Theory and Practice

Let's talk a little about your recent experience. I know you've taken a leave for a year or so from Stanford and gone and worked in the government in Washington as a theorist. What surprised you, or what didn't surprise you about working in the government?

This was the first time that I'd actually worked in the government. I didn't take the job with the notion that I had some great wisdom that I was going to bring, but I was very, very interested in seeing how things worked. Nothing deeply surprised me, but it reinforced some things that I already knew, but hadn't fully appreciated. [First,] if you're actually making foreign policy as opposed to dealing with it retrospectively, the level of information imperfection is immense -- immense. I mean, we're sitting now in the ninth day of the war in Iraq. If you went back two weeks or three weeks, it [would have seemed] possible that someone would have assassinated Saddam Hussein, or that we would have killed him in this initial strike, or that the regime would have collapsed in two or three days. All of those things haven't happened. Now, if we said right now, "How long will this war last? Will it be a week? Will it be two weeks? Will it be two months? Will we end up with relatively small numbers of casualties on both sides, or will we end up with thousands, or tens of thousands of casualties?" Well, all I can say, sitting here right now, today, March 31, 2003, is we don't know. And I would say almost any major foreign policy decision has this characteristic.

So one thing was that the level of information imperfection is staggering. It isn't to say that you can't put parameters on it, but it's very high. That's the first thing.

The second thing is that top decision makers are busy. The demands on their time are something that you can't appreciate, at least from the academic world. I worked when I was in the administration primarily on a new foreign aid initiative called the Millennium Challenge Account. It's a great idea. It's a 50 percent increase in American foreign assistance; the idea is to provide substantial amounts of aid for countries that have already engaged in good governance. We wrote quite a lengthy memorandum to the president on this, which he read. It's not a first-tier issue for the administration right now, but it's not a trivial part of the foreign policy agenda. But if you ask how much time could the president spend on this? Well, maybe several hours, but not more, not days. And yet, this was a pretty important issue; tens of thousands of man-hours went into it in terms of interagency meetings. So the constraints on the time of central decision-makers is something else that I had not appreciated. Those two things, especially the information imperfection, were most striking to me being in government.

Did your work on sovereignty and your thinking on these issues inform the work you did on this Millennium Challenge Account? I'm reminded of the sections of your book where you deal with the various kinds of contracts that states enter into to pay off debt, and the loss of sovereignty that was involved in that.

In this case, not exactly for the following reason, but I'll tell you a story where it did enter into it. In this case, the idea is to pick developing countries, poor countries, that have already demonstrated good governance. So, these are people with some reasonable level of effective, domestic sovereignties. You want to identify states that wouldn't require this "sovereignty with an asterisk" -- that's not what the Millennium Challenge Account is about. But early on, I went to work at the State Department, then I moved to the National Security Council, and while I was still at the State Department I wrote a memorandum about sovereignty. In writing a memorandum, these things filter their way up into a speech, you know, a line or two in a speech that might be given by the Secretary. But this idea [included in the memo] that sovereignty was contingent on responsibility, which has actually been achieved throughout the history of sovereignties, is something that we've echoed since September 11th.

I'm curious, since you were at the National Security Council at the time of September 11th, how did what happened affect the organs of government, just from the perspective of somebody who's an insider?

I was still at the State Department, which is actually quite a big difference in this case. But what you saw, even at the State Department, was that this is something that arrested the attention of a big part of the government. I mean, al Qaeda and the war on terrorism was something that was invisible to me; I wasn't working on that. But after September 11th, a lot of effort was committed to Afghanistan. I didn't see any of the military part of it, I didn't work with the Department of Defense at all. But sitting in on our meetings for postwar reconstruction -- how you would put the group together that would engage in this, what countries would take responsibilities for what kind of activities in Afghanistan, how much money you would we actually pledge -- all these things became, not surprisingly, a very central focus. And my guess is that at the National Security Council, that was even more the case.

Since you're thinking about these future institutional forums, and you've thought a lot about sovereignty in the past, do you have any insights about self-understanding that U.S. foreign policy as an entity will have to come to as it comes up with new formulas for this world we're talking about?

What will happen is what's happened in the past. It's not that somebody sat down at some point in history and said, "Okay, feudalism isn't working. Let's invent something else. Ah, sovereignty." There is this idea that if the Peace of Westphalia was the beginning of sovereignty, but this is wrong. If you read the Peace of Westphalia, which is actually composed of two treaties, the Treaty of Munster and the Treaty of Osnabruck, a lot of it has to do with totally medieval issues, like who will be an Elector in the Holy Roman Empire. Sweden was one of the victors in the Thirty Years War, So the King of Sweden becomes a Duke of Verden, and he gets to sit in the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire. So they weren't sitting there saying, "We're going to invent something totally new." Even if you look at the European Union, or beginning with the European Economic Community in 1957 and the Treaty of Rome, the Europeans were certainly quite self-conscious about what they were doing, but even they could not see how things would evolve over time. The European Court of Justice, which has been a major instrument of integration in Europe, assumed for itself powers like direct effect, having its rulings have direct effect, which were not given into in the Treaty of Rome.

So the answer is that these new developments are something that happened over time in an iterated way, in response to things that happened out there in the real world that you have to address. Now, it is a place where scholarship can potentially make a contribution. But I wouldn't say that I know how this happens in a systematic way.

One final question. If you were to advise students about how to prepare for the future, not necessarily just in the field of international relations or theorizing about international relations, what advice would you give them?

Thinking about what's happened and looking at students I've been teaching for thirty years has made me more committed to at least some elements of what is called "liberal education," which in my earlier life I might have been skeptical of. The environment is so volatile and changing. If you look at the career tracks which students now will follow, what you need are a set of tools that will allow you to operate in a number of different settings. You can't predict now what you'll be doing in ten or fifteen or twenty years. Getting a good set of tools, which is basically being able to write and think with some degree of clarity, and having some decent quantitative skills, is exactly the right thing to do. The social sciences are actually pretty good for that as a direction to go in.

If they were to watch this interview and look back at your life, are there any lessons that you derive that you might want to pass on to them about things that you learned on this intellectual journey? I know you've learned many things, but any meta-concepts that you want to share with us?

Now that is an interesting and difficult question. Although this is not something that's changed for me over time as a meta-concept, in thinking about international relations and about politics more generally, something that's embedded in Hans Morgenthau's famous textbook is that prudence is what counts. The notion that you can create an ideal world is what walked us into Mao's China, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia. If you want a decent life, what you need is a political system which is prudent and limited. I think that the United States has actually done pretty well in that regard, and it does have lessons for the rest of the world.

Steve, on that positive note, I want to thank you for joining us today and coming to the campus to participate in the foreign policy course and being on our program. Thank you.

Thanks, Harry, thanks for asking. It was great.

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

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