There is an underlying assumption with this argument that I find troublesome: America does not have these rivals as much as it is actively making them rivals.
We can and should debate the morality of China's desire to control Taiwan, but Taiwan represents for China, a symbol of their former glory, and its cuddly relationship with the West is not looked upon kindly.
We can and should debate the morality of Russia's desire to invade Ukraine, but Ukraine's decision to join NATO and entrench itself with the EU are not choices Russia is willing to accept.
In the same vein that the USA was very uncomfortable with communist Cuba, and for good reason too.
If you are a great power, you don't want allies of your rival in your neighborhood: imagine if Mexico went communist and started cutting deals with china.
These countries are trying to control their respective regional spheres of influence
The only reason the USA sees this as a threat is because America has always thought the entire world is its sphere of influence.
And I don't need to list the terrible track record that has come out of such 'benovelent imperialism'.
>>because America has always thought the entire world is its sphere of influence.
You mean like the 4 oceans we patrol at the expense of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of aircraft carriers?
>>And I don't need to list the terrible track record that has come out of such 'benovelent imperialism'.
You mean like the expansion of global trade networks under our watch, which has lifted an historic proportion of humanity out of utter poverty within 2 generations, while making almost all other deaths due to war obsolete?
I mean, compared to that, the mistakes we've made seem relatively trivial. It's not like the Brits got anything CLOSE to that kind of return on the far worse brutality they inflicted on far more people than we've ever dreamed of hurting.
>> If you are a great power, you don't want allies of your rival in your neighborhood: imagine if Mexico went communist and started cutting deals with china.
This is a fallacy. The TRULY analogous scenario would be if Brazil was a large power and had amassed a Latin American Treaty Organization that had slowly inched its way northward for the past 30 years. And THEN they'd be inviting Mexico to join their little trade and immigration bloc -- or rather, Mexico would rather be part of a growing, successful trade and immigration bloc while a hostile US was talking about making Baja and Chihuahua the 51st and 52nd states due to their high populations of American tourists and expats who'd bought vacation homes in Cabo, and had already been funding and organizing the 3rd and 6th Redneck Special Tacticool Volunteers militias to make trouble there for the past 7 years.
Also, not to pile on, but there's a concrete difference between "preventing your geopolitical rival of 20 years from putting nukes in your backyard" and "using dislocated ethnic minorities as an excuse for a revanchist invasion of a neighbor whose only 'provocation' towards you happened in the first place because you made it clear you'd invade them if given half the chance".
Dictators classically obsess over respect. They won't respect you if you don't call them on their bullshit.
So, this is not entirely accurate. First off, thank you for your meticulousness.
Second, in 1961, the USA supported an invasion of cuba with military personnel, capital, arms, and presidential sanction.
The purpose of the invasion was to overthrow Cuba's communist president, Fidel Castro, who had just recently gained power. This was before any nukes or missiles were on cuban territory.
It failed. In fact, the failed invasion was a primary cause of the Cuban missile crisis and increased hostilities.
Today, if you read Rob Lee's post in the last newsletter, Russia is in a similar situation.
Ukraine's president is anti Russia, they are developing missiles, and deepening relationships with NATO and America, historical and current rivals of Russia.
And now Russia wants to invade.
It's literally the same situation sixty years down the line. It's back to the future territory.
So, I think I'm justified in saying there's absolutely no concrete difference.
Touché. You’re absolutely right; as a history nerd, I have completely failed here. I don’t really have the energy to write a rebuttal here, but I don’t think my characterization of the pretense for invading Ukraine as bullshit doesn’t still stand.
I do agree with you about Putin only respecting hard power, or at least credible threats of hard power. The West does need to call Russia on its bullshit.
But it should not do so out of any hypocritical sense of having the moral high ground because they have done the same before and will likely do the same if it happened again.
I kind of feel like this is six of one, half dozen of the other, though. I think the bridge between us is that there’s got to be a way to take his idiosyncratic ideological foundations into account, without ceding ground that both we and he knows is ultimately bullshit.
There is a tension between getting involved everywhere, and only getting involved when troops are literally on your border. I take your position as a compromise, respect that states will attempt to control themselves, then their regions, and much more massively index on regional protection over remote engagements.
The view makes sense, and you critique a preference to police national sovereignty globally (and perhaps human rights, the other common twin obligation, but you don't say this explicitly so I don't know), saying that USA sees this faraway conflicts as relevant because it has a maximalist view of its sphere of influence.
It does. However...
Casting this as a uniquely USA view is ahistorical. There's a preference across the world for respecting national sovereignty that's explicitly called out in international agreements in this space, with an implicit understanding that some states will have to ultimately aid some others to maintain the global system.
I believe your "doctrine," if I can use that term respectfully, is suggesting that national sovereignty is only relevant if its violated near your borders, that there's no reason for global concern. Is that roughly correct?
I admit a lot of difficulty trying to craft an internally coherent foreign policy. My best strategy to validate any doctrine is to start with conflicts where my intuitions are strongly in favor or opposed, and test new doctrines against those cases to see if they produce uncomfortable results.
I believe, for example, it's good to halt genocide in the Balkans, or stop the invasion of Kuwait. I don't think either of those would be justifiable under your, maybe, "strict Monroe" approach. I'm not sure intervening in WWII would be either, but I'm not sure.
tl;dr I think "Strict Monroe" is a reasonable shot at a coherent approach, I find it has some merits, but it fails to handle cases where I think intervention was on the whole necessary and beneficial for humanity. You might disagree with those cases, or you might have a patch to something like Strict Monroe 2.0. I'd welcome pushback in either of those directions, or clarifications if I've misstated your views.
First off, you have a very unique writing style. It's like logic in words. It's very thorough and very cautious. It reminds me of Alan Greenspan. It's beautiful.
Second, you are right: it is ahistorical. Global powers see the world as their sphere of influence. Some see it even more directly than others: the British and french empires for instance.
Although there are exceptions. The Ming dynasty in China could probably have taken over the world and chose not to.
The mughals and mongols also quite deliberately restricted their reach.
So it seems to be a very western habit.
Third, yes, it is sort of like the Monroe doctrine. I'm not advocating hermeticism. I don't think hermeticism is good for countries: North Korea and pre-1868 Japan as proof.
I'm in full support of America participating in the two world wars: civilians were killed in 1917 and 1941.
If enough civilians are killed anywhere, then the country has a right to respond. This is why I also support the war on terror even though it was disastrously conducted: civilians were killed on 9/11.
However, the USA or other powers intervening in say Kuwait or Nicaragua, and in today's case, Ukraine or Taiwan, is another matter entirely.
The reasons I don't support these are threefold:
1.) It's literally not their business. It's stupid to risk arms and soldiers and capital to fight wars that aren't your business.
2.) Often times, the motives are very impure. The USA didn't come to Kuwait cos of human rights, they came cos of oil. America is making aggresive noises over Taiwan today not because it cares but because it wants to play a dominance game with China. The same with respect to Ukraine and Russia.
The motives are generally ideological, economic, or political. They usually have zero interest in the human lives actually at stake.
3.) A lot of these 'benign and benovelent interactions', even those done in good faith, end up doing more harm than good i.e Afghanistan and Vietnam. And then the global power just packs its bags and leaves.
It's important to remember:
a.) It's very hard to leave something exactly as you met it. That's one possibility versus the millions of ways you can leave it better or worse.
b.) It's very hard to leave something better than you met it. Because there are more ways for things to go wrong. Especially something as complex as a country.
So most external interventions fail.
In cases like Darfur and the Balkans, I'd recommend more effective international organizations that are actually international rather than captured by American interests.
But for that to happen, a lot of things will have to change, the sources of their funding for one.
I'd also recommend truly helping these countries develop economically, and it's not by free trade.
Economic development often becomes political development: it's harder to bully and control rich and educated people for one.
So, to clarify: national sovereignty is only important if it's violated near your borders or if enough civilians are killed or targeted specifically anywhere on Earth. If not, no.
That is my rather lengthy take and clarification. Thanks. I'm extremely open to your replies.
Appreciate your thorough response, appropriate for a complex issue. I see some points of agreement, some lingering differences. I think I can make a small concession while leaving you with some food for thought.
I think you make powerful points on execution, and I respect your desire for stronger international organizations.
I honestly wish think tanks spent less ink salivating over global rivalries like some high-stakes reality show, and spent much more ink on laying out boring technical machinery that would be most likely to (a) actually reduce the chance of any conflicts in the first place, through international orgs or development, and (b) should conflicts emerge nonetheless, identify the best paths to limit or unwind these conflicts, so they are much more likely to end like Gulf I or Granada rather than Gulf II or Vietnam.
I think sometimes (a) and (b) seem in conflict, why would we work to improve outcomes for something we don't want to happen in the first place? But I think it'd be useful for people to think of these as interrelated, with (b) as a hedge for when (a) fails.
> "It's literally not their business."
I think this is the real crux. As an American living and working in Taiwan, I will probably have a bit of a bias here about how far our interests extend. To be fair, I chose this, I don't think all the resources of the Pentagon owe an obligation to me personally. My taxes wouldn't pay the salary of one private. Global citizens being able to safely do business and live overseas is one of the basic perks the pax americana or pax UN should get us. But if we go to high risk areas, maybe that's on us.
I'm much more interested to know if you think we can sign treaties that extend our interests? If we can sign up to make new things our business?
Like if farlandia comes to us and says, "ok, we will sell you our fantastic new fertilizer (or gps tractors or something) that will triple your yields! But you must first sign this treaty guaranteeing our defense against our aggressive neighbor, nearlandia."
You might say no: if we want to avoid foreign wars, and obliged to keep our promises, it should follow that we must never sign treaties for defense. After all, that's partly what kicked off WWI in the first place, we should avoid creating those conditions.
But sometimes we really do need more food. Or semiconductors. Or airbags. Or we really do want Ukraine to give up its nukes.
I think a lot of our entanglements stem from arcane treaty obligations like that. Sure, not literally preventing starvation, but definitely tied to some specific economic or global stability issue that's important for us. The food angle just illustrates it probably hinges on how important that specific treaty interest is, and there are going to be hard cases.
> ahistorical Western preferences
This is mostly postscript, I think the more important points are above, this is a minor point of clarification. When I said that regionalism is ahistorical, I think you took me to be saying that great powers have always wanted to dominate the world. While perhaps true, that's not quite what I meant, and I would absolutely agree that a history of bad behavior doesn't justify continuing it.
I was thinking instead of the signatories of the UN, distributed all throughout the world. Those signatories looked at WWII and came to the sensible conclusion that a country invading its neighbors while committing genocide is a threat to universal interests and should be stopped. So they all agreed in the wake of that, to quote the charter, that we should "take effective collective measures" to remove "threats to the peace," suppress "acts of aggression," and "[promote] human rights."
You were too kind about my writing, I actually was really messy here. I should not have said regionalism is ahistorical, what I meant was, it seems out of step with a view that almost all the countries around the world have now publicly endorsed.
I think ultimately I agree with you that international organizations should be a stronger and much preferred path here. I worry you're going to find my concesssion a bit Pyrrhic though. I would love a UN that has tools of effective compellence and deterrence to effectively halt violations of human rights and invasions of neighboring states. I note that no state technology has ever demonstrated the capacity for compellence or deterrence in those lanes without credible threats of force. But I truly hope that you are right here, and that there are other ways we can strengthen these organizations to be effective, short of simply prosecuting wars themselves.
Thanks for the back and forth, that was very helpful in organizing my thoughts on these issues.
On to the second point: how do we make these international organizations stronger.
It would be very difficult.
Because you are right: the UN charter is a very sensible conclusion to reach.
The issue with international organizations is similar to the issue with nations: why should I obey the laws of my country?
And there are two reasonable answers:
1.) Nationalism. I mean stories, flags, etc, anything that reinforces the existence of that idea and gives it social proof.
Nationalism is actually very recent. In the past, in Europe, people thought of their obligations as owned locally to the Lord or squire and then to the church as an institution.
It's not like they didn't live in empires. They did. But taxes were paid to local lords who then paid taxes to royalty.
The direct relationship between the state and the individual did not exist.
Today, it's similar with the UN and other international organizations.
You and I have no direct relationships with these organizations. We elect mayors and governors and presidents on the national level but on the international level, what goes on depends on emissaries from member states.
So, we don't feel like members of an international community because frankly we are not: we have no say and no emotional ties. There are other reasons: geography, distance, culture, etc. But that's one of them.
2.) There are no incentives to obey. It makes no sense for the powerful to bind themselves. It negates the very point.
So, international organizations are just like consulting agencies really: if you like what you hear, you follow. If you don't, like with climate change agreements, you just do what you like.
And I don't see why that should or would change anytime soon.
With local laws, I can be jailed, killed, have my assets confiscated, etc, for non compliance.
What can the UN do if china says it doesn't want to play fair?
The UN is just an entity. So even if it enforces sanctions, they aren't really UN's sanctions, they are Germany and america and Canada's sanctions. And so they can be revoked or bypassed by these individual nations at will.
I understand I have answered this question by not answering it but I think that will have to suffice. If you can think of effective solutions to those two problems, then do let me know.
You are immeasurably welcome and thank you for your compliments.
So, we are definitely in full agreement over international organizations getting stronger so no need to rehash that point.
It's just two things here. I'll start with the first:
I'm not sure defence treaties are such a good idea. You alluded quite rightly to the fact that there were a good number of them leading up to both world wars. Indeed, these treaties are the immediate, though far from the only, cause of world war 1: countries that were not directly involved stepped in to help countries that were directly involved ...
The reason these treaties fail is because the only point to making these kinds of agreements is to isolate an opponent who responds by making similar agreements in turn: No Warsaw Pact without NATO.
Call it an agreement arms race
2.) I'm quite happy to enter into a trade agreement with farlandia for the supply of whatever it is my country needs. No country produces everything.
But Economic exchanges should be for economic exchanges: semiconductors for grains or vehicles for processed foods, or weapons for oil, etc. They should not be for helping Farlandia fight neighbours.
You did point out a serious oversight in my thinking: sometimes threats to sovereignty are not always threats to civilians' lives. There weren't many Americans at stake in Kuwait; what was at stake was an American economy that still ran on a lot of imported petroleum.
Did this constitute a charter to invade? Honestly, I cannot say.
In the case with China, America has been largely conciliatory up until quite recently. In a lot of ways it still privileges China.
Since Nixon went to the PRC in the 1970s the US has intentionally tried to integrate China into the world’s international commercial system. It granted China privileged trade arrangements with the USA and played a key role in shepherding the PRC into the WTO.
Additionally, as Peter Zeihan will eagerly attest, the Bretton Woods global trading system has been underwritten by the US (navy primarily) for 70 years. This largely removed the impetus for industrialized regional rivals like Japan to exploit China. It also guaranteed China access to global markets.
In spite of all the good will, China has adopted some serious mercantilist policies and Chinese firms routinely benefit from large scale IP theft. At one point during the Trump Admin it was estimated that Chinese firms reaped $600 billion worth of benefits annually from stolen IP.
This doesn’t begin to touch on how China treats many of its neighbors. America did not raise enmity with China. It is much more the opposite case and now the US is awakened to how much the PRC has been advantaged in recent decades.
First off, the USA was mostly conciliatory with China because it did not see China as a threat for legitimate reasons: no one could have foresaw the amount of economic growth china would have from 1981 till today.
Second, it wanted to detach China from the Soviet Union, America's legitimate threat at the time.
It had nothing to do with goodwill.
To the WTO and International Trade, American consumers bought Chinese goods because they were cheaper, abundant, and mostly well made (there are exceptions). They weren't forced to buy these goods. They bought them because it made economic sense to do so.
And American companies offshored and outsourced their operations to china because of cheaper labour, and as we saw in the case of Uighurs, forced and exploitative labour.
China merely took full advantage of this set of events.
Again, it had nothing to do with goodwill.
Three, America is just as guilty of IP theft. Samuel Slater is credited with being partly responsible for bringing the industrial revolution to America.
His notable contribution? Stealing textile factory machinery designs from Britain and replicating them here.
Textile manufacturing was the high-tech industry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The simple but obscured truth is every major world power got to the top with a lot of ingenuity but also a lot of theft.
It's just too much effort to redesign everything from scratch so companies and individuals in other countries copy and steal.
The government generally looks the other way until its own industries are just as developed before it then begins to treat intellectual property like an actual thing.
(1) Aside from the whether or not your Slater reference has merit, I am not sure it is entirely relevant. Let us assume for argument’s sake that the US has historically engaged in just as much IP theft as China, what does that have to do with the whether or not the US has had goodwill towards China in recent decades?
(2) Benefitting (to some extent) from cheap Chinese labor and having an economic self-interest in Chinese manufacturing does not exclude the US from showing China goodwill over this period. Certainly the 90’s and 2000’s are replete with American leaders welcoming China as a “responsible stakeholder” etc…
The top comment at least gets it and is far better than this neocon clown that Noah interviewed. It's hard to take this guy seriously when he repeats two blatant falsehoods that he doesn't think Bush lied about WMD's in Iraq or that there was no anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11 . Speaking with upper middle class Chinese nationals studying at a university a number off them (correctly) perceived that the only way China could've avoid the ire of the US was to stay poor.
The "US insists rivals must be poor" is a weird take I keep hearing.
It's puzzling to me because it doesn't really explain (well, any US foreign policy talking points), or any other US engagements with rich countries. With the EU, where the competition is mostly over nuanced technocratic issues, like standards bodies trying to figure out the ideal angle for headlights or whatever. US engagement with Japan, which, while there was some economic rivalry in the 80s, headlines saying "Japan Won the Cold War" while the US and USSR weren't paying attention. But it never strayed into geopolitical rivalry, and the two countries remain incredibly close allies, even while Japan remained the second largest country by GDP up to around 2010. It doesn't explain how US relations with Korea have gotten closer as Korea has gotten richer.
From all the signals I've seen, the US foreign policy establishment would absolutely love a new rich neoliberal China.
The other view doesn't match US behavior on other issues. The world economic system is not zero sum, this is obvious to the foreign policy establishment, so that false belief which they don't hold obviously doesn't drive US foreign policy planning and strategy.
Aside from that, the name calling is totally unnecessary. Just as I disagree with your arguments, I disagree with some of the interviewee's points too, but I can do so perfectly well without calling anyone names.
It makes the comment system less worth reading or engaging with. I think it's important to discuss the ideas you raised, even the ones I disagree with, but we can only have those discussions productively if everyone commits to some basic level of civility, even on important topics they disagree about.
This guy Brands is an absolute legend for posting this article on 9/11/2020 (https://www.aei.org/op-eds/trump-ike-and-the-myth-of-the-military-industrial-complex/) about how there is no military-industrial complex, while he was literally on the payroll of that very complex as a fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, funded by Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, US Navy, Royal Air Force, Boeing and so on.
“no massive anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11?” What world is Brands living in? Makes me question his authority on the rest of the topics covered in the interview
I think you are correct to say there was a racist backlash against Arabs but it is incorrect to say against Muslims because Islam is a religion and not a race.
Even so, we were not interning Arab-Americans simply because of their ethnicity. That is objectively speaking better conduct than past periods of our history.
Noah, Brands sounds like a card-carrying member of the blob, determined to. prolong U.S. hegemony in the face of a steady decline. in our. role in the world economy and our multi-trillion dollar fiasco trying to bring thee free market and liberal democracy to the Middle East.
Please, do a comparable interview with someone like Andrew Bacevich.
One very relevant quote: "Disciplinary silos favor an overemphasis onpolitical-military relationships and enable political scientists and historians to ignore decisive economic
issues. Those leaders responsible for managing the U.S.-China relationship arrive at the same over-emphasis on the military because in peacetime our. national allocation of resources is determined by Congressional lobbying, where the military-industrial complex has an overwhelming advantage
True, although "revanchist" doesn't seem appropriate for China. In his writings Brands summarily describes China as a "declining power", which most observers would find a startling and reckless assumption. Not a good foundation for thoughtful or trustworthy analysis. That's why I suggested Noah tune in the Quincy Institute analysis.
I think it's a bit overstated, but not "startling and reckless". There's a reasonable case to be made that Xi is not operating from a position of strength, in the same way that Putin isn't either. That's not to say they aren't dangerous; in fact, they're MORE dangerous because they see threats everywhere, and their entire worldview is based on power and domination, not peaceful cooperation. "Cooperation", to them, happens at the barrel of a gun.
I think the term he prefers is a “peaking power,” that is, the PRC as constituted has reached its zenith. I read a great article by him and Michael Beckley a while back in Foreign Policy about this issue.
That is not a reckless conclusion. Since COVID much of the world has soured on China. It is increasingly cast in a negative light. Many of China’s neighbors are becoming increasingly cold towards it.
There is, also a lot of the systemic problems that accompany Marxist nations (mainly the corruption and mismanagement).
I’m curious where the point c at the end, about firms that have violated intellectual property, comes from. Is there a specific geopolitical risk related to IP? Because I remember a big criticism (not the only one) of TPP was that it had a lot of Hollywood protectionist policies like further extending copyright terms and such. So is Hollywood’s interest fundamentally compatible with competing with China, or is it a distraction? Or are we talking about something totally different when referring to IP here?
Generally speaking, a standard tenet of the Beijing containment platform is that the profits of US multinationals in the Chinese market should be an important priority for US policymakers. Which is in tension with their desire for economic decoupling. But it's a big tent.
Technically, *technically*, the Cold War has not been the only ideological geopolitical conflict that the US has faced in its history. The US was born from another such conflict. To quote Jon Meacham, in the mindset of Thomas Jefferson and followers of his movement, the years from "1765 to 1815 were a fifty year war with Britain. Sometimes hot, and sometimes cold, and as ideological as the Cold War". Before you scoff at this comparison, recall that the revolutionaries disliked the economic dependence that the new post-colonial country had on the British trading system, in which the provinces/states exported raw commodities and imported finished goods. Ahem.
But yes, in the US's modern history, over the period in which it has been an economically powerful country, the only extended ideological conflict it has engaged in has been the Cold War against the USSR. A conflict that occurred, rather inherently, without US economic entanglement with that adversary.
Also, yeah, "no massive anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11" is demonstrably untrue. The rise in hate crimes is pretty well documented. And frankly, the insinuation that the Bushie neocons were acting in anything like good faith in regards to Iraq is a very wrong-headed and, really, pernicious idea. They were on record pushing regime change in the 1990s.
I don't agree that this Brands person is a "card-carrying member of the blob", since being unambiguously gung-ho on TPP seems like the Blobbish line, but he's got some analytic blindspots. I don't support U.S. decline, primarily because I think of its negative implications as being domestic and I want the country to be decent and thriving. Brands makes a solid point that the Cold War against the USSR pushed the US to rejuvenate and improve itself (as the unnamed revolutionary cold war against Britain pushed the US towards political development, democratization, and the seeds of import substitution development), but that's not an original insight.
There was definitely a backlash, but it was muted relative to what it could have been. Imagine if a President Trump had been fanning the flames of hate from the Oval Office on 9/12.
This rather moves the goalposts. Lots of things *could* have been worse compared to things that were done by other people afterwards, but that's not how causality works, and it shouldn't be how moral culpability works. What happened to U.S. Muslims after 9/11, 1) happened, at all, which the interviewee downplays, and 2) was bad. On its own. Objectively.
It definitely was bad. Objectively. I'm just objecting that without context/comparison, it's impossible to put it in the correct light.
For another comparison, was the post-9/11 backlash better or worse than the Japanese-American internment? I'd say better. Relatively, of course. And not just better, but, like, WAY better. As in, "we didn't round a bunch of people up and tempt ourselves with genocide". It was mostly just several thousand random attacks. The body counts and qualitative severity were both just so much lower post-9/11 than with the WW2 internment.
Moreover, who's morally culpable? Bush didn't sign any Act of Congress to vandalize a bunch of mosques and harass Muslim-Americans on the streets. He didn't order any troops to do it, either. Roosevelt DID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066. He signed that. With his own pen. Whether he thought it was a good idea or not, he signed it. He's directly morally culpable for a single much greater crime than the multitude of relatively minor ones committed during the post-9/11 backlash.
So if you want to talk about moral culpability, then great. But that also requires us to talk about proportionality and agency. Bush went out of his way to exercise his agency to stop the post-9/11 backlash attacks. They didn't happen because of him, but in spite of him. Which is why I'm so confused that you're so eager to blame him.
David I think you need to chill on the caffeine. It’s like you’re not actually reading any of what you’re responding to. You make some good points but keep getting stuck in the mud. Thanks for letting us know that it “wasn’t as bad as internment camps” we had no idea
I'm fine on the caffeine, thank you. If you'd like to point out specific points that it seems I "didn't actually read", then be my guest. Otherwise, please don't cast innuendo at a perfectly good argument.
Irene: "Lots of things *could* have been worse compared to things that were done by other people afterwards, but that's not how causality works, and it shouldn't be how moral culpability works."
David: "For another comparison, was the post-9/11 backlash better or worse than the Japanese-American internment?" - No one else was talking about this so why are you bringing it up? It's a pretty obvious comparison that nobody would disagree with.
"Bush went out of his way to exercise his agency to stop the post-9/11 backlash attacks. They didn't happen because of him, but in spite of him. Which is why I'm so confused that you're so eager to blame him." - Irene used 3 sentences to describe her Bush-admin criticism and 4 paragraphs later you're still talking about it. No need to fanboy over W.
“no massive anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11?” What world is Brands living in? Makes me question his authority on the rest of the topics covered in the interview
Love the comment about Bush/Iraq. The left really gets high on its own supply on that one. The most likely reality is that Saddam either thought he had weapons that he didn't (IE his advisors were lying to him), and therefore anted up to play without realizing he was bankrupt, OR thought he could bluff like the North Koreans had done just a few years earlier, but completely misjudged the emotional temperature of the US and its patience for the same stupid "WMDs for aid" gambit.
Because there simply was no other reason for him to lock out weapons inspectors and play that whole game if he knew he didn't have them or thought the US was REALLY going to invade him over it.
Bush, for his part, totally played himself. It wasn't so much about lying, it was just that he saw what he wanted to see, and bought what Saddam was showing him. [Ed: And because he wanted to do it, he sold it all to the American public. The fact that we never found WMDs doesn't necessarily mean he had to have lied. It just means that at minimum, he was wrong about there being any.]
Anyways, what I really wanted to come say was that I'd be a little cautious of curbing investment in the PLA. Not because I feel like we need to finance their military, but because the more financial links their military elites have with US interests, the more they'll second-guess any dumb move Xi makes.
Are you really fucking stupid enough to believe that ?!? Saddam refused the inspectors the entry to his PALACE. For the same reasons you would refuse the police to enter your home without a warrant. You don't just produce nukes, or chemical weapons in your palace, even a big one. That kind of stuff needs industrial plants on a massive scale, and releases chemical residue into the air that the inspectors could have detected from many miles.
And anyone who wanted to know the truth DID know the truth, because Scott Ritter, former weapons inspector, told everyone.
TLDR: Bush is a liar and a mass murderer, and you are a bloody moron.
That was unnecessary. If there were a report feature, you'd be reported. Have a nice day.
Do you feel better about yourself now? Have you sufficiently stroked your own sense of self-righteousness yet? "Bush lied, kids died", right? Credit where it's due, even if it's a little derivative, it's one of the best bumper sticker slogans in modern political history. Kudos. Because Bush was Just Plain Evil, right? It's absolutely impossible that he engaged in motivated reasoning and only saw what he wanted to see. Our military-industrial-complex NEVER makes mistakes and steers us into bad wars, right?
Please. Spare us your arrogance.
Also, if you buy the "it was just a palace" line, then you're just as ignorant as you accuse me of being. There were dozens of weapons sites inspectors got kicked out of, and Saddam was known to use his "palaces" as cover for chemical weapons stores. You don't need to produce *anything* in the palace, you can just keep them behind a locked door and insist it's the jacuzzi.
I am curious as to Hal's recommendation vis-a-vis military strength. I retired from the Military in 2011, have joined up in 1989. I watched the fall of the Iron Curtain, the great draw down, the move to mobile more deployable contingency operations (Middle East).
Military spending is no longer popular. A cold war military is a thing of the past. Interest in military service is down. However, is I detect a sense that Hal thinks we are getting to a point where we have either gone to far with our desire to be relevant compared to our ability to actually project deterrence and strength.
I'm thinking through broader Quincy vs. Blob debates a lot recently, and so far have concluded that...
Crafting an internally coherent foreign policy is hard.
My best strategy to validate any new doctrine is to start with lists of conflicts where my intuitions are strongly in favor or strongly opposed, and test new doctrines against those cases to see if they produce uncomfortable results. Hopefully I can set aside hard cases, but they may be useful checks if the doctrine produces really certain results on them.
I'm pro, for example:
* stopping genocide in the Balkans,
* stopping invasions of Kuwait,
* stopping a mustachioed german who is hellbent on both industrialized genocide AND world domination -- probably the easiest of the easy cases. I've heard there are WWII reservationists* out there, but that seems fringe to me.
Panama ("Just Cause") is a weird case, and the branding for it is especially suspicious! If you separate it out into sub-rationales it maybe becomes easier:
* Panama declares war on the US and begins attacking our forces. Sometimes the other side gets a vote! (We could pushback on inducement, but insofar as this rationale truly holds, if a country just starts killing your people and forces you to respond, I think this a pretty easy case.)
* US wants to police the international drug trade, or arrest a leader because he sells drugs. I think most commenters would agree that this is on the weak end of possible rationales for US involvement.
Panama's a "mixed" case, then there are very, very hard cases. Syria. Pro insofar as you are trying to prevent genocide and one of the worst humanitarian crises of the century, but so, so many Cons: running up against logistical realities, an unclear morally superior successor state, other foreign interests willing to commit to a conflict that could spiral and even worsen the humanitarian issues... those all make this much more difficult to consider.
I think there's some room for conflict in hard cases, so you can provide compellence and deterrence in other hard cases, preventing the need for war more broadly, but that of course flirts with a slippery slope, so acknowledge that's high risk.
I'd be interested in if other commenters have views on wars that should be included in the stable of test cases.
I suspect a lot of people share the same base concerns about human rights or national sovereignty, but that the distinction between different views will often come down to whether or not we trust ourselves to adjudicate when those things are truly at risk, vs. playing into some other base state interest. Often those things are unclear and comingled, which makes this all hard to sort out in real cases.
If anyone (Noah, guest interviewee, other commenters) have thoughts on how to approach this from first principles, at a meta level, as opposed to getting stuck in the object level cases in the current headlines, I think that would be really valuable. Just debating the current situation as it comes up I think pulls on a lot of biases and risks inconsistency. So I'd be very much interested in broader foundational essays on this.
A lot of the American public felt it had been screwed by the trade partnerships before TPP, and it’s hard to deny that the agreements increased inequality in the US. Of course economists simply ran the numbers and assured everyone that these were great deals that would increase the national wealth. They were probably not wrong but they were totally wrong wrt their evil impact on America - leading to the rise of a potent anti-democratic movement. When you bemoan the lack of a TPP agreement I can’t believe it- it’s like you’re willing the rise of Trump. Our capitalist system can’t handle a TPP at this time. Fix that first or our next President will be a stooge of Xi and Putin and Cold War 2 will be over.
There is an underlying assumption with this argument that I find troublesome: America does not have these rivals as much as it is actively making them rivals.
We can and should debate the morality of China's desire to control Taiwan, but Taiwan represents for China, a symbol of their former glory, and its cuddly relationship with the West is not looked upon kindly.
We can and should debate the morality of Russia's desire to invade Ukraine, but Ukraine's decision to join NATO and entrench itself with the EU are not choices Russia is willing to accept.
In the same vein that the USA was very uncomfortable with communist Cuba, and for good reason too.
If you are a great power, you don't want allies of your rival in your neighborhood: imagine if Mexico went communist and started cutting deals with china.
These countries are trying to control their respective regional spheres of influence
The only reason the USA sees this as a threat is because America has always thought the entire world is its sphere of influence.
And I don't need to list the terrible track record that has come out of such 'benovelent imperialism'.
>>because America has always thought the entire world is its sphere of influence.
You mean like the 4 oceans we patrol at the expense of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of aircraft carriers?
>>And I don't need to list the terrible track record that has come out of such 'benovelent imperialism'.
You mean like the expansion of global trade networks under our watch, which has lifted an historic proportion of humanity out of utter poverty within 2 generations, while making almost all other deaths due to war obsolete?
I mean, compared to that, the mistakes we've made seem relatively trivial. It's not like the Brits got anything CLOSE to that kind of return on the far worse brutality they inflicted on far more people than we've ever dreamed of hurting.
>> If you are a great power, you don't want allies of your rival in your neighborhood: imagine if Mexico went communist and started cutting deals with china.
This is a fallacy. The TRULY analogous scenario would be if Brazil was a large power and had amassed a Latin American Treaty Organization that had slowly inched its way northward for the past 30 years. And THEN they'd be inviting Mexico to join their little trade and immigration bloc -- or rather, Mexico would rather be part of a growing, successful trade and immigration bloc while a hostile US was talking about making Baja and Chihuahua the 51st and 52nd states due to their high populations of American tourists and expats who'd bought vacation homes in Cabo, and had already been funding and organizing the 3rd and 6th Redneck Special Tacticool Volunteers militias to make trouble there for the past 7 years.
There, FTFY.
Also, not to pile on, but there's a concrete difference between "preventing your geopolitical rival of 20 years from putting nukes in your backyard" and "using dislocated ethnic minorities as an excuse for a revanchist invasion of a neighbor whose only 'provocation' towards you happened in the first place because you made it clear you'd invade them if given half the chance".
Dictators classically obsess over respect. They won't respect you if you don't call them on their bullshit.
So, this is not entirely accurate. First off, thank you for your meticulousness.
Second, in 1961, the USA supported an invasion of cuba with military personnel, capital, arms, and presidential sanction.
The purpose of the invasion was to overthrow Cuba's communist president, Fidel Castro, who had just recently gained power. This was before any nukes or missiles were on cuban territory.
It failed. In fact, the failed invasion was a primary cause of the Cuban missile crisis and increased hostilities.
Today, if you read Rob Lee's post in the last newsletter, Russia is in a similar situation.
Ukraine's president is anti Russia, they are developing missiles, and deepening relationships with NATO and America, historical and current rivals of Russia.
And now Russia wants to invade.
It's literally the same situation sixty years down the line. It's back to the future territory.
So, I think I'm justified in saying there's absolutely no concrete difference.
Touché. You’re absolutely right; as a history nerd, I have completely failed here. I don’t really have the energy to write a rebuttal here, but I don’t think my characterization of the pretense for invading Ukraine as bullshit doesn’t still stand.
Thank you. It happens to the best of us.
I do agree with you about Putin only respecting hard power, or at least credible threats of hard power. The West does need to call Russia on its bullshit.
But it should not do so out of any hypocritical sense of having the moral high ground because they have done the same before and will likely do the same if it happened again.
I kind of feel like this is six of one, half dozen of the other, though. I think the bridge between us is that there’s got to be a way to take his idiosyncratic ideological foundations into account, without ceding ground that both we and he knows is ultimately bullshit.
You are right. I agree with you exactly on this. I just hope a middle ground can ultimately be reached.
There is a tension between getting involved everywhere, and only getting involved when troops are literally on your border. I take your position as a compromise, respect that states will attempt to control themselves, then their regions, and much more massively index on regional protection over remote engagements.
The view makes sense, and you critique a preference to police national sovereignty globally (and perhaps human rights, the other common twin obligation, but you don't say this explicitly so I don't know), saying that USA sees this faraway conflicts as relevant because it has a maximalist view of its sphere of influence.
It does. However...
Casting this as a uniquely USA view is ahistorical. There's a preference across the world for respecting national sovereignty that's explicitly called out in international agreements in this space, with an implicit understanding that some states will have to ultimately aid some others to maintain the global system.
I believe your "doctrine," if I can use that term respectfully, is suggesting that national sovereignty is only relevant if its violated near your borders, that there's no reason for global concern. Is that roughly correct?
I admit a lot of difficulty trying to craft an internally coherent foreign policy. My best strategy to validate any doctrine is to start with conflicts where my intuitions are strongly in favor or opposed, and test new doctrines against those cases to see if they produce uncomfortable results.
I believe, for example, it's good to halt genocide in the Balkans, or stop the invasion of Kuwait. I don't think either of those would be justifiable under your, maybe, "strict Monroe" approach. I'm not sure intervening in WWII would be either, but I'm not sure.
tl;dr I think "Strict Monroe" is a reasonable shot at a coherent approach, I find it has some merits, but it fails to handle cases where I think intervention was on the whole necessary and beneficial for humanity. You might disagree with those cases, or you might have a patch to something like Strict Monroe 2.0. I'd welcome pushback in either of those directions, or clarifications if I've misstated your views.
First off, you have a very unique writing style. It's like logic in words. It's very thorough and very cautious. It reminds me of Alan Greenspan. It's beautiful.
Second, you are right: it is ahistorical. Global powers see the world as their sphere of influence. Some see it even more directly than others: the British and french empires for instance.
Although there are exceptions. The Ming dynasty in China could probably have taken over the world and chose not to.
The mughals and mongols also quite deliberately restricted their reach.
So it seems to be a very western habit.
Third, yes, it is sort of like the Monroe doctrine. I'm not advocating hermeticism. I don't think hermeticism is good for countries: North Korea and pre-1868 Japan as proof.
I'm in full support of America participating in the two world wars: civilians were killed in 1917 and 1941.
If enough civilians are killed anywhere, then the country has a right to respond. This is why I also support the war on terror even though it was disastrously conducted: civilians were killed on 9/11.
However, the USA or other powers intervening in say Kuwait or Nicaragua, and in today's case, Ukraine or Taiwan, is another matter entirely.
The reasons I don't support these are threefold:
1.) It's literally not their business. It's stupid to risk arms and soldiers and capital to fight wars that aren't your business.
2.) Often times, the motives are very impure. The USA didn't come to Kuwait cos of human rights, they came cos of oil. America is making aggresive noises over Taiwan today not because it cares but because it wants to play a dominance game with China. The same with respect to Ukraine and Russia.
The motives are generally ideological, economic, or political. They usually have zero interest in the human lives actually at stake.
3.) A lot of these 'benign and benovelent interactions', even those done in good faith, end up doing more harm than good i.e Afghanistan and Vietnam. And then the global power just packs its bags and leaves.
It's important to remember:
a.) It's very hard to leave something exactly as you met it. That's one possibility versus the millions of ways you can leave it better or worse.
b.) It's very hard to leave something better than you met it. Because there are more ways for things to go wrong. Especially something as complex as a country.
So most external interventions fail.
In cases like Darfur and the Balkans, I'd recommend more effective international organizations that are actually international rather than captured by American interests.
But for that to happen, a lot of things will have to change, the sources of their funding for one.
I'd also recommend truly helping these countries develop economically, and it's not by free trade.
Economic development often becomes political development: it's harder to bully and control rich and educated people for one.
So, to clarify: national sovereignty is only important if it's violated near your borders or if enough civilians are killed or targeted specifically anywhere on Earth. If not, no.
That is my rather lengthy take and clarification. Thanks. I'm extremely open to your replies.
Appreciate your thorough response, appropriate for a complex issue. I see some points of agreement, some lingering differences. I think I can make a small concession while leaving you with some food for thought.
I think you make powerful points on execution, and I respect your desire for stronger international organizations.
I honestly wish think tanks spent less ink salivating over global rivalries like some high-stakes reality show, and spent much more ink on laying out boring technical machinery that would be most likely to (a) actually reduce the chance of any conflicts in the first place, through international orgs or development, and (b) should conflicts emerge nonetheless, identify the best paths to limit or unwind these conflicts, so they are much more likely to end like Gulf I or Granada rather than Gulf II or Vietnam.
I think sometimes (a) and (b) seem in conflict, why would we work to improve outcomes for something we don't want to happen in the first place? But I think it'd be useful for people to think of these as interrelated, with (b) as a hedge for when (a) fails.
> "It's literally not their business."
I think this is the real crux. As an American living and working in Taiwan, I will probably have a bit of a bias here about how far our interests extend. To be fair, I chose this, I don't think all the resources of the Pentagon owe an obligation to me personally. My taxes wouldn't pay the salary of one private. Global citizens being able to safely do business and live overseas is one of the basic perks the pax americana or pax UN should get us. But if we go to high risk areas, maybe that's on us.
I'm much more interested to know if you think we can sign treaties that extend our interests? If we can sign up to make new things our business?
Like if farlandia comes to us and says, "ok, we will sell you our fantastic new fertilizer (or gps tractors or something) that will triple your yields! But you must first sign this treaty guaranteeing our defense against our aggressive neighbor, nearlandia."
You might say no: if we want to avoid foreign wars, and obliged to keep our promises, it should follow that we must never sign treaties for defense. After all, that's partly what kicked off WWI in the first place, we should avoid creating those conditions.
But sometimes we really do need more food. Or semiconductors. Or airbags. Or we really do want Ukraine to give up its nukes.
I think a lot of our entanglements stem from arcane treaty obligations like that. Sure, not literally preventing starvation, but definitely tied to some specific economic or global stability issue that's important for us. The food angle just illustrates it probably hinges on how important that specific treaty interest is, and there are going to be hard cases.
> ahistorical Western preferences
This is mostly postscript, I think the more important points are above, this is a minor point of clarification. When I said that regionalism is ahistorical, I think you took me to be saying that great powers have always wanted to dominate the world. While perhaps true, that's not quite what I meant, and I would absolutely agree that a history of bad behavior doesn't justify continuing it.
I was thinking instead of the signatories of the UN, distributed all throughout the world. Those signatories looked at WWII and came to the sensible conclusion that a country invading its neighbors while committing genocide is a threat to universal interests and should be stopped. So they all agreed in the wake of that, to quote the charter, that we should "take effective collective measures" to remove "threats to the peace," suppress "acts of aggression," and "[promote] human rights."
You were too kind about my writing, I actually was really messy here. I should not have said regionalism is ahistorical, what I meant was, it seems out of step with a view that almost all the countries around the world have now publicly endorsed.
I think ultimately I agree with you that international organizations should be a stronger and much preferred path here. I worry you're going to find my concesssion a bit Pyrrhic though. I would love a UN that has tools of effective compellence and deterrence to effectively halt violations of human rights and invasions of neighboring states. I note that no state technology has ever demonstrated the capacity for compellence or deterrence in those lanes without credible threats of force. But I truly hope that you are right here, and that there are other ways we can strengthen these organizations to be effective, short of simply prosecuting wars themselves.
Thanks for the back and forth, that was very helpful in organizing my thoughts on these issues.
On to the second point: how do we make these international organizations stronger.
It would be very difficult.
Because you are right: the UN charter is a very sensible conclusion to reach.
The issue with international organizations is similar to the issue with nations: why should I obey the laws of my country?
And there are two reasonable answers:
1.) Nationalism. I mean stories, flags, etc, anything that reinforces the existence of that idea and gives it social proof.
Nationalism is actually very recent. In the past, in Europe, people thought of their obligations as owned locally to the Lord or squire and then to the church as an institution.
It's not like they didn't live in empires. They did. But taxes were paid to local lords who then paid taxes to royalty.
The direct relationship between the state and the individual did not exist.
Today, it's similar with the UN and other international organizations.
You and I have no direct relationships with these organizations. We elect mayors and governors and presidents on the national level but on the international level, what goes on depends on emissaries from member states.
So, we don't feel like members of an international community because frankly we are not: we have no say and no emotional ties. There are other reasons: geography, distance, culture, etc. But that's one of them.
2.) There are no incentives to obey. It makes no sense for the powerful to bind themselves. It negates the very point.
So, international organizations are just like consulting agencies really: if you like what you hear, you follow. If you don't, like with climate change agreements, you just do what you like.
And I don't see why that should or would change anytime soon.
With local laws, I can be jailed, killed, have my assets confiscated, etc, for non compliance.
What can the UN do if china says it doesn't want to play fair?
The UN is just an entity. So even if it enforces sanctions, they aren't really UN's sanctions, they are Germany and america and Canada's sanctions. And so they can be revoked or bypassed by these individual nations at will.
I understand I have answered this question by not answering it but I think that will have to suffice. If you can think of effective solutions to those two problems, then do let me know.
You are immeasurably welcome and thank you for your compliments.
So, we are definitely in full agreement over international organizations getting stronger so no need to rehash that point.
It's just two things here. I'll start with the first:
I'm not sure defence treaties are such a good idea. You alluded quite rightly to the fact that there were a good number of them leading up to both world wars. Indeed, these treaties are the immediate, though far from the only, cause of world war 1: countries that were not directly involved stepped in to help countries that were directly involved ...
The reason these treaties fail is because the only point to making these kinds of agreements is to isolate an opponent who responds by making similar agreements in turn: No Warsaw Pact without NATO.
Call it an agreement arms race
2.) I'm quite happy to enter into a trade agreement with farlandia for the supply of whatever it is my country needs. No country produces everything.
But Economic exchanges should be for economic exchanges: semiconductors for grains or vehicles for processed foods, or weapons for oil, etc. They should not be for helping Farlandia fight neighbours.
You did point out a serious oversight in my thinking: sometimes threats to sovereignty are not always threats to civilians' lives. There weren't many Americans at stake in Kuwait; what was at stake was an American economy that still ran on a lot of imported petroleum.
Did this constitute a charter to invade? Honestly, I cannot say.
In the case with China, America has been largely conciliatory up until quite recently. In a lot of ways it still privileges China.
Since Nixon went to the PRC in the 1970s the US has intentionally tried to integrate China into the world’s international commercial system. It granted China privileged trade arrangements with the USA and played a key role in shepherding the PRC into the WTO.
Additionally, as Peter Zeihan will eagerly attest, the Bretton Woods global trading system has been underwritten by the US (navy primarily) for 70 years. This largely removed the impetus for industrialized regional rivals like Japan to exploit China. It also guaranteed China access to global markets.
In spite of all the good will, China has adopted some serious mercantilist policies and Chinese firms routinely benefit from large scale IP theft. At one point during the Trump Admin it was estimated that Chinese firms reaped $600 billion worth of benefits annually from stolen IP.
This doesn’t begin to touch on how China treats many of its neighbors. America did not raise enmity with China. It is much more the opposite case and now the US is awakened to how much the PRC has been advantaged in recent decades.
It all reduces to what I highlighted in the previous post: China and Russia simply want to control their respective spheres of influence.
Now, we can debate whether they are going about this the right way. Hint: they are not
We can also debate whether America has a responsibility to prevent this from happening.
Hint: I don't think so.
But we cannot debate or pretend like these desires are unreasonable and barbaric. They are not.
Geopolitics is just politics with everything left out except the powerplay.
And one of the biggest reasons you become a regional power is to control your own region in the first place.
Most of your statements are true.
However, they do not explain why they are true.
First off, the USA was mostly conciliatory with China because it did not see China as a threat for legitimate reasons: no one could have foresaw the amount of economic growth china would have from 1981 till today.
Second, it wanted to detach China from the Soviet Union, America's legitimate threat at the time.
It had nothing to do with goodwill.
To the WTO and International Trade, American consumers bought Chinese goods because they were cheaper, abundant, and mostly well made (there are exceptions). They weren't forced to buy these goods. They bought them because it made economic sense to do so.
And American companies offshored and outsourced their operations to china because of cheaper labour, and as we saw in the case of Uighurs, forced and exploitative labour.
China merely took full advantage of this set of events.
Again, it had nothing to do with goodwill.
Three, America is just as guilty of IP theft. Samuel Slater is credited with being partly responsible for bringing the industrial revolution to America.
His notable contribution? Stealing textile factory machinery designs from Britain and replicating them here.
Textile manufacturing was the high-tech industry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The simple but obscured truth is every major world power got to the top with a lot of ingenuity but also a lot of theft.
It's just too much effort to redesign everything from scratch so companies and individuals in other countries copy and steal.
The government generally looks the other way until its own industries are just as developed before it then begins to treat intellectual property like an actual thing.
China did this too.
Again, it had nothing to do with goodwill.
There is a lot to unpack from your statements.
(1) Aside from the whether or not your Slater reference has merit, I am not sure it is entirely relevant. Let us assume for argument’s sake that the US has historically engaged in just as much IP theft as China, what does that have to do with the whether or not the US has had goodwill towards China in recent decades?
(2) Benefitting (to some extent) from cheap Chinese labor and having an economic self-interest in Chinese manufacturing does not exclude the US from showing China goodwill over this period. Certainly the 90’s and 2000’s are replete with American leaders welcoming China as a “responsible stakeholder” etc…
The top comment at least gets it and is far better than this neocon clown that Noah interviewed. It's hard to take this guy seriously when he repeats two blatant falsehoods that he doesn't think Bush lied about WMD's in Iraq or that there was no anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11 . Speaking with upper middle class Chinese nationals studying at a university a number off them (correctly) perceived that the only way China could've avoid the ire of the US was to stay poor.
The "US insists rivals must be poor" is a weird take I keep hearing.
It's puzzling to me because it doesn't really explain (well, any US foreign policy talking points), or any other US engagements with rich countries. With the EU, where the competition is mostly over nuanced technocratic issues, like standards bodies trying to figure out the ideal angle for headlights or whatever. US engagement with Japan, which, while there was some economic rivalry in the 80s, headlines saying "Japan Won the Cold War" while the US and USSR weren't paying attention. But it never strayed into geopolitical rivalry, and the two countries remain incredibly close allies, even while Japan remained the second largest country by GDP up to around 2010. It doesn't explain how US relations with Korea have gotten closer as Korea has gotten richer.
From all the signals I've seen, the US foreign policy establishment would absolutely love a new rich neoliberal China.
The other view doesn't match US behavior on other issues. The world economic system is not zero sum, this is obvious to the foreign policy establishment, so that false belief which they don't hold obviously doesn't drive US foreign policy planning and strategy.
Aside from that, the name calling is totally unnecessary. Just as I disagree with your arguments, I disagree with some of the interviewee's points too, but I can do so perfectly well without calling anyone names.
It makes the comment system less worth reading or engaging with. I think it's important to discuss the ideas you raised, even the ones I disagree with, but we can only have those discussions productively if everyone commits to some basic level of civility, even on important topics they disagree about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
hey noah, you should respond to this video.
I'll get around to it eventually!
It's a fun breakdown of crypto NFTs and a few scams there. Worth listening to while folding laundry!
frankly i have no idea about any of this stuff. I don't get why people get SOOO emotional over it, both for and against.
This guy Brands is an absolute legend for posting this article on 9/11/2020 (https://www.aei.org/op-eds/trump-ike-and-the-myth-of-the-military-industrial-complex/) about how there is no military-industrial complex, while he was literally on the payroll of that very complex as a fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, funded by Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, US Navy, Royal Air Force, Boeing and so on.
Anyways he is a pretty middling, lightweight scholar (see the bizarre assertions in this interview about no anti-Muslim backlash, e.g., or here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/438677174CA5BE6096C214BA90C3EDAE/S0018246X20000412a.pdf/rethinking_latin_americas_cold_war.pdf), and I do not understand why he has such a platform.
“no massive anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11?” What world is Brands living in? Makes me question his authority on the rest of the topics covered in the interview
Yeah that struck as a rather rosy assessment.
Sure, the US didn't lock all Muslim Americans in internment camps, so we cleared that low bar, but there certainly was racist backlash.
I think you are correct to say there was a racist backlash against Arabs but it is incorrect to say against Muslims because Islam is a religion and not a race.
Even so, we were not interning Arab-Americans simply because of their ethnicity. That is objectively speaking better conduct than past periods of our history.
Good information, thank you!
Noah, Brands sounds like a card-carrying member of the blob, determined to. prolong U.S. hegemony in the face of a steady decline. in our. role in the world economy and our multi-trillion dollar fiasco trying to bring thee free market and liberal democracy to the Middle East.
Please, do a comparable interview with someone like Andrew Bacevich.
Joe Studwell, who Noah frequently recommends, recommends in his blog another excellent article on this subject:
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcbg/files/US-China%20New%20Game%20Prism-V9n2.pdf
One very relevant quote: "Disciplinary silos favor an overemphasis onpolitical-military relationships and enable political scientists and historians to ignore decisive economic
issues. Those leaders responsible for managing the U.S.-China relationship arrive at the same over-emphasis on the military because in peacetime our. national allocation of resources is determined by Congressional lobbying, where the military-industrial complex has an overwhelming advantage
There's nothing blobbish about acknowledging that China and Russia are aggressively revanchist.
True, although "revanchist" doesn't seem appropriate for China. In his writings Brands summarily describes China as a "declining power", which most observers would find a startling and reckless assumption. Not a good foundation for thoughtful or trustworthy analysis. That's why I suggested Noah tune in the Quincy Institute analysis.
I think it's a bit overstated, but not "startling and reckless". There's a reasonable case to be made that Xi is not operating from a position of strength, in the same way that Putin isn't either. That's not to say they aren't dangerous; in fact, they're MORE dangerous because they see threats everywhere, and their entire worldview is based on power and domination, not peaceful cooperation. "Cooperation", to them, happens at the barrel of a gun.
I think the term he prefers is a “peaking power,” that is, the PRC as constituted has reached its zenith. I read a great article by him and Michael Beckley a while back in Foreign Policy about this issue.
That is not a reckless conclusion. Since COVID much of the world has soured on China. It is increasingly cast in a negative light. Many of China’s neighbors are becoming increasingly cold towards it.
There is, also a lot of the systemic problems that accompany Marxist nations (mainly the corruption and mismanagement).
I’m curious where the point c at the end, about firms that have violated intellectual property, comes from. Is there a specific geopolitical risk related to IP? Because I remember a big criticism (not the only one) of TPP was that it had a lot of Hollywood protectionist policies like further extending copyright terms and such. So is Hollywood’s interest fundamentally compatible with competing with China, or is it a distraction? Or are we talking about something totally different when referring to IP here?
Generally speaking, a standard tenet of the Beijing containment platform is that the profits of US multinationals in the Chinese market should be an important priority for US policymakers. Which is in tension with their desire for economic decoupling. But it's a big tent.
Technically, *technically*, the Cold War has not been the only ideological geopolitical conflict that the US has faced in its history. The US was born from another such conflict. To quote Jon Meacham, in the mindset of Thomas Jefferson and followers of his movement, the years from "1765 to 1815 were a fifty year war with Britain. Sometimes hot, and sometimes cold, and as ideological as the Cold War". Before you scoff at this comparison, recall that the revolutionaries disliked the economic dependence that the new post-colonial country had on the British trading system, in which the provinces/states exported raw commodities and imported finished goods. Ahem.
But yes, in the US's modern history, over the period in which it has been an economically powerful country, the only extended ideological conflict it has engaged in has been the Cold War against the USSR. A conflict that occurred, rather inherently, without US economic entanglement with that adversary.
Also, yeah, "no massive anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11" is demonstrably untrue. The rise in hate crimes is pretty well documented. And frankly, the insinuation that the Bushie neocons were acting in anything like good faith in regards to Iraq is a very wrong-headed and, really, pernicious idea. They were on record pushing regime change in the 1990s.
I don't agree that this Brands person is a "card-carrying member of the blob", since being unambiguously gung-ho on TPP seems like the Blobbish line, but he's got some analytic blindspots. I don't support U.S. decline, primarily because I think of its negative implications as being domestic and I want the country to be decent and thriving. Brands makes a solid point that the Cold War against the USSR pushed the US to rejuvenate and improve itself (as the unnamed revolutionary cold war against Britain pushed the US towards political development, democratization, and the seeds of import substitution development), but that's not an original insight.
There was definitely a backlash, but it was muted relative to what it could have been. Imagine if a President Trump had been fanning the flames of hate from the Oval Office on 9/12.
This rather moves the goalposts. Lots of things *could* have been worse compared to things that were done by other people afterwards, but that's not how causality works, and it shouldn't be how moral culpability works. What happened to U.S. Muslims after 9/11, 1) happened, at all, which the interviewee downplays, and 2) was bad. On its own. Objectively.
It definitely was bad. Objectively. I'm just objecting that without context/comparison, it's impossible to put it in the correct light.
For another comparison, was the post-9/11 backlash better or worse than the Japanese-American internment? I'd say better. Relatively, of course. And not just better, but, like, WAY better. As in, "we didn't round a bunch of people up and tempt ourselves with genocide". It was mostly just several thousand random attacks. The body counts and qualitative severity were both just so much lower post-9/11 than with the WW2 internment.
Moreover, who's morally culpable? Bush didn't sign any Act of Congress to vandalize a bunch of mosques and harass Muslim-Americans on the streets. He didn't order any troops to do it, either. Roosevelt DID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066. He signed that. With his own pen. Whether he thought it was a good idea or not, he signed it. He's directly morally culpable for a single much greater crime than the multitude of relatively minor ones committed during the post-9/11 backlash.
So if you want to talk about moral culpability, then great. But that also requires us to talk about proportionality and agency. Bush went out of his way to exercise his agency to stop the post-9/11 backlash attacks. They didn't happen because of him, but in spite of him. Which is why I'm so confused that you're so eager to blame him.
David I think you need to chill on the caffeine. It’s like you’re not actually reading any of what you’re responding to. You make some good points but keep getting stuck in the mud. Thanks for letting us know that it “wasn’t as bad as internment camps” we had no idea
I'm fine on the caffeine, thank you. If you'd like to point out specific points that it seems I "didn't actually read", then be my guest. Otherwise, please don't cast innuendo at a perfectly good argument.
Irene: "Lots of things *could* have been worse compared to things that were done by other people afterwards, but that's not how causality works, and it shouldn't be how moral culpability works."
David: "For another comparison, was the post-9/11 backlash better or worse than the Japanese-American internment?" - No one else was talking about this so why are you bringing it up? It's a pretty obvious comparison that nobody would disagree with.
"Bush went out of his way to exercise his agency to stop the post-9/11 backlash attacks. They didn't happen because of him, but in spite of him. Which is why I'm so confused that you're so eager to blame him." - Irene used 3 sentences to describe her Bush-admin criticism and 4 paragraphs later you're still talking about it. No need to fanboy over W.
“no massive anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11?” What world is Brands living in? Makes me question his authority on the rest of the topics covered in the interview
Love the comment about Bush/Iraq. The left really gets high on its own supply on that one. The most likely reality is that Saddam either thought he had weapons that he didn't (IE his advisors were lying to him), and therefore anted up to play without realizing he was bankrupt, OR thought he could bluff like the North Koreans had done just a few years earlier, but completely misjudged the emotional temperature of the US and its patience for the same stupid "WMDs for aid" gambit.
Because there simply was no other reason for him to lock out weapons inspectors and play that whole game if he knew he didn't have them or thought the US was REALLY going to invade him over it.
Bush, for his part, totally played himself. It wasn't so much about lying, it was just that he saw what he wanted to see, and bought what Saddam was showing him. [Ed: And because he wanted to do it, he sold it all to the American public. The fact that we never found WMDs doesn't necessarily mean he had to have lied. It just means that at minimum, he was wrong about there being any.]
Anyways, what I really wanted to come say was that I'd be a little cautious of curbing investment in the PLA. Not because I feel like we need to finance their military, but because the more financial links their military elites have with US interests, the more they'll second-guess any dumb move Xi makes.
Are you really fucking stupid enough to believe that ?!? Saddam refused the inspectors the entry to his PALACE. For the same reasons you would refuse the police to enter your home without a warrant. You don't just produce nukes, or chemical weapons in your palace, even a big one. That kind of stuff needs industrial plants on a massive scale, and releases chemical residue into the air that the inspectors could have detected from many miles.
And anyone who wanted to know the truth DID know the truth, because Scott Ritter, former weapons inspector, told everyone.
TLDR: Bush is a liar and a mass murderer, and you are a bloody moron.
That was unnecessary. If there were a report feature, you'd be reported. Have a nice day.
Do you feel better about yourself now? Have you sufficiently stroked your own sense of self-righteousness yet? "Bush lied, kids died", right? Credit where it's due, even if it's a little derivative, it's one of the best bumper sticker slogans in modern political history. Kudos. Because Bush was Just Plain Evil, right? It's absolutely impossible that he engaged in motivated reasoning and only saw what he wanted to see. Our military-industrial-complex NEVER makes mistakes and steers us into bad wars, right?
Please. Spare us your arrogance.
Also, if you buy the "it was just a palace" line, then you're just as ignorant as you accuse me of being. There were dozens of weapons sites inspectors got kicked out of, and Saddam was known to use his "palaces" as cover for chemical weapons stores. You don't need to produce *anything* in the palace, you can just keep them behind a locked door and insist it's the jacuzzi.
After reading this interview I decided to go on a little Hal Brands kick. And came across this article he wrote recently https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-01-18/overstretched-superpower
I am curious as to Hal's recommendation vis-a-vis military strength. I retired from the Military in 2011, have joined up in 1989. I watched the fall of the Iron Curtain, the great draw down, the move to mobile more deployable contingency operations (Middle East).
Military spending is no longer popular. A cold war military is a thing of the past. Interest in military service is down. However, is I detect a sense that Hal thinks we are getting to a point where we have either gone to far with our desire to be relevant compared to our ability to actually project deterrence and strength.
I'm thinking through broader Quincy vs. Blob debates a lot recently, and so far have concluded that...
Crafting an internally coherent foreign policy is hard.
My best strategy to validate any new doctrine is to start with lists of conflicts where my intuitions are strongly in favor or strongly opposed, and test new doctrines against those cases to see if they produce uncomfortable results. Hopefully I can set aside hard cases, but they may be useful checks if the doctrine produces really certain results on them.
I'm pro, for example:
* stopping genocide in the Balkans,
* stopping invasions of Kuwait,
* stopping a mustachioed german who is hellbent on both industrialized genocide AND world domination -- probably the easiest of the easy cases. I've heard there are WWII reservationists* out there, but that seems fringe to me.
Panama ("Just Cause") is a weird case, and the branding for it is especially suspicious! If you separate it out into sub-rationales it maybe becomes easier:
* Panama declares war on the US and begins attacking our forces. Sometimes the other side gets a vote! (We could pushback on inducement, but insofar as this rationale truly holds, if a country just starts killing your people and forces you to respond, I think this a pretty easy case.)
* US wants to police the international drug trade, or arrest a leader because he sells drugs. I think most commenters would agree that this is on the weak end of possible rationales for US involvement.
Panama's a "mixed" case, then there are very, very hard cases. Syria. Pro insofar as you are trying to prevent genocide and one of the worst humanitarian crises of the century, but so, so many Cons: running up against logistical realities, an unclear morally superior successor state, other foreign interests willing to commit to a conflict that could spiral and even worsen the humanitarian issues... those all make this much more difficult to consider.
I think there's some room for conflict in hard cases, so you can provide compellence and deterrence in other hard cases, preventing the need for war more broadly, but that of course flirts with a slippery slope, so acknowledge that's high risk.
I'd be interested in if other commenters have views on wars that should be included in the stable of test cases.
I suspect a lot of people share the same base concerns about human rights or national sovereignty, but that the distinction between different views will often come down to whether or not we trust ourselves to adjudicate when those things are truly at risk, vs. playing into some other base state interest. Often those things are unclear and comingled, which makes this all hard to sort out in real cases.
If anyone (Noah, guest interviewee, other commenters) have thoughts on how to approach this from first principles, at a meta level, as opposed to getting stuck in the object level cases in the current headlines, I think that would be really valuable. Just debating the current situation as it comes up I think pulls on a lot of biases and risks inconsistency. So I'd be very much interested in broader foundational essays on this.
* What's the right antonym for blob?
A lot of the American public felt it had been screwed by the trade partnerships before TPP, and it’s hard to deny that the agreements increased inequality in the US. Of course economists simply ran the numbers and assured everyone that these were great deals that would increase the national wealth. They were probably not wrong but they were totally wrong wrt their evil impact on America - leading to the rise of a potent anti-democratic movement. When you bemoan the lack of a TPP agreement I can’t believe it- it’s like you’re willing the rise of Trump. Our capitalist system can’t handle a TPP at this time. Fix that first or our next President will be a stooge of Xi and Putin and Cold War 2 will be over.
Do you publish recordings of your interviews?
I don't; the interviews are done by email!