On Sunday, November 17 at 3 pm Eastern Time, classmate Paul Pillar will be returning for a Casual Conversation on Zoom to discuss with us the thesis he elaborates in his most recent book, Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press 2023).
If you were not at the first Casual Conversation, you missed Paul’s deeply informed discussion of foreign policy grounded in his long career in government and the Academy. Now we will turn to his book, where Paul “examines how and why partisanship has undermined U.S. foreign policy, especially over the past three decades.” Francis Fukuyama writes that Paul’s book “presents an ominous warning from one of the country’s most respected former national security officials, chronicling the way that domestic polarization has progressively undermined American foreign policy and weakened the United States.”
Paul is quite critical of the policy “gyrations” of Republicans with regard to Russia and internation trade during the Trump era, “which are understandable not in terms of theories of international relations, security strategy of the United States, or even ideology of the Republican Party itself, but rather only as party tribalism.” (At 232.) Now that Donald Trump is President-elect and about to serve a second term in the White House, a discussion of his first term foreign relations is particularly timely, and how the past might be prologue.
But the past is not limited to Trump. Paul discusses at length the major foreign affairs crises over our Nation’s history, and where what he terms “corrosive partisanship” both did and did not infect our policy, from the beginning of factionalism in the early presidencies from George Washington onward, where the principal foreign antagonists were Britain and France, through the disputes over the War of 1812 and the Spanish-American War, to the League of Nations, onward through to the conflicts that we are more familiar with, to wit, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, continuing to the present day, and the prospects for the future.
Paul will time with us at the suggestion of classmate Bill Stableford, who offers the following link to the “Dartmouth Alumni Magazine”:
https://archive.dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/article/2010/11/01/a-dissenting-opinion .
Here is an article recently published online written by Paul:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/how-foreign-governments-interfere-us-politics-210291 .
His faculty entry at Georgetown University made be found by clicking on this link:
https://gufaculty360.georgetown.edu/s/contact/00336000014RgYUAA0/paul-pillar .
And, finally, a lightly edited submission from Paul that focuses on the topic at hand for this Casual Conversation:
Classmate Paul Pillar has had a career that has confronted—first as a public servant, and later as an academic and independent analyst—some of the more troublesome and consequential aspects of the making of U.S. foreign policy. Joining the Central Intelligence Agency as an analyst in 1977, he had a 28-year in the U.S. intelligence community. Among his senior positions, he was executive assistant to the director of central intelligence as the Soviet empire was collapsing and the Cold War was ending, and was deputy chief of the counterterrorist center at CIA during part of the 1990s.
Paul’s final assignment of his intelligence career, during 2000-05, was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, responsible for managing assessments of the intelligence community as a whole on political and economic developments in those regions. This was the period in which the George W. Bush administration sold and launched the Iraq War, with the selling of that war representing one of the bigger breakdowns in the relationship between intelligence and policy, and in the orderly making of foreign policy.
After retiring from government service, Paul joined the faculty of Georgetown University, teaching in its School of Foreign Service. Since retiring from teaching, he has continued to write frequently about U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East. Most of his current work appears in The National Interest, where he is a contributing editor, and Responsible Statecraft, published by the Quincy Institute, where he is a nonresident fellow.
Much of his writing flows in part from his public service. This began with his doctoral dissertation and first book, Negotiating Peace, which was partly inspired by his experience as an Army officer helping to execute the final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam—an experience mentioned in an earlier Casual Conversation. Following his work as a counterterrorist official, he used a sabbatical at the Brookings Institution to write Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy—which, due to the fortuitous timing of it coming out a few months before 9/11, made it onto the Washington Post bestseller list.
A series of subsequent books has explored the pathologies of making foreign policy and the subsequent detriment to U.S. interests. The episode of the Iraq War furnished much of the material for Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform. A later book, Why America Misunderstands the World: National Experience and Roots of Misperception, describes how America’s exceptional status as a superpower unlike any other nation tends to warp, with policy consequences, the views that policymakers and publics alike have of the outside world.
Our discussion will focus on the subject of Paul’s most recent book, released the fall of 2023: Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. The intense partisanship that has poisoned so much domestic policymaking has similar ill effects on foreign policy. A look backward in U.S. history—which has seen times with comparably intense partisanship that was overcome, as well as periods of bipartisan cooperation that seems unthinkable now—helps to understand the roots and nature of the current intractable variety of partisanship and the damage it has done to U.S. foreign relations.
The usual rules apply. Let me know if you want to join this especially timely discussion to be held on Zoom on Sunday, November 17 at 3 pm, by emailing me at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com . RSVP by Friday, November 15, at the close of business.
See you then.
Arthur Fergenson