Joseph Nye and the End of the American Century

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Bob, a huge thank you for joining me. We’re really happy to have you here, even though this conversation is prompted, in part, by a sad occasion: the death, in May, of Joe Nye. Joe was truly one of the giants of international relations and American foreign policy, and for you, most importantly, a long-standing and extremely close friend and collaborator, including in a recent Foreign Affairs essay.

ROBERT KEOHANE

Well, Joe was indeed a close friend. I knew him since 1967, so that was 58 years. So a very close friendship. He was my best friend. So this was quite a blow, and it still is quite a blow.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Our thoughts are with you and his family and everyone who was so close to him. You and Joe had just finished that new essay for Foreign Affairs, and it’s an enormous honor for us to have it in our new issue—really the best way I can imagine to honor his life and contributions over many decades. Most listeners will have at least some sense of those contributions. Joe was responsible, of course, for some of the most important work in international relations over the last half century, whether it’s the idea of soft power or the seminal book you and he co-authored, Power and Interdependence. He was a long-time dean of the Kennedy School, a professor at Harvard, and also a senior government official, both an assistant secretary of defense and chair of the National Intelligence Council, and really played, in both those roles, a pretty important role in shaping post–Cold War American foreign policy.

And I would just add on a personal note, for me, I met him later in his life; first I was a junior State Department official, then here at Foreign Affairs. And two things that really struck me about him: he was both extremely generous and supportive in sharing his perspective and wisdom and guidance, and also that he really, through his eighties, continued to quite avidly and openly update and develop his own thinking, which is, of course, not necessary given everything achieved before that. But it was really striking. We, in fact, had a long and lively conversation about the essay the two of you co-wrote in our current issue over dinner just a few weeks before he got sick.

So I want to start by talking about that essay. It’s called “The End of the Long American Century: Trump and the Sources of U.S. Power,” and a really kind of central point that the two of you make is that Trump misunderstands power in pretty fundamental ways, and that even his misguided conception of it is riven with internal contradictions. How do you, as you assess Trump, understand his understanding of power, and what do you and Joe argue that understanding gets wrong?

ROBERT KEOHANE

Trump believes in hard power, that is, the use of threats and promises of material sanctions and benefits to induce other countries to do what he wants them to do. And he has one thing right: the United States has lots of hard power deriving from its economic and military might. The key principle of hard power is the one that Joe and I articulated in Power and Interdependence, that is, asymmetrical interdependence in one’s favor confers power; that is, if one country is less dependent on a relationship, it will suffer less from the breaking of that relationship or its distortion than the other. It thereby gains potential ability to affect the behavior of the other; that is, it gains power. So whether it’s less costly for you to cut off trade or military relations with another country, then, if it’s less costly, you can gain power by threatening to cut off those relations, and Trump understands that.

What he doesn’t understand is first, that trade is mutually beneficial, that competitive advantage works, and, with trade, states specialize in what they are best at. Trump thinks that trade is always competitive; it’s a zero-sum game. And he also doesn’t understand what Joe articulated so well in his subsequent work—not work with me—on soft power. And this power, as Joe has often said, is the ability to get others to do what one wants. And coercion is expensive; you have to make threats, you have to use material resources, and it’s not always effective. Attraction, Joe’s soft power, is often costless, so soft power builds on the attractiveness of one society to others, and the United States had lots of soft power before Trump. China had little soft power. And the use of coercive power, which Trump emphasizes, disrupts U.S. friendship patterns and alliances, including with the countries with which we have most in common. So Trump is throwing away American soft power.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You and Joe have, I just think, a great line that captures this in the essay, so I just want to read it. “As Machiavelli once wrote about power, it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. But it is better yet to be both feared and loved. Power has three dimensions, and by ignoring attraction, Trump is neglecting a key source of American strength. In the long run, it is a losing strategy,” which I think is as good a summary of the case for soft power as I’ve read. But let me focus on, I think, one critique that you would get—or one response, I suppose—from members of the Trump administration, and you also hear this from scholars who have engaged with this for decades. That is the argument that soft power or attractive power is really just a byproduct of more material forms of power. I heard a Trump official articulate a version of this when he said, “We don’t need to be so sensitive about allies. You’ll get the allies if you’re the winner because that’s where people want to be. They want the best economy, technology, and military.” That’s the administration version. But I think you heard similar counterarguments from—I think Sam Huntington engaged with this, and he and Joe were, of course, colleagues at Harvard, but also, I think, had a different view of this. How do you think of those counterarguments and what do you think they miss?

ROBERT KEOHANE

They miss that it’s not an alternative. They miss that, even if material power is certainly important—Joe and I never denied that, and military power and economic power are crucial—they miss that soft power is additive. It’s the power of attraction which therefore makes some people, not everybody, in other countries more conducive to following America’s lead, and it doesn’t have a high cost. So it’s kind of foolish to say that just because there’s also material power, both military and economic, that you can throw away another source of power which is cheap and attractive.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So the other piece of this that you mentioned that is at the heart of the essay and really builds on the work that you and Joe did together, starting with your book, Power and Interdependence, in 1977, is that right? I think I have the date of that right.

ROBERT KEOHANE

Yes, 1977.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So this was a really important work and continues to be an important work in international relations. And in some ways, the heart of the difference in your view and the Trump worldview is really about whether interdependence enhances power and influence in security, or undercuts it. And I think there’s obviously a Trump version of this, but it runs much deeper in American debates, this sense that there’s this strong appeal to unilateralism, that’s obviously helped by the fact that America has the geography and resource base and size that makes it more imaginable than it’s for other countries. But you have a different view of interdependence in the way that it changes international politics from zero-sum to potentially positive-sum. Explain the right way of understanding interdependence, and how you think we’re missing it, not just, I think, in the Trump administration, but also in American views of national security more broadly at this moment.

ROBERT KEOHANE

Well, interdependence constrains all the actors involved, so interdependence constrains the United States also. But if interdependence is asymmetrical, if it’s more serious to disrupt the relationship for other countries, then it constrains them more. And since power is largely relative, if the United States is constrained less by interdependence than its partners, it makes the power gain. So the issue is not just whether interdependence constrains the United States. Yes, it does constrain the United States. We make commitments, we involve ourselves in economic relationships, and those are hard to unlock. So there is a constraint, but the constraint is asymmetrical because others are constrained more. If you look at U.S. trade relationships, the United States has huge trade deficits with all of its partners except Canada, and those trade deficits are a source of power for the United States, because if it cuts off relationships, as the United States has done under Trump with China, or raises tariffs to a very high level, it tends to hurt the other side more than the United States.

Now, it’s not as one-sided as Trump thought because if you look at the U.S.-China relationship, China has cards to play in return, rare earths in particular. So the interdependence is actually neutral, although I don’t think it’s totally balanced. I think the United States has an advantage because of the huge Chinese export surplus to the United States.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The U.S.-China dynamic is a really fascinating real-life manifestation of these dynamics. There have been arguments, including one made by Adam Posen, the economist, both in our pages and on this podcast recently, that in fact China has the upper hand in this relationship because it’s the critical supplies, critical inputs to the U.S. economy are, in fact, a source of more leverage than just the fact of trade. Do you think that misunderstands it, or is this the kind of thing that we could only really see in real time as we watch how this plays out?

ROBERT KEOHANE

I think the one thing that is very clear is that the Trump administration overestimated U.S. leverage in the relationship. And Trump’s backing down with China in the face of supply chain problems is an indicator of that. I don’t think it’s clear that China has the upper hand. The United States has a huge market, and China does depend on the U.S. market, and if the United States cut off that market or severely restricted it, it would be very bad for the Chinese economy. I think it’s more a mutual hostage situation than one-sided in favor of one side or the other.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Some of the most impactful, some of the most important work in the field in recent years has come from Henry Farrell and Abe Newman, two political scientists who have done work on weaponized interdependence, which of course very much builds on the work that you and Joe did. And what they observe is how over the last, really, couple of decades, just how sophisticated and aggressive the United States’ use of the tools of interdependence has become. And that’s true across multiple administrations, when you look at increasingly sophisticated sanctions and debates over seizing Russian assets held in European and American banks, or export controls on chips. How do you understand the weaponized interdependence work in relation to your and Joe’s original formulation, and do you share their concern about the United States really overusing the tools of interdependence and eroding those tools and causing others to kind of undermine interdependence on their own as a result?

ROBERT KEOHANE

I think Farrell and Newman’s work is very important, some of the most important work done in the last decade. I think they’re right, broadly, about weaponizing interdependence, and it’s not surprising because it’s very tempting when the United States under, as they say, many administrations faced a problem that was difficult to solve, where the United States wanted to persuade or coerce some other country into actions that it desired, that the other country didn’t want to engage in. Grabbing a hold of [the financial messaging system known as SWIFT] for example, or other tools of weaponized interdependence, was very handy and virtually impossible to resist. So, the United States, I think, overuse these tools. The problem is that in the short run that made sense, and it probably made sense for those policymakers. Policymakers don’t generally take into account the long-term effects of their behavior if it extends past their administration. So you had a long-term erosion of U.S. leverage, a greater incentive for others to try to develop—they haven’t yet succeeded totally, but they’re trying to develop—alternatives to the SWIFT payment system or other sources of weaponized interdependence.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In the essay, you and Joe have a pretty stark warning about the consequences of interdependence, and U.S. soft power eroding over time. You write that, “Wise American policy would maintain, rather than disrupt, patterns of interdependence that strengthen American power, both the hard power derived from trade relationships and the soft power of attraction. The continuation of Trump’s current foreign policy would weaken the United States and accelerate the erosion of the international order that since World War II has served so many countries well—most of all, the United States.” Could you sketch out what scenario worries you if we do see a continuation of some of these developments?

ROBERT KEOHANE

The Europeans become much less inclined to follow the United States’ lead. That’s the first effect. Increasingly, if this continues, they distrust the United States and won’t make sacrifices of their own in the short run to achieve American purposes. The same could be true of other American allies, although the Asians are more dependent on the United States, more worried about China, and less likely to push back. But that’s the first effect. Secondly, the United States, insofar as it loses influence because of its misuse of interdependence—it gives opportunities to China in particular to gain influence in Africa, even in Latin America, by being, at least in the short term, more generous, less demanding than the United States, and that would then shift the willingness of those other countries to support the United States in the United Nations or elsewhere, as opposed to China. So it has long-term effects that are actually potentially severe, even if each day they may not seem very important to the policymaker who’s making a decision to attain some short-term objective.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s one other part of the piece that I want to spend some time on. You and Joe write that the Trump administration is also unwinding another key tool of American soft power: the country’s espousal of liberal democratic values. That assertion stands as stark contrast to what we saw from Trump’s speech when he was visiting Saudi Arabia in May, I believe, when he very bluntly said, “Look, it’s not our business what you do.” This was, of course, in the country which was responsible for the death of [Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi], as well as plenty of other policies that go against liberal democratic values as you see them. The Trump view is that this in fact backfires more than it benefits the United States, and frankly there were lots of parts of the world, not just autocratic governments, who said, “Thanks. Finally, no more preaching.” What do you think that view gets wrong? Make the case that these values, and the kind of espousal of them and support for them, are in fact beneficial to American soft power, not a detriment.

ROBERT KEOHANE

I’m not a great fan of preaching in other countries, either. I think for the United States to exemplify the values has a big effect. I think for the United States to preach at others when they can see, as the Bible says, the moat in our eye or the beam in our eye as well as we can, is sometimes counterproductive. It makes us look hypocritical. So I’m not as critical of Trump as some people might be—I don’t know what Joe would’ve said—for not particularly caring for that kind of preaching style. The United States needs to exemplify its values, needs to carry through its values at home, and then announce them abroad, support them abroad, but not necessarily harass governments that are not meeting our standards, which they may or may not be able to meet given their underlying conditions.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One of the warnings in the piece, and this is one that you read often in the pages of Foreign Affairs and in conversations among people who write for Foreign Affairs, is that the liberal order will come apart. And this is something that Joe has certainly been warning about, and you’ve been writing about for decades at this point. Joe, in fact, wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs just after Trump’s election in 2016 where he writes that, “The demonstrable success of the order in helping secure and stabilize the world over the past seven decades has led to a strong consensus that defending, deepening, and extending this system has been and continues to be the central task of U.S. foreign policy.” And he, of course, worried that Trump would not extend that. Americans tend to think that when they hear about many of the pieces of the order—obviously this is not the way it’s talked about in political conversation—but there’s a sense that the system has worked badly for the United States, that it has not, in fact, had the benefits to security or prosperity or anything else. Why do you think there’s such a disconnect between the kind of popular conception of elements of the order and the way it’s seen in your writing and Joe’s writing, and I think in the kind of consensus view of much of the foreign policy establishment?

ROBERT KEOHANE

I think that one feature of the United States’ political culture is a celebration of American democracy, and along with that goes the view that democracy actually brings all kinds of benefits and very few costs, and therefore the success of the United States, for example, economically, in the last 50 years is attributed to American democratic institutions and American economic institutions. If you actually look at the contribution of immigrants to the American economy in the last 50 years, it’s enormous, and—that is, open borders to immigration by people who are qualified—has been enormously successful for the United States.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I think one other source of skepticism of the kind of liberal institutionalist or liberal internationalist view has to do with China. There was, I think, if you talk to most people in our world in the 1990s, or at least the first half of the 2000s, there’d be a sense that China would be changed more by the order than it would manage to change the order. And part of this was about U.S. engagement with China, part of this was about the benefits that China had clearly gotten from the international system and the ways in which it could play a greater role in it. And China has not exactly evolved in the way that I think most people expected when you go back to the hopes of the immediate post–Cold War. Did liberal internationalists, liberal international relations kind of get China wrong? How do you see this part of the debate?

ROBERT KEOHANE

We all got China wrong. The capitalists got China wrong, too. They wanted to build factories in China and they wanted to trade with China. They wanted to invest in China. So there was a general lack of pushback. I think the liberals got China wrong for one reason: being too hopeful, wishful thinking, a certain view of history that was too deterministic. And the capitalists got it wrong for other reasons: they wanted to make money. And as a result, there wasn’t really any pushback. You remember there wasn’t pushback from Republicans either about China. There was a general view that this was okay. So there were multiple reasons to get China wrong. We certainly got China wrong.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Has that caused you to revise any features, in your view, of international relations?

ROBERT KEOHANE

It doesn’t cause me to revise what we wrote in Power and Interdependence, because there we clearly and explicitly circumscribe the argument. We didn’t say it applied to U.S.-Soviet relations; in fact, we said the reverse. We were talking about relations among capitalist democratic states. So it doesn’t change my view that the relations among capitalist democratic states can be managed through interdependence, and to the benefit of all parties, even though it was with some conflict. It certainly makes me emphasize that this is a conditional statement. It’s not that interdependence, as such, with any kind of regime will generate positive results. It’s that interdependence, which is what we argued in 1977, with democratic regimes—liberal regimes—will generate these positive results.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I’m going to focus on a piece that you wrote, not with Joe in this case, but with the political scientist Jeff Colgan. This was in Foreign Affairs in 2017. It’s called “The Liberal Order is Rigged.” Again, this was in the wake of Trump’s election first time around, so it was this moment when people are trying to grapple with the rise of populism, what it would mean. You argue that supporters of liberal order bear at least some of the responsibility for the rise of populism, and I’ll quote you here: “Those of us who have not only analyzed globalization and the liberal order but also celebrated them share some responsibility for the rise of populism. We did not pay enough attention as capitalism hijacked globalization. Economic elites designed international institutions to serve their own interests and to create firmer links between themselves and governments. Ordinary people were left out.” To what extent is this part of the story that we should be focused on, and to what extent do you see the right sorts of corrections to some of the excesses and mistakes of that earlier post–Cold War framework?

ROBERT KEOHANE

First, I fully subscribe to all of those words still. I don’t take any of that back. I think we as a field overlook these speculations. They became evident with the Tea Party, but we should have seen it coming earlier. I think that in terms of policy, people who want to maintain a liberal international order need to pay a lot more to the consequences of that liberal order on ordinary people whom they don’t talk to themselves. We are such a polarized society that I, for example, tend to talk to people like you and other people I know who are liberal internationalists and who are upper-middle-class, prosperous people who benefit from this economy. I’m not in the coal fields of Kentucky with Arlie Hochschild talking to those people on a daily basis. And so I, therefore—people like me are less attuned than we should be to the effects on people like them, and we need to pay more attention to it.

Now it’s hard because we are so polarized. We read different things. You listen to different programs, and we don’t talk to each other. If I still lived in a little town where I was raised—it’s a town called Mount Carroll, Illinois, which votes Republican reliably and heavily—I would meet these people every day, and I would have to at least take into account their views and try to counter them and try to discuss things with them, and understand that these are views taken by intelligent people of a different view. As it is, living in Lexington, Massachusetts, I’m much more likely to downgrade, or even demonize them, and that’s a general problem in this society.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

It struck me that key figures in the Biden administration clearly shared this view. And I would note that Jake Sullivan, who, of course, went on to become [U.S. President Joe Biden’s] National Security Advisor, wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs in 2018 in which he approvingly quoted your “Liberal Order is Rigged” essay, so there was, I think, an alignment of thinking here. Did you see meaningful steps in the Biden years to address it? Did you see a kind of course correction that you think pointed in the right direction? I mean, it didn’t seem to do a lot to allay populism given where we are now, but it also didn’t have a ton of time.

ROBERT KEOHANE

They tried with the [Inflation Reduction Act] because they focused the IRA’s investments in renewable energy on red areas. I think 75 percent of the investments under the IRA were made in red counties. So they did understand the problem. They didn’t get far enough to succeed with it. Maybe that was partly because it only had two years, and it takes a long time to get these projects going. Maybe there were other reasons. People are reluctant to give credit to their opponents, especially in this society. I think there wasn’t enough of that pressure. There were still the interest groups that were dominant in the Democratic Party, and the primary, especially—groups that don’t have a lot of interest in or support for ordinary people in West Virginia or Kentucky or Ohio who are struggling to keep a manufacturing job going.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me focus on one other essential book that you wrote. Again, this one was not with Joe, but that certainly to insights the two of you helped develop, and that book is After Hegemony, which argued that cooperation can last without a hegemon to manage it, that the kind of institutions and regimes that a power has built can outlast its power. We may be seeing a test of that right now. How do you see it going? I mean, there are some worrying signs when you look at, I don’t know, the risk of nuclear proliferation or the near death of the World Trade Organization, but perhaps that’s too pessimistic.

ROBERT KEOHANE

Two points. One is: I did not anticipate the United States actively trying to destroy the regime. So the scenario was the United States becomes less powerful and no longer hegemonic, no longer able to maintain the regime on its own. But, I said, it’s quite possible that an alliance of countries with similar orientations—democratic, capitalist, liberal countries—could do so collectively. And this was an attempt to refute Charles Kindleberger’s argument in a book he wrote, The World in Depression, in 1973, which said that there has to be one leader, and it can’t be more than one. But it didn’t anticipate the United States trying to tear apart the regime. That’s a much harder sell.

On the other hand, what we do see now is a movement by the Europeans to do a lot more. I think this is supportive of the general argument that I made. So, the Europeans have been free-riding on defense for a long time—while denying they’re doing it, they have—and now they realize that they can’t rely on the United States as their protector, and they’re really quite remarkably rapidly increasing their defense spending, with Poland almost to five percent and Germany up past two percent. So there’s a big switch taking place in Europe. They’re doing exactly what the theory would’ve said they will do when they can no longer expect a free ride. They stop free-riding. So that’s a positive sign, and it does indicate that they have a capacity for collective action, which they hadn’t shown as long as the United States was reliably supporting and protecting them.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I would note, if I can just flog one Foreign Affairs piece that neither you nor Joe wrote, the University of Oxford scholar Ngaire Woods picks up your argument in a piece that we recently published called “Order Without America,” where she really takes your book as a framework for considering this, and kind of sketches out a plausible, optimistic scenario for how order could survive this moment of U.S. hostility. But let me go to one more piece.

ROBERT KEOHANE

It’s a very good piece. I endorse your endorsement of it. Of course, she’s a very good friend of mine, so.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Good, okay. I am pleased to hear that. I suspected that would be the case, but I thought it would be worth getting your reaction. But I also wanted to note one more piece that you and Joe wrote together in Foreign Affairs in 1998, which came 20 years after you’ve written your book Power and Interdependence, when you try to consider how changing technology would change dynamics of interdependence. And this was, of course, early in the internet age, and that was a new factor that you were trying to build into this framework, and you argued that the basic dynamics of interdependence didn’t fundamentally change even as technology evolved quite quickly. One of the things, as I noted, about Joe that was so remarkable was the way that he continued to learn about, and focus on new developments and new technologies, when he could have happily been coasting. I’m curious, as you look at artificial intelligence, and as you and Joe talked about this, did this complicate your view at all? Is this kind of so revolutionary that it changes these dynamics as so many others looking at it and considering geopolitics of the future think?

ROBERT KEOHANE

I think it’s revolutionary. I don’t pretend to understand it very well. It’s changing everything so fast. It’s hard to believe that a change that’s that fundamental and that rapid wouldn’t have a large impact on propositions about interdependence and power. I don’t have any of those propositions yet. I’d love to develop them, and Joe was certainly thinking about it—he was ahead of me in thinking about it. I think it’s something which students of international relations will have to focus on. It’s bound to make a huge difference.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Before we close, I want to spend some more time talking about Joe’s career and influence and work. He managed to be ahead of the curve in his understanding of so many dimensions of international relations. And I’d love to hear from you how you would characterize his influence, but perhaps more importantly, how do you explain the intellectual and characterological qualities that account for his insights and influence?

ROBERT KEOHANE

Joe had a combination, which is very rare, of self-confidence and great curiosity coupled with the ability to say he was wrong. So he was self-confident without being arrogant. He could take a view on an issue, study it, take a view on it, and express that view. But he never got locked into a view that was being undermined by events. So I think it was this remarkable combination of curiosity and self-confidence that Joe had, which I found very, very positive.

When we worked together, I think we said it in the preface to Power and Interdependence, that we worked by tearing apart each other’s drafts, and that’s what we did. We sent drafts back and forth across the country. I was in California, he was in Massachusetts. This was way before the internet, folks, so we sent back typed drafts on pieces of paper that our secretaries or we had typed, back and forth in the U.S. mail, and they came back all marked up on both sides and torn apart and sometimes saying, “This is no good. You have to start over.” Joe was never offended by harsh criticism. I tended, when I was young, to be a particularly harsh critic—overly harsh—and he tolerated that, and he thrived on it. And so we had a very strong mutual relationship that was built by mutual criticism.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There are, in Joe’s memoir, A Life in the American Century, really kind of amazing scenes from your friendship over the long years, and it really brought to mind the friendship between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that is written about in Michael Lewis’s book about the two of them. But it seemed like just a remarkable intellectual partnership that was generative in ways that the two of you would not have been just on your own.

ROBERT KEOHANE

Well, that’s a very flattering comparison with Danny and Amos. Amos was a good friend of mine at Stanford in the 1970s. We were in the same book club. His son and my son are still best friends. And Danny I didn’t know as well, but he was a colleague at Princeton for ten years. So they were giants, no doubt.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Joe was also famous for his mentorship of not just generations of international relations scholars, but also foreign policymakers, and you saw after his death this kind of incredible outpouring of support from world figures of various kinds. How do you see his influence, as you look at both foreign policy and international relations, and how do you understand the task of Nye’s acolytes in updating his work and bringing forward his work and really resurrecting his vision for U.S. foreign policy in a moment where it’s, as the two of you write in the Foreign Affairs essay, quite challenged.

ROBERT KEOHANE

Joe’s mentorship was marked by being so broad. I’m known as a mentor, but it’s almost all people who got PhDs with me, from Fareed Zakaria on down. Joe was a mentor to people in a wide variety of fields: people who were in policy, who were at the edge of policy, people who were academics. So, he had the ability, had a range of mentorship—which I certainly couldn’t match—which meant that he listened to people, and he took them where they were, and he helped them. It was very striking to me after he died how much mentorship discussion there was. And he helped them move ahead from the points they were in. He didn’t try to say, “Well, you should do this. You should start from a different place.” He was always willing to help people move from where they were, which is probably more than I was. I was probably more inclined to say, “Well if you want to do a PhD in international relations, you ought to start here.”

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Your discussions of the academy and of academic international relations tend to turn toward this lament for the state of the field. And maybe just to give a kind of caricatured version of that, it’s that the questions are too narrow and irrelevant to real world concerns, and there’s a kind of obsession with methodological or theoretical innovations that don’t really tell us anything about the way the world works, and on and on. How would you describe the changes in international relations in the field as you’ve been part of it, and what, as you look at the field right now and the world right now, are the most urgent and interesting questions you see the generations below you taking up?

ROBERT KEOHANE

I am—Joe was also—I’m pretty jaundiced about the state of the field for the reasons you gave, but you shouldn’t trust old men who have left the field. And because we’re jaundiced about it, we’re no longer very interested in it. We don’t read that literature—well, Joe had stopped reading the academic literature before I’d stopped, but he stopped a long time ago—so we shouldn’t be trusted. Our comments on work that we have discarded and decided is not worth paying attention to probably shouldn’t themselves be paid too much attention to. But I do think that Farrell and Newman are pointing in the right direction for the field. They are using concepts from theoretical and academic international relations, but they’re addressing them to contemporary problems. But the biggest problem is a variant of the same one I worked on: how do you maintain cooperation in a world which not only no longer has a hegemonic power which is promoting cooperation, but which has a hegemonic power that is behaving erratically and in danger of disrupting cooperation? And to what extent does this require a different policy toward the autocratic states, or to what extent does it require a firmness against the autocratic states? To what extent does it require more concessions to countries like India, which would be needed to maintain a coherent front of democratic countries, even when India takes certain policy stances and behaves in certain ways itself that we can’t approve of?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Bob, that is a great note to end on. Thank you again for joining me, and thank you again for the essay that’s in our current issue that you and Joe wrote. We were, again, just so honored to have it. Joe was an incredibly important author in our pages, an important part of our community, and our thoughts, of course, go out to you and everyone who was so close to him. But within our pages, this was really an honor and a tribute to all the work he’s done over the last several decades for us.

ROBERT KEOHANE

Well, thank you very much for the interview, and thank you for honoring Joe’s memory in this very appropriate way.