So US citizens are capable of debate today—it’s not that they just got used to consensus strategy and were rendered, after the Cold War, unable to formulate international strategy through political debate?

Containment of communism became a consensus strategy, so you’re right that it was never very seriously debated. It was only debated on the margins, when the conservative side would say, “The Russians are coming, they’re 30 feet tall!” And the more liberal people would say, “No, no, no, they’re not going to invade anyone. We don’t need to be spending all this money on missiles and so forth, and in fact, we’re making the world more dangerous.” It was in that framework that the debate took place, and a lot of people got involved. But there was consensus basically on the central organizing principle that we did not want Soviet communism expanding into Western Europe. Very few people questioned that. If your basic question is, can ordinary citizens still get involved in these strategic discussions, my argument is not only that they can but that they must.

Boston University’s Andrew Bacevich argues that since the Cold War, the United States has in fact pursued a grand strategy: a strategy of “openness.” This grand strategy aims to liberalize markets worldwide and open political relations, “thereby fostering an integrated international order conducive to American interests, governed by American norms, [and] regulated by American power.” Do you believe this is truly a grand strategy?

Openness is undoubtedly the slogan that would characterize the administration of US President Bill Clinton, although no one in the Clinton administration ever made the argument, as far as I’m aware, that it was a strategy. In fact, as I point out in my book, Secretary [of State Madeleine] Albright and [Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs] Samuel Berger, when asked what their strategy was, said essentially, “We don’t have one; we respond to events as they occur.” That was a de facto strategy of reaction. Yeah, they used words or phrases like “enlargement,” but I never knew what that meant. It was never defined in any systemic organized way, and grand strategy, as I point out in the book, is the application of a nation’s powers to its larger purposes. And to me “openness” is a vague phrase or word; it’s not a definition of large purposes.

As part of the Hart-Rudman Commission, you predicted a large-scale terrorist attack on US soil. How did the Commission make this prediction?

We received classified briefings. We all had security clearances, so we received classified briefings. We met with and interviewed representatives of the Clinton administration, including the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, and [former counterterrorism czar] Richard Clarke. In varying degrees, their hair, to use Clarke’s phrase, was on fire. Clarke very persuasively said, “We have serious, serious problems. We are going to be attacked here.” Not surprisingly, he also discussed Al Qaeda at great length. This was during the fall of 1998 through 1999, and even into 2000—right on the brink of September 11.

Did international sources contribute to your findings, or were they mostly based on US intelligence?

Yes, we traveled around the world. We went to 25 countries. We talked with all kinds of world leaders, business leaders, academicians, and journalists. Generally, we took a year of our lives to educate ourselves on the changes going on in. To a person, we concluded that terrorism, which had begun in the 1990s against US interests, would sooner or later—and some of us felt sooner—come to this country.

How has international cooperation against terrorism changed since your time on the Commission and what further cooperation against terrorism is possible?

The United States had the support of foreign allied intelligence services that were cooperating with us very closely. Those have, in part, been shattered by Iraq. We had much stronger support from foreign governments in terms of tracking people down and trying to apprehend them. I would just say generally that the amount of cooperation was much greater in the 1990s than it was after the 2000 US presidential election.