| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Robert Gallucci Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
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So did the models of "bureaucratic politics" hold up when you went into the real world and became a bureaucrat?
I would say they are useful. Their purity is probably not replicated in real life. But that's, of course, what theory is like. I think they lead to insights about how things come to happen. The fundamental aphorism of bureaucratic politics, "Where you stand on an issue depends upon where you sit in the bureaucracy of the government," leads people who first read about bureaucratic politics to have a cynical approach, which I think is inappropriate. People stand on an issue based upon their seat because of what they see and what they come to value. That's not cynical, that's human nature. So you see competing bureaucracies when these bureaucrats engage in the policymaking process. One can help explain international affairs by understanding that.
That said, and now I'll be a little bit of a political scientist, there's another level of analysis which is more systemic, which looks at the international system, which I think is extremely important. And if one only looked at competing bureaucracies one would miss an understanding of the sweep of history and the fundamental interest of the nation. And that would be a big mistake.
As a civil servant, have you always worked in the parts of the bureaucracy that dealt with foreign policy and international relations?
Exactly.
What are the important things we should know about U.S. foreign policy? What are the key elements of understanding how our democracy works when it makes foreign policy?
That's a big question. I think that one starts with understanding what the international arena is all about, what the international system is about. All of us have sort of a model or a concept in our head. If we were fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to have courses in international relations and international political theory, maybe it's a sophisticated concept, and it's informed by history and the way nations behave. But first you come to international affairs and you say, "Well, do we have a cold war? Is this 1985? Or are we post-Cold War, is this 1995?" Those are two different kinds of circumstances, in terms of the distribution of power and the way that international affairs work -- different in terms of information, different in terms of the character of economic factors and the way they influence the national interests of the country. So I think understanding context is the most important thing to start with.
The next thing is to understand if you're an American, or of whatever country, is to understand your own country's place in that system, what its interests are, particularly what its vital interests are. America, for example, has lots of interests, but it actually has relatively few vital interests, national security interests. Getting those right, obviously, is very important. That's what I've devoted my professional career trying to do, to figure that out and work to advance and secure those interests.
If you ask how Americans should think about foreign affairs, I think you want to understand the world you live in, understand what your country's interests are, particularly those vital interests, and then assess how well your government is going out securing those interests. If we had a debate right now about President Bush's State of the Union speech, for example, some propositions that are in it, I hope that's the way we would proceed. You know: Is this the way to address the world we live in? Does he have it right about what our national security interests are? And is he proceeding to secure them in a reasonable way, given the nature of the world?
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