Dr. Jervis specializes international politics, focusing on security policy, decision making, and theories of conflict and cooperation. The Adlai E. Stevenson Professor at Columbia, he is coeditor of the Security Studies Series, and serves on the board of nine scholarly journals. A former president of the American Political Science Association, he received the Grawemeyer Award for his book "The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution" in 1990.

Associate Editor Alex Merchant caught up with Prof. Jervis this February.

[Helvidius Group]: My first question is very basic: what first sparked your interest in international politics?

[Robert Jervis]: Well it seems silly but it does go back to World War II. I was born in 1940 and although I don't remember events in 1940 I can remember events at the end of the war. They were of course just central to what was happening around me. My parents were quite political so there was always discussion of international and domestic politics, and those years at the end of the war, beginning of the Cold War, McCarthyism--'50 to '51--which didn't effect my family but friends of my family, the Korean War, all these things were part of my everyday life. I found those questions just fascinating, so I was always interested in politics

[HG]: Is that something you immediately continued with when you got to college?

[RJ]: Well I took an American politics class in my first of my semester freshman year and found it fascinating and I also took a math course, because I had been very interested in math and did well in it in high school, and didn't find it so fascinating. That was sort of the choice, so it was pretty clear after that, at least that I would major in what was then government, same thing as political science just different name for the department.

[HG]: Did you then immediately pursue a graduate degree?

[RJ]: Yes. But I was also doing stuff at a very low level in politics. Volunteering going back to when I was 12, I was on the street handing out leaflets for Adlai Stevenson, which I mention because its really very nice: I'm now the Adlai Stevenson Chair of International Politics. Most chairs are named after people who have given a lot of money and it's really nice to have a chair for someone I never met, but whom I deeply admired and at a very low level campaigned for as a teenager.

And then through high school and college I was active again at that level, not campaign planning but handing out leaflets in the 1960 campaign for Kennedy and for a congressman in California--not congressman, he never did make it, candidate in California. So it was a mix of trying to be in low-level local politics and being a student intern in think tanks and the State Department and academic study proceeding simultaneously.

[HG]: What would be some advice for students in my position--I'm a first year student--who are interested in international affairs and are looking to dive deeper, academically and other ways?

[RJ]: Well academically, really the main advice is you have to navigate the Columbia requirements; Columbia has a very heavy core. You can argue whether it is pedagogically good or bad. I actually think it's too heavy and badly designed. I have been in groups that tried to change it. We lost. There are good arguments on the other side.

The point is there is a heavy core and what is important for somebody who knows they want to get deeply into international affairs is to not postpone things until your junior year; not to say "I'm going to get the core out of the way," but rather to stretch out some of the core and start in doing what your interested in early. Because at the end even if you end up with the same number of courses--if it is compressed into two years, and this happens to a lot of our students--you simply cannot learn it. It has to stew in you, you have to digest, and you have to think about. The students who, by no fault of their own, end up cramming the major into the second two years don't get as much out of it.

The other advice is that--I obviously think--international politics and political science is at the center of a broad topic of international affairs. People in other fields might disagree, but I agree with them that other disciplines are important: economics and history being the ones that anyone interested in international affairs should get a good grounding in. Then depending on what you're doing, it might be studies of a particular area of the world or an approach; you might want to learn about physiology. As you see in my lectures I do a lot of work on political physiology, but that wouldn't be for everyone, others draw a lot on sociology. International politics within political science is inherently interdisciplinary, and if we think of international affairs, a broader category that involves even more contributions than political science, there is a lot one can build in.

Then I think extra-curriculars or co-curriculars are really valuable. There are an incredible number of talks in the SIPA building everyday. I just can't, alas, afford the time to go to more than hand full, but they're just all over and they can be very valuable. You get to meet academics and policy makers; there are all sorts of people who are coming through.

Then of course there are internships, mostly in the summer. I did, well, three, one purely politics, and then I had a summer at the State Department and a summer at a think tank, the Hudson institute working with nuclear stuff with Herman Kahn and the people there. These experiences were very valuable in partly giving ideas and also getting a sense, "is this something I would want to do?" To be honest the summer in State Department convinced me that I would really rather work in a think tank or university. But that was an important thing to learn. [Laughs]

[HG]: Shifting towards current events, today in the New York Times there was an article about Iran's announcement that it would begin enriching uranium up to 20%. What do you think of that?

[RJ]: That they're going to go to 20%? They can't. They just can't do it. I don't know what they're doing. They've announced 10 new nuclear plants. I can announce I'm building ten nuclear plants if you're willing to help me do it! That's just beyond Iran's capability.

[HG]: What do you think is their reasoning is behind the announcement?

[RJ]: I don't know, I honestly don't. I've talked to people who are experts like Gary Sick, I think his instincts are very good, and people in the government. I think they want to be ready to produce nuclear weapons. A friend of mine, who is much more hawkish than I, has a good collection of essays titled Getting Ready for a Nuclear Ready Iran. That's very nice. [Laughs]

I think they want to be some distance from nuclear, if they don't want them, and I don't think we can determine what the distance being measured--in time of a year, maybe six months, not a week--to be ready if things develop badly. That makes sense where they are, it makes sense that they want to go all the way and get nuclear weapons, but that would be rather dangerous. I would be a little surprised if they were going to do that but not amazed. So that I understand, and the enrichment and covering up, but the announcement that you are going to build ten plants make no sense. That's just one of the things that ticks off the French and the Russians, makes them think that these people aren't serious.

Announcing you are going to 20%, when, first, to do this involves major renovations of the Natanz plant that isn't working well anyway or involves revealing that they have a secret facility, and neither of those look like a winner. If they get 20% HEU, my first guess is that Israel would bomb them because the step from 5 to 20% is not easy, but once you are at 20 you go to 96 pretty easily. I think that would be a red line for Israel; I think Iran knows it. And, second, even if you're at 20% you don't have fuel. You have to fabricate the fuel rods. Iran has the technical skill to do it if it would put the investment in, which it hasn't, so it would be years away from doing that. So what's the point of poking the world in the eye? I just can't understand it.

[HG]: That's a fair answer. I have two more questions. There was a recent article in Foreign Affairs by Zbigniew Brzezinski...

[RJ]: Oh, by Brzezinski? Zbig used to teach here, good friend...

[HG]: He was evaluating the Obama Administration's first year. He said the administration had a lot of success redefining, or repositioning, the United States in relation to a host of geopolitical issues, but he says there has been less progress in regards to Iran, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. What, in your opinion, is something successful the current administration has done, and their greatest weakness?

[RJ]: Well the second part, alas, is easier than the first. As you know, I'm an avid Democrat. I did a little work, but my wife spent a month away from me in the battleground states, so I think that's my contribution. [Laughs] I fervently want him to succeed. I have friends and former students in fairly high-level places in the administration, and I don't want to imply that if I were president I could do any better, but there is very little to show for the year.

Putting that in perspective: Kennedy's first year was an absolute disaster, I mean just unmitigated. Nixon's first two years were pretty bad. Kissinger had an op-ed, I forget where, where he said, "Oh, Obama doesn't have anything to show for it so far." True, but considering what he and his president had to show... [Laughs] Eisenhower ended the Korean War, but that's because Stalin died, so he doesn't get much credit for that. So the fact that there isn't a lot to show for is not in itself evidence of failure or not doing as well as expected.

But, I have to be honest: I am disappointed. He got committed to Afghanistan as the, quote, necessary war without any thought: clearly did it on the campaign for political reasons. Came in, didn't reexamine it, made the commitment in March before doing any internal deliberations, then ran this process recently in the fall and early winter that was characterized by him spending enormous amounts of time at high level meetings, but the meetings were not well prepared.

It came out, in effect, exactly as it came in, because what he said is that what we've done is shifted McChrystal's plan to the left or the right, that is in earlier and out earlier, that's not true. The constraint is logistics. So there is nothing he can do about it. I think and most of my colleagues think that maybe this was necessary for domestic politics in the short run, but certainly it was a mistake. Treaded water on North Korea. Just going nowhere there. In Iran it looked like we made progress and then we refused to do the deal in stages. I just don't understand. Doing it in stages is just the way to do it, and I'm very disappointed that we didn't do that.

There are some things they've done well. I think shifting some of the missiles out of Europe to the Med was sensible and took some of the pressure off Russia. The Iranian, I don't worry as much about the Iranian threat, so I don't think we've lost anything. I think trying to induce more of the rule of law in the way we treat prisoners is sensible. Most of what he has done is down payment. Whether we collect the prizes in a few years I just don't know.

[HG]: My final question, as an IR specialist, what is the career moment you have been most proud of, or what has been your biggest success?

[RJ]: Well, I guess the thing I am best known for is putting the security dilemma front and center for the profession. I did not develop the idea, it goes back to Thucydides, but people didn't focus on it until I stressed it in the Misperceptions book and my article, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma." Both pointed out the centrality of the security dilemma, and addressed the question "gee how do you cooperate?" This is important both for us as professors and for policy makers, thinking about how you can do things when you think there may be a pareto frontier out there to be used.

The other thing is not academic. But some of the work I've done advising for the government, for the intelligence community, it's very, very frustrating work although very interesting. Interesting because you are meeting fascinating people and reading interesting material frustrating because I think there are changes we could do that would really increase the level of intelligence, but I can't convince people. [Laughs] But I think that's had a little impact in some areas, and that is something that is both great fun and really exciting to have done.