curious, so I’m looking for information. Obviously I can’t follow the internet all day, but if I’m working on a piece, I also scour the internet for information.
There are articles, books, and journalistic information. I’ll look at British publications too—the London Review of Books, The Guardian. There’s a variety: everything in the U.S. from National Review to the New York Review of Books. I would suggest not becoming too ideologically wedded to one journal as your source of information. I like to have a variety of views. And at The National Interest, we publish opposing pieces. That’s the tradition I grew up in, because I worked at The New Republic for a long time. There’s nothing wrong with publishing a piece one day and, at The National Interest, publishing pieces that denounce something I wrote—because I believe in intellectual fairness. We’ve mutated into a society where people are sitting in their bunkers with guns blazing. To me, it’s preposterous. It’s boring.

Writers Who Shaped Him
BW: Are there any particular figures you love to read now—or who inspired you growing up?

JH: I was a big fan of George Orwell as a kid. His writing is very direct—an original mind, impatient with right and left orthodoxy. As a journalist, he’s a good model. I was also impressed by Winston Churchill. If you read his memoirs--My Early Life, I think is the title—it’s overblown, but dramatic. It’s fun. He’s an incredible writer, and a wild character. The more exotic characters are easier to write for; they’re more colorful, as the journalistic expression goes—they make for good copy.

Challenging Conventional Wisdom
BW: How should young thinkers approach foreign policy without simply inheriting outdated assumptions—liberal, realist, or otherwise?

JH: You’ve got to make your own judgments, and don’t be afraid to say that the conventional wisdom is wrong. This reminds me: Frederick the Great’s motto was “audacity, audacity, always audacity.” A willingness to challenge what other people are thinking can take you a long way.

A Reading Recommendation
BW: Last question--as is customary with the blog: for people interested in the work you’re in, or pursuing a similar career path, what pieces of literature—a book, an essay, a poem—would you recommend, and why?

JH: The book that really influenced me as a teenager was The God That Failed, which has seven or eight essays by famous intellectuals, including Arthur Koestler—first-person essays. You can learn a lot from the journey and self-discovery of other people, especially when it’s raw, like those essays were. That book influenced me quite a bit early on. You could get the same thing with Orwell, because it’s vivid and—in a contemporary expression they wouldn’t have used back then—in your face.

BW: Mr. Heilbrunn, I really appreciate your time. I truly feel like I’ve learned so much in this short period of time we've been talking, and I know our readers will feel the same. I hope we can speak again soon.
​
JH: Thank you, Ben. Good luck with everything.

Reconsidering Political Identity
Ben Wolf: You’ve written candidly about how your political views have shifted over time—sometimes in ways that may have cost you allies. Looking back, was there a moment when you realized this wasn’t just refining a position, but fundamentally rethinking your core assumptions?

Max Boot: That really happened for me on election day in 2016 and the days immediately afterward. I had been on the right for most of my adult life. I worked at the Wall Street Journal editorial page and wrote for Commentary. I thought of myself as a conservative and a Republican, and I never imagined the Republican Party could be hijacked by someone like Donald Trump.
Trump was not conservative in any meaningful sense—he was a populist, nationalist rabble-rouser who began his campaign by insulting one of my great heroes, John McCain, saying he didn’t like people who were captured. That came from someone who had dodged Vietnam service, denigrating one of America’s greatest war heroes. To me, that alone was disqualifying.
I assumed the Republican Party would never fall in behind him, and yet it did. That triggered a personal and political crisis. I had to reassess a lot of what I believed and ask how the Republican Party and the conservative movement had fallen prey to someone like this. If this was what the GOP stood for, I didn’t want any part of it.
Many of my views haven’t changed dramatically, but I no longer identify with the Republican Party. I’m an independent now, and like many others, I feel politically homeless in Donald Trump’s America.

John McCain and a Different Model of Leadership
BW: You mentioned your disdain for Trump because of his criticism of John McCain--as I understand it, you served as McCain’s foreign policy adviser during his 2008 campaign. How did you come to work with him and what was that experience like for you?

Max Boot: Well, I’m actually also now in the process of writing a biography of John McCain. So McCain was large in my life. But I was introduced to McCain because of a book that I wrote more than 20 years ago called The Savage Wars of Peace, about America’s small wars. And one of those small wars was Pancho Villa’s invasion of New Mexico in 1916—and unbeknownst to me, one of the U.S. Army officers who was fighting off Pancho Villa’s forces was an ancestor of John McCain’s—and so he was an inveterate reader. He read that book, he liked it, and so he wanted to meet me. And I did meet him.
So I got to know him some and became a tremendous admirer—somebody who, I think, really personified America and the Republican Party at its best; somebody who was a man of honor and courage, and fought for his ideals. And, of course, that’s not to say that he was infallible. He made mistakes all the time. I mean, he made a big one in 2008 by choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate. But he had a capacity to learn from his mistakes, and he always had a devotion to serving a cause greater than himself. He always wanted to serve the country, and he wanted to serve the cause of liberty.
And those are all things that I greatly admired about John McCain. And unfortunately, none of those words describe Donald Trump—where his life seems to be basically in service to himself, his ego, and his bank account. And I’m mortified and mystified that so many Americans think that that’s who they want as their leader, but clearly that’s the case. And so that’s kind of, in a nutshell, how I became a man without a party.
And by the way, I would add: I don’t expect any sympathy for being without a party. I think it’s actually a pretty good position to be in, because one of the things I found over the course of my life is that when you are identifying as part of a political movement—whether it’s on the left, or the right; whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, or a democratic socialist, or a libertarian, whatever the heck it may be—there’s a tendency toward groupthink, and there’s a tendency to prioritize your standing within your social circle and your peer group over rigorous analysis of policy and willingness to take stances based on the issues, not what’s expected of you.
Whenever you’re part of any political movement, there is always this pressure to conform. And there is always punishment for people who break ranks. And so, over the years, it wasn’t like I said things that I didn’t believe in—I always said what I believed in—but there are issues I didn’t go into. I mean, I didn’t write about the fact that the Republican Party’s opposition to gun control, for example, I think is a myopic and suicidal policy, which is responsible for a lot of needless death and suffering—because good Republicans don’t criticize the stances of the party, and that’s part of this feeling of group loyalty.
So I kind of like now being a free agent and able to make my own way in the political world. The sad part of that has been that I have lost a bunch of friends—folks that I was close to on the right. Some of those friends I kept, because some have become Never Trump conservatives or have made kind of the same journey as I have. But others have gone over to the MAGA side of things, and it’s very hard for me to interact with them, and vice versa. That’s just a huge divide in our political life. So losing some friends has made me sad. I’ve gained some other friends, but it’s been a major transition for me personally—and I think for the country.

Groupthink, polarization, and party alignment
BW: You mentioned the tendency for there to be groupthink within political parties. I think that’s a pretty indisputable claim. But I think another trend we’re also seeing is group polarization—where people, because of the conformity pressures you mentioned within a political party, tend to move to more extreme positions because of the lack of opposition. We’ve seen that with the rise of right-wing extremist Nick Fuentes and criticized statements from figures like Tucker Carlson.
From your perspective---you mentioned that currently you don’t belong to a party--do you see yourself having a party alignment in the future? Or do you see this extremist trend, becoming more and more problematic on both sides of the aisle, continue to grow.

MB: I don’t. I mean, I’m certainly comfortable with the views of some centrist Democrats—just as I’m comfortable with the views of some centrist Republicans—but there are extremes in both parties. For example, I’m comfortable with the views of Josh Shapiro. I am not so comfortable with the views of Zohran Mamdani. And in the Republican Party, I’m comfortable with the views of—well, vanishingly few people these days. I guess maybe Mitch McConnell, or something like that. Certainly not comfortable with the views of Donald Trump or his acolytes in Congress.
But again: I’m not a political operative. If I were a political operative, I probably would have to choose a side, because we live in this two-party system where you’re either a D or an R; otherwise you have no impact, no influence, and no employment. But luckily, I’m not a political operative. I’m just an egghead and an ink-stained wretch. I just write for a living and offer my opinion, so I don’t feel compelled to sign up with either party, and I’m happy to call them both out when I think they’re wrong.
But I don’t want to engage in false moral equivalence here, because the reality is: while both the Democrats and the Republicans have extremist wings, the extremist wing is in control of the Republican Party, whereas it’s not in control of the Democratic Party. And the Democrats have nominated folks like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden—who I’m pretty comfortable with on the issues. If three years from now they nominate AOC or Bernie Sanders—that would be a serious problem for me—but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think Democrats have managed to stay much more in the center than Republicans have done.

Zohran Mamdani, New York City, and Political Branding
BW: You mentioned Zohran Mamdani. It’s interesting--Bret Stephens, in a New York Times column he made prior to the New York mayoral election, said that if Mamdani were to be elected and things were to go wrong, it would end up being better for Republicans, because Trump would be able to say, “This is the Democratic Party now—Zohran Mamdani.” What do you make of that?

MB: I know Bret well. We worked together many years ago at The Wall Street Journal. That’s a concern I have for sure. In theory, Mamdani seems like a very convenient piñata for President Trump. Whether that’s actually going to work out that way or not—very hard to say, because the one time when Mamdani was out at the Oval Office, Trump seemed to love him. They hit it off—which I don’t think a lot of people expected.
We’ll just have to see what happens with New York, which is where I live—where I’m speaking to you from right now. There were a lot of billionaires warning that they were going to flee town as soon as Mamdani was elected, and as far as I can tell, that’s not happening. New York is as popular a destination as ever, so we’ll see.
One of Mamdani’s saving graces is that it’s not clear to me how much power the mayor of New York actually has. In many ways, his power is circumscribed by the state—the state legislature, the governor, the MTA, other boards and commissions. And so a lot of his more far-out ideas are probably not terribly practical.
So we’ll see. When the British Empire suffered a major defeat at Saratoga during the American Revolution, a friend is said to have rushed in to Adam Smith—the great economist—and told him that the empire is ruined. Smith is said to have replied that there is a great deal of ruin in an empire. And I would say there’s also a great deal of ruin in New York City. We’ve had some pretty poor mayors like de Blasio or Eric Adams, and the city still seems to be thriving. So I’m guessing and hoping we will survive the Mamdani administration.
And while it’s true that Republicans will try to associate the entire Democratic Party with Mamdani, that’s not going to be convincing—assuming that Democrats nominate a much more centrist presidential candidate for 2028, because that person is going to become automatically the leader of the party.

New York, Jewish Politics, and The Widening Divide
BW: If I can ask a more personal question: you’re in New York, and I return often since much of my family is there. I recently heard Rabbi Cosgrove of the Park Avenue Synagogue speak sharply about Zohran Mamdani and the broader Israel/anti-Zionism debate—an example of how openly political even religious spaces have become. In your view, what else is driving the level of polarization in New York right now, and how durable do you think it is?
​
MB: I think it’s a phenomenon larger than New York City, because there is no question there has been an increase in partisan polarization over the last several decades—and you can measure it in multiple ways, including data showing that Democrats in Congress are getting more liberal, and Republicans are getting more conservative.
There used to be a large number of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, and there’s almost neither—both of those groups have become largely extinct. If I had to identify with one group on the political spectrum, it would probably be kind of liberal, Rockefeller-type Republicans—maybe Teddy Roosevelt-type Republicans—but they really don’t exist anymore. That’s not a faction of the party you can belong to.
So there has been a tendency for both parties to become much more uniform and much farther apart on the issues. And you also see that to some extent in demographic polarization—where places like California and New York become much more blue, and Texas and Florida become much more red, and much more uniformly so.
And, of course, that trend is going to be accelerated because the Trump Republicans started this troubling trend of trying to do reapportionment in the middle of a decade to deprive Democrats of seats in Texas and other states. And now Democrats have been forced to respond in blue states like California. So I think that’s just going to drive the polarization.
It has a very negative impact in Congress because, for most members of the House, they’re all in safe seats. They’re not in competitive seats, so they feel no pressure to move to the center. In fact, all the pressure is the other way, because the only way House incumbents are likely to lose an election these days is if they lose the primary.
That’s been one of the chief disciplinary mechanisms that Trump has used to keep the Republican Party in line, because he’s always threatening to back primary challengers to Republicans who resist him in any way, shape, or form. And he’s managed to drive pretty much all of the anti-Trump Republicans out of Congress—Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, and all these others. There’s Mitt Romney. It’s just not a tenable place in Congress for somebody who opposes Trump anymore.
So, yeah—I think these are all troubling trends. I think of myself as a raging centrist, and being a centrist feels increasingly isolated on today’s political spectrum in America.

Writing for a Polarized Public
BW: I want to turn the conversation  to your own writing style and career path. Knowing that you write for a broad public at a time when foreign policy debates are deeply polarized, how should historians and writers communicate complex or uncomfortable arguments without flattening them into slogans—or polarizing the other side from even looking at their arguments?

MB: That’s kind of the essence of journalism—always has been, always will be: trying to simplify and explain a very complex issue without dumbing it down or succumbing to caricatures. That’s the essence of what journalists try to do—to grapple with complexity, but not lose your way within that complexity.
And that’s the talent that journalists bring to the table, because we’re usually not the world’s greatest experts in X, Y, or Z. But we’re people who can translate what the world’s greatest experts say, and explain it in a way that your average interested lay reader can understand.

Building Credibility Early
BW: For students who want to write seriously about history and foreign policy, but perhaps don’t yet have institutional backing—or are finding it hard to get involved in the space—how should they think about building credibility early on?

MB: Gosh, that’s a good question. I’ve never been asked that before. I think it’s just a question of doing the work.
It begins with reading a lot—not looking at websites, but reading actual books with covers and all the stuff in between the covers. Increasing your knowledge base. And obviously part of that is going to college; these days, it’s probably going to graduate or professional school. But fundamentally, it’s having curiosity about the world, wanting to learn, and actually doing the hard work of learning—not trying to take shortcuts with AI or CliffsNotes, but actually digging deep into issues that you’re interested in.
And then not being afraid to start at the ground level. I mean, I know coming out of college, nobody was going to pay me to be a foreign policy pundit—that would be a little presumptuous. I was starting off as an assistant national editor at The Christian Science Monitor, then as an op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal, gradually working my way up to op-ed editor of The Wall Street Journal at the same time—pursuing my writing on the side and writing, for example, this book, The Savage Wars of Peace, that led to my being hired by the Council on Foreign Relations in 2002.
So that’s a random career path, which just happens to be what I did, and there are a million other career paths out there. But basically, I think it just comes from learning stuff, working hard, working your way up, impressing people with your knowledge and judgment, gaining more responsibility, and taking advantage of that responsibility in a responsible way.

Advice to His Younger Self
BW: Looking back at your career, if you could tell your 20-year-old self one thing—one piece of advice, one mistake not to make—what would that be?

MB: Be less doctrinaire. Be less ideological. Because I tended to be pretty staunchly conservative—not in my youth, but later—and I feel like it led me down some dead ends.
I regret some positions I took, for example supporting the invasion of Iraq. In 2003, I kind of kicked myself and asked, “How could I have been so dumb?” But I wasn’t the only person who made that mistake, for sure.
I should have been more ready to question what folks on my own side were saying—to be more independent. And I probably should have focused more on fact-gathering rather than opinion-sharing.
This is something that’s even more prevalent today, where everybody has a blog or a Substack, or a podcast or whatever. There’s a huge marketplace for sharing opinions—that’s what drives so much internet traffic, social media traffic. But I think a lot of ideas are much less valuable and important than simply gathering the underlying information that allows you to reach cogent and coherent conclusions.
In some ways, I wish I had focused more on fact-gathering rather than opinionizing. I mean, where I have done a lot of fact-gathering over the years is writing my books, which tend to be pretty thick and have footnotes. And I’ve found that to be a really useful exercise, because when I’m writing journalism, I’m kind of using up everything in my brain—using every mental resource that I have—whereas when I’m doing research, when I’m writing a book, I’m actually building up my storehouse of facts and ideas. And I think that’s a very valuable thing to do.

The Historical Lesson He Worries We’re Forgetting
BW: As we wrap up with our final couple questions: when you look ahead, is there a historical lesson you’re most worried that we’re ignoring or misremembering right now?

MB: The obvious one is the dangers of isolationism and protectionism—which helped to plunge America and the world into the Great Depression and World War II. There was pretty much a post-1945 consensus that we wanted to promote free trade, alliances, American international leadership, standing up for democracy and resisting tyranny. That was a pretty bipartisan consensus in American politics.
And I feel like it’s broken down now with Donald Trump, who champions an America First foreign policy—using the very name that was employed by Charles Lindbergh and the isolationists of the 1930s. I never thought I would live long enough to see the resurgence of isolationism and protectionism, but here we are. That seems like a pretty obvious historical lesson that we ignore at our peril.

What to read—and why it matters
BW: And then finally, as is customary with this blog: for people interested in the field that you’re working in—or wanting to follow a similar career path—what pieces of literature (a book, an essay, even a poem) would you recommend to them, and why?

MB: Oh, gee—that’s a…

BW: You can say your own books!

MB: Yeah, of course—all my collective works are everything you need to know---I don’t know. It’s really hard to say. I would just say: read a lot of serious books. It’s hard for me to cite one book that I would recommend above all others.
I knew when I was a kid, in the 1980s, I was influenced by books like The Wise Men, which was co-written by your professor, Walter Isaacson. I was also influenced by Robert A. Caro’s biographies of Lyndon Johnson. I’m just kind of glancing at my bookshelf now. I was influenced by historians like William Manchester and Barbara Tuchman.
And I think a lot of academic historians—even at the time—would tend to look down their noses at folks like Tuchman or Manchester or Caro or Isaacson or others by saying they were “popularizers,” that they were not proper academic historians. But I think what they really did was write history in an accessible, exciting way that made people much more knowledgeable—and made it a pleasure to learn about the past.
I fear that a lot of people don’t know a lot of history these days, as surveys of civic literacy will point out. And so I think we’re prey to a lot of political and societal delusions because people don’t know enough of what happened in the past. And I think those kinds of works of popular history—which is kind of what I do as well—are a way to rectify that ignorance, and to get people much more knowledgeable about the past, which I think is a basic building block not just of your professional life, but of citizenship.

BW: I absolutely agree. I remember reading Isaacson’s Kissinger biography at the beginning of my sophomore year, and that’s really what sparked my interest in foreign affairs. Mr. Boot, it’s been an honor and a pleasure. I really appreciate you taking the time with me.
​
MB: Great. Pleasure to talk with you.

Beginnings: Finding Journalism — and Economics
Ben Wolf: Thank you for joining me Mr. Appelbaum. If you would, please tell me a little bit about how you got your start in journalism, how you knew you wanted to report on economics, and how you found your own stylistic voice.

Binyamin Appelbaum: I got my start in journalism in a pretty classic way. I edited my high school paper, and when I got to college, I signed up to work for the student paper. I didn’t intend to make a career out of it—it just seemed fun—but I ended up falling in love with it. It became more and more the center of my college experience.
I eventually ended up as the editor of the student paper at the University of Pennsylvania. By my senior year, a little later than I probably should have, I started thinking about how to turn this into a career. I sent out letters to the 100 largest papers in the country asking if anyone would take me on as an intern—using the free stamps from the college newspaper office. One of those papers, the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, Florida, offered me an internship.
I wrote a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer about my experience of job hunting, noting that I didn’t really know where Jacksonville was at that point in my life. But it was an opportunity, so I jumped at it and became an intern at the Florida Times-Union.

The Vanishing Career Ladder in Journalism
BW: Do you think that method—sending out 100 letters—is still applicable today? Or do you see other paths people are taking into journalism now?

BA: No, I don’t think it would work today. I was lucky that it worked then. At that time, there were a lot of big papers across the country that were hungry for young, cheap journalists.
I sometimes think of my career as a rat scrambling up the halls of a sinking ship, jumping from paper to paper as they collapsed behind me. Most of the places I’ve worked are shadows of themselves. Local newspapers are in dire straits—this isn’t news to anyone. Only a very few have found anything like a sustainable bottom, and even those are much smaller than they were in their heyday.
When I was a kid growing up outside Boston, the Sunday Globe was a substantial object when it landed on your doorstep—hundreds of pages of content. The Globe is one of the luckier regional papers, but even it isn’t anything like what it once was.
It’s very difficult today to build a career by working at smaller papers and moving your way up. In the old days, newspaper journalism was like baseball: you started in Single-A, moved to Double-A, then Triple-A, and maybe you made it to the majors. Plenty of people had fulfilling careers at Double-A or Triple-A papers. Today, both that ladder and the likelihood of lifetime employment at a regional paper are broken. People seeking careers in journalism need to find other paths.

When Economics Became Fully Political
BW: I think that extends beyond newspapers, too--to all forms of media. I’m from Kansas City, and our local NPR affiliate is KCUR. I recall last year going to a lunch with Steve Inskeep, who of course is one of the predominant NPR voices, and he told me about how national broadcasters are being sent to smaller affiliates to help raise funding, because those stations are struggling so much on their own. It definitely is a problematic trend.
I wanted to ask you about economic policy debates today. From my perspective, they seem far more political than they were a generation ago. I saw this recently at the DealBook Summit, where Scott Bessent was openly criticizing Democratic-run states over inflation. I was surprised to see this from a figure institutionally separate from the federal government. Is that assessment right, that economics are more political today? And if so, has it made reporting harder—or forced greater honesty about the consequences of policy choices?

BA: I’d say a couple of things. Politics and the economy have always been extremely intertwined. Economics is a way of thinking about how a polity should work, so that part isn’t new.
But two things are much more pronounced today. First, everything is national to a degree it wasn’t historically. You asked earlier how I started covering economics, and the answer is relevant here. I was working at a newspaper in Charlotte, North Carolina, covering local government. The managing editor called me in and said, “We’re looking for a banking reporter.” I said, “That sounds really boring.” He said, “You are the new banking reporter.” That’s how I got into economic journalism—by accident.
At the time, Charlotte was a center of the regional banking industry. Decades ago, the southeastern, northeastern, midwestern, and west coast financial industries were more discrete from one another, and often regulated at the state or regional level. As that system has been replaced by truly national banks and a national financial system, economic issues have become national issues. Debates are adjudicated at the national level, and they inevitably become partisan battlegrounds.
The second factor is polarization. Historically, there was overlap between Democrats and Republicans. Over time, we’ve seen a "sorting"—the parties are more cleanly divided and in more constant conflict over everything, including economic issues. For both reasons, every economic policy question is now national and partisan, which makes good decision-making much harder.

BW: That reminds me of a conversation I had with Bret Stephens about political sorting—not just in Congress, but in people’s personal lives, too. People are far more likely now to marry someone of the same political party than they were decades ago. That trend has reduced conversations across party lines--

BA: --and let me add to that, it’s not just politics—it’s economics too. A cliché captures it: half a century ago, doctors married nurses; today, doctors marry doctors. Political and economic identities are increasingly aligned—for individuals, for families, and for communities. We’re more segregated economically, and those identities reinforce political conflict.

Reporting Power from the Inside
BW: You’ve worked at both local newspapers and national institutions like The New York Times. What has been the biggest difference in the newsroom or in how you reported between the two?

BA: The dividing line for me was between the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. I arrived at the Post in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis. On my first day, before I even had computer training, an editor told me there had been a secret meeting at the White House and asked me to report on it.
I panicked. At a regional paper, you don’t expect to find out what happened in a secret meeting. I was sitting at my desk trying to figure out what to do when the phone rang. Someone who had been at the meeting called to tell me about it.
That’s the difference. At regional papers, you’re desperately trying to get information and often failing. At national papers, the challenge flips. Many people want to give you information—often competing versions of events. Your job becomes figuring out what’s true, what agendas people have, and what they’re leaving out. You become part of the system, which brings real risks. But the most important part of that is the "New York Times" part of your title. If you start thinking sources are calling you rather than calling The New York Times, you can get into trouble.

BW: Could you share a moment where that's happened to you--where you had competing individuals try to shape coverage directly?

BA: It happens all the time. During the Obama administration after the financial crisis, there was a hugely consequential debate about how to help homeowners who couldn’t afford their mortgages. Millions were trapped in homes worth less than their loans.
Different factions within the administration had competing ideas, and each wanted favorable coverage in The New York Times. They were making their cases to me because they knew there would be stories and wanted their approach reflected accurately—and persuasively.
During crises, the dynamic intensifies. Jamie Dimon, for example, would sometimes just call reporters directly. And every night, after our stories went online but before they were finalized for print, my phone would ring—often with someone from the White House trying to “work the refs,” asking why something was phrased a certain way or why another point wasn’t included. The more important the issue, the more senior the person calling.

Translating Complexity for the Public
BW: That’s really fascinating. As we wrap up, I want to ask about the craft itself. Economic journalism requires simplifying complex systems without flattening their stakes. What’s the hardest balance to strike when writing for a general audience who doesn't have the same level of knowledge as you do?

BA: That’s the core of the work. I sometimes say journalism is like being Moses: you go up the mountain to talk to God, then you come down and explain it to the people. Both parts matter.
You need to understand the subject deeply by talking to experts, then explain it to educated readers who aren’t specialists. At The Times, we have a clear sense of who our reader is—an educated person who isn’t an expert in that field. The work is translation: finding accurate illustrations, anecdotes, and language that make economics accessible and interesting.

Advice for Aspiring Economic Journalists
BW: Finally, if you were starting today and trying to build credibility as an economic journalist, what would you focus on in the first year?

BA: I’d focus on becoming deeply expert in something specific. Early in my career, I covered banks—and even more specifically, the mortgage industry. That expertise let me write with authority and build trust. Luck matters too, but being really good at one thing gives people a reason to rely on you, and then to trust you with broader subjects.

BW: Mr. Appelbaum, it’s been a real honor. Thank you so much for joining me.

BA: My pleasure.

​Ambassador Mark Green has spent his career at the intersection of domestic politics and global development—serving as a member of Congress from Wisconsin’s 8th District, U.S. ambassador to Tanzania, administrator of USAID, and president & CEO of the Wilson Center. Before any of that, he and his wife taught in a small village in western Kenya, an experience that helped shape his worldview and his belief in empowering individuals rather than building dependence. In this conversation for The Pathway Blog, Green reflects on how a year without electricity led him to public service, what most Americans get wrong about foreign aid, how China’s rise is reshaping development, and what advice he has for students considering careers in diplomacy, politics, and international affairs.

​This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

​Getting Started in Public Service
BW: You’ve had a long and varied career—from the Wisconsin legislature and Congress to serving as U.S. ambassador to Tanzania, administrator of USAID, and then president of the Wilson Center.
Looking back, what early experiences or roles most shaped your entry into public service and the worldview that you bring to it?
MG: It’s an unusual path that I’ve taken. For me, it really started before the state legislature, when my wife and I were teachers in a small village in western Kenya. That profoundly shaped my worldview and, I think, my drive for public service.
Where we lived and taught, our home had no electricity. There was only one telephone in the entire village—a wind-up telephone mounted in a wooden box. You couldn’t do calls to the U.S. or anything like that.
What struck me was what I saw day in and day out: families in Kenya trying desperately to get a pale shadow of the education that, quite frankly, we throw away pretty quickly. That was inspirational.
Secondly, I had the luxury of time. Because there was no television and no electricity, in the evenings I read. I read every book I could find—every book at the local library. I read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I read the Bible cover to cover, because that’s what they had.
At the end of the year-long program, I decided I wanted to get involved in public service and politics. I never thought I would run for office, but I knew I wanted to get involved, which is what led me, after Kenya, to go back home to Green Bay, start practicing law, and very quickly meet Tommy Thompson, the longest-serving governor in Wisconsin’s history. He became a mentor and an inspiration.
That’s what really got me going.
What pulled me into foreign policy work was something different. Right after 9/11—at that point I was in Congress—the Speaker of the House came up to me. He’d somehow learned about my time as a teacher in Kenya, and he said, “Mark, I’ve got plenty of guys around here who can catch and kill bad guys. I need some people to stop there from being more bad guys.”
He put me on the International Relations Committee, as we called it in those days. President Bush was in office, and we started to work on the PEPFAR HIV/AIDS initiative, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and funding for basic education in the developing world. That’s what really got me off and running.
So it was an unusual path. And then beyond that, at the end of my congressional career, I was asked—through, then-Congressman (before he was Speaker) Paul Ryan, a very good friend of mine, and Karl Rove from the White House—“Does Green want to go to Tanzania?” They asked me to serve as ambassador.
That gave me a privilege that few people get, because I got to be an ambassador overseeing some of the very programs I’d created as a member of Congress—to go from the drawing board to implementation. Extraordinary privilege.
So that’s really what got me going. Each step of the way, it’s been good fortune. I wish I could say it was brilliance. It was good fortune more than anything else.

Representing Wisconsin While Looking Outward
BW: I’m really interested in the part you mentioned about your mentor, but I’m going to ask you about that a bit later.
First, I’m curious: during your time representing Wisconsin’s 8th District, you helped advance major global aid and development legislation. Did serving a domestic constituency influence how you thought about America’s role abroad or the purpose of foreign aid, which of course became extremely relevant to you in your later roles?
MG: The 8th Congressional District—Green Bay being the largest city in that district—is also where Joe McCarthy was from. So it’s not exactly, especially in those days, an area known for being outward-looking in terms of international affairs.
I don’t know that, if we hadn’t had the crisis presented by 9/11, it would have been as easy, politically, to craft some of these programs. After 9/11, I traveled to Afghanistan, I went to Iraq twice, and I also traveled a couple of times to Africa. I’m not sure I could have done that politically if not for what everyone saw as the great challenge of violent extremism leading to terrorism. That created political momentum for those programs. It would have been far harder otherwise.
No one runs for office on foreign assistance or foreign policy.
I also had an extraordinarily good constituent staff back in Green Bay—Appleton being the other big city in that district. Their work—on veterans’ issues, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security—that’s really the day-to-day of what a member of Congress does.
That good work, plus the national crisis of 9/11, gave me the comfort level and political mandate to take on some of the broader issues that maybe aren’t day-to-day concerns for many people, but that I viewed as very important to America’s future.

What Running for Congress Really Feels Like
BW: For me personally, I’m incredibly interested in political careers—ambassador being one of them. I’m specifically fascinated by foreign affairs, for many reasons, but it's in part because the idea of heading a campaign seems immensely strenuous and stressful, frankly: having that much scrutiny on your character, who you are, and whatever family background you have. My first reaction is that I'd much rather be involved politically without running a campaign.
What was that process like for you?
MG: Well, it was different than it is these days. We had conventional media, not social media. And to be honest, part of it was developing a relationship with the press—with journalists—such that, if something came up, they would give me the opportunity to present my side of the story.
These days it’s real-time, instant social media, and you lose control, quite frankly, of the ability to frame issues. We’re in a much more populist time than we were back then.
My first race for Congress—I ran in 1998, when I was elected—I was the only Republican in the nation to unseat a Democratic incumbent in Congress that year. It was a terrific amount of work; it was around-the-clock, day-to-day work.
It is daunting. But it’s also, quite frankly, inspiring. In a district like that, where a lot of it was small towns, small communities, rural areas, you move around and you see the character of America. You meet everyday working people, see what they do to make ends meet, and hear their view of America. That part was fun.
In my four campaigns, I did something like a hundred parades—everything from Polka Fest in Pulaski to Chocolate Fest down in Burlington, to Flag Day, to the Fourth of July.
Sure, it’s work, but it’s also fun meeting people and giving them a chance to kick the tires a little bit and ask you questions. So it is daunting, but it’s also very rewarding. That part was actually enjoyable.

Can Early Internships Box you in Politically?
BW: It truly is a unique experience, and something I'll need to give more thought to. I don’t know where my career will end up, but campaigning is something I’ll have to weigh seriously.
You mentioned being a Republican and taking a seat from a Democrat. In today’s world, you can track someone’s career so vividly online—through LinkedIn, social media, or what have you. I’ve talked to some of my politically-interested peers, and one of their main concerns in early career pursuits is: if they hypothetically intern for a Democrat this summer, but they are yet to fully decided their own political ideology or party alignment, does that risk boxing them in for the rest of their political career? What are your thoughts on that?
MG: I suppose possibly—but it really depends on the role they play.
I think being a Hill staffer is an extraordinarily rewarding experience, and I recommend it to anyone interested in public policy, whether international or domestic. You get to interact with people, and you also see in front of you a range of issues, ideas, and programs. That’s when you begin to formulate what’s important to you.
Doing constituent work, for example—which is often what an internship on Capitol Hill is about: answering mail, responding to constituent inquiries—develops a skill set more than it pins you to an ideological position.
So there is certainly a risk of being “boxed in,” but if I were hiring, I wouldn’t view it that way.
It’s a different thing if you’re committee staff. For every member of Congress, you have their personal office, which interacts with constituents back home. But they’ll also have staff dedicated to their committee assignments. On the committees, things tend to be more ideological, because you’re part of the team considering legislation or oversight matters.
So it really depends on the role. But again, my view is: it’s a rewarding experience.
I worked my way through law school as a part-time legislative aide in the state Capitol, and it was great—and inspiring. I remember my boss, my state senator (who has since passed away), was in the leadership.
In a group setting, he said, “Mark’s going to tell me how to vote on X.” And afterward I thought to myself: I’m 25 years old, and I’m going to be influencing how this person votes. It was inspiring. It was cool—pretty heady stuff.
So again, getting involved in the process, getting into the public arena—whether as an elected official or part of the team—is great. It’s really good work.

Finding Your Place—and Your Ego Check—on Capitol Hill
BW: I was listening to something recently from Scott Galloway, the podcaster and NYU professor. He was talking about how people are often concerned with imposter syndrome—feeling like they don’t belong in the room they’re in—when in reality, that can be a good sign. If you feel like everyone around you is highly talented and maybe ahead of you in experience, that means you’re learning.
MG: Right. So to win my first campaign for Congress was an amazing undertaking. The first poll that came out on the gentleman I eventually unseated—he was actually a friend of mine, a Democratic congressman and former TV personality who has since passed away—was pretty daunting.
When the campaign started, the guy who would eventually become my chief of staff came to me and said, “I have good news and I have bad news.” I said, “Okay, give it to me.” He said, “The bad news is you’re 40 points behind in the polls.”
And I said, “What the heck is the good news?”
And he said, “It’s only up from here.”
It was quite an undertaking.
When we won, I remember going out to D.C. for the first time with my chief of staff. We sat, just the two of us, in a room and said, “Oh my God. This is pretty cool. Whoa. This is cool.”
But you discover very quickly that members of Congress fall into two classes. There are those for whom getting to office is their lifetime achievement. It’s very important to them—their status. They want to be called “Mr. Chairman” or whatever it might be.
And then there are people who are there because they want to do what a congressman can do—good things. The late Henry Hyde, a name you may not know, was a congressman from Illinois who chaired the Judiciary Committee and, during his tenure, crafted many key foreign policy measures that passed. He was “Henry.” He wasn’t “Mr. Chairman.”
You very quickly figure out who needs the title for their ego versus those who are looking for a chance to make a difference. You gravitate toward and form friendships with the right people, and it’s a great experience.
It is heady stuff. You have lots of people around you telling you how good you are, because they’re looking for something—not because you’re really that great.
I was fortunate. There was a men’s accountability group. We used to get together every Wednesday morning in a different member’s office over coffee, close the doors, and talk about what was going on back home. They deflated egos pretty fast, and that was very important for me.
Because again: you’ve got a title, and people spend a lot of time telling you how great you are—but often because they want something.

What Americans Get Wrong About Foreign Aid
BW: As a veteran in the political sphere, I’d love to ask you a couple of policy-related questions.
First, what do you think is the biggest misunderstanding Americans have about foreign aid and international development? And second, how do you think USAID and diplomacy should evolve, especially in light of the political scrutiny and strategic pressures of the past few years?
MG: Those are hard questions to answer because everything’s in flux right now.
Traditionally, people’s misunderstandings of foreign assistance fall into two buckets. First, people don’t realize how small it is. The U.S. Global Leadership Coalition did some polling where they asked Americans how big a portion of the federal budget they thought foreign aid was. The most frequent answer was 25%. In reality, it’s less than 1%.
Then they asked, “How much do you think foreign aid should be?” People said 10%. And again, the actual number was under 1%. So there’s that.
The second big misunderstanding is how we do foreign assistance. The criticism is that we “give money to corrupt leaders.” In reality, we actually don’t give money directly to governments, with a few exceptions. We traditionally work through NGOs—non-governmental organizations—so money doesn’t typically go straight to governments and leaders.
Those are the traditional misunderstandings.
But everything is in flux right now. We’re in the process of rewriting how we do assistance. I think the administration has really jolted the development community, which is not necessarily bad. It’s going to force us to reconstruct things.
I’m a big believer in what I call the “journey to self-reliance.” We don’t want countries or people to be dependent upon foreign assistance. We want them to see it as a necessary evil—a step toward a better future that they themselves take charge of. I think the administration’s moves are forcing us to rethink how we get there.
Again, that’s not a bad thing. We really are in flux right now.

Development, Diplomacy, and the Challenge from China
BW: Given today’s global challenges—economic instability, climate stress, shifting power dynamics—what role do you think U.S. development should play in the coming decade? And if you were designing America’s foreign policy priorities from scratch, what would you elevate to the top?
MG: Boy—also a broad question, difficult to answer concisely.
Development and diplomacy—so-called soft power or smart power—are a crucial part of projecting American leadership around the world. Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis famously wrote in a note to members of the Appropriations Committee in Congress: “If you cut foreign aid, I’m going to have to buy more bullets.”
That’s the way I think of smart foreign assistance. It works on addressing the conditions that often lead to despair. Poverty doesn’t cause terrorism, but poverty and destitution left unchecked can lead to despair, and despair is a condition that bad guys know how to exploit.
So addressing the drivers of despair is a way of keeping America safe and keeping the world more stable. It also helps create economic partners.
What I think is crucial is that we use our investments in other countries as the beginning of the relationship, not the end. We want to take those investments and find ways to help our partner countries mobilize their own resources and build their own capacity—to lead their own future. We want countries to be true partners in a brighter, more just, more stable future.
The biggest change—and this goes to your second question—is the rise of China. When I started in this work, I’m an Africanist by background, there was very little presence of China. Now China’s everywhere.
China’s foreign assistance is heavily financing-driven and loan-based. China is now the largest official creditor in the world. A recent study projected $2.1 trillion-plus in Chinese loans around the world, creating enormous debt.
We don’t operate like that. We operate much more through investments and traditional foreign assistance. But I think China’s presence and its ambitions will force us to rethink our approach to almost every relationship in the world.

Learning from Tommy Thompson and Jack Kemp
BW: As we close here, Ambassador, I want to turn back to some of your early experiences and advice for students. You were mentioning your mentor from Wisconsin earlier, Tommy Thompson. Was there any key advice or anything he said that really stuck with you and influenced you to pursue the career you went on to have?
MG: Former Governor Tommy Thompson—who went on to be Secretary of Health and Human Services—was a really inspirational figure.
Tommy was the guy who launched the welfare reform movement and expanded school choice. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was the first major school district to have school choice, and Wisconsin was once at the heart of the welfare state.
Tommy’s relentless reforms, and his belief in individuals, individual empowerment, and reforming government so it doesn’t hold people back but instead becomes a launching pad for individual growth and opportunity—that inspired me.
When I got to USAID and reformed our foreign assistance framework, I saw Tommy and I said, “You know, I’m trying to do at the federal, international level what you did at the state level.” That was very inspirational to me.
Another gentleman I got to know was the late Jack Kemp, former congressman, former Secretary of HUD, a Republican conservative leader in the empowerment space. He too was inspirational. The notion of breaking down bureaucracy and empowering individuals to give everyone a chance at what we call the American dream—but really is a universal dream—mattered a lot to me.
So it wasn’t much of a step to go from domestic to international work, because the same principles applied—just in a different arena.

What Stands Out in Young Applicants
BW: When you were leading USAID and later the Wilson Center, what qualities in young applicants or people who wanted to work in that sphere really stood out to you? Were there common mistakes that caused otherwise strong candidates to fall short?
MG: I was looking for two things.
Number one, intellectual curiosity. You don’t have to have all the answers—you just need to be looking for them. That mattered a lot to me, because it’s like when you go to law school: people misunderstand and think you’re taught the law to memorize it. In reality, you’re taught a framework for analyzing issues, because the law changes. So I was always looking for intellectual curiosity.
Secondly, communication skills—writing skills. That is probably the greatest weakness I see in most candidates: the inability to put together a concise presentation of ideas, of a message. So I always tell people: work on your writing skills.
We’re living in a time where we all spend time on social media—brevity, shortcuts, acronyms. There’s no replacement, though, for the ability to think clearly and to present clearly and concisely.

Advice to 20-Year-Old Self
BW: Last couple of questions here. If you could sit down with your 20-year-old self—before Washington, before Congress—and offer one warning and one encouragement about a career in public service, what would you say? Would you advise him to change anything about how you got started?
MG: No. It has been a heck of a ride. I’ve enjoyed every moment—every twist and turn.
I haven’t always won, on any issue or cause, but I’ve taken lessons from every activity.
I think the biggest bit of advice I’d offer people these days is: don’t get hung up on stuff that really doesn’t matter.
I just finished up a fellowship at Georgetown, working with lots of foreign service students, and they were always worried about picking the “right” major. “What should I major in? What minor should I choose?”
My answer is: whatever you choose, be really, really good at it. Our engagement with the world is going up, not down.
When I entered this space, there were relatively few career opportunities that took you into foreign policy. Now there are relatively few career opportunities that don’t touch foreign policy. America’s invested around the world; the private sector and business need to open markets and develop partnerships.
So there is almost no major that won’t prepare you for foreign policy—but just be really, really good at it.

BW: I think your absolutely right, thank you for that. Finally, as is customary with this blog, I’d like to close by asking if there are any pieces of literature—essays, books, even poems—that you would recommend to people interested in pursuing a career path similar to yours.
MG: Two books.
My favorite nonfiction book is The River of Doubt, which is the story of Teddy Roosevelt’s somewhat ill-fated trip after the presidency, when he ventured into the Amazonian jungle. National Geographic put together a team for him to explore the source of a river. It damn near killed him and probably shortened his life.
It was inspiring to me because it’s about one person’s personal reach—but also about folly. It didn’t go as smoothly as expected. I’ve always taken lessons from that.
Secondly, an obscure book called Revolution in Zanzibar. Zanzibar is part of Tanzania, where I served as ambassador. It’s the story of a young foreign service officer—true story—on his first overseas assignment in Zanzibar at the very beginning of the Cold War, during what became known as the Revolution in Zanzibar.
He was the one who bucked conventional wisdom. The New York Times ran a front-page story talking about a “domino falling in Africa,” thinking of it purely in Cold War terms. And he was the guy sending cables back saying, “That’s not it. It’s ethnic. It’s essentially Africans overthrowing Middle Eastern slaveholders.”
It taught me humility in foreign policy. There are things we think we know, and we have to be prepared to take a new, critical approach.
So either of those books—and both together—teach you humility. We think we know all the answers, and in fact we actually know relatively few.

BW: Ambassador Green, I can’t thank you enough for your time. I feel like I’ve really learned so much in just this short period of time we’ve been talking.
MG: Well, you’re very kind. Go for it, right? I’m excited for you. You’re in a great place, and this is a moment to chase your dreams.

​Formative Experiences and the Path to Public Service
Ben Wolf: Congressman Subramanyam, it’s great to speak with you. The Pathway Blog is a student-led platform that aims to give students like myself a better understanding into career paths in politics, foreign affairs, public policy, and other similar fields. Let’s get right into it.
My first question for you is: looking back on your personal journey and public-service trajectory, which experiences or formative moments do you consider most important—the ones that ultimately shaped your decision to seek elected office?
Suhas Subramanyam: I always look back to when I was at Tulane and Hurricane Katrina hit the city. I really felt like it was an opportunity to help rebuild and serve the community. I found immense purpose and joy in doing that, and it’s what launched my interest in getting involved in public service.
I don’t think my plan at the time was ever to run for office. It was mostly to try to make things better in the community. That was certainly a formative experience.
I also had the opportunity to work for a member of Congress and see firsthand the impact you can have on the country and the world. That was pretty formative for me as well. Working on Capitol Hill after college—even though it was for less than two years—gave me a really great perspective on how impactful public service can be. That stuck with me as a state legislator and now in Congress.

Policy Priorities Shaped by Early Experiences
BW: And how do some of those early experiences influence the kinds of policies and priorities that you bring to Congress today?
SS: Clearly one of the reasons I got more political was because I care deeply about the environment. I care a lot about making sure everyone can pursue and reach the American dream—having a strong education system, a strong support system, and giving people the tools to unlock their potential. Those priorities haven’t really changed over the years.
I’ve definitely picked up others based on my experiences. For instance, I’ve worked a lot in tech—especially in emerging tech and entrepreneurship. I’ve seen both the challenges and the potential of starting a business. Those experiences have guided my priorities.
I usually try to find things that aren’t really happening on Capitol Hill, or that are underserved there, and build on those. Right now, technology expertise is one of those areas. That’s helped guide what I’m prioritizing.

Law School, Wrongful Convictions, and Lessons on Justice
BW: Before entering elected office, you also pursued a law degree, including contributing to overturning Jacques Rivera’s wrongful conviction. What lessons from that period continue to influence how you think about justice, accountability, and your own role as a legislator?
SS: Wow, what a blast from the past. Back when I worked on that case, Jacques Rivera had been wrongfully accused of murder, and I had the opportunity to work with the legal team that helped get him out.
What I took away from that experience is that the justice system has a lot of problems in America. Pretending that it doesn’t is not just naïve—it’s dangerous, because you end up putting innocent people in jail. The system works best for people who have a lot of money, and beyond that, it isn’t always fair.
Getting a law degree helped shape my career and inform me as a state legislator, and now in Congress. When I run into questions about whether a statute is legal or constitutional, it’s nice to be able to do my own statutory interpretation and have my own informed perspective, instead of having to rely on others.

To Go or Not to Go: The Law School Question
BW: Staying on that note of law school: as someone considering a future in both law and politics, I often think about the trade-offs of attending law school—especially today, when it’s more competitive, more expensive, and less linear than it once was. What went into your decision to pursue a law degree? And do you feel it was essential for your development as a policymaker?
SS: I always tell people: go to law school if you want to be a lawyer—or if you happen to have three years and a lot of money to spend. Most people don’t have the latter, so I usually just ask people straight up whether they want to be a lawyer.
If they’re not sure, I tell them to hold off on law school until they are. Law school is a prerequisite for becoming a lawyer in almost every state, and it gives you the foundation to do that. But it’s not really required if you want to be in public policy, or if you want a degree in something other than law.
It doesn’t hurt to have that foundation—it’s just a very expensive and time-consuming way of learning a lot. A better way to learn a lot without becoming a lawyer is to read books on the area of law you’re interested in and some foundational texts. That can be done without a law degree.

Political Communication in a Hyper-Public Age
BW: We’ll circle back to the reading recommendations in a bit. But I first want to ask you, in an era where political interactions are highly public and the media ecosystem leaves little room for private dialogue, how does that affect the way you communicate with your colleagues in Congress? Do you feel pressured to filter yourself? And how frequent are candid, off-camera conversations among members?
SS: I try to be candid. I never thought I would be here [in Congress], but now that I am, I’ve always disliked politicians giving canned responses that don’t sound genuine.
Even if I make mistakes at times or change my mind, I’d rather be candid and make a mistake than be phony and perfectly curated. That’s just my personality and what I value.
That said, there are definitely times when you have to be careful. Words matter, and you don’t want people to take your words out of context—but that’s always been the case. I generally assume that someone is listening at all times anyway.
I also try not to be paranoid about it. I try to be authentic.

Bipartisanship, Coalitions, and Governing in a Divided Congress
BW: As a newly elected member entering a closely divided Congress, how do you approach building genuine working relationships across ideological lines? Are there particular committees, caucuses, or issue coalitions where you see the greatest potential for bipartisan progress?
SS: I think, like in all walks of life, building coalitions is about relationships and people. If there’s someone who genuinely wants to work with me—even if they’re a Republican—I’m never going to say no.
To me, this job isn’t about my ego or anything other than doing the best we can for our country. I always welcome collaboration. If the other side genuinely wants to collaborate, I’m happy to do so. I usually try to build coalitions by building relationships with people first, even on a personal level, and then trying to find common ground.
I also try not to take things personally, even when it’s very hard. If someone passes a policy that’s really bad for my community, it can be difficult to then turn around and work with them on another issue. But I think that’s part of the job—to not have permanent friends or permanent enemies, and to find your allies issue by issue.

State vs. Federal Government: What Changes?
BW: I really appreciate your time, Congressman. We’re getting to our last few questions here. Having served at both the state and federal levels, what do you see as the most meaningful differences between the two? What should aspiring public servants understand about how policymaking and constituent expectations change across those environments?
SS: The basic difference between the state and federal levels, from what I’ve seen so far, is the amount of public attention that’s on Congress compared to the state level.
At the state level, we didn’t deal with budgets this large or this level of scrutiny. One of the reasons I ran at the state level was because I felt it didn’t get enough attention and that I could really make an impact there—which I feel I did.
In Congress, every vote and everything you do is scrutinized—and it can also be twisted. On any given vote, you never know if someone is going to find one line in a bill, take it out of context, and use it. Sometimes the bills we work on have flaws, but they’re the best we can do or they represent a compromise.
For someone who aspires to do everything as well as possible, it can be frustrating to compromise. But it’s part of the job, as long as you’re not compromising your values. In Congress you’re dealing with people from all over the country, not just your state, and that requires more deliberation and more compromise at times. That’s different.

Facing the Big Tests Ahead
​BW: Looking ahead, what do you anticipate will be the biggest test for you in Congress? And how are you preparing, both politically and personally, to navigate it?
SS: I think I’ve already seen some of it, which is the attack on the federal workforce and the impact it would have on Virginia and our Commonwealth. I talked a lot about this during the campaign last year—that gutting the federal workforce would be a self-imposed recession. I said we’d see efforts to gut the federal workforce and potentially a shutdown.
Now we’ve seen both. That’s been helpful in showing people that federal workers are really essential to running this country. When you fire them en masse, it has real consequences for the country.
We’re already seeing a lot of federal workers and contractors having to be rehired after being let go, and I think we’re going to see more of that.
One thing I hope to do in the future is a full government modernization program. My experience in government has shown me that the problem isn’t the federal workers—it’s all of the regulatory hoops they have to jump through and all of the burdens on their shoulders. That makes their jobs much harder.
When Congress passes well-intended but not always effective laws, it can lead to delays in providing services to the American people. There have also been cuts at agencies that were more ideological than practical—cutting overhead in ways that actually hurt service delivery.
When you make cuts to places like Social Security offices, you end up with really long delays. To me, we’re cutting in the wrong places. We should be cutting unnecessary regulation rather than cutting the people who keep things running smoothly and actually prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.

Government Modernization: A Long-Overdue Project
BW: A government modernization project, could you tell me more about that? What do you see as the timetable for it?
SS: It should have started yesterday. It should have started many years ago.
But I’ve already pushed several bills forward—some of which have passed—on government modernization. I’ve got five I’m voting on today, and there will be more in the next couple of months that I’m introducing.
It’s bipartisan, and it’s the kind of work that will not only save us money as a country but save us a lot of time as far as providing services. And it doesn’t require firing people. I think we can do government modernization a lot better than we have—certainly much better than what’s been done so far.

Advice for Young People Entering Public Service
BW: That sounds really promising. We’re wishing you the best of luck in that passing.
Just the last two questions here, Congressman. First: for college students and young people interested in public service, advocacy, or politics, what guidance would you offer on navigating early-career decisions, developing expertise, and finding a sense of purpose in public-facing work?
SS: If you want to get involved in public policy or community engagement, just get involved! Find organizations or elected officials who are doing work that interests you and ask if they have internships or opportunities where you can help.
Sometimes it starts with things that are not glamorous—knocking doors, writing postcards—but even that work is valuable. It lets you see how people receive public policy.
I always tell people: find what’s interesting to you and engage in it right now. And be willing to work for free at first if that’s what it takes to get your foot in the door. That’s what I did.

Reading Recs
BW: And finally, you mentioned earlier that even if you don’t get a law degree, you can still learn a lot by reading law books. On that note of reading: for those who hope to follow a path similar to yours, what books, essays, or pieces of writing have most influenced you? What do you recommend to students preparing for work in public service?
SS: That’s a really good question. I really like this book called Getting to Maybe. I wish I’d read it before law school.
It gives you a great baseline foundation for what being a lawyer—and being good at law school—is all about. Essentially, it talks about how you should learn to use the facts from both sides in any argument. As a lawyer, you might sometimes represent a side that has a really tough case, and your gut might say they’re going to lose.
But then you dive into the facts from their perspective and realize the facts can actually be on your side if you dig deep enough and align them with the right precedent. I think a lot about Getting to Maybe when I think about my time as a lawyer and in law school.

BW: Congressman, this has been incredibly insightful. I can’t thank you enough for taking this time with me—I really appreciate it.
SS: Yeah, no problem at all—and Roll Wave! I hope they win on Friday.
BW: Yep, fingers crossed!