Conclusion

As we come to the close of the interview, I can't help asking you something. The insights which you've shared with us draw on the binational nature of your background, raised in Germany and educated in the United States.

By the best, like Ken Waltz.

That's right, and by one of the best universities, Harvard.

One of the best?

That's right

Why one of the best?

Because we're at Berkeley.

You know, at Harvard, they call Berkeley "none."

I see. We call Harvard "the Berkeley of the east." But I want to pursue another point here, which is you also are part of two professions, in a sense that you are an international relations specialist -- published, taught at major universities -- but you're also the editor of a major weekly in Germany.

So I'm curious, very briefly, how do you think the field of international relations has evolved in our time to address on a theoretical level these kinds of issues?

Scondly, I'm interested in how journalism is doing its job? I ask this question because as we adapt to this new era, and we have to criticize policies, public education is very important. So that's a big mouthful of a question, but I would be interested in your insights.

The best thing you can say about journalism is that we write the first draft of history. As you know as a scholar and a historian, the first draft of history is in most cases not good enough, but it works very nicely for a while until scholars take over and start digging, start constructing a larger picture than what we can do in our breathless daily or weekly pursuits.

[As for] international relations, we are on the threshold of a new international system. It's the passing from bipolarity to unipolarity to what? Back to multipolarity, a balance of power? We are facing different threats. We've mentioned them -- conventional, with states using unconventional weapons, and non-conventional actors using conventional weapons. International law is being affected by this. We don't quite understand. We don't quite have the vocabulary, the variables by which to understand this new type of international relations. We do have some historical vocabulary to describe or designate the international order, so we talk about bipolarity, unipolarity, and multipolarity. There's a lot to understand here.

What's missing is the people in the field. The field was, essentially, an American field with some smattering of British and Australian contributions as it grew up after World War II. People like Ken Waltz, Bernard Brody, Henry Kissinger, Ernie Hass from Berkeley, Sam Huntington, just to mention a few. Oh, and Tom Schelling ... Thomas Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, who gave us the vocabulary and the system of categories by which we could understand the revolutionary transformation of the post-1945 world, which was nuclear weapons and the concentration of power in the hands of two nations, also known as bipolarity.

We don't seem to have people like those, who raised big questions and gave us big answers, because in the last forty or fifty years the field has evolved into very different ways. The field has splintered into specialties, splintered into model building, splintered into the attempt to recreate the explanatory systems of the hard sciences and apply them to the soft sciences like political science, splintered so hard that we don't even talk to each other in the field anymore. Such a wide variety of scholars, such a wide variety of spectrum of issues, and because this relentless specialization, we don't seem to have trained the kind of people, the kind of Haas II, or Bernard Brody II, or Waltz II, or Schelling II, who can formulate big questions and actually answer them. And that I find a bit sad, because we're now living in an intellectually as exciting a period as the post-Russian and the Cold War years, and we don't have the guides to help us navigate through these new questions and vague, nebulous answers.

On that poignant note, I would say, Joe, thank you very much for joining us today and sharing your insights with us. Thank you.

Until the next war.

Yes, or until the next visit.

Okay.

And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.

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