The Warren and Anita Manshel Lecture in American Foreign Policy with Walter Russell Mead

Well, thanks for that introduction. And thank you all for turning out. Every time I come to Boston, it takes me back to the '60s when I was a student at a prep school not that far from here. And Boston and Cambridge is kind of our mecca. And I was thinking, boy, all those riots on Mount Auburn Street in the old days—anti-war, anti-establishment, great times, tear gas. For a 16-year-old escaping from boarding school, it was about as much fun as you could possibly have.

And then I think, too, with the mood that we had in those days, democracy was doomed. Nixon was going to ruin everything. We boomers—some of you may not believe this—but we were all told, and we believed, that we would be the first American generation to end up poorer than our parents, that the dream was dead, America's power was in irreversible decline, America's moral failure in Vietnam was so total that we would never have any credibility or ability to have any meaningful foreign policy again. And so coming back to Boston brings it all back to me. Thank you for that. And I hope today's students are having as much fun with those feelings of despair and hopelessness as we did. The cup of despair can only be drunk to the full dregs by youth. So please have at it.

So some of you are saying, OK, boomer, you came here. You've bored us with some reminiscences. Weren't you supposed to say something about foreign policy? So I'll try to get into the talk. And this really is one of those very interesting moments in world history—not, I'm saying, a very happy moment, but an interesting one—when the framework that Americans, with some help from some of our important allies, helped to set up after the end of World War II, we kind of revised it in the '70s when the Bretton Woods currency system collapsed, and Nixon and Kissinger reshaped it and introduced a kind of trilateralism to try to boost American power from Western Europe and Japan. And then after the fall of the Soviet Union, we doubled down on it. And the idea was that the kind of Western world order that had gotten us through the Cold War would be expanded in the post-Cold War era.

And that now doesn't seem to be happening. And a lot of Americans aren't really sure that they want it to happen. And so we're looking in a new era in which not only the post-1990s framework is up for grabs, but even, in some ways, the post-1945 framework is being contested. And the questions that I would like to look at tonight are a mix of, well, why is this happening? And then if we tried to conceive of where America might go, Americans might try to take this now, what should our response be? And how likely is it that we would succeed? So let's talk about why the old system is in trouble.

And one of the reasons is kind of a no-fault reason, which is that nothing lasts forever in world affairs. And everybody's always talking about how we're having an unprecedented wave of technological change. Social media is upending everything. New tech is sweeping out everything. Well, if that's all true, why should the international order not also be changed? Why should the world not be in upheaval if everybody's lives in the world are in upheaval? And so this part of it is not anybody making a mistake. It is that human history isn't the sort of thing where you solve the problem and then live happily ever after. That's not how things work. And so we're in a new age. And old assumptions, old institutions, aren't working the way they used to. And we have to think about new ones. Well, again, that's human history. And that is driving a lot of this.

Beyond that, I think we can say one problem is that the adversaries of this old system are now stronger than before and working together more cohesively than before. So that China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela—you can add or subtract the ones that you like—they don't agree on a lot of things. They don't agree on what they would like to put in place of the world system that exists. But in various ways, they all see, and with some real justification, that the current world status quo is not only a status quo that they dislike on aesthetic or even economic grounds. It is a threat to the power of the regimes or the people that are in power and needs to be opposed defensively. And they have, I think, developed some fairly effective strategies. They are putting them together in interesting ways. And they've had a lot of success. They've had some failures. Ask Iran how the last couple of years have gone for them. So it isn't all winning, winning, winning for them.

But on the whole, China, in particular, but Russia also, has had some success in changing the international environment around them. And they want to continue. So that's one problem: the adversaries are back. Second problem, I think, is that on our side, we have not paid sufficient attention to the relationship between public opinion and power. When I look back, particularly with the framework that I developed in Special Providence, I was warning about this back in the early '90s. And as Special Providence came out of my head, I worried more that most Americans—the American support for the Cold War was 40 years, we kept voting these huge defense budgets—40 years, containment was kind of, well, not universally, but broadly accepted as a framework for American policy.

A lot of our Wilsonian friends thought, well, this was because Americans love freedom—the Cold War was about defending freedom and extending freedom. And so now that the Soviet Union has gone, we can do more. The opponent of freedom has disappeared from the stage, so we can raise our objectives. We can now start worrying about gender justice in Senegal and honest voting in Kazakhstan. Our time has come.

But actually, a lot of the support for a vigorous foreign policy in the United States came not from people who were motivated by hope to extend the American system, but had been motivated by fear to want to defend it. And as the fear faded, the Jacksonians—a very large and important element in American policy—stopped being interested in foreign policy, stopped wanting to pay for foreign policy, stopped wanting to take risks in the name of foreign policy. And you think about it. In 1992, the first real post-Cold War election, you had two candidates. You had George H. W. Bush, architect of victory in the Cold War, winner of the Gulf War, a reunifier of Germany. And then you had Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, who didn't know that much about foreign policy per se, but really thought that America should be spending more time worrying about American problems. He wanted less foreign policy, and he beat Bush.

Eight years later, you have Al Gore, the great statesman, the vice president who's been everywhere, the climate champion, the man, the really smart guy, who knows the world leaders and knows the world. And then you have George W. Bush, another governor who thinks we've got too much foreign policy; we don't need to be doing this nation building abroad; America needs to focus on America first. 2008, John McCain, the great Republican statesman, the architect of reconciliation between the US and Vietnam, the man famous globally for his foreign policy credentials. And then this guy who's a first-term senator from Illinois, who thinks that really, America needs to focus much more on stuff at home, and that all of this grandiose war on terror, foreign policy stuff is really getting us into a bad place.

2016, Secretary of State and ex-First Lady Hillary Clinton, great world expert. And I can tell you, I've known her and worked with her on some things. She is a great world expert, versus Donald Trump, a real estate developer from Queens, who thinks we've got too much of this darn foreign policy thing and need to be America first. So at every opportunity from the end of the Cold War, American voters voted for less foreign policy. But one way or another, each of these presidents managed to end up giving them more, which is a very—either the message was not coming through, or the reality of the world situation was such that it was impossible to give people what they actually wanted. I'm not going to try to take a position in this talk over that, but it's significant.

So the American foreign policy system, in a sense, has been running on fumes for quite a while. And Donald Trump's embrace of much less foreign policy, the heck with all this multilateralism, blah, blah, blah, really reached a lot of people at a very visceral level. Although, as I noted in last week's column, he's talking about regime change in Venezuela, humanitarian interventions in Nigeria, and nation building in Gaza. So we seem to be back. And this might suggest an avenue for a challenger, for a candidate in 2028. So that's part of it.

And then I would say that the final reason that I would draw your attention to—that things are not going well with this system—is that I think we got a little bit confused over the nature of power and the relationship of soft power and other kinds of power. You could argue that the last 30 years, we've had two kinds of—liberalism, which in my mind, the liberal mind is not a fundamentalist mind. It's a cautious mind. It looks at any programs, even its own, with a certain degree of skepticism. But many liberals have fallen victim to two different varieties of what I would think of as liberal fundamentalism.

The one we're most familiar with is what people call market fundamentalism. If we just have free trade, then the whole world is going to be fine. And the answer to any economic problem is deregulate, market forces, whatever. That's not all wrong, and there's a lot of truth in it. But like everything else, it needs to be adjusted from the blackboard to the actual world. And that sometimes makes economists unhappy, but it makes doctrinaire people even more unhappy. And I think we've had a lot of doctrinaires.

The other one is what I would call rights fundamentalism, that if we just get perfect, if we really double down on human rights everywhere, everything is going to be great. And that can be the basis for world order, a quest for human rights utopia. Which, again, I like human rights as much as anybody else, and I like free markets. But when you convert these from goals that you are pursuing in a complicated world, sometimes in rather strange, crooked ways, to 'I'm going to get there no matter what; I'm going to bulldoze everything,' and you have a kind of monomaniacal approach, you get in trouble.

I would say we also, even as we embrace these kinds of fundamentalisms, we also forgot the role of hard power in establishing those world systems. We did not win the Second World War because everybody thought Eleanor Roosevelt's ideas about a Universal Declaration of Human Rights were just so compelling that that was how the world wanted to live. We won World War II because we killed millions of people in amazing orgies of destruction and blood. We assembled violence and force. One night in Tokyo, we killed 84,000 Japanese civilians in deliberate terror attacks on civilian neighborhoods, in a country where homes were built of paper. I'm not even getting to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Not even the Huns destroyed as many European historic monuments as we did in that war. Franklin Roosevelt was advised that he should not call for unconditional surrender by Germany because that would prolong the war, increase suffering. It would unite Germans around Hitler's leadership. And Roosevelt's conviction was that one of the reasons that we were having the Second World War was that the Germans had called for the armistice in 1918 before the war got to Germany. The war was still outside. They didn't know what war was. And he said, this time, they will.

So when we talk about the beautiful world order that emerged from the ashes of World War II, we forget not only the cruelties and the horrors of the actual war, and that we won it because we were better at organizing productive powers for destruction than our enemies were. But we also forget just how, for years after that war, the president of the United States basically could decide how many calories everybody in Germany and Japan would get to eat. And there was a decade of real suffering, even as their economies began to recover. And so you have a whole generation of people whose worldview includes the right thing: war is terrible, and war against the United States is even worse. And 50 years later, we thought it was our moral purity and our piety that were upholding the world order.

It's still not. It's a good thing. I'm all for moral piety and purity and all those things. But again, the reason that China doesn't attack Taiwan today is because it's not quite sure what would happen if it did. The reason Russia hasn't nuked anybody in Ukraine or Europe has more to do with their fears of what would happen if they did than to any admiration of the moral example that we're setting by not nuking anyone. So that doesn't mean that soft power has no place. And it certainly doesn't mean that morality in international life has no place. But we've missed it. We've tried to do too much. We have failed to understand the sources of strength. We have allowed ourselves to turn elements of our ideology into idols, so that we have become liberal fundamentalists rather than liberals. And these things have gotten us into trouble.

Well, where can we go from here? And I'll try to be quick. And I'll try to sketch out a new world order in just a few minutes. Because I know that with the new grading policies at Harvard, all the undergraduates here are so crushed, you can hardly live. And you have to get back to your unremitting academic toil. So I don't want to keep you from your books longer than I must.

But I think I would suggest that what the United States got kind of lured into after the end of the Cold War was we became what you might call an offshore hegemon. That is, we were doing things that an offshore balancer does, of trying to prevent any country from dominating Europe, any country from dominating Asia, any country from being able to interrupt the flow of oil from the Middle East—those classic, hard-power things. But we tried to then set up a political order kind of in our own image in each of these theaters. So we promote democracy, and so on and so forth, all of which is fine, no principled objection. But we didn't have the power. We didn't have the push.

I think we need to go back to being more of an offshore balancer, where we're not going to try to tell every country in the Middle East how to live. We're not going to try to tell every country in Southeast Asia what their policy on elections should be. I mean, our civil society can and will continue to do this, but we focus our attention much more on some of the classic and really very limited goals that Anglo-American diplomacy has sought.

I think we would also, in economic terms, we need to take much more seriously than some of us have done the degree to which the Chinese abuse of the world trading system and the inept construction of the world trading system created something that was so vulnerable to abuse. The problem with this is not simply that China has a balance of trade surplus with the United States. I worry about that less than some people in Washington do. But that, in a sense, China monopolized the beneficial consequences of industrialization and growth, so that there hasn't been industrialization, say, in Egypt comparable to what we've seen in China. Because China managed a combination of state subsidies, state policies, and some good work and good thinking.

This is not all like evil Chinese, insidiously, blah, blah, blah. I'm not trying to take us in that direction at all, but nevertheless, in a sense that this great tree grew up and nothing could grow in the shade, and that many of the economic and social problems that Africa, parts of Asia, and certainly the Middle East have, have some connection to this, and a global trading system in which, say, the Europeans could have said, it's really important to us that to the extent that our economic market is going to help promote development and stability, we do it across the Mediterranean, where that really has a big impact on us, and that we might have been a little bit more attentive to trying to make our own neighborhood a bit more prosperous, and so on.

So I think we would move away from the idea of a global, 'one size fits all' approach to a lot of these policy things and a theory-driven approach. Free trade is good. This looks like free trade, therefore this is good. I wouldn't disagree that free trade is good, by the way. I don't want to make that an argument. But like everything else, you have to do it in a practical, pragmatic way, with careful thought for the political, economic, social, and geographical and geopolitical consequences of what you do. And we can get into this much more in Q&A.

But I'd say, America, we're stuck with a global foreign policy. The fact that Trump was adjudicating disputes between Cambodia and Thailand and Azerbaijan and Armenia—that the isolationist, restrainer, America-first president gets drawn into these things should remind us that, in a sense, no matter what somebody wants, this is where you end up going a lot of times as an American. So you need to try to go there intelligently and try to think very hard, not just about what you can do, but about what you can avoid doing.

So a more nuanced grand strategy that does take into account historic American interests and priorities, that is less doctrinaire, more pragmatic—this is not going to be a recipe for universal joy or world peace. Most of the time, most foreign policy doesn't work very well. It was Henry Kissinger who said that a lot of the times, your alternatives are you're trying to avoid the catastrophic and get to the merely bad. And this is not going to go away.

So again, foreign policy is not like a test. If you do the homework and study and apply the right principles, you'll get an A. It doesn't work like that. It's much more like an athletic contest, where even the best athlete in the world will go out there and screw things up, commit fouls, miss easy shots, get hornswoggled by some opponent. And your success today doesn't mean you're going to be successful tomorrow. It's much more of an engagement than it is an academic exercise. Well, listen, that's at least a quick overview. And I'll be very happy to get any questions or comments that come my way. Thank you.

They're very comfortable chairs. Erez Manela: These are nice, yeah? Walter Mead: The faculty club clearly knows how to live.

Well, I think NAFTA was, in my mind, another example of doctrinaire rulemaking rather than smart policy. Because I can remember how both the H. W. Bush folks and the Clinton folks basically said, here's what NAFTA will do. It's going to solidify Mexican democracy, which at the time was looking like it was really moving ahead. It's going to stop migration or dramatically reduce migration because it's going to create so many jobs in Mexico. And then it's going to make Americans better off, because on the one hand, we'll get cheap stuff from Mexico, but on the other hand, as Mexico prospers, we'll prosper. Everything's going to be great. None of these things happened in quite the way that they were supposed to happen.

And even at the time, it seemed to me, for example, that if you really looked seriously at NAFTA, as opposed to a general theory of Adam Smith economics, NAFTA was going to increase migration from Mexico. Why is this? Because part of the price was to liberalize Mexican agriculture, which would mean a lot of great exports from Iowa, American farmers into Mexico, but would mean the destruction of small farms all over Mexico, setting off a really large wave of jobless people who would need to do something. And at the same time, the pre-NAFTA Mexican industrial structure—a lot of it was super protected, unbelievably inefficient, often corruptly state-run crud—but it was still employing people. So you were going to be simultaneously releasing labor from manufacturing that was going to be killed and from farming. And it was really unlikely that maquiladoras, however successful, were going to account for that. So this was just sloppy, stupid thinking.

And it was from people whose dogmatic ideas about the magic of markets—which, again, on the whole, I tend to sympathize with as ideas—would just work themselves out in a very complex historical setting, and you didn't really have to worry about any of the fiddly bits. It wasn't policymaking, it was ideology projection. And at the same time, that failed to understand how the American interests who demanded liberalization in Mexico in ways that would undercut some of the stated policy goals in the US at a pace that was probably unsustainable would miss. And that, to me, encapsulates the way elite policymaking just went wrong.

Actually, now I'm going to say something really controversial. So far, I've been very laid back. But I think probably the worst course of action I can think of for someone who wants to be a useful person in international affairs would be to spend the first 35 years of your life mostly in American educational environments. If you wanted to deal with Vladimir Putin, you'd have done much better to run away from home at 16 and play poker with a one-eyed guy in a dive bar in Hamburg. If you survived that experience, you would have a much better understanding of who was sitting across the table from you than if you'd been reading all these incredibly intricate, theoretical accounts of how states work.

I told you it would be controversial. I'm getting a lot less laughter from the faculty rows, a little bit more back among the undergrads, I think. So again, I'm not saying theory is bad. Academic study is not bad. But when you are socialized into an academic environment where you don't really— you know that great thing that they say in engineering? In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is. If that truth hasn't sunk into your bones, you are going to make a colossal mess in any kind of policy at just the moment you think you've finally got it perfectly right.

Actually, at the time, I was against NATO expansion. I mean, I didn't want to leave a security vacuum. Actually, what I thought you should do was you had to do one of two things. You had to try to create some kind of system, and this is what I preferred, would have been to set up a system of East and Central European states that included some nice, grade-A countries like Finland, real Western countries. And then that this system could be jointly guaranteed by Russians and NATO, and there could be joint exercises, or whatever, but there would be a real guarantee. The worst thing, it seemed to me, that you could do—or the alternative was just to expand NATO right up to Russia's butt, as you might say, right up to the boundary.

But when you put No Fishing signs down on one side of the lake, and you don't put No Fishing signs down on the other side of the lake, you are inviting fishing on the other side of the lake. And even more than this, what we did—the reason we didn't keep expanding NATO east was, well, those countries are too unstable. Their governments are too weak. In other words, they are more in danger. So we expanded NATO to cover, essentially, the easy cases and then left a security vacuum for the hard cases. This is not wise. And we are now having the joy of—

and meanwhile, then, with the Budapest memorandum, we issue empty assurances, pledges that we have absolutely no intention of honoring in any serious way. Because we believe that history is over, and the power of good ideas mean that we're not going to actually have to honor the Budapest memorandum because Russia has changed. And I would say, it's very depressing.

As somebody who writes about foreign policy, you know really the most influential essay in American history, really, is Kennan's "X" article in Foreign Affairs, "Sources of Soviet Conduct." And at the end of the Cold War, every foreign policy person in America pretty much said two things. Number one, Kennan was a genius. He saw it coming 40 years ago. He knew how to manage this. What a guy. What a genius. And the second thing they said was, OK, now that Russians aren't communists, we can be friends, and everything's going to be fine. Kennan's whole point in that piece, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," was not, our problem is these people are communists. It is, our problem is these people are Russian.

So we have a so-called policy establishment which is simultaneously capable of hailing something as prophetic genius and not bothering to pay attention to what it says. And then we go and we do things like sign the Budapest memorandum, a pledge we never really seriously intended to do much about, which only made sense if we would never need it, if no one ever needed it. So the level of incompetence and stupidity and narcissism in these spaces where foreign policy was made— we were drunk on victory and drunk on success. It happens. It's not the first time in history it's happened, and it probably won't be the last. Maybe the last time we're drunk on victory. It might be the last time we win. No, I'm hoping that's not true.

But it really was a failure. And one of the consequences of these serial failures has been that the American people are progressively withdrawing their consent from the foreign policy elites, foreign policy establishment. So it gets harder and harder to get them to do something, even when we should.

Now, as to what we maybe should not have done in the '90s, I wonder sometimes if we made a mistake by acting like a helicopter parent over Yugoslavia. The Europeans failed dismally to do anything about the horrors of the wars of the Yugoslav succession, the civil wars that swept ex-Yugoslavia after that. And the Clinton administration, give them credit, did try to stay out of it for a while. But ultimately, the moral pressure was so great. But it's really quite possible that that would have been a nice starter crisis for the Europeans because that was the time Russia was very weak. It wasn't really able to do something. And I think it would have been a lot less disruptive if we had said back then, no, Europe, really, this is your thing here.

There is no threat to the territorial integrity of any NATO state in this crisis. It's an offense against humanity. It's a problem. It's a humanitarian problem against standards that we share. But you're rich enough. And you're certainly strong enough to deal with Serbia. So do it. And you might have seen a kind of European security personality begin to develop then. But we were helicopter parents. And so by the Ukraine crisis, the consequences are much greater. And Europe, if anything, was less prepared in 2023 to face Russia than it would have been in 1993. So this does not look to me like successful policymaking.

I, of course, would have done everything perfectly. Let's just make that clear.

Yeah.

Well, first of all,

You really have to look yourself in the mirror very hard and ask yourself, how much do you actually care? I think a lot of our policymaking on Ukraine in Europe and in America has been: we actually don't care enough to really take risks or bear significant costs for Ukraine. But we don't think of ourselves as the kind of people who won't stick up for Ukraine. Therefore, what we're going to do is we're going to make a kind of showy thing about how much we care about Ukraine. But we aren't going to cross a certain line, and our intended audience is less Putin than our own self-images and our own self-respect. And I believe that really was where our policy has been and where European policy has been. And so the first thing you have to ask yourself, honestly and openly, is how much do I care? How much does this matter? What am I willing to do? And I actually think, particularly given who Putin is and what we know about Putin, that one should care. I've actually been to Ukraine twice since the war started. I've been out to the front lines. I'm not claiming any badges or anything like that. It wasn't particularly heroic. But I have gone to see, and formed my opinion based on observation and thought.

But I think we're also not thinking very strategically here. The policy discussions about Ukraine are almost entirely focused on: are we giving Ukraine enough weapons, and underneath that, enough money? And the problem with that is that, first of all, the Biden people used to worry, and they were not wrong, that Putin, to some degree, has escalation dominance in Ukraine, that he does, in fact, care more about Ukraine than we do. And at every level, we'll go to the highest level we think we want to go. And Putin will be willing to go one past that. And when you think that at the end stage of that is nuclear weapons, that's a rather chilling kind of thought process to deal with. So providing military aid to Ukraine at the strategic level that could actually win the war is risky. And neither Biden nor Trump has been willing to do that. As far as I can make out, the real, as opposed to the declared, policy in the Biden years was: let's make it look like we're helping Ukraine, and let's give them some help. But ultimately, the Ukrainians themselves will realize that they can't win. They'll get tired of fighting a war that they can't win. And instead of our grandiose statements about the inviolability of national frontiers, and so on, the Ukrainians will ask the Russians for peace, and we will have backed Ukraine. We'll have looked like Winston Churchill in the mirror, even as we act like Neville Chamberlain. And that was really the point that policy was pointing to: a soft landing that lets me feel good about myself. And Ukraine loses a bunch of territory. Which is stupid. Because Putin saw that. And his greatest asset all along is the gap between the kind of moralistic picture of ourselves we like to project and the kind of not very heroic people that we actually are. And so he'll do things that cause us, on the one hand, to issue grand moral statements about how fabulous we are, and how our values are so transcendent, and how true we are to them, but then expose to everybody that we're not willing to pay the price that these values would demand. He loves that. That's his food. And we've served him a huge banquet for 10 years of this, more since Putin invaded Georgia, 2008.

So we have, again, I've said, and I believe, that at the Last Judgment, Neville Chamberlain will rise up and condemn this generation. He appeased Hitler for a year. We've been appeasing Putin since 2008 and telling ourselves that, boy, do we stand up for freedom. Boy, are we great people. Boy, are we Winston Churchill. So what do we do? What do we do? It seems to me that one of the things that you do is you make sure that you don't attack Putin where he's strong, necessarily, but you find places where you can really get at him. The fact that he was able to conquer a fifth of Africa with the Wagner Group, a bunch of mercenaries, while we were beating our chests about our solidarity with Ukraine, tells Putin and tells everybody else we aren't serious. So Putin, I'm happy to see he's taken a pasting in Syria. He should be losing. And I'm happy to see that the jihadis are now giving Wagner a hell of a time in Africa, too. But we should take these toys away, where we have all kinds of advantages, and he doesn't have any. Every morning, he should be waking up, and I don't know, some prominent German politician, can I think of any who's been associated with Vladimir Putin? It's possible, possible that this politician who I don't name and is a hypothetical person might not have reported all of the income he's received from Russia under various things to German tax authorities, I don't know. All right? But probably somebody in the United States government could find that out. So every day, drip, drip, drip, Putin should be seeing an asset blow up, a network of influence destroyed. He should be seeing every day, the price he pays for this Ukraine adventure is growing and growing in ways that deeply, deeply pain him, but don't necessarily involve big battlefield escalations in the place where he is strongest and we, frankly, have the most problems. But again, we don't seem to be doing this. And so the truth is we are broadcasting to Putin on every possible channel: we don't actually care about Ukraine, but we do care about admitting to ourselves that we don't care about Ukraine. That's the message of Western policy. It's a recipe for disaster. It's hypocritical and disgusting, but it is also unpragmatic. And by the way, there are times in international life where you have to do things that are hypocritical and disgusting. This is not one of them. This is not one of them.

[Laughs] I promise my answer won't be longer than the conflict in the Middle East.

Well, what I learned, I think, in the book that I really didn't understand when I sat down to write it, the first thing I learned was how complicated it was. Because I'm not sure I ever would have started writing that book if I'd known how hard it would be to write the whole thing. But that actually, American policy vis-a-vis Israel is a really difficult thing to analyze because presidents use Israel policy in two different ways. One is on the basis of American interest in the Middle East, where what's your picture of the world? What's your picture of the role of the Middle East in it? What's your picture of the role of the US-Israeli relationship in that picture of the Middle East? That's basically the best way to understand what any given administration is or isn't doing about US-Israel relations at any given moment. But at the same time, because Americans care, so many Americans from all different political points of view care so intensely about this issue, it's an incredibly effective way for a president to signal politically. So back in, say, Bill Clinton's days, if he wanted to signal, he could, or even Biden. If Biden felt that he was losing too much support on the left of his party, he could have himself or Kamala Harris do things like saying, well, Palestinians have rights, too, and every human being has rights, and Palestinians. And people go, oh, great. He's not as much in the tank for Israel as I thought. And this is terrific. And this is fantastic. Or if, on the other hand, you were worried that the right was, you were getting pushed too effectively portrayed as being too far to the left, you say something about Israel has the right to defend itself, and we're with Israel. And the thing is, again, you can do that about your Azerbaijan policy or your Nepal policy. No one cares. They snore. You can invade Nepal, probably, and no one would pay a lot of attention. But you can make a little, tiny statement that doesn't involve spending one penny or sending one diplomat, even on one airplane, and you get national headlines about what you are or aren't doing. So that presidents are constantly balancing between their strategic view of the situation and the political impact of that issue on various constituents and on their coalition. So that strikes me, too. I think the last few years have been a textbook case of exactly that, that I think Biden's view and that of the people around him was that after October the 7th, it was not in the American interest for Israel to lose what was, in many ways, a contest with Iran, that American interests were better served by Israeli victory than Israeli defeat. And therefore, he was going to work that. But at the same time, political signaling on the Democratic coalition, as the war went on, and emotions rose, and people came to very strong views, the signaling got more difficult. And in some ways, the difference between Trump's policy on Israel and Biden's policies is not really that great.

I would remind people of something that I abstractly knew before I wrote the book, but came to understand much more, is that America has not always been an ally of Israel. Basically, until the 1970s, Egypt used to get more American aid. Iran used to get more American aid than Israel did. And the moment when America and Israel first really began to become linked is during the Nixon administration and the Yom Kippur War. But basically, for that to happen, Israel had had to win the Six-Day War, which it did, by the way, with French weapons, not American weapons, making itself the strongest power in the region and develop nuclear weapons against US opposition. And so Israel did not become a regional superpower with nuclear weapons because it had an American alliance. It got an American alliance after it became a regional superpower with nuclear weapons. No one ever thinks about that, really. But it's true. In Israel, they think about it a lot more. And there is a constant temptation of people to think that Israel is an extension of American power. Without American support, Israel would just immediately fall like a house of cards. For the first 25 years of its history, when it really was in trouble a lot, Israel actually did not have an American alliance. Stalin did more to help Israel win the War of Independence than Truman did. And then for the next 10, 15 years, it was the French and the British who did much more, including the French giving Israel the technology for the nuclear weapons. So we mythologize this relationship. And the pro-Israel people do it, and the anti-Israel people do it. The thing that is hardest to do is to get Americans to see this relationship clearly, regardless of what you think we ought to be doing about it right now. Shorter than the war, I promised.

OK, well, I'm not going to say anything about the Harvard politics or government departments. In fact, I'm not sure that these things you're talking about are more prevalent there than, and maybe they're less prevalent. I can't say. And I should also, so that people don't take me as doing some kind of anti-intellectual screed, I teach in a university. I teach. I write books. So this is not some kind of, oh, we should all just get back to our simplistic impulses kind of thing. Let's forget about the present moment, in a way. Let's talk about history, that the New England tradition in American life, of which Harvard has been the shining star of New England since the colonial era, is a really interesting and unique one. It does not, for example, believe in limited government. That was not the idea that brought the Puritans to Massachusetts Bay. They believed in a powerful government of the godly, that only good people should be allowed to vote. You had to be a church member. And it was the job of the state to enforce morality on everybody, and that we knew what it is. So now, Harvard actually stopped being what most people would consider Christian back in, I think, 1803, or something, when it went Unitarian, which I've heard described, my brother says, in his town, they call that atheist with children. But it's also been described as Unitarian preaching is confined to three areas: the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the neighborhood of Boston. It's also been defined as the belief that there is at most one God. But anyway, enough down on the Unitarians. They're very nice people. I like them. But the thing is that this notion of righteousness, in a sense, New England thought dropped repentance, dropped grace and redemption, but kept everything else about Calvinism as it moved into secularity. So you have the community, the elect. You have predestination. History is moving down a track, and so on. So I'd say, in many ways, there's kind of a cultural mindset, which has uses, does good things, but can get itself in trouble in various ways and sometimes does.

In Special Providence, the question behind that book was, why has American foreign policy worked? Because for most of our history, almost everybody who looked at the United States, the one thing they were sure of was that America sucked at foreign policy. And this is not just anti-American. I mean, George Washington and John Adams thought that it would be foreign policy quarrels that could destroy the revolution or destroy the Republic. But Tocqueville thought, I think he said something like, successful foreign policy requires none of the good qualities which the American Republic actually has, and requires all the good qualities that the American Republic lacks. So we have this rabble. We have presidents who come in and out every four years. We have divided authority. We have the Senate sticking its oar in. We have all these economic interests, special interests. We have missionaries. You name it, we've got it. And they're all screaming and yelling. And it had never looked to anybody like anything that Metternich or Talleyrand or Bismarck would put up with for a moment. And yet, if you think about it, over the last 200 years, who knows how long that continues. But over the last 200 years, the most marked trend in international relations has been the gradual increase of power and authority of the United States in the international system. So how is it that a country that is so divided, so chaotic, whose political establishment is so weak, whose intellectual establishment is so poorly situated, often politically, how come this country has done so well? And I think my answer is that the American political process, in its bizarre, sometimes extremely bizarre behavior, diversity actually provides a better route for determining the national interest than the great plans of the genius in a tower. So that Metternich was a brilliant diplomat, but he had to run for his life in 1848. Fisher Ames said, the foreign policy of a monarchy is like a great ship of war, and it goes on really well until it hits a rock and sinks. A Republic is like a raft. It never sinks, but your feet are always wet, so maybe something like that.