Clemens grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, graduating first in his class in 1951 from Purcell High School, where he also played tackle on the state champion football team.
Starting in 2021, he has been a frequent contributor to Europe's Edge, e.g., https://cepa.org/article/totalitarians-choke-growth-as-well-as-freedom-nob Clemens has also made contributions to the study of arms control in U.S. relations with the USSR, China, and North Korea.
"[4] In the 1980s, Clemens conducted surveys showing that most Americans erroneously believed that their country was protected by an effective missile defense shield.
The Foreign Affairs review of Baltic Interdependence expressed: "[t]his book, better than any other, tells how the local communist parties tried and failed to adapt to the growing popular demands for national self-determination."
Reviewing this book in Global Asia (December 2023) professor Mel Gurtov observed that Clemens looks beyond Putin and Xi to a new order for the Russian and Chinese people, based on adoption by successor governments of Immanuel Kant's three foundations for "perpetual peace" - republican government, international law under a federation of free states and respect for human rights."
He has written many articles on North Korea and on China for the Journal of East Asian Studies, Global Asia and The Diplomat (on-line).
Analyzing events at the eastern edge of the former Soviet sphere, Clemens asked what lessons, if any, from the U.S.-Soviet experience might apply to arms control negotiations with North Korea.
This was the first book to systematically apply theories of international relations, complexity and negotiation to the goal of stemming North Korea's nuclear program.
The book was praised as a negotiation manual by Graham Allison and Terence Roehrig, but a Canadian reviewer wanted more specific (and self-assured) policy guidelines.
Asking whether and how the West should negotiate with brutal dictatorship, Clemens on February 3, 2011 gave the Glasmcher Lecture in Ottawa, Canada, at the Symposium on Conflict Resolution.
Dynamics of International Relations has received professional praise from a wide spectrum of scholars and practitioners, including Governor Bill Richardson, Zbigniew Brzezinski, J. Ann Tickner, Michael W. Doyle and David Singer.
This book, according to S. Fredrick Starr at the School for Advanced International Studies, "offers a fresh, even startling, paradigm and process for analyzing the seemingly unpredictable relations within and among human societies.
In a similar vein, Jacek Kugler (professor at Claremont Graduate University and former president of the International Studies Association) wrote that "this breakthrough book provides a new, promising general paradigm exploring and explaining the complexity of world politics.