Background

Dr. Barnett, welcome to Berkeley.

Thanks for having me.

Where were you born and raised?

I was born just south of Green Bay in a small town called Chilton, but my family moved several months after I was born and I grew up in a small town of about 2500, a rural community, a farming community, called Boscobel in the southwest corner of Wisconsin, basically where the Wisconsin River meets the Mississippi.

Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world?

It's the classic situation of the modeled behavior. Both my parents were very avid readers. I grew up in a household where my dad watched documentaries and had the news on all the time and always had a newspaper or history book in his hand. So, I just naturally assumed that the way you interacted with the outside world and learned about it was to be a very avid consumer of news and history and mass media content.

Was your mother a teacher?

My parents met in law school. My dad finished his degree and my mom quit and finished up with a Master's in political science. She went on to have nine children. She later went into social work and then later went back and got her degree from law school, forty years after the fact, and practiced law for many years.

Your father was a city attorney, which affected your growing up years, I read in your book.

Yes, he was sort of the local legal leviathan in terms of enforcing rules. We had a relaxed community atmosphere to the extent where some guy might put a bunch of pigs in his backyard that the neighbors might not care for, and so my dad was always the guy who ended up having to enforce city ordinances, which made him sometimes a bad guy in terms of the people that I ended up interacting with who were mad about this or that thing that he ended up enforcing. In a small town it's pretty impossible to escape that kind of personal connection.

So you learned to defend the rule set, as we'll talk about later.

Yeah, yeah.

Where were you educated?

I went to a Catholic grade school, a small one, about a hundred kids grades 1 through 8, and then went to a public high school. All my older brothers went to a regional Jesuit school, a boarding school, as my dad and his father had, but that closed just before I got to age. So I was the first Barnett male in my family to have to go to the local public high school, which created a certain anticipation among the local boys as to how I would perform under such circumstances. I ended up becoming very focused on sports, because that was the mode of gaining acceptability.

What were your favorite sports?

I played football, basketball, cross country, and track. I liked basketball the most, but football was a great joy to me because my mother's family had grown up in the tradition of the Green Bay Packers. Her dad was the lawyer for the first thirty or forty years of the Green Bay Packer organization, and on that basis football and the Packers in particular were a very, very big focus in my family. So the ability to play football in high school was a very big deal. I was the one son out of five -- out of seven, actually -- who [played] it.

Where did you do your undergraduate work and then your graduate work?

I went from my public high school in Boscobel to the University of Wisconsin. At that [time], all you had to do was finish in the top half of your class in Wisconsin and you were in at the University of Wisconsin. There I went from being the bigger fish in a very small pond to joining a class of about 5000, which was twice the size of my town. In fact, there were more kids in my dorm than my town!

Ha ha!

Which was a shock. And so, having been raised pretty strictly as a Catholic boy, I went off and explored the wild side for about four years at Wisconsin, which was a perfect place to do it in the early 1980s. I became very interested in Marxism and studied the Soviet Union, and China, and Mao, and Lenin, and Marx, and went whole hog into understanding that aspect of the dominant military conflict of the age. I learned Russian.

And then went on to do graduate work at Harvard in Russian studies.

I was very fortunate, and still to this day, it's a mystery to me. I was selected Phi Beta Kappa my junior year. Out of a class of 5000 about three were selected the junior year. The big thing there -- and this was back when kids went to college for only four years -- back then, if you got your Phi Beta Kappa and could put it on your applications to grad school, that was enormous. You could basically go where you wanted to, because it was such a rare honor. To this day, I still have no idea how that came about, who engineered that or why, or what made them think that I was the right person to do that. But it was a big, big turning point for me, because at that point, there were really two Soviet studies universities I was interested in: Harvard and Yale. I applied to both, got into both, but Harvard offered the Red Sox and the Celtics and Bruins, and Yale didn't offer anything, even though they offered me ...

Only New Haven.

And more money. They offered me more money. But I was more familiar with the people at Harvard in terms of Adam Ulam and Richard Pipes. I ended up being Adam Ulam's research assistant for five years and that was a big personal growth period for me, just having the opportunity to spend that much time with such a great thinker and to receive that mentoring.

What was the impact of that in the sense that here you were studying under the greatest minds on a subject and a topic that would essentially disappear from the face of the earth, namely the Soviet Union?

Well, I would say it was with tremendous relief that the wall came down, because what I discovered in Soviet studies is that by the 1980s it had become so canonical. You didn't only have to be right, you had to be right on things for decades. In that environment I thought, "How am I ever going to establish myself? All the big books have already been written." Where are you going to come up with a new theory or something that distinguishes you in a field that seems so set?

In the book, I compare it to my fascination with the short television series, Star Trek. Being a Sovietologist was like being a Trekkie. There were only seventy-nine episodes that you had to master to love Star Trek, and there were only about seventy-nine years of the Soviet Union you had to master, and once you figured out all the big leaders and all the big periods and all the big debates, you were done. Where did you go with that, except to drill down on very deep specifics?

What I discovered in pursuing the work was that I wasn't cut out to drill down on nuances and details, that I was more of what I call in the book a "horizontal" thinker. I didn't study the Soviet Union because I wanted to get deep on the Soviet Union; I studied the Soviet Union because I wanted to figure out how the world worked, and that was the biggest player other than us.

So when they went away in 1989, I felt a huge sigh of relief, in part because I wrote my dissertation on East European - Third World relations, and I came right down, literally, to writing the last two chapters, the future of Romanian - Third World security relations, when on television, on CNN, they dragged Ceausescu out, threw him against a wall and shot him, which made that final chapter rather easy to write. There were going to be no future relations.

Then -- was it about a week later? -- Erik Honnecker escaped and ran off to Brazil. So personally, in terms of the research and then in terms of the field itself, I was saved from the career path of being one of the leading lights in East European - Third World security relations, which is, you can imagine, not exactly a huge field. Now what's interesting is how many people come out of that focus, like Condoleezza Rice, like Francis Fukuyama, whose book on that subject was one of the leading sources in my own dissertation. Many people came out of that narrow field of trying to understand the global security environment in terms of the big players and later went on to become big thinkers on globalization. But it was a natural progression, or you could say we had no choice.

You're also suggesting you were forced not to be a vertical digger ...

Right.

... because there was nothing to dig anymore. But the training had positioned you to look at the new world. In your particular case, what led you to becoming a strategic thinker or strategist? How did that happen?

I'd grown up on the Second World War because I was born just seventeen years after the end of the Second World War, so in that kind of recycling of history that occurs on a twenty-year basis, the nostalgia factor for the forties was fairly high in the sixties. Just the sheer volume of those kinds of television shows and books and movies got me very interested in the Second World War, and as soon as you got interested in the Second World War, it was all about explaining and understanding how the current security environment had come about. And once you got that understanding, then [the question] was, how does that work?

About the time I came of age was when Nixon went to China. That was a very, very big thing for me, because it was just spectacular and fascinating, and the notion of having that kind of impact and engaging in that kind of activity became a personal obsession. I had an older brother, the firstborn in my family, who learned Japanese and went into the international financial world. I took his pathway and said, "I'm going to do the same thing, but I'm going to do it for international security." So I learned Russian, Russian literature, and then went to Harvard, and then I was talked into staying for a Ph.D. I was just about going to leave with a Master's. I was going to do the classic thing of going down to Washington and trying to earn my Ph.D. on the side, because my wife was rather impatient with the whole "young genius living on $5000 scholarship" kind of thing.

I see!

I was working as a superintendent for rent in an apartment complex and fixing a lot of toilets, and it just wasn't the glamour trajectory that either she or I had imagined!

But I was cautioned by a former British M.P., a guy named Rod McFarquhar, a tremendous China scholar, who at the time had just become the chairman of the Department of Government at Harvard. He said, "Get your 'union card,' get it now, [before] you go down to Washington and you start working. I've lost so many students that way. You're going to have a baby, you're going to have two babies, your wife's going to want to stay home or she's going to want to work, either way, but it's going to be more complex than you realize. You're in your mid-twenties now. Just cram your way through whatever you need to do to get the topic approved, and then go as whole hog as you can on it in one or two years and get it written. And don't dawdle with it." He said, "And don't try to write the theory of everything. Focus on just creating a nice brick and putting it in the wall. Get your 'union card' and move on."

One of the big pieces of advice that went with that was Adam Ulam telling me, "I did my dissertation on English socialism and then went on to a career in Sovietology." He said, "Do not think that what you do as a dissertation topic is going to determine your career," which is a fallacy a lot of graduate students fall into. They want to make it their entire life. I wrote that dissertation in about twelve months, after researching it for a year, after learning two new languages to get it down, after taking just a year to pass my comps, so I got it in four years, which is about as fast as you can go, and I'm really glad I did. Then I turned it into a book with Praeger and sold the requisite 300 copies to research libraries around the world, and then I put that chapter behind me and said, "What can I really do, now that I have this accreditation?" And that's when I went to Washington.

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