The monthly interview: a conversation with Anne-Marie Slaughter, policy planning chief in Hillary Clinton's State Department, on the future of military interventionism.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE - Interview

Anne-Marie Slaughter recently became president and CEO of the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. A former professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, she was the first woman director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department, a job she held from 2009 to 2011. She was also among the first to call for U.S. military intervention in Syria, making her case in an op-ed published in the New York Times in early 2012. She spoke recently with Washington Monthly editor in chief Paul Glastris about her views on foreign policy and the role of think tanks in affecting policy.

WM: People who share your liberal interventionist views on foreign policy have not been winning many battles in recent years. Do you see cause for concern in that?

AS: I object to the characterization and the diagnosis. I would describe myself as a liberal internationalist, in a traditional Wilsonian tradition, somebody who believes that if you don't pay attention to what is happening on the ground to actual people, you will pay. So that has meant that I've been very supportive of the intervention in Libya and I've been calling for action in Syria for two and a half years. Given how terribly--and predictably--the conflict in Syria has evolved, I think I was right there too. When I was calling for it there weren't al-Qaeda members. The Free Syrian Army had just started, and you had plenty of much more moderate people who were basically asking for the same rights as everyone else across the Middle East. it was completely foreseeable that if you don't help the moderates, the extremists are going to take over.

WM: But in a broader sense, one gets the feeling that a combination of the disaster in Iraq, the winding down in an unsatisfying way of the war in Afghanistan, the rise of anti-interventionism among some factions in the Republican Party, and a resurgence of anti-interventionism among progressives--and just a general tiredness among the public--has made the kind of vision you've written about for many years harder.

AS: I certainly think that is true in relative terms. What I think the president is trying to do is to be the president who ended two wars and ensures that we would not go to war unilaterally and recklessly again. He's saying, Not only am I going to get us out of Afghanistan and Iraq, I'm going to make sure that Afghanistan and Iraq can't ever happen again. He said he'll use force to defend our interests, but...