Eliot Cohen is The Strategist: How to Think About War & Politics

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It is Tuesday, 10/13/2026. Yesterday on the show, we had the New York Times Magazine contributing writer, Janet Reitman, on the show. She has a new book out about what she sees as an American tragedy in five acts. The book is called The Inheritance, and it's what she sees as the strategic blunders of American foreign policy after 9/11. We've done many shows on that, including another book about tragic acts in dramatic terms by, Elliot Ackerman, a scholar, writer, poet, soldier who had a book out a few years ago called The Fifth Act, America's End in Afghanistan, which connects with, Reitman's critique of Iraq and American miscalculation, after 9/11. My guest today is all too familiar both with strategy and with that period. Eliot A. Cohen is a scholar as well as a government man. He, worked for, Condi Rice, back in, 2007, long time ago. He was the counselor of the State Department, so he was himself responsible, if that's the right word, for some of American foreign policy after 9/11. And he has a new book out. It's appropriately called The Strategist, How to Think About War and Politics, and he's joining us from a suburb in Maryland. Eliot, congratulations on the new book. I have to ask you, of course, if you share Janet Reitman's argument that the whole history of American foreign policy after 9/11 is a fundamental miscalculation, mis-strategy. I'm guessing you might disagree with her.

00:02:37 Eliot Cohen: I haven't read her book, so I wouldn't wanna comment on it or on her. I think it's kind of a complicated mix, with, you know, certainly a great deal of miscalculation. I mean, nobody can, deny that. But also some things which were successes in a variety of ways. So I think it's a mixed bag. One thing, you know, I'm fundamentally a historian more than anything else. And one thing that I've learned is that one's judgments at the time are always gonna be changed and amended, with longer term perspectives. So I don't know. I— In general, I dislike completely— Purely linear descriptions of history where it's all one thing or another. I just don't think that's reality.

00:03:25 Andrew Keen: Are you one of those historians who go back to Thucydides, Eliot, and say, well, all the rules about strategy were written in the war between Athens and Sparta, or have we learned anything since?

00:03:40 Eliot Cohen: Well, I taught Thucydides, for a long time, and I think Thucydides has an enormous amount to teach us, and a lot of it is actually considerably more complicated than people [unclear] make it out, you know, when they talk about the Thucydides trap or something like that. He was a very subtle and complex historian, but it would be a mistake to think of strategy as something which is so utterly timeless that it really doesn't make a difference whether you're fighting with swords and spears or stealth fighters and ballistic missiles and cyber warfare and lethal satellites. I mean, there are a lot of things change. So, it's, I certainly had my students read through some of these, and I thought it was important that they do so. But, no, he's not the last word. Nobody can be the last word.

00:04:38 Andrew Keen: The book is called The Strategist, How to Think About War and Politics. We've done lots of shows, Eliot, as you can guess, on war and politics and the state system, international relations, which you've taught and thought about for many years. It seems as if most people distinguish between two kinds of theorists of international relations, realists and idealists. Are those useful terms to make sense of good or bad strategy? Should strategists be idealist or realist, or is the very definition of thinking about war and politics being a realist?

00:05:17 Eliot Cohen: You know, I have to say I find those terms, reductive and not particularly useful. A friend of mine used to say there are two kinds of people in this world, people who divide things into two and people who don't. And one, I'm one of those who don't. You know, I, in fact, I think if you look at most statesmen, you find that they're, again, complicated mixes. And, furthermore, the situations you find yourself in international politics, there'll be times when your ideals and your interests are, congruent. And then there'll be other times when they're at odds with each other. And so I, you know, I, it just strikes me as a, it's a term in political science. And like I said, I, although I started as I got my doctorate in, political science, as time went on, I found it, too appealing to minds that swing on hinges, as opposed to people who want to wrestle with the complexity of political life as it, as it really is. I will say, I think one aspect of, that distinction, which people sometimes, miss is there is no such thing as a pure realist or pure idealist. And what happens is people's values, the things that they prize end up coloring how they understand the world. So it's not as though, you know, you can either be one or the other. You really can't. And you're kidding yourself. If you, if you can be, if you think it can be.

00:06:53 Andrew Keen: In some ways, perhaps does one require if you're one require the other? I know that you write in some detail about Winston Churchill in your new book that he was simultaneously an idealist and a realist, and the two were about as essential to one another as, I don't know, fish and chips?

00:07:15 Eliot Cohen: I think, absolutely. He's a very, very good example of that. He— You know, on the one hand, he's the inspiring orator of World War Two. He's the one who identified Hitler as the threat that he was long before most of his fellow politicians. But he was also the one who was willing to cut deals with Stalin over Poland and he didn't like it, but he felt that he had to do it. And I think he, like most, let's say most great, statesmen from liberal societies, found himself wrestling with the— Between the things he would like to do and the things that the world as it was would allow him to do. And so he found himself caught in between, which is always uncomfortable. That's the nature of what it's like to conduct a country's affairs, particularly in the middle of a war.

00:08:09 Andrew Keen: Many are called, of course. Fewer chosen. Some people see Churchill as that example of the great statesman, although others would strongly disagree, point to his disasters in strategy and international politics, the Dardanelles during the First World War, of course, in particular. I wonder whether it's possible, Eliot to argue that those two Churchills, the Churchill who behaved with such remarkable astuteness and success in the first war— in the second war— [unclear]— second war, and the [unclear]— and the Churchill who behaved so famously, badly or without success in the First World War are kind of the same Churchill, and it just depends on the historical episode that we're talking about.

00:09:02 Eliot Cohen: Oh, I mean, the first thing I would say is, the historical interpretation is always changing. There isn't a school of thought. There's actually been some recent, scholarly work on it that suggests that, Churchill of the Dardanelles was not nearly as much of a disaster, certainly the basic concept as it's been made out to be. What is striking about Churchill is he learned from that episode, and what he learned from it was not to force his military subordinates into operations which they fundamentally opposed. Now, I mean, he— You could kind of give them a difficult time and harass them and have them, and in some cases, he was quite willing to replace them. But I think one of the things that he took away from his experience in the [unclear] was saying, you know what? I— I'm not going to simply impose it. The— No. One of the ironies is, it was Franklin Roosevelt, who overruled his generals much more than Churchill did. I think also that, you know, there's a larger part of the Churchill record in World War I that people forget. So he— As First Lord of the Admiralty, he had done a— An excellent job of preparing the navy for the war. Then, of course, later in the war, he becomes the Minister of Munitions. He played a very important role in the creation of both what was then the Royal Flying Corps, the beginnings of the Royal Air Force, but also in the advent of the tank. He was, you know, odd thing for first Lord of the Admiralty. So like most people, his record was mixed, but the thing that I think is most— One of the things that is most impressive about, and many things are, is that he continued to develop. He developed both from experience, but we need to remember, he really was a first-rate historian. So one of one of, his books, which I always recommend to people, even though it's six fat volumes, is his biography of, the Duke of Marlborough, which if you read it, you— First, it's beautifully written. It's— And it's a piece of historical scholarship. It still stands up, pretty well. But it's also in a way a meditation on coalition warfare. And you can see him in that book digesting and using some of the things that he had learned during the first war, First World War. And, I suspect it was both the experience, but also the having written that book, which were among the things that helped prepare him for leadership in the Second World War, where he made mistakes too. I mean, you know, that— I don't know any perfect statesman, and most statesmen make some really big clanger kinds of mistakes. But on the whole, he— I think he does remain one of the most remarkable.

00:11:48 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, of course, being a statesman requires making mistakes. The idea of a perfect statesman is a contradiction in terms. We mentioned Thucydides earlier, of course, who participated in the wars that he writes about. Machiavelli as well, a retired, diplomat who wrote so famously about international and domestic politics. Churchill himself saw service in the Boer War. Do you think being a great statesman, Eliot, in some ways, might require some action?

00:12:23 Eliot Cohen: No. You know, the American example, which, comes to mind is Abraham Lincoln, whose entire military experience, before he became president, what consisted of thirty day service and something called the Black Hawk War, which is a totally shambolic conflict. He never saw any fighting whatsoever. He, there's a very famous story that he was marching his platoon up to a rail fence, and he'd forgotten how to give the column left, column right, kinds of orders that you learn as a second lieutenant. So he just said, fall out and fall in on the other side of the fence. So he— His military experience was nil. What he did have was a— First, a profound grip on human nature and profound common sense, and those are some of the most important characters. I mean, they— You know, statesmanship is about character and judgment. Experience does play a role. No question about it. But it's those things, I would say, more than any particular training that I can think of? There have been plenty of great war statesmen who didn't really have any military experience to speak of. One of my other books, I actually talk about some of them.

00:13:44 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I wonder if the phrase profound common sense is contradiction in the sense that— I'm not sure if Lincoln was around today, he would describe his quote unquote common sense as profound. Is it something you're just born with? Can you acquire it, Eliot?

00:14:05 Eliot Cohen: That's a philosophical question, and I'm not sure I know enough to answer it.

00:14:12 Andrew Keen: Well, you've been teaching— You— You've taught at Johns Hopkins for many years. You're a, you're the r— You're the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at CSIS. So you've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. And when you come across students that you have done for many years, do you tell them that this stuff can be taught?

00:14:35 Eliot Cohen: When I— I mean, I'm no longer in the classroom except, sporadically for guest lectures. I retired from Hopkins. I think what I always told them is I was trying to do a number of things. At the highest level, I'd say I was trying to help them improve their judgment. I was trying to help them understand the nature of the phenomenon of war and what leadership in wartime was. Then actually at a pretty mundane level, I was trying to give them some of the skills that are really indispensable, I think, to effective functioning in government. And a lot of it's applicable to other places as well. Like how to write a really clear memorandum as mundane as that sounds. It's actually not mundane. It's something that's quite important or how to present an argument succinctly and in a way that furthers, strategic discussion. I never thought I could teach anybody common sense. The most I could reach for and that I think in some cases I did was to improve people's judgment, which is really about learning how to ask questions, learning how to listen carefully to the answers, and then maybe how to ask some more questions.

00:15:52 Andrew Keen: So what are you trying to teach in this book, The Strategist, How to Think about war and politics? These days, of course, it's a particularly controversial subject given the various wars in the world from Gaza to Ukraine to Iran. What are you saying that you think is valuable that hasn't been said before, or at least hasn't been said in ways that need to be said?

00:16:21 Eliot Cohen: Well, so the, you know, the premise that I begin with, which is really in the opening paragraph is, you may wish to be done with war, but war is not done with you. Mhmm. You know, we live in states that were formed by war. As you've mentioned, there are wars going on, so you better understand it even— No matter how much you hate it. I am trying to enable people to understand better both what the nature of strategy is, but also fundamentally why strategic decisions turn out to be fraught, difficult, often riddled with failure. You know, I think all of us kind of leap to judgments quite understandably, about, you know, people in charge screwing things up. And part of what I wanna do is make it clear to people that what they're doing is something that's extremely difficult. The— One of the vehicles that I use for, doing that as I say, look, there's seven kind of big strategic questions out there, which are very, very simple. But it turns out they're very, very difficult to address and to untangle. And the same thing for the basic kinds of decisions that a strategist has to make. Again, very, very simple in one way and extremely difficult to execute. And then what I'm trying to do is explain, okay, what are some of the obstacles? Some of them are really personal and rooted in our psychology. Some of them are much more, collective. And then I try to suggest, okay, here's some of the way these things are mitigated. And the book wraps up with a discussion about the future of strategy. I hope what sets the book apart or a couple of things. First, it's short. I— So I— As I often say to people, I want you to look at it end on rather than just from the front. It's a short book. It is hard to write a short book. It's a lot easier to write a long book. I want this to be a book that actually people can read. Secondly, it's a book, by somebody who has had a number of brushes with, decision making at the top. I've been a senior official in the State Department. I've had other periods of government service, and I've certainly, after now, something like forty years in Washington, DC, in a variety of ways, I've seen a lot of these folks close up. So there's a bit of a firsthand observer. And finally, I would say that although it's a book about strategy, it's not a history of strategy, it's not a history of any particular war. It is grounded in, what I hope is a pretty wide and deep reading of military history. So I think those are some of the things that set it apart.

00:19:11 Andrew Keen: You mentioned earlier that you thought Abraham Lincoln was the greatest of all American strategists. Of course, you and none of our audience met the guy. You've met, though, a lot of the players in American foreign policies, as you say, since you've been in and out of government. You've lived in DC many years. You worked for, Condi Rice, the former US secretary of state. Are there particular people you work with? You're also close at some points to, Paul Wolfowitz. You knew George Bush quite well or you know George Bush quite well. Are there examples of people you've worked with in Washington, DC who, for you, represent examples of, decent strategist? Maybe not in the Lincoln-Churchill, category, but very few people get into that circle.

00:20:06 Eliot Cohen: Yeah. The Lincoln-Churchill mode is really extraordinary. That's not what most people are like. I would say each of them in their own ways, had different elements, which really struck me.

00:20:24 Andrew Keen: So you mean Rice and Condi and— Right.

00:20:27 Eliot Cohen: And, yeah. So, I mean, to take, Secretary Rice, I did not agree with her about a lot of things. That is actually why she hired me. I was the counselor of the State Department, which is a, it's a uniquely American position. You're, quite a senior official, the equivalent of an undersecretary, but you have no portfolio. It's whatever the secretary wants. And, to her credit, she wanted— And I have a reputation for being fairly independent minded. She wanted somebody who would be willing to tell her things that she might not like hearing. I was always careful to do that in private. And I was also always careful to pick my moment, but I give her a lot of credit for that because there were a couple of times when I had to say things which she really did not wanna hear at all. And in some cases downright annoying or worse.

00:21:20 Andrew Keen: Like what?

00:21:22 Eliot Cohen: Well, the biggest one was, when, I had access to really everything except the president's daily briefs. I had very high level clearances, and I've been looking over a lot of the North Korean estimates. Now the— she and the assistant secretary of state for that part of the world had thought that there— We'd really be able to conclude an agreement with North Korea, that would terminate its nuclear program and the war on the Korean peninsula. This would be a major accomplishment. Looking at the intelligence, I began to say to myself, there's something squirrelly here, about the extent to which the North Koreans are, actually following through on their, commitments to, tell us how much enriched— How much plutonium they had. So I went in, I laid out the evidence in front of her, and she was clearly unhappy, but she then gave me license to go hunting. And I came back and I said, all right, boss. And I laid out considerable detail. First, here's the evidence that they're cheating on the plutonium declaration. And here is the overwhelming circumstantial evidence that they have a uranium enrichment program, which is another path to a nuclear weapon with centrifuges and so on. She really didn't like that. The assistant secretary of state who was negotiating this, I think hated my guts for the rest of, the administration and beyond actually stormed into my office. And he said, you're, what are you, what are you telling me that we're gonna, somebody is going to go to Pyongyang and they'll fling open a blast door and there'll be a bunch of spinning centrifuges. And actually a year after I left government, Sig Hecker [ed.: Hecker's Yongbyon visit was November 2010, roughly two years after Cohen left the State Department in January 2009] from Los Alamos lab went to Pyongyang. They opened a blast door. There was a room full of spinning uranium centrifuges, but to her credit, she could hear it. Or there was another case where, you know, in 2007, particularly into early 2008, senior leadership was very, very worried about Iraq. They did not want to think that Iraq— That Afghanistan was in big trouble, and they took comfort in what was being reported to them that, 75% of the violence in Afghanistan was in— Occurring in only 10% of the districts of that country. In ways I can describe, if you're really interested, when you unpack that statistic, it was totally bogus. It was wrong in a number of ways and meaningless in others, and I went in and made a presentation that suggested, no, actually, the Taliban are doing much better all over the country, and Afghanistan's in big trouble. She did not like hearing that either, but she did, and she took it. I will say similarly about President Bush. So even before I went into government, I, had several meetings with him, and at one of them, I was able to summon up my courage, which is not an easy thing to do in the Oval, and say, I think you have the wrong person in charge in Iraq, a perfectly respectable soldier, but the wrong guy. And I don't think the war is going well. I've been over there

00:24:47 Andrew Keen: Who was that?

00:24:50 Eliot Cohen: The— It was a general named George Casey. He was a very fine general officer for a different kind of war. And, I, you know, he was taken aback. By the way, I only summoned up enough courage to do that because my own son was going over there as an infantry officer, in a few months. And so that gave me a, you know, a little bit of steel in my spine. And then the discussion turned to, well, okay. Who do you think should be there? And, I'm glad to say I said General David Petraeus. And then some of the other people in the room were mainly retired senior general officers, said absolutely the right guy. So, you know, and I— Again, I give Bush enormous credit for that. And there were other cases where Bush could adjust. He could— He had— He was certainly courageous. He was able to make courageous decisions. I think, unquestionably, that team made a number of big mistakes in the run up to the Iraq war, and I think in private they will pretty much acknowledge those. But they also made some very good decisions as they worked their way through a war that was not going the way that they wanted to.

00:26:05 Andrew Keen: Oh, you're— [unclear] Petraeus, returns the favor, by the way. He says— I think you probably know. He blurbs your new book. A masterful guide to the art and discipline of strategy that draws on Eliot Cohen's exceptional hard-earned wisdom. So you, you've— He doesn't, owe you anything anymore, does he?

00:26:28 Eliot Cohen: Well, no. He never did. I've known him since he was—

00:26:31 Andrew Keen: No, I'm teasing you.

00:26:32 Eliot Cohen: —a major. Yeah.

00:26:34 Andrew Keen: But let me— You dodge the first question, Eliot, as you probably should have, and it was a bit— Just a general question. Let me revise the question. If George Bush and Condi and all the others, Wolfowitz, all the rest, had read this book, The Strategists [as spoken: The Strategist] [as spoken: The Strategist], before, you know, on a, I don't know, 9/12/2001, would we have had these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

00:27:03 Eliot Cohen: I think we probably would have had the wars— It depends on what, when you're asking. If they had read the books before 9/11 and then 9/11 nonetheless happens, I think it would definitely would have had the Afghan war. There's no question. No president was going to refrain from conducting a military operation in Afghanistan to eliminate Al Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban. I— And I think Democrats would have done the same thing, and I think some of the historians who've now begun to unpack this reach a similar conclusion. The Iraq war is a— The decision to go to war in Iraq is a different kind of decision, and I think there, you know, there are a couple of aspects to it, one of which there's a very good book by a center-left historian who's critical. Mel Leffler is one of the great Cold War historians, but he wrote a book on Bush's decision for war, which I commend to everybody because it's very fair. It's critical, but it's very fair. I think one of the things he captures was the atmosphere of decision making, and the atmosphere of decision making and, you know, it's an important point to remember is people are human. They've just gone through this incredibly traumatic experience with 9/11, and they are not in the mood to take risks, particularly over the Iraqi nuclear program. And there are plenty of other things as well. In addition, I think structurally, any administration was gonna face a very, very difficult choice about Iraq. The reason for that is— What had happened was the inspections regime that had been put in place after the first Gulf War had disintegrated. The sanctions regime was also disintegrating, particularly with the Russians and the Chinese, but some of the European states as well. So the question is, you know, how are you going to deal with the Saddam Hussein who is coming out of his cage again? So I think that was a difficult decision. Where I— And I've been in favor of the Iraq war, as I say in the book, and I've had in another book, called The Big Stick. I have an extended discussion of that if people really want my views. Where I fault myself, and I do mention this in The Strategist, and I think where I would fault them, among other things, is for really failing to think through the question of— One of my seven strategic questions is, what are our means? That is to say, what are— Not how many soldiers do we bring to the fight, what kind of weapons do they have, but are our organizations appropriate for this kind of war? And, I feel I didn't ask that question of myself rigorously enough, and I think they certainly didn't. And that was a huge failure. So, you know, we walked into Iraq without a good plan for military governance, and part of that was it was this ferocious hostility, which is the only way to describe it, between the Defense Department and the State Department. Bush later on in an interview said he hadn't fully appreciated the extent to which Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell couldn't stand each other, their deputies couldn't stand each other, their deputies' deputies couldn't stand each other, and, you know, those kinds of things matter.

00:30:27 Andrew Keen: Well, he was the one who appointed them both. So the buck stops with him on that one, doesn't it?

00:30:33 Eliot Cohen: Ab— Absolutely. And I— And he would acknowledge that. I— You know, he was not a guy who had trouble taking responsibility for things. He really wasn't.

00:30:44 Andrew Keen: Eliot, you wrote— You also write for The Atlantic. You wrote a very interesting piece recently. Don't ask how this war ends. It's the wrong question. You said you need to go back in long terms. You used the example of the First World War going back in nineteen o eight to the, Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia. If we're to understand the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which remain enormously controversial, which you're both a historian of, and you participated in as a diplomat, as a statesman. Do we need to go back before 9/11/2001?

00:31:25 Eliot Cohen: Yeah. I think— Let's just talk about Iran for the moment. But I would say absolutely. You know, my, wife was the head of a major photographic archive, and, she had a wonderful lecture she used to give about photographs, that they always represent a double crop, a crop in time. You don't know what happened before and you don't know what happened after. And of course, a crop in space. You don't know what's to the left and what's to the right, and it's, those are big issues for interpreting photographs. And it occurred to me that they're actually, it's very important for interpreting wars. The biggest question to ask is when did this war begin? And different people will answer them differently. You know, when we look at the Ukraine war, for example, a lot of people say, well, it's February 22 when— 2022 [ed.: the full-scale invasion began February 24, 2022] when the Russians invaded. I think for the Ukrainians, they would say at least 2014, maybe earlier when they took Crimea. I think for Vladimir Putin, it began sometime around 1990. In the case of Iran, and it makes a big difference how you think about those wars, which start date you pick. My view of the Iran war is that, unfortunately, the war really began in 1979. The current—

00:32:42 Andrew Keen: The current Iran war, the American—

00:32:44 Eliot Cohen: The current Iran war. So, I mean, the way— I view the current Iran war as kind of one more campaign in a series of campaigns, but, you know, the root cause of it is the Islamic Republic really is founded on a kind of a very fundamental hostility to the United States, a desire to drive it out of the Middle East, with some hegemonic aspirations there. That's where the war begins. I think we're just in a different episode of it. That doesn't mean that President Trump was right to launch Epic Fury or not. I'm just saying that's where I think the war began. I think similarly, you know, the roots of the Iraq war in some ways lie with the Iran-Iraq war when Saddam Hussein, really does establish himself for a brief period as the dominant force in the Persian Gulf that leads to the first Gulf War, everything that then follows from that, and it— In turn, it sets up the second Gulf War. So it's— You know, this is one of the ways in which history is actually a really important thing to know if you're trying to understand a strategic problem. Sometimes, by the way, I think it's important to acknowledge that there's a break. I mean, you could, and in World War Two beginning of World War Two, you could say, well, this war that's going on with, the Germans is just a continuation of the war of nineteen fourteen. We have a German problem. Or you could say, no, this is actually a war with the Nazis. So it's a problem that begins, say, 1933. It's not entirely either or, but it does make a difference how you think about how you're gonna wage the war and in particular, how you're going to manage the latter phases if and when you actually achieve some level of superiority over your opponent.

00:34:35 Andrew Keen: Eliot, you mentioned that you pissed off Condi because you told her what you saw as the truth on North Korea nuclear capability. I mean, it's a rather dry subject. But in terms of your book, The Strategist, how have the Americans done when it comes to the, quote, unquote, Iranian nuclear threat? Is it equivalent to North Korea? Did they drop the ball somehow?

00:35:09 Eliot Cohen: I— Well, first, the story isn't over yet, so we don't really know.

00:35:13 Andrew Keen: Well, the story today?

00:35:15 Eliot Cohen: The story today is in terms of narrowly—

00:35:17 Andrew Keen: To date, I mean, over the last twenty years.

00:35:20 Eliot Cohen: Yeah. I would say, look, trying to negotiate the Iranians out of a nuclear program hasn't worked. Trying to sanction them out of it hasn't worked. My sense of it, and I no longer have access to classified information, so I can only speculate, is that quite a bit of damage was done to the nuclear enterprise, so they are no longer, on the verge as they were getting very close to be of having nuclear weapons. On the other hand, having lost the Ayatollah Khamenei [ed.: ASR/speaker rendered “Khomeini”; Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening strikes of Operation Epic Fury, Feb.–Mar. 2026], the, you know, the old man who's a bit more cautious and haven't gone through what they're gone through, the chances that they will try to make a rush for nuclear weapons, I think, are— Is higher. So I think their motivation is higher, but I think their material position is actually considerably weaker. So I think we have achieved that. My feeling all along has been they are determined to get nuclear weapons. When I was at the State Department, I kept, on my desk a, Iranian, I think it was a 5,000 rial note. [ed.: the 2007 note bearing the atomic symbol was the 50,000-rial note] It's probably worth a fraction of a cent today. And the reason why I kept it there, part of what I was supposed to do is keep an eye on Iran, because you— If you pick it up and held it to the light, you would see that the watermark was an atom sign over Natanz, which was their main nuclear facility. When you're watermarking your currency that way, it tells you something about your commitment. The other thing is also, and, again, a lot of this is really intelligence driven. And one of the things we've learned is they have always had a covert program, and they've always lied about what they have. But they— You can't find a period when they haven't. So it's an intractable kind of problem.

00:37:11 Andrew Keen: Is there an argument to be made, Eliot, and I don't suppose you'd be particularly sympathetic with this, that it would have been every— In everyone's interest for the Iranians to get the bomb. That way, you would have had a balance of terror as there was between the US and the Soviet Union in the Middle East, and you'd had none of these wars, and the Israelis and the Iranians would have learned to live with one another?

00:37:34 Eliot Cohen: No. I— First, I— You know, I would never treat the possibility of war that could kill millions of people as a political science field experiment. You know, you could try it, but the problem is if you were wrong, the cost would be enormous. But the main thing is that, you know, I think— Look. Do I worry about Indian nuclear weapons or Israeli nuclear weapons or French nuclear weapons or British nuclear weapons? I don't. And that's because I think you're dealing with, you know, fundamentally rational actors who will be very, very careful even about nuclear threats, let alone—

00:37:59 Andrew Keen: Again, you didn't— Did you include the Pakistanis in there?

00:38:13 Eliot Cohen: I deliberately did not. I actually— When I was in government, I met with the head of the Pakistani nuclear program, and I— When I came back, I said to one of my colleagues, I said, well, I met the guy. If they have to have nuclear weapons, I'm glad he's the one that's running it. But I think— But Pakistan is better than Iran. I think to the extent, you know, that you're dealing with people who have a kind of an eschatological view of the world, which is pretty extreme, it's very, very dangerous, and, they might very well use them. So there might be some places where I'm in favor of a balance of terror, you know, more or less for the United States and the Soviet Union, although we had some, close calls, but, in case of Iranians, I don't feel that way. I feel similarly, by the way, about the North Koreans. You know, when you're talking about nuclear weapons, you wanna make sure that they're really in safe hands, and Iran and North Korea would be at least two countries where I would say I'm not sure they're in safe hands.

00:39:22 Andrew Keen: Eliot, you do this wonderful column in The Atlantic. You've written some fairly critical things about the current American secretary of, quote unquote, war, Pete Hegseth, on his [unclear]. You say that, he— He's done profound disservice to America and the military— The American military efforts overseas one way or the other. Should we trust nuclear weapons in his— I mean, is he any different from the North Koreans or the Pakistanis? Do you fear that, he's gonna do something, unadvised?

00:40:01 Eliot Cohen: I certainly do, and I certainly fear his boss. If anything, even more, although I think on those kinds of things, actually, in a weird way, I think Trump, is somewhat more cautious. No. I— Look. I don't think Hegseth is gonna likely just sling a nuclear weapons round, but more importantly, yeah, the United States has a very, very professional military that has custody of these things and a lot of very, very level headed people. And I think in a pinch, if either the president or the secretary of defense, who doesn't really have the release authority, that really comes from the president, were to go simply crazy, I think the decision would get slow rolled and blocked. But, look, I mean, I don't think somewhat critical is the way to put my view of the administration. I think I've been pretty ferocious.

00:40:55 Andrew Keen: Yeah, I meant that, half joking. And—

00:41:00 Eliot Cohen: and, you know, and I think they're dangerous in a number of ways. They're dangerous to our domestic democratic order, enormously destructive overseas. So I can't wait till they're out of office.

00:41:14 Andrew Keen: So, Pete Hegseth is not— Or his boss, that neither of them are Abraham Lincoln?

00:41:21 Eliot Cohen: Not— I wouldn't say not close, but it's like you're dealing with two different species.

00:41:27 Andrew Keen: And how fearful are you then? I mean, you talked about if they did something really stupid, which isn't beyond the imagination, that somehow maybe the deep state or the deep military state would figure out a way to put it off until they were out of office. But is it conceivable that all this is gonna end in serious tears?

00:41:48 Eliot Cohen: Well, I'm fearful about a whole bunch of things. You know? I've got children and grandchildren, and that makes me fearful. But I'm fearful about, different aspects of democratic decay in the United States, but also abroad. I'm increasingly rather fearful about what climate change is going to do. What— I'm definitely fearful about social media and what it's done to a younger generation. I'm fearful about the, political movements on both left and right. Fearful about what I see as a substantial erosion, let's say, of international order. My— I fear all those things, and I think it'd be crazy if you're not afraid of them. The challenge— You know, I do say that the prime strategic virtue is courage. And courage means that, you know, you— It's not that you don't have fears. It's that you have fears, and you don't let them overcome you, and they don't— You don't let them dominate you, and you don't let them, you know, twist your head or, really distort making such decisions as you can. So I podcast about them. I write about them in The Atlantic. I complain to my family. And my podcast is The Shield of the Republic.

00:43:14 Andrew Keen: And you do that every week.

00:43:18 Eliot Cohen: Yeah. Yeah.

00:43:19 Andrew Keen: You do indeed. So finally, Eliot, as we— We're on the brink of the midterms, and then there'll be the run up to the next presidential elections. If some of the candidates read your new book, The Strategist, what would you hope they will learn about rebuilding American authority credibility, in the world, perhaps avoiding war or most wars, dealing obviously with Vladimir Putin, dealing with China, if that's the right way of putting it. What kinds of conversations would you like to emerge in the next two years about the rearchitecture of American foreign politics?

00:44:06 Eliot Cohen: So, well, one kind of conversation would be with people who would be potential presidential candidates. And I would like some of them to read this book and another book that I wrote called Supreme Command, which is about civil military relations about politicians dealing with their generals. And that's really a question of preparing people for, you know, for these extraordinarily high level, positions to which for which nothing— No job that they've had. Even being governor of a huge state is not like that. And just realizing, you know, you're— You will end up making those kinds of decisions. If you're talking to run of the mill politicians, what I hope it would do would be to make them rather more responsible. That is to say, look, I'm as critical of Trump and Trump foreign policy as anybody and, you know, military decision making too. The question really is what is the alternative and how do you think about the alternatives? What is, it's not enough to complain, I guess, is what I'm saying. And it's not enough to hate your predecessor, and it's not enough to investigate them, although all those things may be perfectly appropriate. But it— It's the importance of being responsible or, to use a different word, serious about these matters. The thing that I think is most dangerous now is there is a real streak of isolationism on both the left and the right. That, boy, the world's a messy place. We had these very long wars, which, by the way, very, very, very few of them, ended up sending a kid to war. I'll put that aside for the moment. And there's— There is this desire just to— Can't we just not, you know, not have bothered thinking about these things? That's not the way the world works, and it will come knocking on your door. And so, you know, most of all, I hope that we have a generation of politicians who, however much they wanna change direction from the Trump years, understand that they're gonna face some of the same problems and face some of the same very, very difficult choices.

00:46:25 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. As Eliot Cohen suggested, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. That's one of the pearls of wisdom from his new book, The Strategist, How to Think About War and Politics. As he says, it's a short book, so no excuses for any, twenty twenty eight presidential candidates who happen to be watching. You can read it. You could— How long will it take, Eliot, to read? An hour? Two hours?

00:46:53 Eliot Cohen: A long plane ride.

00:46:54 Andrew Keen: Long plane ride. So when you get on a plane in Los Angeles or San Francisco, get off the other end in New York or DC—

00:47:01 Eliot Cohen: You might have to go to Europe. I don't know.

00:47:03 Andrew Keen: Oh, you have to go to Europe. Well, anyway, Eliot, excellent conversation. I appreciate your honesty, and I think you've convinced everyone that Pete Hegseth is no Abraham Lincoln. Thank you so much.

00:47:15 Eliot Cohen: Thank you, Andrew.