Understanding war: It's a slow march

If you want to become an academic, presumably it is because you want to study, learn, and, if you're lucky, entertain some interesting thoughts no one has entertained before.

If you want to go down to Washington, it's to put your hands on policy to shape what's happening today or tomorrow. Some people are happy studying events, and others feel they want to be a major part.

But these are not exclusive alternatives. There are a lot of academics, particularly in international relations, [who] do both. But when you are down in Washington you are living off your capital, because you don't have time to engage in a lot of reading, ruminating, thinking; you are too busy trying to promote the better draft of the next memorandum. So they live off capital, and the academics are the ones who generate the capital, for better or worse.

On the gap in students' knowledge of history and geography:

Students know very little history; it's not that they ever knew a lot, but I am currently impressed with the fact that they know less than they used to. I find it hard to teach a colloquium on the causes of war [when] I have students who come there with all sorts of propositions about the causes of war, [but] if I ask them to give me at least one historical example, nothing's happening. They just don't know.

In the Columbia PhD comprehensive exams some years back, I would put in very hard things like "List the countries that border France." Half the students taking that exam would not even try the question, and the other half would answer it incorrectly. And yet, where countries are [located] and who their neighbors are has bearing upon what happens in the world.

Today, here we are, the imperial power fighting our little imperial wars around the globe; you'd think people would pay some attention to where Afghanistan is or where Iraq is. But in a recent poll of people between 17 and 22, only about 15 percent could identify Afghanistan on a map, even after we've been fighting a war there.

On model statesmen:

Being the age that I am, I would give high marks to the key people in the Truman administration: [George] Marshall, [Dean] Acheson, the president himself. We are today so accustomed to the United States playing such a major role in world affairs that it is hard for many people to remember that immediately after the Second World War it was not at all a given that we would want to do that or see the need to do that.

If I think of diplomats, it's impossible not to think of George Kennan.

A very perceptive man, a very thoughtful man. He had a good sense, and a very useful one, of the problems Americans keep on getting themselves into with their moralistic approaches to foreign policy.

On Americans' impatience and optimism:

One of my professors, Gabriel Almond, wrote an excellent little book [that discusses how] Americans approach problems with the expectation that there are solutions to them, and they are therefore impatient with things that continue going on.

So one wonders with what degree of sophistication people of today really think about the war against terrorism; that kind of war is like the war against drugs or the war against poverty; that's the kind of activity that will go on as long as you and I are alive, and our children, and so on.

This is one of the things that Kennan kept trying to say. There used to be a statement that diplomats struggle to leave the problem in pretty much the same shape that they found it, they don't seek to solve it.

But we have been an optimistic people, and I don't think we've lost that entirely.

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