Extended interview with Steve Clemons

Steve Clemons is the author of The Washington Note, a foreign policy blog. He was also the New America Foundation's former executive vice president and is now a fellow there. The S&B met with him at Prairie Lights bookstore in Iowa City on Sept. 11. What follows is an expanded—though edited—transcript of the interview led by staff writer Brendan Mackie. The original article ran in the Sept. 15 issue of the S&B.

How did you get involved in blogging?

The Washington Note is an effort to carve out a space for deliberative thinking and discourse about serious national security foreign policy issues that struggles with the unique problems of our times. If you look at these times as a hinge-point in history, a moment of discontinuity where what we're going to be doing in the future is likely very different from what we've done in the past—how we change our institutions and thought in response to this change requires serious deliberation. I'd been at a think-tank for years. I helped build and create the New America Foundation. But I needed a blog to find my voice and I needed to find out what I thought, if that makes sense.

I'm not trying to reach broader America. If they wander through my blog, great. But I write a wonky, clonky blog. I'm aiming at much more of an elite audience. I have probably one of the best readerships among senior journalists, politicians and people in government. I'm trying to influence them.

What can young Americans do to get involved in policy work?

I don't want to give you a cornball answer and say you have to be engaged and write letters to your congressmen. If you want to make a difference in the things that matter you have to learn how to think, how to communicate and how to lead. To become a public intellectual—somebody who's not an intellectual, but an activist who's aware of what the political currents are—you have to be able to add value to what you talk about beyond what that subject is.

What news stories are we not reading, that we probably should?

The struggle over John Bolton [America's ambassador to the U.N.] is a big game of symbolic politics over what kind of character U.S. foreign policy is going to take in the future. Whether we're going to have revived and legitimated this pugnacious nationalistic fortresses mentality, or whether we're going to have a more enlightened one.

There's a battle over Rule of Law in the Bush administration. There is a vital battle in the administration between David Addington, who's Cheney's chief of staff, and the folks around Condi Rice about whether we should end the secret detentions of terrorists, to end extraordinary rendition, to bring the people in who are in the black space in our legal environment into the light. And the president's speech last Wednesday—while poorly delivered—was an important move essentially ending this black space.

These issues about values are important. America seems to be rejecting modernity. Most of the country gets riled up because they get their nerves pushed over gay marriage, stem cell research or education—and they feel threatened. Everybody's now paying homage to these really barbaric anachronistic attitudes and so the Enlightenment is invisibly losing ground. Democrats and moderate Republicans who were products of the Enlightenment and reason haven't figured out how to tell their side of the story yet.

Structural corruption in Washington, like the kind of things that Tom Delay was up to, are important. Just because he's gone doesn't mean that it's over. The problem is that in Washington people don't go after the bad guys. After a certain point Washington becomes a place where no one wants to take risks.

What’s happened to America after the attacks of September 11th, 2001?
A lot of the fault about what happened on 9/11 lies—in my view—in the Clinton era. The Clinton era failed to replace the Cold War brand of thinking with a new brand of thinking that worked. I’m going to be unfair, perhaps, and overstate for this point for effect. I think that the Clinton administration’s foreign and economic policy became (for lack of a better term): Whatever was good for the multinational corporation was good for America. There was a kind of a spiritual vacuum in that way of thinking. There wasn’t much pride of place, there wasn’t much aspiration. We deluded ourselves in thinking that all this new IT infrastructure would automatically create more global opportunity, automatically create more wealth, but it’s just not like that. We deluded ourselves much like Bush is deluding himself now about the success in Iraq.

It’s really interesting to me how the Bush administration came in as Republicans and essentially retracted the ‘What’s good for multinationals is good for America’ strategy. Most people look at the Republicans as representing big corporate America. But they don’t really act that way if you’re honest about it. They’ve shaken up the international system in ways that aren’t good for globalization – you don’t have people and ideas, business and money moving across borders like you once did. The globalization after 9/11 is messier, the borders are thicker.

I think to some degree we became different as a society after 9/11. We’ve been trying to sort out who and what we are and I think we’re very uncomfortable. There’s a pugnacious nationalism that got awakened by 9/11. It’s outraged, very xenophobic and jingoistic, and is politically powerful. This nationalism has started to fill the spiritual vacuum Clinton left with some reason and rationale for a sort of new American triumphalist nationalism. Those of us who are on the more Enlightenment side – those of us who see ourselves as part of the Northeastern political establishment whether we live in Iowa or in California – are struggling to understand how this came to be. Part of it is our own failings as a country to get everybody on the same page before. We were deluded thinking that the IT world was this equalizer. It never was. 9/11 more than anything exposed our own internal weaknesses, which have come back to bite us.

What do you think we should do about Iraq?
I think it’s horrible either way. We’re either in a slow bleed situation if we stay, or if we leave we’re in a situation where great harm will be done to a lot of people. But I think at the end of the day you can set a date for departing Iraq that becomes a wake-up call for everyone else in the region, particularly Arab states and Europe, which basically says: “We’re leaving, guys. You’ll be dealing with the million people who leave Iraq when there’s a bloody civil war, you’re going to deal with the Shia/Sunni regional conflagration as the Jordanians and the Syrians and others rush in to protect their Sunni brethren from being wiped out by the Shia as we leave.” At the end of the day I think [former Secretary of State under President Carter Zbigniew] Brzezinski is right, the Sheiks and warlords that sit on top of these militias and movements and tribes need to look into the abyss of how awful it really could be if there was a full-scale civil war and do a deal. As long as we’re there buffering that deal from being able to take place then these other key players won’t be responsible for the vision of stabilizing Iraq. The only way that we can end the civil war is for leaders on both sides to say that the option of a full-scale civil war is so horrible they would have to make a deal to stop it. Such a full-scale civil war wouldn’t stay internal to Iraq, it would involve all the nations in the region, and they would tear themselves apart. The rest of the world would simply put a big sandbag around the region and wait for them to kill each other. But you’ll see massive migration, massive dysfunction and a humanitarian crisis that we haven’t seen in that part of the world for thousands of years as a result.