Ronald Steel Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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One final question. For students watching this interview, how would you advise them about how they should think about foreign policy, write about foreign policy, or be actors in foreign policy? How should they prepare for understanding in the realm of foreign policy?
First of all, they should prepare by understanding what happened. It's very important to know about history. For example, I don't think you can even begin to think about how to deal with Iraq today if you don't know how it came into being, or why the Sunnis and the Shias and the Kurds are at sword's points with each other. It's striking that so much training in foreign policy and international relations is either about current events or it's about theories, which are all very nice, but if you don't know what happened, then you're not going to be able to understand how to deal with it.
The other thing that's important is to understand the cultural basis of why people behave the way they do. We Americans behave in a certain way because of our cultural experience of how the nation came into being: the powerful religious element, founded by Puritans, a fundamentalist Protestant sect; formed by slavery, the notions of race; formed by the frontier. All of these things determine how we look at the world, the whole notion of an American "mission" which Wilson constantly espoused, which we still do. Other countries have missions, too. Islamic fundamentalists have a mission to spread their faith, and churches have a mission to spread their faith. We have to understand where these ideas come from.
People who want to deal intelligently with foreign affairs, and understand it, and maybe try to bring about changes in foreign policy have to understand things that often are not traditionally taught in foreign policy courses. They have to understand not only history, but sociology: how do groups confront, deal with each other. They have to understand political psychology; they have to understand anthropology. Foreign policy does not exist in a vacuum; it's part of a whole complex of the way societies work, and, in a way, it's a reflection outside their frontiers of how they think inside their frontiers.
Ron, on that advice for the future, I want to thank you very much for being with us, as our guest today.
Thank you.
And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.
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