Lasting
Legacy

Eliot Cohen, who steps down as dean on June 30, has made an indelible impact on the school he has served for more than 30 years.

There is a phrase attached to the United States military, whether professional soldiers ever use it: “boots on the ground.” It has many applications, one of which is to convey a sense that theory, strategy, abstraction, scholarship, history, philosophy, and opinion all play important roles in politics, international relations, and conflict, but in the end, one must heed the reality of what happens when actual people do actual things. When boots meet ground.

Eliot A. Cohen has spent more than 30 years at Johns Hopkins SAIS, beginning as a professor and ending as dean. In that time, he has been a scholar, historian, commentator, adviser, teacher, author, and administrator. Positing a single element that runs through such varied work requires a measure of glibness, but here goes: Common to all of Cohen’s work has been fascination with and respect for boots on the ground.

He steps away from the deanship and the school he has done much to shape on June 30. In his three decades at SAIS, he created the Strategic Studies program and founded the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies, and wrote several books including The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force (2017) and Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime (2012). From 1991 to 1993 he directed and edited the official study of air power in the first Iraq war, The Gulf War Air Power Survey. He wrote a slew of articles and op-eds for newspapers and magazines. For nearly two years starting in April 2007, he worked as counselor of the State Department, a role in which he advised Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on matters involving Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Russia. He signed on to the 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney as a special adviser on foreign and defense policy. And he guided SAIS as dean after Vali Nasr stepped down in 2019.

“I am very grateful to the school for the opportunities that it gave me at quite a young age,” Cohen says. “I was given complete freedom to build the kind of program that I wanted to build, to make it the biggest in the school and I believe the best in the country. I was able to serve in government at high levels. I was able to pursue scholarship in different fields without feeling disciplinary constraints and be able to take my place in the arena, as Teddy Roosevelt would have put it. Those are, for me, the real highlights.”

His stint at the State Department reinforced the importance for him of on-the-ground reality. “I underestimated how much more important implementation is [than conception],” he says. “I mean, ideas are essential, but they’re kind of like the yeast to the bread. The vast bulk of what you do is implementation, and if you’re not good on implementation, nothing else matters.”

Cohen points to what SAIS implemented in his tenure as dean, streamlining the school’s structure and strengthening its integration with the rest of Johns Hopkins University. “We eliminated the structural deficit. We launched a number of new degree programs. We launched online education in a way we never had before — we had zero online courses and we now have 27. We did the COVID-19 transition. We beat our development targets by 25 percent and began tackling diversity in a way that the school had never done before.”

He plans to continue teaching at Johns Hopkins and has two books in progress. The first will examine William Shakespeare “on getting, using, and losing power.” He says, “Shakespeare wasn’t particularly interested in ideology, wasn’t interested in the kind of mass forces underlying politics. What interested him in politics was the study of character, and there is no better student of character out there than Shakespeare.”

Theodore Roosevelt will be the center of the second book. “Teddy Roosevelt was our most international president,” Cohen says. “He was fluent in French and German, actually reading books in those languages. He had traveled to Europe and the Middle East by the time he was 10, and throughout his whole career he’s thinking about the place of the United States to the world. And he’s of course a man of fascinating contradictions. We think of him as being bellicose, but he also won the Nobel Peace Prize. He’s a larger-than-life figure.”

Looking ahead for the school, Cohen says, “I think SAIS can have a very bright future. Our challenge is, how do we define ourselves as a professional school of international affairs, particularly in an era that is very different from the one in which we were founded in 76 years ago?

“Whether you look at the pandemic or climate change or cyberwarfare, the distinction between domestic and international is a lot less sharp than it used to be. Like any professional school, our job is to bring together scholarship and the world of practice, and that’s a struggle that requires a lot of focus and effort. It doesn’t happen automatically.”