Joseph Nye Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

Page 5 of 9

Tenure at the Defense Department

Let's talk about your second job in Washington, which was in the Clinton administration. You were Assistant Secretary of Defense. What was your focus there?

Well, I was responsible for the Defense Department's relations with other countries in the world. So it involved a great deal of travel, but also we planned security strategies for all the major regions of the world. So we did U.S. security strategy for Europe, for East Asia, for Africa, Latin America and so forth. And then, in that context, I spent a good deal of time trying to work through the implementation of the U.S. - Japan security treaty and figuring out how to relate that to the rise in the power of China. So I spent a fair amount of effort on that problem as well.

We'll talk about that in a minute. Serving in the Carter administration and Clinton administration, it's like you were dealing with a different planet. The Cold War had ended, the Soviet Union was less of a problem than it had been before, and so on. I guess what this leads me to ask about is America's changing role in the world and how you were able to shape that view in your role at Defense, based upon the insights that you had developed as a political scientist.

Well, certainly during the Carter period, and obviously in the Reagan period, the worries about Soviet power were dominant. It gave a clear focus to American foreign policy. Sometimes an over-focus. And the problem in the Clinton administration, at least in the early years, was figuring out what the focus should be. Many people thought that the answer was that economics had replaced politics. As the cliché went, geo-economics had now replaced geopolitics. So if you look at the administration's early policy toward Asia, it was focused on trade wars with Japan rather than looking at the longer term question of the rise of Chinese power or the role of Japan in the security equation, and so forth. So I think it was easier for our foreign policy in the Cold War years because of the north star. By the time Clinton came along, the north star had been blocked by clouds.

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