The Innocents Abroad: An Interview with Suzy Hansen

“I went a different way in life after college than Hegseth did, but I know what kind of worldview, and what kind of inferiority complex, that upbringing can produce.”

Suzy Hansen

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, “with his cowboy arms and crispy gelled hair, is a parody come to life,” writes Suzy Hansen in our June 11 issue. He is a parody of a certain type of American swashbuckler: brash, aggressive, god-fearing, contemptuous of the wretched refuse beyond our shores. Though a caricature of American chauvinism he may be, the tradition of raining “death and destruction from the sky,” as he described the Trump administration’s bombing of Iran, did not start with Hegseth. Generations of American foreign policy wonks, Hansen notes, have also trafficked in the bloodshed he so enjoys: “With the invasion of Iran, the Trump administration picked up where the Biden administration and the Democrats left off; the Biden people may not have exhibited that nasty Christianity, but they did exhibit that nasty hegemony.…Whether the perpetrators are Democrats evading responsibility through feigned haplessness or Republicans claiming the power of a wrathful God, the violence is the same.”

For twelve years Hansen was based out of Istanbul, where she had a front-row seat to much of this violence. Before moving back to the US in 2019 she reported widely around the Middle East and west Asia, writing about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, to name a few. Her first book, Notes on a Foreign Country (2018), seeks to take stock of, and renounce, American solipsism abroad. Her new book, From Life Itself, narrates the turbulent decade between 2015 and 2025 as it was seen and heard on the streets of Karagümrük, a working-class neighborhood of Istanbul and a stronghold of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party. Since 2013 she has written for the Review about Turkey, the war on terror, and American foreign policy.

Last week I wrote to Hansen to ask her about our self-styled secretary of war, learning to hold power to account, and the challenges of living and working abroad as a journalist.

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Dahlia Krutkovich: This essay seems to have been written against the grain of your first book, Notes on a Foreign Country, which is partially about turning away from the blinkered gaze Americans cast abroad. What about the last few years of American foreign policy made you want to root around in the world as seen by Pete Hegseth?

Suzy Hansen: I first became interested in Hegseth—interested in or horrified by him—because of how shocking his behavior has been, his cartoonish demeanor, his nastiness. People of all backgrounds seem genuinely bewildered by him. But I actually came to this article by way of my interest in the Biden administration’s foreign policy, its tolerance of mass death and destruction in Gaza, and the shocking callousness of spokespeople like John Kirby. This interest does actually follow from my first book, which takes aim at how liberals and the institutions that produce them cultivate the assumption that Americans have good intentions no matter what havoc they wreak. I spent less time thinking about red state or conservative types during that project, because my worldview and temperament were, as an adult, shaped more by liberal institutions (the Ivy League, New York media, Democratic Party politics, etc.) than conservative ones, and I wanted to implicate myself.

Often, when it comes to their foreign policy, “conservative” and “liberal” are really two superficial camps of Americans, but as Biden’s administration gave way to Trump’s, I found myself wanting to think about the Hegseth worldview in particular. What about his instincts for foreign policy and his lust for violence diverges from that of liberals or Democrats, if it does at all? The mass bombing reflex is at the very least bipartisan and has been since September 11.

You write, “Extreme though Hegseth may be, he is a recognizable type: a jockish, puerile white man, a boy you knew in your public high school, if you went to one. He is the Jersey Shore as much as he is Kansas, Florida, Texas, and Oregon.” One of these places is a little more specific than the others. How did growing up on the Jersey Shore, with the men you may have known there, influence your feel for Hegseth?

One of my guiding principles as a white American writing about the US is that it’s important to include yourself in your analysis, to acknowledge your own complicity or at least involvement in the country’s history or power, because you are a beneficiary of it. According to that rule, I felt I had to gesture to my own origins in this slightly more specific way. I also couldn’t help but notice certain resemblances in his and my biographies: we both grew up in white, middle-class small-town America, came of age during the post-1989 years of US triumph, and won entry to two of the more conservative Ivy League universities in part because we were good at sports. I went a different way in life after college than Hegseth did, but I know what kind of worldview, and what kind of inferiority complex, that upbringing can produce.

To that end, even though I knew men in my childhood who vaguely resembled Pete Hegseth, especially in regard to their class resentment, I also know misogynists and racists as an adult in New York City, and I feel comfortable assuming everyone reading the piece knows men like this, too. I wanted to urge liberals away from the tendency to exoticize him (although I understand the temptation, considering the absurdity of Trump’s second term) and instead consider that this imperial impulse has existed throughout all of American history and society. I wanted to make the case for our collective responsibility to respond to people who prey on the vulnerable, people like him—and maybe people like us.

How did your time at The New York Observer influence your eye for personalities? Your new book also has a few very artful character studies.

You learn different things at different stages of life, but the Observer, the onetime house paper of New York City’s power elite, is where I learned to develop a voice. The Observer’s voice was Peter Kaplan’s—the beloved editor who ran the magazine for years before I started in 2004 and after I left in 2006—and it was his completely original style that we young writers tried our best to emulate. I usually failed, and it was up to the more senior editors to heavily edit those pieces and pull them in line with the paper’s sensibility. It’s through that back-and-forth that you learn how to write for yourself. I worry all the time that as journalism declines, and there are fewer places committed to that kind of editorial exchange, young writers aren’t getting to figure that out for themselves.

It was also helpful that the Observer had a reputation for being snarky, and even mean, to its subjects. I don’t like being mean, but writing with that sharpness taught me how to be critical and how to be tough—particularly when writing about the powerful. Unlike most mainstream publications, we could say almost anything we wanted, which is a very unusual experience for a young person to have. I learned how to be brave and recognized, eventually, that it was actually my job to take risks, to tell the darkest truths, and also to try—always, and all credit to Kaplan for this one—to say something new. It helped me immeasurably when I left to write about foreign affairs, which can tend toward the dull and stuffy. I spent the first years of my time in Istanbul trying to figure out how to write about Erdoğan like I would have for The New York Observer and still get published.

What was it like learning Turkish upon your arrival in Istanbul? What were your early reporting experiences like in the language?

I arrived speaking no Turkish at all, and actually no other languages at all, so I was bad at even knowing how to learn it. But I moved there on a fellowship that paid for six months of language instruction as part of a two-and-a-half-year term in Turkey, and I continued to take grammar classes and study one-on-one with teachers for years after. It’s a very hard language. The lucky part of that fellowship, though, was that I was discouraged from getting published during the term. And even though I kept living in Istanbul once the program was over, magazines weren’t very interested in Turkish politics, so I mostly reported from elsewhere. That’s why so much of my first book takes place in Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Greece, and other countries I visited in the region. American magazines really only wanted deeply reported pieces from Turkey once Erdoğan began cracking down in 2013, and by that time I had already spent six years living with the language.

In retrospect, the difficulty of Turkish, and knowing how hard it was for outsiders to learn, might have inspired me to report my second book the way I did. I wanted everyday conversation to be the mode through which I narrated how public life changed on one street in one neighborhood of Istanbul over ten years. I tried to capture the conversations unfolding in markets and barbershops and teahouses as local and international crises erupted around us and affected—or didn’t affect—everyday life. I ran the tape for hours, hired heroic transcriptionists, and then I translated what was on the page. Much of the dialogue in the book is simply lifted straight from those documents. That listening and translation process made me want to incorporate the rhythm of the language directly into the text, even when I wasn’t reproducing dialogue, while also somehow making it an enjoyable reading experience. I thought it captured the vibe of the place more. I hope it worked.

We’ve talked a bit offline about how going abroad is both a way to live within the humble means to be made by working in media and a way to hone your skillset as a journalist. Do you have any advice for young correspondents trying to find their way overseas?

I moved abroad midcareer, or as some would put it, “late”—I was six months from turning thirty—so I arrived with contacts and editors’ email addresses and a knowledge of the business. It was an extreme advantage, but freelancing was still very hard. The global financial crisis struck just as my fellowship ended, and while that made me (a cheap foreign correspondent living four hours from many international destinations) an appealing hire for magazines, it also meant that rates started shrinking. I always had three or four side hustles and still do to this day. In the beginning it was fact-checking, and then it was book editing, and then teaching. But all of it was to salvage and preserve the gift of living abroad and being able to write, a life of freedom and discovery that I still think I was so privileged to have.

Now it’s a different time in journalism, and if I had to do it again, I would think about it differently, as I have seen my former students do. They get jobs in various professions and write on the side. Or they go for staff positions because freelancing is too brutal and decide that health care and job security are too important to sacrifice. Or they apprentice themselves to writers with popular Substacks or authors working on books (“always find mentors” is my mantra). Or they are being wise about studying, say, data journalism and acquire technical skills. The main thing is to gain life experience—and linguistic and cultural and lived experience—so that you have something to offer as a thinker, while still feeling comfortable enough to stay sane and be kind to yourself. That, by the way, also includes remembering that what has happened to journalism in the twenty-first century is structural and due to enormous, predatory technological forces that we older people failed to protect you from. This was not in your control. And if it doesn’t work out, it’s not your fault.

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