Thinking Outside the Box on U.S. Foreign Policy

What were your first steps in the foreign policy field beyond your education? Was it the World Policy Journal?

Yes, virtually. I went from teaching one year at American University Law School to an organization that was then called the Institute for World Order, which was at the point of making institutional changes from addressing what were long-range future world order questions to being engaged in the American foreign policy debate. That opened up the opportunity to create the World Policy Journal.

The idea was essentially that the Reagan period had forced a new conformity of Cold War thinking, just at the moment when there was actually waiting to break out a generational change in the Soviet Union. This generation that had been absorbed in Western interdependence ideas, many of them associated with the think-tanks within the Soviet Union, or had been associated, actually, with the KGB, where some of the major reformers came and saw the West, saw how the Soviet Union was falling behind, were concerned that the system was corrupt and falling apart. They were generating, just beneath the leadership, a ferment in the Soviet Union which would, in my mind, herald the end of the Cold War. That was all entirely ignored in the American foreign policy debate. At the same time, we were doing stupid things like supporting counter-revolutions in Central America. Do you remember those days when Ronald Reagan said we had to worry about the hoards of Sandinistas that might invade us through Texas -- your home state?

At the same time, there was a new reality. Germany and Europe and Japan had begun to be able to do certain things or achieve a certain kind of economic performance, and the United States might be slipping. There was a new challenge to our position in the international economy.

All those issues, we felt, weren't being adequately addressed in the established debates, partly because those other journals were freezing out younger voices, a new generation, who were more sensitive to some of these developments. Hence we created a new foreign policy quarterly. One of the signs of success is longevity, and it continues to do well today.

What were the greatest obstacles to shaking up the debate, bringing these new ideas? You say that in the last phase of the Cold War things were changing in the Soviet Union, but here the political process was reasserting a hard-line notion of how to win the Cold War. And you suggest that new forces were emerging in other parts of the world -- Japan and Germany -- and we weren't responding. What were the obstacles?

That period in some ways was very similar to the period we're living through now, where there was a suppression or a self-censorship amongst all the major opinion-makers on American foreign policy questions. The voices -- the Reaganites, the forerunners of many of the neoconservatives or the Bush foreign policy team in power and in the chattering classes that exist around The Weekly Standard, etc., -- many of those forces were [in power]. Instead of Bill Kristol you had Irving Kristol and the Committee for Present Danger. The media and the journals -- even journals that had started off as more maverick journals -- [felt] a pressure to conform their views to accepted notions for fear that they would get attacked viciously and [an individual's] career destroyed.

We thought we needed to create more space to have the semblance of a democratic debate; that bad judgment comes from chasing ideas that aren't tested by the public policy discourse, or by reality, either.

Are you suggesting that this urge to conform in part came from the fact that people who might write about foreign policy were looking down the road to how their own careers would be affected by [expressing] what might be good ideas?

I'm sure that happened to some degree, but it's a bit more subtle than that.

The terms of the debate get defined so that you have to fit into the debate. Even if you're somewhat determined not to be cowed or worried about whether something you write might be held against you in terms of a future foreign policy position (either on a senate staff or in a future administration or at one of the major think tanks), you're still trying to fit into a predetermined debate, and there's only so much you can do to move it into [the predetermined debate]. So our effort was both to try to influence that, to change the terms of the debate as well as to engage it. This dual role: to engage in the debate but yet change the terms of the debate by creating a venue where people in our view could talk about the real-world issues, or the realities based on a different set of values and concerns.

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