Clark Johnson does not usually get airtime. A historian and policy analyst with a deep bench of Cold War knowledge, he gives answers that provide context, nuance, and the ability to sit with discomfort. This often sits uncomfortably with the demands of modern political discourse, where sound bites tend to crowd out substance.
Johnson is often published in academic and policy journals; a number of pieces are collected in his 2022 Uncommon Arguments on Common Topics: Essays on Political Economy and Diplomacy.
Clark has worked as a senior advisor, economist, or team leader with the US Departments of Defense, State and Treasury and USAID, among others.
In a recent conversation, Johnson offered a sobering assessment of the present moment. He believes the current strain on American institutions from the collapse of diplomatic alliances to the erosion of constitutional norms may be more severe than anything the country has experienced since the Civil War. He argues that any real path to recovery must begin with two things increasingly rare in public life: a deep sense of history and clear, coherent thinking.
For Johnson, the core issue undermining American decision making today is not just short term thinking, but an outright disconnection from the past. He sees history not as a backdrop but as a crucial operating manual that political leaders are no longer bothering to consult.
His analysis is clear when he talks about foreign policy. Johnson sees the Reagan administration’s diplomacy at the end of the Cold War as surprisingly strategic. Rather than humiliating the Soviet Union, Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz worked to position Russia as a partner in peace. They made efforts to understand Soviet leadership and sought arms control not as a competition, but as a structural rebalancing.
That approach, Johnson argues, was discarded in the 1990s. He sees the Clinton administration’s expansion of NATO as a critical misstep, one that ignored the fragile groundwork laid by Reagan, Shultz and Ambassador Matlock. Clinton, influenced in part by domestic political incentives, chose to extend NATO into Eastern Europe. In doing so, he upended the tacit understanding that NATO would not encroach further into Russia’s sphere. This decision, Johnson believes, contributed to the hostility that defines U.S. Russia relations today.
Despite this, Johnson is no apologist for the post 1990s realignment. He sees the Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy as incoherent and self serving. Trump’s admiration for Vladimir Putin, in Johnson’s view, was more personal than strategic. He views Trump’s tariff wars, beginning with the doubling of tariffs on Canadian aluminum and the inflammatory rhetoric around Canada’s statehood, as theatrical distractions rather than meaningful policy.
In Johnson’s framework, this kind of behavior reflects a broader problem: the absence of context. He sees America acting impulsively, disregarding and even destroying institutional memory and continuity.
The same pattern holds in the media landscape. Johnson acknowledges that high quality analysis is still available; he points to outlets that occasionally platform legal scholars and policy experts – but the overwhelming effect of digital fragmentation, in his view, is confusion. The spread of information silos has made it more difficult for the public to distinguish informed analysis from grievance-stroking. And with the decline of local journalism, Johnson believes that Americans have lost something even more basic: a shared sense of what is happening in the world around them.
But he remains hopeful. Johnson finds value in independent journalism and in international voices that still hold institutional knowledge. He points to Canada’s Mark Carney, recently elevated to Prime Minister and previously governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, as an example of the kind of seasoning that is rare among national leaders. Expertise is available, if we choose to tap into it.
In the end, Johnson’s argument is simple but weighty. Expertise matters. Judgment matters. History matters. Integrity matters. And in a country that too often discards all of these, it is worth listening to the people who still know how to find them.
