Conclusion

Looking back at this intellectual journey that you've taken, what do you know now about ideas in foreign policy that you didn't know when you left the farm in Nebraska?

Well, just how irrational and out of touch the conventional wisdom and public discourse can be. It's driven by money, access, and who can shout loudest, and not often by an honest debate of the merits of particular points. That that can lead to certain delusions or craziness, where even very smart people hold to ideas that are fundamentally flawed, based on false readings of reality or false readings about what has been good for America in the past.

I think what you're describing is correct, but it seems that things are getting worse. So my last question will be the following: How would you advise students to prepare for the future if they're serious about working on foreign policy and they want to bring new ideas to the agendas of American foreign policy, whether with regard to the environment, or with regard to quality and inequality in international economics, or with regard to who we should fear when we're concerned with security issues?

There is value to be gained from serving what I call an arbitraging function, meaning you arbitrage the difference between what the conventional wisdom is and what sound judgment should be. I hope to believe that some people in the end are rewarded by being right. This is a basic problem. There needs to be a major effort to figure out how to bring accountability to the foreign policy debate and discourse in our country, so that people who traffic in totally misguided ideas that prove disastrous are forced to reckon with that in a responsible way, and those who provided wiser guidance and a sense of what was going on are rewarded.

I've been very worried by the extent to which the gap between the academic community and what passes for the foreign policy discourse inside the Beltway has grown much larger. In the sixties and seventies, and even in the eighties, you had influential voices from the academy who were often heard. Partly it's a political thing, but partly the gap has grown [because of] the direction that academic studies have gone.

So the academics are not contributing, or the criticism is not being heard?

I'm not sure, exactly. Part of it is that the directions academics, the academy, has taken towards trying to come up with a more econometric-based political science or even international studies may have made them seem less relevant. But it's also that they have been devalued in the age of cable news broadcasting, where shouting and sound-bites are the rule of the day. It's much more difficult to hear the voices of the Stanley Hoffmans, the Bob Keohanes, Kenneth Waltzes, whether it's from a liberal or realist [perspective], like John Mearsheimer, who occasionally shows up. We need more of those people, whatever their academic perspective, to be part of the debate, because they bring an element of accountability and depth that talking heads in and around the Beltway don't.

On that note, we're offering a possible solution to some of our problems and the role the academy might play. Sherle, I want to thank you very much for taking time to come and be with us on our program today. Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

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

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