The Role of Domestic Agendas

It would seem that the national politics are also part of the problem, both in the Reagan period and now in the second Bush administration, that is, Bush 43 as opposed to 41. Talk a little about the play there. You've already suggested that ideas aren't [publicized] because there may not be the best journal, and you need a new journal and you move in that direction; but still, the play of politics comes back to haunt any effort to shake up the ideas.

My view is that there's a conventional wisdom that's shaped by political forces, inside the Beltway in particular, and inside the major newspaper and [other media]. There wasn't quite the influence of cable news then, but there were still these programs, the forerunners of the programs we see today with Fox News, and even commentators on MSNBC and CNN. This conventional wisdom [works] the way the market works: its valuations or its sense of judgment can get totally out of whack with world realities. A lot of this sense of great American supremacy is based not on hard analysis, but is just a sense that if we say it enough, if we believe it enough, we can begin to convince others.

Then something like Iraq happens, which, while it was a very impressive display of military force, just shows you the limitations of that [American self-image], and then there's an adjustment to reality: we can't remake Iraq overnight, or we're not as beloved as we think we are. This creates the opportunity for commentators, analysts, the foreign policy community to begin to adjust the public judgment and the conventional wisdom back towards our real interests and realities in the world.

Politics is interactive. Politics is the process of defining that curve about conventional wisdom and the public judgment about major foreign policy questions.

So getting new ideas out there and in the right place means that the lurch backwards won't be as great once the tire hits the road.

So that there are solid ideas to fall back on. The adjustment can actually be fairly rapid once the bubble of illusion and delusion bursts. You notice how quickly the debate has changed after [the invasion of] Iraq. Democrats who were unwilling, or only in the most hesitant ways willing to question the president and the Bush administration nine months ago are now feeling new legitimacy, new moral authority, new courage to say what should have been or could have been evident earlier. Again, that's a process of [bursting] these bubbles of illusions and delusions, which were driven in part by politics, driven in part by lies, driven in part by misplaced idealism, ideology.

Often the American political culture, and our political tradition, and the way we write our history invariably makes it impossible to learn all that we might learn from a particular situation, so that if we look at the end of the Cold War, [one] faction says, "It [ended] not because of internal forces, but because Reagan rode tall in the saddle, launched Star Wars and so on, and broke the back of the Soviet Union."

Right. The Clinton and Bush triumphalism (now, triumphalism has been merged with paranoia about the security issues) was the product of a fight over the history of the end of the Cold War. Even though the group I was associated with had our moment in the sun from '86 to '91, where we were on the cutting edge of describing why Gorbachev was real, why these changes were probably irreversible, why there was a new world economic dynamic, we lost then in the '91-'92-'93 period when history was written according to [those who believed] it was a result that we spent the Soviets into oblivion. "It was the power of [our] strength that caused both the Gorbachev and the Yeltsin revolutions" -- which essentially writes out the whole internal power struggle that was going on in the Soviet Union.

So globalization becomes the new form in which American power will assert itself across the globe.

Right. It's triumphalism. Well, it takes two forms. The dominant form in the Clinton years was the globalization and the neoliberal model. But there was also evidence in Madeline Albright and some of Sandy Berger's policies, of this triumphalism in the security area. There was a struggle going on about how to respond to humanitarian crises and others, but the core of the Democratic foreign policy team favored regime change in Iraq based on many of the same ideas as the current administration.

You're now suggesting that the debate often isn't as much of a debate as it pretends to be, and this would suggest the importance of putting these new alternative ideas on the table.

It is that we have episodic debates. There are periods where there aren't sufficient points of contention, because the foreign policy establishment and those people around them essentially conform to certain core ideas, and then they debate about the tactics or whatever. [For example,] very few people questioned Madeline Albright when she said we were an "indispensable nation." Some people were taking aim at Frank Fukuyama's The End of History, but more because it was over the top; at the same time, you had Thomas Friedman and respected New York Times op-ed columnists embracing many of the central core features [suggesting] that there was an inevitable process toward liberal democracy. They added to it that this was America's goal, or it should be the central goal of American foreign policy.

So Friedman gave us a bumper-sticker [theory that] "no two [nations with a] McDonalds ever went to war."

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