Robert J. Lieber (born 1941) is a Professor of Government and International Affairs at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Lieber is the author or editor of a total of seventeen books and has served as the Chair of the Government Department and as Interim Chair of Psychology.
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Education
Lieber completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin. Lieber spent a year in the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, where he studied with the distinguished realist scholar Hans Morgenthau. Lieber continued his graduate program in Government at Harvard, earning his doctorate in 1968. At Harvard, Lieber took classes from distinguished scholars including Stanley Hoffmann, Samuel H. Beer, Louis Hartz, and the future Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. Lieber accepted his first assistant professorship at the University of California, Davis. During his years at UCD, he took a number of research leaves, including a year’s postgraduate study at St. Antony’s College, Oxford and visiting research appointments at the Harvard Center for International Affairs, the Atlantic Institute and the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris, and the Woodrow Wilson Center and Brookings Institution in Washington. He was appointed to a professorship at Georgetown in 1982, where he has taught ever since.
Public Intellectual
Lieber has been invited on to various outlets to discuss topics including oil prices, American decline, and American foreign policy strategy. He has been on The Diane Rehm Show, PBS Newshour and NBC's NewsConference to address current events and publicize his books. Lieber has made appearances on major American cable network programs, such as CNN's Crossfire and the O'Reilly Factor, as well as international television sources such as Al Jazeera and BBC. He has also been used as a source for the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, National Interest Online, and Roll Call for stories ranging from the Obama administration's foreign policy to Donald Trump, ISIS, and the 2016 Presidential Election.
In the policy realm, he has served as an advisor to several presidential campaigns, to the State Department, and to the drafters of U.S. National Intelligence Estimates. In early 1991, Lieber participated in a debate with Christopher Hitchens at Georgetown over the merits of the First Gulf War. Lieber supported the war while Hitchens opposed it.
Publications
Lieber has authored nine books since 1970, mostly on international relations theory, U.S. foreign policy, petroleum politics and European affairs. He has been the editor or co-editor of eight other books in the field. Most recently he has authored a series of books on American engagement and retrenchment in the 21st century, published by Cambridge University Press.
He has written pieces for the Washington Post, New York Times, National Interest, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Christian Science Monitor, Harper's, and Salon.
His three most recent books, collectively referred to as the "American Futures Trilogy," including Retreat and Its Consequences: American Foreign Policy and the Problem of World Order (2016), Power and Willpower: Why the United States is Not Destined to Decline (2012), and The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century (2005) were published by Cambridge University Press.
"Reductio ad Iraqum"
In his 2005 book, The American Era: Power and Strategy for the 21st Century, Lieber coined the neologism "Reductio ad Iraqum," to refer to the contentious political climate after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq where debate on major foreign policy dilemmas often devolved into the blame game and reducive arguments over the consequences of the war. The phrase has continued to circulate around foreign policy analysis for at least a decade after its inception.
Personal life
Lieber appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 thriller North by Northwest as an extra.