| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Max Boot Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 5 of 7
Before we talk about the consequences of 9/11, which really changed things, you are a part of what we might call a cohort, a younger generation of thinkers and theorists who essentially laid the groundwork in their writings for the present administration to seize the initiative after 9/11. I would like for you to help us understand what you see as the common themes that emerge from that cohort. This cohort was writing about these themes during a very different era, the Clinton era, when, in fact, we were at the high point of the implementation of the philosophical assumptions of the Powell Doctrine. Tell us about this group. Where was this beehive of intellectual activity? Where did you do your writing? Was it in journals? Give us a sense of that.
Well, first, Harry, let me say that I appreciate your calling us a cohort, instead of a cabal, which is what some people call us.
Well, that's the least I can do at Berkeley!
That's right. Nowadays, you often read about the vast neo-con conspiracy.
[Barnes]
Yeah, right.
For a conspiracy, I think it's the most poorly disguised conspiracy of all time, because all of its work has been in the public domain, and especially associated with the Weekly Standard,, a magazine that I'm now proud to be associated with as well.
A lot of the folks who have been clustered around that circle were warning after the fall of the Berlin Wall that this was not a strategic pause, this was not a moment where we would have a holiday from history. A lot of these folks were warning about the great dangers that lay ahead, and that the only way to avoid those dangers was for America to take a real leadership role in the world as we did post-1945. They argued that we cannot retreat from the world as we did in 1919, and we had to be actively engaged, because if we retreated, we would suffer a terrible price. I think that, in a lot of ways, 9/11 showed the kind of price that we would suffer if we were not actively engaged even in distant lands like Afghanistan.
So a lot of people were warning about this kind of thing going on during the 1990s. Two friends of mine, Donald and Frederick Hagen, wrote a prescient book in 2000 called While American Sleeps, warning about these dangers ahead. It didn't get the attention it deserved because we were still not wise to the threat that we faced. I think 9/11 made people wake up and realize, "Hey, maybe these guys were onto something, maybe there really is a danger out there." It has alerted people to some of the things that people in this cohort or cabal were saying all along.
Was it the self-confidence that came with the fall of the Soviet Union, the sense that the battle really wasn't over? Obviously, the Soviets and communism were defeated, but the challenges would never cease? How important was that?
There was a lot of that. You saw a real splintering on the Right after the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War, a lot of these divisions had been papered over, but after the Cold War, the question [became], what should be the foreign policy now? A lot of different camps emerged -- the Libertarians, who were basically isolationists; the old-fashioned right-wing isolationists like Pat Buchanan, who were back to the days of Father Coughlin and the America First committee -- all these trends that had disappeared on December 7, 1941, came back with a vengeance after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But there was a small group on the right that was arguing, "No, our mission is not done, just because communism collapses. It doesn't mean that the world is now safe for democracy. There are still dangers out there, and the world can go to hell in a hand-basket pretty fast if we don't take a leadership role." I think that was probably a minority view within the Republican Party for most of the 1990s. In fact, it may have been a minority within the Bush administration up until 9/11. Those attacks changed things very fundamentally, much the way that December 7, 1941, changed everything. And in much the same way, I think both December 7 and 9/11 both woke people up to the dangers and made them realize that isolationism is not an option. We have to be engaged, because if we're not, we're going to suffer terrible consequences.
As an intellectual process, I'm curious to get a sense from you of the intellectual excitement for the people who were doing this kind of writing at that time. You were still out in the woods, so to speak; the country hadn't really embraced it. What was that play like? How did you generate ideas among each other, and elevate your common consciousness of the dilemmas that we were in?
As with any other group of like-minded people who are engaged in the same pursuit, there is a fair amount of give-and-take and interaction, in this case centered around the Weekly Standard. But it's like anything else: if you have a group of experts on Mayan pottery, they're going to exchange ideas on Mayan pottery and send e-mails to each other, and if an article on Mayan pottery appears in the New York Times, they'll e-mail it around. We've got pretty much the same phenomenon here dealing with these security issues. There aren't that many people who engage with these issues from this perspective, and we're not all very tight-knit by any stretch of the imagination, but I think there's some back and forth. And now, some of the people who were engaged in the early 1990s hold some senior positions in the administration, so they're able to articulate these views within the administration, while some of us are articulating them from the outside.
Next page: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Post-9/11 World
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