Zalmay Khalilzad and the Policy Relevance Shuffle
A tale of a wannabe Kissinger.
The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has written a few things about Henry Kissinger over the past few months. Last month in Politico discussed why Kissinger and China’s leadership were having such an ongoing lovefest: “For Kissinger, the visit represents an opportunity to do what he has been trying to do ever since he left public office: maintain his relevancy and influence…. Before him, former policy principals usually wrote a memoir, gave the occasional foreign policy speech, and maybe became the head of a nonprofit. Kissinger was always hungrier.”
Now, whatever one wants to say about Kissinger — and there’s a lot — the fact remains that powerful foreign potentates still open their doors to converse with him. It’s not that surprising — Kissinger was at the apex of the foreign policy pyramid for eight years. That enabled him to build up quite the network of foreign and American friends, which in turn has enabled his continued striving for relevance and wealth.
Kissinger’s ambition mattered not just for his own behavior, however, but those who followed his wake in the foreign policy community. Some of his successors, like Brent Scowcroft, Sandy Berger, and Condoleezza Rice, have pursued a similar third act in their careers.
What about the foreign policy and national security folks who do not quite reach Kissinger’s level, however? That is the question that Nahal Toosi asks in her latest for Politico, entitled, “Zalmay Khalilzad’s push to stay relevant after losing Afghanistan.” Here are a few snippets:
Khalilzad is both urging Biden administration officials to keep trying to implement the peace deal he negotiated with the Taliban and finding ways to remind people his resume covers more than just Kabul. He has joined the shunned Russian ambassador for a very public meal, opined in newspaper pages on Ukraine policy and jumped headlong into Pakistan’s ugly politics….
[Khalilzad is] also an archetype of the Washington creature who thrives on attention and influence, one so determined to, in the D.C. parlance, “stay relevant” that not even an epic failure deters pursuit of glory….
Some Washington stalwarts believe Khalilzad may aspire to reach the ranks of bigwigs such as the late Richard Holbrooke and Henry Kissinger, men with stellar resumes and substantial egos who never lost their desire to wander the diplomatic thickets even after failing to reach some objectives. Kissinger, now 100 years old, recently visited Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing….
He regularly blasts out his writings to people on his WhatsApp list, and he told a reporter to make sure to mention that millions of people see his posts on X, the social media site previously called Twitter.
Be sure to read the whole thing — Khalilzad offers his own explanations for his record and his recent activity, while others like Vali Nasr weigh in as well.
The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts will confess to some mixed feelings about Khalilzad’s attempt at a third act. On the one hand, Toosi’s story falsifies Henry David Thoreau’s contention that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Khalilzad’s desperation to maintain relevancy is quite loud indeed.
At the same time, however, it is difficult to begrudge his efforts to opine on various foreign policy matters. I know Khalilzad (more on that in a second). Beyond the ambition, he’s a quick study with considerable reservoirs of intelligence and experience. Writing and tweeting about op-eds is not a crime — it’s what a lot of us in the ideas industry do on a regular basis.
Mostly, however, Toosi’s story reminds me that I owe Khalilzad a strange but considerable debt for my own professional trajectory.
Back in the mid-1990s, while I was still in graduate school and fresh off my year of teaching and living in Donetsk, Ukraine, I got my first paying foreign policy job — a summer internship at the RAND Corporation working for Project AIR FORCE. This was back in the days when paying internships were few and far between, and the RAND internship had a great reputation. I was hired to research and write an assessment of Ukraine’s domestic political stability and the likelihood that Russia would intervene to foment a civil war.
My boss at RAND was none other than Zalmay Khalilzad.1 I learned a lot working for Zal, though perhaps not the lessons he intended.
As I drafted the report Khalilzad nudged me to stress the risky outcomes in my conclusions, thereby justifying a more hawkish approach toward Russia. What bothered me about it was the need to reverse-engineer the analysis that would lead to the conclusions that Khalilzad wanted to advertise. In the end, nothing I wrote in that report was inaccurate, but I remember on more than one occasion having to push back on Khalilzad because he wanted me to say something that stretched the truth way too damn much.
In the end, I finished up the draft and sent it to RAND for vetting, after which RAND released the report internally. By this time I was back at Stanford writing my dissertation. As a grad student I was pretty excited about my RAND report — a real publication with my name on it! Maybe not a peer-reviewed but a legitimate publication all the same! I had worked on it for the entire summer, and was ready to see my name in print.
What I saw was: “by Zalmay Khalilzad and Daniel Drezner.”
Dear readers, this did not sit well with me. I was responsible for 95 percent of the drafting and re-drafting of the report. I was not so naïve as to think that I would have sole authorship of the report. Zal, however, had not consulted with me on the order of authors. To anyone looking at this sequence it would have appeared as though Khalilzad was responsible for the lion’s share of the analysis.
I had little recourse to protest, and in the grand scheme of things I could still list it as a publication. But I remembered that feeling of utter helplessness when one’s intellectual work is claimed by someone else.
When I started at RAND I was uncertain about which future course of action to pursue — a faculty position in academia or a more hands-on position in a think tank or the federal government. Both tracks held considerable appeal. Working for Khalilzad taught me about some important differences between the two tracks, however. I learned that I was enough of an egotist to want authorship of whatever I created. Even if I had less influence as a professor of political science, my name was going to be on whatever I wrote.
In the end, staying in the academy and occasionally dipping my toes into the policymaking world turned out to be the right choice. I don’t feel the need to reach Kissinger’s level, or to tell reporters about my social media presence. I prefer podcasting about sci-fi and poli sci to performing grunt work for government superiors.2 Looking at Khalilzad’s attempt to maintain his relevancy, I will always be grateful that his accidental guidance three decades ago nudged me towards the right career track.
Fun fact: the other two RAND employees at the time that I helped out also have quite the intellectual legacies. The first was Abram Shulsky. The second was Francis Fukuyama.
But I respect those who have made a different choice!
I took Khalilazad’s undergraduate seminar at Columbia circa 1980. I have to say, he was a model teacher. Never gave an inkling of his own views - even when Afghanistan came up. (It was not long after the Soviet invasion.) But maybe that’s because our work had zero policy relevance!
Thank you, Mr. Drezner, for a another very interesting piece. Your work is much appreciated.