You mentioned the eroding authority of the nation-state. Do you believe non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are better at promoting US principles than the US government itself? What institutions are most successful in promoting US principles around the world? Where does the US government fit in that list?

I think to a degree, this administration is outside the framework of our constitutional principles. It is undermining its own effectiveness for sure. I don’t think it’s possible to rate, on any linear scale, the effectiveness of powerful governments versus non-governmental organizations. There are many things that NGOs can do more effectively than large cumbersome governments. For example, NGOs can more effectively oversee aid relief, administer humanitarian programs, and cope with epidemics and disease, hunger relief, and those kinds of things. On the other hand, there are many things NGOs cannot do in terms of negotiating agreements between and among players in the international arena.

In your book The Fourth Power: A Grand Strategy for the United States in the Twenty-First Century, you argue that the United States should follow the example set by pundits such as Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto and create micro-lending programs. But in the endpaper for this issue, Andrew Natsios, administrator of the US Agency for International Development, writes that his agency has supported de Soto and initiated its own microloan program, among other economic aid programs. Are these indications that the United States is beginning to promote what you call the “fourth power”?

I’ve always been interested in the micro-lending concept, beginning with Grameen Bank and to a degree de Soto. I think the Bush administration favors de Soto because he preaches entrepreneurship, which is fine; I think we should as well. But many countries don’t have economic systems like ours and are going to resist our effort to remake their economies in our image. That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t try. It’s just to say that it’s not as easy as dictating to another country, “Here are our economic beliefs: capitalism, entrepreneurship, and so forth, and we insist that you adopt these.” That’s where the friction is.

In your book, you also argue that after the end of the Cold War, the United States lost a coherent foreign policy strategy and that there was insufficient debate about what the new strategy should be. When in US history has such democratic debate about foreign policy really taken place?

First, in the period between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, in at least governmental circles and to a degree in academic circles, if not in the nation at large, there were debates about what the United States’ role in the world should be. There were neo-isolationists who wanted to just go back to fortress the United States and accordingly wrote articles and books. There were internationalists who said that we had to form the United Nations and international organizations to prevent future wars, and that we needed to form military alliances such as NATO to prevent Soviet expansion. There was the creation of international financial intuitions—the World Bank, International Monetary Fund—the beginning of an effort to regulate the international economy and to provide assistance from the haves to the have-nots. So this was a yeasty period between 1945 to 1950.

How public all this was, how much ordinary people on the streets were involved, is very difficult to say without going back and doing a great deal of research. But I do know that all of these topics were being debated in governmental circles, to a degree within the media, so at least ordinary US citizens could have observed the debate and thought about it as it went on. I think there have been periods in the past, as well, probably the age of US President Theodore Roosevelt when the US role in the world was being discussed a great deal. Should we become an empire, in effect, de facto?

I’m writing a book on the presidency of James Monroe, and there was a great deal of debate at the time about our relationship with the European powers. I think there have been times in US history where there have been broad-based debates, and also citizens who were concerned enough, could take part in those debates, and discuss them among themselves.

Should foreign policy really be publicly debated rather than decided by elites?

I don’t think it’s a choice, frankly. Because of globalization and the information revolution, now more and more people have jobs that are in the global marketplace, even in a place like Denver. So people’s economic livelihood is affected by the international scene and they can’t sit on the sidelines. This is not just an academic exercise; their livelihood is at issue. Increasingly, issues like the environment, global warming, have an immediate impact on people, so as they see the climate change around, they begin to realize that it’s not just a problem for other people—it’s a problem for us. If your son or daughter has gone off to war, you’re immediately and directly concerned about where is Iraq, and who are the Iraqis, and why are we fighting there. So I think the world in the 21st century demands broad-based citizen attention and participation.

You argue that the strategy of containment during the Cold War was effective because it gave the United States a common purpose to which people from all ends of the political spectrum concurrently subscribed. Could it be that this common grand strategy rendered the United States unable to deal with international realities after the fall of the Soviet Union?

Containment was focused on the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union almost collapsed overnight in 1991. Containment of communism wasn’t just containment: containment wasn’t a grand strategy but a strategy as related to one power, namely the Soviet Union. When that power collapsed, containment strategy vis-à-vis communism became irrelevant. And we drifted for about a decade into the 21st century without a strategy to replace containment of communism. Then we were attacked, and the Bush administration made the war on terrorism in effect the replacement for containment of communism. But it’s too small an agenda for all these revolutions that are going on and for the United States’s role vis-à-vis these revolutions.