Background

Welcome to Berkeley, gentlemen.

[Hulsman] Pleasure to be here.

How did you come to write this book?

It's a very interesting story. In Washington there's a tradition of being a gunslinger and shooting it out, if you do TV [panels], as we both do. Anatol was seen as a man of the left, I was seen as a man of the right, and they brought us to the Middle East Institute to violently disagree, hopefully throw a chair at each other. Very early on, when Anatol was talking I said to myself, or out loud, "Good God, I agree with what he's saying." This started a long-term discussion and collaboration where we realized that we had a common sense of impatience with the sameness of what neoconservatives in the Republican Party and liberal hawks in the Democratic Party were saying about the future of the United States, which is, in effect, "It's a unipolar world, the United States can tell people what to do, and in fact ought to tell people what to do." We radically dissented from that view, and that's been the basis of our rather long-term friendship, and indeed, the book.

So, the purpose was to sit down and reason together about some of the important issues confronting the U.S. Was it hard to do? How did you actually write the book, the process?

[Lieven] We wrote it chapter by chapter and then merged them, but we agreed not to say who wrote which chapter. It is a collaborative effort.

Whatever one person wrote, the other would critique and then out of that would come a common new sense of what you wanted to achieve?

The great thing about it is there are times when I can't remember who wrote what because one of us took the lead and then the other one would go over it in great detail, and then we'd fuse those two things, have another discussion and then write again. It's been gone over to the point that I'm not always certain who wrote what. That's the real point of the book, to speak with a common voice, [which] was a key challenge but worked out. In the beginning, we were both healthily skeptical but in the end it got there. That's one of the great successes of the book.

Implicit in the book and your thesis, which we will go into shortly, is a view of the failure of the foreign policy debate in Washington. Talk a little about that. Are the issues being discussed? If not, why not?

Unfortunately, this is an establishment. It has two party wings, and the personal disagreements and dislike between them is very strong. But on a great range of foreign policy issues, people at the Carnegie Endowment, where I used to be, are saying from the liberal wing of the establishment [the same things that] many people in the so-called conservative establishment are saying. On a range of key foreign policy issues, not necessarily domestic issues (on these, by the way, John and I would disagree pretty strongly), but on foreign policy issues, from Israel, Palestine, through Iran, through relations with Russia, NATO enlargement, North Korea, relations with China ...

Democratization.

... democratization. As John said, the last person who [we] heard say that America is so powerful that it can do whatever it likes in the world if it puts its mind to it, was actually a leading Democrat intellectual, not a Republican. So, there is this sameness of the two wings of the establishment, which comes out of the fact that they do reflect the same underlying American Cold War structures, which have come out of the Cold War basically unreformed. Democrats and Republicans are both part of that.

Why do you think that happened, before we get into some of the elements of what you're proposing? Is it what Schumpeter would call an atavism, that the elites didn't face into the [future] but just tried to retool old ideas that may have worked in an earlier period?

There's no doubt about that. In Anatol's field -- you know, Anatol comes out of a great college of Russia, and being a Soviet scholar was where the action was in the Cold War. Now every Soviet scholar wants to be an energy scholar. They don't go away, they merely try to adapt, but in adapting they're not learning, they're not changing their knowledge base. They're just trying to adapt because they know they have to say something different, much as I'm a Europeanist by background, which is less sexy now than being about India or China, so we merely adapt to talk about trade flows between the two. That's fine, and adapting is what part of our jobs are. The problem is when you don't adapt intellectually, you merely adapt bureaucratically to survive. Survival, of course, is the name of the game. They survive, but with the same kinds of views they had in the Cold War, without any notion of what's happened since 1989. And so, you get these curious debates like the "end of history," which in retrospect looks hubristic to put it mildly, that everyone's happy, everyone agrees with us. Well, if you're a Cold Warrior that makes perfect sense, it's the happily-ever-after part of the fairy tale. The problem is we don't live in a fairly tale.

How much is accounted for by America's global position in the world? At the end of the Cold War we were left with all of this power, we were number one, and through the nineties we kept building our military budget to the extent to where I think our budget is equal to the next twenty-five plus countries, and so on. So, is this about our turning inward and not coming up with new solutions because we had no threats out there, no one to balance our power?

I think that is very important. There is this feeling, once again, among Democrats in the Progressive Policy Institute, people around Hillary Clinton, and of course a great many Republicans, and especially the neocons, that we don't need to compromise with other countries. The way that we get other countries on our side is by talking at them to get them to support us, not that we have to make concessions to them, because in the end there is this belief that even after Iraq, and now the impasse over North Korea, over Iran, there is still this instinctive, almost subconscious belief that after the end of the Cold War, America is so powerful that in the end it can do whatever it likes. This by now seems to me obviously totally irrational but it's still very much there.

Next page: Truman and Eisenhower