Yesterday Janet Reitman described post-9/11 America, with its forever wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, as a tragedy in five acts. Today we meet a man who helped strategize one of those acts. Eliot A. Cohen was Counselor of the State Department under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 — in part responsible (“if that’s the right word” as he puts it) for America’s post-9/11 forever wars. Not that he feels deep remorse. Afghanistan was unavoidable, he says — no president would have refrained, and the Democrats would have done the same. While he was in favour of the Iraq adventure, he does admit that he never asked hard enough questions about whether America’s institutions were fit for that kind of war.
His new book, The Strategist, is a short introduction to thinking about war and politics. So is Cohen a realist or idealist when it comes to thinking about international relations? There are two kinds of people in this world, he responded, half jokingly, people who divide things into two and people who don’t. And given Cohen’s distrust of what he calls “purely linear descriptions of history where it’s all one thing or another”, he’s unambiguously in the latter category.
So who are the great strategists in history from whom we should learn about war and politics? For Cohen, Churchill ranks high, as does Lincoln. And how do contemporary American “statesmen” like Hegseth and Trump compare? “It’s like you’re dealing with two different species,” Cohen dryly notes.
There’s one question I half regret not asking. Janet Reitman’s new book, The Inheritance, is full of stories about people that the forever wars broke. Like the angry ex-Marine who was transformed into a leading neo-Nazi. So perhaps I should have asked Cohen about the human costs of Iraq and Afghanistan. If 21st-century America is to avoid more overseas tragedies, must the strategist also be a moralist? History isn’t so linear, he would probably have replied. As he says at the beginning of The Strategist: “you may wish to be done with war, but war is not done with you.”
FIVE TAKEAWAYS
1. He will not call post-9/11 American policy one long blunder. A complicated mix, he says, with a great deal of miscalculation in it and some successes too. He supported the Iraq war and still does, and faults himself on one question: whether American institutions were fit for that kind of war.
2. Realists and idealists he calls reductive and useless. There is no pure version of either, because values colour how anyone sees the world. Churchill named Hitler years before his colleagues did, and also cut a deal with Stalin over Poland that he hated making.
3. His greatest American strategist is Lincoln, whose military career was thirty days of the Black Hawk War and who once forgot how to turn a column and told his platoon to fall out and fall in on the other side of the fence. Judgment can be improved, he thinks. Common sense cannot be taught.
4. Rice hired him to say what she did not want to hear. He told her North Korea was lying about its plutonium and probably enriching uranium besides, and told Bush in the Oval Office that the wrong general was running Iraq.
5. The useful question about a war is not how it ends but when it started. His wife ran a photographic archive: every photograph is a double crop, in space and in time, and so is every war. The Iran war began in 1979. Ukraine began in 2022, or 2014, or 1990, depending on who you ask.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Eliot A. Cohen holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and is professor emeritus and a former dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He served as Counselor of the Department of State under Condoleezza Rice. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and co-hosts the podcast Shield of the Republic. His previous books include Supreme Command, Military Misfortunes, The Big Stick and The Hollow Crown. The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics is published by Princeton University Press.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States, hosted by Andrew Keen, author of The Internet Is Not the Answer and How to Fix the Future. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
00:31 — Janet Reitman’s five-act tragedy
02:37 — A complicated mix, not a straight line
03:25 — Does it all go back to Thucydides?
04:38 — Realists and idealists
06:53 — Churchill as both at once
11:48 — Does a statesman need to have seen action?
12:23 — Lincoln and the Black Hawk War
16:21 — War is not done with you
20:06 — Rice hired him to disagree
21:22 — Something squirrelly in the North Korea estimates
24:00 — Telling Bush the wrong general was in charge
27:03 — Afghanistan was inevitable; Iraq was not
31:25 — The double crop
32:44 — The Iran war began in 1979
37:11 — Would a nuclear Iran have been safer?
39:22 — Pete Hegseth
43:19 — What he wants the candidates to learn