In 2002, George W. Bush did a remarkable thing: carried, for all to see, a copy of Eliot A. Cohen’s book Supreme Command. Not many of us have our books publicized that way.
Cohen is my guest on the latest Q&A podcast. He is a famous student of foreign policy, military policy, and national security. He has taught at Harvard and elsewhere. Today, he’s a professor at SAIS, the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He eventually served in the Bush (43) State Department. In 2012, he advised Candidate Mitt Romney.
In the podcast, we talk about a range of subjects: including GWB and Romney. And Obama. Then there are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We further talk about Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan. These are interesting places — all too interesting. We talk about the military, raising such questions as, How big should it be? What can it do? What should it do?
Along the way, the subject of America’s future comes up. Cohen is not overly gloomy about our future. He points out that there is much life and much good in this country, even if we’ve taken bad hits. (We have administered the hits ourselves, I would say.)
You or I may not be able to enroll in SAIS at this point. But we can still learn from Dr. Cohen, as in this podcast.
A Podcast with Eliot A. Cohen, Conducted by Jay Nordlinger