The Eisenhower Executive Office Building, part of the White House complex in Washington

The Code of Federal Regulations runs nearly 200,000 pages. Congress did not write most of them. Lawmakers pass a statute, set the broad strokes, and go home. What happens next—the fine print that decides who qualifies for a loan, what a company has to disclose, whether your apple can legally call itself organic—gets written largely inside federal agencies, often by people whose names never appear on the document. That gap between the law and the rule is, from Rachel Potter's account, where much of American governance actually happens.

Rachel Augustine Potter has worked that gap from both sides. She reviewed regulations at the White House before they went public, then became the political scientist who argues that rulemaking is not the neutral process it can appear to be. It is politics with the byline removed. Her next book pushes the argument somewhere less visible: into the growing army of contractors now doing more and more of the government's work.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What Happens After the Bill Passes

Ben Wolf: By most estimates, a huge amount of binding federal law comes from agency rules rather than statutes themselves. For a reader who has never thought about this, what actually happens between Congress passing a law and a rule showing up in their life?

Rachel Augustine Potter: In the space between a law passing and a regulation being enacted, you have hundreds of people inside the federal government coming together to think about how to implement the details. The way they do that is they write a proposal. That could take a short amount of time or a very long amount of time, depending on how complex the policy is.

Then, in most cases, they put that out for comment. You can look on FederalRegister.gov and actually see what the current administration is planning in terms of regulatory policy. And you can write a letter, which many Americans do. Often it is businesses or trade associations or organized public interest groups that participate in this process.

So the agency gets these written comments, and there might be ten, or there might be a million, depending on how much public interest there is. Then they deliberate over them. It is not a temperature check to see what the public wants and then do that. They deliberate on the comments and decide what the best policy is, given their expertise.

Then they write that up and publish the final rule. Again, on the Federal Register, you can see what is actually going to come out. And about thirty to sixty days after it appears on FederalRegister.gov, it becomes law. That regulation carries the same force and effect as if Congress itself had passed a law.

The Organic Apple Problem

BW: Your book argues that rulemaking is not clerical work; it is political work. Walk me through where the choices actually get made, and by whom.

RAP: It is hard in any one rule to know. It is an interesting question, because I cannot give you the names. It was not Joe Smith who did this or that.

What happens is that Congress gives a choice to an agency. It says: make a policy on a very specific area. But there is always going to be latitude in that, because the reason Congress delegated the authority in the first place is that it said, this is too much for us. We are a body of 535 members between the House and the Senate, but we deal with all the policy areas. You are the experts in environmental policy or agricultural policy. Here is a specific topic. Make some policy about student loan repayment time frames, or about what actually counts as an organic apple.

And within that choice of how quickly students should repay a specific type of student loan, or what an organic apple is, there are a lot of choices to be made. The people making those choices are the people in these agencies, and they are working in teams.

It is a political choice because it creates winners and losers. Think about something like an organic apple. There are lots of companies in the United States that would like their apples to qualify as organic, and they might be what we would consider on the border of that. If the USDA is making a policy about organic apples, they get to decide which firms are winners and which are losers, who gets to call their apple organic without having to do too much, and who does not.

That is itself a political choice, because it decides who wins and who loses. When I say it is a political choice, I mean it is not value neutral. We would like to think about administrative policymaking as value neutral, where people just apply their expertise and there is always a clear call. But there are always winners and losers in public policy. That is what I mean by a political choice.

“There are always winners and losers in public policy.”

Inside the Regulatory Office

BW: When you were at OMB, were you conscious of being inside that process? Or did the strategic logic only become visible after you left?

RAP: At the Office of Management and Budget, I worked in the regulatory office, which oversees draft proposals and draft final rules. They have a lot of purview into what agencies are doing before it becomes public knowledge.

Did I know this was political? Of course. These issues are often touching on subjects very close to political fights happening that day, even if they are not referred to in The New York Times or The Washington Post as rules or regulations. You might work on a regulation about Medicaid that shows up in The Washington Post a week later. The fact that it is showing up on the front page means there is a political interest in it. It is inescapable. And the amount of political interest from the White House in different regulations makes it very clear that these are politically relevant policies.

If I think about what academia thinks differently about this than policymakers do, there is a lot of theory about the separation of politics and administration. That is where the idea from Woodrow Wilson came about, that we could segregate the politics and the decision-making from the actual administration. That theory has had so much play in how we have developed the American state. But it is basically impossible to implement in practice, because we are all humans, and if we know there is politics involved, it is hard to ever be neutral.

And I do not mean partisan politics. I just mean thinking about who is winning and who is losing, and what my beliefs as an individual are about who should win and who should lose.

BW: You came to political science after working at both the Government Accountability Office and OMB. How did those experiences lead you toward the research you do today?

RAP: I worked at the Government Accountability Office when I was in my master’s program, as a graduate intern. GAO is part of the legislative branch. They work closely with Congress to evaluate and provide oversight over the executive branch and the programs being implemented in federal agencies. That formal internship program is a terrific opportunity to get a sense of the nuts and bolts of what happens in government. When I was there, I worked on a report on contracting and acquisitions, and I learned a lot about that process, which has actually informed a lot of my research today.

After I finished my master’s degree, I went to work at the Office of Management and Budget as a desk officer in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which is the regulatory oversight part of OMB that deals with agencies and their regulations. I got hired through the Presidential Management Fellowship, which I believe no longer exists, but it was a program to get talented young people into government quickly. It was a great program, and I learned a lot about really intricate processes and how they work in government.

[Editor’s note: The Presidential Management Fellows Program, created in 1977, was terminated by executive order in February 2025. OPM formally rescinded the governing regulations in August 2025.]

So this time I was focusing on regulation. If I think about my research today, I have written a book about rulemaking and a new book about contracting. How does work in the real world inform academia? I learned a lot about how these things actually work on the ground, and why they matter to the broader things that happen. A lot of people think, oh God, regulation and contracting out, how boring. But these are what make government hum and sing, and we need these things. The fact that so few people want to understand them gives bureaucrats even more authority and leeway, because no one really wants to engage with the detailed substance.

When the Reasoning Is Not Human

BW: I have to ask about AI, because both drafting rules and generating comments about them seem to strain some of the assumptions this process was built on. Where does AI enter into rulemaking?

RAP: The role of AI is, obviously, like the rest of society, something we are figuring out.

What we know is that we require agencies, in rulemaking, to reason and to defend. They have a duty to reason. That means they have to say not just that we are going to make this policy through regulation, but that we are going to make this policy and here is why, and it has to be thoughtful and evidence-based. The courts provide a pretty significant check on agencies acting in an arbitrary and capricious manner.

The problem AI introduces is this: If an AI bot reasons, is that sufficient to substitute for human reasoning? And second, do we, as the public, know? If an agency has used AI to reason, we might just encounter a rule and have no idea who did the reasoning. As I mentioned, I do not know who worked on a specific rule. They do not give a list of contributors to each rule. So we do not know when AI is being used, or exactly how.

One way the Trump administration is using AI right now, especially, I believe, at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is to identify which regulations they should get rid of. They are using AI to help figure out which regulations are ineffective or could be streamlined. Again, we do not know much about the algorithm they are using, or whether it is a good algorithm, or whether it shares the same values you and I might have about what kind of housing and urban development policy we have. But that is the current state of the world.

[Editor’s note: Internal documents first reported by The Washington Post in July 2025 described a “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool” that had been used to evaluate more than 1,000 regulatory sections at HUD in under two weeks.]

It is a very evolving world. I think we are figuring it out the way we are figuring out everything else, the way higher education is figuring out student work. We are figuring out what we think is appropriate. The technology is ahead of the thinking about values and about what we want, and we are catching up. There is some good scholarship coming on this. But it is not clear.

And on the contracting side, there are also a lot of efforts to use AI in more mechanical ways, and in more generative ways, to streamline the procurement process, which has for decades been considered pretty clunky. I think a lot of improvements can come out of that, just using the bare-bones technology to do a lot of the things people were doing before.

“The technology is ahead of the thinking about values and what we want.”

Writing for Two Audiences

BW: What did seeing the process from the inside let you notice that political scientists working from the outside tend to miss?

RAP: I imagine a lot of your readers are students, and they know what it is like to read something about government that is a little dry, or not that interesting seeming. What my government experience did was force me to engage with these really esoteric processes of government, like procurement and rulemaking, and really get into the process and the procedure in ways I firsthand got to observe: how this works, who is important within this process, and what the values are that come into it and come out of it.

That experience gave me a lot of insight into how this could inform broader theories that political scientists have about how policy is made in Washington, who has input, and how public values enter, or do not enter, what comes out of government.

BW: You also write for Brookings and the Miller Center, which is a different kind of writing for a different audience. How do you decide what belongs in a journal article versus a piece meant for people making decisions right now?

RAP: There is a difference in the writing. Academic research is full of jargon and full of really technical statistical detail. Political science articles have a lot of that kind of thing. That is not what your modal policy person in Washington cares about or has time to engage with. They also cannot even access a lot of academic research, because it is gated behind paywalls.

So when I am writing for the Miller Center or for Brookings, I am thinking: Who is going to care about this? What parts of it might they care about? What are the policy implications, if any, and what do we not know? And how can I write this in a way that captures the true essence of what I was trying to say in the academic piece, without the jargon and statistical detail that these readers do not have the time or bandwidth to engage with?

Should You Still Go Into Government?

BW: For someone in their early twenties who wants to do the work you do, does a government job still make sense as a first career move? Or has that calculation changed?

RAP: I think working for the government and doing public service is tremendously important for all young people, to get a sense of what government is and why it matters to your life. Because it matters a lot, even if you are not paying attention.

It is a strange moment to take jobs in the federal government, because the federal government is undergoing a transformation, and we do not know what that is going to look like. We know that the federal workforce is decreasing right now, and it has also been long established that the federal workforce is graying. That is going to be an opportunity in the next decade for young people to come in and help reshape what comes next.

So I do not think that the pathway is at all closed. I just think it is different than we thought before. That is, in some ways, a little scary. But it is also really exciting to help shape the next generation of what government could be. So absolutely, I do not think jobs in the federal government should be ruled out.

I also think state government is a place where states are doing a lot of really exciting work. They are taking up a lot of the policy work that used to be done at the federal level. It is important work, and again, these are opportunities. These are jobs that are often held by much older people who will be retiring, and these are places where you might be able to take on a lot of responsibility at a relatively young age, which is kind of cool.

Rachel Augustine Potter is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia, a senior fellow at the Miller Center for Public Affairs, and a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Before academia, she worked at the Government Accountability Office and as a desk officer in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the White House Office of Management and Budget. She is the author of Bending the Rules: Procedural Politicking in the Bureaucracy (University of Chicago Press, 2019), which won the APSA Theodore J. Lowi, Richard E. Neustadt, and Herbert A. Simon awards as well as the National Academy of Public Administration's Louis Brownlow Award. Her second book, Going Private: Outsourcing the Administrative State, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in December 2026.

The Pathway Review is an interview publication about how consequential people think, work, and build their careers across foreign policy, politics, business, law, journalism, and public life. Subscribe for new conversations.

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The CIA Memorial Wall at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Photo courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Strait of Hormuz has been closed or barely passable to commercial shipping since the United States and Israel struck Iran at the end of February. Tim Weiner’s account of how that happened does not begin in Tehran. It begins at the Resolute Desk. The CIA’s analysts, he says, called the consequences correctly and in advance — the closed strait, the empowered Revolutionary Guards, the regional war — and it changed nothing, because intelligence is worth only what a president is willing to hear.

That is the argument at the center of a career now in its fifth decade. He says it took him awhile, at the start of those forty years, to understand a simple fact: the CIA belongs to the president. What follows is a conversation about how he arrived there, and about the unglamorous craft that got him there — hanging around long enough that people who have spent their working lives concealing things agree to sit down in a restaurant in Concord, New Hampshire, and talk.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

HOW A REPORTER ENDS UP COVERING THE CIA

Benjamin Wolf: You’ve stayed on the same beat, The CIA, for almost forty years. Where did it start?

Tim Weiner: I’m the firstborn son of parents who fled Hitler’s Europe. They met on a blind date in 1953. I was born in 1956. They became distinguished professors in their respective fields — history and brain science.

I went to Columbia, took degrees in history and journalism, and started out as a newspaper reporter in 1979. I had a lot of luck and a lot of good fortune.

I covered the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986. Then, in 1987, I went to Afghanistan to write about the CIA’s introduction of the Stinger anti-aircraft missile during the Soviet occupation. It was the first time in the Cold War that American weapons were being used to kill Soviet soldiers and airmen. Plausible deniability in American support for the Afghan mujahideen had cracked.

I went backpacking with the mujahideen. I saw a Stinger fired in anger.

All of this was happening as Iran-Contra was boiling over. For readers who don’t remember: President Reagan authorized the sale of weapons to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and the proceeds were skimmed to support the Contras after Congress had outlawed military aid to them. That is what can happen when presidents use secrecy to cloak unlawful action. In that case, the secrecy didn’t last long enough.

So I got deeply interested in Iran-Contra, and in what the CIA was doing.

Before I went to Afghanistan, I called the public information officer at the Central Intelligence Agency. There is such a person; there always has been. I said: I’m going to Afghanistan to write about this secret weapons shipment you’re conducting to the mujahideen. I understand people at the CIA sometimes give background briefings to reporters heading off to strange places. How about it?

He said absolutely not, and hung up on me.

But I had been back from Afghanistan less than a day when the phone rang. Guess who. My new best friend at the CIA. He asked how my trip had gone, and then he said, “How would you like to come in for that briefing now?”

So I drove out to headquarters, seven miles outside Washington, in the leafy suburban glades of Virginia. I walked into the lobby, and there on the wall, engraved in gold leaf, was the Gospel of John, 8:32: And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

And I thought, in the immortal words of The Dude: that’s fucking interesting, man.

I more or less decided then and there that I would make a career of covering the CIA. That was almost forty years ago.

“THE CIA BELONGS TO THE PRESIDENT”

BW: You’ve now written the CIA’s history twice — the first sixty years in Legacy of Ashes, the last twenty-five in The Mission. What do you understand about the agency now that you didn’t understand the first time?

TW: I think the better question is what I didn’t understand forty years ago, when I started out covering them.

The CIA belongs to the president. With rare exceptions, it does what the president tells it to do.

It isn’t as though a couple of CIA officers were sitting around Miami in 1960 over martinis and one of them said, “Hey, I’ve got a good idea — let’s go kill Fidel Castro.” It was President Eisenhower and President Kennedy who wanted that done.

The CIA is an instrument of American foreign policy. And often what are deemed intelligence failures are really policy failures — failures of presidents and secretaries of state to form coherent foreign policies.

So when the CIA becomes the pointed end of the spear — in Afghanistan, say — the question is: what’s the mission? To win a war against a ragtag bunch of dudes, the Taliban. And the United States, in all its majesty, could not do it, in part because the military and the CIA could not get it through their heads that killing civilians does not endear you to the population of an occupied country.

Why were we in Vietnam? Why were we in Iraq? To what end? Ostensibly we went into Iraq and Afghanistan to fight terrorism. But terrorism is an idea, not an army, and it is not susceptible to the logic of force.

The government of the United States, in all its majesty, never came up with a coherent answer.

Go back through the history and you’ll see a litany of tactical successes accompanied by enormous strategic failures.

BW: Make that concrete for me. Where is that pattern operating right now?

TW: The CIA is tasked with locating the supreme leader of Iran and targeting him so that he can be killed by the Americans and the Israelis. That is a tactical success. You have supposedly decapitated a government.

And what have you done? You have empowered the more radical elements of the Revolutionary Guard. The strait is closed. You have ignited a regional war. You have succeeded at none of your strategic aims, and there is no way out.

When the CIA is given an order, it salutes smartly and tries to execute it. But the question is always: to what end? That is the question policymakers have to answer, and it is the one they keep failing to answer.

HOW YOU GET SPIES TO TALK

BW: The Mission is built on six former directors and scores of officers whose entire careers depended on not talking to people like you. What actually turns one of those noes into a yes?

TW: It is much harder to interview a CIA operations officer who has lived his entire professional life undercover than it is to interview a director. Bill Burns, who ran the agency under Biden, is a really impressive man, and he was happy to give an interview.

Now take the man who was put in charge of setting up the secret prison system. You’d think that would be the tougher get. His name had never been published. I found it in the transcript of a deposition given at Guantánamo.

I tracked him down and called him at his home in New Hampshire and said I’d like to come interview him. He said, “Sure. Come on up.”

So I got in the car and drove to a restaurant in Concord. I arrived fifteen minutes early, as one should. About five minutes later he walked straight up to me and said, “Hi, Tim. How are you?”

We talked for four hours. At the end I said, “I know you’re a trained intelligence officer, but how did you know it was me?”

He said, “From the author photo on the jacket of Legacy of Ashes. Good book.”

Here’s the key. If you hang around long enough, and if your work is accurate, and if you deal fairly with people, they’ll talk to you.

The sitting chief of the clandestine service, Tom Sylvester, gave me an interview. As far as I know, no sitting chief of the clandestine service had ever given an on-the-record interview to a reporter.

I’m not a jerk. I’m not an ideologue. I’m not a polemicist. I try to write carefully.

More important than any personal quality, though: covering the CIA — covering any institution imbued with secrecy — is like covering a foreign country. You have to learn the language, the argot, the jargon, the customs of the tribe. You have to understand its history and its traditions.

And if you hang around long enough, perhaps you earn a modicum of trust. Trust is the coin of the realm. Just as a CIA officer recruiting a foreign agent has to win that person’s trust, a reporter has to win the trust of the officer in order for the officer to talk.

Why anyone ever talks to a reporter, I still don’t entirely understand, after nearly fifty years in the business. But it comes down to trust. Looking people in the eye and asking intelligent questions.

LEARNING TO INTERVIEW BY HITCHHIKING

BW: Is that instinct, or did you build it?

TW: When I was a teenager, back in the 1970s, I used to hitchhike across the country. I went to school back East and my parents were teaching at UCLA. Every summer I’d work a job, put a couple hundred bucks in my pocket, strap on my backpack, and try to cross the country. Then I’d hitchhike back East for school.

People pretty much always picked me up. And people don’t pick you up out of the milk of human kindness. They’re bored. It’s a big country. It’s a long way from Indianapolis to Salt Lake City.

They want to talk. And they want to talk about the most fascinating thing in the world, which is themselves.

But often as not they’re inarticulate. You have to draw them out. You have to ask questions. You have to engage.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I was fifteen, sixteen years old. But I was learning how to conduct an interview, and it has stood me in good stead.

THE GOLDEN TICKET

BW: Is there a book you wish you’d written, or someone you wish you’d gotten in a room?

TW: I’ve been very lucky, Ben. I became a newspaper reporter at a time when, if you could write a simple declarative sentence and had an inquisitive mind, you could get a job at a newspaper.

Three years in, I was extraordinarily lucky to be hired by The Philadelphia Inquirer. The paper was run by Gene Roberts, the only person I have ever met in journalism who may conceivably have been touched by genius.

After I’d been there about four years I went to Gene and said I’d like to go to Afghanistan and write about the mujahideen. American reporters did not, as a rule, go to Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Only a handful did. There were no hotels. There was no electricity. There was very little to eat. But I was thirty years old, and I thought it was worth a shot.

Gene listened, and he said, “Sounds real interesting.”

If you could interest Gene Roberts in what interested you, you were good to go. That was the paper he ran. We had the freedom to pursue things we found genuinely interesting, and the Pulitzers followed.

By and by I got to The New York Times, in 1993, hired to cover the CIA among other things. The Cold War had just ended, and the agency was in real trouble. It had lost its great enemy and, with it, its reason for being. How do you remain a great intelligence service without a great enemy?

So the CIA was in a continual state of crisis — which meant enormous opportunity for a reporter at The Times.

I did not become a better reporter when I joined The Times. People just returned my telephone calls.

I had a very good run. On a fairly regular basis I’d do parachute jobs — fly off to a garden spot like Sudan or Afghanistan or Pakistan or Haiti or Cuba, or Liberia at the end of its fourteen-year civil war, and report for weeks or months.

It was a golden ticket to see the world. The journalist, like the spy, can parachute into a foreign country and say, in so many words, “Take me to your leader.” And often as not, you will be taken to the leader.

The ability to see the world beyond America — and beyond what we used to call the Western world — is an ennobling experience.

BW: Then Legacy of Ashes comes out in 2007, and not long after, you walk away from thirty years of newspapers. What did the book make possible?

TW: After about twenty years of off-and-on work, I finished and published it in 2007. Who the hell is going to take a 700-page book about the CIA to the beach? But by God, people did. It sold very well. It’s still selling nearly twenty years on. It won the National Book Award.

That let me say to myself, at fifty-two: I’ve been a newspaperman for thirty years. I’ve done pretty much everything I could have dreamed of doing. I think I’ll take a leap and see if I can write books for a living.

And by God, it worked out.

None of this should count as career advice for young people, because the path is very different today. But I think the moral of the story is: figure out what you love to do, and then figure out how to do it.

“FIRST, YOU HAVE TO KNOW”

BW: There are thousands fewer newspaper jobs than when you were hired. What take aways from your time in the work still hold true today from the way you learned this?

TW: Between the internet, our tech overlords, and a lot of other causes, the newspaper business has suffered enormously. There are thousands fewer journalists at newspapers than there were twenty years ago.

But there are also incredible opportunities to write what you know and get it out there.

First, though, you have to know. You can’t write writing.

If you’re a reporter and you don’t have the information, fancy writing is not going to do it for you. Your opinion is not terribly valuable in and of itself — although there are doubtless people who believe their opinions are the purest gold.

I was a history major. My mother was a history professor. I think history is the best training conceivable for this. The past has a pattern. It informs the present. It doesn’t predict the future, but it gives you good grounding from which to look out over the horizon and understand complicated things.

And a lot of good writing is boiling an ox down into a bouillon cube that still tastes like ox. Understanding complexity well enough to explain it in simple, direct terms.

MAKING THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

BW: You’ve spent a career on institutions that exist to keep things from being known. Strip away the beat and the books — what is that work actually for?

TW: Our job is to make the hidden visible.

News is what somebody doesn’t want you to know. Particularly when the people who don’t want you to know it are in power, it is your job to know it.

TRUST BETWEEN COUNTRIES

BW: You say trust is the coin of the realm inside the agency. What about between countries — is there anyone left who is genuinely an American ally?

TW: We have squandered our alliances. We have betrayed allies who trusted us. Can you name one?

BW: Israel, certainly. And much of Europe still behaves like one, despite everything this administration has said about NATO. If Washington genuinely needed help and asked for it, wouldn’t it come — if only because those governments know America outlasts any one administration, and because so much of their prosperity runs through ours?

TW: Trump has done everything in his power to destroy the North Atlantic alliance.

And trust, once broken, is very hard to repair.

THE DANGER AHEAD

BW: If the CIA is an instrument of the president, what is it when the president doesn’t want the intelligence?

TW: The CIA was created not to serve as an instrument of death, but to gather information around the world, analyze it, and present it to the president in the hope of enlightening American foreign policy — of forging coherent policy as America projected its power.

Intelligence means nothing to this president. When he uses the word, he puts it in scare quotes. You cannot brief Donald Trump. He does not want to hear anything that doesn’t fit his preconceptions.

The agency’s analysts predicted quite rightly that if the United States and Israel went to war against Iran, everything that has since happened would happen — the closure of the strait, the empowerment of the Revolutionary Guard, a regional war of all against all. It made no difference.

And there has been an ideological purge throughout the institutions of American national security — CIA, FBI, State. Hundreds of people have been fired because they would not swear fealty to the president. At the beginning of this administration people were grilled: Who did you vote for in 2020? What did you think of January 6th? Who really won the election? If you couldn’t pass that test to the satisfaction of the people running these institutions, you were gone. I would put it on a scale with the Red Scare of 1950 to 1954, when Joe McCarthy ruled the earth, and in some respects worse.

I don’t know whether the institutions that have been damaged can be rebuilt in my lifetime.

The second great purpose behind creating the CIA in 1947 was to prevent the next Pearl Harbor — to protect the United States against strategic surprise. Much of what the CIA, the FBI, and our cybersecurity agencies built after the Russians attacked our democracy in 2016 has been torn down, along with the people who did the building.

I’ve studied American intelligence since the 1980s. Looking around today, I think the danger of a third Pearl Harbor, twenty-five years after 9/11, is immense and growing. The danger signs are flashing much as they did in the summer of 2001.

That is the sobering note I’ll leave you on.

About the guest.

Tim Weiner is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author who spent decades reporting on American intelligence and national security, including as a correspondent for The New York Times. He won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his investigation of secret Pentagon spending, and the 2007 National Book Award for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. His latest book is The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century.

About The Pathway Review.

The Pathway Review is an interview publication about how consequential people think, work, and build their careers across foreign policy, politics, business, law, journalism, and public life. Subscribe for new conversations.

This interview was conducted in August 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

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March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963. U.S. Information Agency / National Archives. Public domain.

For decades, Americans tended to talk about human rights as something that happened somewhere else. Political prisoners in authoritarian states. Refugees fleeing wars. Governments shutting down newspapers or persecuting minorities. The United States, in that telling, was the country doing the scrutinizing.

Léocadia Tchouaffé’s work starts from a different premise: What if the same international standards Washington invokes abroad are applied at home?

Tchouaffé is a human rights fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, where she works to connect international human-rights mechanisms with domestic civil-rights advocacy. It is a fitting assignment at a strange moment for that system. The United States declined to participate in its scheduled 2025 Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council, and in January President Trump ordered the government to withdraw from 66 international organizations, including 31 UN entities, arguing that they no longer served American interests or sovereignty.

Tchouaffé sees that retreat as a mistake. But her own career also gives her an unusual vantage point from which to make the argument. The daughter of Cameroonian immigrants, she began in refugee resettlement and African development advocacy before turning toward human-rights work inside the United States. We spoke about what changed when she brought that framework home, the strongest case for American skepticism of international institutions, what activists can do when Washington refuses to participate, and why there is no obvious résumé for a career in human rights.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Interview

Ben Wolf: Most Americans hear “human rights” and picture issues abroad. What does your work actually consist of?

Léocadia Tchouaffé: I work in human-rights policy, which encompasses a lot of different things. In my role specifically, I work on applying international human-rights policy and the mechanisms that exist globally to domestic civil-rights and policy work in the United States.

A lot of Americans tend to think of human rights as a foreign-policy issue — something that happens in developing countries or somewhere outside the United States. My work asks how those same frameworks and mechanisms apply to what is happening here.

BW: How did you end up doing that?

LT: I’ve always been interested in human rights. My parents are from Cameroon, in Central Africa, and I think growing up in an immigrant household gave me a somewhat different understanding of what human rights meant.

It was something we talked about growing up, even if we weren’t discussing the specific international mechanisms or legal structures. For a long time, I thought I wanted to become an international human-rights lawyer. Like a lot of people interested in this field, I looked at someone like Amal Clooney and thought that kind of career was incredibly interesting.

Eventually I realized I was more drawn to organizing and policy work on the ground than to practicing in a courtroom.

I worked in refugee resettlement for a couple of years. After that, I worked in foreign-aid advocacy, trying to persuade members of Congress to fund programs dealing with HIV/AIDS, poverty, education, and other issues in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Until graduate school, almost everything I had done was international. Then, through the Master of Human Rights program at the University of Minnesota, I received a fellowship with the Southern Poverty Law Center. That brought me into domestic human-rights work.

It was a major shift. I had spent years thinking about what human rights meant internationally. Now I was asking what those same standards mean in the American context.

BW: What changed when you began applying that framework to the United States?

LT: Knowing what I know now, I’m not sure the difference is as large as I once thought it was.

When you look internationally, some violations can appear much more obvious. Take Cameroon. There has been a long-running conflict involving the country’s Anglophone minority. During that conflict, villages have been burned and the government has shut down internet access in English-speaking parts of the country. Those are actions that very clearly raise human-rights concerns.

From an American perspective, it is easy to look at something like that and think: That is what a human-rights violation looks like. We have freedom of speech and freedom of religion here, so human rights must be something happening elsewhere.

But those freedoms have never been experienced equally by everyone in the United States.

One thing I have noticed in my current work is that Americans often lack a formal education in human rights. In many other countries, people encounter the United Nations, the Human Rights Council, and international human-rights mechanisms as part of their education. In the U.S., unless you study something like political science or international affairs in college, you may never learn much about those systems.

That is beginning to change in some organizing spaces. I was recently in Minnesota speaking with a former professor who has been involved in local organizing. She told me that one community meeting actually began with a presentation on human-rights theory — what these rights are, where they come from, and how they relate to organizing.

A few years ago, I’m not sure people would have thought that was necessary. Now there is more recognition that understanding the framework can help people understand both what is happening and what mechanisms exist for responding to it.

BW: The administration frames its withdrawal from these institutions as a question of American sovereignty rather than an abandonment of human rights. Steelman that argument. Where does it have a point, and where do you think it goes wrong?

LT: I can understand why someone would ask why the United States needs to participate in all of these institutions, or whether every international organization is actually effective. Those are legitimate questions.

But I think it is striking, because the United States played such a major role in constructing the international system in the first place. For decades, despite all of the country’s own faults, the United States presented itself as a leader on human rights.

Coming from an immigrant family, that matters to me personally. The United States was often seen as a place where you could be safe and become who you wanted to be. So seeing an administration dismiss large parts of the international human-rights architecture is disappointing.

I also think there is a broader philosophical question underneath the administration’s approach. My concern is that human rights are increasingly being framed through a particular conception of “natural” or God-given rights rather than through a universal international framework.

As a Christian myself, the phrase “God-given rights” can sound perfectly reasonable. But in a religiously and culturally diverse country, the obvious question is: whose conception of God, and whose definition of those rights?

That is where I worry about Christian nationalism becoming part of the conversation.

And these institutions are not simply symbolic. They create mechanisms through which countries can be scrutinized and held accountable. You can absolutely criticize whether those mechanisms are effective enough. But if you withdraw from the institutions that provide external accountability, you still have to answer the question: what replaces them?

BW: If the federal government will not participate, what can people working in human rights actually do?

LT: One major part of our work right now involves the Universal Periodic Review, or UPR.

The UPR is a process through the UN Human Rights Council in which every UN member state periodically has its human-rights record reviewed by other countries. Governments report on what they are doing, other states make recommendations, and then there is another review several years later.

The United States chose not to participate in its most recent scheduled review. [The Human Rights Council rescheduled the U.S. review for the working group session of November 2–13, 2026, while urging Washington to resume cooperation before then.]

So our question became: if the federal government is not going to participate, how do we still involve Americans in this process?

One thing we have been doing is what we call “UPR at Home.” We bring state legislators together with NGOs and people directly affected by these issues, so lawmakers can hear testimony about human-rights conditions in their own communities.

We held one in Atlanta in May. State legislators heard from organizations and directly impacted people working on voting rights and democracy, migration, reproductive rights, and criminal justice. [The May 18 convening, co-hosted with the State Innovation Exchange, drew legislators from Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee.]

Obviously a state legislator cannot formally substitute for the federal government in the UN process. But the point is to show that the federal government is not the entirety of American society. There are state officials, members of Congress, civil-society organizations, and ordinary Americans who still want to engage.

It also builds a foundation for the future. Administrations change. Congresses change. If the federal government eventually reengages with these institutions, the work does not have to begin again from zero.

And even before then, it helps hold government accountable by making more people aware of the standards that exist and the commitments the United States has made.

BW: For someone who wants a career like yours, what has experiences have mattered most in your own development?

LT: The first thing I would say is that human-rights careers are not very linear.

I know so many people doing this work who arrived here through completely different paths. My boss, for example, spent years as a litigation lawyer working on civil rights before moving into human rights. I thought I was going to law school and didn’t. I worked in refugee resettlement, then foreign-aid advocacy, then went to graduate school, and eventually ended up here.

So I can’t tell someone: do A, then B, then C, and you will get this job.

What I would tell them is to stay very open and learn about things outside their immediate specialty.

Most of my background was in Sub-Saharan Africa. But through graduate school and through meeting other people in this field, I’ve learned about LGBTQ rights, housing, climate change, criminal justice, and many other areas where I would never claim to be an expert.

Knowing those people, hearing their stories, and understanding their work gives you a much broader conception of what human rights actually encompasses.

I would also tell people to learn history. I studied history as an undergraduate, and that way of thinking has been enormously useful. Human-rights issues do not appear out of nowhere. Understanding how we arrived at a particular political or social situation helps you understand the people you are working with and the problems you are trying to solve.

So there isn’t one credential I would recommend. Stay curious. Learn a little about a lot of things. Understand the history. And be willing to take a path that does not look linear.

About the guest

Léocadia Tchouaffé is a human rights fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, where her work includes engagement with the United Nations and other international mechanisms and connecting those frameworks to domestic policy and advocacy. She holds a Master of Human Rights from the University of Minnesota, where she was awarded the Barbara Frey Human Rights Fellowship, and a B.A. in political science and history from the George Washington University. She previously served as a regional organizer for the ONE Campaign, advocating for U.S. foreign-aid funding on HIV/AIDS, gender-based violence, and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa, and worked in refugee resettlement in Kansas City.

About The Pathway Review

The Pathway Review is an interview publication about foreign policy, government, political economy, and the people who shape them.

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An F-15E Strike Eagle departs on a combat mission during Operation Epic Fury, March 16, 2026. U.S. Air Force photo.

Four weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the scoreboard was overwhelming. American aircraft had struck more than 10,000 targets inside Iran, destroyed roughly 80 percent of its air defenses, and eliminated its navy as a fighting force. Iran, by Kelly A. Grieco’s count, managed to get one aging fighter into the air.

Despite this domination, none of it reopened the Strait of Hormuz.

Iranian drones costing a fraction of the weapons used to stop them had struck roughly twenty commercial vessels and brought traffic through one of the world’s most important chokepoints to a near standstill. Tehran could not contest American control of the skies. It had discovered that it did not need to.

Grieco has called that outcome the “most successful failure in U.S. airpower history”: America won the air war it had spent decades building itself to fight and lost the one Iran ultimately chose to impose. Their diagnosis turns on the “air littoral,” the term the two coined in Parameters in 2021 for the contested low-altitude airspace between ground forces and high-end fighters and bombers. It is the band where cheap drones now do their work, and where American control, Grieco argues, no longer extends downward the way it once did. She thinks the Air Force is about to take the convenient lesson from Iran instead.

This conversation took place on July 27, 2026, and has been edited for length and clarity.

THE WAR AMERICA WAS BUILT TO WIN

Ben Wolf: Before we get to Iran, give readers a sense of the job. What questions are you trying to answer at Stimson, and how did airpower and alliances become the center of your work?

Kelly Grieco: I’m a senior fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington, where I work with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program. The program is dedicated to examining the assumptions that underlie U.S. foreign policy and defense policy and testing whether they still hold. Sometimes we test a core assumption and find that it’s right. Other times we find that the assumption no longer holds, and that has significant implications for foreign policy.

Within that, my work focuses on two areas. One is airpower and the future of warfare—how air warfare in particular is changing. The other is alliances and coalition-building, with a specific focus on the Indo-Pacific.

BW: You and Max Bremer called Iran “the most successful failure in U.S. airpower history.” That is a deliberately provocative phrase. When did the contradiction become clear to you—that the United States could dominate the skies over Iran and still fail to produce the strategic effect it needed?

KG: I don’t think I’d say there was a specific moment. But one thing that was really striking was a stretch when Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine [the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] were doing briefings at the Pentagon in the first month or so of the war. The messaging was really about all the targets we’d hit and the things we’d destroyed—a lot of emphasis on missile launchers we’d attacked, particular sites we’d struck, sinking the navy, grounding the air force. All of that was presumably true.

And it seemed so disconnected from the utter disruption that was taking place throughout the region as a result of Iranian airpower—not traditional Iranian airpower, not fighter jets, but the way Iran was using drones and missiles. If you think back to that first month or six weeks, even as the United States was destroying these things, Iran was launching its own systematic campaign against U.S. bases in the Gulf, against Gulf infrastructure, and of course against the Strait of Hormuz. It was really that disconnect, for Max Bremer and me, between one war we seemed to be excelling at and another where we didn’t seem to have an answer for Iranian airpower.

BW: You write that the United States entered the war with a detailed plan for destruction and essentially no plan for Iran’s campaign of disruption. That sounds less like an execution problem than a planning failure. What does a blind spot that large tell you about how the Pentagon defines success?

KG: You can see it particularly early on, and I think it’s important to emphasize that the campaign evolved. In the first 72 hours of the war, there was emphasis on rolling back air defenses, but a lot of the targeting was on the leaders themselves. It was extraordinary how successful that was. I can’t think of another campaign—essentially decapitation—that has been so effective at the tactical level of killing that many leaders in such a short period of time.

That was clearly the early plan. And when it didn’t bring the Iranian regime to say uncle, the effort seemed to move toward degrading Iranian capabilities. That’s something the military, and the Air Force in particular, has excelled at: conducting the standard air campaign that degrades the integrated air defense system so you can gain increasing levels of control, and then going after targets, whether fixed ones like the nuclear sites we know about or mobile ones.

If you look at where the bulk of the effort went, it was around that. There was far less attention to striking things near the strait. If you really look at where we were concentrating operations, it was heavily focused on the mainland and further in, rather than on things like the speedboats and the launchers much closer to the strait. I think you can infer something from that about where the priorities were in the planning.

BW: You’ve warned that the Pentagon could come away from Iran having learned the convenient lessons rather than the correct ones. What is the most dangerous convenient lesson you think officials could take from this war?

KG: The most dangerous one, and the one I’m concerned about, is that we look at the traditional air war the United States fought—what Max and I call the war of destruction—and point to signs of success in terms of what was destroyed. Again, the sinking of the navy, Iran’s air force. I think there was one example where they seem to have gotten an old fighter in the air, but that’s about it. You can look at the fact that the United States was able to gain increasing air control over parts of Iran, particularly the south and west. There have been casualties—we know about the F-15 that was shot down—but remarkably few U.S. casualties from aircraft flying over Iranian airspace. In some sense, you can say that validates much of what the Air Force in particular has done.

My concern is that we look at that and say, okay, this validates our model, and we’re not paying attention to where the adversary has been able to exploit the gaps—where we excel versus where we’re vulnerable. Those vulnerabilities are in a messy area. They’re much closer to the surface, in that lower-altitude airspace. And there are definitely going to be those who want to dismiss that as insignificant, maybe even dismiss it as not being part of the role or the job of airpower at all—being able to control that lower-altitude airspace.

Max and I are airpower zealots, in a sense. We think this is part of airpower’s mission, and a mission and responsibility it has to the joint force: to be able to provide that level of control, including at lower altitudes.

THE FIGHT OVER AIRPOWER

BW: Retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, has attacked the framework directly. His argument, in essence, is that the “air littoral” is an artificial distinction—airpower already extends from the surface upward—and that Hormuz was a joint-force problem, not proof that American airpower failed. What does that critique get wrong?

KG: There are really three charges there, so let’s start with the first: that it isn’t a useful term, that it’s an artificial division of the airspace. In some sense I think that’s a strange critique, because I don’t hear anyone making a similar argument about the maritime world. Nobody suggests that because we have the term “maritime littoral,” we’re creating a new domain. That term exists to recognize that where domains overlap—in that case the sea and the land coming together—there are more interdependencies, and harder areas for the joint force. It recognizes a really important and longstanding operational problem about where that seam is, and it brings attention to that problem.

What Max and I wanted to point out is that we have this growing problem of low-altitude threats from missiles and drones, and that even if you’re gaining control at higher altitudes in the more traditional sense, control was not extending downward in the same way it had in the past. That’s something we need to be attentive to. And it’s particularly challenging because, like the maritime littoral, it’s where the air domain and the surface domain—maritime and land—interact. It becomes far messier, harder to identify, harder to define roles and missions, harder to afford cooperation across the joint force.

So what the term does is bring attention to an operational problem, and one that many other people would like to forget, because it is a really challenging operational problem. I think the best evidence of that is that the term itself has gotten traction: it gives people words for an operational problem that matters and that’s increasing. Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is the clearest evidence of it. It isn’t the only example. But it’s a problem where the United States does not have a ready, effective operational answer.

The second charge is the double standard—this idea that we’re somehow not giving U.S. airpower credit for certain things while giving Iran credit. We’re counting as airpower the traditional airpower the United States has: fighters, bombers, and all the support aircraft that go into that. We’re also counting drones and missiles. So it’s airpower whether it’s an Iranian Shahed or an American clone of a Shahed, the LUCAS, or a Reaper, or missiles. Our standard is the same across the joint force and across both sides.

BW: But let me press you on that. Even if Hormuz was unquestionably a joint failure, why is it important to call it an airpower failure too?

KG: That’s the final piece of the critique: the notion that this really isn’t airpower’s fault—that the Strait of Hormuz cannot be opened, but that this is a joint problem. And I’ll say that I consider that a charge worth answering directly. It may be true. It is true. This is a joint failure, and I acknowledge this is a joint fight. But even if it is a joint failure, it’s also an airpower failure, and a specific kind of airpower failure. If you look at Air Force doctrine, one of the things it emphasizes foremost is that the responsibility of the Air Force is to provide air superiority to the joint force so the joint force can conduct the missions it needs to do. If you look at the Strait of Hormuz, because Iranian drones and missiles are still firing, the Navy is not able to escort ships and commercial shipping is not able to go through the strait. That’s a failure of airpower—of the Air Force as it defines its own role and its own responsibilities to accomplish what the joint force needs.

WHAT HORMUZ EXPOSED

BW: Iran has used comparatively inexpensive drones and missiles to impose enormous costs on the U.S. military and the global economy. If you were sitting in Tehran, what would this war have taught you about how to fight the United States?

KG: There are a couple of things worth emphasizing here. One is just that the Strait of Hormuz is so unique, even compared with other chokepoints throughout the world. There really is no alternative to it. It’s not the situation you had with the Houthis in the Red Sea—which is sort of starting again—where commercial shipping said, this is too dangerous, we don’t like this, and was able to find alternative routes. Certainly those took more time and were more expensive. But the problem with the strait is that there isn’t an alternative maritime route you can take. Some people will draw the concern that now we have to be thinking about chokepoints everywhere. Hormuz is very unique in the degree of disruption it allows.

But if I were in Tehran looking at the strategy, you could see that they’ve had success. This validated many of their concepts—their notion of mosaic defense, of being decentralized and distributed and able to deny U.S. objectives. They’re not trying to control the airspace or the strait. They’re trying to deny the control that the United States needs and that shipping needs. I think that’s an important distinction.

And you can see it in their firing decisions, because they seem to recognize that they don’t actually need a lot of missiles and drones every day to keep the strait closed. It’s a remarkably small number, so it’s sustainable. The biggest thing, if you were looking at this situation and taking a lesson, is that they’re imposing a lot of costs. In individual exchanges, it’s cheaper for them to keep doing this: the drones and missiles are cheaper than what it requires for the United States to intercept them and try to suppress them. That’s a very favorable exchange.

BW: Who does time favor now—Washington or Tehran?

KG: That’s the real question today, isn’t it—which side is favored by time. I think it favors Tehran, for some of the things you mentioned, like the global economy. It’s being held hostage by the disruption. We’re entering this second period of resumed conflict, though maybe we’re getting a pause now, with oil reserves having already been drawn down, so our ability to weather this is going to be harder. The midterms have to be, to a degree, a calculation in the White House—this is a very unpopular war, including with the president’s own base. And the Gulf states that are deeply affected by this are almost certainly putting pressure on the administration to find some way to conclude it. Those pressures are more acute on Washington than they are on Iran.

The only thing I’d add is that long term, we’ve already started to see construction in different Gulf states to try to figure out ways to bypass the strait. So long term there may be some expiration date, if you will, on how long Iran has this source of leverage, or the same degree of leverage. But I think the clock on Washington expires before we get to that point.

HOW A STRATEGIST GETS MADE

BW: You finished your Ph.D. at MIT and then went into professional military education rather than taking the more conventional academic or Washington think tank route. Why? What did you think you could learn from teaching military officers that you couldn’t learn in another academic department?

KG: I spent years at MIT getting my Ph.D. in political science in the Security Studies Program—really excellent training, and I feel grateful that I was able to do my studies there. But one of the things that occurred to me while I was in the program was that I’d originally thought I wanted a very traditional academic job, teaching predominantly civilians, probably undergraduates. At a certain point, I knew I didn’t necessarily want that path.

I had spent all these years studying these issues of military conflict from a more academic perspective, but I wasn’t an operator myself, and that was not the path I was going to choose. So I found professional military education a particularly attractive option, because it allowed me to bring my more academic, book experience and meet it up in the classroom with officers who had ten to fifteen years of experience already in the military and were actively involved in operations. I could learn from their operational experience, they could learn from some of my academic experience, and in the classroom those two perspectives got to meet. I found it an incredibly valuable experience—those conversations, and the learning that went both ways, let me understand these issues in a different way and learn a tremendous amount about airpower. I’ll just say that my greatest teachers on airpower were actually my students themselves.

I was down there for five and a half years. At a certain point I decided that I wanted to have a bigger impact on policy, and that it was probably time to go to D.C. and do something in the think tank space. I was able to bring that experience and knowledge with me, and I’m happy to say that I often run into my former students, who are either at the Pentagon doing a tour or, in the case of international officers, back home and now attachés at their embassies.

BW: People hear “think tank fellow” and probably imagine a lot of reading and writing. In practice, how much of your job is original research versus talking to reporters and congressional staff, preparing testimony, or participating in private diplomacy? What does the calendar actually look like when a war breaks out?

KG: I don’t think there is necessarily a typical week, and that’s one of the things about the think tank space: your week is, to a degree, determined by what the news looks like. When the war kicked off in February, as someone who studies airpower, there was much more interest in trying to understand these issues from the media. So at that time, especially early in the war, a lot more of my time was spent talking to media and journalists, because that’s when they want that information.

I do spend a good amount of my time on reading and research and writing. I write regularly and make sure that I do that. I try to carve out specific time for it, because otherwise so many other demands come into that space. So it’s hard to say I do a third, a third, and a third. It doesn’t really work that way, and it depends on the week. But one portion is certainly talking to media or journalists, or doing outreach to congressional staff—bringing your expertise to others. Another part is original research and writing. And another part is more private work: events, Track II diplomacy where you might be meeting informally with your counterparts from another country to discuss issues, private workshops to try to understand better what’s happening in foreign policy.

BW: Of all of that, what part of the job gives you the most energy?

KG: Probably the variety, in some sense. I like that it’s varied and that I’m not necessarily doing the same thing every day. But my favorite thing about my job is that I’m able to ask really interesting questions and try to understand them. The world is a really interesting place, and I like that I have a job where I’m allowed to ask those questions and try to really understand it.

BW: In a field that rewards people for reacting quickly to whatever happened this morning, what separates durable expertise from simply being good at the news cycle? What did you build early in your career that still compounds today?

KG: Looking back, the most important thing for me has been having really strong foundations. I’m not really someone to chase trends. I think theory is really helpful—and I know theory sounds boring to most people, who want to talk about what’s actually happening right now in policy. But having a really strong foundation in theory, in international relations theory and also military theory, means that any time a different situation arises or something happens in the world that looks new, I already have a set of concepts in place that allow me to work through that problem set.

I’ve found that really valuable: having that set of theoretical concepts to lean on to make sense of things that to other people may look like they completely don’t make sense, or look completely new. To be able to think, well, actually, this is very similar to something that Thomas Schelling wrote in the sixties, or something that Carl von Clausewitz wrote about the Napoleonic period. To make order out of what looks like disorder.

BW: For somebody finishing a Ph.D. who ultimately wants to influence policy, how should they think about the first move—academia, government, or a think tank? Are there doors that become harder to open depending on where you start?

KG: I think this is a very individual decision. I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that one is better than another. They’re just different paths. So people need to be really honest about what it is they want to do, and what they want their time to predominantly be used for. There’s real value in both. I like being able to engage with policy and policymakers, but there’s also real value in people who are a bit away from that scene, in academia, who are able to think through these issues without the noise of D.C. and the existing conversation. Both of those are valuable. So people have to think about what they truly want their career to look like, and what they want their days to look like.

To some extent it’s true that you can move across these. I would say, though, that if you’re serious about wanting an academic career, you probably should start there, and then you can move into the think tank space. That’s an easier trajectory than starting in the think tank space and then moving to academia.

BW: Your path was hardly linear—you were a government major and pre-med, spent two years doing clinical research, went to MIT, taught military officers, and eventually came to Washington. Looking back, is there any detour you would erase, or did the detours turn out to be part of the education?

KG: I think we all would like there to be things we could change—that we’d gotten through something faster, or that we’d written something else. But the most important thing I’d say is that all of the experiences you have shape you in ways you don’t realize at the time.

Coming out of undergrad, I was a government major at Dartmouth, but I was also pre-med, and I was thinking about going to medical school. So I worked for two years as a clinical research assistant in medicine, really planning to go. And it was those two years working in medicine as a research assistant that made me realize that really wasn’t what I wanted. The sign was that when I was supposed to be doing my research for the medical group I was working for, I kept checking the news to find out what was happening with negotiations with North Korea. I was more interested in that. I knew I loved research, but I was more passionate about international affairs.

You could say, in some sense, that those two years working in clinical medicine were wasted. I don’t think they actually were. They shaped me, and I still learned things about research. So I’d just say: always look at what the opportunities are in an experience—the skills you’ll gain, the knowledge you’ll gain. You never quite know down the line when you’ll find that you’re able to use it in some way that might surprise you.

WHAT TO READ

BW: If you could put one thing on the syllabus for someone who wants to think seriously about war—not simply follow it—what would you assign, and why?

KG: That’s a tough question. I really like the foundational theory, so I feel like everyone should read Clausewitz at some point. But it’s a very difficult book, particularly to read on your own. It’s definitely worth struggling through, and a companion helps. The military historian Michael Howard wrote a short introduction to Clausewitz [Clausewitz: A Very Short Introduction]—it’s actually a very thin book, but it does a really good job, especially as a companion while you’re reading, of helping you understand what he actually says. And I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that book.

About the guest. Kelly A. Grieco is a senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and an adjunct professor in Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies. Her research focuses on U.S. foreign and defense policy, military strategy and force structure, alliances, air operations, and the future of war. She previously taught at the Air Command and Staff College and holds a Ph.D. in political science from MIT.

About The Pathway Review. The Pathway Review is an interview publication about how consequential people think, work, and build their careers across foreign policy, politics, business, law, journalism, and public life. Subscribe for new conversations.

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Robert Gates appears before the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation process to become secretary of defense. U.S. Air Force photo.

Robert M. Gates Hall opens on the William & Mary campus later this year, timed to the country’s 250th anniversary. It stands a short walk from the classrooms Gates entered at seventeen, intending to become a surgeon. In February he was re-invested as the university’s chancellor for a third term running through 2033, the first person to hold the office three times; in May, the Robert M. Gates Initiative in American Statecraft launched there, devoted to the instruments of national power that are not military — diplomacy, technology, development, and economic policy. 1 2

Almost none of what came in between was planned. Gates abandoned pre-med for history, intending to teach; took an entry-level job at the CIA as a stopgap; and then, for the better part of four decades, kept telling himself and his wife that the next posting would last a couple of years before he left for the classroom. He is the only career officer to rise from the bottom of the agency to its directorship, and he insists he never positioned himself for any of it.

Robert Gates rose from entry-level CIA analyst to director of Central Intelligence, then became the only secretary of defense to serve presidents of both parties. He is now the first chancellor in William & Mary’s history to serve three terms.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A “D” in calculus

Benjamin Wolf: Secretary Gates, thank you for joining me. When you arrived at William & Mary for undergrad, what kind of life did you imagine you were preparing for? How different was it from the life you ultimately lived?

Robert Gates: It was pretty dramatic. When I arrived at William & Mary, I was seventeen years old. I had been kind of a science geek in high school, and I entered William & Mary as a pre-med student. I wanted to be a surgeon.

I had a very heavy load as a freshman: five hours of chemistry, five hours of biology, three hours of calculus, and three hours of English. I got a D in calculus.

My father made a long-distance call — which in those days was very expensive — and said, “Tell me about the D.”

I said, “Well, Dad, the D was a gift.”

Being in Williamsburg also had a big impact on me. I had always been interested in history and in reading biographies. I read a lot of biographies of American leaders as a kid, and I became taken with the history of the place.

I was also more interested in laboratory work than in the academic and mathematical sides of science. Midway through my sophomore year, I changed my major from pre-med to history. That is where the ball started rolling. I did not know what I would do with it, except that I would probably teach college.

The CIA job that was supposed to be temporary

BW: You went from there to the CIA as an entry-level analyst. What made you say yes, and did you recognize it as the beginning of what would become your career?

RG: I had gradually moved east in my study of history. I started in American history, then moved to Eastern Europe, and then to Russia and the Soviet Union.

I decided I wanted to teach, so I went to Indiana University to get a master’s degree. In the fall of 1965, a CIA recruiter came to campus. I went to see him just as a lark. The first James Bond movie had come out not long before, so the CIA had a certain allure. I was curious, and I also hoped I might get a free trip to Washington as part of the interview process.

By early spring, they invited me to Washington for interviews, a polygraph, and so on. They eventually made me an offer. At the time, my only other job prospect was teaching seventh-grade history back in Williamsburg. I think the teaching job actually paid a little more.

But the CIA sounded interesting and intriguing, so I said, “I’ll do that for a while, and then I’ll go teach.” I never considered the CIA a career.

After I completed my Air Force service and returned to the CIA, I began my Ph.D. program at Georgetown in the fall of 1969. It was a tough few years. I was working probably fifty hours a week at the CIA while taking twelve graduate hours at Georgetown each semester. Later, when graduate students at Texas A&M complained to me about how hard they were working, I would tell them that story. They did not get much sympathy.

I completed my Ph.D. in early 1974 and began sending letters around the country asking about teaching positions. At almost exactly the same time, I received a call from the National Security Council asking me to interview for the Soviet desk, working for Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft.

I told my wife, “I’ll do that for a couple of years, and then I’ll go teach.”

One thing led to another.

Why Soviet history mattered inside the agency

BW: Your doctorate was in Russian and Soviet history. Why that instead of international relations or security studies, and how did it train you to read intelligence differently?

RG: Partly because it interested me. Even while working on my master’s degree, I had moved toward Eastern European, Russian, and Soviet history.

There was also a practical consideration. There were virtually no teaching jobs available in American or European history in those days. I thought I would have a better chance of finding a position if I focused on Russia and the Soviet Union.

The Ph.D. made a significant difference in the way I looked at the Soviet Union. Many people analyzing Soviet policy at the CIA had studied international relations, government, or something similar. They did not necessarily know a great deal about Russia or the Soviet Union. There were not many of us with advanced degrees in Russian and Soviet studies.

Most analysts tended to see the Soviet Union as simply another country or another great power. I thought that perspective missed the ideological foundations of the regime and its policies.

Ideology did not guide every decision. It may not have guided any specific decision completely. But it influenced every decision.

Learning how policymakers actually use intelligence

BW: You are the only career CIA officer to have risen from an entry-level position to become the agency’s director. What set you apart early on, and how did starting at the bottom affect the way you later led the institution?

RG: The thing that made the difference was that I left.

When I went to the National Security Council, I ended up spending about six years there during the 1970s under three presidents: Nixon, Ford, and Carter. By 1980, there was probably no one in the intelligence community who understood better how policymakers used intelligence. I had watched it firsthand under three very different presidents — two Republicans and one Democrat.

That experience did not necessarily win me many points in the intelligence hierarchy, but it caught the attention of people in the White House and in Congress. I was not quiet about how I thought intelligence needed to be reshaped and reformed to become more responsive to policymakers’ needs.

That certainly caught the attention of Vice President George H.W. Bush in 1981. He had served as director of Central Intelligence himself, so he had a feel for these things.

BW: You held substantive positions across several administrations. What did those transitions look like in practice, and is a similar career still possible for young people today?

RG: It would be very difficult today for someone to move from a Republican presidency to a Democratic presidency — or vice versa — while remaining on the NSC in a substantive position.

The process has become much more partisan. People tend to come into the NSC through either a Republican or Democratic channel. A career like mine has become much more difficult.

Serving under those different presidents shaped how I looked at the way intelligence was prepared and delivered to the president and other senior officials. That experience had a significant influence on the actions I took once I reached more senior positions.

Why Washington defaults to military power

BW: The Robert M. Gates Initiative in American Statecraft focuses on the tools of national power short of military force. Having led both the CIA and the Pentagon, why does Washington still find it easier to organize military power than everything around it?

RG: Because the Pentagon has the largest budget in the government, and it has constituents in every state.

It is much easier to get money for the Defense Department and the CIA than for nonmilitary, non-hard-power capabilities. When I was dealing with the F-22, for example, the aircraft had contractors in forty-four states. That is eighty-eight senators. It is tough to cut the money for an F-22.

There is a much broader political base across the political spectrum for defense spending than there is for non-defense expenditures.

The reform he got right and imposed badly

BW: Looking back at the decisions you made at the highest levels of government, which strengthened your confidence in your judgment — and which made you more humble about its limits?

RG: It really began when I became deputy director for intelligence at the CIA and started making some dramatic changes in how we conducted analysis.

I wanted analysts to be accountable for their judgments. Were you right, or were you wrong? Nobody had paid much attention to that in the past.

You can be wrong on any individual issue and still be a brilliant analyst. The question is how you perform over time. I had a portfolio assembled for every analyst so we could evaluate that record. Were you more often accurate than not?

People do not necessarily enjoy being held accountable that way, but it made them more thoughtful. It also required them to be more specific. “On the one hand, on the other hand” is not good enough for the president of the United States. You have to say what you think is actually going to happen. Then, after the fact, you have to ask whether you got it right or wrong.

I made a lot of changes as deputy director for intelligence. The lesson I learned — which did not help me at the time, but stood me in good stead in every subsequent job, including Texas A&M — was about how I implemented them.

I had the support of the director and deputy director of Central Intelligence, William Casey and Admiral Bobby Inman. They thought the changes were exactly right. But I essentially announced and imposed them from the top without consultation, dialogue, or including people in the process.

That was a mistake. Even many people who supported what I wanted to do became hostile to the changes because of the way I had introduced them.

I never did that again as a leader. It taught me the importance of an inclusive and transparent decision-making process.

Telling presidents what they do not want to hear

BW: How did you distinguish between faithfully serving a president and preserving the independence necessary to tell him something he did not want to hear?

RG: We just did it.

During the Reagan administration, we produced an analysis making the case that the pace of Soviet military spending was decreasing. The percentage increases in its defense spending were diminishing.

That was not a welcome message in the middle of the Reagan administration’s military buildup. But we said it anyway. Those were the facts. The Soviets were running out of money and dealing with serious economic problems.

Someone on the NSC staff called me when I was deputy director for intelligence and said, “This is not helpful to the president’s program.”

I said, “My job is not to be helpful to the president’s program. It is to inform him honestly about what is going on.”

That was the only call I ever received like that.

You simply have to suck it up. I was fortunate to serve presidents who might not have liked what we told them but did not put the squeeze on us. Secretaries of state and defense complained about our intelligence all the time, especially when it suggested their policies were not working very well. But nobody ever put serious pressure on me to change a judgment.

Why history beats international relations

BW: Much of your education was rooted in history. What was the importance of that foundation, and should young people interested in careers like yours still follow it?

RG: I have never had any regrets about choosing history.

If you do not know the history of Iran, Russia, or China, you do not have a clue what you are talking about when you try to anticipate what their leaders are going to do.

If you do not understand that Putin believes it is his destiny to recreate the Russian Empire — and that there is no Russian Empire without Ukraine — you do not understand what is going on in Russia. I do not know how you can advise the president without that understanding.

The same is true with Iran. People negotiating with the Iranians today often have little understanding of Persian or Iranian history. They do not understand how the Iranians negotiate, and they have no experience dealing with people who may prefer to die rather than make a concession.

History is much more relevant than political science or international relations, broadly speaking. International relations is certainly useful in helping you understand relationships among countries. But if you do not understand the individual countries involved in that process, I am not sure it takes you very far.

Writing half a page for the president

BW: For someone entering the CIA today, what talents or skills were most important to your success?

RG: I would divide the answer into two parts: bureaucratic and substantive.

The bureaucratic part was figuring out how government worked — or did not work. Its failures created opportunities to think about how it could be made better.

On the substantive side, the work made me a much better and more succinct writer. When you have half a page to explain a complicated problem to the president of the United States, you had better figure out how to make every word and every sentence count.

It is surprising how many people in government struggle with writing, especially writing succinctly.

When I was deputy national security advisor, someone once brought me a six-page, single-spaced memorandum about a very complicated space issue. I said, “You have to make it one page before we can send it to the president.”

He said, “I can’t do that. I don’t know how.”

I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

And I did. I did not know anything about the technology. It was a question of how you presented the argument.

Government also teaches you how things work in the real world, as opposed to the classroom. The classroom is often about how things are supposed to work, not necessarily how they actually work.

That is one reason internships are so important for college students. They give you a flavor of the real world and of how institutions actually operate.

Relationships, criticism, and choosing the right fights

BW: Many people spend entire careers in government without reaching its highest positions. What gives someone the chance to rise? How much depends on relationships, and how much on the quality of the work?

RG: It is both.

As you rise through the ranks, you are inevitably going to antagonize some people. One of my favorite sayings is: To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

You have to learn how to accept criticism. As Director Casey used to put it, you have to grow the hide of a rhinoceros. You have to be willing to watch somebody go after you in print, on television, or elsewhere.

You also have to figure out how to interact with people, particularly those with whom you disagree. That becomes especially important on Capitol Hill as you grow more senior.

You have to approach people who disagree with you, try to find common ground, and, first of all, treat them respectfully and patiently. I cannot imagine testifying the way some people have in recent years — shouting at members of Congress, insulting them, and so on.

You have to show respect for the institution, even when you do not respect some of the individuals.

The same principle applies inside an administration. I had a complicated relationship with Secretary of State George Shultz. I led the analytical side of the CIA for much of the time he was secretary of state, and there were areas in which he completely disagreed with our analysis.

We argued that the Soviet economy was doomed, that the system was not going to survive, and that Gorbachev’s economic reforms would not work. Shultz disagreed with much of that. At the same time, he considered the CIA an invaluable asset in arms-control negotiations and brought CIA officers onto his negotiating teams.

It was a complicated relationship, but we managed it. I think he respected me, and I certainly respected him. I thought he was one of the best secretaries of state we ever had.

You also have to be mindful of your place. There are hierarchies in government. Too many people are willing to antagonize others over trivial things.

If you are going to have a fight, make it about something worth fighting for. If you are going to make an enemy, the issue had better be worth it.

There are no shortcuts. You have to manage relationships and understand the bureaucracy.

The career he never planned

BW: Did you ever know you were aiming for one of those senior positions? Were you consciously taking steps to reach them?

RG: I never had a clue.

I became deputy director for intelligence while I was still in my thirties. I was jumped over a very large number of people who were more senior than I was.

It was not luck, exactly, but it had nothing to do with planning.

William Casey became director under President Reagan, and Admiral Inman, who had led the National Security Agency, became his deputy. Casey hired me as his executive assistant. I had previously been Admiral Stansfield Turner’s executive assistant before moving to a substantive position as national intelligence officer for the Soviet Union.

Casey had heard that I had done a good job for both Zbigniew Brzezinski and Turner, so he asked me to become his executive assistant. I already knew Inman from his time at the NSA, when I worked for Brzezinski at the White House.

Casey and Inman did not get along, and they both trusted me more than they trusted each other. I became executive assistant to both of them and served, in a sense, as a mediator between the director and the deputy.

I knew Casey had a major agenda for improving the analytical product. I wrote him a paper explaining how I thought it could be done. He read it and liked it. Inman liked it too. So they made me deputy director for intelligence.

I had no idea I would be jumped that far, that fast.

Later, when the incumbent retired, I was asked to become deputy director of Central Intelligence. I became acting director when Casey became ill.

President Reagan then nominated me to become director. It was in the middle of Iran-Contra, and there was uncertainty about what my role had been. It was clearly going to be a very difficult confirmation, so I asked Reagan to withdraw my nomination. I told him I was happy to remain as deputy.

The way I handled that impressed a lot of people.

In 1991, when William Webster decided to retire, President George H.W. Bush did the unthinkable: He nominated me again for director of Central Intelligence. The brass ring never comes around twice in Washington. To be nominated for the same job by two different presidents — especially after withdrawing the first time — was extraordinary.

There was no way to predict it. When I withdrew in 1987, I assumed that was it. I thought I would retire as deputy national security advisor to President Bush. Then he nominated me again, and I was confirmed.

The secretary of defense appointment came completely out of the blue as well.

I did not consciously strive to get any of those jobs. Circumstances created the opportunities, and people I had worked with over the years were in positions to make things happen.

You can call it luck or coincidence. It is not that I did not want those jobs, but I never thought they would come to pass. I never consciously tried to position myself to get them.

What setbacks reveal

BW: Gates Hall will open on the campus where you were once an undergraduate. What do you want a freshman walking into that building to learn — even if the lesson has to be learned the hard way?

RG: I would hope no student has to learn lessons the hard way. I would like to think people could learn them the easy way.

But I would tie together two moments: withdrawing my nomination for director of Central Intelligence under President Reagan and getting the D in calculus.

The lesson everybody has to learn is how to deal with setbacks and disappointment. Do you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and say, “That was not much fun. I do not think I want to do that again” — but then keep moving?

The way I handled withdrawing in 1987 made me a lot of friends, including on Capitol Hill. Some people who had opposed me the first time became supporters the second time.

The most liberal senator in the Senate at the time was Alan Cranston, a Democrat from California. After I withdrew, I received a call from him.

He said, “I think you got a really raw deal, and I want you to know that if you ever come up here for confirmation again, I’ll support you.”

Four years later, he did.

How you deal with a setback — and whether you deal with it gracefully — makes an impression on people. It is also simply better for you.

If someone has to learn a hard lesson, it should be how to deal with disappointment and setbacks.

Reading beyond the present

BW: You have mentioned the importance of the histories and biographies you read as a young person. What books would you recommend to students inspired by your career?

RG: I would recommend biographies of people they admire.

Most of the biographies I read as a kid were about George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Abraham Lincoln, and other figures from the country’s early history.

I do not read many books about contemporary politics now. I read a lot, but contemporary books generally do not have sufficient perspective.

I am currently reading Hubris, about the creation of Athens as a democracy, the role of Pericles, and so on. I find books like that more applicable to today’s problems than books about contemporary political figures.

The advent of democracy in Athens involved a popular uprising against oligarchs who controlled the wealth. The relevance to the present is obvious. It is a story about the origins of populism.

Populism did not begin with the Tea Party. It began in Periclean Athens, for God’s sake.

Those kinds of books provide more insight than most biographies of people who are still active today.

About the guest: Robert M. Gates served as the 22nd United States secretary of defense from 2006 to 2011 under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama — the only defense secretary in American history to serve in both Republican and Democratic administrations. He spent nearly twenty-seven years as an intelligence professional, including nearly nine years at the National Security Council, and served as director of Central Intelligence from 1991 to 1993. He was president of Texas A&M University from 2002 to 2006 and is the chancellor of William & Mary, where he began an unprecedented third term in 2026. He chairs the Robert M. Gates Global Policy Center. President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. 1 2

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review publishes long-form interviews with people in politics, policy, journalism, law, diplomacy, markets, and public service about the work they do and the path that brought them there. 3

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This interview was conducted in July 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

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Judge Roy K. Altman signs a copy of Israel on Trial at Touro University in New York, May 2026. Photo courtesy of Touro University.

Benjamin Netanyahu says he is coming to New York in September for the United Nations General Assembly, as he usually does. This year, though, New York’s mayor has made clear that he would rather Netanyahu stay away.

Zohran Mamdani has called the Israeli prime minister a war criminal, said he is not welcome in the city, and urged Washington to arrest him under a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.

There is an obvious problem with that demand: the United States is not a member of the ICC and has never recognized its authority in the way its member states do. For all the attention the proposed arrest received over the summer, the real question was never whether Netanyahu would be taken into custody. It was whether the warrant carries any legal force here at all.

Roy K. Altman has spent his career thinking about questions like that. A federal judge in the Southern District of Florida since 2019, Altman has now written Israel on Trial, a book that examines six of the most serious accusations made against Israel through archaeology, genetics, military conduct, history, and international law. The book approaches those claims less as political talking points and more as arguments to be weighed and tested, much like they would be in a courtroom.

The book is also deeply connected to Altman’s own story. Born in Venezuela and raised in Miami, he spent summers in Israel and winters traveling with his family to Civil War battlefields and Revolutionary War sites. When he was eight, standing at Missionary Ridge and seeing snow for the first time, his father gave him a lesson about what a free society demands of the people who inherit it. From that moment forward, Altman says he knew he wanted to enter a career in public service.

In this Pathway Review conversation, Altman and I talked about the case he makes for Israel, why he believes the West is losing an information war, how he navigates public debate as a sitting judge, and what his path to the federal bench taught him about character, service, and ambition.

Judge Altman spoke in his individual capacity, not on behalf of the judiciary.

The Country His Parents Chose

Ben Wolf: Judge Altman, thank you for doing this. For readers unfamiliar with your background — where does the story start?

Roy Altman: I was born in Venezuela and moved to Miami when I was a little boy. My parents always taught me that in this country we could be or do anything we wanted, so long as we worked hard, followed the law, and treated people with respect.

Every vacation was the same when we were little. Summers we spent in Israel. Winters we spent traveling around the South to Civil War battlefields — I’ve been to hundreds and hundreds of battlefields — and to Revolutionary War sites, like Colonial Williamsburg and Yorktown. Learning about the country we had come to.

I tell one story a lot about what that meant to me. I was eight, and my father and I were at Missionary Ridge in Chattanooga, where a teenage Arthur MacArthur Jr. — later the father of General Douglas MacArthur — changed the course of the battle. He saw the standard-bearer shot, and he couldn’t bear the thought of the flag touching the ground, so he charged up that ridge by himself carrying it, against orders. The rest of the Union army charged up after him. They won. There’s a marker at the top.

We were standing there and it started to snow. It was the first time I’d ever seen snow. And I said to him, isn’t this fun? Isn’t this beautiful?

My father turned to me very sternly and said: We’re not here because it’s fun. We’re here so that you and your sister can understand the character of the country we brought you to. We brought you to a place where six hundred thousand men had to die so that part of the country could be free. That is the level of devotion and dedication a free and fair democracy demands.

From that point forward, I always wanted to be in public service.

I grew up in Miami and went to Columbia, where I was a quarterback on the football team and pitched on the baseball team. Then Yale for law school. I clerked for a federal appellate judge, and then I became a federal prosecutor, handling some of the most serious cases in America — human trafficking, child exploitation, and some of the most violent drug-trafficking organizations anywhere in the world.

After that I became a partner at Podhurst Orseck, doing a very particular kind of work. I represented most of the families of the passengers aboard the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared in the Indian Ocean, and the Latin American families affected by the Germanwings plane that was deliberately crashed into the French Alps in 2015.

Those cases made me feel as though I were working for the government again. My clients were people who had been victimized, who had done nothing wrong, and who deserved redress, and a shoulder to lean on, and somebody skilled in the art to be a voice for the most vulnerable people in our society. I think I did that. The Malaysia Airlines litigation, incidentally, came before Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was a district judge at the time and is now on the Supreme Court.

Then the president nominated me to the federal bench. That process is long and arduous, and in some ways justifiably so. If five or six hundred federal judges are going to decide whether our democratically elected legislatures and executives can pass certain laws — whether those laws comply with our constitutional framework — we ought to make sure they’re the right kind of person. The judiciary is the only branch that can’t be removed except by impeachment, and the only branch with the power to tell the other two that they acted unconstitutionally. That is precisely why the Constitution requires the other two branches to select the federal judges: the president nominates, the Senate confirms. It took almost two years. I was confirmed in 2019.

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Putting Israel on Trial

Before turning to the book, I want to ask about the ICC warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said Netanyahu should be arrested if he enters the city, even while acknowledging that a mayor may lack the authority to enforce the warrant. As a matter of law, what force—if any—does an ICC warrant carry inside the United States?

I can’t comment on politicians, because of my role.

As for the authority of a local official to enforce an ICC warrant, there is no such authority, for two reasons. First, even if we had signed a treaty with a foreign country, that treaty would be enforced by the federal government, which has plenary authority over international affairs. Second, and most importantly, the United States has never been a party to the Rome Statute that created the ICC to begin with. The warrant therefore has no effect in the United States whatsoever.

Israel on Trial examines six of the most serious accusations made against Israel. Which claim required the greatest intellectual effort to evaluate fairly—not simply to rebut, but to test against the evidence for yourself?

None. All six are frivolous.

The point of the claims, as I discovered going deeply into this, is not actually to say something true about Israel. None of the six even approaches reality. The point is to destroy the State of Israel. Many of them were constructed by the Soviet Union long before this whole issue with the Palestinians developed, as a way of contesting American influence in the Middle East.

We were locked in a Cold War, and much of its inflection point was the Middle East, where so much of the world’s natural resources were coming out of the ground. We had geostrategic interests there and so did they. We supported Israel; they supported and militarized the Arab states, including Egypt and Syria, Israel’s most important adversaries. They built those adversaries up to destroy Israel so that America would be pushed out of the region entirely.

Those plans failed. A few million Israelis, against surrounding populations numbering in the hundreds of millions, won in 1948, won in 1967, won in 1973 — where they surrounded the Egyptian Third Army in the Sinai until it was starving in the desert. That is how badly the Arab armies were beaten, in war after war after war that they initiated for the destruction of Israel.

At that point the Soviets said: we’re not going to destroy them militarily, so we need to destroy their logistical support network in the West. There was an ideological framework supporting Israel — the narrative that Israel is necessary because of what was done to the Jews — and the plan was to break that chain. So they created a set of claims and passed them into the Arab world, first through the PLO, then through Nasser in Egypt and Assad in Syria, and ultimately throughout the Arab world they were funding and arming. Narratives that twisted the logic of the Jewish claim to the land. That inverted reality, precisely in order to confuse people in the West about whether it made sense to support Israel at all.

Take the first claim, that the Jews are colonists who took land that wasn’t theirs. It is frivolously absurd.

Set the Bible aside — although the Bible remains an important source for hundreds of millions of people, teaching page after page that the significance of the Jewish people is their connection to the land of Israel. Set it aside, and you still have three independent categories of evidence that don’t depend on the testimony of anyone with a bias or an interest in the outcome.

Rocks in the ground: the archaeology. Words on the page: the documentary record. Blood in the veins: the genetic evidence. All three confirm that the people who lived for thousands of years in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — who were there before the Arab Muslim conquest of the seventh century, before the Christians, before the Byzantines, before the Romans, before the Assyrians — were Jews. They spoke Hebrew, the same language Jews speak in Israel today. They passed to their children the same naming conventions used in Israel today. They worshipped the same God under the same precepts, including Passover, including Hanukkah, including the laws of being kosher. All of those rules were made for the people who lived in the land of Israel, and they are still followed there.

So Israel is the furthest thing from a colonial project. If you went back thirty-two hundred years and looked at every people alive in the world at that time, the Jews are the only ones who still speak the same language, still practice the same religion, and still govern the same land. They are the most indigenous people governing their own land in the world today.

But that is not the point of the claim. The point is to hold a mirror up to what has actually happened, in order to minimize the extent to which Jews have been victimized. There has been real colonization all over the Middle East, including in the land of Israel. It simply wasn’t the Jews doing it. It was the Arab Muslim armies that came out of Arabia in the seventh century and conquered not only Israel but the entire Middle East and North Africa, displacing native populations most people in the West couldn’t name today — the Zoroastrians of Persia, the Yazidis, the Kurds, the Druze, and the Amazigh of North Africa, the true native peoples of what are now Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.

The book draws extensively from archaeology, history, genetics, military practice, and international law. What did conducting that large of a research process look like, and what convinced you that this was the moment to turn that research into a book?

It was extensive, and it took years of my life.

I majored in ancient history at Columbia and wrote my thesis on Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian. He came from a prominent priestly family in the land of Israel and was given command of a region in the Galilee during the great revolt against Rome in 66 AD. He was captured after Yodfat, the city he was fortifying, fell. He first became a slave, but Vespasian — the general who became emperor — saw great value in having a Jew write the history of the Jewish people and their interactions with Rome. So Josephus became his court historian and wrote two monumental works, The Jewish War and The Antiquities of the Jews, which obviously nobody on a college campus has taken the time to read these days. I read the surviving portions cover to cover and wrote about them in college.

So I’ve been studying this since I was an undergraduate. Every time I go to Israel I make a point of visiting the newest archaeological excavations and staying current on what’s being found, in Israel and in the lands around it.

After October 7, all of that became heightened. I began organizing and leading trips to Israel for American federal judges — people trained to weigh evidence and apply a well-worn set of rules to complicated and contested disputes — so they could see the reality on the ground for themselves and come home able to tell their communities what they had seen. In the course of that I spent a great deal of time studying the war in Gaza, meeting with the Military Advocate General’s Corps, the lawyers who in a real sense run the legal side of the war, and with the IDF’s own military courts and prosecutors: the people who investigate, discharge, imprison, and punish soldiers who violate the rules of engagement. Which is, of course, the kind of thing genocidal armies do not do.

So the project has been a labor of love over the course of a lifetime. But it became urgent after October 7, when I came to believe the distortion we were watching take hold in Western society was corroding the legitimacy of our way of life. And I mean that.

I have always said that if you look at history, the societies that allowed Jews to flourish are healthy, vibrant, thriving societies — America being the greatest example. And the societies that turn to the conspiracy of Jew-hatred, that turn to persecuting Jews, especially the ones that convince themselves they are doing nothing of the sort, are societies that are sick and dying.

I don’t say that because I’m a Jew. I say it because I am an American who came to this country with nothing, knowing no one, as a little boy, and was embraced with open arms by the greatest force for good the world has ever known. And I am afraid that if we don’t do something about the conspiracy of Jew-hatred and the anti-Israel nonsense in our media and on our campuses, we are allowing the Muslim Brotherhood, the Chinese Communist Party, and Russian information operations — the enemies of the United States, who study history better than we do — to make us press the button of civilizational collapse without our knowing we are pressing it. That button is Jew-hatred.

That is why, in addition to my day job, I began traveling the country speaking and teaching about Israel, and ultimately writing this book.

The Judge and the Public Debate

The language you’ve been using to describe the accusations against Israel — “preposterous,” “frivolous” — is perhaps stronger than what a reader would expect from the bench. Where’s the line for you between how you write as an author and how you write as a judge?

The premise isn’t right. Judges regularly identify claims as frivolous.

There is an entire body of law governing the sanctions that can be imposed on a party for advancing frivolous arguments, and judges are very clear when that standard is met. If you spend time reading judicial decisions, you’ll see it.

These claims are frivolous in exactly the same sense. They’re frivolous not merely because they’re false, and not merely because all the evidence shows they’re false, but because they’re advanced with an ulterior motive — one that isn’t about getting it right. The purpose is to destroy the Jewish state by other means, and to divide the United States over whether we will stand beside an ally, beside the Jewish people, beside the broader Judeo-Christian foundations of Western civilization. Our enemies want Americans divided and unable to see what is good for us and what is right in front of us.

An argument in court is frivolous and sanctionable not simply because it is incorrect, but because it is advanced to deceive the court or the other party, or for some other improper end. That is the sense in which I use the word.

Federal judges are expected to protect both their impartiality and the appearance of impartiality. Given how contested the debate over Israel has become, why did you conclude that publishing this book was consistent with your responsibilities as a judge?

Federal judges routinely write, speak, and publish about law, facts, and history, even when other people later use that material toward ends that look political. Judges and Supreme Court justices have written extensively about their judicial philosophy — about how history and evidence shape their views on questions like abortion, same-sex marriage, and immigration.

Those books and articles and speeches are not inappropriate merely because politicians or the public may later borrow their themes. They are appropriate because they are rooted in law and describe what the law is, what the facts are, and what the evidence shows.

That is all my book does. It never discusses a single politician. It never supports or opposes a single bill before Congress or any other legislature. It never suggests the State Department should take this or that action toward this or that country. It wades into none of those debates. It removes the emotion and the vitriol and the diatribe surrounding Israel and asks what happens when settled legal rules are applied to undisputed facts. In that sense it is no different from other law books.

What’s actually happening is that people don’t like the answer the law arrives at when you apply it to the Jewish state the way you would apply it to any other state in the world. There is an old saying among lawyers: if the facts are against you, pound the law; if the law is against you pound the facts; but if both are against you, pound the table.

The book lays out, over a couple hundred pages and something like seven hundred endnotes — each running nearly a paragraph of citations — that the undisputed facts and the law are on the side of Israel and the Jewish people. Critics can’t attack it on the facts and can’t attack it on the law. So they attack the person. They attack the project. They call it a political venture inappropriate for a judge. It is none of those things, and making that attack is itself an admission that the book cannot be answered on its merits.

Losing the Information War

There is nonetheless a real and growing opposition to Israel in American political life, including among lawmakers. Whatever one thinks of any particular proposal, the trend is unmistakable. Why is it running against the evidence you present?

I can’t talk about politicians, that I won’t do. But I’ll say this: that is what it looks like to be on the losing side of an information war.

That’s why we need to wake up. The Muslim Brotherhood, the Russians, the Chinese Communist Party — the enemies of the West — have been fighting a war many Americans didn’t know had started twenty-five years ago.

The documents on this were introduced into evidence in the 1990s in the Holy Land Foundation case: wiretapped conversations among terror organizations asking how to destroy America, how to end American support for Israel. The plan was to wage a long-term information war that would bleed into the universities and infiltrate the minds of America’s young people, so that when those people grew older they would be convinced Israel was bad and stop supporting it.

That playbook has succeeded. It outlived the Soviet Union. It bled in through the academy, through Western media, through the student bodies — exactly as it was drawn up in the mid-nineties — and we were asleep at the wheel.

If I have any optimism about it, it’s this. When I was in college, my pitching coach would say, go out to the mound, I’ve got to stop by the bullpen, I’ll meet you there. So I’d gather my things and start walking. And he’d sprint past me, and when I got to the bullpen he’d say, fifty push-ups.

And I’d say, why fifty push-ups?

And he’d say, because you lost the race.

And I’d say, I didn’t know there was a race.

And he’d say: exactly. In life, it is always a race.

We as Westerners, we as Jews, forgot that basic truism. We thought we had won the argument for liberalism and democracy when the Soviet Union fell, and we were wrong. What we’ve been shown is that for thirty years our adversaries were propagating these myths under our noses without any serious rebuttal from us. This book is one attempt to stem that tide.

So for young students—who may see this “information war” that you mention being lost—what can they do to combat it?

Three things.

First, read the book, digest the facts, learn the law and its basic principles, and be able to explain to people why these accusations are wrong.

Second, study the history of the Soviet propaganda campaign these claims came out of. Understand where they originated, how deeply anti-American they are, and how much of the life we have built in the West is at stake. This is not a small country in the Middle East being attacked. It is Western civilization writ large. Be able to articulate that, and to say where it comes from.

Third, speak up. Organize. Stand up for yourselves.

Everywhere you go on a campus there’s a Palestinian flag, and only half the time is there an Israeli or an American one. That has to end. One of the things I find beautiful is that at a pro-Israel rally you see exactly two flags — the Israeli flag and the American flag — because everyone there understands the two are intimately conjoined. At the other demonstrations, if you see an American or Israeli flag, it’s because it’s being burned or stomped on.

Stand up for America, stand up for the West, stand up for the society giving us every benefit we enjoy — and do it repeatedly, and don’t shrink from the moment. This is an inflection point in history, and every person will stand up and be counted.

The Path to the Bench

You’ve had at least four careers at this point in your life — prosecutor, trial lawyer, judge, and author. Of those four, which has been the most unexpected or surprising to you?

The success of this book has been a tremendous surprise. Being nominated to the federal bench by the president of the United States in my thirties was an enormous surprise. At every step, you never imagine these things are going to open up and become possible for you.

People ask me all the time how that happens. It does not happen because you planned every step of the way to get to the end. It happens because you work hard, find something you care deeply about, and spend a great deal of time developing real expertise in it — and because you treat everyone around you, whether it’s the partner at the law firm or the paralegal working for you, with the dignity and respect they deserve as human beings.

The world opens up to people who work hard and treat people with respect in an authentic way. Not because you’re treating somebody well since you want something out of them, but because they’re a fellow human being who is equal to you under God and under the law. That’s what I was taught, and it’s what I’ve tried to practice.

Any regrets?

One. There was a point when I assumed the U.S. Attorney’s Office wouldn’t hire me — the office generally wants three to five years of practice before you become a federal prosecutor, and I was applying straight out of law school. I told everyone that if I didn’t get the job, I would join the military. Probably the Marine Corps, where some friends from law school had gone. I’d serve, and then reapply.

By some stroke of luck, I was hired, and I began my career defending my community as a federal prosecutor. But my only regret is that I never had the chance to serve my country in that particular way.

For young lawyers who hope to sit on the federal bench someday, which skills and experiences mattered most to getting to where you are today?

First, genuinely treat everyone in your life with dignity and respect. When you’re nominated to the federal bench, something like two hundred and fifty people from your life get interviewed — by the FBI, by Senate staff, by the American Bar Association, by the White House, by the Department of Justice. Not just the people you went to college and law school with. Every lawyer you’ve tried a case with, every lawyer you’ve tried a case against, every judge you’ve appeared in front of, your neighbors going back years.

If any one of them says Roy lies, or Roy steals, or Roy treats people badly, he’s an angry and aggressive person — I don’t get to be here. Because there are hundreds of other people in that line who would have made just as good a judge. So it matters to go through life, even when you’re angry, even on a bad day, and take the breath and remember that the person in front of you is a human being too, who deserves dignity and respect.

Second, be in the courtroom. This modern path where lawyers go to big firms and sit in cubicles doing document review and writing memoranda no judge will ever see — never practicing the artistry of being a courtroom lawyer, never learning the rules of evidence and procedure like the back of their hand — that is not the way to the federal bench. You need to be in court practicing the people’s business, serving the people in your community, making it better and safer and stronger than it was before you got there. As a prosecutor, as a defense lawyer, as a JAG officer.

Third, be multifaceted. As a judge you don’t do only civil or only criminal — you do both. So spend part of your career on criminal work and part on civil, so you understand both sides of the house. You can’t be pigeonholed into one narrow band of law, because when you become a judge you are a universalist. You have to know a lot of different kinds of law.

Those are the three: treat people with dignity and respect, become a real courtroom lawyer, and develop enough breadth to understand the whole system.

About the Guest

Roy K. Altman is a United States district judge for the Southern District of Florida. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, and raised in Miami, he graduated from Columbia University, where he played football and baseball, and from Yale Law School, where he was projects editor of the Yale Law Journal. He clerked for Judge Stanley Marcus on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, served as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida, and was a partner at Podhurst Orseck. Confirmed in 2019 at 36, he became the youngest federal district judge in the country. He is the author of Israel on Trial: Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law.

About The Pathway Review

The Pathway Review features long-form conversations with people working across politics, foreign affairs, law, journalism, diplomacy, markets, public service, and the world of ideas — what they do, how they arrived there, and what others can learn from the path they took.

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This interview was conducted by video call in July 2026 and has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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Luke Nichter, the James H. Cavanaugh Endowed Chair in Presidential Studies at Chapman University and a Griffin Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Photo courtesy of the Hoover Institution.

In July 2024, a sitting Democratic president abandoned his reelection campaign under pressure that came not from Republicans but from his own party, handing the nomination to a vice president who could neither run on his record nor run away from it. Luke Nichter had published the book on that situation a year earlier. He set it in 1968.

Nichter’s account of the Humphrey–Nixon–Wallace race argues that Lyndon Johnson did not leave the story when he withdrew from it in March, and that his private ambivalence about his own vice president helped decide the election. It is a contested claim, and he reached it the way he reaches most things: by going back to the records and finding that the accepted version rests on footnotes that dissolve when you follow them. That method has taken him through Nixon’s White House tapes, into a federal courthouse to pry loose sealed Watergate material, and across eighty-five interviews with the children and staffers of the men who ran in 1968.

This interview was conducted by video in July 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

From Westminster to the Archives

Benjamin Wolf: Before you became a historian of presidents and the Cold War, what did you imagine your career would look like? What first convinced you that history could become your life’s work?

Luke Nichter: I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I grew up as a blue-collar kid in the Midwest. I was a first-generation college graduate, and my parents were postal workers. It is a story shared by many first-generation students: if you asked us what our lives were going to look like, we had no more of a clue than anyone else. When you look back, everything appears linear. A led to B, and B led to C. But when you’re living through it, you’re in the eye of the storm, and you don’t know what comes next.

I finished my undergraduate degree with no real idea of what I wanted to be when I grew up. In some ways, I still don’t know how to answer that question. So I went looking for a job in Washington, and like a lot of people, I got bitten by the bug of politics. I started in my early twenties working in the Speaker’s office and then for another committee in the House.

Through some connections, I eventually had a similar experience in the British government. I worked for a member of Parliament and for a minister in Tony Blair’s second government. At the beginning of the Iraq War, that minister was transferred from European affairs to Near Eastern affairs, which was the issue everyone wanted to work on at the time.

Westminster felt like it was under siege. Going to work on the Tube felt like passing through a siege. On February 15, 2003, roughly a million protesters gathered around Westminster.

Editor’s note: Estimates of the February 15, 2003, London march varied widely — police put the crowd near 750,000, organizers at closer to two million.

After a few years of that, I began asking myself what I actually wanted to do. Politics in the moment was fun, but it was tiring. I wasn’t one of those political animals who consumed it twenty-four hours a day.

Then it dawned on me that there was such a thing as political history. You could still engage with politics and recent history, try to learn from them, and apply those lessons to present-day problems. Eventually I realized political history was a closer fit for who I was.

Why 1968 Kept Coming Back

BW: You went from doing politics to studying it, and you are now a Griffin Fellow in the Hoover Institution’s Applied History Working Group. What does “applied history” mean in practice? How would a policymaker use a rigorous history of 1968 differently from a conventional think-tank memorandum?

LN: Most historians would agree that history does not repeat itself. Some people say it rhymes. I’m not even sure it does that.

But history can still be useful. It can be a companion for understanding the present. Let me give you a specific example instead of speaking in the abstract.

When my book about 1968 came out in 2023, it received attention. Usually the first year is a book’s best year, and interest declines from there. My experience was different. The interest followed something closer to a U-shape: it declined after the first year, as expected, and then rose again in 2024. The second wave may have been larger than the first.

The reason was that 1968 featured an unpopular, moderate Democratic president who probably wanted to run again but was torn about the decision. The country was fighting an unpopular war. A critical mass of Americans had lost faith in government at every level, the national political parties, the press, higher education, and other institutions. Young people were asserting themselves differently from their parents’ generation. The United States faced turbulence in the Middle East, economic instability, and anxiety over inflation.

Much of that also described 2024.

As 1968 unfolded, Lyndon Johnson became the last president to be forced from his party’s ticket while seeking reelection. The pressure did not primarily come from predictable Republican opponents. It came from within his own party, particularly from its left wing, which had had enough of Johnson and was aggressively reasserting itself.

History did not literally repeat itself. On March 31, 2024, President Biden did not go on television and withdraw in the same dramatic fashion as Johnson. But he did withdraw from the race in July after planning, as far as we know, to run for reelection. We will not have the full records surrounding that decision for decades. But we know Biden did not step aside because of pressure from Republicans. The decisive pressure came from within his own party.

The people were different. The policies were different. The country had changed tremendously. But 1968 was still a useful vehicle for understanding what was happening.

I told friends in the press what to watch for next. Kamala Harris would not want a repeat of the chaotic Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. Democrats would want to calm the situation and anoint her in advance rather than risk an open convention fight.

Harris also faced a dilemma similar to Hubert Humphrey’s. She needed to establish her own identity and policies, but she was still the sitting vice president. Unless she resigned, she remained connected to Joe Biden. Like Humphrey, she owed much of her political position to the president she served, which made it difficult to adopt fully independent positions or openly break with him, as some people suggested.

None of these analogies was perfect. But they were useful enough to help anticipate what was coming. I was astonished as 2024 unfolded that many journalists covering the campaign — and even many historians who had written about 1968 — did not know the history well enough to draw those comparisons.

That is what applied history can offer. It does not give policymakers a mechanical answer or prove that the same outcome will occur. It identifies patterns, constraints, and recurring dilemmas that sharpen judgment.

We often hear that this is the most divided the United States has ever been. People ask how we escape the impasse. I’m not a hopeless optimist, but I remember something Nixon’s longtime speechwriter Ray Price once said: the 1860s were an actual civil war; the 1960s were a proxy civil war.

As a people, we have been here before. One lesson from the chaotic and disorderly 1960s is that we emerged from them. We did so together, and the country eventually returned to something more normal. When you know the patterns — while recognizing that no analogy is perfect — history becomes an enormously helpful companion the next time you face a storm.

Finding the Archival Frontier

BW: You have built your career around the “long 1960s,” from John F. Kennedy through Watergate. What pulled you into that era rather than, say, the New Deal or the Reagan years?

LN: I wish I had an eloquent, polished answer. For me, it began with a deadline.

Every graduate student eventually reaches the moment when they have to choose a dissertation topic. You don’t necessarily realize that a decision made hastily against a deadline can define who you are. It determines who serves on your committee and which jobs you can apply for. For a historian, the dissertation often becomes the first book, so that choice can shape the first decade of your career and the tenure process. I understand now how important those decisions were. At the time, I had no idea.

My adviser gave me one of the best pieces of academic advice I have ever received: choose something along the archival frontier.

That is a fancy way of saying you should study something whose records have only recently become available. It once took roughly thirty years for everyone involved to be gone, for the secrets to lose their sensitivity, and for the records to open. As government secrecy has grown, it can now take fifty years or longer. Intelligence records can remain protected for seventy-five years or more.

What qualifies as the frontier is therefore a moving target. If you turned the clock back thirty or forty years from when I was in graduate school, it placed me in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

But when I wandered through the stacks of a major library, it was bewildering. My intellectual heroes had written books four or six inches thick. I saw all these shelves about the 1960s, Vietnam, Watergate, China, détente, and almost every other aspect of the Cold War. I thought, “How could I possibly have anything to add?”

What changed my perspective was listening to the White House tapes, particularly Nixon’s.

Day after day, I heard things on the recordings that conflicted with what I had read in books written by those same heroes. It dawned on me that maybe they had not gotten everything right. When you hear policymakers themselves discussing how the trip to China unfolded, or the sequencing of decisions that ended American military involvement in Vietnam, it offers a powerfully different perspective.

I came to a conclusion that has stayed with me ever since: a lot of important history books are not necessarily based on rigorous research. They are based on something else, and I don’t always know what that something else is.

I can’t imagine ever leaving that period, or needing to. The taped evidence is extraordinarily powerful, and the culture wars of the 1960s still resonate today. If Washington gave me the first bite of the bug, the long 1960s gave me the second.

What Walter Mondale Revealed About 1968

BW: In researching The Year That Broke Politics, you interviewed roughly eighty-five former staffers and family members from the Johnson, Humphrey, Nixon, and Wallace camps. Was there one interview that overturned something you thought you already understood?

LN: There was more than one.

These were people I had grown up hearing about: Johnson’s two daughters, George Wallace Jr., Hubert Humphrey III. When you speak with people who have carried names like those for their entire lives, you remain conscious of the history sitting across from you.

My greatest challenge was moving them away from the stories they had told many times before. Today you can look someone up and hear the same anecdotes repeated across interviews. My goal was to move them onto fresh ground. That is especially important with 1968, where there are mountains of books about the decade, the election, and Vietnam. All my books examine subjects written about many times before me, and the difficulty is that the story is deeply ingrained in American culture — and in you. You learned it a particular way. How do you reach a different conclusion?

The interview that challenged me more than any other was with former Vice President Walter Mondale.

At the time of the 1968 election he was Senator Mondale. He was close to Hubert Humphrey and occupied Humphrey’s former Senate seat from Minnesota. They came from the same part of the country.

We met at his law firm in Minneapolis. I had just flown in from Texas, and I think the pilot announced that it was six degrees when we landed. That is pretty cold for someone arriving from Texas.

Mondale was affable, friendly, and warm. I remember thinking that if more of the country had seen that version of him in 1984, he might have become president.

At the very end of our conversation, he said something like, “Do you want to know what I really think about 1968?”

I said, “Of course.”

I asked whether he believed Lyndon Johnson wanted his own vice president to win.

For most people that is a no-brainer. Johnson and Humphrey were members of the same party. Humphrey was a protégé. They had worked closely together in the White House and previously in the Senate, where Johnson had helped Humphrey’s career during his own years in leadership. Their association stretched back long before Humphrey became vice president.

But over the years I had picked up hints in books that raised doubts about whether Johnson truly supported him. I wanted to ask Mondale directly.

He answered without hesitation: “Absolutely not. Absolutely not.”

I was not expecting that. I’m a historian, not a professional interviewer. I tend to think we are simply having a conversation. In that moment, I wasn’t sure how to follow up.

I also learned that an interviewer cannot immediately rescue someone from an uncomfortable moment. Sometimes you have to let the silence breathe.

I waited a few seconds and asked, “What do you mean? Do you think President Johnson wanted his nemesis, Richard Nixon, to win?”

Mondale paused. We were sitting across from each other at a long law-firm conference table. He looked away, then looked back at me and said, “Maybe.”

It wasn’t definitive. But I had never heard anyone at that level question fifty years of accepted history about the election.

Editor’s note: Nichter’s reading of Johnson’s intentions is contested. Other historians of 1968 have argued that Johnson’s coolness toward Humphrey reflected frustration over Vietnam policy rather than any preference for Nixon, and a recollection offered nearly fifty years after the fact carries the ordinary limits of oral history. Nichter lays out the documentary case in The Year That Broke Politics.

Mondale challenged me, from an early stage of the book, to focus closely on Johnson’s mindset.

Most accounts move Johnson out of the center of the story after March 31, when he withdrew from the race. The spotlight turns to the candidates seeking to succeed him — Humphrey, Nixon, Wallace, Eugene McCarthy — or to the other extraordinary events of the year.

Mondale suggested that Johnson remained central. If anything, Johnson worked even harder after he withdrew. His objective had changed. He was no longer trying to secure his own reelection; he was trying to influence the choice of his successor.

So much of Johnson’s presidency remained incomplete. He would be handing unfinished policies to whoever entered the Oval Office next, and that person would have enormous power to shape his legacy.

That interview fundamentally changed the direction of my research. More than any other conversation, it produced the book readers ultimately saw.

How the First Draft Becomes the Final Story

BW: You are describing an established narrative that remained largely intact for half a century. Why did that interpretation of 1968 become so fixed? Was it because journalists wrote the first draft, or was there something about the story itself that made it resistant to revision?

LN: I don’t think the problem is unique to 1968 or even to presidential elections.

Journalists write the first draft of history. During a campaign, a reporter might be assigned to one candidate or several. Once the election is over, the reporter assembles campaign notes, adds some retrospective analysis, and publishes a book as quickly as possible.

That was essentially Theodore White’s formula for The Making of the President series covering 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972. He produced those books extraordinarily quickly, often by the summer after the election.

Then people assume: how much better could I possibly do? White was there. He covered the campaign.

Those first books are necessarily incomplete. They are written on imperfect timetables with imperfect information. But they are not easily refuted.

Then come the social scientists, political scientists, and eventually historians to do the mopping up. Even when they challenge portions of the early narrative using newly declassified evidence, they often fit that evidence within the outline that already exists. The original authors knew what they knew, but they did not know what they did not know.

Once a narrative becomes established, the broader public grows comfortable with it, even when the story has partisan implications.

Take Watergate. Nixon won more than 60 percent of the popular vote in a 1972 landslide. Within roughly nine months, he was underwater in public-opinion polls. That was a dramatic reversal. And it was not only Democrats and journalists who became comfortable with the standard Watergate narrative. Many Republicans did, too. They would say something like, “He did some wonderful things, but he was deeply flawed.”

We grow comfortable with a narrative and assume the experts completed a thorough investigation.

My perspective today is almost the reverse. The more books I see about a subject, the less confidence I sometimes have that the underlying history has been fully tested.

Anyone who loves history will recognize the diminishing returns. The first book you read about a subject is exciting because everything is new. By the tenth, you are learning less from each additional volume, and many appear to be repeating the same stories. The repetition becomes so complete that a book feels deficient if it leaves out one of the familiar anecdotes.

When you follow the footnotes, however, the books frequently refer to one another. They may all lead back to the original proto-history — the first draft of the story.

No one stops to think, “I need to go back and check the records. I need to spend a month sitting in an archive. How do I know the earlier author transcribed that quotation correctly?”

People assume the history has been crowdsourced and must be mostly right. But when you trace some of those footnotes back to their origin, they vanish like a mirage in the desert.

That does not mean the earlier historians got everything wrong. But the original sources can tell a considerably different story.

So I tell my students: don’t assume they got it right. Even if the authors are your intellectual heroes, even if they are beautiful writers and storytellers, look over their shoulders and inspect the original sources. You will almost always find something different or incomplete. Sometimes the explanation is as innocuous as the release of new evidence since the book was written.

There is enormous value in checking the source, because conventional wisdom is often not very wise.

Taking Watergate’s Secrets to Court

BW: In 2009 you set out to open still-secret Watergate records. Walk me through the mechanics of bringing that petition. How did you know that action needed to be taken, and what convinced you the records might actually be obtainable?

LN: As stakeholders in a democratic system, we all have rights — and, I would argue, obligations — to hold public officials accountable. They are operating, in whole or in part, with taxpayer funding.

We therefore have certain tools. For a historian, one of those is the Freedom of Information Act. You can submit a request to a federal agency and ask for records. It doesn’t always work. The records might not exist, or an agency might withhold or heavily redact them. But when there is a disagreement, you have administrative rights. You can appeal, and in exceptional cases, disputes over FOIA are ultimately decided through litigation.

I’m not an attorney, but my work in this area abuts the law.

In my case, I was interested in why so many Watergate records remained closed.

I sometimes joke with my students that my goal is not to turn them into conspiracy theorists by the end of the semester. But conspiracy theories sometimes begin in a perfectly ordinary place: the official explanation is obviously incomplete.

Watergate may still be the largest FBI investigation in American history, although investigations such as September 11 may eventually overtake it once those records are available. Most people assume we have learned everything there is to know, particularly about Nixon. He was the first president to resign. He left in disgrace and accepted a pardon. To many people, the logic is simple: if he accepted a pardon, he must have been guilty of something.

Yet all these records were still closed.

I now believe there are several million pages of unreleased Watergate records, most of them grand-jury material. There are also several hundred hours of Nixon’s tapes that have never been released — more than Kennedy recorded in his entire presidency and almost as much as Johnson recorded in his.

I kept asking: why? Who is being protected? Whose interests are being served?

I happened to notice that the federal district court in Washington had a historical society, and that it had recently held an event connected to a Watergate anniversary. I wrote to the society, explained my interest in the closed records, and asked what the court was doing to preserve and open its historical record. I was grasping at straws and following every lead I could find.

The society did not have much to add, but it said it would refer my letter to the court’s chief judge, Royce Lamberth. Judge Lamberth held the same institutional position John Sirica had held during Watergate: chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

We began exchanging letters, some of which can now be found online. At a certain point, I wasn’t sure where the correspondence was leading.

Judge Lamberth eventually said, in effect, “You’ve raised some interesting questions about these records. If you would like, I could construe our correspondence as a petition before the court.”

A petition is not adversarial in quite the same way litigation is. It sounds like something the Founders might have done: you go to Washington, represent yourself, and petition the government. The judge said he could officially docket the correspondence as a petition. He also offered to waive the filing fees. I thought that sounded terrific.

The process continued for several years. Judge Lamberth was a tremendous advocate for opening the records. I would have liked to have accomplished more, particularly with the grand-jury materials, many of which remain secret today.

But the experience demonstrated that even a kid with a background like mine, with some help and good timing, could represent himself against the Justice Department’s Civil Division and do something useful for American history.

More Information, More Secrecy, More Noise

BW: You have spent much of your career prying open institutions that would prefer to remain closed. Has that work become harder or easier over the past fifteen years?

LN: You don’t have to be as cynical about machine politics as I am to believe that tools such as the Freedom of Information Act work in two directions. The procedures can be used to deny access just as they can be used to enable it.

I do think the work has become more difficult. At the same time, we have more information than ever before — and more noise preventing us from using it well than ever before.

The most important advice I would give — not only to aspiring historians or people who might someday file a FOIA request, but to everyone — is that we need to become better fact-checkers of ourselves.

Every week our news feeds inundate us with information and force us to reach quick conclusions. This is not a partisan statement; I generally avoid making partisan statements. The analysis we reach in the moment will inevitably be incomplete. It may also be completely wrong.

I tell my students that it has taken fifty years for us to develop a better frame of reference for the 1960s. It may take another fifty before historians can properly understand the period we are living through now.

If you look at the presidents from Kennedy through Carter, not a single one’s political future unfolded exactly as planned. They left the stage for very different reasons over roughly twenty years. You can see something similar in the more recent period. How long will the current turbulence continue? Will it last as long as the upheaval of the 1960s?

One day, historians who lived through neither period may compare them and offer an elegant analysis. That is the necessary work of historians, even though it is also necessarily flawed.

When you understand history well, I think it makes you a better citizen. It cannot tell you precisely what is coming next, but it can bring the national temperature down. We need that badly.

“Do Something Interesting”

BW: What would you tell yourself as an undergraduate? What do you wish you had understood earlier about finding your interests and building a career?

LN: When you write a book, you begin by trying to answer certain questions. Along the way you discover many others you simply don’t have time to answer. If you are honest with yourself and your readers, you leave a great deal on the table for other people to pick up later.

The line I come back to is from Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. When I became the first historian to examine his papers carefully, I found something he had written that still resonates. This is the time of year when students graduate and ask, “What do I do next?”

I tell them what Lodge said: when you are in your twenties, it does not matter exactly what you do. Just do something interesting.

Try many different things. Doing interesting things in your twenties will prepare you to do serious things in your thirties.

The more general lesson, whether you are interested in history, academia, or a completely different career, is to develop the self-confidence to ask questions no one else has asked. That might mean reading more deeply into a body of literature than anyone before you. It might mean spending more time in an archive than anyone else.

It was sometimes said of Daniel Patrick Moynihan — a fascinating figure who helped create Johnson’s War on Poverty, worked in the Nixon White House, and later became a liberal lion of the Senate — that he looked at the same data as everyone else but reached different conclusions.

That is a great goal to have in life.

Whatever you do, do it boldly. When you interview someone who has been interviewed ten thousand times, ask the question that person has never heard. Move them toward a story they have never told.

If you do those things, you will stand out and you will go far.

You may not always make a lot of friends, but you will go very far.

About the guest: Luke A. Nichter is the James H. Cavanaugh Endowed Chair in Presidential Studies at Chapman University, a Griffin Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a member of the State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee. He specializes in the Cold War, the modern presidency, and U.S. political and diplomatic history, with a particular focus on the long 1960s. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including The Year That Broke Politics — named a Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2023 in politics — The Last Brahmin, and the two-volume Nixon Tapes series co-edited with Douglas Brinkley.

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review is an independent, nonpartisan interview publication about public life and the people who help shape it. It publishes long-form conversations with public officials, journalists, scholars, diplomats, policy practitioners, and other professionals about the work they do and the path that brought them there.

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The chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. Photo courtesy of the Office of the Historian and the Clerk of the House’s Office of Art and Archives.

In February, the Supreme Court told the president he could not impose tariffs under emergency authority. Members of Congress who had spent a year declining to vote on those tariffs were, by most accounts, relieved. The branch holding the constitutional power to lay duties had been rescued from a fight it did not want to have.

Philip Wallach thinks that pattern is the central fact of American government right now. Congress is slow, sprawling, procedural, and permanently unpopular; presidents look decisive by comparison, and courts look principled. But when Congress stops making the country’s hardest decisions, the power does not evaporate. It migrates to presidents, agencies, and courts — none of which can manufacture the kind of legitimacy a legislative bargain produces. Congress’s frustrating “manyness,” as he puts it, is the function, not the defect.

A Career Shaped by Happenstance

Benjamin Wolf: Before you became known for your work on Congress and the separation of powers, what did you imagine your career would look like?

Philip Wallach: As I was finishing my undergraduate work, I felt like I wanted to come to Washington. I was pretty unclear about the particular direction, so I looked at a range of places where I might be able to do policy research.

Through some happenstance, I got a job as a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute. I worked for Michael Greve, who studies federalism and is a very broad and interesting thinker. I learned a great deal from him.

Research-assistant jobs at AEI tend to be positions where you come in for a little while and then move on. They’re not usually climb-the-ladder jobs. Some people go work on the Hill or for an interest group. A lot go from being an RA to graduate school.

I was debating among law school, a history PhD, and a politics PhD. I chose politics largely because I wanted to read many more books. I didn’t think I had the appetite to become an archival historian, although I’m not sure in retrospect whether I made the right choice.

People advised me that if I went to law school, I would become a lawyer, and I didn’t want to do that. In retrospect, law school keeps a lot more doors open in the public-policy world, because there are many jobs for lawyers. Being a political scientist makes you a little more of a strange bird. Government agencies generally aren’t looking to hire political scientists.

I imagined I would become a professor at a school like Wesleyan. I like teaching, and that would have been all right with me. Then I put my résumé on the American Political Science Association’s jobs board and received an email from the Brookings Institution saying it was interested in hiring people finishing their PhDs. That is very unusual. Think tanks do not usually hire newly minted PhDs.

The person who became my boss at Brookings was experimenting with doing that, and I was one of the beneficiaries. I also had reservations about academia because I felt somewhat politically out of place. I wasn’t a super-conservative person; I probably thought of myself as a moderate libertarian. But I thought it might cause me some problems.

I was drawn back to Washington. Brookings made me a good offer, and I have been in think-tank land ever since. That was in 2012.

It was all a little happenstance. I suppose that happens to many people who do not have a perfectly clear vision of what they want to do professionally. I have written very few peer-reviewed academic journal articles, and I mostly don’t feel like I’ve been missing out. I try to answer big questions. I have been very fortunate to be in positions where I felt I could take on genuinely important questions and try to address them. That is a very good feeling to have about your work.

Trump, Party Loyalty, and Constitutional Responsibility

BW: President Trump has embraced an expansive understanding of executive authority, while many Republican members of Congress have been reluctant to challenge a president of their own party. At what point does party loyalty become a failure to uphold Congress’s constitutional role?

PW: President Trump does not really make arguments. I am almost tempted to stop the sentence there.

He tends to state his sense of things and his feelings, and he is a master at stirring up the feelings of his supporters. When people say he has made an argument for executive dominance, it is more that he assumes he won and therefore should get to do what he wants.

He brings his sensibility as a business manager to the federal government. He was in charge of the Trump Organization, and now he sees himself as in charge of the United States. It is obnoxious to him that all these constraints prevent him from operating as the boss of the country, because he believes he could accomplish much more without those obstacles.

He tends to view every obstacle to his progress as a nuisance. He does not have much appreciation for the worth of constitutional government in its own right.

That is the kind of chief executive the American people have elected twice. Ambitious executives willing to push the boundaries of presidential power are nothing new in American history. In some ways, the constitutional logic pushes presidents in that direction. But Trump — and especially the second Trump administration — has been willing to set aside norms of mutual respect between the legislature and the executive more aggressively than any previous president.

Trump has also been quite successful in driving out people he considers insufficiently loyal. He has reshaped the Republican Party so that personal loyalty to him is probably the first qualification for being a Republican today.

That is very different from 2017, when the party felt more like a tense coalition between its old establishment and the new Trumpist elements. Reince Priebus began the first administration as chief of staff. He was an orthodox Republican Party functionary. Paul Ryan was speaker of the House. The party of 2025 and 2026 feels quite different.

Does loyalty to Trump mean members are failing in their constitutional responsibilities? There is a very serious tension.

In their defense, I think many people on the Hill conceive of their careers as lasting much longer than Trump’s presidency. They believe the best way to serve the constitutional order in the long run is to ride out this moment rather than sacrifice their careers and be replaced by people who are even more personally loyal to Trump, or more committed to an oppositional MAGA movement that wants to discard everything that came before it.

They think the most useful thing they can do is keep their jobs and help steer what comes next. I have a fair amount of respect for that position.

I also respect someone like Liz Cheney. But there is no question that she blew up her career. She is no longer a figure with influence inside the Republican Party.

We live in an extremely partisan age. I wish we lived in a less partisan one. I am not much of a partisan myself, so I tend to admire politicians who create room for independence. But there is a tradeoff between styling yourself as above partisan dynamics and remaining directly influential within the party organizations that shape American politics. Every politician has to work that out.

The people who win elected office have already aligned themselves with one party or the other. Politically ambitious people tend to give party loyalty a significant place because they do not see another practical way to make a difference.

The Tariff Decision and Government by Impulse

BW: On February 20, in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, consolidated with Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, the Supreme Court held 6–3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not authorize the president to impose tariffs. Did the Court reach the right result? And does a decision like that restore congressional authority, or merely rescue Congress from a confrontation it was unwilling to have itself?

PW: There were many members of Congress who were very glad about the Court’s decision. It relieved them, to some extent, of having to take responsibility for deciding those questions themselves.

I was a big fan of the decision. I am also a big fan of what is called the major questions doctrine, which the Court has been developing over the last decade.

It is essentially a judicial attempt to articulate the principle that Congress has to be the branch making the really big decisions. We cannot sidle our way into enormously consequential policies through executive-branch lawyers making strained arguments about what old laws allow the president to do.

That does not mean the executive branch can never make a major decision. But if it is going to do so, it needs a strong congressional delegation clearly establishing that the executive is supposed to make that decision. The executive cannot simply arrogate the authority to itself.

Editor’s note: The major questions rationale did not command a majority. Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justices Gorsuch and Barrett, concluded that the tariffs implicated the doctrine and therefore required clear congressional authorization. Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson reached the same result on the narrower ground that IEEPA’s text does not confer tariff authority at all. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh dissented.

I think the Court got the tariff case right. If it had allowed the IEEPA tariffs to stand in the form Trump created, it would have permitted public policy by executive impulse.

There were no meaningful standards. It was clear that Trump liked that tariff regime precisely because it gave him complete flexibility.

When the executive branch takes it upon itself to fashion an entire legal regime without real constraints, government tends toward arbitrariness.

The Court made a similar point in West Virginia v. EPA when it rejected the carbon-emissions framework the Obama administration constructed under an older provision of the Clean Air Act. The Court did not want the executive branch creating a major regulatory system largely from whole cloth.

Leaving that door open invites abuse and lacks legitimacy in a basic sense. We should want the country’s biggest decisions made in a way that broad legislative majorities are willing to support.

That is the formula for doing politics in a way people can accept, rather than doing politics in a way that sets everyone’s hair on fire and puts the country into an almost apocalyptic frame of mind every four years.

Editor’s note: The ruling ended IEEPA as a tariff authority but not the tariffs themselves. The administration has since shifted to other statutory tools, including a ten percent across-the-board duty under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 and new investigations under Section 301. Questions about refunds of previously collected IEEPA duties remain unresolved in the lower courts.

The Financial Crisis: Law, Speed, and Legitimacy

BW: That tension — between acting quickly and acting legitimately — is the subject of your first book, To the Edge, on the government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis. Why did that crisis capture your attention, and what most surprised you during the research?

PW: The financial crisis was an education for me that ran parallel to my formal graduate education.

I arrived at Princeton for graduate school in 2007, and I was interested in banking regulation before the crisis happened. I had started learning about it, and then — voilà — banking regulation became one of the most interesting things in the world to study. All these brilliant people were trying to figure out exactly what had gone wrong and how we could fix it. It was extraordinarily fruitful to follow that conversation in real time.

I am not a trained economist, so I did not feel I had much to add on that front. But I was thinking about the political and legal sides of the response. It began as a side project in graduate school. I wrote a paper trying to tackle questions of legality and legitimacy that I felt other people were not examining as closely.

A great deal of what happened in the fall of 2008 and the years afterward was legally dubious. It was also an education for me that so few people seemed focused on those legal problems.

The thing that caused perhaps the greatest public backlash was the payment of bonuses to bankers. Those payments were largely made in fulfillment of contractual obligations that had not been voided. In that sense, they were legally regular. But that did not matter to people.

People do not always care about what the law says. They think separately about what justice demands.

That was the puzzle that drew me into the project, and the literature that developed did not really fill the gap I was trying to address. It therefore became a natural book project when I arrived at Brookings, which was a good place from which to do it. People who had been directly involved in the crisis were willing to speak with me and help educate me about what had happened from their perspective.

The book might have received more attention if I had managed to write it faster. It was published in 2015, seven years after the first and most intense stage of the crisis, when American politics was already turning toward new chapters. But I still think it is a good book.

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Why Congress Matters

BW: In Why Congress, you argue that Congress matters not simply because it passes laws, but because it forces different parts of the country to negotiate with one another. How did the research change your understanding of the institution?

PW: I am not a lifelong congressional scholar.

There are many great scholars who fit that description — people naturally drawn to Congress who want to know everything about its history, members, and parliamentary procedures. I learn a great deal from them. I see myself more as a student of American policymaking in general, especially how the constitutional separation of powers works in practice.

I was drawn to specialize in Congress because, when we think about our government’s legitimacy problems today, many of them seem to go back to Congress not functioning very well. So many of the country’s major problems are addressed through executive action instead of bipartisan compromises fashioned by Congress.

Immigration is a paradigmatic example. We seem to have largely given up on congressional action resolving our difficult immigration problems. Instead, we improvise executive-branch approaches. But by the nature of our constitutional system, those actions cannot be as enduring or legitimate. We end up with policy whiplash as control of the White House passes from one party to the other. We spend years fighting in the courts.

When I look at American policymaking in the 21st century, that is the picture I see. Figuring out how to make Congress function better seems like the way to make the entire system more functional.

That has led me to spend a lot of time studying congressional history, which has been very rewarding. There is a congressional angle to almost every important subject in American history. Engaging with the lives of legislators is a good way to enter that history.

The conventional way for an educated person to understand American history is often through presidential biographies. There is nothing wrong with that. I do it myself. It is tidier. There have only been so many presidents, and you can hope to get your arms around them and tell a story.

Congress is so big and sprawling that, in a sense, nobody can ever know it. Nobody can ever know its history in the same way. That can be frustrating if you want a clear narrative, but it gives you a feel for the complexity of American life that presidential stories do not always provide.

It also helps you resist reading history as a morality play.

Take the conventional story of the civil rights movement: Lyndon Johnson’s moral sense and force of personality produced landmark civil rights legislation. That is reductive. Once you examine how those laws actually moved through Congress, you encounter a more complicated story.

You learn about the patience of Senator Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader after Johnson left the Senate and during the period when the major civil rights laws passed. You learn about his ability to work with Southern segregationists, give them an opportunity to slow the bills down, and treat that process as part of cementing the legislation’s legitimacy once it passed.

I have become an appreciator of Congress and of the way legislative relationships provide a different understanding of how America has worked for nearly two and a half centuries.

That is immensely important. Legislatures around the world are challenged at the moment. My current research is turning beyond the United States toward France, Britain, Germany, and Italy. I am trying to understand the challenges facing legislatures more broadly.

It has made me appreciate the complexity of political problems in ways that fixating only on the top leaders can cause people to miss.

Don’t Go Straight to Graduate School

BW: You have moved across academia and think tanks, and you also spent time working with the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. For people considering similar careers, what are the tradeoffs?

PW: I would not really say I was a congressional staffer.

While I was at the R Street Institute, I became a fellow with the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. I was there for about five months, and I describe it as a very long field trip. I went to Capitol Hill every day, but I was not central to the decision-making process. It was not the most successful experience for me, although I learned a lot. Plenty of congressional staffers probably have a similar experience.

More broadly, I generally counsel young people against going directly into graduate school after college. People know how to be students, so continuing to be a student feels safe. But they should give themselves the chance to go into the broader world, hold down an adult job, and see something else. They may discover that they are good at something different, or more attracted to work outside school.

The opportunity cost of getting a PhD is quite high. It sounds appealing: you get to continue going to school, and they pay you rather than your having to spend enormous amounts of money. There are certainly good things about it. But spending five or six more years as a student rather than doing other things in the world carries a real cost.

The best reason to earn a PhD is that you genuinely want to become a professor. That is the paradigmatic case.

I also tell young people that working on Capitol Hill can be an excellent thing to do after college. Congress has plenty of problems, but it tends to give young people opportunities — especially those who are ambitious and willing to socialize and network without always knowing what the immediate payoff will be.

People make connections on the Hill that can serve them for years, even if they do not stay there very long. You can receive substantial responsibility and meet many other ambitious young people.

The jobs can be irregular. Congress does not offer the clean career progression that appeals to people who want to fill out forms X, Y, and Z, present their credentials, and know exactly what comes next.

But I see ambitious young people receive opportunities and advance quickly when they show themselves to be willing and able. It is a good place for people who can simply decide that they are going to become experts.

People who are willing to raise their hands and say, “How about me?” can do very well on Capitol Hill.

Build Hard Skills — But Think for Yourself

BW: For a young person who wants to build a career studying or improving public institutions, what should they prioritize early? What do you wish you had understood before beginning your own career?

PW: Young people with access to a broad range of university offerings have an opportunity to build hard skills that become more difficult to acquire later in life.

Languages are one. Coding would traditionally have been another, although the new era of AI-assisted coding may make that seem somewhat less urgent. A real understanding of statistics is enormously valuable.

Many people can master those things during their undergraduate education and use them for the rest of their lives. It is a very good sign when students invest in hard skills. I wish I had done more of that myself.

For what it is worth, I wish I had taken statistics in high school. I learned mathematics in high school better than I ever learned it later because I did homework every day. I was pretty good at calculus, and I wish I had received the same kind of grounding in statistics.

But learning to think for yourself and write for yourself is also extraordinarily valuable. That is something I did get from college.

I worry that many young people are depriving themselves of that development by leaning so heavily on artificial intelligence. They should learn to write in their own voices, take a position, think their own thoughts, and articulate them in a way they are willing to stand behind.

There is no substitute for that.

Do not let the computer steal it from you.

BW: Philip, thank you for the time.

PW: Thanks, Ben.

About the guest: Philip A. Wallach is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies the separation of powers, Congress, regulatory policy, and the administrative state. He is the author of Why Congress (2023) and To the Edge: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Responses to the 2008 Financial Crisis (2015). He previously held senior research roles at the Brookings Institution and the R Street Institute and served as a fellow with the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University and his master’s and doctorate in politics from Princeton University.

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review is an independent interview publication about public life and the people who help shape it.

Next in The Pathway Review: Luke Nichter, presidential historian at Chapman University and author of The Year That Broke Politics, on the 1968 election, the Nixon tapes, and what the archives reveal that memoirs conceal.

George Washington is sworn in as the nation’s first president in New York City, April 30, 1789. Image courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol, public domain.

The American presidency can feel very structured, even habitual. Cabinets will meet. Power will — hopefully — transfer. Presidents will represent the country abroad, manage executive departments, consult advisers, and inherit rituals that seem older than politics itself.

But almost none of that was obvious at the beginning.

The Constitution says surprisingly little about the day-to-day life of the presidency. The office had to be built through behavior and educated assumptions before it could become tradition. George Washington did not simply occupy the presidency; he gave it form. John Adams did not merely follow him; he tested whether the office could survive succession, party conflict, and defeat.

Lindsay Chervinsky has spent her career studying those formative years, when the executive branch was less an established institution than an experiment unfolding in real time. Her work on Washington’s cabinet and Adams’s presidency shows how much depended on judgment, restraint, symbolism, and personality.

This conversation is about the presidency before it was defined. It is also about the founders’ legacy: an unfinished system built by people who knew they were improvising. Chervinsky argues that the founding generation expected future Americans to revise, repair, and improve what they had begun.

The question is whether we are still willing to do that.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

When Institutions Are Not Yet Settled

Benjamin Wolf: You’ve written about two presidents who had to invent parts of the executive branch in real time: Washington through the cabinet, and Adams through the second presidency. What drew you to moments when institutions are not yet settled?

Lindsay Chervinsky: I think what interests me most is the concept of how people can leave their thumbprint on history, and how individuals can affect the world around them.

If we look at the founding of the nation, not only were they creating institutions from scratch, but because there were so few people in government, each personality really mattered. That caused me to look at power and how it affects people, and what they do with it.

That is why I was interested in the early presidency. And then as my career has progressed, the presidency feels incredibly relevant to almost all of us all the time. Having an understanding of where the institution came from and how it connects to what we’re seeing today is, I think, essential.

BW: How does it connect to what we’re seeing today?

LC: In every way, because the presidency is largely unwritten.

The Constitution is incredibly short. It was only about 4,000 words when it was first written, which made it one of the shortest constitutions in the world. Now, with amendments, we have about 7,700 words. And most of those words are focused on Article I.

So much of the presidency — how the president acts on a day-to-day basis, how they interact with different branches of government, how they interact with foreign nations, how they represent the country abroad — what I would call the squishy stuff of the day-to-day part of being president, is based on norm and custom.

And those all started in the beginning.

Washington as Institutional Designer

BW: Washington is often remembered as a figure above politics, almost symbolic. But your work shows him constantly managing conflict, ambition, and faction. How should we understand Washington as an institutional designer rather than just a symbol?

LC: There’s no doubt that Washington wanted to be president for all people. He was referred to as the father of the country before he even became president. He had an unparalleled stature and a position above the fray in a way that no president since has had. Even our most popular and beloved presidents are still viewed as part of the political process.

Yet he was also incredibly savvy. He was much more political, and much more politically minded, than people think he was.

He was quite good at politics, and he was brilliant at the symbolic, the theatrical, the tangible and intangible things that make up an institution and give it significance and credence in front of the American people.

That is because he had extraordinary emotional intelligence. And that is a skill that is very difficult to teach.

Adams and the Peaceful Transfer of Power

BW: The peaceful transfer of power is now treated as a basic democratic norm. But it had to be created through behavior before it became tradition. What did Adams’ departure from office establish?

LC: That’s right. The peaceful transfer of power is one of, I think, two foundations of what it means to be a republic. The other is civilian control of the military.

If you take away either of those, it’s not necessarily a bad government. It’s just not a republic.

The Constitution mentions elections, but how the transition is supposed to happen is not spelled out. It is not backed up by military power, and it is not backed up by divine right through monarchical, hereditary power. The American people had to be taught that this was something important, that they had to care about it, participate in it, uphold it, and give it strength so that it would endure.

The first transfer, in 1797 from Washington to Adams, is often overshadowed by what came later because they were nominally of the same party. But the people there recognized that it was an essential moment in making history.

Washington attended and then left the room after Adams, and Washington had not walked behind another man in probably three decades. That was a gesture that the office is much bigger than the person.

That was step one.

Step two occurred in 1800 because it was a transition from one party to another. Adams did two things that were essential.

The first was that he lost and went home. And I think he gets a really bad rap for the going-home part. Most people don’t know that the precedent of a losing president attending his successor’s inauguration was not established until 1845. No one expected him to be there. No one asked him to be there. Jefferson did not ask him to be there.

And that election had very nearly resulted in violence and the destruction of the Constitution. I genuinely believe Adams thought his presence would be a distraction, and he was trying to turn the page.

It’s important to remember that this is the age of Napoleon. This is the age when people fight back from islands to avoid giving up power. For Adams to lose relatively gracefully, go home, and establish the tone of a transition that was quite gracious was essential.

He invited Jefferson to the White House. He introduced him to staff. He told him he believed Jefferson was the rightful winner. As the votes were being counted, Adams said he believed Jefferson was the people’s choice and that he would not do anything to get in his way.

Then he instructed his cabinet secretaries to cooperate with Jefferson, to give him briefings on what was happening in the departments, and to not make any major decisions.

There are now a bunch of statutes on the books that require some of that behavior as part of the transition process. But it was not required in 1801. It was a remarkable thing to do, especially given that most of the cabinet members were not particularly big fans of Jefferson.

The last thing Adams did was send Jefferson a letter after he got home. He said everything was peaceful there, and he wished Jefferson a safe and happy administration.

That is the tone of what we want a transition to be. And he was the first one to do it.

The Cabinet Was Not Inevitable

BW: Earlier, you talked about the brevity of the original Constitution. Now the cabinet is one of the most familiar institutions in American government, but it wasn’t clearly spelled out in the Constitution. How did something so informal become such a permanent feature of American politics?

LC: It’s not just that the cabinet was not spelled out. The delegates at the Constitutional Convention explicitly rejected it from the Constitution.

They considered various executive councils and different cabinets, and ultimately decided that they would be too much like the British cabinet. They thought it would obscure transparency and responsibility. It wouldn’t be clear who was making decisions, and it could lead to corruption and cronyism.

So they rejected those proposals.

Instead, they put in place an expectation that Washington would meet with the Senate as a council of foreign affairs and would request written advice from department secretaries on issues pertaining to their departments. Department secretaries were mentioned, but not how many, what kind, or what they were going to be doing.

Washington, as the head of the Constitutional Convention, understood these expectations and tried to comply with them.

The Senate, it turned out, was a terrible advisory body. Washington went to meet with them once and never again.

Then he very quickly realized that corresponding with department secretaries on massive issues of state policy with parchment and quill was highly inefficient and not going to work. So he started having one-on-one consultations with the secretaries and convened the first cabinet meeting on November 26, 1791, which was two and a half years into his administration.

That is really important. The reason every president has had one since is because Washington did it.

It turns out that it is really helpful to have a handful of people who, ideally, you have picked and therefore trust, who are highly qualified, experienced, and knowledgeable, to advise you on big decisions that require many different perspectives.

What Washington established was an institution that is very flexible. It reveals the very best of presidential leadership, like Lincoln and Roosevelt. It also highlights the worst, because the cabinet can completely walk all over or derail a presidency, as with Madison or Harding.

Because it is so flexible, because it is really what the president wants, presidents get to talk to who they want to talk to. They get to consult with who they want to consult with. They can listen or not, depending on what they wish, with almost no oversight.

That institution has had enormous enduring power, even as it has evolved significantly over time.

Precedent and the Burden of the First President

BW: You keep talking about how these early presidents made choices that are now viewed as tradition, almost as facts of American political life. Were they aware that they were setting precedents at the time, or were they just trying to get through the day?

LC: Intensely and keenly aware, sometimes to the point of paralysis.

When Washington was going to his first inauguration, he wrote to Henry Knox that he felt like a prisoner going to the place of execution. About a year later, he wrote to his friend Catharine Macaulay Graham that he was very aware every decision he made was establishing precedent for those who followed, because he walked on untrodden ground.

He was very aware that everything he did and everything he repeated was going to establish precedent.

Adams was also keenly aware that one of his jobs was to fight for that precedent. If it was really important that Washington did it, Adams had to continue it in order to ensure that it survived.

He was also keenly aware that if he did something different from Washington, he was going to be criticized for it. So he was in a bit of a catch-22.

What made Jefferson’s decisions so powerful was that once he repeated something Washington had done, basically an entire generation of Americans was used to it: eight years of Washington, four years of Adams, then eight years of Jefferson.

And because Jefferson was from a different party, and because he had been quite critical of Washington, once he repeated key elements of Washington’s presidency, like the cabinet, those practices were essentially locked in.

The Founders’ Real Legacy

BW: Americans often use the founders as a constitutional baseline for how America should look today. Alongside that, there is increasing distrust in American politics and government. Do you think that distrust comes from a misinterpretation or misuse of what the founders intended by politicians today, or from the founders not properly anticipating how to maintain trust in what America would become?

LC: I actually think the founding legacy is one of innovation and experimentation.

They did not think they were creating things that would survive for 250 years. They thought they were creating things that, if they were lucky, would last for a generation and put the nation on firmer footing. Then future generations would come up with something more creative than they could possibly imagine.

There were many problems they knew they had not addressed, like slavery, and they intentionally swept them under the rug. There were many other problems they knew they could not possibly anticipate because they could not predict the future.

We think of them as these genius, all-knowing beings. And on one hand, they absolutely were genius. They had no roadmap. They had no guidelines. They didn’t know what was happening next. They were building the plane while flying it, and they knew it.

So when we look at what they intended, it is, at best, an intention with the expectation that once the plan hit the circumstances on the ground, it might go completely haywire.

And it did.

The Articles of Confederation, the nation’s first constitution, failed spectacularly. They wrote the Constitution, which was the second constitution, and then they passed ten amendments to it two years later. They passed another amendment, the Twelfth Amendment, in 1803, once they realized there was a loophole around electing presidents.

They were not afraid to admit, “We got that wrong. We better try something else.” That is what they expected their legacy to be, and what they hoped future generations would do.

For the most part in American history, future generations have done that. After the Civil War, there was another batch of amendments. The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act — these all picked up the mantle of what the founding generation started, attempting to make the nation just a little bit more perfect.

I think in the last 50 years, we have stopped doing that. That has led to the sense that the institutions aren’t working, and therefore we don’t trust them.

It’s not because I think the founders have failed us. It’s because we have failed them in trying to continue to improve this thing.

How to Restore Trust

BW: If you were advising a president-elect on how to get back to that original founding spirit, what would you tell them to focus on?

LC: People need to believe that democracy works for them.

They need to believe that their interests are represented, that people are hearing them, and that leaders are trying. They don’t need to solve everything. They just need to be making small, tangible bits of progress.

There are a lot of things representatives, presidents, governors, and state legislators can do to improve trust, and a lot of it is just being more responsive to people and more amenable to making small progress.

One of my hobby horses is that I think we should effectively double the size of the House of Representatives.

When the Constitution was passed, each district was about 30,000 people. Today, it’s almost 900,000. One person cannot represent 900,000 Americans. You can’t have a people’s house when representatives are representing that many people.

It would almost eliminate the gerrymandering problem. It would almost eliminate the problem with the Electoral College because it would align the popular vote much more closely with the Electoral College vote. And I think it would dramatically increase the ability of the House to get things done.

It also is not a solution that favors one party or the other, because Texas and Florida would get many more seats, just like California and New York.

It does not require a constitutional amendment. It requires a bill. Congress passed a bill in the 1920s capping the size of the House. They can pass another bill increasing the size.

BW: You mentioned it helps solve the gerrymandering problem. How so?

LC: If you have twice as many districts, it’s harder to gerrymander. It’s not going to completely eliminate it, but it makes it much harder.

Let’s say you have a square and you’re trying to create four districts out of that square. Now imagine you have to create eight. It becomes much harder to get into all kinds of shenanigans when you have to fit so many more districts in there.

It’s not a perfect solution, but I think it is an elegant one. Again, it doesn’t advantage one party over the other. It affects both. And it would have the byproduct of making people feel that they are better represented because each representative has to speak for fewer people and fewer factions in their district.

From Law School Plans to Public History

BW: As we get close to the end, I want to shift the conversation to how you got involved in the work you’re doing today. What got you fascinated with Washington, Adams, the founders, and the creation of the Constitution, and how did that lead you to where you are now?

LC: I’ve always loved history.

When I was little, my family went to a bunch of historic sites. We went to museums, house sites, places where history comes alive in a way that is really important for kids especially. I was a voracious reader, so I read a ton of historical fiction. But I do think seeing the actual space makes a huge difference.

I was going to go to law school. I did a ton of public speaking and debate exercises in high school and college with the intention of going to law school. I took the LSAT. I applied to law schools. I got into a bunch of them.

Then at the very last minute, I decided I would rather stick needles in my eyeballs.

I ended up working at a museum for a year and then getting my master’s and PhD in history. It was really clear to me by the time I decided not to go to law school that my heart was in the history space. I just had to think creatively about what that work would look like.

I got my master’s, got my PhD, got a postdoctoral fellowship, which was a two-year program. I was in school for approximately a million years. But I loved school, so it was okay.

Then I got a public history job, and I’ve had a series of those positions. It was clear to me pretty early on that my strength lay in speaking to a public audience as opposed to a classroom audience. Those are very different things. It is a very different skill to speak to a public audience than to create a curriculum for a semester.

The type of work I was doing, working on the early presidents and institutions, was less in vogue in the academy. Public history was much more interested in that kind of work, because the public audience actually doesn’t need to be convinced that this work is relevant. They already think so, and therefore they want to read it and learn about it.

My current job is Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library. I started about two years ago. I had been a fellow here in 2015 when I was working on my first book, on George Washington’s cabinet. I continued to work with them on teacher programs and leadership programs.

I had been doing my own thing. I had a sort of history business. I was doing a lot of speaking and writing, some teaching, a lot of media, and I loved it. I had no intention of doing anything else.

Then the job came up here sort of unexpectedly, and they asked me to do it. It was the right place at the right time for the 250th anniversary and for thinking about what the next step for the library is. It opened in 2013, so it’s in its second decade, and the sky’s the limit in terms of potential. That was super compelling to me.

But the main takeaway is that I did not follow a path everyone else followed. I did not follow a path that existed.

I pursued what brought me joy, where I sensed there was interest, focused on what I was good at and what I could lean into, worked really hard at those things, and opportunity presented itself.

I’m a big fan of that quote that luck is opportunity plus preparation.

When the Plan Changes

BW: For readers who are interested in history but perhaps considering law school, too, what was the turning factor for you? What made you pursue history rather than law?

LC: There were a lot of red flags.

I didn’t particularly like the pre-law classes I was taking, and I really loved the history classes. So that probably should have been step one.

I was on a very competitive mock trial team in college, and I loved being the expert witness. Being the attorney made me very stressed out. So that was red flag number two.

I ignored both of those.

The final red flag I could not avoid was when I was working on a writing supplement for the University of Pennsylvania Law School application. The question was: discuss a piece of art or literature that has inspired you to pursue law.

I couldn’t bullshit that essay. I could not find a way to bullshit it.

So I was brainstorming various things with my then-boyfriend, now husband. He said, “What about the book John Adams? You love that book.” I was doing dishes and not really paying attention to my answer, and I said, “Yeah, but I loved it because of the history, not because of the law.”

He looked at me like, duh.

And I was like, oh.

It was such an honest answer that I realized I couldn’t ignore it. That was really scary because I had had this plan for twelve years. This was what I was going to do. I chose my majors based on it. I crafted my internships around it. That was my plan.

My life has turned out really, really great, even though I diverged from the plan. So it’s okay to diverge from the plan. It’s much better to figure it out before you go to law school than after.

And you can still take all of those skills and apply them to other things. My public speaking is what it is because I did so much public speaking with law school in mind. Those skills are not things you lose or that become unimportant later on.

Where to Begin

BW: Finally, if a young person wanted to understand the presidency beyond elections and personalities, or just wanted to better understand the work that you do today, where would you tell them to begin?

LC: My books are probably an obvious answer, so I’ll start there. I am proud of them, and I hope they are enjoyable.

Another place to begin is the Mount Vernon website: MountVernon.org/library. We have unbelievable online resources.

We have a George Washington encyclopedia, so basically every subject you could imagine. We have podcasts, databases, videos, and we stream our book talks and events.

There are nearly limitless resources to learn more about Washington’s presidency in particular. That is probably a good place to start, and hopefully it will launch other exploration for you.

About the guest: Lindsay M. Chervinsky is Executive Director of the George Washington Presidential Library and a presidential historian whose work focuses on the presidency, political culture, and the institutions of American government. She is the author of The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution and Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic, and co-editor of Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture.

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review publishes long-form interviews with people in politics, policy, journalism, law, diplomacy, markets, history, and public service about the work they do and the path that brought them there.

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President Donald J. Trump unveils the 2017 National Security Strategy in Washington, D.C., Dec. 18, 2017. White House photo by Joyce N. Boghosian / Department of Defense.

Nadia Schadlow has spent her career thinking about a question many institutions prefer to avoid: not simply what a strategy says, but whether a government can actually carry it out. Across her work in the Defense Department, the policy world, and the White House, she has focused on the space between ideas and implementation, where plans meet bureaucracy, politics, incentives, and time.

In this conversation, Schadlow reflects on the gap between strategy and execution, the gray zone between peace and war, the overlap between economic security and national security, and the challenges of competing with China. She also offers a candid account of helping shape the 2017 National Security Strategy, explaining why national security cannot be separated entirely from politics and why the hardest work often begins after the white paper is written.

For students interested in foreign policy and national security, Schadlow’s advice is practical: read history, clarify your assumptions, learn both regions and functions, build coalitions, and do not mistake fluent commentary for strategic judgment. Strategy, in her telling, is not just an intellectual exercise. It is a discipline of choosing, sequencing, persuading, and following through.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Strategy as direction and implementation

Benjamin Wolf: You’ve moved between academia, the military policy world, and the White House. When you look back, was there a moment earlier in your career when you realized that strategy, rather than just diplomacy or operations, was the lever you most wanted to pull?

Nadia Schadlow: I don’t think you ever anticipate exactly where your education and experiences are going to lead you. A lot of it is serendipity and being prepared for the moments that are presented to you.

I always knew I was interested in strategy. I like thinking about the components of strategy, but what I really like is thinking about how you operationalize strategy. It is the combination of articulating a direction you want to go, or the direction you think a country should take, and then the operational ways to get there. I’ve always been interested in that combination.

The gray zone and the operational gap

BW: Many people study war, but far fewer study what happens in the ambiguous space before it. What drew you specifically to the gray zone between peace and war as the central problem of modern strategy?

NS: I began to see a pattern of overreliance on the Defense Department as the agency that could get things done quickly. When you work in government, even though I worked at the Defense Department, I could see that my counterparts in other agencies, especially the State Department, and even at the White House more generally, consistently relied on the Defense Department because it had operational capabilities that most other parts of our government do not have.

Not all, obviously. The Department of Homeland Security has components that do, and the intelligence agencies do. But the civilian agencies, such as the Commerce Department, for a long time the Treasury Department, and the State Department, do not think as much in operational terms.

That began to interest me because it was clear that if we were going to operate as a country in these areas short of war, whether we call them operations short of war, gray-zone areas, or non-kinetic competition, we needed a more competitive mindset more consistently. We also needed the capabilities to do things about problems in those domains.

Part of the reason I mentioned the Treasury Department as an agency that changed is because there was a really interesting shift after 9/11. After the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, there was a sense that we needed to improve our financial tools, both to cut off terrorist sources of funding and, later, to sanction countries like Iran that were developing nuclear programs. The need to develop this financial toolkit emerged, and I think it is a very good example for your readers of how the government, when it decides to refine a set of operational capabilities and equip itself to use them, can do that.

There are two specific books you could link to if your readers are interested. One is Juan Zarate’s Treasury’s War, which uses the phrase “guerrillas in gray suits.” The other is Edward Fishman’s more recent book, Chokepoints. The chapter on Iran really describes how Treasury developed those tools.

Strategy versus implementation

BW: When you look at Washington today, where is the gap biggest between the way we talk about strategy and the way we actually behave and implement that strategy?

NS: Unfortunately, it is everywhere.

Another little test case is that your readers could take a number of pronouncements. Just this morning, I was looking at some Defense Production Act awards that have been given over the years. These are grants that the Department of Defense gave to companies and entities to do things. They might be $2 million, $10 million, or $20 million, and it is very hard to find what happened afterward.

That does not mean there are nefarious things going on. But it does mean that follow-up on actual implementation is a serious problem, both in terms of transparency and in understanding how funds are being spent. Equally important, are we getting the outcomes we want?

When we say we are providing a big chunk of money for an infrastructure project, whether domestically or abroad, the follow-up and the ability to figure out whether that outcome has been achieved is, in my view, unnecessarily difficult. There just is not a reason for it.

I see it across the board, including in the State Department. This is absolutely not just this administration. It is a bipartisan problem that has existed for decades.

Competition with China

BW: If you strip away the speeches and white papers, do you think the United States has actually accepted what serious competition with China requires economically, industrially, and politically? Or are we still trying to preserve the comforts of the pre-competition era?

NS: I think we are still debating what it means. I think we are close, but I do not think we have definitively decided as a country the direction we want to take.

There is a push and pull. There is a growing recognition that the overlap between economic security and national security is growing and growing. I am not an economist, but it is harder and harder to argue that you can make decisions only on the basis of economic efficiency.

For your readers who are economists, I think there is interesting work to be done there. How do economists think about that link? That is the way I approach it as a national security person, but what are economists really thinking? How has economics shifted to accept that, or not? I think that is an interesting area.

Second, in terms of the competition with China, we have not really figured out whether we are going to take an approach that emphasizes what we need to do internally as a country, meaning improve, build, reindustrialize here, ensure we have enough workers here, and build up what we need here, or whether we need to do things almost offensively to weaken or slow China.

Those are two different ways of thinking about competition. You have a lot of people who argue that export controls are needed to make sure China does not have the chips it wants right now. That is part of the Nvidia debate. Those are examples of a “slow China down” approach, versus an approach that emphasizes that we need to do our own things no matter what and focus more on that.

It is not an either/or, but I think it is a useful way of framing the different tools. There is a lot of information out there, and what I try to do is think thematically about these different baskets of issues.

What endures across administrations

BW: You helped shape the 2017 National Security Strategy. When different administrations change, there are different cabinet members and different people leading national security. How much of the work you did then is preserved today? How much does it change? Is that ever frustrating, that there is not a consistent presence of one’s strategy?

NS: I think a lot of people in the national security community, for many years, argued that national security was apart from politics. There was a view that there is something enduring about it, and somehow it is all apolitical.

I never really believed that entirely. I think there are enduring assumptions about the way the world works and about the way you think the world works. But in a democracy, a national security strategy needs to be linked to elected political leaders, to a body politic, and to explaining things to the American people. It is political.

It is up to people like me and others to make arguments about why these threats and opportunities should transcend politics, or why, if we keep going back and forth, we are not going to get to a better place as a country. But you always have to be able to make those arguments and convince the next generation of political leaders.

I do think a lot of features of the 2017 strategy are enduring. I can point to many of them, and many of them are not based only on President Trump, although the 2017 strategy was his first administration’s strategy. The Biden administration subsequently did many of the same things, or articulated competition with China and the importance of doing more manufacturing in the country.

It was not all the same. The Biden administration articulated climate as an existential threat. The 2017 strategy did not do that. The current Trump strategy in 2025 does not do that. So of course there are differences. But I think there are a lot of features of the 2017 strategy that remain relevant almost ten years later.

Inside the making of the 2017 National Security Strategy

BW: Could you give us an inside look into how shaping that strategy actually worked? How long does it take? Where does it first begin? How does the research get involved? How does the nitpicking of writing it and proposing it to people work?

NS: There is no set template for writing a national security strategy. It is not something that is handed down from one president to another. Congress basically said, I think in 1986, although you should check when it first became part of law, that each administration should produce a national security strategy.

Since then, every administration has produced one, although they have not produced one every year, which I think is fine. I do not think you want a strategy produced every year. That would seem odd. What you would want is a sense of how things are going and implementation updates. But there is no formula for doing that.

In contrast, in the military, or in the Army, there is doctrine. There are set ways of writing things. That is not the same here. I like to say that it is an art, not a science.

I read all the previous national security strategies, in addition to documents that predated the requirement. President Nixon, in the 1970s, would give these very good messages to Congress on his foreign and national security policy. They were very well written and coherent, so I would suggest that the historians in your audience go back and read some of those.

I read all of that and began to get a sense of what the organization should look like. We decided, as a small team, to develop ours based on four core national interests of the United States: protect the American homeland, advance American prosperity, preserve peace through strength, and advance American influence.

I think those are four core national interests. It would be hard to find American presidents, or even political leaders today, who would say they are not. But what you will find differences in is how you do those things.

Obviously, President Biden felt pretty differently than President Trump about protecting the homeland. President Trump would argue that you have to lock down borders to do that. President Biden did not think that. President Trump is providing more emphasis on Golden Dome and missile defense. President Biden had a different view. But the overall interest is still protecting the homeland. The politics come in when you start arguing about how to do it and how to fund it.

After developing those four pillars, we started to gather the information needed to articulate the different approaches to what we would do. But again, this was a president’s document, so it was driven by President Trump’s view of the world, his previous speeches, his ongoing speeches, and his articulation of themes. I think the same is done for any administration.

It was not my document. It was a White House document.

We got it done in a year, but that is because I am pretty insistent on making sure that meetings do not go on forever and processes do not go on forever. That is the big death of outcomes: sclerosis. I hope all your readers keep that in mind.

You have to take decisions. You have to put a limit on time. You cannot spend your whole time in meetings. That is process, not outcome. Every meeting should have a purpose. Even at the university level, the purpose of the meeting should be stated at the beginning. That is the way you need to begin, whether in business, academia, or government, though it does not happen often enough in government.

Supply chains, critical minerals, and the crisis of repetition

BW: You have written and spoken about very relevant issues like supply chains, industrial resilience, and the innovation base. What do you think national security officials now understand better than they did a decade ago? And what are they still reluctant to confront today?

NS: I think they understand better at a national level the seriousness of our vulnerabilities. Having said that, unfortunately, these problems are not new.

I wrote a piece called “The Crisis of Repetition,” which you can probably link to, that argued that our concern about critical minerals is about forty years old. Since 1980, you can document it. I started to ask: Why are we just repeating this and not doing anything about it?

I did not find a really satisfying answer, except that it is very hard. Political leaders also like to start from scratch themselves because it is easier to have the idea, as opposed to saying, “My predecessor actually also identified this as a problem. How can I help solve it?” I think that is partly human nature. You want to think you are starting fresh all the time. There is a little bit of human ego there, as opposed to recognizing that there are a lot of smart people out there and a lot of people have tried to tackle this problem.

That is another thing I would encourage younger people to do. Begin with that assumption going in, and then ask what obstacles still exist to solving the problem. That is harder. It is also less interesting. It is less exciting. You have to go into the obstacles. You have to go into the regulations. You have to figure out what you want to hack away at. That is harder than saying, “I want to build this shiny new thing,” or “I want to say that I am going to build this shiny thing.” That is just more fun.

The other stuff is hard, but I think technology and data today make it harder to avoid. We know the thousands of regulations that slow things down. We know the years of data that exist on how long projects take. So I think it is harder to ignore, and maybe it will get better.

But I think what we are still discovering is that we still have competing ways of doing things. For instance, in the industrial base, do you throw all your chips into three sectors of the economy? Or do you sprinkle things around?

I think we are seeing now an effort to throw chips into key sectors. I happen to think that is the right approach. Critical minerals, certain types of batteries, different components. That is different from sprinkling things around and letting a thousand flowers bloom. I am not sure that is the right approach.

Having said that, what are the competing approaches to these efforts at industrial policy? That is another idea for your readers, who are all still writing papers and being forced to write papers for classes. I do not think we have settled on these different approaches.

Regional expertise, functional expertise, and the need for frameworks

BW: When you look back at your career, what do you think the biggest trade-off has been in terms of the work you have done, and what do you wish you had known before entering the field?

NS: I think it is the balance between functional areas and regional expertise. People in this field ideally need to achieve both.

For me, one thing was never becoming fluent enough in languages. Fluency with languages is great. I studied Russian, but I never got to the level where I was reading fully because I did not spend a lot of time there. Knowing a region well matters, and language tends to be important.

It is not a game. Some people are terrible at languages, and that does not mean you cannot do this work. But spending time in the countries you are studying is helpful. Having said that, it is harder to spend time in certain countries today, given the environment. But I think it really does help.

I also think you need to figure out what functional areas are important to you. If you are going to do trade, you need to know trade policy well. If you are going to do nuclear weapons, you need to know nuclear weapons well. If you are going to do missile defense, you do not have to be a scientist or engineer, but as a policy person you need to know the nitty-gritty. You have to try to maintain a balance between both.

Then there is the perpetual question of at what level you also have to be a generalist. There is no perfect answer to all of that. Everyone’s time is limited.

But I would encourage people to think thematically about what the debates really mean. You cannot just throw data at things. When you are supporting more senior people, whether as an intern or as a junior person starting out, do not just throw data at the person you report to. It does not mean anything without a framework. It is harder to get to that framework, but that is the work.

Moving a bureaucracy

BW: What did you learn about the difference between writing strategy on paper and trying to move an actual bureaucracy? Was there ever an instance where you felt strongly about a certain policy, but someone above you did not?

NS: It is a combination of the big stick and persuasion. But you do not really have a big stick unless you are the president, the secretary of defense, or someone like that.

It is a mistake for more junior people to think they can go around yelling, screaming, and beating up people, saying, “Do this, do this.” It does not work because a bureaucracy can generally ride you out.

You have to think deliberately about the coalitions you need to build to get something done. I think this is relevant to things students are trying to do on campus: why coalitions matter, how to persuade, how to get the buy-in you need, and how to attach timelines.

For the hardest problems, you are going to need top cover. You are going to need the person who does carry the big stick to back you up if necessary. At the same time, I have found that coalition building is the better way because a lot of entities responsible for implementation can ride you out, especially in government.

In the private sector, it is different because you can fire people who are not moving more easily, and you can get rid of unnecessary organizations more easily. But even in a company, you still need the backing of leadership to drive change. Asking that of your leaders is the top cover you need. Second is coalition building. Third is the timeline, or the Gantt chart.

I wrote a piece a while ago that was critical of efforts to move toward electrification and electric vehicles because, no matter how you feel about them, you also have to create the infrastructure at the same time. You have to make Americans feel like they can charge up anywhere.

Henry Gantt was an important engineer in the early 1900s who had this chart for how you get there. You need to think that way if you care about implementation. Today, there are all these software programs that essentially took his Gantt chart idea, but the fundamental point is that you have to work backward. It forces you to work backward from what you need to do.

Often, there will be a lot of simultaneity. It is not all sequential. You are going to have to do things simultaneously. We do not have the luxury of time in a lot of these areas.

Building strategic judgment

BW: As we begin to close, I want to turn the conversation back to students. For younger people interested in foreign policy, the field can sometimes reward commentary more than judgment. What experiences or habits do you think actually develop strategic judgment, as opposed to just producing fluent analysis?

NS: What do you mean by judgment? Do you mean assumptions about how the world works and whether you are going to be right about something?

BW: Yes, building strong strategic judgment so that when you enter the field, you are prepared.

NS: I would say read history. Read about a particular region or functional area. History is important because it gives you a sense of how things have worked.

Also, clarify your assumptions going in. How do you think the world works? Do not mistake process for what drives actual progress or motivations. Culture, politics, motivations, and your sense of why you think something is going to move in a particular direction all matter. Avoid wishful thinking.

In that sense, I am probably more of a realist. I think power matters in the international system. Do not think everything stays in its lane. Just because you have negotiations and diplomacy does not mean that force is not relevant. It does not mean you do use force, but it also does not mean you do not. People tend to stay in their stovepipe lanes. You have to think across lanes.

Go in articulating and assessing your assumptions, and then reassess them. They are not static. They may change over time because you get new information.

Understand the coalitions that are required or that are likely to play into a particular policy. Think about politics, because politics influences and matters, even when we wish it did not. In most countries it does, even in authoritarian countries. Politics is about people and how they interact. It is harder to assess, but it would be wrong to judge that it does not matter.

Read on your subject. Think thematically about what has happened in the past, what forces are shaping something now, and whether those forces are likely to shape something differently in the future.

Reading for strategy

BW: Finally, as is customary with The Pathway Blog, although you have already recommended many great books, if there were a student interested in following a career path similar to yours, what literature would you recommend?

NS: That is harder because there is so much out there. I break it up into categories.

There are classic books about world order, such as Henry Kissinger’s World Order, but there are other books too. So one category would be classic books about world order and power.

Another would be classic books about how militaries work. Williamson Murray and Allan Millett wrote wonderful books about how the American military worked, technology, and war. Michael Howard has an essay called “The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy” in Foreign Affairs from the 1970s. That is a very nice essay that always framed things for me.

You could think about categories of warfare, such as the period of counterinsurgency. If you are interested in Russia, there is Adam Ulam, Richard Pipes, and John Lewis Gaddis on the Cold War.

I am reading now the president of Finland Alexander Stubb’s book, The Triangle of Power. Right now, I am sorting through different books that look at world order in different ways. It is hard to identify one, which I know may be a cop-out, so I would break it into categories.

I am not an economist, and that is fine. I would have been a terrible economist. But I try to read books about globalization. Shannon K. O’Neil, at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote an interesting book in that category. I would look in categories.

About the guest: Nadia Schadlow is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a national security visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. She previously served as U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy and led the drafting of the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States.

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review publishes long-form interviews with people in politics, policy, journalism, law, diplomacy, markets, and public service about the work they do and the path that brought them there.

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This interview was conducted by video in May 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

George Caleb Bingham, The County Election, 1852. Public domain.

Most public arguments assume that better information should produce better judgment. Benjamin Converse’s work begins from a more complicated reality: people do not simply absorb facts and update their beliefs like clean machines. They notice some things and miss others. They read evidence through expectations, identities, incentives, and situations. They ask, often without realizing it, not only is this true? but can I believe this? or must I believe this?

That does not make people stupid. It makes them human.

Converse, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, is interested in the space between two bad simplifications: the perfectly rational actor of economic theory and the hopelessly irrational subject of pop psychology. Real people live somewhere in between. They respond to incentives, but also to identity, attention, social pressure, habit, and context.

This conversation moves from individual judgment to democratic life. Why does more information sometimes harden division rather than resolve it? How do people come to believe what they already expected or wanted to believe? And why, despite all the messiness of modern politics, does Converse remain cautiously optimistic?

His answer is not sentimental. Democracy is complicated because people are complicated. But curiosity, calibrated confidence, and negotiation still matter. They may be the habits that keep uncertainty from becoming paralysis.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

From the Archive · originally published in The Pathway Blog, April 2026.

Beyond the Rational Actor Model

Benjamin Wolf: When you first studied how people form beliefs, what was the biggest misconception about how people actually process information?

Benjamin Converse: It took me a while to get here. This isn’t where I started. But now I’ve been teaching for basically seventeen years, teaching MPP students, and I think the biggest misconception I continue to work on with students goes back to the rational actor model.

What I’m trying to do is help them find a sweet spot for real humans in everyday life. In our case, at a policy school, that means real humans in everyday life who need to think about policy, economics, organizations, leaders, decision-makers, however you want to put it. What is a useful mental model for how this works?

I think it’s really unproductive to get into any kind of psychology-versus-economics debate. That can be fun intellectually, but it’s not all that useful for people who want to go do their work. So I try to help students see what economic models can help them do when they’re reasoning about causality and big systems, and what a psychological or behavioral science approach can help them do when they’re reasoning about essentially the same problems, but maybe at a smaller scale, in one-on-one interactions or small groups.

So in terms of misconceptions, some people adopt what Thaler and Sunstein call the “Econ” misconception, the idea that people are perfectly rational actors, like supercomputers who know everything. But then on the other end of that spectrum is a misunderstanding of psychology that casts everybody as dumb and irrational. The truth is somewhere in the middle, and there’s a lot of nuance to understanding how we make decisions in the real world.

An Unlikely Path Into Social Psychology

BW: You mentioned this wasn’t where you started. What was your original field of study, and what led you to social psychology today?

BC: Sure. One of the funniest things about my journey, in hindsight, is that I took social psychology early on in my undergraduate career. Even though that is now my primary professional identity — I would say I’m a social psychologist when asked what I do in most settings — it really didn’t make a huge impact on me at first.

It was a very standard introductory undergraduate class, and in hindsight I think what happened to me is what happens to a lot of students who take social psychology for the first time: as soon as you hear these ideas, they seem very obvious, if you don’t take enough time to pause and consider the opposite. I took that class, it was fine, and I moved on with my life. I didn’t expect to be a psychology major at that point, and I certainly didn’t expect to devote the rest of my professional career to those ideas.

What got me hooked was signing up on a whim for a class on experimental design. It was a small class that all the psychology majors had to take, but I signed up for it out of interest. It walked through the process of formulating a research question, crafting hypotheses based on prior literature, thinking about how to operationalize variables, and then testing them.

I found that process fascinating, just encountering for the first time all of these clever ways behavioral scientists were trying to learn about behavior and the patterns going on in interactions, and the invisible things happening inside people’s heads. That’s where I got really excited about psychology.

From there, it was the luck of life. I got a little curious about a certain topic, and then I got passed from guardian angel to guardian angel, people who were doing really cool things and who happened to be amazing mentors.

My undergraduate advisor invited me to do an honors thesis, so I got to work through that full process I had been so excited about. Her name is Kimberly Quinn. She was a postdoctoral scholar when I worked with her in college at Dartmouth, and just as I was graduating she took her first faculty job. As part of her startup package she was able to hire a lab manager, so she invited me to come help set up her lab. That was at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

When I showed up, she asked, “What do you want to do while you’re here?” I had no idea. She said a lot of her colleagues there were developmental psychologists studying theory of mind, how we form ideas about what’s going on inside somebody else’s head even though we can’t see their thoughts or feel their emotions. She handed me some social psychology on the topic, including a paper by Nick Epley and his collaborators, and I started getting really excited about that work.

When it came time to think about graduate school, I reached out to Nick Epley to see if he might be taking graduate students. I thought he was still in a psychology department, but it turned out he had just moved and was getting set up in the business school at the University of Chicago. He was part of that early wave of social psychologists building labs in business schools and teaching management courses.

There was an opportunity to work with him, and I hesitated because I thought, I don’t want to go to business school. I don’t know anything about business. I want to be a social psychologist. He basically said, don’t worry. Come here. If you still want a job in a psychology department later, you’ll be able to get one. I’m pretty confident that by the time you’re done here, you won’t want to.

He was a very compelling person, and I trusted him. So I went to Chicago, worked with him at the Center for Decision Research, and there were just amazing people there doing incredible things.

Then, five or six years later, there was a job advertised at the University of Virginia at a policy school. That never would have caught my eye if I hadn’t already had the experience of being a social psychologist in a professional school. It was the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, and at the time they were building with affiliated faculty.

Tim Wilson, an eminent social psychologist whom I had idolized, was leading the search. I thought, I have no idea what it would mean to work at a policy school, but if Tim Wilson is involved, I might be interested.

I think the experience I had gained in Chicago looked valuable to the people assembling the Batten faculty, and I ended up here. I’ve been here going on seventeen years now. It’s introduced me to questions I never would have asked before and people I never would have collaborated with before. It’s been amazing.

From Basic Research to Public Policy

BW: What would you say is the ultimate goal or intended use case for your research? Is it a prediction model, a tool for policymaker reflection, or something else?

BC: That’s a great question. It’s hard to answer because across my portfolio of work I probably have different answers.

I’m incredibly lucky to be a researcher at a place that allows all of us to roam pretty freely. Some of the projects I start are very basic social psychology. We’re trying to understand often undocumented or unrecognized systematic patterns in how people think, interact, or pursue their goals.

That kind of work is often early-stage discovery work, documenting that this is a thing people do systematically. I hope that kind of work will be interesting, important, broad, and robust enough that in ten or fifteen years it becomes the kind of thing policymakers or decision-makers ought to know about.

But research takes a long time, and that work needs to be replicated and extended. We need to understand when it applies and when it doesn’t before, in my view, we go handing it off to decision-makers.

Then I have other work that’s much more applied in nature, where we think we have a pretty good idea of the psychology and how it works, but we don’t yet know how it applies to a particular problem.

I’ve been able to do some work on decision-making related to climate change, often with respect to climate technology, and that work is much further along in the research process. In those cases, yes, I do hope decision-makers will be able to learn from the findings and incorporate them into how they have conversations or make choices.

So it’s really the full spectrum. I’m intellectually satisfied by being able to move between those kinds of projects, with different collaborators, over time. I’m lucky to be in a place that supports that kind of breadth.

Political Belief, Identity, and the Power of Situation

BW: One of the enduring questions in public life is whether people reason their way into political beliefs or inherit them first and rationalize them later. In your view, what shapes political judgment most, and how do identity, evidence, and prior commitment factor into that decision?

BC: I’d answer that as a card-carrying social psychologist. What that means to me is the power of the situation. I think situations are incredibly powerful in shaping people’s behavior.

I would never argue against the existence or importance of personality or stable beliefs. Both are real, both are relevant. But my own mind, because of my training and experience, is naturally biased toward thinking about the situations people are in. And like many social psychologists, I use “situation” in a very broad sense. I mean essentially anything outside the person.

That includes what we inherit from our closest caregivers, who shape us enormously. It includes the communities we grow up in and the early experiences we have. It includes the incentives we perceive in the world, ranging from financial incentives to social incentives. It includes the information ecosystems people live in, and their propensity to consume information, and their curiosity, or lack of curiosity, to go beyond those ecosystems in a sincere effort to learn.

In my psychology for leadership course for MPP students, I introduce what we might call nested models: individuals inside social interactions, inside groups, inside communities, inside broader institutional constraints, culture, and time. I think for all interesting behavioral problems, there are relevant factors at all of those levels of analysis.

Most people can’t work across all those levels all the time. There are just too many. So one piece of practical advice we try to give students is to identify the level they naturally care about most. Some people are drawn to individuals; others are drawn to institutions, culture, or history.

But whatever level you’re naturally drawn to, it’s a good idea to understand the problem at that level, and also one level down and one level up. One step more concrete, and one step more abstract.

So to your original question about where political and sociocultural beliefs come from, I think it’s a super complicated and super rich set of problems. But it’s always worth asking yourself: what’s going on one level down, and what’s going on one level up?

Motivated Reasoning in the Information Age

BW: A lot of people assume that more information should make politics more rational. Instead, modern research shows that the information environment often seems to make people more certain and polarized. What is the explanation for this phenomenon?

BC: The idea that explains the most variance for me is motivated reasoning.

What you expect to believe, what you want to believe, and maybe also what you’re primed to believe, even if you don’t fully recognize it as something you want or are seeking — all of those things serve as information filters. They affect how you perceive the information coming in.

Again, going back to my MPP class, because I think of it as the greatest-hits version of social psychology for people interested in public policy, we spend a couple of weeks on the mechanisms of motivated reasoning. There are lots of ways we end up believing what we expect to believe and what we hope to believe.

It starts with attention. Take a short news story. You could read it and attend to certain parts of it, and I could read the same story and attend to different parts. We might walk away with qualitatively different conclusions, or with the same conclusion but for different reasons, or with different levels of confidence.

Why did we pay attention to different parts? That’s a complicated question, but it has to do with what we expect to find, what we hope to find, and what degree of skepticism we’re likely to bring to the information.

Then there’s memory, and there are the standards we apply to information once we encounter it. If somebody hands you a policy brief, and you start reading it with the background question “must I believe this?” that is very different from reading it with the question “can I believe this?” You are likely to consume the same argument and the same data in different ways.

So there’s a whole set of mechanisms that lead us to interpret information differently. Those mechanisms help explain how people can encounter more information and walk away more confident in what they believed in the first place.

Democracy, Complexity, and Cautious Optimism

BW: As we begin to close, I want to take a step back from the research itself. After studying judgment and belief revision for years, has it made you more optimistic or more cautious about how democracies handle uncertainty?

BC: I don’t know that it has made me more optimistic or more cautious. I am naturally curious whenever I encounter a behavioral question or behavioral problem.

Some people make progress in understanding the world by simplifying things. Other people make progress by adding complexity. Neither is necessarily better. I happen to be drawn to complexity and to thinking about nuance. And the answer, ultimately, is that a single human’s judgment is extremely complicated. A democracy is therefore infinitely more complicated.

I tend to assume, and I’m motivated in my work and teaching by the idea, that whatever people are doing, they are doing it for some set of reasons that make sense to them. If you approach any kind of decision-maker with that in mind, and you are curious and careful, I think you can make at least some progress in understanding what matters to them, why it came to matter, and how they are understanding the world.

So even though democracy seems extremely messy right now, and even though democracy in some sense always seems extremely messy, I still hold the belief that people are doing what they’re doing for reasons that make sense to them and their situations.

If we approach those interactions with curiosity, with humility, and with care about how confident we are in the conclusions we jump to, I think we can understand why things are happening the way they are.

And from there, the optimism I do have comes from experience learning about and teaching negotiation. Successful negotiators do not have to agree on everything to make progress. They figure out how to make trades and find mutually satisfactory ways to solve problems.

So if you approach these issues as a social psychologist, with curiosity and calibrated confidence, and then approach solutions with a negotiator’s mindset, then yes, from that point of view, I do remain somewhat optimistic.

How We Know What Isn’t So

BW: Finally, if there were a student interested in learning more about your work and the kinds of problems you confront on a day-to-day basis, what reading would you recommend, and why?

BC: I would go with an oldie but a goodie: Thomas Gilovich’s How We Know What Isn’t So.

The examples are dated now, which often happens with books like that. I think the book is probably around thirty-five years old, at least in the edition I know best. But the questions in it are the questions that got me interested in this work.

It uses a judgment-and-decision-making lens to ask how reasonable, intelligent people can come to believe things that are, in some cases, completely false, demonstrably untrue. Not because they are stupid or foolish or selfish or ignorant, but because they are operating with a whole suite of psychological strategies, shortcuts, and tricks that work most of the time.

They are highly functional and highly useful for navigating a complicated world, but they can also lead us astray in predictable and systematic ways.

So from a process standpoint, the book helps students understand what I think of as the behavioral scientist’s approach to the world: how can we set up processes that might prove us wrong about how human behavior works?

And from a content standpoint, it helps us think carefully about many of the questions that animate your project, based on what you told me at the beginning: why you’re persistent about reaching out to a wide variety of people working on important problems, trying to understand their perspective, and trying to understand how, at a societal level, we continue to interact with people who have very different priorities and motivations, but still find a way to be productive and prosperous.

About the guest: Benjamin Converse is Professor of Public Policy and Psychology at the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, with an affiliation in UVA’s Department of Psychology. His work focuses on social judgment, motivation, belief formation, self-regulation, decision-making, cooperation, and competition in public and organizational life.

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review publishes long-form interviews with people in politics, policy, journalism, law, diplomacy, markets, psychology, history, and public service about the work they do and the path that brought them there.

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This interview was conducted in April 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

Jonathan Martin speaks at a Future Forum and Texas Tribune panel on Feb. 24, 2020. Photo by Jay Godwin / LBJ Library, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Jonathan Martin has spent years covering American politics from the inside, reporting on presidents, campaigns, congressional leaders, party factions, and the private conversations that often explain more than public statements ever do. In this conversation, he reflects on a Republican Party now organized around Donald Trump, a Democratic Party caught between generational transition and coalition politics, and a Washington culture where fear, ambition, and survival often matter as much as ideology.

Martin also discusses the reporting behind This Will Not Pass, his book with Alexander Burns on the convulsive politics of 2020 and 2021. The book, he explains, was not simply meant to be a campaign account, but an “intensive first draft of American history” about Trump, Biden, COVID, January 6th, and the political fever that still has not broken.

The conversation closes with Martin’s advice for young political reporters: get out of Washington, cover state capitals and state campaigns, build sources across the ideological spectrum, read constantly, and understand that political journalism is ultimately a way of telling the story of American history, culture, identity, and power.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

From the Archive · originally published in The Pathway Blog, April 2026.

The two parties and where power actually lives

Benjamin Wolf: You’ve covered politics long enough to see several versions of both the Republican and Democratic parties. When you look at Washington now, what do smart outsiders still misunderstand about where power actually sits inside the two parties?

Jonathan Martin: The two parties are very different right now. The Republican Party has become a personality cult in which power flows entirely through the preferences of one man, Donald Trump. That’s a very different moment. All presidents are powerful and have enormous sway over their own parties, but this is something different entirely.

The Democratic Party is in a strange period because it’s out of power entirely in Washington. Generationally, its most prominent figures are part of yesterday rather than tomorrow. People like Chuck Schumer, the Senate leader, and former presidents like Biden, Clinton, and Obama are all figures, to borrow the Bill Clinton line, who have more yesterdays than they do tomorrows.

So we’re in a generational transition. The Democratic Party has always been a coalition party, but it’s sort of a patchwork of constituencies. It’s become much more of a high-and-low party now, which is to say it’s dominated by the most educated Americans: people with advanced degrees, lawyers, PhDs, high-income folks who live in big cities and close-in suburbs. And it’s also a party of people who are closer to the margins of society, who are dependent upon the federal government to survive. That includes a lot of first- and second-generation immigrants. It also includes, obviously, African Americans, who historically are the most loyal voting bloc for Democrats.

So the parties are different. But what’s unique about this era is just how Trump has become a singular force who dominates his party and controls what they do and say. But he also has enormous sway over the Democratic Party, too, because the Democrats, being patchwork in nature, are organized largely in opposition to Trump more than around any coherent ideological agenda right now.

Public justifications and private motives

BW: One thing your reporting does especially well is separate the public justification from the private motive. When you talk to elected officials off the record, where do you see the widest gap between what politicians say is driving them and what is actually driving them?

JM: What’s driving their choices on the Republican side is survival. Republicans want to survive the next primary, and you don’t antagonize Donald Trump and survive many primaries. That overwhelmingly is what’s driving Republicans.

Privately, they’ll acknowledge that. And privately, they’ll mock and belittle Trump. They’ll talk about how little he knows, how uninformed he is, how absurd some of his behavior is. Obviously, they don’t want to say all that in public.

Democrats are more candid privately about issues around identity, whether it’s gender or race, that they don’t want to talk about publicly because of the sensitivities of their coalition. You certainly saw that with Biden. A lot of Democrats were uneasy about him running for reelection at 82. They were reluctant to say so out loud, in part because they feared the next question, which would have been, “Well, then, do you want Kamala Harris to be the nominee?” And the answer would have been, “Well, no, I don’t.” But they didn’t want to say that out loud.

Why? Because they thought she would have been a lackluster candidate. What she turned out to be. So here we are.

Ideology, ambition, and fear

BW: A lot of political coverage still treats ideology as the central explanation for why politicians act the way they do. But when you follow decisions from inside the room, how much is ideology, how much is ambition, and how much is fear of the coalition turning on you?

JM: I think it’s a combination of the three. Again, separate the parties. Republicans are driven by fear of Trump, especially if their prospects hang on a primary. If your survival every two years, every six years, every four years, is surviving a primary, then obviously Trump is the biggest force in your life. Staying right with him is everything.

On the Democratic side, the primary still matters a lot. Obviously, compromising with Trump or being seen as enabling Trump is detrimental to your survival in a primary. But most Democrats are still more focused on the general election, at least if they’re in more competitive districts or states.

Look, politics used to be a hodgepodge of partisan, regional, generational, and individual preferences. It was more confused. It’s much more coherent now, and polarized, in the sense that the parties have less give in the rope. If you look at the votes in Congress, if you look at the preferences of the voters themselves, it’s much more coherent along partisan lines.

That’s why Manchin and Sinema stood out so much, and why Fetterman stands out now, and why Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski stand out on the Republican side. There used to be 30 of them or more in the Senate, these wild cards, these more individual actors and free agents. Now it’s a much more party-line chamber. And the House, obviously, is the same way. People are much more inclined to vote the party line because that’s what’s expected of them.

There’s such a severe penalty, implicit and explicit, for stepping away from the party line. We’re in tribal times, and the expectation is that you will follow the expectations of your party. A lot of this is driven by political polarization and negative partisanship, which is voters voting against the other guys. Helping the other team is the biggest sin. It’s not even ideological principle or an agenda as much as it is being part of the home team.

Where Democrats misread the country

BW: You talked earlier about survival as a major force inside the Republican Party. Looking at Democrats, where do you think the party’s leadership class has most misread the country over the last few years? Not morally, necessarily, but analytically, where did they get the model wrong?

JM: Democrats didn’t fully appreciate how divisive the issue of Israel and Gaza was going to be with a lot of their voters. They thought it was more of a temporary issue, and it’s been stickier than they thought.

I think Democrats also misread their electorate and thought that their voters were more committed to Joe Biden. I was so struck by this in 2023. I actually wrote about it. I did a piece about Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, from Mackinac Island. What was so striking is that the higher on the political ladder, the more loyal Democrats were to Biden and renominating Biden. But further down the scale, toward the grassroots, Democratic activists and voters were okay with other folks running in 2024. There was not some overwhelming feeling of, “We can’t abandon our president.”

But actual Democratic voters were different. I think a lot of Democratic elites were so uneasy about sticking their head out, about being the ones who were going to speak up first and say Biden couldn’t run again, because the perceived penalty for stepping out of the pack in these tribal times is so severe.

Dean Phillips of Minnesota did it and got belittled. Also, nobody wanted to answer the second question about Kamala. So they said, “I don’t want to be the one who says it.” And so here we are. Biden runs for reelection while turning 82, and it turned out to be a debacle. These folks knew the risks. Not that it would be that bad, but they knew the risks and they were uneasy about it. Nobody said a word.

BW: Looking ahead to 2028, and even to the midterms before then, do you think Democrats have absorbed that lesson? Or do you think the party is still at risk of repeating the same mistake?

JM: I think there’s an appetite for a wide-open primary now. I’ll tell you what: if you look at the races where Democrats have won the presidency, 1976, 1992, 2008, basically everything except Biden in modern times, and let’s take Biden out of the equation because Biden was really a vehicle against Trump and a vehicle against COVID, every one of those races was an open race.

There was not an incumbent president or vice president of their party running. Nobody tried to put much weight on the scale. The three folks who emerged all won the presidency: Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

In 2016, Hillary was basically anointed. Yes, Bernie challenged her, but that was an insurgency that had no support from the party leadership. So in 2016 and 2024, you’re basically talking about coronations more than competitive primaries. I think Democrats don’t want that again. They want a clean, open primary.

What journalism gets wrong about populism

BW: You’ve had a front-row seat to elite political journalism in a period when trust in institutions has clearly fallen sharply.

JM: I’ve noticed that.

BW: What do reporters still get wrong when they cover populism? And where does journalism confuse performance for conviction, or noise for actual leverage?

JM: There’s a saying, I think Gary Hart, the former senator and candidate for president, said this. David Axelrod sort of borrowed it, and I think it’s totally accurate: Washington is always the last to get the news.

What that means is that the conventional wisdom in D.C. about who can or can’t be a candidate, or who is or isn’t going to be a strong candidate, is often wrong. The voters surprise us. Arthur Schlesinger had this great saying that the future outwits all of our certitudes, and the voters tend to outwit all of our certitudes here in Washington.

They’re more open to Barack Obama, or Bernie Sanders, or Pete Buttigieg, or hell, Donald Trump, than we think they’re going to be in D.C. So let’s not prejudge who can or can’t be a nominee. That’s the biggest thing: understanding that the aperture is wider with voters than we assume it is. To me, that’s all the more reason to get out of D.C. and cover politics beyond D.C.

Reporting This Will Not Pass

BW: You co-authored This Will Not Pass, which gave readers a very close look at how political actors behaved when the stakes were unusually high. After doing that reporting and the research that went into the writing, what most surprised you about the way senior officials rationalized their decisions to themselves?

JM: Just the massive gap between what they say in public and what they say in private about people. There’s such a gap. They’re so petrified of talking publicly about some of the folks in their own party. But it’s so revealing when you have them on audiotape and can hear how they talk in private.

That was the big reveal. I’m really proud of that book that Alex Burns and I did. We got so much reporting about the conversations taking place at the highest levels of politics in Washington, but also in big cities and state capitals. It’s a really panoramic look at American politics in 2020 and 2021, and the aftermath of 2020.

So, folks, give it a look: This Will Not Pass. Available on Amazon.com right now.

BW: Certainly a must read. Mr. Martin, can you take us inside the reporting process for the book? How did the idea first come together, and what did the work actually look like as you tried to reconstruct that period?

JM: Sure. We had some friends in the publishing world who were eager to have a book about the 2020 campaign. What Alex and I wanted to do was less a campaign book and more a book about a period of time.

I think some of the best books in American history are about a single year: 1865, 1912, 1929, 1968. I think that period of 2020 and 2021, Trump, COVID, Biden, January 6th, was a convulsive period in American history.

It turns out the title held up pretty damn well, because here we are in the spring of 2026, and we were pretty prescient with This Will Not Pass, because the fever hasn’t broken. We’re still living through these tumultuous times.

The idea was that we were going to capture this moment in American politics and American history and do a real, intensive first draft of American history that hopefully will be looked at by future historians.

Curiosity, history, and the making of a political reporter

BW: You’ve covered politics at the highest level across several eras of the media business. Looking back, what choices or habits most shaped the kind of reporter you became?

JM: Two things: you’ve got to work hard, and you’ve got to be curious.

Work hard. Come in early. Stay late. Be curious. Give a damn. Take an interest in the world that came before you. Harry Truman once said, “The only new thing is the history you don’t know.” You’ve got to know where the world was. The world didn’t start in 2016 with Donald Trump. The more you know about what came before that, the better you’ll be.

Then just work hard and get after it. Luck helps, timing matters, connections matter, but if you put yourself in a place to succeed, you’re going to go a long way. I had good mentors. I had good timing, and that helped. But I also had a curiosity that I still have about the how and the why of American politics, American culture, and American identity.

Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we now? Where are we going?

I’m curious about all of that every day. The beauty of political journalism is telling a story about America and American history through the prism of our elections. So it’s a lot of fun.

BW: Where did that curiosity come from for you? Was there a moment when you realized that politics, history, and public life were the subjects you wanted to spend your career trying to understand?

JM: I was always interested in history and politics and public affairs. I was lousy in math and science, and I was always curious about the world around me.

I had parents who would take my brother and me to all kinds of historic sites, and who made sure that we constantly had books around us and were constantly at the library, learning and reading. You’re never bored if you have a book. That has been the maxim I’ve lived by now for almost half a century. That helped a lot.

At some point, you’re either interested in this stuff or you’re not. Some kids reject what their parents are into. I embraced it. For me, it was second nature. I just can’t imagine not being interested in history, politics, place, identity, and culture. It’s all fascinating to me.

I love the vast buffet that is American politics and American history. It’s all interesting to me, and I want to eat quite a lot of it.

Advice for young political reporters

BW: If you were advising a serious young reporter who wants to cover American politics well right now, where would you tell them to look that the rest of the press corps is still underestimating?

JM: I would tell them to go cover a state capital or a state campaign. Get sources on the ground from across the ideological spectrum. Learn how to write. Learn how to report. Learn that the tougher you write, the more skeptical you are, people aren’t going to walk away. They’re going to respect you more, because you’re going to have more authority in your coverage.

And read, read, read. Again, the more you read, the better writer you’ll become. Writing is like osmosis. You just pick it up. You get better by seeing what other writing looks like on the page.

Read, read. Learn about the world that came before. Understand how we are, why we are, and you’ll have an advantage over the next guy. You can get it in your pocket. You have a computer in your pocket. Take advantage of it, man. Get off the social media stuff and read books and articles.

About the guest: Jonathan Martin is the Politics Bureau Chief and Senior Political Columnist at POLITICO. He previously served as a national political correspondent for The New York Times and is the co-author, with Alexander Burns, of This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future.

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review publishes long-form interviews with people in politics, policy, journalism, law, diplomacy, markets, and public service about the work they do and the path that brought them there.

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This interview was conducted by video in April 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

The Combined Air & Space Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, public domain.

Jennifer Kavanagh begins from a premise that still sounds almost heretical in Washington: the United States is already extraordinarily safe.

It has oceans on both sides, weak neighbors to the north and south, a massive economy, and a powerful nuclear deterrent. Yet American strategy often begins from the opposite assumption, treating almost any disruption anywhere in the world as a threat to U.S. security. From that starting point, Kavanagh argues, Washington builds commitments it does not need, spends money it cannot discipline, and defines credibility by how many burdens it can carry at once.

Her work pushes against the reflexes of primacy. She argues for restraint not as passivity, but as prioritization: choosing which commitments actually protect the United States, which merely preserve old habits, and which create risks greater than the dangers they claim to manage.

This conversation moves through the major pressure points of American strategy: NATO, Ukraine, the Middle East, Taiwan, semiconductors, defense budgets, and the politics of saying unpopular things in a city built around consensus. Kavanagh’s argument is blunt: retrenchment is coming either way. The question is whether the United States manages it deliberately, or waits until material constraints make the decisions for it.

For students interested in national security, her path also offers a useful lesson. Research matters. Institutions matter. But so does the willingness to defend an argument that many people in the room do not want to hear.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

From the Archive · originally published in The Pathway Blog, April 2026.

Strategic Strength and the Costs of Activism

Benjamin Wolf: A lot of your work pushes against the reflex to define U.S. credibility by the number of commitments it takes on. At this point, what do you think Washington still gets most wrong about the relationship between military activism and actual strategic strength?

Jennifer Kavanagh: My view is that the United States is actually very safe, and that’s not the narrative you hear in D.C. most often. Every day I read the paper and hear about how the world is more dangerous and the U.S. faces more complex threats, and I just disagree with that.

The U.S. has oceans on two sides and weak neighbors to the north and south. It has a powerful nuclear deterrent. It is very secure and very safe, and it does not need hundreds of thousands of U.S. military forces or 700 bases abroad to protect itself.

So I see the U.S. approach to security, which is to basically define anything that happens anywhere in the world that changes the status quo as a threat, as counterproductive. I don’t see having U.S. military forces based forward as stabilizing to the world. I see U.S. military power, actually, as quite destabilizing.

I came to that conclusion based on my work when I was at the RAND Corporation on U.S. military interventions, where I studied every time the U.S. has used force since 1898, the Spanish-American War. My big conclusion was that these interventions fail. They don’t make the U.S. safer, and they don’t make the places we intervene any better off.

Starting from that assumption, what my work tries to do is look at which commitments we actually need and which we don’t. And when I started challenging a lot of the conventional thinking, I came to the realization that most of the commitments we have don’t actually make the U.S. safer, and they create perverse incentives for our allies to behave in ways that are inconsistent with their geopolitical reality.

If they believe they have an ironclad U.S. security guarantee, they act in ways that are too aggressive or too provocative, or assume a level of military backing that they wouldn’t have if the U.S. weren’t there. Japan is a good example. Israel is a good example. These are countries that take on significant risks because they believe the U.S. will back them up.

I think the world would be better off if they didn’t do that, if they had to deal with their own geopolitical realities without the backing of U.S. security guarantees.

Which Commitments Should Be Reconsidered?

BW: You hinted at it a little bit just then, but a theme that runs through your work is that prioritization is unavoidable. So if you were sitting with a president who accepted that premise, what would be the first two or three commitments that you would ask them to reconsider?

JK: Everything in the Middle East. The U.S. does not have major strategic interests in the Middle East. It keeps getting sucked into wars in the Middle East, and the rationale for those wars is usually that our bases in the Middle East are at risk.

But that doesn’t make sense. Those bases are supposed to be there to protect the United States. They are not, in and of themselves, something that needs to be protected. If the goal is to protect the bases, we’ve made a mistake. So that would be the first thing.

Then I would look very carefully at the commitment in Europe. I don’t know if the number of U.S. forces in Europe should be zero, but it should be much less than 70,000 or 80,000, which is what we have now. I don’t think NATO is really necessary anymore for global security. It certainly isn’t really benefiting the United States.

So I would relook at that commitment and see whether U.S. involvement in NATO continues to make sense, at least to the extent that it is currently involved.

Those are the two places I would start.

Why NATO?

BW: Can you go a little bit deeper into the “why NATO?” question, or I guess, “why not NATO” in this sense?

JK: NATO was founded in 1949. It was basically a compromise with Europe to make them feel secure so they could focus on their economic rebuilding after World War II. The idea was that if the U.S. was there to protect them militarily, they could continue to invest in their economic infrastructure, which had been devastated after the war.

It was also a move by those in the United States who believed that the only way the U.S. could protect its interests was to basically take control of security everywhere. And it was built to inculcate dependence, to ensure that European allies couldn’t be a threat to the United States, and to make it so they couldn’t make their own decisions geopolitically, so that the U.S. could, number one, be the number one global power, and number two, prevent things like World War II, which was in some sense a European mistake that the U.S. had to clean up.

But the world is quite different now. I don’t see Russia as a conventional threat to the United States. It certainly is a nuclear threat, has extensive cyber capabilities, and acts in the hybrid domain a lot. But in terms of conventional military power, it’s not a threat to the United States. And it’s not really a threat to Europe.

I disagree with Europeans who are very concerned that in 2028 or 2029, when the Ukraine war is over, Russia’s next move is going to be to invade Europe. I talk to Russians all the time, and that’s just not how they see the world, and it’s not something they’re interested in.

And if the purpose of NATO is to defend against Russia, and Russia is not really a threat anymore, do we need NATO anymore? But even beyond that, Europe is rich and technologically advanced. The days of the 1940s and 1950s, when Europe was weak and couldn’t defend itself, are gone. Europe is perfectly capable of building a military capability that could defend against Russia, which has a smaller total population than all of Europe together and a smaller GDP than all of Europe together.

So I have a lot of confidence that Europe could defend itself without the United States. And even if it couldn’t, I don’t believe that Russia has the military power to take over Europe. So does it have enough military power to seize a corner of Estonia? Maybe. But does that really affect U.S. interests? Not really. Do I want that to happen? No. But do I think it’s worth fighting a potentially nuclear war with Russia over? No.

That’s the final reason I would get out of NATO: I see it as more of a risk than a benefit. It entangles the U.S. and risks nuclear war with Russia when that’s not in U.S. interests. That doesn’t mean I hate Europe or think the U.S. shouldn’t be partners with Europe. It’s just that the NATO alliance needs something specific to justify it, and I’m not sure that thing is in U.S. interests anymore.

Ukraine and the Meaning of Victory

BW: If you strip away the rhetoric, what do you think U.S. policymakers actually believe victory looks like in Ukraine? And do you think they believe it privately as much as they say it publicly?

JK: I don’t know that policymakers know what they mean when they say that. I think there was a time, when Ukraine was doing quite well on the battlefield, when there was some hope that maybe Ukraine could push Russia back, at least to pre-2022 borders. But now I don’t even think they believe that’s realistic.

The battlefield has been stalled for a long time, and while it doesn’t seem likely that Russia is going to make big breakthroughs, it also definitely doesn’t seem likely that Ukraine is going to make big breakthroughs.

So now, when people talk about victory, I think what they really want is a peace settlement that doesn’t force major concessions on Ukraine, that doesn’t leave Russia feeling like it won the war. Giving up the rest of Donetsk, for example, would be something they would argue against because they would feel that would reward Russia, that it would suggest surrender or capitulation on the Ukrainian side.

They don’t want a postwar settlement that gives Russia major sanctions relief or places constraints on Ukraine’s military capabilities or sovereignty in any way. They don’t necessarily even want to close the door on Ukraine’s NATO membership. So they want a peace settlement that can be sold as a victory for Ukraine, and not a victory for Russia.

I understand, as a human being, why that’s appealing. Russia is obviously the aggressor that started the war, and no matter what its security concerns or grievances against NATO and the United States may be, war is a terrible way to solve that problem.

That said, ultimately I think the outcome of the war in Ukraine doesn’t have a lot of impact on U.S. national security. It doesn’t even have a lot of impact on European national security, or I guess European regional security would be the better way to say it.

So I would be in favor of pushing harder for something that does require some concessions from Ukraine, just acknowledging the reality that Russia can probably keep fighting longer.

And now, especially after the war in Iran, the U.S. doesn’t have the excess material or resources to continue supplying Ukraine with the weapons it needs to protect its infrastructure. So continuing to fight is just a losing bet.

Defense Budgets and Avoiding Prioritization

BW: On the defense budget, do you think more money is sometimes politically attractive precisely because it postpones the need to make these choices?

JK: Yes. I think more money is appealing for a couple of reasons. The first is that there are a lot of constituencies that want more defense money. The defense contractors are a powerful lobby. Congressmen like more defense money because it creates jobs in their districts.

And then, yes, there’s the argument you just articulated, which is that it postpones the need to prioritize. If you look at the report from the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, not the current one that just came out in 2026 but the one that came out under Biden in 2023, they did a review of this issue, and their argument is that prioritization is impossible. The U.S. is so essential that it cannot afford to prioritize across regions.

Then they acknowledge that in order to meet the requirements of this, the U.S. must spend dramatically more every year. They also make the point, very honestly, that the only way to fund this really is through reform to entitlements, which would mean less Medicare, less Medicaid, less Social Security, or higher taxes. And that’s the tradeoff.

That’s the reason policymakers like this, because no one wants to prioritize. No one wants to give up U.S. primacy. Well, except me. I want to give that up. But congressmen don’t want to. They want America to continue to be the global hegemon.

But it’s just not sustainable, because you can’t outspend China.

The argument often made is that with the Soviet Union, we were able to outspend them. We could just keep spending on defense and their economy eventually couldn’t support it. But with China, you’re not going to outspend China. So you need a different strategy, not just more money.

Retrenchment Before Reality Forces It

BW: Ten years from now, what do you think will look more obvious in hindsight than it does today?

JK: That the U.S. should have started retrenching earlier, because I fear that we’re entering a world now where, especially after the war in Iran, U.S. resource constraints will really start to impinge on its strategy.

We’re entering a world where the question isn’t “Should the U.S. do something?” but “Can the U.S. do something?”

If you think about the big debate a lot of us are having in D.C., it’s whether the U.S. should defend Taiwan. This is a long-term question that has become quite an active debate, which is interesting because it used to be very taboo to say that the answer to this question was no. But now I don’t think the question is “should” anymore. In my view, the question is “can?”

And at least right now, the answer would be no, because the United States doesn’t have the munitions to fight a war in Asia right now. It doesn’t have the air defenses. It doesn’t have the offensive munitions to do that. It doesn’t have the naval or air capacity as long as we have so many ships and aircraft committed in the Middle East.

So you’re entering a world where you’re not able to manage retrenchment. You’re not able to choose which commitments you want to give up and do it in a responsible way over a fixed time period. You’re not able to say, “We’d really like to keep these commitments in Asia because they’re valuable to us.” You’re forced to retrench, and you’re forced to retrench in ways that are maybe not strategically ideal.

They leave allies vulnerable. They force you to give up things you’d rather keep or keep you tied down in places you don’t want to be anymore.

And that, to me, is a worse place to be than choosing how you pull back. So I think in ten years we will look back and wish that retrenchment had been something we started sooner, and that we had made more consistent and conscientious choices about the commitments we gave up, and that we gave them up sooner rather than waiting until we were forced to do so by reality.

Taiwan, Semiconductors, and Economic Strategy

BW: You spoke about the rationale behind U.S. involvement in the Middle East, and I can see how it’s a little more blurry there. But as it relates to Taiwan, I think a lot of the concern is that a good portion of our semiconductor production comes from there. For those who want to defend Taiwan because of that, what would you say to them?

JK: I agree that semiconductor production is something to take into account. And I think it’s the only one of all the arguments made for maintaining the current commitments to Taiwan that actually requires serious consideration and thinking. Most of the other ones I can counter pretty quickly and easily.

A few things. First, China is also dependent on Taiwan’s semiconductor capabilities, and that means that at least for now, it also has a reason not to attack Taiwan. Even if it would like to seize those semiconductor fabs, a war over Taiwan would almost certainly destroy them. It’s unlikely they would survive that level of bombing, and the U.S. might destroy them.

If China were to seize them peacefully, most of the intellectual property and a lot of the input parts are not housed on the island. So the U.S. could withhold them. The factories would be there, but they wouldn’t be all that useful to China.

So this gives us a window. The U.S. has an advantage, in my view, in that it controls the technological know-how and intellectual property required to reconstitute TSMC-type production inside the United States. And we have time, because China is, at least for now, not imminently going to attack Taiwan and does have this dependence on TSMC that should keep it, at least for now, from taking military action.

So the answer, in my view, isn’t to keep the current commitment to Taiwan, but to reshore that capability and make sure it exists in more secure locations, in the United States and in other secure places, so you have resilient capacity. That will take time. It won’t be immediate. It will require resources.

But what if we took part of the money that is supposed to be allocated toward this enormous defense budget and, instead of putting it toward weapons, actually made a serious effort to continue building this capability domestically?

The resources are always there for war. But somehow they’re not there for other types of serious near-term investments. In my view, that’s the answer to this problem: not to keep the current commitment to Taiwan, but to think economically about how to reduce the dependence we have on that specific capability, and others, so we avoid this problem in the future.

Entering the Field

BW: You’ve been writing about U.S. military strategy for quite some time. What first got you interested in the subject, and when did it happen?

JK: I started working in this area right after college. I got a job working as a research assistant at the RAND Corporation after college, and I was always interested in international security.

The first events I remember are the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was eight or nine, and it captured my attention as something that was quite fascinating that I didn’t really understand, but thought was worth learning more about.

But what really got me into this line of work was that I loved research. I think research is so much fun. After college, I thought maybe I wanted to get a PhD, because then I could do research as my job. But PhDs are hard and they take a long time, and I wanted to make really sure that I liked this enough to do it as a career.

So I decided I would be a research assistant at a think tank, and I was not super picky about the topic area. I would have researched anything. But I was lucky, and I got this job at RAND. After that, I was kind of sold on it as a line of work. I found it to be so much fun.

I did eventually go back and get a PhD. I stayed at RAND for a few years and then went back. So RAND is really where I learned all about the military, and I guess I’ve been doing it ever since.

Tradeoffs, Criticism, and the Washington Ecosystem

BW: What do you think has been the biggest tradeoff of your work?

JK: I feel like there are so many things I wish I had known.

I think when I first came to D.C., I didn’t really understand how D.C. worked, and there’s a big difference between, say, working at RAND and working in a downtown D.C. think tank. I’ve only gained appreciation for that over time. It took me a long time to understand how the D.C. ecosystem works and how to be effective, how to network, and how to have your work make an impact. So that’s one thing.

I think a second thing is that, at least right now, one thing that’s hard about my job is that I make a lot of unpopular arguments. And that means it attracts negative attention as well as positive attention. So being secure enough to know that this is what I believe, and people can criticize me if they want, but I can back up my arguments and that’s really all that’s important.

And then I guess the third thing is that getting a PhD is very hard. This isn’t something I regret, but it’s something I would advise people looking to get a PhD about: make sure you know why you’re doing it.

I knew why I was doing it. I wanted to go back to RAND. I had a very clear vision of my life after the PhD. So when getting a PhD was hard and I wanted to quit, I at least had this vision of, “Okay, I know why I’m doing this. It will be worth it in the end.” That kept me going through the times when I really wanted to quit.

But if you don’t have that “why,” it can just feel like a slog, because it’s long and there’s not a lot of positive feedback along the way. Especially once you enter the dissertation phase, there’s no short-term gratification. It’s all long-term, and you don’t really know where you’re heading.

And then I think the last thing is that international security in the D.C. space, especially on the military side, is still very male-dominated. I often find that I’m still the only woman in the room. I’m used to it now, but sometimes it can feel isolating.

I’ve been happy to see more and more young women involved in this space. Hopefully they’ll have a different experience.

I know my experience is different from the women who are older than me, who definitely had a very isolating experience. But I think that field is changing really rapidly, and that’s a good thing. Having more different voices and more different perspectives matters.

There are also a lot of programs now in D.C. to get people not just from the East Coast, but from all across the country, including the Midwest and places that haven’t traditionally been feeders into the D.C. ecosystem. And I think that’s also good.

Having a more diverse set of voices in the think tank space is important, because if you’re going to be informing policymakers, you want to hear from everyone, and that can help produce better U.S. policy overall.

Making Unpopular Arguments

BW: You talked about having unpopular opinions and, because of that, facing criticism. Is there ever pressure to say the less inflammatory thing simply because it might make your views more agreeable, maybe bring more readership? How do you stay true to wanting to publish what you actually believe? Where is that line for you?

JK: For me, my goal is to advance a U.S. foreign policy that I see as being in U.S. interests. And if I can justify and back up my argument for why what we’re doing is wrong, I’m not afraid to make the unpopular argument. At this point, there’s no insult that I haven’t heard. There’s no new thing someone can say that will hurt my feelings.

And yes, sometimes my unpopular views mean I don’t get invited to certain things. But more often I’ve found that the more strongly and clearly I make my case, even if it’s controversial, the more things I get invited to, because as long as I’m not making a nihilistic argument, people are willing to engage with different ideas even if they don’t like them.

Having different voices at events provides a depth and interest they wouldn’t get otherwise. That’s a change over time. I think that’s happening more and more.

But I guess it’s just that there’s negative feedback and positive feedback to pushing against the status quo. And if I don’t get invited to all the events or all the cocktail parties, that’s okay, because I still get invited to the things that, in my view, really matter and that really change policy.

Reading Restraint

BW: Finally, Jennifer, if there were a young student who was interested in following a career path similar to yours, what book would you recommend to them, and why?

JK: One book I would definitely recommend, if you want to follow a career path similar to mine, is Barry Posen’s Restraint. It really lays out the strategic case for a restrained U.S. foreign policy in a very clear way.

Barry Posen is an MIT political scientist, so he brings in all the necessary political theory and evidence, but he also makes it very accessible. My goal is to advance his work and bring it more into the military domain. So I would say that’s one key thing I would recommend reading.

I think the other thing is maybe not a book, but to read the articles published in, especially, the print version of Foreign Affairs. The reason I say that is because it’s a really good window into the debates happening in D.C. If you read the magazine over time, the key debates are really surfaced there, because they bring in perspectives from different sides of every issue.

The big debates on European security, the big debates happening in Asia, the big debates happening over U.S. foreign policy are all surfaced in that magazine.

And no matter what you believe, I think it’s important to be able to engage with all sides, and you can’t really figure out what you believe until you’ve seen the full picture. For me, that’s been really helpful: to understand the key debates, and then decide what I agree with and what I don’t agree with.

About the guest: Jennifer Kavanagh is a Senior Fellow and Director of Military Analysis at Defense Priorities. Her work focuses on U.S. military strategy, force structure, defense budgeting, the defense industrial base, military deployments, alliances, and the case for restraint. She previously worked at the RAND Corporation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review publishes long-form interviews with people in politics, policy, journalism, law, diplomacy, markets, history, and public service about the work they do and the path that brought them there.

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This interview was conducted in April 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken addresses reporters from the State Department press briefing room in 2022. Photo by Freddie Everett / U.S. Department of State, public domain.

Steve Clemons has occupied a rare place in Washington: close enough to the foreign policy establishment to understand its language, incentives, and rituals, but independent enough to see when the conversation turns inward and starts mistaking itself for the world.

His critique is blunt. Much of the American strategic class, he argues, still suffers from a kind of strategic narcissism: the assumption that the world orbits around the United States in the way it once did. America remains powerful. But power is not the same as control, and influence is not the same as centrality. Allies hedge. Rivals adapt. Institutions age. Other countries make calculations of their own.

Clemons came to that view through a career that began in an Air Force family, moved through Cold War strategic studies, Japan policy, journalism, think tanks, television, events, and public argument. Along the way, he learned to distrust the performance of seriousness when it is not grounded in reading, historical context, and independent thought.

This conversation is about leverage, perspective, and judgment. It is also about journalism in an age of AI, institutional mythology, and shrinking attention: how to use new tools without letting them think for you, how to build expertise before trying to explain the world, and why young writers should live broadly, take editing well, and avoid over-revering their idols.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

From the Archive · originally published in The Pathway Blog, April 2026.

The Gap Between Washington’s Worldview and the World Itself

Benjamin Wolf: You’ve spent years watching Washington from a vantage point that is slightly unusual, in that you’ve been very close to the foreign policy establishment and understand how it talks to itself, but independent enough to notice when that conversation becomes self-reinforcing. When you look at the national security class now, where do you think the greatest gap is between the way it describes the world and the way the world actually is?

Steve Clemons: That’s a great question. I think the strategic class in Washington is largely unconscious of how narcissistic it is. It is deeply self-absorbed. Over the last eighty years, America’s leadership and its role in building much of the world’s postwar institutional infrastructure placed the United States at the center of most major global action, or inaction. We were the nation that mattered. That mindset got baked into the way people here think.

So it is very hard for them to walk in other countries’ shoes. It is also hard for them to recognize that, over time, America’s significance — not that it has become insignificant, but its significance in all things — has diminished. The biggest gap today is that many people in Washington feel we are far more powerful and influential than we actually are. Other nations are making their own decisions and their own calculations. Not everything is built around the United States. In fact, we are at a moment marked by serious doubt about whether we will even remain present in many of the world’s problems.

The world has moved on in many ways. That does not mean we are unimportant. After Suez, the United Kingdom remained important, but it was no longer definitively important. I think that is the biggest gap right now.

And I’ll tell you, some of the most powerful forces in foreign policy are psychological. You see it in countries like Russia. A great deal of what Putin does is bound up with a sense of humiliation at the hands of the West. In the United States, our version of that is an ego problem around diminished significance that we do not want to accept.

BW: Where do you think that gap comes from?

SC: I think the biggest reason the gap began to emerge is that many of the world’s major institutions, the UN, the WTO, and others, came to represent less and less of how power was actually distributed. Where does India fit in? Where does Brazil fit in? Where does a country like Iran fit in? It has ninety-two million people and is certainly not on our list of favorite nations, but it still carries weight. How does China fit in? China is in the UN, of course, but in many institutions it had to muscle its way in, and that has often been an uncomfortable arrangement.

A lot of these institutions have not adapted well to how power is now distributed. In my view, and I do not blame him entirely, but President Obama had a unique chance after George W. Bush to rewire some of those institutions and make them more reflective of the world as it had become. He had the opportunity, as a transformational president, to help write a new global social contract for the United States and to help create institutions that better matched the real structure of global power. He failed to do that.

So the gap you are talking about comes from this growing distance between the world America wants to see and the world as it actually is, combined with our failure to modernize. We were still sitting atop institutions we built eighty years ago, and we have been inconsistent in figuring out how to keep evolving them.

That is why, on the one hand, America can look more muscular than ever. We throw power around constantly. But in terms of alliances, trust, and solving global problems, we are simultaneously more forceful and yet weaker, less able to get the outcomes we want.

How His Career Began

BW: I want to go back to the beginning of your career. What first got you involved in foreign policy and domestic politics journalism? Was it a specific moment, or did it develop subtly over time?

SC: I was an Air Force brat. I grew up in the military. My dad was in the Air Force, and we lived all over the world. I graduated from high school in Japan. At the time, we were in the middle of the Cold War, and my dad, like everyone else in that world, was very focused on what they saw as Soviet competition with the United States. It was the Soviet Union then, not Russia.

So I grew up in that environment. I always thought of myself as someone who had a lot of international experience as a kid, and I was interested in political science and economics. It seemed natural to focus on those things.

When I was at UCLA, I got involved with something called the Center for International and Strategic Affairs. It has a different name now. I also worked with the RAND-UCLA Center for the Study of Soviet International Behavior. It had a very long acronym.

I worked there for a man named Arnold Horelick, who had been the top Soviet intelligence officer on the National Intelligence Council during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. He had written a classified study of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He completely intrigued me. He was our top Soviet expert. Brilliant. Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision, which in political science was one of the books you always read, was based in part on Arnold’s work.

So I entered that world in the early 1980s, and you could already feel the Soviet Union slipping. You could feel the decline. We held a conference at UCLA in 1984 that brought together many of America’s best-known Soviet experts, and you could sense, in the discussion, the breakdown that would later become unmistakable in 1989. We all saw the foreshocks.

For a young person, it was extraordinary to be in the middle of that. I was just a kid, but I was around people who mattered intellectually. They were driven by ideas. These were not just people with titles. They knew things. They cared deeply. They debated seriously. I got hooked.

At the same time that the Soviet Union seemed to be declining, the region I knew best, Japan, was rising. So I shifted from being a Soviet watcher to someone who thought, maybe I should return to my own roots and study Japanese politics, the Japanese economy, and Japan’s place in the world.

It is hard for younger people to fully appreciate now, but Japan was once what China is today in the American imagination. It was an ally, but it was also seen as a serious threat to American economic dominance.

That whole period fascinated me. I thought Japan represented a genuine competitive challenge, but also a different way of organizing national strength. It took elite graduates, put them into powerful positions across industry and government, and there was a kind of coordination there that was deeply interesting.

The American model was much more laissez-faire and chaotic. You can argue that the United States is ultimately more inventive and creative, but there are moments when another organizational model can be highly competitive.

So I got caught up in the world of ideas, frameworks, ways of thinking. That is really where it began.

Writing, Publishing, and Kissinger

SC: The journalistic side came from the fact that I just started writing. In college, I was involved in something called the UCLA Undergraduate Review. I was in the honors college. I wrote constantly, and then I started trying to get my work published.

The first thing I published outside college was a letter to the Los Angeles Times challenging Henry Kissinger. He had written an op-ed about Japan, and without getting too deep into it, he was wrong about some structural features of Japan’s political system and how they were shaping the trade disputes we were having at the time. So I was cocky. I wrote a response.

Because I worked for Arnold Horelick, I had access to Kissinger’s address in Arnold’s Rolodex. After my letter was published, I mailed it to Kissinger. I wrote, “Dear Dr. Kissinger, I thought I would share this with you. With all due respect, I saw things somewhat differently and thought you might find it interesting.” Very polite.

Then I got a note back from Henry Kissinger. It was extraordinary to me. He thanked me for the piece, and at the bottom, in his own handwriting, he had scrawled a question: “Well, how do you lobby Japan at the subcabinet level?” To anyone else it would have seemed minor, but to me it was electrifying. I had just had my first interaction with Henry Kissinger, and it was clearly his handwriting. So I ended up writing a paper on the question he had posed, and the whole experience was thrilling.

Then, many years later, when I was running the Japan America Society of Southern California, the Soviet Union had collapsed and Japan was still rising. I organized a conference on what would drive power in the post-Cold War world: the size of your military or the size of your economy. Kissinger was famously associated with the first view; I was interested in the second.

Kissinger was on the board of ARCO at the time, and I knew the company’s CEO. I was still a relatively young guy running the Japan America Society, and I said, “Kissinger’s fee is fifty thousand dollars. Is there any way you can tell him I’m the young man who once wrote to him?” I showed him the exchange. And not only did Kissinger agree to speak without his fee, but the CEO flew him out on an ARCO plane.

That conference became huge. It started with Kissinger, then included Larry Eagleburger, Brent Scowcroft, Pete Wilson, and eventually even Richard Nixon. I had Democrats there as well. It became this major event, and somehow it all traced back to a college-aged exchange of letters. That is when I really got addicted to this world.

AI, Journalism, and Staying Useful

BW: Today, with AI, the 24-hour news cycle, and everyone having much shorter attention spans, do you think aspiring journalists need to think differently about the field than you did when you were coming up?

SC: That is a good question. I do not know that I have thought deeply enough about all the displacement dimensions of AI and journalism, except to say that AI is going to write a lot more journalism. I worry that we are entering a world where we will constantly ask whether something nuanced, subtle, and context-rich was written by a human or generated by a machine. And increasingly, the answer may not be obvious.

A lot of people say the key is to use AI as a tool, and I think there is truth to that. Use it on top of your own inquiry. Use it in support of your own reporting, your own accountability, your own thinking. The truth is, some of the best journalists I know will be able to do that. They will use AI well and still stand above it. But not everyone is at that level. A lot of journalists are just trying to do solid work and get by.

I have long told people who want to become journalists: go live life first. Go do something interesting. Go learn a topic deeply. Then become a journalist. I never studied journalism, and I have nothing against people who do. They learn a useful craft. But I think the way to remain ahead is to know something so well, and so deeply, that you become indispensable to that subject. Then you learn to write and report on it well.

We still do not know exactly how AI will play out, but I do think it will displace a lot of people, not just in journalism, but in many white-collar professions. We are going to have to see where it goes.

BW: How have you been using AI in your own daily life?

SC: For me, AI is like a very fast version of the reference tools people used to keep on shelves. Your grandparents had Encyclopaedia Britannica, Webster’s Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus. Then all of that moved online. Now, with AI, you not only have access to information, you also have something helping organize it.

So I use it as an adjunct. I do a lot of public speaking, a lot of research, a lot of problem-solving. I use Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT for different things. I will ask for perspectives because it sometimes surfaces angles I had not considered. That does not mean it is always right, but it can make me think, “That’s interesting. I had not considered that frame.”

I never use it to generate my product, my writing, or my opinions. It helps me work. It also helps with quick primers. I know a lot about Japanese history, a little about Russian history, and almost nothing about Turkish history. AI can give you an opening orientation very quickly.

At the same time, I see a lot of bias in these systems. A friend of mine wrote a book about Thomas Willing, an important founding-era banker, the first president of the Bank of North America and the first president of the Bank of the United States. He was central in ways most people do not appreciate, and yet when you ask many platforms about him, he is described as a kind of second-tier figure.

That tells you something important. These systems aggregate inherited judgments. If history overlooked you, the platforms often will too.

So when you look things up, you are often receiving accumulated bias, not settled truth. If that can happen to someone like Thomas Willing, imagine how much worse it is for people who were even more marginalized in the historical record. So yes, I use AI as an adjunct, but I am also constantly wrestling with how wrong it can be.

Judgment Versus the Language of Seriousness

BW: You spend a lot of time talking to people who know how to sound authoritative. What separates someone who actually has judgment from someone who just knows the language of seriousness?

SC: I think you can tell fairly quickly whether someone has a real command of historical context. You can usually tell whether they are genuinely well read and deeply informed, and whether they can draw on that grounding to explain their views or their decisions. To me, that is one marker of serious judgment.

By contrast, there are people who may perform the role well, but you get the sense they are basically reading talking points. They are not grounded in their own learning or their own critical thinking. The differences can be subtle, but they are real.

That does not mean you should become closed off. I always tell people to maintain a wide aperture. Look broadly. Listen. Do not become so self-confident that you stop taking in information. But there is a difference between someone who has thought deeply and someone who is just playing a part.

I saw this all the time on television. I was an MSNBC contributor for about eight years, and you could tell who had genuinely thought about an issue and who was essentially recycling a script. You would hear the same talking points repeated from show to show to show. They were clearly just circulating a line. I never wanted to do that, and the people I respected most did not do it either.

American Leverage and the View from Outside Washington

BW: You’ve also spent time talking to people outside the American establishment, people less invested in Washington’s own mythology. Has that changed the way you think about American leverage, and how much of it is real versus assumed?

SC: Yes, absolutely. And I have felt that gap for a long time. The distance between the confidence with which many Americans think they are exercising leverage and the reality of how much leverage they actually have has been growing for years.

I once wrote that you can measure the contraction of American power not only through enemies rising, but through allies hedging their bets. I looked at Japan and Germany, countries we defeated in World War II and then helped rebuild, and also at Israel and Saudi Arabia, both deeply tied to the American security framework. You could see all four doing things that, ten years earlier, they would never have done. They were hedging against the possibility that America might not be there for them in the way it once was.

That was long before Donald Trump. Long before the current moment, you could feel relationships becoming more conditional. There is always a lot of triumphal rhetoric in Washington about how close allies are and how durable those bonds are. But over time, the love became less unconditional.

I also worked closely with Chalmers Johnson, a fascinating intellectual. We founded the Japan Policy Research Institute together. He wrote Blowback, which became one of the most sought-after books after 9/11 because people were suddenly asking whether aspects of America’s posture in the world had contributed to the terrorism that struck us.

Chalmers later became more radical than I was comfortable with. In books like Nemesis, he came to see America itself as a rogue power. I did not go that far, but I found parts of his argument deeply instructive.

The broader point is that as India rose, as China rose, as interdependence deepened, it became harder and harder to sustain the fiction that America controlled everything. We were living in a world of interdependence, and a world of interdependence is not a world of total American control. That has been clear to me for a long time.

And yes, engaging people outside the American establishment reinforced that view. H. R. McMaster has called this “strategic narcissism,” and I think he is right. We are so caught up in ourselves that we miss the extent to which much of the world is moving to a different drummer.

Advice to Students Entering the Field

BW: As we begin to close, I want to turn the conversation directly back to students. When you think about your own early career, what skills were most valuable in setting you apart, and what should young journalists today aspire to develop?

SC: I always want to be careful about generalizing, because everyone’s path is different. In my case, my dad died on my first day of college. I was American, but I had really come from Japan into UCLA, and suddenly I had to work immediately to stay in school.

One of the things I did was work with faculty members on their research projects. I supported work in sociology, econometrics, and other fields. I learned a tremendous amount as an undergraduate because I had to. Some students were more passive. I was not doing it out of some grand plan. I was trying to survive and make money. But it forced me into a much wider intellectual life than I otherwise might have had.

So one lesson is that breadth matters. Diverse experiences matter. They can differentiate you. Another is that relationships matter very early. I built strong relationships with professors, and those professors trusted me. That is how I became involved with the Center for International and Strategic Affairs and with RAND-UCLA.

I remember reading Fred Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon, which is about the early strategic thinkers in American nuclear policy, and realizing that I actually knew many of the people in it. I was nineteen or twenty years old.

That taught me that people matter. The people you meet along the way matter. When you are young, you do not always understand that yet. For me, that meant saving business cards and building a Rolodex. Today, it would mean maintaining your contact database.

In Japan, the exchange of business cards and the cultivation of relationships are taken very seriously. In the United States, we are often much worse at that. But for journalists, future sources matter, and relationships matter.

Second, live life. Go do different things. Do not just copy what everyone else is doing. The more varied and interesting your experiences are, the more you distinguish yourself in a crowded field.

Third, do not hate editing. Let people edit you. I have to be edited. Everyone has to be edited. One of the clearest indicators of who will grow as a writer is whether they can accept constructive criticism about how they communicate. Be open to that.

What to Read

BW: Finally, as is customary with the Pathway Blog, if there were a young student interested in following a career path similar to yours, what piece of literature would you recommend to them, and why?

SC: That is a tough question. I read ravenously. There is a book that probably is not easy to find now, but it really affected me when I was young: If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him. It is basically a reminder not to over-revere your idols. You can admire people, certainly, but do not surrender your own judgment. It is really about developing confidence in your own thinking.

I think a lot of young people should absolutely be inspired by great figures, but not intimidated by them.

More generally, I am obsessed with the founding era of the United States. I find it fascinating how many times this country almost did not happen. That period is full of struggle, contingency, and improvisation, and I find that incredibly compelling.

There is also a wonderful book on Cicero that I love: Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt. It is such an interesting portrait because Cicero could be slippery, opportunistic, even exasperating, but underneath all that he developed ideas that proved durable for thousands of years. I find that very compelling too.

About the guest: Steve Clemons is Editor-at-Large at The National Interest and has served as Editor-at-Large at Semafor, The Hill, and The Atlantic, as well as in senior editorial roles at National Journal and Quartz. He is the editor and publisher of The Washington Note, host of The Bottom Line on Al Jazeera English, co-chair of the GLOBSEC US Initiative, and chairman and CEO of Widehall LLC. His work focuses on American politics, foreign policy, political economy, and the institutions that shape decision-making.

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review publishes long-form interviews with people in politics, policy, journalism, law, diplomacy, markets, history, and public service about the work they do and the path that brought them there.

Subscribe to receive new interviews in your inbox.

This interview was conducted in April 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

Rick Atkinson has spent much of his career writing about war. First as a journalist, then as one of America’s foremost narrative historians, he has returned again and again to the places where character, violence, leadership, chance, and national purpose collide.

After completing his celebrated Liberation Trilogy on World War II, Atkinson did not turn to the Pacific, as many readers expected. He went further back, to the war that created the country itself. The American Revolution, he argues, is not exhausted terrain. No great event is. The founding war remains bottomless because the questions it raised — liberty, power, sacrifice, ambition, tyranny, inheritance — remain alive.

This conversation is about the Revolution, but it is just as much about craft. Atkinson describes how large historical projects actually come together: the years of archival work, the thousands of books and articles, the proposals, the outlines, the solitude, and the discipline required to turn mountains of material into narrative.

He is skeptical of shortcuts, easy labels, and heroic myth. Washington matters not because he was flawless, but because he grew. The Revolution matters not because it is clean, but because it was human, morally complicated, and still foundational.

For students who want to write, study history, or understand leadership more seriously, Atkinson’s advice is bracing: do the work. Read deeply. Outline carefully. Resist shortcuts that bypass thought. And remember that history is not ornament. It is inheritance.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

From the Archive · originally published in The Pathway Blog, April 2026.

Returning to the Founding War

Benjamin Wolf: You’ve now written major works on both World War II and the American Revolution. At this stage in your career, what drew you back to the nation’s founding war, and where did you feel earlier accounts still left room for a new narrative or perspective?

Rick Atkinson: Well, I’ve always written about war, both as a journalist, as a foreign correspondent and war correspondent, and now as the author of eight books about five different American wars.

When I finished the Liberation Trilogy, which is about the liberation of Europe and the American role in that, even before that third and final volume was published, I was thinking about what to do next. The obvious thing would have been to pivot to the Pacific and do for that theater what I’d done for the Mediterranean and Western Europe. But after almost fifteen years, I just didn’t have the heart for it. I was up to here with World War II.

I’ve always been interested, since I was a kid, in the American Revolution. The characters fascinate me, always have. The fact that it tells us something about who we are, where we came from, what our forebears believed, and what they were willing to die for is profound, in my estimation.

So I decided, in 2013, that that was what I was going to do. I was going to take on the American Revolution. I think that, like World War II, like all great events, like all great personages in history, the Revolution is bottomless. There’s more there. There will always be more there.

It’s not that I believe the many scholars who’ve taken it on for 250 years have missed something, per se, but I think my voice, my modernist perspective, and the digging that I like to do as a scholar all lead us to a different take on the war and a different narrative account of the war.

Writing for the Reader

BW: There’s a growing sense today that audiences expect stories to move faster, whether in film or in books. As you look back across your career, have you found yourself adjusting your pacing or structure to meet those changing expectations, or do you deliberately resist writing to perceived attention spans?

RA: I don’t really worry about the reader that much. The reader is going to find his or her way. Some of them will find their way to my books. Many will not. So I don’t try to pander to what may or may not be shorter attention spans.

I do recognize, as a narrative writer, that I have an obligation to, as I have a sign right over here next to my writing desk that says, “Get on with it,” I have an obligation to get on with it. So I’m always cognizant of the story and the need to keep the story front and center in the telling of the tale. It needs to be a tale.

So to the extent I’m pandering to the reader’s wants or desires, I suppose it takes that direction.

Washington and Real Leadership

BW: When you study a figure like Washington up close, how do you distinguish genuine leadership from reputation that was shaped after the fact? In other words, what tells you that someone was truly exceptional in real time rather than simply remembered that way because of the outcome?

RA: Well, the proof is in the pudding. If Washington had failed completely in the war, and he failed in various moments of it, which is one of the reasons he’s as intriguing as he is, if he was a war-losing general, that would tell us something about his leadership chops.

If you spend as much time with him as I do, as others have, you see his failings, for sure, but you also see his extraordinary strengths: his commitment to the cause, his robust physical qualities. He never seems to even catch cold, which is really important at a time when typhus and typhoid and smallpox and all the other infectious diseases that torment the world in the eighteenth century are killing tens of thousands, including thousands of his own soldiers.

He’s got a big brain organized for executive action. He is willing to take responsibility. He is willing to make decisions. He has an excellent eye for subordinate talent, so he sees this twenty-five-year-old, overweight Boston bookseller named Henry Knox and somehow intuits that this guy is going to be the father of American artillery.

That is countered by the fact that during his lifetime at Mount Vernon, by the time he died in December 1799, he had had at least 577 slaves working on the plantation. It’s part of the source of his wealth, and it’s the reason he can go away for eight years knowing that business will be taken care of back at the plantation by all those slaves.

So it’s a very complex story, as human stories often are. If you study him as a military figure, as I do, you see that he is not a particularly gifted tactician. He makes mistakes. He reads the ground wrong in places like Long Island or Brandywine. And yet, again, he’s got assets that are important. He’s got good luck, which is the trait Napoleon most cherished in his generals. He’s got fortitude. He’s a commanding presence, which is important in a military leader. When he comes into a room, there’s no doubt who the commanding general is.

So all of this is to say that, yes, it’s a mixed bag, and it’s complicated. But at the time, he was recognized for his leadership skills. As early as the winter at Valley Forge, 1777 to 1778, he is declared the Father of His Country for the first time, and not the last time. His reputation, and he cared a lot about his reputation, has basically stuck with him now for 250 years.

Heroes, Villains, and Human Nature

BW: Your books are filled with figures who are brave, flawed, capable, and often wrong all at once. Has writing history made you more skeptical of neat labels like hero or villain, or even genius or failure, and how has that changed the way you approach character?

RA: I don’t know if writing history has done it, but I’ve always been skeptical of facile characterizations.

I think “hero” is badly overused. If everyone’s a hero, then no one’s a hero. These accolades should be held in reserve for those who are truly worthy of them. Otherwise, you devalue the concept.

So yes, back to the earlier point about Washington, the complexities of human nature, the complexities of human fates, are such that first of all you have to accommodate that as a writer. And it makes it more interesting. It makes them more human. They all have feet of clay. It makes it easier to relate to them. They’re not alabaster, ten feet tall, standing on a pedestal. They make mistakes, they sin, they misbehave. All of this is part and parcel of the human condition, and certainly it’s good grist for writers.

How Washington Became Washington

BW: A core question we ask on Pathway is how people become who they ultimately become. When you study the younger Washington, what do you see being formed? Was his later steadiness rooted more in temperament, discipline, ambition, or something else? And what, if anything, can aspiring leaders today learn from that transformation?

RA: He’s got a capacity for growth and adaptability, and those are important. They help him become who he becomes.

When he first arrives, even before the Revolution begins, back when he’s a young colonel in the Virginia militia during the French and Indian War, always under superior British command, at one point he writes, “I have heard the bullets sing, and there is something charming in the sound.” That’s banal. That’s fatuous. And he learns that it is fatuous, that in fact those singing bullets mean dead boys and sobbing mothers. He never says anything that stupid again once he’s responsible for the entire army. So that kind of personal development is something that we see.

His adaptability can be seen in a number of ways. When he first arrives to take command of the Continental Army in Cambridge in July 1775, he privately has nothing good to say about dirty New Englanders. He’s a Virginian commanding what is largely a New England militia army. They’re from different countries. And he doesn’t recognize the sacrifice that most of them are making to leave their farms, their shops, their tanneries, their families, to serve in the cause at his side. Again, he’s got hundreds of slaves working the property for him back at Mount Vernon.

And he’s got to learn that this mystical bond between leader and led is something that he doesn’t grasp immediately. He’s going to grow into it.

Then, as a general, we see his adaptability. He is instinctively very aggressive, and he wants one big brawl just to settle everything, a titanic battle that decides the war. And he comes to recognize that he can’t do that against the British Army, that they’re professional, they’ve got good officers for the most part, and they’ve got the greatest navy the world has ever seen. He has got no navy to speak of.

So he’s going to have to modify his native aggression and adopt what we would today call strategic defense, where he is looking for opportunities to nick and bleed the enemy, but for the most part he’s playing rope-a-dope with them. He’s staying out of reach. He’s avoiding battles that could cost him the army, and therefore the cause.

So it’s that kind of adaptability that is critical to his success as a general and to the success of the American cause. We see these kinds of mutations in his character and in his behavior that are really important to his success and to growing into the job. He has the capacity, as most great men and women do, to grow, to get bigger. And without that, you don’t have greatness.

The Solitary Work of History

BW: When a new project first begins to take shape, when the idea is still just a possibility, what does your next step look like? Do you move immediately into the archives, or is there a period of reflection before the formal research begins?

RA: Oh, the writing is way far in the future from the point that I have the germ of an idea. You roll it around in your brain for a while to see whether this is something you really want to commit to, because every author, regardless of who they are, at some point is going to hate what they’re doing. It’s just the tediousness of it. You’ve got to have enough momentum and enthusiasm for the subject to get past that inevitable point.

What I do, once I have decided that this is what I’m going to take on as the next book, and obviously I’m consulting with my agent, who I’ve had since 1986, and my editor, who I’ve had since 1987, the three of us have been a troika for a long time now, and I discuss these things with them. For a publisher to buy into the project, you write a proposal. I’ve taken great care with the proposals that I write, because it’s a pitch. It’s a pitch to the publisher to underwrite this project for, in the case of the current project and the previous project, long stretches, years at a time.

And that helps you think it through. First of all, is this really something I want to be doing? And second, how would I go about doing this? How does it really shape up when you sit down and lay out the arc of the story and the plan that you have to make it happen?

And then it’s a matter of diving into the topic. For the current book, for volume three of the American Revolution Trilogy, which I’m just now starting to research in earnest, my books-to-get list, secondary sources, just books, is 2,500 titles long. It’s a lot. I own about half of them.

That’s an enormous task to take on, and it includes the volumes of the papers of George Washington, which have been curated by the University of Virginia beginning in 1968, and they’re almost finished. For the Revolutionary War part of the Washington Papers, they’re on volume 38 now. And then there’s the papers of Nathanael Greene and the papers of Charles Cornwallis and the papers of Benjamin Franklin, and so on and so forth. It’s vast.

And that excludes periodicals. So the periodicals-to-get list, things that have been written in scholarly journals and elsewhere over the centuries now, is very long. I’m very diligent about getting those and reading them.

And then the primary stuff is held in a variety of archives, repositories, and libraries around the country and around the world. I am assiduous in working through those. So for the current book, I’ve been to the British Library. I’ve been to the Huntington Library in Southern California. I will make my way to Ann Arbor and the great Clements Library there. I’ll be at the New York Historical Society Library in another month, and the Society of the Cincinnati Library, which is very close to me here in Washington, where I live.

I end up spending days, weeks, in some cases months cumulatively, in these places, working through the primary sources. It’s all very solitary. It can be very tedious. But the mystery of the next unopened archival box is something that needs to get you up in the morning, or you’re probably in the wrong business.

Writing, Outlining, and AI

BW: For many students, the hardest part of writing is simply beginning, especially in an era where shortcuts like AI are increasingly available. In your experience, does that process ever become easier, and why is it still important to wrestle with the work rather than bypass it?

RA: Well, it’s not for everybody. You can always go to law school, although you’re going to have to do a lot of writing in law school. Maybe you’re naturally a mathematician. You have a different kind of language. Or a scientist, and your writing skills are not as important. It’s not about lyrical writing.

For me, I always start by making an outline. And I think if you don’t make an outline, you’re at risk of finding yourself at sea without a map. I spend six to eight months on the outline, typically. It involves going through all of my notes, all the material that I have been gathering during the years of research. I have no stray documents. It’s all in Word files. And I go through page by page, line by line, deciding: this goes there, this goes there, no, no, it’s not going to fit, no, this goes there.

It’s the most tedious part of the whole process for me. But I always do it. I’ve always made an outline, even when I was a journalist writing a short day story for a newspaper. I would be scratching it on the back of an envelope: okay, this is part one, this is part two, this is where I’m going. Because that just makes it a whole lot easier when it comes to putting the thing in order and doing it efficiently and swiftly.

Once I’ve got the outline done, and the outline typically is two or three times longer than the final book will be, and it tells me where everything is in my notes, then it’s time to sit down to write. I use that outline as the map.

AI? I’m enough of a dinosaur that it’s not going to affect me. Maybe there will be an AI that can write lyrical books someday. I don’t think it’s going to be in my lifetime. AI can do things, clearly. But if you aspire to be a writer, I don’t know why you would want to use AI to sort out what’s happening in your heart and in your brain, because that’s what writers do.

I think AI will never have a human heart. It might have a human brain, but it will never have a human heart. I’m a Luddite, so I don’t really need to worry about AI. What I need to worry about is what I’m doing today and the next book.

What He Hopes Readers Carry Forward

BW: To close, when readers finish this trilogy, what do you most hope stays with them, not necessarily as a lesson, but as an idea or perspective that continues to resonate after they put the book down?

RA: I’m not a didactic writer. I’m not here to instruct. They will take away what they’re going to take away.

I would posit that knowing about the founders and the American Revolution and our early history is vitally important for twenty-first-century Americans, because those founders left us a bequest. And it includes personal liberties, and it includes strictures on how to divide power and keep it from concentrating in the hands of authoritarians who think primarily of themselves.

We cannot allow that priceless heritage to slip away. We cannot allow it to be taken away. And we cannot be oblivious to this gift, or to the hundreds of thousands who have given their lives to affirm and sustain it over the past 250 years.

I would hope that readers take away that fundamental lesson, as well as the notion that not only were they struggling against what they defined as tyranny then — you can think they’re overstating it, that George III is not really a tyrant, the last King of America, but what they defined as tyranny. More important, they were struggling to prevent future tyrannies.

That’s what the Constitutional Convention is about. That’s what the war itself was about. It’s what the fundamental earliest struggle of the young republic is about.

And that’s a pretty important lesson, I think, for Americans to hang on to.

About the guest: Rick Atkinson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist. He is the author of eight narrative histories about five American wars, including the Liberation Trilogy on the Allied campaign in Europe during World War II and the Revolution Trilogy on the American Revolution. His books include An Army at Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History, The British Are Coming, and The Fate of the Day.

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review publishes long-form interviews with people in politics, policy, journalism, law, diplomacy, markets, history, and public service about the work they do and the path that brought them there.

Subscribe to receive new interviews in your inbox.

This interview was conducted in April 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

Daniel Fried’s diplomatic career took shape against the central drama of the late twentieth century: the Cold War, the Soviet empire, and the unresolved question of whether Eastern Europe would ever escape the settlement imposed at Yalta. When the communist order collapsed, he was inside the machinery of American foreign policy as it struggled to make sense of what had happened and what obligations followed.

The transformation he witnessed, from the democratic breakthrough in Poland to the dissolution of Soviet authority across the region, was one of the genuine discontinuities of modern history. What came after was less a triumph, Fried makes this clear, than a prolonged argument: over NATO enlargement, over what the West owed to nations that had liberated themselves, and over how far American power and American principles could travel together.

In this conversation, Fried reflects on what it meant to conduct diplomacy in a Europe being remade in real time, how the debate over NATO enlargement looked from inside government, and why conclusions that now seem self-evident were anything but settled in the early 1990s. He also speaks with unusual candor about the craft of diplomatic advancement, a discipline shaped by judgment, timing, and what he calls the “X factor”: the capacity to break with convention precisely when convention proves inadequate to the moment.

The conversation closes on strategy, alliance politics, and the long American argument about the country’s role in the world. Fried’s contention is that the transatlantic alliance was a rigorous framework in which American interests and American values moved in the same direction, worth defending on those terms rather than any softer ones.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

From the Archive · originally published in The Pathway Blog, April 2026.

Europe, the Cold War, and the problem of order

Benjamin Wolf: Ambassador Fried, thank you for joining me. Let’s start with Europe. When did Europe stop being for you just a regional assignment and become the central strategic problem of your career? Was there a moment early on when you realized this region was not just about diplomacy, but about the future of the political order itself?

Daniel Fried: The question doesn’t quite apply to me, because I entered the Foreign Service wanting to work on Soviet affairs, East European affairs, and the Cold War generally. So I didn’t join the Foreign Service and then discover Europe. I was interested in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as we called it then, and joined the Foreign Service so I could be active in those areas.

So I was always committed.

BW: On that same note, you worked on Europe in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, when the dominant mood in the West was often described as triumphal. What did you see earlier than others about how unfinished that moment really was?

DF: Well, I was working as the Polish desk officer, not a high-level position at all, sort of a lower-middle-level position, from 1987 to 1989. In other words, I was working on Polish affairs in 1989, through the elections and the Round Table negotiations, by which Solidarity out-negotiated the communists, and then the famous June 4 election, where they won.

So that was sort of the best thing ever, to watch the Solidarity movement, which was both a trade union and a national pro-democracy movement, succeed. It was just wonderful.

I then went to Poland for three years to work in the embassy, came back, and joined Bill Clinton’s NSC staff during his first term, where we started working on the shape of Europe after the Cold War.

I wouldn’t call it triumphalism. That is too dismissive. The Clinton people and the George H. W. Bush people before them were well aware of all of the difficulties. Yes, they were aware that democracy had succeeded and the Soviet Union had collapsed, but they were thinking about how to shape the future in a way that would be stable, leave a place for post-Soviet Russia, and not exclude the newly self-liberated Central and East Europeans.

So people working in government were not triumphalists walking around strutting. They were thinking about the problems and were well aware of them. In fact, in the early 1990s, even as late as 1993, it was not clear to most people that the transformations in Central and Eastern Europe would generally be successful. I was optimistic, but I had been in Poland.

Most people thought it was still an open question whether the Poles would succeed. We now know that they succeeded in spectacular fashion. I was confident that they would, but that was not the general view.

So your use of the label triumphalism, I think, is misplaced. I know where it comes from. It’s reasonable of you to start thinking in those terms, but that is a broad-brush attribution that doesn’t actually apply to the way things were on the ground.

NATO enlargement and the post-Cold War settlement

BW: I appreciate that clarification. I think your perspective really is valuable here in considering post-Soviet Europe. You mentioned that when you were with Bill Clinton’s team, you were helping to shape what post-Cold War Europe would look like. What does that mean practically? Was that talks with other nations? Meetings? Drafting memos? What was the concrete work that went into that shaping?

DF: Well, the biggest issue that I worked on was the question of NATO enlargement, which was really about whether or not we would extend the line of the Cold War into the post-Cold War era and leave the Poles, the Czechs, and the Romanians in a kind of gray zone, or whether we would enlarge, whether we would open the doors of the institutions of the West to the countries that wanted to be part of the West and had earned that by virtue of their own effort to overthrow communism and liberate themselves.

So that was the issue, and it was hotly debated within the Clinton administration. In fact, about 90 percent or more of the U.S. foreign policy establishment was against NATO enlargement as late as 1993.

So you ask what the work consisted of concretely. Yes, it was memos and meetings, but it was really making the argument that NATO enlargement was a better answer to post-Cold War Europe than leaving in place the line of the Cold War as a kind of mental line beyond which the institutions of the West could not cross.

This was a big debate, because most U.S. government experts didn’t think much about Central and Eastern Europe, and when they did, they considered it a kind of gray zone unto itself. “Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact” was the uncharitable term of art.

So even though it was the Poles mainly, but also the Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Romanians in the streets, who overthrew communism, there was little understanding that these countries had the capacity to enter the European mainstream. There was a great deal of dismissal of their capacity to build free-market democracies on the ruins of communism.

Now, to be fair, this was an enormously difficult task, one that had never been attempted, not even contemplated. No one in 1988 thought that communism would fall, so in 1989 there was no Western expertise on what would come next.

So the Poles and the others were making it up as they went along, with some U.S. advice. But basically, they were the ones doing it. U.S. advice was not critical. It was second-order.

And I was there on the ground in Poland when they were making these decisions. So the work in the early years after 1989 was understanding what was happening in these countries and helping them to the degree we could. There were things the Bush administration did that were solid. Then the Clinton administration had to open NATO’s doors or decide on the alternative. After much debate, furious debate inside government, a debate in which the Poles and Czechs themselves participated rather skillfully, the Clinton administration made the decision, and NATO’s doors were opened.

It made the decision to enlarge NATO, however, in parallel with the decision to work with Russia, to develop a NATO-Russia relationship which could be, as one of the authors of it said, “an alliance with the alliance.” Such were our hopes in the early days.

So this was a dual-track policy that we settled on by, oh, I don’t know, 1994 or 1995, and then we implemented it.

What people get wrong about the Foreign Service

BW: A lot of students hear “Foreign Service” and imagine the prestige, the travel, the policy influence. What is the part of diplomatic life that is most misunderstood by people looking at it from the outside?

DF: Well, you talked about the prestige. There’s not a lot of prestige in serving in a combat mission in wartime Iraq, and there were a lot of my colleagues who did that. There’s not a lot of prestige in being a junior officer at a large U.S. embassy. The work can be isolating. It is difficult on families. It is hierarchical, so when you’re a junior officer, you may think you’re not much and that you’re very low on the pecking order.

However, the Foreign Service gave me professional opportunities I could have obtained in no other fashion. How else would I have been able to live in Poland during the critical years of the early post-communist transformation? There were other people there, students, some volunteers working with Solidarity, so it wasn’t the only way. But it was a way in which I could be a witness to this transformation and, as an official of the U.S. government, help contribute to its success by letting Washington know what was going on and by making recommendations.

As the Polish desk officer, I had the opportunity to help make some of the early recommendations for the George H. W. Bush administration that helped the Poles in a critical fashion. I was able to do that because nobody expected anything would happen in Poland in 1989, and when it did, the young Condoleezza Rice sort of brought me into the policy picture because I made the call.

The X factor and knowing when to break the rules

BW: You mention Condoleezza Rice bringing you into that picture. I’m always curious about how one climbs the ranks in the federal government. Is it about who you know? Is it about working hard and getting lucky? Is there some skill to it that people should know when they are trying to reach the levels that you have?

DF: Working hard and getting lucky is part of it. Knowing the right people is part of it. And also, there’s a kind of X factor.

The Foreign Service will teach you the rules, and if you’re good and follow the rules and are skillful and diligent, you will get to a good rank. The system will reward quality fairly, to that degree. But there’s an X factor, which is that you have to know when to break the rules.

I’ll give you an example. I’ve referred to my position in 1989 as somebody who saw the changes coming in Poland. I was practically the only one who did, outside of the U.S. embassy in Warsaw, that absolutely nailed it. Very few others could listen seriously to what was happening there.

Condoleezza Rice was willing to listen to me when I said, “You better watch this space. Communism could be coming apart at the seams. Solidarity could win these negotiations.” She had the intellectual self-confidence to actually take this seriously, and she knew something about Central and Eastern Europe because she had studied with Madeleine Albright’s father, Josef Korbel, at the University of Denver. He had taught her about Czechoslovakia. She knew something about it, so she had a feel for it.

So in March 1989, she called me up and said, “Look, Dan, it’s possible that Solidarity is going to succeed in these negotiations with the communists, and if they do, President Bush wants to welcome this. Can you draft a speech?”

Well, desk officers at the State Department are not supposed to draft presidential speeches. She either didn’t know or didn’t care. Anyway, she asked me to draft a speech. So I drafted a speech and sent it upstairs through the system. I explained the background and noted that Director Rice of the National Security Council staff had requested this draft for the State Department to convey to her.

It was rejected within about a half an hour of my sending it up, with a derisive note that read, “Dan, you’re giddy,” which was a patronizing putdown.

I got this and realized there was no way I would get it through the system, so I called up Condi Rice. This was before email. I said, “No way. The only way you can get this draft is if it appears by magic on your desk. In other words, I’ll walk it over to you in a plain brown envelope.”

She said, “Yeah, okay. Do it.”

So I hand her the speech. A couple of weeks later, Bush gives a speech in Hamtramck, Michigan, welcoming the Round Table talks, and it was the speech I drafted.

Now, I had engaged in an act of insubordination. The State Department had said no, and I did it anyway. The only excuse for the insubordination I showed is when you win. I had just drafted a presidential speech. What were they going to do, fire me? No.

And what I said to Condi Rice, handing her that speech, was, “Condi, from this moment forward, I work for you.” And she started giving me assignments. Like, “If you had $100 million for Poland, what would you do with it?” That became the Enterprise Fund, which was one of our more successful initiatives. Congress funded it at $240 million.

Another Foreign Service officer and I drafted the concept paper for the Enterprise Fund in an afternoon and sent it to Rice and her people. We didn’t ask permission.

So this is a long way of illustrating the answer to your question: sometimes you have to break the rules. And then, when you do it, you better win. Notice, I didn’t say when you’re right. Being right is not always enough. It helps. But you have to win.

The Foreign Service will not teach you that. They will teach you all the skills you need to succeed in your career, and these are valuable skills. Pay attention to the training. But there’s always something different.

My Foreign Service colleagues who succeeded often had various versions of the X factor. Think of Toria Nuland. She’s famous for her, let us say, acerbic wit. Look what she’s done. Look at her career. It’s brilliant. Or Nick Burns. All of these people had an X factor, a willingness to push.

They were also people who were not principally interested in their own careers. I mean, you’ve got to be ambitious. I’m not saying that they were saints or that I was. But it wasn’t about getting ahead. At some point, you cannot game the system to plot your advance like it’s some office-politics exercise. You can try, but I remember people who did that, and I don’t remember what happened to them.

All I know is that I didn’t think in terms of my own career advancement. I did very much think in terms of the work. That sounds naive, but it worked out pretty well for me.

Views, strategy, and the debate over the transatlantic alliance

BW: Looking toward today, when you look at the modern debate over Russia and European security, what is the most important thing that younger analysts, who perhaps don’t have your historical expertise, still get wrong because they confuse having a view with having a strategy?

DF: Right now, there’s a larger debate within the Trump administration and within the United States about the value of the transatlantic alliance, or the free world strategy of the United States that we’ve had since Pearl Harbor. A lot of other ideas, with roots in pre-World War II America, have come back. It’s called isolationism, but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. It’s more like unilateral transactionalism and an emphasis on power and narrowly defined American interests rather than a free world strategy.

Well, don’t complain about the debate. Think about the arguments for where values and interests overlap and how best to advance them. Your generation will have to fight this all over again.

I am a believer in the free world grand strategy of the United States. I think it works. It’s got the right-wing variant, which is Ronald Reagan. It’s got the Franklin Roosevelt variant. But they’re basically consistent in that they hold that American values and American interests advance together, which is not, as some critics say, naïveté or charity or do-gooderism.

The free world strategy is based on the assumption that a values-based foreign policy is really good for the United States, that we will come out on top if it is an open world rather than a world divided into competing empires.

Now, Woodrow Wilson had many problems. He was a bigot, for one thing, a racist. But he also understood that American values were a pretty good way to construct American foreign policy, and he wasn’t doing it because he was a nice guy. He did it because he knew that American interests would advance faster if we had a values-based foreign policy.

It’s not naive. It plays to America’s strength, or what used to be America’s strength, which was what we used to call Yankee ingenuity. It meant that we had entrepreneurial excellence and exuberance, massive advantages from a continental country loaded with natural resources, as well as skilled people, as well as industry and power coming out of the Civil War. That launched us to world leadership by the turn of the twentieth century.

And we advanced values because it was better for us. It turned out pretty well after 1945. People who say it didn’t really work out well should compare Pax Americana to the alternatives, which are nineteenth-century European imperialism or, let’s say, Nazism and communism. We look pretty good, which is why the Europeans were so happy to work with us.

Never, as far as I can remember, did a leading world power attract the kind of voluntary support that we did. Voluntary, because our system worked best when it worked for everybody. Which sounds obvious, but that’s not the way previous systems worked. That’s not the way Putin would have the Russian empire work, not at all. Pax Americana worked for everybody, which is why a lot of people signed up for it and why people like the Poles after 1981 wanted to be part of it, because it was a good deal.

But don’t take my word for it. Deng Xiaoping said once, I think thirty years ago, “I don’t know much about foreign affairs, but I have noticed that America’s friends tend to be really rich countries.” A rather sly, clever statement.

Who are America’s friends in Asia? South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore. Winners, every one. And don’t you want to be part of that system? Deng Xiaoping did. Things have gotten sideways with China since. But my point is that the American grand strategy was not based on nothing.

My advice to entering Foreign Service officers is that they think about it. What is it that you’re trying to achieve? Now look, as a junior officer, you’re not going to be doing grand strategy. I promise you. No way. That won’t come for years and years. I get that. But it helps to start thinking about this stuff early.

When I was a junior officer in the Soviet Union, I started trying to put what I was seeing on the ground into a larger framework. It helped organize my thinking. It made my political reporting better. That’s my point. You don’t start thinking strategy because you think you’re going to be Henry Kissinger tomorrow, because you’re not, and you may never be. But thinking about strategy will help inform your work, and it will make it better, and you’re going to enjoy it too.

Trump, NATO, and the risk of squandering alliances

BW: As we begin to wrap up here, I want to ask: when you see headlines about Trump considering pulling out of NATO because the allies don’t want to help in the Strait of Hormuz, or because they’re not adequately financing what’s going on in the Middle East or in Ukraine, where do you see that ending up? And where do you think it should end up?

DF: Well, it should end up with a renewed transatlantic alliance, with greater European capability, more European contributions, and frankly, a greater European voice. On the other side of whatever it is we’re going through can be a renewed transatlantic alliance with a more equal contribution between the U.S. and Europe. That’s the constructive side of Trump’s argument, and he’s right.

The problem is that, having been right and having won the argument, which he did last year at the NATO summit, where allies agreed to pony up the money, his trouble is taking yes for an answer.

The skepticism about NATO has its roots in pre-World War II American foreign policy thinking, but I’ve got little sympathy for it. If you want to build a coalition to help with Iran, then build a coalition. Don’t go off on your own and then tell everybody, whistle, and expect everybody to fall in line.

Look, you can think what you want about the Iraq War, and I’m not trying to defend it. But when the Bush administration wanted to build a coalition, it went out and did it. For all of the problems, we ended up in a better place because we had a coalition than we would have without one.

So it won’t do just to snarl at people. Moreover, if you look more closely at the Trump administration, the arguments tend to weaken. So Trump wants European countries to help out with Gulf security. Right, got it. What’s the one European country that is doing the most right now? Why, arguably, Ukraine, which has offered its drone technology that nobody else in the world can offer, nobody else in the free world anyway.

Have we thanked them? Has Trump claimed that this is his success because it proves that a U.S. investment in Ukraine was right? No. Instead, we’ve brushed it aside.

The French and British offered something rather vague to help with the Strait of Hormuz. But publicly, I know what I would have done with that: grabbed it, run with it, turned it into something. Don’t disparage it. If you dump on it, you won’t get anything at all. But if you try to pump it up, maybe you’ll have something you didn’t have before. That’s diplomacy: make something out of not much.

And it won’t do just to snarl.

Since we were talking a lot about Poland, as I was listening to Trump and Pete Hegseth complaining about allies, I thought of repurposing the opening lines of an epic Polish poem: “Alliances, you are like good health. We miss you only when you’re gone.”

Well, right. Try not to screw it up, is my advice.

Judgment, compromise, and the crooked timber of humanity

BW: One of the things Pathway is ultimately about is how people build judgment over time. After decades in public service, what do you believe now about diplomacy that your younger self, even a very smart younger self, would have resisted hearing?

DF: Don’t be too pure. This is a game of compromise, half measures, taking what you can get. And understand that diplomacy, like human beings, is made of the crooked timber of humanity, to borrow from Immanuel Kant. No straight thing can ever be built.

But that doesn’t mean nothing can be built.

About the guest: Ambassador Daniel Fried is the Weiser Family Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a veteran American diplomat. He previously served as U.S. Ambassador to Poland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Special Assistant and NSC Senior Director under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, and State Department Coordinator for Sanctions Policy.

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review publishes long-form interviews with people in politics, policy, journalism, law, diplomacy, markets, and public service about the work they do and the path that brought them there.

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This interview was conducted in April 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

Leon Panetta official portrait. Photo: Central Intelligence Agency / Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Few public servants have seen the American state from as many angles as Leon Panetta. Over the course of his career, he served as a congressman, Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, White House Chief of Staff, CIA Director, and Secretary of Defense. Across those roles, he was forced to confront the same central challenge in different forms: how to turn values into decisions, decisions into institutions, and institutions into something capable of governing responsibly.

In this conversation, Panetta reflects on the habits that defined his career, from setting goals and building teams to insisting that leadership requires honesty, discipline, and a willingness to make hard tradeoffs. He discusses what budget politics taught him about national priorities, why bipartisan deficit reduction once seemed possible, and why he believes today’s leaders have too often abandoned the political courage that governing requires.

He also looks back on his party switch, his years in the Clinton White House, and his leadership at the CIA and Pentagon, before ending with a broader meditation on public service itself. Running through the entire interview is a conviction that democracy depends less on ideological purity than on the willingness to listen, compromise, and govern.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

From the Archive · originally published in The Pathway Blog, April 2026.

Setting goals, building teams, and making a difference

Benjamin Wolf: You’ve had one of those rare careers where the same person has seen the American state from almost every angle: legislator, budget negotiator, White House operator, intelligence chief, defense secretary, and now mentor to future public servants. Across all of those roles, is there a consistent through line? A problem you were always challenged with trying to solve?

Leon Panetta: I always thought it was really important, whatever job I had, to set goals and not just sit at a desk and move stuff from the inbox to the outbox. I really think it is important, and I say that to young people like yourself, that whatever career you engage in, it’s very important to set goals that you want to achieve and, obviously, work on a strategy to achieve those goals. You have to build a team and establish teamwork.

And lastly, I think you need to be honest with yourself about who you are, not try to pretend you’re somebody you’re not, and also be very honest with others. Those are the basic principles I’ve tried to follow in whatever job I’ve had, so that I could look back on those jobs and say I was able to achieve things that I set out to do. In many ways, that gives you a sense that you’ve made a difference.

Public service is really important if you make a difference in people’s lives.

Turning values into numbers

BW: As Chairman of the House Budget Committee, and then as OMB Director, you had to turn values into numbers. What did budget work teach you about leadership that national security debates still too often ignore? Namely, that every grand strategy is also a spending decision, and every spending decision reveals what a country believes in at that moment.

LP: What I learned from my experience as Chair of the Budget Committee, and then when I went into the Clinton administration as Director of OMB, is that numbers are not just numbers. Numbers reflect priorities. What is it that you want to invest in? What is it that you feel is important in terms of programs and how they affect people? And also, how do you achieve discipline so that you’re fiscally disciplined in what you do and don’t simply borrow and spend, or borrow and cut taxes, and add to the deficit?

Because there was pretty good leadership around at the time I was in Congress, on both sides, both Democrats and Republicans were interested in trying to make sure that we were able to reduce the deficit. We had a deficit in those days, not as much as it is now, of course, but we felt it was important to try to deal with that deficit and ultimately provide some real fiscal discipline.

Not easy to do, because it takes some very tough decisions on areas of spending and whether you tax or do not tax people. Fortunately, at the time, we made agreements that basically did both. Initially, we went to Andrews Air Force Base, and a bipartisan group negotiated an agreement that provided for $500 billion in deficit reduction, $250 billion in spending savings, and $250 billion in revenues.

Not easy. It was tough. But we were able to get it passed on a bipartisan basis, and that was important. Then when I became Director of OMB for Bill Clinton, we did the same thing, another $500 billion deficit reduction package.

As a result of both of those important steps, we were able to balance the federal budget. Not only that, but achieve a surplus. And when we achieved that balance and surplus, I thought politically no Congress would want to go back to borrow-and-spend and adding to the debt.

I was wrong.

It didn’t take very long before another administration decided to do a big tax cut that immediately added to the debt, and then other problems followed. Today, unfortunately, and I say this with a great deal of regret, I think both parties are not interested in making the tough decisions that you have to make if you’re going to discipline the budget. So we’ve got a $40 trillion national debt, and that is basically going to pass on to your generation and your children’s generation if we don’t deal with it.

What a serious budget fix would require

BW: If I might ask, what do you think a good solution to that deficit problem would look like today? People talk about cutting social services or reducing defense budgets, but with every decision there’s a big opportunity cost. In your eyes, what would the best approach be?

LP: I think the best thing we did at the time was that we were willing to put everything on the table. You can’t exclude certain areas. You can’t say, “Oh no, we’re going to look at discretionary spending, but we’re not going to look at entitlements.” Entitlements make up two-thirds of the federal budget. You have to look at entitlements. You have to look at discretionary spending, both defense and domestic, and you have to look at revenues, and determine exactly what kind of balance you can achieve.

By doing that, very frankly, it provided cover for both parties. Democrats don’t like to cut spending. Republicans don’t like to raise taxes. But by being able to do all of that as a package, we held it together. And the result was that we looked at the American people and said: everybody’s got to sacrifice a little bit if we’re going to achieve some kind of fiscal discipline.

We were willing to do that. The presidents at the time were willing to support it, and the leadership in both parties was willing to support it. That kind of leadership is critical, because make no mistake about it, these are tough decisions. When you’re looking at entitlements, you’re looking at Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm price support programs. You’re looking at programs that are very popular, and it’s not easy to try to discipline those programs. The same thing is true for taxes, obviously.

But if you’re willing to take those on and do all of that, in other words, put everything on the table, then I think you can arrive at the kind of balanced agreement that can be supported politically by both parties.

Why he left the Republican Party

BW: I want to go back in time to your election to the House of Representatives. Early in your career, you switched parties. You had worked in the Nixon administration as a Republican and had accumulated relationships within the Republican Party, so you might have been expected to stay. What was behind that decision? And were you nervous that in switching, you might not have support on the other side?

LP: I actually began as a Republican here in California, but I was a Republican in what I would call the Hiram Johnson mold. Hiram Johnson, who was Governor of California, was also a Republican, but he was a moderate and a progressive, and really felt it was important not only to deal with civil rights, but with the rights of employees and other important issues.

I got a job working in the United States Senate with a Republican senator from California named Tom Kuchel, who came out of that Hiram Johnson group. We had Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight, and others. They were moderate Republicans, and Kuchel was Minority Whip under Everett Dirksen. There were other moderate Republicans like him: Jacob Javits, Clifford Case, Hugh Scott, Mark Hatfield. They worked with Democrats on a lot of legislation.

It was really a great experience for me because both sides were willing to work together. I often say I’ve seen Washington at its best and Washington at its worst. The good news is I saw Washington work, where both parties, Democrat and Republican, were willing to sit down and work together on major issues.

What happened, I think, was civil rights. Republicans in the Senate had worked on civil rights legislation with the Democrats, but then Republicans began to back away from strong civil rights enforcement. Nixon made a deal with Southern Republicans to back off strong enforcement on civil rights. At the time, I was appointed Director of the Office for Civil Rights, and my job was to enforce the law. I was getting a lot of political pressure to back off, and ultimately I lost my job as a result of that.

That was kind of the first step. Then, in the next administration, they started going after moderate Republicans. I think it was Spiro Agnew who actually ran against Charlie Goodell, the Republican senator from New York, because they thought he was too liberal. So the party began to cut its own throat.

I just thought the Democratic Party had a bigger tent. It accepted people from the left as well as the right, and that I would be more comfortable there in terms of what I believed in. So I made that change, and I’ve never regretted it.

What the White House taught him about leadership

BW: Let’s look to the Clinton years. When you became White House Chief of Staff, what changed in your understanding of leadership? At what point, for you, did you understand the main challenge in making the presidency actually function?

LP: It’s a very fundamental approach that a president needs to take, which is: I’m President of the United States, and what do I need to do in order to improve the lives of my fellow Americans in this country?

I worked for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Both of them were very bright. Both of them were very capable. Bill Clinton is one of the brightest people I’ve ever known. You could sit down and brief him on complex issues. He would ask a lot of questions, which was good, and he would make decisions as to what he felt needed to be done. He was not afraid to make those decisions.

The good thing about that experience is I saw a president who really took the time to evaluate issues, get the pros and cons, look at different options, and then select an option that he was comfortable with. The purpose of a chief of staff, like myself, was to help present that information to the president, give him the information he needed, and give him the advice.

These were presidents who didn’t mind having smart people in the room. They wanted smart advisors. They wanted people who were experienced in their areas. That is very important for a president. No president knows everything about everything. No president.

Presidents who are successful are willing to listen to people who have experience and can provide guidance. If you do that, your chances are not only that you will get the right information, but that you will make a decision that really is in the interest of the country. And that ultimately is what a president has to do. If I’m going to make a decision, is it in the interest of the American people? That is the fundamental question every president should take seriously.

Credibility at the CIA

BW: You would later become Director of the CIA, where the cost of wishful thinking is obviously much higher. I want to ask: you served in the Army briefly, but beyond that, you did not have a long intelligence résumé. Going into that role, did you have hesitancy? How did you prepare yourself for it?

LP: As you said, I was an intelligence officer in the Army, which is a long way from being Director of the CIA. But I did deal with intelligence. Frankly, as the president’s chief of staff, the president every morning is presented with what’s called the President’s Daily Brief, which is a summary of intelligence from around the world that every president gets access to. So I had a pretty good sense of the role of intelligence and the importance of speaking truth to power.

However, I had spent my life on the budget. I had spent my life working on issues protecting the ocean and working on agriculture issues and that kind of thing. So I didn’t really have a lot of background in it. I asked the president why he was selecting me, and he basically said, “Because I think you can help restore the credibility of the CIA,” which was badly damaged in those days, and both parties were attacking the CIA. He also said, “I want you to go after Bin Laden.”

For almost ten years, nobody really knew where Bin Laden was. I like a challenge. The jobs I’ve always taken, I’ve taken because they were a challenge.

The way I approached it was that I had a very good aide and chief of staff, a guy named Jeremy Bash, who had worked on the intelligence committees in Congress. When I was nominated, I went back and got a full set of briefings from all of the key people at the CIA, so I had a good sense of what they were involved with and what they were doing.

When I went to the CIA, I did something Jeremy had recommended: I didn’t bring a big team of people with me. It was just myself and my chief of staff who walked into the CIA. That basically sent a signal that I was not trying to change the CIA. I was prepared to accept the professionalism of the people who worked there.

Because of that, I developed a very good bond with the people at the CIA and worked closely with them. If you appreciate the fundamental role of the CIA, which is to speak truth to power and present accurate intelligence about the threats that are out there, and if you believe in that, then you understand what the CIA is all about.

We were able to do that job, and obviously we were able to carry out the operation that got Bin Laden. That built a real team that worked together, not only intelligence officers but Special Forces as well. To see that kind of coordinated effort and see it work, that is probably one of the proudest things I’ve done in my life.

On war, clarity, and presidential responsibility

BW: In your recent New York Times essay with Chuck Hagel, you warned, in effect, against drifting into a war with Iran without a clear objective or end state. Let me ask it to you bluntly: what is the first question a president must be able to answer before using force? And how can you tell when an administration is evading that question and acting without clear objectives?

LP: As Secretary of Defense, and in that op-ed with Chuck Hagel, who was also Secretary of Defense, we know that probably our most serious responsibility is to deploy our young men and women in uniform into harm’s way. If we’re sending them to war, it’s very important that we have a clear objective. What is the objective of sending them into combat? What is the strategy for achieving that objective? And what’s the endgame? How do we ultimately wrap it up and bring those forces back home?

I think it’s really important to think through all of those issues. The problem is, when a president becomes evasive as to what the objective really is, or comes up with different versions of why the country is going to war, it creates confusion, not only among the American people, but among our men and women in uniform, who deserve to know the truth about why they are going to war. They’re putting their lives on the line. They are entitled to know exactly why they are at war.

For that reason, I think it is really important for presidents of the United States to speak very truthfully about exactly what the objective is and how that objective is going to be achieved. That is something I think is a problem right now, because the president keeps coming up with different reasons why we would be at war with Iran.

What he tries to teach young people

BW: As we begin to close, I want to turn the conversation back to students. Across your many different positions, you’ve seen interns and young staffers go on to pursue all kinds of careers. Over the years, what have been the most persistent traits you’ve seen in the students who later went on to succeed?

LP: My wife and I established, when I came back from working for Bill Clinton as chief of staff, an institute for public policy. The purpose of our institute is to try to inspire young people to lives of public service.

I’m often asked what attracted me to public life, and it was really several reasons. Number one, I was the son of Italian immigrants who felt very strongly about the importance of serving the country. I served in the military for two years, which taught me a lot about how you build a team that can take the hill. And there was a young president who said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” That inspired me to get involved in public service.

My wife and I felt, when we got back, that young people were not attracted to lives of public service. So we thought it was really important to see if we could inspire young people to be part of our democracy, because they are the next generation of leaders, and they have to be involved in our democracy.

We created a curriculum to try to inspire them. We have an internship program where we train students to go back to Washington and work with the California delegation, both Democrats and Republicans. What we do that is different is bring them to the institute for two weeks of training on issues and on understanding how Congress works, so that when they go back to Washington, they are well trained, or at least they understand what they are getting into.

The most important thing I stress to them is: maintain your objectivity. Don’t get dragged into the partisan warfare that is now a part of Washington. Whether you work for a Republican or a Democrat, always maintain your objectivity, step back, and look at the big picture. I think that is really important.

I also think it is important to focus on the substance of issues. We have another program at the Panetta Institute where I bring in law students from Santa Clara University, my old alma mater, as well as graduate students. I have them look at a major issue, whether it is immigration, health care, the budget, whatever it may be. And what I ask them to do is give me the Republican position, give me the Democratic position, and then tell me what a compromise would look like.

That is called governing. That is what our democracy is supposed to do.

What I am trying to do is restore the art of governing so that young people understand they have to look at both sides. They have to be willing to listen. They have to be willing to understand what all sides are talking about. But their responsibility is to come forward with compromise and consensus. You are not going to simply slam dunk whatever the hell you think needs to be done. It doesn’t work that way in a democracy.

For most of my career in Washington, Washington worked because Republicans and Democrats were willing to sit down, trust each other, work together, and come up with consensus. That is how we governed. I think that is a lost art right now.

What I try to stress with young people is: take the time to understand that you have to listen to other people’s views, and you ultimately have to try to find consensus.

The book he would recommend

BW: Finally, Secretary Panetta, as is customary with The Pathway Blog, if there were a student bold enough to be interested in following a career path similar to yours, what book would you recommend to them, and why?

LP: I really think that young people ought to take the time to read the history of our Founders. A great book on John Adams, a great book on George Washington, some great books on Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin. Take the time to read about the Founding Fathers. What motivated them? How did they look at life? How were they able, in their genius, to come up with what our democracy would look like?

They were all children of the Enlightenment. But the reality is, they had a sense that they wanted to create something special when it came to governing. And in the Constitution, they ultimately put together those elements. They did not want to centralize power in any one branch of government. They did not want a king. They did not want a king and Parliament. They did not want a Star Chamber court. So they created a system of checks and balances in our democracy.

I think it is really important for young people to understand why our country was created with those principles, because in the end, our democracy doesn’t work unless there is a willingness to sit down, have a dialogue, and ultimately arrive at consensus. That is the way democracy works.

They need to understand that right now, frankly, Washington is dysfunctional. The president doesn’t work with Congress. Neither party works together with the other party. They are in constant confrontation, and the problems this country needs to address are not being addressed because of partisan differences.

So what I want young people to know is that it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to be that way. If you are willing to provide leadership, then let me tell you what I often say to students: in a democracy, we govern either by leadership or by crisis. If leadership is there and willing to make tough decisions, then we can avoid crisis. If leadership is not there and leaders are unwilling to make tough decisions, then we will govern by crisis.

Right now, Washington is largely governed by crisis.

BW: Incredibly well put. Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for your time.

About the guest: Leon Panetta is chairman of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy and former U.S. Secretary of Defense. He previously served as Director of the CIA, White House Chief of Staff, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and as a member of Congress representing California.

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review publishes long-form interviews with people in politics, policy, journalism, law, diplomacy, markets, and public service about the work they do and the path that brought them there.

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This interview was conducted by video in April 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

Bonnie Jenkins official State Department portrait. Photo: U.S. Department of State / Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

In an era defined by the erosion of arms control frameworks and the acceleration of technological change, the institutions that once governed nuclear stability are under increasing strain. Treaties that structured great-power competition for decades are expiring without replacement, geopolitical trust is fragmenting, and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence are compressing decision timelines in ways policymakers are still struggling to understand.

The question is no longer simply how arms control works, but whether it can adapt fast enough to remain relevant.

In this conversation, I speak with Bonnie Jenkins, former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, about how the global nonproliferation system has evolved from the treaty-heavy optimism of the 1990s to today’s far more uncertain landscape. We explore the tension between norms and enforcement, the implications of a post-START world, and whether rising U.S.-China competition signals a new kind of arms race.

Jenkins also offers a rare inside look at how policy is actually made within government: how leadership, institutional constraints, and geopolitical realities shape outcomes, and what skills truly translate from academic research into high-stakes diplomacy.

What emerges is a portrait of arms control not as a static set of agreements, but as a constantly adapting system, one that depends as much on political will and institutional capacity as it does on treaties themselves. At its core, this is a conversation about limits: the limits of agreements, of enforcement, and of our ability to manage risk in an increasingly complex world.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

From the Archive · originally published in The Pathway Blog, March 2026.

Opening

Benjamin Wolf: You’ve worked across academia, civil society, and the State Department. At what point did arms control become not just a policy interest, but a career commitment?

Bonnie Jenkins: It really started when I was an intern in what was then the Presidential Management Internship Program, which later became the Presidential Management Fellowship. I was at the Pentagon in the International Law section.

While I was there, I went to a meeting on arms control and weapons of mass destruction. At that point, I hadn’t figured out what type of law I wanted to pursue. I had just finished both a law degree and a master’s degree. After that meeting, I thought: this is really interesting. I hadn’t focused on these issues before. And I decided then that I wanted to work in public international law, focusing on weapons of mass destruction and treaties.

So it was completely by accident. I hadn’t planned it at all.

Fragility and resilience in the nonproliferation system

BW: Was there a specific moment, an event, negotiation, or some sort of internal failure, that clarified for you how fragile or resilient the global nonproliferation system really is?

BJ: In the 1990s, what I think of as the last real decade of arms control negotiations, we were negotiating the Chemical Weapons Convention, finishing the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. Treaties were still something we did. They were regularly ratified by the Senate.

So at the time, the system didn’t feel fragile. It felt like this was simply how the international community addressed weapons of mass destruction.

It also didn’t feel fragile because Russia, then the Soviet Union, and China were part of these processes. What’s changed over the past decade and a half geopolitically has altered that environment significantly. But at the time, this approach felt stable and routine.

Norms versus enforcement

BW: The nonproliferation regime is often described as a normative success but an enforcement challenge. Where do you think that tension is most visible today, and how did we get here compared to the 1990s environment you were describing?

BJ: I think that’s a fair way to describe it. The norm still exists: countries should not develop nuclear weapons.

During the Biden administration, one concept we emphasized was that of “responsible nuclear weapon states,” that if a country possesses nuclear weapons, it should not engage in saber-rattling or destabilizing behavior.

But there has always been a challenge tied to Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which calls for disarmament discussions. The United States and Russia, the Soviet Union before that, did engage in those discussions through the START treaties, reducing nuclear stockpiles by over 80% since the end of the Cold War.

The problem now is that we no longer have a START treaty. It ended recently, and it was the last remaining agreement with Russia that both limited and reduced nuclear arsenals. That mechanism is now gone.

At the same time, we have an upcoming Nuclear Nonproliferation Review Conference. These conferences are always difficult because of the range of issues involved. Iran will certainly be a major topic. There’s ongoing interest in a Middle East weapons-free zone, which will be even more salient now. And non-nuclear states consistently press nuclear states on disarmament timelines.

The last two Review Conferences failed to produce consensus documents, the most recent one in part because of Russia’s position on Ukraine, which wasn’t even directly about nuclear weapons. So the traditional challenges remain, but they’re compounded by new geopolitical tensions.

A new Cold War?

BW: I recently spoke with David Sanger of The New York Times, who argued that we may be entering a kind of new Cold War, given the end of the START treaty and China’s rapid nuclear buildup. Do you agree? Are we entering a new Cold War?

BJ: I would say we’re entering a period of new challenges. I’m hesitant to use the term “Cold War,” because that was a very specific historical period with its own leadership and dynamics.

That said, the possibility of an arms race is real, unless countries come together to negotiate constraints. China is expanding its nuclear arsenal, and without a START framework, there are no longer formal limitations in place. That creates space for increased nuclear and broader military competition among major powers.

So I wouldn’t call it a Cold War, but I understand why people draw that comparison. The absence of constraints is the key issue.

AI and escalation timelines

BW: As AI becomes more integrated into military systems, does it compress escalation timelines in ways current arms control frameworks aren’t prepared for?

BJ: There are both positives and risks. New technologies can improve decision-making in certain contexts.

For example, if we had a new START treaty, advanced technologies could potentially enhance verification processes. We don’t currently have all the tools needed for more comprehensive inspections, so there’s interest in how emerging technologies can help.

But AI is also a new variable. We don’t yet fully understand how it will be used, particularly in military contexts. There is concern about how it could accelerate capabilities or decision-making.

There has been some movement toward norms, for instance, agreements among the U.S., U.K., France, and China to ensure a human remains in the loop for nuclear decision-making. There are also international discussions, such as the RE-AIM conferences hosted by the Netherlands and South Korea, focused on responsible AI use in the military.

Still, the pace of technological development is faster than arms control processes. Even if negotiations were underway, keeping up with that speed would be difficult. Not impossible, but definitely a challenge.

Inside government: adjusting to leadership and making policy within parameters

BW: Inside government, how often do personal views on arms control have to adjust to leadership priorities and institutional constraints?

BJ: That’s always part of the job. I’ve been fortunate to serve during periods when there was strong interest in arms control and multilateral engagement.

Whether the focus is on reduction, elimination, or nonproliferation depends on the issue, the negotiations, and the positions of the countries involved. Every country operates within policy parameters set by leadership, not just one individual, but a broader set of decision-makers.

Within those parameters, there is room for discussion and influence. But the broader direction is shaped by leadership priorities. That’s why it’s much easier to work in environments where leadership supports arms control than in those where it doesn’t.

The biggest misconception about how arms control decisions get made

BW: What’s a major misconception people have about how arms control decisions get made?

BJ: One major misconception is how little people understand about how government works in general.

Many people don’t know the roles of different departments or agencies, or how government actions affect them directly. People naturally focus on what they encounter in daily life, healthcare, groceries, but that means a lot of government activity goes unnoticed.

In more specialized areas like international security and arms control, public awareness is even lower. These issues tend to surface only during moments of crisis, like Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

There’s also a tendency to treat “government” as a monolith, or to assume that anyone can step into these roles easily. But effective policymaking requires expertise, experience, and deep institutional knowledge.

I would like to see greater public understanding of the scope and importance of government work.

Skills that translate from scholarship into diplomacy

BW: You’ve bridged academic research and diplomacy. What skills translate best, and what should students focus on?

BJ: First, I would encourage anyone interested in government to pursue it. There’s some discouragement right now, but we still need people committed to public service.

It’s also important not to equate government with any particular set of individuals. Government is an institution; people come and go.

In terms of skills: respect for different viewpoints is essential. At the State Department especially, you’re constantly engaging with different cultures. No perspective is inherently superior to another.

Writing is also critical. There’s a great deal of it in government, and the ability to construct clear arguments matters.

Curiosity is equally important. You should be asking big questions: who are we as a country? What is the United States’ role in the world?

And finally, a commitment to public service. Whether in government, teaching, NGOs, or the military, the underlying goal is helping others. If that motivates you, there are many ways to pursue it.

The most rewarding part of her career

BW: Looking back, what has been the most rewarding part of your career?

BJ: My commitment to public service. That’s been the constant throughout my career.

When I graduated from law school, most of my peers went into private law firms. Only a small number of us chose government or other public service paths. But that decision opened up incredible opportunities, working across different levels of government, negotiating internationally, traveling, and contributing to major agreements.

I started in city government in New York, then moved to state government in Albany. That foundation eventually led to treaty negotiations, international travel with senior officials, and work on major commissions like the 9/11 Commission.

It’s all come from that initial commitment to public service. That’s what I value most about the path I chose.

Tradeoffs, regrets, and choosing seriously

BW: What’s a tradeoff you wish you had understood earlier in your career?

BJ: I don’t think of it in terms of major tradeoffs.

For me, it’s about making thoughtful choices. Life presents multiple paths, and each one leads to a different outcome. When I graduated from law school, I had several options, all in public service. Choosing among them was difficult because each would have led to a very different life.

The key is to do the research, take the decision seriously, and choose based on what matters most to you. If you do that, you’re less likely to feel regret later.

I’ve always tried to pursue what I’m passionate about, and when something no longer aligns, I move on. That approach has helped me avoid feeling like I made major sacrifices.

Ultimately, it’s about living in a way where, looking back, you can say you made deliberate, thoughtful decisions. I want to reach that point without significant regrets.

And I’ll add: it’s important for younger generations to stay engaged. You’ll be taking on these responsibilities in the future, so your involvement matters now.

About the guest: Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins served as U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security from 2021 to 2024. She is a leading expert on arms control, nonproliferation, international law, and global security policy.

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review publishes long-form interviews with people in politics, policy, journalism, law, diplomacy, markets, and public service about the work they do and the path that brought them there.

Subscribe to receive new interviews in your inbox.

This interview was conducted by video in March 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, and EU officials participate in the inaugural U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council ministerial in Pittsburgh in 2021. Photo by Ron Przysucha / U.S. Department of State, public domain.

Tyson Barker does not describe a serious career as a straight line. He describes it more like a set of coordinates.

You choose a direction. You invest in a mission. You build relationships, learn languages, find mentors, and put yourself in rooms where opportunity can happen. But you also accept that events will reroute you. Crimea happens. Donbas happens. A boss leaves. A policy portfolio shifts. A job you did not know existed becomes the next hinge point.

Barker’s career has moved across think tanks, government, and U.S.-European institutions. He has worked on trade, technology policy, digital governance, Ukraine, and the future of the relationship between the United States and Europe. His path is intentional, but not linear. He knew the broad field he wanted to work in. The exact itinerary emerged through mentors, timing, initiative, and shocks.

This conversation is about how careers actually form in foreign policy: not through perfect planning, but through accumulated judgment. Barker explains how mentorship works, why alumni networks matter, why languages open worlds, and why young people should not rush to make their twenties look more settled than they are.

It is also a conversation about risk. Barker sees the greatest threat to the U.S.-European relationship not only in Russia, China, technology, or climate, but inside the relationship itself: volatility, democratic strain, political whiplash, and the growing difficulty of planning beyond four-year cycles.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

From the Archive · originally published in The Pathway Blog, March 2026.

Intentional Direction, Serendipitous Outcomes

Benjamin Wolf: You’ve worked across think tanks, government, and transatlantic institutions. Looking back, was your career path intentional, or did it evolve through opportunities and moments of uncertainty?

Tyson Barker: I always wanted to work on U.S.-European relations. I prefer that phrasing because I think “transatlantic” can make it sound like we’re not independent actors. Europe and the U.S. have always been, at least in my lifetime, independent actors. So I like talking about a relationship that recognizes that.

If you mean “intentional” in the sense that I set out pursuing the idea that I would have this kind of career, then yes. But it has also been very serendipitous in the way it developed.

I’ll give you examples. In grad school, I was trying to decide between Latin America and Europe. I got a position as a research assistant for a senior professor working on Europe, and that led me in that direction, doing research on the Cold War.

When I graduated, I had done some work on Europe-China relations in grad school, and I received a grant from the Starr Foundation. At the time I was trying to decide: do I focus on the private sector? Do I look at the World Bank or the international financial institutions?

I had a conversation with one of my mentors, and he said, “I think the Bertelsmann Foundation is going to open an office in Washington, D.C. You should contact them and see what their plans are.” I contacted them, and they said, “How did you know we were opening this office?” I told them I had spoken with mentors and gotten that advice.

Long story short, I ended up being the first hire for the Bertelsmann Foundation’s Washington office, something I probably would not have gotten without doing informational interviews and building those relationships.

Opportunities kept presenting themselves, but they were also shaped by my own initiative. At Bertelsmann I focused on U.S.-European trade relations and digital issues: GDPR, information sharing, the Lisbon Treaty, the Eurozone crisis. At the same time, I did a lot of work on the political side. I co-founded Foreign Policy Professionals for Obama and helped raise money for the campaign.

Then, in the second Obama administration, a political position opened up, and I was fortunate enough to be selected by Victoria Nuland, one of the most accomplished diplomats in U.S. foreign policy in the past 25 years. She said, “I need somebody who knows TTIP,” the U.S.-EU trade negotiations. “I need somebody who understands this.” So she brought me on board because, for my generation, I had developed a reputation for working on U.S.-EU relations. Not Russia, not Turkey. U.S.-EU.

Then Crimea happened. Then Donbas happened. So I ended up spending my tenure in the Obama administration not focused as much on TTIP, but much more on Ukraine.

When I left government, I went to Berlin. I knew Germany quite well. I ended up working in a very academic environment on cyber risk: cyber insurance for critical infrastructure, particularly industrial control systems. Very technical work.

But through that, and through getting to know the technology space better, I ended up at Aspen Germany, where I started the digital program and later took over the transatlantic program. After that, I went to the German Council on Foreign Relations and founded their digital program while continuing to work on transatlantic policy. Eventually I was brought back into the Biden administration to work on U.S.-Europe technology policy.

In that role, my boss ended up leaving, Karen Donfried, our top diplomat for Europe in the Biden administration. And my former boss, who was then the number two official at the State Department, said, “I’m putting you back on Ukraine.” So I ended up returning to Ukraine policy again.

I always joke that when I’m in government, I work on Ukraine, and when I’m out of government, I work on the EU. But it’s really a bit of both. You set your coordinates and create opportunities for yourself, but there’s always serendipity too.

How Mentorship Actually Works

BW: You mentioned mentors. A lot of people hear “mentor” and it can be confusing. Is it a professor, a boss, a friend? When you’re looking for mentors, first, how do you create and foster those relationships? And second, how do you use mentorship effectively?

TB: Great question. Mentorship, like any relationship in life, is a two-way street. There’s agency on both sides. You select your mentors, and your mentors also select you.

They come from different parts of your life. I’ve been very fortunate to have bosses whom I consider great mentors. And I’ll be honest: many of those amazing bosses have been extremely ambitious, creative women.

My first boss at the Bertelsmann Foundation was Anetta Heuser, an incredible policy entrepreneur. She set up the office in Washington and Brussels and is now leading a major foundation in Germany. She invested in me because I invested in the mission.

Then I had Victoria Nuland: Dick Cheney’s national security adviser, Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson, married to Robert Kagan, and an architect of years of policy toward Russia. Again, she invested in me because I invested in the mission.

Before that, during undergrad or grad school, a lot of it comes down to demonstrated interest. If you have professors, researchers, fellows, or practitioners in the university ecosystem, demonstrated interest begins with what you did: reaching out. I did that constantly.

It’s one reason I try to pay it forward. I’m getting worse at it, frankly, but when people reach out to me, I want to say yes because people did it for me. When you’re established, you want to open doors and build ladders, pipelines of opportunity.

But many people simply don’t ask. It’s becoming more common now, but for a long time it wasn’t.

Especially in grad school, and maybe in undergrad too, use alumni networks. They can be incredibly helpful. I went to Columbia for undergrad and Johns Hopkins for graduate school, and Hopkins has a very supportive alumni network. People understand the value of helping others coming through the same program.

If you’re part of a specific program, even if it’s not the whole university, that network becomes a core resource. It never hurts to reach out. I remember being an undergrad and emailing professors, this was back in 2000, just cold emails, which felt strange at the time. But sometimes they responded. It starts with outreach.

The Biggest Strategic Risk to the Alliance

BW: Transitioning to current events: in your view, what is the greatest strategic risk facing the transatlantic alliance over the next decade, and how should it be addressed?

TB: The greatest risk is internal. You have to be confident in the core of the relationship in order to project outward.

There are external threats: Russia, China, climate change, competitiveness, technology. But at the end of the day there has to be a fundamental belief in the utility of the relationship in terms of both interests and values.

As articulated by figures like JD Vance and Marco Rubio, there are serious critiques of Europe within the United States, and very serious critiques of the United States within Europe. The message Europe is receiving from what many perceive as erratic U.S. behavior, tariffs, shifting positions on Ukraine, proposals like the so-called “28-point plan,” or even debates around Greenland, creates deep uncertainty.

The big question in Europe right now is: how do we build guardrails and shock absorbers to manage this volatility coming from the United States?

At the same time, there are anti-democratic forces within Europe, both far right and far left, and those pressures can deepen divisions.

So in my view, the greatest threat to the transatlantic alliance is internal.

China and Europe

BW: You mentioned China. How should the U.S. balance competition with China while maintaining focus on European security?

TB: The United States has immense capacity to walk and chew gum at the same time. There has been discussion since at least the Bush administration about a “pivot to Asia” or a “rebalance.”

Europe recognizes that the primary strategic theater may increasingly be the Indo-Pacific, because that’s where a lot of economic dynamism and security competition is happening.

But I would ask right now: is that even what the Trump administration believes? I don’t think the administration has articulated a clearly coherent position on its role as a security provider and economic actor in the Pacific with respect to China.

On one hand, there are impulses toward a more oligarchic or authoritarian-style entente with Chinese leadership. On the other hand, there is occasional rhetorical support for Taiwan and the South China Sea, though not necessarily to the degree seen in earlier periods.

So I’m not sure there is a coherent doctrine. It feels more focused on the Western Hemisphere, to be quite frank.

Europe recognizes that in the Indo-Pacific it will likely play a more junior role, supporting stability because global trade depends on a rules-based order. At the same time, Europe needs to take a more senior role in its own regional security. That’s an area where there is growing agreement.

Munich and the Wrecking Ball Problem

BW: You referenced the Munich Security Conference. Last year, JD Vance gave a memorable but polarizing speech. This year, it was Marco Rubio. What are your biggest takeaways from the past conferences, and what did you make of this year’s speech?

TB: It comes back to the broader structural problem. The pendulum in the United States has increasingly become a wrecking ball. One administration sets a course, and the next knocks it down. That makes it extremely difficult for allies, businesses, or policymakers to plan because the long-term horizon disappears.

This administration has been particularly maximalist. You could describe it as a kind of demolition diplomacy. Many observers expect that some of these policies will not outlast the administration.

But even if the pendulum swings back, whether under Republicans or Democrats, it will be difficult to restore the level of predictability that once allowed allies to plan beyond four-year cycles. And that is a tragedy.

I assign a lot of responsibility to Trump for how he approached the world, but I also think these dynamics predate him. You can trace some of them to the Bush administration and even to aspects of the Obama administration.

Take the Iraq War. It was deeply divisive and sold domestically in ways that fractured international legitimacy. Then the Obama administration comes in and argues that the original legitimacy was never properly built. What does that say to allies who supported it?

You saw similar dynamics with Afghanistan. Allies indicated they might have stayed longer, but without the U.S. backbone the coalition could not hold.

So the lesson for Europe is that you have to plan around U.S. cycles. Increasingly, you cannot assume policies will outlast them, whether it’s incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act, tariffs imposed today, or diplomatic agreements reached in one administration. If I were advising Europe, I would assume many of those policies will not last beyond the current administration.

Your Twenties, Travel, Languages, and Inspiration

BW: For readers interested in your path, what has been the most rewarding part of your career? And what should they know if they want to enter this field?

TB: First, use your twenties to figure out what you want to do. Don’t feel pressure to have everything figured out by 25.

I learned that during my year abroad as an undergraduate. I was ambitious and thought, “By 24 I need to accomplish X.” But I was surrounded by people of different ages who were still figuring things out. You don’t need an extremely linear life.

Second, travel and learn languages. If you want to work in international relations or foreign policy, make a serious commitment to understanding countries, languages, cultures, and anthropology. It’s much more than tourism.

People sometimes say, “Everyone speaks English,” or “That language is too difficult.” But you should throw yourself into it: date in the language, make friends in the language, live with roommates who speak it.

I did that with several languages. I lived in Taiwan for a time. I lived in Germany. I actually left college for a year and went to Guatemala. I started graduate school in Italy.

In those places I learned languages, especially German and Spanish, well enough to work professionally. That opens entire worlds.

And sometimes the value isn’t about what seems “most useful.” People say, “Why learn German? Everyone in Germany speaks English.” But they don’t speak it professionally the way you need for policy work. German opened an enormous world for me in Europe.

The most important thing is to be inspired by the language and the culture. If you have that inspiration, the rest tends to follow.

The Tradeoffs

BW: What has been the biggest cost, or the most difficult aspect, that you wish you knew earlier?

TB: My career path has been fairly omnivorous. I’ve always earned a comfortable salary, so I’m not complaining there, although I have friends who have earned more.

But if you pursue certain government tracks, like the Foreign Service or congressional careers, you can receive retirement benefits like pensions. I’m 45 now, and some of my friends are getting close to eligibility. They may not retire immediately, but they can pivot while still drawing that pension, which is a significant advantage.

Because my path has been more serendipitous and less linear, I don’t have that same pension track.

Another tradeoff comes from living abroad. When you live in another country, you’re ultimately a guest. That shapes your access. German may be my working language, but I’m not German. I’m American. Access in political Berlin or Brussels is different from someone who has spent their entire career in that ecosystem.

And the dynamic works both ways. In Washington, there are advantages that Americans have which Europeans might not.

The Book That Mattered, Even Though He Disagreed With It

BW: To conclude: what book or piece of literature has been most influential on your life, and why should others read it?

TB: I should have thought about this beforehand. It’s such a good question.

This answer might get me in trouble, but I’ll say it anyway because it mattered at an important hinge point in my life. I had lived in Taiwan and studied abroad in Berlin in 2001, but I didn’t want to pursue foreign policy. I was planning on a domestic career.

What changed my mind, what changed my entire generation, was 9/11. I wanted to understand and impose some kind of order on a world that suddenly felt chaotic.

So I read Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. I bought it in a German bookstore in English and read it straight through.

It’s controversial. People criticize it for framing the world in terms of civilizational blocs. And it was in conversation with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History, which argued that ideological conflict had essentially ended with the Cold War.

Even though I ultimately disagree with Huntington’s thesis, engaging with it, trying to make sense of the world through a framework, was very important for me. It shaped how I began thinking about international politics.

About the guest: Tyson Barker is a former Deputy Special Representative for Ukraine’s Economic Recovery and a senior associate fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations, where his work focuses on Ukraine’s economic recovery, reconstruction, and defense industrial base. He has served in senior roles in the State Department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, previously led DGAP’s Technology and Foreign Policy Program, and worked at Aspen Germany on digital and transatlantic programs. He is also a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center.

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review publishes long-form interviews with people in politics, policy, journalism, law, diplomacy, markets, and public service about the work they do and the path that brought them there.

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This interview was conducted in March 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

Journalists ask questions at a press conference in Ankara, Turkey, in 2019. Photo by Ron Przysucha / U.S. Department of State, public domain.

John Haltiwanger came to journalism the long way around: through teaching, living abroad, studying international relations, and discovering that the world’s “big” events are not abstractions when you are sitting in the places they have reshaped.

In Georgia in 2012, still living in the shadow of Russia’s 2008 invasion, he began talking to people, writing, and noticing how much of America’s global footprint even an engaged American can miss until it is suddenly right in front of him. A group of U.S. Marines in an Irish pub in Tbilisi became one of those moments: a reminder that American power operates in places most Americans rarely think about.

That experience helped push Haltiwanger toward foreign policy journalism. His path was not traditional. He did not come through a clean journalism-school pipeline. He built his beat through history, international relations, blogging, freelancing, reporting, and a willingness to keep asking people what they had seen.

This conversation is about the craft and responsibility of reporting on national security and foreign affairs: how to build subject-matter depth, how to vet sources, how to protect identities, how to stay fair without pretending neutrality, and how to explain why distant events matter at home. It is also about what comes next for a profession under economic strain, where trust, distribution, media literacy, and the reporter’s own adaptability may matter more than ever.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

From the Archive · originally published in The Pathway Blog, March 2026.

Georgia, Geopolitics, and the Limits of What We Notice

Benjamin Wolf: To begin: knowing that you’ve built your beat around U.S. foreign policy and national security reporting, what was the first moment you realized this was the lane you wanted to commit to professionally, and why?

John Haltiwanger: I’m not sure there was a singular moment, but a really formative experience for me came not long after undergrad. I had pursued a certification to teach English as a foreign language, and for a brief period I actually taught U.S. history and AP World History. I’ve always been into geopolitics: the history of politics, the history of interactions between countries.

While I was teaching high school, I realized: I’m not sure I want to get locked into a career quite yet. So I accepted a job teaching English abroad in Georgia, the country, in 2012. It was a couple of years after Russia had invaded Georgia in a really short war that was also quite formative for the country, despite the fact that it only lasted a couple of days.

It was clear it was still having an impact on Georgians and on the country, particularly given that Russian forces were still occupying two internationally recognized Georgian territories, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. I started talking to Georgians about it a lot. And I started blogging about it.

And I realized: I’m very into this geopolitics thing.

There was another moment where I was in Tbilisi, the capital. That wasn’t where the school I taught in was. I taught at a school about three hours from there in a pretty small village. But I remember going into this Irish pub and running into all these U.S. Marines who were there to help train Georgian troops involved in what at the time was called ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, basically NATO and allied troops in Afghanistan.

I was 23. I grew up in D.C. I always thought of myself as fairly aware of what America is doing around the world and its global footprint, but it was a shock to me that these Marines were in Tbilisi, and I had no idea.

It was humbling and eye-opening about the limits of my own knowledge about what the U.S. does around the world. It reignited this desire within me to have a better understanding of America’s foreign policy role and its military footprint.

While I was in Georgia, I decided to apply for an international relations program. And because I had had such a great experience internationally, I decided to pursue programs abroad, not in the United States. A lot of the best IR programs are in the U.S., in D.C., Denver, Boston, and all over the country. But I thought it would be interesting to get a non-U.S. perspective on IR. So I applied to a program at the University of Glasgow.

I was really attracted to it partly because they had a strong focus on Central and Eastern Europe, and I was very interested in that region. I got into the program, and while I was there I continued to blog, continued to have conversations with people from around the world about geopolitics, and I realized: this is what I want to do.

I didn’t necessarily know I wanted to be a journalist, but I knew I wanted to write about foreign policy. I loved sinking my teeth into convoluted topics. I loved the IR theory courses, using different theories as tools and lenses through which to analyze the world and current events.

Over the course of my master’s program, I realized academia is great, but I’d rather be more engaged with things at a fast-paced, current level. And what better way to do that than journalism?

While I was in grad school, I kept blogging. I got some freelance opportunities, and it spiraled into a journalism career. In a lot of ways, I ended up here by accident.

The Zigzag Line

BW: You mentioned you had always been interested in international affairs, but it took time to figure out where you fit within that. Looking back, is there anything you would redesign or something you would double down on earlier?

JH: Not necessarily. A lot of fields have prescribed pathways. My pathway into journalism was definitely unconventional. A lot of people go to J-school. They might major in journalism in undergrad, then go to J-school. There are advantages to that if you want to get into journalism: internships or fellowships at media organizations, building the network that can help you get a step ahead. Connections are currency in any field.

That definitely set me back a little bit. I studied IR. I did not have connections to journalism. I really had to put myself out there to get my foot in the door.

But at the same time, I gained a level of expertise in a subject matter that you might not necessarily benefit from in the same way if you are solely going through a traditional journalism pipeline. I don’t want to discourage people from going to J-school. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we should break away from the notion that there is a single pathway into any given field.

You should pursue your interest and not worry too much about precisely where you’re going to end up, while still being practical. We all need to pay the bills. We all need gainful employment. That’s just the way the world works.

But I don’t have regrets about the pathway I took. It was a zigzag line, not exactly linear, but pretty much every experience I had along the way, from studying history to my time in Georgia to my master’s program, gave me skills I continue to benefit from.

As a history undergrad, I took a class called historiography, studying the ways the sourcing of an event affects how it is depicted: primary sources versus secondary sources, thinking about why a document portrays something in a particular light, what perspective it is coming from. That is so important in journalism, understanding biases injected into portrayals of events, particularly by people in power who have a stake in portraying certain events in a certain light.

Going to Georgia, without even realizing it, I was unofficially interviewing people about the war and its impact. I was doing what journalists do: you go into the world and talk to people. I was getting soft skills that matter. It is difficult to go out and talk to people.

Even if you’re extroverted, it can be tough. I’ve had to report in difficult contexts. For example, about two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, I was reporting from the Poland-Ukraine border, speaking to Ukrainians as they crossed, people who were, in that moment, becoming refugees. You’re talking to them on the worst days of their lives. You can worry you’re invading their space, but you have to remember: this is an important story to tell. This is a major event in history, and you’re doing your part in writing the first draft of it. So you go up and talk to them, with sensitivity and empathy, of course.

Every experience I had helped prepare me for this. I’d encourage people interested in journalism to think about what beats they might want to cover and take courses that interest them. In undergrad, it wasn’t just history. I took Middle East politics, an American presidency course, electives I was interested in. Little did I know I’d end up covering U.S. national security, the presidency, and the Middle East years later. I’m a strong advocate for pursuing what interests you.

Access vs. Accountability

BW: Now, you mentioned everyone has to pay the bills. I came across an article recently describing how incentives in journalism have changed over the past few decades. In today’s media environment, journalists can be incentivized to chase outrageous stories, things that get more clicks. How do you distinguish between access journalism and accountability journalism, and where do you personally draw the line?

JH: It’s a very important question. There are certainly people out there who engage in sensationalist journalism. I think it comes down to integrity and your personal set of ethics.

I got into journalism because I care about the world. I care about my country and the role it plays in the world. The United States is the most powerful country in the world. What we do has rippling consequences for millions, if not billions, of people. I think it’s really important, as a citizen in a democratic country, to keep my fellow Americans informed so they can make the best possible decisions at the ballot box, voting for people who align with their beliefs, and to be informed about what is actually happening around the world. And also: if you did vote for this person, this is what they’re up to on your behalf and in your name around the world.

Media has been under a lot of economic strain, especially as it shifted from newspaper- and magazine-based models to digital. I’ve been laid off multiple times. I’ve faced the economic ups and downs. It’s a tough industry.

There have been publications where I’ve faced pressure to report on things I don’t find particularly interesting or important for what the public needs to know. It’s important to push back on editors when they throw those ideas out.

It’s also important to be flexible and creative about how you report the news. A big part of my job is making the news interesting to people, framing it responsibly, but in a way people will engage with. America is inward-looking. A lot of people don’t leave their hometowns or states. They understand America is powerful, but it’s hard to wrap your head around why events in Syria, China, or Venezuela matter to me. People think: I have work, I have bills, I have a family. I don’t have time to keep up with all this.

One challenge is explaining why it matters, why it affects you, why it affects oil prices, the value of the dollar, and so on. Or just putting things in context: the sheer amount of money the U.S. spends on defense every year. This is what your tax dollars are going to. If you’re worried about issues like healthcare, more money is going toward defense than healthcare, and so on. Contextualizing it.

And making sure I’m fair. There is a misconception that journalists are supposed to be neutral. We’re not supposed to be neutral. We’re supposed to be truthful. Sometimes the truth paints one side in a negative light. It’s not our responsibility to avoid that because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, particularly if the facts are something the public should be aware of.

When reporters uncovered Watergate back in the Nixon era, they reported facts about nefarious activity even though Nixon wasn’t happy about it. That’s our job: to speak truth to power, to let people know what’s happening in the shadows, but also to be human about it. Our first responsibility is to do no harm.

That means being selective and careful about information. If I’m speaking to someone in a war zone, and revealing their identity could put them in danger, I don’t do that. If I came across information that could put U.S. operatives or other people in danger, that’s a serious editorial decision: does the public need to know this? What is the value of knowing it versus the potential fallout?

We have to weigh those things while also being aware that media is a business. We have to write at a pace that keeps people reading. But you can do that responsibly and ethically.

I encourage anyone interested in this, who believes in democracy and keeping people informed, to pursue it. But be clear that fair and neutral are different. Watergate wasn’t “neutral,” but it was truthful and important.

And one other thing: when you work at a big organization — Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Washington Post — you’re not just representing yourself. You’re representing the organization, its legacy, and your colleagues. It’s different from some random guy on YouTube claiming he uncovered a scandal. The stakes are higher. If you don’t do your job responsibly, you can hurt a lot of people, including your colleagues. So I take that responsibility seriously: covering things fairly, in a balanced way, doing no harm, and protecting people who need protection.

Sources, Anonymity, and Vetting Information

BW: I’m glad you brought up working at a big institution. I remember a conversation I had with Binyamin Appelbaum at The New York Times a couple months ago. One thing he described was that at smaller organizations you’re really seeking out sources, but at bigger organizations, sources are often coming to you. Have you felt that change? And when sources do come to you, how do you evaluate whether they’re reliable?

JH: That’s a great question. I’ve worked at startups and more established outlets like Newsweek, Business Insider, and Foreign Policy, and, yeah, there’s a huge difference.

At smaller places no one had heard of, I really had to seek out sources, chase them down publicly, be relentless with calls and emails. Sometimes you still have to do that even at the biggest outlets, but you do see differences.

And part of being responsible, especially if you’re writing something critical about an administration or someone in power, is giving them every chance to tell their side of the story. You go out of your way to contact them and give them ample time to respond. If you don’t, you’ve broken a fundamental value of journalism. Journalism 101: reach out and give people a chance to respond.

Our job is to put as many pieces of the puzzle together as possible for readers. If someone requests anonymity, you explain why, because the issue is sensitive or their life could be in danger.

When people reach out to me with information, I have to be cautious. If they’re reaching out, they might be looking for attention. Why me? Why this publication? What are they hoping to get out of going public?

At this point, I’ve been doing this for over a decade. You have to be good at sussing out who someone is and what they do. There’s no room for error. Sometimes I get pitches and I’m immediately like: nope. It’s not our job to regurgitate what people in power are saying. We’re not PR.

The type of news I do is high-altitude analytical coverage that helps people connect the dots on complicated national security and geopolitical developments. Vetting is an extremely important part of what it means to be a journalist, and it’s a skill you develop.

Early on, it’s important to ask for help from editors and colleagues: “I got this tip. I’m not sure how valid it is.” I’ve gotten tips before on massive stories that, if true, would have been huge, and they ended up being nothing. Someone may have been dishonest or misled.

It comes back to responsibility. When you’re working on big platforms with large audiences, you have a responsibility to do no harm, and that means really vetting information and sourcing to ensure you’re giving the public the most accurate possible information.

The Rewards and the Tradeoffs

BW: Looking back at your career, what has been the most rewarding part, and what is the biggest tradeoff you wish you had known earlier?

JH: The most rewarding part is that you get to be a student and a teacher constantly. I’m constantly learning new subjects and getting access to top experts on various issues.

For years, the main region I focused on through national security reporting was the Middle East, because that’s where the U.S. has been most active for a long time due to the war on terror. More recently, with the Trump administration’s increasing focus on Latin America, I had to shift attention there. I was hardly an expert, and I’m still hardly an expert, but I’ve had to build sourcing and learn by talking to really smart people. It’s been fascinating and a privilege.

Another rewarding part is this idea some journalists used to describe as being a “voice for the voiceless.” I disagree with that phrase. I think everyone has a voice, but not everyone has a platform. Not everyone has an audience. So for refugees, people in war zones, people who feel unheard, giving them an opportunity to tell their stories, or doing my best to be an avenue through which they can express themselves, that’s a privilege and a big responsibility.

Talking to people in challenging environments about harrowing experiences and making sure you do their stories justice matters because some of the most impactful reporting has a strong human element. If you’re reporting on a war and just giving casualty stats, it can feel robotic. People relate differently to an individual story that reflects broader trends.

I try to lead with empathy. I’m not just using people for their story. Not to sound corny, I genuinely care. Part of why you get into this field is because you believe in human rights, you believe in democracy, and you want to shine a light on abuses. You can approach these issues with care and sensitivity, and make people feel seen and heard in a responsible manner.

In terms of the biggest tradeoff, I think it would have been nice to have someone warn me how tumultuous the profession would be, how many ups and downs I’d have outside my control: layoffs, acquisitions, getting moved around a lot.

When I entered the industry in 2014, it felt like a golden age for new media: Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Vice News, all these outlets emerging; digital taking over; more video. It seemed limitless, like it would never stop. And then a couple years in, it burst. The older outlets caught up, figured out digital, and they had the money and experience to do it well.

No one could have predicted it. Maybe some people did, but I didn’t. There have been long periods of unemployment for me. Maybe I would have saved more money or prepared better for the rockiness.

But I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I love what I do. It’s been worth it, in spite of the challenges. That’s life. No matter what field you get into, there will be ups and downs.

I’d also say: if you’re considering journalism, don’t be deterred because it’s rocky. It’s very worth it. You talk to incredibly interesting people from around the world. You’re constantly learning. Sometimes you pinch yourself because you have a front-row seat to history. I feel privileged when I look back on what I’ve been able to report on and the people I’ve been able to speak to.

The Next Decade of Foreign Policy Journalism

BW: As we close, I want to look ahead. If you had to guess how foreign policy journalism will change over the next decade, what do you think will change, and how will that affect people trying to enter the field?

JH: It’s a million-dollar question a lot of people are thinking about, especially at a time like this, when we’re hearing rumors of major impending layoffs, including on foreign desks at outlets like The Washington Post. People reporting from conflict zones could be on the brink of losing their jobs. I actually haven’t kept up with that over the last couple of days. Some of this may have already happened, so I apologize if I’m behind. But it’s indicative of the challenges.

And it’s not just foreign policy journalism. It’s journalism in general. Local newspapers have closed. Local outlets have closed. News has become more nationalized, and there are negative repercussions. Local news fuels connection among people you live near. It helps you understand the good and bad things happening around you. When everything is viewed through a national lens, it can fuel divisions.

As it becomes more nationalized, I hope to see efforts to adapt at a local level. Some people have responded by taking a nonprofit approach to journalism. One example in the D.C. area is The Baltimore Banner. So there are solutions. I hope they spread.

Anyone entering the industry needs to be nimble and flexible. You need a wide skill set. You can’t just be good at one thing. You need to write, do TV, do social media, do quick videos, explainers, because people digest news in so many different ways.

And you need to be a strong advocate for media literacy. A lot of people don’t have strong media literacy education. They don’t know how to discern trustworthy sources. They worry everything is incentivized by money and profit. Look, I’m a journalist; I’m cynical. I have to be. Gullible people will struggle in journalism because you have to recognize people in power have agendas. But there are a lot of good people in media who genuinely care about the country and their communities.

Frankly, a lot of us don’t make that much money. If you’re looking for big bucks, I wouldn’t necessarily pursue journalism. You can make a comfortable living, but it’s tough.

So be clear-eyed about the challenges. Be an advocate for media literacy and restoring trust. And the First Amendment is there for a reason. Americans, not just journalists, should be strong advocates for freedom of the press.

If you do get into this field, it’s rewarding, but be prepared for ups and downs. Remember the responsibility. Keep an open mind. Have as many conversations as possible.

And another thing: you have to do a lot of self-promotion. You have to build your own brand as a reporter, even if you work within a brand. It can feel tasteless, but it’s part of surviving in the industry. Pay attention to trends, engage with them, and don’t give up, even though it’s challenging, because it’s incredibly rewarding.

Genghis Khan and the Making of Perspective

BW: Finally, if you had to recommend a piece of literature to a reader interested in following your path, or a piece of literature that most influenced your own, what would it be, and why?

JH: Oh, wow. That’s a tough one.

A book I always think back to from college is Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. I took a class on the Mongols in undergrad. It was really interesting to learn about the ways Western historians denigrated Genghis Khan and elevated the prestige of Western empires compared to the Mongolian Empire.

None of this is to whitewash what the Mongols did. No empire hasn’t done terrible things, and the Mongols certainly did terrible things. But that book was indicative of the importance of balance in writing on complicated issues: context, perspective, pushing against prevailing narratives.

It had a big impact on me as a journalist. It’s important to analyze issues from different perspectives and offer those perspectives in your reporting, so people can come to their own determination about how they feel.

That’s the ultimate responsibility of a journalist, if I distill it: offering different perspectives on a complicated issue and giving people the most comprehensive information available so they can come to the best possible conclusion.

It was also just a great read, an example of taking what might seem like a boring topic to a lot of people and making it fascinating. That’s hopefully what I try to do, too: take something someone thinks they don’t want to read about, but they see the headline or read the lead and think, “Oh wow, I’m going to keep reading. I need to learn about this.”

About the guest: John Haltiwanger is a staff writer at Foreign Policy covering U.S. national security, the Middle East, and geopolitics. He previously covered U.S. politics and foreign affairs for GZERO Media, Business Insider, and Newsweek, and has reported from Europe, the Middle East, and North America. He holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Glasgow.

About The Pathway Review: The Pathway Review publishes long-form interviews with people in politics, policy, journalism, law, diplomacy, markets, and public service about the work they do and the path that brought them there.

Subscribe to receive new interviews in your inbox.

This interview was conducted in March 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.