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

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It is Tuesday, the 13th of October, 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 Condoleezza 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. Elliot, 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, misstrategy, I'm guessing you might disagree with her.

Eliot Cohen (2:36)

I haven't read her book, so I wouldn't want to 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. I think it's a mixed bag. One thing, you know, I'm fundamentally an historian more than anything else. And one thing that I've learned is that one's judgments at the time are always going to be changed and amended with longer term perspectives. So, I don't know, in general, I just like completely, purely linear descriptions of history where it's all one thing or another. I just don't think that's reality.

Andrew Keen (3:24)

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

Eliot Cohen (3:38)

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 from somebody make it out 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, a lot of things change. So I certainly had my students read Thucydides and I thought it was important that they do so.

But no, he's not the last word. Nobody can be the last word.

Andrew Keen (4:36)

The book is called The Strategist, How to Think About War and Politics. We've done lots of shows, Elliot, 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 strategists? Should strategists be idealist or realist? Or is the very definition of thinking about war and politics being a realist?

Eliot Cohen (5:15)

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. I'm one of those who don't. In fact, I think if you look at most statesmen, you find that they're, again, complicated mixes.

Furthermore, the situations you find yourself in, in international politics, there'll be times when your ideals and your interests are congruent. Then there'll be other times when they're at odds with each other.

It just strikes me it's a term in political science. Like I said, 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 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. 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 can either be one or the other, you really can't and you're kidding yourself if you can be, if you think you can be.